Webstractions - Web Development & Design News

Every now and then, there is a forum post worth bookmarking and a Search Engine Watch thread that compiles an excellent list of link-building resources is such a post. The post, and the comments that follow, provides for a very comprehensive list of tools, articles, forum threads and knowledge bases that can be found on the Internet.

Good job Nacho.

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Yet another color scheme generator:

http://www.wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html

VIA: Dave's Chalkboard

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InsideGoogle reported on the first-ever SEO Toolbar which assists site owners with tracking backlinks for all the major search engines and if the page is listed in DMOZ. The toolbar is offered by Garry Grant's Search Engine Optimization, Inc.

Some people may know Garry. He's played a guitar since the age of 19 and has appeared with the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi. His career in web development started when he founded DAG Web Studios about 10 years ago. He also holds a degree, Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, from Monmouth University.

So does all of this make for another must-have toolbar? Not really. Garry is an entrepreneur with a lot of savvy. As a self-professed leader in the SEO Industry, this toolbar (as most are) is just a gimmick.

It boasts that it will provide you with data from 9 search engines. In all actuality, there are only 2 that you need to concern yourself with, Yahoo and Google. All the rest are derived from these two.

One thing that sticks in my craw about this toolbar is that you are required to submit an email address and your Zip Code before you can download it. That is enough for me to pass it up.

Better Alternatives are Available

I use a service, Uptimebot, which will deliver the exact same results as this toolbar. Here are the results for this site Webstractions. I am sure that a bookmarklet could be fashioned to pluck the current page from the address bar and post it to the form. If anybody creates a bookmarklet, please let me know and I will blog it for you.

If you really want advanced linkback analysis though, I recommend Axandra's (maker of Arelis) Link Popularity Check. It is a free desktop program that checks the link popularity status of your web site on several search engines and compares it to other web sites on the Internet (for example your competitors).

Link Popularity Check is completely safe to install on your system. It will not change the system registry and it will not make any unauthorized connections from your system. The software also includes an uninstaller.

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Ever notice that freshdate tag in the Google SERPS is sometimes one day earlier than the actual date in the cached version of that page? This is because the timestamp of the cached version is simply Greenwich Mean Time (GMT -0 hours). The freshdate tag is based on Pacific Standard Time (GMT -8 hours). There will be an 8 hour window where the date will not overlap.

VIA: Zorgloob

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A mozillaZine member, wig_out_on_me, offers up a Windows Registry file that will create a Desktop namespace for Firefox similar to the way Internet Explorer, My Computer and the Recycle Bin shortcuts are set up. This namespace provides for a context menu with Profile Manager, Safe Mode, etc. included on it. Any shortcuts created from this namespace will retain the added context menu items which is handy for the Quick Launch toolbar.


VIA: Gemal's Psyched Blog

Labels: Firefox, repub

In the DHTML Lab section of WebReference, they introduce their first maintenance release of Popup Calendar. They have added better navigation bar styling and the ability to clear read-only input fields. Also included, new functionality that enables you to separate form elements to display any combination of a user-selected date, month and year.

This is a stunning piece of code that you will just have to see for yourself.
(Click on the to access the calendar features)

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Just browsing around the net and came up with these interesting sites dealing with Photoshop. Tutorials, tip, tricks ranging from beginning to advanced. A little bit for everybody. Enjoy!

• Janee's Photoshop Tutorials, Courses in Photoshop
  
• Tutorial Outpost
  
• Good-Tutorials.com
  
• PhotoshopCAFE
  
• Photoshop Tips & Tricks
  
• Photoshop Tutorials
  
• PurePhotoshop Tutorials & Articles
  
• Free Adobe Photoshop Tutorials
  
• 80Four Adobe Photoshop Tutorials, Video Tutorials
  
• CreativePro Photoshop Articles
  
• Photoshop for Photographers
  

If you have any to share, just drop them in a comment or two or three.

UPDATE: Oct 20, 2004

• Studio-X Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Axialis Tutorials
  
• HeathRowe Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Photosjop Tips & Learning
  
• TeamPhotoshop Tutorials & Tips
  
• DesignsByMark PS Tips & Tutorials
  
• Grafika PS Tutorials (Czech)
  
• BioRust PS Tutorials
  
• CBT Cafe PS Tutorials & Articles
  
• Photoshop Lover

UPDATE: Oct 23, 2004

• Creative Bits: PS Tips Blog
  
• 3 Simple Improvements (Greg Roberts)
  
• Planet Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Computer Darkroom (Misc Tutorials)
  
• DevCo Photo Tutorials
  
• Nebulus Designs PS Tutorials
  
• Phong PS Tutorials
  
• Eyewire PS Tips & Tutorials
  
• Think Dan PS Tutorials (Index listing)
  
• Magic Pixel PS Workshop

UPDATE: Oct 27, 2004

• Digital Photography Tutorials
  
• Informit Photoshop Articles
  
• The Makeshift Miracle Tutorials
  
• The Slimarillion
  
• Shanzcan Photoshop Tutorials
  
• Photoshop Brushes Tutorials
  
• GrafX Design PS Tutorials
  
• Pegaweb Web Design & PS Tutorials
  
• RetouchPRO Tutorials
  
• Carl Volk's Photoshop Tips

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Adam Kalsey has a handy online tool to create those little buttons that everyone is so fond of. The tool uses Bill Zeller's button maker script which is written in PHP, so you could host this application yourself with without much trouble.

UPDATE: It does not appear that the script is available on Bill's site.

VIA: Band of Gonzo Forums

Labels: blogging, css, repub

Jacob Rosenberg blogs an entry into today's Yahoo!Search blog to expose some of the more useful (and lesser known) features of Yahoo! News.

He gives examples of advanced search queries to over 7,000 Yahoo! News sources. You can filter your content based on Location, News Source, Category, Language, and News Type. You can even compose your own advanced search by using the above search commands or use their advanced news search page.

There is also a new xml button on the News Search result page, in which you can now turn any search into a fresh full-blown RSS 2.0 feed.

"For example hurricane location:florida gets you your own ongoing feed of hurricane news from Florida. The only restriction is that the source parameter doesn't work in RSS mode, and some providers may choose to opt out of RSS results."

This is probably the best new feature of all. You can roll your own news feed.

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SEbasic has some great suggestions for simple Blogger template changes you can make to optimize them for better rankings. He has complete sample code all laid out for you to paste into your templates. Worth a peak!

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One of the interesting technical challenges that every search engine comes up against is identifying duplicate content. Super-geek, Greg Linden, learns of a whitepaper from his friend Jeff Dean who co-authored (along with Krishna Bharat, Andrei Z. Broder and Monika Rauch Henzinger) a paper (PDF) on this very topic.

"The paper analyzes the performance of several techniques for detecting mirrors, from simple approaches like the similar IP address or hostname to more complicated and quite clever analysis of the link structure of sites. The paper concludes that a content-based approach (called 'shingles' in the paper) works well but that a combination of several approaches works best."

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You can see the latest list of Search Engine IP Addresses and hostnames here. Included on the list (last updated in September) are:

• Fast/AllTheWeb
  
• Alta Vista
  
• Lycos
  
• Inktomi
  
• WiseNut
  
• Google
  
• Ask Jeeves/Teoma
  
• Misc Search Engines
  
• Non Spiders

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An online utility that will validate your robots.txt file.

