class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/gomo-icon.png" alt="" />How does your website look on mobile devices? Google’s new service, How To Go Mo, gives you a chance to find out, and teaches you a lot about mobile websites in the meantime.

Every month more people start using the Internet on their phone. This means an ever-increasing amount of web traffic is through mobile browsers.

If you’re a web developer, or responsible for a website, this is something you need to know. The href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/iphone/">iPhone and href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/android/">Android browsers display websites differently than their desktop equivalents. For one thing, they are by nature smaller. For another, they don’t support the same technology. If your site relies heavily on Flash, for example, it is broken on the iPhone. If your site features very small text, it’s probably a pain to read on a phone.

It’s for this reason that Google wants web developers and website owners to start “Going Mo.” Their initiative for doing so, href="http://www.howtogomo.com/en/#homepage">can visit here, includes a lot of great resources for the job.

Lots of information

Get to this site and the first thing you’ll see is information, arranged in a brilliant interactive design similar to Google’s href="http://www.20thingsilearned.com/en-US">20 things I learned about browsers and the web. Explore this site and you’ll be convinced: mobile sites are an essential part of every website’s future.

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/gomo-slideshow.png" alt="" width="580" height="266" />

There’s more than that here, though. You will find a case study, wherein Google invested to get businesses in Mobile, Alabama set up with mobile websites. You’ll find a list of best practices for setting up a mobile site. You’ll find case studies for complex implementations of mobile websites. I could go on, but you really should explore this resource to see what it offers.

This is only a test

Another feature: you can see how your website looks on a mobile browser, even if you don’t own a mobile yourself. The preview is limited, in that you can’t explore you mobile site in your browser, but it’s still a great way to see what your mobile viewers’ first impression is.

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/gomo-test.png" alt="" width="580" height="212" />

Once you see your preview you’ll have the opportunity to fill in a survey. These questions give you a chance to think about the quality of mobile experience you’re offering, and give you feedback regarding the types of changes you should consider making to your site.

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/gomo-results.png" alt="" width="559" height="307" />

Useful for designers

So who is this useful for? Anyone who owns a website. The mobile web isn’t going away anytime soon, so you might as well get your website up and running with it.

If you’re a web designer this is also a useful tool for you, particularly if you want to get into the business of mobilizing existing websites. Send potential clients this link and they will learn all about the reasons going mobile is a good idea, making it more likely they’ll hire you for the job.

Oh, and if you get a job from that, and the site happens to be WordPress based, I highly recommend you check out href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wordpress-blog-mobilefriendly-wptouch/">wp-touch, a tool for making WordPress sites compatible with mobile browsers. It’s easy to use; I set it up on href="http://justinpot.com">JustinPot.com and think it works quite well.

Conclusion

Google’s “How To Go Mo” site is a wealth of information, and the testing feature is a nice addition. I hope it’s useful for you, but let me know if it’s not. I’ll be hanging out in the comments below.

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/featured-podcasting.png" alt="make your own podcast" />I recently had the opportunity to become part of a href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/podcast">podcast which I’m sure you’ll hear about soon enough – and it’s all fairly new ground for me. As the only one with enough bandwidth to host, and clearly the most experienced of the group in WordPress ninja-ship, I also took it upon myself to setup the necessary protocols that make an actual podcast, as opposed to being just audio files posted on a blog.

Thankfully, there’s a fantastic, free plugin for WordPress that handles the difficult bits, and I was able to get the show on the road within an hour of buying a domain.

What Is A Podcast, Technically Speaking?

A podcast is a special extended form of RSS, or href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/rss-feeds-work-simple-terms-technology-explained/">really simple syndication. Regular RSS just provides HTML content, as well as some additional meta-data such as preview image, a title, a date etc. A podcast feed on the other hand also includes links to the audio/video files in a way that special podcast clients – such as href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/itunes/">iTunes – can understand.

When a podcast feed is updated, the client will prompt you or automatically download the associated media. iTunes also specifies some additional meta-data fields such as description, which it uses to populate the information in the iTunes podcast directory.

Hosting

First off, you need to think separately about the title="The Various Forms Of Website Hosting Explained [Technology Explained]" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/website-hosting-technology-explained/">hosting of the actual podcast media files – typically anywhere from 5MB (10 minutes of audio) to 500MB (video) – to the hosting of the podcast feed.

Today I’ll only be discussing self-hosting both the files themselves and the website used to make the podcast feed, but if you have a particular bandwidth-limited webhost then you may need to consider placing your files on a low-cost host such as title="4 Great Uses For Amazon’s S3 Web Services" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-great-amazons-s3-web-services/">Amazon s3. Either will function the same, but you will need to consider this beforehand. While the bandwidth required to access the feed will be no more than a regular blog, the bandwidth needed for 1,000 people downloading your 100MB podcast every week can rapidly escalate.

An alternative solution is to use a low-cost feed/file host combination, such as href="http://www.libsyn.com">libsyn. The problem with using a hosted service is the same as using a hosted blogging service – if you become popular and need to migrate to your own domain, things can become difficult and you may end up losing listeners in the process.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/libsyn.png" alt="make your own podcast" width="580" height="384" />

On the other hand, many all-in-one hosted solutions offer access to their automated advertising insertion systems. I can’t testify as to the profitability of these, but I assume it’s much the same rules as Adsense – the more downloads you get, the more money you can make. In my opinion, monetization should never be your primary goal on any web project – start off making great content, and only consider monetization once you’ve gained traction.

To clarify a common misconception – the iTunes store will not host your podcast for you, nor will they set up any of the necessary meta-data needed in your feed. This is entirely your responsibility to set up. For podcasts, the iTunes store functions in a similar fashion to a link directory. With the feed correctly set up, you submit the address, and wait for approval. That’s it. You need to provide the file hosting, and the podcast feed hosting.

Using WordPress & Podpress

So assuming you’re going to host your own files on either your own web server or Amazon s3, the next step is to set up a website or front-end to manage the podcast feed, again on your own server, for which we’ll be using the world’s best CMS – href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/wordpress">WordPress. I strongly suggest you get your own specific domain for the podcast too – we got ours for $6 with a coupon at GoDaddy – and that’ll save a world of hassle later on.

A standard WordPress installation won’t do podcasting out of the box, and for this we’ll install a plugin called href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/podpress/">podPress - search for it from the Add Plugin menu option within WordPress.

