Gordon's WebLog

Of course most of us use Google, Yahoo or MSN for searching the Internet, but there ARE other search engines available, 2 of which I have been trying out recently.

Addictomatic

From the Addictomatic web site :- "This isn’t a traditional search engine. It’s not designed to help you find answers about some error message or the cheapest flight to Aruba. Addictomatic helps you see what’s going on now on a given topic."

This is certainly a search engine with a difference as it is an aggregator. Entering a search term starts a search of up to 24 sources of information and then displays panels of links to web pages, one panel per source. If you don't a particular sours panel then it may be deleted.

At first I thought this was just a pretty gimmick, but id does work very nicely, and it is certainly addictive.

Give it a try at addictomatic.com or have a look at their descriptive blog page here .

Searchme

Now this search engine has a REALLY pretty display, very similar to minimized applications in Windows Vista.

Go to http://www.searchme.com/ and enter a search term and you may then browse through the various panels which each display one web page. Best of all you can generate a "stack" of page by dragging the panels onto the "stack" icon at the top of the page. Clicking on any panel opens it in a normal browser window. You can also make it available as one of your search engines if you use Firefox.

It's absolutely fantastic, and very useful for storing stacks of pages that you visit regularly.

Website Grader

Have you ever wondered just how your web site compares with others, its social popularity, its inward links, its readability level and other technical factors ? Well, wonder no more. Website Grader will give you an immense amount of information on many aspects of your site. It is very easy to use, and the results are available within a very short time in the form of a report which includes many useful hints and tips and an overall score out of 100.

When I used this tool on my Church web site it gave a score of 58 i.e. it "scores" better than 58% of other web sites in its effectiveness calculated over 50 variables. The report also states that the site is within the top 8.92% of sites. Further, there are over 33,000 subscribers to its RSS feed. Doing a report on this blog gives an even higher score of 62, and it is in the top 1.82% of blogs tracked by Technorati.

Give it a try. The report may enable you to get a higher ranking.

IE NetRenderer

Yes, we all know that Internet Explorer in its various versions can cause some web pages to display incorrectly. Here is a tool that will render any web page in various IE versions. It is very quick and give a good idea as to whether all is OK with the page. Give it a try. It could save hours of frustration.

YSlow

If you use the Firefox  browser then there is a delightful add-on called YSlow which will enables you to analyze many aspects of your site (performance, statistics and component summary), and it also gives an idea of what elements on a page are causing slow download times. NOTE. It must be used in connection with the Firebug add-on.

Site-Perf

Site-Perf is another useful tool which measures the time taken to load various compenents on a web page. This is particularly useful in relation to images, as these are notorious at slowing doen page loads, particularly if they are not optimized for the web.

In this posting I detailed the Mozilla programs Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird.

Since then Firefox version 3 has been release, and a new integrated calendar and task list for Thunderbird call Lightning - it runs as an addon. This is much better than Sunbird which does not integrate with Thunderbird.

If you are using Sunbird, the Reminderfox extension for Thunderbird, or any other program than can export data to an ics file then you can import them into Lightning very easily.

Altogether a great addition to the Mozilla range.

The Lightning home page is situated here .

NOTE. If you want some great Thunderbird (and Firefox) addons which are NOT on the Mozilla site see this site. I particularly like the one which enables changing the quote and reply format. Do check it out.

So, you've got a web site. Now how do you post your web pages ?

I always prepare my pages on my local computer and then transfer them to my web site using FTP (file transfer program).

There are several very good FTP programs around, some you pay for, some are free. Some are stand alone, some link to browsers. Here I shall discuss 3 programs which I have used.

CuteFTP from Globalscape is available HERE. It is a very good, stand alone, professional program, but you do really need to purchase a licence to get the full benefit.

FileZilla is available HERE and is a free, open source, stand alone program. There is also a plugin version which links to the Maxthon browser (extremely good and thoroughly recommended) and this plugin is available HERE. The plugin displays a button on the Maxthon toolbar which launches the program.

