I subscribe to several daily e-mail newsletters, one of which is Adrian KIngsley-Hughes’ “Hardware 2.o”.  Yesterday he wrote about “Mouse without Borders”, a FREE program written by Truong Do, a member of Microsoft’s “The Garage”. Mouse without Borders allows you to work with a single mouse and keyboard across several PCs as though they were one.

Without repeating what Adrian wrote, visit his blog post to learn more about Mouse without Borders and subscribe to ADNet’s Newsletters.

I wasn’t aware that similar programs have been available for a while, but Mouse without Borders was something I could really use. Within 10 minutes, I had the program downloaded, installed, and working on my two machines.

I can now use ONE mouse and ONE keyboard on my 4-monitor 64-bit Windows 7 machine and my 2-monitor Windows XP machine. For those of you working on a one or two monitor system you’re probably saying “who needs 6 monitors?” … Well, it’s not a matter of need, it’s a matter of convenience. I often have multiple applications running such as Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Word, a web browser, and my e-mail program, tasking between each, cutting and pasting from one to the other. Now, rather than tasking between them, I can have all in view and work between them faster and more efficiently. … I guess it’s a “geek” thing.

Anyway, I appreciate ADNet and Adrian for sharing the information, and especially appreciate Truong Do for writing the program on his own time, and then sharing it with everyone.

So, if you use more than one PC and have the need, or desire, to go back and forth between them using ONE mouse and keyboard, download Mouse without Borders.

Filed under: General Computer, software / hardware utility, Windows 7 64-bit, Windows XP by TriviaWolf
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In the last post I told you about moving the World’s Fair site to a new domain and losing just about all the ranking that had been achieved. Finally over the past 22 days things are beginning to happen:

Website grade (www.websitegrader.com) has gone from a 72 to 88 (still a ways to go)
MOZ index has increased from 0 to 5
From 0 linking domains to 60
All the other ranking indicators have improved greatly, but it has taken the better part of a month.

I also use Google’s webmaster tools which showed me some errors I had overlooked in the past, such as a couple duplicate titles and description meta tags. All of which have be corrected.

One thing I do is to make master pages for each folder, sort of a template, and use it to create new pages. This exercise has taught me not to leave those pages on the server, they get indexed and usually cause your ranking to be slightly negatively affected.

I estimate that it will still take several months to get back the ranking I used to have, and hopefully pass it, which was the whole purpose of moving the site in the first place.

Once the site has stabilized in the search engines, I will start making changes to get the ranking even higher.

I hope by relating this saga to you it helps you to know what to expect when making changes and maybe even moving your own site.

The bottom line is “You need to have patience”.

Filed under: Uncategorized by TriviaWolf
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PMPhoto.to was first registered in 1996 as a business site. As time went on it was used for business and personal pages, things like antiques, a World War II vet story, Christmas, and a few more subjects. Then in 2002, pages for the 1939 New York World’s Fair were added. Much time was spent optimizing the site for everything with a moderate amount of success. The decision was made to separate the various elements of the site. Thus PMPhoto.us was registered and the business was moved. Sub-sites were created for the antiques and personal pages. This left only the ’39 Fair on PMPhoto.to.

To determine what I could do better on the site I used www.websitegrader.com as a guide.  Web Site Grader scores a web site from 0 to 100 depending how well optimize your site is for the search engines. PMPhoto.to had a score of 97. It also had a Google Page Rank of 5 and a decent Alexa ranking.

The problem is that the search engines tend to list local sites (the United States being local) over foreign sites. PMPhoto.to is registered in the Kingdom of Tonga … not exactly in the U.S.A. Although of foreign registry it managed to climb to position #12, but not any higher. Out of curiosity I checked the first 100 results in Google for “1939 New York World’s Fair” and PMPhoto.to was the only foreign site listed.

In late December 2010 I registered “1939NYWorldsFair.com” and set up a 301 permanent redirect to it from PMPhoto.to

The Results
The new site came in with a score of 52 but rose to a 72 in the first week. Out of the 366 URLs in the site map, Google Webmaster Tools has not indexed a single one. However, when going to Google’s home page and entering “site:1939NYWorldsFair.com”, Google is able to index and list 337 of them. This is great since I use the Google Search on the site’s pages to find selected subjects. My Alexa score is nowhere to be found, and the Google Page Index sits at a big 0.