Basic iTunes meta-data is automatically added to your site feed now. Go to the podPress->Feed/iTunes Settings to customise this with your own:

• summary
• preview image (this is what people will see in the store)
• owner
• subtitle
• keywords
• explicit tag

You’re also able to set up additional feeds, but I won’t go into detail with them here as the setup is significantly more complicated. These can be used if you plan on releasing different formats – for example, keeping the main feed as a plain MP3, or also providing a video feed.

Adding Your First Podcast

Releasing a new episode is basically as simple as creating a new post and associating the relevant media file. You can’t actually upload the podcast on most hosts, due to the upload file size limit which is usually about 2MB. You’ll need to open an FTP connection, create a folder for your podcasts, and enter the URL manually on the post screen in the new podPress section.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/podpress-media-new-post.png" alt="how to create your own podcast" width="580" height="313" />

Anything else you write in the post content area will become the “show notes” and description for iTunes.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/description.png" alt="how to create your own podcast" width="580" height="69" />

Submitting To The iTunes Store

Before you submit, make sure you’ve changed all the defaults from the podPress settings screen, and be sure to have a feed image set, as well as accurately marking if the feed is explicit or not.

You’ll need an iTunes account to submit the podcast. Just navigate to the iTunes Store -> Podcasts section from iTunes, and click Submit a Podcast in the top right. Paste in the feed address of your blog, and step through the wizard. There’s a 2-3 day wait time to be approved, and after that the feed will update daily (so you may not see your new episode immediately in the iTunes directory).

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/submit.png" alt="make your own podcast" width="272" height="253" />

I understand Dave is in the process of writing a full guide on the topic of podcasting, so if you’re unsure of the process or you don’t to host it yourself, wait for that in a few months. Comments welcome, or questions if you’re having problems as I’ll try to help as best as I can. If you need more help on blogging in general with WordPress, may I suggest href="http://www.makeuseof.com/pages/set-up-your-blog-with-wordpress-the-ultimate-guide">my own fantastic free guide.

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/websiteup.png" alt="" />Owning a website seems like a terrific idea on paper. Produce a bunch of awesome articles that draw in huge crowds, lots of comments and discussion, and of course plenty of ad revenue. The last thing most people consider when thinking up the next great website is the work. Owning a popular website means regular server maintenance, closely monitoring the health and uptime of your web server, and keeping track of the health of your internal and external links. After your website traffic starts to multiply, sometimes those monitoring and maintenance tasks start to consume more time than you ever anticipated.

Once I realized that I needed these tools, the first place I turned to was MUO. At first I thought that maybe using one of the apps that href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-monitor-websites-that-dont-have-rss-feeds/">Aibek listed to monitor sites might work. Unfortunately those would only tell me whenever one of my writers had updated the site. I wanted something along the lines of href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/pingdom-monitor-website-downtime/">Pingdom, but that particular tool only allows you to monitor one website under the free account.

Eventually, I discovered a couple of tools available from href="http://www.iannet.org/apps.php">IanNet that did exactly what I was looking for – one that would automatically monitor all of my websites, and another that would monitor the health of all internal and external URL links. Those tools are href="http://www.sitesmonitor.net/">SiteMonitor and href="http://www.iannet.org/apps/SiteVerify/">SiteVerify.

The Importance of Monitoring Your Website

The one thing I cannot stress enough when it comes to “optimizing” your website for Google these days is the importance of server health. Carefully optimized keywords and topics are still important, but the site should also be fast-loading, have excellent up-time, and have no broken links.

Using SiteMonitor To Monitor Uptime

The first thing I did when I discovered SiteMonitor was to set it up to run on my personal home web server. This PC, which is always running, is a good starting point to go out and ping my websites at regular intervals every day. When you first run the app, it looks somewhat simple, but the usefulness of the program quickly becomes apparent once you start using it.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/sitemonitor1.png" alt="" width="573" height="393" />

The first thing you’ll want to do is start adding the websites to monitor. Just click the blue “Add” button, and a popup window will appear for the details you need to include. The ping actually looks for a segment of text within the HTML response, so you’ll need to view the source code and pick some text that the page always returns. Many people just use the <title> text for this.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/sitemonitor3.png" alt="" width="579" height="471" />

The program also includes functionality for a secure connection (https) and TCP. Once you’ve added one or more sites, you can manually run a test using the green “Check Selected” button. Or you can use the “Check All” button next to it to test all of your sites at once.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/sitemonitor4.png" alt="" width="573" height="393" />

When you do a manual check, you’ll get a pop-up confirmation that the connection to the web server went through okay.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/sitemonitor5.png" alt="" width="563" height="381" />

You’ll also see the page-load time for that URL. Most people typically only use this app to check the main page of their website, but there’s nothing stopping you from entering additional URLs and testing various pages of your site as well.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/sitemonitor4a.png" alt="" width="512" height="174" />

You may want to keep the standard Google entry as a baseline for your own site. If your page-load time is almost as good or better than Google, you’re probably running a fairly healthy server setup.

Best of all (and this is my favorite feature of this program), you can configure the program to check your website at a set interval, and if there’s a problem you can configure it to email you, or send an SMS.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/sitemonitor6.png" alt="" width="435" height="431" />

This is an awesome tool if you really want your website visitors to have the best possible experience, and are really concerned about any downtime at all. This software will let you know instantly so that you can call tech support and get the issue resolved immediately.

Use SiteVerify To Qualify Your Links

As I mentioned earlier, another really important maintenance task when you own a popular website is to always monitor for broken links. Internal page changes can create broken links without knowing it. Also, external sites may disappear off the net, causing broken external links. This is where SiteVerify comes in handy.

All you have to do is type in the URL of your top-level domain, and then click “Start“. The software will start crawling through your website, checking links at whatever depth you defined in the “Traverse” setting. Keep this at “1″ for the fastest check (individual links).

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/sitemonitor7.png" alt="" width="577" height="453" />

The software will quickly dig out all links throughout your website, and then it will start plugging through the list and validating your links. The test I ran above was for all internal links, but you can check the box for external links – but be warned that the scan will take significantly longer.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/sitemonitor8.png" alt="" width="325" height="299" />

Once the scan is done, you can send the final results to a text file by choosing “Export List” from the file menu, and you can also use SiteVerify to create a Sitemap for your website.

Verifying links is an important thing that I would recommend any webmaster should do at least once a month at the very minimum. By monitoring your uptime and your page load speed, as well as maintaining the health and integrity of all of your internal and external links, you’ll ensure that your site is considered by both search engines and your visitors, as one of the best-quality sites on the Internet.

Give these website monitoring tools a try and see if it catches any problems with your website. Do you find them valuable as a website owner? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Image Credit: href="http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1326722" rel="nofollow">yasin öztürk

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/helpden-icon.png" alt="website visitor chat" />Integrate online chat on your website and start a conversation with your readers. Maybe you want to help people visiting your site by answering basic questions, or maybe you want to turn visitors to your site into customers? Either way, HelpDen gives you a direct way to talk with people visiting your website.

A good website gives plenty of information, but sometimes all the quality copy in the world can’t solve people’s problems. That’s when class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/chat/">chat comes in. People like the feeling of connecting with an actual human being. It lets them cut through the clutter and ask the precise question they’re thinking about. Combine the right software with a good chat strategy and you can offer something other websites can’t.

How It Works

If a process isn’t simple people will never use it. This applies to chat as much as anything else on the web. HelpDen, I think, is simple enough that people will use it.

To begin with, we have a light bulb:

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/helpden-bulb.png" alt="website visitor chat" width="291" height="125" />

The bulb is lit when you’re online; when it’s not lit they can send you an email. The user clicks the bulb and is asked for a bit of information:

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/helpden-info.png" alt="chat with website visitors" width="580" height="236" />

Once they fill this information out they can start talking to you, if you’re online. The chat interface is simple and easy to use:

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/helpden-chat.png" alt="chat with website visitors" width="580" height="317" />

How helpful this is to your site’s visitors is, of course, determined by how helpful you are. Answer questions well and point people in the right direction and you might be able to make them happy. Or, if your goal is to sell your goods and services, help recommend the things they’re looking for.

The Backend

So now you know what the customer sees, what do you see? The HelpDen backend is simple but effective. The dashboard contains your current chat; there is no limit to how many people can talk to you at once (except for how many you can keep up with, of course).

You’ll see a chat interface similar to the one above, but with more options for sending messages:

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/helpden-response.png" alt="chat with website visitors" width="628" height="139" />

As you can see it’s possible to send standard messages and to send files. You can manage both the standard messages and the files in this interface. Here is the file uploader:

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/helpden-upload.png" alt="chat with website visitors free" width="404" height="477" />

There doesn’t seem to be any limits to file size; I uploaded a 10MB file without any problems.

Every bit of text this service outputs to users at various points can be changed; this allows you to customize the experience for your users quite a bit:

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/helpden-forms.png" alt="chat with website visitors free" width="477" height="343" />

Exploring the options is easy to do, so check them out. You can tweak things quite a bit.

HelpDen keeps track of the people who visit your site, and whether they want to hear from you more in the future. Head to the Leads section to see a list of everyone you’ve chatted with:

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/helpden-leads.png" alt="chat with website visitors free" width="580" height="134" />

Follow-up with people. It just might end up bringing you business or solidifying your reader base.

Installing Help Den

Adding HelpDen to your website is easy. You can easily find class="vt-p" href="http://www.helpden.com/add-ons.php">find HelpDen addons for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, so you’re set if you use any of those content management systems for your website. I myself prefer WordPress – adding chat to a WordPress site was simple.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/helpden-wordpress.png" alt="website visitor chat" width="580" height="265" />

Alternatively you can use the embed code to put the button wherever you like. This means you can use HelpDen on any website, whether you use a CMS or not. Even if you use a CMS you might want to use this code in order to place the bulb precisely where you want it.

Limitations

You can use HelpDen for free, but there are some limits to the free version. You cannot brand your chat window, for example, and you can only have one person logged into chat responding to peoples questions at a time. Check the class="vt-p" href="http://helpden.com/pricing.php">HelpDen pricing sheet if you want more.

Conclusion

This isn’t the only chat tool you can integrate into your website. We have  previously profiled  class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/chat-live-website-visitors-zopim/">Zopim, which lets you live chat with your website visitors. HelpDen, however, seems uniquely focused on the needs of businesses. The ability to track potential leads is a big deal, as is being able to offer files.

But I’m sure you guys have some input to offer. What do you think of HelpDen? Will you be using it on your site? If not, what will you use? Let us know in the comments below.

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/HTML01.png" alt="html tags" />The world wide web knows many languages and is coded in several different ones. The one language however, that can be found all over and has been around since the invention of webpages, is the HyperText Markup Language, better known as HTML. As the name implies, HTML is not a programming, but a markup language. The markups are interpreted by browsers to visualize content on websites. In its most simple form HTML is used to format text, embed media files, and organize content on a webpage. In other words, HTML describes webpages and based on this description, the browser creates an ‘image’.

Thanks to href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/website-builder">free website builders no one really needs to mess with coding HTML anymore. However, on occasion HTML tags can come in handy, for example to make quick changes to a website, add hypertext in a comment, or format text for a forum post. In this article I want to show you a few, possibly random, but definitely useful and simple tags for daily use.

Before we start, let me introduce you to some basic rules that will hopefully make HTML tags easier to understand:

• HTML uses markup tags, which are enclosed in angle brackets, such as this: <html>
• Tags that look like the one in the example above are called start tags. Every start tag must be followed by an end tag at some point, such as this: </html>
• Some tags do not describe content. To be compliant with current standards, however, they must still end. Consequently, they unite the start and end tag, such as this: <br />

Formatting Text

HTML tags are usually straightforward. The tags for making text bold, italic, or underlined are derived from the respective word.

Input: <b>bold</b> /> Output: bold

Input: <i>italic</i> /> Output: italic

Input: <u>underlined</u> /> Output: style="text-decoration: underline;">underlined

Input: <s>strike through text</s> /> Output: style="color: #000000;">strike through text

Creating Hypertext

Plain URLs can look pretty ugly. Adding the hyperlink to a text, i.e. creating a hypertext, is much more stylish and will save space, especially if the link is very long.

Input: <a href=”http://www.makeuseof.com” title=”MakeUseOf”>MakeUseOf</a> /> Output: title="MakeUseOf" href="http://www.makeuseof.com">MakeUseOf

As you can see this HTML tag is a little more complicated, so let’s look at it in detail. The actual tag is <a> and the additional elements are attributes that specify further characteristics. The attribute href= specifies the link and title= defines the mouse-over tooltip. Be sure to use quotations marks to enclose the link and the title, otherwise you might end up with a broken link.

Embedding Images

A picture can say more than a thousand words. We should use them more often. And this is how you can manually insert one using HTML:

Input: <img src=”http://www.yourlinkhere.com/Smiley.png” alt=”smiley” /> /> Output: class="alignnone size-full wp-image-75628" title="Smiley01" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Smiley01.png" alt="html tags" width="20" height="20" />

Let’s also analyze this tag. Again, the actual tag is <img> and the required attributes are src= and alt=. The former points to the location of the image, i.e. its URL, and the latter provides an alternative text, which is displayed in case the display of images is blocked or the link is broken. Again, use quotation marks to avoid broken links.

