I just wanted to do a little shout out to any developers, to say that the early bird ticket deadline is fast approaching for this years PHPNW conference.

Tickets have been on sale for a while now at £58 (ex VAT) but this will go up on the 12th August to £75 so if your thinking of going, now’s the time to get your ticket.

For more information or to book your ticket goto http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw10/.

Yesterday Mozilla announced the build has reached BETA and is ready for the more cautious developer to start playing with it. Firefox 4.0 comes with lots of new bells and whistles, you can find a full feature list here, most notable the new UI design and enhancements in <hmtl5> and CSS3. There are also lots of new developer api’s for us to play with including websockets and local indexeddb’s.

If your already surfing the beta channel wave, you should be able to just “upgrade now” although my work machine didn’t find it so had to install it manually. Those of you running a stable realease or want to install manually can do so via the usual beta release channel.

For more information on please read the Mozilla Announcement on their blog.

This new system basically allows them to push anything Googlebot finds into the main index in seconds rather than weeks.

Previously Googlebot would crawl the web, find a site, then submit its content to another system for processing. This other system would then sort and process the content and work out what its all about. It would then pass it to another system for inclusion in the index. This was a time consuming process and was also done in batches, which means your site would have to wait for all the other sites in the same batch to be processed before being submitted to the index.

The new system is different, rather than doing things in large batches, it will work on smaller portions, more portions at the same time and submit them all to the index straight away, allowing users of the search engine to see information much much quicker, and this is just the start!

Image copyright of Google

There are several rumours floating around about what lies in store next for Google users and their shot of caffeine.  But for now we will have to wait and just enjoy our new “real-time” search results.

You can real the full article on the Google Webmaster Blog

First thing the post suggest is to check out Site Performance in Webmaster tools, so off I went. When this first appeared in the Labs section of webmaster tools it was updating pretty regularly and was quite useful and as the graph shows helped me tweak a few things and improve the load time of the server. But it hasn’t been updated in a while now so isn’t very relevant or useful to me.

Next thing it suggests is to install Page Speed for Firebug and test my site. So thats what I did and I got Page Speed Score: 93/100! which is pretty impressive. So I thought next, 7% to go, what can I do to get to 100/100. Nothing it seems… All the suggestions the tool gave me were unsolvable and prevent anyone from getting top marks.

The first suggestion is to Leverage browser caching,
the file it advises me need to do this too is “http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js” which I cant do anything about.

The next suggestion is to Defer loading of JavaScript, “66.4% of the JavaScript loaded by this page had not been invoked by the time the onload handler completed” is smugly informs me.
- http://gavtaylor.co.uk  24 functions uncalled of 25 total functions
- http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js 154 functions uncalled of 243 total functions.

On closer examination the functions it reports on my site are actually from Firebug, which must be open for the test to run? catch 22 there!
And the analytic code again is from Google and I cant do anything about that.

The final suggestion is to Use efficient CSS selectors,
http://gavtaylor.co.uk/core/styles/styles.css has 12 very inefficient rules, 27 inefficient rules, and 0 potentially inefficient uses of :hover out of 101 total rules.

This I can do something about and when I get a moment I will be re-coding my CSS file. But this wont improve my results more than 1 or 2 points.

So this unreachable target of 100/100 appears to be impossible. I could remove the Google code from my site which would resolve the Google plug-in issue but I cant run the test without having Firebug open so there will always be 24 out of 25 uncalled functions reported keeping me away from that 100/100 score.

So… will I be sitting in that tree, doing things I should not be?… No, not until they fix the issues with their testing tools anyway…

IE9 is rumoured to include several <html5> and CSS3 elements, making it a real contender in the new range of “modern browsers”.

You can read more about the release on the IE Blog, or jump straight over to the resources and “test drive” the new release.

I will update this post with my thoughts on the preview, once I’ve had a play with it.

not bad results there really, not much to done on searches for my name, going to focus on php developer I think

interestingly on the web search for ‘gav taylor’, my twitter feed came top.
again searches for my name do quite well, confirms I need to improve seo for ‘php developer’

Will be interesting to see where I end up for these searches in Feb 2011

On the reseller server I had access to grey-listing and SpamAssassin to filter mail as it arrived and I got maybe 2 or 3 a week, but the day after I moved onto the vps this shot up to between 20 and 50 a day!  I have my emails pushed straight to my phone as well so this fast became a bit of a pain.

