Check this new entry to CPayscom2 Online Casino SEO contest. The goal is to rank in the TOP 10 on MSN for the search term "CPayscom2 Online Casino" .

There is $20.000 to win! You can check this SEO contest here: http://www.cpayscom.com/

Google released today a new version of its Spreadsheets, together with a Document wrtiter. The Google "Office suite" is looking better and better. It's now very easy to browse all the documents. (using the same kind of interface as Gmail)

All these documents remain on Google's servers, which is really nice if you travel or use different computers. But you can also export these documents as OpenOffice, Word, RTF, PDF or HTML.

Of course features are simple but it's already very powerful and quite fast. Try it!

That's it! Rumor was true. Today, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 Billion. Wait, let me repeat this. One point sixty-five fucking billion dollars!
YouTube was founded in February 2005 by three Paypal employees and is now operated by 67 employees in California. It's one of the fastest growing Internet company. The employees and co-founders will continue working for YouTube.


It's a while Google didn't acquire anything, but this is the biggest acquisition they ever did.
Here is a message from Chad and Steve, co-founders of YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCVxQ_3Ejkg
They look pretty happy

I just wanted to mention Exoclick.com, a new pay-per-click platform for publishers and advertisers who are looking to buy or sell clicks. It is still in beta version, but from what I could see, it looks like it's going to be a great product. If you are into buying traffic and/or selling traffic, have a look at it. That's a good challenger for AdWords, MSN Ads and the others!

Their traffic is pure SEO, from search engines and portals. And the traffic they sell worked pretty good for me! I will use them more in the future.

I just discovered this firefox extension and it's a must-have for SEO. First because of it's "transparent toolbar", that will give you valuable information on the site you visit. Backlinks, PR, number of indexed pages in Google, Yahoo, MSN... there are a lot of options.

SeoQuake also has a lot of info displayed in the search engines results.

Download it from Firefox.

Here is the first video I made during the Redbull Air Race in Barcelona. This took place Saturday 6th of May on the Bogatell beach.
Video is hosted by Google Video. More to come.

I had never heard of this "race" until they built a freaking airport in front of my house in 2 days!

Third day, everybody started to hear the planes, going up, down and flying a few meters up the sea, doing impressive moves!

Fourth day, it's on the mouth of everybody, don't miss this race!! All Barcelona will be at the beach tomorrow evening, to watch the show.

When I came back home today, passing by the beach, it looks like a war is coming. About 5 helicopters, Red Bull hummers, planes, cameras everywhere and huuuge plasma screens every 200 meters. Jesus! These guys are cow-boys.

Anyways... tomorow, I'll be there! I'll take pictures and videos to post here

More about this event:

"The Red Bull Air Race is an exciting competition in which the world’s most talented pilots are up against each other in a race based on speed, precision and skill.

The competition features a dynamic new discipline of flying, called ‘air racing’ where the objective is to navigate a challenging obstacle course in the sky in the fastest possible time. Pilots fly individually against the clock and have to complete tight turns through a slalom course consisting of specially designed 19m high pylons, known as ‘air gates’.

The Air Race is not just about speed but also precision. The slightest mistake can result in penalty points. Flying low to the ground at speeds that can reach over 400kph, while negotiating the obstacles, requires immense skill that only a certain number of pilots in the world possess. That is why the pilots are hand selected based upon their expertise and experience. These pilots are at the top of their game. They have to be – the Air Race exerts huge demands on their flying abilities and they have to withstand forces of up to 10G. There is no room for error.

What makes the ‘Air Race’ so exciting and interesting for spectators is the proximity of the contest to the crowds. Low level flying on a relatively compact course means that people can really experience all the action close-up.

The idea of the Air Race was conceived by Red Bull who then approached renowned Hungarian pilot Peter Beseynei to help them refine the concept. The very first Red Bull Air Race took place at AirPower in Zeltweg, Austria in 2003 and was hailed a great success. It was clear that there was a huge potential for the competition. Subsequent Air Races were then held in Hungary, England and the USA and since then it has evolved into its current format, the Red Bull Air Race World Series. The first World Series kicked off in 2005, taking place in 7 venues across the world with 10 internationally acclaimed pilots competing.

