Google Internet Share March 2008

Google Inc. (GOOG) received 67% of all U.S. Internet searches during the four weeks ended March 29, according to information service Hitwise.

Google received 64% of all U.S. Internet searches in the same period a year earlier.

Yahoo Inc.'s (YHOO) search engine received 20% of U.S. Web searches in the more recent period, while Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) MSN Search drew 7% and Ask.com 4%.

The remaining 46 search engines in Hitwise's search engine analysis tool accounted for about 2% of searches in the U.S.

Source : CNN Money

Web design India: IT on a new high

In business world, growing competition and brisk changes have made the outsourcing one of the most popular and growing area. Offshore outsourcing in web development, web designing and SEO services is now multi billion industry. Most of the European companies are outsourcing functions from logistics to Human resources to Information technology to Payroll processingto India.


This outsourcing boom has transformed India from a developing country to an emerging economy and a superpower in the making. Dipstick survey shows that India is the first choice as a destination for outsourcing services based on techno-environment, hard working and skilled manpower, effectively managing and mitigating risks involved and helping maintain profound relationships with the customers.

India enjoys a boon in offshore outsourcing services. Indias government manifested its support to IT education by heavily positioning its investments on infrastructure improvements related to telecommunications. Also, generous tax incentive - schemes never fail to attract more companies to outsource its services to India.


Demand of web designing service in India is continuously picking up. The reason for that is, India is a rich source of programmers coupled with academic excellence. India has an extensive pool of programming talent, at high levels of expertise, who are English proficient, and work virtually around the clock. At a fraction of the cost paid to programmers in the US, UK and Japan, India can provide a host of programming experts. Furthermore, web designing companies in India not only consider graphic design and logo design but also give great importance to the content and SEO services. Because a relevant quality content with continuous latest useful information with its visual effect at first look is always important for any business. So that potential customers who once visit your site love to visit it next time for more information, this flow will serve your business purpose - changing visitors to customers, who take interest in your services and products.


The other thing is that web designing company India also boast of their dedicated, genuine, experienced professionals who are adept in adopting latest technologies. And they organize quality and productivity solutions from the initial step of web development which makes them to deliver results faster at reduced time.


Thus, by seeing the present edge dynamic softwares and cutting edge technologies, obviously India is the best site for Offshore Outsourcing Company Website Development because of its easily available rich resources from every perspective. To end with it can be said that India is the most preferred destination for web design and other IT work because of its ability to offer quality services at competitive cost.

Source: Fibre2fashion

Different Between HTML 4 and HTML 5?

It's not as a big of change as it may seem. Keep in mind that "backwards compatibility" is of the utmost concern when releasing a new level of HTML/XHTML. For those of you who may be interested in the forthcoming changes, the W3 have a working draft of a document that details the differences between HTML 4 and HTML 5.

• HTML 5 differences from HTML 4
  http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/

We will be paying very close attention to the progress of HTML 5. We'll be running a series of articles in layman's terms to help you understand the benefits of semantic document structure and using proper markup. We suggest that you take an hour or two each week and review the HTML 5 Working Draft and prepare yourselves for the future.

SEO Benefits

Online ad agencies struggle with this issue everyday. How do you generate the same profit from organic search engine optimization when it requires a lot more effort, expertise, and expense to produce high rankings and organic traffic? How do you sell the possible disruption on a web site to clients, in order to make it rank well? It's a lot easier to throw up a brochure site with a few catch phrases and graphics and bid on some AdWords advertising.

Part of the problem can be solved by valuating search engine optimization services more highly. SEO is grossly underpriced. In my situation, clients are paying 4 times as much for PPC clickthroughs as for organic clickthroughs. Studies show that people click on organic listings in the results pages, even though the space given to text ads is almost pushing them off the screen. Text ads still aren't precisely targeted either. Why should they be? If they're poorly targeted, it creates more clicks and more revenue for the search engines.

Organic rankings don't suffer that problem. If the person isn't interested, you're not out much.

Another solution is to create new web sites to cover specific facets of a product or service. This ensures funds will be invested in SEO, thus creating an opportunity for SEO to generate sales leads and revenue. Many companies stick to one web site when they should have 4 or 5. A single site is under tremendous pressure to perform. Putting all your eggs in one basket is not good risk management strategy since competitors will find it easier to beat your one site, and Google could alter its algorithm overnight resulting in a loss of half of your traffic. Not a likely scenario, but it does happen.

Source: seoconsultants.com/articles

Five Simple Ways To Keep Your Reader’s Attention

In today’s world of evolving blogs and on-line newsletters, readers are swamped with so much information that they become more sensitive to the quality of articles that they are reading. I highly recommend that you follow these five steps to keeping your reader’s attention while at your site, blog, or article:

1. Be Clear. It is always refreshing to use clear language and understandable terms that keep the reader “in the know”.

2. Be Brief. I know it is great to write articles like “100 Ways To” but these articles can tire the reader. Brevity is a real blessing sometimes.

3. Humor is always nice. As much as you might be saying something serious, still, an appropriate use of humor is always refreshing.

4. Be Honest. When the reader can see into your sincerity and candor, that is a real great trick to keeping the reader at your article.

5. Be Unique. This is why websites and articles really make it - uniqueness. This one I will let you interpret for yourself. This is a surefire method to get readers to return to your articles, website, and/or blog with frequency.

Add social bookmarking to wordpress

In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create a quick and simple social bookmarking option to your blog similar to what you see on this site. This is for wordpress themes only although with a bit of tweaking it may be able to work on other blogs.

This will be the final outcome:

1. First, download these images, these are the icons for the image you see above and put them in the images folder of the theme file: socialbookmarkingicons.zip
2. Now open up style.css in your theme and add this code:
   

   .socialbookmarking {
   margin-right:5px;
   text-align:center;
   clear:left;
   float:right;
   font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
   font-size:8pt;
   color:#333333;
   border-left:1px #FFFFFF solid;
   border-right:1px #FFFFFF solid;
   }

   .socialbookmarking_digg a {
   width:27px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/digg.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_digg a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/digg1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_delicious a {
   width:26px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/delicious.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_delicious a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/delicious1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_reddit a {
   width:30px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/reddit.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_reddit a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/reddit1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_furl a {
   width:28px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/furl.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_furl a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/furl1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_google a {
   width:29px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/google.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_google a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/google1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_stumbleupon a {
   width:26px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/stumbleupon.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_stumbleupon a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/stumbleupon1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_live a {
   width:29px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/live.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_live a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/live1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_technorati a {
   width:25px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/technorati.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_technorati a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/technorati1.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_yahoo a {
   width:25px;
   height:28px;
   float:left;
   display:block;
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/yahoo.png);
   }

   .socialbookmarking_yahoo a:hover {
   background-image:url(images/socialbookmarkingicons/yahoo1.png);
   }

3. Now add the following to the single.php page underneath the content of the post (normally something like
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   &t=”>
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   &title=”>
   

   
   ”>
   

   
   &t=”>
   

And that’s it, you should now have an area of social bookmarking icons that is similar to the ones you see here on Help Developer.

source: http://softwaredevelopmentindia.wordpress.com

Meta Keywords Advice

Do not use the meta keywords tag. Many people still think of this as a quick fix for SEO. It's not. Google no longer uses it. Yahoo is perhaps the only search engine that still uses the meta keywords tag but places very little weight on it. By placing this tag on a web page, the primary beneficiary is your competition. How so? The meta keywords tag gives your competitors a nicely formatted list of your important keywords. Don't believe me? Try the free keyword research tool at the end of this article.

Most people agree that this tag is useless (read Danny Sullivan's 2002 Death of a Meta Tag article). I'll take it a step further and argue that it's hazardous. I know many people won't agree with me, but here's my argument:

Search engines used to rely heavily on the meta keywords tag to guess which keywords were relevant on a web page. Now search engines are sophisticated enough to examine the actual keywords in the body of a web page. Major search engines place little, if any, value in the meta keywords tag. There is more risk than reward in using the meta keywords tag because your competitors can view the meta keywords tag and can steal your keywords.

What do I mean by "steal" your keywords? By placing the meta keywords tag on a page, you are, in effect, giving your competitors a list of your important keywords. They can then use these keywords and buy PPC ads or optimize their own site for your important keywords. Why give them this sort of business intelligence? Having invested time and money on exhaustive keyword research to identify the important keyword phrases to use for your own SEO and PPC efforts, why on earth would you make a list of your high value keywords public?

Perhaps a concrete example will help illustrate the point. I was playing with the keyword tool, entering domains of other search engine marketing firms to see if they were using the meta keywords tag, and, if so, what keywords they included. Plugging one site into the tool, I noticed the keyword phrase "targeted traffic" in the meta keywords tag. Looking at the site's home page and even viewing the source, that phrase is only in the meta keywords. Nowhere else. This is what people do - they just stick their important keywords into the tags. You don't have to study the title tag, study the meta description tag, see what alt text is "behind" the images, examine the content of the page, look at the links, etc. In other words, you don't have to take the time to think like a search engine or reverse engineer a competing site. Your competitors give you all of their important keywords in their meta keywords tag. I've never thought of "targeted traffic" as a keyword to optimize for or to buy with PPC ads. Perhaps I'll run some PPC ads and see if it's a valuable phrase for SEO. Point is, I'd never have thought of it if it wasn't in a competitor's meta keywords tag.

Here is our meta keywords advice: do not use the meta keywords tag. Instead, make sure the title of your web page has your important keywords and that those keywords are repeated in the body of your web page. If you want to, create a meta description tag. The search engines do use that meta tag, but it's not essential for SEO.

