Only Network

I’ve been using FasterFox for some time now and it has definitely been useful to measure the load time of different websites. See, one of the things it provides is a counter that goes at the bottom of your browser showing the load time of the page you’re looking at. And it’s more accurate than a Rolex in that it produces timings down to a millisecond. Check it out.

Do you use Microsoft Publisher much? I’ve used it in the past for the occasional flier or to produce birthday invitations, but I’ve just realised that it can be used to produce websites too. Sounds a bit scary really, so I’m not quite sure what it does, but I will give it a whirl in the near future and let you know what it comes up with.

Not really a fan of generated websites though …

Just came across a great post on Stylish Design, a blog with some great SEO advice. The post talks about some of the problems that search engines have with dynamic pages, particularly with spidering these pages and traversing the site to get all the content you’ve prepared. It suggests some practical advice to avoid these problems and optimise your SEO on these pages. Here are the highlights:

• Find out if the database program has a built-in way to create static HTML.
• Modify URLs so they don’t look like they’re pointing to dynamic pages.
• Use a URL rewrite trick.
• Find out if the programmer can create static pages from the database.
• You can get your information into Yahoo! using an XML feed.

Some great advice there, but there’s more details down at the site. Check out: SEO friendly website

I must say, this isn’t my first time down on that website and I do like the author’s style. He goes straight to the point and most of his advice has a technical explanation behind it. It’s nice to be given advice from an expert, rather than someone who’s heard suggestions from a third party. Check out the blog while you’re there.

If you’re wondering exactly how popular your website is, you might want to check out this Link Popularity Tool. It let’s you monitor how different search engines perceive your website, particularly in their count of how many websites link to you. Stick your URL in there and give it a whirl. You may find some surprising numbers in there.

I came across an interesting article today that shows just how powerful vBulletin is. If you’ve never come across vBulletin before, it’s a powerful forum package that is used on literally thousands of websites. Anyway, the article I came across gives a synopsis on the features available to a vBulletin Administrator. It’s well written and shows just how deep the functionality in vBulletin goes.

The article is from The Web Articles Directory an article portal with over 1300 articles spanning a large number of different topics. You may want to submit an article in order to promote your profile and drag traffic to your website. There are also facilities for webmasters to use their content. I’ll bookmark this to have a look at in the future, as it will be nice to get some extra content for this website.

Well, I’ve been using WordPress 2.5 on most of my blogs for a few days now and the more I use it, the happier I get with it. I’m used to all the changes there are in the admin interface and I’m loving the new version of the editor (though I haven’t managed to get it running on Ugh!!’s Greymatter Honeypot for some reason)

However, but far the best feature in my opinion is that ability to upgrade plugins right from within your admin interface. No need to download the plugin, no need to unzip the plugin, no need to fire up your FTP client, no need up upload to your blog. WordPress does it all for you. It’s a bit like a wall sconce in a corridor. You don’t really need it, but it makes a heck of a difference if you have one.

I’ve just written a WordPress Plugin that lets you display the last few people who dropped their Entercard on your blog. It’s a fun little widget especially if you’re into the whole Entrecard space. I quite enjoy building WordPress plugins; and WpAuctions was great fun. Who knows, one of these days I might be spending my time earning a living in my boardshorts

Check out EntreDroppers

Well, it’s official. I’m now 100% convinced that WiFi is the way to go. Granted, it’s radio and so more vulnerable to interference than a cabled network, but even with Cisco cables there’s no guarantee that your wired network won’t suffer any interference (particularly if someone accidentally cuts through one of them).

From now on, I’m recommending Wifi to everyone.

Woohoo .. I’ve finally managed to get permalinks working on this blog. I’ve been looking for a solution for ages and finally found one on this site. I’m just really, really pleased. Now, one reason to switch from IIS to Apache has been quashed!

Are you in the market for a new eCommerce engine? If so, one place that produces ecommerce software that works is 123 Cart. It’s extremely easy to use and has all the features you would expect from a fully fledged shopping solution. It lets you accept all payment types (including Google and PayPal) and includes all the marketing tools you need to attract traffic to your website.

You have a couple of options if you decide to go down that route. You can either buy the package and host it yourself, or go for their hosted solution, where they handle all the hosting and infrastructure for you. But don’t just take my word for it, try out the demo