Help Save MySQL

Michael Widenius, creator of MySQL, has started a world-wide movement aimed at keeping MySQL out of the clutches of Oracle.

If you’ve EVER used MySQL to earn a living or make money, if you know what MySQL is and what it represents to the open source community, you need to get behind that movement.

Sign the petition here.

If you’re running your website on WordPress you’ve probably already come into contact with TinyMCE, the visual editor that comes bundled with WordPress. Before you go haywire and start plowing through your website, adding all sorts of cool colours and formatting, there’s a couple of things you may want to keep in mind.

First and foremost, HTML and Microsoft Word have been butting heads for ages. Microsoft has long been known for adding it’s own proprietary – and often peculiar – quirks to HTML, in support of Internet Explorer. This becomes a problem of course when visitors using a browser other than IE hit your website. WordPress, and in particular TinyMCE, does nothing to smooth out those ruffles. It’s still very much up to you.

So you may want to keep a couple of things in mind when you’re ready to unleash your stuff upon the world:

1. A Word About Word

If you’re pasting from Microsoft Word, you have to “cleanse” your text. There are 2 ways to do this. You can either paste all of your text into a plain text editor like notepad first, then copy that and paste it into your post, or you can use TinyMCE’s “Paste From Word” tool. There are no ifs ands or buts about this. If you fail to cleans your text you will wind up with all sorts of jibberish on your page, you’ll probably break your theme layout, and you may even wreak havoc on some of your plugins.

If you can’t see the Past From Word button (the clipboard with the familiar blue ‘W’), click the ‘Kitchen Sink’ button and that will show it and some other nifty tools. When you click the Paste From Word button it will pop up a new window. Copy your text from Word and paste it into that new popup. WordPress will cleanse the text for you, removing all that nasty stuff.

2. Keep It Simple

People rely on visual cues, and styles applied to your website provide them. Links are a certain colour. Headings are bigger and bolder. Lists are numbered or indented. Visitors need those cues. If you run amok and start changing everything, those cues may be lost, along with your visitors. You’ll be able to tell almost right away of that happens – you’ll see a sharp jump in your bounce rate in Google Analytics.

3. Mind the authors

If you have other authors or contributors posting on your website, make sure they follow the same rules as you do. If they can’t or won’t, you can disable TinyMCE for others and have them use a plain text editor with basic functionality.

 Many companies in Canada are just now coming to grips with they have been hearing for over a decade. That their website and online presence can actually benefit their reputation, and their bottom line. So as they ponder the redseign or redevelopment of their current website – many of which are just stagnate brochure-type websites that spew out marketing mumo-jumbo – they also must come to grips with the driving force behind the project. No, not the colour scheme, though that is important. No, not the menu structure, though easy navigation can make or break a typical website. Search engines, the big 3 in particular, are the target audience. Through them the information and visitors flow. On average, the bigger websites I’ve developed or maintain garner fully 65% or better traffic from search engine referrals. The rule of thumb is, if the search engines don’t like you, no-one will find you. A little over-simplified, but you’ve been warned.

Architecture Changes

Most companies will change the very structure of their website through the re-design or re-development. Folder structures and file naming conventions will be added so the new site is SEO/SEM friendly. Sales funnels will be developed to better convert visitors. The process leaves a raft of broken links and missing pages in its wake. Companies caught unaware of the limitations of Google et al will pay an awful price. What little ranking juice they have will go down the drain. Incoming links from other websites, a major contributor to ranking, will now garner the dreaded “404 Page Not Found” error. Fatality. All those old pages held all that juice. Leave them up? Not an option. Websites presenting substantially the same content on 2 different URLs face duplicate content penalties that are downright painful.

