Archive for the Category »Websites «

Jul

Promoting your website for free

Free Website Promotion…Why Not?

Can you ever avail of free website promotion? Is that even feasible?

Of course yes! Nowadays, your baby website can amass huge traffic in no time thanks to free website promotion.

How does this free website promotion go anyway? What are things to be done?

1. Enlist your website.

Look for the hottest Internet directories and enlist your site there. This is the easiest and most effective free website promotion tactic. Start with this step and the rest of the good things will follow.

Just don’t forget to prep your website and make it all spruced up for a higher chance to get accepted in your directory of choice.

2. Know your forums.

One reason why forums are created is for free website promotion for everyone. Log in, post actively, let them know about your site in every post and you attract instant visitors right there.

3. Write a press release.

Release your writing prowess and start up a press release that advertises your site! This is a free website promotion tactic that you can do anytime. Type a brief paragraph or two and email it to your friends, colleagues, internet e-zines, newspapers and other media and massive traffic will come to you pronto!

4. Be friendly online.

Free website promotion means you need to be friendly to other webmasters. Why, you ask? So they can link you immediately! Establish contacts and never tire of link requests and exchanges.

5. Write an article.

Say, your website is about your travel agency. Write an article about the perks of traveling or the hottest travel spots in the world. On the concluding paragraph, mention your website in passing. This article works as an advertorial and doubles as a free website promotion approach.

6. Just let the whole world know about your site.

What is free website promotion without the word of mouth? Insert your website, its URL and features in daily conversations and let the good news spread from one mouth to another!

7. Make a banner ad.

Make a banner ad for your site and ask another webmaster to do the same for his site. Then swap!

8. Take up a free website promotion course online.

Yes, there are free website promotion tutorials. But don’t you know that you can actually take a free website promotion course that can help you out further? Part of the free website promotion program is signing up for newsletters.

When you make a website, you need not pay anything to promote it. You just read it — there is such a thing as free website promotion!

Category: HTML, Issues, News, Programming, Tips, Websites Tags: CMS, web services, world wide web Leave a Comment

Jul

Search Engine Friendly Pages

Rocky Rasonable

There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

Stop using wrong HTML tags like to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load

Category: HTML, Websites Tags: Altavista, Google, MSN, Yahoo Leave a Comment

Jul

WordPress 3.0 Launched: wpdb::get_blog_prefix() error

Rocky Rasonable

Automatic – the creators of WordPress released their thirteenth major release code named as “Thelonious” and otherwise called as WordPress 3.0.

It is indeed worth the upgrade and the options of upgrading should already be available in your blog admin pages. So what is new in WordPress 3.0. Let’s take a quick look at it -

New Default Theme (Twenty Ten): One of the most refreshing changes is that Kubrick is gone and there is a new default theme called as the Twenty Ten theme. This is to go with the new theme APIs. Twenty Ten is a more modern and flexible theme that takes advantage of a lot of the new features.
A Newer and Lighter Admin Interface: WordPress 3.0 comes with a new administration interface. The new interface has contextual help on every page and has a light feel to it.
WordPress MU Merger: WordPress MU has now been designed into the wordpress administration in WordPress 3.0. This will let users create multiple blogs from a single installation.
WordPress URL shortener: URL shortening can now be done from within your blog as WordPress 3.0 has integrated support for URL shorteners including their own wp.me.
Choice of Admin name: You can now choose an admin name when you install a new blog and will not have to rely on the default “admin” username any more.

One of the major bugs that I found after upgrading to the new version was with the plugin “DB Cache Reloaded”. WordPress now has integrated a few new plugins which are probably conflicting with DB cache and producing the below error -

“Call to undefined method wpdb::get_blog_prefix() in /home/xxxx/xxxx/xxxxx.com/public_html/wp-includes/user.php on line XXX“

The easiest resolution to this error is to deactivate the “DB Cache Reloaded” plugin.

In conclusion I should say that WordPress 3.0 will change the way people blog. It is a welcome change – the admin interface and the contextual help and everything else. Upgrade and enjoy.

Thanks to dkspeaks for the article

Check this video for more information about the wordpress 3.0

Category: HTML, Issues, News, Programming, Websites, Wordpress Tags: DB Cache Reloaded, Thelonious, Twenty Ten, Wordpress, WordPress MU Merger Leave a Comment

Jul

Host File for Web Development

Rocky Rasonable

Our goal

We’re going to edit the hosts file on our PC to make our servers IP address (e.g. 174.120.31.21) resolve to rockyrasonable.com, just like what a DNS server does when example.com’s name servers have been changed to point to the new hosting.

