Apparently there is a Flash Security Vulnerability deriving from the 'authplay.dll' in Adobe's Flash Player on Windows, Mac and Linux for both Adobe Reader and Acrobat v9.x. Basically, an unsuspecting victim may be lured to a site that contains malicious Flash code to either crash or compromise the integrity of the victims computer ... Hmmm.

A CERT spokesperson stated ...

The Adobe Flash browser plug-in is available for multiple Web browsers and operating systems, any of which could be affected ... An attacker could also create a PDF document that has an embedded SWF file to exploit the vulnerability. This vulnerability is being actively exploited.

According to Trusteer, Two weeks after the press release, approximately 80 percent of Trusteer's installed base of 2.5 million online banking users still haven't received the Flash update.

What To Do? Use Firefox with NoScript.

Here's just one more notch in the belt for Firefox, and a prime example of why using Giorgio Maone's NoScript plug-in for Firefox is a must have.

For more info on NoScript ... check out Maone's Rockin' Site, NoScript.net ...

If your still using I.E., That's a shame ...

That's it.

Florida SEO Says, "Dear JavaScript ... Will You Ever Forgive Me? "

In my last post ... I attempted to explain how pure JavaScript menus were not good for SEO. However, after reading how the message came across to some of my readers, I feel it's probably best if I add some clarification. Thanks to Dan Switzer at PengoWorks for pointing out that my post needed some explanation. What I mentioned regarded the usage of pure JavaScript menus -Not All- JavaScript menus. If my post confused anyone, I apologize. There are lot's of SEO friendly menus that incorporate both JavaScript and yet maintain good web design practices ... So, now let's take a look at a few that stuck out with me.

In my humble opinion, menus that use JavaScript to manipulate the DOM (Document Object Model) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to handle styling, maintain a good balance between usability and provide a dynamically appealing experience.

Okay ... So Show Me Some Cool Stuff Now

Before I show the following examples I want to point out the main factor that make these menus search engine friendly is the accessibility of the links to the robots. These menus do not rely on JavaScript to display the content either.

The first example here is from one of the most respected names in design ... A List Apart. Here Dave Shea provides an excellent detail on creating a menu implementing CSS Sprites with JQuery.

1. CSS Sprites2 - It's JavaScript Time

A List Apart
by: Dave Shea

Next, one of my favorite designers, Collis Ta'eed provides in exhaustive detail, everything required to create a very attractive and effective tabbed content area using CSS & JQuery ...

2. Slick Tabbed Content Area using CSS & JQuery

NetTuts
by: Collis Ta'eed

Soh Tanaka offers a very clean and attractive JQuery & CSS menu. Aside from issues with IE6's non-support of the :hover psuedo-class for elements other than anchor tags, this is a very good menu and degrades gracefully with JavaScript disabled.

3. Sexy Drop Down Menu w JQuery & CSS

Noupe
by: Soh Tanaka

Clark gives a solid example of how to create an animated drop down menu that also degrades well with JavaScript disabled - The key here is that the animation on the list elements is acceptable regardless of whether the visitor has JavaScript enabled.

4. Animated Drop Down Menu with jQuery

ClarkLab

Okay ... I'm not a great designer by any sense. But, when I created this site I decided I wanted a little DHTML action and of course promote good SEO techniques at the same time ... So, I used Adobe's Spry  Accordion Widget to build my right navigation ... It too degrades gracefully with JavaScript disabled - The menus tabs will simply open up if JavaScript is not activated.

5. SEO Compliant Spry Accordion Menu

by: Adobe Lab

There are many excellent examples out there ... I really just wanted to take a few minutes to clarify the difference between a pure JavaScript menu and a menu that uses JavaScript and CSS.

That's it.

SEO 101: Search Engine Robots Can't Follow Links in Pure JavaScript Menus

I've recently been receiving some interesting quotes for SEO services with Florida Search Engine Optimization. As part of the standard procedure I employ when reviewing a prospective client's site, I inform them that site architecture is very important and therefore must be taken into consideration. On several occassions I've suggested the removal of JavaScript based menus, and was met with a challenge. One of the prospective clients asked me why it was neccessary. So, I explained the mechanics of a crawler to him in some detail. The other prospective client wasn't all that trusting at first, so he decided to get a second opionion from another SEO before giving me the go ahead. I didn't have any problem with that ... I've been doing SEO for a while now and I've yet to find a client that accepted my opinion of a site review on blind faith regardless of the successful campaigns I've demonstrated.