Creating good content is essential. Each page should have useful content and include your important keywords. Don't try to stuff all of your important keywords onto a single page. Create pages around a theme, a small collection of keyword phrases. For instance, target 1-3 keyword phrases per page. Write a title that incorporates those keyword phrases. If the title seems awkward from the point of view of your audience (site visitors not the search engines), scale back the number of phrases and try again. If you choose to write a meta description tag, it should reinforce the keywords already in the title tag. The body of the page should then include those important keyword phrases. Again, though, the content of the page should be written for your site visitors and not seem awkward.

Since many web sites do still use the meta keywords tag, we have developed a free keyword research tool that will analyze the meta keywords of your competition. Use the tool to see what keywords your competitors are embedding in their meta keywords tags and then research these keywords using other freely available tools. When I begin work for a new client, I ask them for a list of their competitors' web sites. I plug those into the tool and it gives me an instant list of keywords. That's only the beginning, a starting point for further keyword research. These companies have spent hours upon hours performing keyword research. I can take 30 seconds, scrape their meta keywords tags and have solid keyword ideas for PPC ads to create or SEO work to perform for a client. That, coupled with the fact that Google doesn't use the meta keywords tag, convinces me that it's downright silly to use them.

As time goes on, I expect online businesses to become a bit more savvy regarding meta tags and this tool will no longer provide a quick start. In the meantime, use the free keyword tool and crush your competition!

Source: searchengineguide

9 things a web designer can’t do without

As a web designer there are certain things that any web designer would need to succeed in developing his or her skills. Below is a list of 10 key things I personally feel a web designer needs. If you know any more then please leave them as comments.

So here goes:

1. Well obviously a graphics design application. Personally I favour Gimp because its fast, reliable, updated regularly, free and easy to use and doesn’t compromise on features when it comes to web design. The worthy alternative to this is the slow, expensive Photoshop (oh did I say worthy, I meant unworthy, yeah I don’t like it, although a lot of other designers do.)
2. Inspiration, no web designer can produce good sites without getting ideas from other peoples sites (that doesn’t mean copy people sites, just get some ideas). There are plenty of sites that you can get inspiration from, personally I use templatemonster.com, csspick.com, cssdrive.com, cssmania.com, wpthemesfree.com and other general browsing, if I see a site design that I like, I bookmark it and come back to it later. Inspiration from other peoples work is how you can improve your skills over time as you start to wonder how they did something on there site and eventually find the answer.
3. Coding knowledge is something that quite a few designers dont take up, however learning how to code can seriously increase the amount of money you can make, people who want sites designed are more likely to go for someone who can do everything for them, not get a design and then have to find someone else to code it.
4. Templates. As you produce sites you will start to become more efficient, you will realise that the site you are creating has a similar structure to a site you have designed before, therefore it is good practise to get that template you did previously and edit it rather than start the new site from scratch. Personally I have created over 100 templates over the past year (website and wordpress), and I am in a position to code websites a lot faster because the template is already made.
5. The Web Developer Toolbar. (download here) A must have tool is the web developer toolbar, it works with Firefox and gives you all the information you could ever need when coding websites and is also handy for seeing how other people have coded their websites. This makes it a lot easier to code and is definitely an important tool to have. Unfortunately, it isn’t available for IE which is what you would use it for, all of those IE problems.
6. Validate as you go along, the worst part for most web coders is that they will create a great looking site that works perfect in Firefox, heck it may even look nice in IE (very unlikely, but one can only hope). Then comes the dreaded part, validating it to W3c standards. This can take up a lot of your time, so make sure you are validating as you go along, this will cut off that annoying period at the end of development when you can’t see what is wrong with a line of code that seems to be correct but W3c says otherwise.
7. XAMMP, If you are creating PHP/MySQL driven sites or designing skins for online tools like Wordpress then installing xammp is a must. It will enable you to create your site or template offline which speeds up development by a massive amount because you don’t need to keep uploading each revision of each file to the internet, it also keeps that project your working on secure during development.
8. Tutorials. Everybody learns how to design or code through tutorials, its just the way that it is done, when you ask a question on a forum and you get an answer, in essence you are reading and using a tutorial. There are thousands of tutorials out there, take a look around this blog and you will find some.
9. And finally enjoy what you do, if you don’t enjoy what you are doing then you are wasting your time. Don’t become a web designer because you heard it pays well because it doesn’t, it is overcrowded with kids trying to make a quick buck by undercutting the proper designers, it gets very frustrating. Life is about enjoyment, if you don’t enjoy something then it will show in the quality of the outcome.

PHP Cookies

A cookie is used to store data on a users computer. Creating and retrieving cookies and their values is an easy process in PHP and in this short guide I am going to show you how to use cookies.



