Pictures are a necessity for your website. Without them, any webpage looks boring. But suppose that your site has so many images that it would be too overcrowded to show tham all at once? In my website design business, I have several clients with this problem: an artist, a wedding consultant, a woodworking shop,… All of them need to exhibit lots of pictures of their work.
The Ultimate Fade-in Slideshow
A slideshow is one solution to this problem that lets you show as many images as you want without cluttering up your webpage. The first time I used one, the coding was done with Java, and this show is still running fine five years later. The only reason I’ve stopped incorporating it in my later websites is that they are now charging for its use, so I began to use other scripts to save my clients the additional expense.
I have not yet tried flash, which I know is quite popular, but I’m afraid I am too old-school for that. One thing I don’t like about this technique is that I find it very annoying to have a slide-down bar appear every time I go to a site that uses flash, asking me to download it — only to disappear after my browser realizes that I already have the latest version. But the main reason I’m not going to use it is that I find that it takes way too long to load. So I sometimes just give up and hit my BACK button.
My choice for slideshows is javascript. I can easily arrange it so that most of the page loads before the script begins, so visitors don’t have to just sit there and wait for the show to begin.
The script I am using on my latest websites is the Ultimate Fade-in slideshow by Dynamic Drive. This website has lots of nice features for webmasters. In addition to its many free javascripts, there have a CSS library, webmaster tools, and even a forum.
Here are some of the slideshow options:
If you would like to see an example of how quickly this slideshow loads, even for very large images, visit my website on Virgin Islands weddings.
I have been making and using favicons for my websites now for some time, and up to now, it hasn’t been a particularly easy process. The other day I found a wonderful website that has a favicon script to do it for you in one easy step!
More about
favicons
What is a Favicon? A favicon ( an abbreviation for favorites icon ) is a tiny image that is displayed next to the Address Bar in your browser. If you take a look right now at the top of your window, you’ll see mine up there right next to the web address. I made it from the larger icon that’s next to the title of this blog.
A favicon allows you to “brand” your website so it becomes recognizable to your viewers. In most browsers, your favicon will also show up next to your website in the Favorites or Bookmarks menu, so people can quickly spot your site.
All you need to do to create a favicon is go to Favicon from Pics, where there is a form for you to enter the image you want to use. Then just click the button, and “shazaam” … your favicon is right there in front of you!
The ZIP file that you download contains easy-to-understand instructions for placing it on your website, and also has links to get help ( you won’t need this ). There is even a favicon validator. This may be necessary because some browsers don’t show your favicon right away, so validation will let you know if you’ve installed it correctly.
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For years there has been a lot of debate and controversy over the issue of duplicate content.
Five days ago, Google addressed this issue by posting a video on their Webmaster Central Blog by Greg Grothaus entitled Duplicate content and multiple site issues. Greg dispels the “Duplicate Content Penalty Myth” by essentially repeating what Google has been saying for years: there is no penalty.
( Here is a link to an eBook written over a year ago, The Duplicate Content Debate, which has a good discussion of the issues. )
Mr. Grothaus goes on to discuss examples of legitimate duplicate content, and explains that Google will try to choose the best version of the content, and display that for each search engine query. It rarely happens, but if Google decides that duplicate content is being used to manipulate rankings, it will “make appropriate adjustments”. However this is not a penalty for duplicate content — it’s a penalty for spam.
There are several issues ( not penalties ) that may result from duplicate content, even if it IS legitimate:
To prevent such issues, there is a new link element available to tell Google which of several webpages is the one you want indexed. The canonical tag may be used on duplicate pages to point to the page that you want Google to index. Using the example from the video, suppose that you want Google to ignore this URL:
http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265Then you would put the following in the HEAD section of that page ( IMPORTANT – This means it goes on the page(s) that you DON’T want Google to index! ):
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html" />So it seems that the debate over duplicate content has now been laid to rest.
Conclusion: If you’re not trying to be “black hat”, don’t worry about it — but let Google know which of your pages you want them to index.
UPDATE – September 21: I just posted a new Squidoo Lens, Duplicate Content Has No Penalty, Says Google. It is especially for people like me, who really don’t like videos, and would rather read something instead. The lens has the video, but also the slide show, with the ability to slow down the slides so there’s enough time to read them.
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Question: Why would you want to hide your affiliate links? Don’t you want people to click on them?
Answer: I’m not talking about hiding the links themselves. You’re right — we DO want people to click on them. I mean you want to hide their destination. Here’s why:
There are many ways to cloak affiliate links. Some are quite easy, but those methods are also not very difficult for an experienced webmaster to crack. In fact, even the more crafty ways of hiding your link can be bypassed by simply clicking the link to see where it leads. In many cases the destination will clearly give away the affiliate network involved, so a dedicated commission thief can then buy the product using his own affiliate link.
Even if affiliate link theft wasn’t a problem, it would still be worthwhile to hide affiliate links from the other types of people who don’t like to click on them. I have been using an excellent link cloaker for years. In my opinion, it’s the best one available, and it’s FREE! In addition to hiding your affiliate links, it also lets you redirect the person to any page on the destination website that you want — and you’ll still get credit for the sale.
The techies at Link Share advised me not to use it — they maintained that it would cause me to lose my commission. But I showed them proof that my cloaked links were still recognized by their software, so that I still got credit when people clicked them.
Enough said. You can download my favorite link-hiding software for FREE just by clicking here: Link Cloaker. Instructions for installation come with the file itself. For help in using the link cloaker, the instructions here are easy to understand — I rewrote them myself!
I got this wonderful program from IMBuzz Software. If you would like to see all the other software they have available, just click on the banner below.
UPDATE – December 17, 2011: I just posted a new page on my sister site, Professor’s Coding Corner, “Why and How to Cloak Affiliate Links”, so if you want to read more about this topic, drop over there for a while.
Since WordPress is one of the most popular pieces of software on the internet, hackers are constantly looking for ways to exploit it. Googling “wordpress zero day exploit” returns 115,000 results, which shows a serious need for security measures.
I was recently given access to a new WordPress plugin which claims to be very effective in protecting you from hackers. I discovered that the method used in this plugin was not only ridiculously simple, but actually inferior to a method I have been using for years.
The most vulnerable point of access that hackers have to your WordPress blog is through the wp-content folder. This folder contains all the scripts used by your themes and your plugins. A hacker ( or his robot ) need only enter the following into the ‘Address Bar’ in order to discover the names of all the files in the folder:
http://YourBlogName.com/wp-content/themes
WordPress does not protect you against such access.
The plugin that I reviewed protects this point of entry by “fooling” hackers with a copy of the standard Apache ’500 Internal Server Error’ page. This fake page is uploaded as ‘index.html’ to both the ‘plugins’ and ‘themes’ folders, so it is “seen” by the hacker software when it attempts access.
Now for my “old-school” method, which I will show you for FREE.
There is a file in the root directory of your blog called .htaccess This file contains coded instructions for your browser to follow before uploading your blog. It already contains code that tells the browser how to access your blog pages. All you have to do to protect your wp-content folder is insert the following code BEFORE the code that’s already there.
# Denies access to directories
Options All -Indexes
That’s all!
This code tells the browser not to let anyone access the index file of any directory, so a hacker will not be able to read the names of the files in your wp-admin folder, and thus not be able to access them. If the hacker software attempts access, it will “see” either a real Apache ’403 Forbidden’ error page, or just a blank page.
