Tuesday, February 1, 2011
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By Erik Small -
A brief reminder that the File Transfer Planet Forums are now fixed (had a small issue for those trying to create a new registration profile).
Also, don’t forget to utilize the FTP Guides and share with friends. They include basic information on FTP, how to setup an FTP Server, or simply transfer files from your FTP client to a Server/Host.
Winter Computing - Need to Transfer Files?
By Erik Small -
This week, Ipswitch File Transfer released a new version of the popular WS_FTP program – version 12.2.
The new version is Windows 7 compatible in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes. Other enhancements include:
Here the Press release that hit the wires today:
Ipswitch’s WS_FTP Professional And WS_FTP Home Support Microsoft Windows 7
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By Erik Small -
The SEOMoz blog is a great resource for webmasters. Here’s a recent article on the checkpoints to make before relaunching a website. Redesigning a site is easy, but the implications to search engine optimization and proper handling of links is paramount!
Here are the Top 10.
1) Put 301 redirects in place.
2) Add analytics code to every page
3) Robots.txt and Sitemaps
4) Update Google Adwords
5) Review all conversion endpoints
6) Full end to end test
7) Server logs
Ranking reports
9) Email footers
10) Monitor bounce rates
By pete -
When the new FileTransferPlanet.com launched, we had a big dilemma – that being, to port in all of the old forum material that we had or not to. Literally years and years of information – most of which, unfortunately, was too dated to keep without major revising. We made a decision to start fresh – a very daunting task in this new age of social media. An empty forum is never a good sign to a new visitor. Fortunately, some early adopters have jumped in immediately – which is great! Many thanks to PaulBeugeling, Mike, “chester”, and the others who are making it such a helpful place to chat.
The forums have some new features that we are really pleased with. They are built on BBPress, on a really nice open source platform – and happens to work quite nicely with WordPress, which powers this blog. There are of course some anti-spam measures in the background, but on the front end we’ve chosen for a “human test” to help make sure its not a dirty robot dropping junk into a post. Â We did not want to lock it down too much, however, so creating an account is not necessary – guest posts are more than welcome! Other cool features – if you drop a URL to a Youtube video into a post, the site is smart enough to embed the video (here’s an.. umm, example.. from one of our members) .
A “support forum” is also in placed – if you have a question you really want answered, drop it in there, and you have control over it being marked as “resolved” or not – to keep our experts on the case as long as you need.
Other stuff we have.. RSS is all over the place – subscribe to as much, or as little, as you want.. or even go old school with Email subscriptions to particular threads.
That’s just the start – so head on over! Oh and – once you create an account, it works for both forums and blog comments! Yeah, its that easy. Got ideas? Concerns? Please let us know – either comment here – or heck, even better, start a thread in the forums 
.
By c-emmons -
WS_FTP doesn’t necessarily build your website, but it does play a vital role in the process.
It transfers the files that make up your site a remote computer called a web server. After WS_FTP is done transferring your files, the web server does the work of "serving" your files when visitors browse to your website’s address.
If you are interested in seeing what HTML looks like, click right-click your mouse on any web page, you should see an option to "View Source" or "View Page Source". You will see a lot of HTML, links to graphic files and other code such as CSS and Javascript. This code makes the site you’re viewing look and function the way it does. With some of the free and paid tools available today, you don’t necessarily need to write this code by hand, you can manage much of the layout, links, and effects using their "Point and Click" tools.
Don’t get us wrong, learning about HTML, CSS and other languages like Javascript and jQuery are a must if you are serious about web development and design, and learning a little bit about HTML can be helpful even if you’re not!
There are many user-friendly HTML editors which make building website’s easier and a lot of fun.
Adobe Dreamweaver (Free for 30-Days)
Dreamweaver is one of the most popular HTML editors, for intermediate and advanced users.
Download Trial
Komodo Edit (Free)
Komodo Edit is a free, open source editor that has support for Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Tcl, plus JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and XML, and template languages like RHTML, Template-Toolkit, HTML-Smarty and Django!
Download Trial
Aptana Studio (Free)
Aptana Studio is a complete web development environment that combines powerful authoring tools with a collection of online hosting and collaboration services that help you and your team do more.
Download Free
NVU (Free)
XML support, advanced CSS support, full site management, built-in validator, and international support as well as WYSIWYG and color coded XHTML editing.
Download Free
Once you’re done using your HTML editor of choice, you will have a bunch of files sitting on your computer including HTML, CSS, Graphics, and other media files. They all need to find their way to a web server so the rest of the world and access and enjoy your newly created site.
You may have some free web space provided by your ISP, or perhaps you’ve taken the plunge and signed up with a hosting company like our favorite, Dreamhost (which serves the page you are reading right now!).
Either way, the company that will host or serve your website has or can provide you with the hostname or IP address, username and password for your account.
Using the Hostname, Username and Password you can make a connection to your web server and upload your files to make your site available to anyone with an Internet connection.
Watch this great video tutorial on how to create the connection to your hosting service.
By pete -
File Transfer Planet happily runs on WordPress – a free, elegant and very powerful blogging platform. Over the last few years, WP has become increasingly popular and at the same time, more advanced and user friendly.
wordpress admin ui
With the release of 2.7, WordPress had a built in “plugin browser” which allowed on-the-fly plugin installation – where previously you’d have to FTP files to your site. Themes still required FTP however – which I suspect was always a bit of a challenge for novices.
This week, a new version of WordPress came out that improves on the user experience nicely, and more importantly, allows users to install themes without FTP! This is a pretty big deal, and quite a time saver.
installs on-the-fly - evil?
Is it killing FTP? No way. The plugin and theme browsers are limited to the main WordPress repository for these items – yet many, many themes and plugins are hosted elsewhere, in other repositories and developer sites. For these types of situations you still need to download, unzip, and FTP your files back to your site. So to really keep your WordPress blog on the cutting edge – polish those FTP skills. Some of the best plugins and themes are not available via the built in interface!
Did you say you need an FTP Client? We strongly recommend WS_FTP for Windows users, and Fetch for Mac users.. learn and buy them at our online store page.
Interested in learning more about FTP? You certainly came to the right place! Check out our guides, or new forums if you have specific questions. For the record, our forums run on another piece of software by the makers of WordPress, called BBpress. If you have an account on our blog, it works on the forums as well.
Now – back to WP 2.8!! Here’s a video and info put together for the release:
Major New Improvements
First and foremost, 2.8 is way faster to use. We’ve changed the way WordPress does style and scripting.
The core and plugin updaters in previous versions of WordPress have been such a success we decided to bring the same to themes. You can now browse the entire theme directory and install a theme with one click from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.
If you make edits or tweaks to themes or plugins from your dashboard, you’ll appreciate the new CodePress editor which gives syntax highlighting to the previously-plain editor. Also there is now contextual documentation for the functions in the file you’re editing linked right below the editor.
If you were ever frustrated with widgets before, this release should be your savior. We’ve completely redesigned the widgets interface (which we didn’t have time to in 2.7) to allow you to do things like edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings. Developers now have access to a much cleaner and robust API for creating widgets as well.
Finally you should explore the new Screen Options on every page. It’s the tab in the top right. Now, for example, if you have a wide monitor you could set up your dashboard to have four columns of widgets instead of the two it has by default. On other pages you can change how many items show per page.
And Even More
You can read the full list of over 180 new features, changes, upgrades, and improvements on the Codex. The list is exhausting!
via WordPress › Blog » 2.8 Release Jazzes Themes and Widgets.
By pete -
TechCrunch picked up on this little snippet from Opera -
We’ve heard the phrase ‘reinventing the web’ too many times already, so we’re weary of Opera’s claims, but this made us curious anyhow. The browser maker has just unveiled Opera 10 in beta, so it could be taking the wraps off the product and taking it public rather quickly. Or it could be something entirely different.
via Next Week, Opera Claims It Will “Reinvent The Web†.
By pete -
Sure, we’re big into File Transfer here – protocols, applications and all kinds of background tech – however, there’s always the other side of the web.. you know, that front end, which.. well.. IS the web . Much like Search, the Browser game is getting really hot these days. Safari 4 was just announced at WWDC.. Firefox 3.5 in the wings.. Chrome2.. IE8.. its an ever-changing topic these days. Lifehacker posted some really good stuff today – take a peak:
Lifehacker browser speed tests
Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer all reached new final versions of recently, while Firefox and Opera pushed their own web browsers into almost-there betas. We pulled out the digital stopwatch and testing kits to see how they measured up.
If you’ve never seen our browser speed test series before, you should know it’s unscientific but, we believe, fairly thorough. We use a millisecond timer (Rob Keir’s timer, to be specific) to manually clock the distance between launching a browser and seeing it fully loaded on a home page, then do the same timer testing while waiting for multiple tabs to load. All of the timing tests are performed three times and averaged, with far-off aberrations excluded and re-tested.
via Lifehacker – Lifehacker Speed Tests: Safari 4, Chrome 2, and More – Browsers.
By Erik Small -
Yahoo has decided to wind down Geocities. This part of the Yahoo business was big back in the early days — it’s definitely an end of an era. Tech Crunch has a quick write-up on how Yahoo is pulling the plug.
Here’s in excerpt:
“GeoCities’ traffic has been falling over the past year. According to ComScore, GeoCities unique visitors in the U.S. fell 24 percent in March to 11.5 million unique visitors from 15.1 million in March of 2008. Back in October, 2006, it had 18.9 million uniques.”
“There are plenty of other Website creation and hosting services out there, including blog platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, and Typepad, as well as Website creation and hosting services such as Ning, Webs, Jimdo, Snapages, Weebly, and countless more. GeoCities never really kept up with the times, but always remained a decent pageview generator.”
