Why Aren't You Marketing With Testimonials?

You mean you really aren't? Lots of experts have noticed that there are too few e-commerce sites using testimonials. In the brick-and-mortar world, testimonials have been used for decades. They provide a very low-cost and effective tool for adding credibility to your promotional message.

And credibility is what you need in order to convert prospects to sales. The majority of consumers say that knowing and trusting the sender is the key factor in determining whether they would open an email. With email open rates declining, trust becomes more and important in getting your message across effectively:

"Hey, don't just take our word for it--listen to what our customers are saying! You don't trust us? Then trust our customers. Folks like you." Here's the mystery. Creating trust online is a big, big thing. So why don't we see more sites using testimonials? [Usborne 1999]

Testimonials Work

As marketing experts have shown time and again, testimonials work: "I'm a big advocate of testimonials on websites, even though some people call them hokey. Why? Because Web visitors read them and are influenced by them.

In some tests, Web users spend 85% more time on Web pages with testimonials, and transactions have increased by as much as 300%." [White 2006]

Your visitors naturally don't want to lose money and, just as important, they don't want to feel foolish. Eliminating their natural fear and skepticism is exactly the job that testimonials do best.

You can blow your own horn, and should, but when it comes from someone else then people start to truly believe it.

Testimonials may have a long history, but they are essentially the basis of the hottest and most recent strategies for doing business on the Web: word-of-mouth, social networking, viral marketing. [Nicholls 2006b]

You Can't Fake It

Testimonials work but if you don't handle them properly they can, and will, work against you. A botched testimonial can easily backfire and do you more harm than good. Faking it will not work; authenticity is certainly the most important factor:

"Resist the urge to turn your testimonials into marketing-speak. It is important that you retain the voice and style of real people. Don't make up your testimonials, because unless you are very clever, the effort will be transparent. And put full attribution on your testimonials." [White 2006]

Generic, questionable or obviously phony testimonials will do you no good, and may actually harm your reputation. On the other hand, succinct, believable, benefit-specific testimonials from real people, properly placed on your Web pages, can enhance your website's credibility and boost your conversion rate.

A Web page of endorsements by itself is not enough. The effectiveness of endorsements and user feedback depends on leveraging some specific strategies. The basic steps are:


Specify your goals and objectives
Gather the testimonials
Choose the best ones
Use the testimony verbatim
Identify the source completely
Position your testimonials effectively
Let the viral process do its stuff.

There is one potential downside to testimonials, too, that you must keep in mind along with the many benefits. And that is the danger of obtaining a great testimonial but later wishing you hadn't. This rather interesting topic is discussed further in Nicholls [2006a]

How to Do It

Collecting usable testimonials should be an organized ongoing process - never miss an opportunity to get one. Read your incoming mail carefully and keep a file of customer comments. Follow up on the ones with potential and put them in usable form.

Analyze your customer list and develop a sub-list of your top 10% of customers by sales volume and frequency of ordering. Carefully craft a letter to this select list "Asking for their help." Suggest to them what you are looking for in the way of comments and then let them provide you with the raw material.

The key here is that you can't sit back and hope for testimonials to come your way. You have to go and seek them out. Overall, the four essential qualities of every great testimonial are:


A real person talking
It's not too long
Expresses an emotion
Mentions a specific benefit.

Automatically ask for feedback from your members and visitors. A follow-up email asking for feedback is one way to do this. The visitor's book is another way. When you get a good testimonial ask for permission to use it - they will almost always say yes. Keep an eye on the Web in case somebody says something good about you. If they do, see if you can reprint it on your own site.

Scatter your testimonials all over the website. Many webmasters make the mistake of creating a testimonial page and putting all the testimonials there. Instead, scatter them throughout.

If you have testimonials pertaining to a specific product, place them under that product. Another great area to place testimonials on your website is on the right and left borders. They will serve as a constant reminder of your credibility. [Frey 2002]

Done correctly, testimonials work, increase conversions, and are cost-effective to collect and use. So, if you are not already using this proven effective tool to market your e-business - why not?

References

David Frey. "What to Do with What You've Got: Using Testimonials Effectively," 09/24/02.

MarketingProfs. http://www.marketingprofs.com/2/frey5.asp.

Paul Nicholls. "The Down Side of Testimonials," eBizTutors Blog 09/16/06a.

http://www.ebiztutors.com/index.php/?p=219

Paul Nicholls. "Using Testimonials: Going the Extra Mile," eBizTutors 11/20/06b.

http://www.ebiztutors.com/tutorials/testimony.shtml

Nick Usborne. "Where Are All the Testimonials?" Small Business Advice 12/03/99.

http://www.clickz.com/ebiz/small_biz/article.php/818921.

Steve White. "Using Testimonials," Internet Business Coach 2006.

http://www.internetbusinesscoach.net/article.asp?PageID=337.

Dr. Paul Nicholls is a regular fixture at eBizTutors.com where you can find many more e-commerce resources for the new or seasoned online entrepreneur - blogs, tutorials, programs, and support. We also keep an intermittent eye on Asian e-commerce in Paul's Zanshin blog. Visit us at eBizTutors.com

A Beginner's Guide to Building and Hosting a Web Page

A beginner's guide to Building and Hosting a Web Page Web design and development is incredibly fun. For those just getting started, I've developed the following guide to take you through all of the steps necessary to successfully embark on your web design and development adventure!

A) Index:

PRE: The 3 D's

1. Gathering

2. Concept

3. Photoshop

4. Client Approval #1

5. HTML (front-end)

6. Code (back-end)

7. Client Approval #2

8. Uploading & Testing

B) Tools Required: (I'll go through all of these tools in detail below)

1. Pencil

2. Paper

3. Photoshop (or other design tool)

4. Dreamweaver (or other web-development tool)

5. Copies of all the common browsers (see below for more info)

6. Filezilla (or other FTP tool to communicate with your web server)

7. Domain Name (your www. address)

8. Web Host such as GoDaddy (or something similar)

9. A computer

10. A passion for being creative!

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A) Index:

PRE: The 3 D's

All websites in the world require 3 things.

A Domain Name. Through companies like GoDaddy, you can purchase names for small fees per year. If the name you want is something popular, consider purchasing it at the beginning of your build-process, after all, it's good for a year.

A Dedicated Host Once you've selected a hosting package, you'll have to log in and set everything up. You'll have to point, or park your domain name at your hosting setup as well. Once all of that's done, setup your FTP program so you're connections to your server are working.

A Designed, and Developed Web Site (your stuff!). This tutorial will cover off on this one!

1. Gathering

The type of site you use and the tools you'll need will vary a lot depending on the requirements of your client. A website built to do nothing but show pictures will have significantly different technology in the back-end than a page built to allow for discussions. Likewise, a site built for security with employee data and a login system will look entirely different yet.

Knowing what your client needs is the first real step in the building process. Make yourself a checklist and take it with you when you speak with your clients. Over time develop the checklist into a comprehensive consultation document. Be prepared for additional chat though. The most critical component of early web building is proper communication to ensure you and your client remain on the same 'design' page. The last thing you want to do is misinterpret their interests and spend 5-6 hours building something they didn't want in the first place.

2. Concept

You've got all of your initial information. Now it's time to sketch our concept design. You DO NOT need to be an artist for this. The purpose of this concept phase is to remove the computer and other distractions so you can visualize the design in your head.

Throughout this stage, we're looking for general themes. What colours will we use, what header / body / footer layout will we go for? 2 column vs 3 column? Fixed or Liquid layout? Will the news display over here, or over there? What kind of navigational menu do we want, image based or CSS based? Sketch until your pretty little fingers bleed. You want to have an actual design on paper, something you're pleased with. It's incredibly easy to start over while your using a pencil but 3 hours into a designing session in Photoshop is NOT where you want to be when you realize eggplant yellow and rounded corners weren't the way to go...

3. Photoshop

So we've got our concept on paper, now it's time to transfer this design into Photoshop (or other similar program).

This phase is critical to ensuring we have a flexible method through which to make changes later on. It's also paramount in ensuring our web page is cross-browser compatible later.

I'll assume you're using Photoshop and I'll also assume you know something about it, ie: what layers are the general process of creating a graphic by using multiple layers to keep elements separated. If you not familiar with this process, head on over to HERE and spend some time learning the ground-work.

Assuming all of that (I assume a lot, I know!) let's begin...

Typically if I were to create a picture in Photoshop, of a house on a lake, with a sun overhead I would do the following:

1. Delete the background later.

2. Create a new later 'page' to hold everything.

3. Create a new layer 'house'.

4. Create a new layer BELOW that 'lake'.

5. Create a new layer BELOW both of those 'sun'.

In this way, I'll have automatically setup the depth of my picture. The sun will appear behind the lake, which will appear behind the house. I can then design within each layer to keep things organized.

When designing a web site, you follow these same principles, but in a much more complete way.

If we think of the typical web page as having 4 components, those components would be: PAGE (or WRAP) to hold everything, HEADER, BODY, FOOTER. Keeping this in mind, in photoshop we create 'layer groups (or sets in older versions)' which follow the same flow.

1. Create a new layer group called 'page'.

2. Within that, create new layer groups called 'header', 'body', and 'footer'.

3. Within each of those, create individual layers (not sets) to break apart the various design elements.

When you're done in Photoshop, if you look on the right, you should literally have a collapsible hierarchy of design elements that all collapse up into one top-level

element called 'page'. Clicking that one layer group should reveal 3 layer groups within called header, body and footer. I've left out navigation and sidebar etc but those would have their own layer sets as well if you are building them.

By following this method, you'll have a very organized and clear layout. You can come back and edit specific sections later on without having to worry about layering, depth, or moving the wrong components etc.

4. Client Approval #1

It's not time to show our client our Photoshop (or similar) design. At this point it's a picture only. We should have placeholder text and links in though so it appears exactly as a full, written web page would look. Use fake pictures if you need to. We want this to represent the web page as closely as possible.

We'll go back and forth in this phase until the client approves of our graphical design. Once that's done - congratulations! The design work is complete!

5. HTML (front-end)

Open up Photoshop and ensure all of your individual layers are saved as .GIF or .JPG or .PNG, or whatever format you want to use. We're going to need everything in that format for the web.

NOTE: When saving in Photoshop, ensure you choose 'save for web or devices' as this offers some additional compression options for low bandwidth environments.

Open Dreamweaver (I know, I know, you're EXCITED!) and create a new XHTML page. Yes, I said XHTML, not HTML (though they can be labeled the same when picking from the Dreamweaver 'new' menu. If you'd like to know why, check out this article. In a nut shell, it's better, cleaner, more proper, and will ensure your code is more functional and valid.

Your new blank web page will look something like this:

Untitled Document

Start by creating our basic layout with DIV's. It should look like this once complete.

Untitled Document







This is the header!

This is the content!

This is the footer!

Once that's complete, build your page, placing the design elements into their appropriate spots. Once you've got this single, XHTML page working, in multiple browsers, you can stop if you wish at this point. However, there are a few more steps we can take to further clean up our code.

Currently, this page is large and unwieldy. As we add content, it will become difficult to discern where on the page certain things begin and end. To combat this, we can use PHP files to store our content and simply include them in our index page. Note, to do this you'd need to change your index page from a XHTML page to a PHP page.

I won't get into includes, but this is essentially what the page could look like after you've finished including everything.

This is the only actual content on our page. Everything else

is being included using PHP. It doesn't matter how large the other

files are, this is all we'll ever see when we're working in

development mode on this page.

Clean eh!?!

REMEMBER: Nothing is dynamic at this point, we're building a basic, static page, with default news, fake pictures, etc. Nothing is coded in the back-end at this point.

Regardless of how little or how much organization you work into your page layout, the goal of this entire phase is to have a STATIC page, that looks exactly like our photoshop page, that works in multiple browsers. If we've gotten this far, we're almost there!

6. Code (back-end)

Aside from the navigation buttons working, everything else on the site is probably broken. We've manually written in all of our text, and none of our gadgets work.

At this point we want to start coding in the back end, gadget by gadget.

For example. If we have a news section on our page, right now in our static page we've simply written that news in there. Instead, we'd like that news to be automatically entered when we create a new article, with some automatic program that doesn't involve opening Dreamweaver each time. This is what we call a 'Content Management System' or CMS.

There are various forms of it out there. I won't get into it at all, but Joomla and WordPress are great ones to begin with.

Alternatively, if you're like me and like learning how the gears work from the bottom up, you might challenge yourself to learn MYSQL and PHP more extensively and simply write a little news gadget that reads and writes to a databases - it's completely up to you!

Either way, the important part of this phase is to leave the design alone and work on adding life to all the gadgets and widgets on your page. Create that login system, create that user system, how about a gallery, a calendar, a CMS, maybe a guest-book or a comments box... it's completely up to you. Remember, for every gadget, you should have designed it FIRST so you have it in Photoshop as a design. That way the design component is gone and you're just coding the back end.

If you get caught up trying to design, AND code something in at the same time, trust me... it can sap your days away as you struggle to fight with misaligning CSS boxes etc.

Design it, then Develop it. Rinse. Repeat. Success.

7. Client Approval #2

It's time to go back to the client and show them the development work you've been doing. Show off your login system, show off your gallery. WOW them! If they aren't WOW'd, go back and tweak some stuff, sometimes all the way back to the design phase.

Rinse and repeat until you, and your client, are comfortable and satisfied with the current site.

8. Uploading and Testing

Up to this point, you would have either built everything locally and uploaded it piece-wise to test on the web server, OR, you might have used a program like WAMP to run a local server.

If you've been uploading everything to the web server, you're finished! The website will already be up there.

If you've been running everything locally and using something like localhost to test the site, you'll now need to upload everything to your web server. Once that's done, you have to test everything again. MYSQL databases will likely be broken and need re-pointing, likewise things might operate slightly differently on that server for whatever reason.

Go through and ensure everything works up on the server.

Once that's done, you're finished! Congratulations on building and uploading your first web page!

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B) Tools Required:

1. Pencil

A pencil or pen, it doesn't really matter. You're going to need something to do the conceptual design with.

2. Paper

To go with the pencil or pen

3. Photoshop (or other design tool)

You'll need something to do the graphical design with. Photoshop it self is quite pricey. If that's not an option for you, or if you don't have access to it via some shared resource, then do some research and find some free or cheap alternatives. I won't comment on those here as I personally use Photoshop.

4. Dreamweaver (or other web development tool)

This is your bread and butter. This is the tool you'll spend most of your time in. This is the tool that allows you to actually build the web pages, to write the code, to create your functions, to tie your graphical genius in with your buttons, forms and dynamic content.

To be quite honest, Dreamweaver it self is the most complete and by survey, most popular tool for the job. If you're planning on getting into design and development seriously, this is worth the money.

However, there are alternatives if you can't afford that. Again, do some research and you'll find some cheaper/free alternatives that will do the job as well.

5. Copies of all the common browsers

I'm not going to specifically reference the browsers you should code for. The intention of this article is to be valid for more than just the several months in which it was written.

That said, visit this WC3 resource to get a listing of the currently used browsers and their market share of the internet. The list as of today, looks like this:

2010 IE8 IE7 IE6 Firefox Chrome Safari Opera

April 16.2% 9.3% 7.9% 46.4% 13.6% 3.7% 2.2%

March 15.3% 10.7% 8.9% 46.2% 12.3% 3.7% 2.2%

February 14.7% 11.0% 9.6% 46.5% 11.6% 3.8% 2.1%

January 14.3% 11.7% 10.2% 46.3% 10.8% 3.7% 2.2%

If I were building a site today for a client, I'd ensure it was compatible with Firefox, Chrome and IE 7+. That's 85% of the market. Personally I don't believe in backwards designing sites to reach back 3 browser revisions (IE 6). The types of hacks and fixes needed to get a site to operate correctly back that far are not worth the time. Shoot for 85% and you'll be golden.

6. FileZilla (or other FTP tool)

You'll need a tool like this to upload and download files from your web server. This is going to be a common task for you once you begin so find something you enjoy using and stick with it.

7. Domain Name (your www address)

Every site needs a registered name. I'll get into the specifics more in the instructions but essentially, you will at some point need this before you can complete your client's website.

8. Web Host (such as GoDaddy)

Every site needs physical space on the web somewhere. Hosting companies provide this. Companies like GoDaddy sell you space on one of their servers on which you can park your website files. For this you pay a small monthly fee.

Personally I've had incredible success with GoDaddy, but there are many out there to choose from.

9. A computer

Sorry folks, not optional. Laptops work great as well for you coffee-shop coders

10. A passion for being creative!

Corny, but true. This is NOT a business to get into simply because you want to pay the bills and have good computer skills. If you're not really vested, and interested in the work your doing, it'll show in the lackluster designs, rushed coding, and sloppy work you do.

Do yourself a favour, ask yourself this question: "Could I build websites as a hobby and enjoy it?" If you answered "yes" then this is a great business to get into.

This article written by Joey Alain, owner and operator of Rubix PC, a kamloops web design - development, and PC services, company. Check us out @ http://www.rubixpc.com.

Online Learning Tutorials - An Easy Way to Become Professional

From the past decade, it has been observed that so many technologies are changing the way of lifestyle. One of them is the internet technology, with this technology; so many people are getting opportunities in different continents. To obtain these opportunities, every one of us needs some fine quality of qualifications, and we need to improve professional skills. However, everyone's life has become busy scheduled and so many people are having no time to add some more qualifications to their skills.

The online tutorials are one of the best ways to learn our desired courses. Every one of us believes that the computers are an ocean subject to learn. With these tutorials, everyone can become professional towards computers. And learning through online tutorials will give you more fun and enjoyment. In these recession days, adding some qualifications to you skills will boost up your opportunities. Most of these online tutorials are available at free of cost, some of them are charging a few dollars to provide some additional features. In these technology days, the computer courses like Photoshop, HTML, PHP, Java Script and adobe Photoshop are providing numerous job opportunities. Here we will discuss some of these online courses.

If you are interested to learn Photoshop, the online Photoshop tutorial is the best place to learn. Obviously, this online Photoshop software is used to creating and manipulating graphics and photographs. The tools and advancements provided in this software are very much helpful to learn this software easily. There are so many well experienced tutorials are available in internet. With this online learning Photoshop tutorial, definitely you will get a very good opportunity. The web development in these days would be the best business, designing and hosting web sites and e-commerce websites and many more. To become a professional web designer, you should have to learn the HTML basics. With these online html tutorials, definitely you will become professional to design your own web sites. And also it is mandatory to learn PHP programming to become an experienced web developer. However, learning these PHP tutorials could be the expensive one. To resolve this issue, online learning PHP tutorial is the best one for you.

If you are very much an interest to become a developer for e-commerce web sites, it is a best idea to learn java tutorials. The online java script tutorials add some additional functionality to your web designing skills. Finally, learning this software would definitely increase your chances to get more income. And now a question rose in your mind that was to find these online tutorials. There are some well established and experienced web sites are offering these online tutorials to their valuable customers. For more information, please visit their web site.

Welcome to Tutorial Machine - Get Tutorials, tutorial, Photoshop tutorials, html tutorials, php tutorials, online learning tutorial, online learning Photoshop tutorial, online learning html tutorial, online learning JavaScript tutorial, and online learning php tutorial, learn adobe Photoshop at Tutorial Machine. Need of more information Visit us at http://www.tutorialmachine.com

Knowledge Based Programming Scripts For IT Aspirants

The World Wide Web can educate you, making you aware of the latest technologies evolving day by day. IT professionals are now well informed with knowledge at par that provides them with better paying jobs leading to a bright future and acclaim in the IT industry. Its real good news for IT aspirants as they can get all time online guidance on topics related to computers and education on software development and designing from websites that aim to provide with knowledgeable and informative scripts and tutorials on ASP.Net, java script, VB.NET, XML, Flash, Database, Remotely Hosting, HTML, Payment Gateway, ASP.Net, Ajax tutorials and many more topics of vital importance.

Many of the websites today consists of scripts that serve as tutorials that help programmers and students in understanding the essential characteristics about a particular tool and its functions that are well arranged, categorically. These websites present with free downloadable scripts of ASP, ASP.Net, C and C++, XML, CFML, Database, shipping implementation and payment gateway. Learners have access to best tutorials of ASP.net, C#, ASP, Perl, PHP, Java script, C & C++, ASP.Net Ajax Tutorials, J2ee, J2Me, Java, Python & Ruby Rail and Ecommerce etc. The tutorial websites also consist of interview questions to help young aspirants to face job interviews with confidence as this section prepares them with expected questions mostly asked during interviews.

The ASP.Net Ajax tutorial can provide in-depth analysis and lessons on topics related to Ad Management, Auctions, and Blog scripts, Calculators, Calendars, Classified Ads, Communication Tools and Content Management. ASP.NET stands for Active Server Pages. It lets you create dynamic web applications. This popular Microsoft technology creates pages that work in all browsers. Additionally, when programming in ASP.NET, you can build web pages using far less code than with classic ASP. ASP.NET has better language support, a large set of new controls and XML based components. A variety of ASP.NET scripts are viewable online and a study on it would be a wise thing to do.

AJAX, popularly known as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML is not as easy as it might seem. It therefore becomes important to learn correct techniques through Ajax tutorials. Gaining acclaim by Google in the year 2005, AJAX involves the use of the nonstandard XML Http Request object to communicate with server-side scripts. It can send as well as receive information in a variety of formats, including XML, HTML, and even text files. As the name suggests it is "asynchronous" in nature, which means it can do all of this without having to refresh the page. This allows you to update portions of a page based upon user events. Though it is not a new programming language, Ajax has given a new means to create user friendly web applications. Ajax tutorials consists of ECMAScript for XML topics namely Simple Asp.Net + Ajax example, ECMA Script for XML, AJAX Http Requests, Adding AJAX to a website step by step, AJAX and Session "Race Conditions", AJAX and Session "Race Conditions", Alternate Ajax Techniques, Part 1, Ajax - JavaScript on Steroids and other related topic that essential are useful in the long run. Therefore, get on with your online study and reference and to learn more about website development and designing.

Peter Parker, content writer and author of this article writes about Ajax tutorial and how internet has been regarded as the knowledge based environment for I.T aspirants and developers. For more information visit at http://www.soloscript.com

Xdebug Installation Tutorial

Xdebug is one of the best debuggers for PHP. It is completely free and continously maintained by its developer. Most of the PHP development environments have the posiblility to connect to a server side environment running PHP with Xdebug. Ability to debug can dramatically reduce the time to market for a PHP application.

In order to install xdebug, first you need to gather detailed information regarding your environment structure. You need to know the exact versions for all the environment modules (PHP, Apache, etc).

After you are done with this, please proceed:

Download the package. There are many versions available, you need to make sure that you download the appropriate one. A note: xdebug must match your php installation. Let's say we run PHP version 5.2, we download xdebug version 5.2VC6.

Double check the file downloaded. Must contain the php version in the name. Our currently downloaded file is php_xdebug-2.0.2-5.2.5.dll

Copy the file in the PHP extension folder. The folder usually is under the PHP main installation folder and it is called ext.

Install the file under PHP as follows:

Open the php.ini file for editing. Double check it is the actual ini file that gets loaded when php runs.

Ensure there is no entry with the key zend_extension_ts. Our installation will actually insert a line starting with this key and it is important they don't collide.

Copy the following lines:



[xdebug]

xdebug.remote_enable=1

xdebug.remote_host="localhost"

xdebug.remote_port=9000

xdebug.remote_handler="dbgp"

zend_extension_ts="c:/environment/php5.2.8/ext/php_xdebug-2.0.2-5.2.5.dll"

Please note that the zend_extension_ts file contains the full path to the downloaded xdebug dll file. Also, 9000 is the port used to connect to the debugging environment (the environment listens on this port). Make sure the port is not currently in use by other process, otherwise it will not work.

At the end, please restart apache and display again the page containing the phpinfo(); call. Carefully look at the displayed result, and you should see mentioned that xdebug is currently installed. There will be an entry called xdebug and all the properties for this module are listed underneath. The port should be listed there as well and must match the one you just configured. If you don't see anything with xdebug, please look at the Apache error log and surely you will see something there - either the dll version is the wrong one, or maybe its name was misspelled and because of that the system could not load it.

The latest test is to install a sample php file under the main htdocs folder, open it in a development environment, connect the development environment to xdebug (make sure the port on the xdebug client side matches the one that was configured as above) try to set a breakpoint and then run the program. Once you see it stops at the break point, try to see if the variables are communicated and you can inspect them.

Once this done, you are ready to run your applications in debug mode and dramatically improve your performance.

A number of tutorials, free of charge, can be found at http://proghowto.com/

Shortcut Keys on Firefox 2

To those who have upgraded their Mozilla Firefox 1.5 to Firefox 2, you will found that the shortcut keys are a bit messed up. This is especially for bulletin board users - who are used to the "Alt-S" shortcut key to submit their reply. I'm one of those too who are used to the "Alt-S" key, and now it can't be used to reply post anymore - but open the history tab instead.

The old "Alt-S" shortcut key has been changed to "Alt-Shift-S" - so you can use "Alt-Shift-S" to replace to "Alt-S" shortcfut key. But if you are still not happy with it and would want back the Alt-S's old function, you can do this by editing the config. Follow the steps below.

