Have you ever designed a flash button or image animation that you need to redo and then you find out that you misplaced the original files?

Well usually this means that you end up eating your own time and starting over from the beginning. In some cases its not the end of the world but it can be seriously annoying.

Well this is where you would want to make use of a decompiler program or in this case an online service.Flash probe is meant to provide web developers and design enthusiasts a means of quickly creating HTML pages out of Flash-based websites. The free tool will decompile your SWF and show you the images, text and links that are contained in it. Apart from usage statistics, Flash Probe does not collect, resell or permanently host third party content on its server. After submission of a file, the text and images are available for around 30 minutes after which time all content is deleted.

For the most part you can’t expect to get everything that was part of the project but you should be able to grab enough parts to get started again.

Simply upload or enter the url of the flash object that you want to decompile and let the service do the work.

In a short time you will be presented with what they could retrieve from the file.

Again you are not going to endup with the total source that you can just modify and recompile but it is a starting point.

Visit their website

http://www.flashprobe.com

So what is a robots.txt file and how do you modify it so it works well with Google.

What is a robots.txt File
Robots are unmanned Internet tools that visit websites and try to read the content of and index the content of the site. For search engines they are interested in grabbing keywords and links within the site so they can be included in search results for their users.

To do this they read in the HTML content of the page using algorithms to weed out fake content. They will read the title of the page and of headlines and weight that against the rest of the content. They may also look at meta keywords and descriptions located in the header but many robots actually read your pages like a human would. Or at least they try to.

Robots used for advertising banners will read the page and feed an ad banner based on the content of the page. This often happens real time and is transparent to your visitors. This can place an extra load on your server because each page view will require a second, third, fourth or more hits to your pages just to serve your ads.

Ok so what can you do to control these bots? Well a robots.txt file can contain instructions that NICE bots will read and this will let you control how they browse through your site. However even some large search engine companies ignore this file and in that case you will need to setup a .htaccess rule to control the bots access to your site.

Since we are trying to make a nice robots.txt file for Google you should understand that their bots can and do change. Google will give you specific instructions when they change their settings that you can view from your AdSense account.

Setting Up The Robots.txt File
All you need to write a robots.txt file is notepad or other another pure txt file editor.

Start by creating an empty file named robots.txt

Add to that file the following:

Now save this file and upload it to your root website directory.
This is the main directory with your index.html file where people are pointed when they type in www.yoursitename.com in their browser.

This command will allow Google’s Bots to see your whole site. It should be on the top lines of your robots.txt file if you have other commands in your file.

You may also want to limit access to certain directories on your site from all bots.

In other pages we will cover how to block bad bots and how to use meta tags to control bots on your site.

We will also cover how to block bad bots with a .htaccess file.

Remember that controling who indexes your site is never perfect but it is something that you can do to optimize the way your visitors see your site in search engine indexes.

Although there have been abuses of Meta Data by SEO Firms which have changed how Robots use this information it is probably still a good idea to include it if it is not too much trouble.

<META>tags are placed in the <head> area in your webpages. They can contain commands and descriptions and sometimes your blog or website software can include these tags automatically. If not then you will have to find a way to add them to your header area in your website template or html files.

Lets look at some of the more popular <META> tags.

Controlling Robots
There are 2 settings which can be turned on and off
Index this page INDEX, NOINDEX
Follow links on this page FOLLOW, NOFOLLOW

You can also mix and match the index and follow command for instance you could ask the robot not to index this page but follow links to other pages.
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”>

Or you could ask it to index this page but not follow links to other pages.
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

Content Type Descriptions

Now every page you make should have a doctype descriptor as the first line. This is pretty much a mandatory descriptor today because our browsers read in many different file and content types. Meta Descriptors are used for indexing your content and can also include content type and language type instructions.

<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html; charset=US-ASCII” />
<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en-us” />

Content Author Information

It is important to include a human readable copyright notice on your pages but you can also include this information in your meta tags. You can include the Author, Contact info or email and Copyright info.

<meta http-equiv=”author” content=”Jimmy Smith” />
<meta http-equiv=”contact” content=jimmysmith@jimmysmith.com />
<meta name=”copyright” content=”Copyright (c)2001 Jimmy Smith. All Rights Reserved.” />

Search Engine Keywords and Descriptions
Keywords and Descriptions in Meta Tags are not often used anymore because some SEO firms would get fake placement in search engines by manipulating this data. But it is probably not a bad idea to include it anyway until it has been officially deprecated.

