Complete Web Guide

HTML 5 New Elements

2011-01-12T02:24:00.000+07:00

New Elements in HTML5

The internet has changed a lot since HTML 4.01 became a standard in 1999.

Today, some elements in HTML 4.01 are obsolete, never used, or not used the way they were intended to. These elements are deleted or re-written in HTML5.

To better handle today's internet use, HTML5 also includes new elements for better structure, drawing, media content, and better form handling.

New Markup Elements

New elements for better structure:

Tag	Description
<article>	For external content, like text from a news-article, blog, forum, or any other content from an external source
<aside>	For content aside from the content it is placed in. The aside content should be related to the surrounding content
<command>	A button, or a radiobutton, or a checkbox
<details>	For describing details about a document, or parts of a document
<summary>	A caption, or summary, inside the details element
<figure>	For grouping a section of stand-alone content, could be a video
<figcaption>	The caption of the figure section
<footer>	For a footer of a document or section, could include the name of the author, the date of the document, contact information, or copyright information
<header>	For an introduction of a document or section, could include navigation
<hgroup>	For a section of headings, using <h1> to <h6>, where the largest is the main heading of the section, and the others are sub-headings
<mark>	For text that should be highlighted
<meter>	For a measurement, used only if the maximum and minimum values are known
<nav>	For a section of navigation
<progress>	The state of a work in progress
<ruby>	For ruby annotation (Chinese notes or characters)
<rt>	For explanation of the ruby annotation
<rp>	What to show browsers that do not support the ruby element
<section>	For a section in a document. Such as chapters, headers, footers, or any other sections of the document
<time>	For defining a time or a date, or both
<wbr>	Word break. For defining a line-break opportunity.

New Media Elements

HTML5 provides a new standard for media content:

Tag	Description
<audio>	For multimedia content, sounds, music or other audio streams
<video>	For video content, such as a movie clip or other video streams
<source>	For media resources for media elements, defined inside video or audio elements
<embed>	For embedded content, such as a plug-in

The Canvas Element

The canvas element uses JavaScript to make drawings on a web page.

Tag	Description
<canvas>	For making graphics with a script

New Form Elements

HTML5 offers more form elements, with more functionality:

Tag	Description
<datalist>	A list of options for input values
<keygen>	Generate keys to authenticate users
<output>	For different types of output, such as output written by a script

New Input Type Attribute Values

Also, the input element's type attribute has many new values, for better input control before sending it to the server:

Type	Description
tel	The input value is of type telephone number
search	The input field is a search field
url	The input value is a URL
email	The input value is one or more email addresses
datetime	The input value is a date and/or time
date	The input value is a date
month	The input value is a month
week	The input value is a week
time	The input value is of type time
datetime-local	The input value is a local date/time
number	The input value is a number
range	The input value is a number in a given range
color	The input value is a hexadecimal color, like #FF8800

Mozilla FireFox 3

2008-07-30T06:05:00.004+07:00

After months of testing, Firefox 3 (code name Gran Paradiso) is available for download from Mozilla. With its new Gekko 1.9 engine, the browser rocks, rendering pages faster and uses fewer system resources overall. As with any new browser, some add-ons created for Firefox 2 may not work, but give them time. Firefox 3 touts faster rendering, a vastly reduced use of system resources, and clever new data-mining tools for your bookmarks and browser history. Most notable is that Firefox 3 includes many security-related features baked right in, such as the best of breed antiphishing protection, making Firefox the most secure browser on the market today.

Firefox 3 touts faster rendering, vastly reduced use of system resources, clever new data-mining tools for your bookmarks and browser history, and more security features than any other browser.

With its new Gekko 1.9 engine, the browser rocks, rendering pages faster and uses fewer system resources overall. As with any new browser, some add-ons created for Firefox 2 may not work, but give them time. Firefox 3 touts faster rendering, a vastly reduced use of system resources, and clever new data-mining tools for your bookmarks and browser history. Most notable is that Firefox 3 includes many security-related features baked right in, such as the best of breed antiphishing protection, making Firefox the most secure browser on the market today.

Firefox 3 now provides a native look and feel (for example, the Linux version matches the Linux user interface), and smooth scrolling of open browser tabs. What will draw the eye are more icons near and within the address bar itself. A company logo, if available, will appear before the URL; after the URL there's the new one-click bookmark star and the familiar RSS icon. Other tweaks include those to the Password manager, Add-Ons manager, and Download manager.

Returning within Firefox 3 are several core features, such as Sessions Restore, built-in spell checking, integrated search, pop-up blocker, clear private data, and automated behind-the-scenes updates.

Enhancements within Firefox 3 include changes to the Add-Ons manager. Now Firefox presents a list of popular Add-Ons without redirecting your browser to a Web page. From the manager you can install the recommended Add-Ons directly. There is still a link to the addons.mozilla.org page where you can find more than 5,000 add-ons written for Firefox. Another enhancement is within the Download Manager. Mozilla has added search and improved the ability to start and resume downloads.

For developers there are new Web-based content handlers, greater search engine keyword support, a new password manager, something called Extension Manager (EM), the beginnings of an intentity network, better integration with Mac OS X's look and feel, some offline applications support, and site specific preferences. There's also an early look at FUEL (Firefox User Extension Library), a JavaScript library designed to make it easier for extension developers by minimizing XPCOM formality and using more "modern" JavaScript ideas.

As for performance, Firefox 3 does significantly reduce the amount of system resources used when compared with Firefox 2. That alone makes Firefox 3 a worthy upgrade. Throughout our informal testing at CNET, Firefox 3 has been stable enough for day-to-day office use since Beta 5. Although there have been some minor, intermittent glitches when accessing Google-related pages, those problems appear to have been addressed in the final release. The performance, features, and security make Firefox 3 stand out as the best Internet browser available today.

Please note that starting from version 3, FireFox will no longer support Windows 95, 98, and Me; same with Mac OS X, versions 10.2 and earlier.

Mozilla Firefox 3 for Windows

Even though Internet Explorer dominates the Web browser market, you might wonder why if you spend some time with Mozilla Firefox. This light and nimble Web wonder brought tabbed browsing into the mainstream (IE7 recently jumped on the bandwagon) and offers countless ways to customize it through extensions and themes.

Mozilla Firefox 3 for Mac

Though it's difficult to unseat Safari as the preferred browser of Mac users, Mozilla Firefox garners attention through its solid design and extra features, making it a worthy alternative.

Source: C|NET

Book Review: Mastering Joomla! 1.5

2008-04-09T11:40:00.004+07:00

Mastering Joomla! 1.5
Extension and Framework Development
Author: James Kennard
Published by Packt Publishing (November 7, 2007)
ISBN: 1847192823

Recently, a PHP class of mine was nominated to PHP Programming Innovation Award. Thanks to that, I was honoured with a prize of my choice. I have chosen this book because I use Joomla and followed the evolution between 1.X to 1.5.

As anybody using Joomla will know, the platform went through some pretty steep changes for the better, so the online documentation is a bit unhandy to use. Planning to write a few extensions for sites I host, I was looking for a book that could at least be in part a replacement for this documentation.

As I went through Packt's site, my eyes fell on this particular book because of the example chapter they make available for free. Now that I got the book, I am in no way disappointed with it.

In a first look at the book you can see it offers clear tables and lists. It is accompanied with a lot of examples on how to use and implement the Joomla framework to build your own extensions.

In my opinion you can use the book in two ways: either as a complete piece of course-ware that teaches you step by step to use the framework, or as a kind of reference manual of the framework classes.

The book is targeted to the PHP developers who want to understand Joomla with a view to advanced customization or extension development. In my opinion it might have been a good idea to state in the book that a good knowledge of PHP and working with classes and objects is an important requirement.

When I look at a many of the available extensions in the the Joomla Web site and see how they are written, I think that some people will have a hard time getting into the book, or at least get a good understanding of all the concepts. Besides that, for professional developers, the book is a great help. It may help shedding some light on subjects that otherwise you would have to make some effort find help in forums or other resources.

James Kennard has chosen a logical approach for the content of the book, starting off with an introduction to Joomla before he proceeds explaining how to start of with extension development. Most important here is the introduction to the main classes and the coding standards.

After this he quickly enters important matters by tackling the database structure. That is one of the most important aspects of Joomla. Database access was one of the most important changes in Joomla 1.5. It became more secure but database access has also become easier, as long as you stick to the principles laid out in this chapter.

After this James tackles the framework components and especially the MVC setup of components. I never heard about this until the development of Joomla 1.5, but its refreshing logic made me an advocate. Get into it and you will probably start rewriting anything you ever developed, even outside of Joomla. I go strictly MVC now.

The next three chapters focus on modules, plug-ins and extension design. These chapters give a clear picture of the place of your code and how it should interact within Joomla.

The next most important chapter teaches how to render your extensions output. There is no use of having your code do things without showing anything, right?

This chapter shows clearly how you may use templates in your code before stepping into the next chapter that shows how to customise pages and take care of translations and Javascript effects.

The following chapter shows how to use Web services and and ever so popular APIs. It shows you how to incorporate AJAX, LDAP or email into your project, but also covers Web services of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Do you like to toy with XML? This is definitely a chapter you should not miss.

Then we move on to another winner, a chapter about error handling and security. This is chapter is worth every penny you have to pay for the book. Look at it as if you are getting the rest for free.

Most security problems arise of poor programming. This chapter points out how you can make your extension as secure as possible. SQL injection exploits have been and still are a major source of problems on any platform. Here you find info on how to prevent this from your code, as well how to use error handling and access control lists (ACLs) in Joomla.

The last chapter is filled with goodies in the form of utilities and useful classes. Here you will find a lot of info about date and time handling in Joomla, the special helper class, and how to make use of the JLog class.

At the end of the book there is the appendix. It is certainly not the least useful part of the book. It offers a detailed look at the core classes, parameters and configuration of Joomla. It is organized in a way that it can be used as a easy accessible reference during development.

