Web Talk

If you are a webmaster you know only too well how dangerous to put your email address on your website is. In fact, if you don’t use any protection to trick spam bots, in a matter of  a few hours or even less, your inbox could be pestered with hundreds of emails having the most different and dreadful topics. So, what solution do we have to prevent all this? A nice trick is to create an image of your email address so that malevolent bots won’t be able to read it. Another solution is to protect your email by converting it into an encrypted JavaScript code in order to hide it from spam bots, but at the same time make it  fully readable to human beings. The Enkoder Form does exactly this: hide your email address to email harvester aka spam. Once you have typed your email address in its form you will get a code which you will have to copy-and-past directly on your website without other worries such as: understand how it works, modify it etc. It doesn’t matter how tricky the code is, just put it wherever you want and you are done. Guaranteed!

As you know I am always looking for nice widgets to add to my website which don’t require a lot of work to set them up. Yes I know, I am a bit lazy, but that’s the way I like things. Some days ago I started looking for a widget which could tell my visitors the best articles for the current day. After browsing for a while I found an excellent website offering freeware widgets easy to install. The website is called feedjit.com and with a simple copy-and-past procedure lets you add your website a full set of interesting infos. Here is a list of its widgets:

• Life Traffic Feed: this widget shows how many people are visiting your website, where they come from (thanks to a nice flag of the visitor’s country), which website they arrived from, if any, which page they visited on your website and which external link they clicked to leave your site, if any.
• Live Traffic Map: this widget reminds me of another good one which can be seen on this article of mine. It shows you the last 100 people who visited your website on a small map. If you move your mouse’s pointer on any red point on the map, you will be able to see where your visitors come from (country and city).
• Live Raccomending Reading: this widget suggests other pages on your website your readers may be interested in.
• Live Page Popularity: this widget shows you the most popular pages (usually the first 10 pages of the current day) on your website by analysing your recent traffic.

All widgets are fully customisable. In fact you can decide: text color, background color, border color, heading color and widget’s width.

I strongly recommend this website to those people who want and need simple but effective stat widgets but, at the same time, don’t want to spend too much time to tweak them or understand how they work. In fact with Feedjit.com, all you need to do is to copy a code and past it in your website or blog.

There are a lot of ways to hack YouTube videos nowadays. In fact, you can download a video without using any software or you can even watch videos with a higher resolution than the one offered by YouTube itself. Today I want to speak of another hack which lets you embed high resolution videos in your blog (MP4 -H264 with AAC audio encoded at 480×360). This hack is completely different in comparison to the one offered by following the link above because the famous strings &fmt=6 and &fmt=18 won’t work in this case. In fact you will have to use another string namely &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 at the end of the video clip’s URL. Once done, you will have to put the modified URL into a special code and paste it into your website. But let’s see an example.

Let’s say that you want to embed this high resolution video in your blog:

1. Click on the right bottom icon in the YouTube video, copy and past the code you want to embed in your blog:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/DFYfbHLkaRQ”></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/DFYfbHLkaRQ” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

2. Now add the string &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 as shown here:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/DFYfbHLkaRQ&ap=%2526fmt%3D18“>
</param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/DFYfbHLkaRQ&ap=%2526fmt%3D18” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

If you are a webmaster and you are always concerned about your blog popularity, then this nice website is for you. As a matter of fact just by writing your blog’s web address in its form you will be able to check your blog popularity thanks to a list of results coming from the most important and authoritative websites specialised in judging blogs namely: Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Quantcast rank, Technorati Rank. Furthermore it will also give you the following results: Google Index, Yahoo Index, Google BackLinks, Google BackLinks, Google BackLinks etc. Try it now!

Are you a podcaster releasing tons of podcasts on your blog? If so you may be interested in this nice website letting you create a lot of free podcasts with a nice skin. Blogamp is a web-based application that lets you create your own podcast to put on your blog. Just upload your MP3 file ( which doesn’t have to be bigger than 25MB) on Blogamp’s server and you will get a code to put on your blog right away! Its features include: customise your podcast skin color, track your listenership, add e-commerce and video links, embed or Pop-up player on any site or social network, add your own RSS Feeds. If you want to know more, click on the link to get a full list of Blogamp ’s features.

Have you ever wished to get some business cards to show to your friends or people you come in contact with at work? No, I am not talking about real business cards but electronic cards which, apart from being for free, let you show who you are and other important infos. Retaggr.com lets you have your own private business cards with a few easy steps. The service Retaggr.com offers you goes beyond the simple creation of cards. As a matter of fact, once registered to the website, you will be able to leave your profile card whenever you leave a comment on the internet, show your recent twitter messages, display your online activity, link to your card from anywhere on the web etc. If you are a webmaster instead you can have your personal widget to stick on your Wordpress website, specify content from your site to be shown within Profile Cards, make your content more useful while keeping readers on your site etc. The service is totally  free and it just requires a quick registration.

I am fully aware that there are a lot of guides in the Internet speaking about this topic and how to make and increase money with Google Adsense, so I am more than sure that I will not add anything new in this article. Anyway one thing I can do is to order all the tricks I found while surfing and list them tidily, making attention to write just those ones which really worked for me and this blog. This post doesn’t promise to enrich you overnight, but assures you not to make any of those common mistakes people usually do when they decide to put Google Adsense in their websites. Just follow these tricks strictly, and you will start making some money for sure. At least this is what happened to me! Ready? Here is the list. Continue reading »

The whole story started about five days ago when, all of a sudden, Web Talk started experiencing a great drop in its visits. Basically, from almost one thousand visitors a day, at the present time Web Talk just manages to gather a little more than two hundreds people. I have lost around 80% of visitors, and considering that all of Web Talk’s readers come from Google search, well, this has obviously to do with Google itself. This tendency is still on because, while I am writing, my visits are still dropping dramatically by the hour. If it continues, I fear there will be just a dozen of people here at Web Talk. I have to tell you that this thing worries me a lot. That’s why, a few days ago I started Googling to find out if I could get a solution or a reply to this big issue. To my big surprise I learnt that this is not a lone case but a spread tendency, courtesy of Google and its Sandbox. But what is Google’s Sandbox? First of all let me tell you that Google denies any Sandbox algorithm in its policy and, as a consequence, there are lots of theories about it, all of them getting to the conclusion that, despite what Google says, there is a kind of Sandbox behaviour on Google’s side. But let’s start from the beginning. Let’s start from what means being in a sandbox and why it was created. Google’s Sandbox was put in place in March 2004 to prevent fake and spam sites from being placed and ranked highly in the Google Search. Basically, if a website manages to get a lot of visitors, or a high rank or perform well in the Google Search in a short laps of time, Google gets “funny” about the website and, because of this reason, tends to think that something weird, bogus and not-legal was made in order to trick its algorithms. That’s why it puts the website in a sandbox to play…just with itself. As a result the website will stop performing well in Google Search, and while the whole website is still indexed, its keywords will perform badly and its pages will be shown very low in the search result. Solutions? No solution are available at the present time. The only thing to do is waiting. Usually Google puts a website in the Sandbox for a period of time which varies from one month to one year at most. I don’t want to discuss about Google’s policy because a lot has already being said in the Internet. That’s Web Talk situation right now. I can not do anything but continuing writing my posts as usual. For the few of you guys who were able to find this blog, stay tuned because more news and guides are coming up. If you wish to know more about Google’s Sandbox here is a list of the most interesting articles I manged to find while surfing. Continue reading »