Every time you send a text, check a webpage or post a status update, you are using open source software. The Internet is made of open source. But have you ever created any yourself? If you’re a pre-university student between 13 and 17 years old, now you can—and win prizes along the way. Our Google Code-in contest starts this coming Monday, November 21, and you can sign up now. During the contest, which lasts for 57 days, participants can work on cool online tasks for 18 different open source organizations…

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Your holiday merchandising is set, your developers are in a deep code freeze and all your marketing campaign creative is in. Your sales are already picking up, is it too late to tweak your website for maximum conversions this season? No!

Here are 7 eleventh hour tactics you can use to squeeze the most dollars out of your holiday traffic this year.

1. Optimize for speed

Site performance matters…

From tagging a post with your location, to checking in to a restaurant, to simply finding out where you are, location-based services have become some of the most popular features of today’s Internet. One of the key ways technology companies are able to determine a location for these services is through a location database, which matches publicly broadcast information about local wireless networks with their approximate geographic location…

As Web developers, we have an affinity for developing with JavaScript. Whatever the language used in the back end, JavaScript and the browser are the primary language-platform combination available at the user’s end. It has many uses, ranging from silly to experience-enhancing…

Contrary to what you may read, peppering your form with nice buttons, color and typography and plenty of jQuery plugins will not make it usable. Indeed, in doing so, you would be addressing (in an unstructured way) only one third of what constitutes form usability…

Designers hold CSS close to their hearts. It’s just code, but it is also what makes our carefully crafted designs come to life. Thoughtful CSS is CSS that respects our designs, that is handcrafted with precision. The common conception among Web designers is that a good style sheet is created by hand, each curly bracket meticulously placed, each vendor prefix typed in manually…

The November edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, frameworks, some JavaScript tools and resources, some great project management tools, and a number of great new fonts.

Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.

As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments…

Frequently, when I discuss CSS3 with other developers, the issue of stubborn clients comes up. They tell me that even though they personally don’t think a website should look the same in all browsers and they’re eager to try all of these new techniques, their clients insist that their website should look the same, so the developers are stuck with the same Web development techniques that we used five to ten years ago…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Google Can Now Execute AJAX & JavaScript For Indexing

  This morning we reported that the comments on Facebook are being indexed by Google. Google’s Matt Cutts just confirmed on Twitter that Google is now able to “execute AJAX/JS to index some dynamic comments…

Google is displaying some interesting behavior and is indexing Facebook comments even though they are behind a javascript loaded iframe.

The comments don’t appear in the text only cache but are showing up when you search for strings of text from the comments.

I’ve been searching for a few comments from techcrunch and they are not ranking very well. Certainly not as well as I would expect for such a powerful site…

We are currently hiring for a few SEO &  digital jobs in Leeds including a PHP developer. The job advert is below – CV’s to careers@branded3.com (no agencies).

Branded3 is an award-winning digital and SEO agency, working alongside worldwide brands and companies to deliver innovative digital solutions. We’re always on the lookout for experienced and skilled digital experts to add to our growing team; and we’re currently on the search for a talented PHP Developer…

Before we start, I’d like to pose a question: when was the last time you asked someone to review your code? Reviewing code is possibly the single best technique to improve the overall quality of your solutions, and if you’re not actively taking advantage of it, then you’re missing out on identifying bugs and hearing suggestions that could make your code better…

Very frequently in Web development (and programming in general), you need to store a long list of boolean values (yes/no, true/false, checked/unchecked… you get the idea) into something that accepts only strings. Maybe it’s because you want to store them in localStorage or in a cookie, or send them through the body of an HTTP request…

(Cross-posted on the Google Code blog)

As digital designers, we often think about how to translate traditional media into a virtual space. Recently, we thought about the bookcase. What would it look like if it was designed to hold digital books?

A digital interface needs to be familiar enough to be intuitive, while simultaneously taking advantage of the lack of constraints in a virtual space. In this case, we imagined something that looks like the shelves in your living room, but is also capable of showcasing the huge number of titles available online—many more than fit on a traditional shelf…

In this article, we’ll cover how to separate the view of your PHP application from its other components. We’ll look at why using such an architecture is useful and what tools we can use to accomplish this. Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. Learn some basic MVC concepts,
2. Review some popular templating libraries,
3. Play around with a small custom-made view class…

For some this is already old news but in case you haven’t heard, the Google Page Speed performance testing tool is officially out of Google Labs and in your hands!