11 pilots will take part in the 2006 Red Bull Air Race World Series in 9 spectacular international locations.
‘Air races’ have their roots in the US but unlike those contests where the objective was purely about speed, the Red Bull Air Race brings another dimension into the challenge – skill. They are using some of the lightest, agile and responsive planes that exist, but it’s the pilot’s stamina and skill that determines who will be crowned the next Red Bull Air Race World Series champion.", http://www.redbullairrace.com

What is AJAX?

AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. It is not a programming language, but a development technique, mixing different technologies to add interactivity to web pages and "real-time" communication between the client and the server.
Technologies used:

• HTML of course, for the client-side display. Mixed with CSS for the layout and design.
• JavaScript for the client-side actions and handlers.
• HTTP requests for the client/server communication.
• And eventually, XML for the data. But XML is not mandatory, data can perfectly be passed in plain text, HTML or whatever you want.

Links of interest

• For the history and definition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
•  If you have reasonable skills in HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript, you can check this Real Time Online Counter, I found it browsing on AJAX and this is a perfect example/tutorial. You will get the bases of AJAX concept in 5 minutes.
• This man is just a GURU in AJAX: http://www.themaninblue.com/
• One of the first important application based on AJAX, Google Maps.

Ok, but do I need AJAX?

Not necessarily! You should probably not start developing all your site around AJAX and fill your HTML with JavaScript and asynchronous connections, only if you have the need for it. If you need to add interactivity on a specific feature or you can really improve the end-user experience then yes, use it.

Imagine a chat-room. I remember trying to develop some chat-rooms with JavaScript, frames and ugly refreshes, to avoid using a Java applet. This never really worked, because the user experience was awful. AJAX is perfect to solve this problem. You can display the chat messages to the user without refreshing the page, but just by refreshing some little parts of it. Or showing who is online.

So the bottom line is that AJAX is now the super fashion technique that everybody wants to use, one way or another. But use it in a clever way. AJAX will add a layer of complexity to your pages, and so probably a new source of bugs and issues, especially for the browser compatiblity. You will need to make some tests with  several versions of  Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc... and make sure your JavaScript/CSS code is working properly on all of them.

The idea already hit me a few months ago, millions of users with the Google Toolbar, AdWords, AdSense, Google Analytics...
Google can gather a huge amount of information regarding the behaviour of users.
How long they stay on a web site, did they come back to the search engine and clicked on another site, how many page views/visit, etc... These can be very good indicators to know if users where satisfied and so on...

There is no way to know IF and HOW Google is using this information, but I'm sure they do use it. And if this "traffic patterns" or "user behaviour" data starts to get important for search engines, this is going to be a new challenge for webmasters and SEO professionals.

Here is an interresting thread about the subject: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/33769-1-10.htm

BlogBeee.com, the free blog hosting platform I'm running is now generating Google Sitemaps of each blog.
Here is The Geek Blog Sitemap: http://tech.blogbeee.com/sitemap.php

By providing a sitemap to Google, your blog should be crawled much more efficiently and more often, although it's difficult to guarantee anything in this early stage. A sure thing is that it will not hurt your placement on search results.

To learn more about Google Sitemaps: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/navigation.html

In the next days, I'll be testing the sitemaps on different web sites and will let you know my results.

Step 3, backlinks

The best way to get search engines spiders crawl your web site is to have a maximum of backlinks. What is a backlink? Any link to your site or a page of your site from another web site. The more backlinks you have, the more and the faster spiders will crawl your pages.
Ideally, these backlinks should come from pages which are matching the content of your site. If you sell cars and a cartoon web site is linking to you, this will not help you much to improve your placement on car selling.

Use good link anchors. (see previous article, SEO Introduction)

Step 4, see the first results

Check the first results on Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Do you have some pages indexed? site:yourdomain.com
What backlinks do you have? link:yourdomain.com (this takes quite some time before to be updated)
Check the titles and descriptions used for your pages.
Start checking your placement on your target search terms. You can use a free tool like this one to avoid checking all the pages manually... http://www.iwebtool.com/search_engine_position

After these first verifications, you will probably have to adjust several things and improve your pages to get better positions.

If you are looking for a free, open-source and poweful multimedia player, VLC Media Player is what you need. It's playing DVDs, VCDs, MPEG, DivX, as well with sounds formats such as MP3, OGG, etc...
It's also supporting several streaming protocols.

