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

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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)

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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.