I guess at some point we (or our clients) are always interested in how to increase our visibility in search engines. Nick Wilson from Performancing offers his top 3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic. Even before you get to his official tips, I like his suggestions that SEO is easy and be sure to avoid the snake oil merchants!
UXmatters recently performed an analysis of different Label Placement in Forms. Their study used eyetracking technology to attempt to determine if label placement had any impact on the time it took a user to fill out the form.
Ryan Carson suggests a Simple strategy for getting things done. I think he’s on to something here and I’m definitely gonna give it a try!
If you’re still keeping up with the browser wars, Percy Cabello has a nice list of Planned features for Firefox 3. For an unedited list, you might also want to take a look on the Mozilla Wiki.
I signed up with LinkedIn last week. LinkedIn is a great way to connect with other professionals in your industry and can help you find potential clients, service providers, subject experts, and partners who come recommended. There are also opportunities to be found for business opportunities and search for jobs. Guy Kawasaki has a great list of 10 Ways to Use LinkedIn that is worth a read and may just convince to start networking.
If you’d like to get LinkedIn with me, my profile is here and send me a request from your LinkedIn account to jim.rutherford ( at ) gmail.com so we can get LinkedIn!
I’ve seen a few links to a neat little OSX utility called Backdrop that essentially hides all of your desktop icons with either a solid color or image. This is useful when you want to record a screencast or if you are giving a presentation and want to hide the cruft on your desktop. Although Backdrop works great, I like a similar application called Desktopple that does the same thing except that it can be started using either a hot key or by clicking on the applications menu icon. Desktopple is available in two versions - a free feature limited version and a pro version that costs $12.
CheckItOut is an open source Personal Finance Manager web application written with Ruby on Rails. The prerequisites indicate that you need MySQL, a little Rails knowledge and of course a server capable of running a rails app. You can view a live demo to see if this is the type of tool that might help you manage your finances.
Jay Pipes - co-author of Pro MySQL - recently spoke at Google on MySQL Performance Tuning Best Practices. You can watch the full video of his presentation to learn more about tuning your database applications.
Eric Sink has compiled great Source Control HOWTO that takes a tool-agnostic approach to teaching you about source control management. It’s really nice to see a series of articles like this that gives such a great overview of source control.
IBM Developer Works has a nice tutorial that will help you begin working with RSS using PHP. RSS Syndication has now become mainstream, so understanding how RSS works is very important to any developer. This article explains the basics of RSS, some of its uses, how to use PHP to create an RSS feed from a database, and how to use the XML_RSS module to read an existing RSS feed and translate it into HTML.
