Code Required

multi-Internet Explorer testing... a solution?

2009-09-16T09:42:00.002+01:00

we just stumbled across this:
http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

And on initial testing it looks like we may finally have a solution for testing in multiple variants of Internet Ignorer!! Yay!!!

Let us know if you spot any issues with it but we're loving it at the moment.

Now to find FireBug for Internet Explorer and we're truly laughing :-)

Super Preview from Microsoft

2009-05-06T10:01:00.002+01:00

Microsoft has finally done a Chris Tarrant and given us all a lifeline with Super Preview... This handy little toy let's you test your webpages in multiple versions of Internet Explorer without all the hacks - and yes it does include IE8... We're testing it now so will update soon with our thoughts.

In the meantime check it out at the Microsoft Expression site and let us know your thoughts!

CSS coloured bullets in lists

2009-04-09T10:13:00.003+01:00

We've been playing with some CSS and we've commonly used spans to colour bullets… i.e.

<li><span>red</span></li>

<style>
li{
color:black
}
li span{
color:red
}
</style>

Well we’ve come up with a better way all by accident whilst playing with expressions and here it is…

<li>red</li>

<style>
li{
color:black
}
li{
zoom: expression(
this.innerHTML = (typeof this.processed == "undefined" ? "• " : "") + this.innerHTML, this.processed = true, this.runtimeStyle.zoom = "1"
);
}

li:before{
content:'• ';
color:red;
}
li span.before{
color:red;
}
</style>

Note that in the li:before the bullet should be a rendered • NOT character encoded.

Expression is for Internet Ignorer (nee Internet Explorer) and :before works for all other browsers.

this.processed is required or Internet Ignorer keeps on rendering them

Enjoy!

PS. Sorry it's been ages since our last post - but we've been very very busy people!!

Connecting with the Flickr API through PHP

2009-02-23T14:04:00.003Z

Here at Code Required we've been playing with a lot of the Social networking apps over the months... Years and have started to think about the potential of putting them all together and seeing what comes out the other end...

We'll be posting samples of what you can do here and would love you guys to post your samples too!

Anyway to kick off here's how to get a list of your photos from Flickr using the phpFlickr class:

$f = new phpFlickr("YOUR_API_KEY");
$i = 0;

// Find the NSID of the username inputted via the form
$person = $f->people_findByUsername('YOUR_USER_NAME');

// Get the friendly URL of the user's photos
$photos_url = $f->urls_getUserPhotos($person['id']);

// Get the user's first 36 public photos
$photos = $f->people_getPublicPhotos($person['id'], NULL, 1, 8);

// Loop through the photos and output the html
foreach ((array)$photos['photos']['photo'] as $photo) {
echo "<a href='".$f->buildPhotoURL($photo)."'>";
echo "<img width='43' style='margin:4px' border='0' alt='$photo[title]' ". //>
"src='" . $f->buildPhotoURL($photo, "Square") . "' />";
echo "</a>";
$i++;
// If it reaches the sixth photo, insert a line break
if ($i % 4 == 0) {
echo "
";
}
}

You can get your Flickr API key here and explore more cool stuff in the Flickr API Docs

Have fun!

Busy busy busy & our adventures with Google

2009-02-23T13:57:00.004Z

Wow things have been hectic for me over at Code Required recently so apologies for the lack of posts since early December - ouch!

We've been doing some really cool stuff with the Google API recently and have spent several hours geeking out with the guys down at Google HQ in London - which has been great fun and a steep learnign curve for us!

We'll be publishing some articles on Google Apps, Google Sites and the Enterprise Search application in the next few months so watch this space! We must admit we're very very excited about the Google Sites stuff so suggest you all check it out and post your samples back here as we'd love to see what everyone is doing!

Anyway - we're still alive so watch this space!

ASP.net C# ordering files returned by GetFiles

2008-12-02T09:25:00.002Z

A very quick post today to share a bit of a moan about ASP.net and the Directory.GetFiles Method which most of you will no doubt know only returns a list of files order alphabetically. Now whilst we've been developing a system for a client we've had the need to order by date last modified - which I'm sure is a common request for many of you reading this. Well with no further ado here is a very simple class so you can sort the array returned by the GetFiles method...

public class FilesDescendingComparer : IComparer
{
#region IComparer Members

public int Compare(object x, object y)
{
return DateTime.Compare(((FileInfo)y).CreationTime,((FileInfo)x).CreationTime);
}

#endregion
}

To invoke this method is very simple too...

