Lifelog

As you might have noticed my blogging activity has reached a ‘below-zero’ level. Last week i was on a holiday for a week (i’ve been to France), i did my best ignoring my portable for 7 days, and i am proud to announce i succeeded !

Two ints and a Float are in a bar. They spot an attractive Double on her own. The first int walks up to her. ‘Hey, baby’, he says, ‘my VM or yours?’. She slaps him and he walks back dejected. The second int walks over. ‘Hey, cute-stuff, can I cook your Beans for breakfast?’. After a quick slapping, he too walks back. The Float then ambles over casually. ‘Were those two primitive types bothering you?’, he remarks. ‘Yes. I’m so glad you’re here’, she says. ‘They just had no Class!’

Coming from Teranex weblog

I’ve started on a project using a very good framework i am pleased about. If you take your time to have a look around on the website, you can clearly see this is a framework with alot of documentation, one of the major requirements for selection (in my case).

I decided to give it a go and use the framework on my latest project for EuPR (www.plasticsrecyclers.eu), as the timeframe for this project was quite limited, i needed a good framework, with plenty of documentation to solve the issues i would run into…

A snippet from the symfony about page :

Symfony is a web application framework for PHP5 projects.

It aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications, and to replace the repetitive coding tasks by power, control and pleasure.

The very small number of prerequisites make symfony easy to install on any configuration; you just need Unix or Windows with a web server and PHP 5 installed. It is compatible with almost every database system. In addition, it has a very small overhead, so the benefits of the framework don’t come at the cost of an increase of hosting costs.

If you want to have a look at the results, go over to plasticsrecyclers.eu, i implented a login form, upload functionality (in different categories and a pager to browse through the various results of newsletters & documents…Keep in note that this is a “non-released” website still open for feedback & improvements….

Whatta ya think ?

I am running a pretty big company website that uses multiple languages so users can browse the website in their language. Lately i have been working on the Search Engine Optimalisation, and i noticed google (and some other crawl bots) do not correctly crawl the other languages, this had something todo with various reasons :

• language selection was saved in session or by $_GET argument
• meta language tag was not always set
• there was no clear line how the language was selected, user couldn’t see by url which language he selected

I did a few lookups on the internet, some various SEO forums, and i’ve collected this information and, with the help of Apache mod_rewrite, turned the website into a fancy, easy-to-use, multilanguage environment, and this is how i did it. I will explain you in 3 different parts, which i will try to finish in the upcoming 3 days….

To start off i am using .xml files to hold all the different language strings, nowadays you can find some php frameworks that fully support i18n, but back in the days i was making international websites, they were not that commonly available. If you would go for a framework i would choose Mojavi, Prado or Symfony, i am not going to elaborate on that, as this post is not about frameworks, but howto put different languages on your website, and making sure google (and other search engines), crawl em like they should….

Start off by making sure you have a google sitemaps account and have a way to gather website statistics, very good would be a package where you can list the crawl bots seperately (i prefer awstats)

Sitemaps what/where went wrong when crawling your site. The Google Sitemaps program has two major components:

• Google Sitemaps Console: Provides statistics and error information about your site, as well as tools for managing your site.
• Google Sitemaps files: Enable you to tell us what pages are present on your site.

I’ll leave you the time to make sure you have both of the above items + it’s a really nice excuse to stop writing and do something else…Part II soon…

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In the previous months, i’ve been trying to inform myself a little better in the ‘Search Engine Optimalisation’ field. Because i am developing alot of projects it’s important those sites actually get indexed / crawled & visited. Yesterday when i was browsing around on Digg.com i bumped into a plugin ‘Seo for firefox‘

Quote from the ‘Seo for Firefox’ site :

This tool was designed to add more data to Google and Yahoo! to make it easier to evaluate the value and competitive nature of a market. SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a more holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market right from the search results. In addition to pulling in useful marketing data this tool also provides links to the data sources so you can dig deeper into the data.

I decided to give it a go and it turned out a good experience ! Once the plugin is enabled, when searching for a certain domain on google or yahoo, underneath the results you have an instant view of the incoming links, technorati, del.icio.us and alexa report. When i start focussing on seo (search engine optimalisation), this plugin will come in quite handy…

My last post dates from the 10th of March, so it has been awhile ! Sorry i’ve abandoned you guys for awhile, i noticed traffic is still coming in quite well….thanks for that !

So what have i been upto ? I’ve been very busy with some projects & my current job.

I’ve decided that from August (this year) i will be fully independant & working for my company. Considering i have alot of projects at this moment, i think it’s the right thing to do… From then on i will have the time to fully dedicate my time on my company / personal projects, what will hopefully lead to a more structured life…

At this moment i am just running/stressing around between various tasks, always trying to finish the most urgent things first…..Slowly this way of working is turning me crazy…I am never able to really finish what i am doing, always have to end-up with 90% finished projects…And, i could really use some vacation !