This mod will disable/hide all offline sites on your proxy list meaning you have no more broken link images and if the site disappears from the net then it also disappears from your topsite, which comes in handy for large topsites.

To install the mod you will need to download the checker file from here after unzipping the file there will be one file named check.php which needs to go into your topsites root directory. No modification of the file is needed unless you want to change the timeout value on the fsockopen function. This file when run will check every site on your topsite to see if it can connect to port 80, if the script is unable to connect to the site after 5 seconds it will mark the site as unapproved thus removing it from your topsite list temporarily.

I recommend setting up a cron job to run the file every 30 minutes or so, obviously if you have a massive topsite list you want to run it daily during a non peak time as the script will take a while to check large numbers of sites. The cronjob you want to run should look like "php -q /home/username/public_html/check.php" obviously replacing username with your hosting account username however this format will not work for all hosting accounts, and some prior knowledge of cron is recommended.

I started designing websites around 7 years ago and during this time I have discovered some great tips to make your site successful.

1. Site Purpose
Most websites that never fully take off have no real purpose they are designed with multiple ideas in mind. Because of this parts of the site never get finished or are done poorly, so its best to create a website with one central purpose and after it has been successful in attracting users think of other ideas that will keep them coming back.


2. Use Your Own Code
This is one of the most important tips I can give for making a successful website. Even if you dont code the entire site try to customize it and make it unique to others, people dont like visiting multiple websites that look the same with slightly varying content and using your own code gives you full control of how the site looks and works.

3. Clean Design
A clean and easy to use design is an essential step towards having a successful website. Simple things from choosing a good colour scheme to easy to read fonts can make a huge impact on how easy it is to navigate and read your site.

4. SEO Is Your Friend
SEO is an important step for increasing the amount of traffic you receive from search engines. Now you have a great looking website all that's missing is visitors, so how do you get search engine traffic? Your page title is your friend, I would say this is the most important part of SEO because its what people are going to see first in the search results as well as this its what the search engine looks for first when deciding your site's search terms. Meta Tags can be important for setting a site description and keywords for the search engine to use so remember to include them. The hardest step in SEO is getting good backlinks so search engines will rank your site higher than others, always remember that backlinks to sites that relate to your own are of greater value than ones that have little to do with your sites content.

5. Feedback
Feedback is very important, it allows you to improve your site in ways you might of never have thought. Always include a contact address on your website for queries and feedback and remember the easier it is for people to give you feedback the more feedback you will receive.

6. Website Updates
Website updates are important for keeping your visitors coming back. Refer to the feedback you receive for your site when doing updates and try to add new content once in a while the more often the better.

I finally did it, I switched to Linux and I couldn't be happier! I decided to go with the Ubuntu distro as it seems to be the most popular at the moment which is good for support and is regularly updated.

Migrating wasn't all to hard for me as I used Thunderbird for my e-mail and Firefox for my browser while using Windows, all the coding I do can be done in the normal text editor that comes with Ubuntu as it supports syntax highlighting and to top it off Xara X which is what I use to create and edit graphics is free for Linux! Some bad things I have noticed since switching is that Firefox seems to be allot slower and unstable on Linux than it did Windows, but I have switched to Swiftfox which seems has improved the speed a fair bit but I still have trouble running multiple pages with flash objects on them. I also had and am still having some troubles with Compiz but I have managed to fix a few of these by reverting back to default settings, however this can be expected as I believe its still not listed as fully stable but defiantly worth a look at as it gives you many cool animations and more for the desktop.

Want to make the switch but you love your games? Checkout Tux Games theirs tonnes of great titles half of which I didn't even know were available on Linux! I'm currently obsessed with X2: The Threat and recommend this game greatly, try the demo. So why not give it a go yourself, even just boot the live CD and try it out you wont be disappointed.

First I would like to say Merry Christmas to all my blog readers! This blog has not had many posts or been changed since I first made it so I decided it was time to do a little coding and a new blog post. The blog now has a new header and the ads from the left have been removed as well as the making the text larger which makes the blog posts allot easier to read. I hope you enjoy your Christmas and have a great new year!