Web Hosting, Design & Marketing

How google distributes Pagerank throughout a site

2008-07-03T19:22:00.000-07:00

I made this observation on 2 sites of mine where every page was linked equally within the site. In other words, every page had links to every other page on the site. Both sites PR4 on the homepage. Some subpages got a PR of 4 as well, while most had none. None had inbound links from the outside. The pages that got PR juice where those with loooong text. Like 1000 words, and more. 300-400 words was not nearly enough. Seems like there was/is a threshold, the sub pages either have no PR (way less than 1000 words) or high PR (~1000+ words) but there is nothing in between.

CMS Made Simple rocks (almost as much as Wordpress)

2007-11-27T00:18:00.000-08:00

There's another one with a similar name but the one I mean is CMS Made Simple also called CMSMS, a very clean and well coded easy to use CMS. Website Baker is slightly easier but they decided to not stick with UTF-8, and CMSMS' image editor is better, too. I am currently debating ( with myself) if I could stick with Wordpress as the sole CMS for every website or if I should keep going with CMSMS on the side. I probably will keep CMSMS for more classic type of sites or where more functionality is needed. Wordpress where ease of use is the highest priority, CMSMS for everything else, and Drupal for that myspace clone I am going to build one of these days. Joomla too messy, typo3 too bloated and I rather learn PHP better than getting into typoscript.

Site losing Google Pagerank not always a penalty

2007-11-26T15:44:00.000-08:00

Shaun Anderson from Hobo Internet Search & Marketing Solutions blogs about a page that for some unknown reason didn't get any Pagerank love from Google although it should have, according to the site's general layout and PR value. He wonders if a penalty might have been put on that specific page, maybe due to the way it linked to other web sites.

My take on this starts with a little story: I started this blog a few days ago and had a dozen pages in google after 2-3 days, and was already getting a handfull of search engine traffic from the google SERPs. One day later all the pages but ONE were gone from the index. I didn't panic though. Not only does this blog not feed my family or anything like that, I also knew that I had not been a bad boy so it was highly unlikely that the mighty Google god had punished me in some way.

I figured it out rather quickly: I had installed some widget to improve the title tag of my blog. On sub pages, I wanted the post title to appear before the blog title and not the other way round. That worked well, but it turns out that the widget had also put some div tags right into the header section. Not good. I didn't notice first because after the widget install all browsers kept displaying the site without a problem. Sometimes the problem is something really easy, and not related to core SEO at all.

How does this relate to Shaun's problem you ask? Well, if a page has some truly wrong markup, then Google MIGHT just skip it or drop it, and that would definitely have an impact on the page's pagerank, too. I wouldn't say that Google is very sensitive as far as markup validity goes, but "displays well in the browser" is certainly not a good measurement for the Google-acceptance of HTML code.

What to look for in a web hosting provider

2007-11-26T11:11:00.000-08:00

On bloggingpro there's an article about where to find web hosting and what people look for when searching for a new home for their web site. I used to go by price but 7 years and around 100 dedicated servers (and a few shared accounts) later the first and foremost thing I look for before I settle with a new host is the canceling process. How easy is canceling, how many days of notice are required, do they insist on documents being faxed in - things like this. When signing up somewhere you're always welcomed and treated well. It's the parting part that separates the good web hosting providers from the best, in my opinion. I had my fair share of hassles with service cancelations, including some truly bad experiences, and therefore I always ask detailed questions about the end before I even start with a new hosting account. I don't mind moving hosts, and feel much better knowing that I can leave at any time and with very short and unbureaucratic notice. 7 days notice max, and a quickly confirmed cancelation email or cancel button in the admin area is what I usually look for (and get).

Adding trackbacks to blogger with greasemonkey

2007-11-26T06:53:00.000-08:00

I was quite surprised to see that blogger has no trackback function. Looking around I found two possible solutions, the first one being Haloscan. After evaluating it, Haloscan wasn't what I was looking for. It is an offsite solution, and everything is based on Javascript. Not readable by search engines. I want others to be able to trackback my posts and vice versa. And everything should appear on my site, as plain, search engine readable HTML. The second trackback option for blogger seems to come closer to "real" trackbacks. How to send trackbacks with blogger. I am afraid it still won't do everything I want but I am testing it now.