VIA: Band of Gonzos Forums

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An interesting observation by Evan Williams for the search term "powered by" (with quotes) in Google. The search will pull up results that mostly contain the term in the anchor text of links pointing to the sites (view the cache version of the pages to see this).

Anchor text is one of the most powerful ranking factors at Google. The results are a pretty good gauge of how many pages are powered by certain software or services. Of course, pages with higher PageRank could influence the list and not just the brute strength method.

The top ten, at the time of this post, are:

1. Apache.org
   
2. MySQL.com
   
3. PHP.net
   
4. Blogger.com
   
5. Bravenet.com
   
6. FreeBSD.org
   
7. ListBot.com
   
8. RedHat.com
   
9. RingSurf.com
   
10. Linux.org
    

Surprisingly, Google.com did not make the cut. It came in at #14.

Your results may vary, depending on your location. Evan actually had Apache, Blogger and MySQL in the top three.

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A frank and very open discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums regarding cloaking techniques ... and the pitfalls.

The thread has liberal amounts of thoughts from their resident "industrial strength cloaker", Fantomaster. You will learn such things as IP Delivery, Shadow Domains, and a host of other tricks of the cloaking trade.

Meanwhile, Larry and Sergey are in Japan on their promotional tour. They had this to say:

"The company is also working hard to stop search engine optimizers (SEO) from distorting search results...There are many SEOs that are trying to manipulate Google. Our biggest message is that through our products, we always want to promote a better and healthier service."

No that was not in response to the thread at SEW, it is just Peter's quirky sense of humor in his blog post today.

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A simple php & curl script to turn Google News queries into an RSS feed. Please be warned though, this is a scraping script. 'nuf said.

I tested the script out in my Sage reader for Firefox, and it is works very well. No reason why it would not work in most readers.

Since you can not use the Google API to query the Google News area, this is about the only way to get a feed from them. It would be nice if Google would start providing feeds for their News Search though.

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Don't let this name fool you, but the FCKeditor is a full fledged text editor for Internet. This HTML text editor brings to the web many of the powerful functionalities of known desktop editors like Word. It's really lightweight and doesn't require any kind of installation in the client computer for it is all TTW (or Through The Web).

It is also Open Source and jam packed with features, including Internet Explorer 5.5+ and Gecko browser (Mozilla / Netscape) compatibility, skinnable, link creation and anchor support, table creation and cell editing, form fields, right click context menus support, spell checker, CSS support, automatic browser detection, multi-language support, integration with many scripting languages (ie: PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, etc.) and image / file uploading.

You can demo it here.

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ListGarden is an Open Source RSS feed generator
from Software Garden Products.

Features:

• Creates and maintains RSS feeds
  
• Produces both XML and optional human-readable companion HTML
  
• Runs either on your PC or on a web server (perl)
  
• Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
  
• Open source
  
• Requires no knowledge of XML or the RSS data format
  
• Tuned for quick manual additions of new items and simple editing

Lee Underwood has a very nice review of ListGarden at WebReference.com.

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The Toolbar Browser is a complete Toolbar Authoring and Management tool. You can use it to manage dozens of toolbars in a simple tabbed control to save valuable browser space. It also includes all the standard features for search, navigation, popup blocking, etc., so you will never need another toolbar.

Toolbar Authoring & Custom Toolbars
You can take the best features from all your favorite toolbars and combine them into your own super toolbar. Because the Toolbar Browser is also a complete authoring tool, that is exactly what you can do. Designing a new toolbar is as simple as creating an HTML page. Toolbars can be written in XML, HTML, Java or even Flash.

FreeWare
The Toolbar Browser is a freeware application. There is nothing you need to purchase, no royalties or fees, so you can create and distribute a great toolbar for your website, service or business.

Distributing your own toolbar builds customer loyalty and brand awareness. Toolbar Distribution is also very simple. Just insert the toolbar code into any web page.

VIA: SEO Book

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Peer2Mail lets you store and share files on your web-mail account. If you have a web mail account with large storage space, you can use P2M to store files on it. Web-mail providers such as Gmail (Google Mail), Walla!, Yahoo and more, provide storage space that ranges from 100MB to 2GB.

P2M splits the file you want to share/store zips and optionally encrypts it. P2M then sends the file segments one by one to your account. Once P2M uploaded all file segments, you can download them and use P2M to merge the segments back to the original file.

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Simple little icon generator for your Gmail account.



... or your Yahoo! Mail account.



... or your Hotmail account.

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Practical PHP Programming is an online book for PHP that delves into the basics of this scripting language. Quickly glancing through this resource, it appears to be comprehensive and is written in an easy to follow style. Good for the newcomer to intermediate programmer.

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MySQL claims to be the world's most popular open source database and with good reason. It is free, runs on a wide variety of platforms, is relatively simple, easy to configure and performs well even under significant load. By comparison to some other popular database management systems, configuring it is quite simple, but there are still a sufficiently wide variety of security-relevant configuration issues to make securing it a challenge.

NGS Research has a brief whitepaper (PDF file) of common attacks on MySQL and the steps that a MySQL administrator can take to defend against them.

Topics covered in the whitepaper include:

• MySQL versions and patching
  
• MySQL in a network environment
  
• Bugs In The Authentication Protocol
  
• Historical Bugs
  
• MySQL as a web back-end
  
• SQL injection in MySQL (via UNION, SELECT, LOAD_FILE and more)
  
• Local Attacks
  
• Other MySQL features to be wary of

A MySQL Lockdown Checklist is also included.

Further MySQL security resources:

• MySQL Security Guidelines
  
• Securing MySQL: step-by-step
  
• Secure MySQL Database Design
  
• Securing Your MySQL Installation
  

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If you are not seeing the Atom feed button in your Gmail account yet or it has disappeared, you will still be happy to know that the feed is still there. You just need to know where to find it.

The feed can be found at:

https://gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom

You may also be able to use HTTP authorization, which means you can use the username@password construct in some feed readers. Add this to your feed reader:

http://gmailusername:password@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom/

If you are using Live Bookmarks or Sage and GMail is always logged in, you don’t need to do this, but its probably better to do so.

Thanks to Cow

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Persistent.info describes how you can skin your Gmail interface with the URLid extension for Mozilla/Firefox.

Also included is a CSS file (link to a screenshot).

VIA: Blogoscoped

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WebReference was granted the rights to republish excerpts from the book "Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web" by permission of Manning Publications. A very detailed synopsis of what the Symantec Web means and how it may be achieved.

"For the Semantic Web, semantic indicates that the meaning of data on the Web can be discovered—not just by people, but also by computers. In contrast, most meaning on the Web today is inferred by people who read web pages and the labels of hyperlinks, and by other people who write specialized software to work with the data. The phrase the Semantic Web stands for a vision in which computers—software—as well as people can find, read, understand, and use data over the World Wide Web to accomplish useful goals for users."

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Dave Shea of Mezzoblue has announced that there will be a book available soon, The Zen of CSS Design. It is due out early 2005, published by New Riders, co-written by Molly E. Holzschlag. The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.com if you look hard enough.

(hint, hover over the book cover at left)

Labels: css, repub

Open Source Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. At the date of this post there were 884 designs total.

Some of the designs are actually very good -- but with the good there also comes the bad. All in all it is an excellent resource for designers to have a look at.

