Latest Resources:: MarsJupiter Family Shareware

MarsJupiter - Family shareware

Monday, 01 December 2008

Latest Resources

As shareware publishers we feel we should contribute out knowledge to the wider community of authors.

So we are developing a section of our web site dedicated to linking to useful resources for the development and publishing of software.

This section is largely incomplete at this point in time, but continue to check back as it is developing rapidly.

Suggestions to webmaster@marsjupiter.com are welcome.

Shareware sites for software submission

We hope you will find this shareware site submission list useful when you need to get your shareware known on the web.

Other Resource Categories

Browse these lists of articles for useful information.

Pad File Extensions

Since Pad Files are XML based files, they are easy to extend to contain other data without effecting whether applications can read them.

This also means that a Pad Creation program can easily be written to read in from a html file the questions to be asked, and how to save those results in the resulting pad file.

Thus when you see a pad file extension on the net, they will take the form of html text to be saved to your PadGen directory. This can be a little confusing if you do not understand what you are meant to be doing with them!

For the latest pad file extensions look here

Using Alexa to measure your web site

We have installed an Alexa link on our web site. It takes you or us to an analysis of our web sites performance.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?q=&url=http://www.marsjupiter.com/index.php

You can use it to check on any site on the web you choose, and create your own link for your web site.

The link will giving you a series of tables and graphs over time of your comparative web traffic, as well as an invaluable list of what sites are linking to your site.

A lot of the statistical information is similar to the information your web host should make available to you via your web sites control panel. But there is a lot to be said for a comparitive ranking to other web sites.

Having been generally wowed by the available information, caution kicked in! We can't recall allowing Alexa access to our web hosts statistics! how is it obtaining all of this information?

Well the links to your site are easy to explain, Alexa is partnered with google and hence their search engine can easily show you the links it has spotted to your site.

But the traffic is another matter, and is a salutary lesson in knowing what you are getting into when you download explorer toolbar add-ons. The free Alexa toolbar which has apparently had millions of downloads is spyware logging what sites you visit and thus building the database on which the Alexa statistics are based.

This probably means that for some smaller sites, you can take some of the figures with a pinch of salt. If those sites download the toolbar themselves and ecourage their users to do so, then the statistics will be distorted in their favour!

We cannot comment much more on the toolbar, for this very reason! We want to know how much our site is really being used. Therefore we have not installed this toolbar as we think it would distort the truth.

Meta tags - keywords

Meta keywords are placed in a meta tag in the <head> portion of your web pages. For example taken from the "Good Keywords" web page:

The Meta keywords are not visible to someone browsing your site, but are visible to search engines and will be used by some search engines to categorise your site.

There is a lot to be said about the appropriate selection of good keywords for your site. But we will kick off in the right direction with a simple recommendation of the "Good Keywords" freeware program that can help you in the selection of keywords for your site.

Take a look at the good keywords web site and give it a try. It can take only a few minutes to find out keyword combinations that could give your site a real boost in the search engine rankings.

Before thinking of Meta keywords tags as a magic solution to boost your sites rankings we would recommend reading this article it is another indication of what we have said before, that whilst you may attempt to artificially boost rankings, at the end of the day the one thing that is likely in the long term to work well, is good site content.

Shareware Submission programs

It seems to us that we cannot visit a site related to shareware without coming across an advert for programs that will to one degree or another robotically submit your software to hundreds of sites.

This is of course an attractive proposition. But what lies behind the banner headline? We would weclome discussion of this issue on our forums but we do have the following points to make.

Submission is an error prone process

sites timeout, object to discrepancies in Pad Files or any number of other problems occur. These issues will occur for robotic submission too and you will ned to spend time examing errors. If you go back to a site where an error has occured without confident knowledge of just how far the automated process got, you may make a multiple submission and annoy the shareware site staff.

Submission is not safely scriptable

You are relying on a software script to fill in web forms without error. At MarsJupiter we know all about this process, we have two shareware products and two freeware examples in our Alex programming language that make a business of parsing web pages and filling in web forms. So if we felt this process could be safely scripted you would see a shareware submission program from us! But the basic fact is that a significant percentage of submissions will fail and thus undermine your chances of a successful manual submission.

Shareware sites do not like robotic submissions

Some sites state that they treat robotic submissions with lower prioity and some may reject them alltogether. Do you really want this happening.

