Hotlinking is when people display your files on their websites by referring to them directly rather than taking a copy and hosting them on their own servers. As if using your files without permission wasn’t bad enough, hotlink thieves actually use your bandwidth too.
Hotlinkers could be stealing your bandwidth right now. Have a look through your servers logs and you might spot them.
Fortunately, there’s action you can take to prevent people from hotlinking to your files and some are more comical than others e.g. you could simply refuse to serve the file to any external websites or you could redirect the file request to another file.
Read the rest of this entry »
A post by one of my regular commentors, Google Success, recently posted about SearchMash.com and it seems that many in the blogosphere are talking about it including SEW, CyberNet News, and Inside Google.
In his post, GS says,
Google has silently launched a new ‘Search Sandbox’ (not to be confused with Google Sandbox) at SearchMash.com. The privacy policy and Whois records reveal that the site is owned and operated by Google.
My curiousity led me to dig a little bit deeper than that and I discovered something very surprising.
Read the rest of this entry »
Wouldn’t it be great if you could see exactly what links your website visitors were clicking on. With that kind of information, you’d have a better understanding of exactly what your audience is interested in and what areas of your webpages attract the greatest number of clicks. All very valuable information if you want to increase the number of clicks you get on certain links or if you want to know what content interests visitors so you can provide them with more.
You may have already seen the AdSense placement heatmap produced by Google and I’ve found it to be very useful in determining the most profitable ad placements. Imagine if you could have a similar heatmap for your own webpages…
Well, now you can take the guesswork out of placement testing…
Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re like me and you’re able to develop using languages such as PHP, but you couldn’t put together a desktop application to save your life then here’s some news that might open up a world of opportunities for you.
NuSphere, the creators of the PHP editor, PhpEd, have released PhpDock; a deployment platform for PHP scripts. What this means is that PHP scripts distributed with PhpDock will run on a Windows computer without the need for a separate webserver or even an Internet connection.
With an Internet connection, your PHP desktop applications can do all of the usual things that server-based PHP applications can do e.g. interact with other websites and make use of web services.
One of the big benefits of distributing a PHP script as a desktop application instead of running it from your server is that no matter how many users there are, they won’t use your bandwidth or overload your server. It also makes it easier for the less technically minded to use your script because they won’t need to install it onto their own hosting accounts.
So instead of running a subscription service from your website, you could package up your application and just include a licensing check on start-up. If your service interacts with other websites e.g. for directory submission, then you don’t run the risk of having your server’s IP address blocked due to over use. Instead, the submissions will be from individual user IP addresses.
There are so many possibilities, my mind is boggled! 
Technorati Tags: Desktop PHP Applications, PHP Scripts
