There's probably a million lists out there detailing the top tools for webmasters, developers, designers and SEOs but none of them are mine, so I created my own.

Actually, I created this list because I run at least 5 machines and I needed a place where I can remember what the hell I plugged in and where I got it from.

Firefox Plugins

• Greasemonkey - Run scripts to customise how webpages display
• SearchStatus - PR, Alexa, Compete data in yout status bar. Also has a great feature to highlight "nofollow" links.
• ShowIP - Shows the IP address of the site you're viewing in the status bar.

Greasemonkey Firefox Plugins

• Google Search Compactor - Compacts and lists Google search results
• Statistics Detector - Shows what stats package a site is using as you browse

Labels: tools

Google Analytics has become the weapon of choice for one of my clients as it does an admirable job of splitting their paid and non-paid traffic, particularly helpful seeing as they're runnning an Adwords campaign or two.

Today I noticed in Google Analytics' menu there's a Benchmarking (Beta) button under the Visitors heading.

"Benchmarking is a service that lets you see how your website's statistics compare against industry verticals. Use benchmarking data to gain a broader context for your site and identify additional opportunities to improve your site's metrics."

Getting further into the Benchmarking (Beta) I had to allow Google to anonymously collect & share data and I've enabled Benchmarking (Beta) for the client's site. When I attempt to use the service, Google's now telling me that benchmarking data is being collected & combined and that

"Industry statistics will appear in this report within two weeks"

Tres cool, now I just have to sit and wait for up to 2 weeks to see how this site is performing against industry verticals. And this is where I'm very curious... Not knowing how Google knows which industry you're in I did a little search amongst all their FAQs and it appears that you have to set the industry vertical yourself... by going into "Open category list" and selecting a category... and yet I'm not seeing that function either in Firefox or my IE6 browser.

This is going to be interesting comparing visits, page views per visit, bounce rate and average time on site with others in the industry... I wonder how we will fare? I'll keep you posted.

Labels: google, seo, services, stats, tools

We've been clamouring for Google to revise the Google Webmaster Tools for some time now, and taking the webmaster tools user survey seems to be paying dividends.

The toolset so far has been fairly simple but it looks like Google are listening to webmasters and putting out some really useful, really helpful new webmaster tools

I noticed yesterday that G's toolset now includes some very useful Content Analysis features...

Under the DIAGNOSTICS tools there is a CONTENT ANALYSIS section that looks at:

Title tag issues

1. Missing title tags
2. Duplicate title tags
3. Long title tags
4. Short title tags
5. Non-informative title tags

Meta description issues

1. Duplicate meta descriptions
2. Long meta descriptions
3. Short meta descriptions

Non-indexable content issues

These are all really burning issues that many SEO people want to know and by pinpointing problems with title tags, meta descriptions and non-indexable pages it looks like Google are giving us what we want in order to make our sites more competitive.

Like they say, fixing these issues may help in addressing the negative impacts that incorrect title and meta may cause, so listen to Google, fix the problems and report back on whether their guidance was a wild goose chase to simply keep people busy or whether you've had any real successes in the serach results...

Labels: google, seo, tools

When you search Google you tend to get a ton of extra data the sometimes you're really not looking for.

Normally you see, in a Google results page, the following data:

[title]
[description]
[link]

When you're looking for something in a hurry e.g. checking out other competitors in the SEO game, you often need to peruse the results pages fast!

So how do you compact Google search results?

I just happened to stumbleupon DaveN's blog whilst Googling for the pros & cons of having a UK website at a US IP address and I noticed his greasemonkey scripts page.

Now I haven't used Greasemonkey in a while but it's a handy little plugin for the Firefox web browser.

On Dave's page there's a totally handy little Google search compactor script for Greasemonkey.

Really handy, give it a try.

Labels: firefox, google, greasemonkey, scripts, seo, tools

Is Dreamweaver 8's FTP client too slow? Is it driving you nuts? Time outs? Connection breaks? Well, here's the answer....

Use Filezilla instead. I got fed up with DW8's FTP timing out and leaving me with hug installs on one of my servers having missing files. So when I found Friday's upload was incomplete I took a nightly build of my favourite CMS on Monday morning, grabbed all the files in that nightly build folder and added them to the QUEUE, then in TRANSFER options, FILE OVERWRITE SETTINGS I ticked OVERWRITE IF NEWER and then in QUEUE hit PROCESS QUEUE.

