FREAKY: QR Code

Today i didn't feel like writting an interesting post related to web programming or just portal coding, ..yesterday I just slept a bit, ...so I am tired and I just felt like talking and doing something freaky and here it is. FreakZion QR Code:

What is the QR Code??, ..what a horrible image!!!. QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The "QR" is derived from "Quick Response", as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed. QR Codes are very common in Japan, actually I could say they have them everywhere!!. Will these Codes conquer the world??, ...maybe for a while, although I believe RFID code is the winner and if not read my post 3 years from now, besides I am not the only one who thinks that way, ..do you remember the funny techy Nabaztag rabbits from Rafi Haladjian and Olivier Mével??. The like to "smell" RFID Codes

If you have any app at your phone as for example NeoReader (spanish article) to read QR Codes then read my id and your phone will be redirected to my homepage. cool, ins't it??, ..and totally freaky!!. :)

SEO: URLFan

As i posted in my last news at my blog, I talked about pagerank from google and how it works. but who else is crawling your website? Many are watching your blog, as big brother, and one of them is URLFAN!!!.

ULFAN has a few websites indexed, just 3.783.534, multiplying the amount of posts by 100 from more than 5 millions blog feeds. All this info gets for thousands of daily RSS entries from blogs in which URLFAN detects how many times a site, ...you site could be, has been quoted or mention.

Wooow, that means that URLFan is spying at RSS feed checking for your popularity??. Yeap, the popularity of the sites that URLFAn are indexing are registered by daily or just all-times popularity!!.

Which are within the 100 more popular sites??. can't you guess:

1. Wikipedia
2. Yotube
3. Flickr
4. Twitter
5. Google
6. Myspace
7. Facebook
8. Imdb
9. Nytimes
10. Apple

Get into URLFan and check your site's popularity and if the info is not in there just add the RSS Feed or the Bumper Icon to your blog. A new week is starting!!, ..have fun!!

GOOGLE: Page Rank??, ..Did I get an A??

At the end of last month, Octuber, the guys from google updated the the relevance indicator called Pagerank. Third time they do it within this marvellous 2009 year.

As You might know, and if you don't there is not problem because nobody borns knowing everything :), google grants every website with a qualification from 0 to 10, as we all had when at school, university, any exam, or in general when we were/are rated by our partners and friends (of couse we get always a 9, because 10 is boring perfection).

Google, in a periodically basis, searches and "investigate" every web ,from its structure of the links, to the people accessing to it, its popularity, the hypertext harmony as I like to call it which matches to a specific search, etc, etc. Combining the general relevance with the specific search, google sets the search results order. That order comes from that pagerank. (not easy formula of course which is somehow the secret formula of google search engine, that makes it sooooo perfect!!, ..well let's give it a 9.9 because as I said before perfection is boring and google is kind of fun, ..isn`tt it?)

Pagerank technology, or formula, has more than 500 millions variablss, ..that is what google says, ..but trust me, it uses less variables, they just say those much variable so noone will try to understand that formula and copy it :P, ..just kidding. It uses more than 2000 millions terms as well, ...uffff, Einstein formulas are 6 month's baby puzzles compare to these google's one.

One good thing is that google likes to reach perfection, to be number one in class!!, and every year is improving its formula, its algorithm and applies those changes to every new pagerank regeneration every 3/4 times a year.

Very important, ..and of course I will discuss about it at next SEO's articles, google takes into account links to your page from sites with bigger pagerank. That is, if site B points to your site and page C points to your competitor's site and site B has less pagerank than site C, ...then your competitor will get more points, or better called votes, than you...crap!!. Ask Site C to link at your site for god's sake!!

If you get a higher PageRank, this will mean that google's robots will review your Site more often to index your contents, ..because those robots know your site is important, is very busy with people making visits, and in general those robots LOVE your site, ..how romantic.

Things are changing a bit with public pagerank, ...hope this doesn't mean that we will need to signin to private sites paying a fee, ...oh no!!. Check it at google's forum

GOOGLE: Google Chrome OS

Hmmm, Today I feel as shareing something as simple as what Google says: ..wouldn't be a good idea to turn your Browser into your operating system??, and furthermore, ..why store your data in your computer when can be stored in something called ...INTERNET??. This is the introduction to Google Chrome OS. enjoy it.



I just let one question back before i leave...., isn't google next big project something which could be called "Google Internet File Storage"??, ...hmmmmmm, yeap, you and me are not the first to think about it. Which could be the name??, filepod??, myfiles??, fileCrib??, gfile?? ...wait just a bit longer and you will see ;)

QOOXDOO: A newbie at Javascript Libreries Classroom??

