I recently did a site for someone who had paid for a template, which, whilst ok was only as good as the average template available from the Open Source Web Directory.

I have seen a few people ‘reselling’ templates for commercial companies, and to be honest think they are wasting their time. I don’t believe these businesses will exist in a few years time, certainly not for static templates.

The reason? Traffic and exposure is a commodity easily exploited with a free template. I recently wrote about a free template I found, the authors of which claimed to have around 200k templates in use around the world. They generate a lot of interest in their activities by distributing a small number of good quality templates.

There are now thousands of free templates available, designers are competing to get you to download them, for free!

Similarly, there is a growing industry in WordPress templates with many free designs available, though, there are still relatively few high quality functional designs available.

For those that are successful, i.e. produce a good template the exposure they get is invaluable. Take this site for example, the template it uses has over 40k downloads, and at the bottom of the page you will see a link back to the author.

So, that is how web designers make money with templates, they get free publicity, showcase their work and get paid commissions for high value bespoke work.

On the other site, it is possible to make money deploying these templates. Many are complex and require an understanding of CSS and (XX)HTML to be able to work with them.

On top of that, building static sites is a bad plan as they are so difficult to maintain, which means you also need PHP to be able to chop the site up into constituent components, and then javaScript to add some tricks as required.

This is an opportunity for deployer’s of templates and software to earn their crust, and is really how I see the market going, deployment and configuration with a much smaller design / development element.

Why not build the site from scratch?

Well why re-invent the wheel, using templates gives the following advantages:

• Lower cost to the customer
• Faster turn around
• The ability for the customer to choose a ’starting point’ from thousands of free templates

There are already a number of companies making good profits deploying open source applications and templates. I have done this myself.

If you are going to do this, in my opinion you just need to be honest, tell the customer what you are doing, let the price reflect you are using a template as your starting point, and leave the back-link to the original author.

I have seen a few people claiming to be designers, checked their portfolio and realised they are using other peoples templates, not good when their customers find out!

I spend a lot of time typing, at work and home, typing E-Mails, Blog Posts, letters and documents, programming, using chat clients… a lot of button pushing!

I learned to touch type around five years ago before starting a University Degree course. Typing was not taught when I went to school, but I realised what a benefit it would be to learn, as degree’s involve a lot of writing!

Five years later it is still a major benefit to me… anyone who has ever used a chat client to talk to me will testify to the fact that I push out 10 words to their one (not always a good thing!!), and I am still working on other stuff in between!

I decided to write this post after someone at work commented on how fast I was typing and I realised that I have only met one person who can out type me, that person was a PA to a company director with professional typing / shorthand qualifications.

So, what does touch typing mean?

• Make use of all digits on both hands, not just your index fingers!
• Looking at the screen, or document you are copying from, not the keyboard.

The benefits of touch typing are two fold:

1. You will be able to type at least twice as fast!
2. As you are looking at the screen (not the keyboard) you are able to concentrate fully on your work, it is far easier to get into a creative flow if you can touch type.

I taught myself to type using an old copy of Mavis Beacon, by Old I mean pre 2000. The graphics were really poor, and the commentary was really annoying. I muted the sound on my computer and spent two hours a night using the CD ROM for five consecutive evenings.

After those ten hours I had learned the keyboard well enough to type without looking at the keyboard, however I was still typing a lot slower than I had been using my previous finger and thumb method. I think this is where a lot of people fail when leaning to type in this way, they learn the keyboard, but …. old habits die hard.

You have to force yourself to use the new methods you have just learned, if you do this, within a couple of weeks you will be working faster than you ever have before, and will continue to do so for the rest of your life!!

It really is one of the most useful self taught skills I possess, there is no way I could get as much done without being able to touch type.

You can get an old (used) copy of Mavis Beacon for less than five dollars (£2.50) on Amazon! If you use the CD properly, and force yourself to use your new found skill, it may well prove the best $5 you ever spend… really!

The blog has a few tips and tricks, but the really useful stuff is all in the forum, which can be found by reading about YACG on the blog!

YACG or Yet Another Content Generator is an open source application written by Busin3ss to automatically create websites including content gathered from a range or sources.

Busin3ss has just released some information on a private project he is working on, the black hat seo command centre!

Its a real shame Busin3ss is not releasing the source for this program, it looks really interesting, allowing the creation of new domains / sub domains on a server, automatically deploy websites onto those domains, harvest keywords and a lot more.

Busin3ss is however releasing a mass installer for his YACG project and other components used in the command centre and other readers of his blog / forum are already working on their own variants.

