An article located at http://etech.eweek.com/content/web_technology/top_web_developer_mistakes.html makes really good reading.  It's a slide show, but below is a condensed list of what the article says!

My additional comments are in dark blue, you got any?

1) Click, Click, Click - This is great, someone is at your site and they're ready to make a purchase. Here they go; one click, two clicks, three clicks, just one more! And.... they're gone. Maybe if they could get to where they wanted to go right away you would have made a sale. (I disagree slightly in that as long as the navigation is logical and correct then it should not matter to the user how many clicks...)

2) Just Click on the Magic Compass - It's great that new web technologies make it possible to add lots of cool new navigation and interaction techniques. But don't put access to important features and content behind a strange graphic or icon. People know how links work on web pages. Some icons might as well be in elvish.

3) Don't be too Graphic - The Following Web Content Contains Massive Image Files and Graphics That May not Be Suitable For Visitors With Anything But the Fastest Possible Internet Connections. Toning Down the Giant Graphics Files Is Advised For Site Developers. (This is becoming an increasing problem given that mobile internet is really taking off!)

4) Registry of Lost Web Sites - The legend of the Invisible Web Site. Unseen by search engines, web users or anyone who might actually use the services of the website. It uses the magic of enforced site registration to keep its valuable content hidden from all who might want to use it, especially those who want to give the owners of the site some business.

5) Sticking to the Script - Scripting languages are so useful. They make it possible to do lots of cool things in web design. Click this link for an example. Mmm, getting a script error. If only there was some other way to link to content, you know like an HTML link. Don't use scripting where HTML will work just fine.

6) Too Rich - Animation is great, when it comes to Saturday morning cartoons. On the web too many animations, Flashy graphics, spinning graphs and windows popping in your face is sort of like a sign saying, "Stay away". (100% agree)

7) Welcome To Our Site "image placeholder" - Here's a great idea for the budding web site and application developer. There's this technology that makes it possible to display information to visitors and users. It's called Text! And unlike images and animations used where text would work just as well, text will always show up.

8) What's Your Color Scheme? - Whoa, trippy man. I love the way the orange text looks on that purple background. Dude, that financial firm is just going to love this site design. Or probably not. Unless you're designing for a jam band or some other client that likes wild colors, stick to color matchings that are pleasing to everyone. (Obviously they didn't see the custom colours that I used on the TtG Brokers site )

9) Directionless Navigation - Wow, this site looks like it has lots of great content and products. But where is everything? Can't find related content? Where's that thing I saw the other day? I'm lost! Users of your web site shouldn't need a trail guide. Make navigation clean, simple and easy to find. (All computer users are very aware of hierarchical navigation [Windows Explorer] and also an address bar 'bread crumb', so play to their strengths!)

10) Can We Table This For Now? - Aren't tables great! They provide so much flexibility when laying out web content. And it looks so nice, at one specific resolution on one specific browser. At other resolutions, yuck! When using tables make good use of percentages and make sure the design looks good on all users screens.

11) Sloppy with Text - Wilcom too my grate neww web apliccatiun. Im a perfessinal web dervelper! The greatest coding skills won't help if your web content is full of misspellings and poor grammar. (Being dyslexic, I have no cammant!)

12) Click Here for Click Here - This is such a nice web application that you've built. It will really help our business deploy content to the web. And look it automatically creates links that say things like "Click Here", "More" and "Continue Reading." Now how do we change those to something more descriptive? We can't? Don't call us, we'll call you. (Use your Tool Tip and Alt tags!!!)

13) Putting up a Velvet Rope - This is such as cool web site, can I come in? Oh, you only let in people from the IE click? Us Safari geeks aren't welcome? And I was going to spend so much money. Don't you know that browser-specific web sites and applications are like so five years ago?

14) This is a Web Site, Right? - Now this is what I call a content rich site. Look at the useful information here. Let me click here, wait, this is a PDF document, and this is a Word document. I thought this was a web site, you know, something I could view in a web browser. (What is the point of providing a content managed Web site when half the content the user wants to view is hidden away in PDF and Word files?  I bet 90% or more of content in Word and PDF that are available on the internet would be easy to provide on a Web page and if it was users would read it more!)

15) Over-crowding - You know, when people say that something is like finding a needle in a haystack, they don't mean that in a good way. On the web, too many links and other components can make it hard for a visitor to find the content that they want.

The Microsoft Learning site has a number of self-paced eLearning courses on current technologies (e.g. .NET 2.0 & 3.0 and VS2005.) This blog pulls a subset of the developer courses that are free and lists them It is worth taking a look at the full developer catalogue as well.

I am personally interested in Clinic 5046 and 5230.

http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen/archive/2007/06/20/free-microsoft-online-developer-courses.aspx

I do a lot of development on my laptop, both at work and ay home.  Both machines are running Windows XP Professional, and have IIS installed.  I often get the error HTTP 403.9 - Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected".  I have done some digging around this, and found that by default IIS 5.1 on Microsoft Windows XP Professional allows only ten concurrent users connected at any one time.

To get around this, you first need to change your default windows script host to cscript.exe:

cscript //h:cscript

Then you can increase the connection limit to 40.  it can't be increased beyond 40 as this is a hard coded windows limitation:

c:\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil set w3svc/MaxConnections 40

I would then re-set your default windows script host back to it's default of WScript.exe, by:

cscript //h:wsscript

Being in the IT Development industry specialising in Web development, I am always interested in the 'next big trend'. That is, the next piece of development technology that I am going to have to learn and what it's going to be used for. On that note, I came across an article on The News & Observer entitled "3 Internet trends to watch".

The article goes on to describe what in the authors view is the next three themes that will shape the development of the Internet over the next few years. The first trend is as he calls it "the Internet as desktop". This has been bandied about for some time now, but I too feel that this trend is about to take off. He bases a lot of this theme on the introduction of Silverlight , which I too agree about. I think that this theme will permeate the Web rather rapidly, especially by those darned advertisers (which I always block from my browser through a number of means!).

The second theme is about "mashup" where the user is given the ability to take only partial elements from web sites and mash them together with other parts and produce a new piece of content for their consumption. Now, I'm a little worried about this one. Whilst I really can see the benefit for a consumer, but where is the benefit for the Web site owner/publisher who put all their effort into the site? I can see this trend being short lived as the Web site owners start to prevent their site from being mashed so as to protect their intellectual property and profitability.

The third theme I disagree with. Not because of the idea which is fine, but the fact that it will happen in the next few years. This theme is the implementation of search engines that flesh out information with database structure to find relationships between the key word elements of a search. I think that most search engines already try to do this, it is just that there is so much poorly crafted data out there on the Web that it's simply a difficult task to find what you want, because its hard to describe in the same way as everyone else. Everyone has their own way of describing things, and when your descriptions does not match theirs how do you know if there is a match?

Anyway. You head on over and have a read and let me know what you think.

I thought that I'd bring to your attention a couple of great Internet Explorer toolbars/extensions that I use.

Just released is the official release of the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar (IEDevToolbar).  It has just come out of beta, and available for download here.  If you do any development on Internet Explorer or want to 'dissect' Web sites then this is the tool for you.  I really love the ability to change the client code (HTML, CSS, etc.) dynamically!

The second tool that I use for Internet Explorer is the IE7Pro toolbar.  I've blogged about it before here, and it has been vastly updated and improved since then.  Despite it's name, this also works on IE6, so if you are still on the old browser, give it a go.  You can download the updated toolbar here.

Virtually all development that I undertake is destined for the Web and HTML.  The trouble with the Web and HTML is that to get a great Graphical User Interface (GUI), it takes a lot of design and development effort.  This is also coupled by the usual user download requirements being very high.  That is, unless you use something like Flash.  However, for me, using Flash is really a designers tool and not a developers tool.  It is also restricted in that it's only really available from the desktop.  Thus it is not usable if you are on a Mobile browser or other 'limited' browsing platform.

As such, I have been following with some interest what people are calling Web 2.0.  It is perceived as the second generation Web.  Whilst this is true in some respects it really only means that there is a change in the way that developers are utilising the Web platform.  The main way that I feel this going is in the field of GUI design.

To make a real difference to the user experience of the GUI, we need to radically rework how this Web and HTML thing works together with other technologies.  I was really excited then when I read about the release of SilverLight.

"Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows."

For me if SilverLight takes off, I think that this will deliver what is expected from Web 2.0.  No longer would the Web GUI be limited to large blocs of text, interspersed with some static images, but it will take on a whole new organic life.  The reason I believe this is simply in the implementation of the graphics.  The way that Web 1.0 currently works is that a graphics is in either GIF/JPG/PNG format, and is of a fixed size and resolution.  These graphics do not scale well.  To provide a GUI in Web 1.0 to a different scale, almost certainly is there a need to provide a unique set of graphics per size and resolution.  This is expensive not only for development and maintenance, but also for the end download user.  However, the interesting thing about the way that SilverLight can implement graphics, is that it can be done through the use of Raster graphics.  These graphics are dynamically scalable on different devices and resolutions.  Have a look at some of the video lessons on the subject here, or have a look at "Building rich Web experience with SilverLight".

I honestly can't wait until I can get involved with a project that will allow me to utilise SilverLight.  I already have a personal project in mind, but that is a couple months away before I can really start working on it.  Keep tuned, as I intend to blog my experiences on this development (hopefully with SilverLight).

Way back in the mists of time, when I first had access to the internet, I remember the excitement I had at installing Netscape 0.9.  A lot has changed in the worlds of the Internet browser since then.  I used to be an avid Netscape fan, but they soon shrivelled up and more or less died away to be replaced by Microsoft's Internet Explorer.  I must admit that I never really used Internet Explorer until version 5, and since then I have always used Internet Explorer as my main browser of choice.  I have never really got into FireFox much, other than for accessibility and cross browser testing that I do a lot of.  I just want a browser that displays web pages!

Only since FireFox has taken a chunk out of Microsoft's dominance of the browser market has the giant Microsoft finally got off their backsides and made some improvements.  The market is once again competitive, and I feel that this can only be a good thing.  We saw that when IE vanquished Netscape to the great browserhalla, that browser progress and innovation slowed and died away.  Microsoft were basically 'begging' to have someone come into the market and challenge them.  Better that than an 'anti-competition lawsuit'!

As such I've not joined the browser 'wars', but I really, really do hate these 'browser bashers' who rubbish one browser over the other.  Oh grow up!  Each to their own.  The only reason why FireFox has made inroads to the browser market is in the home, where as in the business is is very solidly IE.  This is the environment I live and work in, so I'll stick with Internet Explorer thank you.

Enough ranting for now...

I was interested to read today that at the Mix'07 conference in Las Vegas (Microsoft's annual event for Web Developers and Designers), that there was some 'hint's as to what to expect from Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).  These hints can be found on the Internet Explorer Blog. The hints touted that the main improvements were to be for RSS, CSS and AJAX support.

I have really started to get into my RSS feeds, and you can subscribe to mine here.  As far as I am concerned the only improvements I'd like to see is improvements in speed, everything else I am happy with.

I do a lot of development around CSS, and I really do hope that Microsoft implement strict compliance to the latest standards for CSS.  The current non-compliance by Internet Explorer is a real nightmare for developers, and I can say that from experience that you have to really work at and 'bash' your CSS to get it to look the same just in two different versions of Internet Explorer!  That just isn't playing ball.

I'm only just starting to get into AJAX really, so I cant really comment about any improvements that are needed here.

It is also speculated that IE8 will also have support for what is known as microformats.  These microformats are small embedded tags in HTML that can be interpreted in various ways by software, such as calendar events or contact information.  Microformats are scheduled to be added to the next version of FireFox, so it is likely that IE8 will also have these, just to keep up.

The last thing that is hinted at being done in IE8, is more provisioning for user interface customisation.  As I have previously stated, I want a browser that does what it says on the tin...it serves me Web pages!  So, to me customisation is not something that I want, nor need.  How about putting the extra effort into improving the speed, reliability and what about reducing the size of the install (bloat ware).

I'm a user of a Windows powered mobile phone, which has Pocket Internet Explorer installed, which I use to surf the web with, whilst on the move.  I find this functionality invaluable, and it has made a dramatic impact/change to my life over the last couple of years.  Anyway, what I want to see for IE8 is a Windows Mobile version that properly supports everything that it's big brother desktop version provides.  I would dearly love to have full RSS, CSS, and AJAX support in the pocket version, along with Flash, JavaScript, iFrames, etc.

What do you think?

In my job I create a lot of Content Management driven Web sites.  As part of this process you need to mock-up what various page templates and styles look like.  This can be a real pain to put in some valid content.  Historically I always wondered how the designers that I have worked with managed to put in lorem ipsum to the design to make it more realistic.  Well, a while ago I found the lorem ipsum Web site.

I now use this site all the time to generate some dummy test for inclusion in my mock-ups.

Some details about Lorem Ipsum

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

I read an article today on the BBC Web site, about how BT are developing a motion-sensitive laptop, or more accuratley a device to attatch to the laptop.  The device, which is very much like the Nintendo Wii controler, I think is an idea but not a very good one.

The reason for the controller is apparently to help people with dissabilities  or the elderly.  I don't see that as it's primary use.  Why?  Because it wopuld be like using etch-a-sketch for these people.  How often have the able dodied 'just missed' that menu option, when using the mouse and clicked on something else?  What about those users who do not have full motor control?  Why not give them the same controls as an etch-a-sketch, the knob to move up and down, and the other knob to move left and right?  Would be much easier and simpler!

I see the primary is in the games industry just like the Wii controller.  But why bother?  When you can already buy such devices that are already much better?

Call me a cynic, but I personally think that it's the usual self promotion.  It appeases the share holders as BT are in the news, and it justifies them spending money on this department.  It also makes them look like they are trying to help the disabled and elderly.  If you have a look at the photos.  The laptop that the device is being used on is tiny.  Surely the laptop is too small for these disabled people to be able to see the screen clearly.  There is no way you would be tilting a normal laptop, they are simply too big.  Besides, who can afford such a small laptop, have you checked the prices of those things?  It's almost certinally to expensive for the disabled and elderly to justify.

To me, it's a good try, but too late and completley impractical at this level and target audience.

To keep up to date with the tools that a developer needs is a tricky thing.  It's made even harder when the core tools that they use are in the rpocess of being upgraded/improved/replaced.

The main development tool that I use is Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005.  There is a new version of this tool being developed by Microsoft, which is code named 'Orcas'.

I have known that there is a beta version of the application available for download for some time now.  The trouble with downloading and installing the beta is that it interferes with your current version resulting in you not being able to do your real work properly.

Thankfully Microsoft have provided an interesting solution.  The Visual Studio team have made Beta 1 of the next release of Visual Studio (codenamed 'Orcas') available as a virtual machine.  Its a 500Mb+ download but it does provide for a relatively easy way to assess the beta version without causing problems for your existing development environment.

For a long time now, the humble computer hard disk has been left behind in the development stakes.  Processors, RAM, graphics cards, screens, Front-side bus, etc have all been getting faster and better.  However, the hard disk hasn't really kept pace.  Yes, OK it has increased in size and decreased in cost, but it has not really gotten any faster.

How often have you nowadays been waiting for your application to start up, only to watch the HD light just constantly flash, and you can hear the drive churning.

Well, it looks like there is a bright light on the way.  Solid State Disk (SDD).  From Wikipedia, SSD is defined as:

"A solid state drive is primarily a data storage device, for use in computing applications that traditionally use a hard disk drive. A solid state drive is based on either non-volatile memory or volatile memory instead of the spinning platter and mechanical-magnetic head found in a conventional hard disk drive. With no moving parts, a solid state drive eliminates seek time, latency and other electro-mechanical delays and failures associated with a conventional hard disk drive."

To me, I describe it as a solid state drive is basically a lot of RAM put together that doesn't loose the data when not powered.

I have then found an article on http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/ that gives some details on the size and pricing of some of the early manufactured drives.  The article goes on to say "No word on pricing yet for the 32GB, but the 16GB weighs in at a hefty $250.00. With a range of SSD cards from 8GB – 32GB".  I can't wait until we get as common place these drives in every day electronics, such as laptops, iPODs, Mobile Phones, etc.

A lot of my current job is making sure that all the Web sites I create are AA accessibility compliant, and also cross browser compliant.  As many people who need to do this will already know, to test on many different browsers is difficult at best.  You can't have more than one version of Internet Explorer installed at the same time, for a start.  In my efforts to try and at least do a better job in my development of browser compatible Web sites I came accross Browsershots.org.

Test your web design in different browsers

Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.

I have previously been able to successfully deploy to my computer an IIS application, which is written using the .NET 2.0 framework, that is deployed by using a Microsoft Setup project.  As part of the setup project, it creates a new virtual directory for the IIS application.

Since the last successful deployment, I have installed the .NET 3.0 framework.

When I tried to deploy the project again, using the same setup project, I received the following error:

C:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727Aspnet_regiis.exe failed to set .net framework script map for W3SVC/1/Root/<virtual folder name> - aborting.

I found that after a bit of investigation that the registration of the .NET framework against IIS was not correct and was causing problems.

As my Web site still required to run under the .NET 2.0 framework, I re-registered the 2.0 framework against IIS, and successfully re-attempted the install.

.Net framework provides an Administration utility that manages the installation and uninstallation of multiple versions of ASP.NET on a single machine. You can find the file in C:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v**\aspnet_regiis.exe

To uninstall current asp.net version

use the command: aspnet_regiis.exe -u

To install current asp.net version

use the command: aspnet_regiis.exe -i

I've used, implemented and developed on top of quite a few search engines over my time in 'cyber land'.  Like most people (according to the latest stats), I currently use Google for 'most' of my Web searches.  I always struggle to get out of the search engine exactly what I want.  It's often very difficult to enter the right terms or narrow the results down enough.  The answer to getting what you want out of a search engine is to learn how to use it's advanced features.  I've listed below all of the advanced features that I use on Google below:

 

cache:

Show the cached snapshot of a page
For Example: Cache of www.internetwideworld.com

The cache is the search engine's copy of a page in its index. Google typically caches the first 101K of a page and not the images. The links to the caches are shown in Goggles search results and Page Info button on the Google tool bar can be used to access any cache available for the page.

link:

List pages which link to a page
For Example: Backlinks for www.internetwideworld.com

The term "backlinks" is used to describe those links from external sites which point to the page in question. These links are also known as "Inbound Links" or "IBLs". "Outbound Links" or "OBLs" are links from your site to other sites. The search engine optimisation world places great emphasis on increasing the number of backlinks a site enjoys because Google's conceptual model uses backlinks as votes. In general terms, a site with more backlinks is more of an authority than a site with fewer backlinks. Not all backlinks are of equal importance. In Google the phrase "B.O." is used for "Backlink Obsession" as a humorous reference for webmasters and optimisers who fixate on gaining links. Google's use of the link command omits the "http" protocol.

related:

List pages which Google consider to be related to another
For Example: Related links for www.internetwideworld.com

Related (or similar pages) are worked out by Google's algorithm. This search command allows you to find pages which discuss a similar topic to a page you have already found. For example, a review of Product X is likely to have related pages which also discuss Product X but may simply just be various reviews.

info:

Find one specific URL in the search database
For Example: Page info for www.internetwideworld.com

Presents limited information about a particular page in Google's index. Typically the command shows the page snippet and title as well as links to the cache or related pages. Typing a fully qualified URL into Google's search produces the same page.

define:

Show Google's glossary definitions for a term
For Example: Define SERPs

Google lists definitions of the keyword harvested from authoritative glossary-esq sites. The definitions are presented in a bullet point format with a link to the authoritative URL in green below. This results page differs from the links to Answers.com in the top right of many standard search result pages.

site:

Restrict a search to a single site
For Example: Site search for www.internetwideworld.com

The site: command can be used in two ways; to restrict a search to one site or to list all the pages Google has indexed from one site. For example, site:www.internetwideworld.com google searches InternetWideWorld.com for the word google and site:www.internetwideworld.com searches the site for any page and therefore lists them all. The site: command can either include or omit the 'www' in a domain, omitting the www will return all the sub-domains from the domain which Google has found.

allintitle:

Restrict a search so that all the keywords must appear in the title
For Example: Search for pages with internetwideworld blog in the title tag

This advanced search command restricts results to those pages which have all the keywords in their title tag. The title tag is the mark up to put contents into the bar at the top of the browser (typically blue in Windows XP). The title tag for this page is internetiwdeworld blog really google.

intitle:

Restrict a search so that some of the keywords must appear in the title
For Example: Search for pages which contain internetwideworld in the title and blog in the title or body tag

Returns pages which have some of the keywords in the title tag. This advanced search command differs from allintitle: in that only the keyword adjacent to intitle: is included in the title tag search.

allintext:

Restrict a search so that all of the keywords must appear in the body text
For Example: Search for pages with internetwideworld blog google in their body text

Returns pages which have all of the keywords contained within the body tag. This advanced search ignores the title tag which normally has a non trivial significance in Google's algorithm.

allinurl:

Restrict a search so that all of the keywords must appear in the page address
For Example: Search for pages with internet and wide and world in their URL

A page's URL is its address. The URL of this page is blog.internetwideworld.com/. This advanced search command returns only those pages which have all the keywords in their URL.

inurl:

Restrict a search so that some keywords must appear in the page address
For Example: Search for pages with internetwideworld, blog or both in their URL

Lists pages which have one or more of the keywords in their URL. The inurl: command can sometimes be used to restrict searches to specific sites and directories. For example: inurl:internetwideworld.com/blog/ board will return pages with 'internetwideworld.com/blog/' in their URL and board elsewhere on the page.

OR

List pages which have at least some of the keywords
For Example: Search for george OR leithead

By default Google searches for almost all the keywords entered (some words like a, the, of, etc are omitted). The OR command is placed between two or more keywords and instructs Google to return pages which contain one or another of the keywords.

+

Insist that the search engine includes a given keyword in the search results
For Example: Search for george, leithead and internetwideworld

Google purposely omits some words from normal searches but the use of the + command instructs the search engine to include them. For example, Google would treat a search for george the great as a search for george great as the is ignored but the phrase george +the great would ensure the word the was included.

-

Insist that the search engine omits pages which match a given keyword in the search results
For Example: Search for pages which match leithead but which do not mention george

The - command creates a negative keyword which must not be present on any page Google matches with the rest of the query. For example, football -American is likely to return pages about 'real' football (soccer to you damned Americans!).

~

Enhance a search to include synonyms for a given keyword
For Example: Search for leithead, developer and any synonyms for developer

The synonym search is more like an associated word search. With the ~ symbol present before a keyword Google will return pages which contain the keyword or pages which contain words commonly associated with the keyword. Google simply looks as frequencies across the internet to determine which words are associated with which. Words associated with developer are: software and design.

*

Include a wild card match in your search results
For Example: Search for george, [something] and leithead

The order of keywords in a Google search is significant. Adding the asterisk * as a wild card to the key phrase instructs Google that one or more other words should appear in that location.

[#]...[#]

Search a range of numbers as a keyword
For Example: Search for leithead and a number between 1973 and 2006

The [#] values are replaced with numbers to form a range. For example, 1973...2005. Google will search for pages which contain numbers matching the first, the last or any number in the middle of the sequence.

daterange:

Restrict a search to any daterange
For Example: Search for search on pages which were indexed between September 1, 2005 and September 24, 2005

The daterange command restricts Google's search to pages published between two dates. The date format used in the Julian calendar rather than the traditional Gregorian calendar.

""

Restrict a search so that the keywords must appear consecutively in a phrase
For Example: Search for "george leithead"

The order of keywords in a Google search is significant but not sacrosanct. Searching for george leithead returns pages which simply mention george and leithead. The search for "george leithead" returns different results as only pages which mention george leithead as a complete phrase are listed.

date:

Restrict a search to a recent time frame
For Example: Search for george and leithead on pages published in the last three months

The date: command is used to restrict searches to either 3, 6 or 12 month periods. Pages which qualify are those which have been published and found by Google in the time period. Pages without a last modified header may simply be qualified by the date Google found the page first.

safesearch:

Restrict a search to exclude adult-content For Example: Safe search for girls

The safesearch command mimics the effects of enabling SafeSearch on the Google preferences panel and excludes adult related content. Unlike other Google commands it is necessary to leave a space between safesearch: and the keyword as placing the keyword directly adjacent to the colon results in odd (often adult) results. For example, safesearch:girls (safesearch is off in this example).

filetype:

Restrict a search to a given type of file
For Example: Search for PDFs contain the word search

Google indexes more than just HTML pages. A wide range of different file types, including PDF and .doc files, are found in the search engine. The filetype command restricts searches to documents which match the filetype extension.