Green is The Colour

In today’s world, green is becoming the colour of choice for a number of business sectors – and the IT industry is no exception.

The advent of green initiatives driven by the government, such as the Carbon Reduction Commitment Scheme (CRCEES), ensures that thousands of UK businesses are now monitoring their energy usage in a way never previously seen.

As buyers continue to focus on environmentally friendly products and services, going green doesn’t just provide a competitive advantage, it’s a necessity.

It’s no surprise then to learn, that many IT departments are looking at ways to not only enjoy the benefits of lower energy bills, but are also attempting to be somewhat kinder to the environment. Having a green data centre is a great way of reducing those all-important carbon emissions, so what can be done to make a data centre environmentally friendly?

Published on behalf of Pulsant, one of the UK largest providers of Colocation, Cloud hosting, Managed Hosting, Managed Networks, and Managed Application services. (more…)

Printing Multiple HTML Pages

Recently, I worked on WEB based application, which has to display and print invoices in HTML format. Invoices has to be printed on sheets with already printed logo and company details.

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Improve loading web page with base64 encoded content

Not so recently Vladimir Vukićević at his post “To Sprite Or Not To Sprite“, had put on glance CSS Sprites advantages and disadvantages.

Summarized:

CSS Sprites advantages:

• Improves page load speed. Widely known is that establishing connection between client and server takes more time then receiving the data.
• Doesn’t overload the server. Almost every web server log all the requests, need time to respond, and might “serve” certain amount of requests in a moment.

CSS Sprites disadvantages:

• Client side memory usage. Even though sprite image is compressed (usually transparent .png), the web browser renders decompressed image. Almost every css sprite image has empty/transparent unused space.
• Creating and positioning sprites. During developing process, developers have to spend more time creating and positioning css sprites, instead of using images.

Better approach

How to avoid multiple requests without using css sprite image? The answer is: use inline images included into css file as base64 image data.
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Custom list order number position

During Wigoo development process, CEO requested to place numbers under each list item content.

Positioning elements is not a problem, but list item bullets are not elements. Consequently, list item bullets can not be positioned (top, right, bottom, left) to it’s content.

Possible solution is to place <span> as last element into each <li> and change the content with JavaScript, but it is stupid solution.

The best solution is placing pseudo element after each <li> content, but the problem is setting it’s dynamic content.

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Use hooks to avoid email harvesting

In our previous post “Protect email addresses from harvesting“, we had explained a method how to protect email from email harvesting, without reducing usability and the user’s productivity by using JavaScript.

In this post, we want to extend the usage of the script with Codeigniter.

Codeigniter is great, lightweight, PHP MVC Framework.

The idea is: after generating the content, find all e-mails and replace them to human readable format, ready to replace them back with previous explained JavaScript. (more…)

SEO Friendly Hiding

Today, every serious company is fighting for higher search engine position. Search engine position depends on thousands factors, but few of them are significant.

Every web page should meet following criteria:

• To meet the W3C Standards, (I want to emphasize semantically correct HTML)
• Accessibility
• Usability

SEO is directly connected with above mentioned criteria.

In general, three techniques are “driving force” of a web site:

• HTML – the content, does not care how it looks, nor where is positioned…
• CSS – define how to display HTML elements (design issues such color, size, position… of the elements)
• JavaScript – manipulate (not create) the content

Sometimes, in order to satisfy design/typography issues, developers are forced to use non standard fonts. Beginners are not aware of importance of accessibility/usability on the web, and will place simple <img> tag instead of semantically appropriate <h[1-6]> tag for the headings, but… more experienced developers will use SEO Friendly CSS Hiding (Accessibility/SEO Friendly CSS Hiding snippet) which is much better, but search engines do not like hiding techniques. Search engines can detect CSS hiding techniques, but still tolerate.

We can flag text that appears to be hidden using CSS at Google. To date we have not algorithmically removed sites for doing that. We try hard to avoid throwing babies out with bathwater.

Matt Cutts

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