SEO/SEM Downloads and Other Tools

Reported by Slightly Shady SEO: Russian crackers found a way to crack Yahoo CAPTCHA. Although he mentioned it, he does not want to try it out as he mentions on his blog post:

I have 2 rules for software. I don’t download odd binaries from Blackhats, and I don’t download anything from russians. Especially russian security experts who operate under pseudonyms.

The crack is found (more…)

The urllist.txt file is not something new. In fact it is quite old. I just did a quick search on it and found only a few people talking about urllist.txt, and these are like dated in ancient 2005. But still just for that small little quicker submission time advantage, we still use this. But since there is a Sitemap Generator for Wordpress, I decided to have my own urllist.txt generator. Although mine is not really a plugin, it is just a file you upload in the root url together with your sitemap.xml. And the urllist.txt file will read the sitemap.xml file and generate the file from there. You need to be able to mod-rewrite too to use this.

Download urllist.zip Generator

Please remember that this file is not a Wordpress Plugin. It simply reads the sitemap.xml file. Thus if you are not using the Wordpress Sitemap Generator, maybe you should get that first.

Instructions:

1. Upload the file urllist.php to where your sitemap.xml file is.
2. Add these lines as the first lines of your .htaccess file:Options +FollowSymLinks
   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteRule urllist.txt$ urllist.php

   Note: They should be the first lines because if you place them by the end, Wordpress’ rewrite rules will be followed.

3. Done. Visit your urllist.txt file in your browser to see if it’s working.
4. Go to: Yahoo Site Explorer and submit and authenticate your site and add the urllist.txt there as your feed.

Since this is not a Wordpress Plugin, you can use this on any site that has a sitemap.xml file. Just update the sitemap.xml file, you update the urllist.txt file automatically.

Isulong SEOph LightboxGallery Demo Page

More and more sites have been amazed with the cool Javascript and CSS work done on Lightbox JS v2.0, which is basically making this cool way of viewing images when someone clicks on thumbnails more Web 2.0. No page reloading, no annoying pop-ups. And it is all powered by Scriptaculous. And scriptaculous is powered by Prototype.

Prototype was made to have a comprehensive library of Javascript functions so you no longer need to make them, but it’s comprehensiveness makes things a bit overwhelming to learn it all. So this is where Scriptaculous tries to simplify the process making functions more user friendly for the coder, that may not be that much of a hard core Javascript programmer. And Lightbox JS v2.0 is for a specific purpose of handling images on how to preview them when a thumbnail of an image is clicked. But to make a gallery out of it, using Lightbox JS v2.0 can be a tedious task to do especially when handling many images.

Here comes Isulong SEOph LightboxGallery

LightboxGallery is a script I made in my attempt to simplify the process of having many thumbnails tiled on a page with your Lightbox JS v2.0 code all ready set for you to use. It uses PHP and does not require any database, but requires to number your images incrementaly starting with number 1 and at the current moment, will only support .JPG files, all in lowercase. Although this was made real quickly, more improvements will be see in the future.

What you can easily do with LightboxGallery is tile even hundreds of thumbnails, you set the size of the thumbails (images are not resize, you will have to be in the proper size before using LighboxGallery), and the distance between each thumbnail. Since these are floating div tags, that wrap just like text when the end is met and will go on the next row, you can easily control the number of thumbnails in a row by changing the width of the container. This container may be a table or a div tag, which ever you are more comfortable with.

This is very easy to setup in these few easy steps.

Preparation of Isulong SEOph LightboxGallery

• Prepare both the actual size of images and the thumbnails too. If you have thousands of images and is using Windows, there is a Windows application called Photo Resizer. It is a free software by EMCO and they have very cool network security software as well. Rename your photos as numbers starting with the number 1, and going to the next number without missing a number and having the lowercase .jpg extention. Like 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg and so on. The order of the numbers will be the same order as they appear in the gallery. Make sure each thumbnail filename number will have the same filename number in their corresponding bigger images. It is required that all thumbnails have all the same size. Although it is not required in the bigger images to have the size. So if you have a mix of portrait and landscape photos, you might want to resize the thumbnails in a way that they all have the same height and width.
• Download Isulong SEOph LightboxGallery here. Unzip it all and place the whole folder lightboxgallery on your web hosting account. Do not upload the files inside the lightboxgallery and mix it with your other files unless you really know what you are doing. Having all files together makes it clean and neat within your file structure as well.
• If you have any captions for the images, save each caption in a text file and name them 1.txt, 2.txt. 3.txt and so on corresponding to the same numbers of the images. Save these caption files together with your thumbnails. The captions are not required.

Setting up the Isulong SEOph LightboxGallery

• Open the file lighboxgallery.php inside your lighboxgallery folder and place the URL where the lightboxgallery folder is located like in the example below:
  $lightboxGalleryURL = "http://downloads.isulongseoph.com.ph/";
  Always end your URLs with a trailing slash.
• Upload all big images in the folder gallery-images. Upload all thumbnails and caption text files in the folder gallery-thumbnails.
• Just add these few lines of code in your html code.
  In the head section, preferably just before the closing head tag:
  <?php include("lightboxgallery/lightboxgallery.php"); ?>

  Right after the opening body tag:
  <?php include("lightboxgallery/after-open-body-tag.php"); ?>

  Just before the closing body tag:
  <?php include("lightboxgallery/before-close-body-tag.php"); ?>

  Add this attribute in your body tag:
  <body onload="pwPreloadImages();">

  And finally, where you want your thumbnail gallery to appear, replace the values with the actual values you want to use.
  <?php lightboxGallery(
'thumbnail height', 'thumbnail width',
'margin width', 'margin height',
'border color'
); ?>

  As a guide, here is a copy of the code I used for the gallery above:
  <?php lightboxGallery(
'45', '45',
'20', '20',
'000000'
); ?>

Done! Have fun! This will even get better and easier to use. Visit this page from time to time for updates.

What to expect in future releases of the Isulong SEOph LightboxGallery

• Pagination
• Mouseover previewing like IStockphoto
• Automatic Thumbnail resizing
• No more filename naming conventions
• Wordpress plugin, Textmate Plugin, Typepad Plugin

This Isulong SEOph LightboxGallery had problems in Internet Explorer when thumbnails were clicked and the page is not fully loaded yet. And this problem was solved with the use of a webpage preloader. The code for the webpage preloader was derived from the work of Nimrod Abing.