One of the primary goals of every webmaster is to rank well in major search engines for specific keywords in order to get as much organic search traffic as possible. But, how do you keep track of search positions? Doing it manually would take a lot of your valuable time, specially if you’re tracking multiple sites. The guys at Link Assistant have produced a great free tool, Rank Tracker that performs this job for you.

Rank Tracker can track multiple sites and you can track as many keywords per site as you want. Stats are collected from any of the selected 3 main search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) plus from Overture. Rank Tracker keeps track of previous results and shows the rank diff for each keyword. Here is an example for one of my sites:

Quite nice, I can see straight away which keywords have progressed, which have dropped, but I can also find out if any of the keywords I’ve been working on have made it into the first 100 entries. When you click on a specific rank, you can see it’s position through time, such as on the following diagram:

Rank Tracker supports Google and Yahoo APIs, but you can use the ordinary (non-API) access as well, although you must take care not to perform too many requests in that case so you don’t get banned by the search engine.

Overall, this is a very clean, easy to use and extremelly useful application. If you’re a webmaster, go and get it now.

Tags: Ranking, Search Engine Ranking, Google, Yahoo

Find and Run Robot (FARR) is an excellent application and document launcher, a real pearl for keyboard and productivity freaks. This free software tool enables you to launch applications and open documents by simply typing their partial names into a small dialog which can be opened with a single keystroke. The program comes preconfigured to scan the contents of your Start menu and My Documents folder, but it can be configured to scan any folders of your choice.

In a nutshell, these are FARR’s main features:

• Fully keyboard based
• Smart. You just define the folders you want to be scanned, there is no need to manually setup keywords as with most other launchers.
• Adaptive. It learns from your behaviour, the keywords you use the most get a higher score and appear higher in the list.
• Incremental search, just start typing and the results start appearing, ready for you to select them.
• Built-in and user definable aliases. You can use them for grouping files, performing web searches, etc.
• Fast and small with little resource usage. Doesn’t touch your registry.
• Unobtrusive and stays out of your way until you need it.

Tags: Productivity, Application Launcher, Keyboard

Google today announced the Google Pack. It’s what Google calls “a free collection of essential software”. Although most of the software on the list is not really essential, the idea of a Google Updater isn’t that bad (reminds me of cygwin), and it might even get useful if they start allowing new applications to be added to the list.

Anyway, here is a list of desktop (Windows) applications seen as “essential” from my point of view. Note that not all of them are free, but they are well worth the price, and the free ones are well worth a donation. I will list only the tools that I use on a daily basis, more or less they run all the time. I will cover other excellent apps in another post. Apart from rich feature sets, these apps perform extremely well. I spend a lot of time in front of computers so power and speed is what I need.

1. Total Commander is the ultimate file manager, it is the most essential tool in my collection. Listing it’s features would be worthless, they are numerous. Whatever you think a file manager should have, TC has it and it does it superbly. Using it since 1996.

2. Opera is my browser of choice. In the old days Opera was the only browser that performed normally on low end boxes and it outperforms others even now when I run lean and mean machines. Firefox *is* cool and flexible, but it just doesn’t beat the speed, flexibility, user-friendliness and innovativeness of Opera. Using it since 1997.

3. PSPad is a superb free editor. Apart from using various IDEs throughout the day, I need a fast and powerful general purpose text editor and PSPad is the perfect one for anything apart from really huge files (>500MB) for which I use UltraEdit. PSPad is smart, easy and powerful.

4. KeyNote is the application I use to store all kinds of data, references, code snippets, RFCs, ideas, etc. Anything I need to store for future reference goes here.

5. Agenda At Once. OK, I know you never heard of this one, but it is the most useful PIM around. I was shopping for a descent PIM for over a year, tried every one of them and finally settled with this one. I’ve been using it for half a year now and it still amazes me how easy and intuitive it is. If you need a fast and flexible personal organizer, just get this one.