It may seems a newbie among the javascript frameworks but as any of them it has a getToKnow curve which takes some years and this is the case of Qooxdoo, ..it has been living around us for abot five years. The best description of what Qooxdoo is, can be found at its homepage:

"qooxdoo (pronounced [’ku:ksdu:]) is a comprehensive and innovative framework for creating rich internet applications (RIAs). Leveraging object-oriented JavaScript allows developers to build impressive cross-browser applications. No HTML, CSS nor DOM knowledge is needed. qooxdoo includes a platform-independent development tool chain, a state-of-the-art GUI toolkit and an advanced client-server communication layer. It is Open Source under an LGPL/EPL dual license."

It is a object, or I should say component, oriented framework with the ability to add methods to all the classes and elements embedded in it. It includes console panel, events manager... and it is not as "heavy-weight" as extJS (another javascript framework full of widgets/gadgets). Qooxdoo is very stable and clean as it usually happens working with objects but a bit slow (something that also happens working with objects :)), ..at its origins it was slooower though and had that same windows 9x look&field!!.

It has a nice documentation, something that sometimes misses at other Javascript frameworks. (maybe because it commercial-friendly open source license)

As extJS I would use Qooxdoo to build big JS Apps with a style that may not differ from Qooxdoo standards, but never for little apps or just little javascripts add-ins in pages as for example a drop-down menu.

Finally and although It's taken them sometime, they've finally released a wrapper for GWT. Its name QxWT

Check the demos to know what qooxdoo is able of!!

GOOGLE: Image Swirl

Have you ever entered at google labs to check Image Swirl??, ..did you know how Google is working hard handling images?? ..with projects as Google Similar Image which is currently available in the labs section of the site??. It finds similar images as if it was a very similar job to do!!. Just check this result of similar images of this Depeche Mode Photo:

The result:

Now they have gone a little bit further and have created the Image Swirl which will not only link similar images but will build with the Google Wonder Wheel that they've had available for some time now, links to different wheels of pictures that are related. For example if we select the eiffel tower, then we will have different wheels of pictures. It has very similar pics within the wheel and then a link to another wheel with pics related. In this example an eiffel tower at night will be in a wheel which links to another with similar pictures but during day!!. Isn't this cool??

SEO: Social Networking & Media Strategy

If you are one of my growing followers community, you will remember a quick post I wrote about SEO Strategies by one of my readers's request . Oe of the strategies involved using social networking sites as well as social media sites. Let me point out how to use them to increase your page rank and attract more visitors to yous site. These are my 5 keys for Social Networking and Media SEO Strategy:

1. Bookmarking. The easiest and basic one. Just link your site, your profile, your articles, etc., at all the internet communities and social networks as reddit, linkedin, stumble upon, delicios, technorati, G Bookmarks, mixx.... A very handy tool is sharethis as I posted some days ago.




2. Viral phenomenon or Viral Marketing. Analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses but in terms of spreading your posts, the name of your site, your interests among all the people who interconnects on the web. I like to remar 3 ways for achieving this:
   
   
   
   
   • Through your contacts and their friends. Try to type you are owner of a website and check the results in that same week, ..and furthermore if you know your contacts may like it.
   
   
   
   • Create a Site Profile at a Internet Communitty as for example the facebook pages. One of my friends owns an online Pouf Store and uses facebook pages to fidelize his followers by sending a free pouf on a periodically basis.
   
   
   
   • Are you able to create Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images or just something who might get the attention of your friends???. Post it at your profile or just send it to your friend's profiles.




3. Video Streaming. ..As I always say an image worths more than thousand words, and a video more than a hundred images. Jump and upload a video at youTube!!. You may think that google and most searchers index just text, ..hmmm, I recommend you read about some pretty commercial search engine tools as Blinkx and Autonomy (very related companies by the way ;)). The video is indexed first by youtube and it will find keys within the video as well as it would within plain text and will add the result keys to the description and tag of the video. As usual You Must pay much attention using a proper name full of interesting keywords for the video.



4. There is more than just Internet Communities!!. Make other sites to link to your page. How can you do this??:
   
   
   
   
   • Writing good content!!, ..be patient and constant and persistent. It is one of the best long-term strategies for encouraging inbound links.
   
   
   
   • Why wait??. Get in touch with other sites owners and start a "lovely" friendship. The higher the friendship, the higher the probabilities to be linked
   
   
   
   • A "link to this page" function. Some routine that gives you the exact url to link to your page, ..as google maps does to send the link of a placement coordiates.
   
