Optimize Your Web

I stumbled upon a pretty decent invoicing service.  It’s called Curdbee.  It allows you to customize what your invoices look like, track them with Paypal, and have all of your contacts easily accessible.  What’s the catch?  Well the only downfall that I have seen so far is that it puts a small advertisement for Curdbee in the invoice.

Only thing I do not understand is where they are going to make their money from.  There’s no ads on their site, and it doesn’t seem to be selling actual ads in the invoices.  If anyone can shed some light, that would be great.  Otherwise, for small businesses, or indivduals that need a clean and easy way to track online billing, give it a go.

Ever wondered what the purpose of User Agent settings were for?  Well it has changed over the years, and was used to determine what type of browser or service was accessing your website.  Mainly it is used by people to determine what browser their main subscription base is using in order to tailor their website to that viewing.  One thing that I have seen is that some people use a spoofed user agent setting are trying to see things that they only want a website crawler such as Google’s GoogleBot to view.  This may be taking advantage of if they are showing the crawler special files that they may try to SEO optimize in order to get better ranking.

If you are looking to see whether or not the GoogleBot that has visited your site is legit, visit this list to check and see.  Also, if you are looking to tweak your user agent settings (that I mentioned in my “Top Firefox Pluggins (Addons)”) through your Mozilla Firefox, download it here.

Make sure that you use the correctly formatted user agent information, which you can get a huge list here.  For more information, please feel free to contact me with questions or tips.

For those that are constantly reviewing site visitors with Google Analytics (or any web site analyzer), there are a few things you should realize about their measurements.

Avg. Time on Site.
-This is calculated when they first request a page, and then when they request another.  This is not a true indication of the time.  Say if a person wants to read one of your posts (say a really lengthy and informative post, and it fulfills their needs) it doesn’t say actually how long they sat there and read it.  So it counts it as 0 time on your site if they do not click something else on your site.

Bounce Rate:
Many people don’t go to a website to find specific information and while they’re using that information for their intended purpose, do they continue to search your site unless either A) they’re returning to find out what else you wrote or B) complete finished whatever task they needed to accomplish at your site, and was curious about more.

So in conclusion, these are not great indicators of how your site helps people unless you have 20 articles written about similar subjects.  Because there is not a way for them to see (unless the person clicks something after reading the article, which many don’t).  If anyone has a good alternative or way to determine these and other measurements better, please feel free to share with all of us.

Many users, such as myself, enjoy the great addons to customize and enhance their internet experience for Mozilla Firefox. Well there’s more than a few add-ons out there and most are housed here. Here is a good list of add-ons that may interest you, especially for web development and design, along with blogging and search engine optimization (SEO).

• Aging Tabs – Makes unused tabs fade with age and highlights the selected tab.
  • Great for people who bog down their system with their endless tabbing and want a quick reference to see where they can free up some memory by closing an old tab.
• Better Gmail - Enhances Gmail with a compilation of user scripts and styles.
  • If you use Gmail and Firefox then you must try this addon and get the most out of your Google mail.
• ColorZilla – Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.
  • If you do any type of web design, photoshopping, or anything related, this addon will help you quickly grab any color from any picture or site.
• Delicious Bookmarks - Access your bookmarks whenever you go and keep them organized.
  • This is a great addon for anyone who uses delicious bookmarks, which if you bookmark on multiple computers or want to share bookmarks with peers or friends, this is a must.
• Download Statusbar - View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar.
  • If you are tired of having the default status window, this one is easily customizable to allow small notifications of downloads.
• FireFTP – FTP client.
  • Enough said. Since Firefox does not render FTP connections correctly, this will do it for you.
• IE Tab – Enables you to use the embedded IE engine within Firefox.
  • Great for those sites that were not optimized for Firefox or that require IE. I don’t enjoy those sites, but have this as a little work around. (An example is the stattracker program for Yahoo! Fantasy Sports).
• SEO For Firefox – SEO Information inline with Google and Yahoo! search results.
  • Enabling this addon in the bottom right of your browser and do a search on google. This gives you all sorts of great information about the sites along with a Keyword analyzer.
• User Agent Switcher – Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.
  • Can be used to hide your User Agent information that can be see in website analyzers such as Google Analytics. Also, you can pretend to be an indexing bot like GoogleBot and see if you can view some things only GoogleBot is supposed to see!
• Web Developer – Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
  • You can see more things than you probably want to with this addon, such as css, image properties and lots more.

For those of you who have read my Usenet article, I have a better solution for scouring groups instead of the previously mentioned website.  Try NZBMatrix.com.  I believe it’s a $10 lifetime “donation” which is well worth it.  The other site was like $2/month and now requires an invitation.  I like how quickly NZBMatrix.com’s site responds and the neatness of the entire thing. I have been trying it for the past week or two, and I must say it is very nice. Try it and let me know what you think.

Many people know about Ebay and want to make big bucks by buying those, “How to Make Money in Ebay” books. One of the drawbacks of Ebay is that it’s known by everyone. Therein lies the problem that if someone finds a “deal” so will someone else. And after the bidding wars finish, you are normally left with prices that are the same as buying it off of reseller site such as Bestbuy once you add in shipping.

Another notable problem is the ability to rip someone off with wording and shipping costs. Many people may only charge a small amount for the item, but list the shipping for an outrageous amount, actually costing more than if you bought it local or through a retail store online. Wording can also get people into trouble. Some people will sell information to a good deal on <insert item here> and some people think they are selling the actual item. With these problems, that’s why I suggest Craigslist.org

Craigslist.org is free to use, buyer or seller. It was offered a buyout, but Craig (the owner) who has a very small office in California (San Fransisco, I believe), did not budge because he believes in it staying free. Another benefit is that everything and anything is listed on Craigslist, such as dating, and services. There are local versions of each site for your nearest large city, so give it a try.

One thing I must note is that Ebay does have quick payment and has checks in place to fight against fraud listings and buyers/sellers.

Lastly, I must just ask that you give craigslist.org a try and see how you like it. And if you do, feel free to give it a little donation for staying free for everyone and remaining what the internet should be about.

When Gmail was first announced, the amount of space that they offered was unheard of. Hotmail, which was one of the most popular free email sites at the time, offered space in terms of MB instead of GB. As more and more people migrated from using hotmail, among other free email providers, to Gmail, the only thing that these other companies/sites could do was to give in and try and match Google’s free services.

As more and more companies, such as AT&T – Uverse and Verizon – Fios, try and compete against home internet connections from cable companies, will we soon see someone break into the market in the next few years and offer bandwidth at a good price with great speed? There is also the upcoming purchase of the wireless airwaves in which one startup hopes to offer it for free! I am hoping so, but with the new release from CNet about Comcast capping their bandwidth, I am unsure if it will happen.  Is there any possible breakthrough for ISPs as there was with email services when Gmail came about?