ArcticSoft Blog

I remember going to school and learning Visual Basic. It is a very easy language, but it was fun to make little cheesy programs, and I wrote a lot of them. Then I started to have dreams in programming laguages. It seems like I loved development in my sleep.

Last weekend my wife caught me talking in my sleep. She said I said “NO, Firefox!” I don’t know what I was dreaming of, but maybe it was from all the browser testing I did the last few days.

Anyone else have interesting, weird development or technology dreams?

I have heard of a lot of even well known companies being plagued by what is called “Google Hell“. Google calls it the Supplemental Index. This index was create for weeding out spammers. It looks for pages that are keyword stuffed, or duplicate content from original source pages. They have very good intentions, but this has been harming a lot of legit sites. All it takes is for Google to think you copied you content from another site and BAM there you page is in the supplementals. When really your site the original content and the other sites are the copycats.

When this happens to a page, whatever search terms your page ranked for is gone. And the problem is that the supplemental index is spidered a lot less than regular indexed pages. This means your page could be there forever unless you do something about it. Here are a few tips on getting out of Google Purgatory:  (more…)

I was signing up for a forum the other day and ya know those verification codes now to prevent spam? This is the one I had to type in: 

I found it a little ironic. It was at a CNC metal cutting forum when I found it. Just an interesting code.

After looking over the videos and information on the Adobe site the other day, a few things popped uot at me as great features in the new Dreamweaver CS3. Just to list my favorites here: 

1. Spry ajax - This looks very cool. Instead of extensive hand coding JavaScript for very simple ajax functionality, this allows you to create almost a node/child-node ajax function with just selecting an XML file and setting the data source of a field. This looks easy to do and quick. I can already think of a few things I am going to try it out on. 

2. Pre-Built CSS Layouts - Dreamweaver CS3 comes with an array of CSS templates. Not completed templates with text or anything, just CSS shells to start with. This should save a lot of time when starting pages. 

3. WYSIWYG and W3C? Dreamweaver 8 use the Internet Explorer 6 plug-in for its design view, this was not the most standards compliant and created sloppy/bloated HTML. Now it is based on standards set by W3C. This should make browser compatibility much easier to deal with. 

4. Integration with Photoshop - When Adobe acquired Macromedia; this was the first thing that popped into my head. I love Photoshop far better than Fireworks for image editing. More filters, better tools, just a better product. Fireworks has its uses for buttons and such, but to have Dreamweaver integrated with both will be very nice. 

There it is, some of the things I am looking forward to when I get a copy of Dreamweaver CS3. I hope to get it at the beginning of May. Then I will make sure and post a review for everyone to see if it has lived up to the hype.   

Being a PHP guy you need PHP to run locally on your computer for testing. If your not running Linux and are used to IIS, if you have just upgraded to Vista and tried installing PHP from the PHP installer you found out it just didn’t work so well. After tinkering and searching I have found a few tips on how to get it going, and I will lay it out step by step for you.

1. Intall IIS7 under the programs menu. When choosing components for intalling make sure and choose the PHP ISAPI component. 

2. Download the .zip package of PHP 5.2.1 from here.

3. Unzip the files into c:\php. Or you can unzip them into whatever folder you like to create.

4. Copy the c:\php\php.ini-dist file to c:\windows\php.ini.  Make sure and change the extention.

5. Click Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.

6. Under IIS go to Handler Mappings.

7. Click under actions click Add Script Map…

8. You should get a window like the following:

9. Fill in the fields: (Request Path: *.php) (Executable: c:\php\php5isapi.dll) (Name: PHP)

10. Hit OK.

Thats it! If you are used to just using the auto installer with Windows XP, this seems a little more extensive but after you get used to the IIS7 interface it will become second nature.

After Adobe bought Macromedia there were a few questions out there. A few I had (as well of a few other designers and developers), were:  

1. What would Adobe do with Fireworks? 

2. How would future versions of Dreamweaver work with other image editors, especially Photoshop? 

3. Would Adobe try to keep GoLive as a web editing tool? More importantly would they try to re-vamp Dreamweaver to keep the name and go for more of the GoLive interface? Or get rid of GoLive altogether?  (more…)

The last few days there has been some heated debate over an article written called SEO Workers. 

Now it reminded me of a year ago when I found on a forum a company that claimed they provided SEO services. They would not touch HTML code at all. This just went to show you they did not understand onsite optimization. You see, engines look not only your incoming links, but also at your title, heading tags, and even ALT’s for your images to see how relevant it is to the search term. Of course there are a few rouge sites that show up for terms that don’t (more…)

I would like to share some thoughts on MS Access as a development environment… About 2 years ago I worked for a company that developing applications in Access was how things were done. Now don’t get me wrong, I think Access has its advantages. Come on we all need something to keep track of our CD/DVD collections right? 

I went to that company with experience in vb.net and C++, and a degree in Software Applications and Programming, so I was not a newbie in the desktop application development world. But never the less, my boss thought Access could do everything.  (more…)

Just found the Yahoo Live Badge. I don’t have too much to say about this except, who in their right mind would put something like this on a public professional site. It looks cheap, and I don’t think visitors to your site need to know how many back links you have. Wonder how many developer hours were used in building and testing a worthless tool like this?

As a business with web sites, I have started to get calls from SEO companies. Before I tell you of my experience yesterday I want you to know I am active in a few SEO forums, and do all my SEO in-house. I am ranking on the first page on Google for a lot of terms. So I am no newbie to SEO. 

Well, yesterday I received a call from a company called SEOP. He first started off by telling me what SEO stands for. Then he asked if we were happy with our ranking. I did the wrong thing at that point and told him no, and that I am always working on my rankings as it is my job. He then asked me to go to Google and type in some keywords. Then he gave me the word of ‘bank’ and explained that Bank of America was their client and they got them to the #1 spot, doubtful(a company that big is not hiring someone to submit to directories for them as they have 95,000 (more…)