Since Joomla is very dynamic in its development, James points out that additional info can be found on api.joomla.org. I think this means the book presents additions and erratas in this appendix as much as possible. And this is like it should be for any good book.

I am very happy with this addition to my book collection, if you develop for Joomla it is a must have. On a scale of 1 to 10 I give it a all round 9 (I do not give 10).

In sum, this book will help you to quickly learn how to write extraordinary Joomla extensions that otherwise would be hard to find. James Kennard shares his knowledge of the Joomla framework in a clear and understandable way.

Reviewed by R.L. Renkema

Customer review from Amazon.com (by C. Webb):
I recently read "Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development" by James Kennard, and I must say I really enjoyed it. Every time I read a book about Joomla! framework and extension development, I get all sorts of new ideas. This time was no exception. The book provides a thorough description of the topics surrounding Joomla! 1.5 extension development, and it is a great reference book. I would not recommend reading the book cover-to-cover, but I think it is a great resource to have handy when attempting to develop extensions for Joomal! 1.5. The book was written for experience PHP developers who already have a working knowledge of Joomla! For those wanting to learn Joomla! extension devleopment, I recommend starting with Joe Leblanc's book, "Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development", and having "Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development" as a reference for getting more in depth with the framework.

Special Offer from Microsoft adCenter

2008-01-10T18:05:00.000+07:00

Connect with buyers with Microsoft adCenter

Search Marketing isn’t about reaching a lot of people; it’s about reaching the right people: Buyers. Through Microsoft adCenter, you can reach out to 97 million MSN users, 83% of whom have recently purchased online.¹ So sign up and start using adCenter.

¹Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, June-07, US Home/Work Combined; Nielsen//NetRatings @ Plan, Summer 2007 Release.

Web Technology Reference Links

2008-01-06T18:50:00.000+07:00

HTML
- Specifications
- HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866, obsoleted by RFC 2854 which moved control of HTML from IETF to W3C)
- Related XML Formats
- Validators
CSS

Specifications

Validators

ECMA/JavaScript

Document Object Model (DOM) / ECMAScript Bindings

DOCTYPE-switching / Quirks Mode

Microsoft Internet Explorer (Detecting Quirks Mode)
Mozilla (Changes in quirks mode)
Opera 7
Multiple browser summary by Matthias Gutfeldt
Mozilla and IE summary by Henri Sivonen

Miscellaneous

Source: Infimum.dk HTML References

Google Advanced Search

2007-12-30T23:39:00.000+07:00

Here are search prefixes to perform an Advanced Search using Google:

define:phrase
Show a list of definitions for phrase
cache:www.domain.com
Google’s cache of www.domain.com
link:www.domain.com
List of websites that link to www.domain.com
related:www.domain.com
List webpages similar to www.domain.com
info:www.domain.com
Show information that Google has about www.domain.com
site:www.domain.com
List all webpages hosted at www.domain.com
allintitle:query
Restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title.
intitle:query
Restrict the results to documents containing that word in the title.
allinurl:query
Restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the URL.
inurl:query
Restrict the results to documents containing that word in the URL.
date:months-range
Search only within a range of recent months
safesearch:query
Search with excluding adult contents
stocks:ticker-symbol
Show stock information for specified symbol.
lang:lang-code query
Restrict the results to documents in specified language.

For more information, visit:

Feed Discovery Online Tool

2007-12-30T20:39:00.000+07:00

Feed Discovery service provided by WebTNG.com

Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI)

2007-12-30T16:29:00.000+07:00

The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI Library) is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses that permits both commercial and non-profit use.

The Yahoo User Interface (YUI) Library is a coherent collection of JavaScript and CSS resources that make it easier to build richly interactive applications in web browsers. Some pieces of YUI, like the Event Utility, operate under the hood and are simply there to make in-browser programming easier. Others, like the Calendar Control, comprise visual widgets that can be placed on your page with a default look-and-feel. YUI supports the vast majority of browsers that are in general use.

YUI is backed by developers at Yahoo!, increasingly comprehensive, well-documented, and supported by a growing community in the YUI forums. You can download the distribution directly (latest version on the time this blog being written is 2.4.1) from YUI download at Yahoo Developer site. Full API documentation is available from here. Get examples (more than 230) from YUI examples page. Also keep yourself updated by subscribing to YUI Blog. Also visit "Skinning YUI", a good article on making YUI components look and feel better and fitted well with your site design.

This post is summarized from official YUI site.

Summarized CSS Basic Design Guides

2007-12-30T12:41:00.000+07:00

Interesting and useful topics and links in CSS design:

Text Readibility: 100% Easy to Read Standard
Basic but highly important initial settings for text: “line-height:1.4” for readable lines, reasonable line-lengths that avoid lines much longer than 10 words, and colors that provide balanced contrast (i.e., pure black on pure white is often too strong for bright CRT displays, make smoother contrast with an off-white such #fafafa on #333333
CSS: Getting into Good Coding Habits
This odd 100.01% value for the font size compensates for several browser bugs. First, setting a default body font size in percent (instead of em) eliminates an IE/Win problem with growing or shrinking fonts out of proportion if they are later set in ems in other elements. Additionally, some versions of Opera will draw a default font-size of 100% too small compared to other browsers. Safari, on the other hand, has a problem with a font-size of 101%. The current “best” suggestion is to use the 100.01% value for this property.

Newsfeed from Free-Fonts.com

2007-12-30T11:52:00.000+07:00

New Standard Font Set for Your Web

2007-12-30T11:37:00.000+07:00

Microsoft is shipping great new ClearType fonts with its new operating system Windows Vista. These are beautiful fonts that are rightful replacements for obsolete fonts such Arial, Times New Roman and the like who has served as the default fonts ever since Windows 3.1.

On early release of Internet Explorer, Microsoft Microsoft release a typography project that still persists to this day: the Core fonts for the Web project. Thanks to quick adoption of Internet Explorer, and the dominance of Windows in the home OS market, these standard set of typefaces quickly found their way into the vast overwhelming majority of user's font directories - penetration to the extent that these fonts formed the basis of web design at the time, and still play an important role to this day.The core fonts consisted of the now-ubiquitous Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, and Verdana, amongst others. This limited selection has formed the backbone of typography on the web.

Finally after a decade, Microsoft has released new web fonts (all begin with C as in core) shipped as default font for it's new Windows Vista OS and all-new Microsoft Office 2007 Applications Suite. Utilizing ClearType technology (Microsoft patented technique derived from subpixel rendering algorithm), all of these fonts have been expertly tuned to look great both on the screen (even LCDs) and on paper (although it's not originally designed for printing).

As webmaster, you should take advantages of these fonts by editing your CSS file to include this font, overriding the obsolete standard fonts as follow: Calibri overrides Arial, Cambria overrides Georgia, Candara/Corbel override Verdana, Consolas overrides Lucida Console / Courier New, Constantia overrides Palatino. / Book Antiqua.

Simply put the new font name in front of the old ones in CSS like this example:

<style type="text/css">
body{
font-family:Constantia,"Palatino Linotype","Book Antiqua",Palatino;
}
</style>

Below is some generic CSS classes to address font family quickly...

<style type="text/css">
.arial{font-family:Calibri,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;}
.verdana{font-family:Corbel,Verdana,"Bitstream Vera Sans",sans-serif;}
.sans{font-family:Candara,"Trebuchet MS",Trebuchet,sans-serif;}
.times{font-family:Cambria,"Times New Roman",Times,serif;}
.serif{font-family:Constantia,"Palatino Linotype",Palatino,Georgia,serif;}
.mono{font-family:Consolas,"Bitstream Vera Sans Mono","Courier New",Courier,monospace;}
</style>

For sans-serif font replacement, according to the Poynter article, Cambria is designed to serve as an “all-purpose workhorse text face,” suitable for most business applications. Constantina is designed to look consistent (and consistently beautiful) in both print and on-screen applications.

If you are non-Vista user, you can download the fonts for free and legally as part of the 2007 version of the PowerPoint Viewer available through Microsoft’s website. Install PowerPoint Viewer 2007 (it's free) and the fonts will be available in your Windows system. If you have Office 2003 installed, you can also get them by installing the “MS Office 2007 File Formats Compatibility Pack”. You might as well need to fine tune your font settings and turn on ClearType fonts with the ClearType Tuner PowerToy, or you can do this online from Microsoft Typography site (an Active-X will be installed).

More information about font and it's related web implementation:

Complete Bookmarker/Subscriber for Your Web/Blog

2007-12-29T23:17:00.001+07:00

You can get a complete bookmarker/subscriber tool provided by WebTNG.com. This tool is provided free of charge with no-ads attached and cluttering your web appearance.

Below is working sample of this tool, allows you to easily bookmark and subcribe feed from this blog with your favorite social bookmarking service / feed reader / news reader / web aggregator...

To use this service for your web/blog, simply add following code into your page template (usually posted in footer section):

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://webtng.com/scripts/sbs.js.php?feed=http://completewebguide.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"></script>

http://completewebguide.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default in the example above is the feed URL for this blog. Replace it with your own feed URL.

Google Toolbar v5 for MSIE

2007-12-22T03:21:00.000+07:00

The Google Toolbar is a free download that adds a Google search box to your web browser (Firefox or Internet Explorer). The Toolbar also includes innovative features that make browsing more efficient, such as a web form filler, spellchecker, word translator, and pop-up blocker (for IE).

With the Google Toolbar, you can make your Toolbar as unique as you are. You can add buttons and bookmarks, get instant search suggestions, and share web pages with friends via email, blog, or SMS.

Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer launched version 5 has been launched as public beta. This version introduces a number of exciting features, such as making your Toolbar settings available from any computer that you log into with your Google Account, improved suggestions for broken links, as well as important changes that make Toolbar more accessible for assistive technology users.

Google Toolbar makes browsing the Internet simpler and more efficient with integrated Google search and other web tools. This release is about improving the way the millions of Toolbar users can engage with content on the web and personalize the browser experience.