6. Great News. Although I’ve been using it for just a couple of months, it does reside on my desktops constantly, so I have to list it. GreatNews is a really superb RSS reader, a faster alternative for my previous favourite RSS Bandit.

7. FastCheck is my email checker, a great little app that monitors my Fastmail account (needless to say, all the mail that’s sent to me via various domains and services ends up at Fastmail).

8. Putty is my SSH window to the Unix world around. Whether it is the boxes on the LAN, my web accounts or a console view to IMAP servers, there’s always a few Putty windows open on my desktops.

9. AVG has been my anti virus software since 2002.

10. Outpost Firewall is the thick wall around my home network, protecting me since 2001.

11. Copernic Desktop Search is my desktop search engine of choice. Something just didn’t feel right with Google’s and Yahoo’s products.

12. SyncBackSE is the backup tool I use. It is the little hard worker which ensures that my data is properly synchronized and backed up.

13. Any Password is what I use for managing my passwords. To be honest, I haven’t tried others, but this one works nice for me.

14. Yankee Clipper III is my clipboard manager.

15. And the last app on this list, but not the least important one, is DigiGuide, my TV Guide

As I mentioned, these are the essential tools I use on a daily basis. Other excellent software I use often will be covered in another post.

Tags: Google Pack, Total Commander, Opera, PSPad, Outpost Firewall, Copernic, Putty, GreatNews, SyncBack

In the world of full blown desktop search utilities such as Copernic Desktop Search and Google DS it might be hard to imagine why someone would use a filename search utility. Well, I very often find myself searching for particular files, not by content but by name (yeah, I still have a good memory for the useless little things) and the big guys are quite clumsy for that task, not seeing the forest for the trees (maybe it’s just me…). So after years of frustrations with some poor implementations of file searching apps I finally found the one I’ve been looking for - Locate32.

This is a very smart, quality application, based on updatedb and locate apps for Unix systems, which performs its main task extremely well and fast - searches for files by filenames on your hard, removable and network drives. It can be fully driven from the keyboard, returns results extremely fast, doesn’t use 100% CPU like some other tools (hardly went over 3% while indexing) and is a pleasure to use overall.

RSS feeds have made our lives a lot easier by making the information come to us. Unfortunately, some sites still do not provide RSS feeds and enforce you to keep visiting them manually.

In the days before RSS people used web monitoring tools which allowed you to monitor your favourite sites and notify you of any changes that occurred on them. Some of the more advanced tools would check for changes in specific parts of the page only which was very handy for getting notified of new releases for applications that didn’t provide a mailing list. You get the point.

So, after a couple of years of not using any web monitor tools due to RSS, I felt a need for one again. I tried a few free ones and the one that cought my eye was Sitespector. It’s interface is very clean and user friendly and the app does its job very well. It displays only the changes between web page “issues” which is extremely handy and has good alerting capabilities too. The app is still very new, so there’s space for enhancements, but overall I really like it and have already added quite a few “channels”. Very useful tool, my thumbs up…

Today I’ve been playing a little with Python Web Modules (aka PythonWeb). While deciding which database I would use for session management and other data persistance I found that PythonWeb comes with built-in support for SnakeSQL, a pure Python relational database. Of course, it supports MySQL and potentially other database engines, but I was intrigued by this little database and decided to try it out.

What was very nice to see is that the database doesn’t require any installation, its engine can be placed somewhere on the path and you can start working. It doesn’t rely on any C code, which makes it somewhat slow, but the beauty is that it will run on any platform which can be very handy for small web services and their hastle free installation on various hosts (no C compilation required and no need for setting up external databases). It comes with a simple, but fully usable interactive interpreter and it supports a surprisingly rich set of SQL features for its small footprint.

SnakeSQL is still in alpha, but so far it’s performing extremelly well. I’ll stick to it for now. If you are looking for pure Python databases, you might also want to check Gadfly.

Tags: SnakeSQL, Python, PythonWeb, Python Database

These days I’ve been thinking about implementing a new simple but extremely useful application (I won’t go into details at this stage). A couple of similar applications already exist, but they all run on Windows only and just one of them is free. The niche is very attractive for me and the demand for it is growing, so I thought I would jump in and provide an open source alternative. The application would have a fairly simple GUI in the front end and would have to run on Windows, Linux and Mac. Support for mobile platforms would be a major plus. I have loads of experience developing GUIs with Delphi, Swing and SWT, but I’ve ruled these out: Delphi is not cross platform and Java is, well, just too bulky and doesn’t provide a real native interface.

I’ve been looking at Lazarus for a while. This is a very promising open source Delphi port, built on top of FreePascal. It is already quite usable, but it doesn’t seem to currently fully support Mac OSX, so I had to rule it out. I am however thinking of porting IMAPSize to Lazarus, so I’m keeping a close watch on this one.

After considering several other “mainstream” options, I settled with wxPython, a Python wrapper around the excellent wxWidgets. This page explains the pros and cons of various toolkits and does it much better than I would. It’s a must read! The next question was whether to go for a Python or Ruby wxWidgets wrapper, since these are the languages I feel comfortable working with. I decided to go with the smart guys who’ve put a lot of thought into the whole thing, the Open Source Application Foundation and the GNU Enterprise. Apart from that, I like the RAD tool built on top of wxPython, Boa Constructor. Also, Python is more ubiquitous, which is important for an open source project.

Yesterday I started doing some work. As a wxPython/Boa newbie, I’m bound to bump into many problems. I already asked for some specific help on their forums/lists and got the right answers within a few hours - a sign of a great community. I’m quite excited, it should be a fun little project.

For a comprehensive list of GUI toolkits, check this page.

I just stumbled upon this ten year old page showing Opera in it’s very early days (version 1.0) while it was still named MultiTorg Opera, running on Windows 3.11. Their browser has greatly evolved since then, but the main goal has remained the same: “The aim was to make a lean program that works fast and supports standards without introducing proprietary extensions.“, “The user should never have to sit and wait unecessarily.“, “Lean, mean, full control“. In a world that changes so fast, it is amazing to witness someone stick to their initial ideas for so long. With a reason.

Almost everyone who has ever developed applications for wireless devices was faced with the problem of the different device capabilities. Some devices support WAP 1.0 only, some do XHTML, some support MMS, some don’t, etc. A serious wireless application should be able to recognize the capabilities of the device which is accessing the service and tailor the service accordingly. But how do you achieve this?

WURFL is a wonderful open source project which provides an XML configuration file which contains information about capabilities and features of most of the wireless devices that are in use today. The information it provides is supplied by many wireless developers from around the world and is more accurate than the UAProf database which is mainly based on information provided by the manufacturers.

There are also ready to use open source libraries for mainstream languages such as Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl and .Net, that parse the WURFL file and provide an easy-to-use interface for checking device capabilities.

WURFL is used by many operators around the world and has became a de-facto standard in its field. It is great to see an open source project make such a huge impact in an area packed with proprietary issues.

Tags: WURFL

Yankee Clipper III (aka YC3) is a powerful and elegant clipboard manager tool. It stores everything you’ve placed on the clipboard and allows you to quickly access those snippets again. There are a bunch of clipboard managers around, but YC3 beats them all. It is completely unobtrusive (apart from the icon in the taskbar), easily accessible when needed and has a good search capability. The one thing I love about it is that, unless I want to perform a search, there is no need to open the YC3 main window at all. When you have to paste an item from the clipboard while doing your work in any application, invoke CTRL+ALT+V and select any of your previously clipped items. Simple + Effective = Powerful.

Another thing that amazes me about this app is that version 1.0.0.0 was around for 4 years, without any updates! It had all the features it needed, it was extremely stable (never ever crashed on me). It is just recently that the author started adding new features to it and, apart from the basic free version, released a commercial version too. The basic version still covers all of your day-to-day clipping needs.