Code`n`Chips

All hail the new corporate overlords! …and read on..

Well, enough blogs and news sites have jumped all over the story of the Pirate Bay already so here’s something more positive than most articles I’ve read today.

5 Alternatives to The Pirate Bay.

1. Mininova

MiniNova is perhaps the most well known in the BitTorrent community. It was formed after the demise of SuprNova by ex-SuprNova staff members. It’s not hard to argue that this was the best site that replaced SuprNova. It indexes .torrent files from other sites, so some of the .torrents are from private sites that only allow members of those sites to download the given files. Still, the site is moderated and well-used by members and, with the release of their distribution network, content creators alike.

2. Demonoid

There’s been some debate in the past on whether or not this is a public or private site, though many would agree that this would be classified as semi-private given how often sign-ups are open. Whether or not you agree with this kind of torrent site, Demonoid has a huge following backing them and a number of it’s users would no doubt defend it’s viability as an alternative to The Pirate Bay.

3. ISOHunt

ISOHunt, like MinoNova, has had it’s share of legal trouble in the past and agreed to filtering content. Still, a number of users still use that site for finding what they want and it has stayed being one of the most populated sites online to this day.

4. 1337x

1337x.org is a lesser known BitTorrent site. Still, that hasn’t stopped their front page from saying “we don’t plan on selling anytime soon.”

MustangX continues, “We welcome all the users of TPB to use our trackers and site. It’s a free leech community with NO ratios to maintain, we have a web based chat , A 24/7 radio station with 8 different DJ’s.”

5. BTJunkie

BTJunkie is another site that is well-populated with users, but not as well known as sites like MiniNova and ISOHunt. Still, many users still find this place to be a torrent home or even a second torrent home when another of their preferred sites goes down or inaccessible on their end.

An interesting post from the Google Blog

Understanding drops in traffic

As you know, fluctuations in search results happen all the time; the web is constantly evolving and so is our index. Improvements in our ability to understand our users’ interests and queries also often lead to differences in how our algorithms select and rank pages. We realize, however, that such changes might be confusing and sometimes foster misconceptions, so we’d like to address a couple of these myths head-on.

Myth number 1: Duplicate content causes drops in traffic!
Webmasters often wonder if the duplicates on their site can have a negative effect on their site’s traffic. As mentioned in our guidelines, unless this duplication is intended to manipulate Google and/or users, the duplication is not a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. The second part of my presentation illustrates in greater detail how to deal with duplicate content using canonicalization.

Myth number 2: Affiliate programs cause drops in traffic!
Original and compelling content is crucial for a good user experience. If your website participates in affiliate programs, it’s essential to consider whether the same content is available in many other places on the web. Affiliate sites with little or no original and compelling content are not likely to rank well in Google search results, but including affiliate links within the context of original and compelling content isn’t in itself the sort of thing that leads to traffic drops.

Having reviewed a few of the most common concerns, I’d like to highlight two important sections of the presentation. The first illustrates how malicious attacks — such as an injection of hidden text and links — might cause your site to be removed from Google’s search results. On a happier note, it also covers how you can use the Google cache and Webmaster Tools to identify this issue. On a related note, if we’ve found a violation of the Webmaster Guidelines such as the use of hidden text or the presence of malware on your site, you will typically find a note regarding this in your Webmaster Tools Message center.
You may also find your site’s traffic decreased if your users are being redirected to another site…for example, due to a hacker-applied server- or page-level redirection triggered by referrals from search engines. A similar scenario — but with different results — is the case in which a hacker has instituted a redirection for crawlers only. While this will cause no immediate drop in traffic since users and their visits are not affected, it might lead to a decrease in pages indexed over time.

Slideshow 1

Site design and architecture issues

Now that we’ve seen how malicious changes might affect your site and its traffic, let’s examine some design and architecture issues. Specifically, you want to ensure that your site is able to be both effectively crawled and indexed, which is the prerequisite to being shown in our search results. What should you consider?

• First off, check that your robots.txt file has the correct status code and is not returning an error.
• Keep in mind some best practices when moving to a new site and the new “Change of address” feature recently added to Webmaster Tools.
• Review the settings of the robots.txt file to make sure no pages — particularly those rewritten and/or dynamic — are blocked inappropriately.
• Finally, make good use of the rel=”canonical” attribute to reduce the indexing of duplicate content on your domain. The example in the presentation shows how using this attribute helps Google understand that a duplicate can be clustered with the canonical and that the original, or canonical, page should be indexed.

