As I've been working on optimizing WordPress, I decided to take a look at the server side of things. If you're looking to improve the performance of your website, this may be useful for you. Please keep in mind the things in here are exclusive for VPS or Dedicated type of servers, they will not work with shared hosting or managed hosting, but may work for other hosts besides Inmotion Hosting.

If you haven't done so yet, you may need to configure SSH first so you can access your server from the command line and do the stuff I talk about here. Check if your host allows you to do that, and how to set it up. If you have a VPS with InmotionHosting, you can setup SSH as explained here.

Most web hosts allow you to ssh into your VPS.

As a quick disclaimer, I run all the commands listed here as root. This can be risky so be careful when you're running this on your server; you should always run commands with your own username and use sudo to run commands as root when needed. But I'm awesome, and I live dangerously, so I run as root, deal with it.

Turning off unnecessary services.

The first thing you should do with any server if you're going to optimize it for performance is to turn off unnecessary services. There are usually a half dozen or more services that run on every server but aren't needed, they're there for your convenience and just in case.

Conversely, you should know and remember that if you turn these services off and you need them later, you'll need to turn them back on.

How to find out what services are running.

Depending on the operating system your server is running, you'll need to run some commands to see what services are running. In my case, my server is running CentOS which is a spinoff from RedHat. To find out what's running on a RedHat server, you can  run these commands:

service --status-all

To narrow down to a much smaller and useful list of stuff you can run this command:

chkconfig

And to eliminate even more noise, we can filter the output of the chkconfig command to just the stuff that is running right now at our runlevel, like this:

root@servername [~]# chkconfig |grep 3\:on

That command shows only what's running right now under runlevel 3. Let's take a look:

root@servername [~]# chkconfig |grep 3\:on
apf            	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
atd            	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
cpanel         	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
crond          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
exim           	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
fastmail       	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
filelimits     	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
httpd          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
ip6tables      	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
ipaliases      	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
iptables       	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
mailman        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
messagebus     	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
modules_dep    	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
mysql          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
named          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
netfs          	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
network        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
nscd           	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
psacct         	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
pure-ftpd      	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
ror            	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
rpcbind        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
rsyslog        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
saslauthd      	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:off	5:off	6:off
sshd           	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
sysstat        	0:off	1:on	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
udev-post      	0:off	1:on	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
vzquota        	0:on	1:on	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:on

From the services listed (notice the 3:0n column) that are running, most of them are necessary for the proper operation of the server. The ones I am questioning are exim, fastmail, mailman and ror.

My server doesn't work as an email server and I don't want it to be a relay, the first 3 services I listed are related to mailserver stuff. If I know my stuff, then I'm willing to bet that those services aren't needed for my WordPress site to operate properly.

But what about email sending from WordPress? WordPress sends email out sometimes, like when there are updates, or sometimes certain plugins send updates and alerts. I believe that the sendmail script is all that's needed for that, but I decided to test this theory.

Then the 4th service I found suspect is ror which is the Ruby on Rails service. I don't have any ROR apps running so I don't know why that would even be active.

Turning services on and off

You can turn a service off and on with a simple command:

root@servername [~]# chkconfig servicename off

That turns off a service named servicename. Changing "off" to "on" turns it back on. Note that this command is temporary until the server restarts, so if you make a mistake or shut down a service that you shouldn't have turned off, you may need to reboot the server and the service will restart automatically.

This is how I test to see if I need a service. I first turn it off and then check the site, then if all works fine, I make the service permanently turned off, so it stays that way even after the server restarts. You can see more information on how to use the chkconfig utility here.

To make a service stay turned off permanently, I use this command:

root@servername [~]# chkconfig --level 3 servicename off

Testing services before making permanent changes

To verify that the services I want to disable will not affect my WordPress site and prevent it from sending email, I'll turn off each one at a time and then test my site's ability to send an email. In this case, I'm using a basic contact form from WP Forms to make sure sending email still works.

So I run this command to turn off exim:

root@servername [~]# chkconfig exim off

I then use the test contact form to confirm the site can still send email, I also check the inbox to make sure I received the message. If you're going to follow my steps, I also recommend you test all this before you make any changes to the services running to make sure it's all working fine to begin with.

After I turned off exim, I could send messages just fine. Next up fastmail.

root@servername [~]# chkconfig fastmail off

This also resulted in being able to send emails fine. Next is mailman.

root@servername [~]# mailman mailman off

I turned off all four services, fastmail, mailman, exim, and ror without any adverse side effects. So the next step is to permanently turn off each of those services, like this:

root@servername [~]# chkconfig --level 3 fastmail off
root@servername [~]# chkconfig --level 3 exim off
root@servername [~]# chkconfig --level 3 mailman off
root@servername [~]# chkconfig --level 3 ror off

To confirm that all the changes are permanent, I rebooted my VPS using the restart server button from my Inmotion account dashboard. I don't use the built in reboot or shutdown command from the command line because the server never seems to come back up if I do that. There must be a routine that happens when the server is rebooted from the dashboard instead of the command line so keep that in mind if you feel like restarting your server from the command line.

I confirm one more time with the chkconfig command to list what is running on runlevel 3:

root@servername [~]# chkconfig |grep 3\:on
apf            	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
atd            	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
cpanel         	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
crond          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
filelimits     	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
httpd          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
ip6tables      	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
ipaliases      	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
iptables       	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
messagebus     	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
modules_dep    	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
mysql          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
named          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
netfs          	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
network        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
nscd           	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
psacct         	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
pure-ftpd      	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
rpcbind        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
rsyslog        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
saslauthd      	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:off	5:off	6:off
sshd           	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
sysstat        	0:off	1:on	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
udev-post      	0:off	1:on	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
vzquota        	0:on	1:on	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:on

Notice the services are not listed as being "on" for runlevel 3, success! There are a few other services that other sysadmins would question, like named. In my case, I'm pretty sure that I need everything else listed here for now.

While the active resources that these services may not be very significant, I don't need any mail services running. I also noticed in my mail logs that spammers have been trying to use my server as an email relay, turning off all mail related services should help minimize this activity. To be sure that gets shut down as well, I should turn off all ports that aren't needed. I will tackle that in another post soon.

Conclusion

If you want to start squeezing every bit of performance out of your VPS server, this is an example of some of the things you can do. In this case, I showed you how I turned off 4 services that were running but not being utilized. They may not impact your server significantly, but every bit counts and this is easy to do so why not start with this. You may have other unused services running, but this should be a good guide to show you how to find said services, test them and then turn it off if they're not needed.

The post Server Performance Improvements for WordPress – Turning off Services appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

But once the blog is started and you have a couple articles posted you will certainly face the dreaded writer's block. Maybe it will happen on your fourth blog post, or maybe on your 12th blog post. But every blogger faces writer's block sometimes.

Maybe because we're lacking creativity at that moment, maybe because we are distracted, or maybe we're just not in the mood to write. But maybe you're out of ideas.

This is where I have some help for you today. Having ideas to write about is important, so how do you get new ideas flowing? I have a few tips and five sources for new ideas that should help you get unstuck from that annoying writer's block.

Conclusion

Getting new ideas for blog posts isn't too difficult, you just have to think of the stuff you already know and try to use some of the sources I suggest. Try not to overcomplicate your posts and keep them focused on one topic at a time.

Once you come up with an idea for a blog post using the tips I gave you in the video, you may get a few more ideas right away so make sure you write those down for future blog posts.

The post 5 Tips to Help you Kill Writer’s Block appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

"Know Thyself" would say Plato.

So... do you know what you're good at? What about what you're not so good at?

For me, it's time management and time commitments. I say yes to a lot of projects, then I end up having way too many things on my plate. This leads me to have a lot of stuff that clutters my mind and keeps me bouncing from one thing to another until I burn out.

