EfficientCode.Net

Breaking into many IT related fields can be a daunting task. Luckily, this industry isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

I was lucky enough to get into the field at a young age due to sheer perseverance, determination, and a lot of research.

Here are a few general guidelines to get you started. These mainly pertain to software development, but can translate easily into other fields.

1. Read, read, and read some more.

You should always be expanding upon your library of technical books. Employers can tell if you’re hungry for knowledge, and in this field, you always have to be learning new technologies, methodologies, concepts, and more. For software engineering, this could mean learning new design patters, frameworks, and of course, new languages.

2. Code, code, and code some more.

In order to be a good coder, you have to put down some serious time into plugging away some code. Reading all of those books will help, but they won’t teach you much if you don’t put them into practice. Pick projects that interest you. Make a CMS for a topic you enjoy. Reinvent the wheel if it interests you. Or, make that wheel shinier and more efficient. As your knowledge base grows, revisit your old projects and improve upon them.

3. Participate in your field’s community.

Participate in forums, blogs, and mailing lists. Ask questions, answer questions. One of my personal, most effective learning methods is to actually teach. One great aspect of forums and mailing lists is that you may answer a question you believe to be trivial, only to find out from a more experienced individual that there is a more efficient way of accomplishing said task. Be humble, and don’t be afraid to ask questions. We all had to start somewhere, and a college education can only teach you so much. In my personal opinion, higher education should teach you how to learn, not just what to learn.

4. Build your portfolio.

Nothing says more about your work ethic than working while not getting paid (your offtime).. and enjoying it! Keep building up your personal projects to a point where you are so proud of them, you can’t help but include them on your resume. Take up some contract gigs. Do some charity work. Build a website for that certain friend/relative that keeps bugging you. Make it clean, and do it right. And above all, if you’re making websites, use a CMS so that your users can update the content themselves. You don’t want to keep getting phone calls and e-mails asking you to make a header bold, or remove/add a link every week, do you?

5. Get the right tools for the job.
Sure, you might impress your friends by hacking out some nasty C++ code in notepad, but you’re not going to impress your future employer. Get your hands on one of the free editors out there that will boost your productivity exponentially, such as emacs or vim. As an engineer you don’t want to reinvent the wheel (except in the case of point 2 above), so use any tools available that will make your life, and your peers, easier.

5. Venture outside of your realm of knowledge.

With all that coding and researching, you will need to balance your life. While employers need someone with a strong work ethic and elite engineering skills, they also need someone that can communicate effectively and work in a team. Having some decent social skills can give you a leg up when it comes time to go from junior developer to senior software engineer, or a leadership position. You won’t gain these skills hacking away at a keyboard all night, they are cultivated outside of your command prompt.

I’ve recently been doing some blogging work for the social networking site veggiemeet.com (a vegeterian/ vegan social networking site) and came across an interesting problem.

I decided that when posting a blog, it would be nice to give the blogger a WYSIWYG editor to help with the general aesthetics of the blog. This would allow non-tech users to easily insert images, youTube videos, etc. All without having to know a markup language.

However, when this blog shows up on the preview blogs page ( see : http://www.veggiemeet.com/blogs/ ) we really don’t want images or funky formatting to throw off the general layout. We could do a html to utf8 conversion, but that would leave the html tags in plain text, which is not pretty.

Enter : strip_tags! By using this php function, we can strip all of the html tags from the post, and leave a nice, crisp text preview for the homepage. All without modifying any of the actuall blogger’s code.

Here is the syntax:

By using this tag, we can use the “$allowable_tags” variable to allow certain attributes that we deem appropriate. Such as bold, italics, and other basic properties, leaving our precious home page design intact.

The strip tags function could also be cleverly used for security purposes, by not allowing bloggers to insert malicious html code into their blog.

For more information on this function, please visit :

http://us.php.net/manual/en/function.strip-tags.php

CakePHP has recently received an update, as well as a new tutorial for creating a dynamic online catalogue.

CakePHP is “a stable production-ready, rapid-development aid for building Web sites in PHP.”

CakePHP.org defines their (free) product as, “rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.”

Having used this product, I can safely say that it is a very useful tool for creating dynamic sites from the ground up. The tutorials are clear and useful, and the framework is supported by IBM.