The <img> tag is also an example of a tag that doesn’t need to be ‘ended’ and hence closes with the forward dash in the initial tag, i.e. <img /> rather than <img>.

Breaks & Paragraphs

To create a structured text, you need to utilize line breaks and paragraphs. And these are the tags you need to know:

Input: <br /> /> Output: This tag creates a line break. Note that this is another tag that unites start and end tag in one.

Input: <p>Text inside your paragraph.</p> /> Output: Unlike the previous tag, the paragraph tag has a standard start and end tag. The text in between the two tags is wrapped into a paragraph, meaning there is an empty line before and after.

Lists

There are essentially two types of lists: ordered and unordered lists, better known as numbered and bulleted lists. To create either, you need to know two different tags, but only three in total. Let’s look at the examples first:

Input:

<ol> /> <li>Item One</li> /> <li>Item Two</li> /> </ol>

Output:

1. Item One
2. Item Two

Input:

<ul> /> <li>Item One</li> /> <li>Item Two</li> /> </ul>

Output:

• Item One
• Item Two

To create an ordered list, use the tag <ol> and for an unordered list, insert the <ul> tag. In both cases, the <li> tag is used to define an item within the list.

Now that you have seen how simple and logic HTML is, you may want to go beyond the very basics and learn a little more. For more HTML tips, check out these articles:

• title="5 Steps To Understanding Basic HTML Code" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-steps-understanding-basic-html-code/">5 Steps To Understanding Basic HTML Code
• title="5 HTML Tips to Create a Fast Loading Free Website" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-html-tips-to-create-a-fast-loading-free-website/">5 HTML Tips to Create a Fast Loading Free Website
• title="7 Cool HTML Effects That Anyone Can Add To Their Website" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/7-cool-html-effects-that-anyone-can-add-to-their-website-nb/">7 Cool HTML Effects That Anyone Can Add To Their Website

Do you feel a little more confident about using HTML tags now? If you have been ‘hand coding’ routinely before, what tags do you think are missing?

Image credits: title="HTML" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=22713652">kentoh />
/> href="http://www.supertintin.com/">SuperTinTin – Skype Video Call Recorder /> Record and save your audio and video conversations on Skype or MSN. Easy to use.

/>

 

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Shutterstock-Stopwatch.jpg" alt="website speed test"/>Not every website can be a Google. No; not in terms of scale but in terms of the speed with which it loads up in our browsers. Minimalism is great, but it does not go with the need to put more content and animated ads on the webpage. It is sometimes a trade-off which every web designer has to make.

Creating faster webpages is one of the commandments of great web design. A slow loading speed not only indicates poor design but is also a huge turn-off for visitors. Slow loading webpages could also be symptoms of bugs or any other bottleneck.

The first step you can take to optimize your website is to put it through a speed test. These ten tools are few of the many which can help test loading speeds and give cues to create faster webpages.

href="http://webwait.com/">WebWait

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Page-Load01.jpg" alt="website speed test" width="580" height="344" />

The timer gives you the average loading time of your website. Enter the URL of your site, set the number of runs, and get the results in terms of Average, Median, and Standard Deviation after the runs are through. You can set the number of test runs. While running the website speed test, the app factors in all images, stylesheets, and Javascript. It runs in all popular browsers. (See href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/webwait-measure-website-loading-time/">Directory mention)

href="http://whichloadsfaster.com/">Which Loads Faster?

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Page-Load02.jpg" alt="free website speed checker" width="580" height="286" />

Pit one site against the other and see which one comes out on top. You can benchmark the faster website and use it optimize the speed of your own website. The choice of two modes allows you to control the loading simultaneously in case one site interferes with the other. It could be quite a fun tool too as the ‘epic test’ between Apple and Adobe shows that Apple has bit of an edge. (See href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/whatloadsfaster-compare-website-loading-speed/">Directory mention)

href="http://www.webpagetest.org/">Web Page Test

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Page-Load03.jpg" alt="free website speed checker" width="580" height="336" />

WebPagetest.org was developed by AOL and then Open Sourced. This web app gives you a long list of server locations to try out the tests on. Another dropdown enables you to set a specific browser (IE9 too). Advanced Settings are for further fine-tuning the test by setting parameters like the number of test runs, connection type, including scripts etc. You can also use a visual tool to compare multiple URLs together.  (See href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/webpagetest-test-load-speed-of-website/">Directory mention)

href="http://loads.in/">Load.in

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Page-Load04.jpg" alt="free website speed checker" width="580" height="310" />

This website speed tool is definitely one of the coolest around in terms of visual appeal. Loads.in gives you more than 50 server locations around the world to try out loading speeds on. The first run retrieves the loading speed for a random location. The next ones can be set by country and browser type. As the test completes, you also get snapshots of the webpage at various points on a timeline. The loading time also displays the individual loading times of each site element in a waterfall chart. The data can also be downloaded as a HAR file. (See href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/loadsin-test-how-fast-a-website-loads/">Directory mention)

href="http://www.slowcop.com/">Slowcop

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Page-Load05.jpg" alt="website for checking download speed" width="580" height="275" />

This page loading speed tester gives you an instant speed report that also scores your site from 0 to 100. The report displays data like the total number of elements, page size, download time, and the score. With this as a denominator, you can instantly compare it against a competitor site and see the performance. (See href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/slowcop-website-speed-report/">Directory mention)

href="http://www.pingbrigade.com/">Ping Brigade

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Page-Load06.jpg" alt="website for checking download speed" width="580" height="360" />

Test your website on three scales – ping, page load, and web server latency. The test is quite fast and a colored map gives you clickable server locations in America and the world to test with different servers. (See href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/pingbrigade-how-fast-does-your-site-load/">Directory mention)

href="http://tools.pingdom.com/">Pingdom

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Page-Load07.jpg" alt="website for checking download speed" width="580" height="338" />

Test your page load speeds The Full Page Test gives you a detailed visual report on the load time of each element (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). Objects included in javascript are ignored. You can sort through the results with the tools available on the menu bar and diagnose any bottlenecks if any.

href="http://browsermob.com/free-website-performance-test">BrowserMob

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Page-Load08.jpg" alt="" width="580" height="276" />

The free website performance test gives a neat visual display of loading times with reference to a few locations around the world. The number of objects on the page are also broken down in a nice colorful pie-chart. Use the waterfall chart to analyze each individual element in more detail.

href="http://www.webslug.info/">WebSlug

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Page-Load09.jpg" alt="" width="580" height="350" />

WebSlug’s site timer gives you a comparative estimate of two websites. With just the URL you can benchmark one site against another. The simple site is pretty limited in scope but can be used as a ‘battle tool’ between two websites.

href="http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/">PageSpeed

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Page-Load10.jpg" alt="website speed test" width="580" height="255" />

Page Speed is an open-source project from Google that’s available as an online app and also as a Chrome extension. Page Speed Online analyzes the content of a web page, and then generates suggestions to make that page faster. The suggestions are graded as low, medium, and high priority. Using this valuable tool you can see the suggestions on each object on the webpage. In an improvement, PageSpeed also tweaks the suggestions for faster mobile browsing.

Webmasters need a bevy of href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/webmaster-tools/">tools to work on optimization of their websites. Along with the online apps, there are quite a few extensions and offline tools as well. Tina’s post shows you – href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/run-speed-test-website/">How To Run A Speed Test On Your Website with FireBug and YSlow. If you are looking for a portable app, take a look at href="http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=24963.0">Speed Monitor. Which tools would you recommend to speedup websites and blogs?

Image Credit: rel="nofollow" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=73907131">Shutterstock

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Backing up your website or blog can be an expensive and arduous task, requiring a variety of plugins, or additional plans from your hosting provider – but it needn’t be really. If you have SSH access to your website host (generally you would need at least a virtual private server for this), then it’s easy to backup, restore and migrate your entire website with only a few commands. Let me show you how.

What is SSH Command Line?

SSH gives you the ability to talk directly to your web-server. It doesn’t give a pretty interface, or a nice GUI, just a straight-up powerful command line. This can be daunting to some people, but the sheer power, speed, and level of automation it provides can be an absolute life-saver and makes the process of migrating sites incredibly easy.

Most shared hosts unfortunately don’t allow SSH access to your account, at least not by default. If you’re hosting with GoDaddy, you can enable it though, so be sure to check first.

To log in via SSH, open up the Terminal in OS X (or get some free SSH software for Windows) and type in the following:

ssh username@yourdomain.com

You’ll be prompted for your password. If you’ve never used SSH before, you might be surprised when typing in your password doesn’t anything on screen. Don’t worry, that’s for security.

Once logged in, you’ll be presented with a command prompt, similar to the following:

-bash-3.2$

This means everything is fine, so go ahead and continue with these commands.

Start by taking a look around and trying to navigate to your web directory. Type:

ls

To ‘list’ the current files and folders.

cd directoryname

to change to a directory. In this case, I’m going to navigate to the httpdocs directory, which is the root of my web site (where all my wordpress files are stored). You can then ‘ls’ again, just to be sure.

At this point, we’re ready to begin the SSH backup process.

Backing up the Database:

Since the majority readers will be doing this with a WordPress install, you will most certainly have a database to backup in addition to any files stored on the site. First off, you’ll need 3 bits of information to backup your database, but all can be found within wp-config.php (if you’re running wordpress, that is):

• Database name
• Database user
• Database password

Then, issue this simple command, being sure to replace the username, table name, and backup filename where neccessary:

mysqldump --add-drop-table -u username -p tablename > backupfilename.sql

Hit enter, and enter your password. Once it’s run, you can then issue another ‘ls’ command to check that the file has been output. Congratulations, this is all the information in your database as a single SQL file, ready to backup or import somewhere else.

Note: I’ve assumed that your database server is running on the same server on which you are hosting. On a GoDaddy host however, the MySQL database is actually stored remotely on a separate server to which you don’t have SSH access. In cases like these, you will need to access PHPMyAdmin via the hosting control panel, but that is out of the scope of this tutorial.

Backing Up Files:

Now that we have the database stored to single file on the server, we can go ahead and backup both that and your website files down to a single compressed backup file. To do this, we are going to issue one simple command. You need only replace yourbackupfilename with whatever you want it to be called.

tar -vcf yourbackupfilename.tar .

Let me break that down. Tar is a common linux compression format, similar to zip but more efficient. -vcf are simple some options that say “make a new archive, and tell me what you’re doing”. Next is the name of the file we want to create, and finally a single period mark tells it to include everything. We could have written * instead, but this would miss any hidden files such .htaccess which is essential for WordPress.

That’s it. Once that’s run, you will have a single .tar file consisting of every file on your site. You could log in via FTP at this point and download it, but let me show one final step that allows you to restore all these files.

Restoring Everything:

Let’s say the worst has happened, and something has gone horribly wrong with your site. You’ve got a tar file of everything that you backed up last week, so now you’d like to restore it to that. First off, log in via FTP and upload the backup file onto your server. Perhaps you’ve been storing them in a special directory. Either way, move the latest complete backup file into the root of your site, and we’ll begin.

Start by unpacking all the files, the reverse of what we did to back them up:

tar -vxf yourbackupfilename.tar

The crucial difference here is in the -vxf switch, which tells it to extract the files instead of creating a new backup. Also, there is no period on the end of the command this time.

The last step is to suck your database back in to where it was before. Make sure you have a blank database setup with the same password and tablename as before, or you’ll need to change your site configuration settings too. To suck the data back in, issue this command:

mysql -u username -p tablename > databasebackupfilename.sql

Next week: Automating Your Backups

That’s enough to get you started with doing SSH backups for now, then next I’ll show how to automate the task with a simple shell script and a CRON command. If you have some Amazon s3 storage space, I’ll even show you how you can automatically upload your backup files to a storage bucket once they’re done.

One last tip – when I first began to use the command line, this one really impressed me – try pressing the tab key when your typing in a long filename, and if the name is unique enough it will attempt to autocomplete the rest of the filename!

More articles about: backup, blogging tips, blogging tools, command line, commands, restore, wordpress

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class="align-left" style="border: 0px none; margin-left: 20px; margin-top: 5px; float: right;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/intro5.jpg" alt="photo blog engine" width="251" height="54" />Last month we highlighted href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/pixelpost-capable-photo-blog-engine-website/">Pixelpost, a very capable and easy to use (if slightly outdated) photoblog engine. Despite being a fantastic little freebie, a number of readers got in touch to tell us how great Zenphoto is.

I originally used href="http://www.zenphoto.org">Zenphoto a few years ago, and immediately noticed that the project has come on leaps and bounds since then. I’ll be looking at version 1.4.0.2 in this article, which at the time of writing has only been out for a couple of weeks. If you couldn’t be sicker of href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/flickr/">Flickr and fancy hosting your own hard work then step inside.

id="more-65894">

Setting Up

Much like Pixelpost, ZenPhoto is designed to run on a web server and you’ll need your own hosting package to install. You’re going to need an Apache server with PHP version 5.2 or greater and MySQL 5 or better. As of version 2.0 it is now possible to use PostgreSQL and SQLite databases as well.

