The wibiya web toolbar

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Image via CrunchBase

The wibiya web toolbar should be showing at the bottom of this blog. You can add information to it, delete what you don’t want and use it to see your stats. Of course you need to alter the settings to suit your blog or web site. I think it’s great because you can use it and your visitors can use it to easily add a post to Facebook, Twitter or Digg, for example.

It also makes your site look pretty cool and professional. it is a growing application with more and more people using it. Features are added frequently.

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See your external links

I have come across a free external link manager. It is called e-referrer

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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My site was hacked

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Image via CrunchBase

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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Keyword extractor

Search Engine Strategies Logo
Image via Wikipedia

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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Free image hosting sites

You can use these sites to find appropriate photos for your blogs or Squidoo. You can also upload photos to them as a way of storing them off your computer or sharing them with friends.

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TinyFav

I have tested out the site and you get thumbnails for all your web sites.

TinyFav is a site where you put in all your favorite links, and get one tiny little link back! With this single new tiny link, whenever you go to it, it will randomly select one of the sites you put in earlier to visit, or optionally, display a list of all the sites you entered! This is great for affiliates masking their hoplink URLS, setting your homepage, or when you just want to share your favorite sites with other people without sending them 20 different links!

The other thing which TinyFav does is cloak your affiliate links.

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Customer service and help desk for web designers

Partial map of the Internet based on the Janua...
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SmarterTrack 4.x is a powerful help desk application built for tracking, managing, and reporting on customer service and communications, including sales and support issues. Businesses can manage employees and company communications at distributed locations around the world from a Web browser—increasing the efficiency of virtual offices, mobile agents, and companies with multiple locations. Features include:

* A world-class Ticket solution that transforms service, sales, and support emails into a powerful information distribution system
* Live Chat, which gives businesses the ability to reduce phone calls, capture information on website visitors, and assist more customers
* WhosOn, which gives businesses real-time tracking of customers as they navigate websites, providing the opportunity to increase sales, expedite customer service, and gather information on site visitors
* A portal interface that is optimized for search engines and functions as the central hub for all communication channels
* Self-service resources, such as a Knowledge Base and news items, that allow customers to research and resolve questions and issues
* A Web-based interface that provides accessibility wherever an Internet connection is available
* An integrated survey system that can be triggered upon events
* More than 70 summary and trend reports with many levels of customization and filtering
* Support for multiple brands within a company

And, there is a free version (without as many features, obviously)

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Blogs or web sites

You know when I started designing web sites, blogs didn’t exist. My first web site was made with Microsoft Publisher and a little bit of HTML knowledge. Pretty well every webmy dog site then took an age to download, even if I had had cable then, and had heaps of large graphics and lots of animated graphics. Text was big and the design was usually pretty poor.

By the time I bought dreamweaver, in preference to Front Page, thank God, I was ready to get my own domain name and host. Dreamweaver was pretty easy to learn and I thought, great, this is the best thing since sliced bread.

Then there were all those books in computer book stores about Java and PHP and I didn’t have a clue. But I did learn how to use javascripts not as a developer of them, but as a web designer.

Now we were suddenly going up to XHTML and CSS had arrived. It was all going too fast for me. I’ve managed both of those now, sort of, but we are almost back to a full circle with build a page, wikis, blogs, swickis all of which means that no-one has to know any code.

There’s debate all the time about which way the internet is going to go next. Was it going to be a content management system or was it going to be a blog?

I’ve used both and even had a forum at one time too. But it is only now that I have added WordPress to my site. And I like it.

With my web site, I tried DHTML menus so that every time I added a page I could update the menu in a flash. I’ve learnt Paint Shop pro, but not everything about Photoshop. I’ve made video tutorials that go to YouTube and I’ve made some podcasts. I love technology.

I could never afford much, so any spare cash went on the computer and we now have 2 networked. I’ve never done any IT study.

I find it almost impossible to keep up with all the changes, so the blog makes it easier to write a page and have it indexed almost immediately. Word Press has so many plugins to make it like a web site. There are not just posts here.

Should I change my whole site over to this blog or have it as a quick update of news to do with web design? Maybe not. I’d lose whatever ranking I have.

But which will do better? I have added google analytics to this blog so I can see my visitors. This blog is still only a month old so I don’t expect too many click throughs yet. I have a number of subscribers to my feed already though.

That’s another thing about blogs. A person can see all your posts in one click in their reader of RSS feeds. Subscriptions to web sites like I have seem to be slowing down. RSS is so much easier, although I may add an email subscription to my feed also.

I think too that most of the interesting stuff is appearing more on blogs than web sites. Of course the corporations and small businesses need their web sites. They don’t need to be changed that much, but whenever you go to google adsense or google analytics for example, do they care much about design? I don’t think so. They don’t need to.

