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Friday, February 16, 2001 |
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Client-Side Javascript Includes
I saw something this morning that got me thinking. It was a really ugly (and poorly built) web site that had an interesting feature. On the right hand side of the page, there was a nice looking news feed from internetsoccer.com. How did this gem get on this page?
The answer: client-side javascript includes.
First a little about news feeds: if you don't already know, news feeds make it easy for people to share links to interesting articles that are (hopefully) related to the content of their web site. For example, this site includes a news feed to Wired News. See the right-hand column of this page? Those links to articles are coming directly from Wired. They get updated every day, and the best part is, I don't have to do anything to maintain it. New articles appear on the news feed whenever Wired adds them.
But enough about news feeds. Lets get back to the client-side javascript includes. If you know some of the more technical details of the web, you know that some pages are static (they are just text files stored on the server, and the server just serves them up, as is), and some pages are dynamic (the server builds the page from bits and parts every time someone sends a request for the page). The page I was looking at was most definitely a static web page. So how was this dynamic news feed appearing on the page? Client-side javascript includes.
Hmmm. Pretty clever, but simple really. Instead of having the server build the page dynamically, some javascript on this page caused my client software (Internet Explorer) to build the page dynamically.
How did they do this? There are two parts to the solution. The first part is to create a text file consisting of a snippet of html that you want to include on a page. This text file has to have two special characteristics. One, the text must look like this:
document.write (' html snippet goes here ');
And two, all of the text, including the html, must be on one line.
The second part of the solution is to include a bit of code on your page where you want the included html to appear. Here is what that line should look like:
<script language="javascript" src="http://path to file you created in step one"></script>
If you did everything right, and you have javascript enabled in your web browser, viewing your modified (static) web page should include (dynamically) the html snippet you created in step one. Pretty neat.
There are a couple of potential problems that you should be aware of: one, you are totally dependent on the client machine to properly render your dynamic page. If the browser has javascript turned off, the include won't work. Two, if you want the included html snippet to update dynamically like our news feed does, you will have to find someone who is providing the news feed in the proper format (like the example above).
Our Rev9 product handles news feeds a little differently than the example above, but I thought it was an interesting technique that someone could use. And you don't have to use it just for news feeds. You could easily break a web page into simple text files and have the client put it all back together. Why would you want to do this? It could make editing the site easier. Instead of editing the complete static web page, you could edit sections separately. This would allow you to separate form from content.
But if you are going to go to that much effort, you may want to consider a browser based content management system like our Rev9 product. With Rev9, you get all of the benefits of separating form from content, dynamic pages that can be rendered out to a static server (for speed, reliability), and you don't have to worry about all of the messy details that are going on in the background. Rev9 makes it easy for you to use your brain power to manage the content on your web site so you don't have to waste brain cycles managing your web site.
If you want to learn more about how BIGSEA can help you ease the pain of maintaining your web site and help you keep your content fresh, give us a call. We're here to help.
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Sunday, February 11, 2001 |
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Maybe you don't want to be a webmaster.
So maybe you don't want to be a webmaster. You have read about Rev9, but you don't want to worry about the details of keeping your site up-to-date on a regular basis. Maybe you would just like to be able to tell your webmaster: "change the word 'cat' to 'dog' everywhere in my site", and have the changes made almost instantaneously.
No problem. If that's what you want, let BIGSEA be at your service. Rev9 makes it easy for our hosting customers to keep their sites updated on a regular basis, but for those clients who don't want webmaster responsibility, we can use our Rev9 product to keep your site updated for you.
Maybe you have had a bad experience with your current web developer. You needed to have some changes completed on your site by tomorrow afternoon, but your developer told you it would take a week or two before they could get to it. You thought to yourself: "there has got to be a better way."
There is. If you like the idea of having a webmaster on call to make chages to your site, but don't like the idea of experiencing long delays to get the changes made, give us a call. We can discuss converting your existing site to a Rev9 site. After that, we should be able to make most changes (text, some graphics) to your site in less than 24 hours. If you want a complete re-design of your site or you want to add additional functionality that requires custom coding, it will definitely take longer than 24 hours, but we will let you know in advance. But for most simple changes to text or graphics, we will have your work done by the next day, and often, sooner.