This release adds support for Windows Accessibility APIs (used by screen readers, etc.) and enables keyboard navigation and access. From inside a browser with Toolbar installed, the global shortcut Alt+G places your cursor in the Google Toolbar search box. If you're using a screen reader, you'll hear "Google Toolbar Search". Pressing the Tab key brings keyboard focus to the button placed immediately after the search box, and right and left arrow keys move focus between buttons.

Version 5 comes as a part of ongoing efforts to enhance accessibility in client-side and web applications, which is a matter I hardly need to mention is very important. It's as an important step forward, as the product reaches a very large number of users and enables everyone to gain quick access to a multitude of useful features, through a unified UI. Adding keyboard navigation and other features that enhance the ease of access to these features benefit everyone.

Google Toolbar now lets you:

Add Google Gadgets
Fill in forms with a single click
Access your Toolbar from any computer
Clip and collect content as you browse
Get suggestions for broken links

You can download the new Google Toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com/T5
or read Google Toolbar review in PDF format.

Social Bookmark Subscription Service

2007-12-21T07:15:00.000+07:00

Social Bookmarks is a method of sharing over the Internet bookmarks of interesting web pages that you have visited. When visitors visit your blog you should also provide them with an easy method to bookmark your posts.

There are many social bookmarking sites now and if you add all their icons at the bottom of each post it will slow down the loading of your web page. Hence it is better to add a single bookmark which gives the reader access to the major bookmarking sites with a single click.

You can utilize SBS (abbreviation from "Social Bookmark Subscriptions") Bar from WebTNG. It's as simple as pasting a single line of javascript code into your page (or text widget in some blog software). This blog utilize its service (see it on top of this page). It's fast, easy and free!

Alternatively you can use Share This service. You can customize the bookmark to include the sites you want and in the color to match your blog design. On completion of provided wizard, code will be auto-generated. Simply copy and paste the code into your web page.

Other well-known service is provided by Add This. You can choose your blogging platform as Blogger and click on [Get Your Free] button. On the following page select the code under "New Blog post button - New Drop Down" and copy it. This is a working example of the bookmark button for this site:

If you want old fashioned, manually coding subscription code using HTML of your own, you can find reference to image links and subscription URL in this post. Following chart shows recent social bookmarking service trends (data provided by AddThis).

Based on this chart, at least you should provide button to Google, del.icio.us, and Favorites (this one is actually not social bookmarking service, instead it's a trigger to add opened URL to browser favorite list -- Bookmarks in Mozilla, Favorites in MSIE).

GoogleTalk Auto Translation

2007-12-21T06:04:00.000+07:00

Google Talk, Google's homemade Jabber-based chat client, is now host to 24 (and counting) new translation bots (a (ro)bot is a piece of software that acts as a chat contact and provides some functionality) that will take whatever text you typed and translate it to the appropriate language. Each of the bots was built with an open protocol called XMPP that lets anyone build their own bots and share them on the Google Talk network, as long as you've got some place to host them.

The new bots become particularly useful if you invite one into a group chat with one or more users who speak a different language. The bot will automatically translate the conversation so each user can understand one another, which you can see on the screenshot to the right. It's like having an interpreter sit beside you and translate whatever you say (as long as it can understand you. Mistyped words, slanks, and names will be spelled as is without interpretation. Although machine translation is still far from perfect, these bots can be helpful in bridging language barriers).

If you want to try it, just add en2zh@bot.talk.google.com as a friend in Google Talk and send it a message to translate from English to Chinese. You can use our embedded chatbox gadget from within this blog.

For more languages, just add any of the 23 other translation bots. They're named using two-letter language abbreviations as "[from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com", and the supported language pairs are: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, zh2en. So, for French to German translation, talk to fr2de@bot.talk.google.com.

FaxZero Service Review: Send Fax Free!

2007-12-21T05:50:00.000+07:00

You can send fax for free to anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. An ad will be printed on cover page. You are allowed to send maximum 2 faxes per day (each fax may contain up to 3 pages). To send fax, you can either upload file (DOC/PDF) or type plain text in provided text box.

BlogRush Service Review

2007-12-21T05:04:00.000+07:00

BlogRush is a free service that was created to help bloggers solve their most ultimate need: more Readers For their blog.

By adding the BlogRush Widget to a blog, a blogger can get instant distribution for their latest blog post titles across a network of related blogs. BlogRush users earn "syndication credits" (the right to have their blog post titles shown inside a widget on another related blog) based on their own traffic (loads of the widget) as well as the traffic of other users they refer to BlogRush. Users can automatically refer others to BlogRush via special links on the widget, as well as through the promotion of a special referral URL they are given.

BlogRush is a "Cooperative Syndication Network" that rewards its users for their contributions to the network -- from the impressions they provide of the BlogRush Widget to the referral of other users through 10 'generations' of activity and the impressions of the widget that they provide. BlogRush was designed to be incredibly viral and to provide its users with tremendous distribution leverage to receive exposure for their blog content (onto related content blogs) that they could never achieve on their own; at least without a massive advertising budget.

From practical point of view, BlogRush is a network of blogs that run a small "widget" on their pages. Each time this widget is loaded it will contain 5 clickable headlines which are the blog post titles to other users' posts. Clicking on any of these links will open a new browser window and load the blog and full post. Users earn "syndication credits" based on each time their blog loads the widget as well as each time any of their referrals (users that signup after clicking the "add your blog posts" link on the widget) loads the widget. They also earn additional credit based on all the activity through 10 generations of referrals. 1 Syndication Credit = having one of their recent blog post titles served inside the widget on another member's blog.

BlogRush will work on any blog that allows javascript to be used AND has an active RSS Feed. It will work on almost all WordPress software (but not the WordPress.com hosted service), MovableType, TypePad, and Blogger (Blogspot.com) blogs, plus others. If you have more than one blog, You can also add them to the same account. But please note that at this time BlogRush is only for English blogs.

Creating account is fast and easy, performed in three steps. On the first step you will be asked general user information (name,email,password). Fill the data properly, enter image verification letters, read it's TOS and privacy policy, mark the agreement checkbox, and press the "CREATE ACCOUNT" button.

On the second step you have to fill some details (Blog name/title, Blog URL, feed URL, and content category), then you will be asked to put BlogRush widget code on your page (it's in Javascript). After you have added this code to your blog press the "VERIFY CODE" button. BlogRush system will check and verify that your code has been properly added to your blog. Your account cannot be activated until provided code is successfully verified.

On the final step, your submission will be reviewed by BlogRush staff to see if it meets their quality guidelines and criteria. You should receive a decision via email within 48 hours.

As soon as your submission is approved, you will begin to see the BlogRush widget successfully load on your blog. In other hand, should your blog not meet their strict quality criteria, you will be asked to remove BlogRush code from your blog. If you do not receive the decision by email within 48 hours (as some emails goes undelivered) you can also login to your account at anytime to check on the status of your review.

Signup with BlogRush for free!

VeriSign Feed Manager

2007-12-20T18:13:00.001+07:00

Feed Manager, a comprehensive service from VeriSign, allows you to:

Monetize your content and blog feeds
Manage and configure your feeds for greater flexibility and improved customer experience. Functions include the ability to rename your feed, truncate headlines and administer and apply a consistent style across multiple feeds.
Measure traffic generated by your content and blog feeds.

Feed Manager is available free of charge to publishers of blogs, podcasts, news and other real-time content.

Because Feed Manager gives you a 360 degree view of the traffic generated by your feeds you have a strong foundation from which you can actively drive increased usage and visibility in order to make more money. This completeness of service gives you the confidence that your feeds are working in the smartest, most beneficial way possible.

You do not have to be a technical wizard to use Feed Manager. Getting started is simple. If you already have an account simply enter your login details to access your feed information. If you are new to the service, sign up for a new account. Once your account is created you can add your existing feeds and immediately start to enjoy the valuable services that Feed Manager has to offer.

Following is screenshot of Feed Manager's feed addition and management panel..

Click to view sample of feed managed by Feed Manager
URL of this link is http://manage.feeddirect.com/feeds/show/webmonetizer

P.S.: As free user, you are limited only up to 3 (three) feeds. Should you need to add more feed, you have to become premium user.

Twitter Service Review

2007-12-20T16:48:00.000+07:00

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

If you are interested in engaging early adopters or work in the tech industry, you can easily share links to your content, and build a solid network of contacts in a relatively short space of time. Think of Twitter as a cross between blogging, SMS text messaging from your mobile phone, and social networking sites like Facebook.

Why should you use Twitter? Because even basic updates are meaningful to family members, friends, or colleagues—especially when they’re timely. Eating soup? Research shows that moms want to know. Running late to a meeting? Your co–workers might find that useful. Partying? Your friends may want to join you.

With Twitter, you can stay hyper–connected to your friends and always know what they’re doing. Or, you can stop following them any time. You can even set quiet times on Twitter so you’re not interrupted.

Twitter puts you in control and becomes a modern antidote to information overload.

You add friends and contacts, and then post messages of 140 characters or less. This gives you a great platform to keep your followers updated as to the latest content you've created on your other social media accounts, and to enter into brief, punchy conversations about the latest news and events.

Sign up with Twitter now. Once you are signed-up, you can import contacts from your mail service such GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.

Social Media Marketing

2007-12-18T21:34:00.000+07:00

Social Media Marketing can be a great way to boost awareness of your brand, business or website. The good news is that it won't cost you even a penny. While traditional marketing has typically taken an "interruptive" hard-sell approach to getting your attention, social media marketing, on the other hand, is very much focused on engagement, community and authority.

In traditional marketing, You might be watching TV, for instance, and have the show you're watching suddenly stop for a round of commercial breaks, or find yourself looking for content as you flip through the ads in magazine. You'll hate it for appearing and you are enforced to view/read it with negative feeling - at least in your subconscious mind - as you, like other people, are tend to dislike interruption.

