Submit your RSS feeds to over 58 search engines and top directories
December 1, 2008 by Brandon Sheley · 14 Comments
Submit your Blogs and Forums RSS feeds to over 58 search engines and top directories
Tired of the long and tedious process of submitting your RSS feeds and blogs? Save time by eliminating repetitive data entry work with our automatic submission tool. RSS Feeds Submit is the quickest way to submit your Feeds to the most popular directories and search engines. You may also submit manually to directories that require more detailed information about your feed. RSS can increase your rankings and drive fresh traffic to your website.
Due to the recent marketing trends and better content delivery over e-mail, RSS is quickly gaining momentum. Microsoft recently announced their full support for RSS in the next version of their Internet Explorer, as well as the next version of their Windows operating system. And Google trying to patent ads in RSS, this would be the best time to start publishing your own RSS content and driving massive amounts of traffic to your websites.
vBulletin Development Update
August 5, 2008 by Brandon Sheley · Leave a Comment
vBulletin Development Update
Things have never been busier for the vBulletin development team. The whole team is working flat-out writing specifications and code for new features and we are actively looking for and hiring new talent to assist us in this task.
With all this activity, now seems as good a time as any to talk a little about what is coming up.
Project Tools 2.0, Blog 2.0
The first things you’ll see are new versions of Project Tools and Blog (both version 2.0). Those keeping up with the developer blog or the bug tracker will already know a fair bit about these two updates. The Project Tools update is already running in a beta form here on vBulletin.com, and is available to download from the Members’ area. Blog 2.0 will follow in the coming weeks.
vBulletin 3.8
A little later this year, you will get your first look at vBulletin 3.8 here on vBulletin.com. While primary development efforts are focused on vBulletin 4, we felt that there is still mileage in vBulletin 3.x, so vBulletin 3.8 is a new feature release, designed to extend and improve some of the functionality introduced in vBulletin 3.7, while adding some additional goodies that we’re sure people will appreciate while they wait for the arrival of vBulletin 4.
We will release more information about vBulletin 3.8 over the next few weeks, but here are a few choice morsels to whet your appetites:
Social Group Discussion Topics
This is probably the most-requested feature since the introduction of social groups in vBulletin 3.7. While the current ’social group messages’ system allows messages to be posted to a social group, unlike forums it does not allow messages to be divided up into discussions. vBulletin 3.8 rectifies this, and social groups in 3.8 now have the ability to contain individual topics, each with reporting, inline moderation and many of the other tools one would expect from vBulletin.
vBSkins.com now free!
July 14, 2008 by bdude · 5 Comments
Some of the most prolific vBulletin template designers, vBSkins.com, have recently decided to stop selling all their great designs. That may sound like bad news, but the good news is that there are now 200 high quality vBulletin Templates that are now available for free.
SEO Tip 3: Optimize Your 404 Page
June 29, 2008 by Jason · Leave a Comment
Every site should have a custom 404 page, it doesn’t need to be anything fancy, or filled with catchy sayings. The standard 404 error is pretty annoying for humans, and the spiders hate it just as much. You can find some tutorials on the forums for setting up your custom 404 Error page.
You’ll want to optimize the 404 Error page so when a spider finds it (and trust me the spider will find tons of 404 content over time) the spider will just eat it up, and find content from it. Some useful tips to optimize your 404 page are:
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- Using your main keyword in the title followed by a pipe (|) in the title. Example:Custom 404 Page SEO Tip| vBulletinSetup
- Add some keyword rich content that is relevant to your sites niche. Try to keep it to under 250 words for the page, and try not to reach over a 3% keyword density mix. Be sure to follow some other SEO tips such as putting h1 tags and <strong> tags around the keywords. Maybe put a link to your sitemap on this page.
- Add your standard navigation to the page. This is not only helpful for when a human visits the 404 page to keep them on the site. The spider will also follow these links.
- Make the 404 page, powered by your sites templates. If using vBulletin you can create a custom 404 error page using the template system. Or if not, just try to match the look and feel of your site as closely as possible. Whatever you do, do not make a forum thread, call it 404 error and direct bots to that.
Backing up and restoring your MySQL Database
If you’ve been using MySQL database to store your important data, it is imperative that you make a backup of your data to prevent any loss of data. This article shows you how to backup and restore data in your MySQL database. This process can also be used if you have to move your data to a new server.
Backing up your database
The quickest and easiest way to backup and restore your database would be to use MySQLDump. If you’ve got shell or telnet access to your server, you can backup MySQL data by issuing the mysqldump command. The syntax for the command is as follows.
Holidays and Contests
May 30, 2008 by Blake2181 · Leave a Comment
Well hello again boys and girls. It has been a bit since I have had time to talk to you, but I thought I would talk about how we as webmaster can take? advantage of holidays. I know ok, so your thinking people wont show up on a holiday, and most times you would be right. But, If you take the time and set up a nice contest, they will come, they will most definitely come.
So What do you mean?
Well I have always thought that holidays are the best time for a nice contest to improve member support and or gain more members.? So say for instance labor day. An easy contest would be to ask people to write and let you know what they think of labor day? Or you could do a post contests. I like 1 day post contests the most. You get people to show up and contribute as much as possible in one day for a nice prize.
CrossBrowserTesting.com – a great new resource for designers
April 16, 2008 by bdude · 6 Comments
I spotted a new site on the wire today, Cross Browser Testing; it is a site that helps you test your website across a variety of different operating systems and browsers.
Whilst there are services like Browsershots that let you take screenshots of your site in different browsers, Cross Browser Testing provides you with full interactivity, allowing you to test things like AJAX and JavaScript that you can’t do with a screenshot.
Cross Browser Testing provides a very wide variety of servers to choose from, from Windows 98(!) to Vista and Linux; and many browsers including Internet Explorer, Opera and Netscape.
I played around with the free 5 minute trial session available, and it seems like a really good option for those who need to test their sites in many different environments.
Here’s a screenshot of the vBS blog in Opera:
