Useful Sites and Resources
This is a collection of recommended sites offering tools that are indispensable to a webmaster.
You will find reference and tutorial sites for php programming, mysql, html and javascript. You will also find sites offering excellent SEO and site debugging tools.
- php.net
The language this site and many other dynamic sites are written in.
- MySQL
The world's most popular open source database.
- ApacheFriends.org
The home of XAMPP - Apache web server, PHP and MySQL for the pc. All that you need to install and test your web applications on your home computer.
- dBpowerAMP
The dBpowerAMP family of audio programs. Everything you need to rip or burn cd's, play and convert between a multitude of audio file types, or manage portable audio devices. The converter is free, as is the multi-player.
- The "Howto" site
Lots of web building tutorials including a comprehensive yet very easy to follow guide to .htaccess.
- The mod_rewrite .htaccess generator
Generate SEO friendly url's according to 2 methods. Useful for expressing dynamic url's that normally contain query strings as static url's.
- Open Source Web Design
A place to download free web design templates, usign the latest techniques (CSS, XHTML) and share yours with others.
- Google Sitemap Generators: #1 and #2
Generate XML or TXT sitemaps, appropriate for submitting to Google. Also html sitemaps for using on your own website.
- Which Google Has My Site?
Google has a googlesion datacenters and indexes supposedly mirroring each other to speed up searching. You get to use whichever Google is available at a given moment and you'd never know the difference. But the mirrors aren't all in sync most of the time, so they don't report the same results at all. Now you see it, now you don't. This site lets you query all the Googles (well, hopefully all) so you have an idea which ones have indexed your site and where it's coming up in searches using that particular Google. It should finally explain the apparently erratic behaviour of Google's index and dispel some myths concerning conspiracies, penalties, etc.
- Google Datacenter Saturation
A handier tool yet to see how many pages of a site each of some 40 Google datacenters has indexed, with links to the resutls from each.
- The Oy-Oy Website Toolset - it's all about Google, or is it?
Find a fast tool to check how many pages of a domain Google datacenters have indexed and much more. You will find there the swissknife of web presence saturation analysis tools.
- GSiteCrawler
A powerful, complete, yet simple to use Windows program to crawl a website and produce Google xml sitemaps and much, much more. John Mueller keeps on outdoing himself.
- Xenu's Link Sleuth
Free easy to use program to find broken internal or external links and orphan files on websites. A staple tool for debugging any site.
- W3C Schools
All the Web-building tutorials you need, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, Multimedia and WAP
- W3C Validators
All the various validators, such as HTML and CSS validator, needed to ensure your web pages are as bugfree as possible, and fully compliant with the latest rules.
- Full site validator
What we've all been waiting for, a tool to perform the W3 validation on all pages of a website. Extremely useful.
- Cached.it
Dig into Google's cache and see what you can find about your website, including future pagerank (hmmm....). Interesting tool. A bit vague on how to use it though.
- Statcounter Invisible Tracker
Tracking visitors to and through your site is a child's play with this great free tool which offers very comprehensive stats. Beware, both the stats and the Statcounter Forum are highly addictive!
- Spider Simulator
It will simulate what a typical web spider "sees" on the web page as it crawls it.
- Full SEO Toolset
A comprehensive toolset for search engine optimization. Try it, you'll be amazed at what you find.
- Spam Detector for web pages
Test your web page to see if a bot may consider it spammy or not.
- Neighbourhood Analyzer
Check the sites you link to and the sites they link to and detect any "bad neighbourhood" tendency. Amazingly accurate. Find evidence of hacked serevrs and sites that way too.
- Copyscape
Powerfull tool to find other web pages with substantially the same content as yours.
- Web Page Analyzer
This will analyze a web page's contents and produe a speed of loading report and show warnings for whatever may cause slow downs.
