Posts by Dani

Not true. I've been clicking the arrows and rep has been given. If this is a bug, please don't fix it!

I doubt this. ;) Are you sure you're not just giving a +1/-1 vote??

Also, look at what happens when one person gives rep to the same post two or more times. It's a little screwy.

It works as intended. First time is a vote. Second time is a reversal. Third time is a new vote.

Please note that clicking on an arrow does NOT give reputation. Reputation and comments are only submitted if you click the form button or hit Enter.

It's working for me now. I think the server was just being super sluggish for me.

Can you try clearing your browser cache (not your cookies) and try again? :)

Like this?? ...

echo '<ul>';
while ($row = mysql_fetch_object) {
    echo '<li>' . $row->name . '</li>';
}
echo '</ul>';

Hmm ... Is it just me, or when you vote with a comment, does the comment not instantly show up like it's supposed to?? It works fine in our dev environment and I can't figure out why it's not working for me in the live site.

For all those purple haters out there, here is solid proof that our color scheme is awesome. Even Microsoft decided to use it for VS!

Thanks! Welcome to the DaniWeb community :)

Use Ctrl+0 to resize to the default size.

It's really hard for me to wrap my mind around what you're describing. Can you please either link to your page, or provide the full HTML and CSS?

There are currently four admins: Myself, James, Davey and Sanjay.

Each of the administrators has an additional role to play above and beyond that of a moderator.

• I'm an admin because I started (and currently own) DaniWeb. I do all of the business development side of things, sell advertising, and also code DaniWeb.
• James is an admin because he is co-developer, writing the software that powers DaniWeb.
• Davey is an admin because he is our editor, contributing the majority of our news stories and writing our monthly newsletter.
• Sanjay is an admin because he manages our moderation team, helping to settle behind-the-scenes disputes.

DaniWeb will once again be sponsoring the Percona Live MySQL conference coming up next month.

You can go to http://www.percona.com/live/nyc-2012/ to register and use promo code DANIWEB to save 15% on tickets.

DaniWeb will also be hosting the official after party for the Percona conference, which you can find out more about at http://www.daniwebevents.com/ADWEEK2012

OK fixed :) Your social media contact information (that you provided in your member profile) will no longer show up to non-logged in members from your member profile, so it should no longer be able to be crawled by bots, etc.

Help other people in need!! :)

It depends what you're trying to do. We use <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> when we want Google to crawl a page (and follow outgoing links on it), but not index the page itself (because it's thin content, for example). We use robots.txt to block pages from Google that are unavailable to non-logged in members, and therefore have no content at all to show, or that we don't want Google to even look at for a particular reason.

Keep in mind that the amount of Pagerank that you have is finite, depending on the quality and quantity of your backlinks. Pagerank determines how often and how deep Googlebot is willing to crawl your site. Therefore, you may not wish to waste your Pagerank having Googlebot spidering and indexing mediocre pages of your site, and never getting to your important pages.

Therefore, the whitehat/greyhat technique of Pagerank sculpting is used to block Googlebot from the pages you don't care much about, to ensure that only the pages you do care about get indexed.

We currently use the meta robots tag for member profiles for newbies. We do this because we have just about one million members, and there's really no need to waste our Pagerank having Google spider and index so many profiles from members who have no posts.

We also use the meta robots tag for Q&A discussion threads that have no replies yet, because those are unhelpful to people coming in from a Google search. Once they receive a reply, …

I would avoid reciprocal links. That's a very outdated strategy that really doesn't do much anymore, and, as you mention, I'm not sure how it will be affected by Penguin. We know that a major part of Penguin is to catch those types of black hat techniques, so I wouldn't risk it.

Keep in mind that link: and site: queries in Google only provide a small subset/sampling so you can't really rely on it. If you sign up with Google Webmaster Tools, you can see a much more accurate picture of the backlinks for your site that Google knows about, and you'll see it's a much more complete image. Unfortunately, you don't have access to the Webmaster Tools accounts of your competitors!

The best way to build backlinks is by providing awesome content that people are naturally going to want to link to, aka "link bait". Provide social widgets such as the Like/Tweet button within your content. Google is starting to count these types of social signals within its ranking algorithm, even though it's not considering them true backlinks. As you mentioned, you're seeing Google liking social sites as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackback

Sorry morganlong, but that's not correct :(

It's often beneficial to know all of the different places on the web where a particular article is being referenced. For example, suppose you read an article in the New York Times online. It might be interesting to easily find all of the other articles on the web that are quoting that NYT article. This is accomplished through linkbacks.