Creating a cookie

The Code

setcookie(”cookieName”, “cookieValue”, cookieExpirationTime);

an example:

setcookie(”visitor”, “seenPage”, time()+3600);

this creates a cookie called visitor with the value seenPage and it will expire in 3600 seconds (or an hour)



Finding a cookies value

The Code

echo $_COOKIE[”cookieName”];

an example:

echo $_COOKIE[”visitor”];

this will show to screen the value that is stored in the cookie with the name visitor, so the result would be “seenPage” if we use the previous example



Deleting a cookie

The Code

setcookie(”cookieName”, “”, timeExpirationTime);

an example:

setcookie(”visitor”, “”, time()-3600);

you can see that the time()-3600 is similar to when you create a cookie, this is because if you replace the + with a - then it cancels out the cookie.

So there you have it a very simple quick guide to PHP cookies, I hope this helped

Microsoft releases 14,000 pages of Office suite protocols

Microsoft has taken a serious step towards fulfilling its interoperability and openness promises for developers, partners, customers and competitors, by releasing significant protocol data. .

The organisation posted more than 14,000 pages on MSDN covering preliminary versions of technical documentation for its protocols built into Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

Tom Robertson, general manager of Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft, points out that this brings the total to more than 44,000 pages of protocol documentation now released and freely available – even to ISVs (independent software vendors), open source developers and developers in user IT departments.

Says Robertson: “We believe that providing open, consistent access to these protocols will further unleash the creativity of all developers to work on real-world interoperability solutions. The implementation of Microsoft’s interoperability principles is an important component of our overall efforts to promote interoperability in the marketplace.”

He gives the example of developers working with SharePoint protocols, who now have resources to develop products that work with Office client applications and SharePoint Server products.

source: mcsolutions.co.uk

Secret images of Google Earth

Microsoft upgrades robotics development tools

Microsoft’s efforts in developing tools for robotics took another step forward recently when the company released a preview of the next version of its programming platform.

Robotics Developer Studio 2008 builds on the original release, Robotics Studio 2006, according to Microsoft robotics group general manager Tandy Trower, and is due for release later this year. The company made a community technology preview of Robotics Developer Studio available for download on April 9. The name change lines up with existing product lines and better reflects its role as a development tool, the announcement noted.

The updated developer tools now allow the use of distributed LINQ queries to reduce network utilization and simplify service authoring. Runtime performance has also seen a boost, according to Trower, with the company estimating interservice throughput gains of 150% to 300%, between nodes as well as within a node. According to the company, services now load twice as fast as they had before.

The tools themselves have seen other work as well. The Visual Programming Language tool now allows users to visually define computational domains for managing distributed program execution. Meanwhile, the simulation environment tool now can record and play back simulations, and its floorplan editor simplifies the definition of complex interiors and building structures.

Since the launch of Robotics Studio 2006, more than 200,000 copies of the software have been downloaded, according to Microsoft. The software is free for noncommercial applications and must be licensed for commercial use.

The company also announced a virtual robotics competition, called RoboChamps, which was expected to launch April 21; details are available at www.robochamps.com.

Check Out the Latest Version of Google Earth

Today we're introducing a new version of the Google Earth desktop client. The new release, Google Earth version 4.3, greatly advances our vision of offering a realistic, 3D model of the world in Google Earth by giving users a higher quality, more immersive experience. Google Earth 4.3 also adds more realistic, real-world data so users have more ways to discover and explore all the interesting features the world has to offer.

Here are the highlights:

• New navigation -- We've created a new navigational experience so users can better take advantage of the 3D environment in Google Earth. The navigation takes the traditional pan-and-zoom approach associated with mapping programs and incorporates a first-person, ground-level perspective commonly used in video games.

• More, faster 3D buildings -- Version 4.3 also includes dozens of photo-textured cities and towns, as well as thousands of user-contributed buildings around the world. We've significantly enhanced our approach to rendering 3D data to greatly improve performance and realism of 3D data.

• Street View -- The well-known Google Maps feature gets added to Google Earth with version 4.3. Street View is a popular, engaging feature that allows people to easily find, discover, and plan activities relevant to a location.

• Sunlight feature -- This new addition is a playful way to control the sun's location relative to the Earth. When zoomed out to a view of the Earth, you can control a time-lapse view of sunlight moving across the Earth. While zoomed into a given city, you can watch the sunrise and sunset.

• Image acquisition date -- One of our most requested features, 4.3 now includes an image acquisition date, which shows you on what date a given area of imagery was taken.

• New languages -- Version 4.3 includes twelve new languages, including Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Keep an eye on the Google LatLong (http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/) blog for more details on Google Earth version 4.3 over the course of the week.

A whole new world to explore

On the Google Earth team, we're big fans of Earth Day, so much so that we couldn't hold out until it arrives next week to release our latest labor of love: Google Earth 4.3. With this version, we have completely rethought how you might interact with the 3D world. We've redesigned the navigation to make it much easier to fly from the heavens down to the streets of your town. And with all of the great user-created buildings in the 3D Warehouse, we wanted to make it easy for you to get right up close to see the rich detail.