Then I fire off a quick Youtube video to take a break, next thing you know, several hours have passed. It's easy to go down the rabbit hole of distractions online, then you look, and it's bed time! And a lot of stuff is still pending.

Where did all the time go? Can't you relate?

You still haven't started your online business, or you didn't start that campaign you wanted, or you didn't call your mother, and you still have laundry to do, and the oil change is overdue.

The list goes on.

Time is our most precious commodity. Not only is it gone once it passes, but we as humans don't know how much we have left.

No judgment here!

I'm not going to judge you if you like to binge-watch the latest in Netflix. I watched Stranger Things in one night. A dirty little secret is that I watched the entire remake of Battlestar Galactica in about 2 weeks a couple of years back.

So believe me I'm nobody to judge you on how you procrastinate!

But I do have something that will change everything for you. Something that can fix your productivity and time management woes.

As long as you use this tool, you will see an improvement in how you allocate your time. This is the app of the week and part of the spotlight feature series.

The app is called Time Doctor. I first started using it several years ago when my buddy Syed Balkhi recommended it as a way to manage productivity better.

Time Doctor tracks, it measures and holds you accountable

It's an app, you install it, and it tracks what you're working on. It keeps track of time, and it helps you stay focused on what you're supposed to be working. Its strength is on the desktop but it also works on your mobile device.

It holds you accountable, and it helps you measure your time. It's a godsend for freelancers, bloggers, social media geeks and anybody that needs to keep track of time spent on projects.

It is especially useful for companies that want to or need to give their employees a strong time-tracking tool. I'd venture to say that it is the strongest tool I've tried in its category. Better than Harvest, better than Freshbooks, and I looove Freshbooks.

But Time Doctor is also great if you just want to improve your time allocation and prioritization, or learn more about yourself. Here's a quick overview of the strongest features:

It gives you beautiful reports and graphs and points out where you've mismanaged your time. If you say you're working on a report, but click over to Facebook or Youtube, it will pop up a gentle question:

"Are you still working on that report?"

Just to remind you that you said you'd be working on it...

Time Doctor is awesome. It works for you, and it works for teams if you have one, check it out here and start using it, plans start at $5.00 and they have a limited version for free too. You can thank me later (or now by leaving a comment below).

Oh yeah, almost forgot to mention that Time Doctor integrates with your favorite project management and accounting tools.

It integrates with the tools you already use, like Basecamp, Slack, Quickbooks, Zendesk, Asana and many more.

Visit Time Doctor to learn more or try it out for yourself.

The post Are You in Control of Your Time and Productivity? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

The answer is the same for all.

You have to provide valuable content for the readers and you have to promote the forum to the people that will benefit from that content.

Just because you build it, doesn't mean they will come.

If you have loads of cash, you can do what Neil Patel did with his forum when he launched it. Send $5000 cash to each of your friends and ask them to join and participate.

But chances are that paying would not work.

Neil has built some heavy duty social capital by providing huge value. He's built trust and a brand so when it came time to promote his new endeavor it was easy.

That's why he was able to pay for this. He basically paid for his friend's time to help him launch and multiply the trust and recognition on the forum.

But you don't have $50,000 or $100,000 to spend

So you have to go to the basics. The basics will always help you. Provide value. After you think you have provided good valuable content, then do it some more.

Then again. You do this by answering questions and letting the people that asked the questions know you've answered them.

Pay attention!

This isn't rocket science nor is my prescription something that involves a lot of research. It's almost common sense. Look at how people are doing it, do some googling. Ask questions and then follow a guide or tutorial or the steps of someone that has done what you want to do.

Another friend, Matthew Woodward built his reputation this way and now he's got one of the most popular internet marketing blogs and forums.

Matthew simply looked for the people that would be his audience. He found what questions they had by understanding what problems they were facing. Then he would go to his website and answer the question in excruciating detail.

Of course, there are technical steps to doing things correctly, but these are technical, they're methodical and almost trivial. You can just follow best practices, but you have to have value. You have to provide content, solutions, entertainment.

