A very common practice for spammers is to crawl websites trying to find email addresses in the page text, so they can uses those addresses for sending spam. A nice way to block them is to write the email address using an image.

You can create an image with your email address or any other text using Fireworks or even Microsoft Paint. Also, there’s a simple website that helps you if you are not familiar with these tools. ImageFromText is a page where you can write some text, choose their font, color, size and background and quickly generate the image with the desired text.

Images are generated in a PNG file that you can download for free. Nice site!

You’ll probably know how badly for SEO your e-business is having broken links in your website. Is very common to link external pages and then forget about those links. Those pages can go offline and you’ll never get noticed.

To prevent this, you’d better check your links frequently, especially those external ones, but also those one that point to some other pages inside your website.

The most obvious way to do this is manually, by clicking on each link. This can be a tough task if you have a very big site or with lot of external links. So I recommend you to use an application that helps you with this control.

A very good one and free for Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP is Xenu’s Link Sleuth. This application checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

If you don’t want to install any piece of software in your PC, you can still try Dead Links.com, a broken link checker that has a free service for small websites. If your site is really big, you can use one of the paid services. I tested the free one and it’s really good.

Can’t wait until tomorrow to see today’s traffic stats? If you are an anxious person, this tool can crisp your nerves.

FEEDJIT gives you real-time traffic data on your blog. You just need to cut and paste a piece of code and you’re all set. No registration required and it’s completely free.

FEEDJIT also track popular links across blogs, so if you’re the first to link to a popular site, your blog may appear on their home page.

How many times do you find two or more versions of a single document in your computer? Did you use to program? If you do, this will sound familiar. Today, I’ll like to write about a terrific tool that will help you manage these documents.

WinMerge is an Open Source visual text file differencing and merging tool for Win32 platforms. It is highly useful for determing what has changed between project versions, and then merging changes between versions.

When you select two documents to be compared, you’ll get visual differencing and merging of text files. The documents are located in different panes so you can quickly see both.

For instance, if you download an open source application form the internet and then you make some modifications in the code, this application can quickly help you find those modifications comparing them with the original files. I use it also with office documents. It’s really cool!

One of the major problems when designing and programming a website is the way it looks like in the browser. Many people use to design and program the website in a unique browser and forgot o test it in the other ones (or al least, in the most popular ones).

In my opinion, every website must be tested at least in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. Maybe I can add Opera too, but the other three represents a great percentage of all internet users.

The best way to do this is installing all these browsers in your computer. If you are lazy for this, you can use BrowserShots, a very nice online tool that helps you testing your website in different browsers. Be patient, sometimes it’s a bit slow, but a good tool.

Many people know Wikipedia, a great source of information that I frequently use. Almost all the information that I need and that could be written is there.

Wikipedia is developed with an application called Wiki. The Wiki is a system that let us have a collaborative website so every user can create and edit content there. The application saves the information and stores the older version of it, so you can have all the tracking of every piece of data there.

In big companies people uses Wiki as a documental tool for grab information about all their processes, systems, marketing and other useful data. Their employees write in the wiki all these information so, for instance, they quickly know how to answer a special type or email, or how to proceed to install a software, etc.
In small endeavors, people also use wikis following the same goal: documenting. The next video, shows in a very simple way, why wikis are so useful. Enjoy it!.

I once wrote about PrezentIt, a very nice online presentation software. Now, I found Preezo, a similar online application to create professional quality presentations using an ultra-fast Ajax user interface.

With Prezzo is very easy to collaborate with your team on a centralized web document, as also share your documents with partners, customers and other users. Of course, in order to use it, you have to register.
 This application in very new, it was launched some days ago. Even if it’s not much complete and functional as PrezentIt, I saw lot of potential in this new tool.

I know some people that generate huge incomes by buying and selling domains. Sometimes they buy never-used domains and wait until receive a good call to sell them; nowadays, when almost all nice domains are taken, they are working a bit different: They create some records of domains that are about to expire, their Google Page Rank, their Alexa traffic and some other statistics and, when the domains expires, the quickly buy them.

There’s a paid search engine that helps with this work. Dots.org is an expiring domains search engine. You can search using many filters including the expiration date, the domain type, the part of a domain and many more. You can also have access to different language dictionaries in order to get some help in your searches.

If you want to use this search engine, you have to be a member. There a many options for this. You can become a one day member or buy a 1, 6 or 12 months membership.

By the way, below is a chart taken form this site that explains us the domain expire process.

Perhaps you are planning your e-business and heard or read an article that mentioned the mashups. But, what is a mashup?

According to the Wikipedia, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into an integrated experience. The etymology of this term possibly derives from its similar use in pop music.

Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API. Other methods of sourcing content for mashups include Web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom) –the ones used in many blogs, web services and many more.

Many people are experimenting with mashups using Microsoft, Google, eBay, Amazon, Flickr, and Yahoo APIs, which has led to the creation of Mashup Editors

I constantly see many useful mashups as many other that are really scrap. As mentioned before, anyone can create a mashup in their site. The most important thing before doing this is evaluate the “What for”, the idea.

There’s also a lot of already done mashups so can use them in your site; So, if you are planning to develop a special application in order to gatheer information from other sources, just check before if it exists in the mashups directories. Good Luck!

Below is an interesting video of how to quickly create a mashup using Microsoft Popfly Mashups editor.

There are many applications that can help your business creating tutorials or how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). One of them is Wink, a freeware available for all flavours of Windows and various versions of Linux.

Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.

You can also add audio to your tutorials and export your tutorials or presentation in many available formats (SWF, PDF, PostScript, HTML and EXE). Using smart capture tools, you can easily grab screenshots from your pc based on mouse and keyboard input.

Wink is a nice tool for your business, and it’s free.