Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. » Web Design

HTML5 – Sites that Use it Now

George Garza — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 22:16:56 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

There has been a lot of discussion about whether html5 would be incorporated into IE9 or not. In fact, some of the discussion has also been about other browsers, Chrome, Opera, Firefox and if they are leaving Microsoft behind in using HTML 5. But here the question is, just how popular is HTML5? So to answer that question, here is a short review of some of the websites that have been using HTML5.

To begin with there are many sites that are looking at show casing HTML5.

The 5gallery has multiple sites that they are showcasing.

This site gives a full description about what is going on in the area of HTML5 implementation.

See: 5gallery

Another site, at HTML5Demos gives you just that, demos of HTML5. But you must have Chrome to see the demo.

As you can see, there are are over 21 demos to look at and this should provide you with enough experience to see how the markup language will work.

Source: html5Demos

Another Website, PC Pro dissects HTML 5 by looking at several different websites.

Creative Pony One of the HTML5 Sites Reviewed

Source: The top 10 HTML5 sites dissected

One of the more complete sites is 101 Best HTML5 Sites. This offers not just a list of websites, but also tutorials for HTML5 in websites. Also businesses and personal websites that use this markup.

HTML5 & CSS3 READINESS @ http://html5readiness.com/

Source: 101 Best HTML5 Sites

Apple has also gotten into the act, but more to demonstrate the potential of HTML5, and to show users that Adobe Flash is not needed for their iPhone or iPad products.

Apple's HTML5 Demo Site

Apple is committed to using HTML5, and it even has a link to Steve Jobs explanation of why Apple’s products, especially the i* devices, no longer support Flash.

Source: Apple

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Standards for HTML5 Are Hard to Come By

George Garza — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:06:39 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

Two groups have been involved in the development of HTML standards. One is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the other is the Web Hypertext Application Working Group (WHATWG). So when the latest version of HTML5 was presented, one would think that there would be little disagreement between these two groups.

For one, the World Wide Web Consortium has been absent from standards development for some time; that job has gone to the Web Hypertext Application Working Group. So there would be some friction between them.

Here is an example of the raucous e-mails floating around. “”childish,” “intolerable,” “ridiculous,” “shenanigans.” And there’s a concrete manifestation of the divisiveness: The WHATWG and W3C versions of the HTML5 specification, though both stemming from the same source material, have diverged in some areas.

Many differences are relatively small. Moreover, there are strong reasons to bring the two drafts of the HTML5 specification together. Mainly it would be a real problem for browser makers and Web developers to be faced with two incompatible standards for the same product. Nevertheless, these overseers of the Web are stepping on each other during a time when their new standard is just arriving in the spotlight.

What does HTML5 Offer to developers?

HTML5 has a number of important features. One is the ability to embed audio and video directly into a Web page without relying on Adobe Systems’ Flash Player plug-in. Another new feature, is the Canvas for 2D graphics and geolocation for Web sites to know a person’s physical location. These are standardized in the WHATWG version but aren’t in the W3C draft of HTML5. Other changes include an effort to codify how Web browsers should implement Web pages.

So some of the success of HTML5 will be dependent on compatibility: developers will want to write a single version of a Web page rather than creating different versions for different browsers. That is what the fight is about. Which version will be standard?

Source: CNet

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How to Modify Your Opera Browser

George Garza — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:15:27 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

There are a lot of browsers available besides the Internet Explorer. Many are making a mark for themselves for being more secure, faster, and user friendly. Among those is Opera. Now, you can make modifications to your Opera browser by downloading files or copying code into the browser. At the site and with codes or files that are available on the site you can extend and modify Opera. Opera gives users the ability to modify its behaviour as well as the behaviour of the websites you visit. Different Opera users can share their experiences or code to make modifications and additions to the browser.

Here are some samples of modifications that you can make:

Auto-Hide Status Bar: This shows a temporary status bar when the cursor is over a link (chrome-like)
Wrap plain text files: This wraps long lines in plain text files to desired width.
Open links in background tab with long mouse/touchpad press.:You can opens a link in a backgound with long mouse/toucpad press.
Wikipedia: Redesigned, which can make it easier to read Wikipedia articles.

User JavaScript

User javascript can be used for many things. They can fix websites that are broken in Opera. Or they can add features to sites, to make browsing them more user friendly. They can even be used to add features to the browser itself. Here are some examples:

Show Just Image: If you would lie to removes garbage from some image hosting sites and only display the image, this is the file your want.
Google pager: This will insert the next page of results when the Google search page is scrolled to the bottom.

User CSS

With Opera and User CSS files it is possible to override the way a page looks and make it look the way you want it to.
Chrome’s status-bar for Opera browser: This will show the status field instead of status-bar, the way that Chrome does.

There are other topics that you can find content for: Toolbar setup, Keyboard setups, menu and mouse setups, buttons, macros and other setups. There is a lot to keep you busy if you inclinded to tweak your browser.

Source: Extend Opera

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Google Factoring In How Fast Sites Load In Search Results

Robert Boland — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 21:36:54 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

With high speed internet and broadband widely available these days, web designers don’t have to worry half as much as they used to when designing sites. Even the most basic sites would have to carefully planned so that a user on a 56 kbps dial up connection would be able to load the site before the day was over. However nowadays I think it’s fair to say that everyone has a minimum of 1 mbps broadband connection, many of us have more.

So web designers got lazy and didn’t optimise their sites half as much as they used to and as a result websites have become bloated with excess code and large images etc… You will still rarely find a site that won’t load in under 10 seconds but that’s only because our internet connections are, in most cases up to the task.

But now there maybe a new incentive out there for web designers to optimise their sites for speed once again. Google is now factoring the speed at which a site loads into its search results. They have recognised that consumers demand for instant news and information on the web has increased dramatically and our attentions spans are decreasing rapidly.

Google has a largely unknown recipe for how it organises its search results, but now we know a new ingredient is: site speed. There had been hints out on the web for the last few months that this may be coming but now it’s official. Two of Google’s search engineers have decided to spill the beans for us. Amit Singhal and principal engineer Matt Cutts announced the news last Friday in a blog post and said that’s actually been live for a couple of weeks unknown to us. Google is using a variety of components and factors to determine how much faster one Web page responds compared to another.

However speed won’t be playing a major role in search results and you won’t be getting the number one spot because your site loads in half a second since Google has over 200 other factors which it bases its search results on. Google have said the change should affect fewer than 1 percent of search query results.

Still I think this is a move in the right direction as site owners are becoming lazy when it comes to optimising their sites for speed and this might give them an incentive to work on it a bit.

Why not have a look at some of these tips for speeding up your site

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Webkit2 for Multiple Cores Architecture

George Garza — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 19:28:26 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

Apple, the force behind WebKit, which is a layout engine that is designed to allow web browsers to present web pages, is retooling the product to take advantage of multiple CPU cores.

Many of the features that we take for granted when using a browser come from the WebKit engine. For instance it provides a set of programming classes that will display web content in windows, and implement browser features like following links when clicked, or managing a back-forward list, or managing a history of pages recently visited. Most of the features that we use and the html code that we see are run through the Webkit engine.

Now Apple has announced that a new interface called WebKit2 will be re-designed using the old WebKit model, as a starting point, to support a split process model. In the WebKit2 model the web content such as JavaScript, HTML, layout, and others will live in a separate process. This has some similarities to a feature that Google Chrome offers, but with the major difference that is built into the process directly into the framework.

If you look at the traditional WebKit Architecture you will see where the WebKit resides

The Mac WebKit

Here is the Architecture of the WebKit2

WebKit2

The difference is that you now have two processes that are involved a UI process and a Web Process. Ideally, these will use two different cores for performance and operation. WebKit2 changes the WebKit stack to build a process management mechanism inside the WebKit API layer.

The idea behind all of this is multiprocessor design. Multiprocess designs seem to be accelerating throughout the browser industry. One way is by moving plug-ins, such as Adobe Flash, to a separate process. This can reduce the severity of crashes by isolating the problem.

Source: WebKit WebKit2

WebKitAPI

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Will the iPad and Android stifle the world-wide web?

Mike Halsey MVP — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:47:00 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

One of the big problems with the world’s “best browsing experience” on Apple’s new iPad is the complete absence of Adobe Flash support. Shailpik Biswas wrote about this specific point here earlier, which frankly is a biggie for a great many people. But there’s also another question, as an internet device, will the iPad (and similar systems such as Android which will be appearing on many clone devices) stifle innovation on the world-wide web?

Some time ago we reached a point where the hardware we were buying was able to do things far faster and more powerfully than we need, at least with society the way it is today. But with browser-based devices the technology will always be ahead of the things we use them for, they have to be.

The lack of support for Flash is just a small part of this but the hardware that these devices run on is also another factor. You see while hardware may generally be ahead of what we need, in order to reach the magic price/performance mark, manufacturers such as Apple have to make compromises.

This means that web-apps have an upper limit of what resources are there for them to use in the browser. While this isn’t a problem while web developers are constantly innovating, limiting the available hardware like this might stifle much of that.

To highlight what I mean when Microsoft were developing Windows Vista they had a dream of interactive web apps using a system called Windows Presentation Foundation.

While this system was in beta, and called Avalon, Microsoft had grand plans for it. They wanted to allow people to build interactive web-apps with effects such as transparencies, 3D, reflections and depth all being rendered by Windows itself. The aim was to allow people buying, for instance, a pair of shoes to examine the shoes in their browser in an interactive 3D way, just like they were in the shop holding the physical item. All this would have required the minimum bandwidth because all of the work would have been done on the client computer, without needing to be processed in the clouds and sent frame by frame. This is very similar to what Flash and Silverlight do but would have worked directly with existing HTML and XML code.

When it was dropped, some of those features were subsumed into Silverlight and some will find their way into Internet Explorer 9, which will use the graphics processor on your PC to render web graphics.

The lack of support for not only Flash, but Silverlight on the iPad will act as the biggest possible barrier to this type of web innovation ever taking place. It simply won’t happen unless companies build in both the hardware and software support.

Avalon created a huge amount of buzz and excitement in the web community and left a lot of people disappointed when it was pulled. Essentially we’re still left, possibly permanently, with the existing way the web works. Flat two-dimensional list-based sites with Amazon being a prime example.

Now we’ve got netbooks and low-capability devices such as this new breed of tablets, are we forever, or at least for the next few years, waving goodbye to this new way of interacting with the internet? Certainly if the processing and graphics power required for this type of new web experience isn’t available on every net-connected device (mobile phones possibly excluded as they have their own mobile sites anyway) technology companies will have no reason to innovate and something like Avalon might never appear again.

It’s a shame really, though one that processors such as Intel’s new i3 and i5 line, with their integrated graphics chips, might start to redress. We can only hope that similar processors begin to find their way into net-connected devices soon.

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How To Calculate Dimensions of Anything on your Screen

Umar — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:15:58 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

Designers and developers scrutinize others’ webpages and programs, looking for positive points which they can incorporate into their projects as well. Often they find the dimensions of a particular banner, advertisement, text field, etc. to be perfect. Obviously one cannot find out the exact dimensions by simply looking at the area; one needs to employ a certain tool for the job.

The said dimensions can be found using a number of tools that are freely available online. But if you are looking for the most easy-to-use tool, then myRuler is what you need. The size of the setup file for myRuler is only 450KB. Size at less than half a megabyte, you can download and install this ruler in no time.

Here is how myRuler looks like by default:

The scale shows pixel markings and the number at top shows the total pixel length of the ruler. This pixel length on the first run is 500. In subsequent runs the length remains what it was when you exit the program.

You place the ruler against anything, adjust the length according to the object, and find from the ruler’s reading how many pixel does that particular length cover.

The ruler’s length can be changed by your mouse pointer pulling or pushing either side of the ruler. You can right-click on the ruler anytime and change its orientation from horizontal to vertical (and vice versa):

You also have four color schemes to choose from: Default, Office 2007, Gray, and Orange.

If you enter the ‘About’ section of the program (either by pressing the F1 key or clicking ‘About’ in the right-click menu), you will see some keyboard shortcuts which will help you better work with myRuler.

While this particular ruler serves its desired purpose, a huge journey lies ahead before it catches up to other popular rulers. Some of myRuler’s shortcomings include:

myRuler’s length can only be adjusted from one side.
myRuler does not have a transparent color scheme.
As myRuler’s length is adjusted, the top reading changes but the scale markings become distorted, often unreadable.
myRuler can only be adjusted to measure perfectly horizontal or vertical objects; you cannot use myRuler to measure the pixel length of objects at an angle.

The issues will certainly discourage the experienced developer from using myRuler. Hopefully the program will be improved to math other similar programs available on the net. Meanwhile, the average computer user will find myRuler quite useful.

