Scott Rockers' Blog » Useful Websites

Envato Birthday Bundle

admin — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 21:46:37 +0000

Envato is turning five, and celebrating another year with an amazing bundle for sale, the Envato Birthday Bundle. This year they’re going all out and giving you more than $500 ($507 in fact) worth of some of the most awesome marketplace files around for the rock bottom price of $20. That’s a saving of more than 90%!

This bundles has motion graphics, sound effects, music, tutorials, code, site templates and themes, stock photography, Flash and Unity, graphics and vectors, 3d models and more! There are 51 files all for only $20! But be quick, this deal is available for 4 days only! ( 22nd to 26th midday AEST ).

This is a really great deal, get it while you can.

Cya

Groovesharks Amazingness (wotw)

admin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:43:39 +0000

For my second entry into the website of the week (wotw), I wanted to rant on how much I love Grooveshark. If you don’t know what it is yet then you need help. Grooveshark is another online music system that allows you to listen to music. Like other music websites like Pandora, and Jango you can set up radio stations that will randomly play songs similar to the artist of your choice. But unlike those other sites Grooveshark allows you to create your own playlists, listen to any song at any time, replay songs, and there aren’t those annoying ads between every song. The only ad is on the right and that’s for the free version. You can pay $3 and the ads will go away, but its really not all that bad with the single add on the right. They also have some really cool features like the RSS feed of songs you are listening too and they have a really cool Grooveshark WordPress Plugin. For me who sits in front a computer more than 8 hours a day, a really well made music site that allows you to listen to the music you want is vital to get those creative juices going. The most amazing thing of all is that the whole site is made in Flash and has really great features like the use of the back and forward button (you know how often Flash sites suck as this). Check it out, I highly recommend it, and maybe down the road I will create a cool Flash RSS Grooveshark Reader or something.

Cya

Free Web Icons Download (wotw)

admin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:58:22 +0000

Website of the Week (wotw) is a new series I am doing on my blog, featuring one website per week or as often as I find a good one. I was basically doing this before when I would talk about other really useful websites that I use all the time or ones I come across while surfing on the net. Now this will by no means be anything close to thefwa.com in terms of awesomeness but it might be useful to anyway out there who is a surfing trying to find some good stuff.

This first entry in the Website of the week is Free Icons: More than 100,000 Icons in One Place. Its a really great site for all things icons, and if you still can’t find an icon that you need you will surely find something that could help you at least get started. Be careful though, you can spend hours looking at all the different icons without even realizing the time flying by.

Cya

SEO Check List

admin — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:55:22 +0000

I wanted to create a SEO check list for every website that I work on, that way I could go back and reference it after finishing up a site. These methods are proven and if you follow this SEO checklist as well, then you will have increased traffic on your site too. If you want proof of it working, you can check out my other post Search Engine Optimization Techniques where I explain more in detail about all these points. This check list is just a quick guide to help remind you of whats left to finish on the website to optimize it for Search engine ranking. Here we go:

First, you need to validate all of your webpages on your site (meaning your html code needs to not have any errors or warnings in it). This is the most important step because if the bot can’t index your page then how is it going to know how to categorize it. You can do that here: w3c Markup Validation Service
Select the keywords that pertain to your particular post or page. Its important to select your keywords using a Keyword Tool, like Google Adwords Keyword Tool, so you know how many people are searching the specific terms you are choosing and which ones have the least competition.
Insert your keywords into these parts of the webpage:
1. Title – Very important, the title appears in the search engine results page as the link, Google uses the title tag for determining page relevance and ranks the page higher if the saearch phrase is found in the title.
2. URL – Your keywords should be used in the url that specific page, either in the directory or file name. Its good to use hyphens instead of a space in naming convention.
3. headings – Every page should have a heading
  tag, and the keywords should be used in this and the h1 tag should be used only once.
4. Text – In the text on your page, its very important to use the keywords in the first part of your webpage content. Also, if there is a small amount of text on the page it could cause the page to be ranked poorly too.
5. keywords Meta Tag – Every webpage should have the keywords used in “Keywords Meta Tag”. You add this line of code in between the tags:
6. Description Meta Tag – You add them like this:
Links – Use keywords in your links instead of using “click here” or phrases like that.
Images – all tags should use the alt attribute using the keywords
Include a robots.txt file in the site root of your website. Even if the robots.txt file is blank upload one to your server because it will prevent your site from producing error messages every time a search engine spider visits your site.
Include a sitemap.xml file in the site root of your website. There is a website that will automate or help you create/ edit a sitemap.xml file, it called xml-sitemaps.com.