Here are some useful links to get you started:

Cook Up Website Fast with CakePHP

CakePHP home.

IBM’s articles on CakePHP

Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (aka S.E.M. & S.E.O.) are two similar techniques that are often confused. This article gives a few descriptions of each, with the intent to define their similarities and differences.

Search Engine Optimization refers to the practice of optimizing a site to be read and indexed by a search engine in the most efficient way. It is a subset of SEM, which will be covered later in this article. SEO includes such techniques as:

1. Removing content and design features that are not useful to search engines. Using frames, ajax, flash, and other technologies have their uses, but cannot be read properly by search engines. When optimizing a site, the optimizer will often go in and replace these features with search engine features, such as CSS.

2. Modify pages to reflect proper keywords. This helps in letting the search engine know what your page is all about. Having proper use of keywords in your content, as well as titles and meta tags are an important consideration.

Search Engine Marketing is a much broader category, that refers to increasing your marketing campaign by utilizing search engines. The goal is increase quality and unique traffic to your site by utilizing search engine technology.

Some examples of S.E.M. would include:

1. Paid Placement Ads – In its simplest form, a webmaster simply pays another site to display your ads.

2. Contextual Advertising – Ad networks such as Adense scrape your content, to determine which sites would be most relevant to advertise on.

3. Paid Search Inclusion – By simply paying a nominal fee, you can have your website instantly indexed into a search engine. The availability of this feature is limited to certain search engines, and there is no guarantee of how well your site will be indexed. You are simply paying the site to take the time to index your page. Note that some search engines provide this feature for free.

Looking to drive more traffic to your blog? SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) is an internet marketing strategy. Many SEO’s can argue about the various techniques and their effectiveness. This article is designed to give you some tips on getting your blog higher search ratings and traffic, through some various methods you may not have thought of.  Search engines are constantly evolving their search algorithms,  so you have to stay with the technology to maximize your outreach.

1. Use CSS!

Cascading Style Sheets are a beautiful thing. They have many uses, but SEO is one of the most important. Properly utilizing CSS lets you  move your content around, having your main content at the top of your html file. This allows search engines to quickly crawl your site, with all of your content at the top of their priority. I can’t stress the use of CSS enough – if you’re not using it, you’re crippling your SEO. For more information on cascading style sheets, check out  CSS and SEO.

2. Content is King.

Blogging SEO is different from static web site SEO. Having relevant, useful information available for your visitors will drive a lot of traffic your way. Search engines take notice how often you update your site. Make sure you use tags and categories for every blog. Users will come to know about how often you update your site. If you update your site regularly, you will get regular visits, which means frequent traffic.

3. Use keywords in your blog titles and URLS’s.

Specifically, use permalinks. By using permalinks, you can make your blogs internet address contain your blog’s title. If you look at the top of this article, you will notice the title of the blog is in your address bar. Search engines add credibility to your page if your website address has keywords that were included in your search. Wordpress has an option to do this out of the box – see : Using Permalinks.

4. Provide RSS feeds.

Giving your audience notifications of new content is a valuable tool. You may not realize that search engines take note of this as well. Google sees it this way – the more subscribers you have to your site, the more credible your site is to have credible information. Provide a nice, visible option on your site for easy subscription. I would also highly recommend registering your blog on sites such as Feedburner, Technorati, and Ping-o-Matic!.

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In this Photoshop tutorial, we’ll go through three easy steps to add a nice glossy look to your images. This is a common effect in web design, and takes little time to accomplish. Best of all, the image or text can be manipulated after the effects have been placed, allowing a great degree of freedom.

Here are some examples of what can be achieved using this effect:

First, use the Type Tool to create some text. The color, size, and text can all be changed after the effects have been applied, so you don’t have to commit to any style right now, you will be able to go back and change the font and color after the effects have been applied. For now, use a color similar to mine for demonstration purposes (#2033ab).

Now we will apply some fancy, yet simple effects to the text.

Go to : Layer -> Layer Style -> Blending Options

1. First, we will add a bevel and emboss to the text.  Go to the Bevel and Emboss menu and adjust your settings to look like this:

Take note of the Highlight Colors, Shadow Mode, and Depth Percentage.

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