NPconvert A Tool to Convert your NP$ to USD$
NPconvert is an online tool specifically written with Namepros members. Namepros uses NP$ which pretty much usually work out to 50NP$ to 1USD$, however, odd NP$ or higher numbers frequently confuse even the regular Namepros members, so NPconvert was set up as a free tool to help NP members easily work out how much they can sell their hard earned NP$ into USD$ and vice versa.

It’s a novel idea and one that has been about for a good while now and very simple to use Check out the link below, the design was made by a good friend of mine at TheHiveDesigns
 

 
NPconvert

DNS Propagation
Proxies aren’t just handy for casual web users looking to hide the tracks they make online, they can also be really handy for webmasters and web developers.

Servers hosting proxies such as this site allow another route through the net to another site, probably a webmasters site, which they have just changed Nameservers, because they changed hosts, or changed a domain name from a parked domain to an active website.

Whenever someone in charge of their domain changes or registers new nameservers, it takes a while for the information on the location of the new host to filter it’s way down to individual users from the internet as a whole. For a lot of ISP’s this means a wait no longer than 15 minutes but for some it can take quite a bit longer and although on the whole Propgation (as it this process is called) can be pretty fast problems can arise, often due to caching by ISP’s or even a users own PC. This whole process is called propagation.

This is why it can be very handy to have a reliable proxy on hand, or maybe even several proxies. Proxies can bypass your ISP completely, well, their DNS Cache they store and a webmaster can use such proxies to verify if they are waiting for their ISP to update their records or if their PC is at fault. As a webmaster if you see your new site using several proxies but still the old location without them then you can be pretty sure that the nameserver changes have propogated throughout the net but maybe your ISP hasn’t updated their cache or your pc is still caching old DNS locations.

There’s not much you can do if your ISP is caching DNS settings other than use a proxy of some sort, but if the problem lies with your pc there are a couple of measures you can take to help get the latest locations of each site you visit.

Flushing Your PC’s DNS Cache with Windows XP
This is probably the easiest method and the first trick you should use should you encounter a problem that you are sure your PC is responsible for.

1..Clear your all your browsers Temporary Internet Files / Web Browser Cache.
2..Close all browsers running.
3..Click the Start Button.
4..Click run.
5..Type:

command.exe

6..Then type:

ipconfig /flushdns

7..Restart your chosen browser and before you try to load your page again clear your all your browsers Temporary Internet Files / Web Browser Cache once more.
8..Try your site again, if it still loads the old location try the steps above but after step 6 and before step 7, reboot your PC, then, start from step 7.

Running The Command Line in Vista
If you are using Windows Vista there is no obvious way on how to run the command line to execute this command. Open Explorer (Neat trick is to press the Windows Key and then the letter “e“) and type in command in the search box, you should within a few seconds see command.exe appear in the results, right click it and select Run as Administrator then you can run the ipconfig /flushdns command.

Getting Tricky with the Hosts File
You should only really try this under the following conditions:

1..You have followed the above instructions and they failed to make a difference or maybe a permanent difference.
2..You are absolutely sure your PC is to blame.
3..As a temporary measure.

Editing the Hosts File

1..Use the built in search feature or navigate to:

c:\wiindows\system32\drivers\etc\

2..Open the Hosts (no extension) with a text editor.

3..You should see a descriptive text followed by the following:

127.0.0.1 localhost

4..Under it add your site’s IP and location such as:

127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 yoursite.com

5..If you don’t know your site’s IP you can find out from your hosting company.
6..The changes once saved should be immediate once you try to load your site again.

Editing the HOSTS file with Vista
As with running the IPCONFIG /FLUSHDNS command in vista, if you have UAC (User Access Control) enabled, you may need to run Notepad as an administrator before you can open the HOSTS file.

End
I hope this page has helped you understand how proxies work, bookmark us and check back often as we will always be adding new and interesting content as we grow older!

Namepros currently down
Just letting anyone passing that right now Namepros is currently down, apparently it’s been down ost of the day in the UK and the rest of the world however the last 20 minutes it’s gone from a 403 forbidden message to a network timeout message, so looks like they are having probs with the server, will keep you posted if I learn any more

EDIT : 19:30 Hours GMT
Namepros is back up again yay! Will keep a close eye on the site to see why it went down just in case it goes down again.

EDIT : 20:35 Hours GMT
Namepros is still up and the LIVE auctions look set to go in just under 30 mins! Check them out at Namepros

The Solid Proven SEO Guide
There are some SEO Techniques that seem more like rocket science but fortunately the ones that matter the most boil down to developing good webmaster habits and sticking to a uniformed pattern on your site. This site is mostly geared towards Google fans, but they are basic and effective enough to make a good impact on other search engines too.

