We see new beta sites all the time, but are they any good? Here are some collection of new beta sites. Some of them provide free and useful web services.

1. http://www.sliderocket.com/

SlideRocket is a web application that provides everything you need to design professional quality presentations, manage and share libraries of slides and assets, and to deliver presentations in person or remotely over the web.

2. http://www.behance.net/

This site let us to build your portfolio, list your projects to share and collaborate with other artists.

3. http://www.popfly.com/

Popfly is a tool from Microsoft for developing mashups, widgets and web pages using Silverlight.

4. http://www.sproutbuilder.com/

Sprout is a browser based WYSIWYG editor which build by Flex. It facilitates the way to build, publish, and manage widgets, mini-sites, mashups, banners and more.

5. http://www.tryphone.com/

This is online mobile phone test-drive site. You can get a feeling for what the phone is like to use.

6. http://www.meemix.com/

This is a site can let you to build a very personalised radio channel and interact with the community.

7. http://www.cushycms.com/

Cushycms is a free and truly simple CMS for web designers to let clients to safely edit their own web content without any programming skills required.

8. http://www.kaltura.com/

Kaltura is open source video platform which enables groups to create and edit video collaboratively.

9. http://www.dimdim.com/

Dimdim is the world’s free web meeting where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required for attendees.

10. http://www.nuconomy.com/

Another web analytics as Google Analytics. It let you understand your users’ activities and how they interact with the various features of your site like never before.

11. http://www.skyfire.com/

Skyfire is a new mobile web browser that allows you to experience the internet on your phone exactly like on your computer. It is fast and support Flash and Ajax as well as QuickTime.

12. http://www.ping.fm/

Too many social networks? Use Ping to update WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, Friendster and many other supported services from whatever you are. Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap. Messanges can be sent via AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, WAP, iPhone/iPod Touch, SMS or E-mail.

13. http://www.photrade.com/

Photrade is great for sourcing free photos legally. It also let photographers to sell and licence their own pictures to make some money.

14. http://www.pluginmeter.com/

If you are a wordpress blogger or just for some other reasons if you want to know which plugins are installed on your favorite wordpress blog then just go to Plugin Meter and you will see list of plugins installed on those blog.

Some websites using “[at]” to replace “@” and email will look as “name [at] domain.com”. This is a good idea for personal websites since nobody challenge you. In commercial, many clients wouldn’t allow you to use “name [at] domain.com” this format. They are not web designer and they don’t understand how spam prevention works, or even care for that matter.

I have this method originally from david walsh blog. Its author have a quick PHP script that you can use when putting raw email addresses on a page:

The Function

function encode_email($e)
{
	for ($i = 0; $i < strlen($e); $i++) { $output .= '&#'.ord($e[$i]).';'; }
	return $output;
}

Usage

echo(encode_email('email@office-it.org'));

The above function takes a string input (the email address), loops through each character replacing the letter with the character’s ASCII value, and returns the encoded email address. That’s all you need to do!

Another method (much simple) is found at SOLMETRA. It is a tiny JavaScript code which will encode email for you.

The disadvantage for second method is if you have a page with hundreds of addresses, the page download will be bloated.

I am not guarantee methods above is bulletproof solution, but it is, at least, a basic protection.

We should set up a permanent redirect (technically called a “301 redirect”) between these sites. Once we do that, we will get full search engine credit for our work on these sites.

301 redirect is useful too for search engines which may think, for example, www.office-it.org and office-it.org are two different sites. Let say, www.office-it.org seems to have 5 inbound links whereas office-it.org has 6 inbound links. By correctly configuring a permanent 301 redirect, the search rankings might improve as all inbound links are correctly counted for the website.

What is 301 redirect?

301 redirect is the best method to preserve our current search engine rankings when redirecting web pages or a web site. The code “301″ is interpreted as “moved permanently”. If we have to change file names or move pages around, it’s the safest option.

Below are a couple of methods to implement URL Redirection.

IIS Redirect
1. In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder we wish to redirect
2. Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”
3. Enter the redirection page
4. Check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”
5. Click on ‘Apply’

ColdFusion Redirect

<.cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<.cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.new-url.com">

PHP Redirect

Warning:  Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/icreativem/domains/office-it.org/public_html/wp-includes/feed-rss2.php:11) in /home/icreativem/domains/office-it.org/public_html/wp-content/plugins/exec-php/includes/runtime.php(42) : eval()'d code on line 29

Warning:  Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/icreativem/domains/office-it.org/public_html/wp-includes/feed-rss2.php:11) in /home/icreativem/domains/office-it.org/public_html/wp-content/plugins/exec-php/includes/runtime.php(42) : eval()'d code on line 30

ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url.com/"
%>

ASP .NET Redirect

JSP (Java) Redirect

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.new-url.com/" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%>

CGI PERL Redirect

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect("http://www.new-url.com/");

Ruby on Rails Redirect

def old_action
headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently"
redirect_to "http://www.new-url.com/"
end

Redirect Old domain to New domain (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all directories and pages of our old domain will get correctly redirected to our new domain. The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of our old website (i.e the same directory where our index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with our actual domain name.

In addition to the redirect we would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Redirect to www (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of our old website (i.e the same directory where our index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with our actual domain name.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Free Tool to Test

Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker is the free web services to test redirection.

• ZoomClouds: create a tag cloud using any RSS feed. Using a small snippet code embed the cloud on any web page (e.g. TechCrunch tag cloud). It has its API using which you can have better control over the cloud you create and also build powerful mashups.
• Tagline Generator: a simple PHP codebase that lets you generate chronological tag clouds from simple text data sources (e.g: US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud)
• TagCrowd: web-based tag cloud generator. Manually enter text or upload a text file to create a tag cloud.
• IBM Many Eyes: The Many Eyes tag cloud can show one of two kinds of data: free text, or a two-column table of tags and numbers.
• ToCloud: It has a page to cloud tool which takes a URL and creates a tag cloud from it. I tried one for technacular which can be found here.
• ZoomTags: you can put small (or large) tag clouds on your web page and earn revenue from your web site
• Cloud Control for ASP.NET
• Tag Cloud Builder: cut and paste the text to be clouded and create the cloud.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior 3: for WordPress
• How To Make a Tag Cloud using CFML
• Tagcloud Font Distributor: assign font sizes to tags based on their counts (PHP based)
• How to Make a Tag Cloud for Movable Type Blogs
• Tagadelic: Tag cloud for Drupal
• CodeProfessor: Building A Tag Cloud in WordPress
• Creating a Tag Cloud in ASP.NET
• Designing With Code: How to Create a Tag Cloud
• Building a tag cloud in Java
• Tag Cloud with Database: PHP and MySQL
• A Tag cloud solution in Django
• HTML::TagCloud: Perl module to generate tag cloud

Other links related to tag clouds:

• Tag Clouds Gallery: Examples And Good Practices
• How to Style a Tag Cloud
• Styling a tag cloud
• Tag Cloud Font Distribution Algorithm

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