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URL Redirection (also known as URL Forwarding, Domain Redirection and Domain Forwarding)  are used extensively on the web for great variety of purposes.

Simply put, URL redirection is when a request to a particular URL results in the request being redirected to another URL.

In some cases, a redirected URL will in turn be redirected to another URL and you end up with a chain of redirects.

Common uses for redirects are:

• Directing users and search engines to a new page after a website redesign or a move to a new domain to avoid 404 page not found errors.
• Masking affiliate links by presenting a “friendly” looking link that redirects to an affiliate link.
• Temporarily presenting a specific page when a website is down for maintenance.
• Redirecting from the www to the non-www version of your domain, or vice versa, to ensure both versions are seen as the one website.
• Shorten long URLs to an easier to remember and easier to type URL.

It’s not always easy to see exactly where a redirected URL ends up without actually clicking on the link.   Additionally, if there are a number of intermediate redirections, these generally happen too fast to see in the browser status bar.

I wanted a tool that would visually display URL redirects.  After checking out existing tools, I didn’t find any that worked correctly and I wanted something that would display the different redirection types in a specific way.

After investigation, I decided to develop my own free tool called Redirect Detective.

Redirect Detective recognizes, the following types of redirects:

• 301 Permanent Redirect
• 302 Temporary Redirect
• 307 Temporary Redirect
• Meta Refresh
• HTTP Refresh

Additionally, it will also detect:

• 403 Permission Denied
• 404 Page Not Found
• 500 Internal Server Error

The following screenshot shows an example of an affiliate link that uses a variety of redirects to reach the final destination:

The different server responses and redirects are colour coded to make it easier to see what type of redirect is being used.

Additionally, if cookies are being set at any particular point, the cookie item will be displayed and if you hover your mouse over it, the number of cookies being set will be displayed.

Video Overview of Redirect Detective

The video below gives short overview of the types of things you can use Redirect Detective for.

I hope you find the tool useful and I welcome any feedback you may have regarding use of Redirect Detective or any enhancements you would like.

Cheers

There are so many different WordPress Themes in existence and people spend a lot of time hunting down the “right” theme to use.

Typically a person will come across  a WordPress site that they really like and are interested in using the same theme, but find there is no information or links in the footer as to what WordPress theme has been used.

If you know what to do, you can look in the HTML source for the site you are interested in, but I decided that I would create a free tool to make this process super simple.

What WordPress Theme Is That?

So I created the site  called What WordPress Theme Is That?

It’s very easy to use.  All you do is enter a domain or URL and click on the “Check Site” button.

Here is a screenshot showing you the type of results you’ll get.

There will be a minority of WordPress sites that have their theme obscured, so the tool won’t get all the details for those sites, but for the vast majority of sites, it should correctly detect all the details.

Below is a short video showing you how it works.

Hope you find it to be a useful tool when building your WordPress Sites.

Cheers

 Spintax Generator For Hyperlinks

Like a lot of marketers, I use a variety of tools and websites for generating and submitting spun articles.  Software like The Best Spinner, Article Marketing Robot and blog submission sites like Article Ranks.

One task I often found to be very clumsy and prone to formatting errors, was creating links in spintax format.

I hate doing any processes manually, so I decided to create a simple tool called Spintaxer which makes the process of creating hyperlinks in spintax format a breeze.

Click here to access the Spintaxer tool (it’s completely free)

How to Create eCovers For Free

eCovers are everywhere.  Whether it’s an eCover for an eBook, software or videos, they are an essential part of packaging and promoting your online product.

Given how popular eCovers are, it’s no surprise there’s a huge amount of options for creating them.   Of course, a lot of those options include having to purchase eCover creator software to generate your covers.  Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the eCover software creators can be quite powerful, but you generally need to have a graphics package to create the images and text in the first place to load into the software.

So What Are The Free Options?

If you have a graphics package like Photoshop or GIMP, there are loads of action scripts you can download for free, however, I’m more interested in the options that are quick and easy to use.

After hunting around and trying out various options, I’ve come up with two sites that both do a really good job for free.

3D Box Maker

3D Box Makerallows you to create covers for a book, 3D-box, CD cover, CD cover and Box and DVD Box.

The thing I really like about this site is the ability to rotate the finished cover to whatever angle you prefer.

The one downside of this site is that you need to have pre-prepared graphics to upload in order to create your cover.

MyEcoverMaker

MyEcoverMaker is definitely the best site to use if you don’t have any pre-made graphics (although you can upload your own images if you have them).  There are a whole bunch of backgrounds, graphics and images they provide which you can use for your eCover.  It’s also very easy to add text with control over font, color, rotation and even an option to create text in an arc so that you can place it over a round logo or image.

With the free option, you have access to four different eCover styles:

• Binder Laying Open
• Ring Binder Laying
• Paperback Stack
• Software Box Open Top

The Ecover for this article was created using the Software Box Open Top style.

If you find the free templates don’t quite suit you, there’s another 30 styles you can choose from, which only cost $3.95 per cover.

Managing Online Accounts

As an online marketer, one major aspect of managing your business is password and account management.

Typically you will have multiple accounts for sites like YouTube, Google, Twitter etc, not to mention all the article directories and bookmarking sites.   It is vital to be able to quickly and easily login to all these various sites, as this can speed up the more tedious aspects of online marketing.

The question is how can you effectively and securely manage all those accounts?

Well, like a lot of people, you can rely on the password management features that are built into your browser.

This is how most people start off, but it doesn’t take too long to be frustrated by the limitations it imposes:

• Passwords are stored unencrypted on your computer, which makes them very vulnerable to hackers or rogue software.
• No easy support for multiple accounts for a particular site.
• No easy management of the account information, eg: editing, deleting details.
• Password functionality is limited to the browser, ie: you can’t open another browser and access the same account/password information.

Password Manager Options

There are certainly plenty of password managers that you can use.  One name that comes up a lot is RoboForm.  RoboForm is a good product, but the free version is very limited in functionality, that you really do need to purchase the Pro version which is $29.95

Being the cheapskate that I am, I went hunting around for other products that would offer the same functionality, but for free.  After a lot of reading, I narrowed it down to two options:

1. Sxipper
2. LastPass

In the end, I decided to go with LastPass.  The main reason for this, was that LastPass supports all major browsers, ie: FireFox, IE, Safari, Chrome etc.  LastPass also has better form management compared to Sxipper.

The LastPass  free version is fully featured, however there is a Premium version which costs $1 per month.  The main additional functionality in the premium version is support for mobile devices like iPhone, Blackberry etc.

Every now and then, you come across a really effective, but simple tool that is great for SEO.  The Rank Decoding Engine is one of these.  It is totally free (just requires entering your email address) and is a very small download.

Rank Decoding Engine is a  very clever piece of software.  It basically reverse engineer’s the Google’s result pages.    The most amazing and unique feature of this software is that it shows sites that Google regards as  trusted sites with high authority, and that’s why they are ranking consistently well.  In case you weren’t aware, Google have publicly stated that links from authority sites are more important than links from lesser ranked sites.

Here’s a couple of quotes from the horses mouth:

• “Thematic incoming links from authority sites carry more weight than on-page optimization”. – Matt Cutts (Google Engineer and unofficial Google SEO spokesman).

• “Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote from Page A to Page B.  Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help make other pages important. – Google

So targeting trusted, high authority site in your niche is a great way of boosting your site’s authority and ranking with Google.

You can download the free Rank Decoding Engine from

http://www.crowdmountainsite.com/decoder

Here’s a short video showing how powerful this tool is: