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Bing ignores robots.txt

One of the long-standing conventions on the web is that automated search engine crawlers should follow a set of rules about what pages they should and should not visit and index. For many crawlers or bots, all you have to do is properly setup your robots.txt file, and viola, you control what the bot will and will not visit. The GoogleBot tends to behave well according to what is in the robots.

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Top 3 Reasons to Avoid Magento's getFirstItem()

Magento utilizes a lot of helper functions as well as the Zend Framework and ORM. While this makes things easier to develop, there are areas where this actually makes getting things done more difficult. The very first area that comes to mind is when you are trying to only retrieve a single record from the database. If you were to search Google for the proper way to do this, you would do the following, assuming $collection is your collection object.

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Do you have too many big balls?

Managing a software development team can be a difficult task when everything is moving along exactly as expected. When you add in the paradigm shift of Agile Software Development with Scrum , management doesn’t always have the same insights into what makes up an efficient use of a development team’s time. For the rest of this post, lets assume that we are working with a 2 week sprint, with the first day half-used for sprint planning, and the last day half used for the sprint retrospective.

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Web Browser Font Rendering is the New Edge Case

In the early days of the web, designers and developers relied upon visitors to the sites they were developing to have their chosen font pre-installed on their computers so that their web browser of choice would be able to properly render the selected font. As quickly became obvious, there is a wide variety of fonts installed across all computers worldwide, so this was not an achievable scenario, especially when print level typography was desired.

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LocalStorage and Safari Weirdness

One of the technologies that has been intriguing to me for a while has been LocalStorage on the web browser. One of my first adventures into using persistent storage other than cookies on a web browser was the short-lived HTML 5 standard of the webSQL database. It turns out that it was simply a SQL Lite database that was accessible via JavaScript in all the WebKit browsers as well as Firefox.

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Apple's iPhone Announcement is a Big Deal for T-Mobile

Every year, we are treated to a big show from Apple about what the next iPhone will be like, and how magical it actually is. In case you have been living under a rock, this major Apple annoucement is one of the largest news-making fancy press-conferences you will see these days. It used to be this way when Microsoft would launch a new operating system, remember that launch announcement and launch party for Windows XP?

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T-Mobile Buckles Under iPhone 6 PreOrders

When you are one of the major US carriers that allows its customers to pre-order the new Apple iPhone 6 and Apple iPhone 6 Plus, you would think that you would make sure your internal systems were up to snuff before the pre-order deadline. Well, as luck would have it, when September 12, 2014 rolled around, it turns out that many T-Mobile customers were out of luck when they went to try to pre-order the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

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Parallax Background Scrolling on Internet Explorer is Not Smooth

One of the pleasures of working on a website that is using some of the latest technologies is that you often run into strange compatability issues that only affect one browser or another, and many of the forums have little to no information about how to properly address the issues. Parallax scrolling is a technique that has been around for a while now, highlighted by Apple’s own iPhone 5s card-esque scrolling on their homepage, among others.

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5 Ways to Keep Your Nude Pictures Secure

With the recent revelation that there was a massive release of naked or revealing photographs of many female celebrities, it seems to be an important time to remind people how to make sure private photos and other information don’t get shared all around the internet without your permission. As a result, here are my top 5 ways to keep your nude pictures secure. Don’t Take Nude Selfies - Yes, the best and easiest way to keep your naked selfies out of the sight for the public viewers on the internet is to never take a naked selfie in the first place.

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Visual Studio 2013 EditorPackage Did Not Load Correctly

One of the things that continually conspires to drive me away from Microsoft products and towards those that are free and open source are the random bugs that pop up from time to time in their incredibly expensive software. The other day, I had to restart my Windows development system and discovered I had an issue when I tried to start Visual Studio 2013. When Visual Studio tried to start and open any files that had been previously open or that I wanted to open for the first time, I got this error message: The ‘Microsoft.

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