Webmaster

PHP 4 to PHP 5 Transition

Transitioning your PHP 4 application to PHP 5 has many benefits. Specifically, PHP 5 offers a wealth of new features that will extend your application's capability, streamline your development, improve your user experience, and save you money. Since the PHP community announced it will only support PHP 4 until August, 2008 it is important to create your transition plan now, on your own terms.

Do you want to extend the capability of your PHP 4-based application?
Do you want to improve your application's performance?
Is simplifying application maintenance important to you?
Will you eventually transition your PHP 4 application to PHP 5?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you should get started on a PHP 4 to PHP 5 transition plan right away.

Zend Migration Services can help you get started on a transition whether you need PHP experts to analyze your application for incompatibilities with PHP5, or migrate your application all together. Leveraging Zend expertise can help you make a smooth transition to PHP 5.

Simple Web Syndication with RSS 2.0

I thought I'd do a few  postings on RSS 2.0 because RSS has become the current /ideal way to get your message out, even replacing some email solutions for list owners. It's also the subject of a great deal of focus by the Google corporation, in their efforts to seperate the original content from what they call supplimental content.

I think any look at RSS 2.0 should start with an overview understanding of what it is, and rather than rewrite what someone else has written so well ... I give you Web Syndication with RSS 2.0.

And after you're done with that, I've taken SEO Writing to a new level that might interest you if you're in the market for an SEO Writer.

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RSS was originally created in 1999 by Netscape as a channel description framework for their My Netscape Network. MNN was a portal system that allowed end users to selectively view new content from their choice of content providers. RSS was created as a means of gathering that content. Since its creation, RSS has been updated and expanded to handle a much wider range of content with a far broader range of uses.

Simply put RSS is an XML application for simple web feed syndication and content subscriptions.  Okay, maybe that’s not so simple.  Let’s say you have content on your site that you want to feed, or make available for other sites.  This is known as web syndication.  Most commonly this takes the form of sharing news headlines, product releases, or some similar timely content.  RSS provides a standardized method for web sites to use when creating these feeds.

Based on XML, RSS 2.0 allows you to take bits of content or information and place them into a simple text file.  Other web sites or reader programs, also known as news aggregators or news readers, read this text file at a specified interval.  If new content is found, the listing is updated and the new content is shown to the end user.  Through the use of third party programs, browser plug-ins, or web applications users can effectively subscribe to your content; thus coining the term content subscription.

RSS is a very effective and popular way to broadcast your content.  Many newer technologies have emerged based on the idea of RSS; not the least of which is Podcasting, a method of broadcasting media content from your website to mobile users for viewing with iPods or similar handheld devices.

The current version RSS 2.0 was created to improve upon version 0.93 which was RDF based.  This version has high modularity and is designed to be much more simple to implement.  RSS 2.0 is highly supported by every popular browser and news aggregators.  Support for XML based RSS has even been built into many common web languages such as ASP, JSP, and PHP.

Read the rest of the article....

Complimentary 3-month Membership

Hey female webmasters and techies ...

WITI, along with IDC, would like to invite you to participate in a survey called, "Women at Play" which explores your entertainment usage and preferences. We are looking to learn how you spend your leisure time when you are at home and on the go and see how music, photography, games, TV and movies play a role — or not — in your life.

Please take a few moments to contribute your opinions and preferences. Individual responses will not be used and data will be used and presented only in an aggregated manner. For your time, WITI is offering survey respondents who are WITI members an automatic 3-month extension to their membership and nonmembers will receive a complimentary 3-month membership.

Thank you.

Survey: http://web2.kinesissurvey.com/idcglobal2/html.pro?ID=2

Bad Contextual Ad Marketers

What can you do when a contextual ad marketing company goes bad?

Okay, you're going to laugh ... and that's okay because it is funny if it doesn't happen to you ... and even if it does happen to you, it's still funny.

I signed up for an account with a marketing company that buys text link ads on some of my higher PR websites. I'm not telling you which company yet, but I will ... keep reading.

The contextual ad marketing company is on their third strike with me for not paying up on the ads I've run for them. I threatened to blog. They paid up the first time. This second time, they messed up royally. But in all fairness, I'm giving them one last chance before slamming the door shut forever.

So, get this the Ad company contacts me to run a text ad for a debt company on one of my debt related websites. I agreed to run the Ad. I placed the Ad. I hear nothing back and when no payment came in a month later I decided to log-in and see what's up?!

Next to the advertiser, who is a "debt company" mind you, it reads Credit Card Denied ... start laughing now ... for the amount of $15 !!!  LMAO ... I mean really?! Fifteen dollars?! And they're helping people with their debt issues???

Okay, so the debt company to avoid is ... free-debt-advisor.com ... and the contextual ad marketing company now going for their third strike ... linkworth.com. I'll be back with more information should they fail to pay for the ads they are currently running ... and should they pay up, you will know that too. And yes, you may assume they did not pay me for the one month of ads their client got ... in fact, they pretty much did nothing.

Try these guys instead!

Are you a Big Fish or a Little Fish?

I had a lot of fun playing with this little toy and thougt I'd share it with the rest of you webmasters and SEO masterminds.

Figure out if your website is considered a big fish or a little fish ... or rather what fish it is ... in the big cybger ocean of backlinks.

I plugged in a bunch of sites and was surprise to see one site ranking 1800 backlinks still considered a little fish! Wow! Rough room ... er, um, ocean!

Try your sites ... er, go fishing ...  at GoonGee.com

Open-Source Software

Free software—in more ways than one Here's what Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, has to say in its entry on OSS: "Open source software refers to computer software available with its source code and under an open source license to study, change, and improve its design." Now, take away the techno-babble and read: It's free and you can do what you want with it! If it's free, why is it so few people are taking advantage of it? Well, in some ways, you're actually using it right now. If not for OSS, the Internet might not have developed as we now know it. OSS—a brief history Since we'd like you stay awake while reading this article, we won't start at the very beginning, because the history of OSS predates the personal computer. But it really heated up in recent years through the efforts of programmer Richard Stallman, who strongly believed that software should be open and available to everyone. This doesn't necessarily mean free of charge, but the vast majority of OSS is in fact free. Stallman's intentions for the development and

licensing of OSS were all spelled out in the GNU General Public License. This is sometimes called the rule of "copyleft" software, since its intentions are to ensure freedom, directly opposite to the restrictions of "copyright" software. From there, things took off—other developers wanted to contribute to the cause. The results were the formation of organizations like Open Source Initiative, which sees to managing and promoting the definition of OSS; Free Software Foundation, founded by Stallman to help promote computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs; and Open Source Technology Group, which strives to provide unbiased content and commerce for open-source communities. And, of course, along came the development of boatloads of free software. Yes, the history lesson has been edifying—but where are the free goodies? Cool software downloads For developers, the fun is in writing new software. For typical computer users like you and I, the fun is in using that browser, IM program, or word processor. The range of free open-source software is vast, from games as simple as clones of Pacman to complex desktop office suite productivity tools. Where can you find all this? Here are a few good places to browse for open-source software: SourceForge provides, among other things, downloads of free games and tools for everyone from desktop users to system administrators. Freshmeat also provides free OSS downloads for Windows, Mac, and Unix-based systems like Linux (more on that later). Tucows provides downloads of OSS software along with freeware and shareware programs (downloadable on trial basis, totally free, or requiring a small payment). And here's a handful of popular programs to get you started: Jabber—a secure, ad-free instant messenger program Celtx—screenwriting and TV & film production software AbiWord—a free high-end word processing program OpenOffice—a complete office suite (including word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing programs), and it's compatible with all other major office suites Linux distributions & forums Certainly one of the biggest OSS achievements is the development of the GNU/Linux operating system, often simply called Linux. Unlike Windows XP or Mac OSX, Linux comes in many different flavors, called distributions. Most Linux distributions are free—and they can run on just about any PC, and even some Macs. When Linux came onto the scene in the early 1990's, it was tough for everyone but serious computer geeks to use. But these days many Linux distributions (or distros) have evolved into sophisticated desktop operating systems, complete with sometimes hundreds of software packages, and just about as user-friendly as Windows XP or Mac OSX. One of the most popular distros today is called Ubuntu, which is strongly supported by a rich community of users and developers that anyone can join in on UbuntuForums. Another favorite is Fedora, also supported by a worldwide forum. If you're willing to pay a little bit of money, you can also get some pretty advanced distros like SUSE or Xandros. There's even a type of distro called Live CD, which leaves no lasting effect on your computer hard drive by running entirely from your CD-ROM. One of the most popular of these is called Knoppix. A good way to acquaint yourself with more Linux distributions (and discover how much weirder their names get) is to check out Distrowatch, which keeps a current list of the 100 most popular distros, in addition to providing information and downloads for each one. Or, for some general information and education on Linux, check out Linux.com or Linuxtoday, an online magazine and forum. Coming soon For a final word on OSS and Linux, we thought you might like to know about a couple projects that are in the works. First, there's BarbieOS—a Linux distribution for Barbie fans (yes, they appear to be serious). And last, but not least, there is the $100 Laptop—a philanthropic plan to distribute low-power, Linux-based laptops to millions of poor kids all over the world. Now, that's embracing the spirit of open-source!

http://www.earthlink.net/elink/issue96/focus.html

SubmitWolf Submissions Software

Purchase

SubmitWolf SubmitWolf v6.0 is an easy to use, professional website promotional tool, which automates the process of promoting your web pages on the Internet. It can dramatically increase the number of visitors to your web site. SubmitWolf v6.0 can automatically register your websites with thousands of engines and directories PLUS over 500000 link pages. How does it work? Simply enter your website details into SubmitWolf v6.0, select the search engines where you would like to be listed and SubmitWolf v6.0 will do the rest. SubmitWolf v6.0 automatically visits each engine, downloads the registration form, fill's it in for you and submits it. It does this in exactly the same way as if you did it manually using a browser. To add your link to just a thousand engines by hand would take months of your time, with SubmitWolf v6.0, the same task takes minutes! Benefits Register your pages with over 1000 search engines and Directories in minutes. Post your links to over 500,000 link pages. Submit as many of your URLs as you like at no additional cost. 48 Hour, Priority Paid Submission on many major search engines. more..

