Simo Blog - Part 3

Cheap shareware software by categories

24 Apr 2013

Software

It can happens that free/opensource software are not enough for our personal or professional needs. If you need more features you must choose a commercial software, but there are some good cheap alternatives instead of expensive ones.

Video editing:
Adobe Premiere and Pinnacle Studio are the referenced software for this category, cheap but fully featured alternatives are Corel VideoStudio Pro, CyberLink PowerDirector and MAGIX Movie Edit Pro.

Audio editing:
Adobe Audition and Sony SoundForge are the referenced software for this category, cheap but fully featured alternative is REAPER.

Photo editing:
Adobe Photoshop and Corel PhotoPaint are the referenced software for this category, cheap but fully featured alternative is PaintShop Pro.

Vector graphic:
Adobe Illustrator is the referenced software for this category, cheap but fully featured alternative is Xara Designer.

CAD:
Autodesk AutoCAD is the referenced software for this category, cheap but fully featured alternatives are Google SketchUp Pro and CorelCAD.

Office suite:
Microsoft Office is the referenced software for this category, cheap but fully featured alternatives are SoftMaker Office and Kingsoft Office.

PDF editing:
Adobe Acrobat is the referenced software for this category, cheap but fully featured alternative is deskPDF.

Install a local web server with XAMPP

In: guides tutorials|web

23 Apr 2013

XAMPP

XAMPP (Cross Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl) is a free and open source cross-platform web server solution stack package, consisting mainly of the Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages. There are available Windows, Linux, Max OS X, Solaris distributions. You can use the program both as portable version and with installer.

Note: if you use other software that uses TCP 80 port (eg. Skype, TeamViewer) the program will doesn’t work problems and probably you will get errors.

Within the useful control panel you can manage Apache and MySQL services.

XAMPP

Once running you just need open browser and type http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1 address to view XAMPP homepage.

XAMPP

One note about configuration files. They are important to apply modifications to the web server (the services must then be restarted):

httpd.conf (basic Apache configuration file, it’s placed in xampp\apache\conf)
php.ini (PHP configuration file, placed in xampp\php)

You can manage MySQL databases via web within phpMyAdmin included in XAMPP.

An important part is the XAMPP. Security Console. Here you can set MySQL root password (by default is not set!) and protect XAMPP directory within .htaccess

xampp

The main folder for web documents is xampp\htdocs. You can copy both your static and dynamic files and view them as usally with the browser using the local address.

With XAMPP you can then test your web site / web app / CMS locally.

How to do online advertising and get more visitors

In: web

18 Apr 2013

advertising

If you have a site optimized for search engines (SEO) can result not enough to be popular in Internet, the use of advertising can be a good choice to bring more visitiors.

Once decided the budget to invest let see most common online advertising methods you can choose:

Google Adwords

this Google tool allows to easily create campaigns and monitor them. The annouces are displayed contextually to Google searches but also in other Google services like Gmail and Youtube or as banners in the sites that uses Google AdSense.
The basic rule of Adwords is that you pay only for received clicks (cost per click – CPC).

e-mail marketing

if you have a database of e-mail addresses (for example obtained via subscriptions/registrations) you can use the classic e-mail to do advertising. There are professional services that allows to manage e-mail marketing campaigns such as MailChimp, AWeber, GetResponse and the Italian MailUp.

social network advertising

specifically about Facebook. It provides good advertising options like post promotions and create campaigns through Facebook Ads.

advertising in sites/blogs/forums siti/blog/forums

many sites/blogs/forums allows to insert various forms of advertising (link, banner, article) in agreement with the author.