For many people learning by example is the optimal way to pick up a new programming language, idea, or technique. But finding that ideal piece of code to look at and learn from isn’t always easy. That’s where code search engines and snippet libraries come into play.

The seven listed below are the top places we could find that will help you locate the piece of code you’ve been looking for. But as always, if we’re missed any, please let us know in the comments below.

Popular open source code repository and version control web service GitHub launched a new Code Search feature today. Even though it’s the new kid on the block, GitHub has become super popular in a very short space of time and hosts a ton of public repositories. In a blog post, GitHub’s Scott Chacon classifies the amount of code searched as “a lot.”


Krugle claims to search over 2.5 billion lines of open source code, making them one of the largest source code search engines on the web. They claim to reach over a third of all developers world wide, and their enterprise search product powers code search for Amazon Web Services, IBM developerWorks, Collab.net, SourceForge.net, and Yahoo! Developer Network.

Koders, which claims to search over a billion lines of code, seems to be a favorite among Ruby programmers. In a press release announcing the company’s acquisition by Black Duck Software last month, the site revealed the Ruby searches were up 20-fold over the past four years and have passed PHP, Perl, and Python. Ruby is now the fourth most searched for language on the site behind only Java, C/C+ and C#.

Codase is the little guy on the block, weighing in at just 250 million lines of code searched, according to the site. That might be because development on the search engines appears to have stalled a couple of years ago. Codase focuses mainly on Linux C/C++ open source projects and appears out of date, so unless that’s what you’re looking for, there are better options out there.

With over 13,000 users contributing to over 5,000 code snippets, the DZone Snippets library is a great place to find good code examples. It’s certainly not the easiest site to browse, but there is some gold hidden for those who look. Exercise patience and you may find exactly what you need at DZone’s site.

Snipplr is a nicely designed code snippet library that has less users than DZone (just under 10,000), but more code snippets to crawl through — almost 8,000. And it seems to be gaining steam — more than half of the site’s snippets were added in the past year, even though the site is over 2 years old. Oh, and they have handy plugins for Textmate, Gedit, and Wordpress, and bookmarklets for Firefox and Safari. Very nicely executed.

Last, but certainly not least, is Google Code Search, the grand daddy of all code search engines. While the people at Krugle and Koders may argue the point, and Google doesn’t say how many lines of code they’re searching, when you’re talking search, Google is always the team to beat. Their code search engine searches a ton of public source code repositories — including GitHub, Sourceforge, and their own Google Code site. And Google supports a ton of languages.

BONUS: O’Reilly Code Search: Book publisher O’Reilly lets you search over 123,000 examples covering over 2.6 million lines of code taken from their books. Almost 700 of them.

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If the tumbling world economy has you worried, don’t despair: I’ve got your back. The Internet, as you may have heard, is a wonderful place, full of money making opportunities if you know where to look. My list of 12 ways to make extra cash online will point you in the right direction. None of these ideas will likely net you a full time income on their own — though there are certainly people who have managed to do so with each — but a couple of them in tandem, or in addition to your usual freelance work or day job, can make you some much needed extra cash.

If you know of any others, we’d love to hear your money making tips. Please share them in the comments.

Freelance Projects

Even as companies are laying off workers left and right, that work still need to get get done by someone. Often times, companies will turn to freelancers on a per project basis as a way to save money and get things done quickly. Further, for smaller, one-time projects, it doesn’t make sense for many companies to hire a full-time employee, so frequently they will turn to the freelancer marketplace. There are many places to look for freelance jobs, but the large bid-based job boards are a good place to start. eLance, Guru, ScriptLance, and sologig are some of the best known.

Become a Topic Expert

About.com provides users with a guided tour of the web’s best sites in a wide range of topical areas. Each area of the site is maintained by a paid guide who is an expert in that area. The job of a guide is one part blogger, one part directory curator, and one part columnist. There are always openings for new guides and compensation starts at $725 per month. Guides are paid based on the amount of traffic they bring in and some make in excess of $100,000 per year.

Moonlight as a Designer

More and more smart companies are turning toward design contests to crowdsource their design work and get professional-quality results more efficiently. For designers, contests offer a steady stream of potential clients and a way to build up their portfolios. The clear market leader in the space is SitePoint’s own sister site 99designs. With almost $3 million in prize money awarded, and hundreds of open projects at any one time, you’ll never lack for work. ReadWriteWeb has a good list of other contest sites for designers to find even more opportunities.