The installation process is a fairly painless experience, and one that Zenphoto prides itself upon. You can download the latest version from href="http://www.zenphoto.org">the homepage in .ZIP or href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/compile-install-tar-gz-tar-bz2-files-ubuntu-linux/">.TAR.GZ format. Once downloaded (it’s around 6MB compressed) extract the folder to a location on your hard drive.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/extract.png" alt="photo blog engine" width="564" height="395" />

Now upload the folder you just extracted to the desired location on your webserver. If you upload Zen to your root folder (usually a folder called “httpdocs”) your Zenphoto gallery will be found at yoururl.com/zenphoto. You will need an FTP client to upload, something like href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/transfer-files-by-ftp-with-filezilla/">Filezilla is perfect.

The upload process can take a while, depending on your upload speed so whilst that’s completing you might as well create a MySQL database. Your href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/website-hosting-technology-explained/">hosting company probably provided you with a web control panel like Plesk or CPanel to complete such a task.

Once done make a note of the database name. You’ll also need to add a user to the database, make a note of both username and password. You’re now ready to install, simply visit yoururl.com/zenphoto/zp-core/setup.php and follow the instructions.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/sql.png" alt="photo blog software" width="580" height="257" />

Admin Duties

One you’ve set database options and defined a username and password, you’ll be taken to the admin panel. Zenphoto’s admin interface is definitely more attractive and probably easier to work with than Pixelpost, though the general layout remains the same.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/adminpanel.png" alt="photo blog software" width="580" height="317" />

One of the first stops you’ll want to make is the Options tab, which can take you a while to work your way through. Here you can customize the general settings related to your Zenphoto installation including href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/14-other-ways-to-use-rss-feeds/">RSS, plugins, your theme, upload settings, image display and comments.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/options.png" alt="photo blog software" width="580" height="97" />

When you’ve finally set everything up (and it can take a while) you’ll probably want to upload something. Luckily you won’t need to create any albums before uploading, as there’s an option to do so on the fly. Tags don’t quite operate in the same way and do need to be added on the Tags tab and then be attached to each image.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/upload.png" alt="photo blog tools" width="434" height="318" />

Batch uploading is possible as Zenphoto will accept .ZIP archives that contain recognised image types. Arranging everything just the way you want it is made infinitely easier thanks to the drag and drop interface and galleries can be manipulated in this way too.

Once you’ve uploaded an image or .ZIP collection, you can then add titles, descriptions and individual attributes to your photos. There’s even the option to take care of href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/watermarks-marking-your-image-territory/">watermarking for you and a fantastic thumbnail editor, allowing you to get the perfect crop.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/cropview.jpg" alt="photo blog tools" width="580" height="409" />

EXIF data can be extracted from your images and put to good use, for example using the href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-five-best-things-about-google-maps/">Google Maps plugin you can show visitors where the image was taken using the latitude and longitude stored in the image (if your camera supports it, of course).

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/exif.png" alt="photo blog tools" width="467" height="382" />

You can add all these settings manually for each image of course, and once you’ve filled it all out you’ll probably have something that looks like this:

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/imageview.jpg" alt="" width="580" height="503" />

Whilst viewing your site’s front end you may notice there’s a handy Admin Toolbox in the top right corner, allowing you to manipulate various pages. From this box you can go straight into editing an image, log out and get back to the admin panel.

This is a really handy little feature which means you won’t be constantly fumbling around with bookmarks or the address bar when you want to change something.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/galleryview.png" alt="photo blog engine" width="580" height="308" />

Conclusion

At this stage Zenphoto probably looks a bit drab and boring, and there’s still plenty more that can be done with it. I’ll be following this up with another post about themes, integrating your galleries and even turning Zenphoto into a blog-style href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/cms/">CMS centred around your images.

The exhaustive list of features supported by Zenphoto makes for a thoroughly impressive cost-free package. Let us know what you think of it or share your own gallery in the comments below. />
/>Do you like MakeUseOf articles? Don’t forget to target="_blank" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/share-share-share-spread-word/">share our articles with others! It’s really important to us. />
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style="border: 0px none;margin-left:20px;float:right;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/intro8.jpg" alt="photo blog engine" />I’ve been on the hunt for a good, lightweight yet powerful photo blog engine for my website for a long while now. The other day I happened upon href="http://www.pixelpost.org">Pixelpost and it seems to have answered the call of duty.

If you’ve got some free webspace, a spare MySQL database and a burning desire to share your particular flavour of photography with the world wide web then you’ll be relieved to find out Pixelpost is a powerful free open-source tool for the job.

In this article, we’ll be looking at version 1.7.3 – you can check out the latest version in action href="http://www.pixelpost.org/demo/">right here.

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Installing the Pixelpost Photo Blog Engine

Before you get too excited, it’s important to check you’ve got everything Pixelpost requires to function. In order to install the software, you’re going to need:

• PHP version 4.3.3 or higher
• The getimagesize() PHP function
• PCRE UTF-8 Support
• PHP installation compiled with the GD graphics library

During the installation process, Pixelpost will test each of these settings, and if all goes well you won’t have any issues. If you do then it’s wise to contact your web hosting company for updates and additional software.

style="text-align: center;"> class="alignnone size-full wp-image-64116" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/requirements.gif" alt="photo blog engine" width="569" height="422" />

Download href="http://www.pixelpost.org/releases/latest.zip">the latest Pixelpost release and extract it into its own folder on your hard drive. You’re going to need an FTP client to connect to your webspace, I’d recommend href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/transfer-files-by-ftp-with-filezilla/">FileZilla as it’s free, stable and cross-compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac. You can then upload the folder (with any name you like) to your webspace.

Once done, simply visit your photo blog’s location in a web browser (e.g. yoururl.com/pixelpost) to see if everything’s in order.

You will also need to make the /images and /thumbnails folders in your Pixelpost folder writeable (unless they already are). To do this, open up your favourite FTP program, select the required directories and apply CHMOD 777 (Read/Write/Execute, usually under Permissions in the right click menu).

