Monday, May 05, 2008

floating window working with resize event

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I spent a little while trying to figure out today how to get a little window sticking in the right hand-side corner of my browser, while resizing the screen.

Many examples are available out there, but found difficult to pick up a simple way to achieve this.

the best way I have found was this (suing JQUery code for DOM selection):


<script>
function findwidth(){
ns4 = (document.layers)? true:false
ie4 = (document.all)? true:false
winW = (ns4)? window.innerWidth-16 : document.body.offsetWidth-20
return winW;
}

function positionmydiv(){
var myposition = findwidth()-$("div.mydiv").width();
$("div.mydiv").css({position: "absolute", left:myposition});
}

$(document).ready(function() {
$(window).resize(function() {
positionmydiv();
});
});

positionmydiv();
</script>


You then can use

</div class="mydiv" id="mydiv">My text here..... </div>

Anywhere in your code, the div will float nicely and adjust with resize.

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

forums: embedded link or links in signature?

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I recently participated to a thread on a SEO forum (http://www.webproworld.com/google-discussion-forum/68650-can-inbound-links-really-hurt-you-2.html), which spreads over 5 pages. I initially picked up the thread because it was featured on the newsletter sent by the site - a good bet that this thread would be read by a fair amount of visitors.

It is certainly not what people say in there which would justify spending more than a few minutes on there. So, is it useful to stick on there for links?

I targeted my blog, and checked the stats after a few days.

1) One page is outperforming the others: page 2 has been bringing 50% of the traffic so far. Why?
2) The only difference in page 2 is the actual links to the blog I have embedded in the post. the other pages have got a link to this blog, but only in signatures.

=> traffic wise, it is therefore more important to get an opportunity to stick a link to a site in the post itself, rather than relying on the actual link in the signature to bring traffic.

Note: we are talking about ~5/10 visits/day for 1 thread, not a wide scale experiment. But figures are relevant enough though and I think that a larger scale experiment would lead to the same results.

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Saturday, April 26, 2008

List of sophism. Do you mean syllogisms?

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When I started writing my post about SEO sophisms I realised that it was a bit challenging to find actual examples of sophisms.

I searched for "sophism list", "examples of sophism", etc .. but could not find a proper list of examples.

I switched to "my favourites sophisms", and found a page about paradoxes:
http://brainden.com/paradoxes.htm

On this page were listed 3 sophisms, good start..

"A slim crocodile living in the Nile took a child. His mother begged to have him back. The crocodile could not only talk, but was also a great sophist and stated, "If you guess correctly what I will do with him, I will return him. However, if you don't guess his fate, I'll eat him." What statement should the mother make to save her child?"

"Sophist: "Yes, greedy man gives his cash with sorrow. However, he doesn't have the cash with sorrow, so he gives what he doesn't have.""

"What is better than eternal bliss? Nothing. But a slice of bread is better than nothing. So a slice of bread is better than eternal bliss."

I then looked up in google for "A slim crocodile living in the Nile took a child", "Yes, greedy man gives his cash with sorrow.", "What is better than eternal bliss? Nothing", hoping to find other sites listing one of these sophisms alongside others... but not much success, these sophisms were hardly listed anywhere else.

Back to square one. On one hand Google could not find famous sophisms for me, but on the other hand I was convinced that I had been taught at school that the syllogism "Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, hence Socrates is mortal" was a famous one. How come didn't I come across this one in my previous research. I then searched for "hence Socrates is mortal" and found out that it was classified as a "syllogism".

I search then for syllogism to refresh a little bit my memories, and find out that syllogisms was a kind of logical argument used extensively by sophists.

I then searched for "syllogisms quotes", and finally found what I was looking for on http://www.thinkexist.com!

Since I have written the first post (which was more about SEO than sophists really), I started getting about 10 visits a day from people looking for a list of sophisms. These people are probably like me, looking for actual syllogisms, but simply don't use the right search queries.

So instead of directing them to a SEO forum, I thought I could write an other post directing them to the resources they are actually looking for instead. In short, doing a bit of SEO for good :-), and hoping that this post will rank better than the other one.

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