FireFTP is a Firefox  extension, available HERE ,which again, like FileZilla, displays a button on the browser's toolbar which launches the program.

Basically all 3 programs work in a similar manner. Once logged into your site as administrator you can displa a tree of your local computer together with the tree of your web site. Web pages and other files can bu uploaded from your computer to your site, or vice versa.

Why not try them out ?

So, what is StyleSwitcher ?

It is a system that can be implemented on a web age so that the visitor can choose a different style to the default set up by the WebMaster.

Using a default (coffee coloured) and a grey version of my stylesheet I use it to allow visitors to choose between these two different colours for my web pages at my church web site

Now I believe that there are several different ways that this can be implemented and offered to visitors. Here is one that I find very good and is available from DynamicDrive.

First of all it is necessary to download a small JavaScript file available from DynamicDrive, and upload it to the root folder of your web site.

Next place the following code in the head of your web pages (or template), below your LINK stylesheet tags.

<script src="styleswitch.js" type="text/javascript">
/***********************************************
* Style Sheet Switcher v1.1- © Dynamic Drive DHTML code library (www.dynamicdrive.com)
* This notice MUST stay intact for legal use
* Visit Dynamic Drive at http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ for this script and 100s more
***********************************************/
</script>

Also there is also a nice little tweak so that when the page is first displayed the current style used is highlighted.

Add the following script underneath the one above.
<script type="text/javascript"> window.onload=function(){ var formref=document.getElementById("switchform") indicateSelected(formref.choice) } </script>

Now for the fun and games of actually coding the pages.

Underneath your default style sheet something like
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="default.css" media="screen" />
add another entry for each of the alternate stylesheets like this.
<link rel="alternate stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" title="colour_grey" href="grey.css" />
You will see that this is maked ALTERNATE STYLESHEET.

Right, that sets up the stylesheets, now to allow the visitor to choose a style.

I use it in the right hand sidebar of my web site and the coding is as follows.

Switch styles<br />
<form id="switchform"> <input type="radio" name="choice" value="none" onClick="chooseStyle(this.value, 60)" />Default style<br />
<input type="radio" name="choice" value="colour_grey" onClick="chooseStyle(this.value, 60)" />Grey style<br />
<:/form>

What this does is to put up a small form with two radio buttons which, when clicked, will effect a change to use the selected stylesheet, i.e the default or a grey colour.

There are other ways to implement this, see here for more details.

HAVE FUN, and do visit my church web site and try it out for yourself!

We all need to take a screen dump or copy a selection from a web page at some time, don't we ?

I know I do, frequently, and I have come across two really great ways to capture a screen, or part of a screen.

UPDATE The new version 2 of the Maxthon browser (see this post and the Maxton web site similar manner to Screengrab.

First of all, I recommend these programs because they both work as add-ons in Firefox - the greatest browser around.

Screengrab sits as an icon in the status bar until required Clicking the icon enables saving the complete page or frame, the visible portion or a selection. In addition these three options may be copied rather than saved, so that the resulting image may be pasted into a graphics program.

Screengrab does just what it claims, and does it very well.

Snagit also runs as a Firefox add-on, but in addition there is a full all singing all dancing version.

The free add-on sits in its own toolbar, the full program runs as an application under Windows. Like Screengrab it enables copying of the complete page, a region or just text. The result may be saved to disk, sent by mail or simply copied to the clipboard for further processing. If the option is taken to save to disk the result opens in Snagits own graphic program for further processing before saving. Not Photoshop, but a very good attempt at providing elementary editing.

The full version has additional facilities, and includes full page copying including the preservation of links, scrolling window to PDF, time delay, an object, images only, text only and also the facility to record a screen video. Of course to get these extra facilities means that the program must be purchased, but at only US Dollars 39.95 for a single license it is money well spent.

I can thoroughly recommend both of these.

Now for something just a little bit different. I have long admired some of the css styling visible on the Internet, and have now come across a really superb way of making text stand out from the surrounding page.

Originated by Stu Nicholls of CSSPlay it really is great. Some simple css formatting produces a really nice rounded corner outline with a colored title block and normal text. Here is my own interpretation.

Copyright information. Stu Nicholls states that you may use this method on your web site without seeking his permission. However, a link back to CSSPlay would be appreciated.

It's always nice to include lots of text containing keywords on a web page. But it is so easy to overdo the amount of text. Indeed, it can be very offputting to a visitor.

Is there a way to include text such that the veiwer can elect to read it or not ? YES THERE IS ! And I found it at the HTMLcenter web site.

It's all rather easy actually. First of all yopu need a small amount of JavaScript programming, which should be put in the <head> section of your web page. Here is the code.

<script> function show_hide(the_layer)
{
if(document.getElementById(the_layer))
{
if(document.getElementById(the_layer).style.display == 'none')
{
document.getElementById(the_layer).style.display = 'inline';
}
else
{
document.getElementById(the_layer).style.display = 'none';
}
}
}
</script>

Right, having sorted that out you need to code your HTML in a special way as follows. By the way, this example code is taken from my Agatha Christie web site where you can see it in operation on the home page and also on each novel summary page. Do have a look and then return to this posting.

<p><a href="javascript:show_hide('foobar');">Show/hide Agatha Christie's biography<'/a><br /><br /></p><div style="display: none; text-align: justify;" id="foobar"><p>Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie (Lady Mallowan) DBE is known throughout the world as the Queen of crime.......</div>

You will see that the coding is in several parts. A call to the JavaScript routine, the link text I wanted to display on the page, a <div> with various formatting commandes to hold my text, and the text itself.

As you will see from my example page(s) the effect is great.

HAVE FUN !

Post-it notes are in every day use on desktops (including monitor desktops) and are a useful reminder of important details needing action. Well. How about post-it notes on a web page ? Why, you ask ? Well, they are a very good way of temporarily displaying information without having to clutter up the page on a permanent basis.

I have searched for a long time for a simple way of implementing post-it notes on web pages, and finally found a rather nice solution by Benjamin Keen.

If you open the home page of this blog you will see at the top just underneath the yellow box a link "About this site..." If you click this link a post-it note will open. Clicking the note will close it.

This solution uses a JavaScript file together with special formatting of the HTML code. This link contains all the information you need (I suggest you inspect the source code) together with a download link to the JavaScript file.

To assist you here is a summary.

NOTE that all postits on a single page MUST have unique ID's such as postit1, postit2 etc

First of all you will need to download the JavaScript file and upload it to your web server. Then you will need to add <script type="text/javascript" src='postit.js'></script> to the <head> section of your web page. I would also suggest that you add <style type='text/css'> #postit1 { display: none; } to the <head> section to make absolutely sure that the postit (or a list of postits separated by commas) do not display when the page loads.

Right. Now we are in a position to add out postit. The example contained on my home page consists of the following HTML code.

REM this is the call to the JavaScript file
<div id="postit1" onclick="return showPostit(this.id)">

REM This puts a nice bar header at the top and then comes the actual text (which can include hyperlinks
<div style="background-color: #336699; padding: 2px; color: white">About this site...</div>

REM Now the actual text of the postit, which may include hyperlinks
<br>This site contains just a few of my random thoughts on computers, software, the web, and much, much more. <br><br> It is updated on an occasional basis, and I have an RSS feed available. <br><br> This RSS feed will keep you informed of all new postings. <br><br> To access the feed, simply copy <a href="http://www.gbtamc.co.uk/blog/rss.xml">THIS LINK</a> into your feed reader. <br><br> <b>Click this panel to close...</b><br><br></div>

REM and finally the actual link that appears on the web page
<br><a href="#" onclick="showPostit('postit1')" style="width: 300px;">About this site...</a>

Of course you can adjust the colour of the header bar to suit your web page design.