When you’ve done all this, you can navigate to yoururl.com/pixelpost/admin (replacing yoururl and pixelpost with your own info) to begin the installation. Be aware you’ll need to create a new MySQL database, a user for the database and a password for the user. Keep all this information handy, you’ll need it to complete the installation.

style="text-align: center;"> class="alignnone size-full wp-image-64117" title="sql" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/sql.gif" alt="photo blog software" width="580" height="434" />

Pixelpower

Once you’ve made it through the installation and logged in to your admin panel, everything is fairly straightforward. The bar at the top of the admin screen provides access to pretty much every function you’ll need, though the Options page makes for a good starting point.

style="text-align: center;"> class="alignnone size-full wp-image-64112" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/admin.png" alt="photo blog software" width="580" height="333" />

There are 4 pages of options – General, Template, Thumbnails and Spam Control. The General page allows you to customize your blog’s name, sub-title, href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/14-other-ways-to-use-rss-feeds/">RSS feed settings and so on. Templates allows you to change the look and feel of the site (more on that later) and Thumbnails and Spam Control are fairly self-explanatory.

style="text-align: center;"> class="alignnone size-full wp-image-64121" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/options.png" alt="photo blog software" width="580" height="232" />

Once you’re set-up, you can post a new image from the New Image admin page. But first, there are a few things to remember when posting to your photo blog.

Pixelpost will not resize your images for you – so you’re going to need to resize and save anything you want posted online. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as you can href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/watermarks-marking-your-image-territory/">watermark your images while you’re at it (if you do so wish).

You cannot make categories from the New Image page, a feature that I have gotten used to thanks to WordPress. The best way round this is to quickly create a new category from the Categories page before posting.

You’ve also got the (absolutely fantastic) ability to schedule posts directly from the New Image page, especially useful if you’re doing a photo-a-day and want to sort your photos out beforehand.

Repaint The Galleries

Once you’ve posted an image take a look at your new photo blog. Photography aside, it should probably look something like this:

style="text-align: center;"> class="alignnone size-full wp-image-64113" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/frontend.jpg" alt="photo blog tools" width="580" height="277" />

If you’re sick of the black background, white border and grey text then you can always give your Pixelpost a brand new look by changing the template. Templates come in folders to be easily placed in the /templates folder of your Pixelpost install.

You can then change template via the Options then Template page. There’s plenty to choose from on the href="http://www.pixelpost.org/extend/templates">Pixelpost website.

style="text-align: center;"> class="alignnone size-full wp-image-64120" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/addons.png" alt="photo blog engine" width="580" height="209" />

style="text-align: center;">

There’s also all manner of href="http://www.pixelpost.org/extend/addons">addons available for download, and these should be put in the /addons folder of your Pixelpost installation. You can then activate them on the Addons page in your admin panel.

Once you’ve finally got your photo blog exactly the way you want it it’s time for the hardest job of all – choosing the right photos! I’ll leave that one up to you.

Conclusion

If you’ve got some experience in setting up simple WordPress-style blogs then you’ll have no issues with Pixelpost, from the installation right down to adding images, templates and addons. You’ve then got the task of href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-sites-increase-traffic-to-your-photo-blog/">driving traffic and competing with href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-5-awesome-photo-blogs-inspire-impress/">some of the best photo blogs on the web – good luck!

Did you use Pixelpost for your photo blog? Thinking of starting one up but not sure how? Any favourite themes or addons? Fancy plugging your photography anyway? Let us know in the comments below.

 

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style="border: 0px none;margin-left:20px;float:right;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/pdf.png" alt="embed a pdf document"/>MakeUseOf is no stranger to PDF documents as it’s home to a href="http://www.makeuseof.com/pages/downloads">myriad of guides for all kinds of topics, and plenty of href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/pdf/">articles on href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/a-quadruple-of-light-alternatives-to-adobe-reader/">PDF-reading and href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/use-pdfvue-to-fill-out-edit-pdf-files-for-free-online/">editing software (including href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/pdfescape/">online apps for href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-ways-to-convert-a-pdf-file-to-a-jpg-image/">conversions as well). There are also tips on href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/search-text-multiple-pdf-files-pdf-viewers-advanced-search/">how to search for specific text on PDF files and how to href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/calibre-ebook-management-synchronization-software-multi-os/">optimize them for better viewing on your portable devices.

Today, we’ll take a look at how you, the reader, can take your PDF documents and present them on your website without additional plugins, as all we will be using are embed codes. There’s a number of third-party websites that house your PDF files in their viewers. The most popular ones that have implemented improved features will be discussed after the jump.

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href="http://viewer.zoho.com/home.do">Zoho Docs

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-63603" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/36.png" alt="embed a pdf document" width="580" height="196" />

Zoho is suite of superb office and productivity applications, among which is a web-based viewer that supports a lot more formats than Google Docs, including but not limited to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, RTF (rich text format) files, as well as OpenDocument text, presentation and spreadsheet files. Unlike the Google Docs Viewer, the Zoho Docs Viewer lets you upload a file you own (which you can publish so it will have a short, shareable URL) or paste the URL in href="http://viewer.zoho.com/home.do">the main page. Once you’ve uploaded your file and are viewing it online, you can grab the embed code at the Embed tab. There’s no required sign-up process.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-63602" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/3.12.png" alt="embed pdf" width="568" height="482" />

This viewer doubles up as a handy conversion service, which allows you to convert any of the supported document files to other file types.

href="http://docs.google.com/viewer">Google Docs

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-63599" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/3.1.jpg" alt="embed pdf" width="580" height="481" />

For a simple web-based PDF viewer that can also display PowerPoint files, TIFF images, Microsoft Word documents, href="http://docs.google.com/viewer">Google Docs also offers a viewer. If all you’re looking for is the document viewer, you don’t even have to visit that page. You just need to have published your PDF document so you can get the URL of the stored document and append it to the Google Docs Viewer address at http://docs.google.com/viewer so it just becomes http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=yourURLhere. Since the path also accepts the embed parameter, you can also embed a PDF document viewer in your website with iframes. Just copy the href="http://docs.google.com/viewer">embed code on the Google Docs Viewer page.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-63600" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/35.png" alt="embed pdf" width="580" height="334" />

href="www.scribd.com">Scribd

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href="www.scribd.com">Scribd is a slightly different breed when it comes to sites that allow document embedding. It is actually a document-sharing website for authors that want to publish their works online. You need to sign up for an account in order to finish uploading documents to Scribd, but once you do, you’ll have a beautiful viewer for your piece. Scribd also allows you to import any documents from Google Docs, as well as to create a document from pasted text.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-63604" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/scribd.1.png" alt="how to embed pdf file in html" width="568" height="601" />

If you’re an author and have lots of works you’d like to share or sell, you can use Scribd and other popular document-sharing websites, such as href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/docstoc/">DocStoc, href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/websites-to-publish-share-your-pdfs-online/">Issuu, href="http://www.youpublish.com/">YouPublish, href="http://www.edocr.com/">edocr (the free account has href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/edocr-convert-docs-pdf-share/">limited functionality) and href="http://www.yudu.com/">YUDU, which really have a sharing focus so your documents can get as exposed as possible.