VIA: ReachCustomersOnline

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Interesting find here JR's Pages which is a modest human edited RSS feed directory. Currently there are 1064 feeds available (137 webfeeds and 927 RSS feeds from 347 sources) of which are categorized quite nicely.

You will find some of the perennial favorites here such as Gnomelocker, Mezzoblue, AListApart and others but there are several others that may have escaped your eye also.

What is interesting about this site is the way it was put together. The owner, John Rudge, saw another site and just said "Hey, I can do that". What's more is that it is put together on the personal webspace offered by his ISP.

It will be interesting to see what the directory will look like a year from now.

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Simply the Best Fonts is just that. A tremendous amount of fonts that you can browse through by an alphabetical font listing or by font category.

Each font has a full preview page with proprietary details. Most fonts are freeware and as such free to use for professional webmasters and hobbyists. If you wish to use them commercially, you may have to register them first.

Via Blogoscoped

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Interesting topic running at the Band of Gonzos forum on Cool Stuff for your Mozilla web browser which also includes Firefox extensions as well.

Safe to say that the Web Developer bar is one of the major favorites here, as is the Googlebar. Many more excellent extensions are mentioned and worth a peak to see if there are any you might be missing in your arsenal.

My personal favorite is Sage, an RSS News Aggregator. It picks up where Live Bookmarks leaves off. Why Mozilla did not incorporate this functionality into the browser is a mystery. Live Bookmarks falls short and is not of much worth, to me anyway.

Thanks to David Crouse of USA Linux Users Group for getting the thread going.

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Working with CSS can sometimes present problems other than cross-browser compatibility and hacks. They often lead to large and increasingly unmanageable labors of love. Reuse of your CSS in other designs can be tedious cut and paste jobs, in which you sometimes are just better off starting over from scratch.

Enter FiftyFourEleven's Mike Papageorge with a unique approach of organizing and optimizing your CSS. Mike utilizes modularized stylesheets by function (navigation, colors, hacks etc.) then "stitches" them together with php. The stylesheets themselves are parsed as php also, in which you can comment to your hearts content without worry of that content being sent when the sheets are called from the server.

There are advantages over the normal way of @importing complex function sheets from one basic stylesheet. His method delivers one transparent single stylesheet. He goes a step further with a simple method of Gzip compression and cache control via the php file to deliver this large stylesheet with amazing quickness. An Opera Browser side-effect of actually being able to see individual stylesheets being loaded one after the other is now being served just the one -- and the results (from what I read) are that the page loads very cleanly.

There is a reference in Mike's articles to Andy King's book, Speed Up Your Site, in regards to decompression inconsistencies of .css files between browsers. If you do not have his book, you can still peruse some of the Http compression information at his website.

Labels: css, repub

A very good set of PhotoShop brushes from the people at Toast Snatcher.

Machine Brush depicted at left.

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Here is a great tool called PHP/SWF Charts that is simple to script with PHP. The end product will create attractive web charts from your dynamic data, such as a database or flat file. Passing the data to the tool will generate high quality Flash (swf) charts.

This is a free tool to use, but the $20 registration will add a very desirable feature of clickable charts with editable links.

Via Digital Media Minute

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Free fonts from Tom Murphy here, which include a decent script font called May Queen.


Via Digital Media Minute.

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Old article, but a great resource on screen scraping.

Includes Philipp Lenssen's (of FindForward) screen-scraping With PHP5, an article on scraping almost any website and a few other goodies. A must read.

Cheers to Paul Hiles of Erimus Web Design for the dig.

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This is a cool tool from the people at TextLinkBrokers, the Advanced Backlinks Grabber a free labor-saving tool designed to be the fastest, easiest way to compile a very large list of sites relevant to a keyword or phrase.

What this tool does exactly:

• Performs a Google search for up to the top 20 sites ranking for that keyword.
  
• Crawls their backlinks and lists them by Pagerank, while eliminating duplicates and sites under the specified PR threshhold.

Then it sends you an email containing a list of all the backlinks that were found multiple times in the search - these are considered 'themed backlinks' - in an html and/or .csv list, with PageRank, for importing into Arelis or other software.

I gave this tool a try and it does exactly as advertised. I recieved an email with a whole slew of PR5+ pages (as I requested it to do) that appear in the Google results for a link: check.

UPDATE: Aaron Wall reported that Gmail "clipped" the report that was sent to him, and he did not get to see it all. Due to the amount of processing time needed to produce this report, it might be advisable to have it sent to a regular POP3 email account.

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The Web Accessibility Toolbar for Internet Explorer is very similar to Mozilla's Web Developer Toolbar.

It is provided by the Accessible Information Solutions (AIS) team at the National Information and Library Service (NILS) , Australia. The Web Accessibility Toolbar has been developed to aid manual examination of web pages for a variety of aspects of accessibility. It consists of a range of functions that:

• identify components of a web page
  
• facilitate the use of 3rd party online applications
  
• simulate user experiences
  
• provide links to references and additional resources

A list of functions that include toggling stylesheets, code validation, display headings, image lists, disabling images, color functions, page resize, page zoom, accessibility simulations for color blindness, cataracts, & other sight impairments, and a whole lot more can be found here.

This site also has an impressive listing of tools and references for accessibility that is worth looking at too.

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Having problems with regex expressions? Then try this amazing tool The Regex Coach. It is a graphical application for Linux and Windows which can be used to experiment with (Perl-compatible) regular expressions interactively.

The Regex Coach has the following features:

• It shows whether a regular expression matches a particular target string.
  
• It can also show which parts of the target string correspond to captured register groups or to arbitrary parts of the regular expression.
  
• It can 'walk' through the target string one match at a time.
  
• It can simulate Perl's split and s/// (substitution) operators.
  
• It tries to describe the regular expression in plain English.
  
• It can show a graphical representation of the regular expression's parse tree.
  
• It can single-step through the matching process as performed by the regex engine.
  
• Everything happens in 'real time', i.e. as soon as you make a change somewhere in the application all other parts are instantly updated.

If you want to experiment with some regex expressions using this tool, try the Regular Expression Library. The library has categorized expressions for Email, Uri, numbers, strings, markup code, dates/times, address/phone and more.

Thanks to Mark Cunningham (Mark's Virtual Playground) for his post in the Html-Kit newsgroups on this. Nice find Mark!

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Open Source has a new Customer Relationship Management software called SugarSales and it is "sweet". This is a commercial grade Sales and Marketing tool that you more than likely will not see anywhere -- except at SourceForge that is.

SugarSales is designed for Sales and Marketing professionals to keep on top of the key deals in their pipeline. It helps to manage accounts, contacts, opportunities, leads and more. Easily track tasks, phone calls, emails and meetings with your customers. I wouldn't be surprised if it brought them their morning coffee.

The User Interface is very clean and intuitive. The tabbed interface uses minimal clicks as possible to do the job, and there are hot keys everywhere if you prefer using a keyboard. Multiple user-selectable templates (skins) can give you the look and feel like other web apps you may have used.

It will run on Linux or Windows using IIS or Apache Server. MySQL and PHP are required though. Runs on high-end servers or small notebooks/computers. Source code is provided.

Check out the demo at the SugarCRM website.

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For those who use the Html-Kit web authoring software, you will be pleased to know that a new plugin has just arrived.

Looking for a way to create thumbnails of large images? This plugin can generate a custom size thumbnail of the specified GIF, JPEG or PNG image along with the HTML code for opening the original image.


