A problem few seem to address is how to get good back-links for a niche blog.

The problem with getting back-links for niche sites is that it is hard to find other relevant sites to get links from.

If you are doing niche properly, then by default there will be very few specialized sites like yours out there, and finding them can be problematic.

If you do blog searches on Technorati for example, you will find hundreds of spam sites, but very few of value. This is because search engine spammers use automated blogs to hit huge lists of long-tail keywords.

If you search Google then you will mostly find old static sites, but your chances of getting links from those sites is almost zero. If you refine your Google search to look for specific blogging platforms you will find what you are looking for, but you will need to develop specialized searches for each blogging platform, and going through the results list is time consuming.

There are Firefox plugins and other cheap software tools you can use to make life easier, but even with these products finding the right sites can be a slow process.

However, as I have been fortunate enough to be given a copy for the forthcoming release of Comment Hut to evaluate I now have a solution to this probem

Comment hut will search for blogs on WordPress, Live Journal, Drupal and Type Pad, as well as two additional platforms that have not been formally announced yet You can search one or all of these platforms for your niche terms.

Furthermore, Comment Hut will ONLY return URL’s with ‘commentability’, i.e. only blogs on which comments are enabled.

It also allows you to set the minimum PR (Page Rank) of sites to be returned, so, if you only want to look for PR 3+ sites, it will do that for you.

The fact that it allows filtering by PR in itself acts as a spam filter, as spam sites almost invariably have no PR.

Once you have your list of URL’s you can export it to file, or just click the links in the page. There are a couple of export options, (Exel or HTML), again allowing you to click the list to open URL’s.

You can then order the list by PR to prioritize the sites you want to target, then go off and start commenting.

You can just leave link bait if thats how you want to play it. Personally I prefer to take the time to build collaborative relationships with other bloggers, working with them to mutually boost our SERPS on a given phrase.

The only things that seem to be missing from Comment Hut are the ability to search the mySpace and Blogger platforms. Though there are two new platforms available in the forthcoming release, mySpace and Blogger are not among them. That said, with the number of results it does bring back, you will have plenty to be getting on with!

As a little test I thought I would do a search on “fear of flying” as Mitch at harpzon.com is doing a case study on a site in that niche.

Above you can see some of the wordpress URL’s returned by comment hut along with their PR. In total I was able to find 118 PR3+ links containing the search term “fear of flying”. I have been through the lists and found a number of sites which are directly discussing fear of flying (as opposed to mentioning it in passing) that would make the best sources of backlinks. If you want you can check the list here.

The current price of Comment Hut is $97 which seems a little expensive, however, with products like this you have to remember that economies of scale are not working in your favor!

You can get the demo version of Comment Hut free, which will search wordpress blogs only, and return just 10% of the results… this gives you an idea of what it can do, but is in no way representative of the results the full version delivers…. there is a huge difference between the demo and full versions.
Also, to get the free version you have to supply a mail address… if you do this be aware that these guys do run mail campaigns and you will get periodic mail shots from them.

So, is it worth $97? Well if you are serious about niches then my honest opinion is yes it is.

I am no stranger to advanced Google searches, even so, this product is a real time saver and helps hook you up with others in your niche very quickly.

Whether you get your $97 back is down to how well you select your niches in the first place, and how many sites you build!!

I have no doubt that I will squeeze $97 back out of this software pretty quickly (I reviewed this software for a reason ).

If you have any further questions about Comment Hut both Paul and Stewart are very approachable guys and are contactable via their site.

For the record there are no affiliate links in this page, and after getting my grubby paws on the evaluation copy I was free to say whatever I wanted about it….

My previous two posts were Automate Website Browsing which discussed a browser containing a scheduler, so you can set it to browse sites at different times of the day, and Automatically Browse and Test Websites with Firefox which discussed the Salenium plugin for firefox.

Like Salenium iMacros is a plugin for Firefox which allows you to record whatever you do in your browser and then play it back again.

Once installed you need to access the plugin via View/Sidebar/iOpus iMacros …

After which you can start ‘recording’ !!

