I am running a website that contains documentation for an open-source project of mine. The various pages are available in different versions, which you can differ by their url schema:
/1.0/some-topic
/2.0/some-topc
/latest/some-topic
This works perfectly fine, but I'm running into problems with Google: If you search the web for some topic, you get all the different versions as results. While this is basically fine, it would make more sense to show the newest ones first. Unfortunately, older pages get ranked better than newer ones.
Is there any way I can give a hint to search engines to favour the newer versions of those pages over the older ones? Is there a clean, official way for this?
Related
The last Type Provider I wrote just after F# 3.0 was released, and I used the ProvidedTypes.fs(i) files that came with the sample pack.
These files are quite old by now, and I wondered if there are more recent versions.
By googling alone I came up with six different versions. Where can I find the current, official version of ProvidedTypes.fs and ProvidedTypes.fsi?
Moreover, I heard that generated types are now easier to implement. Is this funtionality already inside newer versions of those files?
As requested by Nikon, here is the comment promoted to an answer :)
The starter pack is maintained at https://github.com/fsprojects/FSharp.TypeProviders.StarterPack
I recently get to know grails and start to using it, I know that grails is a great language and it is very helpful for rapid development, but I cant understand why grails dont have a good backward compatibility, I use grails 2.3.8 and grails 2.4 for my projects but many of sample codes in the internet are 2.2 or less, and it isn't time efficient to convert them to 2.3.8 or 2.4 because there are many changes from one version to another. And some times although I do any things right and every thing must work like it works with grails 2.1 or 2.2 but some things still remains.
Am I wrong? I skipped some things that make converting version so hard?
And above all this, what are the guaranties that projects I'm developing right now will be compatible with higher versions of grails that comes in the future?
Joshua Moore is right with his answer, but I do not see it as passimistic as he does.
The grails development team is brave enough to make changes which break with the past. I consider this as a great feature - Grails does not ride dead horses.
For me, most of the changes don't seem to bee too radical. Most of the time, I skip 2-3 version and then upgrade my apps to the current stable version in less than a day. This also helps me to get to know the new features.
If you don't know how to upgrade, the safest way is to use the grails upgrade command. Just increase you version number step by step and do an upgrade and re-run your test (yes, tests help you in your upgrade process :-). If tests fail, take a look at the great changelogs and the "What new in Grails x.y?" sections of the documentation.
Often it is also helpful to compare your old grails version app with a new and empty target version project with a good comparison tool like BeyondCompare. This way you easily spot changed configurations.
Hope that helps
Update: When you are new to "all those webconcepts" you should first decide on the platform you want to work on. If it is the java ecosystem, Grails is the best webframework on the market :-) Otherwise PHP, Rails, DJango etc. could also be a match.
So if you want to learn Grails (and with Grails all those webconcepts), I would suggest to start reading the Guide which will tell you how Grails works. If you need more examples, I can suggest the "The Definitive Guide to Grails 2" published by Apress. It covers basically the same content as the guide, but it does so by walking you through a process of building a sample application.
When it comes to the samples you find on the net... as soon as you get to know the framework better, you will probaply know ho to handle the examples - but there is no silver bullet...
Nothing guaranties that your projects will be compatible with future versions of Grails. In fact, from my own experience, they won't. Often things change, and sometimes radically too, as Grails matures into higher versions.
The same holds true of backwards compatibility as well.
All you need do is take a look at the introduction section of the Grails documentation to see how often things change significantly between versions. A lot of times these changes require significant refactoring of older projects to upgrade them. I still have several large projects running on the 1.3.x branch of Grails because we don't have the resources (time) to go through and upgrade them.
Often this upgrade process involves creating a new empty project then slowly moving the code from the old project into the new project, updating code to reflect newer means of doing the same thing and testing. It's not easy for projects where you have 100+ Domain classes, 1000+ GSPs, 50+ Services and several hundred thousand lines of tests.
What browsers is supported by stable Dart 1.1.1 - where can I find such information or results of tests done on browsers. I want be sure what I can except in future version.
It is not clear for me what mean "major browsers" since it is not clear if it is tested. I plan to use dart since can be nice in doing advanced application.
I think only about compatibility of Dart/JavaScript - not interested in pure Dart in Chromium.
From the Dart FAQ:
Q. What browsers do you support as JavaScript compilation targets?
We’re currently aiming to support the following browsers:
Internet Explorer, versions 9 and 10.
Firefox, latest version.
Chrome, latest version.
Safari for desktop, version 6.
Though "We're currently aiming to support" certainly doesn't inspire the same level of confidence that "We support" would.
It's not really an answer but to long for a comment:
Dartium is intended for development only.
JavaScript generated from Dart is currently the only supported scenario of Dart for production use.
Dart or more specific the generated JS helps a lot in abstracting browser differences away but there are also still a lot of open issues, some with known workarounds and some without.
I doubt there can or will be a perfect solution even in the future.
How good or bad someone finds the support of one of the browsers listed in #PixelElephant s answer is mostly based on opinion and/or what features someone wants to use.
If you have issues with some of these browsers, post an issue. Common features are likely to be fixed in the short therm others may take longer (also depending on complexity).
Background info:
Over the past week, I have been messing around with Chrome extensions and had no problem creating my extension. Great, Chrome rocks for making the development process very easy to learn, and, well... just easy!
Now I have it in my mind that I'd like to create this extension for as many browsers as I can, so I decided on Firefox next.
What a mess! There documentation has done nothing but give me a headache and waste my time so far, VERY convoluted and just generally unorganized.
I have managed to locate a code sample for a simple extension that I think I can use as a starting point and have begun messing around with - fine...
I have learned that this sample extension will not work with anything less than Firefox 4, as it uses the bootstrap technique to make the extension installable without a browser restart. Ughhhhhh....
Now we arrive at my questions:
Is it possible to develop an extension for Firefox 7 that will work with previous versions of Firefox? I don't even care about anything prior to Firefox 4, if that's the cutoff point for restart-less installations. It would be nice to know that what I am spending all this time making will work consistently and for more than a week when the user is prompted to upgrade next.
How about the reverse? Can I create an extension that is compatible with Firefox 3.5 through Firefox 7? I realize it would require a restart to install, but that would be acceptable if it resulted in a working extension regardless of the version.
Can anyone with experience on this stuff share a bit of what I'm getting myself into here? It seems like this is a nightmare of a platform to develop on, and that I will be constantly fixing my extension.
One last piece of relevant information:
The extension I am developing is purely javascript based - this stuff should work (I think?) because it's dependent on just one feature "content scripts" that really shouldn't be changing in implementation between versions at this point... right?
So what exactly am I missing? How do you create easily manageable Firefox extensions that will work in all versions of the browser?
Thanks everyone! :)
You have to distinguish between "traditional" extensions and extensions built with the Add-on SDK. The former are far more powerful given that they have direct access to all APIs the browser uses - but that's also the reason why they are more complicated to write and why the documentation is rather unordered (there are simply very many things that you could do, far more than you could with Chrome). They are also more likely to break as the browser changes. The Add-on SDK on the other hand gives you a limited API much like Chrome. The Add-on SDK currently supports everything from Firefox 4 onwards (yes, because of restartless installation), with the promise that browser changes will merely require your add-on to be recompiled with a newer version of the Add-on SDK. In fact, that recompiling will likely happen automatically in future for add-ons hosted on addons.mozilla.org. On to your questions:
Is it possible to develop an extension for Firefox 7 that will work with previous versions of Firefox?
Sure it is. The Add-on SDK currently marks your add-on as compatible with anything between Firefox 4 Beta 7 and Firefox 8 Alpha 1. Even as traditional add-ons go - starting with Firefox 4 the differences between particular browser versions are rather small, most things work in all of them. You can also stay compatible with Firefox 3.x but depending on what you do it might require some effort. Important information:
Firefox 4 for developers
Firefox 5 for developers
Firefox 6 for developers
Firefox 7 for developers
How about the reverse? Can I create an extension that is compatible with Firefox 3.5 through Firefox 7?
It doesn't matter which way you go. I wouldn't recommend spending much time on Firefox 3.x support however. With Firefox 3.5 no longer supported the only relevant version is Firefox 3.6. According to the statistics of my add-ons roughly 18% of the Firefox users continue using it. In the next few months this percentage will get significantly smaller, especially when Mozilla announces end-of-life for this branch. So for a new add-on supporting it is usually not justified.
Can anyone with experience on this stuff share a bit of what I'm getting myself into here?
Depends on how complicated your add-on will be. Given that you are developing an equivalent to a Chrome extension, you will most likely be using the Add-on SDK which means that there won't be any compatibility problems. As traditional add-ons go, simple add-ons that don't rely on some obscure implementation details also typically don't have any trouble staying compatible (I have two add-ons that didn't need a single adjustment since Firefox 3.5). Add-ons that go deep down into the system are more problematic of course.
Is there a indexing plugin for GDS that allows for source code search? I see some for specific types (Java, C++, ...) and one for "any text". These are nice, but I would like one that allows for many/configurable extensions (HTML, CSS, JS, VB, C#, Java, Python, ...). A huge bonus would be to allow for syntax highlighting (http://pygments.org/) in the cache.
I just found Dropout and it seems to work great. Put Dropout in any folder and it will index all files in that folder. I put it in my Projects folder and it crawled all my code. Very fast and flexible search. Dropout
You could use OpenGrok or some other code-specific search engine instead.
I wrote a quick review of some of them some time ago.
It has been a long time, but the last time I tried to use Google Desktop Search for searching code, I found it quite inappropriate for that task, as I outlined at [http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=490310], the gist of which is that GDS (silently) only indexed a tiny fraction of many source code files (and made it quite a challenge to figure out why searching so often failed to find so much of what was in source code files).
I found Copernic Desktop Search worked better on code files (but I also had trouble with later versions of it being buggy in not finding all matches so I've been staying with version 2.1.1). But these days I don't use it much (mostly because I don't have permission to install such things on the laptop provided by my new employer).
You can try out Larry's Any Text File Indexer. You can specify a list of extensions at install time and it will do full text search on those file types.
Im just giving this a go:
http://desktop.google.com/plugins/i/java.html?hl=en
..also you can search for things in your Java tree using the following syntax in Google Desktop:
<YOUR SEARCH> filetype:java under:"C:\hft\trunk"
..where I keep my code in "C:\hft\trunk"
This is not a Google Desktop plugin, but works for what we need.
We have started using http://svnquery.tigris.org/ and it seems to work and is very fast. I wish it supported multiple repositories per site. We have a repository per project, so currently I have to create a virtual directory for each project we have. Not a show stopper, just something we need to automate in our project setup script.