It's finally here: NOISE 5 - the latest edition of the world-renowned series of design books by our friends at the Attik. As far as big design studio monographs go, the Noise series has a huge international following and each issue has become a collectors' edition.

Self-published with only a 3000 limited run, each book has cost over £200 to produce, resulting in a visual feast of experimental design and extensive print techniques. The book showcases over 250 pages of stunning design, using 9 different kinds of paper stocks and over 40 print finishes including hot foils, scratch-off inks, hi-build gloss varnishes, embossing and heat sensitive inks, and the result is a very tactile and very beautiful piece of work.

This book has been 3 years in the making so you can imagine that it's very hot property for those lucky enough to pre-order a copy. But since we're not just any old web design studio, no, Sizzle Media are one of the very few privileged enough to get a complimentary copy well before the book hits the stores!

Having pored over it since its arrival, we absolutely love it. It really is a work of art and has everything a designer could wish for and more. It's absolutely saturated with creativity and you genuinely sense the attention and effort that has gone in to the production – not to mention it cost a small fortune to produce!

Overall it’s a landmark piece of work by the Attik and a highly recommended purchase for any print or web designer when it does eventually hit the book stores.

Thanks to the Attik for our copy :)

We like Twitter, here at Sizzle. We don't really 'get' it, but we like it nonetheless. However, we were recently struck upon a conundrum - how to integrate our most recent 'tweets' into our site using ASP. We could find code snippets for PHP and ASP.Net, but not ASP itself. Fortunately, we eventually happened upon a ridiculously simple solution: Use your Twitter's RSS feed!

Using the code from here and substituting our RSS feed for the provided example, we were able to easily pull down our 20 most recent tweets. A bit of code-chopping, and we trimmed it down to a svelte layout. We were nearly done, but not quite... Our links were being served as plain, unclickable text! So we implemented this nifty yet very basic bit of business to separate out link-laden tweets and add the appropriate <a> tag:

..And voila! Our tweets, served up in lovely div classes, ready for insertion into our Javascript-powered homepage box. Note: By default, the linked script caches RSS feeds for 1 hour, which'll stop your server from harassing Twitter's too much. It's easily amendable, but we're not sure if we'd recommend it.

Around November last year, Sizzle Manchester looked into some of the free and upcoming open source platforms available for e-commerce websites as cheaper, off-the-shelf alternatives to bespoke websites for our clients. One that stood out as a forerunner and possible osCommerce/Zen Cart competitor was the very new, very shiny, and very impressive Magento.

Magento is written in PHP and built upon the Zend framework. For those of you who still don’t know what Magento is or what it can do, go here now... It’s ok... We’ll wait. Back?

Magento supports tons of payment options (Protx, Google Checkout, and Paypal), and the Magento community provides tonnes of new additions, modules, and proprietary add-ons every day.

We originally looked at GoDaddy for a temporary test hosting solution, as they had recently added PHP 5.2 support and they support .htaccess files to override certain hosting features. However, we still had some problems getting it to work straight from the box, although a quick search of the internet and Magento forums brought the majority of answers we needed, so we’ve decided to put together a quick start guide to getting Magento up and running on GoDaddy!

We have used both the economy and deluxe Linux packages available on GoDaddy successfully, including the free hosting provided with a domain (although you should beaware that GoDaddy puts rather intrusive advertisements on the free hosting). Step by step:

1. To start with we downloaded the Magento 1.2.0.2 package.

2. In the root folder we opened the .htaccess file and added the following line under the CGI options section:

AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php

3. At this point we were able to get to the install screen, however some users have reported that the php.ini file needs to be renamed php5.ini and the following line changed from:

#cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1 to cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1

4. Once installed and running, we hit one more snag - The administration panel didn’t work in any browser! Again, a quick search of brought us the solution and we have provided the package from the Magento Forums here for you to download and use. You should unzip this and place this over the head.php file in “app\code\core\Mage\Adminhtml\Block\Page” Hopefully later versions of Magento will address this.

Using this technique we were able to get Magento installed on three separate test accounts (Free Hosting, Economy and Deluxe), although the website performance did vary dependent on which account we were on, the deluxe package obviously fared slightly better.

Hopefully this is all you’ll need in order to get Magento up and running on GoDaddy Linux hosting. We have also provided the pre-modified 1.2.0.2 solution we used to install it here. Once installed you should be able to update to the latest version without any problems.

