1) Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

2) Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

3) Site optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone.

Recommended Websites for Online Sitemap.xml Generator

• xml-sitemaps.com
• sitemaps-builder.com
• sitemapdoc.com

Sitemap.xml Generator Program

• sitemapbuilder.net

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!

More Control over Flash Apps

Anyone that knows a little bit of SEO will surely tell you that Flash is not a search engine’s best friend. Often, Flash sites and applications are built in one big compiled block, impenetrable to any indexing script or web spider. Hence their low ranking on all search engine results pages.

While this limited Flash in the past, in recent years, Flash CMS (content management systems) have been under constant development to help regular users and developers alike in building modular websites, with lots of SEO-friendly content.

This is also possible because of the ever more present interaction between ActionScript and other scripting languages. There are many scripts and AS3 classes out there especially built to facilitate the interaction between JavaScript and Flash. Doing so, it indirectly provides access between the Flash app and other content on the web; here including the search crawlers as well. Not being offered anymore in a single block of binary data, Flash websites are moving away from niche and brand sectors and into a category of deep and searchable content authoring tools.
Flash applications will evolve with the release of Adobe Flash Player 10
Enlarge picture

Besides some successful programs like FlashMoto CMS, SILEX, fCMSPro, FlashNuke, XOT Flash CMS and others, Flash in general has some big events coming up this year too. Already released in a beta version, Adobe Flash Player 10.1 has included NVIDIA support, delivering enhanced rich Web content to NVIDIA GPU owners.

Alongside NVIDIA support, Flash 10 will also bring support for multi-touch and mobile devices, expanding its horizons to more than the average PCs.

Aside from Flash Player, another beta version of a piece of software revolving around Flash has sparked some genuine interest in the world of Flash developers as well. Adobe AIR 2.0 will surely capitalize on the success of its predecessor, AIR 1, with a much hyped release. The newer version will bring some exciting features such as API for accessing microphone raw data, HTML5 support, CSS3 support, global error handling, very much improved cross-platform printing, UDP support, secure sockets, socket listening capabilities, mass storage device detection, native code integration, multi-touch and gesture support, the ability to open a file with its native program, etc.

HTML5 & CSS3 Tutorials Will Flood the Web

While an official date for HTML5 or CSS3 hasn’t been announced, developers have already jumped on the available standard drafts, and are constantly pouring tutorials and articles about the soon to be released languages.

HTML coders and slicers should be more than happy this year, with lots of tutorials and tips & tricks articles being published on any respectable tutorial-content website network. Actually, I think I’m one of those editors that couldn’t wait for the official version and got ahead of myself in this article here.

These newer versions of HTML and CSS will be better adopted and accepted much faster compared to the fiasco with the previous release of ActionScript 3, which saw many programmers stick to AS2 because of hard to read documentation and the lack of online tutorials. The Internet is full of them now, but at the time of AS3′s release, they were kind of scarce, denting the success and features of AS3.

Compared to the huge mass of HTML5 and CSS3 tutorials currently available on major search engines, we surely are in a better position to transition to the new standard pretty fast.

Touch Technology

As mentioned above, touch technology has been on the rise since the iPhone made it available outside security departments and high-tech gadgets. Now, it is the number one topic of development and integration at Microsoft, but the Redmond-based giant is not the only one leading the way on this wave. Through Flash10, Adobe has joined the current alongside Apple, Microsoft and Google.

Look no further than a couple of years when this will be standard in any newly released hardware gadget or software.

Do-it-yourself Applications

eople with no programming knowledge that use “coded” products generally do not want to know how their product basically works. This is why WYSIWYG editors, CMSs and GUIs have been so successful. These do-it-yourself (DIY) applications will continue to grow, expand and conquer new markets, changing the way general purpose applications need not only to be operated, but built.

These days, programmers have not only to bullet-proof a website against hackers and virus attacks, they have to also “dumb it down” for their administrators and users. While frameworks basically build other applications, CMS have entered the common day-to-day vocabulary, being considered a must in any coding project.

People want to build their own website, create their own blogs, put together their own form validation process, manage their own user pool, create and administrate their own ad campaigns, and the list goes on. For an application to have success in 2010, it must allow the user to do everything and not depend on any company support or complicated FAQ page. In other words, programmers should not alienate form the KISS rules and the proper success will follow. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the most successful tools out there: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Coppermine, LimeSurvey, XOOPS, etc.

Ruby Closing the Gap on PHP

While PHP was still dominant  on the Elance Online Work Index, that didn’t mean anything on the quality and performances of the two scripting languages. While PHP owes its #1 spot to its widely spread community, Ruby has managed to go under the radar and insert itself through various Ruby-powered platforms like Rails and Sinatra on very big and popular websites.

Currently, if someone is tempted to build a social network, any big consulting agency will recommend using Ruby as its code base. Just take a look at some sites running Ruby these days and see how much it has spread, shadowing PHP in performance and code re-usability. Some examples of sites running Ruby code are: Twitter, Google, Justin.TV, YellowPages, Scribd, Hulu, Github, BaseCamp, Jobster, CrunchBase, Identi.ca, Shopify, Urban Dictionary, Lighthouse, XING, Campfire, Odeo, iLike and many more.