Features:

• Creates a thumbnail of the specified GIF, JPEG or PNG image.
  
• Generates HTML code for displaying the thumbnail and linking it to the larger original image.
  
• Real-time, side-by-side preview of the original image and the thumbnail.
  
• The size of the thumbnail can be customized to be as small as 16x16 or as large as 120x120 pixels.
  
• Thumbnails can be saved as JPEG files or as PNG files (for better image quality).
  
• Code tab for viewing the generated HTML code.
  
• Supports tag formatting preferences under 'Edit | Preferences | Format'.
  
• Displays image dimensions and image file size.
  
• Remembers the location and the size of the resizable wizard window between sessions.

Using the plugin to insert a thumbnail is very simple. Images in the HTML document path (where the HTML file was saved) will be listed on the wizard by default. Pick an image and click 'OK' to save the new thumbnail image in the HTML document path. The 'OK' button will also insert HTML code for displaying the thumbnail and linking it to the original image.

Another great plugin from the Html-kit Support team!

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Angie McKaig has put together the Ultimate Blog Template List on her design and geekery blog. The list has some of the more notable such as BlogDesigns, BlogSkins for Blogger, and EyeForBeauty (templates for your journals) as well as a whole slew of others to browse through.

"Want to blog but can't design? The ultimate blog template list features dozens of sites with weblog templates for your use. Some are paid, some are free, still more are linkware... get blogging!"

Labels: repub

If you are a user of Html-Kit for Html authoring, then you may find the hkRemotePreview plugin of value for making it easier to preview files opened from remote FTP servers through a web server while editing.

This new plugin will undoubtably be useful for those who do not have a local server running on their design machines while developing web pages that use SSI or PHP scripting for includes or other functions. Without the server, your pages do not render properly in the design preview. This plugin is just the ticket.

Features:

• Previews files opened from remote FTP servers through a web server specified in plugin preferences.
  
• Ability to maintain up to 3 different web servers for previewing.
  
• Editor Preview tab or the plugin button can be used to invoke the remote preview.

Labels: repub

Nvu, an Open Source project from Lindows, is being billed as the complete Web authoring system for the desktop. Flavors are available for both Linux and Windows. The IDE sports a tabbed editing environment in which you can jump between WYSIWYG and Html modes easily.

This is truly the first free WYSIWYG editor that I have tried that can even begin to compare to the likes of DreamWeaver or FrontPage; although Nvu does have a long ways to go. Still it is a very simplistic and easy to use interface as evidenced by this screenshot. You will see the tabbed editing environment in that image which makes the screen less cluttered.

The FTP site manager in Nvu become browseable in a sidebar. You can get a tree view of a site, à la Explorer's folders pane, or a one-dir-only view, à la Explorer's directory view. It is also possible to filter files and show all files, or only HTML documents or image files. The browsing area also allows to show for each file its size and the date of last modification.

What is impressive about Nvu are some of the other features it has. Building Forms is a snap and provides for easy property assignments to build perfect forms in the blink of an eye ... well maybe not that quick, but it is fast.

Nvu is based on Gecko, the layout engine inside Mozilla. Support of XML, CSS and JavaScript is also offered. Its architecture based on XUL makes it more extensible.

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CSS Filters is a categorized matrix of filters and hacks for CSS and whether or not they will validate or not, or just totally break the browser. The matrix will allow you to display any of a variety of browsers on the market today, and yesterday, via a drop down selection screen.

"Because of the generally crappy CSS standards support in modern browsers, a number of techniques have been developed to hide CSS stylesheets, rules, and declarations from browsers that won't understand or will mis-interpret them, or to set different values to the same CSS property in different browsers in order to achieve the same appearance on all (or most) browsers. On these pages, I've collected a number of these techniques (usually called filters or hacks) and documented what browsers they work on."

The pages are categorized into CSS filtering using CSS only, CSS filtering using (X)HTML, CSS filtering using JavaScript, and Non-validating Hacks for quick and easy referencing.

Labels: css, repub

The [!] htAccess Generator is the mother of all .htaccess generators. This page has it all!

"Use this online htaccess generator to create your apache configuration files.

Dot Htaccesser simplifies the process of creating Apache .htaccess files. Users fill in the HTML form for the configuration desired, and it generates the .htaccess file syntax. It handles options (execCGI, includes, MultiView, etc.), authentication files, IP address blocking, custom MIME types, and error documents"

I am going to add this to my favorites inside of my Html-kit, because I don't frequently write .htaccess files. But when I do have a need to write one, I am forever and a day looking up the right syntax. This sucker is just the ticket, and covers just about everything you can possibly dream of -- except the kitchen sink.

Labels: repub

Have you ever wanted a simple interface for you clients so they can edit portions of a web page without having to know any Html or other technical skills? Enter Flyspeck , a - browser based web page editor that enables them to edit whole pages or selective parts of the page only.
 
Flyspeck is a PHP enabled script that you install on your webserver that interprets parts of the page wrapped with 'beginning' and 'ending' edit tags. Then you add a 'trigger' and the script handles the rest via an online Html editing interface. The Html editor does require IE5.5 or higher though, but that is a common enough browser and probably one that all of your clients are using anyway.
 
The script works by using a pattern matching function to read in just the chosen editable portion and loads that into the editor. After pressing save, the altered HTML is put back into the file . The user can't break your layout tables or edit things that you don't allow.
 
The script has a moderate price tag of $40, but a small enough fee considering the numerous hours of time this will save you in updating their called in changes.
 
The Flyspeck website has some online demos of the script in action here http://www.flyspeck.net/demos/

Labels: repub

Bill Humphries has written an article on the mod_rewrite rule for Apache Server. The article is very concise and easy to follow. If you have not yet learned or about to delve into mod_rewrite and it's regular expressions to output spider friendly dynamic Url's, then take a look at the article A List Apart : URLS! URLS! URLS!.

Labels: repub

For those of you who have become accustomed to replacing your heading-text with images, then you know how cumbersome it is to generate the images and to maintain them. It often requires firing up the old PhotoShop, choosing an elegant font in which you use to type in your text, create the image and upload it to the server. Don't forget to update your Html as well. If the heading text changes ... well back to step one. Text styling is dull and boring web design process and can be an all too time consuming process too.

Now you can forget all that nonsense. Using JavaScript and PHP, you can generate accessible image-headings using any font you like. And you don't have to change the structure of your HTML or CSS at all.

Dynamic Text Replacement is an article at A List Apart which describes the process in detail. They also will provide you with the php/javascript files to effect this change.

View the demo to see Dynamic Text Replacement in action, then view the source code. Your browser is displaying images for the heading text, but the source contains simple (and very spider friendly) H1 & H2 elements. No span tags or CSS class elements at all. This is one nifty little trick.

Labels: css, repub

On the pages of Web Spider Traps is one of the most comprehensive studies I have seen in Robot behavior patterns. With the use of craftily constructed robots.txt files, .htaccess files, detection scripts, and a variety of other techniques this page has detected, proven and found guilty numerous spiders that violate the code of robots.txt and the Robot Meta elements of your web pages.

For instance, Googlebot was shown to have followed it's orders in robots.txt except for files of type pdf, tar and zip. This trap has also caught red-handed in the act www.dir.com (Pompos), Gigabot, ia_archiver, and Yahoo! Slurp to name a few.

