SWISH : alternative Flash animation tool

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SWiSHzone.com is the world leader in alternative Flash™ animation tools. The philosophy of SWISHzone Pty Ltd is to make Flash authoring accessible to everyone, with software that is both easy to use and affordable.

Founded in 1999 and based in Sydney, Australia, SWiSHzone’s product range has grown from a single text animation tool to a suite of products that make it easy to create Flash-based video, photo albums, PowerPoint™ presentations and more. The flagship product SWiSH Max is a professional Flash authoring tool with enough power and flexibility for the most demanding of users.

XTNDConnect PC from Sybase iAnywhere

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Sybase iAnywhere – Desktop synchronization of PIM to mobile devices

XTNDConnect PC is a software application that allows you to easily synchronize your contacts, calendar, tasks, email and notes between your mobile devices and popular PC applications. XTNDConnect PC greatly improves your effectiveness and productivity without requiring the involvement of IT departments.

Available in 17 languages and validated in the market with more than 50 million copies distributed, XTNDConnect PC is fast, flexible and easy to use. It is available directly for customers or can be customized for OEM/ODM implementations.

XNTD was developed by Extended Systems Inc. Founded in 1984, Extended Systems was acquired by Sybase Inc in 2005.

CHMOD

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CHMOD (abréviation de change mode) est une commande exécutable dans un environnement de type Unix qui permet de changer les permissions d’accès (spéciales ou non) sur un fichier ou dossier. Il arrive fréquemment qu’on lit dans un guide d’installation d’une application sur un serveur qu’il faut configurer un fichier ou dossier en chmod 777 ou chmod 644 ou -wx.

Sur un serveur, on trouve, sous propriétés d’un fichier ou dossier, un tableau avec des champs à cocher avec trois colonnes “lire ( r = read), écrire (w = write) et exécuter (x = execute)” et trois rangées “propriétaire (owner), groupe (group) et autres (all users)”. Lire a la valeur 4, écrire a la valeur 2 et exécuter a la valeur 1.

Par exemple CHMOD 764 veut donc dire :

  • le propriétaire peut lire, écrire et exécuter: 4+2+1=7
  • le groupe peut lire et écrire:4+2=6
  • les autres ne peuvent que le lire: 4

Il n’est pas recommandé de mettre les permissions des fichiers et répertoires sur un serveur sur 777, car tout le monde peut alors les modifier s’il a accès au serveur. Il est conseillé de mettre les fichiers sur 664 et les répertoires sur 775, sauf exceptions justifiées.

Domain name system (DNS) & management

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Last Update : March 15, 2013

The Domain Name System (DNS) associates various information with domain names; it serves as the “phone book” for the Internet by translating human-readable computer hostnames into IP addresses. A DNS also stores other information such as the list of mail servers that accept email for a given domain. By providing a worldwide keyword-based redirection service, the Domain Name System is an essential component of the Internet.
The right to use a domain name is delegated by domain name registrars which are accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization charged with overseeing the name and number systems of the Internet. In addition to ICANN, each top-level domain (TLD) is maintained and serviced technically by a sponsoring organization, the TLD Registry.

DNS records or Zone files are used for mapping URLs to IPs. Located on servers called the DNS servers, these records are typically the connection of a website with the outside world. Requests for a website are forwarded to the DNS servers and then get pointed to the WebServers that serve the website or to Email servers that handle the incoming email.

DNS servers communicate with each other using private network protocols. All DNS servers are organized in a hierarchy. At the top level of the hierarchy, so-called root servers store the complete database of Internet domain names and their corresponding IP addresses. The Internet employs 13 root servers, named A, B, C and so on up to M, maintained by various independent agencies. When a DNS server receives a request not in its database it automatically passes that request to another DNS server or up to the next higher level in the DNS hierarchy as needed.

The mostly used DNS records in all DNS configurations are the following :

  • A record or adress record : An address record assigns an IP address to a domain or subdomain name. Example : saraproft.com. IN A 69.9.64.11
  • CNAME record : A CNAME record or canonical name record makes one domain name an alias of another. The aliased domain gets all the subdomains and DNS records of the original. Example : stuff.everybox.com CNAME www.everybox.com
  • MX record : An MX record or mail exchange record maps a domain name to a list of mail exchange servers for that domain. Example : mydomain.com. 14400 IN MX 0 mydomain.com.
  • NS record : An NS record or name server record maps a domain name to a list of DNS servers authoritative for that domain. Example : example.com. IN NS ns1.live.secure.com.
  • SOA record : An SOA record or start of authority record specifies the DNS server providing authoritative information about an Internet domain, the email of the domain administrator, the domain serial number, and several timers relating to refreshing the zone. It’s the most essential part of a zone file. It includes TTL, the duration in seconds that the record may be cached by client side programs.
  • TXTrecord : A TXT record allows an administrator to insert arbitrary text into a DNS record. For example, this record is used to implement the Sender Policy Framework specification.