HAVE FUN !

Tooltips on web pages ? Whatever would I use those for ? Well, they are a very good way of temporarily displaying information without it cluttering up the page on a permanent basis. But how on earth would I do it ? Recently I was browsing the CSSplay web site, and I came across a very simple, elegant way. However, as with most of the CSSplay examples, there is very little in the way of explanation as to how to implement it, merely an example page (which is situated here). So here is a little bit of help on how to produce tolltips using purely CSS.

First of all a little example. Place your mouse over this linkThis is the tooltip.. Voila. A lovely little tooltip that disappears when the mouse moves away. So what is needed to work this little piece of magic ? First of all a simple style sheet in the <HEAD> section of your web page or your default CSS file if you prefer. The code for this follows. Simply copy and paste the following purple text.

<style type="text/css">
a.tooltip {color:#c00;}
a.tooltip b {display:none;}
a.tooltip:hover {border:0; position:relative; z-index:500; text-decoration:none;}
a.tooltip:hover b {display:block; position:absolute; top:20px; left:-25px; padding:5px; font-weight:normal; color:#000; border:1px solid #888; background:#ffc; width:150px;}
a.tooltip:hover b em {position:absolute; left:20px; top:-6px; width:11px; height:6px; background:#fff url(tooltip.gif) 0 0; display:block; font-size:1px;}
</style>

How to display the tooltip ? Here is the HTML code that I used in the above example. Place your mouse over <a class="tooltip" href="#">this link<b>This is the tooltip.</b></a>.

Right. Now here is a little variation which make the box of the tooltip a little bit more appealing. We shall use a small "carat" graphic (available HERE - click the link, download and upload to your web server, changing the CSS URL to point to it) and a couple of changes to the HTML code. AFTER the <b> add <em></em>. I know this appears to be a little strange but yes, you do put these two tags together with NOTHING in between ! See this example. Place your mouse over this linkThis is another tooltip. Note the top "carat" graphic..

HAVE FUN !

Yes folks. At long last the Safari browser by Apple is now available for the Windows operating system as well as for the Mac.

It's still in Beta stage, but is available for download at http://www.apple.com/safari.

The installation is quick and easy (including Quicktime) and once fired up the screen is very easy on the eye.

So, what do you get ? Well, as I haven't ever used a Mac I'm not sure whether there are any new features in the Windows version of Safari, but here is a short list of its capabilities.

1) Blazing performance. Faster than IE and Opera, yes, even faster than Firefox 2, and this applies to HTML pages, JavaScripts and also the actual application launch.
2) Very nice brushed steel user interface.
3) Easy bookmarking - including for the inbuilt RSS feeder, with importation from any (well almost) browser lists, and you can also set a bookmark for a set of tabs - very useful. You can just store the bookmarks, or drag them to you toolbar for quick access.
4) Of course there is pop-up blocking and other security facilities, including "Private browsing" where history etc is not stored.
5) Find details on any page via the small search box situated at the top of the page.
6) When opening a page from a search a snapback icon is displayed. Clicking this takes you back to the search results.
7) Auto fill of forms and resizeable text fields. Let Safari fill in your name, street address, city, zip code, email, and other information.
8) Of course, what browser is complete without tabbed browsing.

I have now used Safari for just a few days now, and have found it both easy to use and very stable. My only gripe is that it does not always display pages when links are clicked (nor sometimes when the back button is clicked), but a second try seems to work OK ! Apart from that I have had no problems with any site I have visited. Should you have problems there is an option in the help menu to report bugs to Apple and these can include a screen dump and page source

Of course it does not have the extensions and plugins that Firefox has, not even themes, but no doubt they will come in due course.