Matthew's answers have been some of the best and people recognize this so they always go back for more. Matthew reportedly spends over 20 hours writing one of his legendary blogposts, sometimes twice that.

He once told me that he simply needs to outwork everyone else and the rest just happens, in other words...

Get off your ass and start working

It doesn't take rocket science, but it takes a lot of effort and consistency to achieve the trust you need to make a website property stand out. You have to do the legwork, you have to put in the time.

If you don't, you simply become like one more website or forum from the billions out there.

Get great content online and then show it to the people that need to see it. Do this and you will be ahead of the curve.

Installing a forum is trivial, starting a blog takes 5 minutes, running updates and changing settings can be done without any real thought.

Creating valuable content is the art and science that will help your forum succeed. As the saying goes content is king.

Oh yeah, and don't forget to promote what you write. Share it in social media, use your email list, tell people about it. You do have an email list right?

[last-modified]

The post How Do I Get Visitors and Traction to my New Forum? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

You don't have to break your budget with marketing and advertising. You can use so many inexpensive and out-of-the-box strategies to get your brand out there and discover what works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-SzOBmy338

The post How to do Guerilla Marketing by Daymond John appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

This is the second article in a series of posts to help you get more out of the internet. The previous article was about Evernote.

Just like Evernote, Dropbox is easy to use and jam-packed with functionality and utility. Dropbox is an app that stores your files in the cloud and synchronizes it across all your devices. It is safe and secure from prying eyes because the files are stored with a high level of encryption. Due to its nature Dropbox works best with a high-speed internet connection.

But it's not just storage.

In addition to saving your files and making them available on your iPhone or iPad and your computers, Dropbox lets you share any file or folder in your account with anyone. You can share a file privately via email, or publicly by using a public link. When you send someone access to your file or a folder via email, only you and them can see and access the files or folders and you can revoke the permissions at any time. Sharing a file publicly lets you post it to Twitter, or Facebook or even your blog.

I use the sharing feature all the time to share picture folders with friends and family and I also collaborate with clients in various projects using shared folders. Instead of having to email each other new files or edited files, we just put the files into a shared folders. If more people become involved with the project then we simply give them permissions to access the folder. It's quick and easy.

Ok, this sounds great but how much is it?

Drobpox just like many of today's apps and services operates on a freemium model. The app offers a free version that works for most people. You get 2 gigabytes (GB) for free just for signing up.

After you sign up, you can earn more storage by sharing the app with your friends or family and by completing basic tasks like connecting your mobile device, uploading pictures to your account. From time to time Dropbox will offer special promotions to increase your storage even more. I currently have about 64GB of storage for free.

If the free version isn't enough for you, the Pro version offers three plans, 100 GB, 200 GB and 500 GB at a cost about $1 per GB/year. Dropbox also offers a solution for teams or companies where you can buy 1TB of storage for up to 5 people. In the business plan, additional users are $125/year and if you use all the initial terabyte of space, they'll increase it at no charge, making the business plan a virtually unlimited storage plan.

I can only assume and predict that prices will drop overtime as storage becomes cheaper and cheaper in the next year or two. But at $500/year for 500GB it is still a bit pricey if you compare it to your run of the mill local hard drive. So the convenience of having your files accessible from your phone, or laptop and desktop is what make Dropbox so attractive.

Why do you need it?

If you ever find yourself emailing files to yourself just so you can get them from your laptop or a friend's computer then you may need Dropbox. I use it daily and it is extremely useful. I move a lot between my desktop and my laptop because I work from home and various locations. I need flexibility, but I also need my files. So I have a folder in Dropbox where I keep all my current work; that way my files are available on my laptop when I go somewhere. I also have the app installed on my iPad and on my Galaxy S4 so if I need to read a document quickly I can do it without having to get to my desktop or open up my laptop.