Social media marketing has a totally different approach. It is depend to the creation of valuable, engaging content within the context of online communities, and building reputation and authority within these communities and your content niche.

While it arguably might be easier to just pour your money into interruptive advertising, and sit back to wait on the results, social media marketing has two advantages to this approach. First and foremost, it cost you nothing. Secondly, social media marketing gives you the opportunity to specifically target your prospective audience or clients, and have them willingly spread the word about your brand in their own will (even sometimes... efforts!)

Social media is defined by Wikipedia as:

"Participatory online media where news, photos, videos, and podcasts are made public via social media websites through submission. Normally accompanied with a voting process to make media items become "popular""

The term is a loose one, but goes a long way to describing the new, democratic media found online, and the emphasis on sharing placed on web destinations from personal blogs to YouTube and social bookmarking services like del.icio.us. It utilize Web 2.0 technology to allow users and sites to exchange information, delivering dynamic content which interconnected to build a whole new web experience with personal touch.

If you've ever put (or shared) a video/image online, written a blog post, created a profile on Friendster, or shared one of your favorite websites through del.icio.us, you are already a social media maker.

Mainstream media operate in a less socially conscious way - they broadcast or print their messages to a large, slightly fuzzy, audience and offer a more minimal degree of interaction between content creator and content consumer. In the clients point of view, it's passive, static, sometimes obstructive and annoying.

Social media, on the other hand, is focused very much on the interaction. When you write a blog post, people can enter into a conversation with you in the comments. On Friendster, your friends can send you messages, share photos, or just drop a note on your "testimony". If you publish a video to YouTube, others can add it to a playlist, leave a comment, or even post a video reply to your original content.

Social media can be a lot of fun, then, but it also has great potential as a means to build the presence, reputation and visibility of your business or personal brand. And this is where social media marketing comes in.

Social media marketing, as you might have already guessed, is an approach to spreading awareness of your web content or brand via the vast variety of social media destination on the web.

However, while it perhaps shares similar goals with traditional marketing - converting casual passers-by into potential clients, readers, advertisers or whatever else your goal might be - the methodology is profoundly different.

Traditional marketing attempted to send out a broad, sweeping message to as many people as possible in the hope that some small fraction of them would respond to the "call to action" placed. Traditional marketing is very often about interrupting what your reader or site visitor is doing to barrage them with a message.

You can see this both on television and in print media, but also online. Banner advertising, pre-roll ads that run before a video starts playing, and annoying splash advertising pages that appear before you can access an article in full are just three examples.

Their efficiency is questionable, and seems to be on the wane. Sometimes it can give negative effect. More often your ad shows up means more negative your clients feel about your brand. This is happen primarily when interruption really distract it's audience enjoyment, such ad appears in the middle of heart-touching scene of some movie.

Social media marketing is marketing without the hard sell. Rather than trying to force your one-way message down the throats of passersby, with social media marketing you attempt to offer valuable content, suggestions, contributions to conversations and engagement, spreading your offerings as far and wide as is possible.

In this way, you build both presence across a number of online destinations - increasing your web traffic - while simultaneously cementing your reputation and authority within your chosen subject or content niche.

There are a number of reasons you might want to put some time and effort into creating a social media marketing strategy:

If you have more time than money to spend on building the reputation and visibility of your business, social media marketing provides you with a free or cheap way to go about it, if you are willing to invest the time in doing so
If you wish to complement your existing marketing practices and build your reputation as an authority in your field
If you are hoping to build qualified, niche-targeted traffic to your website
If you are looking to build on your search engine presence and increase your Google ranking, so that your results are seen above those of your nearest competitors
If you want to open conversation with your users, readers or customers and gather feedback from them as how to best progress with your latest content or product offerings
If you want to build a community of regular visitors and "evangelists" for your brand, willingly spreading the word about what you do without economic incentives

And that's really just the tip of the iceberg. Given time and effort on your part, an effective social media strategy isn't going to make all of your problems go away, nor is it going to turn an ill-conceived idea into a good one. But it will, without a doubt, build your standing, bring you more traffic to your website and establish your presence on the web.

So how do you go about social media marketing and how much time is it going to take you? The short answer is, limitless. The degree of effort (and passion) you are willing to invest in your social media marketing campaign will likely relate directly to the results you see.

Here are some points for you to get started with social media marketing:

Blog! - If you don't have a blog already, you need to start one. Far and away the most effective and powerful tool in your social media marketing arsenal is going to be your blog. Blog about a particular niche subject (the one directly connected to your business), write often, and apply some solid search engine optimization (SEO) tricks and you'll be well on the way to kick-starting your social media marketing strategy

Listen! - If you are going to make a real splash with your blog and other content, you need to listen to what's being said about you, the latest news in your niche content area, and even the hot discussion points outside of your niche. If you are in tune with all of this information, you will be in a much better position to both write and share compelling content, and you'll never be accused of not taking part in the discussion at the heart of social media practice. RSS is your ultimate friend here. RSS is a great way of gathering information from all over the web and bringing it to an email inbox style "reader" where you can digest the latest news as it is published.

Respond! - It's one thing to listen to what's been discussed about you, your content, and the latest news in your field. It's quite another to respond.
One effective way to build your online presence and authority is to leave informed, thoughtful comments on other blogs when they discuss your business, or talk about something of interest to you or your brand.
Being responsive to feedback, and on top of the latest trends in your industry is a subtle form of marketing in and of itself. There's no need to leave ad-lite type comments dropping in your web address and what you do. Carefully thought-through responses that add to the conversation will gain your far more respect, and people will in turn click through to your website from the URL link attached to your name.

Share! - Finally, when you find interesting information, videos, blogs or other content online, make an effort to share it with others. The same goes for your own content. Over time, if you make use of some of the services mentioned below - social bookmarking services, for instance - to give something of value to the communities you join, you will build up respect and kudos for doing so.
There's a lot of information out there competing for people's attention. By pointing out great things that you've found, and drawing attention to your own work, you can people a great service. Over time, you'll be acknowledged as a subject area expert, and both turned to and recommended.

Next important question is, which social media tools and destinations should you utilize? There is no simple answer to this question, as there are as many niche communities and services as there are days in a year (or decade, more likely). Nevertheless, there are certain key tools and services that you definitely might want to make use of in your social media marketing strategy. Here are some of them to get you started:

Your blog - whether you use Blogger, Wordpress or Movable Type, your blog is likely to be the center of your social media marketing universe. It's here that you have the best chance of building your brand, sharing great tips, reflections, advice and news with your readers, and carving out a niche for yourself.
Blogging is also one of the best ways to boost the search engine ranking of your website. Blog often and blog well, and you will receive both inbound links and more chance of being discovered.

Social bookmarking services - Social bookmarking services make it easy for you to share the cool websites and videos you find online. Rather than simply adding the website to your own private set of favorites, social bookmarking lets you publish your latest find to the web for all to see. People within the communities using these services can then find, browse and subscribe to your bookmarks, which you can also add category "tags" to, helping them to find relevant and interesting information on the web. The most popular of these services is arguably del.icio.us, and if you take the time to set up an account there and regularly add relevant and interesting bookmarks to your own content and that of others, it is likely to pay dividends in winning you attention, respect and traffic.
To maximize your chances of discovery further, you might consider using a tool like OnlyWire,which will allow you to add a bookmark to several different services simultaneously, with a single click. This gives you even more chance of having your content or recommendations found, shared and discussed.

Social News services - Social news services allow anyone to submit a news item or blog post to their respective communities, where it will compete with other stories for user votes. The most popular stories rise to the top, and least interesting fade rapidly into obscurity.
The most popular social news destination is Digg. One idea to increase your chances of people seeing and voting on your own blog content is to add a "Digg this" widget to your blog posts. That way if one or more of your readers likes what they see, they can add their vote for your article right from your blog itself. Depending on which blogging platform you use, the way you might add this button to your blog posts varies. Try googling "Digg this widget" and adding the name of your blog platform, such as "wordpress", "blogger" or "movable type" and you'll be up and running.
Other popular social news sites you can submit your content to, and build your reputation by submitting other relevant content, include Reddit, Netscape and Newsvine, and Alex Iskold does a great job of discussing the differences between them in his Social News Faceoff article for Read/WriteWeb.

RSS and commenting - As mentioned above, RSS provides you with a great way of keeping track of what's being talked about in your community or what's being said directly about you, your product, or your blog. You'll probably begin by finding an online or desktop feed reader, which you can think of as an email inbox for news and blog posts. I make some personal recommendations on choosing a feed reader, and what you can achieve with RSS in my recent guide to RSS.
Once you've subscribed to some websites that interest you, and started leaving regular, thoughtful comments, you might want to create what's known as a vanity feed. A vanity feed (or "ego radar") is a way of tracking all of the things people write about your blog or business online. This gives you an excellent prompt for making timely responses to what's being said.
If someone praises your blog, business or post, you'll be able to quickly head over and leave a thank you in their comments section. And if they criticize you, you'll also build a solid reputation if you can offer thoughtful responses and pay attention to what's being said.
Darren Rowse of Problogger.net provides a solid introduction to how you can create your own vanity feed which will get you started in no time.

RSS and Blog Directories - Another great way of maximizing the amount of people that discover your blog is to submit it to as many RSS and blog directories as possible. This way casual browsers of these different communities may very well find your content where they might not have on Google or another search engine.
If you'd rather spend a little money than take a day out of your schedule, you can use relatively inexpensive submission services such as Postami and the very thorough RSS Feed Submission site to do it for you.

Video sharing websites - Video sharing websites are also a great way to get people to discover your blog, content or business. By setting up accounts on YouTube and other services, you can provide another way for people to discover you and your business.
Even if you don't have the capabilities to make your own video - and it is easier than ever to create video content with your webcam, PowerPoint or other services like UStream - you can add value for community members by aggregating interesting videos together, or creating niche-themed playlists of existing content.
You can then link back to your website from your video sharing account. And if you want to maximize your exposure across a number of services, you might want to use a tool like Tubemogul, which lets you upload a single video and have it added to a number of different sites simultaneously.

