Coding College

Harvey Kane is a true webmaster. He has managed to do things that most of us want to do but simply don’t have the skills, time or man power to accomplish. He is a SEO consultant and runs the site Rage Pank where he discuss common (and not so) SEO problems.He has also developed his own open source CMS call Jojo CMS.

Why did you decide to learn to code?
Everything about my career in IT started with computer games. Back in the dark ages before internet, getting computers to work properly was quite tricky. A lot of my spare time was spent fixing mum’s computer before she noticed something was broken. I was tinkering with code from the age of about 8 or 9 I guess - writing simple programs in basic, and a (lame) attempt at a text-based adventure game, as was cool at the time. A friend of mine knew how to get coloured text appearing in basic, so there was a source of inspiration to keep me going.

What coding languages do you know?
PHP is my staple, along with other languages required to build a website such as Javascript, CSS (if that counts) and SQL. I have written a few custom applications in Delphi as well.
Along the way, I have written a small amount in Perl, C++, Basic, Visual basic, Pascal, Machine code, ASP (Classic), Cold Fusion and probably others.

How long have you been coding?
If you count my first piece of code ever, about 22 years. I have been full-time coding for the last 8 years. Before that I was fixing PCs and networks, and coding part-time and for fun.

Why did you decide to make your own cms?
I never really sat down to write a CMS - It started by moving a client’s site into PHP so I could manage it using includes (ie to make easy sitewide changes). After that came a simple content editing area for a fixed number of pages. After that came a WYSIWYG editor and page content stored in a database. The CMS soon became less about providing an admin section for the client, and more about being a consistent framework for developing on - the main advantage being that code could be re-used between client sites. Meaning cheaper and faster (in terms of development time) sites.
If I was starting out again, I wouldn’t create a CMS from scratch with such good open source options out there. But writing a home-brew CMS does give you a great understanding of how websites work. Jojo CMS is still as much about being a good framework as it is a CMS, and we have some nice points of difference in there, particularly in relation to SEO.

What is the most common S.E.O mistake you see web site owners make?
Web developers make all kinds of SEO mistakes. But for website owners, I think the biggest problem is that many aren’t prepared to put the time in to make the content decent. There is this mentality of farming the website marketing out to a consultant, or to get the new kid at the company to spend some time writing the same old corporate nonsense for the homepage.
There are cases where website owners phone up a year after a site goes live asking for the password to the CMS. Or site owners that don’t notice there is a bug in their enquiry form and go for months without getting any enquiries. Or even websites that have domains expire without anyone noticing for several weeks.
It’s very hard to create interest in a website that the owner isn’t interested in. People just don’t like linking to ugly websites, or buggy websites, or websites without content. SEO is as much about dealing with humans as it is about tricking Googlebot, and the website owner should know their market and product better than the web developer does. They need to help communicate this to their audience.

What other fun/interesting projects have you been involved with because of your coding skills?
I’m always coming up with non-work-related ways to use code. An early example of this was PartyPlay which was a jukebox program in Delphi for playing mp3s - before the market got saturated with options - designed specifically to be easy to use for pissed people at parties, and with decent queue control (I was getting sick of going to parties where songs kept getting chopped off halfway through, or people clearing the queue you spent half an hour preparing). Even now (about 10 years on) it’s still way better than Itunes / Media Player for running a music box at a party.
I ended up losing the source code in a system failure and have to run my own copy using a crack I found on some warez site. Kinda funny.
Another fun project was the FireLadder, a gaming ladder website for Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. This evolved into anticheat software which booted people from the server who were using hacked installs of the game. The FireLadder was a fun couple of years, before I got a mortgage and had kids.

Do you have any pointers/tips for people looking to get into coding?
- Take some time off work / study to sit down with a good book and go through the exercises. Too many times I have written my own functions / routines because I didn’t know about a certain built-in feature. Learning the basics properly maks it easier later on.
- Spend time in forums, discussion lists, and meetups to learn new tricks from more experienced developers.
- Start out coding something fun, which you will get more inspired by. One of my early successes in web development was a gaming ladder. It was successful because I loved gaming. Plenty of time for coding invoicing systems later on.