   



5. Write your own Blog. Show all the internet surfers which are the capabilities of your product, you and your knowledge. A blog will help people undertand how good is your product compare with the competitors, ..and will help you yo better your product. Your Blog is just an advertisement which lasts months, even years. One exmaple: The Dojo Blog. The same idea works with a Forum but of course you need a really big list of followers/writers to get it to work properly

SEO: Social Bookmarking with ShareThis

Digg, Meneame, Stumble Upon, Technorati, facebook, twitter, ....and many, many other places where you can link your posts for sharing with all your friends!!!, and why not, get your posts much more popular!!!, ..and everyday the list keep growing. does it mean that you must add new social networks in a daily or weekly basis to the code of your blog???. Well, yes you can do so, or you can use share this .

Share This makes it so easy enabling to add a widget at wordpress, Typepad, Blogger and gives you the code to add it to your website. You choose which social networks to add from:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• MySpace
• Digg
• Delicious
• StumbleUpon
• Reedit
• G Bookmarks
• Technorati
• mixx
• wordpress
• Xanga
• Blogger
• LiveJournal
• Faves
• friendFeed
• ....
• etc, etc.
  

I just added to my blog for a quick test so just take a look and remember ...keep sharing my friend!!

JOOMLA: V1.6

It's been a long way run in little time, from 2005, since Joomla has been helping programmers, and even more important, non programmers, to build portals easily.

A year has already passed since 1.5 opened its eyes with features which made the installation muh more easily, more platforms ready to run over (somehow thanks to mootools obviously), multi lengual, more template features and more scalable....

Since less than a month we are enjoying alpha2 of Joomla v1.6 which comes with new ACL System, mootools 1.2 fully integrated and so on cleaning up the javascript code, less code being a 30% a lighter solution, big changes at the menu system (mainly for big web sites), an efficient system of modules, which can add new packages that extend or complement and enhance their ability to work with our website photo galleries, word processors, and of course again a larger number of design templates...

The questions now are:

• When will be final 1.6 will be released???
• When will be v2.0 come to scene???.

If anybody knows those answers..., why don't you tell us?? :)

And remember one thing about joomla, ...Here are just some examples of the hundreds of available extensions:

• Dynamic form builders.
• Ecomerce Solutions.
  
• Organizational directories as well as directory services.
  
• Document management.
• Image and multimedia galleries.
• E-commerce and shopping cart engines.
• Forums and chat software.
• Calendars, Scheduling Apps.
  
• Blogging software
• Email newsletters
• Data collection and reporting tools
• Banner advertising systems
• Subscription services
• and many, many more.

SOCIAL NETWORKING: Google Social Graph API

Sometimes the plot about I am going to write in a daily basis at this blog comes from what I have read that same day, ..sometimes the idea comes just because I feel like talking about it, ..sometimes because someone asked me about a topic and want to share the answer with you all ..and this is the case of today. I was asked about public information of people relationships on the web. Is there such a thing??. Well, absolutely, actually more than you may think (twitter, facebook, digg, ....etc. stores this information as public, and even more this information can easily accessed if declared by XFN and FOAF markup.

Google is working, in one of their labs, in a Social Graph API which access to many public sites looking for:

• All public URLs that belong to you and are interconnected. This could be your blog (a1), your LiveJournal page (a2), and your Twitter account (a3).
• Publicly declared connections between people. For example, a1 may link to b's blog while a1 and c link to each other.

...How this API may help us??. Well there can be many funtionality which bombs my mind, for example:

• Getting to know all your friends to check the availabity to contact you for a job offer or just for a deal.
• Getting to know all your public URLs may be interesting to know what you are interested in, and so what to sell you (hmmm...interesting tool for one of the main money incoming sources for searchers!!)
• If you sign in a new website, ..why do you have to upload again your profile info, picture, CV...., why are not just asked you to get all that info from other sources as facebook, Flickr, .... A nice development is being done by Glenn Jones with Ident Engine.
• ...................

...Now time for today's great concert!!

JAVASCRIPT: 6 ways to improve you performance..

...and again thanks to the JS Ninja Thomas Fuchs.Some of the things in the presentation are already known by many of us, for example the use of inline coding is faster that function calling (although as usual you may check how many times a function may be called at your code and the amount of code within that function. Some other "tricks" ,as the weird stuff related to math calculus, remains me when I posted my 3D programming blog, more than 13 years ago and when I posted my first "Games programming" tutorial at geocities
having more than 2 millions hits, snif, snif, old times.

