A client wanted me to add EVEN MORE content to their homepage; just a couple of paragraphs but nonetheless adding to the number of words on their important front page.

You see, they always ADD articles but do not have the good housekeeping habit of removing the OLD ones, so their page just grows and grows.

As a professional webmaster & content manager it's my job to deal with these things, to keep pages trim and fresh. As an SEO guy it's also my job to ensure that pages are succinct and keyword rich, not too much though.

So all this adding of MORE words to the homepage made me wonder... what's the homepage word count now?

I couldn't remember my password for www.ranks.nl's keyword density & prominence analyzer, which gives you keyword/keyphrase counts, keyword/keyphrase density and keyword/keyphrase prominence, not to mention word counts etc etc...

So I did a quick search and found a simple alternative tool...

www.keywordcount.com

Optimising files for size can seem a bit stupid to some people. So what if I reduce a 6k file down to 5k, that's only 1k!

Well fine, but if it's a popular file, say a server side include, you could have millions of hits a day; not only does every k on every file save on bandwidth usage and costs but it also speeds up the delivery of the file to the user.

The CMS system I'm using comes with a template which has a 12k CSS file. Having modified the file quite extensively it eventually rolled in at 17k.

I saved the CSS file with ALL its original markup and comments to an archive/src folder and then set about modifying the live CSS file.

All the comments removed saved 1k.

Then I uploaded the CSS file to HTML tidy, switching off all the output options to get the most basic HTML file, stripping out the CSS and dumping it back in the CSS file.

That saved another 2k.

I changed the wrap from the default 90 to 999999 and uploaded again.

That saved another 1k.

So now I have a much more complex CSS file, initially 5k (nearly 50%) bigger than the original that is actually only 1k more than the original. Not bad huh?

Effectively all this is doing is removing the line breaks from the original CSS file, saving 5k of code. You still have your source CSS file, right? If you need to work on the CSS again, just work on the source CSS file, comment it as appropriate, save it and run it through the optimisation process again to get a trimmed-down version for your live site :)

Firefox 2.0 RC 3 (Release Candidate 3) came out today.

OK Beta testers, go get your latest copy of Joomla 1.5 Beta now, and test, test, develop, test like there's no tomorrow!

Labels: CMS

Need a link dump? Need to grab a list of all those links on that webpage?

Well, this was another need for a time-saving tool or method stemming from building a CMS... I needed a list of links from my old legacy site so that I could list them in the .htaccess file, along with the corresponding links on the new CMS-powered site.

The tool for the job was the link extractor from Webmaster Toolkit.

Enjoy :)

Firefox 2.0 RC 2 (Release Candidate 2) is out now! (Just got an auto update 2 minutes ago)

In all my 8 years of designing websites I've never had to de-list or remove a site from the web.

Today I did.

The owner of the business is terminally ill and I was instructed by the family to take the site down. Luckily it was only 4 pages so I replaced all the old pages with a simple "this website is no longer maintained" message and a de-listing via the robots.txt file.

To de-list the website from the search engines using the robots.txt file just create these lines in the file...

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

And that's it.

Did you try the HTML tidy? Was your code too narrow? i.e. did you wrap at 72 characters because it looked good in your CMS window but then found it was too narrow for output to PDF? Well yeah, I found that out too...

The solution? Run your page back through the HTML tidy but wrap at 99999 characters or something like that ;)