Omar Kattan » Code

Languages to Learn to Create a Website From Scratch

Omar Kattan — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 16:35:44 +0000

Learning to code a website from scratch can be easy if you know the logic behind scripting and programming languages. Here is the good news: Creating a website does not require programming. In fact, students are advised to use scripting languages sparingly. To master web development quickly, study these languages in the following order: Read more..

What is PHP?

Omar Kattan — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 19:07:53 +0000
For years, ASP has been one of the most popular server-side scripting languages and for good reason. It is easy to learn, can be based on either Visual Basic scripting or Java scripting, and it runs on any Windows based server. But therein is the problem. It only runs on Windows based machines. With the growing popularity of UNIX and Apache based we... Read more..

Search Engines Agree on Canonical Tag

Omar Kattan — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 12:08:59 +0000
An agreement was struck yesterday by the three main search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) on the adoption of a new tag to tackle canonicalisation in the SERPs. Read more..

PHP Code to Grab Google PageRank

Omar Kattan — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:46:55 +0000
Here is the code to grab Google pagerank for any website. This can be very useful in Buzz Monitoring applications or tools that measure importance of backlinks (including competitors) ;-) Code:
define('GOOGLE_MAGIC', 0xE6359A60);

function _zeroFill($a, $b){     $z = hexdec(80000000);     if ($z & $a){       $a = ($a>>1);       $a &= (~$z);       $a |= 0x40000000;       $a = ($a>>($b-1));     }else       $a = ($a... Read more..

PHP Code to Grab Alexa Traffic Ranking

Omar Kattan — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:35:19 +0000

Here is a php code that lets you retrieve a website's alexa ranking, useful in web applications that measure importance of webpages (such as bespoke link popularity tools).
For this code snippet to work CURL library for php needs to be enabled on your server. Code: Read more..

Favicon – that little added touch

Omar Kattan — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:55:37 +0000
Have you added a favicon to your site? If you haven't then this post will guide you through the simple process. But before I start, let me explain what a favicon is. A favicon is the little icon that shows up in the browser and tabs of your computer (depicted below). It can distinguish your site from the masses by adding that special touch.
Read more..

Inline Editing with Ajax

Omar Kattan — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:56:29 +0000

Last week I came across a tutorial and code for inline editing using Ajax. The reason I was looking for this sort of application was to implement a project management solution for one of my clients.

What inline editing does is allow you to edit an online document on the fly using AJAX, PHP and MYSQL. An example of this nifty solution found here: http://www.yvoschaap.com/instantedit/
Read more..

Meta Tags for E-tail Sites

Omar Kattan — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 12:21:59 +0000

I recently conducted a competitive analysis for one of my etail clients and to my astomishment, I found that out of the 13 competitors I tracked, none utilised the meta description tag on their site. This prompted me to write a post on this discussing meta tags and best practices for using them on your site ...

Firstly...What is meta data? In a nutshell, meta data is the information that is placed in the ... Read more..

Optimising Images on Your Site

Omar Kattan — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 04:43:08 +0000
A very juicy water mellon
With the concept of " Read more..

Changing Charatcteristics of a File – Static to Dynamic

Omar Kattan — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 06:46:00 +0000

Did you know that you are able to change the characteristics of a static file such as a .html or .txt file to allow it to accept dynamic code such as php or asp? Well you can, here's how...

Lets say you're looking to create a dynamic .csv or .txt for a shopping feed for one of the shopping comparison search engines such as Shopping.com, normally, you would not be able to do so because .xml/.txt/.csv files are static and would not ordinalrily execute php commands to output the products from a database.

The solution...
Read more..

This Site May Harm Your Computer

Omar Kattan — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 12:19:38 +0000

"This site may harm your computer", this is what Google placed underneath all my listings towards the end of last week, why?... Well basically because a hacker managed to penetrate my server and place invisible code designed to place Read more..

Managing your Robots.txt File

Omar Kattan — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 21:57:33 +0000

A robots.txt file is a text file that manages the search engines that listen to its instructions.

Major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN all listen to the robots.txt file and obey the instruction... Read more..

Google’s Unavailable_After Meta Tag

Omar Kattan — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 19:07:41 +0000

Google is planning to introduce a new meta tag to deal with time sensitive information on websites. The new tag -dubbed "unavailable_after" - was announced by  Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google at a recent SEMNE conference.

The "unavailable_after" tag will for instance allow webmasters to tell Google when a particular page on their site will no longer be available. For instance, if there is a time-sensitve special offer on ... Read more..

Word Press Title Tag Optimization

Omar Kattan — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:47:03 +0000

Here a quick tip to help you optimise your Word Press title tag so that it becomes more search engine friendly.

Login to your site using your favourite ftp application.

Open the header.php file, it can be found in root > wp-content > themes > your theme.

Find: <?php bloginfo('name'); ?><?php wp_title(); ?>

Replace with  : <?php wp_title(); ?><?php bloginfo('name');... <a href="http://www.omarkattan.com/2007/07/02/word-press-title-tag-optimization/">Read more..</a> </article> <article> <h1>Permanent (301) Redirects – Managing the Google Index</h1> <p>Omar Kattan — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 13:09:57 +0000</p> <a href="http://www.omarkattan.com/2007/07/02/permanent-301-redirects-managing-the-google-index/" alt="Permanent (301) Redirects - Managing the Google Index"></a><p align="left">Have you heard of <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection" title="wiki page about 301 redirects">301 (permanent) redirects</a>? If you haven't let me explain what they are to you.</p> <p align="left">A 301 redirect is a tool available at your disposal as a webmaster that allows you to manage your indexed pages within the major search engines including Google.</p> <p align="left">Let me give you an example:</p> <p align="left">1- You have decided to change your url structure by removing the file extensions such as ".php", ".html" etc... and y... <a href="http://www.omarkattan.com/2007/07/02/permanent-301-redirects-managing-the-google-index/">Read more..</a> </article> <article> <h1>Structure of an HTML page</h1> <p>Omar Kattan — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 18:45:49 +0000</p> <a href="http://www.omarkattan.com/2007/07/01/structure-of-an-html-page/" alt="Structure of an HTML page"></a><p align="left">The basic structure of an HTML document according to <a href="http://www,w3.org" title="official w3 site">W3C </a>is as follows:</p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.2">HTML version information</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.3">The HTML element</a></p> <p align="left"><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.4">The document head</a></p> <p align="left"> <a href="http://www.omarkattan.com/2007/07/01/structure-of-an-html-page/">Read more..</a> </article> <article> <h1>To Validate or not to Validate</h1> <p>Omar Kattan — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 19:27:10 +0000</p> <a href="http://www.omarkattan.com/2007/06/24/to-validate-or-not-to-validate/" alt="To Validate or not to Validate"></a><a href="http://omarkattan.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/google-validation.gif" title="google w3c validation results"></a>To Validate or not to Validate...That is the question. Does your HTML code validate? ... But first, do you know what valid HTML means? Let me start by explaining what Valid HTML means. <a href="http://omarkattan.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/google-validation.gif" title="google w3c validation results"> <a href="http://www.omarkattan.com/2007/06/24/to-validate-or-not-to-validate/">Read more..</a> </article> </main></body></html>