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RocketTheme Adds WordPress Themes

Michael Lankton — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:46:18 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

WordPress bloggers rejoice! RocketTheme, designers of the world’s best looking Joomla! and phpBB3 templates has launched their WordPress Theme Club with a handful of WordPress offerings ported over from their renowned Joomla! Template Club.

When I began writing for the web again a couple of years ago I first used WordPress to publish my content. Coming from a background of writing html in a text editor back in the 90′s, I saw a friend working on his WordPress blog and immediately thought how accessible it was. Anyone could publish web content using this tool I thought.

So I dove in, and WordPress allowed me to have a nice looking site with an article on it after an afternoon’s worth of tweaking the design. It’s a brilliant tool that has a simple interface to a simple end, and it just works.

However, within a month it just wasn’t enough. I soon made my own WordPress theme from scratch in an effort to get my web pages to look more polished. Even then I felt handcuffed by the limitations of working within WordPress.

Before my second month with WordPress was up I had migrated to Joomla!, and I’ve never looked back.

Don’t take any of this as a slam against WordPress, because it isn’t. WordPress is a great tool that has brought the ability to publish web content to millions of users across the globe. We have a much richer web today because WordPress exists.

I had always wondered why WordPress themes looked so amateurish compared to the really good Joomla! designs. Was it some inherent limitation of WordPress, or were there simply no great designers making WordPress themes?

As time has gone by better looking WordPress designs have surfaced. A host of magazine and newspaper style themes exist, some commercial some free. WordPress design is much improved in 2009, but at the end of the day every time I see one of these new themes right after I get over my initial admiration of the layout I realize that I can identify it as a WordPress web site within about two seconds.

WordPress themes and the WordPress backend will continue to improve, but WordPress will remain WordPress, which is exactly as it should be. If the powers that be behind WordPress ever moved it into more CMS-like behavior than it already has I think they would be shooting themselves in the foot. They already have the right product. Refine it, but don’t change it to be like the other CMS solutions. They have different markets.

Ok, so WordPress is the logical choice for the vast majority of people wanting to jump in and put some content on the web. For those WordPress users who need more out of their page design than the standard two or three column blog layout there are more choices today than there were even a year ago. Many of them still look like lipstick on a pig however.

RocketTheme to the rescue.

RocketTheme has made the first seven offerings in their WordPress club available. You can demo all of them here. These are all existing designs from their Joomla! club. I’ve looked them over, and they are not exact replications, but they have come close to offering WordPress themes that look and function as great as their Joomla! counterparts.

The Mynxx theme for example has VirtueMart integration in the Joomla! version, which is absent in the WordPress theme. I don’t know whether or not if there is a plugin for WordPress that would add the ecommerce functionality back into the Mynxx theme. You can look at the original Joomla! template here to see what I am talking about.

The RocketTheme WordPress Club is $50 for a 90 day membership, gives you full access to all of their WordPress product, and allows you to implement their WordPress themes on two sites. For $75 you get the same for a year, and you get to implement the themes on three sites instead of two.

The RocketTheme Joomla! club receives a new template on the first of every month, rain or shine. The WordPress club is only five days old as I write this, so I don’t know how many of their templates they intend to port to WordPress or what their WordPress release schedule looks like. My guess would be the whole ball of wax as WordPress users represent a considerable market. Membership also gains you entrance into their support forums, where answers to problems you encounter are answered by RocketTheme members and other users with lightning speed, in my experience.

If you offer a web forum attached to your site, RocketTheme also offers phpBB3 versions of most of their designs so you can have a perfectly matched site and forum. I used to use one of their SMF templates on AV Enthusiast, and I felt pretty slick having a forum that exactly matched my main site. Of course, no one used the forum, but it looked very nice. The phpBB3 club is a separate membership and not included in your WordPress club fee, so if you want one of their phpBB3 templates you will need to shell an additional $50-$75 clams.

RocketTheme offers Joomla!, phpBB3 and WordPress designs that seamlessly plug in to your site, offer incredible flexibility with page design, produce valid markup and just flat out look better than anything you’re going to get short of paying someone to create a one-off design just for you. Take a look at their demos and see for yourself.

The bar for WordPress theme design has just been raised.

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Is It Time To Start Blocking Firefox Users?

Michael Lankton — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:35:58 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

All views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Connected Internet or its proprietor.

When you come to one of my websites you are absolutely welcome to not click any of the ad links. You are equally at liberty to not pay attention to the ads should you so choose. I will also make a promise to the user that the monetization of my sites will not be intrusive and will not draw undue attention to itself.

That said, if you block the ads on my site, pound sand. It’s practically like you are stealing from me.

I am sympathetic. There are websites that are so intrusive with their monetization that there is more advertising than content. Some sites you don’t dare move your mouse for fear of launching an inline ad link. I get it. I don’t like it any more than you guys do.

However, you don’t get the option to ignore monetization in the world. You get it on TV, radio and print media. You drive by it daily. You attend events in venues, whose very name is monetization, to see entertainment that is sponsored by a financial concern. People are wearing it. There is product placement on TV and in movies. There are ads in video games. It’s everywhere.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that people use the internet to try to make a buck. Let me tell you where I’m coming from regarding ad blocking:

The ads on my site represent the only way I have to pay for my hosting costs. Also, while I do web design and writing because it’s an enjoyable pastime for me and my main pursuit is to add value to the internet, my time is valuable and I would like something back. There is absolutely nothing wrong or mercenary about that. I do not own a single domain whose sole purpose is to make money. Everything I do on the web is about the content. If I want to stick a banner and a couple of AdSense units on my page, who are you to block them?

Look, regarding the sites with advertising so intrusive it drove you to run an ad blocker, boycott them. Vote with the only thing that counts to a web site, your unique visit. Enough people do that and sites will change their ways.

As for the sites you visit whose content you enjoy and who don’t ram monetization down your throat, why not click an ad link now and then? It’s a way for you to show your appreciation for the service the web site is providing. It helps the site make money. It took you about half a second.

The title of this article was purposefully inflammatory so you would read on. I am not about to block Firefox users or tell anyone how to do so. I want every Firefox user out there to hit my web sites. I would also like a few of them to help me make a little money by voluntarily clicking ad links. If no one is seeing my ads I may have to reconsider whether I want to spend my family’s money and take my time away from my family to continue to contribute to the web.

So think about that before running ad blocking software. Instead maybe you should turn it off and just stop visiting the sites you can’t stomach without it.

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Validation Fail

Michael Lankton — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:19:01 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

There are a lot of good reasons to have valid markup on your web sites. In theory, if you use standards compliant code, then your standards compliant web site will work for everyone using a standards compliant web browser.

One of the problems is, the vast majority of us are still using Internet Explorer, which has never seemed to care that much about being in compliance with the established standards. I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, so I’ll just state now and for the record that IE is garbage, and urge those of you using it who have the ability to do so to switch.

Internet Explorer 8, while improved, is still not standards compliant. Come on Windows guys! You lived with a broken operating system for all those years, and now that it’s mostly fixed you are rightfully proud of it. Why defend a broken web browser?

Compatibility you say? What if your favorite web site won’t work in something else?

Here’s the deal. I have never encountered a web site that wouldn’t function in Firefox. I happen to prefer Webkit browsers (Safari, OmniWeb, Chrome), and I have found a few ecommerce sites that made me launch Firefox to use them. In the case of OmniWeb, Omni Group has added the ability to specify per-site preferences, which I think is a great idea. Sometimes just identifying your browser as IE or Firefox to a web site is all it takes.

In any event, if there are web sites out there that won’t work properly in anything but IE you should broadcast to those sites that you support open web standards by not using them until they get their act together. There, sermon over.

Why is there so much bad markup on the web? Probably a combination of apathy and hacking stuff together so that it DOES work in IE. In the case of common content management systems like WordPress and Joomla!, they do generate valid markup. Unfortunately, many of the plugins and extensions we would like to use do not validate without some PHP massaging on your end, and as a result most of the WP and Joomla! sites out there are just as broken as the rest of the web.

If everything else out there is broken should you care? Yes, because if we all cared about whether our sites were valid markup or not then the browser makers would be forced to be standards compliant, eventually resulting in the user experience being the same for everyone regardless of platform or browser. If the site validates and it’s broken in Browser X, it’s Browser X’s fault, not yours.

So while figuring out if I can live without a poll and an ajax search box on my valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional blog so that I can turn it into a valid HTML 5 blog this weekend I became curious. I always include a link to the w3c validator on my pages to proofread my markup for me as I design and change sites. I started checking the validation of some of the most heavliy trafficked and esteemed sites on the web.

Here’s what I found:

Winners

Apple (HTML 5) 6 errors, 1 warning
WordPress (XHTML 1.0 Transitional) 5 errors, 0 warnings
Joomla! (XHTML 1.0 Transitional) 3 errors, 2 warnings
Sony (XHTML 1.0 Transitional) PASSED!
Netflix (HTML 4.01 Transitional) 7 errors, 5 warnings
Mozilla .com and .org (XHTML 1.0 Strict) PASSED!
IBM (XHTML 1.0 Strict) PASSED!
Burger King (XHTML 1.0 Strict) PASSED!
BBC (XHTML 1.0 Strict) PASSED!

The Apathetic Norm

Google (HTML 5) 39 errors, 2 warnings
Wikipedia (HTML 5) 51 errors, 2 warnings
Facebook (XHTML 1.0 Strict) 43 errors, 4 warnings
Yahoo (HTML 4.01 Transitional) 34 errors, 8 warnings
CNN (HTML 4.01 Transitional) 49 errors, 26 warnings
Slashdot (HTML 4.01 Strict) 61 errors, 2 warnings
Twitter (XHTML 1.0 Strict) 71 errors, 0 warnings
Ebay (HTML 4.01 Transitional) 240 errors, 0 warnings
Youtube (HTML 4.01 Transitional) 174 errors, 54 warnings

Losers!

Microsoft (XHTML 1.0 Transitional) 300 errors, 31 warnings
Digg (XHTML 1.0 Transitional) 403 errors, 309 warnings
ESPN (XHTML 1.0 Transitional) 711 errors, 222 warnings
Amazon (HTML 4.01 Transitional) 1058 errors, 71 warnings
CNET (XHTML 1.0 Transitional) 1036 errors, 904 warnings

Kudos to the webmasters responsible to the above sites that passed, especially in the case of the strict validation sites. Strict is no joke, so good job.

Google has 39 errors on the page? Really? I can make a white page with a logo and a search box that validates, you’re telling me Google can’t?

???

Amazon and Cnet. Unbelievable. Someone should get fired for that.

Looking at some of the above examples, you can see from this microcosm of the web that markup in general is not being done with standards compliance in mind. Is it laziness, or is this the result of web designers catering to non-standards compliant browsers?

Whatever the cause, we don’t need to add to this mess. Clean up your code and make sites with valid markup.

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Does Cloaking Still Make Sense?

Joseph Plazo — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 02:08:05 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

Do you cloak? I wouldn’t touch that thing with a ten foot pole.

In a nutshell, cloaking is that blackhat technique whereby sneaky software generates two kinds of webpages on the fly. One page is intended only for human visitors. If a person like Everton or Umar visit, the server displays tastefully laid out pages with useful information . Now, when a google or yahoo bot visits, the software serves up a gobbledygook of code that makes no sense even to one with an IQ of 300- however, the content is highly optimized for keywords. The end result is that you rank highly for those words. That’s the theory.

This entire year, some blackhat friends of mine had been extolling the virtues of some pricy software called Fantomaster which costs $2000+ but which they claim had them dominating the rankings even with relatively new sites. The $2000 was worth it in their opinion.

I visited their sites occasionaly and did notice that they held the top ten keywords despite having a PR of 2 or below. Some words they vied for even were those hotly contested ones pertaining to the financial industry. I was tempted. It took me months to build rankings the white hat way.

Good thing I didn’t yield to temptation.

Fantomaster did the job well for 11 months then Google found them out. Just a few days ago, all their sites (some 30 of they) tanked in PR and ranking. PR dropped to N/A and their traces were stripped from the search engine results. They’re now applying for reconsideration. Good luck with that. I doubt Google will listen. Anything that manipulates search results is a no-no. That’s all the more so when you serve nothing but useless information full of ads. These friends of mine ran Made For Adsense networks that simply regurgitated content populated with adsense. It’s definitely crap… but crap that ranked well.

If you’re tempted to increase rankings the lazy way, go ahead. But don’t blame the vendor of pricy blackhat tools when something bad happens. And it will happen.

Does Cloaking Still Make Sense? is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.

10 Reasons Why Flash Is Better Than Silverlight

Michael Lankton — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:05:58 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

…or, why it’s better to stick with the devil you know.

Please note that within 24 hours of publication of this article I made the response that follows the article. My sources of information on Silverlight were suspect and/or dated, and the points I made regarding Silverlight were full of misinformation. Thanks to all who responded for calling me out when I was as wrong as I was.

With the help of Tim Heuer, Microsoft employee and program manager for Silverlight, I am going to try to undo my mistake, and you will see an interview published here soon where Tim can address some of the issues regarding the benefits of Silverlight vs. other technologies.

I made a mistake, and would love to take this article back, but I am not going to run away from my error. My apologies for violating your trust with a poorly researched piece.

I’m human, and I will do what I can to rectify the mistake.

You know my feelings on this. HTML 5 provides web designers an interface for integrating rich content into their web pages. Why use a proprietary delivery format if you can use simple markup, and be assured that every user with a Mozilla or Webkit based browser will get the same experience?

Now obviously when it comes to games Flash is a mature platform that allows you to create something that plays in a web browser that standard markup wouldn’t let you do. That’s fine. I’m just saying that you have better options for embedding video and audio content into a web page.

Flash IS useful when it accomplishes something that standard markup wouldn’t allow you to do, and it will continue to be useful for the foreseeable future. Now we have Microsoft’s Silverlight, a competing product to Adobe’s Flash. Why should you care?

Well, you shouldn’t.

It’s bad enough having one proprietary plugin that is necessary for web browsing. We should be moving away from plugins and exploiting the intrinsic features of HTML 5.

Adobe Flash is a necessary evil. HTML 5 provides a way to move part of what Flash delivers to the web browser, which is moving in the right direction. Introducing yet another proprietary content delivery method into the web is the wrong direction.

Now that I’ve re-established how I feel about web content that deviates from standard markup and javascript, on to the 10 Reasons Why Flash Is Better Than Silverlight:

Platform compatibility Flash officially supports Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris. Silverlight supports Windows, Mac (only just recently too), and Linux, via Moonlight, an implementation started by the Mono Project, an open source effort to bring .NET frameworks to the linux platform, sponsored by Novell. Linux and Solaris desktops may be an inconsequential segment of the market, but the backbone of your internet runs on linux, BSD and Solaris servers. Exclusion of these platforms narrows your developer audience.
Advantage: Flash
Market penetration Adobe tells us that Flash is on 97% of the web browsers out there, which pretty much jives with the independent numbers I found while researching this article. Microsoft states that Silverlight is on one in four browsers, or 26% market penetration. Not sure about that, as some of the independent studies show it as low as 6%.
Advantage: Flash
64 bit web browser support Adobe has an alpha version of Flash Player 10 for 64 bit linux systems, with the other platforms to come next when it’s done. Microsoft does not support 64 bit web browsers, and hasn’t said anything substantial, other than to remind people that 32 bit Internet Explorer works on 64 bit Windows machines.
Advantage: Flash
Supported image formats Flash supports almost every image format. Silverlight supports png and jpg only.
Advantage: Flash
Package delivery Flash is a compressed format, and is stored and delivered as a single file. Silverlight is not compressed, and it’s component files are stored and delivered individually. However, it’s been pointed out to me that you can store the Silverlight content on the server as a .zip file. As an afterthought. Touche.
Advantage: Flash, barely
Audio Flash’s ActionScript scripting language contains classes for generating and controlling audio. Silverlight does not support audio API’s, so you won’t be writing any audio events for the browser in Silverlight. You can’t even play back a .wav in Silverlight.
Advantage: Flash
Portability Flash files can be turned into Windows applications, and can be played on any host computer who’s operating system can run a standalone Flash player (read, almost all os’es). Silverlight can only be used in a web browser with a Silverlight plugin.
Advantage: Flash
Accessibility Flash contains a nice set of controls for hearing and vision impaired users. Captions, keyboard bindings for audio controls, and screen reader functionality make Flash a better choice for accessibility.
Silverlight gives the ability to switch color schemes. That’s it.

Advantage: Flash
Client-server communication Flash implements the ability to have the client communicate with a remote server. Many useful applications come to mind. Silverlight allows you to do this, but only using .NET, which most internet servers aren’t running, being unix systems.
Advantage: Flash
3D rendering Flash now supports 3D graphics rendering, which opens up a lot of possibilities for Flash game designers. Silverlight does not.
Advantage: Flash

Now, if I wanted to, I could write an article on the 5 Reasons Why Silverlight Is Better Than Flash. The technology is not without merit. However, we already have a proprietary technology for delivering rich web content, and it exists on nearly 100% of the computers hooked up to the internet. Why is it we need a new one?

And why is it you would trust Microsoft to be the supplier? 20 years of Microsoft dominance on the desktop gave us an operating system standard that has an arcane administration interface, a mediocre desktop environment, and made you all accept it’s lack of security and stability as status quo. Because there was no competition, Microsoft was never forced to make a better product, and all you Windows users just had to take what they gave you.

This is who you want to entrust with control of your web standards? Really?

Ok, I’m opinionated. I have a platform to express my opinions, and they are generally backed up with solid experience or data to justify them. I am not always right, and I welcome anyone who disagrees with my thoughts on Microsoft’s Silverlight to begin that discussion in the comments section.

I don’t see the draw to Silverlight, and you better have a better selling point than “It’s Microsoft” if you want to win me over.

The above article is as written. The following in italics is an update dated 21Aug09 that I made in the comments section. Many of you will never read through all the comments, so I am adding it to the article. Please read before making your judgement in the comments section. Thank you.
-Michael Lankton

Obviously with this kind of negative reaction there are some serious issues with the content of my article this week.

I write a 1000 word article for this site, weekly. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, and I can’t be Ars Technica on a given topic with 1000 words.

This kind of reaction would not have occured over an opinion, so obviously my postition was seriously flawed. I apologize. I wrote a “10 things” blog article over a topic I lacked your expertise in, and you exposed my lack of knowledge in the area. This was not my intention, and I genuinely believed in the points I was advancing, but I was mistaken about a great deal it seems.

I will correct this with a properly researched comparison. Until then, please accept my apology for this article. I generally write on topics that I have a firm grasp of, but this week I went out on a limb with minimal research, and it bit me in the ass. I will not delete this article, because I feel that your comments are valid, and frankly I deserve it if I was so wrong in my assertions.

Thanks for straightening me out.

10 Reasons Why Flash Is Better Than Silverlight is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.

Tweet Like A Pro

Joseph Plazo — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 08:53:29 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

Do you remember the time when Blog and Pings helped skyrocket a weblog to success? That was 2004 to 2007. Now, with the abuse of that method, blogging and pinging has lost its power. Try using it. You’ll notice that it barely affects your PR or SERPs at it used to.

Where one SEO technique has faded away, a new method of improving engine visibility has arisen. And that’s through the help of massive web 2.0 site, Twitter.

With twitter, you can easily drive traffic to your site. The social networking site lets it become so easy to get the word out so you can enjoy effortless viral marketing. The rise of twitter led to the rise of dozens of twitter apps. Each one offers features that claim to help online marketers achieve their goals. Of the hundreds of twitter apps, I love only two. Once you try them, so will YOU.

TweetSuite- King of WordPress Tweet Plugins

Tweetsuite is a wordpress twitter plugin that does the work of a handful of twitter plugins. In a nutshell, it accomplishes the following

Server-side (no-JS or remote calls) TweetBacks
ReTweet-This buttons for each TweetBack
A digg-like Tweet-This Button
Automatic Tweeting of new posts
A Most-Tweeted Widget
A Recently-Tweeted Widget
A My-Last-Tweets Widget
A My-Favorited-Tweets Widget

You’ll discover that the integration of this plugin lets you keep n eye out on the twitter landscape and how it pertains to your blog. It affords your users the capability to spread the good word on your gosepel and keep tabs on related posts. Once you install it, I doubt you’d ever take it off. It’s so comprehensive that it ranks up there with the All In One SEO Pack as a must-use wordpress tool.

Twitter Friend Adder

The Twitter Friend Adder, on the other hand is a free application and not a plugin. It runs of XP and Vista. The objective of the Twitter Friend Adder is to amass a great deal of followers to your twitter account. The steps it takes are simple

Input your login details
Input your keyword. The program will scan twitter for people matching that keyword. So if you put in ‘football’, it looks for people who tweeted recently about football or have the word in their profile or nick.
Alternatively, you can input a persons twitter handle. This way, the software app will hunt for all the twitter friends of the target
Set the program to add 100 friends daily. More than that and you may end up finding your account vaporized.
Set the program to pause 2 seconds in between adding. This mitigates screening filters.

Press GO! That’s when the magic begins. Twitter Friend Adder logs in, scans for targets then FOLLOWS the matching targets. By reciprocity, people you follow, may follow you back and et voila! They become your followers.

I’ve experimente with one twitter account and its grown from zero to three hundred in three days. Those are potential eyeballs for ads!

Oh- one caveat- some people the program adds may not be people. They’re bots. Zombies. Twitter marketing androids. Meaning that they may be pure marketing vehicles for other SEO and SEM specialists as well. If you find that some people you added are mere robots, you can unfollow them. They’re useless to your camplaigns because they’ll probably ignore your tweets. Worse, they may even bombard you with advertising tweets!

This program is so good and so handy that I’ve notice people on eBay and DigitalPoint selling clones of the program. The lowest priced one was $19, and the priciest was $97. They promise the moon and stars, vowing that a tidal wave of traffic will come in. Not true. While you can use the Twitter Friend Adder to get the word out, abuse of it by means of blasting nothing but ads will get people annoyed. You’ll be UNFOLLOWED.

My advice? Send marketing spiels once a week. The rest of the week, send em the good stuff. Like what you ate for dinner.

Tweet Like A Pro is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.

How Not To Do SEO For 2009

Joseph Plazo — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:44:26 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

Web start-ups face a daunting task of getting known. As of last count, over a billion pages literally litter the web. That’s a billion competing pieces of informtion swamping yours. Compound that with the short attention span of the average surfer. And the problem of ever shifting viewer loyalties. No wonder many netrepreneurs surrender and pack their bags in less than a month. Have you ever given up in despair?

Startups need web visibility. They crave keyword dominance that lead to online brand equity. This problem becomes a need that lends itself well to “expert SEO services”. So, it’s no wonder that enterprising entrepreneurs have begun launching SEO companies.

I’m confident that you may have received the occasional email to “increase your ranking” or “be the top ten in google”. Visit the webpage behind these emails and you’ll be treated to a glossy website that promises exotic services like directory submission, keyword optimization. Do these make you salivate? Think again. How many of these really make an impact to your online web presence? I’ve been into SEO for almost a decade now, and I’ve realized that many paid services simply do not work. The following are among the poorest SEO tactics you can buy:

Submit to 10000 Directories. Nobody visits the HappyLuckyNine.com directory and its ilk. That goes for human vistors and search engine bots. These sites have negligible impact on your real world visibility and do little for keyword ranking. I find it odd, therefore, that SEOs offer the “premium service” of blasting your site to 10000 directories for a low price of $299.95. Listing in such directories may even be harmful as some search engines consider such sites link farms.
Blog Spamming. Run a blog? Then you must be a master of patience. You probably receive hundreds of comments each day from people called “BuyViagraOnline” and “HoodiaWeightLoss Now”. I don’t know about them, but I’d sue my mom for giving me such a name. But seriously, blog spamming benefits no one. It irritates the blog owner and does zilch for search engine ranking. One reason is that search engines devalue most blog comments. Another is that blogs tend to infuse the NoFollow attribute to comments. Be wary, therefore, when an SEO offers to send your URL to thousands of blogs using an automated software. You’ll end up on the receiving end of very angry email.
Article Submissions. “We send your articles to 1000 article repositories for $99 only.” Is that a good offer? It depends. If it were 2002, that would work to your advantage. Today, that’s no longer the case. Articles can give human readers a reason to visit your site if they like your information. However, it does not have favorable impact on search engine rankings because the engines hate duplicate content. The algorithms used by google filter out copy that look similar to another. If 90 documents look the same, expect that they’ll be consigned to the supplemental search results- or worse- to the sandbox. That means your $99 for thousands of duplicate articles just ended up in smoke.
.Edu Spamming. Some SEOs think that edu domains hold a mystique for the search engines and offer to send your links to .edu blogs. Alternatively, they offer to broker off the sale of your links on .edu sites. This arrangement benefits only the SEO and the edu site that receives your “charity donation”. True, the search engines accord great respect for educational sites- but if it sees an external link to your poker site on Harvard University, it gets suspicious. Nothing screams “paid link” louder than unrelated sites on the footer of educational webs. We all know how worthless paid links are.

Whoops. I think I just eliminated 80% of most paid SEO services. So what else can you buy from them? I’ll cover that in the next article. Meanwhile, hold on to your cash!

How Not To Do SEO For 2009 is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.

