When users want to find information on your website, they first look for a search box. Failing that, they head back to Google – potentially finding a competing site and taking their business elsewhere, or simply becoming frustrated with your service. But implementing effective search doesn’t have to be hard. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to build a basic site-specific web search in just five lines of code, using the Yahoo! APIs.
Tim O’Reilly said that in the age of Web 2.0, data is the next “Intel Inside”. With the ever increasing popularity of social networks, the volume of personalized user data is a virtual goldmine for Internet businesses. Facebook has been getting much press lately due to its tremendous growth, as well as emphasis on security [...]
Social networking just keeps on growing. It seems every major public business wants a Facebook application, corporations are adding social features to their websites, and organisations are bringing social networking into their intranets. Previously, building your own social networking applications involved some serious engineering challenges. Thanks to Ringside Networks, that just got a lot easier, [...]
Are you on your way to becoming a Photoshop expert, wizard, or guru? Here are five tips for working more efficiently with Photoshop that will make you a faster expert, wizard, or guru.
The more we rely upon CSS, the larger and more complex stylesheet files become. Planning and organizing your stylesheet is essential to creating a lean, manageable website. There are many ways of organizing CSS code but the following are best practice…
One of the most popular CMSs is Drupal, partly because it offers all of the aforesaid features, and partly because developers familiar with PHP (the language used by Drupal) can modify the functioning and appearance of almost every aspect of Drupal. The latest series of Drupal, version 6.x, provides improvements and brand-new features in a variety of areas: installation, administration, human language support, theme management, security, performance, and more.
Every blogger dreams about creating viral content, infecting people with your ideas and being the talk of the town. But how exactly does one go about it? Unfortunately, there really aren’t hard and fast rules. Even experienced bloggers will tell you that luck has a lot to do with it. It’s a matter of great [...]
In part 1 of this series, I looked at the web browsers and (Windows) IDEs. Today I’m going to look at a local development server and its PHP configuration, as well as some of the IDEs/editors available for Linux, especially the cross-platform options. Local development server Now, when developing your applications, you can’t simply keep [...]
Over the last few years, there’s been much talk about how social media releases are replacing traditional press releases. True, the old method has its flaws. Tom Foremski called it too “spintastic” – full of gravy, not much meat. So are traditional press releases going in the way of the dinosaurs? The answer is no [...]
IT projects are, by their nature, destined to fail. When you plan for a new project, you’ll probably realise that while what you’re bui/lding isn’t new, it ts new to you, and you’re bound to encounter some surprises along the way. Maybe you haven’t quite thought out how you’re going to build a specific feature [...]
