After having to deal with UNIX timestamps in an application I am currently developing, I realized that there's probably a few people out there who are wondering how to convert a UNIX timestamp into a useable System.DateTime in a .NET application. Well the good news is that it's quite simple. All a UNIX timestamp represents is the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970 12:00:00 AM... [More]

The worlds most appropriate and descriptive alt attribute as used within an article on one of the major newspapers in the UK. [More]

It appears that within the past 2-3 days the popular social book-marking site del.icio.us has started blocking the major search engine spiders from crawling their site. This isn't a simple robots.txt exclusion, but rather a 404 response that is now being served based on the requesting User-Agent. This raises some questions as to the intentions of del.icio.us, and perhaps Yahoo! With Yahoo! recently integrating del.icio.us bookmarks into its search results this could an attempt to enhance the effectiveness of that new feature by preventing competing search engines from indexing content from del.icio.us. [More]

Defining custom error pages is a convenient way to show users a friendly page when they encounter an HTTP error such as a 404 Not Found, or a 500 Server Error. Unfortunately ASP.NET handles custom error pages by responding with a 302 Temporary redirect to the error page that was defined. In this post I explain how to create a custom HttpModule that allows you to use custom error pages while preserving the original HTTP status code and avoiding the 302 redirect to the error page. [More]

There has been a flurry of reactions to the IE8 development team's recent announcement about the new version-targeting meta declaration that will be introduced in Internet Explorer 8. In an article I posted on the Metamend SEO Blog yesterday, I looked at how this feature could bring IE8 and Web Standards a lot closer together and find the ideal balance between backwards-compatibility and interoperability. Many, however, did not share my optimism and saw this as another cop-out by Microsoft that would continue to hold back the web standards movement. Being that this is a topic that involves both Internet Explorer/Microsoft and web standards I naturally came across a lot of heated discussion. As I read more and more of this discussion I was once again reminded about how so many people take such an unreasonably hard stance on the issue of web standards and browser support. When it comes to a topic as complex as web standards and interoperability it is crucial that one considers all factors, both theoretical and practical, otherwise the discussion will inevitably end up taking a "your with us or against us" mentality, that does little to benefit anyone. [More]

The increasing interest of the search engine marketing community in social media has resulted in more and more discussion about how to get in on the "traffic goldrush". As an SEO, I appreciate the enthusiasm in exploring new methods for maximizing exposure for a client's site, but as a social media user I am finding myself becoming increasingly annoyed with the number of people that are set on finding ways to game the system. [More]

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]