SEO Experience Required - A Case for SEO Standardization?

What happened next really suprised me. I expected the need to debate my case with the prospective client that was not all that warm to me. However, I was actually opposed by both client's SEO's. Yes, that's correct. Both of the prospective client's SEO's were baffled as to why I suggested having text based menus. Oh yeah ... we SEO's tend to think they know everything ...

After receiving the suggestion for the menu removal, one of the SEO's mentioned to my client, "It's not important ... just make an XML sitemap so the robots can find you ... " I found that rather amusing. However, I found the other SEO's comment to be just as interesting as the first's. He simply stated that "He's even made Flash based sites rank on the first page ... " Thing is, the client requested a quote for services with me primarily due to the SEO's lack of effectiveness ... said SEO didn't so much as provide one case-in-point example - Pwned. So an experienced SEO is essentially stating that by providing an XML sitemap to the navigation of a site, serious issues arising from JavaScript based menus can be resolved. Okay - I don't think so ... But, let's see how accurate this is ... or isn't.

To Crawl or Not to Crawl? That Is ... Important.

A web site's internal link structure is very important when considering SEO. Almost any Decent SEO will attest to this. So why is it important? Because a web site is really nothing more than a group of pages linked together. Granted the linking relationships can become quite complex but it's really just a  Web of Links. When robots can't determine what is and isn't a link, they can't move from link A to B ... Link A was never realized.

To demonstrate ... Let's take a look at a site that employs JavaScript navigation and may not neccessarily require having highly crawlable links. I'm going to use Deluxe-Menu.com for this example - It's a very nice site that uses a JavaScript based menu, and does so with impunity - The site's entire theme is provided on the home page.

From the Eyes of a Spider - Where's the Web?

So what we see here is a screen shot of the site's navigation ... We can clearly see the links for Home, Product Info, Samples, Download, Purchase and Support in the menu. Simple enough. However, if we inspect the internal linking of the page through a text-only browser such as Lynx,  it also shows that there are no visible traces to these links. The screen shot below is from the SEO text browser over at domaintools.com which, I have quite a habit of using ...

So what are we're looking at here? This basically provides a detail of the elements a search engine robot would recognize when they visit a site. Blue signifies an anchor or link element. Red signifies images - for this example it isn't relevant to us whether those images are also links. The first link we see at the top of the page is for the site's logo, deluxe-menu.com. The next link we see in the document structure is for the site's sitemap which comes directly after the JavaScript menu. Notice how there are no links elements recognized by the text browser for the menu. A crawler would not identify this as a link either.

Okay, so I wouldn't expect someone in the C-Suite to be able to gauge the performance or effectiveness of a web site. But for an SEO? This should be first year  ... I find an unusually high amount of people claiming to be a "professional SEO" that don't know the first thing about web design, web development, Server Side programming or even HTML for that matter ...

In short ... This is old hat.

While I was hacking and cursing my way through a routine to convert RSS feeds in to HTML ... I had an idea. I thought, "Wow, maybe there's another way to do this ..." Converting RSS can be messy so I opted for a much easier and cleaner solution ... JSON. For those Ajax pros out there ... have a heart ... I'm definitely a nOOb at JSON ... I just wanted to share my experience because the introduction and experience was enlightening ... at least to me it was.

Before I go in to this, I am offering this obligatory warning. What I'm about to do may not be in compliance with Google's T.O.S. So, if you get yourself in a pickle with the big G ... It's on you. You've been warned.

What I wanted to do is create dynamic and fresh content for say ... Oh the news. That's a no brainer. Typically you could just grab some RSS feeds and embed them in your content. So, What if you wanted the HTML from say ... Google's news ... Hmmm? You could use a SOAP request to Google for the info ... But SOAP won't be supported by Google for much longer ... So, that's no good. That's where Google's RESTful JSON interface comes in. According to Google documentation for their AJAX Search API, The interface was created for developers that need to have access to Google's Search API in non-JavaScript environments. The docs provide the base URL's to retrieve results for several of their searchers. Here' s a list of all the types of searchers you can access remotely.

• Web Search: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web
• Local Search: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/local
• Video Search: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/video
• Blog Search: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/blogs
• News Search: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/news
• Book Search: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/books
• Image Search: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/images
• Patent Search: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/patent

So I decided to have my hand at grabbing some news ... Here we go ...

