The free software Websites Cop can monitor contents hosted on one web server. Configuration is not that comfortable which is the biggest let down, apart from the inability to use the freeware to monitor multiple ftp servers.

The program interface is divided into three tabs. You add local files and their remote location under the Main setting. The biggest issue here is that you can only pick one file at a time which is not very comfortable if you need to add dozens or even hundreds of web files.

Webmasters configure the ftp server under Settings. Here they need to add the ftp server’s address, port and the required username and password to access the entered server.

Additional settings are listed on the right side of the window. This includes the monitoring interval (set to 60 minutes by default), whether files should be automatically repaired if checks revealed that files on the ftp server are not identical to local files, and whether the program should be started with Windows.

The notify tab finally holds configuration options for email notifications. The program will send emails to the email address or addresses whenever files need repairing (when they are not identical anymore).

Errors can be displayed in the program interface as well. This option is listed under the File menu in the application window. Other options there include opening the log file and the list of different files.

Websites Cop is limited to one ftp server and the ftp protocol. This limitation along with the rather cumbersome way of adding files are holding the program back.

Webmasters can download Websites Cop from the developer’s website. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. The program needs to be running in the background continuously to monitor the files on the ftp server. (via)

They basically allow you to create variations of an existing web page in a drag and drop like manner. For that, you do not need any coding experience whatsoever. Here is what you do. You create a new experiment first by entering a web page address that you want to A-B Test.

The web page is then rendered in the interface. A click on any element on the page displays a context menu with options to move, resize, hide or remove the element, change an image, edit the HTML directly, edit the link destination, track clicks or use custom JavaScript for advanced functionality.

You can make fonts bigger, move images around, exchange contents and manipulate the page in any other imaginable way. You can create one or multiple variations of a page.

Once done you get a single line of JavaScript code that you need to add right below the head tag of the web page that you want to A-B test. And that’s it. No manual creation of pages on your web server, no code editing.

A click on Start Experiment starts the monitoring. You can from that moment on access the stats for that experiment to compare conversion rates, improvements and the performance of specific links on the page that you have chose to monitor.

Here is a video that outlines the whole process.

A-B Testing Video:

What I personally really like about Optimizely is the ease of use. You don’t have to create multiple pages on your web server to test their performance, which speeds up the process significantly. The downside is the price of the service. Users get a 30-day free trial after which they pay $79.99 for up to 20,000 visitors or $399,99 for up to 200,000 visitors, both with an unlimited number of experiments.

Optimizely has more to offer, including multi-browser testing of pages, automatic goal tracking or multiple page testings which is very helpful if you want to make changes to an element that is displayed on several pages of the website.

Optimizely is an A-B Testing service that I can recommend to web developers, Internet marketers and enthusiasts regardless of their technical background.

If you run a CSM or platform like WordPress, you can utilize plugins to create automatic and custom mobile versions of your website. You still need to test those resolutions to make sure that the sites display correctly on the devices.

Most webmasters do not own all of the devices that they need to support. The only available option to test screen resolutions and mobile compatibility is to use emulation.

Screenfly is an online service that can display a given website in predefined resolutions. Webmasters are asked to enter a web address into the form on the homepage.

This website is then displayed in one of the available resolutions. Semi-transparent buttons on the left side are provided to switch the resolution or device group. Available for selection are desktop, tablet, mobile and television devices, each with several subdevice listings.

The desktop group ranges from 10″ netbook resolutions of 1024×600 all the way up to 1920×1200, the native resolution of a 24″ monitor.

Tablet support is available for Apple’s iPad and four Android tablets including the Samsung Galaxy and the Motorola Xoom.

The mobile device category includes two Android smartphones, the Apple iPhone 3 and 4, the Asus Galaxy 7 Windows 7 phone, the Blackberry 8300 and two Motorola RAZR phones.

Television finally displays the website in a 480p, 720p and 1080p screen resolution on screen.

Switching to another device or resolution is a fluent process that happens without a reload of the page.

One interesting feature of Screenfly is the ability to detect mobile versions of a website. The service will automatically use the mobile version of a site if available and supported by the emulated device. This detection can be used to test a site’s mobile version thoroughly.

The one thing that is missing is an option to test a custom screen resolution. Webmasters who want that feature can try Simures, which supports custom screen resolutions.

Screenfly is a handy online service for webmasters to test their website’s display on different screen resolutions and mobile devices. (via)

The stock market is different. You need to research stocks a lot before you invest your money. And that’s where the problems start. You could invest into a fund but would need to do research on that fund as well, or hand the money over to your contact at your bank and ask them to invest. If you are lucky, you may get a 20% or even 30% increase over one year. If you are unlucky, you may end with 0 Dollars. The most likely outcome is the +/- 20% range. If you get 20% you end up with 12,000 Dollars after one year, minus taxes and brokerage fees. You may also get a dividend on top of that. Problem is, you do not have the money yet. You need to sell your stock. (Please note that expert traders may have much higher returns, the average Joe on the other hand will usually end up with less money). And you do not get that extra 20% or whatever directly into your bank account.

Investing In Websites

Lets take a look at website investments for a minute. I’d like to share two first hand experiences with you. I bought a site about six months ago for 400 Dollars. It generated a revenue of approximately $40 per month from Adsense and Amazon. I paid another $200 Dollars to get guides and articles updated, and fresh contents on the site, and another $400 so far for SEO.

That’s an investment of 1,000 Dollars. The site is now raking in $60 Dollars per month and climbing to new heights ever since. If it sticks with 60 Dollars I will end up with 720 Dollars after one year’s time. That’s a 72% increase in the first year. If I would not have done anything it would probably have returned $480 in its first year, which is a 120% return on the investment.

The second site was more expensive. I paid 23,000 Dollars for it. It earns between $2000 and $3000 Dollars per month. I plan to do light SEO and content generation on that site for about 200 Dollars per month. My first year investment is therefor 23,000 + 2400 = 25,400 Dollars. The money I earn from the investment is conservatively $2000 per month, that times 12 is 24,000 which is almost a 100% return of my investment. Even if all hell breaks lose and the site drops to $1000 per month, I would still earn 12,000 from it which would be more than 40% return.

And that’s money that I get right into my bank account.

Websites rise in value not only if their revenue increases, but also if other factors change. And one of those factors changes without the user’s doing: Age. A track record of constant earnings over a longer period of time will usually result in a higher selling price.

Websites, like stocks, can crash badly. Most websites rely on Google, Bing and other search engines for the majority of traffic. A ban on Google could seriously hurt the earnings of a website. You’d still have opportunities like PPC but that would require another investment and thorough research.

It is still possible to burn all your money on a bad investment. I see offers for new websites with 100 visitors that are supposed to earn 1500 Dollars per month every day. You will encounter black sheeps among the sellers, which you often can get rid of by looking at a website’s track record of traffic and earnings. If the seller is only providing information about the last month or two, you can almost be sure that something fishy is going on. One of the tricks of those sellers is to drive extra traffic to the website in the first month to make it look like it is getting good traffic and earnings. Once you buy the site, the traffic stops and you end up with an almost worthless website. It is possible to spot those if you get access to the stats of a site.

I’m not saying that website investments are the best option for everyone. You need some knowledge in the field, not only when doing your research and evaluation, but also technical knowledge later to move the website and set it up on one of your servers or hosting accounts. I do all that by myself but you could hire someone to do the job. That again costs money.

For me personally, investments in websites are the way to go forward. I have the expertise to evaluate them and the technical know how to maintain them after they have been purchased.

If you do proper research, your websites will return between 40-100% of your investment after one year’s time. Even if it crashes in the search engines, you can still work on it to improve the rankings again.

That’s another difference to the stock market. Once you have made your purchase there, you are a passive bystander hoping for the best. With your website, you can actively promote and optimize it.

Here are two good sites to get you started with web investments: Flippa.com is probably the best known marketplace for web properties. You find many professional buyers and sellers there, and it is rare that you can make a bargain purchase there. It happens, but it is rare and you need to be fast. Despite its quality, you find many lukewarm and some fraudulent offers on that site.

A second place to buy domains is the Digital Point forum. You usually get less stats and information about a website, and more fraudulent or lukewarm offers because of this. Sites here tend to go for a lower price though and you may end up paying less. Some webmasters buy on DP, optimize for a month or so and sell for a premium on Flippa. That’s called site flipping.

You will find other sites where you can buy domains, eBay for instance or Sedo. Good sites there sell for a lot of money.

Where do you invest your money in?

For all of you out there who have used an iPad or an Android tablet you’ll be loving the finger-friendliness of the operating system.  People such as myself, using Windows 7 on a tablet are at a disadvantage.  Even Windows 7′s touch interface looks good though when you compare it to the average websites we visit.  This is because, small as they are, the buttons in Windows are still larger and easier to press than links or buttons on almost all websites.

The difference for iPad and Android users, who have extremely touch-friendly interfaces, will be even more pronounced when they start navigating around websites.  You can zoom in and out of websites using multi-touch, I can do this in IE9 too on the ExoPC, but why do we want to be constantly zooming into, out of and around websites when instead we should be just using websites that work?