Should you try it ? Well, far be it for me to recommend, but of all the browsers I have installed (IE, Maxthon, Opera, Firefox and Safari) It certainly seems to be very quick and once you get used to the Apple buttons, scrollbars etc, you should find it a very worthwhile addition to your browsing armory

Pricing & Availability. The free public beta of Safari 3 is available immediately as a download at www.apple.com/safari, and is preview software licensed for use on a trial basis for a limited time. The final version of Safari 3 will be available as a feature in the upcoming Mac OS® X version 10.5 Leopard, and will be available as a free download to Mac OS X Tiger and Windows users in October 2007.

Go on. Give it a try.

Sitemaps are essential if you want your site to be thoroughly indexed.

In this post I gave details of a free sitemap generator from freesitemapgenerator.com

In a later post I gave details of yet another from xml-sitemaps.com

And now I present yet another, and I think the best of the bunch.

GSiteCrawler from gsitecrawler.com differs from the above in that it is an application which is installed on your PC, whereas the others either run from the main web site, or, in the case of xml-sitemaps, may be purchased fro a very small fee and actually uploaded to your own site where it is run.

The program is some 10 Mbytes in size and installation follows normal windows procedures. A database is generated which is used to store the URL results obtained. The program will produce not only Google sitemaps but also Yahoo url lists.

Setup is a breeze, (it includes a wizrd to get you started) and a single click will crawl your site and produce the necessary files. It also includes an ftp section which can automatically upload the sitemaps to your web. The actual crawling of your site can be set to run automatically at any desired interval.

I have now used this program for some time, and I have found it both easy to use and robust. I can thoroughly recommend it.

If you want further information then visit the website, or, and I hope the compiler of the program does not mind, I include below the main features as extracted from his web site.

GSiteCrawler Features

In general, the GSiteCrawler will take a listing of your websites URLs, let you edit the settings and generate Google Sitemap files. However, the GSiteCrawler is very flexible and allows you to do a whole lot more than "just" that!

Capture URLs for your site using

• a normal website crawl - emulating a Googlebot, looking for all links and pages within your website
• an import of an existing Google Sitemap file
• an import of a server log file
• an import of any text file with URLs in it

The Crawler

• does a text-based crawl of each page, even finding URLs in javascript
• respects your robots.txt file
• respects robots meta tags for index / follow
• can run up to 15 times in parallel
• can be throttled with a user defined wait-time between URLs
• can be controlled with filters, bans, automatic URL modifications

With each page, it

• checks date (from the server of using a date meta-tag) and size of the page
• checks title, description and keyword tags
• keeps track of the time required to download and crawl the page

Once the pages are in the database, you can

• modify Google Sitemap settings like "priority" and "change frequency"
• search for pages by URL parts, title, description or keywords tags
• filter pages based on custom criteria - adjust their settings globally
• edit, add and delete pages manually

And you have everything the way you want it, you can export it as

• a Google Sitemap file in XML format (of course :-)) - with or without the optional attributes like "change date", "priority" or "change frequency"
• a text URL listing for other programs (or for use as a UrlList for Yahoo!)
• a simple RSS feed
• Excel / CSV files with URLs, settings and attributes like title, description, keywords
• a Google Base Bulk-Import file
• a ROR (Resources of Resources) XML file
• a static HTML sitemap file (with relative or absolute paths)
• a new robots.txt file based on your chosen filters
• ... or almost any type of file you want - the export function uses a user-adjustable text-based template-system

For more information, it also generates

• a general site overview with the number of URLs (total, crawlable, still in queue), oldest URLs, etc
• a listing of all broken URLs linked in your site (or otherwise not-accessable URLs from the crawl)
• an overview of your sites speed with the largest pages, slowest pages by total download time or download speed (unusually server-intensive pages), and those with the most processing time (many links)
• an overview of URLs leading to "duplicate content" - with the option of automatically disabling those pages for the Google Sitemap file

Additionally ...