<!--- Create a Couple Vars for the Search Params ... ---> 

<cfset gQuery = #ReReplaceNoCase("ColdFusion","\s+","%20","ALL")#>

<cfset qRegion = #ReReplaceNoCase("Fort Lauderdale","\s+","%20","ALL")#>



<!--- Call Google's AJAX Service ---> 

<cfset gData = "http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/news?v=1.0&rsz=large&#qRegion#&q=#gQuery#">



<!--- Save the Result to a Var ---> 

<cfhttp

   url="#gData#"

   method="get"

   result="gDataResult">

</cfhttp>



<!--- Make the Data is JSON --->

<cfset gData = #SerializeJSON(gDataResult,false)#>



<!--- Clean up the Result Data with RegEx --->

<cfset gData = #REReplace(gDataResult.FileContent, 

      "^\s*[[:word:]]*\s*\(\s*","")#>

<cfset gData = #REReplace(gData, "\s*\)\s*$", "")#>



<!--- Make Sure We Have JSON ... --->

<cfif !IsJSON(gData)>

  <h3>Uh Oh ... Somthing Went Terribly Wrong ... <br />

      But! Don't Fret ... Coders are Hard at Work to Get Things Up ... <br />

      Right Away ...  ;)

  </h3>



<!--- If the JSON is Good, Deserialize It. --->

<cfelse>

    <cfset gData = #DeserializeJSON(gData)#>



<!--- Create a Var for the Reponse Data   --->

<cfset response = #gData.responseData.results#>

  <cfloop from="1" to="#ArrayLen(response)#" index="ndx">

    <cfoutput>

      <p><strong>

          <a href="#response[ndx].unescapedurl#" rel="nofollow" 

          target="_blank">#response[ndx].titleNoFormatting#</a>

          </strong><br /><br/>

          #response[ndx].content# <br /> <br />

      </p>

    </cfoutput>

  </cfloop>

</cfif>

The Google Search API's Class reference has a list of all the arguments you can include as URL parameters that will give you plenty of options to customize your results ...

Recently I decided that it's time to start paying a bit more attention to improving the visual presentation of one of my sites. The site's built in ColdFusion with lot's of nifty CF Ajax stuff thrown in. CFDiv's, CFWindows, and Pods here and there too. So, I figured since I'm not too bad at coding in CF - at least I can usually Google my way through most of the snags I run in to - I wanted to try challenging myself a bit by taking on something fairly foreign to me. Ajax.

I know the basics of Ajax. Asynchronous JavaScript with XML - Sending and receiving Http requests and responses to a server to return data to a site without refreshing the documents. However, I had little experience actually taking on an Ajax project. But if that wasn't difficult enough, I wanted to get really frustrated, so I decided to use a JavaScript library that I had little if any experience with - Entrance JQuery.

Now I've seen a lot of very groovy examples of the nifty UI tricks that can be done with JQuery. They are cool. But I really wanted to learn how to use JQuery for my specific needs. So, I did. I choose to launch my campaign with a real world example. So for my project, I mapped out what I wanted to do with ColdFusion, JQuery, and Some CFAjax stuff. Here's what I planned out ... First, I wanted to add a US database to my site, SEOMasterList.com, to build out some dynamic pages. The reasons for that should be quite apparent. I'm planning to obtain rankings and possibly monetize the site.

Next, I wanted to add some cool visual effects while providing improved functionality to the site, and possibly give visitors a better experience.

And finally, I just wanted to see if I could actually do it - two weeks in to it, I finished it. I have got to admit I spent a hell of a lot of time learning while trying to get the site done - someone with experience could have probably launched it in a matter of no time. But, I learned a lot.

Once I modified, installed, and built out the components to accommodate the addition of the database, I set up another component to dynamically bind the results from the database to two selects in a form. This was very challenging - I spent the better part of two days just trying to get the bindings to work. Luckily, I found a cool ColdFusion script and modified it to output my database queries to XML. That came in really handy. The first go at trying to output 80,000+ records to a single flat XML file didn't work out to well. I ended up rebuilding the data CFC's several times in order to get what I needed. I ended up with a 1.4 MB XML file that I'm now using to bind to the data in the selects.

After tackling that part of the project, I wanted to introduce some visually appealing effects to the site so I picked up the latest JQuery code and sent it up to my site. After some effort, I was successful in creating a pretty slick interface for my Ajax loaded form. Through the use of some nifty ('#div').show(),('#div').hide () functionality on the form page, I was able to add and remove elements of the page which weren't necessary at every stage of the form submission process. This proved to be tougher to implement than I had expected. Up to this point I have a form bound by CFC's to data, an asynchronous form handler to process a form submission, and some nifty JQuery going on to assist in dressing up my application modifications. All in all. I think it went really well - and I learned a whole hell of a lot doing it. If you want to see what I did ... have a heart ... I'm an Ajax nOOb. Check it out on SEOMasterList ...

