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Okay, so I have had Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 for a long time and it worked beautifully until I installed Windows 7. Now it is behaving very strangely. I went onto a Dreamweaver forum, now owned by Adobe, and asked questions about why certain things were not working in Dreamweaver. They all said “Get a later version” and “It’s a wonder it has worked for this long”. Well, I’m not rich, so what now. I’ll have to learn HTML and XHTML afterall. Maybe I’ll download NVU, an open source program said to be like Dreamweaver.

A lot of programs that I have will not be compatible with Windows 7. Apparently, if your Windows 7 is 64 bit, then nothing much will be compatible, but the 32 bit version may be nicer to you. To find out whether your version of Windows 7 is 32 bit  or 64 bit go to Start>Control Panel>System Security>System

I know most items these days are made to be obsolescent in a couple of years, but I don’t think this was the case with computer programs which used to be okay in their time. The makers would not have been aware that computers and Bill Gates would have such amazing operating systems in the future. I mean Windows 7 is better than the security ridden XP OS.

So what do you do as a home programmer in the way of software which becomes outdated?

I asked my host to fix the page and notify me because I need to notify Google now. My host suggested I upgrade my word press platform, so I did that. There is one error, so far. I’m having trouble getting to Post, although obviously I did because here I am.

Since I did all this maintenance I went back to google webmaster central, only to find that SOMEONE else now owned my site. But after I settled down after the panic attack, I realized that my host has taken over in order to fix the problem. Boy, I hope that is it. Then again, that seems to be a bit naughty, don’t you think?

More posts soon when problems fixed.

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It is similar to my own site, but has many more tutorials on css coding, xml, and

• JavaScript Tutorial
  Learn how to add functionality and interactivity to your web pages.
• ColdFusion Tutorial
  ColdFusion is a server-side programming/scripting environment used to build dynamic websites.
• PHP Tutorial
  This PHP Tutorial demonstrates just how easy it is to create dynamic websites using PHP.
• VBScript Tutorial
  This tutorial teaches you VBScript from the ground up – starting with the basics.

Database

• Database Tutorial
  Learn the fundamentals of databases and database management systems.
• SQL Tutorial
  Covers everything you need to know to get started in database programming using SQL.
• SQL Server Tutorial
  Provides an overview of SQL Server – Microsoft’s enterprise database management system.
• Microsoft Access Tutorial
  Use Microsoft Access to perform many typical database tasks such as creating databases, tables, queries, and more.

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If you go to the Google Analytics home page you will see an Application gallery where you can add various features to your analysis of your web site.

However, what I have noticed in my reports is a beta feature which you get to by clicking on Contents and then In Page Analysis. Here you will find that your site shows where visitors are clicking on your page, what percentage that is and what percentage click under the fold. Hover over the percentage bubbles and you will see how many visits that is.

Very useful! To see more than just your home page, leave the google analytics page open and click through other pages.

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Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers.

I’ve just installed this add-on and it really excites me for some reason. I took a screen shot of this blog. It’s useful for me because it takes the whole site in, not just what the Print screen key can take, which is whatever you can see, but not further.

I have made the image smaller so it fits on this blog.

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What you do is sign up and they will collect referrers for you which appear on your blog or web site. I first thought that these kind of back links were alien to Google, that Google didn’t like them, but I tried it out anyway.

Gradually, as people come to this site the referrers are appearing. You can see the list down the bottom right. I have found it surpringly useful, even though I have only had it for less than 24 hours. It alerts me to which Google seaches are coming to my site and I was surprised. On the google page one of my posts was on the front page and it had my picture, my blog and other posts of mine.

So give it a go. It’s in beta form at the moment and your user name appears on their site. Already my user name has disappeared, so it must be popular.

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I received an email from Google to notify me that I had malware on my site. When I went to the offending pages I saw, “Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer” No-one could see the information.

What to do?

The email had a link to Webmaster tools (You must have a Google account).

Click on your site

Click on Diagnostics > malware

You will see down the bottom : Problematic URLs

Click on details

It shows suspected injected code. Mine was an iframe linking to an ad.

Now you might be able to find this and delete it, but I just deleted the subdirectory (it was on a second blog of mine)

I changed my password for my FTP program and my control panel where I host my site. I scanned my site: nothing. So someone had accessed my control panel on my server or my FTP program.

I have lost the posts for this blog because I hadn’t backed it up, but luckily I wasn’t using it much. I’m not sure if the bad code could have been easily removed.