Best cheap web hosting provider / company?

2007-11-22T19:36:00.000-08:00

While the term cheap may sound somewhat "cheap", it is still exactly what most people are looking for in a web hosting service. No matter whether they call it low cost, low price, affordable, discount or inexpensive hosting, they're all looking for "the best bang for the buck". The quest for the "lowest price" is followed by the hunt for the biggest packages. Big as in: huge disk space and, even more important, tons of bandwidth (transfer).

Consequently, a whole set of new web hosts and web hosting plans emerged in the past years, which all cater to exactly this clientele. What all these new and old companies have in common is: They're offering quite powerfull and feature-rich shared web hosting packages for something around $5- $15 per month.

Below is a list of the most popular $5-$15 shared / virtual Linux web hosting packages:

List is sorted by monthly price with 1-Year-Term
∞ means unlimited or unmetered, Y means Yes, - means None or No.
MOUSE OVER Web Hosting Provider name in the left column for package name (if any) and brief description of package highlights.
CLICK ON the Web Hosting Provider name in the left column to visit the site.
MOUSE OVER Blue entries for additional info.
Look below the table for further explanations.

Web Hosting Provider
IXWebhosting	300	3000	∞	1	1	0	4	4	-	-	H-Sphere	-	-	4.95	3.95	-	-	435	-
WebhostingBuzz	300	2000	∞	1	-	∞	4	4+5	-	Y	CPanel	Y	-	4.95	3.95	-	Y	-	Y
PowWeb	300	3000	∞	1	-	75	5	4	Y	Y	OPS	-	-	5.77	5.77	-	Y	-	-
Dot5Hosting	300	3000	25	1	-	∞	5	4	-	Y	vDeck	-	-	5.95	4.95	-	-	80	-
Hostgator	350	3000	1	-	-	∞	4	4/5	Y	Y	CPanel	Y	8.95	6.95	5.95	4.95	Y	-	Y
AN Hosting	250	2500	20	1	-	∞	4/5	4/5	Y	Y	CPanel	-	-	6.95	-	5.95	-	120	Y
StartLogic	300	3000	50	1	-	25	5	4	Y	Y	vDeck	-	6.95	6.95	5.95	-	-	80	-
WebhostingBuzz	375	2500	∞	1	-	∞	4	4+5	-	Y	CPanel	Y	-	6.95	5.95	-	Y	-	Y
Bluehost	300	3000	∞	1	-	50	5	5	Y	Y	CPanel	Y	-	7.95	5.95	-	Y	100	-
Hostmonster	300	3000	∞	1	-	100	4	5	-	Y	CPanel	Y	-	7.95	5.95	-	Y	100	-
IXWebhosting	500	3500	∞	2	8	100	4	4	Y	Y	H-Sphere	-	-	7.95	6.95	-	-	460	-
Lunarpages	350	3500	10	1	-	∞	4	4/5	Y	Y	CPanel	-	-	7.95	6.95	-	Y	-	Y
Midphase	200	3000	1	1	-	1	4/5	4/5	Y	Y	CPanel	Y	-	7.95	-	-	Y	175	Y
HostICan	200	2500	2	1	-	50	5	4+5	Y	Y	CPanel	Y	-	7.95	6.95	-	Y	-	Y
VistaPages	350	4000	∞	1	-	∞	4	4	Y	Y	CPanel	-	-	7.95	6.95	-	Y	25	-
HostPapa	300	3000	11	1	-	100	4/5	4/5	-	Y	CPanel	-	-	7.95	6.95	5.95	Y	75	-
Dreamhost	500	5000	∞	1	-	∞	5	4+5	-	Y	Custom	Y	10.95	9.95	8.95	7.95	Y	-	Y
Hostgator	600	6000	∞	-	-	∞	4	4/5	Y	Y	CPanel	Y	9.95	9.95	8.95	7.95	Y	-	Y
WebhostingBuzz	750	5000	∞	3	-	∞	4	4/5	-	Y	CPanel	Y	-	9.95	8.95	-	Y	-	Y
HostExcellence	300	3000	6	1	6	100	4	4	Y	Y	H-Sphere	-	-	9.97	6.97	-	-	-	-
Midphase	250	∞	∞	1	-	3	4/5	4/5	Y	Y	CPanel	Y	-	11.95	-	-	Y	175	Y
HostICan	500	∞	∞	1	-	∞	5	4/5	Y	Y	CPanel	Y	-	11.95	10.95	-	Y	-	Y
Hostgator	1000	∞	∞	-	-	∞	4	4/5	Y	Y	CPanel	Y	14.95	14.95	13.95	12.95	Y	-	Y
IXWebhosting	∞	4000	∞	3	16	∞	4	4	Y	Y	H-Sphere	-	-	14.95	12.95	-	-	485	-
VistaPages	500	5000	∞	1	1	∞	4	4	Y	Y	CPanel	-	-	14.95	12.95	-	Y	25	-
HostExcellence	∞	4000	16	2	16	∞	4	4	Y	Y	H-Sphere	-	-	14.97	12.97	-	-	-	-