Lightning fast and accurate. Job done.

Labels: dreamweaver, tools

This has got to be my favourite CSS Formatter/ CSS Optimizer/ CSS optmiser/ CSS compressor.

It's got a number of options in which, for example you can make the file highly compressed yet still readable or totally compressed and virtually unreadable or totally readable with less compression.

You can even feed highly compressed CSS files into it and set the output to readable so that you can see what you did, edit and recompress again.

Extremely handy piece of kit if you ask us ;)

Labels: css, tools

I just found out something really cool in DreamWeaver 8's Find & Replace, here's the crack...

I had a compressed & optimised CSS file, with no line breaks. Thing is that I needed a version WITH line breaks so that it can be worked on a bit easier THEN optimised and compressed.

Trouble is that DreamWeaver doesn't appear to have the option I wanted... I wanted to replace every brace character } with a brace } and a new line/ carriage return/ line feed. I checked DreamWeaver's Help and it didn't enlighten me.

So I just went ahead and did what I thought might work, taking the CRLF knowledge from PHP into DreamWeaver, making sure, because this was a test, to only apply the Find & Replace to the current document ;)

Find: }

Replace: }\n

Replace All

It worked!

Obviously if your CSS is fully compressed you can give every single selector a line break with find & replace on opening braces { and replace with {\n and replace every semicolon ; with ;\n

Labels: css, dreamweaver, software, tools

This new Google Notebook feature is handy. At long last we don't have to just cut & paste URLs into our bookmarks or CTR-D the page when we get there, we can also note URLs from within Google and write notes to go with them.

Look, we've searched Google for 22i design Farnborough. In the page that Google displays there's a "Note this" link at the foot of the listing. The link opens My Notebook, the Google Notebook.

The Google Notebook is then your online, inGoogle tool to have all your bookmarks to hand AND to allow you to add notes to your bookmarks. Tres handy indeed although you do need a Google account to set this up. You can associate it with any current Gogole account you have or there's the option to disassociate it ;)

Labels: google, search, tools

A developer friend put me on to the Firebug extension for Firefox a few months back and yesterday it proved invaluable in identifying some troublesome code on a live web page. I specifically used Firebug to track down which classes and IDs in a blogger page template were causing my layout problems and it worked an absolute treat.

Folks, if you haven't already plugged in the Firebug extension/add-on for your Firefox browser then I recommend you give it a go.

Labels: browsers, development, tools

I've been busy using a huge array of free web tools over the last few weeks and the OctaGate SiteTimer has proved to be very handy.

Whilst optimising the HTML and PHP code in a number webpages I used the SiteTimer, checking to see if there were any noticeable speed gains, and the OctaGate SiteTimer not only showed the speed of the page but of the individual files that the page pulled in.

By that it showed me the speed and loading times of:

• The page as a whole
• Favicons
• Cascading Style Sheets
  
• External JavaScripts
• Image files

What the SiteTimer highlighted was that one of the pages I was pulling in had 3 favicons being called when there was only a need for the 1. So I dived into the CMS I was using, hacked the templates and saved 2x file calls and a good couple of seconds of server time.

In addition SiteTimer highlighted that there were a couple of redundant images I was calling in to my pages and not using... now time to hunt down the code for those images and kill them off too...

Labels: design, development, tools

Don't accuse me of jumping on the bandwagon - these are my own personal reasons for hating IE7...

1) The code view or Page > View Source: Why is it all in black text? I love Firefox's syntax colouring, you can't beat it for helping to debug/scan lines of code.

2) Why does my stylesheet work so perfectly with Firefox? I just write it as I would normally and it just works. In IE6 it quirks out and in IE7 it quirks out. I have to write a normal stylesheet and one for each of the dire IE6 and IE7 browsers! If Microsoft had just stuck to writing a browser that renders styles correctly there wouldn't be this waste of time hacking everything.

3) Anti-fishing. Great. Yes, there are people dumb enough to be suckered by phishing but when IE7 questions every single link and stops you going there it just becomes a right royal pain in the arse.

4) CTRL-F, Find on page... why does IE7 have a stupid floating box and not the slick, integrated search that FireFox has?

5) Downloads: No single download manager, just a load of scruffy individual boxes... 10 downloads? 10 windows to close.