Squidoo and Hubpages - Squidoo and Hubpages are both communities in which members share blog-like articles on things that they are interested in or passionate about.
As they are smaller communities than "blogosphere" - the sum total of blogs on the Internet - they provide an excellent way of having people discover your writing, and move on to your other content - such as that of your blog. By submitting really useful how-to guides, reviews or thoughtful opinion pieces to these services, you are given a golden opportunity to link back to your own website.
Just as is the case with social networking services, Squidoo and Hubpages provide you with a profile where people can find out more about you, including of course links to your other content.

Twitter - If you are interested in engaging early adopters or work in the tech industry, Twitter makes for a great way to easily share links to your content, and build a solid network of contacts in a relatively short space of time. Think of Twitter as a cross between blogging, SMS text messaging from your mobile phone, and social networking sites like Facebook.
You add friends and contacts, and then post messages of 140 characters or less. This gives you a great platform to keep your followers updated as to the latest content you've created on your other social media accounts, and to enter into brief, punchy conversations about the latest news and events.
Read more about this service in the Twitter Service Review on this blog.

If you are launching a new business, service, competition, or just a new aspect to your business, you might want to consider creating a social media press release to distribute to fellow bloggers. Traditional press releases are very often deleted before they're even read by the blogging community, so to give yourself a better chance at encouraging conversation, you need to take a slightly different approach.

In short, a social media press release offers bloggers a package of relevant information, drawing on various social media elements such as YouTube videos and del.icio.us bookmarks to place your news release in context, should people wish to discuss it further.

Another way you can build your presence online is by giving it away and making your content easy to share.

With traditional copyright, your readers aren't granted permission to redistribute - or remix - your work without directly approaching you and asking. Creative Commons offer a number of alternative licenses you can apply to your work to make it easier for people to share and redistribute. You can request that your readers give attribution to you when they share your work, for instance, or that they don't alter the original version if you wish.

In short, the benefits of making it easy for people to share you work are that you will quickly be able to build your reputation as an expert, opinion leader and reliable source of information, further building your presence and traffic.

Thought leader, marketer and author Seth Godin allows anyone to download his book "Unleashing the Idea Virus" for free, but also sells the paperback on his website. This has helped Godin not only cement his reputation but also brings new readers to his blog and other books.

By giving away valuable content online, you create a great opportunity to establish your personal brand and bring in new clients, readers or advocates for your cause. While the temptation is there to charge for everything, the power of giving away something of real value can produce even better results in the medium to long term.

Creative commons licensing gives you the chance to have your ebook, podcast or blog post "go viral" - which is to say, to have one person pass it along to another, and so on, building your traffic and reputation step by step. This is the very foundation of effective social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing Summary

If you have the time to invest in adding some simple routines to your daily publishing routine, and sharing your passion and interests in the right places, social media marketing can serve as an excellent complement to traditional marketing approaches, or in some cases as a complete replacement.

By combining niche targeted blogging and the creation of a presence - and reputation - in a variety of social media settings, you can bring a great deal of traffic to your online content.

But social media marketing is about more than just traffic - by creating trustworthy, value-rich content and disseminating it far and wide across the web, you can also build both engagement and authority for your personal brand, something that can't be said for straightforward interruptive marketing.

In this beginner's guide I have tried to fill in the gaps as to what social media marketing is, how you can use it, and when and where it might be useful. If you wish to build on this basic foundation, however, there are no shortage of articles and ebooks that might help you on the way, both here on Master New Media, and elsewhere on the web.

While social media marketing isn't an instant, quick fix approach to growing your brand, in the long term it can be one of the most effective approaches in establishing your reputation online.

By combining niche targeted blogging and the creation of a presence - and reputation - in a variety of social media settings, you can bring a great deal of traffic to your online content.

While social media marketing isn't an instant, quick fix approach to growing your brand, in the long term it can be one of the most effective approaches in establishing your reputation online.

If you'd like to read more about social media marketing, you might want to check out following additional resource:

Wikipedia defines social media marketing
The Social Media Marketing Blog
The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing from Marketing Pilgrim
Social Media Marketing, Eh? Let's See What's In Our Bag of Goodies from SEOmoz
5 Rules of Social Media Optimization from Influential Marketing Blog
21 Traffic Triggers for Social Media Marketing from Copyblogger
The Importance of Social Media Marketing from doshdosh
Social Media Marketing: The New SEO from Search Engine Land
Social Media Marketing For Small Business from Search Engine Land
PubCon: Social Media Marketing Tips from Webpronews
Social Media Marketing in a Nutshell from doshdosh
Social Media Marketing Roundup from Chris Garrett
Social Media Daily, a free step-by-step ebook
Authority Blackbook - another popular free ebook on becoming an authority website
How to Leverage Web 2.0 & Social Media Sites to Market Your Brand & Control Your Message from SEOmoz
Thoughts on a Product Launch Promotion from Marshall Kirkpatrick

Smaller Retailers Reliance on Search Engines

2007-12-17T14:59:00.000+07:00

Smaller top retailers lean more heavily on search engines than their larger competitors according to a new study by Hitwise.

Internet Retailer sums up the report nicely:

Smaller niche merchants in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide are more dependent on search engines to drive traffic and sales than their larger competitors, according to new data from web measurement company Hitwise Inc.

While MarketingCharts lays out some of the bullet points of the Hitwise report:

Half of merchants ranked 400-500 rely on search engines for 50% or more of site traffic.

Most Top 100 retailers depend on search engines for 11-30% of monthly visits; only one generated up to 39% of site traffic from search engines.

Only 13 Top 100 retailer generated 30.1-40% of all site traffic from search engines; 50 generated 20.1-30% of traffic via search; 31 generated 10.1- 20%, and 6 generated less than 10% of traffic, via search.

The implications are pretty clear from the data spread... large retailers are just beginning to tap into the search engine traffic and sales generation game as compared to smaller retailers who have been using search via their PPC and affiliate programs for growth and performance.

As companies, such as comScore, which serve the largest retailers point the way towards more search involvement, the metrics begin to make more sense and affiliate/click fraud is neutralized by a wiser and more efficient market, expect these numbers to even out in the coming year.

Linkshare Improves API

2007-12-17T14:57:00.000+07:00

Linkshare has improved its API to allow for better searching for products within data feeds. Linkshare points out that the improvements are most suited for shopping comparison sites, price comparison sites and product search engines, but it's still a nice sign to see improvement in web services from the networks.

As they continue through years of innovation, LinkShare has announced that the release of a new Merchandiser Query tool that allows you to search for products within your Merchandiser data feeds. This API makes your life easier! No more digging for product links, just enter your search term and get the link you want.

Linkshare points out that the improvements are most suited for shopping comparison sites, price comparison sites and product search engines, but it's still a nice sign to see improvement in web services from the networks:

Merchandiser facilitates the distribution and updating of individual product links for affiliates that require access to a complete and dynamic inventory of a merchant's products. Merchandiser allows you to integrate individual product links on your website without having to create links manually for each product that is carried by a merchant.

The full details can be found on the Linkshare Merchandiser page. As affiliate performance marketing continues to "grow up" expect to see more of this sort of voluntary (and needed) expansion of API's and web services from all of the networks.

Listen to Google, Sell More!

2007-12-17T14:51:00.000+07:00

Don't look for the perfect scenario, but you may want to learn a couple things (or get a helpful reminder) from this new Google Webmaster Central Blog post about giving meta descriptions a makeover to attract more traffic.

You've heard about how meta descriptions should be diverse. If they're properly reflecting the page content, that shouldn't be tough in most cases. Google goes into some detail about how to handle this with dynamic websites. The post comments present some problems as well.

Although the snippets (the preview text that appears with the search results) can come from the visible text or the meta description, it can't hurt (and may help) to write meta descriptions that catch a searcher's attention. Go for details, not redundancy. Focus on value, not just a string of keywords.

Google doesn't go into detail about how it decides whether to include the meta description or a portion of text from the main content. But a well-written meta description may increase the odds of the meta description being used. Google includes good and bad examples of meta descriptions.

I was encouraged that Google went out of its way to say that even accurate meta descriptions "won't affect your ranking within search results." Don't optimize a website for rankings by spending your time changing up meta descriptions, but write them the best way possible the first time you introduce content.

Turn your Feed into PDF

2007-12-15T20:43:00.001+07:00

RSS2PDF is a free online feeds (RSS, Atom or OPML) to PDF Generator.

Link to use (choose based on your feed format):

For RSS & Atom
http://rss2pdf.com?url=http://www.yourdomain.com/rss/yourfeed.xml
For OPML as Feed (Max. 100 OPML Entries)
http://rss2pdf.com?url=http://www.yourdomain.com/rss/youropml.opml
For Feeds from OPML (Max. 10 Feeds)
http://rss2pdf.com?src=opml&url=http://www.yourdomain.com/rss/youropml.opm

You can use following image as link to this service: (80x15px, 292 bytes).
Image URL is http://rss2pdf.com/images/rss2pdf.png

Visit RSS2PDF website for more information.

CO.CC Free Domain

2007-12-15T19:44:00.000+07:00

With CO.CC Free Domain service, you can change your web site address into simple and cool one.

Not only simple URL forwarding, this is real domain name service. You can use DNS management to point to CO.CC nameservers to your site (please note that DNS change will require some times to clear data cache, due to CO.cc FAQ it could take about two days).

you.co.cc will redirect to your own website.

Both you.co.cc and www.you.co.cc work.
URL hiding / Path forwarding
Compatible with the major search engines and optimized to give you a higher ranking.

Feed Validator Service

2007-12-15T16:16:00.000+07:00

You can easily validate your feed by using free service from FeedValidator.org.

