Helping You Rock Out Your Site Like A Rockstar!

I use to like Internet Explorer. There are some uses – like the fact there are people that use it and view my site with it. However, it seems there are people who missed the updates and still use Internet Explorer 6 (IE6.) I still see people viewing my site in IE6 and know my PNG images look crappy to them. Oh well, I am not changing it for IE6 and I do not optimize sites for it. As a web designer, it is my choice and I am not afraid to tell my clients why I do not.

It is not just about integrity as said in Joseph McCullough’s article IE6 and the Starving Artist, it is about making people aware of how much safer it is to surf without a faulty browser. Funny how the update was missed as when IE7 was released, it came out as an automatic update!

Why is Internet Explorer 6 bad?

The program is not compatible with some css and javascript elements. It is also well known to have many security vulnerabilities.

It is not about being snooty or web standard compliant (okay, well, you should at least try to be W3C compliant), it is about safe surfing. No one likes malware or viruses. Some of them can be a pain to remove or even costly!

While I am not going to slap some code on my site to tell people to update, I am at least writing to tell people that IE6 is dead. As funny as it sounds, there was even a funeral for IE6 too! Google even started phasing out IE6.

So, why not upgrade to Windows IE7 and above? It is available and not really that hard to update. There are also other great browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari.

What browser do you like to surf the Internet with?

Some would argue that it is not worth it and is only a system to track traffic. In fact a lot of the traffic they track usually depends on whether or not your visitor installed the Alexa tool bar. So how does Alexa put together a number for each site?

According to Alexa’s FAQ How are Alexa’s traffic rankings determined?, traffic rank is determined by the number of uses of their toolbar. The uses are divvied between page views and reach. Even if you visit a site multiple times, your visit is only counted once. Again, this is solely based on Alexa users.

So what could this mean for some people who want to improve it?

This means that you should probably encourage your visitors to download the Alexa toolbar. For those who have websites already, it might be a good thing as there are plugins for Firefox that you can install and monitor your Alexa rank without even directly visiting the site.

Does Alexa Rank Really Matter?

Yes, it does. A lot of ad systems and advertisers look at these ranks to figure out how successful a site is and gauge how many people they could possibly attract through purchasing advertising. Others think of it as a site goal to make a certain number. That is fine too.

People need these type of systems to find some sort of progress. Please do remember that it does take some work to achieve these types of goals. Some webmasters will succeed faster than others due to their website’s topics and their influence within social networks as well as other online communities.

Dan Keller writes in his article How to Improve your Alexa Ranking. You might want to hop on over there and read his post. I do want to note that even though he mentions webmaster, you can pretty much exchange it with your target audience and you will do fine.

Do you know your Alexa rank? Have you already downloaded the Alexa Toolbar? Should website owners pay attention to their rank at Alexa?

I saw through my Twitter stream someone using Gowalla, and was curious to what it was all about. Gowalla (@gowalla on Twitter) is a site made for people to share where they are in the world. Might sound a bit like telling too much or a way for people to become a bit stalker-ish, but those on the go and use to being social, this is a way to allow people who are interested to know more about you.

You can share if you had a beer or shopped at places like the Navy Pier in Chicago, Illinois. Or if you have been to a place that has not been covered, you can create a place, or as they say at Gowalla, ‘pin’ a place.

The site is really user-friendly and allows you the option of connecting your Gowalla account with your Twitter and Facebook accounts. The systems is even courteous enough to check through your followers to see if anyone is using the system, so you can friend them at Gowalla too!

Gowalla even has a couple phone apps for users to be able to check-in and automatically update on their profile.

Have you tried Gowalla? What do you think of it?

So Google seems to be seriously looking into reasons why they should stay in or pull out of China. Whether it is the right thing for Google to pull out of China for business reasons as mentioned in TechCrunch, or for the greater good – the fact is that Google can do what they like.

Hacking happens all the time. Ten years ago, we were raving about Yahoo! getting hacked on New Year’s Eve. I remember that because I was online as it was happening and was in shock like the rest of the users on. I have nothing really against China. Their economy is growing and yeah, I wish the United States could be in the same situation, but for any of our home grown companies to venture to another country, it is not my problem to judge Google if they pull out of China.

While some would say that Google is not profiting well in China, and others argue it is stupid to pull out because the country has 1/6 of the world’s population – who cares. If Google pulls out, what can the common techy online do – NOTHING (but grouch about it.)

Perhaps as mentioned in the TechCrunch link above (and I will put a quote from it):

This may be the most shocking part: In retrospect Yahoo has played China far better than Google. It pulled out of the country years ago, knowing it wouldn’t win and owns nearly 40% of the Alibaba, a company that very definitely knows how to grow in China. Entrepreneur and angel investor in China Bill Bishop —who hasn’t always agreed with my China coverage in the past—pointed this out, adding “Not often Yahoo looks smarter than Google.”

Perhaps Google could learn from this and invest smartly in Chinese web companies as Yahoo! has.

What do you think?

Recently I came up with a dilemma with my own scripts PHPads and PHPurl. Because they have been so popular, and I have been hosting the zip files on my own server, it has been eating up my bandwidth. Believe me this year, the downloads for both have skyrocketed compared to last year. Link promotion from many websites have been awesome, BUT… I have only received $60 in donations last year. I am lucky to have received what I have and appreciative. That is just 3 hours of my time….or even for those who want another smaller comparison – at minimum wage, which covers 1- 8 hour day.