Sell Your Stuff

Becoming an eBay millionaire is far from a piece of cake, but making some extra money in tough economic times is definitely doable. We all have some stuff in the attic that we never use, have outgrown, or just no longer need. Put it up for sale on eBay or Craigslist and make some extra cash. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, after all.

Cash in on Your Photos

Amateur-produced stock photos are a huge business. Last year iStockPhoto paid out $20.9 million in royalties to contributors. So selling your photos is indeed a possible way to make some extra, passive income, and there are a number of places where you can try to sell your pictures. I will a list of 15 such stock photo web sites, many of which give bonuses for exclusivity.

Flip a Website

Buying and selling web sites has also become big business, and unlike the house flipping market, the bottom hasn’t fallen out of the web site market. SitePoint’s Marketplace has grown into the web’s number one place to buy and sell web sites, and many people make a living doing just that.

Help People Search

If you’re good at finding things one the Internet, then you can make a few extra bucks helping people locate the information they need. Web search site ChaCha employs an army of search guides that help people do web searches. You won’t make big bucks doing it, but it’s not a bad way to make some spare change in your down time.

Sell Your Writing

Finding a full-time job as a writer isn’t easy (trust me, I should know!), but selling your freelance writing (and audio, video, and images) has never been easier thanks to Associated Content. AC is a network of content producers that allows anyone to submit content and be paid for it when it is distributed to their partner sites. The site says it has paid out over $1 million to content producers.

Name a Product

Even if you’re not a designer, you can still get in on the crowdsourcing action. NameThis is a contest site similar to 99designs, but rather than competing for design projects, users compete to come up with names for new products and services. If you fancy yourself a clever wordsmith, there is money to be earned at NameThis.

Design a T-Shirt

On the other hand, if you’re a design star, you may want to try your luck at t-shirt design for Threadless. Winning designs get $2,000 in cash, and $500 worth of free t-shirts, plus all the prestige that goes along with being a Threadless winner. Non-designers can submit slogans for a shot at a $500 cash prize.

Do Odd Jobs

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a people-power API from Amazon that lets companies easily outsource tasks to humans. These tasks are often mundane, and don’t pay much on their own, but they can be a good way to make extra cash just by doing things like reviewing restaurants, evaluating search results, and rating videos.

Sell Products on Your Blog

Have a blog? If you want to make a little extra cash, PayPerPost offers a way to write sponsored blog posts about products and services for money. There are some ethical ramifications here, so we’d advise that you always clearly disclose when a post is paid and avoid jobs that require a positive review.

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How to make money blogging is a common question for those who want to monetize their blog. There are so many ways to do this. So many blog whiz provides free information on how to make money blogging nowadays. Here is the list of money making ops that you can choose:

1. Google ads
- Please don’t motivate others, click the ads on your own ads or exchange clicks. It might get the account banned from the network. There are many similar service providers but none as big and huge network as Google ads.

2. Paid posts (make sure nofollow, or else you will lose page rank)
- So far only socialspark tag along nofollow rules on paid post links. PayPerpost strict on dofollow links. However, there are other paid post networks which let the customers choose between dofollow or don’t bother about dofollow. I tried BuyBlogReviews, SponsoredReviews and Bloggerwave for nofollow paid posts and it works.

3. Text link ads - Private / Other service providers (nofollow)
There are many text link ads service providers available in the market but the fees is very high. Some even charging between 40 – 50%. Personally, I feel it is better to sell it privately to the visitors.Otherwise, you could try any other text link ads with nofollow and cheaper fees. For me, Scratchback is one of the cheapest, but only drawback is we need to wait until min $25 to withdraw.

4. 125×125 ad spot - Private / Other service providers (nofollow)
125×125 pixel ad spot becomes more famous these days. Most of the blog templates comes with ad spots of 125×125 nowadays. There are a few advertising networks provides 125×125 ad spots with higher fees. Personally, I want to sell it privately. It is up to the blogger’s decision.