This is just a really quick seo check list that will dramatically help with your websites overall SEO, but if you don’t think your site is being indexed by google still, you can go to google.com/addurl and add your site url and google will start to index your site.

Cya

jQuery: The Write Less, Do More Javascript Library

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:57:32 +0000

Keeping up with the latest trends in web development is tough sometimes, only because there are new things always being created. jQuery is one of the newer creations that have come up in the last several years and its not going away. It is the most popular JavaScript library in use today. If you don’t know what jQuery is then here is a brief description: jQuery is a JavaScript Library that is fast and concise that makes HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development much easier. “jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.” It’s lightweight, around 23kb, and cross browser compliant and compliant with CSS3 as well. You can create sliding banners, dropdown navigations, and much more with it. I am trying to learn more and more of it everyday, and its pretty exciting. jQuery is provided under the MIT and GPL licenses which means you can use it in your commercial projects like selling of themes and stuff. There are several good tutorials and other helpful resources on their website and I would highly recommend it and learning some yourself.

Cya

Web Developer Toolbar Add-on for Firefox

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:34:11 +0000

I wanted to take a second to talk about an awesome add-on for firefox: the Web Developer Toolbar. The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It’s a must have for all developers and designers because it saves countless hours of developing and troubleshooting time, and it has tons of really great features. One of those great features is the ability to edit the CSS of a website in real time and see your changes updated on the web page as you type them. Then you can save out the changes you made and update accordingly. This alone can save you tons of time when sifting through the files on your server searching for the correct CSS file to update, uploading changes you made to it and then refreshing the browser to see the changes. Another really nice feature is the one-click validating of your page’s HTML, CSS, and javascript. Instead of going to the W3C Markup Validation Website, and manually copying and pasting the urls into the field. It automatically does it for you, SO TIGHT!!!!! There are several other features of it that are really nice and if you are a designer or developer of websites I highly recommend it.

Cya

PureMVC – A Lightweight Open Source Framework for Flash

admin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:05:39 +0000

I was looking around on the internet and come across the PureMVC website and was pretty impressed. PureMVC is a lightweight framework for creating applications based upon the classic Model, View and Controller concept. This concept is an architectural pattern used in coding that isolates the application logic for the user from the GUI, allowing development to come from different places “permitting independent development, testing and maintenance of each”. PureMVC is open source and was originally implemented in the ActionScript 3 language for use with Adobe Flex, Flash and AIR, is now being ported to all major development platforms. I have taken a very quick look at it but it seems very cool. An example of this in use is the T-mobile website, which has a very cool flash GUI on the front page, take a look and see what I mean. The picture above is taken from the PureMVC website.

Cya

Add .html to WordPress Pages

admin — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:59:55 +0000

Have you ever needed to add .html to WordPress pages? I know I did, and I found a cool plugin created by IntroSites that does this for any WordPress created page. Its a simple idea but very useful especially for the project I am currently working on. I wanted to write a quick post about it and kudos to them for making it.

Cya

CU3ER – A Free Flash 3d Image Slider

admin — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:11:46 +0000

I just heard about a free flash 3d image slider creator called CU3ER. It looks amazing, its free to use in your own and commercial projects, its customizable by XML, and you can tailor any of the transitions and several other things to make it your own. I am in the process of creating my first template to sell on ThemeForest, another Envato Marketplace website, and I am definitely going to use it. Art director and designer Stefan Kovac came up with it and much thanks goes out to him for such an awesome utility.

Cya

Search Engine Optimization Techniques

admin — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:55:06 +0000

Since the beginning of working on web development and design, I have been enthralled into SEO (Seach Engine Optimization) and its importance in helping me market myself and the websites that I maintain and create. I wanted to quickly talk about some of the techniques that I use when creating and developing a new site. I have proof that these techniques work as well as a resource that will back up my arguments. A couple of months ago I finished the redesign of the company website at which I work, DataPath, Inc. Before I applied the redesign, I tracked the words “Data Path” and found out what the page ranking was for the three major search engines, which are Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search (now Bing). The ranking was not that high and it was usually on the second page or near the bottom of the first. After applying the redesign and waiting a couple of months for the bots to read the new content and structure, the ranking had jumped up to be the within the top 5 searches on all three search engines, and came to be third on Google.