• It can run on just about any Windows version from Windows 95b on up (tested on Windows Vista beta 1 and all server versions).
• It can use local MS-Access databases for re-use with other tools
• It can also use SQL-Server or MSDE databases for larger sites (requires a seperate installation file).
• It can be run in a network environment, splitting crawlers over multiple computers - sharing the same database (for both Access and SQL-Server).
• It can be run automated, either locally on the server or on a remote workstation with automatic FTP upload of the sitemap file.
• It tests for and recognizes non-standard file-not-found pages (without HTTP result code 404).

... and much more!

For many years I used Microsoft Outlook linked to an Exchange Server at work, and a Virtual Private Network connection from home.

However, when I ceased my full time employment I turned to Outlook Express, as a more light weight alternative to Outlook, but I must admit that I did miss Outlook's ToDo lists, calendar and notes.

For some eighteen months I was quite happy with this, untill I heard about Mozilla Thunderbird and Sunbird.

Not so well known as their bigger brother Firefox (which I have also used since its first release, both of these programs are now in constant use on my home PC.

Thunderbird is Mozilla's email client software, and you are able to import data from several other programs when you change to Thunderbird. It has all the normal email client functions, including downloading messages from remote mailboxes. One great advantage is that it can also be used as an RSS reader, much in the same way as some of the extensions used in Firefox. It really is great, and with the recent release of version 2 I am quite happy to use it for the foreseeable future.

Sunbird is Mozilla's calendar software. It includes tasks in addition to normal calendar events (which can be set to repeat in a number of ways), and again data can be imported from Outlook.

Both of these programs are thoroughly recommended, and complement Firefox.

UPDATE. SEE ALSO THIS POSTING.

In this posting I gave details of a free site map generator/ which I used for some time and found it excellent.

However, I have now come accross one at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ which I believe is far better.

So what can you do with it by logging onto the site ?

Build your Site Map online (XML, ROR, Text, HTML) This website will let you:

Create an XML sitemap format that can be submitted to Google to help them crawl your website better.

Create a Text sitemap to submit to Yahoo.

Create a ROR sitemap, which is an independant XML format for any search engine.

Generate an HTML site map to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your website.

It is limited in the number of pages it will crawl, but you can also purchase (and put in a folder on your web site) a paid-up version available here which is NOT limited and has additional configuration features. It is well worth purchasing this version - particularly as it only costs 14.99 US Dollars !

Here is the brief summary of its features:

1. It generates any kind of sitemap you require: XML, Text, HTML site maps.

2. It is developed in PHP languages and works with most web-server's configurations

3. Fast and easy installation onto the same host that should be crawled

4. Flexible configuration that allows you to set any sitemap parameters and crawler settings

5. Support of LARGE websites, dividing the sitemap on the parts per 50,000 URLs each and Sitemap Index file according to the Google sitemap protocol.

6. "robots.txt" exclusion protocol is supported

7. GZip compression supported (optional)

8. User-friendly progress indication for sitemap generation in manual mode

9. Allows to setup the cron job to create sitemaps without a user interaction

10. Informs (ping) Google automatically when sitemap generation is complete

11. Website structure analysis feature represents the tree-like layout of your pages distribution within folders

12. The script collects all generated sitemaps details and provides the log chanages in it, including the number (and the lists) of added and removed pages.

13. The broken links are detected by the application and reported on the special page, providing also the URLs pages that refer to these bad links.

And it give change logs and broken links reports as well.

Give it a try - you will find that it is an excellent srcipt, easy to use (start the crawl and it's all automatic - even to pinging Google) and you will notice that your page ratings increase together with the number of visitors to your site you get.

Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox for short, is a free Internet browser.

"What's wrong with Internet Explorer?" you say - well despite being a good browser, Microsoft was getting complacent. Internet Explorer's vulnerability to numerous security breaches was growing by the day, yet many simple things MS could do to patch these up were left undone. Internet Explorer lacked many convenience features often requested. And Internet Explorer did not adhere completely to web standards; it pretty much set its own standards. Internet Explorer lacked competition.

