If you are a pro or amateur developer editing or upgrading your WordPress plugin or theme, if you are short of time (or knowledge) and you need a handy repository of code snippets, WordPress Snippets is the place to get them!

Save your precious time. – Don’t reinvent the wheel.

The idea behind WordPress Snippets is simple; to provide small snippets of code, helping you to create a magic WordPress Theme. The original documentation of WordPress is excellent, but not as straight forward as you may want. Straight forward is the lead word for WP Snippets. No talk, just Snippets.

Visit their website at: wp-snippets.com/

1. An insight into Google’s 200 ranking factors

Last week, Google’s Eric Schmidt said that listing Google’s 200 ranking factors would reveal business secrets. Although Google does not officially publish their ranking algorithms, there is something that you can do to crack Google’s secret algorithm.

Google’s 200 ranking factors

Google uses about 200 ranking factors to determine the position of a web page in the search results. Unfortunately, Google does not reveal the list of ranking factors and how exactly they are weighted.

Google’s ranking formula is a business secret. The problem is that your web pages must have all of these 200 elements if you want to see your pages on Google’s first result page.

Which factors are important to Google?

3 Comments »

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, September 13, 2010:
Children’s Websites: Usability Issues in Designing for Kids

Summary:
New research with users aged 3–12 shows that older kids have gained substantial Web proficiency since our last studies, while younger kids still face many problems. Designing for children requires distinct usability approaches, including targeting content narrowly for different ages of kids.

Millions of children use the Internet, and millions more are coming online each year. Many websites specifically target children with educational or entertainment content, and mainstream websites often have specific “kids’ corner” sections — either as a public service or to build brand loyalty from an early age.

Despite this growth in users and services, little is known about how children actually use websites or how to design sites that will be easy for them to use. Website design for kids is typically based purely on folklore about how kids supposedly behave — or, at best, on insights gleaned when designers observe their own children, who hardly represent average kids, typical Internet skills, or common knowledge about the Web.

To separate design myths from usability facts, we turn to empirical user research: observations of a broad range of children as they use a wide variety of websites.

This research covers users aged 3–12 years. (Guidelines for sites targeting 13- to 17-year-olds are available in a report from our separate research with teenagers.)

Read the study here: Usability Issues in Designing for Kids – www.useit.com/alertbox/children.html

How to get more visitors with Google Instant search
Last week, Google released Google Instant. You have to adapt to this change if you don’t want to lose many website visitors. In this article, we’ll explain what Google Instant is and you’ll learn what you can do to benefit from the change.

What is Google Instant?
Google Instant is Google’s new way to display search results while the user is typing the query. Google tries to complete the query during the input.
For example, when you enter “bike h” then Google will display the results for the keyword “bike helmets” because Google thinks that this is the most likely query.
Google Instant will not display the search results for the keywords “bike h”, which are totally different. If you want to get the results for “bike h”, you have to click the search button.
What does this mean for your website?

4 Comments »

This article authored by Craig Buckler was originally published by Sitepoint.com

This is a sneaky trick. It was devised by Jacob Seidelin at Nihilogic.dk and has been used by some participants in the 10K An Event Apart competition, though there is some contention as to whether it’s in keeping with the spirit of the event.

That said, it’s interesting to see how it’s done, so let’s have a look. Here are the steps:

1. Minimize your application

The first step is to squeeze your final CSS and JavaScript to the smallest possible size using any decent compression tool.

2. Encode your CSS and JavaScript as a graphic

This is the tricky part. You need to convert your ASCII-encoded CSS and JavaScript files into a single binary image. The PNG format is best because it’s lossless (your code is preserved), uses zlib compression, and is supported by all browsers. Web developer Cal Henderson has published his research and PHP/Perl code that converts code to an image using various formats such as 1-bit, 8-bit, 24-bit, and so on. You can view the jQuery library as a 1-bit square here. The PNG can be reduced in size further using tools such as Smush.it and PNGOUT.

3. Extract the code from the image

We now need to load the image and convert it back to executable code. This can be achieved by loading the image into a canvas element using the drawImage() method. Individual pixels are then read using getImageData(), and converted to a string that can be passed to eval() or embedded into the DOM. Results vary, but file size savings of 75% can be achieved. In a few cases, the image format can beat files compressed with Gzip. So you could enter the 10K competition with 40Kb of code!
Does this have a real-world use?
So, apart from cheating at contests, does this technique have any real-world application? It’s an interesting hack, but Gzipping source files on the server will normally result in better compression and it’s far easier to implement.

However, I could see the technique being used for steganography, or to encrypt sensitive code from novice hackers. Very cool, but would you use it?

by Craig Buckler in www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2010/09/07/compress-css-javascript-png-canvas/

1 Comment »