Array.Sort(theFiles, new FilesDescendingComparer());

Where theFiles is the result of your GetFiles call.

Happy coding!

More charity fundraising for Macmillan with the Amateur Transplants

2008-11-18T10:38:00.005Z

Hi all, another unrelated topic I'm afraid but of infinitely more importance than the usual technical/marketing/seo/web stuff...

A friend of mine over at the Amateur Transplants has re-released a very funny, slightly explicit, song about the London Underground. He’s selling it on iTunes and ALL proceeds, yes 100%! is going to be donated to Macmillan Cancer Support (the same charity me and Pat chose to sponsor this year).

I know most of you have already given kindly to our sponsored parachute jump but just another 79p won’t hurt will it? Go on let’s help get it played on the radio and in the charts while saving money for a very worthy charity…

Buy it here

Open Source content publishing methods

2008-11-02T14:50:00.005Z

Recently we've been exploring more open source CMS solutions and a couple of e-commerce sites have also come into the Code Required workflow.

We've looked at loads (I mean dozens and dozens of them!) and there simply are so many options we've decided to drop further development for Roots and start working on building components and extensions for some of the applications that already exist.

I mean... Why fix something that isn't broken? Our site currently runs with a combination of Blogger feeds (you're reading one now!) plus some static pages and some dynamic php stuff too... But we've been playing with WordPress recently and have started to be swayed from Blogger over to WordPress in fact we've also started to developed a few extensions for Wordpress already! We'll also be looking into some Dreamweaver plugins to add development of themes.

Most of you reading this also know of our preference to working in LAMP based systems - hence the mention of WordPress, Blogger and a couple of others we like in SilverStripe and Magento for commerce based sites but the Open Source solutions come in a mass array of formats - recently we've used DotNetNuke which is an ASP.net CMS solution... We've also been made aware of the rather exciting option of Umbraco recently.

We certainly won't write off commercial systems (Microsoft Sharepoint, for example, is often something that we are asked to develop on/for) but with so many great solutions out there why re-invent the wheel? Why waste time developing something when we can enhance an existing solution?

We'd love to hear more about your experiences with Open Source solutions so please email us and let us know of your experiences with any of the aforementioned or indeed an exciting new CMS you've been developing!! ;-)

Alternately if you are interested in hiring Code Required to work on your website, be it implementing a CMS, full ecommerce solution or just a spring clean do get in touch!

Google helps make your 404 pages more useful

2008-09-22T17:20:00.002+01:00

Here at Code Required we're always trying to make the user experience the best it can possibly be for the sites we develop and we've just discovered Google's new custom 404 widget.

Basically this little snippet will analyse the url which returned the 404 and display close matches from Google's listings... Awesome - certainly saves us writing custom handlers and pattern matching for the urls!!

Check it out... Google's new custom 404 widget

Internet Explorer and elements named "description"

2008-09-16T14:48:00.003+01:00

OK I'm not entirely sure why I've never come across this before but it's a classic "Internet Ignorer" bug...

When doing Javascript validation on a form recently we had a field named (& id'ed) "description"

<textarea name="description" id="description"></textarea>

Subsequently we attempted to validate the value of this field in JavaScript...

if(document.getElementById("description").value!=""){...}

Well it turns out that this returns the meta description tag for Internet Ignorer ("undefined" for the value)... Marvellous! Well there is a workaround, either rename your field or, simply override the nativeGetElementById method for Internet Ignorer... Check out Sixteen Small Stones

Charity Skydive update: Thank you to everyone who sponsored us!

2008-09-15T14:50:00.002+01:00

Well we've done it and we survived - so all those hoping that we didn't - tough!

We just want to say one big final thank you to everyone who sponsored us, to everyone at Headcorn Parachute Club in Kent and especially to everyone at MacMillan Cancer Support for all the great work they continue to do.

