I have been working with large organizations to create or move web and intranet sites from static HTML pages to the company's chosen CMS. My role is that of liaison between the IT department (or whoever manages the project) and end user. By default, my clients tend to be in clerical roles: the folks in the trenches. My job is to evangelize the product, explain the process, present, instruct, coach, and guide clients in web architecture basics and design best-practices, and in use of the chosen software.

One Saturday afternoon, I agreed to take my daughter to the AT&T store, just to LOOK at an iPhone... touch one... explore a little. MISTAKE. I should have duct-taped myself to the mast — and my wallet to my ass — because next thing I knew (after daughter demoed it as expertly as if she'd been using it all her life) we were walking out of the store with a brand new iPhone 3G. You'll love our coverage, the AT&T salesman assured as he packed the phone into a bag, only for us to discover upon arriving home that we had no reception within a quarter mile of our house.

Dang! I thought, now we have to move.

I have a very simple anti-bot spam technique that works extremely well. It requires no javascript, cookies or complicated server weirdness, is fully accessible, has no hidden fields, has negligible overhead and takes just a moment or two to implement. It requires that the user fill out one field with a number, so it's good for anti-bot but will not prevent human spammers. In three years, I have yet to receive any spam on any of the many sites that I have installed this on. Sites that were being bombarded with hundreds of spams daily suddenly became quiet and good emails get though.

Apache's asis feature, provided by mod-asis, is a very simple way of sending static HTTP headers along with static content. Many installations of Apache have this disabled (the default) and those of us not on Apache are out of luck. This combination has led to this simple and useful feature being overlooked by most web developers.

A few years ago, I needed a Content Management System (CMS) for my site Voor Beginners and its English counterpart For Beginners. One of the requirements was, that the CMS should use "search engine friendly" URLs. This is fairly easy to accomplish with Linux and Apache; however, another requirement was that the CMS should run on the Windows platform... In this article, I will show how you can "simulate" the effects of .htaccess and mod_rewrite using Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) and classic ASP.

Anybody who monitors their rankings with the same vigor that we in the SEO community do will have noticed some fairly dramatic shifts in the algorithm starting last Thursday (July 5th) and continuing through the weekend. Many sites are rocketing into the top 10 which, of course, means that many sites are being dropped at the same time. We were fortunate not to have any clients on the losing end of that equation however we have called and emailed the clients who saw sudden jumps into the top positions to warn them that further adjustments are coming. After a weekend of analysis there are some curiosities in the results that simply require further tweaks in the ranking system.

This document describe an approach to SQL queries of hierarchical data using ancestor tables. Multiple inheritance are allowed but cycles are not allowed for this approach to work.

I'm a little confused. As an internet consultant specializing in search engine optimization, I believe that it is a good idea to submit your site to DMOZ (a.k.a. ODP or the Open Directory Project) --in fact, Google even encourages you to do so! However, being an ODP editor myself, I can tell you from personal experience that perhaps only 10-20% of all the site suggestions we receive actually follow our guidelines...