At any case here you have this wonderfull masterpiece presentation:




As well as a link to a pdf file in case you want to have a nice reading at bedtime!! :). Tomorrow Depeche's mode concert!! ..I was there at munich, and I will be at Madrid .....life is perfect.

LOGIN: OpenID

When building a site, you may need a private section where the user must log in. Well that seems not hard at all, but why don't you help the user to use an existing login identity which may already have?? Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, MYSpace, AOL...

Thanks to OpenID you can do this!!!.

The owner of your identity is the Identity Provider and that provider is the only site who knows/handle your password, the only one, and the rest of your profile info can be shared to all the sites you want to sign in with your identity. Your provider asks you which of this information you’re willing to give out and which not.

How does it work??. Very easy, anytime you are going to sign in at freakzion.com which allows openID you would see something like this:


if you are using a blogger account you would log in as:

user.blogspot.com where user in my case would be sepelka.blogger.com

Freakzion.com then should redirect the user to a blogger sing-in page where the user, in my case sepelka, would enter blogger's user and password. Now, the identity provider, Blogger, sends the user back to the web site he/she were visiting, freakzion.com, and gives it the information he/she allowed. Now the user is logged in to freakzion!

A new week is coming and depeche mode's concert is here!!, this cannot be a wrong week!!

TOOLS: Spy your Readers...

As we all have seen at Google Wave, users action log as well as user online interaction is just ...sooo coooooooool!!. Why don't you just add something cool as that at your site??, for example a tool which tell you the readers whole navigation on your site. The name of the tool is userfly:



To test it, just get in here. check every move of users at your website!!.

It remains me of software called newKnow from META4 Owner, ...6 years ago... life changes but it cycles so much!!

TOOLS: Do u have any broken Links at your site??

During Next days I will post about tools which may help a site to be "cleaned" and "usable". Let's starting cleaning our site!!.

It's awefull to have broken links at your site, ..it gives the idea of unmaintenance of the site, like getting to rent an apartment and find a garbage bag as soon as you open the apartment's door!!. There is a piece of cake solution called Xenu's Link Sleuth (TM). Link verification is done on "normal" links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. As you can check in this wuick tutorial you can filter wich links to show, which links to exclude....



It works with SSL sites as well as partially testing of ftp and gopher sites. Time to clean!!. At nay case if you are looking for something really quick just access here and this php litle tool will help you

JAVASCRIPT FRAMEWORKS: JQuery vs Prototype

It is said Jquery started being a "child" of Prototype and no wonder that are probably the two closest javascript frameworks to each other.

Actually you will use '$' in both Prototype and Jquery, although jquery uses '$' as prototype '$$', and anything that can be done at jquery can be done at Prototype and viceversa. New versions of the libraries are being release frequently, and for example Jquery "$(document).ready()" will result as document.observe('dom:loaded',) included at its dom content loaded event in version 1.6.

I remember a very nice article from Remy Sharp and although it is a bit old, 2007, it gives a nice view of the differences:

I, myself, prefer prototype just a bit more than Jquery, it is a bit simpler although not much differences (for example node.up('div') at prototype or node.parent('div') at Jquery when trasversing), but I must admit somehow having the Effects library glued to the Jquery baseline is cool!!. For prototype you must add script.aculo.us or scripty2 aside to have cool Effects, ..but at any case i LOVE to code at both, Prototype and Jquery.

Talking about cool effects, ..do you remember this video??

SEO: WebSEO Analytics

Ok, ok, You have applied all the SEO strategies you already know, you have set your "h?" attributes properly, you have all your meta and keywords tags perfect, you have included your site in some social networks...

What else can you do to improve it??. Well I encourage you to use this free tool which will give you an idea of things as for example is your site being indexed at google, yahoo, bing???, which social networks are linking to your site, which external links do u have?, Which are the words more repeated in your page??, are u using a robots.txt file to tell the browser not to index for example a print page??.....and more!! as your pagerank, Info about the updates done at your page,...



Just access here, get a URL and let Web SEO Analytics help you.

...Still some more presentations to do at work, ..a proper song for this moment

PRESSXINE: PXMenu v0.6

Another review of configurable multilevel dropdown menu. Still not release 1 but getting closer!!. To have a javascript dropdown menu is as simple as adding a list to your site with class="pxmenu" and in that list will turn into a dropdown menu:

<ul id="menu1" class="pxmenu" style="display:none;">
  <li><label>PX Menu</label>
    <ul>
      <li><a href="index.html">Description</a></li>
      <li><a href="pxMCtnt.html">Menu Content</a></li>
      <li><a href="pxMCss.html">Menu Styles</a></li>    
      <li><a href="pxMCode.html">Menu Coding</a>
        <ul>
          <li><a href="#">Menu Code</a></li>
          <li><a href="pxMCodeCnf.html">Menu Conf.</a></li>    
          <li><label>Download</label>
            <ul>
              <li><a href="PXMenu.zip">Click Here</a></li>    
            </ul>
          </li>     
        </ul>
      </li>          
    </ul>    
  </li>
  <li><label>JS Libraries</label>
  ...............
  ...............

