alex mccabe
2009/2010 university blog 07501657

This week in Internet Applications Development, we discussed the topic of ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. This is a much debated area of the web as it is very difficult to put and exact pin on how to search optimise your website.

Our lecturer handed out copies of the Central Office of Administration’s Search Engine Optimisation document. This document attempts to inform people how to provide effective SEO in plain English.

For me, this document was far too simple and I already practiced much of the information contained within. It was aimed at Website Managers within the public sector, and well if you manage a website, I’m pretty sure that you have a good idea how to code (unless you are managing the content), but then this document doesn’t apply to you. I’m not entirely sure why this document was created in the way it was.

However it does bring up a few interesting points, some things that many people may not even think about; XML Sitemaps. This is something that I personally have at the root of my website, but it is something that after a little bit of discussion, not many people knew about or how to create. Another thing that caught my attention was the analysis of search results. This takes time to do, but results could be beneficial. You can see what people on your website are searching for and then cater the site to these results. By this I mean restructuring the site to make the most popular content easier to get to, hence making your users happier and then they keep coming back. This is a good thing obviously. I don’t have a great deal of content on my website, so this is irrelevant. This idea of SEO is most certainly context based (bigger the site, the more relevant it becomes).

All the other points contained within the document are very…simple. Like I said before, other than the search result analysis, I practice all of the SEO tips. And they definitely work. Try Googling Alex McCabe or xandesigns to see what happens. And yes, that is a shameless plug for my site in the hope to get more visits and keep my rank.

So is this.

So, recently I had to create a wiki entry on my IAD wiki site. The topic was ours to choose, but had to be web based in some way. As someone in last years course did Authentication, I thought i would give it a crack.

Well I took authentication to mean the likes of OpenID (this is due to a small role played by one of my lecturers mentioning this to me) and although technically correct, it is a much, much broader topic. So I wrote all about OpenID and Facebook Connect and how they work and all about them yada yada yada…

You can view the wiki if you so wish. Take me to the wiki now!

Ok it is not that great, let us not get too cocky about it, but I think I improved upon last years student, if only by a small amount.

Now, once this was complete I had to give a presentation on the exact same topic. Easy enough to create, take all my data from the wiki then talk about it in front of my two lecturers and a few students. Simple. Lasted longer than anticipated. Even better.

It was after my presentation was over that it was pointed to me by one Chris Wallace, that authentication was what the web is. More specifically when users log-in to a site, regardless of using OpenID or otherwise. I feel a bit silly at this point, and just nod and agree then build upon what he said to me, turn the bad into the good, so to speak.

All in all not such a bad assignment, definitely one of the better at the moment, I will mention no names, but there are some terrible assignments on the go.

So after trying (and failing) to create this project from scratch using PHP, I have decided to use a Framework.

As the title of this post suggests, I will be using CodeIgniter. I have done some research into CodeIgniter itself and it seems a very extensive Framework that is fairly easy to use. It is built upon the MVC (Model, View, Controller) architecture to provide an easier more understandable way of coding.

Not only this, the CodeIgniter website is full of information and documentation about the Framework, and there is also a very extensive FAQ and forum that will help with any problems I might have.

During the course of my daily rummaging around the web space (sometimes called ‘research’) I came across something quite interesting. It is in fact the exact thing that i want to do. I thought that my idea was completely original, however it turns out that I was not the first person to think of such things.

It is not the full project as there is a lot that isn’t there that I will include in my final project, however the essence of the main functionality is.

Check out the cart.

I don’t really want to use this code, as well I wouldn’t be learning would I. However I can use some of the techniques and processes to hopefully recreate it.

Shame I wasn’t the first to think of such things.

Thanks in no small part to the social network site, twitter, I have managed to find a lot of jQuery resources that would be perfect to use in my project.

Following the jQuery twitter feed directly (http://twitter.com/jQuery) as well as NetTuts (http://twitter.com/nettuts) has yielded many, many useful websites for jQuery plugins, tutorials and enhancements that are perfect for the site i wish to build.

Take for instance the drag and drop function that has recently been implemented into jQuery. As this is a key feature to the functionality of my site, I was pleased to find that it is now very simple to get working. Check out this URL for more information on the drag and drop. The live demo is here.

There are many more jQuery plugins and tutorials that I have bookmarked and I am hoping that there will be many more.

Thank you Twitter