Just type in any URL and Google will return a report with an Overview (complete with a percentage score) and high, medium and low priority action items:

Clicking on any item in the menu takes you to more detail:

For example, Piperlime’s home page has a bit of Javascript to minify…

We aspire to build great products that really change people’s lives, products they use two or three times a day. To succeed you need real focus and thought—thought about what you work on and, just as important, what you don’t work on. It’s why we recently decided to shut down some products, and turn others into features of existing products.

Here’s the latest update on what’s happening:

• Code Search, which was designed to help people search for open source code all over the web, will be shut down along with the Code Search API on January 15, 2012…

If you’ve spent any time on the internet chances are you’ve seen silly, funny, or just plain insane custom 404 error pages. However this article isn’t about creating one of those types of custom 404 pages, this is about creating a better 404 page that is not only helpful to your users, but solves technical problems you might not even know you had.

Make Your 404 Page Informative

Technically a 404 is an “invisible” code that is sent by your webserver to the computer or search engine that requests your page, and it tells them the page they were looking for isn’t there…

Imagine you’re playing the latest hash-tag game on Twitter when you see this friendly tweet:

You might want to check your #WP site. It includes two copies of jQuery. Nothing’s broken, but loading time will be slower.

You check your source code, and sure enough you see this:

<script src=”/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery…

The October edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, boilerplates, some JavaScript tools and resources, useful documents for working with clients, and a number of great new fonts.

Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.

As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments…

I occasionally write about implementing design patterns in JavaScript. They’re an excellent way of building upon proven approaches to solving common development problems, and I think there’s a lot of benefit to using them. But while well-known JavaScript patterns are useful, another side of development could benefit from its own set of design patterns: jQuery plugins…

I’m looking for feature sponsors to help cover the programming costs of a new WP plugin I’ve been working on. It’s not a competitor to All In One SEO Pack or Yoast’s WP SEO, but provides new functionality that so far hasn’t existed. It will be given away free to the web community once completed.

Read on for details on the plugin.

To sponsor, contact me…

There are two simple ways of telling Google and the other search engines where your business is located via your website. One is to create a KML file and an attendant geo-sitemap. The other is to provide your full business contact information in rich snippet format on the site. Now there is a way to easily do both with one simple creation tool from Michael Borgelt of 51Blocks.

From a single input of your basic NAP + web information, the tool creates a kml file, a geo-sitemap file pointing Google to the KML file and an HTML code snippet in the new schema…

WordPress plugins are PHP scripts that alter your website. The changes could be anything from the simplest tweak in the header to a more drastic makeover (such as changing how log-ins work, triggering emails to be sent, and much more).

Whereas themes modify the look of your website, plugins change how it functions…

If you’re a freelance designer, or you work for another company, you got there not because you love business, but because you’re a designer at heart. The business side of things came as a necessary evil, but you really love nothing more than to doodle all day, mess around in photoshop, or bang out semantic code. There are a lot of traits of being a good designer which are counter-intuitive to being a good business person…

Local development refers to the process of building a website or Web application from the comfort of a virtual server, and not needing to be connected to the Internet in order to run PHP and MySQL or even to test a contact form. One of the most annoying parts of development, at least for me, is the constant cycle of edit, save, upload and refresh, which, depending on bandwidth and traffic, can turn a menial task into a nightmare…

Google Search likes simple, easy-to-crawl websites. You like dynamic websites that show off your work and that really pop. But search engines can’t run your JavaScript. That cool AJAX routine that loads your content is hurting your SEO.

Google’s robots parse HTML with ease; they can pull apart Word documents, PDFs and even images from the far corners of your website…

I read a novel not long ago, Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge, that suggested that in the future one of the most popular technology positions would be that of software archeologist, with development and programming skills capable of digging through many lines of code to decipher where they originated and how they might work [...]…

Reports have been coming in about flakiness in the verification process. Optilocal reported earlier in the week issues with service area and he also noted several users having reported temporary issues with phone verification which Google reports is fixed(Image from Michael Borgeit of 51Blocks.com), frequent system errors (We’re sorry but we are unable to server your request)…