ruki spot

If you design websites, chances are you have wished there was an easier way to test your new creation on all the popular browsers. Unless you own a Mac, Linux and Windows machine or run a virtual computer with these three operating systems on your machine, chances are you will have to resort to asking your friends or users how your website looks like on their browser. Browsers each display websites slightly differently, and just because your website looks great in Internet Explorer doesn’t mean it will look they way you want it in Fire Fox and vice versa.

Someone has thought about this problem and come up with a solution and best of all it is free to use! At browsershots.org you can submit your website’s URL and it will be added to the job queue. browsershots.org have many machines (called factories) that will eventually browse to the page you requested and take a screen shot of what your website looks like in the host browser. At submission you can select the browsers you wish to test for. If your website page is larger than a screenful, browsershots.org will take an enlongated screenshot so you can see your whole page within the screen shot. This is pretty cool!

My only critism for browsershots.org is that the queue is constantly full and it can take up to four hours for your job to be completed, in some cases you may have to resubmit again if the job queue is too large. Take a look at some of their statistics within their website, it is pretty impressive. They sure are very busy!

So next time you find yourself wondering what your website looks like in other browsers, head off to browsershots.org and take a look for yourself!

Today while googling, I came across some pretty nifty add-ins for Visual Studio 2003.

VSFileFinder2003 - This will create a tab window, kinda like the solution explorer. It is a file searcher. As you type more of the filename, it will narrow down the list of filenames so you can easily find that file you are looking for. Good for large projects where there are many files and they are buried under different levels of directories.

VSTabs - This nifty add-in groups up all your open files. It will group files with the same name, making it easy to switch between that test.c and test.h file.

All these add-ins have installers that automatically install the add-ins to visual studio 2003. I believe they might work on Vistual Studio 2005, check out the website at http://www.zero-one-zero.com/vs/

…and just in case you didn’t know, I discovered today that you can use CTRL RW (CTRL followed by R followed by W) to toggle visible whitespace on/off or from the menu bar Edit->Advanced->View Whitespace.

Just thought I’d share these findings with you all.

What are anchor text? Anchor text are the visible text you see within a link. Take for example:

<a href=”index.html”>Test website</a>

In this case, “Test website” is the anchor text. Anchor text does a few things for your website. They describe the link to the users so they have a fairly good idea what the link is about before landing on the website. But most importantly, search engines will use the keywords within the anchor text to index your website. Search engines love anchor text because the keywords are of high relevance to the linked website.

As a simple test, do a search for “click here” in google. The first page is Adobe Reader website. Now open that site and search using your browser for “click here”. Those keywords are no where to be found for this website. So how can a website where these keywords appear no where within the text get top ranking? Simple! There are lots of websites out there that link to the Adobe Reader website using the anchor text “click here”. Hence, google has associated these keywords with this website. This is prove that you do not have to have your keywords within your website text to be indexed by them.

As another example, search for “failure” using google again. The top ranking website is the President’s website. You can be sure the word “failure” does not appear anywhere in this website, it is simply lots of people linking to this site using the word “failure” within the anchor text. This is described in the google blog, this site has been googlebombed! You may have come across this site in funny emails that are circulated around the web.

In a nutshell, when you are creating backlinks to your website, take some time to work out how you can use the keywords you want to be searched by within the anchor text of these backlinks. It will do you wonders! Don’t just use your website name as the anchor text.

This is the description given by Wikipedia for backlinks:

“Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. Backlinks enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that link to your posts. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node (Björneborn and Ingwersen, 2004). Backlinks are also called incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.”

In simple terms, a backlink is a link from another website to your website. It does a number of things for your website. Firstly it increases your traffic. The website that has a link to yours will no doubt get some traffic and some of those visitors will no doubt click on the link and land on your site.