Some blogs and web sites are really beautiful and I still like a good looking site.

Anyway, what do you think? What will be the future of the internet and please don’t say mobile phones.

Oh? About the eyes on the dog. I’ll get rid of the blue pupils for the next post and tell you how I did that as if you didn’t know!

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Widgets

Adding Desktop Gadgets
Image via Wikipedia

http://www.widgipedia.com/

Here’s an interesting site if you want to make widgets for your web page or desktop.

You can also use the widgets that are there. There is a URL to each one and the embed instructions as well.

There’s a forum on this site as well.

Here’s another site which just offers you gadgets to add to your site.

http://www.smartwebgadgets.com/

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Web design and resources for beginners and before CSS and web 2.0

You don’t have a web site yet

It’s very difficult to keep up with the changes to web design these days. Some of the flash sites we’ve seen are particularly brilliant, some are not. Making a web site without buying Photo shop, paint shop pro and dreamweaver will leave your site fairly plain. That may be all you want, but if you want a more professional design try this. Try these templates

Web design tips

There are things you can do to your web site to confuse the spammers. There’s a way of using another symbol apart from @ for your emailon your site. It is @
Spider robots looking for the @ then can’t find your email.
You can use a ‘no right click script’ . But I believe that even going to all those lengths you will still get spam mail.

Appelet menus..very attractive
The web developers virtual library

One of the reasons we could never quite get the colours right on the site is that without seeing them together it is difficult to judge how they will look. As with painting a room, we found the following site invaluable. We had the web site there to pick the colour and the dreamweaver open to see how it looked next to other colours. From our experience a two colour site is probably best, but that doesn’t count the text link colours.

Check out this colour picker

Here’s a great link to HTML tags and which browsers the tags work in.
HTML tags

Create DHTML/Javascript menus for your web pages visually, without any programming experience required! A Javascript menu will work alike in browsers supporting DHTML, such as the I.E., Netscape Navigator, Firefox and Opera browsers, without you having to deal with DHTML incompatibilities across them. A DHTML menu can be vertical or horizontal, it can be movable, stay visible while scrolling, contain static or animated images, borders, colors and much more. There is also a collection of predefined styles in the Style Gallery that can help you build a dynamic menu very fast; just add the text for each menu item and let the Style Gallery take care of its appearance. Finally, a simple step-by-step process makes it easy to compile and link a menu to your web page in just seconds! Since menus have always been familiar and straightforward to users, you can really boost your sites’ functionality with comprehensive, well-designed menus; AllWebMenus is definitely a great tool to achieve this!
I have used the All web menu and can recommend it provided it is not too graphic intensive. They are attractive and popular. All Web Menus

This site was advertised as Site Pro News of the week. I has simply everything you’d need. Everything the web designer needs

Creating site maps with different software – all free

I have a page of resources on my web site.

Flash

Well here is a great link to flash tutorials. Good luck. I can’t make head nor tale of flash. I guess I’m not
that keen on learning it either. But for the occasional banner or button flash is pretty useful. I use on-line flash generators if I need it

Articles about web design

Do you have some affiliate programs from which you’d like to receive some commission for advertising them on your site? Have you clicked on one of these from another site and thought you’d like to buy
something but decide to get rid of the referrers ID? You can encrypt your link by using my Protect your link service to be found at the bottom of the About affiliate programs page

HTML Code Tutorial’s goal is to provide the most helpful and complete guide to creating web pages anywhere. They have good tutorials on frames and on forms at
http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/

Free on-line web tools

Flash Generators, Graphic Generators, Dhtml/Css Tools, JS Generators, JS/Css Generators, Html Generators, MetaTag Creators, Calculation Tools, Colour Charts, Site Popularity, Dates & Times, Text & Numbers, Domain Related, Fun Tools, System Information, Ping, whois, etc. Code Validators, Miscellaneous http://www.freetoolkit.net/

Make your long URL shorter http://www.snipurl.com/

Creating vertical lines on your web page

We do this by building a .gif image we’ll call “vertbar.gif” and then placing that next to some text. You can build the image to width, say 2 pixels, and form the height as desired using the img height attribute, like this: <IMG src=”vertbar.gif” width=2 height=n align=”left”>
You obviously have to create your vertical graphic in your favourite graphic program.
If you are short on one of these check out my free graphic editors

ALT TAGS

This tag is the one that is most often misused: The alt tag.
Alt tags are comments that should be used whenever you add a graphic, or image to a web page. Pictures are worth a thousand words to you and me, but zero to a search engine. An alt tag should be a little bit of short, descriptive text which helps any user (and search engine) understand what the reference is pointing to. If you are not aware of what an alt tag looks like, here’s an example: <imgsrc=”chinavase.jpg” width=”159″ height=”196″ border=”0″ alt=”china vase”>

DHTML menu

Another DHTML menu builder : this one is also cross browser which is invaluable as many only work on some browsers. There are free DHTML menu codes out there but often, not very exciting, or limited to few browsers and you have to know how to code them yourself. Mine was free at the time, but that no longer applies. Mine also does not work on the Opera browser. Why do I like DHTML menus? Because you add a page and you just add the page to your menu. You don’t have to use SSI or change every page on your site.

Interactivity

If you have a web site with content that you want to share, FreeSticky is the place to list it. Freesticky also locates and reviews high quality website tools and website improvements that you can easily add
to increase the professional look of your site. You will find a variety of content including headline news feeds, financial content, jokes, lottery results royalty free photos, images, stock tickers, sports tickers and much, much more. Web site tools include remotely hosted applications such as free chat rooms, free hit counters, free message boards, free guestbooks, free web forums and more! Make your site sticky

Jumping links Internal links, or whatever you want to call them, are pretty easy. Let’s set up the basics right now and then I’ll totally explain it. The word anchor in this lesson will apply to the target of the internal link.
The anchor is the spot you go to. If I was linking to ozwebhub.com, the anchor would be “http://www.ozwebhub.com”.

With internal links, the link and anchor are both on the same page usually, but they can be on another page too. So, the link has to point to something other than a conventional anchor.
Now I will show you the HTML since you should have a solid understanding:
<a href=”#soft”>Free software</a> would take you to this anchor: <a name=”soft”>Free software</a>

You can jump to specific areas on another page, too. Simply address the page area you want to go to like so: <a href=”http://www.ozwebhub.com/dreamweaver.html#dwvideo“>How to use dreamweaver</a>

That HTML would lead you to the page known as dreamweaver.html at the section (anchor) called “dwvideo”.

TARGETS are great for a site map. Break up your pages and point to more information by using targets.

Xara web service applications have just added a menu maker to their products. But there are heaps of other quite cheap things to choose from as well as free tools

How to protect your web site from thieves.
Is it possible? Is it advisable?

Yes it is advisable for security reasons, but then there is the philosophy that the internet should be open source and free. Right click codes don’t really do the job as people can just look at your source and write it down. I’ll leave it up to you. Here is what HTML-Protector says about their product, and it is pretty cheap, besides. You don’t need to use it on every web page where you want people to download something, but it will help stop that most annoying spam.
HTML-Protector.com is incredibly simple to use. Within seconds, you can:
Completely hide all your HTML!
Encrypt every single e-mail link, ensuring spam “spiders” can’t snatch your address!
Securely encrypt every single PayPal “return” link!
Lock your pages, so they only display on your site!
Disable right-clicking, offline browsing, text highlighting and printing!
Stop URLs being shown in the status bar!
Cancel any clipboard copying or screenshots from being taken!
Prevent dragging-and-dropping and Adobe Acrobat Web capture!
Automatically break out of frames!… and more!

Favicons

I have made a favicon.
The tiny icon next to your bookmarked page really makes it stand out. One note about it. It can disappear because it relies on cookies. If you delete your history and cache you will need to upload it again. You can download a free program called FavOrg to bring them back again. See my tute on making one

Web design tips

Even though this site looks a lot like one of my own pages, I recommend it. It has HTML tutorials. It talks about communications and it has a crossword on it, which really tests your knowledge of computers. The crossword is made in a very interesting way. It is really designed for year 12 IT students. Web design

Tips on web design http://www.tlc- systems.com/webtips.shtml

How to write HTML
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/tut/index.html

Accessibility

See how your site is viewed by all browsers, link checker and more http://www.anybrowser.com/

Web tips

1. For Dreamweaver users (and possibly Front page users)

I was sent an email by Roy Bryant of http://www.seventwentyfour.com which alerted me to broken links outside my page. As I went into the code to see what was causing this I discovered that if you don’t put http:// in front of your link, it will not work. At the same time I discovered that I had plenty of 20% all over the place. I had to delete these from my code. Also those sites where you see www.geocities/~sam for example, the squiggle translates to something else in the code, but doesn’t seem to effect the viability of the link. You can make these mistakes so easily. Only yesterday as I was rejigging my site, I discovered that I had a ‘h’ missing for a URL link. Result? Yet another broken
link.

File structures

I am changing the file structure by separating out the images and HTML files.

So on my computer I have a folder called ‘ozwebhub’ containing all the HTML files which belong to that and under that file I have one called images. On the remote site (my server) I created a new folder called images too, so all the images go there.
But in my HTML code I have to change it to <img src=”images/banner.gif” width=”286″ height=”138″ alt=”how to make a banner”> for example.

Now you can use this same process to separate up more parts of your site, like your blog.

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