I have run across several scripts that purport to be an easy way to make a short video to use for website promotion. But none of them come anywhere near being as easy to use as Instant Video Articles. This script will help you to easily make a video from your article. So you can make one every time you publish an article to Ezine Articles, and then publish the video on YouTube, and/or other video sites, to give you lots more traffic and backlinks to whatever site you’re promoting.

I purchased this package myself today, and haven’t yet had a chance to use it. But I have looked it over, and am very impressed, particularly with the tutorial, which you can see without even buying the product. I would suggest, however, that you first watch the video on their promotional page, so you can get a look at how easy the script is to use. The narrator, Calvin, is sometimes difficult to understand, but if you take the time to watch all of it, I think you’ll be as impressed as I was.

Instant Video Articles was just launched yesterday by IMBuzz, and the good news is that the special introductory price for this great tool is just $17! So click the banner below to get started right away.

Technorati Tags: make videos, traffic and backlinks, video from your article, website promotion

Why don’t you activate Kasumi, the anime SitePal character you see to your right, and see what I was able to do with my free trial in just a few minutes. ( Please don’t play it more than once, as I am only allowed a limited number of audio streams, and I want everyone visiting Scripts For Your Website to be able to hear Kasumi. )

But be careful if you go for the free trial! You can only use a limited number of featuress for free. If you get addicted, it will cost you a minimum of $9.95 / month. And that includes only the basic features:

• use of the editor, including over 60 characters and 230 background images or videos ( or use your own scene )
• adding audio via microphone, telephone, or from your own recording
• ability to publish to HTML webpages, emails, or PowerPoint
• 1,500 streams / month
• email support

Other features that you may like to have, such as using SitePal’s Text-to-Speech script, require a more expensive membership. And, of course, if you want everything that’s available, you had better be making a lot of money online, because it will cost you $250 / month!

Speaking of TTS, for the demo above I decided that my own voice wouldn’t sound too good coming out of a pretty girl’s mouth, so I found a website that will convert Text To Speech, and then send you an MP3 recording to use. If you’re interested, check out ABC2MP3.

I encourage you to give SitePal a try. It’s really a lot of fun, and it won’t cost you anything for 15 days. Of course, as usual, if you decide to pay a monthly fee, I will get a commission for my excellent salesmanship!

Experiment with the banner below – don’t be afraid! You can put words in Dana’s mouth. If you just enter something in the text box and click “Speak”, it will NOT take you to the SitePal website. Dana will just say it, and add a commercial message. Or you can click on other parts of the banner, if you dare!

Technorati Tags: animated characters, create talking characters, Site Pal, SitePal, speaking characters, talking characters, text-to-speech

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.

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:

• The transition between images is limited to a fade-in effect, but the options available give you plenty of other choices.
• The display can be set to automatically move to the next slide after whatever time interval you choose, or the show can be controlled manually by the viewer.
• The show pauses on mouseover.
• Each picture can have a descriptive subtitle. This can appear automatically, or just on mouseover.
• Each picture can also function as a link.
• And one feature I have not seen elsewhere: If the viewer refreshes the page, the slideshow resumes where it left off.

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.

Technorati Tags: fadein slideshow, javascript slide show, javascript slideshow, slide show script, slideshow review, slideshow script

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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The Language Used in Blogs
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Technorati Tags: create a favicon, favicon, favicon script, favicon validator

• Is there a penalty imposed by the search engines for having material on your website that is identical to material on another website?


• If so, how much of the content can be duplicated without penalty?


• What is the penalty?

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:

• Link popularity may become diluted by having backlinks point to several versions of the content.


• Google may inadvertently pick the wrong content to use in search results.


• The extra time taken to crawl the duplicate content means that there is less time available for Google to discover new content.

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:

Then 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! ):

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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Technorati Tags: canonical, duplicate content, duplicate content debate, duplicate content penalty, Greg Grothaus, rel=canonical

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:

• Affiliate Link Theft: There are plenty of unscrupulous webmasters who will steal your commissions if they can see that it’s an affiliate link. All they have to do is substitute their own affiliate id for yours.


• Ad Haters: Then there are those people who won’t click on such a link because it looks like an advertisement. Personally, I don’t understand this — if they’re interested in the product, why shouldn’t they look into it? Just about everything they buy is advertised somewhere!


• Unsightly Links: And there’s the fact that many affiliate links just look ugly. Many affilliate networks try to put too much information after that question mark. Doesn’t
  http://yourwebsite.com/product.htm
  look a lot better than
  http://qstrlvx.com/FX6jLSz4VHjoiz2y?sid=product&aid=yourname ?

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: Cloaker Buzz. 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!

You are welcome to give this script away too. In fact, you can even rebrand it with your own links if you want, just as I did. Click the banner below to get a free membership to IMBuzz Software.

Technorati Tags: affiliate link theft, affiliate links, cloak affiliate links, hide affiliate links, hide your affiliate links, link cloaker

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:

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.

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.

Technorati Tags: deny access, exploits, hackers, htaccess, WordPress

One fully-automated method is to send out a “robot” program to search all the websites that it can find. Search engines do the same thing, but for a legitimate purpose. The “spambots”, however, are only looking for one thing: email addresses.

I wrote a short javascript several years ago that hides your email address from spam robots. They can’t find it because it’s not in the HTML source code of you webpage. It only gets added to your page AFTER the page is loaded into your browser.

You can read all about the script, copy it, and use it on your own website. Just go to the Stop Spam Bots page on Professor’s Coding Corner ( one of my other websites ). There are clearly-written instructions on how to use the script on your website.

Don’t believe it? I’ve had readers who’ve told me that it’s impossible! But I’ll prove it to you right now.

Scroll down to the bottom of this page. You will see my email address – it’s shown right there as plain as day.

Now right-click anywhere on this page, and choose “View (Page) Source”. This will pop up a small window containing the HTML source code for this page.

Can you find my email address anywhere??? If you can, I’ll eat my hat!

This HTML source code is what the robot sees — ergo, the robot can’t see my email address either.

So go to Professor’s Coding Corner right now, and get the script.

Technorati Tags: hide email address, script, spambots, stop spam