SQL Formatting & Guidelines

I've never really seen a decent standard on writing SQL statements, that may be because I haven't looked for any standards or I didn't like what I have seen. For the most part when reading SQL statements written in stored procedures, SQL text files, embedded in data access layers etc, I cringe most times realizing the smashed blob of characters is actually a SQL statement.   I have designed my own personal formatting guidelines that have worked really well in writing, maintaining and most importantly understanding SQL statements well into the future. All it honestly takes is a little discipline and extra care when writing them in the first place (no matter what dialect of SQL you happen to be using). Typical Bad Example: select p.*, t.Name, s.Title as MyTitle from Product p, join Producttype t on t.productID = p.ProductID join sales s on s.productid = p.productid where s.qty... [More]

May 21, 2008 • by Justin Gattuso

Prevent Google from Indexing Portions of a Page

Today one of my clients asked whether it's possible to instruct Googlebot to ignore a portion of a web page when crawling and indexing his web site. This client shows product pricing on their web site, but would prefer that Google not index the prices so that they do not appear in search results. I was not aware of a directive that Googlebot would follow to ignore anything other than entire web sites, pages or folders, so I researched the topic and here's what I learned. [More]

Feb 26, 2008 • by Jason Sherrill

Best Practices for Choosing Challenge Questions for Bank and Credit Union Web Sites

Today I signed into one of my AT&T accounts and was presented with their risk-based authentication (RBA) setup page. The challenge question choices they presented reminded me how important it is to follow a few simple rules when choosing challenge questions for your users to choose. [More]

Feb 21, 2008 • by Jason Sherrill

Improve your web site's accessibility by using percentages for font size

Now that you've weened yourself off of using tags to set the font attributes on your web site, it's time to refine your style sheet even further. It may be easier to just use the point (pt) or pixel (px) size, especially when converting a Photoshop mockup, but if you use percent (%) for your font-size, you'll greatly improve accessibility. [More]