Shawn Donley’s BLOG

Article by Matt McGee

Small businesses are growing more aware of the need to understand and implement at least the basics of search engine optimization. But if you read a variety of small businesses blogs and Web sites, you’ll quickly see that there’s a lot of uncertainty over what makes up “the basics.” Without access to high-level consulting and without a lot of experience knowing what SEO resources can be trusted, there’s also a lot of misinformation about SEO strategies and tactics.

http://searchengineland.com/070628-074149.php

Sometimes it is just easier to add to your blog when you are off-line or using other applications than the ones that are supplied with your on-line blog editor.

I found myself looking into this while I was researching my new web project and wanted to keep track of some of the research that I was doing without filling up my Favorites… again.

Well here is a cool little - FREE - Utility that you can use to modify your blog. The COOL part about it is you can configure all of your Blogs and post to multiples at once.

It’s called BlogDesk. Here is a quote from their site and a link…

Blogging should be simple, but it gets complicated and time-consuming if you are serious about it. BlogDesk makes it easy to write, speeds up lavish processes and assists the author with smart features.

http://www.blogdesk.org/en/index.htm

http://www.merchantos.com/makebeta/wordpress/wordpress-customization/

As a PHP programmer, dealing with syntax errors is almost as important as breathing… and when a host takes away the ability to view these errors for “SECURITY REASONS” then… wow it sucks. Trying to go through the code to find an error… again… just sucks.

So I hit the old trusty net looking for a resolution to fix my situation. After several lame attempts that didn’t work… I came across the following. Of course you need to have access to modify your .htaccess file, but hey… works sweet for me.

http://www.blizzard-media.com/hosting/question/id/6.html

You have to love this site. Well, at least I do, it has saved me so many times, I have lost track. I’m posting this just to get to it quickly…

The link below is to a table on W3Schools.com that provides a list of the color names that are supported by all major browsers.

http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_colornames.asp

You don’t honestly think I have the time or ambition to create these great looking posts do you? Especially when I cannot even spare a few moments to get the stupid spell checker to work correctly in WordPress… anyways, this is very slick. The following explains the whole thing:

http://skattertech.com/2007/02/word-07-supports-wordpress/

cron is a unix, solaris utility that allows tasks to be automatically run in the background at regular intervals by the cron daemon. These tasks are often termed as cron jobs in unix , solaris.

Crontab (CRON TABle) is a file which contains the schedule of cron entries to be run and at specified times.

The following link gives some details on how to use the command. I am constantly looking this up.

http://www.adminschoice.com/docs/crontab.htm

A very common task for a cgi script is to be able to inform a set of users with data generated by itself or other programs, cgi’s or not. For example, you might be one of the web designers who have joined one of the myriad of free counter programs on the internet that email you with nice statistics and reports about your web pages’ traffic. Systems like that are responsible for informing such a large number subscribers that sending the reports manually would require a full-time employee devoted to this task only. Obviously this wouldn’t be a sensible option even for a relatively large organization.

The following post has some great documentation on this…

http://www.perlfect.com/articles/sendmail.shtml

Just a quick reference link to the PHP manual for the number_format function.  Use this all the time, but for some reason always seem to forget the syntax.

http://us3.php.net/number_format

Sometimes you run into an issue where you need to override the CSS for the page. Instead of defining a new CSS or adding it to the page (which would change those elements on the page) you can use an inline style which would override all of the mentioned previous. The following link is a tutorial that will explain how to actually do this correctly.

http://www.tizag.com/cssT/inline.php