Ruby on Rails (RoR) is available on all web hosting packages of Dreamhost, Bluehost, Hostgator, Lunarpages, AN Hosting and VistaPages.
Chilisoft ASP is included in the Hostgator "Swamp" package for $14.95. This is the only virtual plan where you can use both PHP and ASP from within the same account.
Backups: Most of the above mentioned providers will provide courtesy backups without guarantuee. It is recommended to use the backup function of the control panel to create and download your own backups. The providers who explicitely mention daily backups without the addition "courtesy only" or "no guarantuee" are PowWeb, WebhostingBuzz and HostICan.
USA / Canada: All companies are US based except HostPapa and VistaPages which are both based in Canada. HostPapa is also a "green energy hosting" provider.
Free Marketing Credits: Certain conditions usually apply. Some marketing credits can only be claimed by US based customers.

Where's the catch? You shouldn't expect to be able to push through 2000 GB worth of dynamic traffic with any of these web hosting packages. You CAN run dynamic sites such as blogs, forums and shops with these packages - many people do that without problems. But in case that you have an extremely busy and highly dynamic web site (and maybe partly bad programmed, too), certain CPU and RAM usage limits will come into effect at some point. You will then be asked to move to another server or to another web hosting package. And in an emergency, i.e. if your site bogs down the whole server, they might even turn off your site BEFORE the move.

But, these cheap & powerfull web hosting solutions are immensly popular for a reason: Besides the attractive price, it is the peace of mind that 300 GB of space and 3000 GB of transfer provide to any site owner.

Run a highly mission critical web site, that generates lots of money, on web hosting services like the ones mentioned above? Probably NOT.

Run one, a whole bunch or even a real lot of web sites, including blogs, forums and ecommerce sites with shops, basically: small business web sites, on these web hosting plans? Definitely YES, granted you don't have money to waste, and an occasional slowdown or a RARE outage that is fixed within reasonable time won't KILL you.

Tracing photos online

2007-11-21T18:13:00.001-08:00

This is a very nice online tool: VectorMagic, a free online Bitmap Vectorization tool. You upload an image and it gets vectorized online, and in good quality, too. Afterwards, you can even edit the image online. For a moment I thought I should offer mass vectorizing of photos and bitmap logos as a business, with the help of this free online tool. It sounded a tad too easy though, and indeed, it seems that VectorMagic won't take too many or too big images in a row. Too bad, really ;) Here's a sample I made with VectorMagic. The original is on the left hand side. They have a few samples online, comparing the tracing results of their online tool with those of Adobe's Live Trace and Corel's PowerTRACE.

CSS Frameworks: YUI vs. blueprint vs. YAML

2007-11-21T15:40:00.000-08:00

Some purists insist that they'll never use CSS frameworks due to the overhead of unsused CSS code, or because they want to "understand everything" they do. That's fair enough but we all know how hard it can be, no, make that: IS, to make a fluid, tableless CSS Layout that works equally in all browsers, especially the you know which one I mean browser.

So, in theory, a CSS framework would do all the nasty stuff behind the curtains, read: hacks, that nobody really loves dealing with? Sounds good. The developer cares only about the artsy part of composing a visually appealing and functionally enhanced web site. The framework deals with all the ugly hacks and maybe even with the W3C and the screenreaders? Because - no matter how important validity and accessibility may be - we all rather just design away, or?

The most popular CSS frameworks seem to be these, in no particular order, although I guess that the one from Yahoo is the most used one, and not because it's from Yahoo but because I acually saw it being used on a few sites.

Content with Style: A CSS Framework: I just overflew this one but will have a closer look in the near future. It's listed #1 in Google for CSS Frameworks so it might have the most backlinks or be the oldest CSS framework.

Yahoo's YUI Grids CSS: This one I used a bit, and yes it has a small footprint and it works. The standard settings have large margins betweens the single layout blocks which I found a bit odd as in visually not appealing. Of course, that can be changed rather easily.

blueprint: Seems to be grid-based just like YUI. Couldn't say if it does it better than YUI. Both YUI and blueprint seem to be rather basic though in what they offer as base functionality, compared to the next one:

YAML: This one does NOT work with grids, instead it has all those ugly hacks included and neatly kept away from the eyes of the developer. A set of (visually appealing) basic layouts is included, also a set of CSS navigation menus. YAML costs money if you do not want to link back to them. If it had more layouts included and more drop down, drop out, fly out etc. navigation menus, maybe even a CSS Nav creator like the open cube one, then I would have bought this one, I guess.

For now, I am not using any CSS framework but I just might in the near future. YAML might be something in the future if they pack quite a bit more pre-made stuff into it, considering the price.

Adding custom widgets to Wordpress themes

2007-11-21T14:14:00.001-08:00

The automattic guides for adding widgets can be hard to swallow if you're in a rush, especially since at one point the guide stops in the middle of a sentence.

Here's a step by step guide to how to add your own custom widget to a Wordpress theme in WP versions 2.3.1 and above. (Should work from 2.2 on). This could also be used to modify an existing widget. Actually that's exactly what I am going to show. But the process of creating a new widget and editing an existing one is basically the same. Read on...

Everything will go into functions.php, located in the root folder of every Wordpress theme. For the default theme, that would be wp-content/themes/default/functions.php

First, make sure you have this at the top of your functions.php file:

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</li>',
'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));

That part "registers" a sidebar and sets the default formatting for each widget that you'll drag and drop into that sidebar later on.

At the bottom of functions.php, add this

function widget_pages( $args ) {
extract( $args );
$options = get_option( 'widget_pages' );

$title = empty( $options['title'] ) ? __( 'Pages' ) : $options['title'];
$sortby = empty( $options['sortby'] ) ? 'menu_order' : $options['sortby'];
$exclude = empty( $options['exclude'] ) ? '' : $options['exclude'];

if ( $sortby == 'menu_order' ) {
$sortby = 'menu_order, post_title';
}

$out = wp_list_pages( array('title_li' => '', 'echo' => 0, 'sort_column' => $sortby, 'exclude' => $exclude) );

if ( !empty( $out ) ) {
?>
<?php echo $before_widget; ?>
<?php echo $before_title . $title . $after_title; ?>
<ul>
<?php echo $out; ?>
</ul>
<?php echo $after_widget; ?>
<?php
}
}

The code from above is the actual code for the widget. Most of the default Wordpress widgets (and this Page widget is a default one) do have a second function. More below. The bold blue part towards the bottom is where the widget writes the content into the sidebar. If you wanted to change the appearance of the output, you'd make the appropriate changes there.

Simply copying the widget from wp-includes/widgets.php over to wp-content/themes/default/functions.php and not changing it at all wouldn't make much sense, after all.

The bold red part at the top of the above code indicates the first change that I made:

wp_widget_pages in wp-includes/widgets.php
became
widget_pages in wp-content/themes/default/functions.php

This new "Pages" widget we are creating in functions.php will act just like the original "Pages" widget in widgets.php, but the new widget will overwrite the original one, because I will use the same name ("Pages") when I register it later on (see below).

So, keep that in mind before you start copying over other default widgets from widgets.php to functions.php: Remove the wp_ part from the beginning of both the widget and the widget control (see below) function names.

Since (like most, but not all default widgets) the "Pages" widget is one with a control (the little graphic on the widget that lets you set a few options), there is another piece of code to be copied over from widgets.php to functions.php, and that is the function named wp_widget_pages_control in widgets.php.