Webmastery 101: How To Cut Fat And Build Muscle

Michael Lankton — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:47:40 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

You’ve taken great care to present your website to the internet. You tweaked and fine tuned until you were satisfied that your design and layout showcased your content in the best possible way. Are you done? Do you just sit back now, churn out content and watch the traffic grow? In a word, no.

There’s a lot more going on with your website underneath the hood than the superficial skin the viewing public sees. I am not trying to detract from the importance of quality content and good web design, not by any means. I’m just saying that if you stop there you’re not giving your site the full attention it deserves to be successful.

Equally, if not more, important than the impression you make on your readers is the impression you make on the countless spiders that will crawl your site. Machines don’t care about your tasteful design or your thoughtful, well-written content. If you’re serious about your site’s success, you need to spend some time making sure that Google thinks as highly of you as your readers do. Otherwise, the task of building that readership will be a much steeper hill to climb. Great content is first and foremost, but great content that no one sees isn’t going to get you or your site anywhere.

You’re thinking “Geez, I just want to blog. I don’t know anything about html and all that under the hood junk.”. Don’t worry. You don’t need to be fluent in PHP to do some fine tuning that makes your site more legible to bots and gives your content it’s best shot with the search engines.

Here are a few things that won’t take a lot of time, will make your site cleaner and more legible for the bots, and with any luck, just may improve your SERPS:

Use robots.txt to trim fat In the public html directory of your website there is a file named robots.txt. This includes a list of directories within your website’s ownership that should not be crawled by the spiders. Got a directory named downloads full of files that your content links to? How about your template directory? Got a test installation of some CMS you were wanting to try? You don’t need that stuff included in the Google search results. It brings no value to your site, dilutes your content in the eyes of the search engines and gums up your search results with crap that no one needs.
Here’s a sample robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /downloads/

Got a directory you want excluded? Just add another Disallow line. The goal here is to have the briefest, cleanest listing with a search engine that you can achieve. You want the emphasis on your site to be the content, not the arcane hierarchy of directories contained by your CMS.
Put your sitemap on a diet The tendency is to think that the bigger your sitemap, the better, as Google is going to have more of your pages indexed. Bzzzzzzt! Wrong. You want the emphasis to be on your content, not how many superfluous pages your site generates. Trust me, 150 strong entries in a sitemap will make a bigger splash than a bloated 500 link sitemap. Include the links for all of your articles, but DO NOT include the links for all your category pages.
Example:

YES
www.yoursitehere.com/seo/your-great-article

NO
www.yoursitehere.com/seo/8

On top of that, category pages are constantly changing as you add content. You don’t want that surfer to go to the second example looking for that article, because now it’s on page 10, and most people will just bounce instead of looking for the content.
SEF urls Search engine friendly if you were wondering, but more sensible to humans too. A slight detour, as this is human-related and not an issue for spiders. If you’re using WordPress, and a lot of you are, the default SEF url generation adds the article date to your SEF urls. Like this article, www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2009/02/24/webmastery-101-cut-fat-build-muscle/. My only cause for concern with this naming scheme is that you may lose some readers on older material. If I am a surfer looking to read about a given subject, as I scan the search engine results I may or may not notice the date on your article. I do when I’m surfing. If that article is a year old, I may fly past you down to the next results because I am looking for something more current. Maybe, maybe not. Why give people a chance to bail? That is one potential affiliate or Adsense conversion lost. I don’t think having the publishing date in the article url is a positive, and it may very well be a negative.

Fix all your broken links Use a third party service like LinkTiger to scan your site for broken links. You wouldn’t drive a car with a dead spark plug, don’t let your site fill up with broken links. Google and surfers will both find them, and it doesn’t make your site look good to either.

Valid HTML and CSS Does anyone really notice if you’ve taken the time to eliminate all the errors and warnings in your site’s code? Yes, they do. People and spiders both. Not because they’re so impressed with your leet web skillz, but because everything is going to work for them. As in life, sometimes you win by not drawing attention to yourself. Use the validators at W3C to check your pages. Checking verbose output and source include will show you where your problems are, and with a little digging in the PHP files for your particular template a lot of these simple errors can be resolved. Not up to it? Not the end of the world. Try anyway. You just may learn something about HTML and your CMS in the process.

These tips aren’t going to quadruple your RSS subscribers or Adsense revenue. Not by themselves. They are, however, important facets of your site’s success, just like content, design and monetization. It’s the little things like this that can distinguish the great from the good.

Scrape around under the hood a little. I bet you’ll find some unsightly flab you weren’t aware of. Time to cut some fat and get lean.

Webmastery 101: How To Cut Fat And Build Muscle is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.

How To Get Free High PR Links

Joseph Plazo — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 08:08:48 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

Many professional SEOs don’t give a damn about PR anymore, but that still leaves a big chunk of the web community pining for higher PR. Here’s a tried and tested way to get solid PR backlinks without having to pay for it. You’ll obtain:

a backlink on a highly ranked page
using your anchor text
in just a minute of your time

Ready to start? Great!

First, grab a copy of Mozilla Firefox. Install the plugins which help you view ranking factors in real time (PR, Alexa, backlinks, etc). My favorite is SEOQuake . An alternative would be SEO For Firefox .Keep them activated and you’ll see webstats for every site you visit. Just don’t run them while doing shadey SEO or the engines may keep tabs on your activity.
Start searching for forums that use PhpBB or vBulletin Forums. Choose a heavyweight forum from the list that comes up. Examples would be digitalpoint, sitepoint or warriorforum. Initiate a site: search on the forum. Eventually you’ll find internal threads with PR5 onwards- SEOQuake will inform you which is which. DigitalPoint in particular carries old threads, some of which are just a page long and boast a PR5-PR7.
Sign up for the forum and go straight to the internal thread with at least PR5. Leave a relevant post in the thread. This is a critical step. Leaving trash like “Nice thread” or “Great idea, I’ll try that” will get you castrated by the moderator. Contribute , contribute contribute!
Repeat steps 2 to 3 on as many other forums as you can. Keep tabs on your forum details.
Wait a week then sign back on and edit your posts by adding your links to each post. Woah! Now you have backlinks to your sites with chosen anchor text! Don’t add the links on the first time you make the posts. Chances are someone would notice and flag your account.
Wait till your PR rises. Give it 3 months for an update. On experience, it takes 5 PR backlinks from different domains with no other outgoing links to raise a PR0 site to PR4.

Ready to revive the PR insanity?

How To Get Free High PR Links is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.

Add Digg Labs Products as a Screensaver

T.J. Mininday — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 06:54:38 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

I still love Digg. Although not as much as I used to, when it was almost strictly technology based, I probably still frequent it, much more then any other website on the net. It still has the ability to bring almost each and every top story of the day, and do it before much of the rest of ‘mainstream media’.

One thing that Kevin Rose and company added during the growth to internet fame, was Digg Labs. A behind the scenes look at what is being dugg in real time, in a few various forms(Screenshots Below).

Well, for a while now, it hasn’t been publicized that much, but you can add each of these extremely innovative flash based products as a Windows or MAC screen saver. On each of the Digg Labs items, you will see screensaver download in the upper right-hand corner. Simply download the item for your respective operating system and run through the quick and easy installation.

Digg Labs – Big Spy

Digg Labs – Arc

Add Digg Labs Products as a Screensaver is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.

What’s coming with WordPress 2.7?

T.J. Mininday — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 06:15:03 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

After my long hiatus from blogging, one of the most exciting items I was looking forward to seeing was the upgrade of WordPress from the lower versions of 2.0, up to the substantially different 2.6.2. Competely revamped interface, tag additions, theme preview, plug-in upgrades, on and on. They really have come a long way and have one of the most incredibly solid open source products on the market. It really is one of the most incredibly easy to use, modifiable blogging platforms on the market.

Well, word has it, the next version of WordPress, is 2.7 and word has it, that it’s release date is in or around November 10th. Here is what we have to look forward to:

New admin UI based on the crazyhorse experimental UI branch with new menus and navigation
New edit post page that allows dragging and dropping of meta boxes. Boxes can be expanded and collapsed as before and now also completely hidden.
Ability to hide columns on the content index pages
Inline editing of posts and pages on the content index pages
Comments XMLRPC API (Who wants comment moderation on the iPhone? Me.)
Reply to comments from the admin
Keyboard hot keys for managing comments
Threaded Comments and new wp_list_comments() API
Sticky Posts
Automatic plugin install and integrated plugin browser
Automatic upgrade of WordPress
HTTPOnly auth cookies
New HTTP request API
A new SSH2 filesystem abstraction for updates and installs over sftp

Feature list found via WPHacks.com

What isn’t to like with some of these features…you have to love built in Upgrading, Reply to comments, threaded comments, and plug-in installation. Those are some of the big ones that I have my eye on. What about you? What do you like and what would you like to see in 2.8 or 3.0???

What’s coming with WordPress 2.7? is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.

Ugly Sites Make Loads of Adsense Income

Joseph Plazo — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:36:52 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

If you’re a blogger living off Adsense, chances are you’ve tweaked everything from ad colors, placements and sizes. You experimented with heatmaps, placed icons next to ads and even bought Joel Comm’s overpriced adsense books. But yet, your ads just don’t seem to reap the revenues you lust for.

I share your pain. My idea of the ideal adsense site is one that makes a thousand smackers a day. I don’t hit that.

say that A typical gadget/business site of mine made about $100 a day in adsense. I used the standard blogger’s format that embeds the ads inline flush to the left. It looks like this:

The ads are well blended and don’t annoy the user. It occasionally compels a few clicks and plunks $100 a day into the ole bank account. It definitely won’t land me in the fortune 500.

Then sometime mid this year, a happy accident occured. I was editing the adsense code of my site and my ads ended up showing this way:

Look at the page. It’s ugly, isn’t it? The page begins with the Heading or Title, then followed by my boxed ads. The body text don’t wrap around the ad, but goes way below, after the ads. Looks like crap, right?

I didn’t notice that my posts were appearing this way for some two or three days… that is, until I checked my adsense stats.

WOAH. Those past three days, I actually made $200 to $250 off the same site instead of $100.

Ugliness made people click!

Hmmm… I surmise it may have been for the following reasons:

1) People thought the ads lead to the main article, without seeing the following text (perhaps they used tiny eeePCs) and hurriedly clicked the ads to go to “the next page”

2) People hated the layout and wanted to escape the ugliness and clicked on the first thing they saw to escape the site.

After a few days of consistently making over $150 to $250 a day, I reverted the site back to the old layout because the high paying layout simply looked unprofessional. My earnings dropped back to lower than $150.

Seems ugliness pays….

What do you think?

Ugly Sites Make Loads of Adsense Income is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.

Validate The XHTML For A Whole Site In One Click

Everton — Sat, 24 May 2008 08:30:32 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

I got an email this morning from Shahar telling me about a XHTML tool that he’s released that I’m sure will prove very popular. Shahar has written a XHMTL validation tool that validates a whole site in one click, rather than a page at a time like other tools. This is fantastic as one thing that stops me validating my complete site is the time it takes to validate each page.

Why XHTML Validate?

Validating your pages is very important:

It Helps Resolve Cross-Browser, Cross-Platform And Future Compatibility Issues – if your code validates more users than not will see your pages as intended
Search Engine Visibility – if your pages are well formed then it is easier for spiders to index all your pages i.e. understand them

Using the XHTML tool is very easy. All you have to do is download the tool and install it as it is not browser-based. Then enter your url for your sitemap (usually http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml) and let the tool work it’s magic. This might take a while if you have a big site e.g. for Connected Internet there are 3965 pages to check.

For any invalid pages that are discovered, you just click on the arrow next to the url and it will display the errors for that page. If you hover over each individual error more details are displayed that can aid debugging.

I think this is a brilliant tool and I’m going to add running my sites through this to my monthly blog housekeeping.

More: XHTML Site Validation Tool

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Speedup Your Website With HTML Optimizer Pro

Everton — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:27:02 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

I normally don’t buy applications like HTML Optimizer Pro, but I’ve been very impressed with the reductions it has made to the size of the files in my new theme, making my pages load even faster. In a broadband world you may question the need for products like HTML Optimizer Pro, but if you have heavy pages like me then they can still be worthwhile.

What HMTL Optimizer does is run through your HTML and script code to make it lighter and slimmer, without corrupting the raw code. To use the tool all you have to do is download a copy of your site or theme and run it through the optimiser, which then outputs the optimised files in a new folder so that you still have the original files. It also optimizes JPEG and PNG images, which can cut the image sizes by up to 50%.

The whole process took about 2 seconds to run on my PC and you can see the results above. As you can see the optimiser reduces many big elements by nearly 20%, which is significant. although this won’t necessarily by itself mean you will save 20% on your bandwidth bill or that your pages will load 20% faster, it’s definitely going to help.

