Latter day virtual servers enable hosting companies to give you an exclusive block of disk space and limits each customer’s RAM usage, unlike in a shared hosting situation. The server’s cpus are used in the same way as for shared hosting, however.  The way top vps hosting companies insure that your web sites’ traffic spikes and those of other customers do not result in performance problems is by using burstable memory. That is, when memory usage reaches a threshold, reserve memory will be used.

When you are logged into your virtual server, it is hard to differentiate the experience from that of having a dedicated server, since the file system and the applications look identical. Everything you can run on your own dedicated machine you can also run on a vps, with very few exceptions. Since a vps runs within its own “jail”, anything that transpires within your vps has no effect on the host machine, so if your virtual kernel crashes, you will just remote reboot it just as you would if it was a dedicated server.

So, which should you choose? If you want to host a slew of different sites, or run your own server applications and scripts without any restrictions, or have a site with a serious amount of traffic, that pretty much eliminates shared hosting. The big advantage of vps when compared to a dedicated server is that if you need more ram or disk space, you don’t have to copy,  reinstall and re-configure everything on a new server, or pay big bucks to the hosting company to install more memory chips or an extra disk. Instead, you just bump-up your hosting plan. In addition, maintaining your own server means acting as your own sys admin, which is time consuming and more involved than what you are looking for.

Next time you are looking for hosting, consider the vps option

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PhpLinkDirectory is the most widely used software for running one’s own link directory web site. It’s entirely written in php and uses Mysql as the database. Most people use the free version, which is a much older edition (2.2) of the software, which obligates you to display a link back to phplinkdirectory.com. If you want the latest version, 4.0, you have to pay either 30 dollars with the link back, or 80 dollars without the link. Each download is for one site only, so if you want to create two different directories, you have to buy two licenses. In my case, I chose to buy two 30 dollar licenses, as I planned to create two directories and didn’t mind giving them the link back.

I started regretting my purchase decision right away, as the steps I had to go through to buy the software proved to be the most long drawn and twisted I’ve ever had to endure buying anything over the web. The first step was the payment, no problem there, but then you’re obliged to register for a site account and wait for a confirm email in which you’ll click on a link, before being able to download anything. Then you’re asked to sign-up for the phplinkdirectory forum (yet another confirm email), which it turns-out is the only means for support. You’re also asked to enter the URL of the site where you’ll install each download of the software, which is the only place where you can install it, you’re told.  Maybe you didn’t get a domain yet? Too bad! If you’re not already exhausted by the convoluted buying process, now you have to wait for each package to be generated and appear in your online account page. This can take a while, you’re told. Why is it I can buy software from Microsoft online with a few clicks, but acquiring a mere php script package from phplinkdirectory feel like you‘re being screened for the Pentagon? It would seem the program’s author is excessively worried about being scammed, treating every comer as a potential terrorist.

Installing the software appeared to be simple, but the instructions appear to have been scalped from an older version and contain errors. For instance, you’re told to change permissions on a configuration script that doesn’t exist yet — you have to rename another file, but you’re only told to do this further on. When I overcame this small (but sloppy) obstacle, I launched the web-based installer and sailed through the rest of the installation process until the last screen, where you’re given a list of choices, one of which will trigger an error. It’s an inconsequential error, but as I program for a living, I easily deduced this, but I shudder at the thought of non-programmers panicking when faced with this same situation. WordPress, a free blog management program, can be installed by a complete novice, but Phplinkdirectory appears to dispense with niceties.

At this point I was ready to start creating categories and populating them with links. Rather than entering all the link information from scratch, you have the option of using a “spider” tool. You can either enter keywords and get Google search results, or enter a Dmoz category, and you’ll get results returned inside a form, which you can then edit and add to your directory. This is a nice feature, but it has the nasty habit of truncating all site URLs to the domain for Google, and inserting bogus email addresses (webmaster@) which you’ll have to edit out. Note that if you use any titles or descriptions from Dmoz, their rules stipulate that you have to give them credit, something that phplinkdirectory doesn’t make mention of.

I created a bunch of categories and added links and didn’t encounter any problems. Then I decided to mess with the template, or site theme if you will. The software ships with two themes, neither of which is particularly attractive. The management interface doesn’t tell you how to get more templates, but I found out the hard way that on the phplinkdirectory web site  (once logged-in), there’s a small bunch of templates you can obtain free. None are terribly sexy, but several are better than the default templates. Unlike free programs like WordPress, you can’t just download and install a new template directly from the web manager. Instead, you have to download the archive from their site, then upload it to your server and unpack it there inside the templates directory. Again, not a problem for me, but this could be intimidating for some. As we said earlier, phplinkdirectory is short on niceties! You’ll minimally want to substitute the template’s logo and logo image for your own, and if you use Google Analytics, add the required JavaScript code. Edit the templates, simple enough! Ah, but the programmer made the fateful decision of using Smarty for his templates, rather than a straight-up php and html mix. Smarty is a pseudo language, which means that a php script will parse the template before its output, which is of course a lot slower. Thus, when you look at the template code, it’ll be a bunch of gibberish. You can’t just add html to a phplinkdirectory template, because Smarty will crap-out. You’ll have to wrap your html in a set of {literal} tags. To do anything more complex, you’ll have to learn Smarty! It would have very simple for the programmer to add a form in which you could easily change things such as the logo, but then again, no niceties.