Here's a sample of what you'll find in this release:

• New navigation - We've improved the zoom control so you can swoop down from outer space to street level in a single seamless motion. And with the addition of the "look" joystick, you can look up at buildings or across a mountain range.

• More, faster 3D buildings - It's more fun to navigate through a lot of new 3D content. Besides adding thousands of buildings contributed by people around the world, we've added dozens of photo-textured cities and towns in the U.S. and elsewhere.

• Street View - The popular Google Maps feature makes its Google Earth debut.

• Sunlight feature - Never seen the sunrise over the Alps? Now you can.

• New languages - There are 12 new languages, including Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Check out the Lat Long blog for all the details, or head over to our website at earth.google.com. And stay tuned for more details about Earth Day coming soon.

Design Your Site with WordPress Magazine Themes

As with any website, design can be key to your overall performance. Many already know that WordPress offers some great features for blogs and sites alike. But did you know that you can get great magazine style themes to ensure maximum design efficiency online?

That’s right. WordPress magazine themes are outstanding design frameworks that include a wonderful, easy to manage homepage instead of the traditional blog homepage. Now, you can set any html page as your homepage when using WordPress, but this method requires little know how and even less technical ability. And at least one of them is free.

WordPress is the most used open source CMS out there right now and it takes little work to build and SEO powerhouse. Google loves it and indexes all pages easily if you have everything working properly.

But when visitors come to your blog, they frequently see a standard blog home page, with snippets of posts in a list and some sidebars containing various items of interest.

Magazine themes eliminate that aspect of this. They give a well structured, easy to follow foundation for the rest of your site and aid in directing traffic from your home page to various key areas of your site.

Three Great WordPress Magazine Themes

Mimbo 2.2
The first magazine theme called Mimbo 2.2. Mimbo creates a wonderful area for featured articles, sub-categories and less important categories individually. This is done with ease and a little code manipulation. You can get assistance with the code from the creator Darren Hoyt. It uses category key numbers to determine what content to place where and then uses WordPress’s custom fields to place the pictures.

The best thing about Mimbo is it’s free! Below is a screenshot of a Mimbo 2.2 theme in use right now.

Mimbo is the only free magazine theme found that merits any recognition; but there are also two for purchase that are just as outstanding, if not more so.

Revolution
Revolution is a top notch, for purchase magazine theme. It is a widget-ready, customizable theme that is an ideal solution for online magazines, online newspapers and other websites that wish to use WordPress as a content management system. It offers a little more flexibility and a different homepage layout than Mimbo.

Revolution also has other magazine style themes specific to news, business and more. A set can be purchased for around $80.00 for single use.

WP-Magazine
Also of note is WP-Magazine Theme. It has a great scrolling image on the home page with a larger area to work with and less white space. The basic option here sells for around $80.00.

Now you have the resources to build a powerhouse publication website with a great design, ease of use and fun right at your fingertips. Why are you still reading? Read more about WordPress and the great things you can do with it now… More Info: cmswire.com

Drupal 5, clean URLs, and Fedora

Monkeying around with Drupal 5 on Fedora 8, trying to get up to speed in this strange new world of structureless node soup. I thought an easy warmup task would be to get clean URLs working, but that turned out to be quite a tussle.
I had Drupal installed in a "/drupal" subdirectory of an existing site, which worked fine as long as the Apache config had Alias /drupal /usr/share/drupal, which was installed by default. That made everything work, but putting in the default "clean URLs" rewrite rules and trying to access the "admin/settings/clean-urls" URL (instead of "?q=admin/settings/clean-urls") gave this error in the Apache config:
The requested URL /usr/share/drupal/index.php was not found on this server.
Assuming that's the googleable phrase that will land folks here, here was my solution: first, realize that the Alias of /usr/share/drupal was preventing the rewrite rules from ever being accessed - remove the rewrite rules and you'll see you get the same error. I ended up removing the Alias altogether, and instead making a symlink inside my web root to /usr/share/drupal. Then just add your rewrite rules and an option to follow symlinks in a Directory config for your web root, like so:
Options FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /drupal
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]


And don't forget to remove the Alias /drupal /usr/share/drupal line from your config. Do that, and it should work. Works for me, at least.

Source: frobnosticate.com

First Magento Training Class - Sold Out, New Dates Announced

Magento’s first developer focused training class, Developing with Magento, is now completely sold out. The next class will take place on May 6 and run until May 29. These classes are timed to start at 6PM Eastern Daylight Time, perfect for after-work attendance in North America and daytime attendance in the Asia-Pacific region.

To learn more about Magento’s training program, visit our training page.