RESTENA is the registration service for Internet domain names under the national top level domain LU in Luxembourg. P&T Luxembourg and Visual Online are also approved as official registrars in Luxembourg. My saraproft.xxx names have been registrated and managed in the past by SpiritDomains. The domain saraproft.lu has been registrated by RESTENA. All the domains have been transferred in the meantine to Visual Online.

DNSstuff.com provides a lot of free and paid tools to configure, monitor and fix problems with a domain or email. Google offers tools to check the MX records and the CNAME records of your own domain. Useful tutorials about setting up Google apps (and to verify ownership of domain) are available at N.E.R.D.logger.com.

Today I deployed with success Google Apps to my domain saraproft.com. Google Apps are smart applications for email, documents, sites and more. The different DNS records for my domain to set up Google Apps are configured as indicated herafter :

A record : the domain saraproft.com points to the IP address of the P&T server hosting my other domains in Luxembourg. This IP address is not relevant for Google Apps.

CNAME : The aliases for www.saraproft.com, mail.saraproft.com, sites.saraproft.com, docs.saraproft.com and calendar.saraproft.com points all to ghs.google.com. It’s important to add a dot at the end of each record parameter. To verify the ownership of the saraproft.com domain, a temporary CNAME record with a secret parameter provided by Google Apps was activated.

MX : The mail domain saraproft.com points to different prioritized mail servers indicated by Google:

  • ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
  • ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
  • ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
  • ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
  • ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
  • ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
  • ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

NS : The name server record points to the servers indicated by my registrar SpiritDomains:

  • dns1.spiritdomains.com.
  • dns2.spiritdomains.com.
  • dns3.spiritdomains.com.
  • dns4.spiritdomains.com.

SOA : The SOA record contains the standard data provided by the managed DNS service of SpiritDomains.

TXT : The text record includes the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) with the statement “v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all” to prevent mails to be considered as spams.

Sitemap’s

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Last update : June 16, 2013
Sitemap’s are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. Sitemaps also offer human visitors an overview of a website to easily navigate. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

The sitemap xml protocol 0.90, available on www.sitemaps.org,  is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

There are several tools available to generate sitemaps. My favorite is the online sitemap generator from xml-sitemap.com.

A quick guide for creating sitemaps is available on www.sitemapxml.co.uk. Detailled user guides are edited by the search engines providers, for example by Google.

On 13th august 2009, I installed the standalone sitemap generator from XML-Sitemaps.com succesfully.

Pagepeel, pageear and pageflip

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The first flash scripts to  show a flip book animation on a website appeared a few years ago. The most advanced script was programmed by IpariGrafika in Hungary. A dynamic version with an external xml file based on IpariGrafika’s script was published in 2005 by Steve Palmer on the Blogspace of 76design in Canada.

Today, IpariGrafika still offers the version 2.25 of the PageFlip script for free, but the new scalable versions 3.5 are associated with a paid licence ranging from 25 US$ for one website without source code to 395 US$ for unlimited commercial use with source code included. A special website www.pageflip.hu bas been created to promote and distribute the different versions. Several demonstrations of the pageflip script for artworks catalogs can be seen at the website of Leslie’s Artgallery in Luxembourg.

Two years ago, a script called pagepeel related to the pageflip animation appeared as a new interesting advertising form on websites. Pagepeel is a small animated pageear waving on the top right side of a website. It reveals a hint of something behind it. When a visitor moves the mouse over it, it pulls down like peeling the page down to reveal the eye catching ad design, while not effecting the website.

The pagepeel script is also named pagecurl, magiccorner, adpeel, peelad, eselsohr, flash peel, … There are a lot of more or less well designed pagepeel scripts available on the net, but only a single one is available for free. It’s the pagepeel flashscript developped by Christian Harz from Webpicasso Media in Germany. A scalable version 1.4 was released on june 29th, 2008. A tutorial about programming a pagepeel script is shown on www.pagepeel.info.

In the IE browser, animated GIF’s are stopped running when the pageear closes. Tip : The small image has an x-offset of 3 pixels and y-offset of 1 pixel.

Website visitor tracking

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There are several tools available to analyse and monitor visits to a website or blog in real-time. The common method for reliable tracking consist in inserting a simple piece of javascript code on every webpage and saving a first party cookie on the visitors computer. The cookie allows to distinguish between returning visitors and first time visitors. The sum of returning and first time visitors are called unique visitors.
IP + User Agent tracking typically reports higher numbers than cookie-based tracking because of dynamically assigned IP addresses and spider and robot visits. 3rd party cookies are set by a source other than the website being visited and are often blocked by browsers and security software, whereas 1st party cookies are considered as harmless by spyware protection software.

