it is vital to submit shareware to as many sites as possible. We are developing and maintaining a list of up and running shareware sites.

Where applicable we give you the link to submitting software in the "pad file" format. If you are not already using this, then it is important you start! as it does make the submission process far easier.

Shareware Site List

The area of code optimisation has long interested me.

I started off my programming career in assembly language on the venerable BBC Microcomputer, one of my first exercises was to convert an efficient implementation of Conways game of Life, the cellular automation game that had been written in BASIC to 6502 assembly language.

My initial implementaion had a bug! a test that whether a cell was worth calculating caused the machine code to always calculate every cell. The net result was a program that worked, a program that was inherently  perhaps a 100 times faster than the BASIC version did in fact operate marginally slower.

This bought home to me the importance of using the correct algorithms and efficient programming.

Later in my career I worked using Alex an interpreted language, but one that does have a callable API allowing you to avoid the slowness of any interpreter. In this particular project, the language. Alex used almost all the right algorithms and extensive profiling revealed very few black spots. Despite this it did run at too slow a speed for the project in question. extensive work on just about all section of the code did bring about a near doubling of the speed.

This made me question the old adage of optimisation, which is essentially don't waste time on it, but at the end of a project profile and deal with the problem areas. I think that with big projects you should always be keeping at least a weather eye on optimistion, as sometimes the small issues mount up, and to have the intelligence to see the obviously key areas of a project in advance and not to be left trying to "hack" in optimsations at the last.

Using C++ in particular raises a number of interesting aspects to opimisation.  In C++ you tend to operate at a much higher level than in C. When you use a null terminated string in C there is no question in your mind as to what you are getting for your money. You know for example that if you write:

for (i = 0; i < strlen(strText);i++){

}

then it is going to be very inefficient.  But when you are in C++, just how bad is:

for (i = 0; i < strText.length();i++){

}

It is these questions and others that I intend to try and address here.

The news in the world of web development. What is happening with the search engines, the portals and other matters that influence your web site.

We get pretty fed up with the quality of results produced at times by web search engines. It was one of the motivations behind us writing the Foboz - Meta Search Engine.

We have therefore decided to take an occasional benchmark of the results produced by the major web search engines. Looking at two criteria.

• Relevence - Do the results reflect what you are looking for.
• Legitimacy  - were the search engines themselves spammed into producing this result by aggressive placement strategies or by downright illegititmate strategies such as hidden keyword placement.

We will look at the top 10 results produced by each engine on the fairly specific search text. This text will change for each report we do, and we plan to produce about one report a month. The text will be chosen on the basis that a user might have some legitimate expectation of good results. For example:

"download meta search engine program"

Search engines will be ranked on a scale of 0 - 10. Based on the sum of each of its top 10 results graded on a scale of 0-1.

Each results grade will be (R x L)/4.

These measures are not integral. e.g. a result may be 0.75. Placement value for a site will generally be 2.0, we cannot penalise sites that make good use of meta tags to help their ranking. The "L" rating begins to slip when this gets beyond the pale, with for example page titles designed for the search engine rather than the human reader. 

We all like to measure the success of our efforts.

Here we are aiming to have items on the ways of measuring your web sites success.

Search Engine Listings

Getting your web site listed by search engines is probably the most important thing for your web site. If you cannot be found you cannot be visited!

SEO Search Engine Optimisation

The number of tips, tricks and potential pitfalls is vast and you can spend weeks and months trawling the web looking for answers, or paying thousands of dollars paying someone to do it for you.

The latter course though may still require you to either take a lot on faith, or to study the subject almost as much as if you were undertaking the exercise yourself, as there are many underhanded or downright fraudulent SEO services.

SEO Tips & Tricks

Tips range from the fundermental issues of title tags, to consideration of alternative spellings, should you say optimize or optimise for example!

SEO Pitfalls

Our SEO Resources

In our resource section of Search Engine Optimization we aim to cover the essentials in a relatively few easy to digest articles. We are not aiming to get into the ever changing detail of how best to rank top on  a particular Search Engine, as we consider this to be too much like chasing the end of a rainbow for most web masters to manage.

Instead we concentrate on general tips that should see your site do better across the whole range of engines, for now and for the future.

Pad Files are undoubtably a great advance for shareware authors, speeding up the submission process and ideally allowing version upgrades to your shareware to be automatically reflected on shareware sites.

Of course life is never quite that simple.

Here we share a few tips on getting the most out of pad files. 

Web Portal also known as Content Management software provides by far the easiest and professional looking means to a great looking and easy to maintain web site.

We use Mambo Open Source which in conjunction with a web hosting package that supports php and mysql will allow you to create a web site without having to do any programming. In fact with use of the wysiwyg editor provided, you do not actually even have to know html!

Portal software means you can add content to your web site via a simple menu driven interface. Portals will allow you to select what content is published and in the case of Mambo even how long you want something to be published for.

Portal software will also manage banner advertsing, RSS newsfeeds, and depending on the Portal, there may well be a large number of custom components available to perform tasks such as integration with Bulletin Board systems.

One of the great features of portals is that they work with templates, this means that by selecting or changing the template for your site, you can radically change how it looks. Thus all sites using the same Portal software do not look the same. A good Portal will also make use of cascading style sheets (CSS) which allows further cusomisation of the look and feel.

However as much as Portal software "dumbs down" web site design, it will always be the case that the best sites have at least some custom coding. Good Portal software like Mambo allows you to create your own components that appear integrated into Mambo. The MarsJupiter web site for example contains various components/modules that are not part of a standard Mambo installation. Some are from the wide range of user contributions to Mambo and some have been coded in house to provide features special to our site.

A professional looking web site, is vital to making the right impression on people. Even if your web site is not a business, you want it to look well run, but if you are selling software a badly designed web site will put off potential customer as they will expect the same from your products and services.

There are many issues to address to create a professional looking site.

• Hosting - You need a reliable host with the facilities you require.
• Portal software - Allows you to add and manage site content at a higher level than directly editing html.
• Bulletin Board - Do you want forums on your site?
• Graphics - No site is complete with out logos and other graphics to break up the text and enliven the site.
• Active Content - It is important that a web site changes content regularly, so that customers are encouraged to return for more.
• Programming - There is a trend for sites to require much less hand on programming. But whilst you can use portals and bulletin boards etc, without customisation, it is still the case that a bit of tweaking is almost always needed to get the best out of things. 

A good web host is essential to the smooth running of any company. There are many issues in choosing a host:

• Cost
• Reliabability
• Support
• Bandwidth
• Transfer limits
• Server Speed
• Support for mysql, php, asp etc

Latest news about our Resources section of the web site, which we intend to be a valuable reference for shareware authors.