Sound interesting? Give us a call. We're here to help.
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Wednesday, February 7, 2001 |
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Another thing that makes Rev9 great...
You're updating the content on your website. It's late, you're tired. You are working with your favorite WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) web page editor. You find the page you want to change on your local machine, make your changes, save them, and FTP the updated page to the webserver. Just to make sure all is well, you browse to the page you just changed to see your changed page live.
Oops. Something went wrong. Your page isn't rendering correctly in the browser. Next you realize you overwrote the original copy on your local machine when you saved your changes, and you overwrote the original on your webserver when you FTP'd the page to the web server.
You were hoping to hop into your warm bed, but now you know you have another hour of work ahead of you to correct the damaged page.
If you had a Rev9 site, this extra work could have been averted. In Rev9, you edit your pages directly in your web browser, in WYSIWYG mode (works with Internet Explorer for Windows). You make your changes, click the "Post Changes" button, and then you see your changes in the web browser. You know right away if the changes you made were the changes you intended.
What if you made a mistake? Don't worry, you can always go back and edit the page again to fix it. But what if you really, really made a mistake? You are still O.K. Rev9 keeps two copies of your pages in circulation. One copy resides on the Rev9 server (this is where you make your changes) and the other copy resides on the public web server. The page your customers see doesn't get changed until you choose to "render" the final version to the public web server. So, if you get stuck, we can always help you revert your Rev9 page to the original page that is stored on the public web server. If you accidentally rendered your page to the public server and overwrote your remaining "good" page, most likely we can help you restore yesterday's page from backup. That may take some time and effort on our part, and we may charge you a restoration fee, but rest assured that in most cases your pages can be restored (Just don't wait too long to let us know you want a page restored. Our backup tapes don't go back forever.).
What if you don't know HTML? Don't worry. If you have used a word processor, you can use Rev9. Some HTML knowledge can help you, and you can use a WYSIWYG editor as a crutch, but most people can maintain a Rev9 site without using any HTML at all. In fact, I am typing this story into my browser window, without any HTML. Just plain text, no special formatting. On a Macintosh.
Are you interested in learning more about Rev9 and how it can help your business? Give us a call. We're here to help.
About Our Web Site
A potential client once said to me: "I don't get it: what is your site all about?". Good question. At first glance, our site may not make much sense to a new visitor. We have articles about web development and hosting, links to tech support and services, dynamic news feeds from national publications like the New York Times, a calendar, and a search box, among other things.
I'll agree that we've broken just about every marketing rule in the book. But that's the point. This site is part marketing, part customer service, part technical support, and mostly a showcase of interesting technologies that we can implement for our customers on their web sites.
Take the calendar, for instance. To a casual visitor, it just looks like a normal calendar with the current day highlighted. But it is really a daily index to all of the articles that we have archived on our site.
And the search engine? How many times have you visited a site looking for a specific piece of information only to be frustrated because they didn't offer a way to search their content? An integrated search engine is another example of the kind of functionality that we can offer our clients for their own websites.
You will also see references to Rev9 throughout our site. What is Rev9, you ask? Rev9 is a tool that our customers can use to keep their sites up-to-date, every day. Although the casual visitor may not realize it, this site is driven by Rev9. If it were not for Rev9, keeping a site like this up-to-date would be a major pain. If you don't believe me, try it the old fashioned way, then give us a call. We can convert your existing site to a Rev9 site. We'll teach you how to use your web browser to edit your site (that's right, I said "web browser"). And then you will understand the beauty of Rev9. Remember, give us a call. We're here to help.
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Thursday, February 1, 2001 |
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News Feeds
We now have the capability to add news feeds to a Rev9 web site.
Do you see the New York Times Tech News box at the right? That is an example of a news feed that gets updated on the dynamic version of this site every day. To see the dynamic version of this site and the latest news, click here.
