All Geekness Great and Small

Posts Tagged ‘Programming’

I recently wrote about a script designed to generate Rotating Banners. The script works fine, but using JavaScript to present a user with links creates a few problems of its own:

• Google Analytics will not be able to track these external links (if, for instance, you’re using my Google Analytics for external links)
• Non-visual User Agents will not be able to access these links
• As a subset, Google will not be able to crawl these links and so associate your site with the sites those banners point to.

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I was recently sent a script designed to take a series of advertising banners and rotate them on a page. By ‘rotate’, I mean display on banner in a designated position and then, after a certain period of time, replace it with another, and then another, and so on. To be fair to those who paid for the banners, each banner was chosen at random so that each new visitor to the site would see a different banner first, second, third, etc. After taking a look at it, I spotted some problems and decided to fix them.
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I’ve been coding in Perl for years and, generally, I think I’m a pretty competent coder. However, every now and again, I fall into a hole that takes me a loooong time to get out of. Invariably, these problems boil down to upload issues, not code issues. As an aide-mémoire for myself and, hopefully, to you, I thought I’d jot down a few problems that I’ve seen and what the solution was.
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O’reilly release the first chapter of their new webOS book in the past few days and it has been a welcome island in a sea of tedious rumours. While others may wildly speculate on when the Pre will appear, at least we now have some idea of what it will be running.
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I saw @mhat’s tweet today about ‘What language should I learn‘  and it got me thinking about the times I’ve asked that question and how I might answer it. So, @mhat, I’m taking your tweet to be a challenge to write an unbiased and ‘unwrong’ post. To do this, I’m going to give you a history of the languages I have learned.
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