OK, if you don’t already have Excel and you do ANYTHING on the computer that involves keeping track of things, analyzing things, or sorting things, why on earth would you ever put yourself through NOT having Excel?? Whether you like Microsoft or hate them, it doesn’t much matter. Excel rules, period. So what the heck… here’s a link where you can Get Excel. Just a plain ol’ Amazon affiliate link, but don’t feel obliged to buy it there if you’d rather get it locally. Get it wherever/however you can find it for the best price. Personally, I have a friend who works for MS so I got it for an employee price. Hey, it’s all about using WHATEVER advantages you’ve got.

Apparently, AdSenseLogger is no longer available for download, but as it is licensed under the GNU and gives explicit permission to distribute it, I’m posting it here for all to have, free!

Get AdSenseLogger here

It is not quite as sophisticated as some other tracking scripts, and there is a new version coming soon to replace it, called Revenue Monitor, but this does work quite well and you certainly can’t beat the price.

Have you figured out yet how much I love free stuff??

I’ve had a version of this spreadsheet in my toolkit for a month or two now, but I polished it up a bit and decided to release it “into the wild” so that others might benefit from it. No real documentation with it, but it should be fairly obvious to anyone comfortable with the basics of Excel.

Paste your keywords in cel A1 as a list, and they will populate A1 to Axxx. The output you want to copy & paste into RSS2Blog will appear in column F.

You may have seen some buzz about this on various forums if you do any portal site or keyword-based site building. Well, I decided to take the plunge and check it out, not wanting to miss out on the low intro price, just in case it really was as good as it claimed. So far…?

WOW.

Now I warn you, this program is still early in development so it has some rough edges, and if you just take it out of the “box” and use it with its defaults, you may not be impressed. But you shouldn’t be using ANYTHING the way it comes standard!

If you deal with sites that consist of hundreds, maybe thousands of files, and have ever needed to change a bit of text on ALL of them, you know this pain! The sheer agony of even considering such a chore by hand… *shudder*

Fortunately there is no need to do anything so horrible. Just use a server-side find & replace utility! Much like doing a find & replace in Word or any text editor, this utility will allow you to find & replace across an entire domain if you want, or just an individual directory, file, etc. An absolute MUST HAVE for anyone who makes lots of web pages. There is a paid option, but I don’t know what the difference is. This free version MAY stop working in 2006, I’m not certain. Download it at the following link (works as of this writing):

Well, like any good software tester would, I found some bugs. The unfortunate thing is they were in my own code!! D’oh!

So, I fixed some things and updated the script to version 1.1. If by chance you downloaded the previous version, PLEASE get the newer one, as the bugs I fixed could prevent that script from doing much of ANYTHING for some people.

Index Checking Script

I just used this to check the indexing in the 4 big search engines on roughly 75 sites or so, and it took maybe 15 minutes tops.

Sadly, a friend and mentor of mine died quite suddenly about a week ago, and I will be attending his memorial service in Las Vegas tomorrow (Sunday), and won’t be back until Monday. That, combined with a rather crazy amount of other things that are going on for me right now, means I probably won’t be posting for at least a couple days. I know you’ll miss me… admit it, it’s ok.

But never fear, I’ll be back soon and as always with all kinds of nifty ideas for how to do things more efficiently and faster than ever.

Anyone into building portal sites with tools like Traffic Equalizer or any of the others, has probably also heard of if not used Really Simple Site Generator, or RSSG for short. I don’t personally know the whole history behind it but it was written supposedly by a young “kid” of about 15 years old, and was released as Open Source, meaning FREE to you & me. I haven’t used it yet but have heard great things about it.

I’m so used to using this at this point, I tend to forget about it! But if it were to go away… oh boy would I be crying.

It’s called… wait for it…

PC-Com.

Now, does that name inspire you or WHAT??? OK, so maybe it has a lame name. So maybe the company that makes it also has a name you couldn’t remember if your life depended on it. That’s ok. YOU MUST HAVE THIS UTILITY!

And the price?

Hang on to your hats… it’s FREE, and if you want a few more features you can pay a whopping $10 for it to be upgraded.

If you don’t know how well you’re indexed, how can you know what you need to do next? If you build portal sites especially, pages = income, and therefore more pages = more income. But if you don’t know from day to day how many pages you have (or have lost!) in the search engines, you really aren’t taking care of business.

So, I have been using the Index Checker at www.marketleap.com for a while now, and it’s very handy (and free!) But, I wanted to check lists of URLs in a more automated fashion. It can’t be TOTALLY automated at this time because they do have a manual CAPTCHA-like security code required, but you can do 6 at a time and with this script, the security code is the ONLY bit of human interaction required.