Thoughts, notes, and ramblings on the technology Mark Cervarich deals with on a daily basis.
…or, why the heck are the links in my html not doing what I told them to do in my CSS sheet. It’s because you need to have them in a certain order:
For more info, please visit Eric Meyer’s Page on link specificity
XHTML is the next generation of HTML: XHTML is not very different from HTML 4.01, so bringing your code up to 4.01 standards is a very good start.
The Most Important Differences:
This XHTML Tutorial will help you on your way.
It is very important to validate your code using the available online resources.
You can also validate your CSS code while you are at it.
You will need to start each xhtml document with a document type declaration (DTD). There are three you can choose from:
If you have lots of existing HTML code, you’d probably want to use the Transitional DTD.
Finally, let’s let our tax dollars work for us for a change! Here is a page from the EPA with tips to make sure your html code complies to XHTML standards.
Now that you know know a little bit more about robots.txt files, wouldn’t you like to who is sending out the robots to your website in the first place?
Whenever a page is read from a web site, the log file records a number of details including the time, the IP address and usually the referrer page and the user agent. Some user agents are quite obvious, “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)”, but others might just confuse you, “Mozilla/4.0 compatible ZyBorg/1.0 Dead Link Checker Beta-d01″. When you need to look up which bot is hitting your site to determine whether or not they should be added to your robots.txt file, take a look at: the search engine robots page.
This site will let you lookup user-agents, as well as providing you even more inforation about robots that will probably come in useful.
If you ever take the time to look in your web server access logs, you might be surprised to see that you are getting tons of 404 errors for a file called robots.txt. While you could spend the time to make an elaborate file, why not spend 30 seconds to make a very simple one that will reduce the number of 404 errors, and make search engine spiders that much happier to visit your site.
A generic robots.txt file that welcomes all robots and denies none would look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
More examples can be found at clockwatchers.com.
After years of coding, I’m realizing that CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) have finally hit critical mass. As this site proves, you can separate design from content. What are some sites that help me to rememember this?
I’ll add to this list as I come across/remember more resources.
People are always asking me, “Hey Mark, how do I get my website listed/ranked higher in search engines.” I’m never sure what to tell them, because there are so many variables involved. Came across this great guide, 26 steps to 15k a Day on searchengineworld.com. If you were to follow it, you would be well on your way to a better site.
Stumbled upon the Death Calculator which is on a promo page for 6 Feet Under, the HBO show. Answer some questions, find out how long you’ll live.
I’ve put my results in the extended entry. (btw, I’m currently 33 years old)
Having grown up in the 70s, I fondly remember playing on my colecovision and atari 2600 game systems. What would today’s kids think about the games that I grew up with? Electronic Gaming Monthly tackled this subject in a recent article: http://www.egmmag.com/article2/0,4364,1338730,00.asp
http://www.ordinary-life.net/blog/archives/cat_web_design_backend.php has neat looking blog that has some great looking tools in it.
I think I wanted to remember this page because of the PayPalDev resources.
