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Software

Hide/Show Password

Lately I've been seeing a trend for showing passwords on forms. The logic here is – many users mistype because they can't see what they are typing (this is backed by data), and at the same time, on many conditions there is no security advantage. Sure, if there is someone looking at your monitor behind you it will be easier than seeing you type it (unless you are a very slow typer), but that is just one case.

So I think Hide/Show Password is a great idea. If you really want to, you can just hide the password, or show it. It is a JQuery/Zepto plugin and looks easy to use.

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Software

Enhanced Link Attribution in Google Analytics

One thing that always bothered me about Google Analytics in-page click maps is that you can never tell where a customer clicked if you have several links that go to the same pages.

Now you can easily do it. Took me a couple of minutes to set it up, now I guess I'll have to wait and see if it behaves properly – usually results for these click maps were weird and really different from other services such as CrazyEgg…

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Software

Web Album


You can quickly make Web Albums with STGThumb.

While you can easily tell from the name that thumbnails were the main idea when I first developed STGThumb, very soon users started to request a Web Album feature.

It couldn't be easier to make online photo albums with STGThumb. Just choose the photos you want, click Generate HTML Album and your photo album is ready to upload.

Other album maker options are several Album styles:
Vertical Style HTML Album
Classic Style HTML Album
Horizontal Style HTML Album
Lytebox Style HTML Album
HTML Slide Show
Classic Album with CSS Instant Photo Effect

[big_button color=”blue” url=”http://www.stgsys.net/files/stgthumb.exe” desc=””]Download Now[/big_button]

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Software

WooThemes WordPress Themes Review

I've been setting up a few new sites with WordPress, and the premium themes I bought over time have been a huge source of frustration.

Every single one of them had huge bugs – clipped sections, missing images, and more. On my main blog, I had to edit the code to fix several issues.

So it was a very pleasant surprise when I installed Inspire, from WooThemes. Not only everything worked perfectly, their menu system is particularly good and well organized – instead of the huge pile of unrelated options I've seen on other premium themes.

They have very nice documentation too.

While I was writing this review, I realized Inspire had a new update (looks like they are always getting updated). The site had somehow removed it from my account. I contacted support on a Sunday afternoon, and by Sunday night they had answered and corrected the problem. Awesome!

Very recommended. I will definitely be replacing the theme for this blog when I can.

Check out Inspire on WooThemes

Inspire Main Page

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Software

OnStage App – Collaborative e-mail design

MailChimp released today the first version of their new Collaborative e-mail design app – OnStageApp .

The concept is pretty cool – you can easily link to your MailChimp and share a design with other people. So they can mark places and suggest changes.

Check out their blog post for more details.

 

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Software

Dr. Explain Review – Help Authoring Tool


Dr. Explain is a help authoring tool. It has a major distinguishing feature – it can self document GUIs by grabbing the screenshots, parsing the controls and generating individual graphics and help pages, thus saving any help author a lot of work.

I already use Help & Manual, which is a great tool, but I decided to give Dr. Explain a try.

So how well did it work?

My main computer uses Windows 7 64-bit.  On this OS, it seems that sometimes it locks up while looking up controls. I then tried on a XP SP3 VM, where it is works perfectly. Update: The latest version (4.8.659) now works fine on my Windows 7 64-bit machine, too.

It can capture full screens, menu items, toolbars, etc. The capture doesn't always get the right controls, and sometimes it doesn't recognize the control at all.

In these cases, you can still add the control by hand, and it is still a lot better than what I can achieve in Help & Manual.

However, I didn't plan on switching from Help & Manual. I planned on getting the help pages from Dr. Explain and importing them into my existing help. That didn't work as well as I hoped.

I tried this for FPP's toolbar. This is Dr. Explain's output for FPP's toolbar . And this is what I got on Help & Manual , after quite a bit of editing.

One interesting thing to note on the Dr. Explain version is that it has a cool hover effect (both on HTML and CHM formats)  on each item – it shows the title, control and description. When importing into H&M, I couldn't figure out a way to retain that. I still liked the overall look, compared to my previous documentation effort.