Perhaps inspired by popular CMS packages, including WordPress, phplinkdirectory has a number of widgets, which you can stick to areas of the pages. For example, if you want the newest links added to be displayed in either the left or right sidebar, there’s a widget you can activate and assign to that area (or “zone”). A number of widgets come with the package, and although the web manager again gives no hint of this, there’s a bunch more you can download from the site. Similar to templates, you have to download the widget archive and unpack it, this time in the widgets directory. Unlike templates, you can’t edit the widget’s source code from the web manager, but you can configure the widget’s custom features via the latter. One type of widget that’s sorely lacking is a text widget, where you could enter your own html and/or php (not Smarty, please!).

Up to this point, everything seemed fine, but I have to tell you that on both sites where I used phplinkdirectory I ran into mysterious fatal errors on several occasions that forced me to reinstall the package from scratch. This typically happened after changing or activating something in the configuration using the web manager. The web manager itself never crashed, but the directory itself simply exits (the blank page syndrome). There’s no hint in any log of what went wrong, and as I have a full time job as well as manage several web sites, I don’t have time to go debugging somebody else’s software. I posted the issue in the phplinkdirectory support forum, but months have passed without a response. Somehow, I’m not surprised. Seeing hours of work go to waste several times over is enraging enough, let alone when you paid for the privilege. On one such occasion, I did trace the error to the script that runs widgets, but I don’t know if this was the case every time, as the configuration edits that caused the crashes didn’t always involve widgets.

I’ve virtually given up on phplinkdirectory now, as a recent glitch cooked its goose for me. I recently upgraded my server’s php and Apache using yum, as one should do regularly. My WordPress sites worked normally after this operation, but phplinkdirectory? I tried creating a new category, and instead of doing that, it edited and mangled its parent category. Again, I don’t have time to chase this anymore, so I give up! I strongly suspect that phplinkdirectory 4.0 contains deprecated php instructions, but I’m not motivated to verify my theory!

That said, I do know that the free version of phplinkdirectory, although an antique, is stable from having dealt with it for clients, thus if you need a directory software package, that’s the better option. Alternatively, you could buy one of the competition’s offerings, eSyndicat or Indexu. I can’t comment on either since I haven’t tried them out for size, but I promise I’ll tell you all about them once I do!

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If you don’t run your own server, and your hosting company doesn’t provide Awstats pre-installed, it isn’t going to be your solution and you’ll have to use one of the web-based services instead.  If you do have a shell account but are too intimidated to do anything that involves typing commands into a non-graphical interface, then once again stick to the web-based options. If you’re looking for the most comprehensive statistics, Awstats does  generate the most in-depth reports for a single site.  Awstats needs to be set-up as a daily recurring job (crontab in Linux/Unix servers), and uses your server’s log files. It supports Apache style logs as well as those produce by IIS (Windows) and even parses and produces statistics from mail logs. You run an interactive non-GUI configuration script to install Awstats on your server. If you want to get more sophisticated geographical statistics, you’ll need to install one of the geo plugins (perl modules, in reality) and the corresponding database. MaxMind offers its free geoip database and perl module. Because Awstats uses your web server’s logs, it won’t have any statistical holes such as can happen with web-based services. With a web-based service, the visitor’s browser could fail to download the javascript, either accidentally or by  filtering it out, that is needed to report the user’s activity back to the stats provider’s site. Awstats can also give you statistics on the many robots that visited your site, whereas a web-based tracker can’t provide such data since spiders don’t download javascript files, let alone interpret them.

Sitemeter has been around for many years and until Google Analytics came along, it was the favorite statistical tool used by hundreds of thousands of bloggers. All you have to do to get this free service is to sign-up on their site and then paste a bit of javascript in your site’s footer, so that accesses to all pages get metered. Each account you open can only cover one site, thus if you have ten sites, you’ll have to register ten times. To view your sites’ statistics, you have to log-in to their web site.  Once there you can view details on the most recent activity on your site. Statistics for previous days or months are limited to totals. A lot of the other statistics are limited to the last 100 visitors to your site. Thus, you can see that someone from Japan visited recently, but you can’t tell how many Japanese visited in the last hour, day or week. You can get enhanced statistics only by upgrading to a more advanced plan, which of course involves a monthly payment. Apart from these limitations, Sitemeter has  been frequently criticized for throwing a copious number of tracking cookies at your site’s visitors on behalf of an advertiser, SpecificClick.net.

Google is the most trusted entity on the Internet, and thus it’s no surprise that its Analytics service has quickly become the main site traffic  tracking  tool used by most sites. Analytics requires that you register for a Google mail account and paste a bit of javascript into your site’s footer, similar to Sitemeter. You view your accumulated statistics via their web site, also like Sitemeter. The major difference between Analytics and Sitemeter, is that you can access all your web sites’ statistics via the same interface, whereas Sitemeter requires a different log-in for each.  Having everything in one place is a great convenience.  Analytics gives you every feature up front and free. No need to buy an upgrade.  You can review detailed statistics for any date or date range, even well in the past, something that’s not possible with Sitemeter’s free plan. There is one drawback to Analytics, although it’s rather insignificant: statistics are compiled only once a day. Sitemeter allows you to see the latest activity, but the truth is, that’s not so useful except to determine if there’s any problem with your site.  Many big name sites use Google Analytics.

To resume, a statistical compiler such as Awstats is a lot more complicated to set-up, but does provide the most reliable and complete data. On the other hand, web-based statistical sites are extremely easy to set-up and use, but can’t provide stats on anything that isn’t a web page, such as images, flash, or Java applets, and also can’t keep track of accesses by web crawlers. The best option among the web-based stats services is Google Analytics. However, if you have a site with a lot of traffic and need hard core traffic reports, use Awstats. You can still use Google Analytics as a secondary source of statistics.

If you also need  to have a credible external audit of your site’s traffic, perhaps to show the public, the competition, or a potential buyer that you’re a serious contender,  you’ll have to use a reputable web-based auditing service for this. You can sign-up for a free account at Quancast, or pay hefty fees to services like Nielsen, comScore or Compete. Typically, you’ll have to paste some javascript into your site’s footer. Hopefully, such code won’t clash with your Analytics or Sitemeter javascript, but if you really need an an audit service, it’s worth switching to using Awstats for your internal traffic reports.

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Directories attract motivated users, who are eager to promote their own web sites. Just today, there were almost 82,000* new domains registered in just six of the top level domains (.com,.net,etc.) Of these, a large number will surely wind-up being used for web sites. Add to that the thousands of new hosted blogs and web pages, and you have many thousands of new web sites being born each day, and therefore thousands of webmasters looking to generate backlinks to get their sites on the Internet map. All of them will surely submit their links to the big league search engines and directories, but a fair percentage will also seek to add them to as many not so popular directories. A part of this traffic could be directed at your new directory without much effort on your part. I don’t know of any type of web site that doesn’t contain nudity and can attract traffic so quickly.

Now that you know that your directory can be a traffic magnet, you can use it to increase backlinks and traffic to your other sites . One of the ways you can do this is by requiring or suggesting a “three way” reciprocal link to another of your web sites. Requiring it will lose you some people, but on the other hand some will comply, whereas if you make it optional, the vast majority will decline. If you prefer, you can require a backlink to the directory itself, but one way links are usually preferable not just for you, but also for the one submitting. You can also give your other sites a boost by adding links to them in the directory. Since you’re the boss, you can give them a more prominent placement by making them featured links. You can also add “deep links” to them, that is URLs other than the main one. Deep links are said to be rated higher as backlinks by major search engines.

Always set your directory to accept only opt-in submissions. That is, submitters must include a valid email address and then receive an email with a confirmation link they must follow. By requiring an email, you build a mailing list which you can legitimately send messages to, being careful not to abuse this privilege. Such messages can have links to your other sites, or the directory itself, effectively recycling the submitters rather than letting them disappear forever. One way to keep in touch is to have an e-newsletter which provides directory or seo updates. If it includes interesting and useful content, adding advertising shouldn’t result in protests. Building email lists comes with a warning label: A fair number of emails you’ll get will be throwaway addresses that the submitter uses only for this sort of thing. In other words, the user won’t be reading your newsletters. You can safely presume any address containing the word “spam” is bogus, but beyond that it’s virtually impossible to filter bogus emails just using your eyes. Although it would be possible to compile a list of such domains and reject any address whose hostname part matches, your directory software won’t have support for such filtering.

Of course, you have to be careful to not turn your directory into a link spam generator. Start by making it a niche or language-specific directory, specializing in certain kinds of sites. The temptation is to accept all links submitted by making it a general directory in an effort to maximize the number submissions you get, but you can have it both ways: create a separate category tree for unrelated sites. Whatever don’t make a clone of Dmoz, or even a portion of Dmoz. Create your own original directory structure and populate the categories with your own carefully picked links. Human edited directories are genuine, whereas clones will tend to get sneered at.

You’ll need extreme patience managing your own directory, since you’re guaranteed to receive buckets of spammy links. You recognize spam when you see the same ip address for a big batch of submissions, or a bunch of sites dealing with the same or similar topic, or from the same description being used for a series of links. The proper course of action is to mark these links as spam, a function which your directory software should support. It’s unlikely the big name sites will submit their link to your lowly directory, thus in the interest of maintaining a high quality database, you should first populate it yourself with as many relevant , quality links as you can.

I don’t want to mislead you, any web site needs to be promoted to succeed, and directories aren’t any different. You’ll have to go through the motions and submit your directory’s link to a big bunch of other directories to get things started, and use every other means to get exposure. Listing your site in directories of directories such Directorycritic, is particularly important, as that’s where a lot of new site owners will be looking for places to submit their link. You could also suggest your directory to a multitude of site submission services and programs, but only do this if you have some use for the email addresses this will generate, since the people who submit to your directory via such services actually won’t visit your site. A robot will submit their data for them. Most submission services stick to the big name search engines and directories, but there some who submit to up to several hundred lesser known directories using a specific directory software.

Which directory software package should you get? Well, the choices are quite limited if you’re looking for something that’s relatively easy to install and configure, as well as having a lot of features. Almost everybody uses either Phplinkdirectory, eSyndicat, or Indexu, all of which are php-mysql based. eSyndicat sells for 75 USD for a one site license, Phplinkdirectory will set you back 80 dollars per site, while Indexu charges the most at 99 USD per site. However, Phplinkdirectory offers a cheaper version, at 30 dollars per site, but that means you’ll have to display a link back to their site. They also offer a free, much older version. Indexu is the only one that’s lets you try their full version for free., though the other two do have online demos you can preview. All three products have a variety of free plugins to extend your directory’s functionality, as well as templates. It’s very difficult to say which of the packages you should pick, though I would put Phplinkdirectory in the third spot owing to my personal experience with the product and the company, which I’ll be writing about in an upcoming article.

Now, go ahead and start your own directory!

* Source: domaintools.com

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Note that a number of members have been accepted automatically into Demand Studios if they met certain performance criteria during the time they wrote articles for eHOW . Most of those who responded to my query weren’t accepted and thus would have to apply for acceptance at Demand Studios through an application that even requires the upload of a c.v. Not all the users who were pre-accepted were jubilant. Dustin, who qualified for Demand Studios responds: “No, I won’t be publishing any new articles through DS due to the fact that as soon as you publish a new article you lose all ownership rights and can’t supply YOUR content anywhere else…” Most members would fit into the same category as Dustin, authors who syndicate their articles to many different sites, thus having to submit exclusive content is a sticking point for them. However, exclusivity only applies to paid assignments by Demand Studios, as opposed to completely original works.

