Trusted reviews: personal computers, internet and web, webmastering

Laptop prices continue to fall, aiding students about to enter college or university:

The For years, students have had to pay a sizeable premium for laptops over desktops. That reason was limited demand – laptops were mostly used by businesspeople – which prevented manufacturers from achieving economies of scale. But now, some of the same components used in laptops are turning up in other devices. The small disk drives, for example, can also be found in iPods, while liquid crystal display screens are increasingly being used in TVs. This has helped laptop makers like Dell Inc., Gateway Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. slash their prices.

Laptop prices hit new lows

Originally posted 2005-08-31 20:17:18. Republished by Old Post Promoter

On the other hand, simple, unstyled <hr> does not look well in richly styled documents. That’s why I tried to find a couple of cross-browser compatible ways to make it prettier.

Styling <hr>

Originally posted 2003-03-13 08:18:31. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Spam, The Stuff You Love To Hate

Author: Jeff Colburn

We all get spam, and we all hate it. I always thought it would be great if I could open some spam, press a button on my computer and have a zillion volts of electricity shoot through the phone lines all the way to the computer that sent the spam and turn it into a smoldering pile of metal and plastic.

Before I made a few changes I used to get about 2,500 spam EVERY DAY! Now I only get about 250. Still a lot, but only 10% of what I used to get.

Learning how to do this for your own website, and your clients’ websites, will make you a hero in everyone’s eyes.

So let’s talk about some of the things you can do to cut back on your spam.

One of the things I did to reduce my spam was to remove the “Catch All” setting on my web hosting company. A “Catch All” does just that. It catches all e-mail sent to your domain name, in my case that would be Anything@CreativeCauldron.com, which would include JeffColburn@CreativeCauldron.com, Giggles@CreativeCauldron.com, PinkElephants@CreativeCauldron.com and so on. Any e-mail address that ended with @CreativeCauldron.com was grabbed by my hosting company’s e-mail program and sent to me.

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Originally posted 2005-04-18 10:53:31. Republished by Old Post Promoter

This $75 program is one the reasons I no longer use any stats program that can be seen by search engines on my websites.

[Program name omitted] is a … mass referrer spammer, which means that it will make a connection to a buttload of sites of your choosing with any referrer URL and User-Agent that you specify. This accomplishes several things. Firstly, it generates webmaster traffic from webmasters checking their referral statistics.

Yep, you might get a visit from me. If your traffic is really low another visitor might inspire a moment’s false optimism. That certainly won’t make me turn to you for mortgage information, buy the secret of untold wealth from you, use your dating service or get you an extra click on a banner ad. Seeing you aren’t a friend I’ll just close that Firefox tab and move on.

Secondly, it boosts your link popularity and thereby your Google PR, because a lot of sites have public referral stats with linked entries. [Program name omitted] operates on textfiles with URL-lists, and a textfile of 3047 active blog websites which you can use to start getting free traffic and PR right away is included!

I’m sure at least one of my sites is on that list. I used to run Refer there and like many webmasters made the stats available to anyone who wanted to look. That was how I learned about referrer spamming. It took less than a month to get all trace of those bogus referrals out of Google.

Even now “thehostingnet.com” sends a bunch of referral spam to that site. They aren’t getting an iota of Google PR from doing that. But it no more harms me than it does them a lick of good.

If you run a web statistics package ideally you keep it out of your server’s web accessible areas. If you can’t block the subdirectory in your robots.txt. You might want to password protect it as well.

Once you are listed as a site to be sent referrer spam I don’t think you’ll ever fall out of the lists. But you can keep the spamming from having any effect.

Originally posted 2004-09-03 11:53:21. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Author: Tinu Abayomi-Paul

This is the second part of an article series in which you’ll find many tools that you can use to monitor your site’s search engine position and see how your do-it-yourself search engine optimization efforts are coming along.

The following tools are for monitoring your search results in the three major search engines. It isn’t an all-inclusive list, but rather a highlight of some of the tools you can use. (I’ll point you to one of the master lists when we get into more general tools in part three.)

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Originally posted 2005-09-18 15:35:30. Republished by Old Post Promoter

1. Web designers are marketers per se. Web sites are all about advertising products, ideas and services. Thus, a web designer has to understand the mindset of marketers in order to create a design that sell.

2. Read, read and read. We do not experience everything. Thus, our tendency is to learn from others. Reading web design books, newsletters and tips are pretty valuable since they can save you time and effort. Basically, books are more conclusive than newsletters and tips however, they are for free and mostly updated.

3. Narrow down your target market. You cannot please everybody same thing that you cannot be good at everything. Thus, this fact calls for the narrowing of your target market. Even in the interface of the so-called web design, a designer cannot claim that he is an expert at anything or everything about the needs of a website. It is better to pick a certain audience and try to be good at catching their attention, preference and choice. This practice allows you to be best at a given area thus developing expertise.

4. Answer your target audience’s needs. In order to answer the visitor’s needs, web designers must know what kind of visitors his site is welcoming. Do they belong to the younger generation or otherwise? What do they want from your site? Are these information, details and pleasures in your site in order to get their undivided attention and loyalty? Bear in mind that colors, font size, style of graphics, contents and the entirety of the site affects viewer’s decision and choice.

5. Know the basics of SEO and copywriting. Though Search Engine Optimization and copywriting are not directly related to designing, still, designers must have basic knowledge about them. This is because web designing is intertwined with marketing, use of keywords and visibility.

Aside from that, designers must also have knowledge of the programming basics. If not, the tendency is waste time or to create a mediocre or unsatisfactory design to the detriment of the sites.

6. The primacy of functionality. If ever you are faced to make a decision between a web site’s aesthetic form and its functionality, you have to be firm in upholding the latter. Not everything that is pretty is ‘saleable’. Besides, you don’t create web sites for the sake of making it nice-looking.

Above anything else, the site must be functional so as to cater to every visitor’s wants and needs. Appearance is a means to catch visitor’s attention nevertheless, it is not the end. If a designer prioritizes appearance alone without considering its primary consideration the web site’s marketability will suffer.

7. Know when to break the rules. Rules are only guidelines, if you feel that the rules are inappropriate for a certain creation follow your heart’s desire and venture on an experimental adventure.

Originally posted 2009-05-28 16:37:26. Republished by Old Post Promoter

I imagine everybody has their own favorite whois tool. I like Network-Tools because the page isn’t clutter with ads, most everything you want is there: ping, lookup, whosis, trace, DNS records, HTTP Headers.

Network-Tools

Originally posted 2003-03-14 16:32:44. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Andrew Orlowski in The Register writes about weblogs influence and the almost instant redefinition of a phrase.

Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a “Second Superpower”, it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRank™ to flood Google with Moore’s alternative, neutered definition.

Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed… in 42 days

Originally posted 2003-04-03 09:58:01. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Copyright 2005 Nathan Sire

Web site design has certainly, in the past decade, evolved tremendously. More clients now are demanding custom design, as opposed to the ‘cookie cutter’ sites of yesteryear.

Where once there existed a limit as to the types of fonts used, the types of coding languages used, and the styles themselves, there is now the possibility for more variety in Web site design than ever before. This has come about because of the advances in technology that did not exist even a few years ago, and it has opened up many creative avenues for Web site designers in the creation of custom designs.

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Originally posted 2005-08-30 22:06:49. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Author: Michael Rock

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to leave some code in your web site to tell the search engine spider crawlers to make your site number one? Unfortunately a robots.txt file or robots meta tag won’t do that, but they can help the crawlers to index your site better and block out the unwanted ones.

First a little definition explaining:

Search Engine Spiders or Crawlers – A web crawler (also known as web spider) is a program which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine, that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches.

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Originally posted 2005-05-14 18:42:51. Republished by Old Post Promoter