My VPS did come with SpamAssassin pre-installed as part of Plesk but due to the licence I have installed I couldn’t use it so this caused two problems, 1) emails are not filtered for spam and 2) SpamAssassin is using up precious memory while not actually helping.

The first thing I did was to turn off SpamAssassin, it was using a lot of memory as even tho it wasn’t filtering any mail  it was still scanning every message that arrived on the server, On advice of my hosting providers tech support I decided not to un-install it in case it caused problems so I just stopped the service from running and then disabled it from auto starting on system reboot to preventing it restarting if I ever need to reboot the server.

I then tried to find the grey-listing software used on my old reseller server, this seemed to work really well so I wanted it on my server too. Support told me they were using a script put together by Brent Meisher written to work specifically with Plesk but  unfortunately the repo had been removed and I couldn’t download the files.

I was speaking with a support engineer about it and he mentioned a new tool he was playing with called SpamDyke and how it was looking promising as a replacement to their current grey-listing solution, so I decided to give it a try.

The good news is, that since I started writing this blog post, SpamDyke has been added into the atomic repositories, so to install it is as simple as using apt get or yum. Configuration is just as simple, the default settings are actually quite effective and I’ve been using them for two weeks and haven’t received a single piece of spam.

All the information you need can be found on the SpamDyke website and the README file is really useful.
This is something I defiantly recommend to everyone who is running their own mail server.

There are lots of great updates in this release and pretty much all add-ons are supported so I advise you all to update.
More details can be found at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6/releasenotes/

While your at it, remember to upgrade to the latest version of Firefbug, there have been some great improvements in the net panel, improved timings etc and the html inspector has had a lot of updates made to it. More details can be found on http://getfirebug.com/

What is the Google Webmaster Central Channel?
Its a channel on Youtube that is used mainly by Matt Cutts (project leader of Googles web spam team) to pass on little snippets of info and answer questions made by Joe Public and his wife on the Google Forum. It is also used by other teams,  to give useful information and advise on how to make the most out of Google and the web as a whole.

Why should I watch them?
Why not? Google are market leaders in their field and they are giving advise (for free) on how to improve your website, I’ve learnt many tips and tricks from watching the videos and a lot of them have helped out a lot.

Where can I watch the videos?
Here is the answer, on YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp

We have been waiting for a mobile version of Firefox since forever, currently on WM6.1 we have a choice between using Internet Explorer 6 Mobile or Opera Mobile, There are some other browsers available but none that really tear people away from IE or Opera.  While Opera Mobile is vastly superior to IE6mobile and renders pages as a desktop browser does, it unfortunately comes with a small price tag unless bundled with your operator and so means a lot of people are stuck using IE. Fennec is about to change all that.

I’ve been playing with Fennec since its release on the 15th and  I have to say its rather good. Navigation is quick to respond and doesn’t take long to get used to, like existing mobile browser users swipe and tap the screen to pan and zoom in on pages, tabs and menu items are available by pulling the left and right edges of the screen respectively, to open side menus, this works well on a mobile device as you save space for viewing the website,  although I did find when reading some pages I accidentally opened the menus more than I’d liked.

Websites load as expected and without any particular long load times, other than the expected result of mobile browsing, I tested via WI-FI and didn’t notice any load time at all, built in javascript engine was able to handle some very javascript heavy sites like Facebook with out giving up in the way mobile IE does. I could even get Youtube working once I’d enabled plug-ins.

There is support for basic add-ons and as mentioned before tabbed browsing, both of which help to improve the mobile browsing experience although opera has had both these (tabs and widgets) for a while, Fennec seems to load them quicker than the version of opera i have installed.

The only problems i found while testing fennec were a result of my win mobile device, it seems to use a lot of memory which my poor tytnII doesnt have much of spare, am sure on the newer win mobile devices it runs fine.

Overall for an alpha development Im very impressed, the basics are already in place and Im looking forward to the next release.

Fennec is available to download here or if you don’t have a win mobile device you can install it to your desktop by grabbing a copy of the fennec desktop build.

Watch a walk through of  the new features included in the Win Mobile Alpha build courtesy of Madhava Enros