Adventures in IT

The supposedly standard method of retrieving a handset's capability is through UAPROF (see UAPROF on Wikipedia). Very simply put a mobile phone should send through identifying information when it retrieves a website. However, UAPROF is entirely voluntary and there are several problems associated with relying on it. Along comes WURFL , which touts itself as a free option to consider when looking to identify the capabilities of your visitors browsers. There are of course paid options to help you identify mobile phones visiting your site (such as device atlas ), but why pay for a service when you can get it free? At first glance WURFL looked very promising. It has an active project on Sourceforge and a set of API's for PHP, JAVA, and others. One immediate problem I encountered was that the current release revision (1.1.r2) of the WURFL API is buggy. Well that's not fair for me to say actually- the API works perfectly, it's just the example code that doesn't work ...

Reciprocal links are touch and go for a few reasons. The reason that incoming links are good is that search engines think your site is worthwhile if humans are linking to it. In other words, if a webmaster reviews your content and links to it then your content must be good (thinks the search engine). So people actively started to try and build links, to make search engines think that their content is good. The only thing is that search engines hate it when you do things just to optimize your site for search engines. Optimize your site for users , while making it easy for search engines to see what it's about (this is where the bold , italics , page title and headings come in) Search engines see reciprocal links as a distortion. The webmaster is not linking to you because your content is good, they're only linking to you because they're getting something in return (a link to their site, or even money). If you have a page of links that link to sites that are linking to yo...

Dear Webmaster, First off, I want to demystify search engine optimization. I've read so many blogs and books by specialists and it seems that most SEO specialists are actually marketing themselves rather than dispensing the very core knowledge that is required. There is really only one page whose opinion I trust and that is the official Google Guidelines for Webmasters (find it here - http://www.google.com/support/ webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl= en&answer=35769 ). Make sure that you read this page and ask me any questions that will clarify your understanding of it. If anybody tells you to do something other than what is written on this page be very careful. Yes - there are "tricks" in SEO. But think about it - Google hires teams of incredibly clever people (read Matt Cutts academic profile if you don't believe me). What are the chances that Google is going to be tricked for very long? Very slim. And Google punishes sites that have tricked it in the past. So...

I've been working on a gateway system that will help a WASP to accept MMS requests and pass them on to the network for delivery to a mobile handset. For some reason the original designers of the gateway decided not to allow service consumers the ability to upload SMIL directly. Rather, an XML is POSTed to a webservice. The XML is then parsed into SMIL and handed to the network provider in a nice SOAP wrapper. Why is this a problem? Well it means that only the gateway only supports a subset of SMIL. So in order to make a slide look the way that our client wants it to look we have to modify the gateway code to allow text colours and backgrounds to change. Another problem I've had is that there seem to be very few SMIL tutorials online . When I'm learning a new language I usually pick up what I need by asking Google. Unfortunately even the mighty search engine draws a blank, provides hopelessly outdated pages, or documents like the technical specifications which I don...