Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Really Simply Syndication, or RSS, feeds are an easy way to bulk up your website content or actively promote your website material on other sites. With RSS, content is delivered through a feed to another website, email or web browser. RSS can deliver any number of content offerings from your site including promotional material, articles, new blog posts, or alerts readers or other sites. The use of RSS feeds has expanded dramatically in the last decade and has become instrumental in syndicating content.

RSS is especially useful to pull feeds into your website. This bulks up your site with content offerings and article titles from other related sites. RSS can also be used to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) as it makes your site more visible to search engines and generates traffic and incoming links. Finally RSS can be a connection between you and your customers letting them know when new material is offered through your website.

To use RSS feeds, consider the following:

• Plan the content the RSS will contain. A RSS feed can contain many forms of content. The feed can publicize articles or blog posts, product reviews, press releases, announcements or any combination of the above. The contents of your feed should be interesting to readers, and centralized to retain the interest of your initial audience. The more specific and interesting your feed, the more likely it will be picked up by other sites or individuals. (more…)

There are many different markup languages for webmasters to choose from these days. All have their own standards dictated by an organization known as W3C. In this article we are going to look at four of the most common markup languages and their standards. The markup languages that will be covered in this article are HTML, XHTML, XML, and CSS.

HTML:

Intro:

In the first section of this article, we will look at HTML. HTML is the oldest of the four languages and stands for Hypertext Markup Language. Its main purpose is to structure a web document by denoting sections of the document with certain tags. In HTML, there is usually a header section, which contains the title and description as well as some META tags for search engine spidering purposes. Next there is a body tag which contains the main content of your document. Paragraphs, descriptions, and pictures would usually go in this section. Last of all, there is a footer to an HTML document. This is usually there additional links or any additional information that does not belong in the body go.

History:

Although HTML has been expanded and changed since its initial creation, it was originally created by physicist Tim Berners Lee in 1980 while he was working as an independent contractor for CERN. Since the world wide web at that time was mainly a way for scientists to share research data, HTML did not gain much notice until the end of the 80s and into the 90s. It was not until 1990 that the World Wide Web (W3) was proposed and accepted by CERN. The year 1991 marked the first year where an HTML standard was made public. This early version of HTML had relatively few tags(some which are still available today), such as the basic “href” link tag and the “img src” image tag that could be used to define parts of a webpage and where certain elements could be inserted into an HTML document. HTML continued to improve and expand throughout the 1990s. People began to take more and more notice of HTML standards as the World Wide Web gained popularity among the masses. HTML specifications have since 1996 been maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C). In 2000, HTML standards became international and spread across the globe. The latest version of HTML that is widely accepted is 4.01.

Advantages and Disadvantages:

There are two flavors of HTML standards, strict and transitional. The difference between them is that transitional is much more of a loose standard and ignores many things that strict would consider errors or warnings. Transitional is widely accepted and is favored among most webmasters and designers as it allows for more elements in the document than strict. The advantage that HTML has over other standards is that it is the easiest to follow and one that most webmasters should be familiar with. HTML knowledge is generally considered a requirement to build any kind of website, no matter how complex or simple. The disadvantage of HTML is that by itself it is quite limited is what it can do. It does not provide the variety of descriptive tags and elements that something like XHTML or XML can provide. While beginners may be content with HTML, more advanced designers will want to learn other markup languages and standards. (more…)

The web 2.0 is a phrase which was first used in 2003 by a company called “O’Reilly Media” to define a new version of the World Wide Web, its main characteristics were:

1- It made the WWW public, generating and distributing web content began to be more common, users could participate in the sites data creation and create their own pages, threads, blogs, videos and auctions. These sites such as Wikipedia, Ebay, and Youtube have now become the leaders on the WWW and contain big usercommunities which update their sites data consistently.

2- Categorization and organization of content, such as the deep linking, site owners organized their content in a more comfortable, user freindly way using the back slash (/). The sites appeared more clear on search engines and the user could just type www.site.com/news instead of browsing the whole site to find this section.

3- And the last, most important thing was the “Dot-Com boom” (1995-2001), in which many new Internet-based companies began their work as their owners saw their potential on the Internet, companies such as Google and Ebay had been founded in the early beginning of the “boom” and became the great success of today.

The uses of Web 2.0

Web-based applications and desktops:

These “online desktops” are similar to a PC environment and function as application platforms giving the user the feeling his is at his desktop, not online, today this service is mostly used when a user wants to enter his desktop from another computer, all he/she needs to do is to sign up to one of these services and the problem is fixed.

Rich Internet applications:

Client-side software

Web 2.0 gives the users an option to work with data stored on servers, a simple example of it is an online html form which can be found anywhere these days, this forms are made using the scripting languages such as javascript, Java or flash, the forms are very helpful for site owners who can easily browse the form with all the details included inside and sort it or make further uses out of it (such as export it and store it on a side-server).

XML

XML is a fee-free open standard. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across the Internet. XHTML and RSS are written on the XML language by adding semantic constraints.

RSS

The RSS is another Web 2.0 feature giving the users an option to make other uses of a sites data.
The RSS is used to publish content updates such as new headlines on news sites or blog entries.
The user can enter and see the updates made on his chosen site and the chosen section (News/Music/Jokes) without
the need to search for them by himself.

Web protocols

Web communication protocols are supported by the Web 2.0 structure. These protocols such as the REST and SOAP involve some form of XML coding in them.