DreamWeaver Kit

People have being looking for a toolbar for Chrome browser to display the famous Google PageRank bar of the web page currently visited web page.
Well there isn’t one, unless somebody can tell me otherwise.

Thanks to the open-source community, you can instead use  a browser extension published by “kalehrish”. Here is a link to that PageRank Extension for Google Chrome. I just downloaded and installed it. As far as I know, it integrates well with Google Chrome 4.0.249.78 (36714) for PC.  I did not get a chance to check how it would behave on a Mac.
It works like a charm for me and it’s very lightweight.

A while back, Google  removed PageRank from the Webmaster Tools section of its website. The big G also informed us that little green bar is not as important as we might think. Indeed the PageRank is not all there to SEO but that green bar is an indicator of the quantity & quality of inbound links to a given web page.

We know that search engines put more emphasis on relevance of the page content to the search query for ranking. But all things being equal, the higher the Pagerank, the better the page placement in search engines results.

Another option is the Kuber PageRank Checker. It not only display the Pagerank  beside the address box but it also show the Alexa rank and a whois link when clicked: talk about killing three birds with one stone.

Over the holiday break I had some time to create some new free Dreamweaver templates that are built on the 960 Grid System. The templates use a 12 column grid and a 30 pixel gutter. This is really the first time I had implemented the 960 grid into a template, so I’m still deciding if [...]

In a forum where I am an active member, I recently offered a quick solution to create a password protected page where the visitor does not need to register in order to access the page information. The server-side code of page in question is written in PHP but one can use any other language to get the same results.

1. First I set a pHP variable
   $validlogin=false;
   This variable will later determine whether the user will be able to see the webpage info or will be presented with a login form.Then define an array containing the values of passwords to be given to people you would like to grant access to the web page.
   $thepasses=array(’pass1′, ‘pass2, ‘pass3′);
   pass1, pass2 and pass3 being the password you would like to set
2. Second I set a authentication process that use a cookie variable to compared the value stored in the visitor browser with a preset value. In this case the cookie variable is “validlogin” and the value tested against is  ‘userOK’. That means if the user is already logged sucessfully then s/he will no longer need to login again for the lifetime of the cookie which  we will define later.if (isset($_COOKIE['validlogin']) && $_COOKIE['validlogin']==’userOK){
   $validlogin=true;
   }
3. Another authentication step will be taken if no cookie is found or if the cookie value does not match what we are looking for. In that case we check to see if the visitor has submitted the login form and the password submitted is in the array of password defined earlier:else if(isset($_POST['userpass']) && $_POST['userpass']!=”){
    foreach($thepass as $key=>$value){
          if(trim($_POST['userpass'])==$value){
              $validlogin=true;
              break;
         }//end if
    }//end foreach loop
   }//end else
   
   As one can see the foreach loop goes through the array of passwords to see if any of those value matched te password submitted through the login form. If a match is found then a “true” value is assigned to the variable $validlogin and we can safely end the loop.
4. Once the $validlogin variable is “true” then we can set a cookie to store an authentication parameter in the user computer. This prevent the system from asking the visitor to login everytime s/he refreshes or reload the page or come back to the site after a short period of time:if($validlogin){
    setcookie(’validlogin’, ‘userOK’, time()+3600);
   }This set a cookie named “validlogin” with a value “userOK” that will persist for 1 hour (3600 seconds). You can increase that value to any amount you deem reasonable enough. The cookie lifetime will be increased whenever the logged user reloads the page or revisits that web page: that resets the cookie for another hour.
5. Inside the actual web page (between the the opening <body> and closing </body> HTML tags you can now insert the logic that would either display the web page information if “$validlogin” is “true” otherwise the visitor will be presented a login form:<?php if($validlogin){ ?>
   The web page information you would like to shar goes here<?php } else { ?>
   The login form goes here. The only restriction is for the password field name to be “userpass” 

   <?php } ?>

You can see the entire code here.
All you need is just copy, paste and save it using the “php” file extension.

Email communication is without any doubt one of the most important traffic on the internet. The very first thing most of us do in the morning after “booting up” the computer is to log into our email account to read our email mail while sipping some coffee (or tea for the rest of us).

First you need to weed out SPAM, then sort the remaining message either by sender, try to spot the most interesting subject line or maybe just click on the very first message then read through.

If you use email as the primary mean of communication with your clients, partners or other associates as I do then you understand how important is it to keep your inbox clean to receive only emails related to your business. Keeping your email address private is the best way to fight against SPAM.

As the saying goes, do not mix business and pleasure. Well, I can also add do not mix business with family as far as email goes.

My point is, do not use the same email address for your business  communications  and for keeping in touch with your friends or relatives.

And you know what, you could even do better by separating those two groups as well.  Get different email addresses for friends and relatives. That way you can always be assured your family dirty laundry and drama will not spill over to your friends when you accidentally hit the dreadful “Reply All” link.

I cannot recall how many times I started exchanging emails with a long lost friend who soon afterwards start sending me jokes, chain letters and more.

