January 3rd, 2012 by Alex Trauzzi
In dealing with various technologies and services on the internet, one thing that my experiences as a developer have taught me is that open is better. You can use this rubric for just about any online or IT concept, and you’ll find that in the long haul, you’ll be better served. Whether it’s by using open software, hardware that communicates using standards or using a service that isn’t afraid of letting your data get away from them. Examples are all around us and the majority of successful tech companies have banked on the quality and transparency of free software. Even Microsoft and Apple have leveraged the quality of free and open – despite what their marketing departments might want you to think about it! In the grand scheme of things, open solutions tend to be longer lived, easier to work with and overall cheaper. Read more...
Tags: facebook, open source
Posted in Random Musings, Web Development | No Comments »
December 22nd, 2011 by Jonathan Dart
Google’s PHP client library for their GData API hasn’t received as much love as their client libraries for other languages. Despite the lack of high level service classes for Google Analytics’ Core Reporting API it is possible to work with it using google-api-php-client.
The below is a quick and dirty self contained example based on a Google+ example to get a report. Before you get started go to the API Console and enable access to the Analytics API and generate a client id, client secret, and to register your redirect uri. Read more...
Tags: google, google analytics, Google API
Posted in Web Development | 2 Comments »
December 21st, 2011 by Jonathan Dart
Here at the Web Shop, we like to take advantage of existing tools, whether they’re free or reasonably priced. One tool that we opted to not roll on our own is a site search. From time to time clients require them and the first third party search tool so used was Google Custom Search. It’s pretty expensive considering how much traffic site searches tend to get and it behaves oddly, especially with sites that aren’t well indexed. Read more...
Tags: bing, Google Custom Search, yahoo
Posted in Web Development | No Comments »
December 13th, 2011 by Chance Hoggan
A few months ago I wrote about Google’s QDF algorithm. QDF is an acronym for Query Deserves Freshness and it’s a method used by Google to provide fresh content in response to queries. When I first wrote about QDF around 17.5% of queries were affected, the latest update double that figure to 35%.
At this time the exact details of how Google determines freshness is unknown, however they have stated that one of the factors used to determine freshness is the date a page was first indexed. So if you publish page and then update it a few months later that is NOT considered fresh, even if you have completely rewritten the page. Read more...
Tags: QDF, Query Deserves Freshness
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
December 5th, 2011 by Heather Wait
If you’ve been keeping up with the latest and greatest in web design, you’ll probably have heard of the Responsive Design (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/) trend that’s been picking up steam the last couple of years. Personally I think it’s a great concept, and I’ve been looking forward to the day it becomes standard practice in web design for quite awhile now. However, each time I express my enthusiasm to fellow web designers, I am greeted with blank stares and total apathy. Read more...
Tags: design, Web, Web Design, Web Development
Posted in Web Design, Web Development | 2 Comments »
December 1st, 2011 by Omar Zulfi
If you’re into Search Engine Optimization, you are probably already aware of all the uproar surrounding Google’s algorithm initiatives in 2011. This year has been a nightmare for certain website that were, let’s say, not the greatest in terms of unique, quality content. (For those unsure, content is essentially the stuff that visitors of your website can consume online – articles, videos, images, etc.) The latest algorithm updates, dubbed “Panda,” heavily penalized websites that had thin content, engaged in web spam and generally did not provide visitors with a good user experience. Read more...
Tags: Caffine 2.0, Freshness Update, google, seo
Posted in Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
November 29th, 2011 by Danny Wood
An exciting announcement today for us, as we are launching FXR Racing’s expansion into the International E-Commerce world. New sites such as FXRRacing.no will be focused in Scandinavian countries at first, with the site in question being FXR’s Norway site. Other sites being launched FXR Racing Sweden and FXR Racing Finland.
What makes these new e-commerce solutions especially exciting is their localization features. Translations of the FXR site into local languages, combined with product prices displayed in local currencies mean that FXR’s global e-commerce expansion will be highly accessible for the consumers it will reach out to. Read more...
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
November 24th, 2011 by Jonathan Dart
I was recently tasked with creating e-commerce sites for countries where dollar signs don’t apply. Symfony’s I18N support was great for translating strings but proved to be inadequate for formatting currency. Having only used our e-commerce software to display currency in either American or Canadian dollars I had to first remove all hard coded dollar signs from our templates and invent a generic way to display currency for different regions.
Symfony’s format_currency() almost gets the job done, so I created a helper which augments its output. There’s nothing fancy here. You can add a currency indicator on either the left or the right of the currency, and if neither a left or right currency indicator are configured, we default to showing a dollar sign. Read more...
Posted in Web Development | No Comments »
November 21st, 2011 by Chris Savoie
My October read was Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton. This brief design handbook is an excellent addition to any student of typography which boasts itself as “A critical guide for designers, writers, editors, & students”. This quick read, which I read in a couple hours on a flight home from Honolulu, covered many of the same bases my college course on typography covered. More than just a crash course, Thinking With Type delivers the basics, history, and techniques required for effective typesetting. The book is separated into three distinct sections. Read more...
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