I much prefer this plugin to Salenium as it is a lot easier to use. Also, like Salenium all actions are recorded in a text file, so you can save your actions for later. Unlike Salenium the format of this text file is very easy to work with, so it can much more easily be modified, either by hand or by writing scripts to build up more complex actions.

You can set the recorded actions to loop over and over, re-visiting sites, you can also control the speed at which the browsing takes place, and the timeout if a page is not found.

It does not have the advanced features of Salenium which are useful for testing… but for automated browsing I think it works much better…. it is certainly a lot easier to work with.

Unfortunately it still does not have a scheduler, for that you will have to use the product reviewed in my Automate Website Browsing post.

A limitation of Selenium as an automated browser is the lack of a scheduler, which would allow you to browse sites at set periods.

If this is something you want to do, then, the Easy Bee could be what you are looking for.

I recently used this to log onto a website and refresh and advertisement every 30mins.

The Easy Bee is a relic of a pre RSS era and was not designed as an automated browser so much as a news aggregator. It allows you to record all your actions within the browser and select page elements (text or images) which you want to store for later use.

Once you select an element to save, then you are able to set the scheudle:

Now you can see why there haven’t been any screen shots until now!

It may not look nice, and the worker bee analogy gets annoying, but it does the job.

The image above shows the content I wish to collect as well as a timer counting down to the next run.

The Easy Bee can be downloaded free of charge from most download sites, such as download.com.

Unfortunately, the free version does note let you schedule within periods of less than 30 minutes, though you can create more than one “bee” and offset the times to get a faster refresh rate.

The full version will schedule once a minute.

The other problem with the free download is that it has “bee’s” configured within it which constantly “fly” round pre-determined sites. Now, as only one “bee” can “fly” at a time your own schedules don’t get to run. To get the program running you need to delete all the other “bees” and “honeycombs” and restart the “hive”

With such an ugly interface and silly analogies it is little wonder that this software never really made it, that along with a price tag of $129 for the full version

Selenium is available as a Firefox plug in and allows you to record your actions in the browser window.

Once installed you use Tools / Selenium IDE to open the control panel:

Then click the record button, and move to a browser window.

Selenium will then record your actions:

You can then ‘play’ your actions back, and save / export your test to run at a later point in time:

As well as recording from the browser, you can manually write your test scripts, using the comprehensive drop down list of options provided.

Interestingly the scripts, whether generated by recording, or using the GUI can be translated to a number of different formats for export, including HTML, which allows you to easily copy and paste processes from one test to another.

Its a really nice plug in for Firefox, which could be used to automate daily tasks as well as for its intended purpose of running test scripts.

A nice addition would be a scheduler, so that you could run your processes automatically throughout the day, perhaps the authors will add this in time, if not, there is another tool I am going to review which, although less flexible than Selenium does have a scheduler.

There are a few programs capable of ripping websites, the one I use is HTTrack Website Copier which:

Allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site’s relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the “mirrored” website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online.

If you point HTTrack at a blog, it will rip the entire site and store it as static pages on your PC (it cannot get the PHP code as PHP is a protected server side resource).

Playing with local copies of websites is a good way to learn, and this tool makes getting such local copies very easy.

HTTrack have a few rules they ask users to follow, such as:

We hereby ask people using this source NOT to use it in purpose of grabbing
emails addresses, or collecting any other private informations on persons.
This would disgrace our work, and spoil the many hours we spent on it.

Elsewhere there are warnings about not stealing copyright content etc, which you should respect, but, if all you want to do is keep a local copy of a site, backup your own work or just play with something there should be no issue.

Using HTTrack is very simple, after installing you choose the folder where the copy of the site is to be stored, give the copied site a name, and , if you need to, set some more advanced options. For example you can control the way links /site structure is preserved, or filter out different types of file, asshown below:

There are lots of options for controlling how this software makes copies, once you are happy with your choices, you can start ripping:

This program is a lot of fun, particularly watching the screen above, which shows the ripping operation in progress!

Before you can use the the applications though, you will need to create a database. If you have installed Easy PHP or something similar, you will already have MySQL installed on your PC.