The normal version costs $20 and the pro (image support) costs $33. It’s not a lot of money, but their is a free trial that allows you to use the tool for 30 days. It is limited as it will only optimize 50% of the files if you want to scan a whole folder at a time. But if you are really patient and only have a WordPress theme to optimise (20-30 files on average), then you can load each file one at a time to get them optimised to get around this limitation

More: HTML Optimizer

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Sexy New Theme For The Site!!!

Everton — Fri, 16 May 2008 01:00:22 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

It’s been a long time coming, and after recruiting two designers, but I’ve finally settled on a WordPress theme I like. This theme is by far the easiest I’ve ever used, especially when you consider how much functionality it has. It’s so easy to use that it only took me a few hours to get it to the state it’s in so far, which I’m sure you’ll all agree is a major improvement over the old theme.

There are a few bugs to iron out and once I’ve done those I’m going to start on the more complex items. I’ll do a more detailed post highlighting what’s new but for now I need to go to bed as I’m exhausted!!

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How To Whip The Competition In Organic Search Results

Joseph Plazo — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:08:20 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

You know what organic search results are, right? That’s the listing that comes up when a user types in some keywords into google’s search box. It differs from PPC campaigns, such as the intrusive adword ads you see in the sidebar.

Middle last year, I’ve been experimenting with ways to increase clicks on my organic results. This included

- Using startling headlines in the Title Tage

- Using benefit statements in the metatags

- Using directives and imperatives to visit in the body text.

They worked well- but then I discovered something far more powerful by April of 2007. Okay, to begin with, I already rank in the top five for many critical keywords for some of my sites. Key in “maximum persuasion” and you’ll see that one of my sites is number 2. But you know what? Since I’ve applied a special technique, my google organic traffic exploded.

My trick is simple. Use all caps in the Title and Meta Tags.

Check out the organic result in google for “maximum persuasion” Which of the two links invite more clicks?

The first one: http://www.maxpersuasion.com/ or the second one: http://www.xtrememind.com/

Chances are you’d say the second. Not just because I used startling headlines, but also because my text is in all caps.

I’ve measured this quantitatively as well. Weblogs indicate spikes of traffic 3x what it used to be since I implemented the change. Perhaps you want to whip the competition as well? Modify your sites with this recommendation. Let’s see if you can handle the traffic.

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10 Insane Ways To Build Links

Joseph Plazo — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:09:22 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

Are you white hat or black hat? White hat SEOs build inbound links at a steady pace and focus on quality, rather than quantity. Black hat SEOs take the opposite route and funnel in as many links as possible in a bid to create brand awareness.

They don’t care if their activities yield poor quality networks and sometimes offend other webmasters in the process. Are you guilty of the following poor link building procedures?

Directory Spamming

1. Blast your site to 10000 cheesy paid-inclusion directories (rating $5 a pop) that send a whopping zero traffic.

Forum Spamming

2. Rattle off 500 URLs in your sig file. It screams “I’m desperate”

3. Post only when you can add links to your sites in the post area. Doofuses kept sending viagra URLs to my radionics forum that I implemented rules preventing urls until 50 SENSIBLE posts were made.

4. Fire off “me too” posts to amass your post count. It gets worse when you accompany each bit of nonesense with a link-rich signature file.

5. Create a phoney debate on the best [GREATGADGET], where [GREATGADGET] is an cool doodad that you sell. Then, you intelligently use the same IP address create another forum account and banter back, raving about how ubercool your own site is.

6. Create 20 accounts per day at new forums asking people the same question about viagra even at AIDS Awareness websites. Of course, you don’t forget to post your 500URL sig file.

7. Revive forum threads that ended a decade ago just to plug link to your semi-related website on cialis.

Blog Spam

8. Judiciously signing blog comments with spammy keywords. It’s okay to sign up as Sex God or SEO Dude. That’s cool. But when you sign as “Cialis Viagra Levitra Wholesale”, I reach for the shotgun.

9. Commenting how your secret eBook marketing methods made you 500Million a year- on the FeedNigeria charity blog.

10. Creating a 10,000-strong blog empire all on the same webhost/IP using RSS2Blog and linking them to your mainsite. You can almost hear the google engineers cackling before they push the button that tanks your pagerank

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WordPress Blog And Server Optimisation Masterclass: Introduction

Everton — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 09:31:47 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

I’ve been blogging for nearly 3 years now and this site has gone from a handful of page impressions and dollars per day to around 600k page impressions and $15k per month. In that time I’ve moved hosts a few times, moved from shared hosting to a dedicated server, changed blogging platforms, tried numerous plugins and ad schemes, and the net effect of all my fiddling has been to slow this site down to almost a crawl.

I got tired of being embarrassed about having the slowest site on the block, so I’ve enlisted the help of a server expert who is making a number of changes to my server and theme to optimise my WordPress site to make it faster and also more secure. I’ve asked Chris to keep notes of all the changes he makes so that I can share them with readers in a series of WordPress Masterclass posts, so that you can all benefit from his work.

If you haven’t already subscribed to this site’s RSS feed I’d do so now, as I think these are going to be great set of posts. He’s only been working for a few hours so far, and regular readers can already see the amazing improvements he’s made already. I can’t wait to see how fast he can make my WordPress blog and server.

I’ve also recruited a designer who is working on the next generation of my Eureka theme to make it sleeker, sexier and faster. The mockups he’s produced so far are much closer to the picture I had in my head for how I wanted the site to look, and I think readers will be pleased. It will also be a lot lighter than the current theme, which again should help with site loading times.

Look out for a Eureka theme update and release in the near future!

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4 Exceptional Commercial WordPress Themes

Michael Lankton — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 19:21:21 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

WordPress has not enjoyed a large community of commercial theme designers. You can’t swing a dead cat on the internet without hitting a free WordPress theme, and most of the successful bloggers who do use a commercial theme paid for a one-off design, or had one made for them gratis. More and more CMS style WordPress themes are starting to show up, the majority of them are commercial.

Why pay for a theme when there are so many free ones? Why pay for a theme that someone else can purchase and use? I’ll tell you why after the jump…

There are an awful lot of commercial themes out there that look no different or better than most free themes, and offer no functionality that can’t be had in a free theme. Forget about them.

The newspaper and magazine style layout is one area where you are getting more for your money, because they allow WordPress site designers to do things with their content that a two or three column traditional blog design won’t do. I took a look around to see what was happening with WordPress CMS style theme design, and while there still aren’t an overwhelming number of options, a few are popping up. I submit the following as 4 Exceptional Commercial WordPress Themes:

Revolution Tech
Brian Gardner’s Revolution newspaper theme made a big splash when it came out, and he has branched it out into a couple of magazine style layouts. The latest variant, Revolution Tech makes this list. Very clean and readable, with a good layout for adding the touches that seem to disappear in a sidebar. It’s $79.95 for a single website license, which also gains you free updates and access to the support forum.
BlackMaster
Jesse Lee’s Blackmaster theme is an Ajax powered theme with nice javascript based menus, content sliders and Ajax comments, so no page reload is necessary. The color scheme is going to be dark for most, but it’s nothing a little CSS and Photoshop won’t fix. This theme is $58.80 and support is via a usenet group.
Shifter
The Shifter theme is the first WordPress theme I saw and thought wasn’t readily recognizable as being a WordPress theme. This is a nice theme. Shifter contains 13 module positions, so content and advertising options are much more CMS-like than WordPress-like. This is a very flexible theme that is skinnable for different looks, and your Shifter site will look like a million bucks without you having to be a design genius. This theme is $79.95 for a single user/unlimited website license, and that’s a bargain.
Essence
The guys at Rockin Themes launched their new iThemes site, and Essence is the first theme they are offering through it, and a spectacular first effort it is. The Essence theme allows for a handful of color schemes, and utilizes a responsive CSS top menu navigation. Very clean. The Essence theme is $99.95 for a single website license.

WordPress themes and theme designers are starting to compensate for WordPress’ limited layout possibilities, and some very creative themes are starting to pop up. If you have big aspirations for your site, less than $100 for a look that will set you apart and above the competition isn’t such a big price to pay. I think these four themes are a step in the right direction. Give these themes a glance, and keep an eye peeled on the WordPress design community this year. This is just the beginning of a new wave of WordPress theme design. Your options for showcasing your content are about to expand dramatically, are you ready?

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Use Any Font On Your Site With sIFR

Kline — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 01:51:44 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

Most blogs/websites whenever they want to have some fancy text for headlines/nav usually resort to using an image. This becomes a burden whenever you want to change things, and isn’t as good for SEO as plain old text. Enter sIFR, a javascript method for using *any* font on a webpage with little to no work. And it degrades well! Follow along on a full example.

I’m sure many of you are familiar already with sIFR, but this is for those of you that have not heard of it, or were skeptical about how hard it would be to implement.

Let’s look at what you can do with it. An example page is set up here that shows fonts being used. Theres no images on the page. Turn off JS and see that it still works fine.

First, head down and grab the latest release. Unzip it and make sure the demo html works ok. 2.0.5 is most current, fixing a problem with the latest version of flash.

We need to generate sIFR SWFs which are flash versions of a TTF font. So, choose which fonts you want, open sifr.fla in flash, double click on the big invisible box, select your font, and export it. That’s it.

What, you don’t have a copy of flash? That seems to be what gets most people. Luckily, theres an alternative to using flash. Check out sIFR Maker that converts TTF to sIFR SWF on a windows command line without needing flash.

Now, import the CSS and JS files into the header of your blog/webpage.

Next, in the header, add a JS code block and insert the following lines

sIFR.setup();
sIFR.replaceElement(named({sSelector:"{CSS SELECTOR TO SIFR}",

sFlashSrc:"{PATH TO sIFR SWF}", sColor:"#333333", sLinkColor:"#333333",

sBgColor:"#ffffff", sWmode:"transparent", sHoverColor:"#333333", nPaddingTop:2,

nPaddingBottom:2, sFlashVars:"textalign=left&offsetTop=0"}));

You can add as many of the second line as you want to cover all your CSS selectors or different fonts you may wish to use. Also feel free to edit any of the above parameters to suit your design (color, etc).Â Most of them are optional

You can read a more in depth tutorial on setting it up here.

sIFR fonts can help your site be SEO friendly, easy to maintain (no more making new graphics when you need a new nav icon), all while keeping whatever typography you choose.

Remember to use it sparingly (only on headlines, etc), and to choose an HTML font that complements your new headers.

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Joomla! 1.5 Stable Released

Michael Lankton — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:45:24 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

Two and a half years of development came to fruition today, when it was announced that Joomla! 1.5 Stable was made available for download.

Joomla! 1.5 is a major rewrite of the core Joomla! codebase, which was forked from Mambo on August 17, 2005. Joomla! 1.0.x retained a great measure of compatibility with Mambo, but Joomla! 1.5 will change all that as numerous internal changes were made to the Joomla! codebase. In fact, Joomla! 1.5 is not backwards compatible with Joomla! 1.0.x. Joomla! 1.5 is the future of Joomla!, and provided there is a 1.5 version of your template or a 1.5 template you’ve been thinking about, now is the time to think about getting off the fence and upgrading. It won’t be long before developer support and extensions for the legacy 1.0.x branch dwindle to nothing. Good luck on the migration, as while a tool has been made available to assist Joomla 1.0.x users, the process appears arcane and may require a lot of hand-repopulating of your new Joomla! 1.5 site. Don’t forget that you need to use Joomla! 1.5 compatible templates, as the structure of Joomla! generated content has changed dramatically.

Joomla!, despite all the bad-mouthing it gets here on Connected Internet from Joey, is a great CMS. It’s developer community is overshadowed only by WordPress, and there are some incredibly talented designers making templates for Joomla!. If you are ever putting a site together that you feel WordPress may not be the best solution for, I encourage you to take a hard look at Joomla!.

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You Got Duplicate Content!

Joseph Plazo — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 11:17:46 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

Google isn’t indexing your WordPress blog!

And it could all be because of the duplicate content problem. Wait. But you know you have unique content… right? Write the best articles all you want, but the default WordPress coding structure tends to be un-search engine-friendly- quite like the Joomla core. Observe how the archives, categories, built in search, and menuing helps allow navigation, and yet feature little unique content at all. Fire up your blog. Check out the pages that bristle with duplicate excerpts of the complete posts in chronological order. There you go. There’s your duplicate – and it looks hideous to Google. These extra pages with stale content repeated incessantly weaken those unqiue pages on the site: the articles.

Fortunately, there’s a cure. I stumbled across a cool plugin at Seologs.com that provides a snap-on solution for you. Visit this generous download link and install the plugin. It’s as simple as ftping it into the plugin directory and activating it from the control panel.

The plugin works magic. What it does is to instruct the search engine spiders not to index pages with duplicate content by adding noindex meta tags. Headers are insinuated with conditional tags to check for page type, and adding the noindex tag when needed. Voila! No duplicate content.

Enjoy!

