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Just came across this bug when using Google’s “Specific date range” search option …

Google allows a number of ways to filter via their “Show Options” link above the standard search results. Clicking “Show Options” opens a column on the left with more options including the ability to specify a date range. Notice their suggested date format (dd/m/yyyy) and the date format I am using in my example search following the suggested same date/month order. Oops!

Google is localising the suggested date format but not handling the localised input.

On the right you can see using m/dd/yy it works fine.

(And no - no different if I use yyyy instead of yy).

Need to serve up different content for people from different countries? Or track users by country? Or make a site more usable by providing options relevant to a particular country? I recently had a small programming task which required pre-selection of a country field based on the visitor’s country.

Maxmind offers a free Geolocation database, GeoLite Country which allows lookup of country from an IP. They claim it to be 99.3% accurate. They have a paid version that is more accurate. They also offer other databases, including one to lookup a city from an IP. The database is available as CSV data or in binary format. The binary format is very easy to implement as they provide APIs in a variety of languages. I used their PHP API. There are code samples to get things going quickly.

I used their PHP class which was the easiest to implement. Simply upload the class file and binary file and require the class file. The calls are simple and the lookup is fast. Very easy to implement.

Some high quality and impressive looking 404 pages.

read more | digg story

We might understand what 404 means, but many users do not. Some good tips to provide a more helpful error page to the user when a page cannot be found.

read more | digg story