You can still sponsor us upto and including the 13th November 2008 so if you haven't... Do so now at http://www.justgiving.com/patandjon!

Finally if you fancy a laugh check out these links...
Jon's video on YouTube
Pat's video on YouTube
Pat's pictures on Flickr
Jon's pictures on Flickr

Now what can we do next time I wonder??? Mmmmm....
(ideas on a postcard please!)

Cheers
Pat & Jon

Code Required Summer Break

2008-08-14T17:34:00.003+01:00

Please note that Code Required will not be accepting any new clients until 1st September due to developers on summer vacations and extremely busy workload for the interim period.

If however you would like us to tender for projects after that period please contact jon@coderequired.com.

Many thanks
Jon

Code Required's Desktop RSS Reader

2008-08-11T12:54:00.002+01:00

Hi Code Required fans... (All 2 of us according to Technorati but I'm sure more of you love reading our ramblers than that... Well I hope so anyway).

We've created a Yahoo Widget so you can view all the latest news and views from Code Required directly on your desktop.

You can download our desktop rss reader here

Semantic content: images with alt attributes vs plain text? The CONCLUSION

2008-08-11T12:23:00.003+01:00

For any of you who have been tracking our quest to see if semantic markup truly does have an effect on natural search engine rankings we can confirm we now have a pretty concluisve set of results.

We ran three different versions of content: (H1/P are the tags used to mark headers)

"Frank"
(H1: image with alt and title)
"Fred"
(H1: as plain text)
"Roger"
(P: as plain text)

The analysis...
Roger was the clear loser on Google and failed to get indexed after initially ranking quite high (second to Fred for much of the experiment).

Roger was however the first to be indexed by Google, Yahoo AND Altavista. So if it's quick wins you want Roger is your man.

Frank ran a clear second to Fred for much of the experiment (not unsurprisingly and thankfully the suspected result).... HOWEVER... Over time it has proved pretty fairly conclusive that Frank and Fred had NO significant difference in ranking on Google.

In fact 2 of the 5 search engines completely ignored all of our pages so we cannot be entirely conclusive. Ask and Windows Live did not index ANY of the pages at ANY point throughout the 3 month experiment so clearly their algorithms rely more heavily on inlinking or natural spidering - of which none formed a part of our experiment.

The conclusions?
Well to be honest... Pretty unconvincing. It has to be said that at the time of writing (and when we closed the experiment) Frank (H1: image with alt and title) was the ONLY page naturally listed in Google's results.

Roger(P: as plain text) listed consistently best on Yahoo.

Frank & Fred had the most consistent results overall suggesting that, in our opinion, semantic content DOES make a difference. Although we are truly shocked that it didn't appear to make as much difference as we suspected, especially considering accessibility laws and the use of semantic tags to help screen reading browsers to navigate.

Our next experiment will be based around meta information in a quest to see how search engines actually use meta information and it's significance for companies trying to achieve high natural rankings in the major search engines.

So in our first experiment to uncover SEO secrets with "No bullsh*t just hard & fast evidence of what works best" proved pretty inconclusive... Sorry guys! :-)

Caveats to consider...

Each page was given similar content (same volume of keywords completely irrelevant to what the test website was about and each other).
Each page had no in-links from other sources except those that appeared in the Code Required blog (however we cannot account for links to the pages from other blogs etc - at the time of writing we were unaware of any and the pages have been removed from the test site)

Note to clients r.e. Firefox 3

2008-08-04T10:57:00.003+01:00

A few of our clients have been requesting support for Firefox 3 of late. Unfortunately our development standards do not currently permit development in FF3 due to some unforeseen bugs in the Beta release that Code Required have raised with the Mozilla development group.

Until we can confirm that these bugs are resolved we will not be supporting FF3.
(UPDATE: Please note that this refers to not just the Beta release FF3.0 but also to the release FF3.0.1 and is related to unpredictable and inconsistent browser crashes)

Code Required are proud to announce....

2008-07-16T16:01:00.002+01:00

Code Required have just released a brand new corporate website for Verulas, an independent market data consultancy, at http://www.verulas.net.