So, keep your virus program up to date, change passwords on your FTP and control panel regularly and back up your blog. Web sites are easier to fix.

Get a good firewall.

Good luck!

Oh, once you have fixed the problem you need to get your site reviewed by Google. Webmaster tools tells you how.

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Have you ever wondered why some websites end up higher on search engine results than others? Now there’s a new tool to add to your search engine analysis – AnalogX Keyword Extractor!
AnalogX Keyword Extractor (KeyEx) extracts all of the keywords off of a webpage, and then sorts and indexes them based off of their usage and position. Once indexed, you can adjust search-engine specific weighting factors and keyword criteria to get the best possible view of how a search engine sees your site. KeyEx can load up both local files as well as files off other websites, and even can work through a proxy, and can have separate configurations for as many search engines as you’d like to enter!

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Ever wondered how to do this on a mock up web site? What is lipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Here’s the interpreter?

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RSS : what is it? How to read it and how to use it

[I wrote this article some time ago and you will see how old it is now. Everyone uses Feedburner now, but since Google took it over, you need a google account.  Personally I only subscribe to a blog if there is provision for email distribution, as my blog has. Do subscribe ]

RSS is the name given to a simple and well-established XML format used to syndicate news. Once a website creates an RSS file they have created a means to allow others to syndicate their news.

The first version of RSS (RSS 0.9) was released by Netscape in March 1999 as a format for adding news channels to their My.Netscape.Com portal.
Then in July 1999 Netscape released RSS 0.91, incorporating most of the features of a format called <scriptingNews>, which was created by UserLand. Shortly thereafter Netscape discontinued developing the RSS
format, however UserLand persisted and RSS continued to grow in strength.
In December 2000, the separate RSS-DEV Working Group released RSS 1.0 and Userland announced RSS 0.92. As of April 2001, Userland is now planning RSS 0.93. Although RSS is not clearly an acronym of anything, different
people have called it Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary and Really Simple Syndication at different times.

The lack of clarity in what RSS stands for or which version is the correct one to use can seem confusing to beginners. However these issues don’t need to addressed by a website wanting to create an RSS file. RSS is a very well recognized format, in fact it is often referred to as the most successful XML format to date. Some websites have a preference for oneversion, others create more than one RSS file and support multiple versions and a recent survey suggests that the first two versions of RSS (0.9 and 0.91) are still by far the most popular.

Everyone must have seen one of those orange buttons called XML by now. Why are they being used? I suppose it was in place of newsletters and a way to avoid one’s newsletter being dumped in a spam folder. That’s what happened
to some of my newsletters and they are not spam. It’s a way to make a page ‘sticky’. People will come back frequently. It’s also a way to let people know quickly if your site is updated. They are used most frequently on blogs, which have themselves exploded over the past year.

It’s a good idea to have an RSS reader just in case you see a site which you want to subscribe to, so let’s discuss this first. Most of them have items on them already, but you can delete what you don’t want. There’s the Google reader and another popular one is NewsGator. These are free.

Both readers explain how to get the news into your RSS readers, but the general idea is to click on the XML button or the place where the site directs you to get the feed and then open your RSS reader or aggregator and add that .xml file and the title of the site.

Okay, now you want to put one on your site, don’t you. Not many static sites would do this and nor would any that didn’t have an hourly turnover of new stuff on the web site. So you do, or you want to put it on yourblog.

Here’s a good link to learn from

http://www.webreference.com/xml/column13/index.html

RSS Wizard or Feed Editor or Feed Mix

If all this seems to difficult you can easily create, edit and publish rss feeds. New RSS feeds can be quickly and easily created with FeedForAll.
Advanced features enable you to create professional looking rss feeds quickly.
Existing RSS feeds can be repaired and enhanced with FeedForAll.
RSS feeds generated by other means can be automatically repaired, so that they conform to the RSS 2.0 specification. Existing feeds can be enhanced to contain advanced feed properties.

Ping aggregators to let them know that you’ve created an RSS feed. In order to let the world wide web know that your feed is up and running, you must give them a Ping. This is very easy to do – just go to http://pingomatic.com
and choose the appropriate sites to inform. Select blog related sites if you’re a blog and non-blog related sites for other content. Complete the information and Ping. Another site you should Ping is Yahoo! Simply visit the Yahoo!
RSS submit page and add your feed URL. This will let the big boys know that your syndicating.

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