Some members are deleting the content they uploaded to eHow before the switch, such as images, worried about losing their copyright to Demand Studios . One such user told me “You are selling everything (for a few cents) to Demand — but they can use your works anywhere and not pay you anymore“.

formythreeboyz, one of many confused members, writes “Not too sure what I plan on doing. I got really excited and had a lot of fun writing for Ehow…I am just waiting to hear what I am supposed to do next.” Another user expressed fear of Demand Studios’ application process: “As their name says, they are very demanding and I don’t qualify“. While still another worries about their true intentions: “I would just be providing them with information for their email marketing list, which they might sell to others“. Finally, there’s the member who claims eHow deliberately deleted articles, causing users to not qualify for automatic participation in Demand Studios. Snowfence believes eHow’s future is bleak: “What is eHow supposed to become now? A playground?! Geez…”

Some eHOW writers are more hopeful about the change. ” I am hoping this switch will at least correct ALL the publishing issues. It is no fun when Ehow never seemed to work properly.“, writes one of them. Could the notorious technical flaws have been one of the things that prompted them to abandon the community format that had been so successful?

Cynicism abounds among the disenchanted members, one of which, John, says: “So now I can’t write for eHow or Demand Studios! Oh well, I’m going to focus on writing for myself!” Did eHOW err? To quote one member: “Overall I am sad to see a good thing come to an end.”

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Google gives each web site a rating, or pagerank, to indicate its importance. The pagerank value ranges from zero to ten, where ten is the highest rank possible. The formula Google uses to derive the pagerank of your site is a well kept secret, but what is known is that it’s largely based on the number and quality of the sites linking into yours. Thus a backlink from a site with a pagerank of 6 will help raise your own site’s rating much more than one from a site with a pagerank of one. This doesn’t mean that you should reject a link exchange request from a site with a low pagerank, as that site could have a higher pagerank later on and every link that might send people to your web page has an intrinsic value.

Another factor affecting pagerank is the number of total links on a page that links back to yours. If there’s lots of links on a page, the value of the backlink is lessened. Therefore, you should concentrate on getting other sites to link back to you from their blogroll or from within an article, rather than a resource page with hundreds of other links. Over time Google has also started to penalize a site’s pagerank for such offenses as participating in link farms, which are directories that exist for the sole purpose of creating backlinks. What is and isn’t penalized isn’t clear, despite claims by hundreds of SEO (search engine optimization) sites.

Curiously, Google has said publicly that the importance of pagerank has been greatly exaggerated. Truth is, it has some effect on Google’s search engine results, but your content’s keyword relevance is far more important. However, since so many people use pagerank as a gauge of your site’s worth, you can’t ignore it and have to seek ways to improve your rating. Your new web site starts out with a pagerank of zero and will likely stay there unless you devote the time to promote your site in the right places.

Organic links, that is links to your Website that other people put just because they like your content, are the best kind, and they’ll come, but you can’t rely on them when you first start out. There’s a number of methods you can use to create quality backlinks:

1- DO Exchange links with other sites that are relevant to yours. You can do this directly by contacting the site owner or through discussion forums and social networks. DO NOT exchange links with sites that are totally off topic. DO NOT join a link exchange site, as the backlink will be likely lost in a sea of other links on the others’ sites, and for the high risk of being associated with a link farm, which could result in a penalty against your pagerank.

2- DO post in discussion forums related to your site’s topic. Answering someone’s question and including a link to a relevant article you wrote is perfectly acceptable. DO NOT put links to your pages just for the sake of creating a backlink. People aren’t stupid and you’ll soon be barred from that forum.

3- DO submit your links to as many directories as possible. There’s a great number of them that specialize in blogs, while others accept only RSS links. Do them all! DO NOT pay for a listing unless it’s one of the very top directories, or it will be wasted money.

4- DO submit your posts to article or “help” sites such as associatedcontent.com, zimbio.com, ezinearticles.com, ehow.com, squidoo.com and searchwarp.com, among others. The biggest article sites are crawled by Google every day, and some of them allow other sites to copy your article with your bio, which includes a link to your site, thus multiplying the backlinks and potential visitors. Of course, you have to mind your grammar and your posts usually have to be at least 500 words long. Some can just pick-up your RSS feed and do the rest.

5- DO submit your own links to bookmarking sites such as Digg. Not all of them will get crawled, however, but as we said before, all backlinks are good!

6- DO link back to your site from your own accounts on social networks such as Facebook. Again, some of them might not produce backlinks because the content is either dynamic or requires a log-in, but must I repeat that all backlinks are good?

7- DO link back to your posts from your microblogging accounts on Twitter and others. As you build a list of followers, this will be a solid block of visitors to your site every time you publish new content.

Finally there’s another kind of backlink that’s steeped in controversy: paid backlinks through services such as inlinks.com. DO NOT do it! This practice is poorly regarded and will probably wind-up being penalized by the major search engines once they figure out how to identify them. Your money would be better spent using advertising such as AdSense. It doesn’t do anything for your pagerank, but it does produce highly motivated visitors.

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To be accepted into Demand Studios, authors are required to fill-out an online application and attach a resume as well as writing samples. Writers will submit their articles through Demand Studios, whose editors will thoroughly review every contribution for quality before accepting or rejecting them.

eHow claims that the goal is to improve the quality of its content, but most existing members  don’t appear to be enthralled by the move.  eHow says that its best and most prolific contributors are automatically accepted into Demand Studios, but that due to the large number of writers,  their entrance into the new system will be staggered.  Another new feature is that writers will be paid fixed amounts if they take a suggested assignment. Under the present system,  authors earn small commissions based on their article’s popularity.

It’s worth noting that eHow content provided by Demand Studios isn’t anything new, as a portion currently already originates from that source. The main difference is that eHow is morphing from a friendly how-to article emporium where anybody can participate, into a more serious, restrained and controlled medium. Will contributing users, who are  in their majority using eHow to promote their own web sites, desert en masse? Doubtless many of those  who aren’t automatically accepted will, as they won’t qualify for Demand Studios or won’t even go through the application process. For them, there will be no compelling reason to stay on board.

It will be interesting to see how big a hit eHow will take in visits and page views over the coming months, which will translate into lost revenues via less Google AdSense clicks, currently the main source of income for the company. They simply cannot replace the massive amount of content produced by their current non-professional authors. Perhaps the real reasons for eHow’s metamorphosis  will come to light further on.

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First thing you want to do is create fake hostnames that resolve to the localhost address, 127.0.0.1. You can create totally fictitious  hostnames or override real ones. On a Linux machine, edit the file /etc/hosts, while on Windows, it’s located at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts – make sure it’s writable/modifiable by users. For each hostname you need, add a line similar to the following to the hosts file:

127.0.0.1   www.fakedomain.com

Next, install the latest version of the Apache  web server (yes, on Windows too). Note that if you have Skype installed on a Windows computer, you’ll have to disable it by opening the task manager and killing all the Skype processes running. You’ll have to do that every time you boot your computer unless you uninstall Skype, as it intentionally listens on port 80. You could alternatively modify the Apache config (httpd.conf) and make it Listen to a different port, but this will force you to use ugly urls with the port number in your tests. Find and edit the file conf/httpd.conf in the Apache install directory, changing the Listen instruction to:

Listen 127.0.0.1:80

This will insure against Apache being open to the outside world. If you’re using a different port than 80, than the line above should be changed to the correct port. If you want to use several fake hostnames in your test web server add this line to httpd.conf:

NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1

And create a virtual host. For example:

<Directory C:\htdocs>
Options All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
</Directory>
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
ServerName www.dingdong.com
DocumentRoot C:\htdocs
</VirtualHost>

Next, install the latest version of php, or re-launch its installer if you already have it (choose “change” in the first screen), and make sure you select “Apache  2.*  module” in the Web Server Set-up screen. If you’re working with a Linux computer, follow the same installation instructions from the php web site, exactly as if you were setting-up on a real server.

If you did everything right, you now have the perfect testing environment!

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Ehow: With well over 20 million unique visitors per month, this is one of the top sites in the world. I enthusiastically joined, but haven’t been able to post any articles as apparently there’s a bug in their system. On the other hand, over a hundred other users asked to become my “friend” in the first couple days after I signed-up, even though we don’t know each other from Adam! I don’t know yet what advantage they get from adding friends, but it’s likely because you can spam them! I must point out that you won’t be able to publish your article as is on Ehow, as its format requires you to enter step by step instructions on how to do something. You can adapt a lot of your material, of course, but it’s a lengthy process which can end in frustration if the aforementioned bug rears its head. Hopefully the problem will soon be resolved, or my participation in eHow will have generated no tangible benefits!

Ezinearticles: The grandfather of article archives! It even preserves intact the ugly look of yesteryear! While its readership has been steadily on the decline, its readership is still in the millions, and putting your articles here will get you quality backlinks overnight. The major difference between Ezinearticles and the competition is that your articles will always be reviewed before being published. Your accepted submissions will be syndicated by default.

Associated Content: A very credible archive, with the most polished look. At first, humans review your submissions, and they take a long time to do so, but after a few are accepted, inclusion is immediate. My first article was rejected for plagiarism, citing my own duplicate article I had posted at Ezinearticles! I eventually had them correct their mistake, but while you’re still in probationary mode, I recommend you submit to Associated Content first, and once its approved, then submit to the rest, to avoid any problems. Associated Content’s RSS feeds are picked-up by some othe major news sites, including USA Today.

Squidoo: Despite being on a site having millions of visitors, my Squidoo content took the longest to get crawled by Google, and some of it was mangled. Squidoo, although often referred to as an article site, is actually a kind of social network. You sign-up and create unlimited “lenses” which are pages where you stick any number of items via a wide variety of widgets. The only widget that serves our purposes here is the RSS one that you can use to display your posts, but since it’s dynamic content it won’t generate a bunch of backlinks. The number of people that read my lenses in two months is in the single digits, probably because there’s several other million lenses to compete with. Unless it’s for the backlinks you can put via some of the widgets, I can’t recommend you waste your time with Squidoo.

Zimbio: This isn’t really an article archive per se. You add your RSS feeds via your member interface and then simply choose which posts you want to include. You’re only asked to select an appropriate category and your content will immediately appear online. You’re given the option to edit the download text, which might be a good idea in order to avoid having duplicate content (see bottom of this article). In order to have the entire article text uploaded, make sure your RSS feed is not set to only use an excerpt. Despite its limitations, Zimbio shouldn’t be ignored, since it has monthly readership numbering in the millions.

Searchwarp: It has a rather outdated look, with ugly colorful icons and logo, but don’t let that prevent you from becoming an active member, as this is a credible site and the articles you submit here will be crawled quickly by the major search engines. Initially, all your uploads will be reviewed by Searchwarp staff, but they usually give you a quick approval unless it’s a weekend or holiday.Searchwarp bills itself as a writers’ community and for the privilege of publishing you’re expected to participate in a number of ways, all of which will add to your “community interaction score”. You need a score of at least 22 points to submit a new article. Not commenting on comments (!) on your articles is the main source of point deductions! The main activity is to review other members’ articles and assign them a rating for a variety of criteria. Posting a comment gives you more points, but learn from my mistakes by not criticizing even the worst articles, as that will beget threats of retaliation and insults, as happened to me. If you must absolutely let the author know how much it stinks, use the anonymous comment option! After a number of submissions, your articles will be automatically approved. Searchwarp does allow site visitors to copy its articles and put them on their own sites, if you enable that option on a per article basis. Searchwarp is like a social network for amateur writers, and thus requires the most time to be involved with.

GoArticles: Has only a fraction of the visitors of Ezinearticles, but its backlinks were crawled overnight. Unlike the other top article sites, this one never subjects your uploads to any scrutiny by their staff. It also makes money from content contributors by charging for preferential positioning.

An important point: if you’re going to participate in any of these sites is that duplicating your own site’s content in this manner will carry consequences with Google. Contrary to popular belief, Google won’t penalize your site’s pagerank rating, but instead will seek to not list the duplicated content in search results, thus likely resulting in your site’s version being omitted in favor of one of the more highly ranked article archives. The solution is to produce two versions of each article: one that appears only on your site, and another for syndicating. Each version should differ significantly from the other, although it need not be a total rewrite.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if other sites republish your material, they’ll rarely respect the terms of the article site’s syndication agreement. Even if they keep your bio, I’ve often found my articles with different titles and additional paragraphs tacked on. Content theft is of epidemic proportions on the web, and all of these article archives have a disclaimer absolving themselves of any responsibility. It’s incumbent upon you to find and contact any infractor. One way to locate violations is to search for exact phrases from your article.

For all these sites, the number of page views for your articles will probably be quite low, and clicks back to your web sites via your bio links even fewer. Several offer monetary rewards based on the number of page views your posts get, but it will amount to only a pittance even if you wind-up being one of the top authors. Post in article archives for the quality backlinks they generate, and for the joy of having others read your words!

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Image by Dominik Gwarek

How rough are their numbers? I checked a web site I own on both these free services. I know from using Google Analytics that it gets about 35,000 unique visitors a month, 9,630 of which originate from the USA, yet the US unique visitor traffic figure was off by over 50 percent in Compete. Meanwhile in Alexa, which doesn’t give an estimate, the same web site ranked in the 770,000 range, while sites that have much less traffic than mine ranked in the 200,000 range. Testing Quantcast, which also only bothers with traffic originating in the USA, the uniques number was closer to the mark for the same web site (8,900) . A lucky guess?

What do they use to come up with these numbers? Alexa, for its part, has a help page that attempts to answer this question: “Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources.” Alexa toolbar users? How many of those millions actually use it? Furthermore, “diverse traffic data sources” is mightily vague. Perhaps they mean Alexa web site searches? Millions of Alexa toolbar users still can’t replace the accuracy of actual metering on the real web sites. Oddly, Alexa doesn’t offer any such device, which I’m sure millions of web site owners would be glad to add to their home page to set the record straight.

Alexa does utter this disclaimer on their site, to be fair (excerpted): “The traffic data are based on the set of toolbars that use Alexa data, which may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. To the extent that our sample of users differs from the set of all Internet users, our traffic estimates may over- or under-estimate the actual traffic to any particular site…Sites with relatively low traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa…Generally, traffic rankings of 100,000 and above should be regarded as not reliable“. So, from the horse’s mouth: the stats for most sites in their database mean nothing! I suspect that the toolbar is a strong marketing tool for Alexa and they have less interest in accuracy.

Compete.com, on the other hand, takes the high road in its help page: “Compete has developed a unique methodology created by experts in the fields of mathematics, statistics and the data sciences to aggregate, transform, enhance and normalize data in order to estimate U.S. Internet traffic.” Then they go on to say that their numbers are arrived by monitoring the activity of two million members of the Compete community, which I believe to mean people who register on their web site, the vast majority of whom would have opted for the free plan, being that the next plan up costs 199 dollars a month! Looking over what services a free account provides, I fail to see how meaningful statistics can be extracted from their activities on the site.

As for tools to meter your own site’s traffic, that doesn’t appear to be an option with Compete until you buy the enterprise package, which entails having to call them for the cost (uh-oh!). Compete gives the appearance of being the luxury web site metrics provider. I conclude that unless you’re part of that exclusive club, their stats for your site are meaningless! I also found it enormously humorous that they describe their methodology as being superior to that of Google Analytics, going on and on about how deleted cookies and users with multiple computers can seriously alter unique visitor tracking. Yes, using actual data is sub-par as opposed to estimates!

Quantcast is the only one of the three to have estimates that have some semblance in reality, Their explanation for how they get their data: “We collect directly-measured data from the millions of web destinations controlled by our Quantified Publishers.” I don’t know what that means, but it sounds serious! The good thing about Quantcast is that they do give you free traffic monitoring for your site. You just paste a little bit of code in your site’s footer just as you would for Google Analytics.

Compete, Alexa, and Quantcast aren’t the only sources of free site metrics, but they’re the ones most frequently consulted. Of the three, Quantcast is the only one that gets a passing grade, for acting responsibly. Alexa and Compete, however, are knowingly peddling largely inaccurate data, and for this reason should be shunned. Note that Google has a free product: Google Trends. It currently doesn’t include smaller sites, but instead of inventing data for them, it just tells you they don’t have any. Google, the trustworthy giant of the web, will hopefully extend this service to you and I!

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Image by Christian Ferrari

1. Header-Footer: To add stuff to the header or footer without modifying the theme files. Modifying theme files isn’t recommended since any edits will be lost if you upgrade the theme or change it for another. Particularly useful for adding your Google Analytics javascript to the footer area.

2. Efficient Related Posts: To create more page views by providing “related posts” links at the bottom of each post, with titles. Note that it does have one shortcoming in that it displays the section even when there’s no related links found. Uses tags, so make sure all your posts are accurately tagged.

3. Social Bookmarking Reloaded: Generates a row or rows of nice little icons for a wide variety of social networks (you choose which). The great thing is that the links go directly to the sites rather than through a third party’s, as happens with the hugely popular (undeserved) AddtoAny plugin. It has insignificant defects in its settings page, where the default text is in Italian, which you can easily change, and a page exclusion selector which was broken in our tests.

4. GD Star Rating: Adds a rating system for your posts, comments and pages. Uses Ajax effectively. Has an excessive number of options, which may be a little intimidating at first, but works beautifully once you get the hang of it. This is a great feature to add to your site as it invites visitors to get involved and personal.

5. WP-Polls: My choice to add polls to your sidebar(s), another great mechanism to get your visitors to participate in your site. Uses Ajax. Every other popular poll plugin we tested used a third party polling site and required registration. WP-Polls is very easy to use and has all the options that matter. I would only use this on a site that has a decent number of visitors, since a poll with few participants can be unattractive.

6. All in One SEO Pack: Justifiably one of the most popular plugins. One of WordPress’ biggest shortcomings is that it doesn’t produce keyword and description meta tags. This plugin can automatically generate them and also let you enter your own wherever you need to. Additionally, it can auto-generate single post titles that use the actual post headline, making them more search engine friendly. It can add html to the head area of a page, but not the footer, hence our need to include the Header-Footer plugin as well.

7. WordPress Automatic Image Hotlink Protection: To protect your images from bandwidth thieves, that is, other sites using your image URL in img tags, use this plugin. It will protect your files in the wp-content/uploads directory by modifying the WordPress root directory’s .htaccess file. If there are any images that should be linked to from other sites, you should move them from the uploads to an unprotected directory you create.

8. WP Archive-Sitemap Generator: To create a site map page, which helps you get more page views. Has many settings. Remember that Google recommends having no more than 100 links on a single page.

9. Redirection: To redirect old URLs to new ones. Good to have on board even if initially you don’t have any bad incoming links.

10. Contact Form 7: One of the most popular plugins for its simplicity yet high flexibility. Requires the Really Simple Captcha plugin, by the same developer. Don’t even think of having a form without a captcha unless you like spam! Despite the name, you can use it to create all types of mail forms.

11. User Photo: Allows users to have their real mug shot in their bios rather than the ugly avatar icons.

12. Favicon Generator: Use it to upload an image which it will transform into a favicon. It will also automatically add a html tag for it in the page head output, but be mindful that if your theme comes with its own favicon, it won’t remove the existing tag.

13. Register Plus: A good way to keep the connection with your visitors is to have them register for something. This popular plugin lets you upload your own logo for both the log-in and registration page, replacing the default WordPress logo. More importantly, it can send out a confirmation email, which requires them to click on the link it contains in order for the process to be completed (lest you like spam again!).

14. Subscribe2: Once you have users that are registered, you can use this plugin to email to them. It can be set to automatically email new posts to all users.

15. Google XML Sitemaps: It’s simply wrong not to have a sitemap.xml file, as it will guide Google’s and other major search engines’ spiders to the right resources on your site, resulting in more of your pages being indexed. This plugin will automatically generate a valid sitemap.xml for you.

16. WP Super Cache: A big defect with WordPress is the large number of files it needs to load, plus all the code it has to execute, to render a page. Google and other search engines could penalize your site because it takes too long to download pages, not to mention that visitors might not want to wait around either. This plugin saves copies of pages to disk and returns them instead of letting WordPress go through the normal page construction process. Disable it when you’re changing things on your site, lest you don’t get to see your modifications on the spot.

17. WP Photo Album: If your site needs to have one or more photo galleries, this problem-free plugin will do the trick. If some of you are wondering why I didn’t pick the more popular and complex NextGen, it’s because the latter was buggy when it came to viewing photos, and included software advertising.

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Komodo Edit: This is an exceptionally good IDE since it debugs automatically while you add or modify your code. It supports a wide variety of programming languages, including php, perl and C++. You can get it from the Activestate website. Note that in some cases, such as with php, you need to also have the actual language’s interpreter installed.

Putty (Windows only): A very nice ssh client. The Linux version isn’t nearly as good, but using your shell directly with openssh is more than fine. Get it here.

Filezilla: A very handy sftp client. Get it here.

Gimp: If you need to edit or create images, nothing compares to this very complete graphics editor. Get it here.

That said, any serious code slinger who creates web interfaces should test the output on all popular browsers: MSIE,Firefox,Chrome,Safari and Opera. Ideally, you’ll also have older versions of each installed, as page rendering can vary quite a bit from one release to the next.

An even more advanced development environment can be had by setting-up a web server to run directly on your PC, but that’s a topic on its own…

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Image by Svilen Milev

1. A logo. Your site or company name in plain text says “amateur” like nothing else. Your site’s logo is the most important visual element, your trademark, carrying with it a high recognition factor. Thus, it’s imperative to invest in a professional logo if possible, or at least thoughtfully create your own using graphics software or one of the many free logo generating sites. Having professionals make your logo doesn’t have to be expensive, costing as little as 69 USD with logodesignteam.com, for example. If you elect to make your own, remember that your design has to reflect what your company or site is about, and to keep it clean and simple. Gimp, a very sophisticated but totally free graphics program, has everything you need, although it might take a while to learn how to use it. Alternatively, there’s lots of free logo design tools online. One I particularly liked is flamingtext.com.