Contrary to popular believe we do have design skills in-house and this site was designed, built in Strict XHTML & CSS and published completely by Code Required.

If you're interested in contacting code required for design or development work please email jon@coderequired.com or visit our contact us page.

What do you mean you can't get me to rank #1??

2008-07-03T10:20:00.002+01:00

One question that always comes up when people ask about SEO (search engine optimisation) services is "does that mean I'll rank number one on Google?... But Company X said they'd guarantee they could get me to number 1".

You've all heard it right? Well the guys at Google have further updated the Webmaster Blog post:
"What's an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?"

I really do urge that anyone offering SEO services and equally anyone looking for SEO services should look at this article NOW!

Help us raise money for Macmillan Cancer Support

2008-06-20T12:30:00.004+01:00

OK a slightly out of context post today but one for a very valid and worthwhile cause so if you don't like it - tough! :-)

Jon (the founder of Code Required) and a friend Pat Fahy (of Sonaa fame) are doing a parachute jump from 12,000ft in an attempt to raise money for Macmillan Cancer Support a charity very close to both of our hearts and I'm sure many of you reading this if you have ever experienced the devastating effects that cancer can cause not only to the sufferer but to the friends and family as well.

Therefore it'd be great if you could sponsor us (even just a few pence will make a difference) at http://www.justgiving.com/patandjon

Thanks so much for your support!

Semantic content: images with alt attributes vs plain text? Part 2

2008-06-11T13:29:00.003+01:00

OK so interesting results from our little test case... Although it looks like Google is certainly acting as expected for natural rankings with the way we markup content we've had some interesting results from the other guys at Yahoo & Altavista where it looks as though our mate Roger (un-sematic plain text content) is certainly leading the way!!

Page name	Position
Page name	Google	Yahoo	Altavista	Ask	Live/MSN
Frank (H1: image with alt and title)	3	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Fred (H1: as plain text)	1	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Roger (P: as plain text)	2	2	2	n/a	n/a

I must say - I'm a bit concerned by these results as it certainly doesn't bode well for the way we've been told we "should" code so often!

Watch this space for further updates!! Feel free to drop Jon an email if you want to see more comparisons.

You can see the pages at:
http://www.mycardioworld.com/tests/frank.html
(header as image with alt and title attributes)

http://www.mycardioworld.com/tests/fred.html
(everything as plain text)

and...
http://www.mycardioworld.com/tests/roger.html
("un-semantic" plain text)

Semantic content: images with alt attributes vs plain text?

2008-05-30T12:40:00.008+01:00

One of the big arguments I constantly have about SEO is whether semantic content as images (with appropriate alt text) or simple text values will rank differently.

For example - which is better for SEO?

<h1>header</h1>

Or...

<h1><img src="header.gif" alt="header" /></h1>

...And does the H1 tag actually make a difference?

<p>header</p>

Not surprisingly it's an incredibly difficult subject to find any solution for so here at Code Required we're currently running a simple test to see what happens...

You can see the pages at:
http://www.mycardioworld.com/tests/frank.html
(header as image with alt and title attributes)

http://www.mycardioworld.com/tests/fred.html
(everything as plain text)

and...
http://www.mycardioworld.com/tests/roger.html
("un-semantic" plain text)

We'll be monitoring the situation over the coming weeks on all the major search engines and posting updates here - in the meantime if you would like us to add other versions or have any comments please drop Jon an email.(For example should we do a sIfr version? should we do a version without title attributes on the images? etc).

Page name	Position
Page name	Google	Yahoo	Altavista	Ask	Live/MSN
Frank (H1: image with alt and title)	1	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Fred (H1: as plain text)	2	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Roger (P: as plain text)	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a

Quite possibly the best CSS "hack" I've ever used...

2008-05-16T11:50:00.002+01:00

After a good couple of days banging my head against the desk trying to figure out a solution to a Windows Safari "bug" I think I may have found the best CSS "hack" ever...

