Gordon's WebLog

I have now created a links directory in my blog site which is located here and all the pages on my blog now contain a link to it.

The idea is that links to useful web sites, articles etc are categorized. Each link will contain a short introductory paragraph and will link back to the original web page or article.

I have added just a few of my own links, but anyone can add their own links - and I hope that this will become a widely used and useful reference tool.

To add a category or submit a link you must become a member of the site, which is easy and free. Then you can go ahead and use the site. The more web pages that link back to your site the better your search engine ranking will become.

NOTE. New membership and submission of categories or links are all controlled by me. I will be advised by email when submitted and will I review and confirm or deny any addition.

One thing I do ask is that you add a reciprocal link back to this site by copying this link and displaying it on your site.

Wikipedia is a free on line encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It was created in 2001 and has grown into probably the largest reference website on the Internet.

It really is the most amazing and fascinating site to visit. All articles are fully cross referenced, and if you are not very careful you can easily spend hour upon hour browsing. Read all about it in 2 articles on the actual encyclopedia site situated here and here. Do give it a try. I can promise that you will love it.

Great site ? How do they do it ? Is it available for download ?

Well, the software used can actually be downloaded and used by anyone and there is an encyclopedia entry here which will give you some idea of its scope and capabilities. The software is available for download at the Mediawiki web site where you will find lots of hints and tips and help topics.

Important note. You will need PHP and MySQL to run the software.

Once you have downloaded the software, extract it to a suitable folder on your local PC, then upload to your server or web site. A certain amount of configuration is needed before you can begin to use the software and I suggest that you view this FAQ page for more details.

Do try it. It is great fun, and surprisingly easy to write a smart looking Wiki in a very short time.

There is also another version of wiki software called PMWiki. The home page is situated here and the installation instructions are here .

UPDATE. SEE ALSO THIS POSTING AND THIS POSTING.

The first thing you as web master must decide is if creating a sitemap worth is worth the effort? Once you know all the benefits of a Google™ Sitemap you can create one yourself or look for a tool that does it for you.

Google™ spiders your site and stores pages it thinks are important in it's (huge) database. With a sitemap you can list all pages YOU think are relevant and even prioritize them. Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It's a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages. With Google sitemaps you get - Statistics about your site and information about URLs we had trouble crawling - Better crawl coverage to help people find more of your web pages - Fresher search results - A smarter crawl because you can provide specific information about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes. Besides that, you get some very nice statistics when you have submitted your sitemap to Google™. (From Google Sitemaps)

Generating a sitemap is a bit complicated, so many sites offer tools to do it. I have tried out several of them, with varying results. One site which offers a FREE sitemap generator (for up to 5,000 pages) is FreeSitemapGenerator.com and I have found it very good indeed.

How does it work?

First you must create a (FREE) account and add your first website. Just enter the homepage url of your website. Whenever you want to generate a sitemap press the make sitemap button on the control panel page. The site spiders will, just like a Search Engine spider, crawl your website finding all links. When it is done spidering your website you will receive an email You can then download the sitemap (zip file) from this site and upload it to your own website. Don't forget to submit your sitemap to Google. You can even let the site upload the new sitemap directly to your website automatically, and even ping Google™ to let them know you have a new sitemap ready. NOTE. To ping Google manually enter the following into your browser. http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=www.SITENAME/sitemap.xml

On the site you have a full control panel where various tasks can be performed, and you can view a report of any link errors. You can also view a graph of how many pages have been spidered by Google.

All in all it's a very good system, one which I can fully recommend - and it's FREE !

In this post I described the great little program SyncBack. Well, here is an update for the program SyncBackSE version 4.

Many new features have been added to the program, including Smart Synchronization faster and improved Zip compression, complete control over which files & folders to backup and restore, clear & complete control over what to do with changed & new files, new log file format to clearly show the results of a profile run, more profile configuration options, improved Fast Backup options, completely revised and extended Help File.

When first run you will be invited to set up a profile. This will contain details of files or folders to back up, where to place the backup (I use an external USB hard drive), scheduling information (uses Windows Scheduler), and much, much more.

You may set up as many profiles as you want for different jobs, probably one of the most important being backup of My Documents, but others may be for backing up download folders, desktop items etc.

When a profile is being run it is possible to pause/restart it or even abort it. The backups are extremely quick

It is possible to run any profile in simulated mode, and all profiles runs produce a very detailed log file in HTML of all operations carried out, system information, and much more.

In case of disaster, restoration is a matter of just a few mouse clicks.

The program is available at the 2brightsparks web site, and can be thoroughly recommended. At just under £15.00 it's a snip not to be missed.