Saturday, March 14, 2009
How to: Add Translation Widgets to your Site
Translation widgets make web and blog sites more multilingual accessible by helping visitors read web pages in their native language. These widgets provide a link on a web page that a visitor uses to submit it to an automated web page translation site. For example Google Translator, Yahoo Babel Fish, and Microsoft translator are all sites that can be used to to translate web pages.
Listed in this post are nine free translation widgets you can add to your site. They primarily differ in languages supported, means of choosing a language, and translation sites. Each widget is active in this post so you can try each one to help in choosing a widget. Many of these widgets have different versions available at their site.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
How to: Add Google AdSense Search Form
Google’s AdSense program offers search forms you can add to your website. These search forms can be for just your site, a group of sites, or the entire internet. The search results are provided by Google’s own search engine. AdSense provides the listed ads. When visitors click on these ads, they can generate revenue for you.
Using the group site option, you can provide your blog sites visitors a ready-made search of sites that relate to topics covered by your Blog site. This is a great time saver for your visitors. For example, the Google search form on my FlatPress blog site includes FlatPress related web sites. Using this search form, visitors can search the best sites for finding information on FlatPress.
Creating an AdSense search form can be challenging do to the many options provided. This post provides step-by-step instructions for setting up a Google AdSense Search Form on your FlatPress blog site.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Google Webmaster Site Verification
Google Webmaster Tools has a feature that allows you to add a “sitemaps.xml” file for each of your websites. To take advantage of all its features, Google requires you to verify the site is yours by either adding a specific file to your site or adding a Meta tag to your index.html.
The file verification option does not work for 110MB websites and I do not have an index.html on my FlatPress blog. I could create an index.html that contains the Meta tag and automatically forward visitors to “index.php”. However, this second option is not something I want my website visitors to endure.
After searching the FlatPress forum, I found the solution I needed. FlatPress has an easy to use user plugin named HeadStuff, which allows Meta tags to be defined. It is simple to setup and use.
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Monday, September 8, 2008
How to: Enabling PrettyURLs
FlatPress Blogs posts (entries) are assigned a unique web address of numbers. These addresses are not too user friendly. To rectify this, FlatPress included the plugin PrettyURLs, which takes these web addresses and creates alternate addresses based on the entries subject.
PrettyURLs web address format:
http://yourwebsite/index.php/year/month/day/the-name-of-the-entry/
The plugin PrettyURL, while included in FlatPress is not enabled by default. To enable it only takes three steps.
Monday, June 9, 2008
Six Free Contact Page Providers
A contact page offers website visitors the opportunity to send the site owner an e-mail without the owner publishing their e-mail address. This help protects owners from being spammed.
The contact form that comes with FlatPress requires the function mail()/sendmail to be enabled. The function SMTP/FSocketOpen is not supported by FlatPress. If the mail() function is not an option, you can use a free contact page provider. These providers host your contact page on their site. All you have to do is add the link to your blog site.
This post identifies six free contact page providers. Each is different in their features and how they support multiple websites. They all seem to provide sufficient protection against SPAM. So far I have not received any spam from any of them.