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W3C Publishes First Public Working Draft Of HTML 5

Michael Lankton — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:45:55 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

Yesterday the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) published the first public working draft for the next revision of the HTML standard, HTML 5.

HTML 5 is backwards compatible with HTML 4 and XHTML 1, but will no longer support some of the SGML elements of HTML 4. In addition to HTML syntax, HTML 5 will support XML syntax. The changes are numerous, but of particular interest are some of the attributes that have been eliminated altogether. Particularly affected will be those that are using nested tables in their design.

The first public working draft for HTML 4 was announced on July 8, 1997, making yesterday’s announcement the first move toward a major revision change in almost 11 years. HTML 5 is still down the road a bit, but using strict HTML and XHTML markup now will help you make an easier transition when the HTML 5 standard is final.

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Be The Master of Your Social Network

Joseph Plazo — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 18:44:42 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

Being a member of Facebook, Myspace and Linked In can be fun… but hey the novelty eventually wears off. Besides, why be a mere member when you can build your own online community for professional, cash-chugging purposes. A social network easily becomes a vehicle for any marketing, advertising or linking endeavor. Want to have your own for a pittance?

Believe it or not, you can quickly establish a social network complete with RSS feeds, member profiles, discussion forums and dating apps. Visit Ning.com or Nexo. It costs nothing to start building the rudimentary site. The only time you’ll upgrade is when your network expands to over a few thousand members or when you want to strike out those annoying ads popping all over.

Mosey over to Ning.com. Yep, load it on a new page right now. You’ll agree with me that it simply has among the best design tools for forging a snazzy social network. Want to organize the main page? Simply drag a text box, form handle or forum widget into the layout window. Satisfied? Move on to choosing colors, fonts, background jpegs. Juggle them a bit to suit the site’s temperament then save. Now you’ll want to invite the first close friends to sweeten the pot (hey, who’d join a network with zero members?). Simply fire up the import client and addresses from Gmail, MSN, hotmail, Aol, Yahoo and any other web mail service are processed for invites. They’ll sign up in seconds- especially if Jessica Alba graces the front page of your site.

I kid you not- give it a day and your finalized site will shine like a gem. Even better than clunky Myspace’.

An alternative to Ning is Nexo. It offers a superb site builder a tad simpler than Ning’s. Simply select templates from a wizard or begin from scratch. Insert a few dozen modules including the feeds, polls, images and discussion groups. Presto: another Myspace clone!

You’d want to try Nexo if pressed for time. For instance, you just snagged a hot date in 7 hours and want to impress her by owning a MyFace.com site before meeting up. Nexo can get you something flashy enough in less than an hour.

Ready to master your social network?

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ColorblindS WordPress Theme

Michael Lankton — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 02:17:56 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

While content is king, most of us give quite a bit of thought to our presentation. After all, the look of our web site is a big part of establishing our brand, and we also want a design that is optimized for readers, crawlers and advertisement.

Early on when I was still using WordPress it really bothered me every time I stumbled upon a web site that was using the same theme I was. I hadn’t been using WordPress for very long, and while I was fairly good at knocking out XHTML and CSS, I wasn’t capable of building my own WordPress theme yet. I discovered Yvo Schaap’s excellent WordPress Theme Generator, and after playing with it for a bit decided I could produce a presentable enough starting point to make a theme out of. I liked the idea that I wouldn’t see any dopplegangers of my site while I was out surfing.

The resulting theme was serviceable enough, and I was pleased with the idea that it was mine and mine alone.

However, even after playing with the stylesheet the theme produced by the theme generator was very basic and perhaps a little dated looking. After my initial satisfaction with it wore off, I was compelled to come up with something that represented myself and my site a little better.

I had been using black text on white, but had always been attracted to dark designs. The problem with dark designs is that they are, more often than not, hard to read, and, more often than not, look like some angst-ridden teenager’s MySpace page. I started playing around with Photoshop to see if I could come up with something that was visually appealing, yet wouldn’t repel readers.

The resulting work produced the theme Colorblind and it’s successor ColorblindS (colorblinds, not colorblind s), which I would use until I abandoned WordPress for Joomla. I always felt the theme was kind of neat, although a little limited in it’s appeal due to the dark scheme. It uses transparency in the header graphic and in the content windows, and looks pretty sharp, as dark blog themes go. Instead of just leaving it in the broom closet for eternity, I thought I would dust it off and offer it to anyone who liked it.

I ended up adapting the theme to utilize a suckerfish-style top menu, courtesy of Stu Nicholls. The menu is 100% CSS and XHTML, so it is fast, resource-light and browser-friendly. It allows you to have as much or as little navigation as you can imagine. It will accommodate top level links to static pages, or you can set it up to have as many levels of navigation as you need. I have left the sample menu intact so you can look at the XHTML in header.php to see how it works before modifying it to suit your needs.

This theme is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. I have changed the content type from application/xhtml+xml to text/html for maximum compatibility with advertising scripts. You may consider changing the DOCTYPE from XHTML 1.0 Strict to XHTML 1.0 Transitional if you use a lot of plugins, as unfortunately, there are a lot of tag-soup WordPress plugins out there that break strict validation. The CSS is a mixed bag. My stylesheet validates, but there is a Yahoo stylesheet that is used for the sidebar navigation, and it produces errors. However, the theme does display properly in all major web browsers. The theme uses transparent PNGs, and the Internet Explorer PNG fix script is already in the header.php so you don’t need to do anything to ensure that IE users see the theme properly.

ColorblindS Theme For WordPress

Demo ColorblindS Theme

Download ColorblindS Theme

Note that this demo install is not set up very well and navigation is limited. This install was created just so I could dust off the theme and ensure that it was set up properly for someone else to modify it for their own use.

This is a basic, no-frills theme that is easy to manipulate into doing what you want it to. It won’t make anyone’s top ten list, but it was a lot of fun to make and I didn’t want to see the work go to waste. Aspiring WordPress theme designers who are so inclined may pick up where I left off and give the windows rounded corners, change the color scheme and add drop shadows, etc..

I encourage all WordPress users to be more hands-on with their themes. The lessons you learn about XHTML, CSS, and getting both to validate will serve you well whatever you end up working on in the future.

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5 Professional-looking Free WordPress Themes

Michael Lankton — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:40:20 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

Great content can lose momentum if it’s wrapped in a brown paper bag. Your site design impacts content layout, advertising space and most importantly, it influences how your readers perceive what you have to offer.

There are no shortage of bad looking WordPress themes. Many times I will pass by a site without really scratching the surface because my initial impression is that it is just another generic, poorly designed WordPress blog.

Here are 5 Professional-looking Free WordPress Themes that I feel stand out from the crowd. These free themes will have your site looking like you paid someone to design it. It’ll be our secret that they didn’t cost you a thing.

1. Digg 3 Columns 1.0.1

The Digg 3 Columns theme is very nicely done. Rounded window corners, tabbed top level navigation and a clean layout. Could use a footer box to match the header and content body, but this is a nice theme nonetheless. In fact, this is one of the nicest WordPress themes I’ve seen.

2. Black Fresh 1.0

The Black Fresh theme is clean like the crisp, white shirt of WordPress Themes. Stark and clinical, the Black Fresh theme offers a fairly two dimensional presentation. It sports a large footer section for navigation, advertising and widget options. The default blockquote font color is too pale, but such things are easily fixed.

3. The New Order Theme

This is another theme that is really a cut above as far as WordPress theme design goes. Rounded window corners, great stylesheet with a color scheme that is professional and easy on the eye, but not one bit boring.

4. gHacks Theme

The gHacks theme has a nice, high contrast color scheme that makes things stand out without causing eye strain. The comments bar is attractive and does a good job letting the reader know they’re leaving the article they just browsed, but it’s a lot of real estate for just a comment balloon. It would be a good place to list the category, or better yet, related articles to give interested readers somewhere to go.

5. Illacrimo Theme

Very sharp, very professional looking theme. Will help give the impression that a team of designers, writers and editors are involved in producing your site.

Feel free to comment with any themes you think should be on this list. In a sea of bad designs and clones of the successful ones, good design stands out.

5 Professional-looking Free WordPress Themes is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.

Design And Monetization

Michael Lankton — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:56:53 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

Good design draws a reader in instead of repelling them. Good design makes your web site appear more credible. Design is secondary to content, but it’s an important cornerstone of your web site’s foundation. Since design is subjective, mastering the design that works for your web site is a task you will never really consider completed. There is always room for improvement, and experimenting is the only way to wade through the hits and misses to arrive at the elements you want to keep.

Think of your website’s monetization as being part of your design. You should. Those ads are eating up real estate on your pages. People see them. Thinking of your web site’s monetization as an aspect of your design is important, regardless of whether the herd has already hit your site or whether you are still building traffic. Bad monetization can set back the hard work you’ve put into the rest of your design and keep your web site from generating the income it is capable of producing.

Your web site should be designed with monetization in mind, so that you can produce some income from your pages without your readers feeling like you are cramming ads down their throats. On WordPress this means having headers, footers and sidebars that are optimized for placing ad content. On one of the popular CMS solutions this means having enough module positions in your template for flexibility in ad placement and display.
Make an effort to have the ads you place on your web site be relevant to whatever your content is, if possible. Some niches are harder to pair with products, some are easy. Nobody is going to click ads for nutritional supplements on your World of Warcraft blog.
Pursue private sponsors that are perfect for your web site. The ads are perfect for your reader. Your web site is perfect for their targeted traffic. Private ads usually look an order of magnitude better than pay per click ads. Private ads mean guaranteed money every month. You may end up developing important relationships with your sponsors that will benefit you down the road. They may give you a crack at reviewing their hot new product, or better yet, may send you one gratis.
Don’t monetize too early? Look, if you have a design and more than a page or two of content, go ahead. It may not produce, but it won’t kill you to try. You won’t make much money, but you’ll get some experience with placement, design and different ad providers.
Don’t overmonetize? Boy, this is really subjective. We have different opinions on what “too much” means. Just don’t let your content or your design suffer because of your monetization. I’ll use the example of the blog I found who had a PayPerPost affiliate banner in between every_single_piece_of_content on his site. Too much.
Ad positioning. Some locations pay, some don’t. In my experience the sidebars don’t get too many clicks, which is too bad because it’s a nice place to put ads that doesn’t interfere with your content. Same goes for the footer. Above the content is by far the best. Immediately below the content is good (It gives the reader somewhere to go). As far as ads within content goes, this can be the most successful strategy of all. The caveats are A) don’t annoy your readers and B) don’t pursue monetization at the expense of your content. Undermine that and the ad revenue will surely go south. Your article should still flow, and if you place your ads the same way you place images, it will. Don’t let your content be overtaken by your attempt to produce some income.
Since more often than not you are not the one designing the ads you will place, in many instances you will still have some degree of control over how they display on your page. A good rule of thumb with pay-per-click ads is to either A) make them blend into your pages or B) really make them stand out. I have always gone with strategy A and felt that my ppc ads performed as well as can be expected.
Advertisers don’t care if your web site validates or not. If you do, you better check your XHTML validation on the pages you have placed ads on. Many advertisers have sloppy code in their ads that will break your XHTML. A common culprit is use of a ‘language’ declaration in javascript. XHTML doesn’t allow it. Remove the offending snippet from the code and replace with type=”text/javascript” and you’ll be alright. Generally you can make someone else’s ad code validate, but there are cases where it’s just plain broken. If someone can’t be bothered to make ads that will validate, I can’t be bothered to publish them on my web site.
If you’ve read any of my articles on Connected Internet, then you know that I am not a fan of text link ads. They offer very good money for very little space. They will almost never give you something that is relevant to your niche, which is my first issue with them. My second and overwhelmingly strong issue with text link ads is that they will hurt your web site. That good text link income comes at the expense of your web site’s relationship with Google. If you do not care about that relationship, by all means, take the money and run. If you do care, then be advised that your pagerank and location in search results may suffer from having any kind of paid link on your web site. This is your decision. I am absolutely not anti-text link ad, but I have made the decision that using them is contrary to the goals I have for my web site. If using them is not going to set back your web site as far as what your goals for the site are, then you’d almost be stupid for not using them. They represent a fantastic, guaranteed source of income if you can get them. Just be aware of the issues surrounding Google’s stance on paid links.

Following these tenets of good design will help you monetize your web site in a way that will complement your design and content, allow you to make some money, and not have your readers think you are more concerned with the lucre than you are them. Content is king, but that doesn’t mean you have to wrap it in a brown paper bag. Whether the thought has crossed your mind before or not, your monetization is part of your design. Give it the same consideration you would the other aspects of your site’s design.

Design And Monetization is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.

