Favicons (short for favorites icons) are those tiny little icons left of your web browser’s address bar, and are a part of your overall site branding. They show up in your web browser, but also in news feeds, so it’s important that you include one with your site. Favicons really are tiny icons; their dimensions are 16 pixels by 16 pixels—not an awful lot of space to work with. Have a look around the Web and see what other sites are using. Some icons work better than others at this small size, and simplicity is the key.

Yahoo! Sitemaps was scrapped on November 21, 2011 (actually, it was named “Yahoo! Site Explorer” but no one called it that). The system allowed website owners to submit their XML sitemaps and feeds to the search engine in the same way as Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Following last year’s partnership agreement with Microsoft, Yahoo has adopted Bing’s search engine so you’ll now be forwarded to the Bing Webmaster Tools page. There’s nothing to fear but, unfortunately, you can’t automatically transfer your old Yahoo sitemap configurations either. However, with a little preparation, each of your sites can be set-up within minutes.

As the name implies, jQuery focuses on queries. The core of the library allows you to find DOM elements using CSS selector syntax and run methods on that collection.

jQuery uses native browser API methods to retrieve DOM collections. Newer browsers support getElementsByClassName, querySelector and querySelectorAll which parses CSS syntax. However, older browsers only offer getElementById and getElementByTagName. In the worst scenarios, jQuery’s Sizzle engine must parse the selector string and hunt for matching elements.