WebCoder

Keep Track of Current Events with IceRocket

Ever hear the end of a news broadcast on TV and wonder “what’s that all about?” Simply visit IceRocket for the latest in blogs, Twitter, images, videos, and news stories about any topic. It’s fast and simple!

Create a Free Web Host Easily

Free web hosting is a risky business to go into–if you don’t plan right, or have a dishonest server provider, things can go very wrong very fast. Although it’s not as good as running your own server, MyOwnFreeHost helps you start a free host without as many risks (assuming you trust their parent company, but I’ve had no problem with them).

After creating an account for free, you can add your own domain (I don’t suggest using the free domain they suggest, it makes you seem unprofessional) and start advertising your host. You are able to customize your host’s main page, and moderate accounts using the “Reseller Panel”. The support forum is very active and you can exchange tips with other users of the service.

The reseller account is free, but you can upgrade your users plans for a fee. Eventually, when you have experience and the money, you’ll probably want to move to an actual server, but MyOwnFreeHost is a good start!

Search Google’s Index from 2001

In honor of their 10th birthday, Google has added an archive of their index from 2001. You can check it out here.

Try searching for Windows Vista. I also noticed in 2001, this existed (look at the first result). And I thought my name was original.

I’m Worth $5,161.10

I googled my own site and this showed up. Not very accurate, because they say I get 10 times as many page views per day as I actually do, and I don’t even have any ands to make revenue on ($7.07 per day… I wish, but all the ad providers require you to be 18, which I’m not). Wikipedia is said to make $412,503 per day on ads, but they don’t have any ads, and are nonprofit. As I said this site does not provide very accurate results, but it might be worth checking out if you’re in need of an ego-booster.

Update: I clicked the “update the results” button on the site and it increased to $7,095. 0_0

Improve Your Wordpress with Plugins

WordPress (WP) is great as is, but did you know that you could improve it? Plugins add more to the functionality to your blog. The official plugin directory has a lot, but I will focus on my favorites.

All In One SEO Pack

Blogs are useless unless they have some readers. If you write articles, you should try to optimize them for search engines. This extension has many options, such as changing the home page title and description and changing the format of the titles of various pages.

Google Syntax Highlighter

If you run a coding blog, you need a plugin like this. This one uses JavaScript to highlight code in many different languages. You can see it in use on this site.

NextGEN Gallery

This is a plugin for you artists/photographers. It displays a gallery of images on a page you specify, and contains many admin features such as uploading from a zip file, albums, and roles, so people other than the main admin can modify the gallery.

ShareThis

Social media sites are among the best ways to get a lot of traffic (assuming your server can handle it!). This plugin adds a button to the bottom of each post. Click it, and the users can submit the post to sites like Digg or StumbleUpon, email it, or post it on their own blogs.

WP-SpamFree

Spam is very annoying for blog owners. It adds lots of junk to the moderation queue, and spams your inbox if you have notifications enabled. This extension uses multiple tests to verify that the commenter is human, and does not require an account on another website.

And now you know 5 more methods of making your blog better. Happy blogging!

16 Ways to Waste Time on the Internet

After a long day of web programming, why not relax for a while? These sites will help with that.

Free Games

• Sodaplay - Contains some different physics games. You can build moving creations out of springs and masses, make a minigame, or draw shapes in different colors and animate them.
• Phun - You can build 2D things out of parts like boxes, circles, hinges, fixates and springs. When you’re done you can upload it to Phun Box to share it with other people a nd get ratings and comments.
• iSketch - A game like Pictionary, but played online with people from all over the world. One person draws an object, and other people try to guess what it is. The winner is the person with the most points, which are obtained by drawing good pictures or guessin correctly.
• Free Evo2 4×4 Evo 2 is a game that originally came out in 2001, but has recently been released as a free download. It has lots of offroad tracks, a career mode, and multiplayer online play. The only catch is that most of the trucks have been removed from the game and replaced with a few custom ones.
• Falling Sand Game - A collection of online as well as downloadable games. This is sort of difficult to explain, but it’s more interesting than it sounds, especially if you download one of the games and install modifications (in the wxSand, Enigma Sand, and Burning Sand forums.)

