If you have a blog that is even moderately popular then you have likely fallen victim to some form of content scraping. Ever since it became possible to earn money through ads on a website there have been people trying to find ways to cheat the system. The most widespread example of this comes in the form of splogs and similar spam-based websites, which consist only of ads from Google AdSense and duplicated content from other sites. In this post I will share a method you can use to identify "evil" spiders and bots that are wasting your website's resources.. [More]

I normally don't discuss topics related to online security, but I recently came across a post over at Sphinn that detailed how David Airey had his domain hijacked thanks to a security exploit in GMail and wanted to help make sure as many people as possible are made aware of it. I recommend to any of you who uses GMail to read David's post that details the trouble that this has caused him and make sure that your GMail account hasn't been compromised. Not the most festive post for an early Christmas morning, but I'll wish everyone a Merry Christmas anyways.. [More]

Being a successful web developer requires constant effort to refine your existing abilities while expanding your skill-set to include the new technologies that are continually released, so when I first started my job as a search engine optimization analyst I was fully expecting my web development skills to dull. I could not have been more wrong.. [More]

In my first post on this subject, Reducing Code Bloat - Or How To Cut Your HTML Size In Half, I demonstrated how you can significantly reduce the size of a web document by simply moving style definitions externally and getting rid of a table-based layout. In this instalment I will look at the practice of semantic HTML and how effective it can be at keeping your markup tidy and lean.. [More]

The use of XHTML in the context of SEO is a matter of debate. The consensus tends to be that using XHTML falls into the category of optimization efforts that provide certain benefits for the site as a whole (extensibility, ability to use XSL transforms) but offers little or no added value in the eyes of the search engines. That being said, as the number of pages that search engine spiders have to crawl continues to increase every day, the limits to how much the spiders can crawl are being tested. This has been recognized by SEOs and is reflected in efforts to trim page sizes down to make a site more appealing to the spiders. Now it is time to start considering the significant benefits that a well-formed XHTML document can potentially offer to search engine spiders.. [More]

Seperating the style from the markup of a web document is generally a painless, if sometimes time-consuming, task. In many cases however, the process can have some added speed-bumps; most notably when the original HTML is using an infamous table-based layout. The two most common speedbumps when dealing with table-based layouts and styling are recreating the classic borderless table and keeping the default table border appearance.. [More]

While working on a client's site today I came across this gem that I thought you might enjoy. The snippet speaks for itself.. [More]