Our websites are like shops and just like shops they earn no money when customers can not get in.
I came across a service that will monitor your site and send either an SMS or an email when a website stops working and another message when the site springs back to life.
The service is free of charge and they promise to not use your email address for anything other than site notifications. I do not know how often they ping sites on their list but as an alternative to my current service that works well but sends me a metric shedload of sellymails I think this is worth a look.
The URL of this service: Ding It's UP! Site up monitor
Filed under Blogging Tools, Ideas and Tips, Reviews by on Dec 1st, 2008. Comment. 
Most of us are running small sites with maybe a few hundred pages. Some are running sites with a coupel of thousand pages and a few of us have sites with hundreds of thousands of pages.
The issues connected with optimising these larger sites are not entirely the same as for the smaller ones as we sometimes find from forum posts.
Today I read an article from WebPro News which starts to explore some of the issues and solutions. I'd suggest a shufti at the comments as well as the main article. Perhaps the article may give some ideas for those of us facing large site challenges.
The two biggest takeaways for me were the use of tiering – placing search terms in order of priority to enable a manageable workload and secondly the use of XML sitemaps to aid the indexing process. My experience has been that getting pages indexed at all is oneof the toughest challenges and using XML sitemaps may be a way forward in providing a partial solution in an automated form.
Filed under Ideas and Tips by on Dec 2nd, 2008. Comment.
OK, so they may not be new as in 'written yesterday' but they are new to me.
There are two that I have been looking at over the past couple of days. The first is One Click Plugin Updater
I hear the collective cry 'but Andrew, WordPress already has an updater!' and I would say 'yes, but not like this one!'
Actually this one allows users to add plugins and themes to their blog from within WordPress thus saving a bit of messing around. The author notes that the plugion is moving toward obsolesence as WP takes the functionality of the plugin and makes part of the core WP application.
The second is called 'Better Blogroll Widget' and this is a cool tool. With this you can have your blogroll links changing at random and even use it as a basic ad rotator. I'll let the developer tell you all about it though.
The Blogroll widget excites me because I can see how to use my blogrolls to provide links to my other sites without having to have a huge long blogroll making the sidebars look ugly. I also like the idea of being able to easily sell text links to other webmasters and companies and BBW certianly makes that easier, especially as I can even use to manage image ads.
Filed under Blog Promotion, Blog Setups, Blogging Tools, Ideas and Tips by on Dec 29th, 2008. Comment.
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