Even better speed

A while back, I posted my SpeedTest.net results, of 6706 kbps download and 503 kbps upload.

Here’s a NEW SpeedTest.net result:

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PageRank at 0? Huge PR drop!

This seems surreal. Dropping from PR3 to PR0 in a matter of hours isn’t something a webmaster expects. But that’s what has happened to Geekie.org and ALL of its subpages today (January 30, 2008); querying different datacenters return the same result — PageRank 0.

Strangely, this isn’t reflected in my Google Webmaster Tools dashboard, nor have I received any indication that my site has been banned from the Google index. As it stands, Geekie.org still shows up second for the search term “geekie” and almost all of my posts are available in Google Blog Search.

In such a case, one must ask, why?

According to several webmaster forums, a PageRank drop to 0 (zero, nil, nothing) for a site previously of high PageRank (such as PR5 or PR6) is indication of a Google PageRank update or change in the algorithm. Apparently, losing all of your accumulated Google PageRank is a normal part of such an update.

(Which means you have to lose it all before you can gain anything.)

Let’s hope that the loss is due to an update. If Geekie.org’s PR stays at 0, I’m going to be asking some serious questions: what have I done wrong?

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PHP coding shortcut: the ternary operator

Many of us coding or able to code in PHP often take the long route to do a simple task. Some completely “reinvent the wheel” with custom string handling functions. Others use complex while loops with simple tasks.

Most use the classic if… (then)… else… style conditional statement. Things such as the following:

<?php
if($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']=='/index.php') {
	echo('Hello World!');
} else {
	echo('This is some other page');
}
?>

Some may have moved beyond such rudimentary coding to blocks like the following:

<?php
$request_uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
switch($request_uri) {
	case '/index.php':
		echo('Hello World!');
		break;
	default:
		echo('This is some other page');
}
?>

Clearly, the second takes more work. Given something as simple as echo-ing a phrase like “Hello World!” or “This is some other page”, using the switch-case syntax simply doesn’t make sense. Even the if-else syntax is a bit overkill.

That’s why programmers and coders who perform simple tasks should use the ternary operator (available in PHP and JavaScript):

<?php
echo ($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']=='/index.php') ? 'Hello World!' : 'This is some other page';
?>

Simple, right? Right.

It follows the pattern of (expression 1) ? (expression 2) : (expression 3) where this statement evaluates to expression 2 if expression 1 returns TRUE and the statement will evaluate to expression 3 if expression 1 returns FALSE.

For more information, consult the PHP manual.

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Subscribe to our newsletter

Since early 2007, Geekie.org has remained dedicated to providing useful content about technology. We’d like to extend that now by offering a newsletter, and perhaps going into podcasting in the next while.

Our newsletter is now active, and we’d like to gain a few subscribers. You can go to the newsletter page at http://www.geekie.org/newsletter and subscribe, after which you can receive occasional mailings. (The page might not display properly in IE — I’m trying to fix that.) We will never send you SPAM, and your e-mail address will never be shared with a third party.

You can also opt to subscribe to our feed, to read the most recent posts easily and hassle-free.

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Free Polls Service

Easy-Poll.com has one of the easiest poll services I’ve ever tried. They have a wide selection of different poll styles, including designs for darker sites (like Geekie.org), colorful designs with bars indicating yes/no, and code that displays perfectly simple HTML.

It’s incredibly easy to produce any sort of one-question interactive poll, whether it’s for your blog, or if you’re making myspace polls. We’ve previously posted on our site a poll made on Easy-Poll.com that asks for user preference in terms of logos for PersonalLog, and the behaviour is a bit different from what I’ve previously tried. The designs may not be Web 2.0, but the functionality is there — vote on a poll and the results appear in a popup, so a visitor voting on a poll isn’t being taken away from the site.

When someone creates a poll, he or she can easily enter information such as the question, possible answers, and the category of the poll.

(Click on the image to enlarge.)

And the system generates a piece of HTML code that you can directly copy and paste to display the poll.

What concerns me is this code, for which there is a warning above the box telling me that my account will be deleted if I change this code. (I’m sure this is to keep the links there, but they should be clearer and allow customization to make the code valid XHTML.) If you click on the image above, you’ll see that (clearly) some parts have been highlighted and some parts have been censored. I did the erasing because I didn’t want to actually allow someone to put up the code for an existing poll I’ve published, and I’ve done the highlighting to point out a few things:

• Its HTML design could be improved by not using tables and using more CSS-based design
• It uses the border attribute for many tags, which should be replaced with CSS-based design
• It messily links back to Easy-Poll.com

While I’m certain these are some of the minor shortcomings of their code, these are not huge issues that decreases its value. In fact, Easy-Poll’s code is in fact hugely faster than ones from more complicated services like the one I used previously to survey users on CMS software preference. It’s a small piece of code, the JavaScript doesn’t take up much, and copying and pasting is all that’s needed — even on WordPress blogs that (normally) misinterpret code pasted into it.

Overall, Easy-Poll.com provides a valuable service (up to 99 polls of each type — multiple-choice and yes/no) that many webmasters can find useful. A quick registration process coupled with the fact that all of the data is managed on Easy-Poll.com makes it a valuable tool.

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Try PersonalLog

After several months of inactivity, we’ve finally reopened PersonalLog for free signups to the blog hosting service. Currently, we’re trying to use SPAM-preventing techniques such as a human verification question on the first-time blog signup and CAPTCHA on the login pages to minimize the amount of useless junk we get. (More than 130 blogs so far have been created by SPAM bots for no purpose.)

Try our blog hosting, and see how you like it. It offers similar features to an ordinary WordPress installation, except plugins and themes are centrally managed, and there’s no code or database to handle. Just leave the details to us.

Vote on a logo

Of the two logos below, which do you find more appealing? Vote using the form below. (I’ll blog about the poll service in the next post.)

	Which of the two logo styles do you prefer?
	The dark button
	The brighter button
free polls

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