If you would like to add dynamic news feeds to your web site, give us a call. We're here to help.
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Thursday, January 18, 2001 |
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Free Upgrade!
We have just increased the Data Transfer limits for all of our hosting plans.
Here are the details:
Personal Plan: was 2 GB per month, now: 3 GB per month
Professional Plan: was 4 GB per month, now 5 GB per month
Corporate Plan: was 5 GB per month, now 7.5 GB per month
Commercial Plan: was 7 GB per month, now 10 GB per month
Enterprise Plan: was 8 GB per month, now 15 GB per month
High Volume Plan: 20 GB per month, now 35 GB per month
How much extra is this gonna cost you?
NOTHING!
This is a free upgrade for all of our hosting customers. Enjoy your new bandwith. Use it. We'll buy more.
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Wednesday, January 10, 2001 |
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Search Engine Submission Tips
You have probably seen the ad on TV: 3 or 4 men and women sitting around a computer monitor, watching the results of their online store on opening day. At first, the orders trickle in. The participants look nervous. Then the orders come faster. And faster. Elation turns to glee. Then the floodgates open and the orders rush in. Glee turns to dispair as the group begins to ponder how they will support and fullfill that many orders. (Of course, the ad is for a shipping company who wants to help the fledgling company deliver the shipments to its waiting customers.)
For the past 3 or 4 years, the hype has been that anyone with a website and a good search engine listing will become an instant Internet success. A lot of my customers ask me, "How can I get my site listed in the top 10 search engines? And by the way, I don't just mean listed anywhere, I want to be listed in the top 20 for my keywords".
I usually answer their question with "Well, thats not as easy as you might think.". I always expect my customer to say something like "if you can't get me listed in the top 20, I will find someone who can." and hang up on me at this point. Strangely enough, no one has said that to me or hung up on me... yet. I think most people realize the enormity of what they are asking. At this point, the number of websites on the internet runs in the millions. Each of those websites would like to be listed in the top 20 listings of the top 10 search engines. Do the math: 200 postions (20 x 10) all being pursued by millions of website operators. As you can imagine, it takes a pretty good effort and a lot of luck to get listed in the top 20 of any one of the major search engines.
So how can you increase your odds of being ranked in the top 20 or of even being listed at all? Start by taking the time to make your site ready. Most search engines index websites using software programs called 'spiders' that are always crawling the Internet following hyperlinks and indexing the content they find. Since these spiders are computer programs, they are best at indexing text content. So make sure you put content on your site that the search engines can index. Articles and stories with lots of useful text is a good idea. So is using META tags that describe your site and its contents and image references that include descriptive 'alt' tags. If you are not sure what those things are, consult with your web developer or a good web development book.
People have tried a lot of tricks - like repeating several words over and over on a page that is the same color as the text - but the search engines have gotten a lot smarter over the years and those tricks don't work as well as they used to. But if you think about it, those tricks don't serve you or your customer very well. You may get listed, but if a customer visits your site after finding you in a search engine only to see nothing there that they can use, they will leave in a nanosecond. They probably won't even wait around to see your page completely load.
Do yourself and your visitors a favor. Build your site with good useful content, keep it updated on a regular basis, and pay attention to the details. After you have added value, submit your site to the search engines. Give them some meat to chew on. You might be surprised by the results. And if you need to deliver products to all of your new customers, there will be a shipping company ready to serve you waiting in the wings.
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Thursday, January 4, 2001 |
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Atomz Search
We just added a new search engine called "Atomz.search" to the BIGSEA website. You may be asking yourself: "What is Atomz.search?".
Atomz.search is a sophisticated search engine that indexes the content on your web site so that users can find what they are looking for more easily. Atomz.search indexes the content just like the major search engines: it uses a "spider" to "crawl" the links in your site and index the text content that it finds.
A few days ago, we added Excite! search cababilities to the BIGSEA website. The two search engines, while they both provide search functionality to your site, are very different in implementation.