Put the following at the bottom of functions.php, right after the code from above:

function widget_pages_control() {
$options = $newoptions = get_option('widget_pages');
if ( $_POST['pages-submit'] ) {
$newoptions['title'] = strip_tags(stripslashes($_POST['pages-title']));

$sortby = stripslashes( $_POST['pages-sortby'] );

if ( in_array( $sortby, array( 'post_title', 'menu_order', 'ID' ) ) ) {
$newoptions['sortby'] = $sortby;
} else {
$newoptions['sortby'] = 'menu_order';
}

$newoptions['exclude'] = strip_tags( stripslashes( $_POST['pages-exclude'] ) );
}
if ( $options != $newoptions ) {
$options = $newoptions;
update_option('widget_pages', $options);
}
$title = attribute_escape($options['title']);
$exclude = attribute_escape( $options['exclude'] );
?>
<p><label for="pages-title"><?php _e('Title:'); ?> <input style="width: 250px;" id="pages-title" name="pages-title" type="text" value="<?php echo $title; ?>" /></label></p>
<p><label for="pages-sortby"><?php _e( 'Sort by:' ); ?>
<select name="pages-sortby" id="pages-sortby">
<option value="post_title"<?php selected( $options['sortby'], 'post_title' ); ?>><?php _e('Page title'); ?></option>
<option value="menu_order"<?php selected( $options['sortby'], 'menu_order' ); ?>><?php _e('Page order'); ?></option>
<option value="ID"<?php selected( $options['sortby'], 'ID' ); ?>><?php _e( 'Page ID' ); ?></option>
</select></label></p>
<p><label for="pages-exclude"><?php _e( 'Exclude:' ); ?> <input type="text" value="<?php echo $exclude; ?>" name="pages-exclude" id="pages-exclude" style="width: 180px;" /></label><br />
<small><?php _e( 'Page IDs, separated by commas.' ); ?></small></p>
<input type="hidden" id="pages-submit" name="pages-submit" value="1" />
<?php
}

Note that I changed the function name yet again. This time from

wp_widget_pages_control in widgets.php
to
widget_pages_control in functions.php

On to the last step. We're still in functions.php. At the very bottom, right below the two code pieces from above, add this:

$dims150 = array( 'height' => 150, 'width' => 300 );
$class = array('classname' => 'widget_pages');
register_sidebar_widget('pages','widget_pages', $class);
register_widget_control('pages','widget_pages_control', $dims150);

?>

This is the part where the two functions, the actual widget function and the widget control function get registered. Note that I use the name pages instead of the original name Pages. That's just to verify that I indeed have the newly created "Pages" widget in the widget area of my theme now.

After you've uploaded the modified functions.php, go to the Presentation -> Widgets tab in your Wordpress admin area and see if there's a widget called page now. The original widget with the name Page should be gone now. The widget names are not case sensitive it seems, because the old, default "Pages" widget still gets overwritten even though the new name is not exactly the same.

If that worked, change the name from pages to Pages if you wish, just to go sure nothing breaks in future WP versions. Or give it a whole new name. Then you'd have a new widget.

If it didn't work, see

see, if you have any open PHP tag anywhere
look closely, if anything happened to any of the " and ' in the code on the way from this page over to your browser, to your editor, to your blog.

Now that you have the widget in functions.php, you can start editing it by adding or editing PHP, HTML, Javascript, whatever....

Making Gears with Illustrator's Pathfinder tool

2007-11-21T13:34:00.000-08:00

Another nice and easy tutorial that works like a charm. Creating gears with Adobe Illustrator's Pathfinder tool. A star and a few concentric circles is all it takes. Gears with Pathfinder.

I made these two gears with the help of the tutorial. I didn't have the Illustrator AI files readily availible for upload atm so what you see here are gifs in a rather bad quality. The originals are razor sharp, scalable vector files, as it is standard for Adobe Illustrator graphics.

Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

2007-11-21T13:19:00.000-08:00

Here's a nice collection of well made Adobe Illustrator Tutorials. I really love the design of this site and want to get there soon. Illustrator rocks. This image here is a shiny button that I made with the help of the aforementioned tutorial. Unfortunately, it came out like a pimple. I should have chosen another color rather than beige for the circle in the center. But you get the idea. A button like this is easy enough to do in Adobe Illustrator.