CogBlog

JQuery goodness

Adam Shallcross — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:22:38 +0000

Whilst trauling the internet for great examples of JQuery tools, i stumbled across a number of useful sites. So I thought I’d list them here in case anyone was interested…Enjoy!

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/15/45-new-jquery-techniques-for-a-good-user-experience/

http://nettuts.com/articles/web-roundups/the-20-most-practical-and-creative-uses-of-jquery/

http://snook.ca/technical/jquery-bg/

http://www.malsup.com/jquery/cycle/

http://blog.insicdesigns.com/2009/01/10-promising-jquery-lighbox-plugin/

We’re on the road to becoming Umbraco certified

trssaunders — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:02:49 +0000

Tim Saunders our development director flew over to Copenhagen last week and took one of Umbraco’s fantastic and rigorous training courses.

After a couple of intense days with Umbraco’s founder Niels Hartvig, Tim emerged battered but unbowed with his Level 2 Umbraco professional certification proudly clutched in his hand.

What does this mean?

Well it’s the first step for us in our aim to become an Umbraco certified solutions provider. However it also means that we are well placed to perform complex integrations using the Umbraco platform.

We think Umbraco is a fantastic platform with a great future and we’re gald to be able to show our expertise in it on paper. Most of all though it means we can contribute even more to the thriving open source community which surrounds Umbraco.

Keep your eyes peeled for code snippets, tips, tricks and all sorts of Umbraco goodies over the coming weeks and months as we aim to make the Cogworks one of the top Umbraco solution providers in the UK.

Top margin HTML wierdness

Adam Shallcross — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 22:41:36 +0000

I’ve been coding HTML and CSS for over 9 years now, and the range of quirks and work arounds that you stumble across when trying to overcome cross-browser compatibility and to get the same margins and padding in all browsers still amazes me.

One I found a while back, that I have just rediscovered if the use of a 1px border at the top of the screen. To explain…

I have an HTML page, with a container DIV as follows:-

The styles to control this are:-

#container {position:relative;margin:0px auto 10px auto; width: 980px;border-top:1px solid #004180;}

Without the border-top:1px solid #004180; in Firefox and Safari on Mac and PC there is an extra 10px at the top of the screen that seems to come from nowhere. Which is bizarre…and even more bizarrely is that it works perfectly fine in IE6.

Adding the top border does indeed add 1px, but it closes the top margin. I have no explanation for this, it just works.

Thats that…you work it out I gave up trying to figure out why many years ago And if you do figure out why, then please let me know too.

SEO (search engine optimisation)…our view

Adam Shallcross — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:24:16 +0000

So what is SEO (search engine optimisation)…well historically search engine optimisation seemed to involve a range of techniques used to try and trick the search engines into believing your site was better than someone else’s purely by stuffing in some keywords and descriptions in your HTML header, maybe adding as many keywords to the bottom of the page as can be squeezed in, sometimes even hiding some in white so the user cant see them and submitting your site to as many directory sites as possible, related or not.

It can be true to say that in the heady days of the birth of the internet search engine, that these techniques may have made an impact on your rankings, but what would happen if you tried this now.

Well, you would, in no uncertain terms, be blacklisted from most reputable search engines quicker than you can say ‘top of page one on Google’.

Unfortunately though, there are still some scurrilous individuals calling themselves ‘search engine specialists’, or even using that hazy grey word ‘ consultants’ who carry on using some or all of these techniques.

Well, at The CogWorks, our view is that SEO these days is not so much about the meta data and keyword stuffing, but it is more about online PR, although the former still does have a great impact and shouldn’t be overlooked, but it has to be done well and professionally. You must relate the meta data to the content of each individual page. Don’t just wedge in some generic words for the whole site. This will server no purpose whatsoever.

So what do I mean by online PR. Well, basically it is anything that you can write or publish that is interesting to someone about you or your company, that they may like to read, but most importantly contains links back to your site.

For instance, press releases, blog articles, twitter feeds, latest news sections, industry insight, articles on magazine sites etc etc. Basically anything you can write and syndicate out to other sites that can link back to your website. This article you are reading is a piece of well formed SEO work …I hope

Yes you do need to work on the meta data for your site and also find some related directory sites to list your site, but don’t underestimate the power of content and links back to your site. This is the key to the holy grail…page one of Google…and maybe even no 1…but that would be the cherry on the icing on the cake.

And please dont beleive anyone who can guarantee you number one in Google…because undoutably they will be using some of the naughty techniques used above…and you dont want to get into trouble do you!…well not too much.

Good references and tools are:-

SEO tools – www.seocentro.com
SEO news and some help – www.searchenginewatch.com/

Hello…and welcome to the CogBlog

Adam Shallcross — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:39:22 +0000

Greetings and welcome to the CogBlog. A long time coming, but finally we have one.

We will be adding, from time to time, snippets of information, ideas, comments, rants, thoughts…indeed anything we feel is worthy (or not worthy, dependent on your perspective) from our day to day lives at The CogWorks.

Please feel free to comment and let us know your thoughts.

Well…here goes…