<meta name=”description” content=”Jimmy Smith Talks about Farming” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”cows, chickens, oranges, farming, lemons, tractors” />

Other Uses
Meta Data can be used for for any type of descriptive information and some companies such as child safe search engines and website blocking software read the meta tags to see the Rating of the website you are visiting. This information is voluntary by the website owner but if your visitor is using website blocking software and you do not include this tag they will not be able to load your webpages.

an example of such a tag would be:

<meta http-equiv=”pics-label” content=’(pics-1.1 “http://www.icra.org/ratingsv02.html” >

For the most part that means you can’t buy links on the right sites and you can’t go out and generate a bunch of free websites to promote your links. This practice is called link farming and because Search Engines depend on advertising they are always hunting down link farms and excluding them from their databases.

Even so you will still see companies claiming they can place 10,000 good links to your site for $495.99….. Don’t fall for this. The best way is to have good content that visitors will back link or share with friends. Not to mention the fact that if your site is included in a weblink farm you may end up on a black list once the search engine company blocks the farm from their database.

Becoming popular is relatively slow at first unless you have a large advertising budget. Google recommends that a publisher write at least 500 unique pages before they begin to evaluate their websites placement.

For an average Blogger even a commercialized website with just one or a few writers this can mean weeks or months before enough good content is available for both your viewers and for webbots to evaluate.

In our other Guides we will go over methods that can improve not only your traffic but your retention of visitors. We will also cover how to implement an ad campaign and how to ad advertising to your site.

So, pretty much as you probably thought if something seems too good to be true then it probably is.

Value your visitors by making good content and they will return the favor by linking back to you.

The first and most common is a 404 Error.
This is when your visitor trys to visit a page that is not available on your site. This often happens when you change your directory structure or permalink rewrite structure for your pages and although it is an Error it does not really represent a problem occurring.

The best way to handle your 404 errors is to add a 404 error page to your root website directory. If you are using CPanel or another website management panel you can review the ways that your host wants this file written but for the most part it is as simple as writing a basic html page and naming it 404.shtml and placing it in your /public_html/ directory. Note that the file is named SHTML because it is a server scripted file.

Other common website errors include:

206 Partial Content
301 Moved permanently (redirect)
400 (Bad request)
401 (Authorization required)
403 (Forbidden)
404 (Wrong page)
500 (Internal server error)

If you read your website logs you should be concerned if you are getting a large number of any errors.

500 (Internal server error)
This is a very important Error because it means that the scripts on your site are not functioning properly. It is very common to get this error when you are first installing Perl or Php Scripts because during the install or writing process you are likely to mistake a location of a file or forget the dreaded ; at the end of a line.

Once you fix the initial install if you check that the script is working well then 500 server errors may be caused by a slow server where your processes are timing out before they are completed. This is very common on shared hosting and for some website scripts there really is no cure but to move to a dedicated server to gain you more power. However for most basic website software your host should be able to handle a decent amount of load if you do not go overboard with plugins and special features.

Remember if you are seeing these errors in your log files then your visitors are seeing them when they load your site. Installing Error Handling Pages will present your customer with specific information and if you desire a way to contact you.

Writing Your Error Handler Files
You should make a html file that looks like the rest of your site but the content area should announce the information they were looking for can not be found or that an error has happened.

The page should have all the basic navigation working so they can get back to the area they just were or get to your home or contact page.

An easy way is to view your website and then copy the pages web source code into a text document. This is important for Shopping Sites and Blogs whos sites are often split up in a template.

You can also include a Search Box.

Some ad companies frown on placing ads on error pages so check with your program guidelines. The reason behind this is some sites make temporary pages to get into search engines and then take them offline generating thousands of error pages just to get clicks. 

Site Maps for Search Engines
If you find your site is having a number of missing or moved page problems you may want to look into generating a Sitemap file that can be read by search engines. View our other Guides on Search Engine Site Maps.

This is very important for administrators who use Amazon Webstores and for anyone that feeds their content off of remote xml data. If the generation of your sites pages can be unlimited based on an external data resource you should examine more indepth ways to restrict access to any bot.

For WordPress users you want to restrict access to files and directories that are not part of your site. You may also want to restrict access to your images and cache files.

A basic WordPress robots.txt file could include the following:

Notice User Agent * is all…. and that disallows are at the top
followed by overrides for Google AdSense.
An included badbot is also banned based on their user agent info found in the webserver logs.

Remember that a robots.txt file is only as good as the bot that reads it.
If someone is using wget to grab your site or a bot designed to harvest emails and links you are better off stopping it with script level denial, .htaccess or firewall commands.

If your site is getting hammered then contact your Service provider for help.

This info is just for reducing unneeded or unnecessary load by having bots run around in circles not finding what they should be looking for.

To do this you can use the PHP command getcwd() this will retreive the Current Working Directory or the location of the file that is being executed.

Simply make a new text file named whereami.php

Upload this file to the directory that you need to get the path to and load it in your browser.

You should remove the file after it is no longer needed.

You go to a screen where it asks you what type of ads you want on your pages. Of course you select the banner ad because that is the best for placement but there are 2 other ad types (as of now) that you can select.

The first is a full page ad that is shown to the visitor after 3 to 5 page views, we will cover this ad type in a different HowTo

The second is their inline Link Ads that highlight words on your page automatically and then show the visitor a popup ad when they hover over the word.

The inline ad type is best used on pages with a lot of text 500 words or more is best.

You also may want to restrict their use from pages that are official information about your business like your About page or Contact form pages and also your Store Pages where a visitor may be navigated away froma purchase.

Other then that they can be placed on any page simply by adding a small javascript to the page and including the option in your Ad Zone.

Create a New Ad Zone in your Ad Brite Account

For best control select inline ads only.

Fill in all of the information about your site or use the stored info.
Name of ad zone: yoursite.com InLine Ads

Set your keywords and other site information then click Get Ad Code

The ad code is a javascript that you can place anywhere on your page but it is probably best placed in your Header since it is not an ad banner.

To view inline ads only in post and not on pages place the code in your single.php file.

Getting Control over the Placement of the Ads

Once you see the ads have been activated you will notice that words outside of your main post content will be highlighted. You may even see parts of menus and headers and footers being highlighted.

This will make for a very ugly site.

To restrict the area that inline ads will be made in your text you can simply use the following:

<span class=”adbriteinline”> your content here </span>

for WordPress users open your single.php file and wrap the span around your content php

<span class=”adbriteinline”><?php the_content(); ?></span>

Now all of your highlighted inline adbrite ads will be restricted just to your main content area.

Final Note

Every website is different and using inline ads is something that may chase your visitors away but it will reduce ad blindness where visitors completely ignore ads.

You should treat this ad type as you would any other and if you do not see income you may want to restrict its use.

Well Yahoo Buzz is a Beta directory of recent posts to websites, blogs and other information on the web that viewers find interesting enough to give a bump.

To let your visitors submit your sites pages to Yahoo Buzz you can add a Button that will bring your visitors to the yahoo Buzz site.

You have a few options when you select your button including predefining the form fields for the submission.

To get started

Visit Yahoo’s website and choose a button you like

http://buzz.yahoo.com/buttons

You have the choice of a standard button or one that shows how many times your page has been submitted.

Once you have selected the button you want all you need to do is add the javascript to your site.

You also need to replace the ARTICLEURL in the code with the url to the page.

For WordPress users you can replace ARTICLEURL with a link to your Permalink code.

You can also fill in some of the other optional fields with WordPress code.

If you are not using WordPress but you are using PHP there are a number of ways to grab urls and place page titles into your Buzz Buttons. Your use will depend on your website.

You should check with Yahoo’s site for additional updates to their Buzz Buttons

Here are some other optional fields that you can put in your button code.
Optional Elements

To provide a story’s headline upon submission: yahooBuzzArticleHeadline = “Enter Story Headline Here”

To provide a story’s summary upon submission:
yahooBuzzArticleSummary = “Enter Story Summary Here”

To provide a story’s category upon submission:
yahooBuzzArticleCategory = “Enter Story Category Here”

where “Enter Story Category Here” must be one of the following: business, entertainment, health, images, lifestyle, politics, science, sports, travel, usnews, video, world-news

To provide a story’s media type upon submission:
yahooBuzzArticleType = “Enter Media Type Here”

where “Enter Media Type Here” must be one of the following: text, image, video

Finally, to automatically pull the URL associated with the page where the button lives upon submission: yahooBuzzArticleId = window.location.href

Google Apps is a customizable package of business applications including mail, calendar, team site creation, document collaboration, and video sharing.

The reseller program will allow developers to deploy standard or modified packages for their customers and then charge for the products.

This is a great way to market your skills to a wide range of customers including the ones you may already have.

Resellers are also expected to offer a level of support to their customers.

For more information about this exciting opportunity visit

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/resellers/index.html