A lot of the portfolio sites I see today uses Flash technologies to display their works in a more interactive environment. In the past, if you wanted cool animations and effects on your site, you would need flash to do this. An HTML site was usually static, and having cool effects were hard to achieve. The pros of having a flash site is that it is compatible across multiple browsers, and you can achieve awesome animated effects. The con of having a Flash based site is that it has very poor SEO capabilities, and for any struggling photographer, having more eyes on your portfolio increases the potential for gaining more clients. So to summarize, Flash looks great but your marketing potential becomes greatly reduced.

So the only option would be to create a HTML based site, so all your content can be indexed by the search engines. But you no longer have to worry about the blandness of HTML, because since jQuery has been in wide use, there are tons of fantastic jQuery photo galleries created that will give your site the “Flashiness” it craves for.

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With the year 2010 ended, I thought I would take this opportunity to share some important SEO tips.

If you aren’t aware of it, SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, which is necessary for anyone planning on doing internet marketing. Every site online is given a page rank by the search engines, and that page rank will determine how high the search engines should display your link. The goal is to have your page display on top of the first page whenever someone types in your keyword. So now that you have some background on the subject let’s get started with some seo tips.

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One of the techniques to having an SEO optimized website is to have interlinking between web pages on your site. Unfortunately, doing this manually can be a real pain, so it would definitely be nice to have a plugin or software that does all this for you. Well if you operate a wordpress blog, your prayers have been answered by SEO Smart Links.

SEO Smart Links is a Wordpress Plugin that that will automatically link the contents of your website, and it even allows you to add custom keywords to link outside your site. SEO Smart Links will basically crawl your site looking for relevant anchor text to attach links to. The plugin will figure out what keywords it can use to link to posts, pages, categories, and tags which all happens automatically. And for the control freaks, you can manually add custom keywords which will convert them into links as well.

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For years, I’ve been writing web applications from scratch, and I can only compare this to climbing Mount Everest. The time wasted doing tedious coding tasks is enough to make me run and jump out a window. Luckily for me, I discovered the magical world of Frameworks which essentially eliminates the need for writing repetitive code. Instead of writing the same old code over and over again, your focus can be left for the Logic and GUI aspect of development. There is literally a framework for every aspect of your programming life, and most of them follow the very clean MVC design pattern that will leave you with nice, extensible code.

So for those of you still confused about frameworks, well it basically supports the development of a website, web application, and web services. Frameworks allows for the access of database functions, templating, session management, and promotes code reuse. As a PHP developer I’m more interested in PHP Frameworks, so below is a list of some widely used PHP Frameworks. It will be up to you to determine which one will prevent you from jumping out windows like the Hulk.

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Biggest security risk for most websites is the SQL Injection Attack. This is where the hacker will attempt to put SQL code into text boxes or into your query strings in order to discover sensitive information. A way to prevent SQL Injection Attacks is to use the following PHP code:

mysql_real_escape_string($value)

This will automatically clean up any type of values that is potentially harmful. This is especially important for sites that is dealing with customer information, and should be a requirement. For anyone looking for a developer, make sure you ask them how they handle security when they program websites. Do not mention anything about SQL Injection Attack, and see if they bring it up on their own.

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Web cache controls improves the performance of a website by bringing downloadable content closer to the user. For example, a first time visitor would download images and content from your website, which then gets stored into temporary internet folders. Now when that user revisits that same page, instead of downloading all those files over again, he’ll be able to retrieve it from his own computer. So this saves bandwidth for your server which will increase the performance of your site.

Cache controls are actually best used for content that doesn’t change much, such as graphics. But how does one go about enabling caching on your website?

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If you are a php web developer, I’m sure you’re familiar with the usage of phpmyadmin. For those who is unfamiliar, phpmyadmin is a web tool that give a graphical user interface for the mysql database. Let’s just say it makes life easier on the web developers.

So as a any good developer should do, they should always back up the database in case anything horrible happens to the server. This is easy to accomplish using the export function in phpmyadmin. Now if your database has less than 16mb of data, importing that backed up information is simple through phpmyadmin. But what do you do when you have gigs of data to import? You definitely cannot use phpmyadmin to accomplish this as it will warn you of the size limit. In this article I’ll give a quick solution to this problem by using a mysql bulk upload, so lets start from the beginning.

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Apache Solr is an extremely powerful, enterprise level search engine, and can be used to store billions of records. For anyone with experience in MySql, you will understand how query time starts to degrade after reaching around 1,000,000 rows for any given table. After doing tons of research to try to find an alternative method for a quick and reliable search database, I stumbled upon the Apache Solr Project. The general consensus about Apache Solr is that it’s lightning fast, and after using it for a recent project I will definitely agree to this.

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If you are a web developer you understand first hand how miserable IE (internet explorer) can make your life. While trying to format some div elements on a web page, I noticed that parts of the div would disappear anytime I scrolled through a page then magically reappear later. Apparently if you had a div container, and within that container there were floating div elements you would see what is known as the IE IE peekaboo bug. Luckily for me this is a well known and well documented bug so I quickly found my solution for it. Just add this tag to your main CSS stylesheet.

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I’ve been using mysql professionally for a little over 2 years now, and have found it increasing inadequate for humongous databases. I had first hand experience with this when building out a 7 million record database for a client of mine. I did resolve some of the issues by placing the proper indexes in the table structures, but it still had underwhelming performance issues when it came to the keyword searches. As I knew the client didn’t have the funds to have me solve this issue, I just left it the way it was.

But as a person who is always trying to seek answers to my problems I felt the need to do some investigative research. How are websites like Google able to have billions and trillions of records, and still have fast and responsive queries? It took me a while, but I discovered Apache Solr as the answers to my prayers. Based on the Lucene Search Engine, Solr is able to handle databases into the billions of records. The only catch to using Solr is that you must be on a server that has java. The only servers that allow java are dedicated servers, which can cost up to $200 a month. So obviously this search application is not for your average run of the mill website, but what kind of run of the mill website needs millions or records anyways?

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