Also, besides Ruby, look out for Python and other scripting languages to emerge from the pack and bite from PHP’s market share.

More JavaScript, AJAX and Flash than Ever

Imagination levels are at an all-time high on the web. The ones to blame for this aren’t designers, project managers or art directors. The guilty ones are only code developers. While earlier versions of JavaScript, AJAX and Flash were doing some basic animations (move slow or fast from here to here), these days, the same languages have become standards in the hiring process. What do I mean by that? Well, if a developer or designer wants to get a job, they must know all of them, or at least have a clue of what they can do.

With the rise of JavaScript libraries like jQuery, MooTools, YUI, Dojo, Prototype and many more, developers were given a tool not only to write faster and more intelligible JS code, but powerful tools to go after the user interactivity and design that only Flash applications were providing. With a plugin database as big as Joomla‘s module repositories, jQuery is surely the leader of the pack, influencing every part of the web. Its success is so great that, recently, W3Schools, a very famous tutorial website for learning programming and scripting languages has included a course for learning jQuery, something it did not do in the past for other similar JS libraries.

At the same pace with jQuery, AJAX has been keeping up with the rhythm of modern day designs, being more and more used to animate and load remote and local content. Just check out the AJAX-based scripts indexed on Softpedia or other resources like Ajax Rain, Solutoire, MiniAjax, AjaxDaddy and DZone Snippets.

Online Work Gets More Profitable

We have already talked about this trend in Part I of this editorial, and wanted to advise all the developers and programmers still reading this editorial to take advantage of the recent trend in companies and businesses around the world that choose to give freelancers more work opportunities on their projects hoping to achieve lower total costs in code developing. We recommend online work marketplaces like Jobster, Guru, Elance, Rent-A-Coder, ODesk, GetAFreelancer and much more.

Cloud Computing

The 2009 success of this topic has been built mainly on the quality provided by companies like Amazon, RackSpace and GoGrid. While it still has its naysayers, cloud computing seems to have at least slid a foot in the door for later discussions.

Silverlight Continues Growth

Still not as known and used as Flash, Silverlight has been quietly building a user base by slowly getting itself installed on as many computers as possible. While the biggest web user of Silverlight (besides Microsoft sites) remains NBC, developers taking a look into Silverlight apps have been praising it for its fast development pace.

Personally, I think it artificially considered the stage of evolution it’s in. Also, I heard many opinions on the web from much more Silverlight and Flash knowledgeable personas stating that Microsoft’s Flash-clone had surpassed Adobe’s product in many areas, while still implementing new features at a rapid pace. Even so, Silverlight has a long way to go, being still behind Adobe in terms of reachability.

.NET 4

Microsoft’s new product will be released alongside Visual Studio 2010 in the coming months, but the buzz surrounding the event is getting as big in the programming world as the Windows 7 release had on regular PC users.

With the new versions of these products come fresh features like after install ready-to-use ASP.NET MVC, inclusion of F# in the .NET Framework, C# and VB.NET feature improvements, Visual Studio 2010 to fully support all of .NET 4 environments, and much more.

From Softpedia.com

ShopperPress is a wordpress theme that turns a standard wordpress blog into a feature rich shopping cart website used by thousands of people worldwide for many purposes;

WordPress is great! It’s no doubt. But unfortunately it still doesn’t have many quite necessary features. One of them is the ability to change wp-admin folder name, which is the admin directory as you probably already now. After searching for several hours on the internet without any success I started thinking of ways how to change my wordpress admin directory name. In this small tutorial I’ll show how to do it. Before starting the tutorial I have to say that this is rather complicated way and there may occurred some bugs. Anyway I have tested it and didn’t found any. So let’s start.

All we have to do is to search “wp-admin” in all wordpress files and change it to what we need to use as a admin directory name. Let’s name it for example “profile”. There are over 50 files to change. It’s practically impossible to find all these files manually so we need this great software called “grepWin” (Download). After installing this software right click on your wordpress folder and then choose “grepWin…” (see image below)

Then type “wp-admin” in “Search for:” box and “profile” (or anything you wish) in “Replace with:” and click “Replace”. This software will find every “wp-admin” and replace it with “profile”.

Now we are almost done. There is one file in /wp-admin/ directory called wp-admin.css. You have to change it’s name to “profile.css” (your_admin_directory_name.css).

Please note that some plugins and themes may also use the “wp-admin” name somewhere, so before you upload any theme or plugin don’t forget to scan it using grepWin and change every “wp-admin” to your chosen directory name.

The documentation on activating authorizenet is horribly sparse, but authorizenet does indeed work. I made it work just now.

The good news is IT’s EASY!

Here are step by step instructions on how to do it.  (Others are invited to jump in with their comments.)

1)  Make sure your hosting company has  PHP 4.0.2 or later, with cURL extension (with OpenSSL support). If you are not sure, contact your hosting company.  This is essential.

2)  In the VirtueMart control panel, click on List Payment Methods.  Make sure Credit Card is active.