The problem as it stands is that while the overall market for tablets and smartphones in Internet usage is growing exponentially, it’s still extremely small compared to the usage figures seen on desktop computer systems such as PCs, Macs and even GNU/Linux systems.

Then there are the development costs incurred by businesses in making their websites touch friendly.  You can almost immediately discount drop down menus, multi-choice options of any kind in fact become problematic.  Text links, which still make up 90%+ of website navigation controls, are the biggest culprit, being placed too close together and too close to other clickable items to be of any use for touch control.

There is absolutely no sign yet though that web developers are looking to update these websites to make them ready for the boost in touch access that will occur in the next few years.  Instead we see the main websites including Amazon, eBay, Gmail, Twitter and Facebook all putting their money into mobile apps.  There has been a huge flurry of activity here in the last year with all the main platforms having apps developed for them at significant expense.

This makes sense to a certain degree as apps can be faster than websites and the user interfaces can be far friendlier.  These apps are now able to do things that the traditional websites have never been able to achieve.

Now though the current crop of Browsers, which will be complete with the formal release of Internet Explorer 9 tomorrow, all support HTML5 which allows for much greater flexibility and control over websites, and which also enables websites to look and behave far more like the apps that have followed them.

While it’s an easy sell though for companies to devote time and money to platforms such as iOS, Android and Windows Phone for app development, which in the grand scheme of things have user figures in the low 10′s of percent of overall web users, redeveloping their websites to support HTML5 when few people have the latest browsers is a much harder proposition to accept.

This is because when you develop an app, you will know that every single person who owns that platform will be able to access it even if that number is relatively small, say just a few million.  With three billion people online around the world though and with regular visitor numbers in the hundreds of millions for the big websites, it’s an expensive gamble to spend time currently developing an HTML5 version of your website that will support touch, or even multi-touch, knowing that this will only be seen or used by around 1 or 2% of your overall user base.

This gives people using the iPad and Android devices a significant advantage over Windows tablet, PC or Mac users.  If the rumours of a multi-touch Mac this year are true this will compound the issue even more.

This all leads me to wonder if the future of the web doesn’t lie in the websites themselves but rather in software, that is more powerful, more flexible and more visible to users.  We could instead find that while existing websites are maintained, any future updates will be merely include finger-friendly links to appropriate apps.

The advantages here are that apps are more secure, provide better functionality and with an app store already available for the Mac and one due next year for Windows, everywhere.  From a marketing standpoint an app also gives you a permanent advert, via an icon, on the user’s screen.  This is something that websites currently can’t do (we can discount IE9′s ability to pin apps to the Windows 7 taskbar as something that will be used by small numbers of users only).

So while companies will still have to maintain back-end web systems, we could find that the future of the web is in front-end apps rather than the websites themselves.  I would say this is a good future and one to welcome.  It will be interesting to see which way the big companies decide to jump.

It is surprising that you cannot find a single site on the Internet that collects those unique, rare websites. You find the occasional top list that is usually outdated, with half the sites down for good, but no service that’s maintaining a list of the Internet’s top sites.

Maybe there is such a service, but if it is it is damn hard to find. I first thought Delicious or other directories or bookmarking services could be used for the discovery, but they are polluted that it is hard to find the gems among the thousands of sites.

The following 27 sites are unique and wonderful. You may have heard about some of them before, but I’d bet that you will discover at least a few gems among the services and sites listed below.

Recommendations

Recommendation engines are similar to search engines. The main difference is that they will recommend something to you based on your input.

Tastekid – A recommendations website to discover new books, movies, music, shows and authors. just enter what you like and Tastekid will display items that are similar. That way, you can find new items that you have not heard before that are “like” something that you already know.

Jinni – Concentrates on movies recommendations. One interesting aspect is that you can not only enter movie and TV show titles but also plots or themes. Just enter Gothic Horror for instance to be presented with recommendations such as Sleepy Hollow, Interview with a Vampire or Frankenstein.

Alternative To – Looking for a program or service that is like something you know? Alternative To may have suitable candidates for you.

Search

Google is not the only search engine. There are thousands of specialized search engines that often provide better and different search results.

Joongel – combines access to multiple niche-specific search engines. Available niches include music, images, social, gossip and torrents. Joongel displays results from one of the search engines with an option to switch to any of the other available search engines immediately.

Scroogle – Search Google without cookies and search history. Helpful if you cannot install add-ons or extensions to achieve that.

Supercook – Ever wondered what you could cook with the ingredients that you have at home? Enter supercook. Just enter what you have and the recipe search engine will spill out recipes that match those ingredients.

Commerce

People like to shop. The services listed below improve your shopping experience.

Swap A Skill – Need something done? Then trade it for something you are good at in. Shoes for legal advice, a patio for french lessions, holiday in India for website? All that and more is possible at Swap A Skill.

Bust A Name – Combines words to find free domain names.

Jangle, Searches Amazon.com for bargains and displays them in a neat sorted listing on their website.

Etsy – A marketplace for handmade goods. Carries everything from art over bags and purses to toys and supplies.

Media

Music and video mainly. Resources to discover new media, or listen to it online without paying a dime.

Jamendo – Offers nearly 300,000 free music tracks. Albums can be downloaded or listened to online. Great for discovering music that is not in the mainstream.

Nutsie – Takes your iTunes library to the web, only the album and song information that is, nothing gets transferred. You can then listen to your songs, or new recommendations online from a compatible PC or mobile device.

Hypem – Discover new music. The service adds new music that is posted on music blogs all the time, with options to play the music right on site, and visit the original blog.

Musicovery – Another music discovery engine. Select a mood, favorite song or artist and listen to related music.

Gaming related

Like games? These gaming related websites either invite you to play games online or offer a wealth of information about games.

Brettspielwelt – A multi-lingual online board games website. The Java driven website invites players from all over the world to play popular board games, from Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne to Dominion and Backgammon, against other players on the site.

Board Game Geek – Without doubt the largest English board game related website in the world. The site offers user based rankings, reviews, rule discussion and more. If you need information about a particular board game, or like to find a new one, then it is the site to go to.

Apps

Applications and online services.

Portable Freeware Collection – Site that lists the latest portable freeware releases and updates.

The Rasterbator – Create a poster out of a standard sizes image. Uses rasterized images, posters can be up to 20 meters in size. Block Posters is an alternative that uses the same technology.

KeyXL offers a searchable keyword shortcut database. Just enter a program name and hit go to see available shortcuts for it. You can filter by platform or software category if you like.

xFruits – Offers to aggregate and forward news feeds and other forms of communication to one another. It is for instance possible to create an RSS to pdf, mail to RSS or RSS to mobile module on the site.

Misc Internet

Everything else that did not fit into one of the other categories.

Cl1p – An Internet clipboard. Create a unique url that starts with cl1p.net to paste text and other information into the opening editor. A click on save stores the information so that they can be accessed again in the next seven days.

Web 2.0 Calc – A handy online calculator with history feature. An alternative is Ecalc.

Rainy Mood – 30 minutes of relaxing high quality background rain to relax.

The Best Page in the Universe – If you every wanted to see the best page in the universe, this is it. Even if you disagree, it is pretty funny.

What Happened In My Birth Year – Displays information about the year entered including what people did, the top books, movies and music of that year and other interesting information.

Support Details – If you ever had to talk to tech support you may have had problems answering questions about your operating system, web browser or IP address. Support Details list the important information, at least where online support is concerned, on a single page.

Metacritic – Do not trust reviews of a single website, paper or reviewer? Metacritic combines the review scores to present you with an average for the game, movie, tv show or music that you like to know more about.

Do you know of a website or service that should be in the list? Post your url in the comments. Please note that I will review every posted site before they go online, to avoid spam.

If you’d ask me I’d say ehow, answers.com, mahalo and the like, plus all article directories like ezinearticles, single-page sites like hubpages or Squidoo and Wikipedia like sites (including Wikipeda).

It is to early to say how the algorithmic change affects search. It is currently rolled out in the US with other countries and regions to follow later this year. If you look at webmaster forums like Webmaster World you notice that several posters are not happy at all with the changes. While it is not possible to determine the quality of their sites, many report that their “legit” sites saw a traffic drop of 30-60% while low-quality sites remained unaffected. The drops happened on February 23 for most webmasters.

It may take weeks before the search engine settles down which means that the results that are currently showing are likely not the results you will be seeing in March. Google confirms that the algorithmic improvement – that’s what they call it – impacts 11.8% of all search queries, a high percentage. The update did not rely on feedback from users who have been using the Personal Blocklist extension for Chrome. The algorithmic change did however address 84% of the “top several dozen or so” most blocked domains from the Chrome extension which Google sees as confirmation that the update is indeed improving search quality.

The problem with that assessment is that it does not necessarily mean that quality sites have filled the positions. Some webmasters who have voiced their opinion in the forum thread linked above have reported that low quality sites have taken over the positions, and that the change affected legit sites that they own or monitor.

