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Jan 23

Make your pages load faster with PHP!

Coding, Website Design 9 Comments »

I am always looking for ways to make my websites faster, and I know that everyone loves a fast website. Lucky for me I stumbled across this PHP function ob_gzhandler().
Basically what it does is compresses your PHP/HTML code every single time a users web browser loads your site. How cool is that?

To use it all you have to do is be using the .php extension on your pages, if you are, lets get it working…

Check Your Server

First things first, we better check our server will let us run it. To do this theres a really easy function in PHP called “PHPinfo”. Just open notepad and make a file with the following code in it, then save as phpinfo.php

<?
phpinfo();
?>

Now save and upload this to your site and go to http://yourdomain.com/phpinfo.php
What you are looking for is “Zlib Support” if it says enabled, we are good to go! Also please check you are running PHP 4.0.6 or higher or this method will not work for you.

How to compress your page!

Now to compress your page all you have to do is put this code before your and tags in your pages, so the top of your code should look like this…

<?
ob_start( 'ob_gzhandler' );
?>
<head>
<html>

And we’re done!!! That was really easy huh?
You should notice a large speed increase in your site, and it will of course also make your site use much less bandwidth. It wont effect any of your images as they are already compressed themselves.

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Jan 17

Best ways to Promote your Blog in 2008

Blogging 2 Comments »

So now that we have experienced Googles first PageRank update for 2008, gotten over all our Christmas parties, and visited all our friends and family. Our sites are probably a little dormant at the moment, with everybody having been on holiday things can get quiet in the Web world.

So let’s bring ‘em back!

In this article I will concentrate on some great ways of getting people to your Blog.

Part 1: Spruce up your blog.

Now I am sure with holidays etc we have not had as much time as we would like to spend on our blogs, keeping them up to date and bringing fresh content. This is something we will have to address!
Content is the one thing that drives people to your blog, without it, why would people want to see your blog when there’s tones of others with interesting articles updated sometimes even daily?

But DON’T just fill your blog up with nothing, try and concentrate on your niche, give some new ideas, spark up discussion with your readers! The best way to target your audience is to provide content THEY want to hear, not what takeaways you ordered for lunch ;) Although of course this does not count for personal blogs.

Consistently bring new content to your blog and they will come.

Don’t just stop at content, is your blog design a little out of date? People can get tired of looking at the same page every day, why not give it a little change maybe a new header, logo or even layout for the new year!

Part 2: Getting the word out.

This would be just as important as content, you may have all the best content in the world, but if nobody knows about it, what good is it?

A great service I have found recently is EntreCard (http://entrecard.com/). Basically its a service where you put a little image on your site, you can see this on our side bar, its over there >>>
When you have this image on your site people can “buy” that space to advertise their blog with “EC” credits, you can get these credits to advertise on other blogs too by checking out other peoples blog and dropping your card on theirs and many other ways.

Get to know other bloggers, check out other blogs preferably related to yours and read about what they are blogging, not only does it give you some ideas (don’t just copy though) but it helps you learn ways to better your blog by seeing what other people are doing on theirs.
Comment their blogs! Join in on the discussion, add your opinion, and of course have your link to your blog in the URL section, this helps get the word out about your blog and also builds your reputation online.

Also make sure you submit your blog to lots of directories and search engines, in our forums we have a great list of directories to submit to here.

Part 3: Subscribers and RSS.

Subscribers to your blog is one of the best sources of potential traffic you can have, Ensure that there is an ability to subscribe to your blog via RSS or Email.
I have personally found FeedBurner (http://www.feedburner.com/) to be a great tool in doing this, they have an email subscription widget that you can freely use on your blog, and they also can ping your blog to many other RSS directories.

Part 4: Social Networking.

Another great source of traffic is Social Networking. The basics of social networking are that people can find sites they like and share with their friends, everyone can also see who likes what and how many people like certain sites. By submitting your site to the likes of StumbleUpon, Del.ico.us, (and yeah Digg too…) you can get a lot of great traffic to your site.
But be very careful to follow the guidelines of these sites or you could get banned really easily (especially on Digg).

Part 4: Some More Tips

Okay so most people will know about these methods but I will list them anyway for those who don’t!

