Tag Archives: tip

What is the Quality of your Sitemap.xml file?

by Posted in SEO
 

How important is it to have an accurate, up-to-date sitemap.xml file for search engines?

According to Bing, it is very important.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday at SEOmoz, Duane Forrester of Bing unveiled the idea that Bing has a quality threshold for the sitemap.xml file that a website submits. Duane states that Bing only wants to see “end state URLs” in the sitemap.xml. This declaration provides some insight to those keeping up on their sitemap.xml file.

Do not include URLs of the following nature:url address bar

  • No 404, 302, 301, etc.
  • No rel=”canonical”

This solidifies the importance for your sitemap.xml to be up-to-date and accurate with URL inclusion. Duane didn’t unfold that specifics of what happens to websites with “dirty” sitemap.xml files. He only indicates that a “dirty” sitemap.xml does impact how Bing views your website.

Using jQuery: Get Current Year

by Posted in Code
 

Using jQuery to output the current year is a useful substitute when your website pages are done in HTML and not with server side languages like PHP or ASP. The following code demonstrates how to print the current year in HTML using jQuery.

First, you will need to reference a jQuery library in the <head> of your HTML. You can do this one of two ways:

  • Link directly to the jQuery library on the jQuery code site
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
  • Download a version of jQuery from the jQuery site (http://jquery.com/) and relatively link to it from within your site
<script src="/script/jquery-1.4.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

With the jQuery library referenced you can now pull the current year and push it to an HTML element using some jQuery syntax. The below JavaScript grabs the current year and pushes the value to the “text” of the HTML element with the ID of “year”.

<script type="text/javascript">
  var currentYear = (new Date).getFullYear();
  $(document).ready(function() {
  $("#year").text( (new Date).getFullYear() );
  });
</script>

Now we create the HTML element to receive the year value:

<p>Copyright <span id="year">TEXT</span> Company Name - All Rights Reserved.</p>

With this code in place, the year will be pushed to the TEXT position of the “year” span tag when the DOM is ready. This functionality is useful for elements such as copyright dates or other date representations that need to stay current.

Create a Minimum Height with CSS

by Posted in Code
 

As developers, we all battle the cross browser struggle.  What works in Internet Explorer may not work in Firefox. Sometimes what works in IE 7 doesn’t work in IE 6.  Little nuances like that appear all of the time in browser testing.

One such issue is setting a min-height with CSS.  Firefox supports this CSS property but Internet Explorer does not.  To overcome the issue in IE you need to modify your min-height property in the CSS syntax.

CSSselector {
min-height:100px;
height:auto !important;
height:100px;
}

Utilizing this CSS technique to establish a min-height does not require you to include empty div elements into your HTML; therefore, keeping your HTML clean and your CSS for presentation.