In addition to all your favorite features from Mock Draft 2009, the 2010 edition also allows for multiple mocks, drag and drop reordering, push notifications for live picks and trades and a featured Mock carefully crafted by our good friend Will Spencer of DraftBreakdown.com

What are you still doing here? Go check it out!

This app was developed by the company I work for, Tap Tapas - we specialize in iPhone/iPad/iPod-touch app development.

]]> http://www.billyswebdesign.com/blog/2010/mock-draft-2010-iphone-ipad-ipod-available/feed/ http://www.billyswebdesign.com/blog/2009/what-is-seo-introduction-to-search-engine-optimization-and-search-result-rank/ http://www.billyswebdesign.com/blog/2009/what-is-seo-introduction-to-search-engine-optimization-and-search-result-rank/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:15:34 +0000 admin http://www.billyswebdesign.com/blog/?p=108 Everyone wants their site to come up on the first page of google, yahoo and other leading search services. There is no simple or guaranteed solution to do this. But there are some things you can understand to get started on your website all on your own that will make a significant impact. This practice is known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

SEO is a major industry on it’s own. Many people hear about the meta tag description and keywords are all but extinct today since all the major search engines pretty much ignore them and use much more sophisticated methods of “reading” and indexing your website.

These methods are closely guarded secrets in order to prevent abuse to insure that the search results are genuine and as useful as possible. That being said, there are 3 major areas of website development and maintenance that will help your ranking.

1. Well written content - Having descriptive, well written content throughout your site using the keywords that people are searching for will not only help your search rank but also provide more (and better) information to visitors to better entice them to your product or service.
2. Links - The more links to your website from other websites, the more likely it is to be found. Not only that, but the search engines notice how many people are linked to your website and will consider your site more important if it has more links to it. A few ways of getting links to your site is to get on facebook, myspace, twitter and other social websites and share links to your website there. Also, periodically posting a craigslist ad that includes a link to your website will help. If you have a friend with a website, you could exchange links with them.
3. Keep it current - Updating the site on a regular basis helps a lot. A great and easy way to do this is to incorporate a blog on the website. You can update the blog with news about your site, changes to your products and discussing relevant current events. I have added blogs to my own website and have noticed a significant increase in traffic with regular blogging (ok, semi-regular).

Finally, note that there is no overnight solution to SEO. Maintaining good content, regular updates and keeping it linked throughout the web whenever possible will produce great results over time. The longer you do these things the greater and greater the traffic should become and the more you will learn what works.

I found this little program that does just that. It actually opens the file and tries to detect the file type by comparing it’s structure to a library of known structures.

You can get it free here:
http://filext.com/faq/files_with_no_extension.php

Make sure that once you get the program, you then get the library (packaged as a .rar) or the program will be useless. The library download is available on the same site as the install. Just unpack the .rar into the same directory as the .exe and you’ll be good to go!

basename($str) will return the filename portion of a given $str.

dirname($str) will return the directory portion of a given $str.

First off, you can use the import and export tools that wordpress provides which do work, quite well, but they leave out images.  Because of this I found the best way to do a COMPLETE migration of my wordpress blog (including content and most, if not all, plugins) is to do it manually.

Instructions:

1. Download the entire wordpress directory from the old server.
2. Modify the wp-config.php file to reflect your new settings.
3. Upload entire wp directory, maintaining directory structure, to the new server.
4. Use phpMyAdmin (or other mysql database manipulation tool) to export your wordpress database.
5. Open the exported database file (probabaly ending in .sql) in a text editor.
6. Search for and replace any references to your old host/server address (if it has changed) with the new one.
7. Now you need to determine the server’s path to your web root folder for each server.
   • Create a new text file and place the following in it:
     <?php echo $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']; ?>
   • Save this is path.php and upload to the root directory of both the old and new servers.
   • Access this file in your web browser and compare the two different path locations it returns.
   • Replace all instances of the old path with the new one in your database export file.
8. Now that you have replaced all the references to the old server you may import the modified database file into the database of your new server (again, using phpmyadmin or similar program).
9. You should now have access to your wordpress on your new server with all images and other content remaining intact as well as most plugins you have installed.

Final notes

You will likely find when you next login to the wordpress admin that there are some error messages about permissions on the wp-content directory (and sub directories) which will need to be relaxed to allow wordpress to handle any new content you upload to it.