If you’d rather not use a third-party document viewer, href="http://flexpaper.devaldi.com/?ref=FlexPaper">FlexPaper will likely be the best option for you as a website owner.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-63606" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/8.png" alt="embed a pdf document" width="580" height="306" />

It is an open-source web-based document viewer that you can download for non-commercial purposes href="http://flexpaper.devaldi.com/?ref=FlexPaper">at this website and upload it to your site.

Did we miss any other free online document viewers? Let us know in the comments!

Photo credit: rel="nofollow" href="http://findicons.com/icon/71081/pdf?id=71081">Wendell Fernandes />
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class="align-left" style="border: 0px none; margin-left: 20px; margin-top: 5px; float: right;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/twitter1.jpg" border="0" alt="twitter chrome extension" width="223" height="180" />With Twitter pulling out all the stops to make their website as class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/twitter-desktop-clients/">functional as possible, you might be inclined to ditch your third party client in favour of using the website instead. Some of the features include viewing images and videos directly on the website, hovering over shortened URLs reveal the full URL and conversations are much easier to follow.

There are definitely advantages to using the website – the most obvious of which is that it will use less resources on your computer.That said, you’ll find that there are quite a few features that Twitter has yet to implement on the website and they could easily be a deal breaker when it comes to making the switch. You’ll instantly lose notifications, integrated URL shortening and much more. Chrome users, however, have at their disposal a variety of extensions that will turn the Twitter website into the ultimate tweeting experience.

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Notifications

One of the first things you’ll miss if you decide to use the Twitter website as opposed to a client, is notifications. Want to be alerted when someone replies to your tweets, DMs you, or even when your feed is updated? Install the Twitter Chrome extension, class="vt-p" href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ikknnkomiokeodcdkknnhgjmncfiefmn">Twitter Notifier and configure the extension, deciding which alerts you want to receive.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/NotifierChrome.png" border="0" alt="twitter chrome extension" width="474" height="284" />

Notifications appear at the top right hand corner of the screen, regardless of which website  or program you have open at the time.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Notification.png" alt="" width="332" height="123" />

Retweet Options

Retweeting seems to always be an issue when it comes to using the Twitter website. In the past, there was no way to quickly retweet, and you had to resort to the copy-and-paste method. Now, you can retweet, but only using Twitter’s updated version which only allows you to quote the entire tweet word for word. If you want to retweet the good old way, giving yourself a chance to edit, or add your own comment to the tweet, install the extension class="vt-p" href="https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/djdfflimbhkajfhigefijdlcmdcideoj">Retweet Old School. The extension adds a link to each tweet, next to Twitter’s native reply, retweet, and favourite buttons, that reads Retweet Old School.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Retweet.png" border="0" alt="twitter chrome plugin" width="580" height="95" />

Automatic Refresh

Another staple feature in most Twitter clients is that your feed automatically refreshes every so often so that you can instantly see the latest tweets from your friends. While the new Twitter website does let you know how many new tweets are waiting for you, rather than have to click a button, install class="vt-p" href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hdpiilkeoldobfomlhipnnfanmgfllmp">Twitter Refresh and new tweets show up automatically.

Hide Recommendations

Twitter clients are blissfully devoid of follow recommendations, promoted Tweets, and everything else that Twitter has recently added to the sidebar. If you’d rather remove that content from Twitter, the Twitter Chrome extension class="vt-p" href="https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ebjehgoicideedhhnfjhfaidlpdhofod">Hide Twitter Guff will do the trick.

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Anything promotional is automatically removed, but you can configure the extension to remove follow suggestions and Twitter trends.

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Bit.ly Integration

If you’ve become accustomed to integration Twitter with your Bit.ly account, you’ll be happy to know that there is a quick and easy way to shorten URLs directly from the Twitter website, using class="vt-p" href="https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bgilpachmloimelohcimoljjgengbgop#">PBTweet. If you have a Bit.ly account, entering your username and API key to the extension will ensure that you can also keep up on the stats for all the links you share.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/PBTweetConfig.png" border="0" alt="twitter chrome plugin" width="408" height="452" />

After installing the extension, a new ‘Shorten URL’ link will appear under the status update box.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/PB-Bitly.png" border="0" alt="PB-Bitly.png" width="533" height="155" />

And that is just one of the extension’s features. In fact, it does offer some of the features that have already been covered, such as auto-refreshing your timeline, removing ads, old school retweeting, and growl notifications for mentions. Notifications are only useful however, if you happen to be on the Twitter website making Twitter Notifier a more useful extension as far as this feature is concerned. Additional features include translation options, and the resizing of fonts.

Filter Tweets

Want to remove a certain word from your timeline? Or possibly have a friend who’s live-tweeting a soccer match? You can temporarily remove certain words or users from your timeline with class="vt-p" href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bdmjagdcpkfpebaaffpafncgkleijako#">Tweet Filter. This extension really gives you a way to weed out tweets that aren’t of interest to you, and ensure that you don’t miss the tweets that count.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Filter.png" border="0" alt="Filter.png" width="482" height="176" />

Upload Photos, Videos Or Files

class="vt-p" href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hdlobccdgbkenfknlelodajbmhehajdc">TwitPlus gives you the capability to upload photos and videos directly from the Twitter website. The file sharing capability comes courtesy of YFrog.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/TwitPlus.png" border="0" alt="twitter chrome extension" width="580" height="359" />

Other features include auto-refresh and integrated URL shortening. That said, as far as URL shortening is concerned, PBTweet seems like the better options because there is no authentication, and Bit.ly is not included on the list of shorteners available.

Would you ditch your favourite client for the Twitter website? Let us know in the comments.

 

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class="align-left" style="border: 0px none; margin-left: 20px; margin-top: 5px; float: right;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/code.jpg" alt="build a webcrawler" width="300" />This is part 2 in a series I started last time about how to build a web crawler in PHP. Previously I introduced the Simple HTML DOM helper file, as well as showing you how incredibly simple it was to grab all the links from a webpage, a common task for search engines like Google.

If you read class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/build-basic-web-crawler-pull-information-website/">part 1 and followed along, you’ll know I set some homework to adjust the script to grab images instead of links.

id="more-60554"> /> I dropped some pretty big hints, but if you didn’t get it or if you couldn’t get your code to run right, then here is the solution. I added an additional line to output the actual images themselves as well, rather than just the source address of the image.