Or, “Why Web development can only move so fast”.

I’m consulting with a client on search engine optimization (SEO) for their sites and was asked to prepare a few key points they can take to a client that’s new to the web. Now, I’m not an SEO expert, and in fact feel that many people try to sell some magical solution that doesn’t actually deliver results, but I do know what’s worked for me and others over the years. Here are my thoughts…

This is just a quick tip, but ever since discovering it I use it constantly. A lot of developers use PHP’s print_r() function to display human-readable information about a variable, which makes it great for debugging arrays and objects (among other things) very quickly. However, you have to wrap the output in <pre></pre> tags otherwise it gets spit out in a jumbled mess and doesn’t display nicely.

It’s not like I don’t have enough on my plate and I need to find new stuff to keep busy with. Despite that, my list of things I want to check out seems to grow each week. Two things I’ve been wanting to look closer into are 960 Grid System, and Object-Oriented CSS.

Customization is key, so when I had spent a considerable amount of time trying to disable editor resizing in CKEditor and kept coming up blank, it started to get frustrating. Here we have a pretty solid editor coupled with a pretty solid lack of documentation – reminds me a bit of Magento! To their credit, it’s still extremely new and they are working on documentation for it. That aside, I managed to stumble across a post on their forum that led me in the right direction.

I don’t write because no one reads. No one reads because I don’t write.

For anyone who may be editing in TextPad, there’s a way you can have some Subversion functionality within the TextPad interface.

Here’s a handy little shortcut for jumping around your code in Dreamweaver: