Google's SEO Starter Guide
Search Engine Optimization is essential for webmasters who want to promote their websites to their fullest extent. It is usually divided into onpage and offpage SEO. Onpage SEO describes the process of […]
Have WordPress back-ups emailed
We are always told how important it is to back-up our blog, in case it is hacked, which can happen from one minute to the rest. My personal blog, Webby's World, I […]
The Times are a-Changin’
As WordPress emerged the dominant self-hosted blogging platform of perhaps 2 years ago a growing ecosystem of sites and services sprung up around WordPress.org including resources websites, premium WordPress themes and other […]
Get Free Images, Video and Sound from Wikimedia Commons
When creating a presentation, a web design, a leaflet or a brochure, it is important to find suitable images to use. Whilst one option is to pay for stock photos to use […]
Image Optimization With Smush It
One important task of being a webmaster is optimizing the elements of a website to provide visitors with a fast loading page. Unoptimized images can increase the page loading time tremendously. It […]
Alphas, Betas and Why we’re all Guilty
It’s been remarked upon of late that the concept of beta software has changed dramatically over the last ten years. Perhaps Google was a major influence (sigh… Gmail) or perhaps the Internet […]
Source Code Analyzer
Highlight is a free program that you can use to format code in a better way. It turns the source code -- of supported programming languages -- into formatted text with syntax […]
WordPress Issues
I have been working with the WordPress script that powers this blog and several of my other websites for almost three years now and can say that the overall experience is quite […]
WordPress For iPhone Is Not A Killer App
Everyone on the Internet got really excited about the recent WordPress release for iPhone users that lets iPhone users create and edit WordPress posts using their iPhone. I'm probably the only one […]
Monitor Your Servers With Livewatch
Livewatch is the server monitoring service that I'm using to monitor my dedicated servers 24/7 to make sure that they are running. The main advantage of Livewatch over similar services is that […]
Colour Schemes
I have spent this week struggling with colour schemes for my blog. I found deciding on a colour scheme to be an incredibly frustrating process, and what I finally settled on was […]
An easy way to learn web design
I spent a little time today on a WordPress theme for one of my clients. He asked me to copy his webpage design and turn it into a WordPress blog. This took […]
Test Websites in various Internet Explorer Versions
Webmasters do not like Microsoft's Internet Explorer because of its inability to comply to web standards and the changes in various versions that make it extremely hard to code a website that […]
Domain Finder
Domain Finder is not your usual domain search engine that performs a search on the word that you type in by appending different domain extensions to it. It is also not one […]
Alexa changes their rankings
I usually start my day by opening Thunderbird to check my emails and my website to check the comments that are awaiting moderation. I have installed some rank checkers in the Firefox […]
True Make Money Online Websites
Making money online, that's everyones dream I guess. Working from home, letting the websites collect the money for you and all you need to do at the end of the month is […]
Domain Suggestion Tool
I would like to write a short review about a cool domain suggestion tool that I discovered lately. Bust a Name is not your usual domain search engine, it is highly flexible […]
Secure your server with htaccess
I apologize if this topic drifts a bit away from the usual ones you find here at ghacks but I thought it would be extremely useful for everyone who has a server or webspace that supports htaccess and htpasswd. Htaccess files can do much more than just secure a directory on your server or website but I want to concentrate on this topic because it is something that I have been using on some of my websites for a very long time to increase security.
Internet Explorer Virtual PC Images
Website owners should test their websites with the most common browsers to make sure that the website is displayed as intended in all of them. Nothing is more frustrating than to realize that a website was not displaying properly for users that have been visiting the website with a certain browser.
Ways to check if a website is really down
I got the inspiration for this post from the Download Squad article "Is this web site down for everyone or is it just you ?" which mentioned a service that would check if a website was down or if it was more likely to be a problem on the user's side. Some guys mentioned in the comments that the website checking service would display false results from time to time which in turn convinced me to write a post about other methods on how you can check if a website is up, or not.
Moleskine - offline notes and calendar
This is not strictly software or web apps, but a Moleskine may be a great addition to many people's lives. Think of it as your Outlook when you're away from the PC. […]
Any Client a Web Based FTP Client
When I was working back then for a big company I had to use a computer that they provided with no options to install new software on that computer. I still did update my websites frequently in my spare time but always struggled when I had to install new scripts or upload files to the website because I did not have access to an ftp client nor something like WinSCP.
Analyze your website's meta tags
A great way to see if you are optimizing your site enough is to take a look at your meta tags and your keyword/content focus, A great Website Analyzer page I found […]
Create Instant MP3 Rss Feeds
I have not really put much thought into the way podcasts work until now but when I stumbled upon Dir Caster I began to realize that publishing podcasts is different from publishing blog posts. I mean you have a mp3 file and need a way to create an RSS feed out of it.
reCaptcha: stop spam while helping to digitize books
Spam is a pain and we all got used to the necessity of fighting it every single day spending our valuable time on deleting junk mails and undergoing additional security measures like captchas and many others. Is there any way to transform daily wasted time and effort spent on these measures for good purposes instead of regarding them as a necessary evil? You bet there is.
Resources for web designers
I'd like to point out three websites offering varied stuff to the professional as well as amateur web-designer and summarize their purpose and properties.
How to link and how not to
I would like to write about a subject that I have been investigating lately. I'm talking about links in general and how they should look like and how they should not look like. This is solely from a webmasters point of view so forgive me that I'm not taking the users into account here. Links play a important role in search engine rankings, they are probably the most deciding factor when it comes to search engine rankings.
Alter all websites in the world
The following is a nice trick that I learned in a webmaster forum. I thought it would be nice to describe it to my readers as well because you can have some fun with it. It allows you to manipulate all elements of a website. You could for instance create number one positions on Google, add your own products to Amazon or write a cover story at CNN.
The Rubicon Project
The Rubicon Project is yet another service like Pubmatic that tries to optimize your ad inventory on your website. They do this by testing different kinds of ads from different advertising companies in the ad spots on your website which has the result that ads generating maximum profits are displayed after a while.
Check CSS Properties with Xray
Xray is a bookmarklet that can be used in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6+ and Safari that displays CSS Properties of elements on a website. The process is as simple as it could be. The user loads a website, clicks on the Xray bookmarklet which loads an overlay that will display the information.
Analyze Google Adsense statistics
Google Adsense offers webmasters a quick way to monetize their website without really thinking about niches and affiliates that work for your website. While the Adsense website offers a quick way of analyzing your revenue and some filters it does not really shine when it comes to generating reports that webmasters can use to analyze the revenue.
Easily create and maintain a website with Doodlekit
I have to say that I really hate website builders, I even hate WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) HTML editors. These tools are inflexible, create laughably complex website codes […]
WordPress Incorrect Password notification
Cheryl emailed me this morning telling me that her password would not be accepted by Wordpress after registering a new account although she was sure that she did type it correctly. The message that would appear was always "Incorrect Password". My first step of solving this problem was to change the password to "test" and try the login procedure again.
New Adsense Clickzone consequences
Google changed the clickzones of their Adsense ad units and most webmasters are reporting decreases in their ad unit click through rate and revenue. Many have seen a decrease between 1-2% in click through rate which reduced the earnings by a figure between 30-70%.
Google Adsense Tips and Change Announcement
A list of tips was published at the official Google Adsense blog Inside Adsense which should help maximize revenue potential. The tips are to turn custom channels into ad placements which will highlight parts of your website to advertisers, to enable text and image ads on your website and to use the 300x250 medium rectangle because many advertisers use this specifically when creating rich media ads.
WordPress 2.31 is available
A new version of the blogging plattform Wordpress has been released today. It is an advised update for every webmaster especially for those with register_globals enabled. A security vulnerability was found that can be exploited if that setting is enabled.
Google Adsense Revenue and Traffic Comparision
I'm using Google Adsense for more than two years to monetize Ghacks and experienced some ups and downs. I thought it would be nice to create a graph that would put Adsense revenue in relation to the traffic that my website received. This could give courage to those webmasters who are currently struggling with their Adsense revenue especially when it dropped suddenly while the traffic remained more or less on the same level.
Have you been hit with a Pagerank drop?
Many popular websites and blogs have been hit with Pagerank decreases in the last days. Most went down two points (some even three) from one day to the other. The Pagerank drop does not seem to have an influence on other factors like website traffic or Adsense. It does seem pretty random though, some websites get hit, others that do the same do not get hit at all.
Create your own favicon with ease
Website owners should create their own favicons that are placed in that tiny space next to your url and consist normally of 16x16 pixels. They show up in the bookmarks section of your browser as well and several extension for Firefox let you replace the text of the tabs with just the favicon of the websites.
Are you selling links? Watch your Pagerank!
What has been a rumor for some months seems to have become reality in the last weeks. Google is starting to punish websites that are selling links by dropping the sites Pagerank. Danny Sullivan noticed a huge Pagerank drop from 9 to 7 on the Stanford Daily website which happened to sell links since 2005.
