Friday 13 June 2008 09:56
We run a small web directory site Tech-Directory. I started it because we had a number of static html links pages on Tech-Pro.net that were created to provide lists of useful resources related to various topics such as data recovery or anti-virus. I was constantly receiving requests to add links to these pages, which was a hassle as I always have 101 more important things to do. So I set up Tech-Directory.net using the free directory script IndexScript so that people could add their own links to the directory. Read more...
Web development no trackbacks § ¶
Monday 26 May 2008 18:09
The holy grail of web development for me has been to find a system that puts paid to the business of hand coding and uploading individual pages without losing the flexibility and control over search engine optimization (SEO) that hand coding gives you. Content management systems (CMS) have been around a long time, but they always seemed to have a steep learning curve. It was hard to figure out how to make the pages look how I wanted, or incorporate features that were not built into the package. And it seemed impossible, if the aim was to convert an existing site, to keep the page URLs the same as the originals, something that is essential to retain any page rank the pages have already earned. I think I have finally found the holy grail, and it's name is CMS Made Simple. Read more...
Web development no trackbacks § ¶
Wednesday 21 May 2008 12:51
Recently, the contact forms on my websites have begun attracting the attention of idiots who use them to send me spam. Why they bother, I do not know. The emails consist of HTML text containing links to sites with gobbledygook names. Whether these sites exist I have no idea. I have no intention of trying to visit them even if the names looked real. It is a complete waste of their time and mine. So to eliminate the need to look at, and then delete these emails, I have implemented a captcha check on all of my contact forms. Read more...
Web development no trackbacks § ¶
Thursday 01 May 2008 17:25
We have just opened a hosting account with Hawk Host, and will be migrating the sites that we currently have hosted at iVhosting.com over to it during the couple of months that our subscription with the old host has left to run. Those sites include The PC Guru and our URL shortener site xaddr.com, as well as my personal ham radio hobby site g4ilo.com, but not tech-pro.net itself. Read more...
Web development no trackbacks § ¶
Saturday 05 April 2008 11:21
Security firm Comodo recently introduced a product for webmasters called UserTrust, that allows users to rate your site and displays the rating online. As it is a free product Comodo hopes that many web sites will use it, which will promote the idea that users should look for indicators that a site can be trusted before downloading or buying anything online. Read more...
Web development no trackbacks § ¶
Wednesday 02 April 2008 18:04
I've been running the business and developing our sites using Linux for a couple of months now, and there have been no Windows applications I've really missed or been unable to find an adequate replacement for. However until a couple of days ago I had just been too busy to do any web server log analysis to see what our site visitors were up to. Under Windows I had been using Web Log Storming, a powerful interactive web log analyzer that lets you quickly set filters and do drill-down analysis to find out exactly how people arrive at any goal, and what search keywords they were using. Linux seems to have nothing remotely equivalent. Read more...
Web development no trackbacks § ¶
Tuesday 18 March 2008 14:40
Once upon a time a group of people woke up one morning and found that their web sites were unavailable. When they went to their web host's home page, that wasn't available either. Email to the host's support address bounced. Attempts to contact the host by phone were unsuccessful. Enquiries on web hosting forums established little more than that many other people were in the same situation. If they had had their own backups, these unlucky people could have opened an account with a new web host and had their sites up and running again in a few hours. But most didn't have backups. Read more...
Web development no trackbacks § ¶
Friday 14 March 2008 11:21
Surveys about web usage habits show that many web users are impatient, and will go somewhere else if a web page doesn't load within a couple of seconds. There are many factors that can affect the speed of a web page - the size of the page itself, the speed of the web server, and the speed of the connection between it and the user. It may not be easy to do much about these things. But there is an easy way to get a 4 times increase in the speed of your web pages. Read more...
Web development no trackbacks § ¶