So my first impression about Google's new Chrome browser, is that it Rocks. It's quite apparent that the engineers at Google know exactly what the development community is looking for and they make no small feat in creating a web browser that is able to completely annihilate the competition. Moreover, I really like some of the features that are included by default like the Firebug style DOM inspector that you can invoke by a right click context menu (Nice).

In my first shot at testing out the new browser's speed, I attempted to pull up a Google Map that I have on my site which makes a remote call to Google's GeoCoder object to retrieve coordinates for a city to update the map locations based on those coordinates. Though I should actually have the coordinates in a Google GeoCoder Cache to speed up the process, I don't » yet.

The results were amazing. while it took Firefox 2 approximately 4 seconds to fully display the map image, it took all of 500 milliseconds for Chrome to display. My results are just from personal experience though. Google claims that Chrome's new JavaScript engine, V8, shows remarkable performance levels and they provide a collection of benchmark test results to boast. [Chrome Test Results.]

According to the developers over Mozilla, the new browser is not as impressive as Google may claim and they also ran some tests on Chrome with a JavaScript testing engine named SunSpider. Mozilla claims that the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine slated to be included in a future edition of Firefox, will perform even faster than V8. Things really start to get interesting though when JQuery's inventor, John Resig, decided to run some of his own performance tests on Chrome. In short » John agrees that Chrome's JavaScript engine is really fast.

I really like regular expressions (RegEx's) and I have this crazy fascination with learning and using them whenever and wherever I get a chance. If you don't know what a regular expressions is, the Sun Developer's Network's states:

"A regular expression is a pattern of characters that describes a set of strings." » Simple enough.

I picked up the bug for RegEx's after trying to "think my way through" a JavaScript form validation function without any experience in regular expressions or JavaScript for that matter.

That event led me to pick up Mastering Regular Expressions, III ed. By Jeffrey Friedl; OReilly's JavaScript, The Definitive Guide, By David Flanagan, and a fierce desire to learn more about the almost alien-looking esoteric characters that were here to take over my programming world.

The good news I found out later was not only that I am not the only RegEx fan that has been drawn in by their mysterious attraction. Many of the coders and developers that I've found to respect, have this crazy bug too.

So, what I want to do now, is put together a RegEx Library right here on this post for all of the coolest regular expressions you know. So, post me your regular expression(s), with a brief description.

I finally got to the point where I had seen just about as much spam that I could handle and being somewhat of a ColdFusion developer, I decided to take some action ...

My first shot at stopping the pesky spammers was by implementing a Lyla CAPTCHA. However, I had some problems getting the CFC working correctly, and after several failed attempts, I tried to use Rob Gonda's AjaxCFC with Lyla too ... Yet, I still wasn't able to get the CAPTCHA working ...

So, after talking with a friend, that is quite familiar with ColdFusion ... he asked me why I didn't just use CF8's native support for CAPTCHA's with the CF Image tag ...

I really hadn't even thought of it ... I found the answer ...

I learned quite a bit more CF code in order to get the image going along with some JS validation ... For starters, I got the base idea from Camden's example of using CF CAPTCHA ... but I didn't want to break the layout of my form page by expanding the form during validation error messages ... I had to find a way to convert Ray's form validation in to JavaScript validation ...

Well, I searched through hundreds of pages in order to find a solution to my problem ... How to turn ColdFusion variables ... in to JavaScript variables ... I didn't have a clue ... until I found another non-related tutorial example by ... (guess who ...) yep, it's Ray again ... that alluded to the toScript method ... almost everywhere else I had searched, returned answers which expresses that there was no way in converting a ColdFusion object in to a JavaScript object ...

So, I was one step closer to my goal ... then, I hit another obstacle ... the error strings all ended with a "<br />" in order to separate the error strings when returned to the page ... that would not convert in to a JavaScript variable ... New Problem ... how could I insert a line break » Carriage Return in to a ColdFusion variable ... and return it in JavaScript without throwing errors?

Thanks to the friendly Ben Nadel ... for his contributions to the CF community again ... where I found a post of his on converting CF characters to JS ...

So, with a bit of my own efforts some where in there ... I finally have a CF CAPTCHA on my site ... and can say good bye to the spammers ... bye spammers ...