No matter what kinda coder you are every once and a while the idea of a regular expression or a regex comes up. It came up recently for me, I thought I’d highlight an article featuring some of the more popular regexes out there.
Regular expressions are essential for string validation, say you want to make sure a username cannot have special characters in it and has to be between 3 - 18 characters long.
Username: /^[a-z0-9_-]{3,16}$/
This has been coming up a lot at work and there’s a couple of interesting points here…
First, on dynamic URLs vs. static:
It’s a common SEO misconception that Google can’t read these URLs or gets cut off after 2 or 3 parameters. In 2011, that’s just not true – although there are reasonable limits on URL length. The real problems with dynamic URLs are usually more complex:
- They don’t contain relevant keywords.
- They’re more prone to creating duplicate content.
- They tend to be less user-friendly (lower click-through).
- They tend to be longer
Second, on exactly how to change URLs over… and retain your rankings:
If you do decide a sitewide URL change is worth the risk, plan and execute it carefully. How to implement a sitewide URL change is beyond the scope of this post, but keep in mind a couple of high-level points:
- Use proper 301-redirects.
- Redirect URL-to-URL, for every page you want to keep.
- Update all on-page links.
- Don’t chain redirects, if you can avoid it.
- Add a new XML sitemap.
- Leave the old sitemap up temporarily.
Adobe on Wednesday said it will no longer push its Flash plugin format for use in smartphone and tablet browsers. For details on this about face, click here.
Want to get a head start in Adobe’s forrary into HTML5? Check out their still-in-development Edge application: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/
According to Adobe:
October 3, 2011 — The latest version of Edge introduces interactive capabilities such as looping, hyperlinks, and greater animation control. Edge is a new web motion and interaction tool that uses web standards like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.
In MS SQL, very often I want to insert records into a table based on the record set of another query I have.
I always end up looking up this over and over, so here it is for your reference and mine.
INSERT table_desitination
(td_field1, td_field2) SELECT ts_field1, ts_field2 FROM table_source
This is one issue I keep having with my Windows RDP sessions. While I’m typing a come across the “m” key and suddenly everything within the session starts minimizing. It looks like the Windows key is stuck in the session!
Disconnecting from the effected work station doesn’t seem to help the situation.
According to social.technet.microsoft.com
The bug arises most frequently when you use Win+L to lock your desktop while the Remote Desktop window has focus. It is caused by a synchronization issue between client and server that only arises on a subset of machines, possibly due to a driver or 3rd party software conflict that messes up the timing of the Remote Desktop client.
Unfortunately the solution he gives of jamming on the Control (Crtl) Key a hundred times doesn’t do the trick. The solution I found burried deep within the article:
1. Open ‘on screen’ keyboard which is in the accessories/accessibility menu.
2. Press the ‘on screen windows key’.
That did the trick!