Slideshow 2
In conclusion, remember that fluctuations in search results are normal but there are steps that you can take to avoid malicious attacks or design and architecture issues that might cause your site to disappear or fluctuate unpredictably in search results. Start by learning more about attacks by hackers and spammers, make sure everything is running properly at crawling and indexing level by double-checking the HTML suggestions in Webmaster Tools, and finally, test your robots.txt file in case you are accidentally blocking Googlebot. And don’t forget about those “robots.txt unreachable” errors!

Read the full article here;
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Traffic drops and site architecture issues.

When it comes to design, copyright is often a very muddled gray area. Just as the lines between plagiarism and homage are often confusing, so too is the line between infringing and non-infringing use of copyrighted material. Since it is natural and even expected of Web designers to incorporate elements from other sites and other creations, it is important to understand the risks and hazards when it comes to copyright in Web design. As such, here are five of the most common copyright pitfalls Web designers face and how to best avoid them

Read the full article here;

In the Woods – 5 Biggest Copyright Pitfalls for Web Designers.

One version of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, what Novell likes to call SLE 11, will allow companies to run applications built with Microsoft’s .Net platform to work on Linux without recompiling them. That version, called Mono Extension, even runs on IBM’s System z, enabling IBM’S mainframe computers to run .Net apps.

Read the full article here: With SUSE Linux 11, Novell draws even closer to Microsoft.

I’m not so sure this a good thing, hands off Microsoft!

Accessible View

Navigate search results quickly and easily, with just your keyboard. As you navigate, items are magnified for easier viewing. If you use a screen reader or talking browser, the relevant information is spoken automatically as you navigate.

I think this  would be handy on mobile devices as an alternative to having to zoom on the small screen. Try it out here!

Alternate View

I particularly like the alternate views in experimental search.  Try it out on this image view link.

See results on a timeline, map, or in context of other information types. With these views, Google’s technology extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension.
Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Info view shows all the data found for each result, to help you select the best choice.

This tool is just perfect for helping you try out different web typefaces. It gives a live preview as you mess about with any of the CSS properties.

How many times have I needed something like this? .. well not just like this, exactly this!

Font Tester Tool

The change in VAT rate in the UK this week has put many retailers both on and offline under more than a little stress lately.  Forums on Quickbooks, ZenCart and osCommerce to name a few have been spilling over with help requests from confused ecommerce users and company accountants.

Real Points CMS however, coped easily with the change and it could be applied by anyone, without any technical or accounting know how!

The eCommerce portion of the bespoke, SiteControl CMS was written in such a way that changes like this could be made quickly and easily. Each product is assigned a VAT code. As many VAT codes as you like can be defined within the CMS. On top of that, there are separet VAT setttings for postage by zone, so it’s possible to apply a different amount of VAT on postage with the UK or to Europe and so on.

This time round, I made the change for most of our clients late on Sunday night, it only took a few minutes. Next time, they can do it themselves!

Well, I did as the one I’ve been using up till now hadn’t been updated since 2005 and wasn’t fully IE comaptible even then. So, not being a javascript guru myself, I did some Googling and came across this wonderfull script by Hugo Ortega-Hernández.

This script is just so easy to implement, just give your input an ID like so;

And include the script and CSS in your html;

That’s it! It’s formatted for English style dates by default which is a bonus for me and it supports multiple languages. It can be easily configured to output dates in other formats and you can even set how many days are in a weekend (for the French, accordong to the author!).

See a live demo

Download it from the authors site

The guys at webmaster central have put together an excellent guide to on site SEO best practices as used inside Google.

It doesn’t contain any amazing new revelations and it certainly won’t garuantee you the number one spot on Google any other search engine, but it is reassuring to have what we already knew officially stamped by Google themselves.

Most, or all of the information contained in the 22 page PDF download is commonly available from various sources all over the net but it is nice to have all this collated and verified by Google.

The Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide is a must for beginners, covering the topics from title and header tags, meta data and URL structure through to sitemaps and site promotion.  It’s generously illustrated and points the reader to other online resources.

All in all, A must for anyone involved in search engine optimisation and certainly something I’ll be passing on to my clients. Thanks Google!

You can read the webmaster central blog post and dowload the PDF here.