Internet

Are You Really Ready To Launch Your Website?

Categories: Web, Internet

Posted on Friday, April 10, 2009 by Tim Fehlman

Thought that you might find 15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website to be useful. Here is the start of the post:

Your website is designed, the CMS works, content has been added and the client is happy. It’s time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it’s useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world.

This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch — little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.

Here is a list of the things that they recommend you should check:

Favicon
Titles and meta data
Cross-browser checks
Proofread
Links
Functionality Check
Graceful Degradation
Validation
RSS Link
Analytics
Sitemap
Defensive Design
Optimize
Backup
Print Style Sheet

[15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website]

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Create Your Own Realtime Web Based Twitter Monitter

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Categories: Web, Internet

Posted on Thursday, April 2, 2009 by Tim Fehlman

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Monitter.com allows you to watch in real time various key words as they appear on Twitter. But, did you know that you can create a similar page yourself?

If you download the widget file from their website, you can create your own customized widget that can monitor any word you wish and not allow others to change it!

Pretty cool!

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The Seven Types of Searchers

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Categories: Web, Search Engine, Internet

Posted on Saturday, March 28, 2009 by Tim Fehlman

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We all spend some time on a search engine. And, believe it or not, some of that information is gathered.

Back a few years ago, there was a leak of information by AOL. They anonymized the search data of 650,000 AOL users and made the 36,389,629 searches available to academics for research purposes. Paul Boutin from Slate magazine got his hands on the data and very quickly came to realize that there were seven types of searchers. He published his findings in Slate and then they were republished in The Best of Technology Writing 2007 (an excellent book, by the way, that I highly recommend reading).

So, according to Paul (and leaked AOL data), these are the seven types of searchers:

The Pornhound - lookin’ for love in all the wrong places! Dedicated to getting that next hit of nudity and inappropriate adult content.
The Manhunter - trying to find out more about specific people. Could be a headhunter, HR manager, or stalker. (They are, after all, hard to tell apart!)
The Shopper - they’ve got money burning a hole in their pocket (or a credit on PayPal using up database records). Looking to buy the next great thing they absolutely need until the next great thing comes along.
The Obsessive - seriously addicted to one topic. They may look for something else from time to time but they always come back to the same thing.
The Omnivore - they don’t have any specific pattern of searching, they are just searching a lot. They either search for the sake of searching or have an unquenchable thirst to know everything!
The Newbie - often search for website addresses (mistaking the search bar for the address bar) or searching for terms that make no sense (e.g. “a”, “the”, “allthebestboybandsintheentireworld”)
The Basket Case - overly concerned with why they are not perfect. Treat the search engine like a therapyst (e.g. “Why am I so ugly?”, “Why won’t Tim go out with me?”)

So, what type of a searcher are you? Leave us a message in the comments.

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Embed Any Font You Want Into Your Website

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Categories: Editing, Web, Blog, DIY, Internet, Open Source, HowTo

Posted on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 by Tim Fehlman

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One of the annoying things about web design is the fact that you are really quite limited in the number of fonts that you can use on your website. Unless you’re really into rendering your text to graphics and adding a pile of alt tags so that search engines can see your content, there really is little that you can do.

Well, it appears that your prayers have been answered. typeface.js is a javascript library that will render your text in real time so that your website looks the way it should without all of the advanced work. Check out some examples of how this works.

You also aren’t just limited to the fonts that the authors of typeface.js produce. You can upload any TrueType font that you may have in your library (i.e. c:\windows\fonts folder) and it will prepare it for the script.

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Check To See If You Are Being Impersonated

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Categories: Identity Theft, Web, Search Engine, Internet, From the Files of DCOT..., HowTo

Posted on Monday, March 23, 2009 by Tim Fehlman

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As any SEO marketer will tell you, your personal brand is critical. If someone else is using it, it can be a huge issue that can cause you money or, even worse, your reputation.

One way of checking to see if someone is infringing on your brand is to check whether or not your username/screen name is being used by someone else. Dialusername will allow you to check your username on all of the following social media sites in one fell swoop: