This morning I saw a first-hand example of why links to your web site from other sites can be so effective. I was looking at the Google Analytics for the hobby site that I run for the Austin Scale Modeler's Society. The traffic for that site has been pretty steady overall. But I noticed a huge spike in February - five times the normal number of visits.
Digging deeper, I saw that almost all of that traffic was in a 3 day span in February. I thought there was no way this traffic was legitimate, must be some kind of DOS attack, or something. I looked at the geographic stats, fully expecting a spike in overseas traffic in that time period. But it wasn't there. As usual, most of the traffic was from the States. I looked at the content analysis and saw that most of the traffic was to the home page, so not much enlightenment there.
Finally, I started looking at the referral information to see where it was all coming from. Turns out all that traffic was being generated from one site - HyperScale - that had a link to our home page in their "What's New" round-up on Feb 12. I recalled contacting them and asking them for a link on their site. Boy, did it work!
This is not a commercial site, so I don't know how many sales conversions that would have resulted in, but I can't see how a 5-fold increase in visitors could have hurt. Just goes to show that taking the time to "pound the pavement" for reciprocal links can really pay off.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Friday, April 10, 2009
Getting an Indented List to not Indent
It seems like it should be really easy. I want a bulleted list, but with no indent. In other words, I want the bullets aligned to the left with no indent, but I still want the space between the bullet and the text.
Why would I want this? Lots of reasons. I may have a list that is contained in a table in a page column where it makes no sense to indent the list.
It seems like this should be easily controlled with CSS, but not so. All my attempts at this resulted in results other than what I wanted. Attempts to reduce the left indent usually resulted in the bullet simply vanishing or other odd stuff. I tried having the list items without the actual list tag, which worked in some browsers but not others; I encountered problems with the text wrapping under the bullet.
I thought I must be missing something so I searched a bit online. It seems there really is no good way to do this. Apparently the indented list was intended to be just that - an indented list. Thus, there is no standard reliable way to change it.
What you end up having to do is create a table where each row is a list item with two cells. One cell contains an image for your bullet, the other contains your text. It works, but it's hardly efficient.
Just one of those HTML oddities, I suppose.
Why would I want this? Lots of reasons. I may have a list that is contained in a table in a page column where it makes no sense to indent the list.
It seems like this should be easily controlled with CSS, but not so. All my attempts at this resulted in results other than what I wanted. Attempts to reduce the left indent usually resulted in the bullet simply vanishing or other odd stuff. I tried having the list items without the actual list tag, which worked in some browsers but not others; I encountered problems with the text wrapping under the bullet.
I thought I must be missing something so I searched a bit online. It seems there really is no good way to do this. Apparently the indented list was intended to be just that - an indented list. Thus, there is no standard reliable way to change it.
What you end up having to do is create a table where each row is a list item with two cells. One cell contains an image for your bullet, the other contains your text. It works, but it's hardly efficient.
Just one of those HTML oddities, I suppose.
Friday, December 5, 2008
Cross-Browser Testing Made Easy
One of the challenges of building a web site is ensuring that it will function the same way when viewed by many different web browsers and versions of browsers on different operating systems. Something that works fine in the latest version of IE or FireFox may not work the same way (or at all) in an older browser or on a different O/S. This is not as much of an issue if you are just using very vanilla HTML. However, if you start using JavaScript, DHTML, or some of the more exotic CSS, you may be in for a nasty surprise when you try to view the page on a different system.
What really got me thinking about this recently was my interest in weaning myself away from table-based design in favor of more CSS-driven design. I know it's supposed to be so much better, the wave of the future and all that. But my concern has always been how to be sure it would work on older browsers.
I try to keep the latest versions of IE, FireFox, NS Navigator, Opera and now Google Chrome on my local machine for some basic cross-browser testing. But I can't have the other versions or the other O/S configurations to test. I don't even own a Mac at present.
I started thinking it would be cool if there was a software tool out there that would grab a page and render it just like a specified browser, version of browser, etc.
As it happens, I found something even better. This web site (http://www.crossbrowsertesting.com/) allows you to log into any of their many and varied images to test your page. It's free, with some restrictions that I'll get to in a bit. But you can hop on to a Mac, Ubuntu or Windows (98, XP, Vista, etc.) system and try out many different browsers, versions of browsers, etc. It's brilliant. It's not some kind of program that mimics the browser. It's the actual browser. And it's fully functional so you can test all your JavaScript, DHTML, whatever.
There are a few restrictions on the "free" part. You can only stay logged into a session for 5 minutes at a time. But you can launch as many sessions as you like. So for quick tests, it is perfectly adequate. Also, paying customers get preference for access when the site gets busy. If you need to do more complex testing and need more than 5 minutes on an image, you can buy little blocks of time. It's all very well thought-out.
Now, if they could just do something similar to test wireless devices...
What really got me thinking about this recently was my interest in weaning myself away from table-based design in favor of more CSS-driven design. I know it's supposed to be so much better, the wave of the future and all that. But my concern has always been how to be sure it would work on older browsers.
I try to keep the latest versions of IE, FireFox, NS Navigator, Opera and now Google Chrome on my local machine for some basic cross-browser testing. But I can't have the other versions or the other O/S configurations to test. I don't even own a Mac at present.
I started thinking it would be cool if there was a software tool out there that would grab a page and render it just like a specified browser, version of browser, etc.
As it happens, I found something even better. This web site (http://www.crossbrowsertesting.com/) allows you to log into any of their many and varied images to test your page. It's free, with some restrictions that I'll get to in a bit. But you can hop on to a Mac, Ubuntu or Windows (98, XP, Vista, etc.) system and try out many different browsers, versions of browsers, etc. It's brilliant. It's not some kind of program that mimics the browser. It's the actual browser. And it's fully functional so you can test all your JavaScript, DHTML, whatever.
There are a few restrictions on the "free" part. You can only stay logged into a session for 5 minutes at a time. But you can launch as many sessions as you like. So for quick tests, it is perfectly adequate. Also, paying customers get preference for access when the site gets busy. If you need to do more complex testing and need more than 5 minutes on an image, you can buy little blocks of time. It's all very well thought-out.
Now, if they could just do something similar to test wireless devices...
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