However all that has changed since Firefox became a legitimate challenger. Firefox has forced Microsoft to incorporate many much needed security and customization features into the latest version of the world's most used Internet browser, Internet Explorer 7. All of this has been spurred on solely by Firefox's existence and growing popularity.

Aside from helping improve Internet Explorer, what else makes Firefox great? An easy to answer is that it has all the useful and familiar features of Internet Explorer, yet provides additional features, better security, adherence to web standards, less of Internet Explorer's quirky behavior, and most important of all greater potential for customization. In releasing Firefox 2.0 in October 2006 the Mozilla Foundation has further improved Firefox, adding useful new features and tightening its code base to prevent new security vulnerabilities. Now more than ever, Firefox stands as a true competitor to Internet Explorer, and has massive customization potential with add-ons, extensions and themes.

Find out for yourself just what Firefox can do for you. Believe me. Once you have used Firefox you won't want to return to any other browser. Visit the download site by clicking the following graphic. And if you want a great guide to the new version click here.

Internet Explorer version 7

Finally Microsoft has released Internet Explorer version 7 for download. This follows extensive testing of beta 1 and beta 2 versions.

The download is stated to be available from the Microsoft web site but I have to say that the link on the site does NOT seem to allow download ! Even Microsoft make mistakes. As and when the link is corrected this post will be updated.

Well, well, well. One day later and Microsoft have removed the link from their home page (wonder why), but I have tracked it down HERE.

It is also rumoured that as from 1st November 2006 Microsoft will add IE7 to the automatic update program.

Windows Vista

Vista is now in an advanced state and should be available fairly soon.

In the meantime, there is an upgrade adviser program available from the Microsoft web site here which will analise your system and point out any problem drivers, cards and programs.

Having run the adviser on my PC I was advised that it would run Vista OK, but several drivers, graphic card and other programs (interestingly enough including my Anti Virus software) may cause problems. However, Microsoft do give fairly good advice as to how to overcome problems and download new drivers etc.

If you read this post you will see that I am now hooked on using the Firefox browser. In that post I mentioned an extension called StumbleUpon. This is a great little extension which adds a toolbar to Firefox. Clicking on the "Stumble!" button will display random pages from the web. You can log onto the main StumbleUpon web site and set up a range of topics in which you are interested. It really is amazing what you can come up with. I never cease to be amazed at the scope and variety of sites.

One site I came across recently is DeGraeve.com and here you will find several little routines that you may find useful. One I especially like is the Colour Palette Generator. It's a simple little routine, but very useful in web or blog design.

Let's say you have a nice graphic on your site and you want to ensure that the colour of the other elements of the page(s) do not clash. Enter the URL of the graphic into the web page, click the button, and the page will not only display the graphic (sometimes just a little bit distorted as it is displayed as a square), but also extract a set of matching colours with their hex values. These may then be used in your web or blog pages, probably via the css file.

As a matter of interest, here is the display of this blog's header image and corresponding colours.

Just what does a visitor do when your carefully designed web site first appears before their eyes ? What part of the page do they look at first ? How far down do they scroll before leaving your home page. What are the important areas of your page ? How about the text size ? And what about graphics ?

These and many other questions were used in experiments on web users by Eyetrack and their web site makes very, very interesting reading.

It seems that there are certain patterns which visitors eyes tend to follow when looking at a web page. There are a couple of interesting graphics (reproduced below - click the image to view the original larger version) which show "heat maps" of the most important areas of the page, and the track visitors eyes tend to follow.

One very interesting thing that came out of the research was that smaller text tends to be read more then large text, which tends just to be scanned.

Although the research was carried out a couple of years ago, I think it makes very interesting reading and may provide clues to web masters and bloggers when designing web pages. Do have a look at the site - you can even download a 300 page pdf file of all the results to keep as a reference.

Related to this subject, but on a different web site, there is a posting here which may shed more light on the subject.

Once again the web site is at Eyetrack.

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 .