Categories
Software Release

STGThumb 3.10 release

Instant Photo Effect from STGThumb
Instant Photo Effect from STGThumb

I've just released STGThumb 3.10 .

The biggest change in this release is the addition of a CSS based instant photo effect. I've added a new sample album with this effect on.

Instant Photo Effect from STGThumb
Instant Photo Effect from STGThumb

As you can see, the effect adds a white border and drop shadow that looks like a Polaroid photo. Personally I really like how it looks, and I think some of you will too.

There were also some minor fixes, and changes in the defaults for album – particularly, I changed the yellow background default (which I started really disliking over the years) to a light gray.

For next release, I'm planning to add support for custom fonts from Google's Webfonts.

 

Categories
Book Review

Article Marketing: The Write Way to Build More Links – Karon Thackston – Book Review

Article marketing is now horribly popular, to the point that Google had updates to specially tame article directories and content farms. Of course, that happened because articles are an easy way to get links to your site, as well as get content to Adsense sites.

You have probably noticed that the average quality of those article is awful. WordTracker Masterclass: Article Marketing: The Write Way to Build More Links by Karon Thackston teaches how to write better articles, that get more results.

Chapter 1 begins by looking at your audience. Obviously, whatever is your topic different audiences will have different perspectives and interests, and the article will simply work better for them if it is tailored to them.

Chapter 2 looks at the various styles of article – such as interviews, cases studies, top N lists.  This covers a large part of the book, specially as it has a lot of articles demonstrating the style. Some are interesting and useful, and others just beg to be skipped over.

This list is useful for ideas on how to approach a topic. Some of this (and more) is covered on another of WordTracker's book, The Web Content Recipe Book.

Chapter 3 has some notes on planning content and getting topics.

Chapter 4 goes into optimizing articles for search engines. Being a WordTracker book, of course it mentions keyword research. Personally I like and recommend Market Samurai . Not that WordTracker isn't great (and it has the advantage of having its own huge database), but it is quite expensive in comparison.

Chapter 5 has useful tips on how make an article outline, as well as the right way to write your Bio/Author box.

Chapter 6 covers title and opening paragraphs. It is somewhat useful, but I have seen better copywriting suggestions in other books, such as Writing Kick-ass WebSite Sales Copy .

Chapter 7 and 8 talk about how to write articles that get reprinted and how to publish it. It list site names as well as ideas on how to select the best.

It also suggests that to get the best results, you should avoid article-blasters and getting your articles everywhere (the Pagerank you get from most sites is going to be minimal and there can be repercussions on Google's duplicate content filters) and what I felt is the best suggestion in the book – place the article on your site and wait till it is indexed before you distribute. I have no idea if this makes any real difference on Google ranking, but it does sound good.

So, is this book worth your time and money? Barely so, at the current launch price (US$29). It is acceptable, but doesn't cover a lot that is detailed in other books I mentioned throughout this review. I recommend you get one of those instead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
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!

Categories
Articles

Fog Creek Site Redesign

Fog Creek, of the world famous FogBugz, had an interesting blog post about how they redesigned their web page.

It covers what was wrong with their web page – I was a little surprised to see that it took 8 clicks to get a price quote! – and what they did, and are doing, to improve it.

It really is very clear at a glance that the new page is much better, and the redesign reminded me of all the design principles that were covered in Save the Pixel and Convert!.

I do wish they shared hard numbers on the conversion improvements, though.

 

Categories
Articles

Form popover times

Interesting article on aWeber's blog.

Popover forms are inline forms that pop in a web page (thus avoiding pop-up blockers). A lot of people use them to request sign-ups for e-mail lists, and in this article, over a couple of tests, looks like they got better results with faster times.

I would have thought that longer times would help the user get interested on what you say. (I guess that depends on if they are more interested AFTER reading your content or BEFORE…)

Of course, given the anecdotal nature of the data, it is probably best to run your own split tests for this.

Categories
Software

Site map for Google

SEO PowerSuite Box


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.

Categories
Software Release

STGThumb 3.05 and CSS Drop Shadows

I have just released STGThumb 3.05. The main new feature is CSS Drop Shadows. You can see a sample below, as rendered by Google Chrome 11

STGThumb added Drop Shadow as an image effect many years ago.

There are a few advantages with the new CSS Method:

  • Even when images are not created by the program, you get the drop shadows. That means they apply for all albums, non-resized images on Vertical and Horizontal framed albums, as well as slide shows. Pure HTML Albums too.
  • You can change the background color of the HTML and they still look fine, even with background images.

The one disadvantage is that they are rendered by the browser – that means they may change from browser to browser and may not even work on some.

To turn CSS Drop Shadows on, just turn the option on menu Options,HTML Configuration. I recommend turning the image effect off on menu Options, Output Settings if it is on.

The new version is available from the regular page, as usual.

Categories
Software

SEO PowerSuite Review

SEO PowerSuite Box

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!

Categories
Articles

Multi-factor Auth and password reuse

MailChimp just had an interesting blog post about the new authentication system from AlterEgo that they have started using.

But what I found most interesting about the article is the study they made of leaked passwords. Using a file that was hacked from a blog network and posted online, they discovered that 25000 accounts on their service matched the e-mail. Out of those, 7000 used the same password – a much larger amount than they expected. And certainly much more than I did.

While AlterEgo's system is much less secure than RSA token, it is free and adds some security.

Categories
Articles

How to get high open rates on your e-mails

An interesting article on Aweber with suggestions to get high open rates for your e-mail.

The suggestion I liked the most – using the logo alternate text for the textthat is usually extracted from the first line. I didn't know online e-mails did that for logos, and it solves having an awkward first line, sometimes separated from the rest of the e-mail (or the traditional Click here to View this online).