by WebKeyDesign | Dec 28, 2005 | WebKeyDesign
This week I added a new section to WebKeyDesign: The WebKeyDesign Store is an online shop for all those books that you need to read when you first start learning web site design. I figure that the store would help make WebKeyDesign more popular in general with our site visitors and search engines, and secondly it comes in handy for refering friends and clients to yet another source of self-help. Many times I get asked about how to learn HTML and other web technologies like PHP and MySQL, and usually I can recommend a book or two on the subject, but I always end up having to look up my recommendations on Amazon.com, so I figure why not just make an Amazon based web store? This week, I got around to putting something together that works.
The WebKeyDesign Store is powered by Associate-o-matic’s Amazon Shop script. This is a PHP based script. Most of the other Amazon scripts that I found were based on Perl, but I chose Associate-o-matic based on their Lite script which is commissioned based. Most scripts cost around $99, and their look leaves a lot to be desired. Although I did find BlueLightSoft’s AJAX based Store scipt interesting, I decided against it because it is still in testing stages.
by WebKeyDesign | Dec 27, 2005 | News & Trends
If you have a blog and care about your content, you definitely need to read Om Malik’s post on Wholesale Blog Plagiarism. Apparantly Om Malik’s popular Om Malik on Broadband Weblog has been for a long time the target of plagiarism, otherwise known as splogging. Sploggers have been using the RSS feeds from Om Malik’s site to republish his content word for word on their site. The main purpose of this is to of course make revenue from the advertisements of the splog site. Although splogs and scrappers sites do sometimes improve the original website’s pagerank, the lost ad revenue may be more important to bloggers than any pagerank improvement. When it comes to Om Malik’s blog, his popularity I would think would make his content not really suitable for splogging, but obviously sometimes sploggers do not really think these things through I guess.
In general bloggers may need to start considering just how much is their content worth and if RSS feeds should be curtailed to only include post summaries instead of the entire post. But even then, scrappers can use any combination of Perl and PHP to copy any content they wish, so the war against splogging is not going to end by turning off RSS feeds.
The irony of course is that many bloggers see themselves as non-commercial entities that spread information for free, but the minute they realize that someone else is making money off their labors, the converstation takes quite a different tone. However, can you really blame them? In Om Malik’s case, the site’s content is a literal copy, word for word; this makes it not only plagerism, but outright insulting.
by WebKeyDesign | Dec 27, 2005 | Web Site Basics
With WordPress 2.0 coming out this week, it only seems fitting that I write something about Content Management Systems. Many webmasters find it hard to choose the right CMS or weblog script to run their site. Other than trying out the demos on sites like OpenSourceCMS.com and reading an occasional review, most CMS scripts are not very well reviewed. Just recently though, MacInTouch.com started one of their user contributed reports on the subject of CMS scripts. Although the report is for webmasters currently interested in running a CMS script on Mac OS X, the information and user comments on different scripts is helpful for your basic Linux server setup.
Content Management System (CMS) Report