With different styles you can get totally different menus:



You can set the speed of sublevels hidding/unhidding, any menu style, names for ids of menus and options... and working now on different effects to be applied when hidding/unhidding, having as many menus as desired at same page and choose actions from mouseover to mouseclick (this will allow you to build any menu you may think.....). More info at PressXine Menu Site. Have a nice weekend!!. ...and yes!!! here is a song for this weekend, a great version by Lacuna Coil of the one and only depeche's Enjoy the Silence!!!

ALL: Autocomplete at any JS Library

ufff, what a horrible week at work almost no time for this blog with many projects and teams to lead!!!. But I can't ever forget about my daily readers!!. I have been asked by the autocomplete of google and facebook. I am going to shwo you a list of different options, ..and as usual I will build a nice solutions in some weeks so you may use it with many configurations....

PHPGuru example. A Javascript library which provides an auto-complete dropdown which you can attach to one or more form inputs (typically text inputs). It functions the same as the Internet Explorer auto-complete, and works in Internet Explorer and Firefox (tested on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera). ...It only matches characters matching exact start of name.




Script.aculo.us Autocomplete. As usual one of my favourites developments. I link here the local function although there is another one getting info from external data source using ajax. The constructor takes four parameters. The first two are, as usual, the id of the monitored textbox, and id of the autocompletion menu. The third is an array of strings that you want to autocomplete from, and the fourth is the options block. The option blocks allows to have a full search of substring Search anywhere in autocomplete array strings!!!. Really cool. Example here.



AutoSuggest. An AJAX auto-complete text field tested on Safari 2.0.4, Firefox 2 Mac & PC, IE 6, IE 7. It has a nice style look&field but it is a bit slow and it looks for character input which matches starting string characters..


JQuery Autocomplete. How could JQuery help with this??. this is just an example because it doesn't refresh quickly at any keystroke at it should happen as well as it only matches first characters at string.



jQuery Autocomplete Mod. I lead many important, big and expensive projects at one of the best forbes worlwide enterprises and i have learnt two basic rules: anything you develop may look cool as any commercial product, and with just an eye glance you see a nice product. This is not the case of this software, but trust me when I say it is one of the best autocomplete JQuery solution out there!!. Thanks to people as

WEB OPTIMIZATION: Compress your JS, CSS, ....files

do u want to speed up a bit your sites??. compress your code with any of this tools besides ofuscating the code in some cases.....

• JSMin is a conservative compressor, written several years ago by Douglas Crockford. It is considered safe (especially if you verify your code with JSLint first-- an excellent thing to do anyway) because it doesn't attempt to change any variable names.
• jasob will typically shrink for around 70% which will significantly improve download time and execution speed in the Web browser. This is done because it ofuscate the codes besides eliminating unused blank spaces. Jasob reads files with JavaScript code and replaces descriptive variable and function names like Customer, Salary, FirstName... with meaningless names like d, g, m... It also removes comments and unnecessary white space characters (space, tab, carriage return, line feed).
• Dojo shrinksafe is a very popular Java based JavaScript compressor that parses the JavaScript using the rhino library and crunches local variable names.
• Packer by Dean Edwards, is also a very popular JavaScript compressor, that can go beyond regular compression and also add advanced on-the-fly decompression with a JavaScript runtime piece.
• YUI Compressor is a newer compressor written by Julien Lecomte, that aims to combine the safety of JSMin with the higher compression levels acheived by Dojo Shrinksafe. Like Dojo shrinksafe, it is written in Java and based on the rhino library.

Remember to try to use gzip compression if your hosting provider enables it.... Welcome to the shrinking universe

SEO: Quarkbase

Do u know who is visiting your site?. Most probably you have many information at google analytics about that. But do u know if your site is being linked within social websites?, which info about your site may be at wikipedia??, which blogs are linking to your site?? ....and many more more info. Quarkbase is a mashup of more than 30 data sources and algorithms which gathers info about your site, social networks linking to it, info about the domain, people who founded or just related to your site, most popular pages within your site, internet pagerank......



All the research is done online, free and fast. It gives many info, ...but remember other tools as weboptimizationsite. Never there is enough info, never the world is enough