In business, time is money. Nearly half of all home users have narrowband connections and they won't wait for anything: they just click away, which means lost sales or readership.
Web site optimization (WSO) is the process of reducing website size and complexity to maximize website performance. Website optimization can also include search engine optimization, pay per click optimization, and conversion rate optimization (getting more traffic and sales).
Use this fabulous tool to analyze your Web Site Optimization performance.
And keep in mind that performance of your site is far more important than fancy flash graphics, widgets, pull down menus and third-party Java script files, which not only make parts of your site's content invisible to Google but also mean visual clutter, poor user interface, slow connection times, and ultimately, lost sales.
Without much thought nor hesitation I would recommend to everybody to block IPs in the range of 222.208.0.0 - 222.215.255.255, and 125.64.0.0 - 125.71.255.255 which belongs to CHINANET Sichuan province network — the homebase of some of the world's most dedicated and prolific spammers. They actually enter it manually.
No wonder unemployment is so low in China.
"Just as we've been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we've had to suspend Friend Connect's access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance," Cheever wrote in his web log.
While banning Google's Friends Connect widget, Facebook is about to launch their own Connect service. Both companies are trailing behind the My Space's Data Availability service.
While it might be of little concern to the average users, it shows that their personal data is in high demand.
Lately, all I have been hearing about is how Word Press is "free." Now, the way I do math, anything that takes over ten hours to set-up and still doesn't function without a consultant and/or IT specialist has a cost associated with it, the cost of loss time, lowered productivity and no blog at the end of the day. For the last two weeks at my office we have been struggling to set-up a simple blog using WordPress.org that I have come to call the "buteverybodyusesit" software. I understand that developers and programmers love it because it is "free" and allows them to exploit gullible users in search of "free" software.
But I think there is some confusion regarding the defintion of free, which Word Press itself notes:
About the GPL
The GNU General Public License, or GPL, is an open source license. Open source doesn't just mean that you can view the source code - it has political and philosophical implications as well. Open source, or "Free Software", means you are free to modify and redistribute the source code under certain conditions. Free doesn't refer to the price, it refers to freedom. The difference between the two meanings of free is often characterized as "Free as in speech vs. free as in beer." The GPL is free as in speech.
So, while I am all for free beer and free speech I am also for the clear distinction between the two meanings of free.The amount of attention H.264 encoding format garners lately can only be due to the fact that amatures have finally moved into the area of encoding. Even more surprising is the ever growing field of "experts" and self-professed gurus who will, for a certain fee, explain to his "client" that H.264 is the way to go nowdays. Frankly it didn't cross my mind to use mpeg-2 for encoding in many years. Here is a brief exerpt from the Wikipedia:
The intent of the H.264/AVC project was to create a standard capable of providing good video quality at substantially lower bit rates than previous standards (e.g. half or less the bit rate of MPEG-2, H.263, or MPEG-4 Part 2), without increasing the complexity of design so much that it would be impractical or excessively expensive to implement. An additional goal was to provide enough flexibility to allow the standard to be applied to a wide variety of applications on a wide variety of networks and systems, including low and high bit rates, low and high resolution video, broadcast, DVD storage, RTP/IP packet networks, and ITU-T multimedia telephony systems.
The standardization of the first version of H.264/AVC was completed in May of 2003. The JVT then developed extensions to the original standard that are known as the Fidelity Range Extensions (FRExt). These extensions enable higher quality video coding by supporting increased sample bit depth precision and higher-resolution color information, including sampling structures known as YUV 4:2:2 and YUV 4:4:4. Several other features are also included in the Fidelity Range Extensions project, such as adaptive switching between 4×4 and 8×8 integer transforms, encoder-specified perceptual-based quantization weighting matrices, efficient inter-picture lossless coding, and support of additional color spaces. The design work on the Fidelity Range Extensions was completed in July of 2004, and the drafting work on them was completed in September of 2004.
Further recent extensions of the standard have included adding five new profiles intended primarily for professional applications, adding extended-gamut color space support, defining additional aspect ratio indicators, defining two additional types of "supplemental enhancement information" (post-filter hint and tone mapping), and deprecating one of the prior FRExt profiles that industry feedback indicated should have been designed differently.
At the end of the day it is all about the bit rate. H.264 is about twice as efficient as mpeg-4 part 2 encoding. Currently H.264 is standard on many encoding and decoding applications.
So, when another new media guru will try to explain to you that H. 264 is the way to go and present you with a bunch of Xeroxes to account for all the valuable time he spent on the research, rest assured he is taking you for a complete idiot.
