Over at blog.bug.gd they had an interesting article. They state that Google omits some HTML in order to have their page be fast, and thus a better user experience. Some of the tags that the article points out are the closing tags for the body of the document, and the closing HTML tags. These are two tags which W3C documents stated can be omitted in HTML 4.01. The article goes on to explain that by not including certain tags can save 14 bytes or so per request for more complex pages. If we think about how many searches are performed on Google each day, we can only imagine how much bandwidth they are saving, and the money they are saving also. Google has even put together a portal where developers can talk with each other about how to create faster web pages.
Google’s Captcha Theory
Captchas are currently the best way to protect sites from bots. If you have signed up for any site, or filled out any form on the web recently, you most likely ran into a captcha. For those who don’t know what a captcha is, here is a brief explaination of what they are. Captchas are visual parts of a web site, which determine if the user is a human or a bot. A basic captcha will ask a simple question, like what is 3 + 5. Most of the time, a captcha will contain numbers, letters, or even words either on a background which makes the characters hard to read or the characters are distored. The user must then put in the correct charcters or phrase in order for the script to determine if the user is a human or a bot. Other captchas will ask the user to compare images, and ask a question based on those images. These types of captchas may ask that you pick out the image of a cat, when all the images but one are of dogs.
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PHP Pocket Reference and PHP Hacks Book Reviews
This is something that we haven’t done on the site in a while, so I thought we would do it again. A book review, and today we are going to be reviewing two books. Both are from O’Reilly, who if you have been a programmer for a while, is very popular for their programming based book series. The title’s of the books we are going to be looking at today are PHP Pocket Reference by Rasmus Lerdorf, and PHP Hacks by Jack D. Herrington.
Google Friend Connect
Google has became famous for their APIs that they create. There are APIs for everything, Google Maps, Google Search, the famous Google Adsense, and even Picasa has APIs. Google recently released Google Friend Connect.
