HTMList.com, A Web Development Blog by Synapse Studios

As you may or may not know, when creating a Google Ad for insertion in their AdWords or AdSense network, (the ads that appear beneath search results or alongside 3rd party content, respectively) you can embed the relevant keyword that triggered your ad into the ad copy itself. This is pretty useful for creating a single ad template and applying it across multiple keywords while still maintaining relevance.

For example: If you were creating an ad for selling shoes, you might use shoes, nike, adidas, reebok as your keywords. The ad copy might read:
Buy cheap shoes!
But it’d be much more compelling if it parroted back my search term to me:
Buy cheap Nike shoes!

Learn how to make this happen in your campaigns, after the jump. Or learn about our AdWords Campaign Management services right now.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

Tagged with: adsense, adwords, dynamic keywords, google, google adwords, keywords, optimization, seo

Posted in: Development

The development for open source software is strong and growing. Open source software is software in which the source code is publicly available for examination or contribution. If you talk to a typical person or business, you’ll usually find that their computers are all running Windows and have Microsoft Office installed. Some may even have more expensive software installed like the Adobe Creative Suite applications. By buying and using such high-priced software, it is easy to shell out two or three times as much money on software than on the computer itself. With many capable alternatives, there is a lot of money to be saved by utilizing free and open source software.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

Tagged with: eclipse, extension, firefox, gmail, google, mozilla, open source, projects, software

Posted in: Cool Stuff, How To

The Interweb is a wonderful place to host complex web applications as long as you’re tethered to it by Cat5 and an ISP that has your back (Communism works out in this scenario as well). But that’s not the world we live in, and in all other cases using web applications from mobile platforms can be a new circle of Dante’s Inferno below that ice one.

The trouble with web applications on mobile platforms is two fold. First, displaying data for mobile devices is a problem in and of itself, for which I will say nothing more about in this article. Imagine users with laptops and tablet-PCs. The second and more interesting problem revolves around maintaining state and managing client server interactions in an environment where spotty network coverage and ambient radio noise are totally messing with your stuff.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

Tagged with: ajax, javascript, projects, sessions, state

Posted in: Design, Development, How To

As the guys around the office are well aware, I tend to obsess over minor details in our code. Whether it be fixing code formatting to be tabbed properly or renaming variables to better fit naming conventions of a project, the developers hate when I meddle in the codebase. Is it my fault that sometimes I miss a few when I go through and rename variables, functions, methods, etc? Clearly, no. The joys of being the boss.

But what I really want to discuss is something I don’t consider so minor, complying with web standards. Most times when I am doing web development I prefer to go with the HTML 4.01 strict doctype. We try to observe strict standards wherever we can, and they have helped us to avoid patterns of behavior that are more prone to errors. We make sure that notices and E_STRICT are enabled on the PHP side. While developing, our templating system is set to validate our markup against its doctype in a very angry way that we both love and hate. The added benefits of sticking so closely to the standards is that you can pick up errors through malformed output that browsers obfuscate, and you can achieve a greatest amount of compatibility between browsers. As any good website designer knows, creating web pages that render the same in every browser can be a royal pain (thanks Microsoft).

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Tagged with: ajax, html, standards, strict, w3c, wordpress, xhtml, xml

Posted in: Design, Rants

We’ve decided to get a little serious about this and brand our blog under the awesome HTMList.com domain. I know, you’re jealous, right? We’ll be changing some design elements to reflect the shift in real estate soon but get a head start and subscribe already using the nifty dropdown on the left. You can add us to iGoogle, Google Reader or about two dozen other subscription aggregation services you’ve never heard of.