OpenX: A Case Study and Joomla! Friend

Joomla! core member Peter Russell has been on a sabbatical of sorts and during this time he's been looking at a range of open source projects. Today, Pete talks with OpenX founder and CTO, Scott Switzer. Scott, 38, drives the product vision and is the OpenX community leader. Scott works at OpenX's London office or out of a suitcase—he travels a lot. University trained (Vermont), he has been a software architect for large software systems such as for GEHealthcare. He was formerly the co-founder/CTO for other media companies, like M3 and article 27. Pete Q. Scott,please explain the journey that has seen you involved in Open Source? Scott A. As the co-founder of article 27, we spent lots of time thinking how to break into a software market with established players. At the time, I advocated an open source model, but we could not build a supporting business model. That decision, and subsequent exit of the company, provided the challenge for me to build a business plan which would support open source software for my next company. We decided on a services model with M3 MediaServices, now part of Unanimis Consulting. We built upon OpenX software (which was open source), and released a hosted service based upon the software. Q. How do you reconcile Open Source and the commercial path OpenX is taking? A. When starting OpenX we decided to not charge for software or services, but instead charge advertisers a percentage if we connect them with one of our publishers. Because OpenXcharges advertisers, our publishers seem to be fine with this as long as OpenX continues to maximise the value that their inventory is worth. Q. How many developers do you have on board and where are they based? A. We have around 15 full-time developers based in Europe (London, Poland, Italy), and other community developers based around the world. Q. What does OpenX do for publishers and why would they want to use it opposed to just AdSense? A. Publishers like to use OpenX to deliver advertising from ad networks like AdSense. This way, they have technology which gives them independent statistics on how their campaigns are performing as well as the ability to control numerous advertisers and ad networks simultaneously so that the maximum revenue can be achieved.

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Database Programming in Java Using JDBC

An application that does not persist its data in a database is a rarity. Programming languages reflect this trend. That's why all languages provide a robust and flexible library for database access. Java is no exception.

Java provides the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API to access different databases. In this discussion, I will be focusing on the basics of JDBC. I will start with the whys and wherefores of JDBC. The next section will focus on the steps to use JDBC to access a database. In the final section, I will develop an application that will access MySQL database server using the steps described in the previous section. That's the outline for this discussion.

JDBC: What is it?

JDBC, which is short for Java Database Connectivity, can be defined as "An API for the Java programming language that defines how a client may access a database." In other words, JDBC specifies the ways and methods that are needed to access a database, more specifically a relational database such as Oracle, MySQL, and others. The main aspect of JDBC is that it is a specification and not a product. So different vendors (here RDBMS vendors) provide their own implementation for the specification.

For example, the JDBC implementation for Oracle database is provided by Oracle itself and the same is the case for all others. The implementations provided by the vendors are known as JDBC Drivers. The most important point to be kept in mind is that JDBC Drivers are installed at client-side and not at server-side.

JDBC has been with the Java Standard Edition (JSE) from version 1.1. The latest version is 4 and is being shipped with JSE 6. Regardless of the version, JDBC supports four types of implementations or drivers. They are:

1. Type I or JDBC-ODBC Bridge

2. Type II or Partly Java Partly Native

3. Type III or Network Protocol Driver

4. Type IV or Pure Java Driver

The types are defined by how the driver provides communication between the application and the database server. Here are the details.

A Type I Driver is also called a JDBC-ODBC Bridge. The reason is that in this case JDBC internally makes calls to the ODBC. It is the ODBC that communicates with the database server. The job of JDBC is to provide the queries to the ODBC in a form understandable by ODBC and to deliver the result provided by ODBC to the application in a form that is understandable by the application. This Driver works mainly with the Windows platform. This is the only type of Driver that is shipped with a Java installation.

A Type II Driver uses the native API of the target database server to communicate with the server. Hence it is known as a Native Protocol Driver as well as a Partly Java Partly Native Driver. This Driver doesn't contain pure Java code as it uses the client-side API provided by the target database server. To call the client-side API of the database, it uses JNI. However, since it doesn't have the overhead of calling ODBC, a Type II Driver is faster than a Type I. Also, by using a Type II Driver, one can access functionalities that are specific to the database server which is being used.

A Type III Driver is also known as Network Protocol Driver. Type III Drivers target the middleware. The middleware then communicates with the database server. In essence, Type III Drivers are like Type I with the exception that Type III Drivers are completely written in Java and use the network protocol of the middleware instead of ODBC API. Type III Drivers are more secure since middleware is in the picture. In a nutshell, in Type III Drivers the conversion logic is at the middleware level and not at the client-side.

The Type IV Driver is known as a Pure Java Driver. It is comparable to Type II as it directly interacts with the database server. Unlike Type II, Type IV doesn't use native API calls. Instead the API has been written in Java by the vendor. Apart from being a pure Java implementation of database client API, a Type IV Driver delegates the processing to the database server. That means at client side no processing related to the database or SQL translation occurs. The only job the client does is connecting to the server, passing the queries and input to the database server and getting the result back through the same connection. Due to the delegation of all the processes to the server, the Type IV Driver is also known as the Thin Client Driver.