The most used free tracking and statistics packages are StatCounter, SiteMeter and Google Analytics. A comparison of StatCounter versus Google Analytics has been published by Andy Atkinson on his blog “Pain in the Tech“.

Google Analytics

I prefer Google Analytics, which is based on Urchin, and I use it for different websites since 2006. Google Analytics uses 1st partie cookies, counts a visit even if the page is pulled from a user’s or server’s cache, but it registers only one visit if a user comes to a site twice within thirty minutes without closing their browser. The Google Analytics reports include a dashboard with different site usage overviews and detailed informations about visitors, content, traffic sources and goals. All the data are anonymous and the privacy of the visitors is guaranteed.

Google provides a help page, an official blog and a conversion university for Google Analytics. An unofficial Google Analytics Blog is provided by ROI Revolution. A forum about Website Analytics – Tracking and Logging is available at WebmasterWorld.com. A solid tutorial “8 stupid things webmasters do to mess up their analytics” has been edited by Linda Bustos on Marketing Pilgrim. SiteScan offers a Google Analytics Diagnostic tool designed to provide you with a complete audit of your Google Analytics setup.

Nicolas Lierman is the author of the Google Analytics Reporting Suite developed in Adobe AIR. He published on his website AboutNico.be 5 tips for using Google Analytics.

Webalizer

A famous log file analysis programm for web servers is Webalizer. It produces highly detailed, easily configurable usage reports in HTML format, for viewing with a standard web browser. Written in C by Bradford L. Barrett who started the development in 1997, the program is open source and was designed for running on Linux systems. Version 2.20-01 was released on july 12th, 2008. “What is your webserver doing today ?” is the motto of the webalizer website.

Google Custom Search

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Google Search

Google offers a custom search engine (beta version) to webmasters to create a local search tool on a website or a blog. A quick and easy way consist in integrating a javascript code provided by Google on your webpage. The search engine can be customized to include more sites or to adapt the style of the results pages to the style of the website. Google provides tutorials, FAQ’s, developer documentation and featured examples to help webmasters to design the search tool.

Google’s “Terms of Use” state that you may not in any way frame, cache or modify the Results produced by the Google search engine. The results pages include advertisements placed by Google. For enterprises wanting ad-free results pages, Google offers various price plans for the Google site search.

A solution used in the past by several developers was based on javascript code to open a small search window for doing a local search on a website. An example for searching the saraproft.lu website is given below:

=======================================

<p><a href=”javascript:(function()

{ p=prompt(‘Entrez un texte pour faire une recherche dans le site saraproft.lu via Google Luxembourg.’,”);

if(p)

{ document.location.href=’http://www.google.lu/search?

q=site:saraproft.lu ‘+escape(p)} })();” >

Search</a></p>

=======================================

This solution has some disadvantages with the security mecanisms of the new browser generation and is no longer recommended.

Google gadgets and Yahoo widgets

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In 2003, Konfabulator, a startup, released a paid software that consisted of cool standalone applets that did all sorts of stuff from telling the time, to monitoring stock market prices, to displaying your calendar. Mid-2005, Yahoo acquired the startup, and then offered Konfabulator as freeware, both for Mac OS X and Windows. They call it now widgets. In 2006, Google introduced Google gadgets, a precursor has been the side panels in the Google Desktop.

Google Gadgets are interactive mini-applications that can be placed anywhere on your desktop or on your iGoogle page to show you new email, weather, photos and personalized news. Other gadgets include the clock, calendar, scratch pad, todo list and many more. Google Gadgets are made by users that offer cool and dynamic content and can be placed also on any page on the web.

All Desktop gadgets use the Gadget API. They can also use core JavaScript features and the XMLHttpRequest class. Windows-only Desktop gadgets can include native Windows libraries and use selected Search APIs to take advantage of Google Desktop search features.

Google offers a Desktop SDK that has everything you need to write Google Gadgets and to integrate desktop searching into your applications. A development forum, a FAQ webpage and a hall of fame are available to provide valuable feedback on creating gadgets.

Google gadgets can also been used in Lively, a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs and that was released as beta on July 10th, 2008. Lively gadgets provide rich media and interaction capabilities to users.

A great site for gadgets, widgets and SEO is Seoish, run by Patrick Sexton alias Feedthebot.

Google Desktop et iGoogle

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Google Desktop

J’ai installé aujourd’hui Google Desktop sur mon portable. Google Desktop permet de faire des recherches locales aussi facilement que sur le Web et de trouver et de lancer des applications et des fichiers en quelques clics.  Google Desktop permet d’ajouter des plug-ins Google Gadgets pour personnaliser son bureau et pour consulter les actualités, la météo et bien d’autres informations. Pour aller un pas plus loin, on peut installer sa page d’accueil personnalisée avec iGoogle.

Il y a un blog officiel de Google Desktop qui constitue une source très riche d’informations concernant Google Desktop.