Configuring the server

All server configurations are different but the principle is generally the same, we need to find out/set our example.com to appear in the web browser when we visit our example IP of 174.120.31.219. For this example I’m going to explain the process on a Cpanel driven server (from this you should be able to get an idea of how this would be achieved through other management software packages).

Configure your web space for rockyrasonable.com and upload all your files to it
Login to Cpanel
Select Server from the left-hand menu
Go to the IP Addresses – This should present you with a list of IP addresses assigned to your server, when you configured the hosting for example.com you will have selected one of these IP addresses (you may even only have one IP address in this list)
For each IP address there’s a column titled Hosting with a link showing the number of domains assigned to that IP address, click the link that corresponds with the IP address you selected for the web space
Select rockyrasonable.com and click Set As Default - You can only select one default domain to be displayed if you visit that IP address in a browser
Make a note of the IP address (e.g. 174.120.31.219)
Visit 174.120.31.219 in a web browser – You should be presented with your newly uploaded site for rockyrasonable.com

Editing the hosts file

PC’s have a hosts file that we can edit to make 174.120.31.219 resolve to rockyrasonable.com just as if the name servers for rockyrasonable.com had already been changed.

Open the hosts file
Edit and save the hosts file

Go to the Start menu and choose Run. Type the following in the Run dialog box:
1. For Windows NT and Windows 2000
  1. C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc
2. Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7
  1. C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
Click the OK button (This should open a window with several files in it.)
Find the file called ‘hosts’ and double–click it. If prompted, specify that you would like to choose a program to open the file with from a list of programs.
1. Choose ‘Notepad’ from the list of available programs.

Start typing on a new line at the bottom of the file.
1. To do so, place your cursor at the very end of the last line and hit ‘Enter’ to start a new line.
Type these two lines of text like this example:
(use your server IP address and your site domain in–place of the defaults below)
```
174.120.31.219  rockyrasonable.com
```
```
174.120.31.219  www.rockyrasonable.com
```
Close the hosts file and save it when prompted.

PLEASE NOTE: At this point you should be able to view and publish to your web site using your domain name. After 3–4 days, you will want to undo this change to your hosts file so that you can check to see that your domain name is now resolving without assistance over the internet.

Undo the Hosts file change (after you have confirmed that it is resolving properly)

Open the hosts file as described above.
Delete the information that you added previously and close the file.
Choose to save the changes to the hosts file when asked.

Category: HTML, Issues, PHP, Programming, Websites Tags: Host File, Server, Web Development Leave a Comment

Jul

Web Programming Languages – Your Options

Rocky Rasonable

Over the years several programming languages have appeared on the scene and some have stayed the course. The first programming language to hit it big commercially with business applications was COBOL in the Mainframe days. This was followed by C and C++; when the client server era came briefly, Microsoft launched VB, VC++. The arrival of the web spawned several new languages such as ASP, Perl, Java, Cold Fusion, Ruby, C#.

COBOL still has its forte thanks to legacy applications and IBM. C/C++ has always retained its stronghold – engineering and embedded systems.

On the web front, which has seen enormous applications and innovation, a few languages stand out in terms of popularity – Java, Microsoft .Net (C#/VB.net), PHP, Ruby (on Rails).

How does one decide which language to use? A lot of factors come into play, some of the key ones being:

Legacy
Cost – development, tools, products
Community – popularity, size of user base, developer base
Support – product vendors, user groups, proprietary/open source
Development – speed, simplicity, ease
Performance
Platform – Enterprise, Internet, Mobile, Device etc..
Application type – Content, Transactional, Collaboration….

If you are an established enterprise, a lot of times this is dictated by existing environment, if you are an IBM/Sun/Oracle shop you are probably going the Java/J2EE way. Most large enterprises have chosen to go the J2EE route mainly because of its non-proprietary nature, the support from several vendors and its first mover advantage as a robust enterprise platform for the web. If you have been a Microsoft factory, the choice is obvious. Microsoft does particularly well with mid sized companies and in several non-US markets. PHP and Ruby seem to be going head-on and competing in similar segments. Startups and newer companies do not have legacy overheads and hence are free to choose any platform. Also when the hunt is for the best fit COTS product or solution rather than a bespoke application, programming language becomes secondary and more a consequence than choice.

In summary, the field has narrowed down to a few languages, each of which has its niche and application areas. The consumer now has some stable choices to pick from; it is a good time and setting to be in!