I believe Dr. Explain is still worth checking out, specially if you are looking for a complete Help Authoring tool. However, I recommend that you download the trial and test how well it works on the programs you intend to document.

PS: Dr. Explain is often featured on Bits Du Jour (a software discount site), so if you sign up and wait you can get a nice discount. As I write this, the deal is for 70% off!

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Software

Site map for Google


SEO PowerSuite box

If you want to make a Site Map for Google, Yahoo or Bing, the latest version of WebSite Auditor has a neat new feature that generates a sitemap and even sends it to your site.

If you don't already know, a sitemap is useful in getting search engines to find all the pages in your site – including dynamic pages, forums, blog, etc. You can also suggest a frequency of updates and priorities of page displays.

There are somewhat expensive programs for sitemap generation, but the one in Website Auditor is very simple to use, and a very nice addition to an already very good SEO tool.

If you don't already use the program, I recommend you take a look. This is their article about sitemap generation on Website Auditor.

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Software

SEO PowerSuite Review

SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite includes a range of a tools to help you with daily SEO tasks. So, is SEO Power Suite worth it? I really think so. Read my review of the SEO PowerSuite components for more.

Rank Tracker

This is my favorite tool in SEO PowerSuite. I use Rank Tracker on a daily basis. The main focus of the program, as the name says, is tracking the rank of any number of keywords.

The main reason you need to track your rankings is because getting on top 10 on the keywords is vital – 99% of clicks go to the first page of results. And it is really hard to focus your SEO efforts if you don't know where you stand, and even more important – what works.

With Rank Tracker it is easy to track your keywords for any number of sites on a large number of local or global search engines. You just set the scheduler and it searches by itself every day, and gives you ranking for those search engines, as well as a graph of your ranking history for each term. It also keeps what was your best ranking for that day – you might be surprised! I've been surprised a couple of times, and for some keywords the page that ranks best actually switches over time.

Since I started using Rank Tracker I've gotten greatly improved ranking on several of my keywords.

Another feature of Rank Tracker is finding you keywords – and showing you what they are worth. It is very easy to pick the wrong keywords, and discover that either the competition for them is extreme, or that they are worthless because no one is looking for them. You can use several tools to find more specific, longer keywords.

Link Assistant

Link Assistant is a tool that allows you easily find link partners – which help improve your Google PR. Not only can it look for pages that are relevant to your site, it can also find how good is that partner ranking, generate your reciprocal link directory for you, and (this is important) keep track if your partners are still linking to you!

With bigger directories, that could be very time consuming to do by hand. Link Assistant can look into whole page hierarchies for you, and it also tells you if the link has the Nofollow attribute, which effectively makes the SEO value of the link null.

SEO Spyglass

SEO Spyglass lets you look at a competitor's website and see where their links are coming from. In many cases, you can even get your links from the same place! It also shows you the relative worth (PR and Alexa rankings) of each link.

Website Auditor

WebSite Auditor goes through your website, and gives you a report of many things you could be doing better. For example, you might have duplicated titles, pages that don't exist but you link to, HTML errors, your links in several social sharing sites, and much more.

Conclusion of SEO PowerSuite Review

SEO Powersuite tools pack a lot of power. They aren't cheap, but the range of features you get are well worth your initial expense. If you are still not sure, just download their trial version and check it out for yourself – their trials include most of their features.

Starting Improving your SEO now!

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Software

Analytics360

Analytics360 Screenshot
Just added a new plugin to my main WordPress Install – Analytics360. It allows getting data from both Google Analytics
and MailChimp (where my mail lists are now).

It gives you Analytics data, complete with graphs, referrers and top content. The graphs show when you list campaigns were sent, so you can easily see their effect. It also has filters so you see distinct graphs, such as Total, CPC, Organic, Referral or e-mail list.

Further on the MailChimp side, it also displays subscriber graphs for any of your e-mail lists.

You can also set GA to show only the blog stats.

If you use both MailChimp and GA, it is pretty neat.

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Software

STG Folderprint 3.77

Thought I should have a quick mention of the latest release. It just includes a simple new command-line option: -relative , and uses a new version of the protection system.

If you are not aware already, FPP has a lot of command-line options that you can use to automate reports of folders. Great for the busy sysadmin!