Again, it may be to early to tell at this point if the algorithmic change has a positive effect on search quality. Do you see changes in the Google US search engine? If you do, would you say the search quality has improved, or declined? (via)

Static HTML websites on the other hand do not come with sitemap generation scripts, and while it is perfectly possible to hand code a sitemap before submitting it to Google and other search engines, it often means unnecessary work.

Sitemap generators, like the WonderwebWare SiteMap Generator. crawl domains automatically to generate sitemaps at the end of the crawling.

The freeware creates multiple sitemaps, for instance an XML sitemap for Google, a static sitemap, CSV map or plain text sitemap.

sitemap generator

Several parameters can be configured before starting the sitemap generation. It is for instance possible to increase the maximum simultaneous connections to the server hosting the website, set starting pages, and to configure exclude and must-follow patterns.

The example website Garden Patio Set for instance operates a blog in a subdirector which makes use of a plugin to generate sitemaps for that part of the web page automatically. The blog subdirectory could be added to the exclude pattern to avoid duplicates in the sitemaps.

It pays to click on Settings before starting the process. The maximum amount of pages that should be crawled, the maximum url length or the delay between page retrievals can be configured here, as well as specific parameters for Google’s XML sitemaps.

google xml sitemap

The sitemap generator lists all internal links in the Links section. The tab buttons at the top lead to the various sitemaps that have been generated by the software. Each sitemap can be edited right in the program window, for instance to remove entries that should not be included.

Sitemaps can be saved or copied to the clipboard. The program generates listings for failed urls, all outbound links and the website’s robots.txt file automatically and displays the information in its window as well.

Those can provide important information, especially if they are processed correctly. The failed urls can be corrected for instance, the outbound links checked for broken links which often improves a site’s standing with the search engines.

Some options need to be unlocked before they can be used. The developer is asking for a donation or link to the website. The unlocking does not require verification.

The new options can be used to load or save settings for future sitemaps.

WonderWebWare Sitemap generator is an excellent free program for users with static (even though it is not limited to those) websites who want to create a sitemap. Download available at the developer website. The software was tested on a 64-bit edition of Windows 7.

Webmasters with larger projects may want to use a software that can perform these validations on all pages of a website. Open Validator, the web conformance tool, can do that, and more.

The Open Source software is available for Linux, Mac and Windows PCs. A wizard is displayed on startup, that aids the user in the selection of a local or remote website. Additional parameters can be defined, including the depth of recursion, the conformance tests that should be run, the document type, whether a proxy server should be used for the connection, the browser user agent for emulation purposes and pages that should be ignored.

Open Validator then downloads and scans all pages that are part of the selection. This process is speedy, it usually takes less than 15 seconds for the results to appear. Large web projects may take longer on the other hand.

Each page is listed at the top, with its page title and url. Selecting a page displays a snapshot of it as a thumbnail image, the page’s source code and an error report in the lower half of the interface.

open validator

The three error and warning categories are sorted in expanding tables, that provide detailed information for the webmaster. The outline column lists validation categories like design practices, server, HTTP and site considerations or Body information. Error numbers are listed in each row to give the webmaster a first overview of the number of errors and warnings on the page.

Webmasters can directly edit the source code of the page, a click on Revalidate validates the page anew. This works similar to the Firefox add-on Firebug, with the difference that the changes need to be revalidated before the results are shown.

Open Validator offers an impressive feature set:

1) Verification of a single page or entire web site at your option;
2) HTML Validation against W3C DTDs and WHATWG (X)HTML5 pre-release schemas;
3) Automatic checking and correction of many aspects of conformance to international best practices;
4) Visualization of a snapshot with a given character encoding (the user agent is also chosen in order to present the specific version originally intended to be seen in a given web browser);
5) Complete verification of links.
6) Automatic correction of missing widths and heights of images to enable better responsiveness of web pages;
7) Automatic correction of missing meta tags elements like default language and metadata;
8) Support for web pages in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and many other languages.
9) Performance optimization for multi-core processors.
10) Validation during navigation.
11) Application of standards during revalidation.
12) Memory revalidation with no need to make all corrections of a web page at once (users may correct small portions of the code and see the results pressing F5).
13) HTML Tidy accessibility check.
14) Balloon tooltips for contextual help.
15) Recursive validation for frames.
16) Proxy support.
17) Integrated web inspector with javascript debugger.
18) Site map detection in 51 languages.
19) Exportation of reports to HTML
20) Bypass selected paths when using recursive options
21) Exportation of reports to ODF
22) Memorization of login in protected parts of sites
23) Command line tool for unassisted report generation
24) SSL support

Not all errors or warnings that Open Validator detects will throw an error at the W3C Validator. The software goes beyond just checking the markup, which becomes obvious for instance in the design practices category where suggestions for well-engineered websites are included in the report. The findings of the tool are very thorough, which may turn away some webmasters who may feel overwhelmed by the reports.