What most people don’t know is that backlinks are also votes for your site. Google and other search engines will see your website as important because some other website has linked to yours. What this does, is contribute to your PR (Page Ranking). PR is a formulae used by Google to determine how ‘important’ your site is. The PR will be used by the search engine to determine your position within the search listings when people search for your keywords.

So does this mean I can go off and create lots of sites and link to my website and get a good PR which means a top listing right? Not quite! The PR of the sites linking to you also come into the equation and it is not that easy to build up your PR, it takes a lot of time and work. If you have backlinks in PR5 websites, you will need less backlinks compared to if you were concentrating on creating backlinks on PR0 or PR1 websites.

But all is not lost! There are many PR5+ directories out there. This is a good way of getting nice decent backlinks. Some are paid directories, some recriporal and others completely free. It is quite a task to find these directories and submit to them. I personally use the services of a freelance manual submitters like DirectoryVault but you can do it yourself if you are willing to spend the time. Simply search in google for “PR5 directories” and start working!

Writing articles and submitting to article repositories is another good way of getting backlinks. There are a lot of people who run article repositories and quite a few of them copy from each other. This can be a good thing, it just means you have more backlinks coming to you without work done from you. Once again you can submit to article repositories yourself, but if your like me and find it time consuming, look for a freelance article submitter. Once again I use the services of DirectoryVault for this.

If you run a blog, then use it effectively to market your website and create a backlink. Blogs get indexed by search engines frequently because by nature they contain frequently updated content which search engines love.

If you are a programmer, then making mods for open source scripts or writing some free scripts with links in the footer is another good way of creating backlinks. I do something similar with my SEO mod for Cube Cart. If your mod or script is good and in demand, you will have backlinks from thousands of sites.

Do you frequent forums? Then add a link to your website in your forum signature. Each time you post in the forums, you will create a backlink. Do not post for the sake of creating a backlink. Make sure there is a good reason for posting, otherwise you will be spamming and that will violate the forum rules.

Don’t forget to exhaust the simple traditional ways of creating backlinks. That is contacting all your friends that run websites and asking if they can link to you or exchange links with you. Another traditional way is to search in google for all the top websites for your keywords and then email the webmasters asking if they would like to exchange links with you. There is a good chance that your email will go straight to the recycle bin, but there is also a good chance that someone will link to your website! Do not also forget the obvious! If you run other websites then use them effectively to market your new website with backlinks.

I am sure there are plenty of other ways of creating backlinks, if you have any good ideas or tips please post a comment and share it with us.

About July last year I went googling on the net for some product I could purchase at wholesale price and sell to the public via an online shop. After searching high and low, I came across a lingerie wholesaler. Now I had a product, I now needed a solution to help sell my product online. Writing something from scratch was out of the question, I simply didn’t have the time or energy.

I spent some time researching for a great out of the box shopping script. I tested Oscommerce, but decided the code was a bit complicated to use, however there is quite a lot of community mods and most of them free of charge. I also tried Zen Cart, which is basically Oscommerce but with some of the most useful community mods installed my default. I also came across Cre Loaded, again same story. It is Oscommerce with useful mods built in.

The cart I decided to go with was Cube Cart. It seemed a lot more simpler than the other carts and code was well written and the whole package just seemed less cluttered. One issue with this solution was that it wasn’t search engine friendly and there was no SEO mod. I was faced with a dilema, go with one of the Oscommerce spin-offs or write a SEO mod. I decided to stick with Cube Cart and write the SEO mod. I am glad I went down this road, as I have learnt a lot in the process and my mod is now widely used. A quick search for “running with search engine friendly mod” in google will give you a fairly good idea on how popular it is. There are also many others using my mod without the link in the footer as they have purchased a license. If you are building an online shopping website, I recommend trying out Cube Cart and running it with my SEO mod.

Cube Cart shopping script
My SEO mod for Cube Cart

And oh, if your in Australia or New Zealand, then make sure you head down to my lingerie site Intimate Wear and purchase something for your partners! That is my lingerie site if you haven’t guessed already!