Ever wondered why Safari renders fonts bolder than all other browsers on Windows? Well it's down to a setting hidden away in the preferences dialog shown below:

Which is great if you can control everyone's install of Safari but, well let's face it - you can't. Which left me with the dilema... how the hell do I get the headers on my website to render as expected in Safari? Well fear not - just add the following line to your css:

text-shadow: 0 0 0 #FFF;

Where #FFF is whatever the background colour your text appears on and voila Safari's nasty aliasing "bug" has vanished!

Social networking for SEO... the next big thing?

2008-05-13T09:16:00.003+01:00

We all know the huge benefits of social networking when it comes to SEO - there is no better way to get new visitors than those on recommendations from existing customers... I mean you're hitting your target audience without even trying.

Social Networking and content sharing have rapidly become the de facto standard in marketing on the web well Google might have just taken that to a whole new level with Google Friend Connect.

Still in a preview release (ie. not even beta yet) it's pretty exciting stuff and I strongly suggest you check out Mussie Shore's (he's the project manager) post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog entitled "Becoming Social".

Google Friend Connect let's you interact with users on social networking site such as Facebook and invite them to check out the website, post directly to their diaries etc and invite their friends - potentially increasing your audience virally with minimal effort... According to Mussie Shore you only need to know very little coding to get going in minutes!

Google's use of Meta tags... The debate goes on...

2008-04-30T12:59:00.004+01:00

So we've all heard how Googlebot no longer uses meta description or meta keyword tags to index your webpages in it's SERPS listings; and how it uses the actual page content to evaluate the "PageRank" etc... Well with that in mind many web developers/agencies/SEO "experts" often neglect to include meta tags in today's market... Well think again!

A recent post on the Offical Google Wemaster Central Blog explains how Google DOES use meta tags (well the meta description tag at least). Now, although this may or may not have an impact (our research shows that it most certainly does have an impact) on your actual positioning as such, it certainly can have a huge effect on your links "clickability".

The post explains how the meta description data is used to support the link so people can determine if it's your content they were actually looking for... Therefore, our research certainly indicates, that as more people visit your site, Google increases it's importance... Thus how you sell your content in the meta description tag must have an impact on your SERPS positioning.

Pure CSS headers as gradients?

2008-04-29T12:27:00.003+01:00

Just a quick one (ooo-argh missus) to share this great post I found on Web Designer Wall for doing CSS headers with a graident effect. Ok, granted, it's not exactly a new technique but it's a really nicely written tutorial for all you CSS newbies and some nice ideas for those of you who have been doing this stuff for years (scroll down to see the examples).

Check it out at http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/css-gradient-text-effect/

Cheers
Jon

Introducting RootsCMS...

2008-04-21T16:56:00.004+01:00

We've been busy beavering away over the last few weeks (hence the lack of posts!) building our new CMS system - RootsCMS...

Built around the Smarty template engine RootsCMS is intended as a very simple and easy to plugin content management system - in fact anyone with basic HTML knowledge can plug RootsCMS into their website within minutes - it really is that simple!

Many commercial CMS applications are either incredibly expensive to licence or incredibly complicated to to integrate into an existing website - this is the barrier we are striving to overcome with RootsCMS - think Adobe Contribute but without the delays of FTP uploads - RootsCMS runs on the back of your web server on a simple sql-driven database (whatever you have available).

RootsCMS is no slower than executing a basic PHP request!

With the use of the Smarty templating system the overheads are also minimal - the majority of CMS systems compile each page request as it's made - not RootsCMS...

On publication of a page RootsCMS compiles the template with the content updates and caches the result so the end user only ever receives the final compiled version - which means very simple archiving of content for: rollbacks; archiving; or even event based content publication.

RootsCMS is currently in user testing on a couple of websites but it currently publishes to XML, XHTML, HTML, CSS & PHP (we'll also be porting it to other languages when we have a stable version to release for beta testing). RootsCMS uses a WYSIWYG editor for ease of use for site editors and can be customised to use your favourite editor... TinyMCE, FCKEditor... Whatever you prefer.

Anyway we'll be releasing updates over the coming months and hopefully we'll have a release for you to try in the next couple of months!

*RootsCMS is in the early stages of development but we appreciate any comments people have on content management systems they have had issues with (so we can make RootsCMS even better), people interested in seeing it ported to other platforms etc etc... Basically if you have something to say - email us