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Web Development

Web Development

At Yoast we develop, a lot. From our premium WordPress plugins to internal tools, to Quix, we’ve done quite a few different things and we intend to do even more. This is where you’ll find us writing about that!

Why relative URLs should be forbidden for web developers

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Twitter is the website / web service most of us love and sometimes hate, a service that has become an integral part of most of our online identities. It’s one of the services we expect to be there when we Google ourselves or other people. So when you Google yourself and instead of twitter.com, you…

XML Sitemap PHP script

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Recently, while working on the site for my father in law (in Dutch), I wanted to create an XML sitemap for the many publications on his site, that are downloadable PDF’s. I regularly add PDF’s to his site too, and since I’m a tad bit lazy I don’t want to keep updating the XML sitemap. So…

Web Intents from Twitter

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At the end of March Twitter released a cool new feature called “Web Intents”. I didn’t really see the value of it till recently, but I’ve now started using it way more. When you have a Tweet button on your site, you’re already using the Web Intents API, but you can do way more cool…

Email Reliability: use an SPF record

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A while back I outlined my system for preventing comment spam. One of the core fundamentals in there is that I send people an email to verify their email address before their comment is published. For this to work well, I need to trust on my email to be received. As it turns out, email…

Killer Performance Tips from the Expert

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My business & podcast partner Frederick Townes, who also happens to be the CTO @ Mashable.com, has finally finished a long awaited (by me at least) post covering lots of the performance tips he’s applied at Mashable (I hope you’ve seen their awesome redesign) and in other projects to make the sites faster despite having…

“Design by” footer links…

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When you’ve had someone build a website for you, it turns out to be common practice for that “someone”, usually a web developer or a web designer, to add a “design by” or “website developed by” footer link to your site. Let me make my point clearly: if they haven’t given you a discount to…

Link dump: interesting reads from around the web

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So last week I’ve started sharing a lot more of what I read on a day to day basis on Twitter, and I decided I had to share these links here on yoast.com as well. Below is a quite extensive list of links that I found interesting, ordered by topic. I’ll try to do these…

Change domain, and warn your visitors

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When you change domains, for instance using my moving WordPress to a new domain guide, you’ll usually redirect your visitors with something looking like this: The only issue with this is that people might not notice that you’ve moved to a new domain, and thus might not update their links to you. As Matt Cutts…

Practical Guide to creating a 404 Error Page for WordPress

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I make mistakes. You make mistakes. We all do. And some of these mistakes end up providing our readers with a 404 page. Chances are that page says “Error 404: file not found”. How does that help your visitor? Instead of just identifying the problem, your 404 error page needs to offer a solution. In…

Playing around with VPS.net

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Update: my WordPress blog is now hosted on VPS.net, check out my article on WordPress Hosting, you’ll also read there that I actually use a different image than the one below, though the steps are almost the same. So the guys who run WestHost and provide me with my awesome WordPress hosting, are a sister…