It's a validator tool for syndicated feeds. It works with RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0. It also validates Atom feeds. The validator can find any problems in your feed and give explanation messages for each type of problem. It will highlight your feed source on location where the problem first occured.

Alternatively, you can directly enter your feed URL and click on the 'Validate' button to start validating your feed...

CWG-News: NewsBurst discontinue it's service

2007-12-15T16:09:00.001+07:00

Well... seems that webmasters that add this button in their site and provide easy subscription to NewsBurst service from C.Net must remove this link as C.net announce their plan to discontinue NewsBurst service from December 31^th 2007.

If you have syndicated feeds with their service, hurry to login to your NewsBurst account and export the sources you have saved by clicking the link 'Export your feed sources' at the top of this page. You can use this file to import your feeds into another web-based or desktop RSS feed reader.

Feed Subscription Links & Graphics

2007-12-15T15:02:00.000+07:00

Here is list of most popular web based news reader (feed reader / web aggregator / subscription services), along with direct link reference and button graphics preview and information...

Image URL: http://buttons.googlesyndication.com/fusion/add.gif
Link URL: http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=your_feed_url
Size: 1,784 bytes. Dimension: 104x17px Format: GIF

Image URL: http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/my/addtomyyahoo4.gif
Link URL: http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=your_feed_url
Size: 719 bytes. Dimension: 91x17px Format: GIF

Image URL: http://www.newsgator.com/images/ngsub1.gif
Link URL: http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/subext.aspx?url=your_feed_url
Size: 1,025 bytes. Dimension: 91x17px Format: GIF

Image URL: http://www.netvibes.com/img/add2netvibes.gif
Link URL: http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?url=your_feed_url
Size: 1,531 bytes. Dimension: 91x17px Format: GIF

Image URL: http://www.bloglines.com/images/sub_modern5.gif
Link URL: http://www.bloglines.com/sub/your_feed_url
Size: 213 bytes. Dimension: 80x15px Format: GIF

Image URL: http://www.pageflakes.com/subscribe2.gif
Link URL: http://www.pageflakes.com/subscribe.aspx?url=your_feed_url
Size: 1,249 bytes. Dimension: 81x17px Format: GIF

Image URL: http://o.aolcdn.com/myfeeds/html/vis/myaol_cta1.gif
Link URL: http://feeds.my.aol.com/add.jsp?url=your_feed_url
Size: 435 bytes. Dimension: 63x14px Format: GIF

Image URL: http://image.excite.co.uk/mix/addtomix.gif
Link URL: http://mix.excite.eu/add?feedurl=your_feed_url
Size: 1,111 bytes. Dimension: 91x17px Format: GIF

Image URL: http://www.rojo.com/corporate/images/add-to-rojo.gif
Link URL: http://www.rojo.com/add-subscription?resource=your_feed_url
Size: 725 bytes. Dimension: 51x17px Format: GIF

Image URL: http://plusmo.com/res/graphics/fbplusmo.gif
Link URL: No direct link available, you should make your link via provided wizard
Size: 1,744 bytes. Dimension: 85x19px Format: GIF

Note: Don't forget to replace your_feed_url with full-qualified-URL to your feed XML.

Related Online Tools: Try WebTNG Feed Viewer to easily embed feeds into your website. It's easy to use tool with form-assited code setup and script generator. The code is embedded with IFRAME within your site, accurately parsed and beautifully formatted with expandable tree structure. Free to use.

OpenAds: Ads Management Software

2007-12-13T16:10:00.000+07:00

As your site getting more traffic, you might start to realize your site’s earning potential is not exploited to its fullest as it might be limited by only using programs like AdSense. It’s not that Adsense is bad, in fact it is really great, but there comes a time when you need to expand your earning possibilities by selling other kinds of ads. even you can start selling space directly to advertisers.

Actually you can put a little “Advertise Here” link on the right column of the site. You may provide several pricing options depending on size and the duration of time the advertiser wanted to show their ads.

There was an ad management program called phpAdsNew , and now become OpenAds, and had undergone a major upgrade. Installation and configuration was pretty straight forward. Not much worse than installing wordpress or a similar web app.

Here are some benefits of Using OpenAds:

Tracking Ad Stats, Including Click-Thru-Rates (CTR)
I can now test the effectiveness of different ads on my sites to see which perform best. It’s a lot like using Google AdSense Channels, but even better, because you can pick what kinds of ads to show.

Great for Managing Affiliate Ads and CPA ads
If you use ads from networks like Comission Junction or CPAEmpire.com, OpenAds is pretty much a necessity. I was able to find the ads that perform the best by just picking several ads that I thought might be good, and running them for a week or so, then removing out those that didn’t perform

Dealing with Advertisers
With OpenAds, I just enter an advertisers info, create a campaign, set the time span and forget about it. When the ad is about to expire, OpenAds will send the advertiser a reminder to renew, which is just great.

OpenAds Sends Traffic Reports
OpenAds sends weekly reports to advertisers, detailing the number of page views, clicks and CTR for each their ad.

Checking up on AdSense
Now when Google, or some other company tells me I had 10,000 page views, and only 5 clicks, I can verify that. (Yes, you can run AdSense and track AdSense clicks via OpenAds)

Tartget your Ads
Ability to target ads by: Browser, Domain, IP Address, Language, Operating System, Useragent, US Area Code, City, Continent, Country, DMA, Netspeed, ISP/Organisation, US/Canada Post Code, Region, Referring Page, Source, Date, Day of Week, Hour of Day, Longitude/Latitude, Channel, Homepage, Page URL, Variable

Sell CPM Ads
You have the option to cap your ads after a certain amount of pageviews, so if you wanted to, you could price ads as something like, $1/1000 views.

Conversion Tracking
Give priority to your best performing ads.

Download OpenAds
As the name suggests, OpenAds is completely free. You can get it at OpenAds.org.

Free Web Site Design Sites

2007-12-08T13:06:00.000+07:00

Whateverlife.com
WhateverLife.com offers anything from myspace layouts to website layouts to graphic design services!
AmboGraphics
AmboGraphics - custom graphics and web site design - unique digital art prints and note cards - web graphics including backgrounds, buttons, and bars
Wonder Backgrounds
Offers myspace backgrounds, myspace layouts, premade myspace layouts, free backgrounds, myspace graphics, myspace background codes, myspace layout codes, valentine's day myspace layouts, myspace valetines day backgrounds, valentine's layouts, background images, free myspace graphics and myspace codes
EOS Development
Eos Development - web site development and design. Extensive free clip art section of web site buttons, bars and backgrounds in a kaleidoscope of colors and textures.
Elated ImageKits
Free images from ELATED. Download free stock photos, animations, backgrounds, buttons, icons, bullets and bars!
CoolArchive
Huge free vault of 1000+ clipart images, 950+ fonts, 4000+ icons, hundreds of animations, buttons, bullets, arrows, bars, html and photoshop tips, sounds. plus an online logo generator and button maker to create your own graphics!
Absolute Cross
Wide selection of hundreds of quality seamless background textures for use in Photoshop, websites, 3D modeling, and video game design.

MP3 Search Engines

2007-12-08T12:51:00.000+07:00

AltaVista Audio Search
Search for MP3s, WAVs and streaming audio files on the web and on FTP sites. (Recommended)
MP3 Search
FTP based search engine for sound files.(Recommended)
eSpew
Search for MP3s by song title, artist, album name, genre, and file size. MP3 files can be downloaded or played instantly in an online media player.(Recommended)
Mp3search.com
Find MP3 files by title or artist. The archive can be browsed by artist name.
YourMP3.net
Song posting board and download search engine.
MP3int.com
Gives results back like bitrate, play length, id3-tag, if archived file needs password, the files exists in archive.
New MP3 Free
Search song archive or browse it by letters. Music news and charts also available.
MP3 Miracle
Provides searchable archive, also accessible sorted by letter.
AirMP3.net
Contains a collection of links to music files. Get access to the database by using the song list or search box.
MP3 Fanatic
Search engine with options to browse MP3 archive by letter, artist or genre.
Download MP3 Hits
Provides the latest MP3 hits with it owns database.
Stardotmusic.com
Music news, software, and an MP3 search feature.
Fastdown.net
Search for mp3 files on public servers.
MP3Stalker
An MP3 crawler and directory.
Multimedia-Search.com
Search for MP3s by artist or title.
AlltheWeb
Locate MP3, WAV, MIDI, and AU files on the web.
Search MP3
Searches in own archive of hosted artists. Audio software downloads also available.
eMP3Finder.com
Spider search engine with own database of files. Also includes charts, news and guides.
Mp3Search.us
Search for MP3s, music covers, biographies, discographies, and music photos and images.
Ithaki
Powerful finder of free MP3 files across the internet. Searches for MP3s by keyword match.
MP3 Box
Search for audio resources, or browse specific categories for links to tools and information.
AirMp3 - Free Mp3
META mp3 search engine that searches for artist name and/or song title
Arianna Multimedia
Italian resource for Mp3, images and video.
Audio Galaxy
MP3 Music Search Engine.
Audiofind
Great mp3 search engine.
Fast MP3 Search
Search for music downloads (MP3s) from the internet.
FindSongs.com
Music directory & Search Engine.
Ithaki Music Metasearch
Metasearch engine that helps you to find Mp3s & midis.
Media Track
FTP mp3 search with nice interface.
MP3 Babu
Indian and Pakistani mp3 search engine.
MP3 Board
HTTP and FTP search for MP3 files. Nice site.
Mp3 Miracle
Fast search for mp3 music.
MP3Lizard.com
Promote your band for free on MP3Lizard.com.
People Sound
Find MP3's from new bands.