You need Dropbox if you want to be more efficient and if you want to leverage the technology that is currently available. You can get pretty creative on how you use Dropbox, I use it daily for many different cases. There is even a way to have a website built with Dropbox, but I'll leave that for another post. But I can think of three ways I use Dropbox on a regular basis.

Here are a few use cases

As a Blogger

I can use Drop box to gather photos, and save notes or reading material to have handy at any time. Dropbox has a photo uploader feature that lets you automatically save your photos from your phone to your account. That way you can attend an event, or location that you want to blog about, take pictures and by the time you sit down to write about your experience your photos will be available for you to edit, upload and post on your blog. No messing with cables or memory cards and memory card readers, etcetera.

Sales 

If you are in sales, you can keep your brochures and sales documents in a folder that is easy to access from wherever you are. You can have videos, photos, audio or PDF files there easy to show a potential client at a moment's notice.

Real estate professionals

Dropbox is ideal for realtors and real estate teams. While somebody is out in the field taking pictures and saving them to a shared Dropbox folder, somebody else in the office can get to work on the marketing materials for the property. Or if the agent is out with the client and somehow forgets a document, an assistant or team partner can put the document into the Dropbox folder and it would be available for the agent in the field in just a couple minutes, easier and more reliable than sending email.

Photographers

If you are a photographer and like to share your photos in Instagram, or Twitter, Dropbox is for you. You can take your photos with your nice camera, then save them to your Dropbox account. They'll be available to share via Instagram or Twitter or 500px. This lets you share your photos in social media networks without having to compromise the quality of your photos. As an extra bonus, Drobpox has a nice system to view photos online so you can browse through your photos, create galleries and generally manage your photos through the Dropbox system.

Webmasters, programmers and other techies

The geeky side of me also uses Dropbox to save configuration files for several applications I use. This is how that works. I use a program that connects to people's websites via FTP (I'll spare you the geeky details), all the website information is saved in the program and I have dozens of them. Instead of having to re save all the information on my laptop and having to update it any time it changes between my desktop and laptop, I have moved the configuration file for this app to a Dropbox folder so that any changes I make are automatically available on my desktop and my laptop.

It plays nice with other apps. Dropbox has a really nice developer program so that other people developing apps can enhance its functionality. One of my favorite third party services that interacts with Dropbox is If This Then That (IFTTT). I can have IFTTT automatically save any photo that someone tagged me in facebook to my Dropbox for example. I could also have photos I post to instagram automatically be saved to Dropbox for backup purposes.

In conclusion

Using Dropbox requires no special skill. In order for you to use Dropbpox, simply install it and then start saving stuff to your new folder, just like any other folder. This automatically makes the folder and files available online via a web browser, or on any other computer that you install Dropbox. Install the mobile app for iOS, or Android and you'll have your files available there as well. Windows phones used to have a Drobpox app but it is no longer updated or published.

Dropbox is one of my favorite apps and I consider it a must have for anyone trying to wrangle the interwebs. It will save you time, headaches and make your life generally easier. All you have to do is use it and take advantage of it. You can download it here.

If you are already using Dropbox, how do you use it?

The post Access your files anywhere with Dropbox appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

If you want a free solution, Aweber offers a free account as well. Try them out here, using my affiliate link.

Some of the really fancy email systems out there like Infusionsoft, Marketo, Aweber, and others let you do what is known as a targeted drip campaign. This really just means that you can send specific messages to a sub-group of your list based on what they do or don't with your emails.

For example, if your reader clicks on a link that is in your email, you could send a follow-up email based on that click.

You could send an email announcing two specials on your website for example. Standard email as you've done in the past. Let's say that the email includes Link A, and Link B.

Let's also talk about two readers, hypothetically Jane and Joe. If Joe clicks on link A, he can be put into a queue to receive certain emails after that click. These emails could be specially crafted for people that click on link A.

At the same time, Jane clicks on link B. This action puts her into a different queue with different emails.

This is a marketer's dream because you can easily send different emails based on the actions of your reader. The same can be done for people that don't click on any links. This is a really nice addition to Mailchimp. You can read about this and other changes in their blog (they removed this blog post so the link has been removed).

They've updated the way auto-responders work, the features available, and other stuff worth taking a look.

The post Autodrip and Autorespond with Mailchimp’s new Features. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

A WordPress website tends to slow down overtime when the author or admin continues to add plugin after plugin just to have a new shiny feature. Each plugin takes resources and when you multiply those new resources being used, by the number of visitors accessing your site, you can have real problems with your hosting provider keeping your website up. Especially when you have a spike in traffic, as my friend Megan found out when her name hit entertainment news outlets a few weeks ago.

Checking your load times and reducing them as much as possible is important if you want Google to increase its love for your website. It sounds simple enough, make your website load faster and Google will give it some brownie points. But how do you actually find the things that are slowing down your website and how do you make it go faster? It's a lot like tuning a car. And the same principles apply, if you like tinkering with cars and getting every ounce of performance by tweaking the air intake and the fuel ratio and all that stuff you'll be spending time in the garage working on that stuff. If you like the results that come from tweaking your car but you don't particularly like doing the work, you can always pay someone to do it. The same is true for websites and blogs. You can follow tips and advice and even tutorials you'll find online. Each time you adjust something you'll see results and over time you should be able to adjust your entire website and see how your traffic and visitors react. Or you can pay someone to help you optimize your sites.

[pq]Fine tuning loading times can take time and precise adjustments accompanied and directed by research and analytics.[/pq] But to get started, there are two places and things you can do. The first I'll mention applies to any website it's by Pingdom and their page tester tool is free. It's a time load testing website into which you'll enter your own blog URL and see how it performs. The screenshot above shows you the summary view of my consulting website's results. After the summary you'll find all kinds of goodies, like each script that loads and how much time each takes. This is particularly useful to help you trim the fat in all those extra plugins, widgets, badges and other stuff that ends up accumulating in your blog without having real purpose.

The other option and should be used in combination with the first one, only applies to WordPress websites. Using the P3 Profiler plugin, you can actually run a detailed load test from your WordPress dashboard.

The P3 Profiler plugin is free and it works great. It will tell you which plugins and what parts of your website are taking the most resources and longest time. With that information you can identify the plugins, scripts, widgets, badges or images that need to be optimized or removed altogether.

Google also has a performance testing tool but that is a topic for another day. If you're starting your blog out, you probably don't need to do this. But if you like keeping an eye on these numbers you could take a baseline of how fast your blog loads before you do anything with it, and repeat the test each month or so and see how your blog changes overtime.

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You know how to deploy jars and wars on tomcact, you can hack .htaccess for apache and even speed up performance with nginx or lighttpd, but guess who doesn't know or care about any of this? Your customer. They care about their bottom line and whether you can do the work or not.

Customers just want you to fix their stuff, they need you to get in and fix or update or change things around. To them these kind of changes are always "quick" and "should be really easy for you". But before you commit to any hard numbers on your quote or proposal, be sure you understand exactly what technologies you're working with.

This is where wappalyzer comes in. Wappalyzer identifies software running on websites. It runs as a Firefox addon, and it does one thing and it does it well. Wappalyzer tells you all the different technologies running on a website. This is crucial for webmasters, webdesigners and even systems administrators that run their own businesses because it allows them to identify the type of work and skills that will be required to complete the job.

A really skilled systems administrator or webservice company might be able to obscure some of these technologies (and you should for security), but most people don't, and even if they knew how, they won't. So you can run this addon on against a website and find out what's going on before you commit to the work or come up with your estimate.

In addition to the webserver, it also finds the type of traffic analytics software being used, supporting javascript technologies, additional sharing functionality and much more. It identifies: CMS, Widgets, Database managers, frameworks, caching tools, even the operating system!

It's easy to install, just find Wappalyzer on the Firefox addon directory and install it, reboot and then Wappalyzer just works.

