User feedback regarding a CMS web application was that the certain areas of the site were running slow. There could be many reasons for this like the usual suspects of a slow internet connection, poorly optimized images and stylesheets, and large page sizes. In this case there was a large amount of data coming from a couple tables in the database and were combined together to render the page. This was slowing the page load time down as the MySQL database was combining this data. This is where a simple optimization technique called indexing can help. Read more

Self promotion is getting other people to WANT to do your promotion for you. Peter Shankman personifies and lives this notion. He is well known for HARO, which has changed how media, individuals, and companies connect. His presentation at SXSW was powerful and mind changing, enough so that I’m promoting right now. It is about creating win-wins. These wins can also be good for the environment as Val Casey pointed out in her Keynote speech. So how do you do good and be that guy or that company that everyone talks about and make money? Read more

It took some trial and error to create an appropriate paint method for inactive items in an item delegate for QT’s list view. Here are some pointers.

Some Wordpress plugins and themes require you to supply a list of page ids. This brief video tutorial shows you how to get those IDs for a page or post.

Mary of ProVirtual Solutions suggested the Reveal IDs for WP-Admin plugin to help get the IDs .

A friend in his newsletter, BLIANESWORLD asked:

Have you ever switched your email address? I know it is a pain, but I’m thinking
of doing so sometime in the future.

As such, I have heard that there are services that make this much easier for you
to make such a switch. If so, have you ever used such services? And if you have,
what was your reaction to them?

My answer, don’t consolidate instead.
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Persistent Uniform Resource Locators or PURLs can take many forms. Typically software that I use like Wordpress has this functionality built in, but they call it by a different name Permalinks like the one for this article http://www.365webapplications.com/2009/12/15/what-is-a-purl, which you can see in your browser above. It is much more friendly than the database link http://www.365webapplications.com/?p=724. In SEO you want to sure you efforts don’t get lost over time, by using these in conjunction with search engine and human friendly names. Like http://www.365webapplications.com/category/review/, which regardless of the year would always show the latest reviews. Also archives would have similar forms like http://365webapplications.com/2009/10, meaning show all articles from October 2009.
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A question that comes up from time to time and a task that I complete for every site I launch, is submitting it to the search engines. With billions of sites and pages online this isn’t an instantaneousness process and it takes some patience, but here are two basic ways to accomplish this task.
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