webgeek's blog

I'm anxiously awaiting the four coding books I ordered on Amazon.com
After watching a Stanford video on web development I was inspired by the lecturer handwriting in three different languages, html, css and javascript.
Having worked with Content Management Systems for over three years there's little need for writing from scratch. I've developed the skill of editing other people's coding to match what I want, but I'd love to be able to handwrite my own themes and web sites.
The Stanford lecturer used Webkit.org it's mostly for MAC OS, and not being a personal fan of Apple and it's products I decided to look for an alternative.

Although I've previously used dreamweaver, I was looking for a cheaper even free alternative. I downloaded Amaya as my web playground. There are many other alternatives including Aptana RadRails, but that proved far to complicated for someone merely beginning to learn various coding.
There's also HTML Kit which I'm considering downloading and exploring later this weekend.

Whilst I await the arrival of my books on html 4, CSS and javascript, I am exploring online CSS tutorials such as W3Schools CSS as a start point.
My ultimate goal over the next few weeks is to develop my skills enough to produce my own version of CSS Zen Garden This project has been around for years, and at first I was intimidated by CSS with all the 'margins' and 'padding'.
Using Amaya and the W3 School tutorial, I hope to be able to produce my first CSS.

Patiently waiting for the mailman,

Webgeek.me

By accident I stumbled on https://www.google.com/
This is google's new beta for a secure sockets layer search. It only works with google search and not with google images or maps.
Check for https not http to use the SSL.

More coming soon..

I recently purchased a Premium WordPress theme, that I have had my eye on for awhile, the theme is
named WPRemix. As an owner of several other Premium themes, I justified the purchase from the point of view that more design options can't be a a bad thing. Besides I had heard so much about Remix that my curiosity had finally gotten the better of me. The purchase price $75.00 for a single use
license was in line with most other themes also claiming to be "Premium" in nature.

At the home site for WPRemix the marketing hype makes some pretty bold claims, that I was eager to
put to the test. Here is the main tagline's claim to potential customers:

"Bundled with more than 50 strategically designed & coded custom static page templates, the theme
enables everyone to publish small sites in minutes saving weeks of time, maintaining top notch
standards-compliant quality."

Feedburner has an awesome tool for creating a subscription list that sends RSS email updates from your site to users inboxs, and it's free!

Users only receive email when your rss feed is updated with new content.

Features;

• choose which email address your newsletter will be sent from
• add your logo to the email (must be no larger then 200x200 pixels
• customize your welcome message
• customize the way your newsletter is displayed including colors and font.
• select which language you want to use for your subscriber box including English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Japanese.

You can also choose the subject title of your email. You can use your blog title or company name. Alternatively you can insert your posts title in to the subject line using

${LatestItemTitle}

Feedburner allows you to choose a time zone for your email delivery and select what time you'd like your customers to receive it.

Monetize If you use adsense, you can also set your newsletter feed to include ads in the email.

Subscribe to WebGeek.Me for an example of how feedburner newsletters appear in your inbox and updates on the site!

Search Engine Optimization is primarily the art of getting your site found in search engines for keywords relevant to your sites content. You want free targeted traffic right?

Webgeek.me has gathered some easy tips on increasing your sites SEO.

Tagging Images.

Adding alternative text to images increases the number of keywords the spiders will find on your page. When users search for images on google, your picture is more likely to be found with relevant keywords.

You can easily add alternative text using the following code;

< imgsrc= "image.jpg" alt="keyword" height="150" width="150" >

Use the alternative text to describe your picture so that it is relevant to your articles or the content on your page. Do not use the alternative text to stuff your site with keywords. Search engines are smart and do not rank overstuffed keywords.

Naming your image. Think about it, if someone wishes to save your image to their computer, which will look better "image1.jpg" or "chyrpdemoscreenshot.jpg". Image titles are also crawled by search engines and act as keywords.

Sign up for Google Analytics a free tool for measuring traffic and how visitors find you.
Google lists direct traffic, referred sites and search engines. WebGeek.Me's second highest referral are images.google.com (Lucky enough to have direct traffic as our number one referral). If you're not using alternative text in your images you are missing out on free relevant traffic.

Submit your articles to Article Directories

Increase incoming links by submitting your articles to the most popular online article directories. The more websites your articles are seen on, the more traffic you can bring to your website. Most article directories allow you to post your website link and information either at the beginning or end of your article. The more links to your website, the higher your page will rank in search engine results!

SEO Elite Software

The look of your site is important to you and your end user, but it's imperative to test the compatibility of your site in different browsers. You could have the best product, service or blog in the world, but if people can't view it, nobody's going to be interested. There's a rather large intolerance to slow or poorly loading pages.

Just recently a collegue was absolutely blown away by the site he had built with GL Fusion. They loved the ease of use and customization of the CMS. He thought his site was ready.

After two weeks of traffic building and telling all his friends about the new site, he discovered after a phone call that his site wasn't loading. "But it shows up on my computer?"

Today there are several choices of browsers, and more are being developed and upgraded. Some people love the familiarity of IE, other's love Firefox for the security and add-ons. Personally I'm a huge fan of Google Chrome. I love the "Recently closed tabs" feature, and the 9 screenshot favourites that make it easy for me to load my most common sites.

Whatever the reason for people's choice of browser, your website should load in it!

Shoutem.com is an online platform that allows you to set up your own Microblogging community.

You can use it to

• Start a group
• Create a support network for your site,
• Use it to interact with customers online.

TweetLater.com

Built with tutorials on how to use their system, tweetlater.com has an abundance of great features to manage your twitter account. Managing so many social networks, microblogging and constantly updating your status over various websites is no doubt time consuming. These days it seems internet social peer pressure almost makes it necessary.

tweetlater.com allows you to manage multiple twitter accounts and schedule tweets!

That means whilst you're out by the pool, tweetlater will post your scheduled updates. Promote new blog posts, music, videos, or just let everyone know your out having fun in the sun.

You can add and manage multiple Twitter and Ping.fm accounts or add Blog and Status Feeds.

You can schedule a tweet and choose when it is posted, or you can save it as a draft for later.

Pligg is a web application that allows you to submit an article that will be reviewed by other users of the site and will be promoted, based on popularity, to the main page.

Pligg has been compared to Digg, Drigg (the drupal version of digg). All of these applications allow your sites content to be published and promoted dependent on the popularity and votes on articles.

When a user submits a news article it will be placed in the "unpublished" area until it gains sufficient votes to be promoted to the main page.

Facebook Pages - Word of Mouth 2.0

Facebook Pages can be used to promote your product, brand or website. You can use it as an interactive mini-web page that will create more traffic and interest in your chosen field.

A facebook page is separate from that of a profile. Nobody can see your individual page without adding you as a friend. Use a facebook page to upload photo's, add video's, flash content and more. Engage your readers/customers with interactive content hosted on a reputable website.

The benefit of a facebook page is that there's less programming involved then doing it yourself. Facebook is already an established platform and has many developers creating new applications everyday. If you were looking for a specific application you could hire somebody to develop one for you. However there are 1000's of relevant applications you can use already.