The worst part is those very same messages are sent in bulk as Carbon Copies (CC) to all her/his contact list with my email address in plain sight for just someone  in that network of “friends” to harvest and start spamming the rest of us.

Online people networks are not that different from their offline counterparts. Most of the time keeping them separate is a must.

So please ask my permission first before sharing my email address with a third party be it a relative, an acquaintance or a business partner.
My  privacy is paramount online and offline.

Over the last month, JustDreamweaver.com has been undergoing a complete overhaul. Not just cosmetically, but under the hood as well.
In designing the new site, my goal was to create a much more productive visitor experience with easier to use navigation, much better organization, and faster page loads from streamlined code. I will be the first [...]

WebAssist has recently introduced their Essential Suite of Dreamweaver extensions. This bundle of tools replaces their Web Developer Suite, and adds a few more extensions to the mix. If you were to buy all the extensions individually, you would pay over $1,300. The Essential Suite is prices at a very competitive $599.99, which is a [...]

I receive an email this morning from a client I just provided Dreamweaver Training to.
Here it is:

A quick question for you…I’m wondering about the differences between using tables, layers, and floating divs (is that what you call what we used yesterday with CSS?) When would someone want to use one vs. the others? Layers seem to be the easiest way to create your layout the way you want it, but I’m wondering what the drawbacks are to that? Also wondering how you might combine two or more methods to create your layout?

Thanks again Alex!
It was great to work with you…

Here is in a nutshell my response:

Tables are more appropriate to present a grid-layout data just as you would display data in an Excel spreadsheet with rows and columns. As you will notice in the index.html file inside the portfolio folder, we use a table to display the content of that page because the information is presented as a grid.

However using tables for the website layout is cumbersome. Tables take more time to display compared to DIV elements because all the rows and columns are tied together. The web browser has to make an extra effort to have all the cells in the right places taking into account all the rowspan and colspan that might be defined in the HTML markup.

You can hide or show a box (layer, div tag, container) either by changing its visibility from visible to hidden or set its display property to “inline” , “block” or “none”.

Floating Div tags comes in handy when the need arises to align rectangular blocks of content side by side horizontally without having to use absolute positioning. A div tag creates is typically a block-level container. As such has natural tendency to occupy a 100% width of its parent container and push down any another other element placed after it in the HTML markup. Therefore by specifying the width of div tags and floating them you can place them side by side as long as the width of their common parent container can allow.

The only drawback of using CSS is that you have to do the math as we did yesterday to get the right positioning or calculate the dimensions of each box to align them side by side.

So always design you website layout using div tags (i.e. #wrapper, #header, #maincontent, #footer, ….) as the main building blocks of your web page layout. You can then use more div tags to create smaller containers for your content and position each section of your web page.

When the data you are presenting is a grid then use tables to get the job done more efficiently. Table and CSS are not mutually exclusive. You can use a table then format its look-and-feel with CSS. Again it keeps your HTML and content semantic clean & tidy, easy to maintain and Search Engines Friendly.

I hope this message answers your questions.

WordPress is hands down the easiest way to launch niche sites in the least amount of time. Thousands of internet marketers rely on the easy installation and near zero setup time required to create a custom niche blog.
The problem arises when it’s time to create your custom sales page in WordPress to sell your product. [...]

If you haven’t been under a rock for the last year, you probably know who Mark Dulisse is. He has developed techniques for making money online that are currently earning him over $10,000 a month on just one site.  He’s not afraid to tell you where he’s come from and where he’s going. And with [...]

I just released my new internet marketing WordPress theme called FlexSqueeze this week. You can take a look at it over at FlexibilityTheme.com .  How does a WordPress affiliate marketing theme relate to Dreamweaver? Because I created it in Dreamweaver, of course!

FlexSqueeze allows internet marketers to easily create squeeze pages in WordPress. With a one-click sales page function, you can take any page on your blog and instantly strip out the navigation and sidebars and all other blog appearance and drive your visitors to your call to action.

FlexSqueze has a new user-interface, so if you’re familiar with my Flexibility or Flexibility 2 themes, you’ll welcome the new tabbed interface. There is a new "Squeeze Page" tab where you can control your sales page background color, header image, link colors, footer color, headline fonts, overall page font size, and much more. All your squeeze page settings are independent from the rest of your blog settings, so if you run a blog on the domain as well, it will not change any of those settings.

I packaged FlexSqueeze with over 250 sales page graphics that can be used on your pages, and I also created another product called the Squeeze Page Vector Pack .  I originally created all the bitmap images included with FlexSqueeze in Fireworks, so as an additional product, I bundled up all the vector images and created both PNG and PSD versions of all the graphics.

If you are a WordPress blogger in need of a way to very quickly create squeeze pages or even complete minisites (there’s a video tutorial to show you how to do this), then take a look at FlexSqueeze and also the Squeeze Page Vector Pack. They are both available at FlexibilityTheme.com .

ShareThis