When doing a standard search for “1939 New York World’s Fair”, the new .com site doesn’t show, but PMPhoto.to is still number 12… go figure.

Search engines also consider site age as a factor. PMPhoto.to is more than 14 years old, and the new site, well, it’s brand new and has no track record.

Patience Required.
The bottom line is that whether you have a new site, or like me, move a site to a new domain, even if you have done everything right for the search engines, you need to be patient and wait to see results. I suspect it will take from three to six months until the site achieves a ranking even close to what it had, but I also expect that in the end, it will surpass the original site. I guess I’ll have to patiently wait and see.

I’ll let you know how things change over the next several months.
Happy New Year to all.

Filed under: Search Engines, Web Browsers, website design by TriviaWolf
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On August 27 I reported a problem with Dreamweaver CS5 and deleting files from the server using the Delete key. Adobe’s recent patch seems to have fixed the problem. Now when you select a file to delete on the server, the Delete key actually removes the file and not one on your local machine.

Bad problem, good fix … Thank you Adobe

Filed under: Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver CS5, website design, Windows 7 64-bit by TriviaWolf
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If you are a beginner with Dreamweaver, or don’t know about Snippets, then this is for you.

The Snippets panel can be found under Window in the File menu. Snippets is a collection of code which either comes with Dreamweaver or you create.  I use it mostly to save pieces of code that I use over and over again when building HTML or CSS pages. Once you have created your Snippet you simply select your insertion point on the page you are working on, select the code Snippet, and click on the Insert button in the Snippet panel.

The first thing you should do is create a personal folder in the Snippets panel to keep your Snippets separate from the ones that come with Dreamweaver. The main reason for this is that when you create your own folder, it is saved in the Application Data folder (on a PC) which can then be copied and saved as a back up, and shared with other machines that are running Dreamweaver.

Creating a new folder:
Be certain that none of the existing folders or snippets are selected, right-click anywhere in the blank area of the Snippets panel, a pop-up menu will appear. Click on New Folder. Once you have your new main folder (ex. MySnippets), you can create sub-folders to hold the different categories of Snippets you want to save. Some of my favorite categories are: CSS, Meta tags, Java Scripts, ASP and ASPX.

You can find more detailed information on using Snippets in Adobe, Dreamweaver Help.

Backing Up Your Snippets:
As I mentioned, the Snippets folder is stored in the Application Data folder on windows. Typically the Application Data folder is hidden, so the first thing to do is make this folder viewable. There are several ways to access the Folder Options menu, one of which is by opening the Control Panel and clicking on Folder Options. Once the Folder Options box is open, click on the View tab. Without having to scroll, you should see “Hidden files and folders” with two options: choose “Show hidden files, folders, and drives”. After selection, close the Folder Option window.

XP Users:
I tried doing a Search for the folder but it was not found.
Depending on your choices when you installed Dreamweaver,  the Application Data  folder you want is in one of the user profiles under Documents and Settings. Open Windows Explorer and expand the Documents and Settings folder. You will see sub-folders like: Administrator, All Users, Default User, etc. For now, we’ll call the profile folder [User]. Here is the complete path.

C:\Documents and Settings\[User]\Application Data\Adobe, Dreamweaver CS4 (or CS5)\en_US\configuration\Snippets\MySnippets

For Windows 7: (Vista should be similar)
C:\Users\[User]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Dreamweaver CS4 (or CS5)\en_US\Configuration\Snippets\MySnippets

Copy the Snippets folder as a back up and remember to keep it current. Using Snippets can save you a lot of time building a page, and having a backup of the folder will save time when you must install a copy of Dreamweaver.

I have been able to copy my Snippets folder from Dreamweaver CS5 running in Windows 7 to Dreamweaver CS4 running in XP without any problems. I have also shared my Snippets folder with a few other people who have copied it into their version of Dreamweaver running in XP, Vista, and Windows 7.

Filed under: Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver CS4, Dreamweaver CS5, website design, Windows XP by TriviaWolf
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