Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

That's something some governments may start investigating as well. While going through an article by SEOmoz's Rand Fishkin, I came across a pie chart that shows components of Google's Ranking Algorithm as perceived by 72 SEO experts -   -o- As I've been increasingly blogging about things other than Web Development, I felt it would be more appropriate to rename the blog title to Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia . I will probably start referring to it with the moniker T4   :-)

I have seen this uncommon question come up on the Forums on how to make a PDF or a Word document show up within a browser rather than having that file open up in a separate window through Adobe Reader or MS Word (as the case may be). I realized while trying out Google Viewer that it can be used programmatically in your own pages to force  a .PDF or .DOC link to show up within the browser. Moreover with this technique, it does not also matter if the end user has a PDF or Word document viewer installed on his comp . Here is how Google Viewer typically works. The URL of the .PDF or .doc file to be opened within the browser has to be passed to Google Viewer as a querystring value - http://docs.google.com/viewer?url= http://www.hud.gov/buying/checklist.pdf Suffixing an absolute URL of a PDF or Word document as a querystring value does the trick. Update (4/Feb/2013):  Google Docs/Drive viewer currently helps you preview over 16 different file types , so this trick can be ext...

I feel participating in technical Forums aids as a supplemental learning tool as you get to know about other developers real-life scenarios. Understanding these experiences & their resolutions can be  helpful in avoiding pitfalls & learning about best practices. For instance, did you know that the popular JavaScript Frame Buster code that prevents other sites from "framing" your site within an iframe can itself be busted. In a relatively short time, Stack Overflow has become one of the most popular technical Forums (16 million hits a month, with currently over 0.5 million questions in all) on the Web. One of it's interesting features is that participants can vote questions and answers up or down and edit questions and answers in a wiki fashion. The best questions & answers cascade to the top based on votes. An active & open-minded community of users ensure frivolous questions and answers are voted out. You can also gain deep insight on some topics from g...