Development

Create a self-expiring homepage

Self-expiring, disposable or temporary emails have been around for some time and are quite useful for quickly joining a website that forces its users to register before they can see the content or participate. Disposable Websites on the other hand is a concept that I never heard before.

Monetize your website with TNX ads

I heavily rely on Everton from Connected Internet who sends me new interesting ways to monetize my sites from time to time. Today he was sending me a link and a short description of TNX which basically sells links on your website. Unlike other sites that sell links the links from TNX are sold on a per page basis. Every sold page earns the user points which can be either exchanged into cash or used to buy links as well.

Allowed sites now available for Adsense Webmasters

Until now it was possible to use the public id of any Adsense webmaster and place it on bogus sites to get the account of that webmaster banned. The public id is visible when viewing the source code of a website that uses Google Adsense to monetize.

Which Adsense Ads and Locations work best on my blog ?

If you ask ten webmasters about the best Adsense unit that is offered at the moment, the best color scheme for that unit and best location you would get ten different answers. There is no absolute truth, no way to setup Adsense that will earn you the most. It depends on so many factors that it is difficulty to give general tips.

WordPress one click installation of plugins and themes

One Click Installer is a Firefox extension and Wordpress plugin combination for Wordpress blog owners replacing the need to upload themes and plugins by ftp with a one click installation in Firefox. The extension will take any link pointing to a plugin or theme and upload it to the right folder of your Wordpress installation without the need to do that manually.

Secure WordPress with the first WordPress Worm

Did you know that the latest version of Wordpress contains at least seven security vulnerabilities that could compromise your blog ? If you use Wordpress you should make sure that to fix them as soon as possible. The easiest way to fix them right now is to use the first Wordpress worm - which is a good one - to fix all seven vulnerabilities for you.

How to setup Hotlink Protection

Hotlinking is a technique that is frowned upon on the Internet. This happens if you upload a file to your webserver and someone else links to that file directly effectively using your bandwidth to display and / or spread the file on his website. This happens most often with images but it could also be happening with all other files such as zip or pdf.

Why you should setup Alternate Ads in Google Adsense

Let me ask you a short question: Do you know how many PSA - Public Service Announcement - ads are displayed every day on your website ? You might not be able to answer this question even though you are running Google Adsense. The reason is simple. Google is not displaying stats about PSAs.

Glassy buttons without touching Photoshop

Yesterday I was looking for a way I could create some nice buttons for a website of mine. I needed people to pay attention to that button and make it stick out so that it would not be overlooked. Instead of downloading a utility for that purpose, I found a fine online button generator that let's you create original buttons for your website or for other purposes as well. Of course it is possible to create buttons in Photoshop or similar programs but I bet it would take you much longer if you're not a pro. And beyond that, not everyone can afford such programs.

How to create a successful rewarding blog

I got several emails the last days asking me about tips on how to start a blog or improve an already established blog which in the end led to the post that I'm currently writing. I sometimes hear the argument that it does not make sense to start a blog because there are so many blogs out there that already cover all topics that one can write about.

While this is definitely not true for all topics you will face serious difficulties if you want to create just another gadget or technology blog unless you can provide something that the other blogs can't. While it will probably not be worthwhile to just copy and paste what established sites like Gizmodo or Engadget write it could be worthwhile to write about the same topics from a different point of view.

Get a free RSS widget for your site

This one is for those of you, who have a website and would like to display the contents of a RSS feed on that website. It does not really matter if you want to display your own feeds on a different part of your blog or feeds from other websites. FeedFlash is a nice service that takes feed urls and places them in a nice looking and scrollable widget that can be embedded into websites.

Check your robots.txt on Google's Webmaster Tools website.

A robots.txt tells the search engine robots about the directories and files that should be indexed on a website. A wrongly edited robots.txt file could mean that search engine robots are not crawling your website anymore with the result that new articles will not be indexed in the search engine index.

This can be quite devastating especially for webmasters who do earn their living from their websites. It takes up to two weeks until changes can be seen when you edit the robots.txt file which is way to long if you made a mistake.

Why Stumbleupon is better than Digg for Webmasters

Let me introduce Stumbleupon and Digg first in case you never heard of this services before. (must be living on the moon for a couple of years, uhm ?) Every user may post and vote for articles on Digg. New articles are kept in the Upcoming Stories section for a maximum of 24 hours. If the article receives enough votes in that time it will be transferred to the frontpage and drive incredible traffic to the website where the article is hosted. If the votes are not sufficient it will be removed and can only be reached using the site search.

Monitor your website with Montastic

When you first start a blog and you’re slowly building your audience and your traffic, your site’s uptime/availability is not something that you often think about. When your audience is still small and your blog is down for one or two or even ten hours it really doesn’t matter that much, as the potential number of people who might have tried to visit and failed is small, and most of them at that point are friends or are somehow connected to you and will likely come back again.

Once you have grown your traffic to a fairly decent amount, however, downtimes that affect your site are a complete different story, a nuisance that can mean that hundreds of people are unable to get to your site, most of whom are likely to never come back again. In my experience, even when my hosting company promised 99.8% uptime, this began to increasingly seem like meaningless marketing hype when I started getting emails from friends and strangers alike informing me that my site was down at such and such an hour (many of which downtimes occurred in the early am hours when I wouldn’t have been online anyway).

View your site in different browsers

If you have a website, did you ever wonder how your website would look like in another browser ? It is not that practicable to download and install all browsers that you have to use to test your site. Sure, you could install the most used versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera but what about previous versions ? What about browsers in another Operating System ? This is essential for many webmasters especially for business related websites.

Money Makers: Tribalfusion CPM Ads

Tribalfusion is one of the few companies that thrive on CPM, that is Cost per Thousand, advertising campaigns which is not that hard to get into. It actually took only two weeks until I got accepted and could run a cpm banner campaign here on ghacks. The advantage of CPM ads is of course that you do not need to think much about ad placement and layout unlike CPC, that is cash per click, ads like Google Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network. You do get paid a fix amount of money depending on the type of banner ads that are displayed on your website. The range usually is between $0.50 up to about $2 per 1000 impressions on your website which can sum up nicely if you have lots of traffic.

How to determine the value of a website

If you do own a website you probably wondered about the value of it. With value I mean the amount of money that someone would be willing to pay for it. The following information could be very helpful if you need to sell your website, want to buy one or get approached by someone who offers money for your website. It actually happens quite often that webmasters receive mails from companies or individuals who want to buy their domain. Let us examine some factors that play a role in determine the value of a domain.

Optimize WordPress loading times

I'm using Wordpress as the blogging software of choice for Ghacks and all of my other blogs. After reading Paul Stamatious article on optimizing CSS for Wordpress I decided to give it a try and see if page loading times would benefit at all from it. I also had to check if the optimization would change the way my blog would be displayed or would throw up errors. I began by analyzing the page loading times of my blog without any optimization. The result for the frontpage was that my blog used 166K and that users with ISDN (128 Kbit) would have to wait 18.55 seconds before my site was fully loaded.

Use Onlywire to drive traffic to your website

I'm normally not writing that many articles with webmasters in mind but I sometimes come upon a remarkable service or site that I like to much that I have to write about it. We all know that webmasters use Social Bookmarking websites such as del.icio.us to bookmark and tag their own articles to drive traffic to their website. This is working well in conjunction with buttons that let visitors of the site add the same article to those bookmarking sites increasing the popularity of the article.

I never had the time and passion to submit my articles to many bookmarking sites and only submitted it occasionally to the most popular services. That is, until I found the site onlywire which handles most of the submitting process for me. I had to signup for the service - it is free of course - and provide login details for all the social bookmarking services that I wanted to combine. I then had to drop a bookmarklet into my browser bar and click on it whenever I was on a page that I wanted to submit to all of the services that I supplied login details for.

Host your own webserver

It is relatively easy to use your home computer running Windows to become a webserver that is accessible from anywhere. The following method is highly flexible and makes it possible to host websites, documents and files on that server and protect the contents with passwords if so desired. All you need is a software called XAMP which installs the Apache server environment on your computer.

Have a blog? Make it a successful one!

I have been writing about the basics of finding a domain name and creating a blog on that domain name. It can be quite frustrating however if you are full of ideas and write great articles but either no visitors show up or the earnings are not worth mentioning. Not every blog has to be monetized. I know of some that use their blogs purely for reasons such as publicity, discussion or for a reference in their resume.

How to create your own blog with domain Part 2

Welcome to the second part of the how to create your own blog with domain series. I would like to add some information about what I have said in the first part of this article. Hosting is essential of course but you should not be to afraid to make errors. I switched hosts three times before I found the one that offered me everything that I was looking for. The others decided to disable my website at a certain point because it was causing to much load and traffic on their network.

How to create your own blog with domain Part 1

Creating your own blog is no big deal anymore. All you need is some time at hand to think about a topic that you want to write about. I found out that it best works with topics that you are passionate about. You could of course write about other topics but it is in my opinion much harder to output regular articles in a niche that you do not like or know that much. I'm also only writing about text blogs, not about the two other possibilities video blogs and podcasts.

List of WordPress Plugins installed

I was getting some emails lately asking about the plugins that I have installed here at ghacks. I know that many webmasters read my blog and I thought it would be nice to write about the plugins. I also thought to write a little series of articles about setting up a blog with your own domain, please let me know if that sounds interesting enough. I have been using Wordpress since the beginning and find it really easy to administrate.

ShowMeDo Free Video Tutorial Website

ShowMeDo is a relatively new website that is about videos by the people, for the people as they put it. Not the normal type of videos that you find on sites like youtube but videos that teach the viewer. The site currently has seven categories where movies are located, those are Python, Java, Ruby, Linux, Blender, Screencasting and Other. The biggest category is the Other category which will most likely be the most interesting category for everyone who is not into programming, linux and 3d.

Unsuggester and some Apache .htaccess tips

If you read allot of books, it's always nice to know if there are others books that you might like based on a list of books you like.
Well Unsuggester is kinda like that, but then the other way around.
You type in a title of a book you like, and the site servers you a list of books you will probably not like.
It is not very useful, but who knows maybe you'll find a nice book even though the system says you will probably not like it.

The problem of running different browsers

Want to run the 5 big browsers (Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 1,x and 2,x and Opera 9) at the same time?
Here is a little guide on how to do that.

Automate and Script Windows Tasks

AutoIt is a freeware scripting language that runs on every Windows operating system starting with Windows 95. It makes it possible to use a combination of mouse movements, keystrokes and window / control manipulation to automate tasks in Windows. It is also capable of executing Windows and Dos programs.

How to Setup a Ftp Server in 5 Minutes

How do you normally send files to a friend ? By email ? What if the file is rather big but you want to send it anyway ? You could setup a ftp server and give your friend access to it. The speed that your friend can download with depends of course on your upload speed. Still, ftp servers are the number one method to swap large files. The best thing, it´s not complicated to setup your own ftp server, just follow these easy steps:

Interesting .com Domain Name Facts

HTML Kit

HTML-Kit is a full-featured editor and an integrated development environment designed to help HTML, XHTML, XML and script authors to edit, format, lookup help, validate, preview and publish web pages. Newcomers to web page development can benefit from letting it point out errors and provide suggestions on how to create standards compliant pages.