Free News Server

2007-12-08T12:08:00.000+07:00

Free Web Based Internet Fax (Free FOIP)

2007-12-08T05:37:00.000+07:00

Free Services to Send Fax Online:

FaxZero
Supported Country: United State, Canada, Puerto Rico
FileFormat: Text, Microsoft Word .DOC files, PDF files
Limitation: 2 free faxes/day;15 pages/ fax;
Cover page and Site Language: English
TPC
Supported Country: United States, Canada, Botswana, South Africa, Greece, Netherlands, San Marino, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Italy, Romania, United Kingdom, IOM, Channel Islands, Sweden, Germany, Honduras, Nicaragua, Cuba, Brazil, Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon
Format: Text only
Site Language: English
nacion.com
Supported Country: Costa Rica
File Format: Text only
Site Language: Spanish
Denotos
Supported Country: Worldwide
Format: Text only
Limitation: An ad is embedded in faxed document
Site Language: Germany
www.faxen-online.de
Supported Country: Germany, Italy, Austria, France, Switzerland
File Format: Text only
Limitation: 18.00~ 02:00; 2 faxes/day; 3 pages/fax
Site Language: Germany
www.outfax.com
Supported Country: Hong Kong
File Format: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, plain text, Rich Text Format, JPEG, PNG, BMP, PCX, TGA, TIFF
Limitation: 1 page/fax (Free)
Site Language: Chinese
VIF Internet
Supported Country: Canada (Montreal only)
File Format: Text Only
Site Language: English, French
MyFax
Supported Country: United State, Canada
Limitation: 200 in/100 out pages/month;30 Days Free
Site Language: English
CallWave
Limitation: 30-day Free Trial and No Credit Card
Site Language: English
RapidFax
File Format: Limitation: 30-day Free Trial
Site Language: English
eFax
File Format: Limitation: 30-day Free Trial
Site Language: English, Chinese
Vonage Fax
Limitation: 30-day Free Trial and No Credit Card
Site Language: English

Free Services to Receive Fax Online:

Denotos
Country: Germany, Austria
Receive method: Via E-mail
Limitation: ad to email for 6 months
Site Language: Germany
MessageNet
Country: anywhere in Italy, also in London
Receive method: Via E-mail
Limitation: 3 faxes/month
Site Language: English
Callsure
Country: United Kingdom
Receive method: Via E-mail (pdf)
Limitation: Only can be dialed from the UK Web Site
Site Language: English
eFax
Country: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, United Kingdom, United States
Receive method: Via E-mail
Limitation: ad to email
Site Language: English
K7.net
Country: United States (Seattle, CA)
Receive method: Via E-mail
Limitation: Must receive 1 fax or voicemail/month
Site Language: English
efaxcn
Country: China
Receive method: Via E-mail
Web Site Language: Chinese

Home of pipster

2007-12-03T13:13:00.001+07:00

If you are considered yourself as serious pipster (making money from forex trading), or just easy beginner with curiosity on foreign exchange and financial investment, this site is one-stop solution for you. Tons of article review, forex news, forex glossary, forex learning, forex tools, forex resources, link to quality forex broker sites. A home for pipster, starting point for forex beginners!

read more | digg story

What is social bookmarking?

2007-12-03T10:00:00.000+07:00

Social bookmarking website allows you to store and share bookmarks on the web, instead of inside your browser.

Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, but depending on the service's features, may be saved privately, shared only with specific people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, via a search engine, or even randomly.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.

Tags are one-word descriptors that you can assign to your bookmarks. They're a little bit like keywords but non-hierarchical. You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like and easily rename or delete them later. Tagging can be a lot easier and more flexible than fitting your information into preconceived categories or folders.

Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.

As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.

Several advantages of using social bookmark service:

First, you can get to your bookmarks from anywhere, no matter whether you're at home, at work, in a library, or on a friend's computer.
Second, you can share your bookmarks publicly, so your friends, coworkers, and other people can view them for reference, amusement, collaboration, or anything else. (Note that you can also mark bookmarks as private -- only viewable by you -- if you like.)
Third, you can find other people who have interesting bookmarks and add their links to your own collection. Everyone chooses to save their bookmarks for a reason. You have access to the links that everyone wants to remember. You can see whether two people have chosen to remember a link, or whether it was useful enough for a thousand people to remember -- which may help you find things that are useful for you, too.

Popular Social bookmarking Sites

SEO - Do it Yourself

2007-12-03T08:24:00.000+07:00

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is big business. If you rely on search engines to bring visitors to your business website, you need to rely on more than luck. Your business will lag far short of its potential unless your site is optimized and re-optimized for search engine results.

Trying to get visitors to come to your Web site can be a big challenge. Search engine optimization attempts to take some of the guesswork out of this challenge by getting your Web pages to place highly in search engines. When you use search engine optimization, you aren't employing tricks or hacks, but instead writing your pages so that they provide exactly what your customers want while simultaneously showing it to the search engines effectively. These five tips will help you learn search engine optimization to get better rankings for your Web pages.

Step One: Pick a Target Phrase
When using search engine optimization, you need to determine one phrase that describes what your page is about. This is called your target phrase. A target phrase for your Web page should be three things:

Important
Your phrase should be an important part of the page information. If your page is about cat food, then your target phrase should include "cat food" and not just the word "cat".
Accurate
One of the commonly tried hacks with search engine optimization is to try to optimize on a phrase that isn't accurate for the content of the page. Just because the terms "sex" and "xxx" are popular doesn't mean you should optimize for them on your cat food page.
Popular
If your page is about cat food, your target phrase should be one that people will search on. People don't search for "cat chow" nearly as much as they search for "cat food", so "cat food" is a better choice.

There are several search engine optimization tools you can use to find good target phrases:

Overture is a great tool for assessing popularity as well as brainstorming ideas for target phrases.
Google is great for brainstorming target phrases.
Word Tracker can help you assess popularity and also compare how the competitors use the target phrase you're after.

Step Two: Analyze Your Competition
The second step in search engine optimization is to determine who your competition is. Remember that when you're doing search engine optimization, you're working at the page level, not the entire site. So while you might consider any site on pets to be your competition, for your target phrase "cat food" your competition is more specialized perhaps Purina.com or another cat food company rather than cats.about.com.

Check Yahoo and Google to see what shows up when you search for your target phrase.
Examine the pages on the first page, note where and how they use your target phrase. You can use the "Cached" page option in Google to see your targeted phrase highlighted.

Remember that the more popular a target phrase is, the more competition there is likely to be. Sometimes it makes sense to target a less popular phrase where you can corner the market rather than aiming for the highest popularity phrase there is.

Step Three: Write Your Page
Search engine optimization is not all about meta tags. In fact, focusing solely on meta keywords will only help you a little bit, and if you go overboard can actually hurt your ranking. Take the following focused approach to search engine optimization:

Make sure that your title is "clickable". This is what most people see when they search, so keep your title logical and descriptive. Include your target phrase twice in the meta <title> tag
Include your target phrase twice in the meta description. This description is used by most search engines as a short paragraph below the clickable title, make sure it extends on the title, and doesn't just repeat what the title says.
Include your target phrase in the meta keywords. Don't flood your keywords, use just a few, and don't get carried away.
Include your target phrase in the title or headline for your page. Write that headline using a header tag for your headlines, as search engines often weight words in these tags higher.
Include your target phrase in subheads, using header tags here too.
Finally, be sure to include your target phrase in the first paragraph of your page, and twice if you can. Also include it in other locations on the page, including external links, headlines, and sidebars.

Step Four: Promote Your Page
Make sure that when you announce your page, you use your target phrase in both the link text and any explanatory text. If you run a blog, you will want to blog your page with at least two references to your target phrase.

Step Five: Check Your Results and Tweak
If Google or Yahoo don't crawl your site on a regular basis, then submit your page to them. Wait about a week and then go to those engines and test your search engine optimization target phrase. Your goal should be to get to the first or second page of search results for your target phrase.

Search Engine Optimization Isn't Rocket Science
It's more like magic, in many ways, but there are ways to get your pages to show up higher in search rankings, and these five tips should help you to improve your search engine optimization.

PHP Encryption

2007-11-28T15:39:00.000+07:00

At one time or another, a software developer is faced with a potential troublesome issue. When all the programming is done, and it's time to distribute the actual program, the question arises: How do I protect my intellectual property from being misused, changed and sold by a potential user of my program? Of course there are copyrights, but not all users might be aware or care about it.

Usually this is not a problem when using ordinary executable files. The customer would have a hard time opening up the file in code debugger, figuring out assembler code and modifying the content. This process is called reverse engineering, and for some people this is an art.

The problem is a bit trickier when programming in an open format such as ASP, PHP or any type of scripting. The program is easily readable and sometimes ingenious and potential lucrative algorithms could fall into the wrong hands.

unencrypted PHP script, clearly visible and easy to modify

But there is a solution. This article is focused on how to protect your PHP scripts using obfuscation techniques that makes the program unreadable for humans - but still fully functional for a computer.

encrypted PHP script, hard to read and nearly impossible to modify

There are several open-source tools that solves this problem for you. Open Source means that anyone can view modify and contribute to a program in development. The main benefit for a lone programmer is that it's completely free of charge and can be used to solve this PHP encryption issue.

There is one thing that separates all of these programs. Type One is the programs that needs to have additional software installed on the hosting server in order for it to run. This means that the administrator (most often not you) will have to modify something on the server where the encrypted files will be executed. In turn, this means an additional layer of time consuming stuff when distributing your software. Sometimes this is okay, but most often not.

Type Two is the programs that doesn't need to have additional software installed on the server. PHP Obfuscator falls into this category. Theoretically it is possible to have a higher level of security (and sometimes performance) when using Type One encrypters. In practice, noone will ever put that much effort into trying to reverse engineer your scripts. This is why we chose PHP Obfuscator for this How-To part.

Here are two of the main Open Source PHP encryption tools:

Turck MMCache is an open source software package with many included features, such as PHP accelerator, optimizer, encoder and dynamic content cache. One drawback is that in order to use all these functions you need to have additional software installed on the running server. It is fully compatible with Zend Optimizer, but not recommended.
RaizLabs PHP Obfuscator (POBS) is the software package focused on in this arcicle. It does not need additional server PHP modules installed in order to run. It's easy to install and easy to use. The main feature is the actual PHP encryption, with many configuration options.