3) Click on Credit Card.  Make sure the cards (Visa, Mastercard, whatever) you have set up with your authorizenet.com account are checkmarked, and the other cards are not checkmarked.

4) Click on Configuration tab.  Type in your authorizenet.com Login ID.  Keep it in Test mode for now. Click “Show/Change the Transaction Key” button.

5) Where it says “Please type in your User Password:” enter your JOOMLA user password that you have previously set up on your site. (NOT the authorizent.com password.)

6)  A box will appear where you enter the Authorizenet’s current transaction key.  In the bottom box re-enter your Joomla user password.  Save the panel.   (***)

7)  Make sure Authorizenet is in TEST mode  by logging into your authorizenet account at authorizenet.com)

8   Go to your store and do  a TEST order.  Use the following TEST credit card to do your authorizenet test. Note: The below card only works in TEST mode and will return an error in live mode.)

5424000000000015 MasterCard.   Use any fake name and use any date after today’s date as the card expiration date.

9) Once the above works, go to authorizenet.com and change your account from TEST to LIVE.  And go into the Virtuemart Credit Card configuration tab and change authorizenet from TEST to LIVE.

10) Then do a test charge with a real card.  You can go back to authorizenet.com and VOID that card charge if you do it before the settlement process takes place.

*** NOTE: You get your transaction key by logging into your authorizenet.com account and creating one under Authorizenet’s Settings and Profile link> Obtain Transaction Key link.

ANOTHER NOTE: Interestingly, the above worked WITHOUT the test site using a secure certificate.  However I strongly suggest you set up a secure certificate for your site.

That’s it!

Recently hostgator went green, probably making them the first main stream host to do so. They purchase renewable energy credits up to 130% of their total power consumption.

HostGator (HostGator.com) has become one of the better known web hosts in the industry by being themselves. Though nothing they do is completely spectacular or unbelievable, they do what they should do. That is, HostGator actually answers their phones, replies to their emails, responds to live chat requests, doesn’t rip you off, and provides quality hosting. It’s actually quite sad that most hosts can’t seem to get these things right, but it’s great for HostGator as they’ve banked on it and it’s translated into success.

At first glance, HostGator is not too impressive. They have a fairly generic web site, a logo with a fairly lame slogan – “we eat up the competition” (the alligator in the logo is eating the “H”) (sorry HostGator), ordinary copy on their text, an apparent lack of updates on their site, a pretty standard ModernBill setup, cPanel, and basically everything an average web host has.

However, that’s the beauty of HostGator. They don’t have too many bells and whistles, marketing ploys, or anything of the sort. What you see is what you get and it’s that simple. HostGator’s terms of service is pretty standard, as is their order process. Marketing isn’t shoved down your throat at every page and billing is simple. The order process takes about 5 minutes and HostGator accepts both credit cards and PayPal (which is always nice), as well as debit cards.

Hostgator offers linux hosting only(even though they are expected to start windows hosting in the near future). All their packages come with all the features needed for a serious website. Baby and Swamp packages allow unlimited domains(add on), which makes a lot of sense if you have multiple websites. They use cPanel, which is the best control panel around. You get Fantastico script installer which will install most of the popular open source scripts with few clicks.

They support PHP4 & 5, SSH, Cron jobs, Python, Ruby On Rails etc. Also, all the packages include enough POP3 accounts(20 for Hatchling and unlimited for others).

Hostgator Coupon

Hostgator has a promotion running at the moment. The coupon code BEACH offers 20% discount on initial order amount. That means the users who select yearly billing get a much better discount compared to those who opt for a monthly billing.

If you prefer monthly billing, coupon code hgc25 might work better as it makes the first month bill just $0.01.

All other coupon codes available on the net does exactly one of the above. So choose one of the codes above depending on your billing amount.

Web services are being adopted in the marketplace as a mechanism for efficient process integration in the enterprise. In creating Web services for your corporate network, you may see the need to to grow the scope of these services beyond the limit of your firewall. You can offer your services to your business partners, customers, and even subscribers, and allow them to become integral parts of your business processes. There are certainly many business issues to be solved before you offer others access to services from your network, but let’s focus on the technical issues behind this.

As you start externalizing your Web services beyond the boundaries of your enterprise network, you will be faced with a number of issues that you need to address. These issues include security, reliability, quality of service, communications compatibility, and more. On the issue of communications compatibility the scope of this article you can run into a myriad of technical issues that network software using different protocols, operating system platforms, or even written in different programming languages need to satisfy to even talk to one another.

What You Should Already Know

Before you continue, you should have a basic understanding of the following:
•    HTML
•    XML

What are Web Services?
•    Web services are application components
•    Web services communicate using open protocols
•    Web services are self-contained and self-describing
•    Web services can be discovered using UDDI
•    Web services can be used by other applications
•    XML is the basis for Web services

How Does it Work?
The basic Web services platform is XML + HTTP.
XML provides a language which can be used between different platforms and programming languages and still express complex messages and functions.

The HTTP protocol is the most used Internet protocol.

Web services platform elements:
•    SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
•    UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration)
•    WSDL (Web Services Description Language)

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