Markus Welter

There are a view things to keep in mind, if you create a new website. Me working for my own company “welante“, we concentrate on providing the most professional experience to our customers while creating web applications. One of the topics is – of course – seo related. Everybody wants to be found somehow. There are companies earning money by analyzing your website and providing consulting for basic steps to increase seo “performance”. These steps are general for any website not being magic at all, nor complicated.
Every website has its unique content waiting to be found by potential readers or future clients. Neglecting the very basics is bad, because your page content could be so unique that engines would rank you in top position automatically. It is necessary to have reliable seo resources when you have strong competitors for your keywords or special solutions where you need to “fool” search engines. You better pay for consulting in this special – and for you important – area.

I always liked the website http://www.clickminded.com as a source of information. These guys have a big knowledge and delivering nice posts about digital marketing in general. One of the posts is a 30 points checklist which they provide in their seo training class http://www.clickminded.com/seo-checklist/. This list covers the basics of the seo topics:

• tools (did you know bing has webmaster tools as well?!)
• on-page
• off-page
• link building
• social media/reputation

By starting a project I open the checklist and go through each of the steps. Most importantly google analytics and webmaster tools are every web developers swiss-knife, when it comes to statistics and “healthiness” of your – or your clients – website.
A healthy and fast website is getting more importance in ranking results, at least for google. We also developed some tool-sets notifying us of errors and slow pages/functions. I’m still searching the time to push these nice helpers to github…

Another resource I grabed the basics from is http://www.webconfs.com/15-minute-seo.php there is a list with more than 70 useful and bad points to do with your website. Still providing some useful information, it feels a little outdated IMHO.

If you have a interesting resource you like and want to share, feel free to contact me or reply with a comment!

Markus

CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) sponsered by homeland security posted the top 25 programming errors:

You can get the full list @ http://cwe.mitre.org/top25/#Listing

The symfony forms framework is quite impressive and saves a lot of time in a developpers live!

I’m posting a Widget which handles “readonly” fields. One could use the html attribute “disabled” by setting the attribute property of a widget:

$this->widgetSchema['readonlyfieldname']->setAttribute('disabled', 'disabled');

The problem is that “disabled” elements are ignored when posting the form.

So we need another solution. I came up with a simple WidgetForm which outputs a div tag with the current value and the field itself as a hidden input:

/**
 * cnWidgetFormInputTextReadonly represents a readonly HTML text input tag.
 *
 * @package    cn
 * @subpackage widget
 * @author     Markus Welter 
 * @version    SVN: $Id: cnWidgetFormInputTextReadonly.class.php 23810 2010-02-21 19:25:44Z markus $
 */
class cnWidgetFormInputTextReadonly extends sfWidgetForm
{
  /**
   * @param array $options     An array of options
   * @param array $attributes  An array of default HTML attributes
   *
   * @see sfWidgetForm
   */
  protected function configure($options = array(), $attributes = array())
  {
    parent::configure($options, $attributes);
    $this->addOption('class');
    $this->setOption('class', 'readonlyWidget');
  }

  public function render($name, $value = null, $attributes = array(), $errors = array())
  {
    return '

'.$value.'


'.$this->renderTag('input', array_merge(array('type' => 'hidden', 'name' => $name, 'value' => $value), $attributes));
  }
}

I was looking for a solution to use pagination in the news reader module of typolight.

There was already an issue in http://dev.typolight.org/issues/show/331 and a blog post on http://www.typolight-community.de/showthread.php?t=1458, but not leading to any solution.

So I had some spare time over the weekend and thought: “Why not try to create such a module on my own”. So here we are with my first extension for typolight. The NewsNav module.

Basically it contains the logic of the well known ArticleNav module which does pagination for articles.

It is my first extension. I’m sure you’ll find some bugs or have ideas for improvments. Don’t hesitate to contact me in this case.

You don’t need to configure the module. It just displays all the links to the news in the same news archive. The template used is a copy of the one for ArticleNav.

I haven’t had time to investigate how to publish an extension. So just download it, copy it to the system/modules directory, try it out and leave a comment!

Hi to all!

As I’m going to work as a freelancer and contractor in april ’10 again – I created this blog to write about my stuff!

This blog mainly contains solutions to problems I had and other technical related stuff.

Hope you like it!

Markus