Have you ever wondered if your skills are in demand? With so many different possibilities available for web development, it is tough to know if you should keep mastering a specific technology or start learning a new one. After reading an article about how PHP programming jobs are in high demand, I asked myself the follow-up question: what other skills do I have that are in high demand, and which skills do I have that are not?

The article linked to a great resource from oDesk that lists the current (monthly) trends for many of the development and design skills used for web development. There are 84 different trends with a wealth of useful information about the skill's demand including graphs, stats, and recent job postings. Although these stats are pulled from information specifically on oDesk, it represents demand from all around the world. I have listed links to some of the most in-demand skills right now.

• CSS
• Drupal
• FreeBSD
• Flash
• PHP
• Photoshop
• MySQL
• XML
• JavaScript
• Ajax

As a side note, this site is a fantastic example of how great the Google Chart API is.

As a developer I have often wanted to be able to test query speeds among other things. The problem is I didn't always have a usable data set sitting around that could meet the requirements of my test cases. To make a long story short, I wish I had GenerateData.com a long time ago. This is a great tool and has a lot of potential. It can save a lot of time when you are trying to create your own test data set to work with.

GenerateData.com is currently in version 2.1 (released July 25, 2008) and offers a nice set of features. You can generate data in many different data types like addresses, numbers, lorem ipsum text, email addresses, phone numbers, and more. Once you have chosen what kind of data you would like to generate, you can choose from five different export options. You are able to export the data in XML, Excel, HTML, CSV and SQL formats. The SQL export options gives you the choice of MySQL or Oracle syntax. You can generate up to 200 records at a time, unless you donate $20 or more, which allows you to generate up to 5000 records at a time.

The generator is written using PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript. You can use the online version or download a copy of the script for use on your own server. The downloadable version is licensed under GNU. The website has requirements and installation instructions to follow if needed.

If you have visited a few blogs then I am sure you have seen the FeedBurner stats graphic. The count is very useful, but the graphic itself isn't very appealing, even with the ability to customize it. Thankfully the FeedBurner API was released, which allows you to retrieve your stats without the graphic. I have taken that API and created a simple function, with the help of simple XML, to grab your circulation count and display it as text on your site without the graphic.

To start off, you will need to download the simple XML class and put it in the same folder as the file that will contain this function (or change the include path to reflect the directory of your choice). Once you have done that, you are pretty much done. All you need to do is copy the function below and call the function with your feed URI and it will return the circulation number.

You can see the function and sample usage below.

Function

function FeedBurnerCirc($feed) {
include 'simplexml.class.php';
$api = 'http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri='.$feed;
$sxml = new simplexml;
$sxml->ignore_level = 1;
$data = $sxml->xml_load_file($api,"array");
return $data["entry"]["@attributes"]["circulation"];
}

Usage

echo FeedBurnerCirc('http://feeds.feedburner.com/webmastersbydesign');

You could also easily customize the function to include more data and return an array of results. The API returns data other that the circulation, such as your reach and views. I only wanted the circulation so I didn't return an array of results, but it wouldn't be tough to do.

Sitemaps are a big part of the SEO game. The main reason for generating a Sitemap (Sitemap with a capital "S" denotes an XML Sitemap) is to help ensure all your web pages are listed in the search engine indexes. It is incredibly important to have search engines indexing your page to show when a keyword is searched. Major search engines like Google and Yahoo! can drive a lot of traffic to your site simply because you added a valid sitemap to your site. A Sitemap file is simply an XML file that contains a list of pages on your site. Here are the rules to follow when creating a Sitemap.

General Rules

• The file must use the UTF-8 encoding.
• The data values must be entity-escaped.
• The file location must be the root of the URL's being submitted.
• A minimum of 3 tags are required: "urlset", "url", and "loc".

Detailed Rules

• The file location determines what URL's can be included in the Sitemap. If you place the Sitemap at "http://www.yoursite.com/blog", the only URL's that can be submitted have to reside in the root URL "http://www.yoursite.com/blog". URL's from "http://www.yoursite.com" can't be submitted in the Sitemap. The URL's can also be only from a single host. If you place the Sitemap at "http://www.yoursite.com", you can't submit URL's from "http://dev.yoursite.com".
• The "urlset" tag is the root tag of the Sitemap. All other tags will be within the open "urlset" tag (<urlset>) and the close "urlset" tag (</urlset>). Within the open "urlset" tag you must include the schema to be used; in most cases it will be "http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9".
• The "url" tag is the parent tag for each URL you want to to be included in the Sitemap. All tags available, with the exception of the aforementioned "urlset" tag, are child tags of the "url" tag. Available children tags include "loc", "lastmod", "changefreq", and "priority".
• The "loc" tag is the last required tag. This tag gives the exact URL of the page that is being referenced. The URL entered here needs to be the full URL including "http://".

Optional Rules

• The "lastmod" tag can be included to show when the page was last updated. This date needs to be in "YYYY-MM-DD" format.
• The "changefreq" tag allows you to show how often the page is changed. There are 7 possible values for "changefreg"; they are "always", "hourly", "daily", "weekly", "monthly", "yearly", and "never".
• The "priority" tag is the level of importance each page is in relation to the others (on your site). This tag does not have anything to do with other website pages. The values can range from 0.0 to 1.0, with 0.5 being the default value.

Example Sitemap

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2008-07-07</lastmod>
      <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
      <priority>1.0</priority>
   </url>
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/about</loc>
      <lastmod>2008-06-09</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.2</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>

Additional Resources

• Google Webmaster Help Center
• Sitemaps.org Protocol Information
• XML Sitemaps Generator