The choice of which driver to use depends on the type of application that is being developed. For example, if the application is web-based, the best option is Type IV as it releases the application server from being a part of database transactions. In this case the application server would only have to provide services to look up the name of the connection pool and maintain the pool. All other data-related operations would be delegated to the database server. Next we will discuss the steps involved in using JDBC.

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PHP and OOP

PHP is mainly a procedural programming language. Procedural programming is so called because the program code gives a set of instructions (i.e. an algorithm) for processing a particular task or set of tasks.

When programming in a procedural manner, the programmer usually breaks down the task/tasks in a top-down manner; this means the program will end up being made of a number of function calls, which can in turn call further functions or tasks.

In procedural programming data is of secondary importance and is normally placed into structures (data structures). As we would expect this data is global to the whole program, allowing us to see and access every function or procedure in the program, each of which will be able to change that data.

This is a very important concept; it means that whenever we change the format of any data structure in our program, all the other procedures and functions that operate on that data will also have to be changed. This can lead us to have to make numerous changes, something we really wouldn't like to happen when developing software of any type.

For around forty years, the idea of thinking about software in terms of objects surrounds us everyday, and indeed we make use of them almost everyday. For example clicking a button in your text editor to change the font color, wakes up the button object, which in turn tells other objects in the program that it had been clicked and that the font color must be changed. Also when we navigate the channels in our digital boxes to check when a tv programme had started, we may use objects, or better an object-oriented programming software, without knowing it.

The idea of having objects communicating with each other to get, give, and process data is the core concept behind programming in object-oriented manner.

At the end, if you think about it, this is what happens exactly in the real world. Although we cannot say we are objects, we surely can say that we do communicate with each other in order to gain information or give information, and sometimes we use the functions provided by a object to carry out one or more task.

Think for example when we make a phone call. We use the phone object to reach someone who is far away from us.

In OOP happens exactly the same and we may say that software objects simulates the part of real world that concerns an application. This is often called application domain or problem domain.

Most recent versions of PHP have increased their support for object-oriented programming, giving the tools to create objects' definitions and have them communicate with each other to run tasks for an application.

PHP, being a web scripting language and born as a procedural programming language, doesn't have all the features of pure object oriented programming languages such as Java and SmallTalk but, still, the possibility to create objects in PHP can bring huge benefits in the form of code design and organization and for the creation of more complex web applications. One of the biggest advantages of OOP versus procedural programming is the ability to promote re-use of code (to improve productivity), as well as being able to adapt methodologies like UML (Unified Modelling Language) and documentors (for PHP is phpdocumentor) to provide API documentation for libraries of classes.

(Article Source: weberdev.com)

Announcing Google Weblogs (beta)

Today we’d like to offer you a sneak peek at an exciting new product we’ve been working on: Google Weblogs.

Since Google bought Pyra Labs in 2002, we’ve been dreaming, planning, and implementing the next revolution in personal publishing: Google Weblogs.

Google Weblogs, or “GWeblogs,” or “Gblogs,” which will launch later this year in a public beta, is the next revolution in personal publishing. Here’s what you can expect:

• Don’t limit yourself to “reverse chronological” publishing. Our advanced Google algorithms put your best content at the top of your blog. Even if your later work goes downhill your previous posts will still shine.
• No more template languages to mess with or sidebars to get right. Our advanced Google algorithms automatically populate your blog’s sidebar with the most relevant possible content.
• Stop worrying about your PageRank or your search engine optimization. Post directly into Google search results for maximum visibility.
• Save your readers time and effort. We’ll automatically extract the most relevant sentence from your post for the index page, along with any necessary ellipsis. We'll also put some words in bold!
• Your blog’s header will stay fresh with new images from our team of artists, each and every anniversary of a scientific achievement.
• Unsure of what to post about? Just click “I’m Feeling Lucky” and we’ll “take care” of the rest!
  

Excited? So are we! Take a look at this sneak peek of Blogger Buzz, powered by Google Weblogs.

We’ve put together a quick video tour to take you through the highlights of Google Weblogs. Check it out!

Zend Framework Documantation

Component Goals & Benefits

Succinct descriptions of the major components of Zend Framework, their goals, and benefits. Each developer in the Zend Framework community who worked on a component has explained their thinking behind its design. This includes:

• High level goals for each component
• Design intent of the component
• Benefit gained from using this component
• A link to the Programmer's Reference Guide for that component

Programmer's Reference Guide

Written in a book format, it contains the information a developer needs to actually understand and use each Zend Framework component. Such as:

• Description & goals for a particular component
• Details on the various capabilities of the components
• Code snippets on how to use the component to accomplish real world examples

API Guide

The API Guide is low level phpdoc information for the Zend Framework components. It is useful for developers needing detailed reference information. It contains information such as:

• Interface information
• Details on how program elements interact, which elements use others
• Where in the source code an action or series of actions occurs
• How to extend the code to add new functionality

Microsoft Posts 14,000 Pages of Office, SharePoint, and Exchange Protocols

Microsoft yesterday announced it has posted 14,000 pages of technical documentation describing how to use the protocols for its Office, SharePoint, and Exchange products. The company says the move brings the total number of pages of technical documentation it has posted to 44,000, and takes another step toward fulfilling the commitment to openness it made in February.