SEO and and Designing Pages for Visitors
Before you tackle any page, the best course of action to take is to target the page you are creating for the visitors you are hoping to attract. Many webmasters only see numbers and keywords but the visitors that are the ones that are going to subscribe to your RSS Feeds, buy your services and products and offer the best form of advertising you can have, Word of Mouth, not spiders but real people and real people like to see pages that are easy to read and that are not filled with endless reams of dull text with no paragraphs or colour.

• This means good use of White Space, it helps the eye keep track of what it is reading, even the simple good use of paragraphs is a great help to a reader. Blockquotes can be beautified and enhanced with CSS to further break up and emphasize content as can the use of bolded or italic and other text formatting.
• Images are a fantastic way to illustrate visually what you are talking about on a page and can really help to empower the reader with more understanding faster than they would otherwise. They also provide you with the means of adding additonal SEO Keywords to your content, that not only compliments the keywords you have carefully crafted into your written content but that will also appear in Image Searches.
• Tables are a great way at providing tabular information for easy reference. But, big tables are hard to follow with the eye, don’t be afraid to use differently coloured rows and / or columns even if only subtlety so.
• Spelling is crucial to attractive content and will of course improve your overall SEO greatly. Search engines don’t normally know the correct spellings for words or phrases themselves but they can match a users search phrase and compare it to other users similar or exact search phrases and link it to content on the web. This works out pretty well normally and means that poorly spell checked content will get shafted in what can be very competitive results. Poor spelling and worse, TXT spelling is also very annoying to most readers.
• Maintaining a pattern, format and style across your entire site help visitors adapt quickly to how you present your content, the good use of bolded text, well thought out and uniform use of headers and sub headers, bulleted lists and uncluttered page design all help a visitor find the information they are searching for easier and hopefully more attractive to return to.

Good SEO Habits to get into
Good webmaster habits are essential to good SEO.

• Pages that are well written in HTML are easier to read by spiders and can provide faster loading times for visitors by their browsers. Poorly written HTML can also destroy a sites layout making it unattractive to visitors.
• H1 headers are not always best, I’ve found H3 and H4 headers and sub headers to be very effective and aren’t a giant blight on a page that may suffer from lack of real estate.
• Good use of alt=”" in images and title=”" in links not only provide helpful visual cues to a visitor but help a spider understand your page better.
• Good link building, don’t try and get as many people to link to your pages and sites as you can, focus on sites with similar content. Links from content related sites will serve you far better than the brute force method.
• PR Sculpting and outgoing NOFOLLOW links are out and have been changed big time in Google.

  Only use NOFOLLOW on links that visit pages that would be annoying and useless for spiders to visit and adding NOFOLLOW to outgoing links will reduce that pages weight just as much as ordinary outgoing links.

Google Adwords Keywords is your Friend
Most webmasters probably won’t want to worry about this tip as it’s an ultra fine tuner but it is an excellent free resource that can help you attract more visitors by helping you tailor your content more precisely to what your visitors are actually searching for.

Google Adwords Keywords is a free tool offered by Google to help it’s paying customers find the most effective keywords to advertise whatever service or product they wish to advertise on Google for. However, the humble webmaster can also use it to determine an approximate search volume for sets of relevant keywords.

The idea is, before adding what you believe are relevant alt=”" and title=”" attributes, page titles, headers and sub headers, just quickly pop over to Google Adwords Keywords and check to see if there are more popular searched for phrases or keywords.

SEO Building and Tracking
Google offers webmasters their free to use Webmaster Tools, it’s a great tool that allows you, among other things, to find 404’s wasting your SEO potential and the keywords people are using to find your site and where you ranked when they clicked your link in those results.

cPanel and other hosting control panels also may offer a statistical gathering program called Awstats, once you get used to it the software can become an invaluable tool in tailoring content your visitors are searching for, enhancing current content and tracking all sort of useful information that can help you improve your site.

Google Analytics is another free tool offered by Google for webmasters that offeres a wealth of interesting and statistical information about your visitors, their browsing habits and more. There is an incredible amount of detail contained within and a good few years ago companies were forking out thousands for software that Google has since made available to all for free.

Study your Competitors
It may help you to improve your overall results in Google to maintain friendly relationships with other webmasters that provide similar content to yours, however, that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be higher than the competition. Scan your competitors sites aggressively if their search ranking improves or surpasses your listings, it’s not normally a good idea to make big changes to your sites overall SEO strategy as the results can at times be unpredictable but small selective enhancements and keyword focusing of an entire page throughout the entire content of your site can make noticeable differences.

Good Content is King
Good content will always be the major driving force of visitors to any website, people are using search engines for many reasons, they want information, they are interested in buying products or services and they are looking to be entertained. Find out what they are searching for and within the scope of your sites focus provide content they find attractive and matches their needs. Build on previous successful content and don’t be afraid to launch unfocused content to it’s own site.