- Post on forums! By building an online reputation, responding to peoples questions, helping other members out etc people will be more interested in checking out your site, ensure to have your blog listed in your Signature. This is a great way of bringing new readers to your site. A lot of forums also have the option of syndicating your RSS feed into your profile (check in the user control panel!)

- Link Exchanges, Exchange quality links with other bloggers and sites related to your content, this not only helps your search engine rank but will bring traffic to your site.

- Nominate your site for awards like the Bloggers Choice Award (http://www.bloggerschoiceawards.com/) this will help get the word out about your site and you may even win!

- Be sure to list your blog on other blog sites like Technorati (http://technorati.com) this will help people find you too!

I hope this article will help your blog become more successful in 2008! If you have any more ideas please do share them with us, comments to my blog posts are always welcomed :)

Good luck!

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Jan 15

Promoting your site via Digg? No Thanks.

Promotion 7 Comments »

I’m sure we’ve all been using Digg to promote our sites from time to time, Most of these Social Bookmarking sites can get awesome results.
By blogging, adding your link etc to these sites can get a huge influx of traffic in a very short time. Which is what we all want right?

I have been using Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.ico.us and many other bookmarking sites to promote many of my websites, but I will never use Digg again. What? Why?

Let me tell you a story, In a very popular Webmaster forum (DigitalPoint) people can ask for what we call Digg Exchanges, where you Digg other peoples links, and they Digg your’s, sounds awesome! Yep, but thats what got me BANNED from Digg.

I simply ran a Digg exchange with MANY webmasters and got over 35 Diggs, Was very happy with this until I could no longer log in to Digg.

But how do you know that you’re banned? Well its hard to tell, you don’t get a nice email or a warning or anything, you just loose all functionality but get no errors.

Here’s a list of symptoms of me being banned:

- Cannot log into Digg, if you try you get a blank page
- Cannot signup to Digg, it redirects back to the Digg Homepage
- All my Digg URL’s have vanished, as well as my profile.
- All my friends are no longer friends with me :( (well on Digg :P)

Now you’re probably saying “No big deal, Try a free Proxy to signup and Digg.” Sure… it work’s I can signup, I can Digg other peoples links, but what if I try Digg AdminMania or get someone else to try? This beautiful message comes up…

“This URL has been widely reported by users as being regularly used to spam Digg’s submission process and cannot be submitted at this time.”

Damn, So not only does your account get banned, but your ENTIRE DOMAIN gets banned too!!! Lots of Webmasters have reported this happening to them also. Many popular sites including…

- John Chow’s blog
- DigitalPoint (may be unbanned now)
- SEONewsBlog
- CyberNet News

So take this as a lesson, Digg Exchanges are FAR TOO RISKY. The worst bit is I never got much traffic out of it anyway. From now on I will stick with the likes of StumbleUpon and other bookmark services as these seem to be MUCH better!

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Jan 15

A dollar a day is PERFECT! Heres why.

Revenue 2 Comments »

I am sure we all have that website floating around somewhere thats making a tidy, $1 per day on Google AdSense or similar. But it doesn’t seem like much does it?

Put your thinking cap on…

Who says you only can have ONE website earning $1 a day? Web Hosting is cheap now-a-days and you can host so many websites.
If you put some effort in and make some niche, content rich websites, they will earn $1 or more a day too.

Say you keep this plan and make 50 Websites, thats $50 PER DAY!! And how much is that per week again? $350!!!!

Certainly some food for thought. Don’t limit yourself to just one website, make a few others too and increase your revenue!

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Jan 13

Tips for Forum Admin Beginners

Forum Administration 3 Comments »

Thanks to our users at the AdminMania forums we are proud to list some very useful tips for webmasters wishing to create a new forum.

- Keep to a subject, your forum should be about one thing so like minded people join.

- PLAN PLAN PLAN, draw a design on paper of what you want your style to look like. And then write down the categories you are going to have, on paper it will look really obvious if somethings not right.

- Stick with a few broad categories and build up on thoes later when the forum becomes more active, otherwise it will look dead.

- Be Creative and Unique! Design your own skin so you stand out from the crowd.

- Keep posting in your forum, this keeps it active, even if nobody else is around it still is active and guests will notice and hopefully register and post!

- Never give up, always have faith in your community, if its going slow try get people interested with a contest or promote your site more

- Referal contests can be great for your forum, always helps to have more people!

Feel free to share your tips by commenting this post!

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