As reported by Telegeography, the international Internet traffic is growing fast. It was reported that the traffic increased by 53% from mid of 2007 to mid of 2008.

A few things to note:
1. The top 3 regions with the most traffic growth are South Asia, Middle East, and Latin America. Definitely, we can see the trend that developing countries are starting to enter the Internet realm pretty fast.
2. Telegeography’s Directory of Research, Alan Mauldin, states that, “Traffic growth is fueled by consumer demand for video.”
3. Interestingly, it seems that in the US & Canada and Latin America, the traffic growth outpaces the development of new Internet bandwidth. Therefore, some Internet providers such as Comcast is setting up a hard cap on the bandwidth use.

From these points, we can think that:
1. Internationalization in the Internet is becoming very important. Multi-national corporates soon need to incorporate multiple languages features on their web resources. This might no longer become an “added” feature but a “must” feature.
2. The utilization of the Internet continues to invade more into the multimedia factor. We can see that the growth of YouTube-like websites is tremendous.

With the multitudes of developing countries invading the Internet and more sophisticated media entering the Internet technology, two questions will make me ponder: (1) “How can our business benefit from these changes?” and (2) “Can a single-language and text-and-image only website stand out from others?”

Google is advancing its Internet front-end even more by publishing its first web browser named ‘Chrome’. Download Google Web Browser Chrome.

The latest move in web browsers revolve around robustness, reliability, security, and ability to run multiple web applications at one time. These are what Chrome and IE8 featuring on in their browsers.

But, one thing that shocks me is that Randall Kennedy of InfoWorld mentioned that Chrome out-bloated the new IE8 in terms of consuming resources. On top of that, IE8 consumes more than Vista. This definitely shows a trend that robustness, reliability, and security of a software are compensated with resource consumption.

So, does the high resource-consumption Google’s Chrome prove to be a worthy browser? Can Chrome invades the “monopolized” browser market? We’ll see later on.

PS: Hopefully, there will be no more browser compatibility issues. *sigh*

CAPTCHA (”Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) is a program that tells humans apart from computers. These are basically the so-called “verification-code” or “are you human?” colorful pictures that contain words in it. All you need to do is simply to enter the words in the picture.

For many websites, CAPTCHA is ultimately used to protect a site from being abused by bots. For instance, without captcha in a contact form, a bot can submit a thousand forms within seconds (unless the web administrator limits the number of submissions) causing your inbox to be flooded with unnecessary emails. CAPTCHA helps to prevent this by asking for the words in the “hard-to-guess-by-computer-but-easy-by-human” picture. Thus, this prevents bots from submitting the contact form.

Interestingly, there is another reason for using CAPTCHA. It is to digitize books. This idea is provided by reCAPTCHA. When books are scanned by computers using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), some of the words in the books are misinterpreted. Therefore, these misinterpreted words are then used by reCAPTCHA as CAPTCHA words. If the user entered correctly in conjunction with another known word, the misintrepreted words are then submitted to reCAPTCHA and will be used again to ensure that these words are interpreted the same by other users. Great idea, eh?

So, it’s time to give back to the community. Instead of using CAPTCHA for your own personal protection of your website, use CAPTCHA to digitize books so that your community can benefit in the future.

Visit reCAPTCHA for more information.

A cache is a temporary storage area where frequently accessed data can be stored for rapid access.

Recently, we were given a privilege to work with large-scale web projects that deal with huge amount of data (GBs) with a very high number of site hits. Some of the web pages generation involve complex processing of huge data.

If the website is just accessed by a few people, it might work well. However, as more and more people are accessing the website, the server will eventually be bogged down resulting in the server / site crash (the ultimate disaster of a website).

Therefore, it is very important to ensure that the system is efficient. One of the ways that a system can be efficient is to use “cache”. Instead of processing the “same” requests each time from different users, we can cache the results of these requests. So, the system will process a request and store the result as a cache. So, when there is a similar request, the system does not need to process it - all it needs is to get the result from the cache. This will cut down the system’s process tremendously, reduce database requests, and increase the page output speed.

There are many ways to do caching in a web environment:

1. Final output caching - the final HTML output is stored as a cache. In this context, the system will process the first request (such as fetching and processing data from the database) and generate the HTML output. It will then save this HTML output as a static file. So, when there is a similar request, it will just get the generated HTML static file. It does not need to fetch the data from the database again. This is useful for a page that is visited very frequently by users and change once a while (say once a day). An example of this is your homepage (if it gets dynamic data from the database).

2. Query caching - the result of a database query is stored as a cache. This is useful if there are multiple web pages that utilize the same query over and over again.

While caching can be a useful tool, its use requires a thorough planning to ensure that it is used properly. Over-caching or mis-caching will eat up a lot of space or worse yet will cause the presented to be not updated. Thus, it is very important to know when to refresh your cache.

Hence, think caching whenever possible.

InfoWorld had the chance to interview the creator of JavaScript (Brendan Eich) to discuss about the future of JavaScript.

With the widely used of JavaScript in almost all web pages, JavaScript proves to be a language that adds flavor of interactivity to a mundane web and to top it all, JavaScript proves to be interoperable among all browsers despite the fact that there are disputes especially in DOM.

Seeing this, it is very likely that JavaScript is going to stay for a very long time in the internet browser world. With the new additions since AJAX, such as ARAX (or HotRuby for Ruby) and APAX (for Python), JavaScript pushes its front ends even more. On top of that, JavaScript 2 (after 9 years of major updates) is now being developed and tested.

For more information about JavaScript 2: http://developer.mozilla.org/presentations/xtech2006/javascript/.
For more information about the interview: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/23/eich-javascript-interview_1.html

I should have posted this post a while ago.

For those of you who are fans of FireFox, or curious about FireFox, or just want to try anything new… then, try FireFox 3:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

The question posted in this page is: Can a browser really make the Web better?

The answer depends on you. But, do share with us!

Recently, we were given a privilege to complete a project that involves integrating a large database (around 5 GB) into the current database (around 100MB). The purpose of the integration is to add “much more” content or data into the system. This huge jump in the amount of data certainly puts a lot of pressures into the current MySQL database.

This is one of the reasons why it is important to optimize your database. Optimizing your database will help to:

1. Add endurance to your database.

When you optimize your database, it will be able to handle a large data. On top of that, it will be able to handle multiple query processes.

2. Speed up your queries.

People demand fast-loading pages. Your users will not wait 2 pages for your page to load. By having your queries completed faster, you will get a faster loading page.

3. Save some space.

Many might take this for granted because of the humongous disk space (1TB is tired. 1PetaB is now in) that our technology provides. However, having a more compact and effective database allows you to put data into the RAM. It allows a faster reading rate on your database.

These three reasons are definitely some of the top reasons why optimizing your database is very important.

So how to optimize a database? Let’s wait for the next blog. :)

What is hCard microformat? According to microformats.org, hCard is a simple, open, distributed format for representing people, companies, organizations, and places, using a 1:1 representation of vCard (RFC2426) properties and values in semantic HTML or XHTML.

It is basically a formatted display of your contact information using vCard properties in your website.

Why should I use hCard? It is simply because many local search engines are now starting to use hCard formatted data as local signals. Yahoo! Local has supported hCard since June 2006; Google Map has supported hCard since July 2007; Technorati Kitchen is now pinging microformats. So, there are great avenues to expose your website to the local people.

How can I use hCard?

1. Understand about hCard and its format.
2. Create your own hCard using this FREE hCard generator.
3. Embed the hCard code into your web page. (Most likely in your contact page).
4. Submit your page to pingerati.

So, that’s it! Though it is tedious to include these microformats, applying this practice when building your website will give you a heads-up in local search engines as well as in other search engine applications (including Yahoo! Search Monkey).

WEB DESIGNERS, SitePoint is giving out a FREE BOOK “The Photoshop Anthology - 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks, and Techniques”.

Amazon.com Book’s Description:

The Photoshop Anthology is full-color, question-and-answer book for Web Designers who want to use Photoshop to build Websites and create better looking web graphics more effectively.

The book covers:

* Photoshop interface tricks & shortcuts
* Basic Skills: Transparencies, rounded corners, blending images, matching colors and more
* Buttons: Creating buttons and tabs in various shapes and form factors
* Backgrounds: Making various gradient and textured backgrounds
* Creating text effects, texturing and shadowing text, wrapping text around a curve, and more
* Adjusting Images: Removing blue tints, darkening and lightening images, fixing red-eye, removing dark shadows, sharpening images and more
* Manipulating Images: Creating fish-eye effects, removing imperfections, making product shots for ecommerce and more
* Creating Web Interfaces: Best practice & time saving ideas including how-tos on slicing images, creating rollovers, and more
* Advanced: Generating thumbnails, animated GIFs, bulk watermarking, sharing Photoshop Actions and more

Additionally, the book will walk you through the entire process of designing a Website in Photoshop - from using layers to keep organized to using the slice tool to create individual Website elements.

Amazon’s Rating: 3 1/2.

Download Now.

Pay-per-click (PPC) is one of the most important web marketing tools to boost your website conversion. Since PPC involves money, it is crucial that you plan your PPC campaign carefully.

Following are few tips in planning your PPC campaign:

1. Decide on keywords

When selecting keywords, it is important that you use keywords that your potential customers will search for. You can start by going through the list of keywords that you have developed in the beginning of this SEO tutorial (5 Steps to Define Keywords).

Refine your keywords to use specific terms instead of general terms. For instance, the keyword “night light” can be made more specific into “hand-crafted night light”. Limit your keywords up to 3-4 words. Not many people are likely to type in more than 4 words to search for something.

2. Do a PPC research on the keywords

Do a research on these keywords on the PPC search engines (such as Yahoo!, Google, and MSN AdCenter). Find out the competition level, the number of searches done on these keywords, and the bidding cost for each keyword. Evaluate all of these factors to select the keywords for your campaign. Ideally, you want to choose keywords that have low competition level, high number of searches, and low bidding cost. Balance out these 3 factors when selecting your keywords.

More specific keywords present a better opportunity because of its low competition level, moderate number of searches, and low bidding cost.

3. Setup a budget

Using your research data, create a budget for your PPC campaign. How much you are willing to spend on your PPC campaign? Use this budget to establish your maximum budget and maximum bid for your keywords.

4. Prepare your PPC campaign plan

Once you have prepared all your keywords and your budget, prepare your PPC campaign plan.

Write your text ads for each of your keywords. When writing your text ads, make sure to make a compelling statement, insert your keywords, and relate them to your landing pages. Your text ads are like bridges for your potential customers to visit your landing pages.

Create landing pages for your keywords. Make sure that your landing pages are effective enough to convert your click-through users into clients. It is pointless to have a high click-through but low conversion because of poor landing pages. Copyblogger.com has an elaborate tutorial on how to develop killer landing pages.

5. Execute your PPC strategy

Do a final review on your PPC strategy. Make sure that you are selecting the right keywords. Ensure that each of your text ads will capture the search audiences and bring them into your landing pages. Review your landing pages so that they are compelling enough to convert your click-through audiences.

Finally, do NOT forget to turn on your website analytics and setup your analytic goals to keep track of your conversion rates on each keyword.

Once you have done all of these, start running your PPC campaign.

6. Monitor. Monitor. And, improve.

Like other SEO strategies, PPC requires constant monitoring. Do a regular monitoring. If you have just started your PPC campaign, do a close regular monitoring (say, hourly). Once your PPC campaign has matured, you can reduce your monitoring frequency.

When you are monitoring your PPC, please take note of irregular behaviors on your keywords. These include high number of click-through with low conversion, budget is maxed out in just a few days, and no impressions or click-through happening. Take appropriate actions to correct these irregular behaviors.

On the other hand, you should also monitor the success of your PPC as well. Keep track on keywords and landing pages that have high conversion rate. Use these as learning examples to understand your audience and create effective keywords and landing pages.

Use these data to find ways to improve your PPC such as rewriting your text ads, reselecting your keywords, adding new keywords, and so on. When your PPC campaign has matured, do not be satisfied with the results that you are having. Continue to make improvements to your PPC campaign. If you find that PPC proves to be a highly successful web marketing tool for you, you might need to consider increasing your budget for PPC.

While it involves cost, PPC can be a powerful marketing tool for your business when planned and executed wisely.