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Now there are quite a few advantages to an online business vs a brick and mortar business; like we don't commute, well maybe a 30 second one own the hallway, we don't pay building rent, we don't have employees, while except maybe the virtual ones. But, one advantage that's quite unique online is that we can sorta 'spy' on our competitors a bit more easily. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating any wrong doing here or anything UNethical or anything like that, and I'm certainly NOT saying to 'steal text'(plagiarize) or anything like that. All this is, is a simple little method that's quite common to see how our competitors do things,... the ability to be able to look 'into' their websites. In the Search Engine Optimization field, it's often done to see how and where others place their keywords, their tags, descriptions, etc. etc.. I'm simply talking of viewing the HTML code that makes up the webpages,... now anyone can do this, if they are somewhat familiar with their web browser. And it basically works the same for both browsers; IE and Netscape. Now, for someone looking at this for the first time, all they will probably see is a lot of letters, symbols, text, etc. but for someone with a more basic knowledge of HTML, it can be quite amazing and rewarding in knowing how to 'read it.' Ok, here are the steps for the two major browsers: In IE or Internet Explorer, go to your Main Menu, then to View, then own to Source. Thats: Main Menu -> View -> Source then upon clicking Source, a notepad window will pop open which will show the web pages HTML source code for the webpage, thats presently within your IE browser. And in Netscape Navigator,... the same thing,... Main Menu -> View -> Page Source(Crtl+U) then a Netscape Navigator window will open up, showing the web page source code to the webpage presently in Netscape. Now with Netscape, the code is highlighted in the viewer compared to in IE. This makes it a bit better and easier to understand if your familiar with HTML. I say again, this assumes of course that you know the basics of HTML code. However, if your at all knowledgeable in CSS, Javascript, Flash, and so on then you'll get more out of looking at the source code. Being able to view the source code of webpages can be quite enlightening, believe it or not. This can be to perhaps get ideas for page layouts and/or keyword placement etc.. It can be a very valuable tool for Search Engine Optimizers to get a better understanding of optimizing a web page with meta tags and so on. And it can also provide a huge aid in learning HTML and understanding how others do it.
This post comes a bit late in the whole web 2.0 cycle. I feel that it bears repeating because I have come across sites that don't follow some basic principles when pulling in 3rd party data from sites such as flickr, twitter et. al. APIs and data portabilityThe blessing of popular and easy to use APIs and the data portability of web 2.0 applications has had an unfortunate side effect, and that is that some implementations that use these services do not integrate appropriate contingency design should these 3rd party services fail. Caching data calls to APIs is a good bit of contingency design. Many APIs will require caching - like that of Amazon - but I suspect this is intended to help limit resource use of the API host, not the site using the API. The reasons a person using API accessed data on their website would want to cache the data are:
A simple implementation to handle those two cases would be one that caches an API call for a given amount of time and one that freshens stale cached data and triggers an error should an API call fail. Caching is good contingency design practiceAs I said above, this post is a bit late to the party but it is worth writing as recently I have come upon at least three sites where firebug and other widgets have revealed issues retrieving API fetched data and the site loading times have been horrible. A decent implementation idea would be to roll your own caching wrapper and agnostically plug it in to a stable caching tool, perhaps something like Cache Lite for PHP. In this manner you have a reusable, caching library independent piece of code that can handle caching/flushing and refreshing of data which could function to handle the two cases discussed above. And that's it. It's been 541 days since my last post. Wow. I hope this is a re-start of a new phase of blogging. Article Index: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 |
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