Labels: browsers, tools

Joomla! CMS rolled in its 100,000th verified forum user yesterday. That's 100,000 users in just over 18 months and officially "Joomla! has the largest Open Source CMS focused forum on the planet."

Stats-wise the Joomla! forum has:

• An average of 172 new user sign-up each day
• 765,000 posts
• More than 1200 posts daily

There's even a funky Free Joomla! A3 poster to commemorate the ocassion.

Now if the next landmark can be just to get Joomla! 1.5 out of the door, that would be awesome.

Labels: CMS, news, open source, software, tools

There's new bug fix and security releases in versions Wordpress 2.0.9 and Wordpress 2.1.1

Labels: blogging, CMS, software, tools, wordpress

Last weekend I couldn't log in to Blogger under my old username & password, I kept being redirected to the new Blogger login page. Whether it was a quirk of cookies, my machine or blogger forcing me to upgrade, I don't know but I was desperate to post quickly so, until I moved to new blogger, I couldn't porogress. So I signed up.

This other blog site is hosted on its own server with its own domain name and simply uses blogger as the tool to publish the articles there. The Atom XML feed has always been at the path http://www.mydomain.com/atom.xml

And yet I noticed in one forum that uses that exact xml feed path that the "Recent blog:" link displayed next to my profile on every post I made is pointing to blogger.com/feeds... I checked my control panel and the path is http://www.mydomain.com/atom.xml... yet viewing my profile and posts the link is blogger.com/feeds...

With numerous links to my feed and my site, my domain has accumulated, since 2004, a reasonable amount of InBound Links (IBLs) which may or may not have helped with both traffic and a reasonable PageRank... PR5 for a personal blog.

Recently my PR has gone down from PR5 to PR4 and the number of IBLs has gone down by over 150... I suspect it may have something to do with the feed now pointing to blogger.com/feeds rather than http://www.mydomain.com/atom.xml

Whatever has happened I'm a little annoyed at losing links, annoyed at losing PR and annoyed that MY links to MY feed are hijacked by blogger which uses it's own URL and not mine.

Looking at the page source of my blog I see a new format for the feeds. So here's the new lines that blogger places within the <body> tags of my blog and not within the head...

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="My Domain - Atom" href="http://www.mydomain.com/atom.xml" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My Domain - RSS" href="http://www.mydomain.com/rss.xml" />
<link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="My Domain - Atom" href="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/xxxxxxx/posts/default" />

It seems to be this new service.post that's getting all the links.

I've been good to Google and stuck with Blogger despite all the time outs, down time etc... but maybe it's time to move on... I really do like WordPress and the other WordPress sites I run have caused me no trouble like this at all over the last few years... and if I want the xml feed to MY domain I'm sure WordPress will b ehappy to allow me to do so...

I'm off to do some experimenting, I'll report back my findings.

And if anybody knows any workarounds or hacks for this problem please let us know and we'll share it here :)

Labels: blogger, blogging, CMS, tools, xml, xml feeds

Damn. Damn & blast.

AVG Free anti virus software from Grisoft will no longer be free from 18 Feb 2007.

Thanks AVG,
you kept me virus free
for so many years.

Farewell.

Labels: software, tools

We just had a link tinker with some PHP code and set-up a little toy so you can surf anonymously... just like a MySpace Unblocker.

Labels: php, tools

WooHoo. WordPress 2.1 Released today. It's named after Ella Fitzgerald, the jazz singer, but hey, that's up to them. 500+ bug fixes and some new features, requires PHP 4.2+, MySQL 4.0+

OK, we're off to do a few installs :)

Labels: CMS, tools

Mozilla have released an alpha version of Firefox 3 code-named 'Gran Paradiso'.

Download the 3.0a2pre aka 'Minefield' for the Mac, PC and Linux.

Labels: browsers, software, tools

Get the FireFox 2.0.0.1 update now :)

Labels: browsers, software, tools

One of the niggles of using Dreamweaver is that once you start using its FTP the software locks up and you can't do any more FTP work. Let's say you're downloading a full site backup and, whilst you're waiting, you want to upload some files elsewhere... well that's tough, unfortunately... you get the nag box "Dreamweaver is currenlty interacting with a server" and have to go make a cup of tea or take a walk around the block.

Well, that's why having a backup FTP programme is so damned handy and what could be better than Free FTP software?

Here's a couple of Free FTP programmes for you to try out:

• CoffeCup FREE FTP
• FileZilla

Labels: ftp, software, tools