Google translate

There is an automatic translation of web page, supported by more than 51 languages and is available to all webmasters. The idea is simple, the javascript gadget is added the website, then the clicks the dropdown box and clicks on translate. To note: the code doesn’t cause any problems with adsense either.

The language of the page is checked accordingly, if the visitors language is different from the page’s language then they will be asked to translate the page via a banner.

Install the Google Website Translation Gadget

Go to the installation page (currently set for Simplified Chinese) and follow the instructions.

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Why an RSS Feed

It’s not required that every site has it. CMS sites like Wordpress automatically have it setup, whilst static HTML or custom coded sites do not. Offering a feed makes your site dynamic, so when new content is added – it’s automatically displayed on the feed. People can then download your feed and keep upto date with your site without having to visit it. It can also be a source of traffic, if you submit to RSS Submission sites.

PHP made RSS Feed

The source code below can be downloaded and integrated on your site. Any problems let me know here.

• PHP RSS Code

You would then integrate it using something like this, also using a Cron job to active it would help alot:

$myfeed = new RSSFeed();
$myfeed->SetChannel('http://www.mysite.com/xml.rss',
'My feed name',
'My feed description',
'en-us',
'My copyright text',
'me',
'my subject');
$myfeed->SetImage('http://www.mysite.com/mylogo.jpg');
$myfeed->SetItem('http://www.mysite.com/article.php?id=bla',
'name',
'description');
....
echo $myfeed->output();

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Browser Features

The browser showcases tabs in a different way as you can isolate certain tabs. You can also run video direct from the browser, isolate pop ups, webfonts support, link to Web Applications and create third party plugins. It also supports various tools such as:

• Search
• Desktop Search
• Gmail
• Virtual Drive
• Web browsing
• G Docs

Using Google Chrome for Websites

For web site owners, Big G’s browser will be a useful addition. What I found useful was support for Javascript heavy sites and web applications, site locked quickly and less resources were used up on my computer.

Integration with RSS feeds worked well since they were instantly loaded in the browser.

Download and Install Google Chrome

• Download

Conclusion

It’s still a bit buggy and being Windows XP compatible only, the launch feels a little premature. I do believe it’s a useful addition to my browser collection for testing compatibility issues, loading many sites at once in different browsers and also for ease of use with RSS feeds.

My current preference is to use IE for do to do usage as I’m comfortable with the layout, Firefox for site testing and Google Chrome for final testing and multi-site viewing.

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Ways of disguising affiliate links

Firstly you should of already applied to relevant affiliate offers and made a list of the affiliate urls.

Meta Redirect

You can create a page which contains the following code, which when clicked on will redirect to your affiliate link. This code is useful for people who’d like a quick fix. In the tag place:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=AFFILIATE URL HERE">

PHP Disguise

Create a .php file containing the name of your affiliate product – say bestblogsasia.php, then within the new .php file add:

<?php
header( 'Location:http://www.bestblogs.asia
' ) ;?>

htaccess 301

My personal preference is to use this placement although the the .htaccess file can get quite large:

Redirect 301 /go/affiliate.htm http://www.affiliate.com/?ref=123

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Style Declarations

When creating a site, no matter what the end design ends up being, there are certain standard css declarations that I end up making every time.

* {
margin: 0; padding: 0;
}

body {
padding:0; background:#fff;
} 

form {
padding:0; margin:0;
}

Compressing your CSS

I’d recommend by visiting CleanCSS first or CSSDrive, then trying the following technique in php:

Before

< link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen"
href="/style.css"/ >

After

< link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen"
href="/style.css.php"/ >

Now to the real part. Open up your style.css.php, or whatever you named it, file and add the following snippet of PHP to the very top:

< ? php if(extension_loaded('zlib')){ob_start('ob_gzhandler');
} header("Content-type: text/css"); ? >

Then, add the next line to the very bottom and save the file.

< ?php if(extension_loaded('zlib')){ob_end_flush();}? >

That’s it! Refresh your site and check it out. Compression rates can be upto 400%!

Print Stylesheet

A print stylesheet is useful, when a user prints a page you can control what should be printed.

In the print.css place the following, on the site you can place any areas which don’t need to be printed with the noprint div tag:

html {
     width:100%
}

body {
    background-color: #fff;
    color: #000;
    font-size: 12pt;
}

a {
    color: #000;
}

img {
    border: 0;
}

.noprint{
    display: none;
}

h1, h2 {
    page-break-before: auto;
}

p {
    page-break-inside: avoid;
}

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Checklist Setup

• What is the goal of the website project and who is the target audience?
• What kind of image (branding) do you wish to convey?
• Will it be a bilingual website?
• Do you have a domain name and require hosting?
• Any database functionality required?
• Who are your competitors and which sites you admire?
• How many web pages to be created approximately?
• What is the approximate financial budget and the ideal completion date?

Working with Clients

• Preliminary website page flowchart is given.
• Approximate financial budget is re-confirmed, waiting for acceptance. Site is developed in secure environment.
• Client gives feedback, afterwards launch live and invoice final payment.

Content

• Check spelling and grammar.
• Look at the style of writing.
• Implement recurring common phrases (keywords).

Website Standards

• Accessibility.
• HTML, JavaScript and CSS validation.
• Create custom 404/error pages.