First, I make sure all the pages of the website are validated. Which means all the html, css, and javascript code is correct and in valid markup, and you do this so that bots that search engines send out to read your site can easily extract and classify what’s relevant on your page. If your web pages can’t be read by the search engine bots then how will the search engines know your relevance. To validate your site, you go to The W3C Markup Validation Service and input your website’s urls in the search field, hit “Check”, and then fix the errors and warnings on that web page.

Secondly, I make sure that all the link tags in your website aren’t “‘Click here’ to read more.” Links hold a lot of weight when bots read your site. The text of the link is what is important, so I make sure that it is relevant to what you are wanting to see. For example, look at the links on this post.

Thirdly, I make sure that the title tags are different on every page and rellevant to what is on each page. Also, make sure to add the description meta tag within the head tag, which is what is displayed under the title on the search engines results page.

Also, I create a sitemap.xml file and robots.txt file on the website. These give the bots a easier way to see the structure of your site, including the robots.txt file which blocks the bots from crawling certain parts of your site that you don’t want indexed.

There are some cheap and easy ways to get your sites’ page ranking to increase but they do not last and it can cause search engines to penalize your site. So be weary of easy quick fixes such as adding duplicate content. Also, other things that might hurt your page ranking are broken links and images, and not putting alt and title attributes with your image and alt tags. But usually the W3C Validator page will let you know about these problems. You can check for broken links and image links by going to The W3C Link Checker. And make sure your css is validated too, by going to The W3C CSS Validation Service.

Some other techniques I use to help SEO is to have logical or friendly url names for your pages. If you have a bunch of products with a page for each one, have those pages under the folder products, it’s as simple as that and remember that any page on your website shouldn’t be more than three clicks from the root page. Also, if your site is large enough, its good to use breadcrumb navigation for user friendliness.

Finally, when I finish the website I implement Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools into it. Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website’s traffic and marketing effectiveness, which basically means that it is a very comprehensive stat tool for the traffic on your website. Google Webmaster Tools shows you how Google crawls and indexes your website to help diagnose any problems.

These are just some of the things I do to increase SEO and it really seems to help. All these points are backed by an article titled 20 SEO Tips That Ever Web Developer Should Know. Sometime later I will talk about user friendliness and the importance of it.

Cya

Adobe Kuler AIR Application

admin — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:09:11 +0000

Adobe Kuler is a web-hosted application for exploring, creating and sharing color themes. You can experiment quickly with color variations and browse and use thousands of themes from the Kuler community. I just want to say I really love this site and I use it all the time. If I have a new client, I create a color theme, save it, and then I can show the client the theme from anywhere in the world as long as I have internet access.

Something else really sweet that I just found out is that they have created an AIR application that runs locally on your computer. Also, it allows you to import themes directly into Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Illustrator, Indesign, Photoshop). Pretty sweet, huh?

Cya

31 Days of iPhone Apps

admin — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:03:05 +0000

I just found a new site today that wrote 31 iPhone applications in 31 days, its called AppsAmuck. And I think its a good place to start to create my own iPhone App. I have been thinking about doing this for a little while now because my wife got an iPhone for Christmas. I want to see what I can do with it, because I really love the interface and motion controls of the iPhone.

There have been a few hiccups I have come across already while researching this. First off, the iPhone Development Center says that the SDK to develop the apps in is only available for the Mac OS X Leopard. This is quite a big hurdle for me since I don’t have a Mac, but my brother (Adam) has already started trying to figure out what to do about this. So Adam and Mark, a co-worker of ours, have gotten Leopard to work on his a virtual machine running on Windows, now we just have to replicate his process. The second hiccup is that to publish these apps to the actual app Store on the iPhone, you have to pay a licence fee of $99. I guess this can come later if actually do come up with some cool apps. So it may take a little longer than I thought it would to get started but it will happen.

I will post an update once I know more.

Cya

WhatTheFont Font Recognition System

admin — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:22:31 +0000

One of my friends Jeff found this website that allows you to upload a scanned image of some font and instantly find the closest matches to that font in their database. I have a hard time figuring out what fonts people use in their projects and this site allows me to do that, easily.

Here is the link, WhatTheFont.

Cya