FREE Toolbar!! Download the FREE Trellian Toolbar

Webmaster Contracts

My buddy, Skip, and I have been discussing the need for more structure and better contracts for all of our web site  and graphics clients. I have filing cabinets full of samples and actual contracts that I've used over the years, but it really seemed like it was time to get get updated. So, we set out on a quest to find some really good contracts or hire a lawyer to draft them for us.

What we came up with was pretty awesome. At least, we think so!

Web Professional Proposal Kits - Turnkey proposal kits to assist you in creating proposals for web development projects, contracts to protect your business and your clients and more.

This one has everything you need as a web or tech professional. It's a very comprehensive collection of contracts and there's an additional wizard tool you can buy if you want to automate a lot of it. We thought that was a nice touch. Now, the one we decided to use is the Proposal Kit Pro because it has everything, but the wizard for only $197 ... which is far less than the attorney quotes were. Anyhow, if you're a web professional, this is definately a set of tools that you'll need to be 100% professional. Check it out!

Designing Robot Text

What is a Robot.txt file?

Well, basically it tells the robots that visit your website where they are and are not allowed to go and spider. Spidering being the thing that search engine companies do to grab your website's information and pull it back to their search engine. The search engine spider will follow the instructions of the robot text.

Designing a robot text file:

It's actually very simple to do. First of all it must be written in ascii ... to newbies that basically means make it in a plain text file ... to really, really newbies that means use your Notepad application to make it.

Your robot.txt file must live in the root directory of the web site as spiders will not look for it anywhere else.

Examples
To exclude all robots from parts of the server:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /misc/sitestats/

Exclude a specific spider from parts of the server:
User-agent:slurp.so/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /secure/
Disallow: /products/
Disallow:/misc/sitestats/

Nothing is disallowed and the spider can follow all links:
User-agent: *
Disallow:

To allow a single robot complete access and exclude all others:
User-agent: Googlebot/1.0
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This keeps your entire web site from being indexed:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Are you getting 404 errors?

If you do not have a robot.txt file in the root directory of your web site you're going to get a large amount of 404 errors on your web stats. This is because the robot.txt file was requested by bots or spiders, but wasn't there. You can confirm this by looking at your error logs.

Looking at Logs and Stats:

If you look at your website's log and error logs, you're going to see who is visiting your website, what are they visiting and which spider bots are spidering you. Some search engine spider bots you might see are:

209.67.247.156 - Fast WebCrawler/2.1 pre14
209.185.143.98 - Mozilla/3.0 (Slurp/s slurp@inktomi.com
216.35.103.42 - Slurp.so/1.0 slurp@inktomi.com
209.185.108.147 - Googlebot/1.0 googlebot@googlebot.com
209.67.229.101 - bos-spider10b.bos.lycos.com Lycos_Spider_(T-Rex)
204.162.96.124 - InfoSeek Sidewinder/0.9
198.3.103.97 - Excite ArchitextSpider
208.219.77.19 - NorthernLight Gulliver/1.3
Openfind data gatherer@Openbot
flunky crawler_admin@bigfoot.com
parallelContextFocusCrawler1.1
larbin_2.2.0 (crawl@compete.com)
Bot mailto:craftbot@yahoo.com
SpaceBison
webbandit
BunnySlippers
ScoutAbout
Ziggy The Clown From Hell!!
LinkWalker
LexiBot
BaiDuSpider
DigOut4U
KIT Fireball
Microsoft URL Control 5.01.4319
Microsoft URL Control 6.00.8862
moget
Xenu_s Link Sleuth 1.0r
URL Indexer
sitecheck.internetseer.com
MFC_Tear_Sample
Nokia7110
Nutscrape
TV33_Mercator_1 1.0
teomaagent crawler admin@teoma.com
bumblebee@relevare.com
Mitsu
CSE@IITBombay
MARS SV
AtlantisSearch
RepoMonkey Bait & Tackle
spider.yellopet.com www.yellopet.com
The Intraformant
SwishSpider
SlySearch (slysearch@slysearch.com)
AmigaVoyager
Toutatis 2.5 2 (http:
GaisLab data gatherer, Gaisbot
Zeus ThemeSite Viewer Webster Pro V2.9 Win32
WIBBLE WOBBLE
Surfnomore Spider v1.1
WebSauger 1.20b
UIowaCrawler
Kenjin Spider
Robot@SuperSnooper.Com
16274.345.67.23 WebWasher 3.0
NOSEYBOLLOCKS V1.0
GB2 LinkChecker
EmailWolf 1.00
EmailSiphon