Professional webmasters on the hand find in Open Validator a tool that can be used as a quality conformance test for their web properties.

Webmasters who want to try out Open Validator can download a version for their operating system from the project website.

The Firefox add-on Similar Web reduces the time it takes to discover related sites by offering suggestions in the web browser. It will by default display related sites in a small sidebar on the left, the display can be changed to the right sidebar or a toolbar button easily in the options.

similar sites

The related sites are displayed with a thumbnail image, their page title and url. A click on an item opens it in the same tab by default. This can be changed in the settings so that each new site is opened in a new tab instead. The usual double-click to open a link in a new tab works however as well.

But Similar Web can not only display related websites. It can also display articles about the active site, or recent Twiter buzz about the site.

The suggested sites are often spot on, especially when popular websites are accessed. The tool seems to have more difficulties in finding related sites for niche sites where it may not offer any suggestions.

The suggestions are not limited to English websites. Our tests with German sites revealed solid results as well. Users can suggest similar sites, and vote for existing sites by moving the mouse over the thumbnail image.

Lastly, it is possible to stop the add-on at any time by clicking on its status bar icon, which unfortunately is placed at the left side of the status bar, a highly unusual place, especially since it stays on the left side of the status messages that are displayed in the status bar. The icon can be disabled in the add-on’s options.

Similar Web makes it a lot easier to discover related websites on the Internet. Firefox users can download and install the add-on via the official Firefox add-on repository. The add-on is compatible with all Firefox 3.x versions, but not the latest 4.x releases, at least not officially.

All have in common that they visit a set amount of websites on a regular basis. The Firefox add-on Morning Coffee tries to automate that process for the user.

It basically can be configured to open specific websites on a specific day of the week. Websites can be added to specific weekdays or to the every day category which ensures that they are opened on every day of the week.

Morning Coffee offers two advantages over the manual approach. The first is that it can be configured to open sites that update on a regular schedule, like weekly columns on newspaper sites, updated web comics or any other kind of information or services that are posted on a schedule.

The second advantage is that it can be used to open websites that the user would open anyway on a day or on every day. Configuration of the add-on is straightforward. Just select a day or Every Day in the options, click the Add button and enter or paste a website url in the opening form. The website is then added to the list, with the option to edit or delete its entry at anytime.

morning coffee

The extension is triggered by default with a click on the Morning Coffee icon. It may be necessary to add the icon to a Firefox toolbar first before it is accessible there. A right-click on a blank space in a toolbar and the selection of Customize should display the icon which can be dragged and dropped on a toolbar in the browser.

The add-on options contain a setting to replace the homepage with the Morning Coffee schedule of that day. This appears to be the only way to automate the opening of websites in the browser.

Morning Coffee without the automation could be rebuild by users easily without the need for the extension. All that needs to be done is to add a bookmarks folder to the toolbar, add weekday subfolders and move the bookmarks into each daily folder. A double-click on a folder will open all websites stored in the folder in Firefox.

The common denominator of the hack was that all affected websites were hosted on so called shared hosting servers. These servers host multiple websites by different users. Affected web hosting companies are Go Daddy, Bluehost, Media temple, Dreamhost and Network Solutions. It is likely that others are affected as well.

It is not clear yet how the hack was carried out. Current suggestions are either weak passwords or file access rights that allow the attacker to gain access.

We are seeing multiple reports today of WordPress sites (running their latest version) getting compromised. The initial reports today were restricted only to Dreamhost, but now we are seeing the same pattern on blogs hosted at GoDaddy, Bluehost, Media temple and other places.

How do you know if your website is affected?

All those sites had this javascript added to their pages:

http://www.indesignstudioinfo.com/ls.php
http://zettapetta.com/js.php

Which came from a long base64 encoded string added to their footer.php file (or on all the PHP files in some cases).

The website WP Security Lock posted detection instructions as well.

