Development

Whilst clicking around the internet, you decide to go back and visit one of your favourite sites and suddenly it all look broken: the layout seems wrong and it is just a mess. This is where clearing your cache or using the “shift and click refresh” trick normally fixes things and gives you a nice, fresh-looking site.

The solution we have come up with uses query string manipulation so the browser can quite happily cache the file in the normal way, however when the query string changes it will grab a new version thinking it is a dynamic file that has changed on the basis of the query string changing. The trick is to ensure the query string only changes when you update the cascading style sheets (CSS) file without you having to make any changes manually. The elegant solution we are starting to use at Zeta utilises the PHP function filemtime() to insert modification time of the CSS file into the query string.

<link href="css/style.css?v=<?php echo filemtime("css/style.css")?>" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

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The old dinosaur of IE6 has taken another step closer to its final demise.

On Friday Google announced that from 1st of March 2010 it will no longer support IE6 and from that date, users of older browsers (IE6 included) may find that key functionality in Google Docs and Google Sites will no longer work properly. Other parts of Google will also stop working as changes are made without the excessive amount of effort required to make web 2.0 sites work in a web 0.5 browser.

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After the reports last week that Chinese hackers exploited the vulnerabilities of Internet Explorer; we have been reminded again of the importance of developing according to web standards rather than to support a single, specific web browser.

The hackers were able to exploit security vulnerabilities in the 10-year-old browser and operating system  combination of IE6 on Windows XP.

This was a zero-day exploit, which means it was a new-found vulnerability that the vendor (in this case Microsoft) and antivirus / security companies were unaware of. Meaning there was no security fix for this issue.

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Hosting your website on multiple domain names can cause a duplicate content penalty. Many of us have variations of our domain names (such as domain.com and domain.co.uk or domain-name.com and domainname.com) so we need to let the search engines know which one is the primary (canonical) domain using 301 redirects via an apache rewrite rule. more…

When you are deploying a new site to the same IP as an existing site you need to keep the public away while you are uploading the files and ironing out any problems.

One way to do this is to create a new document root directory and edit your vhosts configuration, but when you’re using a control panel like Plesk you are asking for trouble if you start messing around with the file system. more…

It’s estimated that the internet has around 1.5 billion users. It’s an impressive sounding statistic. Until you learn that, in December, the number of connections to mobile devices worldwide reached four billion, a figure that represents 60% of the world’s population.

Similar figures are borne out in the UK. An Ofcom report in November found that there are 26 broadband connections for every 100 people, compared to 121 mobile phones per 100 people. These are significant numbers for anyone who runs a website or blog. As mobile devices become more sophisticated and offer far better web browsing experiences, it becomes increasingly likely that users will be accessing web sites and applications from behind a mobile, not just a desktop or laptop computer.

Apple took the concept of mobile web browsing mainstream when it launched the touch-screen iPhone in the US in June 2007 (a belated UK release followed in November 2007). In the same way that it’s hard to conceive of pre-iPod MP3 players (they were chunky and user unfriendly, as a rule), mobile manufacturers were forced to respond to Apple’s sleek device.
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