A traditional web server is made up of many different components, including an http server, mail server, FTP server, and more. In days gone by, a webmaster would install each software package individually to get a custom web server up and running. These kinds of server setups offer many advantages, including testing, learning, and being able to have total control over the web server environment. Today there are many different options available that bundle each component into an easy single installation package.

The installation packages are basically split into two main categories, WAMP (Windows Apache MySQL PHP) servers and LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) servers. As you can see, they are installation packages that include the Apache httpd server, the MySQL database server, and PHP installed on either a Windows machine or a Linux/Unix machine. There are many different WAMP/LAMP installation packages available that contain the 4 major components, as well as other software to make a more full featured web server. These packages can vary slightly, while meeting the general requirements for running a web server. I have listed some of the most common packages available below.

WAMP

• Apache2Triad - This package includes an incredible list of features. It installs Apache with mod_python, mod_ssl, mod_perl, OpenSSL, and AWStats, MySQL with phpMyAdmin, PostgreSQL with pgAdmin and phpPgAdmin, xmail with PHPXMail and UebiMiau, SlimFTPD with PHPsFTPd, PHP with Pear and Smarty, Perl with CPAN, and Python with Spyce and wxPython.
• XAMPP - This package installs Apache with OpenSSL, MySQL with phpMyAdmin, PHP 4 and PHP 5, FileZilla FTP server, and Mercury Mail Transport System. You can also get Perl and Tomcat as an add-on.
• WampServer 2.0 - This is the new version of the WAMP5 server. It installs Apache, MySQL with PHPMyAdmin and SQLiteManager, and PHP. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the first servers listed, but it is reliable and has the ability to install many different releases of Apache, MySQL, and PHP.
• The Uniform Server - This package installs Apache, MySQL with phpMyAdmin, and PHP. It also includes SSL capabilities, but I couldn't find what software is used.
• SpikeWAMP - This package installs Apache, MySQL, and PHP. This version also includes the ability to install popular applications like Drupal, Joomla, Moodle, phpBB, and more. There is also an update channel that allows you to download and install the new beta versions of the applications. This is a nice and easy WAMP installation package.

LAMP

• XAMPP - This package installs Apache with OpenSSL, MySQL with phpMyAdmin, PHP 4 and PHP 5, FileZilla FTP server, and Mercury Mail Transport System.
• Apache Toolbox - This package installs one of the largest bundles of applications and mods I have seen; it boasts almost 100 different modules. Some of these include Apache, MySQL, Apache, WebDAV, OpenLDAP, and gd libraries. Take a look at the website to get the full listing.
• BitRock - This package is based on the BitNami stacks and installs Apache, MySQL with phpMyAdmin, and PHP. There are also some popular applications available for easy installation with BitRock, like phpBB, WordPress, Joomla, and Subversion just to name a few.

What LAMP/WAMP server do you use? Or do you set up all the pieces separately? Let us know in the comments.

Dreamweaver CS3 is a great tool for web developers. It has tons of bells and whistles that help make developing a lot faster and easier. Despite the great things I have to say about it, there is one problem that I experienced while using it with Windows Vista (I have included a screenshot above). The problem lies in the FTP function that allows you to remotely edit a file on your web server. When trying to access a file, whether it is saving, opening, or reading a directory, I would get this no response error. After dealing with this for too long, thankfully I found that there is an easy fix.

I was able to fix this by changing the FTP timeout value in the preferences. Apparently when Dreamweaver is installed, it sets this value to 2 seconds. That turned out to be too short for me. I have seen other people with this issue, and I believe the 2 seconds was too short for them as well. All you need to do to change it is go to the "Site" preferences and make the change. I changed mine to 30 seconds and haven't received the error since.

In the toolbar, go to Edit > Preferences > Site and change the "FTP Time out" (screenshot below).

I hope this helps and is able to take care of the problem as easily as it did for me.

