Web Developer Resources

A globally recognized avatar or to put it short, a Gravatar, was conceptualized by Tom Werner. It is simply an avatar image that appears beside your name everytime you comment on gravatar enabled sites.

Usually, the size of a Gravatar is 80 by 80 pixels. There is also a rating for each image, allowing the webmasters to control the content of to Gravatar to be displayed on their website. Email addresses are hashed with the MD5 cryptographic hash function to eliminate spam and prevent spambots from harvesting e-mail addresses.

One of the leading providers of audience engagement and media distribution services for blogs and RSS feeds is Feedburner. It helps bloggers, commercial publisher and podcasters promote,deliver and profit from their site content on the web.

Feeburner offers the largest blog and feed adevertising network, bringing together an unprecedented caliber of content coming from the world’s most recognized media, individual publishers around the world and A-list bloggers. The most useful tool is its ability to allow readers to subscribe to the site and be updated with new posts from the site owner.

Haloscan is a free and useful commenting tool that can be easily installed on any weblog or webpage. Several of its features are: comment moderation, ability to ban offesinve comments by single IP or an IP range, a fully customizable comment window, worldwide time-zone and language support and hundreds of user-submitted templates to choose from. It also has a comment dashboard and is able to handle gravatar support.

Another innovation by Google is its ad serving program called Google Adsense. Website owners may enroll in this program which enables advertisement like text, image and video advertisements appear on their site. Administered by Google, these ads generate revenue on either per-thousand impressions or per-click basis. Currently, Google is beta-testing a service that is cost-per-action.

A popular and useful widget for live traffic is Feedjit. It shows statistics on your website in realtime like the city and country where your visitors are from, which website they came from, the page they visited on your site and the external link that they have clicked to leave your site.

To protect the privacy of visitors, Feedjit has the option to discontinue showing their future visits by clicking on “options” on the widget and selecting “Ignore my browser”. It does not slow down the site as it is very fast and is used by several high traffic commercial websites. Web owners can also choose the size and design of their Feedjit by customizing the colors to fit their layouts.

A portable and embeddable chunk of code is what widgets are. It can be installed and then executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user. Widgets can also be called as badge, module,snippet,gadget,flake and mini. It often uses Javascript, DHTML or Adobe Flash.

Most bloggers often use widgets either to advertise or put entertainment and design on their site.

Making it easy to improve your results online is the New Google Analytics. It has been re-designed to help the web owner know where your visitors came from and how they interact with your website through the detailed statistics.

It also aims to strengthen your marketing initiatives, create higher-converting websites and write better ads. The best part is that it is free to all publishers, advertisers and site owners.

One of Mozilla’s useful extension is the HTML Validator. It adds HTML inside Mozilla Firefox. The number of errors of the HTML page can be seen of the form of an icon in the status bar when browsing. Details of the errors can also be seen when looking at the HTML source of the page.

Why is there a need to validate HTML? First, validating HTML makes it possible for your site to be listed on search engines. Browsers will also render better and faster. Most of all, broken link and ugly pages caused by poor HTML can drive visitors away.