Need a Great Programmer?
I can’t take kudos for this post, I was inspired by a good friend of mine called Don’t let this talented man go un-noticed.

You see, both Mellow and myself frequent the perhaps by now familiar forum to you here called Namepros, which is if perhaps you don’t know already, a domain and webmaster forum and market place. It’s a good honest place and lots of good people there, one of whom is a programmer called Eric.

He’s so good in fact that he’s been the main programmer behind the long awaited upgrade that Namepros is recently going under, this is a big forum, it has over 150,000 members and growing daily and is one of the most respected domaining and webmaster forums and market places on the net and Eric is responsible for the smooth migration to the latest version of the VB software it is based on and all the countless modifications that have been added to it.

Eric has done programming work for me in the past, he’s prompt, thorough and quick, he can knock out most code some people would spend a week figuring out, he’s also a dab hand at article writing as, if you’ve read a few posts lower, he’s written some for this site too. He’s also fair and affordable, if you need a good PHP and MySQL programmer who also knows a fair bit about javascript there isn’t anyone I would rather recommend.

You can Visit Eric’s Site Here – it’s called Secondversion.com and view his resume yourself and contact him if you do need programming work doing

SSH Tunneling

What is SSH Tunneling?

An SSH tunnel consists of an encrypted tunnel created through an SSH protocol connection. Users may set up SSH tunnels to tunnel unencrypted traffic over a network through an encrypted channel. This is SSH Tunneling.

Why use SSH Tunneling?

There are many reasons you may want to use SSH Tunneling. For example:

• No one will know which sites you visit.
• Any data you download, as long as the application supports it, is encrypted. (For eg: email clients and browsers).
• Your activities will be hidden from any potential malacious folk

Ok, so say I’m interested; What do I need to set this up?

This will work for any program that supports use of SOCKS v5 proxies. This includes:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird (Mozilla’s Email Client)
• … there are others, but these are what I have personally tested.

You will need:

• A browser, of course. Firefox is recommended
• PuTTY – a free SSH client
• And access to SSH on a remote server. This can be a dedicated server, or a VPS (Virtual Private Server); possibly even on a shared host, if they allow you to have SSH access, and they are Ok with this.

Before setting this up, to verify everything is running as it should; visit Free Surf City and take note of your IP before the setup, then visit it again once finished.

Ok, I’m interested – so how do I set it up?

The first thing you need to do, is find which port you need to use for SSH. It’s typically port 22 by default. You will also need the IP of the remote server you’ll be connecting to for the SSH Tunneling.

Next, you’ll need to download PuTTY. You can do so, here. Once you have that downloaded and installed, we can move on to setting up a tunnel.

Installed? Good. Now open PuTTY. It should look something like this:
 

 
Now, enter the IP of the remote server, in the “Host Name” input box, and enter the port number in the Port input box. Also make sure the button under “Connection Type” is set to SSH. Now, on the left, you should see a list (or tree) of different categories/options. You’ll need to click on the “Connection” category. Once there, click on the “Tunnels” category.

At this point, you’ll need to enter another port number, in the “Source Port” field. This SHOULD NOT be the same as the remote server, you can center a random number here. Try to make it 3-4 numbers, and not sequential (eg: 1234 is bad, 2918 is good). Next, click/select “Dynamic” below that, then click “Add”.

On the left side, again, now click on “Session”, then click “Save” to save your settings. Finally, click “Open” to start your connection to the remote SSH server. At this point, you’ll need to login. It will first ask you for your username, then password. If you’re not sure what to use here, ask your web host. Now minimize PuTTY.

Last Step
I’m going to show you how to do this on Firefox. For other applications, consult their support or documentation.

Open Firefox then go to “Tools” then “Options”. Now click on the “Advanced” tab, then the “Network” tab. Now click the “Settings” button. You should see the following:
 

 
At this point, click on “manual proxy configuration”. In the “SOCKS Host” field, enter “127.0.0.1″. For the “Port” field, type the random number you chose in PuTTY in the last step. Now check “SOCKS v5″ below that, click OK, then OK again.

That’s it for the SSH Tunneling, you’re ready to go However, there is one last step if you want to hide Firefox’s domain lookups. In the URL/Address bar type about:config (if you’re using Firefox 3, this will bring up a warning first – go ahead and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button).

In the “Filter” bar, enter network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and change it’s value to true (you do this by right clicking on “false”, then clicking on “Toggle”. Why do this? Like I mentioned earlier, this can keep people from knowing what sites you visit – instead of your computer doing DNS lookups, the remote machine will

That’s all there is to it! Enjoy.

You can download PuTTY here
You can download Firefox here

This article was written exclusively for Monsoon Domains by Secondversion