Fixing Transparent Images In Internet Explorer

Michael Lankton — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:26:24 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

As a website proprietor I want everyone to come to my site. First of all the traffic validates my labor, and second I hope to make some income. A lot of time is spent on design. We want people to find our websites intuitive to navigate and easy on the eye. Once we are satisfied with the design, we may or may not care that all of our visitors are getting the same experience. We should, and I think most of us do take a look at the finished site to make sure it looks proper in a variety of web browsers.

My preference is for Mozilla-based browsers, but KHTML-based browsers (Konqueror, Safari, OmniWeb) and Opera are also excellent choices. There’s no denying that Internet Explorer is still a big player in the web browser business. Since my site’s inception on August 5th of this year, 46% of my visitors have surfed in on Internet Explorer.

So, I thought that I had my site’s behavior nailed down to perform the same regardless of web browser. That was, until two weeks ago when I discovered another hoop that Microsoft was going to make me jump through to get my site to work as intended in Internet Explorer.

The hurdle was that Internet Explorer prior to IE7 did not support transparency in images. This is an issue for me, because I use a transparent PNG in my header graphic. I use an obscure font for my logo, so I can’t just slap my name up in HTML, I have to whip it up in Photoshop as a transparent PNG that lays on top of my header. That logo is my brand. I need everyone to see it the same, regardless which OS or web browser they are using.

I’m a Mac user at home, and at work we are 100% Firefox, so I hadn’t noticed that my logo was a big, gray splotch on the header for IE users. My first reaction was that’s what they deserved for using a crappy web browser, but then reality sank in and I realized nearly half of my visitors saw an unfinished-looking header perched atop my pages. Unacceptable.

IE7 now supports transparency, but there are still a lot of IE6 users surfing out there. The answer? I found that someone had already done the work for me and written a javascript workaround that allowed IE6 to display transparent images. The solution is to embed this script in your pages if you have any transparent images on your site. If you’re feeling particularly clever you can save the script as pngfix.php and add this single line to your header:

The end result? Your web page is a couple kilobytes larger and IE6 will now display your transparent images as you intend them to appear.

Fixing Transparent Images In Internet Explorer is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.

Some Tips For Setting Up Your Sitemap

Michael Lankton — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:56:38 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

XML sitemaps are used to help search engine crawlers do a better job of finding and prioritizing all of your content. It doesn’t guarantee that your pages will be indexed, but it does assist the crawlers in determining what content you don’t want indexed, and what content you would like to see a higher priority placed on.

There are several web-based xml sitemap generators, and in particular a very good WordPress plugin that will do the job for you and make it a plug and forget affair.

The important things to keep in mind when setting up your XML sitemap are 1) figuring out what content you do not want indexed, and 2) figuring out how to include your content so that the pages you really want showing up in the search results do.

There are pages on your site that you do not want to include in your XML sitemap. It’s great having a lot of content to submit to the search engines, but you want search engine results to return content, not your Contact page.

Some of the content you may not want showing up in search results:

Contact form pages
About pages
Poll results pages

Keep a watchful eye on your polls, some poll plugins generate duplicate pages! One of the surefire ways to incur Google’s wrath.

Links pages
Users online pages
Category pages
Archive pages
Comments pages

What do you want to have the search engines return in search results? Your content or the comments? Content.

Disclaimers and disclosure policy pages

Starting to get the idea? Say you’ve targeted the keyword schnobblegrueber. When someone searches schnobblegrueber on Google, you want them to land on search results that send them to articles you have written that are relevant to schnobblegrueber. This is where the category and archive sections can cause a problem if you are submitting them to be indexed.

You want people to enter on:

yoursite.com/category/schnobblegrueber/ways-to-increase-your-sites-schnobblegrueber

as opposed to:

yoursite.com/category/schnobblegrueber/3

or:

yoursite.com/2007/10/12/ways-to-increase-your-sites-schnobblegrueber

The problem with 2 of the 3 above urls?

yoursite.com/category/schnobblegrueber/3 is constantly changing if you write more articles in that category. You don’t want people to get a search result that takes them to this page on your site, because the schnobblegrueber content may not be there anymore. Now they bounce off to somewhere where they can get what they were looking for, where if your search result would have returned the article page they might have stuck around for some pageviews and ad clicks.
yoursite.com/2007/10/12/ways-to-increase-your-sites-schnobblegrueber creates duplicate content on the search engines. They don’t like that, and it’s confusing to have two urls for one piece of content.

You probably do want the search engines to display your category pages, but remember that Google won’t only end up displaying the first page in your category listing but /2 /3 /4 ad infinitum as well. Set them to have a lower priority than your individual article entries.

Starting to get the idea? You want the search engines to like you and think you’re one of the places they should send people. 1200 entries in your XML sitemap may look impressive, but often 500 entries that direct the search engines to what you really want people to see is much more effective. Avoid duplicate content, don’t submit items that people aren’t going to be searching for, prioritize how you want the search engines to display your content, and you have just taken another step toward increasing your serps.

Some Tips For Setting Up Your Sitemap is a post from Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.. Visit Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.

Preview Of New Eureka WordPress Theme

Everton — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 10:59:32 +0000

Posted on Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news.

It’s been a long time coming, but hopefully the new Eureka WordPress Theme will be live on the site tomorrow for everyone to test. Alex the designer is making some final tweaks, which I think will be put us in good enough shape to let you all lose on the theme.

If you want to sneak a peak then head on over to www.windows7news.com which is where Alex is working. I’ve disabled comments on that site so that Alex doesn’t get distracted, but if you have any early comments or spot any bugs can you leave them on this post please.

My last set of comments to Alex are below:

Titles need hover colour – h2, h3, h4 etc
Can you make the h1, h2, h3 text have different colours
Links need hovor colors – main body and sidebar
Can you make the ‘related posts’ and ‘bookmarks’ text look sexier please. Item 2 might do the trick
Can you make the links in the top nav a bit smaller
Can you make the tabs for Top Posts/New Comments a bit sexier please. Can you also change the colour of the currently selected tab please
Font for Roll of honour doesn’t match top posts/new comments
The 125×125 badges aren’t aligned – can you align them in a colum please and add in 4 badges in total so we can see how they look. The bottom badge should be the ‘advertise on this site’ banner you made
Missing format for numbered lists – e.g. the list in this post should be 1,2,3,4,5 etc as the bullets
I don’t like the underline for H4 – can you remove please
Can you do a background colour for – diff to . Can you also italicise please


For the logo (in the header and sidebar) can you use the version that is black where the C and the I intersect
The 
 is too dull
I think you are missing the  page navigation at the bottom of each page (i.e. go to page 1, 2, 3, 4 etc)
Do you think a line, border or shading to seperate the post info section at the bottom of posts will make it stand out more?
Can you make the ‘next post’ ‘prev post’, text slightly faded like on this site http://loppl.com/2007/07/25/k2-style-2-headless/
Can you add an alternate colour background for every other comment please
Can you fix the font on’Archive for ‘news’ category on archive pages please http://windows7news.com/category/news/ and also tag pages
Can you make the margins smaller/make better use of blank space e.g.

header – make nav strip slimmer once completed #4
Main page – gap between start of first post and header smaller, left and right margin smaller in main body
Sidebar – move ‘what is RSS’ closer to last badges as there’s a huge gap, make shading behind ‘subscribe via email’ smaller, can you see if you can make the ‘Editors picks’ and ‘top posts’ sections a bit wider and reduce the size of the margins within the sections so can get more text in,
Single.php – make gap between post title and header smaller, left and right margin smaller in main body smaller, no gap between title and post date, smaller gap between end of post and ‘subscribe to this post banner’, smaller gap between subscribe banner and 468×60 banner, smaller gap between related posts list, smaller gap between related posts and categories, smaller gap between ‘posted’ and ‘next post’/'prev post’


20. Can you make the ‘leave comment’ button a bit smaller
‘Money Makers’ in sidebar – the ‘join the schemes…’ text should be on the line below the title ‘Money Makers’
Can you replace the ad in the footer with the square ad that is below every post please


Preview Of New Eureka WordPress Theme is a post from Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more..  Visit Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.



Chatter For Free
Joseph Plazo — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:21:16 +0000
Posted on Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news.
I’m flabbergasted at the startups on the web these days. Many tend to be silly and serve no use. Others actually hold golden promises that deliver. One application of the latter flavor come to mind: Chat With Me Now. It’s an Outlook plugin similar to Meebo.com and bristling with features.
Chat With Me Now
Desire an app that offers a realtime way to tell people you’re free to banter? Don’t have YM, AOL, Gmail? No fear. This cute add-on to Outlook and Outlook Express smacks a Chat With Me Now button into every correspondence you send. When someone clicks on the button, the receipient lands on a web page and from there, you can chat the night away using text, video and voice.
Offline? No sweat. The button truns gray.It greens up only when you’re connected to the web.
What’s even better is that you can use a bit of coding skills to embelish your site with a button linked to Chat With Me Now. It doesn’t matter whether you simply send emails, run a blog or host a gargantuan ecommerce station. This plugin works everywhere to bring you stellar connectivity.
Setup is straightforward and shouldn’t take more than 60 seconds. The only obstructions may be firewalls. If you have one, enable following ports to enable chat with me now.
TCP port 12890

TCP port 80

TCP port 1935
From there, you should be good to go. Now here’s the best part: there’s no need to register. You get a full version with no ads. Simply download it and integrate. Then chat with fantastic new friends everyday.
Chatter For Free is a post from Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more..  Visit Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.


Tips For Getting Your XHTML To Validate
Michael Lankton — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 10:34:08 +0000
Posted on Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news.
Getting your website’s XHTML and CSS right ensures that your site will function properly for all your users. As web browsers change and (hopefully) become more standards-compliant, it becomes even more important to have good markup on your pages, lest you face a headache trying to fix it later when your site no longer works with the latest Firefox. Sloppy code may cause your site to take forever to draw a page, look bad in a particular web browser, and may turn off potential surfers, or even worse, advertisers.
XHTML comes in three flavors that we are concerned with:
XHTML 1.0 Transitional
XHTML 1.0 Strict
XHTML 1.1
XHTML 1.1 appears to be deprecated, so ignore the fact that it looks like the logical path to follow. XHTML 1.0 Transitional is more forgiving, allowing users to include some traditional styling markup and still validate. XHTML 1.0 Strict is what I strive for, but it is unforgiving and requires more effort on your part to achieve validation.
I have found that there are 4 Major Hiccups that cause most websites to not validate. Fortunately none of them are difficult to fix.

Use of align on XHTML 1.0 Strict web pages
align is deprecated. Transitional XHTML will let you get away with using it, Strict XHTML will not. Instead of using align, we have two CSS alternatives we can implement:

float
For aligning an object left or right, we can inject CSS float to replace it and achieve validation. Instead of img src align=”right”, we can use img src style=”float: right;”.
text-align
float has no ‘center’ property, so to center align an object instead of img src align=”center”, we can use img src style=”text-align: center;”. Styling info can also be wrapped in a div, so if you’re using div instead of p for paragraphs (you should be), keep that in mind.

You missed a trailing slash somewhere.
You forgot to close something with a trailing slash. This is easy enough to fix, just find it and insert the / where needed.
Your crappy plugins are poorly coded and are breaking your site.
More than half the plugins out there are poorly coded. Sure they work, but they have bad markup, or worse, create duplicate pages of your content (polls are notorious for this), and now Google hates you.
It’s easy enough to figure out if a plugin is breaking your site’s validation. If one is, see if there is another plugin with the same functionality that validates. If not, sometimes you can fix someone else’s bad markup and find the problem in the plugin’s .php flatfile and hand edit it to use proper markup. Obviously this fix is not for everyone, but again, if you have a site you should be absorbing some XHTML and CSS know-how. It’s not rocket science.
Your ads are declaring a language variable.
Big cause of XHTML errors. Javascript declarations used to include a language=”javascript’ variable. It’s deprecated. All you need to do is change your script calls to include a type=”text/javascript” and do away with that language declaration.
W3C’s validation page is the place to check your site’s XHTML validation, and at the bottom of that page they also have links to their CSS and RSS validation pages. You can check the verbose output and show source buttons, and identifying your problems and figuring out the fixes will be a snap.
If you can get your site to validate XHTML 1.0 Transitional, you may not be too far off from getting it to validate XHTML 1.0 Strict. XHTML 1.0 Strict is the path toward where W3C is going with XHTML, so you’re that much closer to having your site ready for the next standard. Plus, it’s harder to get your site to validate Strict, so there are bragging rights involved.
Take the time to check your site in more than just your favorite web browser. There are 4 major web browser engines in use at this time. Download an example of each and run your site through them all to make sure that your pages are displaying properly. Firefox and IE are the two major players, but both Opera and Safari boast enough users for you to care about their experience.
List of Mozilla-based web browsers:
Mozilla
Firefox
Netscape
Flock
Camino (Mac)
Galeon (Gnome)

For what it’s worth, I’m a Mac user at home. My personal preference is Camino. OmniWeb, which is based on Safari, but with nicer features and interface, is also excellent. Those of you using Xwindows can take your pick between Firefox, Galeon and Konqueror. As far as I’m concerned, the only game in town for Windows users is Firefox.
If no one cares about standards we end up with a sub-standard web. Case in point, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, a standards non-compliant web browser that breaks half the sites it displays, because once again, instead of sticking to established standards, Microsoft thought they knew what was best for all of us and made up their own rules when making IE. What a mess. If you’re using it, please go download a real web browser.
The prevalent attitude is that if it works in IE and Firefox, who cares about validation? ESPN’s front page has 1378 XHTML errors, and they are not alone. That’s a lot of work for those webmasters if they need to fix those sites to work in the new version of Mozilla, and it’s just plain sloppy.
There are a lot of broken websites out there. Don’t let yours be one of them.
Tips For Getting Your XHTML To Validate is a post from Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more..  Visit Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.


