Web Info & Tutorials

When we visit our favorite websites, we have very little insight into the person who created them other than recognition of our shared interests. A publisher in India might own a website about his penchant for classic American cars, and the majority of his readers might reside in the UK. The beauty of the Internet is that each web page could have been created by anyone, anywhere in the world -- and the site's readers are often as demographically diverse as they are a group of like-minded people.

This is where AdSense comes in -- publishers can earn money for something they probably would have done for free, i.e., writing about subjects they love. Since ads are targeted both to the content of the page and the location of the user, there are no geographic limitations on who can succeed. This puts publishers in the developing world on a near-level playing field with publishers in the developed world when it comes to earning money from their interests. We've heard stories from publishers in all parts of the world about how AdSense earnings are being reinvested into creating better websites and content, or spent on life improvements including new cars, vacations, education and even engagement rings.

While there are of course still barriers to entry in some parts of the world, like high hosting costs and access to the Internet, one of our biggest motivators in improving the AdSense product is hearing your success stories -- so please, keep them coming!

Posted by Brian Axe - AdSense Product Management

This concise book (149 pages) uses Ruby to teach basic programming; a good book for total green-horns to programming. But keep in mind this book is not titled: ‘Learn to Program Ruby’.

What I mean by that, is that the book targets new programmers, not programmers new to Ruby. So it may be a little slow for some people (experienced programmers) when the author (for example,) explains what an array is …

WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK INTERESTING

The book is well written and the flows well, but what I find interesting about it is:

• It uses Ruby to teach programming.
• It teaches some interesting concepts that you might not read in say, a PHP book.

Ruby is the hot new language in the geek world, but it has yet to show itself substantially in commercial application. That said, it is an interesting language choice for this kind of book: Ruby is a terse and easy to use language, and I think this allowed for the author to jump into concepts like recursion and procs - I like this.

CONCLUSION

A good book that is not so pragmatic, in that you don’t see the typical how to build a shopping cart project at the end.

Instead, the author concentrates on basic programming concepts and leaves it to another book to expose the reader to real-life application.

I would use this book in a programming 101 type of class.

But report generally unimpressed with Big Seven websites TD Canada Trust's on-line banking service has been singled out as the best of an unimpressive bunch in Canada by a U.S. market research firm.

So I was doing some client work today when I noticed something somewhat disturbing; phpinfo() has a logo that sends data back to php.net. I’m not sure exactly what the data is, but here’s the offending markup.

<img border="0" src="?=PHPE9568F34-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42" alt="PHP Logo" />

The somewhat more disturbing part is that this image also sets a cookie. The cookie appears to hold both my country and the IP address of the requesting agent.

COUNTRY=USA%2C64.34.176.111

I’ve looked at a few scripts and found that the src of the image file appears to change slightly between installations. I’m sure it’s nothing malicious, but it is a bit odd.

Anyone else know anything about this?

‘CSS Mastery’ covers the most sought after CSS concepts, tips and techniques. It’s a must-have book for any intermediate level web designer because of the way it covers the material: it is concise, clear and pragmatic.

Just when you’re finished learning one great CSS technique, you turn the page and bing-bang, there’s another juicy one to jump into! A nice change from the zealot batherings I’ve had to endure in other books on the subject!

Like all the books from this publisher, it is also well put together physically:

• Good layout
• Good choice of paper
• Easy to read font
• Not too thick or thin
• Good use of graphics/diagrams

The publisher (Friends of Ed,) have done a great job with their web design books lately; ‘CSS Mastery’ along with Dan Cederholm’s book (Web Standards Solutions) are the best out there today.

I have yet to read ‘Web Designer’s Reference’ by Cederholm, but I hear it’s good too.

Stefan Mischook (Web Design Heretic)

Welcome to the world of modern web design!

This is a very good book on blogs. OK, so why should web designers want to read a book on installing and customizing popular blogs?

The anwer: web designers today, NEED to learn how to work with blogs. Blog implementation (installing, customizing, skinning) is a growing part of the web design business these days and is now an essential tool in the web designers toolbox.

Blog Design Solutions gives you a to-the-point tour of several important blogging engines:

• Moveable Type
• TextPattern
• ExpressionEngine
• WordPress

The is a multi-author book where each blog is given its due by one or more authors - as such, you know that each blog is covered by people who know what they’re doing.

Along the way, you will also pick up tips about Flikr integration, blog syndication and other things that this old time web designer may have not been ‘up to snuff’ on.

I use WordPress, and so I immediately jumped to that chapter; I found the writing to be clear, and the author covered topics that I wanted to read about. I am not a user of the other blog engines, but I’m glad that the book covers them for sake of comparison - it’s always good to know about competing products.

Beyond covering the blogs, the last chapter actually takes you step-by-step through the process of creating a blog from scratch using PHP. I went through the code, and enjoyed the way the author runs through the process - you’ll might also pick up a few PHP ideas along the way.

I recommend this book to any web designer who has the intention of earning a living in web design.

Stefan Mischook (The Web Design Heretic)

One of the key components of running a successful web design business (any business really,) is to manage your money effectively.

Most businesses go out of business, simply because they don’t follow some basic money management rules. The following are my ‘Killer Money Management Rules’.

Top 6 Killer Money Management Rules

1. Credit cards are for transactions only - not for carrying debt. Pay off your entire balance every month!

2. If you can’t buy something cash, don’t buy it.

3. If your bank account is not increasing every month, it’s time to go into crisis mode.

4. You should have a stash of ‘fcuk-you’ cash … one years worth. So, if you spend $2000/month to live, you should have $24 000 in the stash. The stash should be held in a no risk, immediate access account like an ING account.

5. Never touch your emergency stash unless it’s an emergency. Having this stash makes you sleep well at night. I call it ‘fcuk-you cash’ because when you know you will be fine for a year, you can tell idiot clients to … you get the idea.

6. Create a separate retirement account/investments that you pay into regularly and first - this is a ‘never touch’ account.

Lots of business owners pile all their funds in one place (as I did) and then end up broke at 55. Fortunately for me, I learned these lessons young.

 

Ron McKerlie became Chief Strategist and Corporate CIO of Ontario, Service Delivery, with the Ministry of Government Services last fall.

Following in the footsteps of former chairman Alan Greenspan, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board raised its target for the federal funds rate by 25 basis points to 4.75% at the first meeting of Ben Bernanke's ...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- NASA resurrected an ambitious mission to explore two of the solar system's largest asteroids on Monday, just weeks after budget woes killed the project.