VLC is cross-platform, therefore running on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and a lot of other Operating Systems.

The design of the interface does not give a very good impression, as it is for PowerDVD for example (this one not being free at all) which is giving a lot of importance to the artwork.
VLC on the contrary has done a sober and practical interface. All the needed options are there, easy to use, it's light and very fast to load.
However, there is a skin system and they start to have a few good skins available.

A lot of options have been implemented to configure image colors, contrast, the sound, etc... and it is supporting subtitles files, which is really nice when playing DivX.

In summary, VLC is a very good player, free and usable on any platform. To today, they count a total of 14 millions downloads of the software, that's a big success and they deserve it.

A simple tool on WebRankInfo, to query 17 Google data centers at once. Useful to check your rankings and future rankings.

http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/google-data-centers.php

I just bought a new MP3 player, from COWON (iAUDIO) for 169 euros.
I was hesitating a long time, comparing with a product from Packard Bell but the saleman made me buy the iAUDIO instead. And he was right for sure!

The packaging is already excellent, and the specifications listed there are really impressive.
Playback audio formats: MP3, OGG, WMA, WAV (What else could you need !?)
Voice recorder, FM radio and recording (direct MP3 encoding), USB 2.0 Drive, Lithium battery (rechargeable through the USB port) with up to 20 hours continuous playback. Etc, etc..

Opening the box, it comes with really nice  earphones, manual, USB connector and USB cable, Line-in cable, a carrying case, a neck cord and an installation CD. I could not wish anything more.

First surprise, the player itself is VERY light. I almost can't feel it in my hand and it's pretty classy.


I plugged it to my computer, uploaded a few albums and let the battery recharge for a while... Power ON!

I usually never read manuals and learn by using the product, but this time I had to give a quick look as some of the options, like the files navigator, are not so easy to find.
However, after a few minutes, I got to know the menus, checked the options and with the multi-directional button, it's super-fast to browse the different sections.

Audio quality is good and download MP3s on the player is very simple, by using the software coming with it or just using it as a USB hard-drive.
I'll probably not use much the software (JetShell) except for the MP3 encoder which is pretty nice (and fast!) to encode MP3s from audio CDs. Plus it is checking the CDDB for album information and tagging the MP3s, which is pretty nice.

In summary, a great product, a bit expensive but very well done.

iAUDIO

Web Developer is an extension which adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

It is a MUST HAVE for all web developers. It has excellent features for CSS, XML, HTML outlining, information, validation, etc... Try it and you won't be able to live without it.

Bunny Hunt is a free game developed for Easter by "The Man in Blue", completely in AJAX. And it's impressive to see what's possible to do with HTML and JavaScript, more pricesely with AJAX.

It's not in FLASH!

Just a small article to tell you about jEdit, a free and open-source text editor for programmers.
It is written in Java and therefore running on Linux platforms, Windows, Mac OS, etc...

Hundreds of plug-ins are available and you should find all what you need.
Files and projects Management, FTP, code highlighting, code parsing, version control, docbook, HTML, XML, etc...

If you are not so happy with your current editor, you should definitely give a try to jEdit. This is my favourite editor since I discovered it. http://www.jedit.org

Nowadays, it requires a lot of efforts to get traffic to web sites. There are billions of pages out there.

You can create a very nice product, with a great design and lots of services, and never get one single visit. Sure, content is king, but a king needs its villagers. And one of the best places to gather villagers is on search engines.
Amongst others: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, etc...

I'll try to give you a few tips to get more visibility on search engines.

Step 1, content, content, content

Search engines (through their spiders) are indexing text content from your pages. So the first thing you have to do, is make sure you have plenty of text, related to the subject of your web site. The context of the words is also very important, so don't just list hundreds of keywords. Write correct sentences, repeating several times the words you want to focus on. Try to use all the synonyms you know. Eventually, don't correct your typos or mistakes, people will do the same typos when they do a research!

Plus:
Always set the value of the alt="" tag of your images.
Set the description and keywords metas. If possible, write different metas for each page.

Step 2, internal links

Make sure to have a good sitemap, linking to your different sections and pages, and inter-linking all your pages. When doing so, give a lot of importance to the anchor text your are using for your link.

