Microsoft has launched a free trial of its new Expression Web Designer (Community Technology Preview 1) WYSIWYG editor. MS claims it is a “professional design tool” to create modern standards-based websites with CSS-based layouts, CSS formatting and management.
If the above holds true, it could be a worthy competitor to Adobe’s Dreamweaver and Golive.
Microsoft Expression Web Designer - Free Trial
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Another impressive offering by Google for web developers, search engine optimization professionals and site owners.
Google Trends is a application that allows you to compare the numbers of searches for specific search terms, making it a very useful keyword/phrase analysis tool. You can enter up to (5) topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time, and which geographic regions and languages have searched for them most often.
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This is kind of old news but I just stumbled upon it. Microsoft has released their own developer toolbar much like the one for the Firefox browser. It was originally slated for release with IE7 but can now be download for IE6.
The Developer Toolbar can be pinned to the Internet Explorer browser window or floated separately. Get it at: Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar Beta
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Recently I wanted to use PHP includes in an existing site so I could make updates to common parts of the site faster by editing one file (e.g.: header, navigation, footer, etc.). The problem was the site was designed with all pages ending in .html. Of coarse I could have changed all the pages to .php but the site has very good search engine rankings, and many other sites already link to these .html pages. After a little research, I found the solution to be the .htaccess file.
Since pages without a .php-extension will not be parsed by PHP by default on most web servers, you need to tell it to treat all HTML pages as PHP pages. You do this by simply adding a line to the .htaccess file located in your site’s root directory (or create a .htaccess file using a text editor). Just add:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .html .htm
Note: .htaccess files need to be placed in each directory that will make use of PHP in .html pages.
Update: If you get an 500 Internal Server Error try “AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php .html .htm”
Google has just released a free website statistics (analytics) tool. The program seems to have similar features to the free StatCounter but can be integrated with your AdWord accounts so you can easily track keyword performance and cut the ones that are underperforming. However you do not need need to have an AdWord account to use Analytics.
Check it out at Google Analytics.
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