tools

PAY SERVICES

ANALYSIS. In a 14 days test period, beginning 2005, I tested an analytical tool from AdviceDigital . The service gave some additional information about users, but the service did not prove as efficient as expected.

LINK CHECKER. www.seventwentyfour.com is one of the few services I actually pay for... Fortunately I got a discount: for USD 49/year I GOT a weekly summary with broken links, and information about the total number of links, inbound links etc. By now almost indispensable to keep this site smoothly functioning, because link rot IS a problem.

As of 2003 the price for the service has tripled. Since I was a regular customer, I was offered a discount, however, decided to look for another service. To that end I am testing siteimprove.com (JAN05: deep link removed, linkrot :-@)(December 2003), another link checker service. It's about the same price as seventwentyfour, and the reports are different (you have more options as to how you want to see the errors found). It ís slow, because its a 100 percent webbased solution.

Details about the use of seventwentyfour

As of January 2005 I test a share ware from Lithops Software that is much better: Please find detailed information about the HTML link checker in bots blog. Eventually I will have to pay for this service, about 35 USD/year.

COUNTERS (i/ii). thecounter.com is a good place to start to track the traffic to your newly uploaded site. The Counter has been in place on this site since 16 June 2001 - a some stage I had to pay, but its OK. I think the service is good for the price: I check the number of daily users and get information about where users are referred.

I made a short case story of it: learning lab #01.

ISP. struer net is my internet service provider - a comparatively cheap and reliable service if you really need a provider supporting PHP. Which I do.

Although there was serious disruptions during the summer of 2002 (due to an upgrade), the overall stability of struer.net is OK and I want to stay. The helpline is acceptable, and helpfull :)

WEBSTAT. See also the webstat, the online webstats for this site - powered by struer.net and Webalizer.

DOMAIN REGISTRATION. DK hostmaster's who is database is the place to find out who's behind any Danish site, including the one you're looking at... I don't pay for but we all pay to register the URL, the dot.dk-extension is only about 10 €/year :).

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SHAREWARE

SURVEYS. Ask People is a free, online service used for surveys. In December 2004 I launched 15 questions about the usability and the content on linqx|dk. Details available in bot's blog.

MAIL CAMPAIGNS. Prior to sending out the first news letter (brief) in January 2005, I established an external service from 1-1. Learn more here: 1-1 mail campaigns/news letter.

COUNTERS (ii/ii). In addition to the pay-for counter referred to above, two other free counters are operational. In 2002 I installed the Peak Counter and in 2004 a counter from Chart.dk. You can see these below under "Transparancy on this website".

FTP CLIENT. Windows Commandor is a an apparently very searched for link: every month a number of users have consistently found their way to this stable and rather user friendly, file transfer protocol (ftp client) - via the link provided here.

Windows Commander is for free, but really, one should register if a frequent user!

SEARCH FACILITY. freefind.com is a lasting starting point (sic!), if you need a search facility and can't make it yourself. Its the freefind spider that weekly crawls and indexes these some 360 (JAN 05) odd pages of mine. I like freefind because they remain... free of charge ;)

In the online survey carried out in 2004/05 I realised that users were in fact quite pleased with the search facilities on linqx|dk - and thus the freefind search interface. Personally I think there are too many repetitions.

WEB EDITOR. Fra http://www.stoneware.dk/ har jeg downloaded det prisbelønnede program Stone's WebWriter, ver. 3.5. Det er frit for enhver at anvende, men hvis man alligevel registrerer sig og betaler et beskedent beløb, får man visse fordele, så vidt jeg ved endda adgang til support. Jeg bruger mest notepad, selv når jeg opretter sider og laver større ændringer i eksisterende dokumenter. Det er blevet en vane.

Jeg ville ønske, at jeg kendte WebWriter bedre, og brugte programmet konsistent. Det ville sikkert være bedre! Jeg kan klart anbefale WebWriter :-D

Update: Hmm. Faktum er, at jeg faktisk i altovervejende grad nøjes med at redigere og endog oprette dokumenter (websider) i en simpel text editor som TextPad fra Helios Software...

IP LOOK-UP. visualroute is excellent to check IP addresses - often you can get an idea of who visited your site.

USABILITY. useit.com is Jacob Nielsen's homepage. Jacob Nielsen was a great inspriration to me, in my job as webeditor in the Council and when I started designing linqx|dk (now, that why my site's so boring, you think... right, thx).

PS: Selv om Jacob Nielsen anbefaler at hyppige brugere af hans 'Alertbox" lægger en skærv i kassen, kan man imidlertid fortsat gratis modtage hans særdeles udmærkede 14-dages nyhedsbrev.

Hvis du ikke allerede havde fattet det, så ligger en stor del af Jacob Nielsens anbefalinger og erfaringer vedr. brugervenlighed "Usability" til grund for designet af linqx.dk.

STATIC PAGES

UNDERSTANDING WEBSTATS: How to interpret webstats. "ebalizer Quick Help

HOW THE WEB WORKS: what happens when you connect to these pages. How the web works

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Find shareware yourself: tucows.euro.net download.dk

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