Software Engineering

Tip a friend - not so simple

Many online sites such as news-sites and other content providers often have a “tip a friend” option. With this you can mail a friend and tell them about an interesting piece of content you’ve found. The Idea seems quite simple, and everyone should have the tip-option, wright? - no, wrong. While it may offer a convenience for some, it has several backsides. First if you - or your email provider - has implemented anti-spam techniques such as SPF-records, the “tipping mail” will not be sent through the authorized list of mail-servers and thus have a larger likelihood of being labeled as spam.

The case against tags

To every modern web 2.0 site offering tagging seems to be an absolute requirement. While I may agree, that tagging in some cases may offer some improvements in content navigation over many other points, I do think it’s been too abused in way to may cases. Tags on sites such as Flickr and Del.icio.us are absolutely fantastic. They offer some cross navigation options, which would probably be near impossible, if not for the tags.

Checking requirements for PHP Applications

A great strength in PHP is that it’s so accessible, that almost anyone can get access to a PHP site and often will download “applications” for their site such as discussion boards, photo galleries and others. While it may easy to download such applications, it often happens that the people trying to get things to work, doesn’t read the requirements section of the install.txt or readme.txt file, and thus never get the application running and doesn’t understand what the problem was and how to fix it.

No comments

The option to leave comments on this site has now been disabled. A new version of the website is coming and the pain comments – from time to time – causes with movable type (in terms of comment spam, server load and likewise issues) is really not worth the trouble. You will quite possible be able to leave a comment once the new version is launched, but until then sorry, no comments.

About redirects

The web change constantly and content moves around. This article gives a brief overview of the various different options available to you, to make a redirect. Redirects come in two major flavors - clientside and serverside. Client side Clientside redirects reside within the HTML documents on the server. There are three basic ways of making these: Manual (or user driven) redirects. Meta headers. Javascript redirects. Manual The manual redirects most often used when you really, really wants the users to know, that the page has moved.