Take a look at these examples of websites and what technologies they're using. The red dots indicate the system being used.

The one thing that it doesn't do is find the hosting company. But there's another tool for that, that will be another topic soon.

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Similar to the last screenshot utility we talked about, Screengrab, this one displays its activation button also on the bottom right corner of your browser. The activation of the screen capture function is a little bit different and you should probably take a look at the preferences options to set it just the way you want it to work. If you click on it, you'll activate it as the default settings are configured, but if you right click on it, you can choose alternate settings just for the next shot.

Screen Capture Elite options After installation Screen Capture Elite Grizzly Ape Logo

Screen Capture Elite by default is set to take a screen shot of a selection, but like I mentioned, you can change the settings by going into the Firefox Addon preferences. As you can see from the screenshot above, this addon has more options than the previous one I reviewed. Some of them are just preferences that let you configure things like setting the location of the button to take a screen capture. Other settings are a little more functional, like setting a default save location for your screen shots. This is great if you want to team this utility up with Dropbox.

You can download Screen Capture Elite for Firefox at the Firefox Addons library.

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Install as usual, then after installation you'll have a new icon on the bottom right hand corner of your Firefox browser. From there, you can choose to do a screen cap of just a section, or the entire site, or just certain viewable space on the web page.

In the settings of the addon you can pick other preferences like taking screenshots in jpg instead of png and whether you want the timestamp as part of the file name.

Partial screenshot of a sample website, ideal to do a website review. pop-surrealism-full-screenshot screengrab-after-installation screengrab-menu-save Screengrab-Settings

Simple, useful and very straight forward. I often use this instead of Skitch because it allows me to save a full website into an image with JPG or PNG option. This is very handy when I have to show the full view of a webpage to a client. I often use this also for initial consultations with a client in order to annotate changes that need to be made to their website. In the case that we're doing a critique or consultation, I take a full screenshot with screengrab, then I open the image with Skitch to annotate.

Go and get Screengrab for Firefox right here.

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If you use both of these apps, you might want to synchronize your Skitch screen captures with your Dropbox files. It is rather simple to do this but you need to do this from the command line. Full instructions are available at the Tips and Tricks wiki from the Dropbox guys.

The trick is to create a Skitch folder in your Dropbox directory, then you move all the necessary files and folders from their original location to this newly created folder. After you do this, you then create symlinks (shortcuts) from the original location of the files and folders to the new location in Dropbox.

On your second computer, you just need to copy your .skitch files into the new Dropbox location, delete the other locations (because they are in Dropbox), and then symlink the original locations to the Dropbox counterparts.

After you do this, each time you save a Skitch to your history, it will automatically be available in your other computer.

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She's a virtually non existent, yet she'll soon be everywhere and do a lot of my work for me and my clients. Get to know her if you want, or not. But when you wonder who this hot chick that just friended you came from... now you know.

She's a repeater, a poster, a tester and a friend or follower. Say hi to her if you want on Facebook or Twitter or even on email. Just don't spam her, she doesn't like it. Send her your questions, concerns, trepidations, dilemas, tribulations and fears. She'll have an answer for you with any difficulty you encounter or any help you need.

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Please Follow me and subscribe. It's all going to be really geeky stuff. Mainly information for technology professionals and information workers. The main topics you can expect over there are Linux Related Tips and Tricks, Apps and Webapps, stuff related to running your own website, and stuff like that.

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they have both advanced and basic probability and statistics.

http://www.mymathforum.com/ This one is also pretty active and has a statistics section as well.

6 "cheatsheets" to help you out.

Another good looking cheatsheet in PDF http://personal.maths.surrey.ac.uk/st/K.Young/form_sheet.pdf

How to use Google Calculator. I'm not sure how much this will help, it can do trig, log base 10, log base e, square roots but not sure if it will help you http://www.google.com/help/calculator.html

Do you know of any other Probability and Statistics resources that are worthy of sharing? Let me know in the comments and I'll add them on here.

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