The easiest way to use MySQL on your PC is to install the free admin tools available from the MySQL website.

There are two tools of particular value, MySQL Query Browser, which allows you to browse tables and run SQL statements, and MySQL administrator, which allows you to create users and databases.

Installation scripts for common web applications require a database name and a user, so MySQL administrator is the application you will need first.

After downloading and installing it, you will need to log onto your MySQL instance. By default, you will log on using the username “root” with no password:

You will also need to set “localhost” as the server (indicating you are connecting to MySQL on your local PC as opposed to a network machine).

Once logged on you will be able to click the “Catalogs” icon. Right clicking in the window below will allow you to create a new database schema:

Once you have created your new database (schema), you need to create a user. Click on the “Users” icon in the left hand menu and, within the right hand window click “Add New User”. You will then be able to enter the name of the new user, and their password:

Once you have created a new users, you need to assign privileges for this use on your new schema. Click on the “Schema Privileges” tab. In the left hand pane, select the database schema for which you would like to assign privileges. In the right hand window you will see all available privileges. Highlight the privileges you wish to assign and click the arrow pointing left. If you are assigning multiple privileges, you will need to use the “double arrow” As shown below:

You will see the requested privileges move from the right pane to the left, confirming privileges are assigned. In the screen shot above I have assigned all privileges on the schema named “test”.

I can now install a web application using the database “test” and the user “sitelogic” on the server “localhost”.

I have not used XAMPP, instead using Easy PHP, a very similar package to XAMPP. Easy PHP comes with a Windows installer which takes only a few minutes to install. Once installed you can access a simple console to start and stop Apache and MySQL:

Within the directory Easy PHP installs to is a sub directory titled “WWW”, within this directory you can unpack your test applications (blogs, CMS, E-Commerce etc).

Navigate to “http://localhost/yourApplication” and run the installation script as you would on a web-server.

Before doing this you will need to create a database and database user, for that you should use the MySQL Administrator, on which I will write a separate post.

It uses similar technology to SSH relying on MD5 certificates which are generated when the first connection is made.

Some hosts will only allow the use of SSH / SFTP, which can be problematic if your HTML editor does not support this.

NVU is a good example of such an editor, only supporting FTP. Older versions of DreamWeaver (pre 2004) also share this problem.

The solution to this problem can be an FTP SFTP bridge, like Mind Term provided by Appleagate. mind Term is a Java based program, so you will need Java installed on your computer to run it.

You connect to your site via comman line console, once connected you can start the SFTP FTP bridge:

Once the bridge is started, Mind Term will listen on localhost (127.0.0.1) for FTP requests:

So, now you have Mind Term connected via SFTP to your server, but also listening on your local PC for FTP requests.

All that you need to do then is use localhost / 127.0.0.1 as the ‘remote server’ in your HTML editor.

Mind Term is free (for personal use) and can be downloaded here.

Whilst not as featureful as DreamWeaver, it will save you a lot of money!

The main disadvantage of this product when compared to DreamWeaver is the absence of a split view, allowing simultaneous viewing of the graphical preview and (X)HTML code. This is a particularly useful feature in DreamWeaver as it allows you to click on a graphical element and jump to the relevant code.

That said NVU is perfectly usable and does support a number of different views, along with CSS and JavaScript editing tools, in addition to all the usual formatting features you would expect from such an editor.

There is also a basic FTP client included to allow easy publishing of pages, however SFTP is not supported (I will write a separate post on how you can use this with SFTP).

There are other free editors available, however, most are designed for Linux, whereas NVU has a version for Windows.

If you want to try it for yourself you can download it here.

I did not really want to do this and thought I would see if there was a FireFox plug-in that would do this, and as usual with FireFox, there was!

Reload Every can be downloaded here.

Its a really neat plug in as you can set different refresh rates for each tab. It is not really suitable for updating websites, as a script running on Cron or Windows Scheduler on a server would be more reliable, however, there have been many occasions where I wanted to keep reloading dynamic pages for testing purposes. In the past I always inserted a re-direct, but this will save having to do that.

Its simple to use, simply right click in your browser window / tab, set the time and your done!