Smart 404′s & Redirects

Enter the seasoned profession web developer. With some foresight, and some insight into how Google and the others work, a site re-design or re-development does not have to be a painful experience. The outcome of the exercise is to boost the website’s dominance in search results. You know how it goes. If you’re not on page one – prefereably above the fold – on organic results, you might as well not be there at all. There’s only so much you can do with Adwords, and they seem to work best when you’re already in the top 5 in organics. As much as possible, old pages can be preserved in name. This can be done in a couple of ways. Apache’s mod_alias module provides for an easy one-to-one relationship between old pages and the new ones. For example, if you had a page called ‘/internetmarketing.php’ and the new page is /internet-marketing/’, you can create an entry in a .htaccess file mapping the old page to the new page with a 301. Visitors, and google, will be happy. If you have thousands of old pages this poses a significant challenge. But what is a 404 page anyway? All it is is a web document displaying an error message. That document can be anything really, you can tell the server which document to use for a 404, and that document doesn’t have to be stupid. At the very least, it should be as pretty as your website. Give it a brain and it can be both beautiful AND smart. Surely the developer has included a new sitemap.xml file for the search engines, and in it is stored a hierarchy of your new website. Tell the webserver to use a PHP script for the 404, and in that script determine what the user was looking for and direct them to where they should be going using a 301. This can be a simple one to one mapping, or even some logic that inspects your sitemap.xml and sends the visitor to the nearest match. In our example above the logic would see that the visitor attempted to view ‘/internetmarketing.php’, traverse the sitemap, find ‘/internet-marketing/’ as the closest match, and redirect the visitor. That all said, it is still incumbent upon the company and their developer to do some planning so that a smart 404 can be, well, smart about stuff.

Google & Ajax, a footnote

For years, the pitch was “keep it simple”. But oh no. Ajax has to be everywhere. Entire pages loaded via Ajax calls. In fact, there are sites out there that only have one real document. The contents of the entire site are loaded into that document by Ajax calls. The entire menu is a series of javascript calls out to ajax loaders. If that doesn’t make any sense, you’re right. What makes even less sense is Google’s proposal to deal with that type of junk. Time to get real. Ajax is nifty, Ajax is cool. Ajax can do all sorts of things that make sense. Stick to those. Leave the rest for your competition.

jQuery has been around for a while. So what’s not to like? Well, when it’s the first word in a sentence it means the sentence starts uncapitalized. Not so bad. It’s a little hefty too – coming in at a whopping 120,763 bytes as of 1.3.2 un-minified. That’s a ton of code to be bringing in on every request just to do, well, everything under the sun you could imagine, and some stuff you haven’t imagined yet. Slide-ins, slide-outs, fades, modal windows, ajax calls, xml and json processing… the list goes on.

Learning Curve

Of course, jQuery is the very epitomy of “don’t re-invent the wheel”. Aside from the base library itself there are literally 1000′s of well-written examples of how to make use of it out there, together with 100′s of plugins. That’s right. javascript plugins, if you could imagine that.  But the learning curve on jQuery is quite steep. In the wrong hands it’s hundreds of large caliber weapons aimed directly at your feet. Such is the life of a developer though. The same can be said for any language or codebase, server-side or otherwise.

I’m lovin’ jQuery, despite its quirks and complexity. Filed in the toolbox.

I’ve been a strong proponent of WordPress for a long time, but only recently has this tool matured and gone really mainstream in the web development world. Not so long ago when a client needs a blog, WordPress was the tool of choice. Now it’s a whole new ball game.

WordPress is a CMS.

Aside from the massive collection of plugins and bolt-ons available, some of them really well done, the WordPress documentation has evolved along with the tool. Now, any decent developer can roll out custom plugins that do exactly what is needed and do it really well. Not only can you deliver great functionality, you can deliver it in a really slick way. If Web 2.0 is set upon us with no looking back, WP as a CMS is Web 2.5.

When I started blogging in 2002 most of tools were green. You could really tell too. While it wasn’t a trivial exercise building something lightweight that could post articles and images – and not a nightmare to maintain as PHP gre by leaps and bounds – it sure beat installing some of the archaic, bug-ridden prefabs available back then. So I built my own.  Not to say that was without its problems either.

In the last 12 months WordPress grew up in a big way. So much so that I converted the front end of my sports blog to WordPress and imported 6 years of data, all in one day. it left a gaping hole in the backend however. What came next was astonishing. Using the WordPress documentation and some terrific “hello word” examples, I was able to convert the vast majority of my backend functionality to WP admin and widget functions. Uploading schedules and having them parsed out, editing the schedules, displaying the next few games in a widget. It happened fast. What’s more, WP recently converted to automatic upgrades. I can now keep myblog software completely up to date without touching a lick of code and not have to rewrite huge swaths of code to keep my backend current with the front end.

Presto.

So if i was such a huge advocate of WordPress, what took me so long?

Well, it wasn’t for lack of effort. I’ve tried a few times to change over but was met with some eratic behaviour I just couldn’t cope with. Like I said, it’s only been the last little bit that WordPress has really come of age. Stability is no longer an issue, upgrades are now a complete snap, and the plugins directory has grown exponentially. A lot of what I would want to do with WordPress just wasn’t around or very stable, not even a year ago.

Hats off to the WordPress Team!