Goto "about:config". (Do this like going to a normal website)
On the config page, find ui.key.chromeAccess and ui.key.contentAccess

Modify ui.key.chromeAccess to 5

Modify ui.key.contentAccess to 4

If you have done all these steps correctly, you should now be able to use "Alt-S" to submit post in forums. Please do follow the instruction very carefully, and make sure you understand it before making any modification. This is to avoid any misconfiguration that may lead to errors.

For more information, you can visit the MozillaZine forum at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=446830 - where this matter is discussed. Start a new thread in MozillaZine if you have further doubts on the Firefox 2 shortcut keys. By following the steps above, it doesn't mean all shortcut keys will be the same like it is in Firefox 1.5.

"If you are not a Mozilla Firefox user, you can get a copy at http://www.getfirefox.com"

Author's Blog - http://www.VincentChow.net

How To Make Dynamically Generated Title Tags That Are Indexed By Search Engines

First off you need a bit of basic scripting knowledge of both Python and PHP. If you don't have knowledge in these areas look towards the end of the article for a link to a great Python tutorial. It's lengthy but worth it - its great for automatically generating text. Once you have done that tut, you'll be able to get by with minimal PHP knowledge using the greatest tutorial of our time – "Google it" (not strictly a tutorial but you get the idea). Secondly, somewhere in the source code of the page you are wanting to have a dynamically generated title tag for, you need to have a line that contains the title you want – e.g.

African Lions.

You need a line with just one tag so if its not, make it so. Thirdly, you need, in the dynamically generated page an URL that contains a unique identifier value – eg. [http://www.somesite.com/index.php?id=9898] (the id=9898 being the identifier). Fourthly, this article is a follow on from my previous article "URL Rewriting - Get Rid of Those Ugly Dynamic URLs" so please read that first. Then you're ready to go, just edit that line mentioned above so it contains the words "forPython" in the code – eg.

African Lions .

Then you want to write a Python script that extracts the line mentioned above and then extracts the words African Lions (for example) from that. You'll need to have at least version 2.5 to do this. I used code similar to the following:

from cStringIO import StringIO
from xml.etree import ElementTree
import urllib2

def gettext(url):
for line in urllib2.urlopen(url):
#Created special id in the line where I want the information (lion cubs & lioness)
if 'id="forPython"' in line:
parsed_line = ElementTree.parse(StringIO(line))
root = parsed_line.getroot()
x = root.text
x = str(x)
return x
#You'd want to change the line below so that it ranges in the range of the unique identifier that you've got hold of (e.g. id=9898)
for page in range(0,10000):
page = str(page)
#The line below should be changed to your new mod rewritten URL
x = gettext("http://www.africapic.com/index/closeup/102-"+page+"-0.html")
print page, x
myfile=open(page+'.txt','w')
myfile.write(x+"n")
myfile.close()

The import values that you would want to change would be in the lines "for page in range(0, 10000)" and "x=gettext("http://..."). The first line that would be changed so that between the two numbers all the possible values for the unique identifier are accounted for. For example if my pages ranged from id=1000 to id=9999 I would put "for page in range(1000,9999)". The second line would be changed so that it "fetches" your newly mod rewritten pages (e.g.[http://www.somesite.com/this/that/50-]"+page+"-28.html) or even (e.g.[http://www.somesite.com/this/that/]"+page+".html) in some cases. This script would write 10000 text files (if the values for range were correct) each containing the words in the tag. So what do you do with these files? Upload them to your server in a folder and then on to the PHP.

You'll need to edit your index.php file here (or at least a PHP file called by index.php). Firstly put the following code in the title tag:


Then you'll need to add code similar to the following to the beginning of the file (above the title tag):

// if URI in format index.php?...id=1000 assign value to id
$id =$_GET['id'];
// sitemap = string file name with id;
$sitemap = "./sitemap/100-".$id.".txt";
// This will open the file, in folder 'sitemap' that has the Media Name on the first line, and assign that file to an array;
$file_lines_array = file($sitemap);
$title = $file_lines_array[0];

That should do it. Any questions feel free to email me at blindlemonsam@hotmail.com I did this successfully for the site http://www.africapic.com ; go have a look (the easiest way is to navigate to the site's sitemap). The Python tutorial I promised is http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html.