WebMastersLoom

by Steven Vaughan-Nichols

As you may know, Google is close to making a deal with Dell in which the search giant will get to preinstall its software package on Dell PCs. What you may not know is that Google may be spending a billion dollars over three years for the privilege.

For cash-rich Google, it’s a cheap price to pay to cut Microsoft off at the knees by getting pride of place on about 33 percent on all new U.S. desktops.

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POOR website usability is the biggest frustration for online shoppers, according to new research.

In a poll of online shoppers, Manchester-based fulfilment and distance selling company Zendor found that a third of respondents nominate poor website usability as their single biggest frustration when shopping on the Internet.

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by Jim Rapoza

What is RSS, and why should you be interested in it?

You should care about RSS if a) you’re interested in regularly updated newsfeeds from around the Web a la the old PointCast; b) you’d like to add syndicated content from news sites and blogs to your Web site; or c) you want to make it possible for sites to syndicate your content—thus driving more traffic your way—and for visitors to see updated headlines in a newsreader.

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by Melissa Campanelli

ONLINE RETAILERS beware: Click fraud–which occurs in pay-per-click online advertising and involves artificially inflating traffic statistics–may be a larger problem than you think.

Most PPC search engines have systems in place that identify click-fraud patterns and don’t charge the advertiser for the fraudulent clicks. Google, for example, can generally detect rapid, successive clicking from the same person or IP address. However, individuals involved in click fraud today are using more advanced cloaking technologies that may circumvent these preventive systems.

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by Jeff Cogswell

Sometimes, when developing Web applications with ASP.NET, you encounter a problem like this. You have a small amount of data that rarely changes; you need that data again and again throughout the life of the application; and further, such data is shared among users accessing your application.

For example, you might have an online sales application that serves a limited region. Your application is aware of 50 different zip codes. For each zip code, you might associate the phone number of the sales office serving that zip code. This data might be used in various places in your application, including as a datasource for some Web server controls.

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by Larry J. Seltzer

You don’t have to surf the Web very long before running into pages written in PHP (which officially stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor), an open-source Web scripting language. According to Netcraft’s February 2001 survey of Web servers (www.netcraft.com), PHP is running on over five and a half million domains. Shop for Web-hosting services and you’ll find they almost all offer PHP.

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by Mark Gibbs

GEARHEAD INSIDE THE NETWORK MACHINE

We’ve always loved those smartalecky names that programmers give to their applications. In particular, we rejoice in the recursive names such as Pine and PHP Pine used to be one of the most widely used e-mail packages for Unix and came after another e-mail program called Elm. PINE is a recursive acronym that stands for “Pine Is Not Elm” (yes, you have to be a geek to find this stuff funny).

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