5 Ways to Drive Me Away From Your Blog
Michael Lankton — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 06:39:25 +0000
Posted on Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news.
The blog explosion that the internet has been enjoying (or cursed with, depending on your point of view) reminds me very much of the initial internet explosion in the 90′s. There are blogs for whatever tickles your fancy, some of them very close to the best commercial websites in their niche, others little more than online diaries where the author vomits out excruciatingly boring minutia of their daily lives. (I really don’t care what your kitten did after breakfast, and I care even less to read SEO tips from a pagerank 0 website with such an offending design that it burns my retinas to look at.)
Blogs are both everything that is great, and everything that is wrong with the internet. The internet almost imploded after everyone who thought that a web presence meant surefire riches realized that it didn’t, and if you worked in IT you felt that, because a whole lot of jobs went away when that happened. Will the proliferation of blogs continue, or will the whole thing implode? Is it reasonable to expect that people can continue to make so much money off properly targeted, well monetized blogs? I don’t know, but I do know 5 Ways to Drive Me Away From Your Blog.
1. Your Blog Is About Nothing  Nothing makes me run faster than inane blogs that have no focus, or are too personal. Really, go to a bookstore and buy one of those books full of blank pages and keep a journal. You may care to read your thoughts again some time down the road, but much like family photos, no one else cares.
Another way to lose me is if your blog meanders all over the place. Monday you’re a tech blog. Tuesday you talk about Web 2.0, Wednesday you’re on to the presidential primaries. There are a few very smart, interesting people that have made a career of this. You’re not one of them. Pick a niche already.
2. I Can’t Find Your Blog Beneath All The Monetization  I certainly don’t begrudge anyone who is taking the time and effort to create web content the opportunity to make some income from their labor, but please monetize wisely. Use sparse advertisement in locations that pay.
Here’s some clues you are going about it the wrong way:

You have Adsense, Adbrite, Linkworth, Text Link and Affiliate Ads. All on the same page.
You have some sort of ad placed between every single piece of content on your site.
A good portion of your content consists of some sort of paid article.
You’ve utilized all of the above, in addition to in-link AND interstitial ads.

Chances are if you’re guilty of any of the above, you aren’t making too much money off your site anyway. Focus on your content, monetize wisely, and the revenue will come.
3. Your Blog Is Broken Your header contains a php error. If I actually find something interesting on your pathetic blog and try to leave a comment, I get a WordPress database error page. Your content overflows into your sidebar, which extends 2000 pixels beyond the confines of my web browser window.
FIX YOUR SITE!
Anybody who really takes blogging seriously is probably going to absorb a little xhtml and css knowledge along the way. Take the time to make sure your site is functioning for the people that find it. Better yet, get your site to validate, and check it in more than one web browser.
I’ve made designs that looked fantastic in Safari, only to find they had a major flaw in Firefox, and vice versa. Make sure that everyone sees what you want them to. CONTROL your viewers’ experience, don’t send them on a wild ride.
This is a good time to talk about validation. If you are capable of getting your xhtml and css to validate, do so. You are one major step closer to making sure that everyone’s experience is the same. When something comes along down the road that breaks your site, you will have to do less hunting to find the cause.
In my experience, plugins are the biggest culprit in breaking website’s validation. Check new plugins, and choose your plugins wisely. If you find a plugin that adds something you really like to your site, is it worth it if it generates 493 xhtml errors, or causes duplicate pages that make Google scowl?
If that is too much for you, then please pick a theme that works out of the box, and don’t screw it up.
4. Your Blog Looks Like It Was Designed By Ronald McDonald On LSD.  Good design is appealing, isn’t it? I mean, why else would you drive an Audi when you could be tooling down the road in a Kia? A design that is easy on the eye, or one that is eye catching, goes a long way toward making your viewer settle in comfortably to see what you have to offer.
I do not want to be anywhere near your site if:

You think color is great, therefore every color is even better.
You expect me to read yellow text on a white background.
You think MySpace layouts are rad.
You like monochromatic schemes, and also think earthtones are cool. Hint: grays and browns don’t go together.
Your site is so colorful and so busy I get vertigo within 10 seconds of surfing in.

Sometimes less is more. You can design some pretty cool layouts that look great in a vacuum, but once they become populated with content, they’re too much. Never be afraid to take styling cues from successful sites. Don’t try to incorporate every good idea you come across into your site, but do experiment. Finding a winning layout requires a lot of trial and error. This is where it helps to be a little obsessive-compulsive. But not too much. Don’t screw it up once you finally get it right.
5. Your Blog Mirrors Larger, More Successful Blogs  You read the feeds of all your influences, and then rewrite and post their articles, usually within hours of the original article being posted. What do I need you for? Your blog serves no purpose if you are just rehashing what the big boys write.
There is actually a large, successful blog that must read my feed, because they consistently post articles that I put out a few hours ago, yesterday, or a few days ago. I wouldn’t mind so much if they would throw me a bone now and again and credit my site as a source. It irks me a whole lot more because the site that does it is a huge site with lots of traffic, and probably wheelbarrows full of ad revenue. At least I must be doing a pretty good job if they are copying me.
Don’t let my cynicism dissuade you. Go forth and blog, just do so with studied effort and passion for what you do. You are taking your time, time away from things that have meaning, like family and relationships, to create web content.
Make it count.
5 Ways to Drive Me Away From Your Blog is a post from Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more..  Visit Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.


Should You Get SEO-Certified?
Joseph Plazo — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:27:27 +0000
Posted on Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news.
In addition to my dull day job, I’m author/editor of at least five blogs. When I’m not blogging, I do part time SEO Consulting work for companies to sharpen my skills. The clients never stop coming but I sometimes wonder: should I get SEO Certification?
I toy with this thought because certification might consolidate reputation and bring additional income. Then again, not. So I spent the night jotting down the pros and cons of getting that certificate.
Thumbs Up:

A piece of paper means a lot to some people. Lets face it- credentials come on a piece of paper. Someone is said to be a ‘celebrity doctor’ if big clients talk about his miraculous cures at parties and his clinic hangs heavy with degrees from Harvard. Without the latter, he may just be a very convincing quack. Or an urban leged . Certification is tangible testimony to excellence.
You pick up knowledge. Many certification boards like EC-Council provide self-paced coursework that build up personal knowledge. Since certification follows study and fairly rigorous examinations – you feel that you really earned it.
The sheen of credibility passes on. Certifying bodies maintain a roster of SEO professionals who can be scrutinized. Clients like the facility of doing credit investigation on folks who’ll be handling sensitive data- like their websites..

Thumbs down:

Search engines mutate. What you know today may not hold tomorrow. Till today, no one really understands the google algorithm. Everything is educated speculation. So unless you keep learning beyond the courseware of certifying bodies, your skills rapidly reek of obsolencence.
SEO isn’t the Excalibur of online business I know that Everton doesn’t even use SEO to his ConnectedInternet.co.uk, and still he pulls in 2000+ RSS subscribers.This proves that SEO and link building isn’t the only means to drive massive traffic to a website.
The final authority on search engine expertise are the search engines themselves- but do you think Google would ever spill its guts and open an SEO school? That would be like giving the keys to rapists in the night!

At this point, I’m still unsure if I want to be certified, but for those who do, do consider the following bodies.
SEOCertification.org.
ExpertRating.
OnlineWebTraining.
Search Engine College
Fly high and dominate!
Should You Get SEO-Certified? is a post from Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more..  Visit Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.


Migrating From WordPress to Joomla, Part 1
Michael Lankton — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:26:41 +0000
Posted on Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news.
Recently I migrated my main site from WordPress to the CMS Joomla. While evaluating the potential of leaving WordPress for a CMS, I found lots of information pertaining to migrating from various CMS’s to WordPress, but little to no information about moving a site away from WordPress. There were some web forum threads regarding such a move, but no FAQs to assist the move, and unfortunately, no script that would help automate such a process.
After spending three days preparing for as headache-free a move as possible, and one day spent nailing down some issues that arose after moving my test install to my root directory, I felt it may be of use to some to share some of the issues and solutions that I encountered when migrating from WordPress to Joomla.
First of all, what would the motivation be to leave WordPress in favor of one of the CMS solutions like Joomla? WordPress has a huge community of developers, and there are lots of options for people looking to extend the functionality of the default WordPress install. If there is an easier way to get a web site up and running than WordPress, I haven’t found it. In addition, WordPress makes managing content simple enough for even technophobes to master.
One issue with WordPress is that no matter how much you customize your theme and content, your site will always look like a blog. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, not every site is suited to the blog format. If you have a non-blog site published on a blog platform, you may risk damaging your site’s credibility in the eyes of your target audience. Ultimately, some sites are better suited to the blog style display, and other sites need a more traditional web site design in order to explore the possibilities available for organizing and displaying content.
This isn’t to say that you couldn’t have a blog running on any of the CMS’s, you can. A CMS will give you a lot of functionality that you probably won’t touch if you’re using it for blogging. On the other hand, using a CMS will give you some layout and feature options that either don’t exist, or will be easier to implement than they would be on WordPress. Again, nothing I say in this article is meant to detract from WordPress and it’s functionality. It’s solid software with a great community behind it. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if WordPress didn’t eventually evolve or fork into a full fledged CMS and the lite version that exists today.
In my case, my news section is absolutely best served by being dished up blog-style. However on a site that functions as a niche news portal, I felt that other aspects of the blog format were less flattering to my content. I felt constrained by the options provided to me by WordPress, and very much felt that I was limited in the ways I could display my content.
So my search for a CMS began.
There are many open source and commercial CMS packages available, and they don’t necessarily share the same strengths and weaknesses. I eventually came to the conclusion that Joomla would be the direction I would go, if I went at all.

Joomla began as a fork off Mambo, an established CMS. In August 2005, the core developer team of Mambo left to form Joomla, citing that decisions made by the non-profit foundation that funded Mambo were made without consulting key stake holders and violated open source principles.
Joomla, like WordPress, enjoys a large community of developers and users. In particular, extensions to core functionality are just as abundant on Joomla as they are on WordPress, which was an important selling point to me.
One of the things that stood out when looking at the various CMS packages, was what a great looking web page Joomla rendered. Joomla templates are, like WordPress themes, abundant.
Also like WordPress, there are many ways for users to extend core functionality. Joomla handles extensions differently than WordPress. In Joomla there are three paths to extending the core functionality; Components, Modules and Mambots. Joomla itself has many of it’s features implemented via these three types of extensions, and there are many third party add-ons. Components handle RSS feeds, sitemap creation, advertising banner display, etc., and often work in conjunction with a complementing module. Modules are bound to locations on the page, which are user specified. Examples of modules are RSS feed icon placement, Featured Articles, Popular Articles, etc.. Mambots are generally smaller, and function more like a traditional plugin. The basic rundown is that all three add functionality that is configurable via the admin back end, as if installed plugins were an intrinsic part of the CMS.
Having made the decision that Joomla was going to allow me to realize my vision for my website, I created a subdomain to install Joomla on so I could test it before going live. On my hosting account, like most hosts, Joomla was available to me as a Fantastico install. For those of you unfamiliar, Fantastico is a script located in your CPanel interface that provides a graphical front end for installing software on your web server. Fantastico makes installing and uninstalling packages as simple as two clicks of your mouse. With my site still running live on WordPress, I entered the admin backend of Joomla to see what it allowed me to do.
Next week in Migrating From WordPress to Joomla, Part 2, we’ll see if I found Joomla up to the tasks I wanted to accomplish with my content, and whether or not the transition was a smooth one. Or, would I end up cursing myself for breaking a perfectly good website?
Migrating From WordPress to Joomla, Part 1 is a post from Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news. - Updated daily with the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more..  Visit Connected Internet -  tech, mobile and gaming news. for the latest news, tips, tweaks, social networking, wordpress tips & tweaks, windows optimization help and more.

Connected Internet - tech, mobile and gaming news. » Web Design

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