For example, if you have a page selling an online HTML training.
DON'T DO THIS:
To join our online HTML training, <a href="001.html">click here</a>.
DO THIS:
Join now our <a href="online-html-training.html">online HTML training</a>.

Search engines algorithms are taking into consideration the text used for the link itself. "click here" is meaningless. But "online HTML training" correspond exactly to your subject, and this specific page, whatever its content, will be considered as an interresting page for "online HTML training" by the search engines.

For the story, it is because of this algorithm that it is possible to do "Google bombs". Try the search "miserable failure" on Google, and you will find as first web site the biography of George W. Bush. I can assure you Bush is not talking about a miserable failure anywhere in its biography. But a lot of "funny hackers" added a link to the site of Bush, with the text "miserable failure".  As so many pages link to Bush's web site with that text, Google consider it as an interresting ressource for miserable failure.
This was done long ago and it is still number one on that search. Living proof of the very importance of the text for your links...

Okay, that will be it for today, now go to work on your pages
To be continued...

What is CSS?

CSS stands for "Cascading Style Sheets".
It is a standard from the W3C. (http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/)
All major browsers support it.

Basically, CSS let you define the style and layout of your HTML pages.

Separate the content from the display rules.

One of the biggest advantage of CSS is that it allow you to separate completely the content of your page from the design rules applied to it.
Using only HTML, you need to use tags like <i>, <u>, <b>, <font>, <center>, etc... to add style to your content. First problem is that these tags are limited and it will often get tricky or even impossible to get complex effects. Next problem is that your HTML code will quickly get full of all these design tags, everywhere in your code.

Imagine a page with 20 subtitles. If you want to change the display of all your subtitles, you will need to do it 20 times... No global change is possible.
CSS is also solving this problem. You will define the display of your subtitles in 1 place.

External CSS file.

All the CSS can be saved in 1 central file, that will just get included in all your pages. This is a huge help for web designers and developers. Any design change on a web site of hundreds of pages can be done in just 1 central file.

Examples in next articles

A very common task when creating web sites is to have them translated in several languages. Webmasters creating static pages will usually duplicate their site in another directory and translate all the pages and images.
This becomes absolutely impossible to maintain when there is a lot of pages and different languages.

There are lots of possibilities to do this with PHP, here are a few of them.

The geek way: Gettext.
Gettext is a GNU package, proposing a set of tools to manage multi-language support in a project.
PHP implements some functions to work with this architecture.

Good points:

• Lots of tools for translators and developers.
• It's a standard.

Bad points:

• Needs to restart Apache when updating the translation files.
• Not so easy to use for beginners.

Conclusions:
Gettext is good for very large projects, involving lots of people and big amounts of translations. Not worth using it for small or average size projects in my opinion.
For more information on Gettext:
http://php.net/manual/en/ref.gettext.php
http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html

The simple way:

Let's say we have a page, with the text "Hello World!" that we want to translate.
It would look like:

        <?php
        echo("Hello World!");
        ?>

Create 1 PHP file per language. Example: FR.php, ES.php, EN.php
And in each file, create the same variable, but in a different language.

FR.php:
        <?php
       $mytext="Bonjour Monde!";
       ?>

ES.php:
       <?php
       $mytext="Hola Mundo!";
        ?>

EN.php:
       <?php
       $mytext="Hello World!"
       ?>

Now in your page, replace:
        echo("Hello World!");
by
        echo($mytext);

Last step, include the appropriate language file:

        <?php
       if($_GET[ln]=="FR") include("FR.php");
       elseif($_GET[ln]=="ES") include("ES.php");
       else include("EN.php");
      
        echo($mytext);
        ?>

That's it! Call your PHP passing a parameter called "ln=XX", replacing XX by FR, ES or EN and you will get your page in the good language...

This is a simple approach, which you can improve in many ways.
For example, replacing the variable $mytext by a big array of texts, detect automatically the language used in the browser with the global variable  $_SERVER[HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE]
You could also create a function lng(...) to call your translations texts and add some dynamic variables or  have some default  text if no translation is found in a certain language.

Welcome to this brand new blog, I'll be talking mainly about web technologies, web standards and of my experience developping online projects.
I hope you enjoy the reading and comment on my articles so we can gather interresting ressources here.

See ya!