I had to take the files off my server and host them at a free host. I am hosting them at FileHosting.org. I also found a lot of people were going directly to the page and not enjoying the rest of my site, which has a lot of articles that are very useful.

So… in the near future, I am moving it to another page, and putting 125×125 banners on my sidebar. By the way, the site is about to go through a bit of an overhaul. Nothing too extravagant, but something I feel is needed. People who have linked to the scripts in their articles, I will be going through and asking that they either link the Hotscripts listings for each script or my main site.

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I know I am not the only web developer that has had issues. Some have removed their free versions and re-posted to charge a small fee. Some simply removed their script for good. Some could not keep their sites up because of bandwidth from the downloads. Some no longer bother to answer support emails, even if there is a FAQ. The script might be free, but let me ask: If it has helped you quite a bit and you have a few dollars, you might consider pitching in a few dollars. It is not much and it keeps future scripts coming in, and staying free.

It also helps for web developers with smaller websites who might need more bandwidth and space, or even database resources.

Other ways to appreciate your web developer is to either check out their sponsors, or possibly become an advertiser. That way, you still get something for your money. You can also visit other parts of their site. If they blog, perhaps they might be someone you might want to connect with, or find that they have a lot of great information.

Have you shown your appreciation to your favorite web developer lately?

Social Media – it was a word that popped up in the mainstream and blew everyone away by storm. Well, at least those who were not as computer savvy nor marketing savvy.

We learned Social Media and Social Networking were not the same, where social media was a technique to market yourself or your company a social networking were the sites you could exercise your marketing strategies. Of course, there are still people who get those two words mixed up a lot.

This past year, we saw social network giants clamber to be the top, making unique features to draw more users. In fact, there are probably more users that jumped on the bandwagon of social networking versus blogging. In fact, users found more ways to flex their social media muscles on the social networks to attract people to their blogs. Some users found web celebrity status this year, overpowering teeny bopper half clad girls on MySpace who just wanted you to leave a comment while debasing themselves.

We saw governments crack down on Twitter usage, even countries banning their own people from telling the horrible truth about them to the world.

We even saw celebrities and normal everyday people gets sued or even fired or literally roasted online for their Twitter usage.

It has been quite the year for Social Media. Can it get better? Yes. But it could get worse as well. In 2009, spammers crawled out from their holes and found they could play with the social networking masses.

What is in store for 2010? Who knows? For myself, of course, I would love to strive to be better than last year. I went to having a Google PR of 1 to a Google PR 4, and on Alexa, I am doing better than 200K. I actually made my goals, AND beat my goals. I even improved my content. I have more than one blog – each focusing on some of my major interests. I opened Blogrity, a social bookmark site for bloggers that is built with WordPress. I started guest posting at other blogs. I educated and influenced people. I believe I am a blog rockstar, but nothing huge…yet.

What have you noticed this past year in social media, and have you met your goals? How did you go about achieving them and did you use social networking to do it?

I am pleased to know that since the release of both of these scripts, that they have done well in the community since introducing them in January 2009.

PHPurl, my free PHP URL shortening script has been downloaded over 1737 times. Before I reset the demo site, Re-URL.me, the site had been used more than 7000 times to shorten URLs. I even had an issue at one point with banning spammers. I was a bit flattered at first, but also angry to have to find the time to remove them. It ended up the reason for resetting the numbers. PHPurl was introduced at the time where short URL sites have been in need, especially since Twitter has become mainstream. There have been countless sites that have mentioned my short URL script and I appreciate it a lot.

My other PHP script, which is a simple ad management script, PHPads has been downloaded over 3900 times. PHPads is actually a re-troduction and rename of its previous – PixelledADS, which was available well over 3 years ago. Most of the installation questions I have gotten have been the same, and dealing with not CHMODing certain files or changing the ads.dat file before loading it up. As for the page and the demo, because I did not remove the configuration section that allowed people to change the password, I ended up removing the demo, and replacing it with screenshots, until I can find the time to put a demo back up again. Someone had changed the password to be a jerk.

I enjoyed the comments and some of the smaller jobs that people have hired me to customize these for them. As for donations, there have been a few, but it was to be expected. Developers are not as appreciated, but I did not want to turn these into commercial GPL. I may introduce such versions at a later time, but right now, until I have more time on my hands, that will not happen anytime soon.

I appreciate the support and look forward to introducing other projects I have worked on the side this past year.

In the past decade, there has been an increasing number of FTP clients available for free or purchase. For those who do not know was FTP is, it stands for File Transfer Protocol. It allows you to upload and image to another server from your computer. Of course, a lot of the paid FTP programs are great, but the normal person does not really have the money to fork out to buy for a program that they might not use that often. Of course, for webmasters or web designers, it is a necessity, so I have gathered a small list of FTP programs to share.

Here are a few I found:

FileZilla – I use this and it is great!
SmartFTP – actually there is only a 30 day trial, but I have tried it out in the past and liked it. Although it is not free, I thought I would mention it as it has been one that I have enjoyed using.
GoFTP – only costs if you are in a company of 50 or more clients. I tried this, but it did not work very well and I found it a bit unfriendly user-wise.
FireFTP – this is a cross-platform ftp client for Firefox users. I have not tried it, but after asking a few friends of mine, they liked it. It is free and the site says it has been downloaded over 12 million times.
CoffeeCup Free FTP – free version. They also have a purchase version called Direct FTP. Very user-friendly.

What do you use? Is it free? Do you recommend it?