Trackbacks are a type of linkback. News Site #1 provides a trackback URL for each article that it publishes. When News Site #2 writes an article that references the News Site #1 article, they ping the trackback URL for News Site #1, to alert them that they are linking to / mentioning / quoting the article.

Hi Julia!! Welcome to DaniWeb :) You sound like you have more creativity in your little pinky than I have in my whole body!!

What your version does is use preg_match(), which includes a bit of regex. It's probably a bit more efficient than my version, but a bit more complicated too :) I hate regex!

I'm actually not much of a regex expert, but I think that the ^$ are incorrectly placed in your regex string.

You can try testing it out by hard-coding $browser = 'googlebot' and see if it catches it.

At the heart of Facebook is their open graph model. Essentially, everything on Facebook (every person, every event, every photo album) is an object in the open graph.

You could essentially write a script to fetch all of the information related to you and save it. However, there wouldn't be a way to reimport it back into facebook.

For example, here's some public information about me:

http://graph.facebook.com/cscgal

If you wanted to go the extra step, you could register for a Facebook API Key from https://developers.facebook.com/apps where you would be able to esesntially pull all private information about yourself from http://graph.facebook.com/me or (with their permission by installing your app) about anyone else as well. It's pretty powerful stuff once you wrap your mind around it.

Googlebot has an insurrmountable number of IPs so you can't do that. You might be able to filter by user agent though. Googlebot always goes by the 'gootlebot' user agent, and there are other bots as well.

You could do it like this in PHP (completely untested code):

$robots = array(
    'googlebot'         => 'Googlebot',
    'msnbot'            => 'MSNBot',
    'slurp'             => 'Inktomi Slurp',
    'yahoo'             => 'Yahoo',
    'askjeeves'         => 'AskJeeves',
    'fastcrawler'       => 'FastCrawler',
    'infoseek'          => 'InfoSeek Robot 1.0',
    'lycos'             => 'Lycos'
);

$is_bot = false;

// Loop through an array of bot keys (googlebot, slurp, etc)
foreach (array_keys($robots) AS $robot)
{   
    // If the user agent contains the name of the bot somewhere in it ...
    if (stripos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], $robot) !== false)
    {
        // We know we have a bot and no longer need to continue our search
        $is_bot = true;
        break;
    }
}

// If not a bot ...
if (!$is_bot)
{
    // Count visitor
}

Be sure you are 301 redirecting the links. Also, the only problem you can run into with being blacklisted by Google is if you're cloaking, serving different content to googlebot than to a human. So don't just redirect googlebot to one place and everyone else somewhere else :)

Adding this feature alone has increased our "social activity" from an average of 250 likes/tweets per day to forum discussion threads up to an average of over 400 per day.

Currently, the very vast majority of our traffic comes from Google results. Google has made it no secret that they are now factoring social signals into their search algorithm (meaning, they take the number of tweets/likes a page gets into consideration in determining how that page should rank in the search engine).

Encouraging users to socially share kills two birds with one stone. Firstly it helps our Google rankings, but perhaps more importantly, it also helps send traffic to DaniWeb from other sources so we hopefully won't have to rely on Google so much in the future. Right now, we rely almost exclusively on Google to keep our heads above water, and it's not a very good position to be in. The amount of traffic we're getting from Facebook and Twitter has been slowly increasing lately, and continuing on that trend is a sheer necessity for our future.

Yet another benefit is that ad agencies are really hopping on the social bandwagon lately, and they really want to put their money towards publications that are ahead of the curve with social media.

A LOT of research has indicated that the vast majority of the DaniWeb audience are on the social media bandwagon, and are actively integrating their Facebook world with DaniWeb.

For example, we just fairly recently integrated a Login …

Essentially you want to select every item in the list except for the one being clicked on, right?

If they're all at the same level in the document tree, and all of the tabs are the only thing at that level of the document tree, you can try $(this).siblings().css({'color': 'white', 'height': '35px', 'background': '#990000'});

By "the same level of the document tree" I mean:

<div>
    <span>Foo</span>
    <span>Bar</span>
    <span>Baz</span>
    <span>Bat</span>
</div>
<div>
    <span>Foo 2</span>
    <span>Bar 2</span>
    <span>Baz 2</span>
    <span>Bat 2</span>
</div>    

The first group of spans are siblings, and the second group of spans are siblings. Additionally, the two divs are siblings.

Another option would be $('.sub').not(this).css({'color': 'white', 'height': '35px', 'background': '#990000'}); In this case, basically we're saying to match on everything with class 'sub' but not this (aka the currently clicked item). More information here: http://api.jquery.com/not/

Glad to be back!

Sorry about that, it was a bug. Everyone was seeing the button in member profiles to send a PM to the member regardless of whether or not they had permission to do so. Fixed :)

I'm confused by your question. This forum is meant for people who are running eCommerce sites, not buying from them.

Meanwhile the other side of the argument is that of members who feel like, when it is near the quick reply, it looks like it's supposed to be of interest to those who are replying to the thread, which it's not. They feel like it's more of use to the OP to see a potentially answered similar question.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of our traffic are people who are coming in from a Google search. They might read the initial question, and if it isn't a perfect fit for what they're looking for, I'd rather present them with an alternative right then and there, then make their only alternative to hit back and return to the google results. Keep in mind that this is the MAJORITY of our audience, so in many ways we have to cater to them first.

Plus, there are also reasons why we have it within the actual post area instead of immediately below. The first reason is, at the suggestion of the Google guy, it significantly increases the click rate as opposed to being in its own box immediately below the post. Secondly, most short posts end up having white space immediately below the message because of the medium rectangle ad to the right. By putting this whitespace to use, we are able to reduce scrolling required on nearly all pages. If you look at this thread with ads enabled, for example, you'll see that by having the related article where it is, instead of …

PHP is a very different animal because a lot of PHP devs got their start doing it as a hobby on the side with no formal training. Therefore, I would say you can get a PHP programmer for as little as $20/hr, but a good one would be $100-150/hr.

OK done :) I wasn't going to implement this because it's extra resources for what I think isn't a good enough reason since there's already a visual indication that the link worked, but enough people have complained about being confused so here ya go.

You can bring up the dialog box asking the user "Would you like to bookmark this page?" but, as far as I know, you can't do anything without there intervention and approval. Regardless, anything you would do would be done through Javascript, not PHP.

Sooooo ... crazy huge thanks to James #2, I think that we officially have liftoff when it comes to marking threads read. Most of the code that goes into this functionality was way above my head, and took me about three hours to comprehend 100 lines of code tonight, so super thanks to him.

Please let us know if there are any bugs with it still.

Again, super shoutout to James for three awesome features this week.

My favorite is Zend PHP Studio. It's based on Eclipse.

DaniWeb uses CodeIgniter, and it's my first time using a web framework. It was really easy to catch onto and it's really lightweight. They make it easy to overwrite any built-in library (which you should be doing often, because some of them are horribly designed!) Regardless, we do use a lot of their built-in functions on DaniWeb because many of them are extremely relevant for us. It's the perfect built-in toolkit for our needs, without being in-your-face.

It's a good first framework to delve into if you don't have any previous existing experience with MVC because they implement the MVC concept very loosely (i.e. the model layer is optional). If you want something more structured, you need to just be self-disciplined enough. I've heard a LOT of really great things about Yii, which is supposedly what most experienced PHP devs are using nowadays. From what I hear, though, it can have a bit of a learning curve, and no other PHP framework is as lightweight as CodeIgniter anyways.

i cant send private messages for myself anymore and i just really dont know why,

We had a lot of problems with Private Message spam recently, so we now require I think it's 10 posts before you can have full PM access. You're almost there :)

Cast your vote in the Summer 2012 Code Snippet Contest :)

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CodeContest

HTML 5 is not fully supported yet, but a lot of what it does offer does downgrade cleanly. A lot of times you can get away with some non-necessary HTML 5 features that will only improve things as more people start to upgrade their browsers, but aren't critical to go without.

If you're looking to write personal projects to show in a resume, I would develop with the latest technology possible. If you're writing something that is going into production today, such as a website for a small business, first and foremost it needs to work with as many browsers as possible because it's not necessarily going to be utilized by early adopters. You can write the absolute best iPhone app in the world, and show off your amazing Objective-C skills, but if your target audience doesn't even have a smartphone, it's as useless as a brick.

You can also try Fiverr.com

This should do it ... it's untested though.

 # Force everyone to use www.example.com
 RewriteCond        %{HTTP_HOST}    !^www.example.com$              [NC] 
 RewriteRule        ^(.*)$      http://www.example.com/$1       [R=301,L] 

 RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.example.com [R=301,L]

There are lots of forums. V7N was mentioned, and then of course there's SitePoint, WebmasterWorld, Digital Point, etc. The list goes on and on.

Each one has its own unique rules and regulations. Some are nofollow, some aren't. Some have amazing content but don't allow you to mention your site by name. Some don't allow signatures and some do. My advice would be to be active for a decent amount of time in all of them, and then devote your time to the ones you feel are the most beneficial for you.

In my case, I get the most value out of the ones that don't allow you to mention your site by name, or are behind a login wall (i.e. you need to be logged in to see any content, and they are not indexed by Google at all). These tend to give the best value in terms of quality, because people are posting for the sake of truly learning from each other instead of just to gain a backlink.

PayPal doesn't do that? Google Checkout, perhaps? No clue, sorry :(

I know in the past, they were treated as different sites, but I think Google has gotten smarter since then. Regardless, you should always choose to use just one of them, and 301 redirect the other to the preferred one. Do all marketing just with whichever you prefer. Google Webmaster Tools also lets you set a preferred domain, where you can choose example.com or www.example.com, so be sure to set that.

Two words. Mechanical Turk.

It's all about optimizing for the search engines nowadays.

I don't care what my friends think, but what their parents think is often important to me.

Odd society you live in. :-P

OK thanks. Issue being looked into.

Any and all information posted on DaniWeb may not be copied or used elsewhere, in any way, shape, or form, either on the Internet or in print, without prior written permission from Dani Horowitz.

I have no issues with people using code on DaniWeb within their apps or as part of an open-source or commercial release. That's what a code snippet library is intended to do, after all.

My issue is where entire articles (such as our product reviews or lengthy tutorials) or even entire forum threads are duplicated in their entirety without giving credit back to the source. It's also an issue in the Internet Marketing forums where blackhat SEOs will come up with a paragraph or two on an SEO-related topic, and post it to 500 different forums, because they want to have a presence everywhere but don't want to take the time to come up with 500 unique somethings. It's quality content, but we are able to take action because the content is not unique to DaniWeb, and so that's one of our rules. Copying snippets of code and/or text is perfectly fine.

Transfer of exclusive copyright rights must be in writing and signed. DaniWeb does not have an exclusive license to any of my posts.

That's actually not true. By signing up with DaniWeb and providing your information to us, you accepted our terms of service and effectively entered into a contract with us, for which you are bound by its terms. A link to our terms of service are clearly labeled on every page.

In this digital age, an electronic signature can hold up in court just as well as an old-fashioned paper signature. For example, I have entered into many digital contracts over the years simply by signing up with an online service, where no actual signature was required, such as with Google AdWords, Network Solutions, GoDaddy, etc.

According to Wikipedia, electronic signatures have been in use since the 19th century: "Since well before the American Civil War began in 1861, morse code was used to send messages electronically by telegraphy. Some of these messages were agreements to terms that were intended as enforceable contracts."

The ESIGN Act, for example, has the sole purpose of ensuring that contracts entered into electronically are just as enforceable as their paper equivalents. There are many other federal laws in existance which you can read up on regarding electronic signatures. According to most of them, an electronic signature can be in the form of a "process" such as completing a sign-up form as long as there …

DaniWeb retains full rights to everything posted on the site. We do this for a few reasons.

1. If someone posts something in violation of our rules (spam, illegal, etc.) then it's important that the DaniWeb moderation team be able to modify it / delete it to our liking. (We have a strict policy of never modifying posts UNLESS they violate our rules.)
2. "Duplicate Content" is a big part of Google's search algorithm, and what this means is that they penalize sites in how they rank in search results if multiple sites have the same content verbatim. Therefore, if someone posts an article or tutorial on DaniWeb, we require full copyrights to that content, because we need to make sure that it doesn't get published elsewhere, therefore damaging us with the search engines. By having these rights, we are able to go after other publications that duplicate content on DaniWeb in whole or scrape our content. (If a member posts an article or tutorial on DaniWeb that already exists elsewhere, it is a rule violation and will be deleted as soon as we notice it, which is usually quite quickly.)
3. As a business entity, essentially what DaniWeb is is a database of technical knowledge and content. We would be nothing if we didn't own the content in our database, and yet were responsible for housing it.
4. DaniWeb, as a business, is a publication. Basically our business model is to publish content and make money on advertising revenue. We reserve the right …

Our entire site structure changed with the relaunch, and so it's been taking Google awhile to respider our entire site and really grasp our new navigation structure and how pages are linked together. We lost a lot of search traffic as a result. Unfortunately, it's taking Google longer than expected to "relearn" the entire site.

You can now log into the site with either your existing credentials or with Facebook.