RaizLabs PHP obfuscator application encodes and obfuscates PHP code to make the output difficult to reverse engineer. The application requires no pre-modifications to your code and no additional components on your server. This product allows for encoding of functions, variables and the removal of whitespace. The application is provided for free. Compatible with Windows XP and higher.

Why Obfuscation?

PHP Obfuscation allows you to scramble your PHP code. Obfuscation allows you to provide normal PHP files that have been encoded making the source code difficult to reverse engineer. Unlike some other solutions PHP Obfuscator does not require special server side libraries or server components to work properly. This allows you to target a broad range of servers that support PHP. This may be useful for commercial products looking to secure their source code.

What does Obfuscated code look like?

Here is a sample of what obfuscated code looks like...
function FC7321B391B6EF18F0711B835402E91D1($RE91192A00FF990477EE414AD5D708F08) { global $db_prefix; global $R695CD54D1F9CB31C11C71AF5EF74FDDB; $R9E9F3EDB7A84E99A0567F313F4EAC1BA = $RE91192A00FF990477EE414AD5D708F08; $R37A721F3B04CA577A7730084048F2BE3 = array_keys($R695CD54D1F9CB31C11C71AF5EF74FDDB); foreach($R37A721F3B04CA577A7730084048F2BE3 as $R90E8291866BD6CB7ED5089CE7E833D11) { $R9E9F3EDB7A84E99A0567F313F4EAC1BA = str_replace($R90E8291866BD6CB7ED5089CE7E833D11, $db_prefix . $R90E8291866BD6CB7ED5089CE7E833D11 , $R9E9F3EDB7A84E99A0567F313F4EAC1BA); } return $R9E9F3EDB7A84E99A0567F313F4EAC1BA;}.

Chat with other webmasters!

2007-11-20T17:13:00.000+07:00

What is JSON?

2007-11-05T02:19:00.000+07:00

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data format based on the object notation of the JavaScript language. It is minimal, textual, and a subset of JavaScript. Specifically, it is a subset of ECMA-262 (The ECMAScript programming Language Standard, Third Edition, December 1999).

JSON has been widely adopted by people who found that it made it a lot easier to produce distributed applications and services. It is lightweight and very easy to parse by any language and libraries and tools exist in many languages to handle JSON. There are now JSON libraries or built-in JSON support for these programming languages and systems: ActionScript, C, C++, C#, Cold Fusion, D, Delphi, E, Erlang, Haskell, Java, Lisp, LotusScript, Lua, Perl, Objective-C, OCAML, PHP, Python, Rebol, Ruby, Scheme, and Squeak.

JSON has been formalized in RFC 4627. The MIME Media Type is application/json. JSON has no version number. No revisions to the JSON grammar are anticipated. If something has a 1.0, it will inevitably get a 1.1 and a 2.0, and everything is crap until it is 3.0. JSON is very stable.

The character encoding of JSON text is always Unicode. UTF-8 is the only encoding that makes sense on the wire, but UTF-16 and UTF-32 are also permitted. A JSON decoder MUST accept all well-formed JSON text. A JSON decoder MAY also accept non-JSON text. A JSON encoder MUST only produce well-formed JSON text. This is consistent with Postel's Law: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send."

JSON is built on two structures:

A collection of name/value pairs. In various languages, this is realized as an object, record, struct, dictionary, hash table, keyed list, or associative array.
An ordered list of values. In most languages, this is realized as an array, vector, list, or sequence.

JSON Format Overview

JSON is a very simple text format based on JavaScript's object notation. The notation contains these basic elements:

Objects. Objects begin and end with curly braces ({}).
Object members. Members consist of strings and values, separated by colon (:). Members are separated by commas.
Arrays. Arrays begin and end with braces and contain values. Values are separated by commas.
Values. A value can be a string, a number, an object, an array, or the literals true, false, or null.
Strings. Strings are surrounded by double quotes and contain Unicode characters or common backslash escapes.

A simple example of JSON output looks like this:

{
"Image": {
  "Width":640,
  "Height":480,
  "Title":"Screen shot of my web",
  "Thumbnail":
  {
    "Url":"http:\/\/myweb.com\/image\/837492",
    "Height": 160,
    "Width": "120"
  },
"IDs":[ 123, 467, 87346 ]
}
}

In this example, Image is a top-level object; all other data is a member of that object. Width, Height and Title are all simple members containing number and string data. Thumbnail is a nested object, containing members for URL, Height and Width. IDs is an array, containing number values. Note the string value for URL, in which the slashes are escaped ("\/").

For a complete description of JSON and its many uses, we suggest a visit to Douglas Crockford's JSON.org, with a side trip to JSON: The Fat-Free Alternative to XML, on the same server.

Free 2 Gb Online Storage

2007-11-02T18:43:00.000+07:00

This is a good service I've recently discovered...

With Diino you can easily store, share, manage, access, send and backup your documents, music, e-mails, photos and files with the highest security available online. Your data is stored on 2048-bits encrypted secure servers.

Diino provides easy access to all your important files, from any PC - and now you are also able to access your files from your personal DiinoWeb page using your cell phone’s web or wap browser. Anywhere, anytime – and on any device!

New secure email functionality
Collect all your email messages in one place and access all your email accounts from anywhere. Large storage capacities (up to 100 GB) means you never need to delete any emails.

Mobile access and personal mobile blog!
Did you know you can access your files and emails from your cell phone. You can even send blog entries with pictures and text from your cell phone to your Diino blog page.

No more worries about Backing up your files
Backup important files from your computer over Internet to our secure servers. Schedule your backups to run automatically at regular intervals.

You can get a 2GB Diino account for free and discover yourself what Diino can do for you.

Google Translation Buttons

2007-11-02T18:07:00.001+07:00

Google offers a list of bookmarklets that you can drag to your browser's links bar and that allows you to translate the current page from a language to another language.

"While surfing the web, if you find a piece of text you'd like to translate, select the text with your mouse and click the browser button. If you want to translate a whole web page, simply click the button."

Here is the code...

<script type="text/javascript">
function googleTranslate(lpair) {
var t=(
(window.getSelection&&window.getSelection()) ||
(document.getSelection && document.getSelection()) ||
(document.selection && document.selection.createRange &&
 document.selection.createRange().text)
);
var e=( document.charset || document.characterSet );
if(t!=''){
 location.href=
   'http://translate.google.com/translate_t?'+
   'text='+t+'&hl=en&langpair='+lpair+'&tbb=1&ie='+e;
}else{
 location.href=
 'http://translate.google.com/translate?'+
 'u='+escape(location.href)+
 '&hl=en&langpair='+lpair+'&tbb=1&ie='+e;
};
} //end_of_googleTranslate()
<script>

Then to use it on your page, simply add a simple link like this:
<a href="javascript:googleTranslate('en|fr');">voir cette page en France </a>

Demo: Click here to view this page in France

What does `lorem ipsum dolor' mean?

2007-11-01T11:59:00.000+07:00

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat."

This is the first part of a nonsense paragraph sometimes used to demonstrate a web template. It has been well established that if you write anything as a sample, people will spend more time reading the copy than looking at the actual feature. The "gibberish" below is sufficiently like ordinary text to demonstrate content sample but doesn't distract the reader. Hopefully.

Rick Pali submits the following from Before and After Magazine, Volume 4 Number 2.:

After telling everyone that Lorem ipsum, the nonsensical text that comes with PageMaker, only looks like Latin but actually says nothing, I heard from Richard McClintock, publication director at the Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, who had enlightening news:

"Lorem ipsum is latin, slightly jumbled, the remnants of a passage from Cicero's _de Finibus_ 1.10.32, which begins 'Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...' [There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.]. [de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45 BC, is a treatise on the theory of ethics very popular in the Renaisance.]

"What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since some printed in the 1500s took a galley of type and scambled it to make a type specemin book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged except for an occational 'ing' or 'y' thrown in. It's ironic that when the then-understood Latin was scrambled, it became as incomprehensible as Greek; the phrase 'it's Greek to me' and 'greeking' have common semantic roots!"

About FreeForBiz.com

2007-11-01T10:50:00.000+07:00

FreeForBiz projects enables and empowers ordinary internet users to establish their online business presence easily with no capital investment.

Service provided including free hosting plan (300 Mb disk space, 10 Gb monthly traffic, PHP, MySQL database, FTP account, POP3/Webmail email account) with related tools and references that might be required to build a complete commerce ready website.

User without established business can also take benefit by providing creative content (blog,picture,etc.) and receive 1:1 payment from advertisement displayed in their site.

Introduction

Do you have email account in Google, Yahoo!, Hotmail, or any other free mail service?
Did you pay for their good service?
Majority of us will answer those questions with both answer in this sequence: yes and no.
Yes, we have enjoyed their free service for years. No, we didn't pay for it.

Have you ever wonder, why they generously give us such services for free? Why are they not only financially survived but even growth into giant multi-billions dollars corporation? Are they getting their profit from users that paid for premium services (i.e., bigger mailbox)? Well... surely they score some cash from such premium charge, but it's not their main source of income. So can you guess where do those greens come from? Yes, they come from...

ONLINE ADVERTISEMENTS

Online advertising is a form of advertising utilizing the Internet and World Wide Web in order to deliver marketing messages and attract customers. Examples of online advertising include contextual ads on search engine results pages, banner ads, advertising networks and e-mail marketing.

With recent web technology refinements, online advertising has evolve to better forms of interactive communication. Information/content can be chanelled based on audience geography, specific time and occasions, statistical analysis of visitors behavior, contextual relation with corresponding content, etc. All of these methods is cross-calculated in sophisticated complex algorithm, resulting into high conversion ratio from impression to actual business transaction. In short, today online advertisement cost much less than its conventional media counterpart yet resulting more sales and profits.

Reports from Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLP, states that Online Advertising generated over $17 BILLION in 2006 and growing rapidly.