So there we go. Hopefully, in the very near future, and once we’ve got our head around the design and skinning aspects, Sizzle Manchester will be able to offer Magento solutions, and despite our success and more importantly the community’s success, they will be hosted on our own dedicated servers, not GoDaddy’s.

Please note that Sizzle Media takes no responsibility for the use of these files, nor does it claim any copyright to them.

UPDATE: LifeBlue.com have provided instructions for v1.3.2.1 of Magento on Godaddy here

In the world of SEO it seems everyone is out to make a quick buck. Questionable SEO firms promise businesses limitless leads, instant #1 listings, and a whole host of 'too good to be true' shenanigans.

For example, we were recently approached by a firm stating that we could get the #1 Google search result for 'web design Manchester', or our money back. At first glance, this seems perfect. We had a look into the SEO firm's tactics - hundreds of almost identical, spammy, low-quality websites serving the sole purpose of linking back to their clients. This is what's known as a link farm, designed exclusively to funnel Pagerank to client websites. Google doesn't like link farms, because they're attempting to fool the system. And everyone knows the first rule of SEO is 'Never annoy Google'.

SEO firms also love to promote things like 'Site Structure Analysis', where they look at every bit of your website's code then tell you what you've done wrong. We've lost track of the amount of times our clients have had someone tell them they're "missing the keywords tag", and that that's why they're not rolling around in great big piles of money. In reality, the keyword tag might've been the be all and end all back in 2001, but nowadays Search Engines are much smarter, and over the last 2 years missing keyword tags have very little or no impact on SEO. And here at Sizzle we're dedicated to keeping on the edge of web design and search engine optimisation techniques, and so we don't waste time on redundant technology!

Another issue is the 'W3C Compliant Code' business, insisting that our clients should have 100% valid 'Strict' XHTML, and that doing so would make them rich beyond their wildest dreams. Now don't get us wrong. We love strict XHTML, and we aim for it with every site we make, but that doesn't mean it's a neccessity, nor that it's absence is an issue. And besides, search engines are smart. They're very capable of pulling information from all but the most poorly constructed sites. As you can see from our website we're all WC3'd up!

Finally, our last rant goes to the international spam centres which offer '5,000 hand web directory submissions' and similar. The problem here is that all of these directories will be off-topic and rarely visited. Google can tell when you've been spamming, and nothing reeks of it more than thousands of poorly-worded links from general websites. And if Google thinks you're spamming, that's it. No more search engine visitors. You can't afford to annoy them! 20 links from quality, hand-picked niche directories are infinitely more valuable than any number of ones from spam-infested general dirs. And do you really want the link to your site showing up next to adverts for pharmaceuticals or other undesirables?

SEO is an ongoing job. It's not something you can 'do' in a week or even a month. Good, long-lasting results take a considerable time to develop. If you're promised results in a miraculously quick time, you're getting ripped off.

Here at Sizzle, we pride ourselves on being honest with clients. If you want good, ethical link building, you're on the right site. Want instant results? We'll handle your Pay Per Click campaigns. If you want something suspiciously cheap which runs the risk of total and permanent removal from Google's index? You'de be wise to get a second opinion first!

Here at Sizzle, we love new web technologies, and we're particularly fond of the increasing trend towards code standardisation and the adoption of lean xHTML and CSS. Unfortunately, the ability for the Internet to develop at full pace is limited by the reluctance of the general public to adopt newer, better browsers. Much as we'd love to abandon older browsers like Internet Explorer 6 (which would allow for the development of slicker, quicker, more usable, more search engine-friendly websites), a whopping 17% of users have not upgraded despite it becoming outdated way back in 2006.

This latest version of Firefox brings with it support for two very exciting (from a nerd's point of view) HTML tags: <video> and <audio> allowing rich multimedia content to be embedded on-site without reliance on bulky plugins. It also has support for the new W3C Geolocation API, CSS 2.1 and CSS3 properties, and support for offline applications. Admittedly, most of this stuff won't affect the end-user just yet, since us web developer types can't abandon the people using old browsers, but it's great to see the Mozilla foundation pushing ahead with these new standards.

From a user's point of view, the new release comes with new and improved rendering and Javascript engines, meaning websites will load in less time and operate faster and more reliably. It also includes a new 'private browsing' toggle, ideal for use on publically-accessible machines or situations when you'd prefer people not to know what sites you've been on, for whatever reason.

Anyway, enough blabbering. If you're feeling adventurous, the release is available for download right here!