5. Affiliate sales – Choose the paying affiliates
Affiliate income could be the largest income revenue in blogging industry if we really utilize it. Try to advertise affiliate links on domain, hosting, paid post networks, etc and get money from your visitor’s activity from this affiliate links.

6. Matched - Unique Earning method
You need to register your blog with Matched and can provide up to 5 posts link to advertise. There will be a small box advertisement running at the footer of this post if got any approved ads. Remember, each approved ads will earn us GBP$8.00. That is about US$12 - US$15 based on exchange rate.

Here are only a few guidelines on how to make money blogging from my point of view. If you have any additional ways, please share.

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A system is a set of interrelated components which interact with each other to achieve some desired objective.

Characteristics of a system:

1. It has a definite purpose,objective or goal.
2. It tends to maintain itself in a steady state.
3. It has self correcting and self adjusting abilities.
4. It interacts with the environment through input from the environment and output to the environment.
   

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An effective web design is one in which your users are able to find information quickly and in a logical fashion.

Do they visit the content you want them to visit? Are they looking in the right places of your web page? Are you able to keep your user’s attention, or do they just leave quickly?

It’s not just about the content either. If your design loads slowly - or if moving from one section to another takes a long time - it affects the user’s experience.

These things can be the make-or-break factors between a user clicking on a link to find more information, or the back button to find it elsewhere.

Some things to consider:

• Are important information being seen by the user?
• Are the navigation and action items intuitive?
• Is the user being directed to sections in a logical manner?
• Does the web page load quickly enough to not turn away the user?

If you’re interested in analyzing and optimizing your page layout - here’s some extremely useful tools that you can use to help.

1. ClickHeat

ClickHeat is an open source visual tool for showing “hot” and “cold” zones of a web page. It allows you to see which spots users click on most, and which spots are being ignored.

It’s very easy to implement on your website, you only have to include an external JavaScript file.

Download: Clickheat on SourceForge.net.

2. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg offers a myriad of analytical tools to help you visualize what visitors are doing.

Features include: Confetti - allowing you to see what people are clicking on based on certain factors such as their operating system and where they came from, Overlay - providing you with tons of data about particular links, and Report sharing - enabling you to share the data with team members and clients.

The free version only allows 4 pages to be tracked - so use your top landing pages to get the most data.

3. YSlow for Firebug

A key tenet of a strong design is that, not only should information be presented in a logical and elegant fashion, but that it must also be served quickly, with very little delay.

YSlow for Firebug is a free tool for Mozilla Firefox that gives you information about your front-end design to see if it performs well. It gives you a letter grade (A through F) and outlines your web page’s trouble spots.

It’s based on the Yahoo! Developer Network’s “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site” initially written by Steve Souders, who was once the Chief of Performance at Yahoo! and is now working over at Google on web performance and open source initiatives.

Downloads: Firebug extension for Firefox (required) and YSlow.

4. clickdensity

clickdensity is a full suite of usability analysis tools that will help you assess your web page design.

You can use heat maps showing where users click on the most, hover maps - which shows people scrolling over links but not clicking on them, and A/B Tests which allows you to change certain page elements to see which style is more effective.

The free subscription give you 5,000 clicks and only one page and one site to monitor.

5. ClickTale

ClickTale offers a lot of user data pertaining to how visitors use your website.

There are plenty of things you can look at such as average time it takes for a user to click on a link, a user’s hesitation on clicking a link, hover to click ratio, and much more. It also provides detailed reports and charts on your users’ monitor sizes to better optimize your web page design to cater for the typical visitor.

6. Clicky

Perhaps the most interesting feature that Clicky has is its real-time tracking and monitoring feature, called Spy (check out the demo here).

Besides Spy, there’s a host of other analytics data you can look at such as user Actions - which records click data from your users and Visitors - providing you user data.

7. Google Analytics

One of the best free services that Google offers is Google Analytics and probably the most well-known analytics tool. It’s incredibly easy to install and offers plenty of user and content data to help you learn more about your web pages’ performance.

It has a feature called Site Overlay, which gives you a visual representation of the popular places your users like to click on. It also offers data on bounce rates and your top exit pages (to see what pages make users leave).

So there they are, some of the best tools in the market to help you troubleshoot and optimize your page layout. In the end, it’s a combination of great content, as well as how you present this content — that will lead to an effective design.

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