Depending on what plugins you installed before, you may have trouble with these depending on how they function though most should work just fine.

I began my search of existing web-based wysiwyg applications and found that the two leading applications (FCK and TinyMCE) are pretty good.  They have a lot of tools, but a big problem with them is that they can give your web design customers a little too much control over the content.  This can result in disasterous layout problems, horrible color combinations, and unwanted calls from frustrated non-tech-minded business owners.

What I needed was something simple and customizable and able to produce valid xhtml.  I came across a newer wysiwyg called NicEdit which is at version 0.9 r23.  It is highly customizable and feature rich, yet simple and clean in design and implementation.

However, none of these 3 editors could properly clean a paste from MS Word, which is something our web design clients love to do.

So I set out to solve this problem.  I chose to work with my favorite of the 3 editors, NicEdit, and then modified one of the classes to not only clean a paste from MS Word, but a paste from anywhere.

The Solution

1. Go download NicEdit then open it up in your favorite text editor.  Get a demo working.
2. Find the nicEditorInstance class.
3. Replace the nicEditorInstance class with the code in this javascript file. DO NOT replace the entire nicEdit js file, only replace the nicEditorInstance class.
4. Try it out!

Sorry… I’ll have a working demo up soon.

Other things to do.  If you’re like me, you want your clients to work with a pre-defined set of styles.  Check through the NicEdit docs, forums and examples and you’ll see it’s pretty easy to remove formatting buttons from the editor.  Also look through the MODIFIED class above and you should see how you can strip/include more html tags from a paste.

Good luck!  Send me any improvements or suggestions you find.

After a quick google search I found this to be the fix...

1. In your Winamp program directory (C:\Program Files\Winamp) create an empty text file.

2. Rename this text file to winamp.m3u

Now Google Talk should have no problem getting track information from Winamp for your status.

Most of these problems can be fixed with a simple css style that have been using for years.

First… Why does it happen?

The “picaso” effect with elements displaying in unpredictable manners, overlapping or getting pushed off to the side of the page, is a result of how css attribute float with assigned value of left or right are treated by the browser.  The browser ignores the height as well as top and bottom margins of the floating elements when rendering any elements following them.  Depending on your page structure and the browser you are viewing the page from, this can cause a wide array of undesirable display problems.

How do I fix it? - The Ultimate Line Break!

You’re probably already familiar with <br> (or <br /> in xhtml).  Here is a CSS enhanced version of the line break to fix many unpredictable display issues.  In fact, this has saved me in a number of places and has become a staple in most of the style sheets of practically every site I build.  It validates correctly and should not cause any extra vertical space on your page.  You can place this pretty safely anywhere and it will vertically break up whatever is above and below it so that they are on separate lines and do not overlap.   You can even use the HTML multiple times througout your page just like the old <br> tag!

The HTML:

<div class="hrClear"><hr /></div>

The CSS:

.hrClear {
width: 100%;
height: 0;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
clear: both;
}
.hrClear hr {
width: 100%;
height: 0;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
visibility: hidden;
display: none;
}

I’m pleased to announce that ScrewballTees.com, my work in progress for the past couple of months, has finally launched!

The site was launched on April 9th with 3 completed t-shirt designs (which I’ve been proudly wearing all over town), printed and sitting in boxes in my office waiting to be shipped.  More designs from new and fantastic artists are in the works and will be available soon.  Get on the email list to find out as soon as great new t-shirt designs are released.

The site design was a collaborative effort between myself and a graphic designer I know in Boston.  The logo was designed by a colleague who does graphic design named Chelsea Grose who hit the nail on the head with the vision I had.

The shopping cart was hand-coded in php by myself.  Building a shopping cart solution from scratch is something I’ve wanted to do for some time and I am happy with how the ecommerce php class came out.  It is relatively simple, and integrates with the Google Checkout HTML API, which is the simpler Google Checkout solution that I implemented for lack of time (though it works great).  I plan to upgrade this in the future to a more powerful e-commerce solution (possibly a server-to-server post with Google Checkout) as sales pick up.  So far I have been impressed with the ease of integration (compared with similar paypal solutions I’ve used in the past).

Although I have only just begun the process, adding Google Checkout to a custom built e-commerce site, it already seems easier than integrating PayPal. Google’s documentation seems more complete and there is a lot of example to code to use and learn from.

I’ll post a more complete review of my Google Checkout integration once I’m complete in another day or so.