One of the most interesting things going on in the forum is a case study. Using these black hat seo tools, busin3ss is describing an attempt to make a LOT of money online by automatically generating thousands of sites over hundreds of domains.

Whether you agree with this stuff or not there is no denying the level of commitment and expertise being demonstrated here, its a really interesting read, particularly if you get access to the forum.

Accessing the forum is free, but you are asked why you want to join. I have no idea whether anyone has ever been refused access to the forum, but I was allowed in, so they can’t be that choosy

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.

Content Solution can read in content from a range of sources, scraping content from Search Engines, Article Engines /sites, RSS feeds and text articles:

The scrapes are separated by article or search and can be individually edited as required. Once an article is ready, it can be passed to either a re-writer using sysnonyms, or the Markov Generator.

The re-writer replaces text in the article using a thesaurus. The more this is done, the less sense the article makes, however, articles largely remain readible. These newly re-written articles can be put out to an rss feed which will change every time it is loaded (a spinner) and can be used many times to create multiple variants of a single article.

Using the Markov Generator it is possible to spin many articles together to create new and unique content, which although meaningless to the human reader appears to maintain the structure of a genuine document, and remains readable (though it makes no sense).

The spun content can be output to different formats, creating RSS feeds and ’spinners’. The spinners are particularly fun to play with, they are plain text web pages which, when refreshed re-generate, or re-spin content.

It is really interesting to see this program at work, and although spam is much maligned within the blog-sphere, it has me wondering how many sites already use this kind of software to pad out sites. It is relatively easy to hide content from readers without using black hat techniques.

At around 50+ posts Google usually indexes an entire blog, not just posts, but all comments pages, author pages etc, and I can certainly see this software being used by the impatient! I can also see it being used by people who run multiple blog’s.

One reason I became interested in this software is because I have seen it work on other sites. These were splogs pointed at a ReviewMe I wrote a while back. For the brief time these splogs linked to my site, traffic doubled and my SERPS jumped dramatically.

If this stuff did not work, people would not do it… that said, it can get you into trouble, particularly if you try and run adsense in the spun posts!

The main reason I have been playing with it is because I think its an ingenious little program that is stable, easy to use and good at what it does…. its a real shame that its encrypted, it would have been fun to play with the source!

Considering the ‘dark’ nature of the product, the guys at halfagain.com (the company that produces the software) seem pretty cool too, and have taken the time to reply to a couple of questions I had.

If you are interested in this software you can get a free trial of Content Solution Here. For those looking to in increase revenue on their blog, the affiliate commissions are very generous too.
(links in this post are direct to their site, I am not making on aff sales here…)

Have fun,

Being a web application it is easy to host / share across organisational / geographical boundaries. Being written in PHP means hosting is easy to find and cheap, and, as it is open source it will not cost you anything to use!

The stated aims of the developers of dotProject were as follows:

Originally commenced in 2000 by dotmarketing.org, dotProject was developed as a state of the art Project Management tool from the start.

The original theme (still available in the first release of 2005) flagged dotProject as an open source alternative to Microsoft products and other expensive, commercial applications.

Right from the start, dotProject had, as it’s core aims a number of simple requirements:

• Clean, simple and consistent user interface
• Project Management functionality - not another CMS, groupware environment or all things to all people collaboration tool, but a project management environment
• Open source / open access / free usage.

And right up until the current day, these aims remain the core aim of the current administration team.

I have recently started using this software and have found it very useful and reliable.

It has all the features you would expect of project management software, a monthly calendar showing tasks:

Detail of tasks to be completed:

Which can be expanded to show Gantt Charts:

And some less common features such as problem ticketing:

If you want to play with dotProject they have a demo site which you can log into (which is where I decided to take the screen shots from, hence junk data…).

In my opinion its well worth a look, even if you have no use for it right now, its one of those app’s that it pays to be aware of!

Now I thought I would add a post demonstrating why Alexa is worthless!

I was looking at some of the “Movers and Shakers” on Alexa, and saw a site “LookSearch.com” had fallen through the floor.

The site in question is an MFA site containing nothing but Ads. It has no PR.

Looking on Alexa’s wayback machine I can see it has been that way for some time, after the domain was put up for sale….

Below are their Alexa stat’s for the past 3 months:

As can be seen above, it all started with an almost vertical rise in traffic, and ended with an almost vertical fall!

Having looked at the site it is difficult to believe this traffic is genuine. 25 countries are listed in the stats, making this site very popular in almost every corner of the Globe! (apparantly!).

I would love to know how they did this, I have been told that proxies do not work too well, but clearly the people behind this site have a good method of rigging Alexa.

Whether it benefited them in any way is another matter, after all, it appears they have given up on it….

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”.