Fully robotic submission is a myth anyway

Some submission engines actually admit that because of the problems with robotic submission they in effect only partially automate the process. So they in effect guide you through manual submission and keep records of author account username and passwords and the submissions made. This may well be useful, but if you have a list of shareware sites of your own, then how valuable is it?

Submission programs promise hundreds of sites?

Shareware sites have been closing rapidly. We have checked through some of these lists of 100's of sites and found only about 30% of them to be working. If these products really do have hundreds of truly worthwhile sites we would be very surprised. Beware of alias's defunct shareware sites are often redirected to live ones!

Paying for manual submission

Some sites offer manual submission as a service, you pay for their staff to submit your software to sites on your behalf. We can see some potential benefits to this. As with any process if you do it for a living you will develop speed and expertise. But as ever when the process is out of your hands you have to consider the following:

How much does it cost?
How much time will we spend checking the results?
What knowledge would we gain if we did it ourselves?

The best sites or the easiest sites?

With the advent of Pad Files some sites are clearly easier for robotic submission than others. When sites are selected for robot or even manual submission is it on the basis that the sites are the best ones for your shareware or because there is a desire to report the greatest number of submissions?

Conclusion

We would advise people to examine the use of these services, but to do so with a sceptical eye.

Your own internal web server

Unless you are in a large corporate environment you would be ill advised to run your own customer facing web server. The problems are many fold.

You can be target for hacking, and your internal network is under threat if it is connected to your web server. e.g. you need very good firewall protection.
Web Server maintenance to a very high percentage of "uptime" is non trivial.
Web server security on a vulnerable customer facing server, is a job in its own right.

Third party servers from dedicated hosts have many benefits.

A good host like f5hosting has excellent support, extending beyond simply problems and into helping you develop your site.
They are in real terms a very good financial deal.
They provide full backup of your web site.
They should be a reliable and fast connection for your customers.
Whilst there is always a danger of hacking. They should have the dedicated expertise to limit the risk.

Having talked about the benefits of not attempting to host your own web site to the world. We would now state the benefits of using a computer on your internal network:

To provide a working backup of your web site.
If you are developing complex code on your site, your code may have bugs that will effect the server performance. Even if your host is a tolarant one, it is cleary best to minimise this risk. Hence developing code on your own server is better.
To avoid downtime on your site. Some changes are not incremental and hence you need transfer a working copy as quickly as possible.
Test installations of code, it is better to practice on a copy before risking it on the real thing.

it is useful if your host is not running Microsoft servers, but the freely available Apache server. This allows you to freely duplicate the actual setup your host is running. Albeit without needed to take all the time and trouble to implement the highest levels of security as your server will only be visible inside your internal network.

The typical host will be running Apache with the mysql database system, with the appropriate Apache "mods" to allow access to mysql via languages like php.

At marsjupiter.com we have installed such a system under Microsoft windows 2000.

We have also installed such a system as part of installing Mandrake Linux.

Both system were fairly easy to install, the main issues being ensuring the Apache mods were active and that all files permissions were set correctly on Linux.

At MarsJupiter.com we have settled on the Mandrake Linux solution for our internal server, for the following reasons.

Linux is a far more stable server than windows 2000 in our experience.
Our host is running Linux as will be the vast majority of Apache hosts. It is better if running a test/backup server to be in as similar a configuration as possible.
Simple logic of our internal network. Our windows 2000 computers are part of our software development process and can therefore never be exposed to the outside world. As we only do a few bits of actual development under Linux, exposing the Linux server could technically be an option. Albeit still an undesirable one.

Linux does have some drawbacks:

It is a whole new system to learn which can be daunting.
You will need a dedicated PC.
You will probably want to edit your web pages via a windows PC, as such you will need to configure samba to allow your PC to seamlessly access files under Linux. This works wonderfully well, when you get the hang of it, but can be confusing. Linux distributions should have a GUI tool for this. You may also want to use VNC to allow you a virtual view of your Linux system. Again this requires a little set up at the Linux level.

Especially if you choose the windows route assuming you are inexperienced with Linux you can probably set up an internal web server within a few hours. This minimum of educational effort is easily ourweighed by the benefits if you plan to do anything complex with your web site.

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