Here’s some of Zettapetta’s behavior:
Your website is redirected to:http://www1.firesavez5.com/?p=p52dcWpkbmmHjsbIo216h3de0KCf…….. or
http://www1.firesavez6.com/?p=p52dcWpkbG6HjsbIo…
This redirect page is a blank page. The source code contains the following:

404 Not Found

The page that you have requested could not be found.
All of your .php files on your WordPress contain the following malicious code… Located in the source code near the bottom of all .php files is the following script: http://zettapetta.com/js.php and http://www.indesignstudioinfo.com/
Your antivirus program blocks the installation of the threat: www.firesavez5.com or a www.firesaver6.com installer.

Sucuri.net has posted instructions on how to remove the malicious code from WordPress.

Via SSH:

If you have SSH access to your server, run the following commands on your web root:

$ find ./ -name “*.php” -type f | \
xargs sed -i ‘s###g’ 2>&1
$ find ./ -name “*.php” -type f | \
xargs sed -i ‘/./,$!d’ 2>&1

Via web:

If you don’t have SSH access, download this file to your desktop:
http://sucuri.net/malware/helpers/wordpress-fix_php.txt and rename it to wordpress-fix.php.

After that, upload it to your site via FTP, and run it (using your browser) as: http://yoursite.com/wordpress-fix.php

This script will take a few minutes to complete, but will scan your whole site and remove the malware entries.

Once you are done, go back to your site and remove this file.

Has your blog or website been affected by the hack? Let us know how you resolved the issue in the comments.

The Geocities-izer brings back those fond memories by offering to turn any modern website into a Geocities look-a-like that is making use of all those elements that were popular back then.

It works by entering the url of a website into the form on the main page of the service.

Three different themes and twelve different music themes are available that can be switched by changing the parameters directly in the url. The themes are also switched randomly whenever a new page is loaded.

Users who want to go down memory lane can visit the Geocities-izer tool to turn their websites into something completely different. But beware, it might hurt your eyes and ears. (via Instant Fundas)

But that is not an elegant solution especially if the information on the website need to be accessed urgently. Several third party tools are available to troubleshoot connectivity issues. Some noteworthy ones are ping or traceroute that can provide the user with information why a website cannot be accessed.

There are also tools that can provide access to a website’s contents even if the site is not available. These caching solutions are offered by most search engines.

ErrorZilla is an extension for the Firefox web browser that displays troubleshooting and caching solutions on Firefox error pages.

The modified error page displays eight buttons that can be used to troubleshoot the connectivity issue and to display the contents of the website.

• Try Again: Will reload the website. Pressing F5 or the reload button in the toolbar of the browser has the same effect.
• Google Cache: Display the contents of the website if they are stored in Google Cache.
• Coralize: An alternative cache that can be used to display the contents as well.
• Wayback: Usually not as up to date as the other two caching options. Often used to see how a website looked in previous years.
• Ping: Use an online service to ping the website.
• Trace: Use an online service to trace the connection.
• Whois: Display information about the website registrar)
• Proxify: Use a previously configured web proxy to access the page.

All of the tools that are accessible on the modified error page can also be accessed without the tool. The main benefit of the Firefox add-on is the fact that it provides quick access to these tools which speeds up the troubleshooting process.

ErrorZilla is available at the Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

The Password Fail extension for Google Chrome tries to aid the user in evaluating a web service. It displays icons in the Chrome statusbar if a website is loaded that is using bad password policies, specifically saving passwords as plain text.

One of two icons may appear in the web browser’s statusbar upon connection. A yellow warning sign that indicates that a website sends out passwords in plain text after user registration and a red sign that a website sends them out upon request.

Both are indicators that the passwords are stored in plain text on the web server which basically means that attackers will also be able to get their hands on the unprotected data if they find a way to either request the data or hack the server.

Password Fail relies on user contributions. Users can submit new websites and services that they suspect to store passwords in plain text. This will be verified by the team by registering. Only after that will a website be added to the service’s database.

A sample list of websites with bad password policies is available on the Password Fail website. It lists among others MySpace.com, Brady Games and Stumbleupon as offenders.

Chrome users can download the extension for their web browser directly from the Chrome extension gallery.

The service will display transparent information on top of the website that has been loaded visualizing how much of the website visitors see without having to scroll. This is done by displaying percentages on the screen and using colors to differentiate the different groups from each other.

A 98% rating for example means that 98% of all visitors of the website have their browser window open to the size or larger. It does also mean that 2% use a smaller size than the one displayed.

The service can provide the webmaster with important information about the site’s visitors as it can aid in optimizing specific elements on the website to increase their exposure to all visitors without them having to scroll to locate it.

Five, ten or even twenty percent of all visitors is a huge number on some sites. That’s a big number considering that some visitors tend to leave a website without scrolling the page they landed on.

