The content management system uses JQuery in its latest version but not in earlier versions

A skin designer uses JQuery in the design of a skin

A plugin developer uses JQuery in the implementation of a plugin

Someone who writes custom content for a page wants to use JQuery for a page

All these different people want to use JQuery – but the JQuery framework does not function properly if it is included more than once on a web page.  There’s also no conditional include in HTML (or any include functionality at all, which I’ve always thought to be a glaring omission).

I wrote a wrapper that you can include instead of JQuery that doesn’t include JQuery if it’s already there. It’s based up on a post by FlySwat but the problem with FlySwat’s is that you have to put some extra code in front of your JQuery code every time. To use my version of the wrapper, all you have to do is use a different function other than $(document).ready to start your scripts at page ready time.

Here’s my “jquery.js” which you can put on a page as often as you like:

if (typeof(loadJSInclude) == 'undefined') {
 function loadJSInclude(scriptPath, callback)
 {
   var scriptNode = document.createElement('SCRIPT');
   scriptNode.type = 'text/javascript';
   scriptNode.src = scriptPath;

   var headNode = document.getElementsByTagName('HEAD');
   if (headNode[0] != null)
      headNode[0].appendChild(scriptNode);

   if (callback != null)    
   {
     scriptNode.onreadystagechange = callback;            
     scriptNode.onload = callback;
   }
 }

 function loadJQuery(task) {
   if (typeof(jquery) == "undefined")
   loadJSInclude('/js/jquery-1.4.1.min.js', function() {
     $(document).ready(task)
   });
   else
     $(document).ready(task());
 }
}    

And then, to start your JQuery operations, use loadJQuery()  instead of $(document).ready()

loadJQuery(function () {
  .. your jquery stuff here ..
  $('#boomboom').click( function() {
  alert("BOOM!");
  });
);

One of these is some sort of expert tech site that you have to pay to access.  But the results always show up high when I’m looking for help.

Google has a cool feature where you can click on an X and then omit the site from that search, and it even remembers for future searches on those words.  But what I really want is to be able to ban a site, or particular kinds of results, from ever showing up in my search.

I’d like to be able to ban by domain name so that I never see search results from a specific domain.  I’d also like to be able to make some search results that include certain keywords ranked less.  A “deprecate” option that lets me deprecate result because it contains a certain phrase would be nice.  I might deprecate the word “baby” and “infant” for example because, unless I’m explicitly searching for “baby” stuff, I really don’t want to see baby clothes show up in my searches.

In addition, an “promote” option would be nice.  Since I frequently search for ubuntu help, for example, I’d rather see ubuntu results higher placed than results for SUSE linux.  Additionally, I might want to promote search results from a certain city I’m not in right now because I visit there a good bit.  At present Google is very aware of my location, but I would like to be able to tell it where I am or where I want to be, rather than it figuring that out from my IP address.

It would be relatively easy to do – I’m just asking to have the search results rearranged a bit and filtered based on my own personal likes and preferences, which I should be able to edit.

Even so, there are some basic steps you should take to make yourself even remotely findable.

Paid and Free Search Engine Listing

First, you need to list your site in DMOZ Open Directory Project.  Many major search engines including Google start their web crawlers here.  (A crawler is a computer program that hops links from page to page and site to site to index the web.)

Second, list in the free Yahoo site listing.

Third, if you’re serious about your business, fork out the fee to list your site in the Yahoo Directory.  Non profits are free.

Fourth, if you are running a business that operates out of a location, add your site to the Bing Local Listing Center and also Google Local Search.  This is really important if you want people to find you with the street navigation on their smartphones.

Web Site Basics for SEO

Make sure you have a title for your web page, and that your web page has brief, cleanly presented text and great photos or graphics.  Avoid needless words, and stay brief.

Use key search words and phrases in your text, especially in your header tags and hyperlink text.  People can’t find your site by searching for it if the words and phrases you want them to find are not actually on your website.

Additional Work for Search Engine Optimization

Generate a search engine site map XML document if you can.

See if you can get some associated businesses or friends to link to your website.

The idea of course is simple – allow advertisers to pay only for visitors that click through their ads.  I (me as a service and goods provider) decide how much I will pay for a click, and then Google determines the placement of my ad to maximize their profit – clickthrough percentage times clickthrough revenue.

For me the advertiser it seems I’m getting a good deal, but no…. that’s not the case.  It just offloads the job of me calculating the clickthrough rate myself and saves me from having to figure out what I’m willing to pay per impression on the front end.  But I still have to figure out how much of my revenue per visitor I’m willing to set aside.

There are problems with pay-per-click, and no actual advantages, for me the advertiser.  But still there are few effective alternatives for businesses who primarily sell via the ‘net.

The two most serious problems are:

• Click fraud. I can’t tell if a click through my ad and a visit to my site is from a visitor that’s interested in what I’m offering, or not.  Google and other engines try to put technology in to minimize click fraud, but even so, when someone clicks on my ad, it costs me money no matter what.
• Uncertain impression cost. How much do I have to pay for an impression?  In advertising, name recognition is everything.  With the PPC system I can’t figure out how much an impression costs because impressions are not something I pay for.  But impressions very much matter.
• Skewed ad placement. It’s possible for others, or competitors, to push my ads off the search results just by clicking on them, particularly if I limit my daily spending on ads a lot.

To illustrate the problem, just to be contrary, I always type in the name of sites directly into my URL for sites I find I’m interested in, because I don’t want the company I’m buying from to have to give money to Google and raise my costs as a consumer.

Think about this: By not clicking on the ad in Google, you are reducing the cost of goods that you, the consumer, pays.

Additionally, I always click on the Google ads of companies I don’t like.

Think about this: By clicking on ads in Google, you can cause money to be transferred from the company to Google even if you could care less about actually using their goods or services.

Google and other search engines could, very easily, provide me with click through statistics even if I purchase impressions.  And if I use the same adwords tool to track the conversion rate, I’m still guaranteed to know what a click is worth in terms of revenue for me.

But there are advantages to purchasing impressions:

• It doesn’t matter how many times anyone clicks on it, so paying for impressions is immune to click fraud. Google and other SEOs can very easily avoid counting repeat quick impressions by the same user.  If a user refreshes their search page 100 times in an hour, search providers can trivially count this as one user impression.
• I get to decide how much it’s worth to me to get my name out in front of a potential customer who searches for a related key word, and
• I get to see my relative impression placement against people I might be bidding against for placement.

It’s not even difficult for search providers to calculate my clickthrough rate, and with integration of site stats, my conversion rate and return on investment.  That could easily give me a Pay-Per-Impression model that would work well.

Think about this:  There’s no way for people (like me above) to skew ad presentation or cause transfer of money for uninterested visitors.

I pick on Google most of all because it invented this insidious advertising model to start with, but every other search provider does it pretty much the same way.  So tell me then…. why do we even have Pay-per-click in our marketplace then? I’d sure like to know, and I’d sure very much love to see it go away.

Nov. 24 – Update with an example: It’s certainly possible for impression-fraud to happen the same way click-fraud does, with bots all over the internet querying for search terms to generate an impression of my ad.  But it would require more work, as in many many more hits. That’s because impressions are worth so much less than clicks.  One of my ads has a clickthrough rate of 0.2 % and costs 50 cents per click.  A click fraud operation could exhaust my $20 per day budget in just 40 clicks.  But with the click through rate established, the cost per impression is 1 cent.  So a click fraud operation would have to generate 2000 impressions.  That’s harder to do undetected because it requires 2000 computers instead of 40.  Google would still make the same amount of money if I were bidding 1 cent per impression as if I were bidding 50 cents per click because Google’s already collected stats on my click through rate and that rate is fairly constant over time for my ad.

Choosing a domain name.

I recommend using mydomain.com as a domain registrar – it’s easy to use, provides domain name resolution (DNS) services for free, isn’t cluttered with tons of ads, and has great features.  And it’s cheap.  You can use that site to choose and register your domain name.  You’ll need to sign up for the DNS service, as well as email forwarding as well, but you need a hosting account too where you will actually put your website.

If we will be working for you, please set us up as a technical contact for your domain:  Purple Ivy Web Design,  110 Oakland Dr,  Black Mountain, NC, 28711.  828-686-8231 is our contact phone.

Choose a web host.

We recommend Hostgator.  If you want to order and set it up on your own, feel free, or we can handle all that for you.  Once you have your web host set up, you (or we) will point the domain name to the host.  They’ll give you an IP address, and you need to tell your domain registrar (mydomain) where people can find your website (the IP address at Hostgator).

Set up email.

We recommend gmail.  Just set up a new email address and then go into your mydomain account and have them forward all email to that address.  You can set up gmail to automatically reply using the right email address as well so that your messages don’t come from gmail.com but appear to be coming from your website address.

Install your CMS.

We use Wordpress, and that’s the technical part.  With access to your web host, we’ll do all that for you.

Upload your web content – photos and text

Of course you have to have some content to upload!

And that’s it, you’re good to go!

But my biggest beef with Windows 7 is the task bar. It’s nicer than XP, yes.  The way it groups and displays applications is wonderful.  But its behavior is inconsistent.

• When I click on an application that has only one window open, it brings that window to the front. NICE!
• When I click on an application that has several windows open, it pops up its menu of possibilities. NOT nice.

Why can’t it bring all the windows to the front?  There’s not even an option to do that in there if you right-click.  It’s inconsistent.  Clicking does different things depending on how many windows are open for the application.

This is especially annoying with The Gimp, which has lots of windows:  Pallete, Layer, Paths, Images, Colors, and more.  Getting them to the front is quite simply a pain in the neck, and to edit an image, you really need to bring all those windows to the front.

It also shows up in Firefox and IE, when I want to open the firebug or IE developer console along with the web page when I’m viewing web pages in different browsers.

Almost everything else about Windows 7 I dearly love, but this one thing drives me bonkers. I do hope that Microsoft fixes it soon.  There are tons of other glitches in the user experience that are neglected, but this one’s the most practically annoying for me personally.

Windows 7, which I’ve decided to call “Windows Heaven,” is such an example.  The interface is not just fresh and new, but redesigned in fundamental yet subtle ways that give some consistency with the former interface of Windows-95 through Windows Vista, but yet is the most substantial change in interface since Windows 3.1 went to Windows 95.  Though not quite as big a change as Apple’s foray from OS9 to OS-X.

It borrowed a lot from the Mac:  a more functional dock thing that’s still called a “taskbar” but works more like the Mac dock.  Windows groups applications together now always by default, and not just if it starts running out of space.  Gone are the useless titles like “C:\My Docum…”  which don’t tell you a thing.  Replaced by pretty functional icons.  And when you mouse over them, two wonderful things happen:

• You get a preview of the window that pops out above the dock icon and….
• The entire interface dims out all but the windows you are previewing, enabling you to see all of what’s in there.

As a consequence, Microsoft Windows actually does windows now!  Prior to that, I could not run more than a few apps at once on my PC.  I use a Mac too and frequently have 30-4o windows open with 10-15 applications.  Under Windows Vista and predecessors, that number of windows was simply unmanageable.   Now, Windows is actually as good as managing lots of windows as my Mac.

It’s interesting to see Apple borrowing some of the functional ideas for its new Snow Leopard from Windows 7.  I hear that the Alt-TAB functionality in Snow Leopard will shade out the other windows that don’t belong to an application so you can more easily pick which application you want.   Windows 7 does that, but Alt-TAB switches between windows, and not applications. I prefer switching between applications the way my mac does because usually if I am working on a project, I will have several apps open to work on it, and the most recent window for that app is almost always the one I want when switching between them.

But the improvement in Windows Heaven of actually letting me SEE the windows I’m tabbing over, instead of that stupid ridiculous long name that I can’t read quickly, is just fine!

I actually bought some stock in Microsoft. Not just because of this OS, but the company seems to be changing the way it works, innovating more, trying new things.  That’s new for Micro-shaft (which is what I used to call it).  They’re a bit late in the game with some technologies, but with some new things coming out, I’ve got my eye on them.

Maybe it’s cause Bill’s gone.  Never did like him much. He has a whiney voice, and looks like his butt’s in the front of his body instead of the back.  That’s not his fault and I don’t want to knock him for it – he’s apparently a very generous man!  But I’ve never been impressed with the way he ran Microsoft.  In my opinion he thought backwards, too, gobbling up other companies and then trashing their products instead of designing new things.

We’ll see what Microsoft does next!

With the advent of services like Wild Blue that have true satellite uplinks as well as downstream,  things got better!  Sending files became more responsive, but there’s still a large lag problem because the signal has to travel up to a satellite and back.  Gaming, of course, doesn’t really work well over this kind of laggy (or high latency) connection.

Now, there’s another problem.  Boom.  Boom.  Boom…. the death knoll for Sattelite Internet.  Web 2.0.  Boom. Boom.  Boom.  You can hear the drumbeats in the distance.

The reason things are getting bad again is that  the lag time is becoming a problem.  Web 2.0 web-based applications work by sending bits of data back and forth between your computer and a web server on the internet.  From periodic saving, to getting the contents of a dropdown menu….  from moving the mouse around in a document to positioning and streaming of video….. Web based applications require frequent small communications between your computer and a web server.

That doesn’t work well when it takes 3 seconds for your “hello!!!! I’m here!” to get from one end to the other and back.  I’m using my mom’s Wild Blue connection now, and there’s a lot of things I simply can’t do.  I can’t watch video on Ted.Com.    (I suppose I could download them.) Most interactive websites just don’t work at all.  Gmail works.  That’s nice!   Chat… kinda works..  Those “software update” tools don’t work.  They often get the mistaken impression that the connection goes down.  It doesn’t.  It’s just slow.

The new breed of web-enabled apps need reasonable latency.  You don’t need uber-fast connection speeds, but uber-slow just doesn’t cut it.  I’m not so wild about wild blue anymore.

You know the story.  CSS differences between IE and Firefox / Opera / Safari / Chrome / Everyone Else have always been a pain.

Well, as it turns out, most browsers use C-Style comments in their CSS.  C has two style of comments:  /* Like this */ which comments out a block, and // Like This

The above comments everything after the // on the line.

I haven’t found // in the CSS standard, and … IE just ignores these characters.  It proccesses anything after the // as if the // wasn’t there at all.  Other browsers seem to think it’s a comment, and ignore the // and everything after.

In other words if you have this tag:

#myblock {
margin: 0px;
// margin: 10px;
}

IE will use a margin of 10px, and all the other browsers: 0px.

I haven’t tested it out with IE8 yet.  But works in IE6 and 7 which are the biggest pains anyway.

I’ll come up with a better example later but this is HUGE!  Now we can put IE-specific CSS in our CSS files, to make IE do things that the other browsers will just ignore!

Of course, anyone that’s reading this that’s using IE6 or IE7 – UPGRADE.  You are exposing yourself to serious security problems.  Latest news is that these old browsers are susceptible to virus attacks that can take over your machine.  I’ve a mind to make my websites display “Upgrade your browser – You’re in DANGER!” if they are using an old version of IE.

Now, I could do that conditional stuff with just CSS!