John Blackmore

Google Panda Strike Again!

Once again it looks like Google are refining it’s search algorithm with no less than 40 changes this February. If you aren’t seeing the effects yet I’m sure they will be filtered in over the coming weeks so pop over to the official Google blog and check out what’s changing.

I’ve not yet read the full list but I can guess what it’s going to say so my advice remains as always; build a site with good quality original content and become the best resource of information you can in your sector. Great content will be rewarded (unless it’s stolen by a more popular site in which case chances are your site will get canned for duplicate content).

How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did

This is data mining to perfection! Find out how Target was able to work out that one girl was pregnant simply based on a change in buying habit. What this article explains is a statisticians wet dream, identifying buying trends and using them to calculate a pregnancy probability.

It gets better, the article then explains how Target use mailshots to send offers on certain baby products but so they don’t raise suspicions they also include offers on items they know won’t be purchased. End result? The pregnant lady has no idea they were targeted and assume it’s a generic mailshot that everyone got.

This happens in the UK as well, although I doubt you would get anyone to admit it. Can anyone say “clubcard”?

PDO vs. MySQLi: Which Should You Use?

Thinking about moving away from the native mysql wrappers in PHP? There are many reasons why you should, security being one of the top ones, but which alternative should you choose?

This article shows you code examples of PDO and mysqli (in both procedural and OO modes) and once you get the gist of it transitioning from mysql doesn’t seem daunting at all.

Now all I need to do is convince our technical director to move from mysqli to PDO and my work here is done!

New Programming Jargon

Funny post of commonly used terms to describe those programming moments where things aren’t exactly right.

Speed up page loads with head.js

Last year Google made some changes to it’s algorithm that meant that page load speed was becoming a contributing factor in it’s search engine ranking algorithm. This means that if your website loads slowly you could be suffering in the SERPs.

One way to streamline the loading of your site is to parallel load your JS files, and you can further improve load time by placing those JavaScript links at the bottom of your page.

Head.js aims to make this all easy for you, by allowing parallel downloads of JS files as well as a whole bunch of other nice features such as a CSS moderniser, HTML5 enabler, browser detection, feature detection and screen size detector.

In short it does the job of about 5 or more other scripts and it weighs in at just 6.4kb in minified form, so it’s small as well. Give it a go in your next project and see what it can do for you.

It's OK to cheat with CSS3 Generator

As a web developer some people think that you need to know everything off the top of your head and that knowing it makes you good at your job. This isn’t the case, you don’t need to know it all, you just need to know where to find the information when you need it.

I haven’t learnt all the possible combinations of features for CSS3, why should I need to? In most cases when you are working on websites or applications you have the Internet on tap, so as long as there are websites such as CSS3generator.com I don’t need to learn those bits that I only use maybe 2-3% of my time.

In short, it’s OK to cheat sometimes. Just make sure you know the bits you use all the time, which in my case is PHP and MySQL and not CSS3.