In the mean time, expect more posts on bleeding edge web development concepts, quick and easy how-tos and the nitty gritty into the languages and tools we use every day. We’re going to be attacking things across the spectrum skill-level wise so there should be something for everyone. And yes, we’ll be covering nearly everything web dev—far more than “just” HTML.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged with: html, htmlist, htmlist.com, relocated, web development

Posted in: Announcements

Today, I’ll be reviewing php|architect’s Guide to Programming Magento by Mark Kimsal. Magento is a relatively new open-source e-commerce application written in PHP with a MySQL back. All in all, the Magento package is an impressive application with great administrative features and a flashy user interface. But under the hood, Magento is a complicated piece of machinery. At the very least, it’s definitely not for the faint of heart. So in order to navigate this maze of XML layout files, multiple template and style directories and the EAV database schema, we purchased Mark Kimsal’s Magento programming book. Find out what we thought of it, after the jump.

At first glance of the index, I got warm fuzzies all over. File hierarchy layout, EAV schema and custom module development…who wouldn’t feel a little happy? However, I’m not really the type of person to give accolades unless something is absolutely stellar. As such, this post will primarily be about the shortcomings of the book.

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Popularity: 22% [?]

Tagged with: book review, books, documentation, e-commerce, magento, php-architect, Reviews

Posted in: Development, Reviews

[Editor's Note: This post was authored originally in 2006. Edgar will be writing an update shortly, but some things have definitely changed in that time.]
As a web developer, I’m constantly having to deal with zip codes, with almost terrifyingly frequency. These experiences no longer leave me in cold sweat; instead, I’ve warmed to the concept as it’s nice to be able to validate someone’s zip code based on the city and state they entered. (Or to autopopulate their city and state based on a zip code.) This can be a major headache saver if you’re doing bulk or CASS-certified mailings as the cost increases for each unverified address. Ensuring the accuracy of your data at the data entry point is always a good idea and is a relatively simple endeavor. Follow us after the jump for a look into what can be done about zips.

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Popularity: 14% [?]

Tagged with: census, coordinates, geocoding, GIS, great circle distance, latitude, longitude, mysql, openGIS, postal codes, r-tree, web development, zip codes

Posted in: Development, How To

Coders like to code; coders don’t like to write. It’s no secret that thorough and approachable documentation is a rarity in the coding world. Despite its necessity for the adoptability of a given software package, finding good documentation is notoriously difficult. I’ve seen “documentation” consist of a simple phpDocumentor run. To the folks at Magento: this is NOT DOCUMENTATION!!! It’s merely is an incomplete reference guide!

Maybe it’s because I’m not the greatest coder this side of the Mississippi, or perhaps because I actually have an interest in writing English, but I, for one, like to write documentation. In past projects, I have begged bosses and project managers to allocate time for me to document the code that I have written (every time I was denied…by the way). [Not the case here, for the record. We love documentation and Brandon's new. He'll come to see that. :-) —Ed] Good documentation, whether for internal applications or publicly available code bases is nearly as important as the code itself. Here’s why, after the jump.

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Popularity: 11% [?]

Tagged with: adoption, best practices, code, comments, documentation, knowledge, legacy, phpdocumentor, projects

Posted in: Development, How To, Rants

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to quickly and easily use single images and a bit of crafty CSS to create easy image rollovers. You can also use this technique to simplify browser caching of your images by storing multiple images in a single “meta image”, so to speak. (There are some reasons not to do this, though.)

I don’t know if the creators of CSS were thinking of sprites (more on that later) when they thought of the background-position property [Never doubt the range of "what if" thoughts of those who created CSS—Ed] but thanks to many innovative CSS users, we have an excellent way to reduce the load times of our pages. Check it out, after the break.

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Popularity: 68% [?]

Tagged with: background-image, button rollovers, css, javascript, load time, optimization, sprites

Posted in: Design, How To

GigaOM caught up with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos at the D6 conference this week. A lot of people on Wall Street have been struggling to make the somewhat obvious connection between Amazon as a retailer and Amazon as a web service provider. The background to the concept is really pretty self-evident: Amazon needed to develop amazing tools for their own internal scalability and data management needs and in doing so, determined they could scale those tools, make them available to developers for their own applications and commoditize the marketplace. So they did, as we describe after the jump.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged with: amazon web services, amazon.com, aws, ec2, gigaom, ilike, jeff bezos, ommalik, s3, scalability

Posted in: Tech News