As I have been recently afflicted with a fascination for usability and accessibility and how they relate to search optimization, I found this definition posted by Joe Clark absolutely hilarious:

accessibility theatre

conspicuous but ineffective or counterproductive measures giving the appearance of responsible attention to accessibility

I am officially a Web Directions North affiliate. What a fantastic resource! If you’re a web developer and you haven’t heard of Web Directions… you have GOT to check it out.

Web Directions North | February 6 – 10, 2007

An Aussie creation that spans the globe, Web Directions is a mecca of veritable web talent brought to you by Dave Shea, Derek Featherstone, Maxine Sherrin, John Allsopp and including speakers like Kelly Goto, Andy Clarke, Adrian Holovaty, Douglas Bowman, Dan Cederholm, Joe Clark, Molly Holzschlag, Derek Featherstone, Veerle Pieters, Jeremy Keith, and others.

Workshops will cover Ajax and Javascript, CSS, Microformats, mashups, standards based web design and development, accessibility, web app development, XHTML and HTML and more. Top that off with two optional days of skiing and boarding at Whistler, and Web Directions North is 2007’s web design and development event not to be missed.

Often, web developers turned database designers begin their coding endeavors by picking up whatever snippets are printed in the O’reilly title at hand or whatever Google throws their way. Building a database-driven website is easy. Making it fast is not. A little attention to schema, indexes, query optimization, and benchmarking could give your app the performance boost it needs to reach greatness.

1. Benchmark to measure success
2. Get familiar with the EXPLAIN command
3. Know how the storage engines differ
4. Narrow, non-redundant indexes are better
5. Smaller data types are better
6. Fewer reads = faster results: Use the query cache for read intensive apps
7. Learn to use joins properly
8. Use calculated fields only when necessary
9. Increase memory

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