With this move, anybody with an MSDN account can freely access the "preliminary versions" of 14,000 pages of technical documentation for the protocols Microsoft used with Office 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and Exchange Server 2007. Following a review of the preliminary versions, Microsoft expects to release the final versions of the technical documentation by June, at which point it will have decided upon a suitable way to license the information.

The new documentation released yesterday describes the use of protocols for "connection points" between several products, including: Outlook and Exchange Server 2007; Office client applications and SharePoint Server 2007; SharePoint Server 2007 and other Microsoft server products; and Office client applications and other Microsoft server products.

The move follows through on the commitment Microsoft made in February to be less secretive and more open with its customers, business partners, competitors, and open source advocates. As part of that announcement, Microsoft also pledged not to sue open-source programmers for developing software that uses the interfaces.

Microsoft made several other pledges in February that it is in the process of fulfilling. One of these includes the creation of the Open Source Interoperability Initiative, which the company said in February would foster openness between Microsoft and the open source community, including organizing and conducting special events. However, there doesn't appear to be much to this initiative yet except this Microsoft Web page.

Other promises made by Microsoft as part of its Four Principles announcement include enhancing data portability through the creation of new import and export functions in its products (such as Office); enhancing support for open formats (such as ODF) in its products; and adding the capability to change the default file format in its Office applications. A Microsoft spokesperson says the company will announce additional documentation and disclosure schedules in the next several months.

In any event, Microsoft is celebrating the release of the 14,000 pages of preliminary versions of technical documentation. "We believe that providing open, consistent access to these protocols will further unleash the creativity of all developers to work on real-world interoperability solutions," said Tom Robertson, general manager of interoperability and standards at Microsoft.

(Source: itjungle.com)

How to Debug a Web Part for SharePoint 2007

The basic steps are as follows:

1. Open the solution with the web part(s).
2. Now goto Project ---> Properties --> Click on Debug ---> Set Start browser with URL to your share point site url e.g. http://sharepoint:80
3. Now Build the project. So it creates .dll and .pdb files in bin directory.
4. Now copy those both files into C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\ ( Your website)\bin directory.
5. Now deploy your web part project. Import the web part into the web part gallery so it is visbile, create a smaple page and add the web part to the page in design view and publish the page.
6. Now place a break point on the code of interest in Visual Studio.
7. Under the Debug Menu, select Attach to Process
8. Find the w3wp.exe process. If none exists, begin browsing to the site that has the web part you are debugging. (I usually conduct an IIS reset so that all of the w3wp.exe processes go away and the sole one that you are interested in is easier to find)
9. Watch as the page processes and as soon as your web part is hit, Visual Studio will load symbols and begin the debugging process
10. Enjoy....

Magento 1.0 has arrived!!!

My previous post was published before the launch of Magento - Preview Version and was introducing the features those were going to be implemented (and now have been implemented). The preview version was released on 31st August, 2007. So it has been very long time since my last post but busy schedule of life was'nt giving me a single moment for blogging.

And yesterday, on 31st March, 2008, long awaited Production version of Magento Commerce has been released.

Since the release of first preview version, the updates was being released frequently. With every release, Magento was shining more and more. The progress is incredible in very less time. Magento provides lot of exciting features like Multiple Stores and Websites, Google Checkout support, Single Page Checkout, Shipping to multiple addresses in one order and many more.

Varien - Magento Company has already announced parnership and collaboration with Parallels and Media Temple to deliver Magento 1.0 through a one-click installation wizard.

As a developer, the most impressive thing I found in magento is its flexibility for customization. As I have already mentioned in my previous post, magento is developed on Zend Framework and uses MVC architecture, which makes magento easier to maintain. Apart from that, magento also provides out of the box solution for customization. That means, magento can be customized as you need without modifying a single line of code in existing core modules. Instead, you can develop your own modules with specific configuration which overwrite the behavior of existing core modules. I love this way because it provides flexibility for upgrading magento to newer version.

So, on this occasion it really worths if they say:

Open Source eCommerce has officially evolved.

An Online Reputation Monitoring Tool - Trackur.com

Trackur.com.
What does that mean? It means that Trackur is open for business and fully functional. We want to make sure the servers can handle the load and so will monitor things over the next week, before announcing the official launch.

What happens to Trackur Tracking?

This blog is now hosted in a separate server and new sub-domain: blog.trackur.com. We did this so that should you not be able to reach Trackur for any reason, you should be able to reach this blog for updates and support requests.