After the launch of the new Lily O’Briens site, designed by Magico a bit of a discussion arose around the site’s design (overall good) and specifically the SEO aspects of the site.

Richard Hearne of the SEO blog RedCardinal in his blog post Blind People Can’t Eat Chocolate highlighted that the site will not display anything in browsers it does not recognise.

In a follow-up post Richard reveals that for a period of time after the site going online the Google Bot was also blocked from the site.

Previous to Richard’s post (but after the site had been edited to accept GoogleBot) I set off to do a bit of investigating on what User-Agents Lily O’Briens would accept.
I hacked together, and then tidied up Hide-my-UA which allows you to choose a User-Agent to “pretend” to be and then browse around a site. Comments and suggestions welcome.

I’ve added a new article called “Beginning MySQL in PHP” which describes a step-by-step process of creating a database, table and schema and then querying the database.

I’ve added a new article, called “Securing Your Downloads“.

The article describes blocking access to your downloads directory and then granting access selectively based on the user’s credentials.

“AJAX“, is it a buzzword, methodology, technology or Web2.0-crapology?

It all depends on who you ask but I do think that when used properly, not excessively that a little bit of AJAX magic can do wonders.

I began thinking a little while back that I’d like to make a little tool to crawl a web page, check links, images, scripts etc. The problem with these things is that it takes time - too much time for a normal page, it would stall and die.

So, I thought it the perfect project to split up the jobs to be done and update the client as each of them are completed - I.E. a loading bar. What it does is split the requests to be done into chunks and then when the client’s side (AJAX) calls the server it processes a chunk and then updates the client again - simple.

It is by FAR not a completed tool, merely a fraction of what could be done. In reality it should check for Description tags, Author, check image ALT tags, check syntax etc.

Have a try here: Mini Page Checker

Please leave comments, suggestions, thoughts etc. if you like.