2. A favicon. This is the tiny icon that appears next to your site’s name in the browser’s bookmarks, history, and location bar. Much like the logo, it helps distinguish your site from every other. Nothing could be worse than having the WordPress default icon displayed instead of a custom one. Although tiny, the icon should resemble your logo as much as possible, or failing that, mimick the site’s theme. The easiest way to create a favicon is to use one of the many free online tools. One I recommend is favicongenerator.com. You upload an image and it derives the favicon from it.

3. Images. If your posts are all text, your blog will be monotonous and put your readers to sleep. Adding relevant images to an article makes it much more tantalizing. You don’t have to go out and snap digitals, or steal images from other sites, as there’s plenty of royalty free photos and graphics you can download from numerous image archive sites. One that I use that’s particularly good is sxc.hu.

4. A blogroll in your sidebar. This is your strongest bargaining tool for doing link exchanges, as sidebar blogrolls give other bloggers very credible backlinks, and are much more propitious to getting clicks from visitors to your site. Links in a separate links page aren’t as likely to be seen and may be ignored by the crawlers of major search engines, especially if you name that page “links”. That said, don’t let that blogroll grow too big or it’ll wind-up being treated as link spam. The best policy is to put those who added you to their blogroll in yours, and the rest in a resource page.

5. A RSS feed. Crawlers often do a poor job of extracting text from your pages, whereas a RSS feed will give them the titles and excerpts you want them to index. If you’re using a content management system such as WordPress, you ‘ll have a RSS feed by default.

6. A XML sitemap: This is a xml document that tells some major search engine spiders about all the pages on your site, but also ranks each for its relative importance. Googlebot looks for this document, so having one is a big asset. If you use WordPress, there’s plugins that will automatically generate a sitemap every time you add content. The “Google XML Sitemaps” plugin is one I highly recommend.

7. A contact form: A “mailto” link is a very bad idea since it will wind-up being crawled by spam bots, and also because a lot of your visitors will use webmail rather than email software. Rather than putting some trumped-up robot-foiling email address on screen, the correct way to handle this situation is to have a contact form they can fill out, and you’ll get the data via email without your address being seen by the outside world. With WordPress, an easy and flexible contact form plugin is “Contact Form 7” which requires the plugin ” Really Simple Captcha“. Never have a contact or other type of mailing form without a captcha (the image with text which only humans can “see”), as you’ll get lots of spam.

8. Spam protection for comments. Even if your site has no visitors, you’ll get oodles of spam if you accept comments. Ways to protect against this is to add a captcha to the comment form or require that users be logged-in, or use Akismet. I prefer the latter, as it’s been 100% effective in stopping comment spam on my web sites. In WordPress, the Akismet plugin is installed by default. You’ll need to get a free registration key from the Akismet site before you can activate it.

9. A site map page. This isn’t the same as sitemap.xml, as it’s meant to be read by humans, giving them a quick way to find interesting posts or pages from your blog, thus giving you more page views. A good WordPress plugin that generates a site map is “WP Archive-Sitemap Generator“.

10. A search form. Whether it be a Google search form or the default one in your blog software, this is a critical feature as people are pressed for time and want to find what interests them quickly.

Do all of the above and then you can spend more time writing great posts!

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Photo courtesy of Alek von Felkerzam

However, Green Dam wasn’t absolutely necessary for the Communist party to achieve its aims, it was just an additional measure to restrict what the Chinese view over the Internet, and perhaps a way to identify subversive citizens. The fact is, what you can see in China is already controlled via the Internet service providers as well as content providers who cow-tow to the party’s policy, lest they be summarily unplugged and prosecuted. Industry insiders refer to the censure system as the “Great Firewall of China“.

Go to a cybercafe in Shanghai or Beijing and try accessing YouTube or Facebook, and you’ll get “server cannot be reached”, or maybe even some Chinese web page that has nothing to do with these sites will be returned. Then try searching for “Dalai Lama” on Baidu, the country’s most popular search engine, and the results will be for web pages that condemn the exiled Tibetan leader. That’s just a tiny sample of what the Chinese government deems as inappropriate content.

Google China made headlines by announcing it would not filter search results as required, threatening to abandon China if the authorities tried to force them to comply. Very noble on Google’s part, but if you’re in China, clicking on the search result links won’t take you to the banned sites. I’m not sure if Google’s cached versions would still be accessible. Note that Hong Kong ,although administered by the Chinese government, isn’t subject to censure.

how can you find-out if a web site, perhaps your own, is on China’s restricted list? One way is to type the domain name in the form at http://www.watchmouse.com/en/ping.php which will try accessing the domain through a large number of places, including Shanghai. Here’s a few top domains I tested and what transpired through a Shanghai isp:

myspace.com – Not blocked
cia.gov - Not blocked
hrw.org (Human Rights Watch) – BLOCKED
dalailama.com – BLOCKED
wikipedia.org – Not blocked
Wikipedia page about Tiananmen Square protests: BLOCKED
falundafa.org – BLOCKED
wsj.com (Wall Street Journal) page about Uighurs’ protests: Not blocked

From these results we can conclude that while a web site itself isn’t blocked, any pages it contains which refer to subjects the Chinese government is sensitive about may be censured, although they appear to not have the means to catch all of them. If they could, there’s no doubt that they would!

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