Websites

• StumbleUpon - This is a toolbar integrated with a website. After you sign up, you can tell the site what your interests are. Then you can click the Stumble! button to visit sites related to your interests. After you arrive at a site you can click the I like it or Not for me buttons to affect what sites it shows you in the future. You can also review websites, or add people that you are interested in as a fan to see the sites that they have rated.
• PyWeek- A contest for games made with the Python language. You can enter your games in the contests, or download games other people have made (there are a lot).
• Computer Stupidities - Stories about stupid people trying to use computers!

Blogs

• TechCrunch - General tech blog.
• Gizmodo - News about new tech products.
• Oddity Central - Funny pictures!

Resources

• HotScripts - Largest collection of scripts in all languages.
• Dafont.com - Lots of free fonts, in many different categories.
• Good-Tutorials - Tutorials for just about anything.
• Zymic - Free hosting, tutorials, and templates.
• YoungCoders - Help forum for young programmers.

Super-Simple Wordpress RSS Syndication For Your Site

If you’re like me you probably have a blog as well as another site. I have found that an effective way to get vistiors to the blog is to link to it from the main site, assuming that that site is more popular. RSS (Really Simple Syndicate) is a way of syndicating your blog to other areas of the web. It is based on XML and generated automatically by Wordpress.

A PHP RSS parser is MagpieRSS. We will be using it in the following tutorial.

1. Download the most recent version of MagpieRSS from the above website.
2. Upload the “rss” folder to your web server.
3. Next we need to make a PHP include file for displaying the posts. Use the following code

   <?php
   require_once('rss/rss_fetch.inc'); //Include the MagpieRSS include file
   $url = 'http://yoursite.com/blog/?feed=rss2'; //Set a variable containing the URL to your blogs RSS feed
   $rss = fetch_rss($url); //Retrieve the posts
   $items = array_slice($rss->items, 0, 5); //Only show the first 5 posts (the second number can be customized to suit your needs)
   $posts = '';
   foreach ($items as $item) { //Loop through the items
   	$href = $item['link'];
   	$cat = $item['category'];
   	$title = $item['title'];
   	$date = $item['pubdate'];
   	$text = $item['content']['encoded'];
   	$text = preg_replace('/<img [^>]+\/?>/', '[image]', $text); //Replace images with [image]
   	$text = preg_replace('/<\/?[^>]+>/', '', $text); //Get rid of HTML
   	$posts .= "<li><a href=$href>$title</a> <em>".substr($text, 0, 100)."</em></li>"; //Print the current post title linked to the page on your blog, and the first 100 chars of the post
   }
   echo $posts;
   ?>

4. Now you can include that file into your site wherever you want the feed to appear. Enjoy the free traffic!

Google Reader

A few weeks ago I discovered Google Reader. If you read a lot of blogs, Google Reader is for you. Put in the URL to the RSS feeds of the blogs you read, or you can also select pre-selected packages of blogs. Then, the site will aggregate all the posts together onto one page. It’s web-based so you can access it from any computer.

The 100 most funny and unusual 404 error pages

The 100 most funny and unusual 404 error pages

Very creative!

Freezoka — All the annoyances a paid host doesn’t have, for FREE! (Freezoka Review)

(Note: this was my experience in March, so some things may have changed, but last time I checked their main page was still extremely slow and hotlinking of files resulted in the adpage)

I joined Freezoka after learning that my old host was about to close. First thing I noticed after creating me account: it was VERY slow. I decided to continue using it anyway — the free host before this “accidentally” deleted my account. Didn’t think it could get much worse than that. Unfortunately, it did. I uploaded a PHP script. A blank page appeared, so I enabled error reporting to see what was wrong. I was redirected to the “Hosting Blog,” a site containing several popups and stolen blog posts, and plastered with ads extending halfway down the page. After disabling JS, I could see that there were 2 iframs in the code, between the lines of the error. I posted a thread on their forum. A user replied with a fix for the error. I tried it, also fixng the PHP errors and… now a meta refresh was introduced into my page’s code, pointing to the blog! I added an htaccess file for custom error pages on my main site while waiting for the admin to reply. Then every page on my site redirected to their spam blog. The admin suggested me to submit a support ticket (why I gave this a 3 instead of 1) but by then I had already bought paid hosting.

I have used many free hosts over a period of two years prior to trying Freezoka, and it was the worst host I have ever used.

(On a side note, I looked at my old thread on their forum, and the ad code I had pasted into my forum post is now being parsed as HTML, redirecting my post to the spam blog [it didn't when I originally posted it]. I’m waiting for someone to try an XSS attack…)