SEO and Metrics

• Ensure content is marked-up semantically/correctly.
• Define Meta Data.
• Check format (user/search engine friendliness) of URLs.
• Set up Analytics, FeedBurner, and any other packages for measuring ongoing metrics.
• Create an XML Sitemap and submit to Google Webmaster/Yahoo Site Explorer.
• Create Favicon.

Functional Testing

• Check on common variations of browser and variations of Screen Resolution.
• Test all forms and Test without JavaScript, Flash, and other plugins.
• Make sure all external links are valid.

Performance

• Configure backup schedule and check disk space/server capacity.
• Check image optimisation, page loading times, css optimisation and correct DB indexing.

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Setting up name servers in both WHM and Cpanel was one of the hardest things to do, here’s my tips.

Registering the Name Servers

Register Name Servers where you registered your domain at, example Godaddy. I suggest using one IP per name server, i.e.:

• NS1.yourdomain.com = IP#1
• NS2.yourdomain.com = IP#2

You may also need to notify your DataCenter to setup Reverse DNS for the IP addresses used above and for your name servers, this can be done via your Host’s Support ticket system.

Name Server Setup

1. Login to WHM as root

2. Click “Edit Setup” or “Basic cPanel/WHM Setup” from the left hand menu.

3. Type: ns1.yourdomain.com in the Primary Nameserver field.

4. Press Assign IP Address

5. Then Press Add an A Entry for this nameserver

6. Type ns2.yourdomain.com in the Secondary Nameserver field.

7. Click Assign IP Address

8. Then Click Add an A Entry for this nameserver

9. Click Manage Nameserver IPs from the left menu in WHM.

10. If you see any nameservers that do not belong to you, remove them now.

11. Click Initial NameServer Setup from the left menu in WHM Run this for the “initial name server setup”

12. Login to SSH to restart bind. (Be sure it restarts, so don’t do this in WHM)

13. Type: service named stop

14. Type: service named start

15. While in SSH do the following to verify installation has gone well.

16. Type: pico /etc/wwwacct.conf
Scroll to the bottom and insure that your name servers are listed like this: NS ns1.yourdomain.com NS2 ns2.yourdomain.com

17. While still in SSH do the following to verify installation has gone correctly.
Type: pico /etc/resolv.conf
It should look like this:

domain yourdomain.com
search yourdomain.com
#nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver ip address #1 here
nameserver ip address #2 here

18. Check one more thing in SSH to make sure Name Server Configuration went GOOD.
Type: pico /etc/nameserverips

It should look like this:
ip address 1=ns1.yourdomain.com
ip address 2=ns2.yourdomain.com

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Defining a Sitemap

A site map is preferably automated as when new content to a site is added, the sitemap has to automatically update also.

New pages added should have a higher priority in the sitemap as pages such as contact us, about us and privacy policy do not change often and demand a lower priority.

Make a Sitemap

• For Wordpress 
• Standard version

In your robots.txt file don’t forget to add the line:

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

Submit a Sitemap

• Google webmasters
• Yahoo
• Submit to Ask

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Opensourcefood Site

It’s a site where users can submit, tag and take photos of recipes. To date there are over 2000 recipes (and growing) on OSF, each with a picture, all created by the community.

As you can see from the graphs below it’s a popular site:

Opensourcefood Sold ;(

I guess the time comes when someone offers you enough money to prise a favourite site out of your hands. I really thought Yongfook would of kept the site though as his passion is food and the site was run more as a hobby and less for financial gain.

Source of Income

Since 2008 I’ve learnt that creating sites can be fun, but there needs to be some benefit at the end of the day. I saw he implemented Amazon type adverts, selling cooking products and then finally Google Adsense. Google Adsense is a beast and at times a pain, you can be sending many clicks to your competitors for only a few cents.

Cubestat rates it as making $50+ a day from Adsense. It’ll be interesting what source of income the new owner uses for the site.

He made no mention of how much he sold it for, I bet it was quite a bit since the investor is high profile and probably made him an offer. I’d personally price it at $80,000 which may be considered on the low side but the amount of revenue gained from the site is minimal and the competition is huge. The price would be mainly for the coding, the cool sounding url (which I see is now re-directed) and user fan base.

Although my thinking is users may be put off that this isn’t a Yongfook site anymore, the url has changed to something less memorable and that their contact details have been sold on.

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Simplemachines Tips

In Sources/LogInOut.php find:

$context['never_expire'] = false;

Add after:

$context['robot_no_index'] = true;

In Sources/Help.php find:

$context['sub_template'] = 'manual_' . $context['all_pages'][$context['current_page']];

Add after:

$context['robot_no_index'] = true;

Due to templates changes, I would find where you link to the following pages (probably Index.template.php) and add rel=”nofollow” in the href link:

/index.php?action=help
/index.php?action=search
/index.php?action=admin
/index.php?action=pm
/index.php?action=mlist
/index.php?action=logout

Robots.txt

Remove duplicate content by adding the following to robots.txt (you may have to make this file first):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?action*
Disallow: /*sort=*
Disallow: /*msg*

Edit the META Tags

Again this is in Index.template.php, you can personalise the keywords and description for your site.

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