To use Google Browser Size for a specific website enter the url of the website into the text form at the top. Please note that the service will not automatically align the website at the left browser border which might be necessary for sites that do not do that automatically to visualize the real percentages. A user with a 1920 monitor resolution will for instance see a different result for the same website than a user with a 1024 monitor resolution. It is therefor important to align the content to the left side of the screen.

This can be problematic for webmasters who face the same DNS propagation wait time especially if they want to make sure that the website works fine at the new hosting location. There is one easy way of accessing the website at the new web server even if the DNS is still pointing to the old: The Hosts file.

The Hosts file can be used to map a domain name to an IP address. All that needs to be done to work with a website before DNS propagation is to map the domain name to the new IP address. Here is how this is done in the Windows operating system.

The Hosts file in Windows is located at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\Hosts

You might need to change the rights of the current logged in user first so that the file becomes writable.

All you should see when opening the Hosts file with a text editor is a comment section on top unless someone else has already added new entries to it.

New entries to the Hosts file can be added after the last line. To do that add the IP address of the new server and then the domain name of the website like 96.30.22.116 acerliquid.net with a blank in between. All programs of the operating system will now open the website using the new IP address even if the DNS servers are still routing to the old server. This gives webmasters an excellent opportunity to edit these websites before the DNS propagation has finished.

Google Analytics users who can access it will find a display of their website’s traffic graph along with another bar below that is showing the alerts for the corresponding days. Alerts are color coded with automatic alerts using a light green and custom alerts a light blue color. There will only be automatic alerts in the beginning.

The automatic alerts will give a webmaster immediate information about traffic jumps. This includes major traffic changes to certain pages on the website, a change in a page’s bounce rate, pageviews or a higher or lower than usual visitor stream from a specific country, state or region.

This gives the webmaster a quick overview of traffic developments on a specific web project or website. There are certain possibilities where Google Analytics Intelligence module can help. Webmasters could for instance investigate traffic increases or decreases more effectively as it will for instance display a decrease in traffic to a very popular page on the website. The webmaster could then analyze the issue further.

It is furthermore possible to create custom alerts and this could be very interesting to some webmasters. Custom alerts are created from a list of available alert conditions. The webmaster selects a traffic type to be monitored. This can be all traffic, traffic from a campaign, keyword, medium and landing or exit page. This traffic type is then combined with a metric that is triggering the alert. This again can be pageviews, total visitors, revenue or pre-defined goals. The selected metric is then given a threshold value. An alert is then automatically created whenever that value is crossed.

Another interesting option is to look at weekly or monthly reports which even gives a better overview as day to day variations are something that every webmaster has to live with. Google Analytics Intelligence is available in the left sidebar menu of the Google Analytics account.

Google Sidewiki allows Google Toolbar users to leave comments about any website or page that they are visiting. Comments that have been left by other users can be read by anyone but only users who are logged into a Google Account can leave comments.

Users can rate comments and only the most popular comments are displayed initially with the option to look at the rest of the comments on the next page. The Google Sidewiki team has released a video that is showcasing the functionality of it.

One of the problems that these kind of programs are facing is abuse of the system. Google tries to combat abuse with the rating system. It remains to be seen if this is good enough to keep internet marketers and spammers away from manipulating comments on popular websites.

The other problem that could turn down many users is the exclusive integration in the Google Toolbar. Users who do not want to install the toolbar can still read comments by using a method described at Digital Inspiration. Google Sidewiki can be downloaded at the Google website. It is compatible with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

Update: Google has discontinued Sidewiki. The service is no longer available. There does not seem to be a comparable service.

The main problem with pagination is that it limits the amount of content on each page forcing the user to click on one of the buttons to be taken to the next or previous page of the website to access new content. Some extensions and scripts are available that automatically load the new content once the user reaches the end of the page.

Another alternative is provided by the SiteFlow bookmarklet. The bookmarklet recognizes the headlines of the active page (which would be the titles here at Ghacks for example) and displays them in an overlay on top. It offers previous and next buttons which will load previous or next pages of the website both in its interface but also on the screen.

A click on a headline will take the user right to the beginning of the article.

Keyboard shortcuts are available to perform the following operations:

• Go to next page [right arrow key]
• Go to previous page [left arrow key]
• Return to first page [Shift Home]
• Skip to last page [Shift End]
• Jump to next headline [CTRL down arrow]
• Jump to previous headline [CTRL up arrow]

The keyboard shortcuts to flip pages come in handy in many occasions as it only takes one key to perform the action. SiteFlow is compatible with many modern web browsers including Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari.