Website development

The only way I have found to fix weird characters (eg ampersands "&") appearing in the aggregator feed is to hack Drupal as follows (refer this):

if ( !function_exists('htmlspecialchars_decode') )
{
function htmlspecialchars_decode($text)
{
return strtr($text, array_flip(get_html_translation_table(HTML_SPECIALCHARS)));
}
}

// Resolve the item's title. If no title is found, we use up to 40
// characters of the description ending at a word boundary but not
// splitting potential entities.
if (!empty($item['TITLE'])) {
$title = htmlspecialchars_decode($item['TITLE'], ENT_QUOTES);
}

I don't have any experience submitting patches, when I know how to do it I will submit it as a patch.

When you are writing content for a web blog or website, you must break up the text.  When readers are confronted by many paragraphs of text, they subconsciously are "scared off" and will back away from reading it all.

You can use images, bullet points and white space to defeat the "big blob of text" look. It will make a difference.

What it means

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the industry that "optimises" your website to make it appear as high as possible on the Google search listing.

One of the techniques that SEO companies use is to pay other sites to link to yours.

How to do it - the best and real way

The best way to increase your ranking in Google is to have:

• good content
• regularly updated content (like a blog)
• the basics correct (eg page titles)

Methods of "tricking" the Google system may work in the short term, however Google are constantly tuning their ranking system.

Just to repeat, the most important thing that you should do is have good real content, updated frequently.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that simpler is better. Too many times in technology the "frills" are put before the real functionality.
The most popular site on the internet is Google, and the plain Google site is the most boring. This is because of its functionality and utility.

If you include a small amount of code in each web page you want to track, Google will track the hits and users that come to your web pages. It is quite easy to set up. The best and easiest way is to use the drupal module.

Relative fonts Don't use absolute font sizes! Sometimes people need to increase the font size for readability. Don't forget that there are quite a lot of people with impaired sight. I sometimes like to have the font a bit larger. To see how to implement relative fonts (it's quite easy) click here.

Links:

• Using Drupal
• Color schemerHere is a really cool tool to get a matching set of web colours for your web site development.