CyberProdigy

I had this wonderfull chance to test www.apollo.lv upcomming portal version. In this quick review I’ll start with some imperfections, and finish with some good words afterwards. Probably the most notable and most visible drawback is that portal design lacks flexibility. I really like some competitor portals, mainly because their designs are fluid and takes advantage of higher screen resolutions. This is how new portal design looks at Full High Definition resolution. The code is not W3C valid. Although this is not extremely important, it usually shows, that coder cares about the code he writes, and is able to follow standards. I’ve tested portal loading performance for several times, and average complete site loading time was 10.5 seconds. So that could be faster. Latter site surfing performance is greatly improved when all of the files are loaded into browser cache, but still there are things to improve. One thing is that all JavaScript files that are loaded from one domain should ...

Many web developers uses meta http-equiv tag, without solid understanding what does it means. http-equiv stands for: hypertext transfer protocol equivalent and is equivalent to HTTP response header. So putting: <http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <META http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> in HTML as meta TAG has the same effect as declaring HTTP response header Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 That is why they are called ‘equivalent’. It is recommended to use HTTP header over HTML http-equiv meta tags. Multiple headers with the same name may be present only if the values may be concatenated.

To change your Google webmaster interface language you need to set your browser language to whatever language is you need. Of course not the browser interface language, but the Accept-Language header browser sends. So, for example, this HTTP request to Google webmaster will return a Swedish version GET /webmasters/ HTTP/1.1 Host : www.google.com Accept-Language : sv,lv;q=0.8,lv;q=0.6,lv;q=0.4,en;q=0.2 But this is going to return an English one GET /webmasters/ HTTP/1.1 Host : www.google.com Accept-Language : en,lv;q=0.8,lv;q=0.6,lv;q=0.4,en;q=0.2 Where to configure browser headers differs from browser to browser, but for chrome it is under Options->Change font and language settings. I’m not sure that showing interface language based on headers is the best solution. I think much better would be if there was an option where to switch a language, just like it is for gmail.com .

There is something that is driving me nuts about Google webmaster? It's that i can not change the interface language to English. No really, I’ve tried like a zillion times, but somehow I just can’t figure it out. In Google products I always set English as my default language. I’ve even set that I live in U.K. so that Google do not dare to offer me Latvian. But somehow webmaster is different. It knows me. It knows me deep inside. It even scares me ;D. The reason why I prefer English over Latvian is pretty simple though – when the specific words are being translated into Latvian, in most cases text become unreadable, and I constantly need to think – now what's that word would be in English. Some examples include: Noildze – delay; Rādītājs - index; Iesūtne - inbox; Rāpuļprogramma - crawler; Not only words are confusing, but in many cases translation is ambiguous too. It can easily be seen, that translator did not take context into account. And today I was exceptionally upset, be...