15 web developer tools outlined by Six Revisions:
Title says it all. Here’s the link http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/13/2316207&from=rss
Just found a great article on Youtube SEO utilizing Youtube’s query suggestion tool. This information can help create a better video title or even help suggest video content in order to increase video views.
The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular open source JavaScript libraries. By using the Google AJAX API Loader’s
google.load()method, your application has high speed, globaly available access to a growing list of the most popular JavaScript open source libraries
A few days ago I wrote about how to configure Wordpress to use Google’s cache proxy servers to serve images. After writing that entry I kept thinking to myself that there had to be a better/easier way to accomplish this other than changing Wordpress settings. Well I finally figured it out and got it working on my other blog DavidChiu.net. It involves using mod_rewrite and symbolic links. First you need to create a symbolic link to the Wordpress /uploads/ folder. For example:
ln -s wp-content/uploads/ images/cache
Then you just need to modify your .htaccess file:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^.*wp-content/uploads(.*) http://gmodules.com/ig/proxy?url=http://davidchiu.net/images/cache$1 [R,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
And voila! All images will now be served by Google’s proxy cache!
Because of the outages that we experienced at Opsource for a high profile site and recent maintenance notices I’ve received from another hosting provider that I use, I’ve started looking into fail-over options. In my head I figured there had to be a way to monitor a website and if that website goes down, to dynamically re-route traffic to another server. I’m not talking about the typical load balancing of multiple servers on the same network, I’m talking about a DNS fail-over system. After a couple of google searches I stumbled upon bindmon, an open-source project that does exactly what I was looking for - monitor servers and dynamically change DNS upon failure. But I wanted to see if I could find a hosted solution. A few more searches and I stumbled on UltraDNS which handles DNS traffic management and DNS failover. They seem perfect, but I wanted to do one more search to see if I could find a “free” solution for my own personal sites. That’s when I found ZoneEdit.com. Their website is pretty sparse, so it worried me a little bit, but a few google searches turned up a lot of references to their site across the internet with both good and bad reviews. An idea I have is to use a DNS management/failover service that points to a custom blog at Tumblr upon server failure. Why Tumblr? Because it’s free and they allow CNAME pointers.
Anyone have experience with DNS failover services at ZoneEdit or any other free DNS management service?
A friend of mine just showed me Maniac Mansion playing on his HTC Tilt! The old LucasArts game looks perfect on the phone and the interaction works flawlessly! This is all possible through an open-source project called ScrummVM - a program which allows you to run some of the old classic point-and-click graphic adventure games. The software runs on a variety of mobile devices (including the iPhone) and desktop operating systems.
Userplane Mediaplayer™ is a next-generation video player with unlimited uploading and playback. If that weren’t enough, Userplane is offering free, unlimited video hosting. Learn more about the key features of this Flex-based, centrally hosted app…
I found some really good articles on SEO today. Here is a summary of some key points I learned from each article:
55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love
11. Check for canonicalization issues - www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.
12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.
15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.
20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.
21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.
43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.
45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.
49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.
55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.
You Don’t Own Your Brand Online…But You Can Own the Search Results
Promote Positive Pages
Basically, if there are positive pages around your brand that aren’t in the top results, throw some backlinks their way to try and improve their rankings.Create Content on Other Sites
Create Profile Pages
These tend to do very well in results, but only register on these sites if you are actually going to use them. Sites like Aboutus.org also tend to rank very highly around brand terms because of the authority of the domain and the on-page optimisation / relevance each page has.
Six Ways to Protect and Enhance your Image on the Internet
1) Search (and research) your name
2) Register your name as an internet domain
3) Set up a Google Alert for your name
4) Clean up, and then improve, all of your social networking and internet profiles
5) Generate positive and meaningful content associated with your name
Use SEO tools such as
Search Analytics @ Compete.com
On my other blog One Man’s Wishlist, I’ve configured Wordpress to use Google’s ad proxy cache to serve my blog images. The setting to change is “Full URL path to files” under Settings->Miscellaneous:
The path needs to point to: http://gmodules.com/ig/proxy?url={path to your uploads folder}. The downside is that this setting will only apply to images inserted into new posts. Old images in posts will need to be changed using a search and replace plugin or manually.