Excite! search is a cgi script that resides on your web hosting server. Because it is local to the server, it can see all of the files on your server whether they have a link to them or not. What this means is that if you don't limit the files that the Excite! search engine can index, it will index much more than you want it to. The first time we generated an index using the Excite! engine, it indexed all of the text files on our server in addition to the public html pages. When we did some test searches, we were surprised to see that the Excite! engine had indexed many files that we did not want the public to see. This is not to say that the Excite! search engine is inherently bad; it is actually quite useful and fairly easy to configure. To try the Excite search engine, click here.
Atomz.search is a free (for sites that are 500 pages or less) service provided by Atomz.com. To try a sample search using the Atomz.search engine, enter a keyword in the box in the left margin of this page and click the "Search" button. Atomz.search has some great features:
- The "search" and "results" pages are (almost) completely customizable.
- Atomz.search can be scheduled to re-index your site on a regular basis.
- Atomz.search tracks the keywords your visitors used to search your site and can create summary reports of the searches to help you understand what your customers are looking for.
- Atomz.search "crawls" your site just like the major search engines, so the only pages it can index are pages that have links pointing to them.
- During the indexing process, the Atomz.search engine finds broken links and reports them to you so that they can be corrected.
- Atomz.search offers advanced search functionality to help your visitors better define their search queries. To see an example of the advanced search, click here.
Which engine would we recommend? They are both good search engines and they each have unique features. If you want to implement a search engine for your web site and aren't sure which engine is better for you, give us a call. We're here to help.
First Steps for Editing Your Rev9 Site
If you are editing your Rev9 site for the first time, it may be a little confusing at first. Don't worry; with a little practice you will be on your way to becomming a professional web site editor.
Here are a few suggestions if you are a first-timer:
- Before you can edit your site, you must login. Click the login link on your page, and fill-in the username (your email address) and password. After you are logged in, you will see a new "Editors Only" menu on your page.
- You will also see some new buttons on your home page. They are "Flip Home Page", "Edit This Page", and (if we have set up a web hosting account for you)a "Render This Page" button. The "Flip Home Page" button does just what it sounds like. If you imagine your home page being a page in your calendar or a journal, then to turn the page, you click the "Flip Home Page" button. After you flip the home page, you will need to click the "Edit This Page" button to add text to your new page.
- To modify the content on a new or existing page (sometimes refered to as a story), click the "Edit This Page" button, make your changes in the form that appears and submit your changes. Tip: You can include html in the form if you want to add special formatting to your page.
- If you are a web hosting customer, you will also have a button called "Render This Page". When you get your page looking the way you want it and you are ready to make your changes public, click the "Render This Page" button. Be patient, this part can take a few minutes. When your page is rendered to the public webserver, you will be transported to the public version of the page (notice that the url for the page you were editing has changed, and the "Editors Only menu is now gone.). To make more changes, just click the "Back" button on your browser to return to the page you were editing in the Rev9 site.
These are just a few pointers to help you get started. As you use the system, you will probably become more interested in learning about the other options in your "Editors Only" menu. Feel free to take a look at the various options available to you. You will see that the Rev9 sytem is very customizable. As always, if you have any questions, give us a call or send an email. We're here to help.
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Friday, December 29, 2000 |
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BIGSEA is now searchable
We have just added Excite Search capabilities to the BIGSEA website.
Want to try it? Click Here.
Excite Search is a great tool that makes it easier for your customers to search the contents of your webserver. It is a concept-based search engine that is able to find the documents you are looking for based on a few keywords or phrases. It sorts the results by relevance, and will even create a summary that makes skimming large documents easier.
And best of all, it is an included service for our BIGSEA Professional Plans and greater. If you have wanted to add search capabilities to your web site but didn't know where to begin, call us. We're here to help.
Breaking News from CNN:
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the population of the United States has grown to 281,421,906.
Wow. 281 million people. Think about that number for a minute. Those 281 million people are going to need a lot of shoes, clothes, food, housing, automobiles, government services (like police and fire protection), roads, factories, and schools to produce an educated workforce to make all that stuff.
We don't have time for an economic slowdown. We need to get busy...
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