Spiders that do not follow robots.txt rules or do not limit bandwidth usage include WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves, MSNbot/0.1, msnbot/0.11, and several others.

Not all bots involved in this study are of the garden search engine variety, other traps for fighting against the "Spam harvesters", "email grabbers", "email collectors" and "spambots" can easily be understood and quite easily done, but as all spiders are not used for bad purposes why should they all be blocked, even if they consume bandwidth and sometimes block or overload some sites.

The site provides a fairly comprehensive list of links to known lists and databases of robots, user-agent/browser strings, search engine robots, IP addresses, and e-mail collectors.

There is also plenty of information on how you too can build your own effective spider trap. Wow, this could be a fun hobby.

Labels: repub

Here is a nifty tool called Copyscape - Website Plagiarism Search which is powered by GoogleAlert. All you need to do is enter the Url of one of your website pages and it will return any webpages that have copied in its entirety or just portions of your pages (and vice-versa). As long as Google has indexed a page which may contain parts of your work within in it, this tool will sniff it out.

I thought I would put it to the test. Rob at Binary Circus Media is using my feed, so it should show up on the report from this tool. I ran my news page through the tool -- http://www.webstractions.com/news/ -- and it brought back a screen full of links.

There are a number of articles on this page, ranging across a number of categories. It pretty much breaks the page down and finds snippets of the page pretty effectively. As suspected, Binary Circus was at the top of the list, plus one more site that is carrying my feed. Other items in the list are parts of the page that I quoted over at the Band of Gonzos web design forum, as well as items that I quoted from news articles or other forums. This tool works both ways I see. I found a couple of items that I was quoted for. In all cases though, my links (and theirs) are in tact -- author representation is maintained by linking back.

For a discusion on this tool, visit the Band of Gonzos Webmaster Community.

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A website, cmsInfo, is an internet community of users and developers of Content Management Systems. Dedicated to provide news and information of the Open Source weblog and CMS niche.

The site provides the latest news concerning approximately 90 Open Source CMS systems including Plone, Typo3, Xoops, Zope, pMachine, Drupal, and too many more to mention. It is a completely volunteer site of people who edit and maintain it. They are looking for people with expertise in commercial CMS systems, so feel free to volunteer to help with providing information on these products.

Labels: repub

Just released by Price Media - Cascade DTP is a new kind of web page composition tool that harnesses the powerful features of cascading style sheet (CSS) layout and formatting commands.

Until recently, web designers were forced to use HTML tables as a means of controlling the position of page elements. But since the launch of IE5, Netscape 6 and later browsers, over 95% of web users can now view pages written using CSS.

Unfortunately, most of the major web editing packages still incorporate CSS tools as an add-on, which causes confusion and discourages a break with the compromises of the past.

Cascade DTP is different. Nearly all its functions are based entirely on the CSS layout model. The result is far cleaner code and much enhanced control over positioning and typography. This typically means pages download quicker because it is no longer necessary to convert text to images in order to give headings and logos the desired look.

If you want to see what can be achieved with this ground breaking application - look no further. The Price Media website was built entirely using Cascade DTP.

Features:

• Complete freedom to position text and images anywhere on the page


• Custom file format (.cas4) enables you to save layouts and text for further editing


• Precise control of colour for all text and page elements (borders, backgrounds and fonts)


• Numerous typographic settings for font type, size, text justification, letter and line spacing


• Work with embedded or linked cascading style sheets


• Images used as page backgrounds may be set to repeat vertically, horizontally or both


• Full control of scrollbar colour scheme


• Unique 'live' preview of text box appearance enables you to see the affect of changes instantly


• Fully integrated body text and cascading style sheet editors

Labels: css, repub

As a result of the SimpleBits Great Book Giveaway Contest, 485 comments were collected, each with a link to a favorite article, web site or weblog entry relating to web standards. Steve Smith formatted these comments into a nice, neat, easily digestible list of links, complete with titles. Look for a similar list being compiled by Shaun Inman which will list every URL posted, along with a tally of how many folks shared the same article.

This is a great collection of links. Although there are some that you may already be aware of, you will be pleasantly surprised of what other resources are out there.

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Looking for free webpage counters or scripts? Try CounterGuide.Com for a list of web counting and traffic analysis resources.

Counter reviews include free hosted counters, paid hosted counters, counters for auction sites such as Ebay, CGI counters which you install on your own server, some PHP counters also, and log analysis tools that converts your server's log files into pretty graphs.

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Found on ReachCustomersOnline.com

Gadgetopia, a website that covers programming and personal technology, has an engaging article called My Corbis Nightmare that includes a number of good sources for stock photos.

Some of the stock photo resources mentioned are FreeFoto, iStockPhoto, iStockPro, links to public domain photos, stock.b-man.dk, Image100, Zefa, and MorgueFile. The sites that Tim uses with success are Eyewire, GettyImages, and Photos.com (somewhat).

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Learn the pros and cons of syndication with javascript in JavaScript Syndication: How to Easily Syndicate Your Web Content over at BarelyFitz Designs.

If you are syndicating to websites that are not under your control, you don't know that the webmaster will have the expertise to implement a syndication strategy using XML. You might be syndicating to a small company that used FrontPage to make the website; they certainly can't set up a dynamic process to fetch an XML feed from your site, cache it, and integrate the data into their site.

Using JavaScript has benefits for the target website, in that the implementation is simple ... just add one line of HTML to the target page. The only caveat is that the browser supports or has javascript enabled. When you update the content, changes are immediately reflected on the syndicated sites. Cached solutions such as RSS there is typically a self-imposed delay of up to an hour.

The article will walk you down step by step through all of the ins and outs, and follow up with some commonplace examples of how you can implement syndication thru javascript.

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Over at vbrush.tmp.layout you will find a brush for every occasion, mood, and then some. A talented artist, known as Vered, has over 160+ original brush sets, plus a brush search engine for locating just the right brush.

While you are looking around, check out some of the art he has created with the brushes. A very exceptional site to view. Enjoy!

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The purpose of The Big List O' Quality Software is to help you get useful stuff done with your Windows PC. Windows users face the opposite problem from users of alternate OSes; those folks look far and wide for software that does what they want, so when they find good stuff, word travels fast. In the Windows world, however, there is just so darn much software floating around that it's possible for even very good stuff to get lost in the clutter. So Jason Lefkowitz decided to throw together this little guide, to share with you some things that he had found very useful in the past.

The list is comprised of software ranging from webpage editors (Html-Kit) to graphics editors (PhotoPlus 5.5). The list is arranged by task. It is, what Jason refers to it as, a living document. It will evolve with time, so you may want to bookmark this for future reference.

Another is Dave Pollard's list of essential links and free tools which was put together with some inspiration from Jason's Quality Software List. Look in the comments area of this post for a few suggestions that were added by Robin Good as well.

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300 Images From 1800 Sites is a collection compiled by Ro London who started gathering little, iconesque web images for himself so that he could compare, contrast, and study the techniques used by other graphic artists on the web. His initial pool of images looked so interesting that he decided to continue methodically hunting and capturing the icons for a public display piece.

"The purpose of this document is not to copy the intellectual property of others, but rather as a jumping-off point for your own unique web graphic projects. It's for Brainstorming, if you will."

He roughly estimates that for every six web sites he scoured, he was able to acquire one graphic image. He visited only Fortune 1000 company sites, major online retailers, well known blogs, top advertising, publishing, and design agencies, technology and software industry leaders, and the very largest online news publishers. Approximately 1800 web sites later, he had this collection of 300 of the most interesting, unique, and beautiful formations of pixels to display.

The collection covers arrows, posts, mail, comments, bullets, print, carts and bags.

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Keep your code secure against intruders. In an article in WWWCoder, they provide examples of SQL injection attacks and how you can write code to prevent them. Stop people from getting information from your database.

SQL injection attacks take advantage of code that does not filter input that is being entered directly into a form. Susceptible applications are applications that take direct user input and then generate dynamic SQL that is executed via back-end code. For example say you have a logon form that accepts a user name and password. Once authenticated against the database, the application then sets a session value, or some other token for allowing the user to access the protected data.

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If you are an Html-kit user and like to write a little javascript from time to time, then you may want to check out how you can install a local JavaScript syntax checker. Mark Anderson describes how to combine Douglas Crockford's JS Lint with the hkShowInTemplate plug-in to enable you to check your syntax easily and with no fuss.

The folks at Html-Kit have obtained the author's consent to install a local copy of JS Lint for use with the plug-in. The JS Lint page is a free service kindly provided by Douglas Crockford. The main JS Lint page has a link to supporting documentation. JS Lint is a syntax checker - which will help you spot errors in your syntax, such as unmatched pairs of '{}' braces, missing ';' at line ends, etc.

Labels: repub

It has been a while since I have seen a good article come out of A List Apart and this one is a doozy Dynamic Text Replacement in which the author Stewart Rosenberger describes how to create static heading images from text on the fly using any font of your choosing. What you say? Read on.

Text styling is the dull headache of web design. There are only a handful of fonts that are universally available, and sophisticated graphical effects are next to impossible using only standard CSS and HTML. Sticking with the traditional typefaces is smart for body text, but when it comes to our headings - short, attention-grabbing blocks of text - it would be nice to have some choice in the matter. We've become accustomed to this problem and we cope with it either by making the most of the few fonts we have, or by entirely replacing our heading-text with images.

Most sites that replace text with images do so using hand-made images, which isn't so terrible when there are a set number of headings, but it quickly becomes unmanageable on a site that is updated several times per day. However the replacement is performed, each image needs to be bound to the text it is replacing. That binding usually manifests itself as an <img> tag, an embedded style sheet, or a custom id attribute. And over time, through layout changes and redesigns, that binding needs to be managed by someone.

We can forget all that nonsense. No more <img> or <span> tags, no more id attributes or wasted time in Photoshop, and no more messy CSS hacks. Using JavaScript and PHP, we can generate accessible image-headings using any font we like. And we don�t have to change the structure of our HTML or CSS at all.

View the demo to see Dynamic Text Replacement in action. Then read on to find out how you can add the same functionality to your site.

The process does require a javascript enabled browser and PHP enabled server, although the server side scripting can be accomplished in Perl, Coldfusion, ASP or any other flavor of scripting. The scripts are designed to be "flicker free" which is a nice touch.

Labels: css, repub

Chami.com, the makers of Html-Kit, has an online JPEG compressor. JPEG compression can help you to make your pages load faster by reducing the size of your JPEG files. The online tool will display multiple versions of a given image compressed at different levels for you to pick the smallest image at the best possible image quality you require.

Labels: repub

Good Keywords is a free Windows software for finding the perfect set of keywords for your web pages. Knowing the right keywords to target is very important because your site should provide what people are searching for.

In this software there are no nag screens, no registrations, no advertisements and no payments. They don't ask for your email address.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch said, "I'm not easily impressed with promotion software, but this one's a keeper."

Good Keywords makes use of various tools provided by search engines like the Overture Search Suggestion Tool, Search Engines Like Lycos, Google, Teoma and other services like Alexa. Please note that you can manually do most of the tasks performed by Good Keywords. However using Good Keywords makes it all very simple, fast and straight forward.

You can also use Good Keywords as a meta tag creation tool. Keep adding the keywords you need into the Keyword Pad available within the software. Once you are done, a simple click will get you the required keyword meta tag... ready to be pasted into your HTML file.

Good Keywords includes other tools

Good Keywords is not limited to keyword tools alone. In addition it also includes a site popularity meter and a link popularity meter.

The site popularity meter allows you to measure your success by comparing your traffic with that of your competitors.

The link popularity meter is for checking how many sites link to you. The results are obtained from search engines like Altavista, Lycos, MSN and Google.

Labels: repub

Robin Good recommends PDF/TextBox in which you can create Acrobat PDFs -- free, no strings attached.

Acrobat PDF is a popular digital distribution format for documents, presentations and other multimedia content requiring faithful display across platforms, security and a more manageable file size.

PDF/TextBox is an easy to use free PDF editor. It allows you to write documents quickly and easily and then to save them in PDF format directly. You can also copy/paste content straight from Microsoft Office applications. PDF/TextBox supports editing and changes to PDFs you have already created. PDF/TextBox also supports typical PDF features such as password protection, encryption and document info.

PDF/TextBox runs on Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT4, Windows 2000, Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional and Windows 2003. It also requires Microsoft .NET runtime, but that is available as a download option. You can significantly decrease the download size by excluding the Microsoft .NET runtime from the download. Free download, no spyware, no ads, no tricks.

Labels: repub

Here is an interesting graphical effect called the Jog-Shuttle Dial Control. When I first saw it, I thought it was a flash animation. I was wrong. The effect was all controlled with four images, some CSS, and a little bit of javascript thrown in.

The effect is part of Web Page Design for Designers series of articles on Dynamic CSS Animation. Two other effects are demonstrated, a news ticker and a digital timer, both of which give an irritating flicker to the mouse cursor. Still an interesting effect (if you can keep your mouse out of the window).

The website also includes an easy to follow tutorial CSS from the Ground Up, which has some visually fantastic table and list creations in it. Well worth a look at.

Labels: css, repub

Owen at Asymptomatic has caused a stir over at Slashdot with the posting of his Blog Software Breakdown chart. The chart displays attributes of different user-installed blog software packages side-by-side for comparison. Only server-installed scripts were included in this list. (No Radio, Blogger, etc.) The chart was created by Owen to help figure out what blog tool best suited his needs. Hopefully, says Owen, it will be useful to the self-hosted blogging community as well.

"Even before the whole Movable Type fallout, I had been trying to decide which of the many weblog CMS packages would be best for my needs. I got tired of flipping back and forth between each of the sites, especially when not all of the answers to my questions were apparent from simply reading the main web page."

See the Blog Software Breakdown at Asymptomatic, which covers Movable Type, pMachine Pro, WordPress, b2evolution, TextPattern, Pivot and more. It is one fine piece of work in my opinion and undoubtedly will prove to be invaluable for anyone looking into setting up their own server-installed blogging scripts.

An Excel spreadsheet containing all the data is also freely available for download.

The Slashdot post points out "Here's a rather detailed breakdown of currently popular blogging and content management systems. Out of 11 software packages, 10 run on any server with variations of Perl/PHP and MySQL/PostgresSQL, and one requires Windows and .NET Framework. 4 are licensed under GPL, 3 are under BSD."

Of the PHP/MySQL entries in the chart, such as WordPress, they can all be test driven at OpenSourceCMS. The site features over 60+ Open Source CMS software installed onsite with access to the adminstrative panels. Each CMS is reloaded every 2 to 3 hours, so don't worry about screwing anything up.

Labels: repub

Reach Customers Online published a fine list of color schemers and resources. Included in the list are a variety of desktop applications and online tools including Color Schemer, Color Match 5K, and one of my favorite online tools the Pixy Color Picker.

The list is rounded out, of course, with a link to Lynda.com who is one of the original designers (if not the original) to figure out the web and then write books and produce extensive training on the topic. She's a first rate resource.

More color resources at ReachCustomersOnline.

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htmlArea is a WYSIWYG editor replacement for any <textarea> field. Instead of teaching your software users how to code basic HTML to format their content, they can use htmlArea to do it instead.

The interface provides for:

• Format text to be bold, italicized, or underlined.


• Change the face, size and colour.


• Left, centre, or right-justify paragraphs.


• Make bulleted or numbered lists.


• Indent or un-indent paragraphs


• Insert a horizontal line.


• Insert hyperlinks and images.


• Insert tables


• View the raw HTML source of what they're editing.

You can also create your own buttons to insert custom blocks of HTML code and images. Currently version 2.03 is available for IE 5.5+ browsers. Version 3.0 (beta) adds support for Mozilla 1.3 (all OS) cross platform functionality.

See interactivetools for more details.

Cross-Browser Rich Text Editor

Another editor of note is the cross-browser rich-text editor by Kevin Roth. This editor implements the Mozilla Rich Text Editing API included with Mozilla 1.3+.

The editor supports IE5+/Mozilla 1.3+/Mozilla Firebird/Firefox 0.6.1+ for all rich-text features to function properly. If browser does not support rich-text, it should display a standard textarea box in it's place. Included in the archive package are HTML, ASP, and PHP demos.

TTW WYSIWYG Editors

htmlArea is one in a line of what is referred to as a through the Web (TTW) WYSIWYG editor. In order for it to be classified as a TTW, it must function within a browser. Some editors allow you to toggle between the view and source modes.

The University of Bristol's Information Services has compiled a list of known TTW editors. The list is heavily commented on supported browser, XML support, scripting language, spell checking, and other notes of interest. Also the list is grouped into three areas Open Source, Commercial, and Web Based Services.

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Thumbshots.com, the site that provides you with the thumbnail images of your Web site is now offering a new tool for search engine ranking. Thumbshots ranking tool allows you to check your site ranking and compare it with different search engines. The ranking tool is made by Thumbshots.org engineers & volunteers and is provided as a free service.

You can type in different keywords to perform searches and see how your site ranked in different search engines. It provides some of the most popular search engines like Yahoo, Google, MSN, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, etc. for you to check rankings for.

Just type in the keyword(s) that you want to search in the search box and select the search engines that you want to see the rankings for. A result will display and you will see the small dots with connecting lines will appear if any links appear in both queries for the terms that you selected. Putting your mouse over the dots will show you the site address and if it's available, a thumbshot (small screen shot) of that website will be shown as well.

The multiple keyword terms was a nice touch. For example, you can enter in the terms for "web design" and "website design" at the same time and the results will be compared on the next screen. While you could optionally check for two different search engines also, the most benefit from this method is checking against a single search engine.

For those of you who wants to locate your website easily, you can type in a site address in the Highlight Site box and the red dot will appear if your site is within the top 100 ranking. This feature requires that you are running Internet Explorer 5 or greater though.

Labels: repub

Throwing your email address up on the Internet is sure fire way to attract a mailbox full of spam. Email harvesters are constantly probing websites for any and all email addresses.

Automatic Labs has an online tool that will encrypt your email link into a small JavaScript code that you can insert into your Html page.

The website has two other scripts worth noting also. One is a php script that will rotate images, and the other is a URL cleaner. If you are attempting to validate your web pages and keep coming up with errors with links to other websites, then you probably have the dirty URL problem.

Labels: repub

The MIT Information Services and Technologies office provides an excellent starting point for anyone needing to test, evaluate, analyze or assess the effective usability/accessibility of a Web site. In one well organized page, all critical areas of usability and accessibility are covered through a simple guidelines table that can be used to collect and annotate information.

The MIT usability guidelines include most of the critical factors to consider during a usability evaluation of a Web site though not all factors may apply to every Web site or online information system available out there.

The areas covered by the MIT set includes:

• Navigation


• Functionality


• User Control


• Language and Content


• Online Help and User Guides


• System and User Feedback


• Web Accessibility


• Consistency


• Error Prevention and Correction


• Architectural and Visual Clarity

See MIT Information Resources

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I learned more in thumbing through a wealth of information at Lee Lefever's Common Craft website than I could anywhere else. Lee has a gift for explaining things in terms in a simple and easy to follow style.

For instance, I did not know what a trackback url was until I stumbled upon his site. I knew that it had to do with tracking other blogs that linked to another blog, but it was not clear to me how the process worked. Lee explained every question that I had about trackbacks. So this post is my first official use of a trackback url. Thanks Lee.

He does not stop there, for he has other information on Wikis, Rss/Atom differences, Blogrolling, and that is about as far as I got ... cuz I was still itching to get back here and test this darn trackback out.

If you get a chance... visit Lee at Common Craft : Online Community Strategies.

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An entry in John Battelle's Searchblog had one of the more interesting uses of the Google API that I have seen so far.

Social Grid, an Orange County Calfornia based firm is what the founder Chau Vuong describes as, "a Google for people." It is a free dating service with an idea that is simple. Registered members turn their own personal or business Web pages into free personals ads.

Members that sign up get a string of HTML to put on their personal or business Web pages. The SocialGrid Search System then translates information that members enter into their SocialGrid profiles. Then Google and other search engines index not only the page but also the profile.

The search can be used to find soulmates or could also be used to find lost classmates, roommates, job listings, internships, etc. For individuals who have personal websites, blogs, or use P2P Telephony, you can use SocialGrid to increase the visibility of your site by allowing others to search for you directly through Google.

Labels: repub

In a Security Alert issued by Stanford University's Information and Technology Systems and Services, a "family" of worms referred to as NDemon, Phatbot, Agobot or Gaobot are infecting a large number of machines across the Internet. They spread through a number of mechanisms, including password guessing (looking for accounts with weak passwords), scanning for open file shares, and identifying machines without vital security patches.

The alert offers links to all known detection methods and removal tools, as well as a steps that should be taken by all computer users to prevent the spread of these bots. Microsoft Windows users are strongly encouraged to take the following steps to reduce their exposure to this new threat - for details on how to make these changes, please consult ITSS: Secure Desktop Computing.

The ITSS Secure Desktop Computing bulletin includes password safety tips, procedures for securing your desktop computer, adminstrative guide policies, dealing with online harassment, and software and tools including a Security Self-Test utility.

The Stanford Security Self-Test utility is a simple, self-contained tool that performs a set of basic security checks appropriate to the kind of computer you run it on. The tool is non-intrusive, sends absolutely no information about your computer over the network, and is provided as an educational aid in your efforts to keep your computer more secure. It is not intended for use on servers, but rather individuals' desktop and laptop Macs and PCs.

If the tool discovers any significant security vulnerabilities on your computer, it will alert you to this fact, and tell you--usually by referring you back to the Secure Computing web site--how to address the problem. For help you can click the tool's "Security Self-Test Help..." button, which will take you to the appropriate web page.

Discuss at the Band of Gonzos Virus & Security Forum

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Many sites forget the art of a good tease in their rush to hit the right keywords and satisfy harried Web users. Teasers are the two or three lines below the headline that tell more about what's inside. They hint there's good stuff in there. You can tease for special site features and updates to your regular content.

Susan Soloman provides tips in writing effective teasers to capture your visitors attention and tempt them into digging deeper into your website.

Want more insights into writing head-snapping Web content? Read "The Better to Tease You With"

How did I do Susan? ;0)

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Today Robin Good posted an article about a website that offers you the opportunity to "try out" some of the best open source and free php/mysql based content management systems in the world. You can log in as the administrator to any site here, thus allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs."

The site is OpensourceCMS and it provides you with all the tools and information to try out any of these systems. Over 60 different systems are presented and made fully accessible including Drupal, WordPress, pMachine, Nucleus.

Thanks Robin!! Nice find.

Labels: repub

One of the most crucial aspects of optimising your site is choosing the right keywords that you want to rank for. Evaluating the importance of keywords requires a tool that will show you how frequently certain keywords are searched on the web.

In order to help inform you of the keyword frequencies, I will list a couple of keyword suggestion tools that are available for use on the Internet. Please note that these tools are what the individual services have been tracking and may not be representative of keyword searches on the whole -- they are suggestive. By combining the knowledge of all of these tools together, you will at least have a more clearer picture of keyword usage in search queries overall.

• Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
  
• Google's AdSense Keyword Sandbox - https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox
  
• Espotting's Regional UK Regional Keyword Tool - http://www.espotting.com/popups/keywordgenbox.asp
  

Another tool, is offered by WordTracker. Wordtracker's data is mainly derived from US meta crawlers, so mainly useful for US sites. They offer a Free Trial to evaluate their service. http://www.wordtracker.com/trial/index.php3


After determining what keywords you will likely be using, find out what the competition on those keywords are by searching for them in the Search Engines. Do not stop with just Google either. Yahoo and MSN combined can be just as formidable as a Google search.

Labels: repub

A List Apart

This month A List Apart, a veteran in the use of Cascading Style Sheets as part of standards-based web design has published some exceptional demonstrations of the power of CSS.

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Table Row Highlighting

With a bit of JavaScript / DOM sorcery, we can provide our visitors with row highlighting for long data tables in HTML, by applying rollover states to the rows. This could be implemented tediously by hand, of course, but it would be silly to do so. Instead, we will use the DOM to find the rows to highlight on mouseover.

To see the effect in action

Read the article by Christian Heilmann - The Table Ruler

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CSS and Email

Most people who’ve attempted to recreate a sophisticated design in HTML email have run into a wall when using CSS, either in the form of inexplicable mangling by email clients or a pronouncement by an email administrator stating that CSS is “against the rules.”

Despite prevailing wisdom to the contrary, you can safely deploy HTML emails styled with good old-fashioned CSS. Not all attributes will be invited to the party, but many of them work flawlessly with this method. If you’re not content to roll over and use font tags in your HTML emails, read on.

Read the article by Mark Wyner - CSS and Email, Kissing in a Tree

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CSS Sprites: Image Slicing

Say goodbye to old-school slicing and dicing when creating image maps, buttons, and navigation menus. Instead, say hello to a deceptively simple yet powerful sprite-based CSS solution. This article will demonstrate using CSS to create hover buttons, mapping links, and defining irregular shapes. It follows up with the design benefits and pitfalls.

• Single-image CSS rollovers
  
• multicolored Icon Buttons
  
• Irregular Shaped Rollovers
  

Read the article by Dave Shea - CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death

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Rounded Corners in CSS

Part II : Dynamic CSS layouts with customized borders and corners, advances to the next level, extending the technique to work with more complicated backgrounds such as gradients and patterns.

Rounded Corners in CSS Demo

Read the article by Soren Madsen - CSS Design: Creating Custom Corners & Borders Part II

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More articles on CSS can be found at A List Apart

Labels: css, repub

Making the transition from tables to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can be a frustrating process, with cross-browser compatibility one of the major stumbling blocks. But in my opinion it is all worth it. It separates the presentation from the content, and leaves your Html cleaner and easier to read from a spider standpoint.

Changes to the presentation such as font styles, column positioning and dimensioning, border thicknesses and colors, margins, and wide variety of other element attributes are all handled through one external file. Do a View Source on the page you are reading right now, and you will see that there are no tables in this document. You can actually almost read the content with some degree of ease -- and so will the spider. The spider will see more content and less garbage cluttering it's way.

I have found three sites that will get you well on your way to understanding a little more about CSS. The first one is a little old, but the techniques used still apply. What is unique about it is that the CSS is displayed in a text box at the bottom of the page so that you can study it and compare to the actual page. The second one offers a variety of common and useful applications of CSS. And the third, is for more advanced techniques and offers CSS masterpiece showcases to demonstrate just how far you can go with this style of coding.

glish.com - CSS Layout Techniques
If you are looking for help making the transition to CSS layout (Cascading Style Sheets), then go to Eric Costello's glish.com - CSS Layout Techniques. Eric is cataloging many useful cross-browser CSS layout techniques that he can find. All the examples on this site have been reduced to only their essential code, and you will find the source displayed on each page to hopefully make it quick and easy to understand the inner workings of the CSS.

Eric started this collection because of the lack of resources he tried to find when he went looking for information on how to translate typical table based layouts to CSS layouts. You will also find links to various online CSS resources and tutorials, appropriate for both the novice and the seasoned CSS veteran.

The Imposter's Fun with CSS
A well organized list of some of the more common everyday uses for CSS, such as roll-over menus and trees, box positioning, and dynamic stylesheet switching. This gallery of CSS demos can be found at Fun with CSS : Experimental.

There is one bad CSS demo in this collection and that would be the Rounded Edges page. While it is true that CSS will remove the presentation from the page, there are some limitations to it. This demo states that it is a relatively painless way of creating image-free rounded edges with just CSS. It is far from painless, actually it is downright ridiculous when you look at it. You will see what I mean when you see the coding for it. Let's just say that this is a good CSS example of a bad CSS example.

Mezzoblue's CSS Zen Garden Resources
For the intermediate coder, there is Mezzoblue's CSS Zen Garden -Resource Guide. By no means exhaustive, this list has been put together to reconcile helpful CSS tips web-wide in one spot. Expect it to expand over time.

The CSS Resource Guide is just the tip of this iceberg. You will have to visit the their Zen Garden - The Beauty of CSS Design site, it will rock your world. An awe inspiring showcase of what CSS is capable of. Look over on the right side of this page for a list of other CSS showcase sites of which are equally amazing.

Where to go from here
It would be advisable to procure a CSS editor of some type to facilitate the creation of your stylesheets with. I use BradSoft's Top Style Lite which is integrated into my Html authoring software. It does not have as many features as their Pro Version, but it gets the job done and makes a lot of hand typing process easier by auto-filling it in for you. Top Style Lite download page. Top Style Pro is also available for purchase on this same page.

Finally, after you have fooled around and experimented with CSS for a while and you need some advice -- visit the Band of Gonzo's Web Design Support Forum where there are several people around who will be able to answer any of your questions.

Labels: css, repub