You can read more on H.264 at:
EE Times: H.264 codec jeopardizes MPEG-4's ascendancy
CommsDesign: Emerging H.264 standard supports broadcast video encoding
It was reported that HTML PHP tags could bypass strip_tag function in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Safari in server environment of PHP versions 4.3.7 and earlier and PHP5 versions 5.0.0.0RC3 and earlier. When 'magic_quotes_gpc' are not enabled it allows tags to bypass security.
Solution: upgrade to the latest version of PHP4 or PHP5.
Due to the latest work on the notification between Moxie Type blogs using the Live XML Feeds, I took a closer look at what's happened to RSS. While it was immensely popular a few years ago, it was dropped both by Yahoo and Netscape. Yahoo dropped RSS Feeds as soon as they established their branded channels, i.e. food.yahoo.com, tech.yahoo.com, etc. While there are plenty of critics, I understand their decision. They are trying to keep the audience within their microcommunities.
Below is some background on Netscape's involvement:
"RDF Site Summary, the first version of RSS, was created by Guha at Netscape in March 1999 for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal. This version became known as RSS 0.9. In July 1999, Dan Libby of Netscape produced a new version, RSS 0.91, that simplified the format by removing RDF elements and incorporating elements from Dave Winer's scriptingNews syndication format. Libby also renamed RSS to Rich Site Summary and outlined further development of the format in a "futures document". This would be Netscape's last participation in RSS development for eight years. As RSS was being embraced by web publishers who wanted their feeds to be used on My.Netscape.Com and other early RSS portals, Netscape dropped RSS support from My.Netscape.Com in April 2001 during new owner AOL's restructuring of the company, also removing documentation and tools that supported the format." according to Wikipedia.
While most sites do indeed have the RSS button, usually buried on the bottom of the page in 6pt type along with the legal disclaimers, getting the feed itself is almost imposible. For example, I tried Salon.com. I did find the feed at the place I suspected it would be, and yet it sent me directly to the Feedburner.com where after subscribing to their feed I only got a first sentence per every article and the rest of the article I read back at their site.
It makes sense. They have ads and they want you to see them.
Feedburner was bought by Google which "believes that feed-based content and advertising is a developing space where we can add value for users, advertisers and publishers" according to the statement on the Feedburner site. And yet, only a few years ago the same Google issued a cease-and-desist order to block the distribution of Google News RSS feeds against British programmer Julian Bond with a warning that the creation of a news feed from the results of Google News was against its terms of reference.
At that time Bond released it to the open-source community, which means anyone can use it to create customized feeds for newsreaders. "The script is still up there and I'm sure people are still using it. I'm not sure how they would even know that you are scraping Google News and sending headlines to your aggregator." Consolidation of the feeds in the Google owned Feedburner is likely to put the stop to it.
It does say something about the future of RSS, doesn't it?
Here are a few observations on the conflict between w3.org standards and some XML feed validators, RSS Feed Readers or News Aggregators as most people know them, which mushroomed in the recent years. Some of the elements of your document will still not be able to be read properly.
Below is an explanation about what Relative URL is and why it is used in your HTML document according to [RFC1808]:
This document describes the syntax and semantics for "relative"Uniform Resource Locators (relative URLs): a compact representation of the location of a resource relative to an absolute base URL. It is a companion to RFC 1738, "Uniform Resource Locators (URL)" [2], which specifies the syntax and semantics of absolute URLs.
A common use for Uniform Resource Locators is to embed them within a document (referred to as the "base" document) for the purpose of identifying other Internet-accessible resources. For example, in hypertext documents, URLs can be used as the identifiers for hypertext link destinations.
Absolute URLs contain a great deal of information which may already be known from the context of the base document's retrieval, including the scheme, network location, and parts of the URL path. In situations where the base URL is well-defined and known, it is useful to be able to embed a URL reference which inherits that contex rather than re-specifying it within each instance. Relative URLs can also be used within data-entry dialogs to decrease the number of characters necessary to describe a location.
Contrary to the established practice of World Wide Web Consortium on the use of Realtive URLs, some XML readers are unable to publish the images embeded via this method.
Some RSS elements are allowed to contain HTML, including links and images. However, if these links use relative URLs to point to resources, users of some news aggregators will not be able to click on them. And your images use the relative URLs, the images may not appear (since the news aggregator will be looking for the images locally on the user's hard drive, rather than on your web site).
How one should act in this situation? If you know that the content that you publish will be viewed via RSS Readers, either hot link the images to their original sites, or use a separate server to upload your images to and provide a full URL to your images versus a Realative. For example [url=http://yourdomain/images/picture.jpg]http://yourdomain/images/picture.jpg[/url] versus /images/picture.jpg.
Next