The Red Frog Blog

I am reposting a great article done by Nick La over at Web Designer Wall about some simple SEO methods to pay attention to. As someone who is aware of Search Engine Optimization will know, there are a lot of ideas (some good, some bad) floating around about how to improve your page listing in Google. If you are able to implement most of these methods consistently, your websites and any website you design will have much better search results standings.

Here was something written in his article that impressed me:

Hint: Properly describing your images can help your ranking in the image search results. For example, Google image search brings me hundreds of referrals everyday for the search terms “abstract” and “dj“.

There is lots more to learn over in the post Web Designer Wall: SEO Guide for Designers, so check it out!

I ran across two annoying problems when setting up a new Trac project on our xserve today. Thought I’d share my solutions in hopes of helping someone. Our xserve runs OS X Server 10.4.11, and we’re using Trac version 0.11b2.

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MAMP is an awesome program that allows you to install Apache, MySQL and PHP with just a few clicks on Mac OS X. It’s a really easy way to set up a local development environment, or to get a dynamic website running a laptop (which is something we recently had to do for a client).

Apparently there’s a bug in the current version (1.7.1) that causes MAMP to stop working even though the MAMP window reports Apache and MySQL running with a green light. When you try to load up pages in a browser you’ll get an unable to connect message like “Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at localhost:8888“. Stopping and starting the Apache and MySQL services doesn’t fix the problem and even restarting your Mac doesn’t help! You may not even be able to get MAMP to stop running. Here’s how to fix the bug…

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I recently ran across this positioning problem. I was setting up a site where I needed a div layer (nav element) to go inside a layer with 100% width. I needed to position the div absolute, top and also align it in the middle of the page (url to follow when we finish the site!). CSS doesn’t always behave like you expect it would. But in the event you were wondering how to align your div top and center, here is the solution.

Set your container element’s position as absolute with top as 0px, if necessary. Next give it a position of left: 50%. Give the div an appropriate width for its contents. Then set it up with a margin-left as the negative value of half of the width. See my example:

#headerInside {
       position:     absolute;
       top:          0px;
       left:         50%;/*some magic to align the element in the center;
       width:        1000px;
       margin-left:  -500px;/* half of the width */
}

You can also use the same principle if you want to align the element in the middle of the page vertically, by using top: 50%.

I recently had the task of moving an installation of DigiShop from one server to another. Here’s how I did it, in ten easy steps:

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