Yesterday marked a Big Update to Webmaster Tools for Microsoft's Live Search Webmaster Tools. They announced on their blog that they have added additional tools to the suite as well as taking it out of beta. Live Search Webmaster Tools was originally released as a beta back in November of 2007. Since then they have continued to make improvements and additions to the webmaster center.

One of the notable addition I found was the new Crawl Issues Tool. This tool will help you find indexing problems with your site. It can identify file not found (404) errors, blocked pages, long dynamic URLs, and unsupported content-types (Windows Live Help). Filtering by 2 subdomains or folders is now available for errors with 1000 or more occurrences. Because the basic output is limited to 20 results, there is also the ability to export the results as a CSV file. The exported file will contain the first 1000 records of the specified error.

The other notable addition is a Backlinks Tool that helps you discover where your inbound links are coming from. This information is very valuable for tracking where you could advertise or promote products. The links can help you understand your demographics better and market more effectively and efficiently. This tool includes the ability to filter your incoming links to a certain section of your website as well as to view all incoming links or just incoming links from other websites (excluding any incoming links from other pages on your site). Not only does this feature help you learn who is linking to your site for demographic purposes, but it also provides information about how well your site may rank. Backlinks play a part in how well your site ranks in a search, so you will want to know who is linking to you (websites with high credibility that link to you will increase your rank in a search, while websites with low credibility that link to you will lower your rank in a search). Downloading the first 1000 results as a CSV is available with this tool as well.

Overall, I think these are great improvements and additions. I think that they were expected to be released at some point in order to compete and to provide important information. I hope that the Live Search Webmaster Tools will continue to add useful and helpful features that I can use to rank better in the SEO game.

Sitemaps are a big part of the SEO game. The main reason for generating a Sitemap (Sitemap with a capital "S" denotes an XML Sitemap) is to help ensure all your web pages are listed in the search engine indexes. It is incredibly important to have search engines indexing your page to show when a keyword is searched. Major search engines like Google and Yahoo! can drive a lot of traffic to your site simply because you added a valid sitemap to your site. A Sitemap file is simply an XML file that contains a list of pages on your site. Here are the rules to follow when creating a Sitemap.

General Rules

• The file must use the UTF-8 encoding.
• The data values must be entity-escaped.
• The file location must be the root of the URL's being submitted.
• A minimum of 3 tags are required: "urlset", "url", and "loc".

Detailed Rules

• The file location determines what URL's can be included in the Sitemap. If you place the Sitemap at "http://www.yoursite.com/blog", the only URL's that can be submitted have to reside in the root URL "http://www.yoursite.com/blog". URL's from "http://www.yoursite.com" can't be submitted in the Sitemap. The URL's can also be only from a single host. If you place the Sitemap at "http://www.yoursite.com", you can't submit URL's from "http://dev.yoursite.com".
• The "urlset" tag is the root tag of the Sitemap. All other tags will be within the open "urlset" tag (<urlset>) and the close "urlset" tag (</urlset>). Within the open "urlset" tag you must include the schema to be used; in most cases it will be "http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9".
• The "url" tag is the parent tag for each URL you want to to be included in the Sitemap. All tags available, with the exception of the aforementioned "urlset" tag, are child tags of the "url" tag. Available children tags include "loc", "lastmod", "changefreq", and "priority".
• The "loc" tag is the last required tag. This tag gives the exact URL of the page that is being referenced. The URL entered here needs to be the full URL including "http://".

Optional Rules

• The "lastmod" tag can be included to show when the page was last updated. This date needs to be in "YYYY-MM-DD" format.
• The "changefreq" tag allows you to show how often the page is changed. There are 7 possible values for "changefreg"; they are "always", "hourly", "daily", "weekly", "monthly", "yearly", and "never".
• The "priority" tag is the level of importance each page is in relation to the others (on your site). This tag does not have anything to do with other website pages. The values can range from 0.0 to 1.0, with 0.5 being the default value.

Example Sitemap

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2008-07-07</lastmod>
      <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
      <priority>1.0</priority>
   </url>
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/about</loc>
      <lastmod>2008-06-09</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.2</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>

Additional Resources

• Google Webmaster Help Center
• Sitemaps.org Protocol Information
• XML Sitemaps Generator

Databases are used in so many ways on so many websites. They are used for small tasks and large distributed networks scaled to handle millions of transactions per day. Sometimes we need a little help, a little push in the right direction in order to create a properly designed and normalized database. Thankfully, there are sites like DatabaseAnswers.org that provide help from "getting-started tutorials" to "database models."

There are over 500 free database models at this website. They are all viewable in data model form and can be saved as an image or printed. You are also able to request an access database for any of the data models available by simply emailing and asking for one. The data models span many different categories from customers to bookstores to catalogs, and the list just goes on. I have listed the top 20 data models below.

Top 20 Data Models

1. Libraries and Books
2. Inventory Control for Retail Stores
3. Hotel Reservations
4. Video Rentals
5. School Management
6. Clients and Fees
7. CD Collections
8. Customers and Invoices
9. Payroll
10. Apartment Rentals
11. Customers and Services
12. ERP
13. Car Sales
14. Customers and Addresses
15. Driving Schools
16. Health and Fitness Clubs
17. Hospital Admissions
18. Inventory of Files in Boxes
19. Sports Clubs
20. Airline Reservations

The creator of all of these database models runs multiple database companies; one is in the UK; the other is in the US. He has also created data models that are included in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express. He offers his reason for providing these saying, "I design these Data Models for free to give something back to the Database community that has provided me with a good (and interesting) living for the past 15 years" (DatabaseAnswers.org). Be sure to check these out and show some love for all the hard work that went into creating these and offering them for FREE!

For those of you who use WordPress as your blogging platform, you can understand the need for support forums and help documentation for troubleshooting problems that occur. Hosting your own blog requires you to take care of any issues that may arise. Even if you don't host your own blog and use WordPress.com to host it for you, there are still situations that require a certain level of support.

Starting yesterday, Aug 2, WordPress.com now offers support 24-7. Previously, support was available during the day from 9am - 4pm PDT, and then 24 hours a day 5 days a week, but that has just changed. They recognized the need for fast support at any time and have expanded to meet this need. "The time has come for help without delay. We hereby announce 24-7 support on WordPress.com" (WordPress.com Blog). They will try to get back to you within 24 hours, if not sooner, and are working hard to provide quality support in an efficient manner.

I'm pretty excited to here this news. I don't host my blog through WordPress.com, although I do use WordPress. However, I think this is a great step that they have taken to reach out and provide extra support needed by their users. Hosting your blog on WordPress.com is free, with a few upgrades available at a cost, and yet they still upped their support level to 24-7. I think that is pretty impressive and says a good deal about their business practices. Kudos to you, wordpress.com!

Performance is very important to webmasters and a lot of times it would be nice to know how long on average it took for our web pages to load. I created a simple class in order to track how fast a page executes. This is written in PHP because that is what I use to develop my sites. It currently just displays the output on the page; I haven't turned this into a log or database table yet but I probably will. Once I convert it to save the output each time, I could use it to track the averages per page. This is just a basic timer at the moment though. I have included the class and an example within the same PHP file below. You are free to use and change the script as you wish. Feel free to link back if you would like, but it is not mandatory.

<?

class LoadTime {

var $PageLoadStart;
var $PageLoadEnd;

function PageStart() {
$this->PageLoadStart = microtime();
}

function PageEnd() {
$this->PageLoadEnd = microtime();
}

function LoadTime() {
return round($this->PageLoadEnd-$this->PageLoadStart,4);
}

}

$timer = new LoadTime();
$timer->PageStart();

$i = 0;
while ($i<100000) {
$i++;
}

$timer->PageEnd();

echo $timer->LoadTime().' seconds';

?>