When was a Webpage Updated

Ever wanted to find when was a webpage updated? Here are some methods to find out when a webpage was updated. We'll be discussing several methods to find when a webpage was updated. 

For example the WayBack machine method, change Detection method and JavaScript method.

The WayBack Machine

One of the most popular methods for non-programmers is the wayback machine method. Codemakit had already discussed the method in one of its previous articles on the Internet Archivist.

It is a project by 'The Internet Archive' a non-profit enterprise which has been receiving data from Alexa and many websites. In short it is a type of library that stores versions of your website.

The usage is awfully clear, you need to enter the URL of the website which you need to check in the search bar and press enter. The previous version would be right before your eyes. Now it must be clear that you cannot use the Wayback machine for determining the last updated version of a website that needs a login before you enter, simply because, the website would need authentication.

Another problem is you would not get a very accurate date. For a smaller/ not so popular website it would be in the range of a month. If you need a more accurate method of finding when your page was updated, keep reading.

Change Detection Method

A website known a change detection also performs a similar task but differently. Here you need to paste the URL of the page and your email address. So, whenever the website/Webpage URL changes, you'll be the first one to receive a notification. The only problem with this method is you will not be able to get any historical data. The mails would start from the point when you enter the email address and never before.

The JavaScript Method

The JavaScript method is by far the most simple and the most effective method i have found to determine the last updated/modified version of the webpage. The steps too are simple.

1. Go to the URL you need
2. Paste the following code "alert(document.lastModified)" (without the quotes)
3. Now type the following on the code "javascript:" (without the quotes) *
4. Such that the complete code looks like "javascript:alert(document.lastModified)" (without the quotes)
5. Press enter **

The steps are outlined below,

* Note. It is very important that you type in the code in third step. It doesn't seem to work without it. The code is said to work in all major browsers and gives the most accurate time and date.

** Note. You need to remember that the results are in the MM/DD/YYYY format and the Time is in HH:MM:SS format. This is particularly useful when you have a date as 01/04/2014.

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Create an Auto Responding Google Form

Corporates and institutions often accept information from public through online forms. The best (Non Google) form creation websites have already been discussed which do provide a lot of facilities. Often the best of them are disguised behind the paid ones. These are mostly inaccessible to the general web owners as the professional ones need a note for shelling out money from their firms and the freelancers just don't have the money. 

One such facility is the automated response which one receives after he/she has filled up an online form which might say "thank you for your responses" or something. The facility, though available on Google docs is not readily available. You would not see fancy buttons to facilitate your auto responding form. So, you'll have to do it yourself.

For this purpose an app needs to be created. The app will obviously have a script. but fret not, as most part of the script is already filled by Google. you just need to add a small snippet and your work will be done. Following are some really simple steps with instructive screenshots which will help you create an auto responding form which has the ability to send emails to the filler. But, do read the special note so that things go smoothly.

Step 1: 

Firstly you need to create a form at google Docs. The form creation has been explained pretty clear article at codemakit.

Step 2 : 

Now assuming you are accepting the responses in a google spreadsheet, You then need to open the spreadsheet where the responses for the form are stored.

Step 3 : 

You will land on the Google Script Window where you need to select, which script do you need to create. Since we're creation a script for a spreadsheet, click spreadsheet. A scipt will then be visible to you. Do not modify any code, Just add another piece of code given here.

The Code

Edit the code to your wishes, Do check the notes to understand the functioning. 

function formSubmitReply(e) { var userEmail = e.values[2]; MailApp.sendEmail(userEmail, "Yo! Thanks for your time", "Thanks for submitting your information to us, \n\n", {name:"Help Desk"}); };

Note. 

One must understand the intricacies of the code and not use it mindlessly.

formSubmitReply is a function, which handles events, this is the function that initiates the action. It has a parameter 'e' which basically is an array filled with values. Have a look at your spreadsheet containing responses, First one will always be the timestamp. If your table consists of 2 questions, ie.e 'Name' and 'email' address, you will have to put the array value as e[2] so that the app would know where to send the response.

Also the name of the sender is taken as "help desk" Which can be changed to suit your needs.

Step 4 : 

Now you need to set a trigger for the script you just set. Click on resources menu and select "All your triggers". You will see a window stating all your triggers, Click on "create new", which will create a new trigger instance. Select values from the dropdown window as is done in the screenshot below.

Step 5 : 

You might be presented with an authorization window where you need to click yes to go forward. Once you've authorized the app. Your form will start sending automatic responses to anyone who fills your form with an email address.

Related Reading

1. If you're unsure, why you need an online form, you can check out Why Online forms, A study (Part One) and the rest can be found out at Why Online Forms, A study (Part Two)
2. Need help creating a form using Google Forms, Try this.

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8 Best Online Form Creation Websites (Study Part 2)

Consider a case when you really need to create a form for your website, and so you need to decide which online service would suit you best. Though the reasons for creating an online form were discussed in an article before. Different websites have different USPs, some are suited for the general non programming public. Some are for more advanced users who actually know about the nitty gritty of coding and are willing to go the extra mile for providing awesome service to their customers or visitors. Some Form creation websites are meant for people who don't have the time and can do without the petty details which most people fret about.

So here is a list of all websites that can perform the task of creating an online form. Codemakit Website Research analysed them perfectly for your perusal so that your time is saved

Jotform

If you think of form creation with the speed of light, You would probably consider jot-form as the best. One visit to jotform would change you perception of form building forever. This is the first time I personally considered buying one of the premium packages that the website offered. The simple drag and drop functions bundled with easy edit and move options, jotform can be the site to look for.

Cons- The free subscription offers just 100 submissions in a month. No option of dedicated hosting of form. you must embed the form on your website for it to be functional. The responses are mailed separately but not as a spreadsheet which has found to be useful for most web masters and statisticians. There were speculations however that jotform domain was temporarily shut down once by the US Government.

FormSite

As is evident from businesses around the world, one man's thrash is another man's treasure, The disadvantages in jotforms were completely removed when the developers were creating formsite. Formsite understands that people actually need to use the information that they gained from the forms filled by the visitors. Formsite offers you services that helps you convert the responses into pdf /xls or similar spreadsheets so that you are spared from manual entry into spreadsheets for further processing or record keeping. Wiki entries boast about formsite into the top 5000 websites in terms of daily unique visitors. With more than 500 million form submissions, formsite is one of the most popular form creating destination for developers worldwide.

FormStack

Formstack can be called as just another form creating/maintaining website. Some of its USPs are better control  for the information flow by the form creator. The only major con for formstack is its 14 day trial. The website seems hell bent on converting nearly ever visitor into a customer. It is because of such low return on investment (ofcourse the functions wouldn't work afer the trial period.), codemakit decided to give it a rating of B3. Final verdict, If you are a freebie and want little fucntionalities for your blog/website, you woulnd'nt want formstack. It is for corporates and big players in the internet sphere.

Wufoo

Though Wufoo brags about cloud storage as its USP, It is interesting to note that Google drive is the only sensible enough competition for the same. Thus If you want your form data to be automatically stored at cloud storage. You can either use the ever free Google Drive forms or Wufoo. Since both are in the same battle field now, Let us compare them further. The one thing that Wufoo offers apart from the others is that you can personalize the pages to an extent that the form would look like an inhouse creation. With really high PageRank, SERP and an acceptable CWR (see Codemakit Website Research Ratings document) rank, WuFoo has been crowned the best in its class.

The Analysis

The following is an analysis for the eight Form Creation Websites from codemakit Website Research. Four different Rating Systems were employed for determining the overall worth of each Website; Webutation, known for providing users with the actual reputation of a website analysed by it. Page Rank, as you might know is one of Google's most overused methods of determining which page should be ranked first. The Third CWR rating is Codemakit's way of analyzing websites based on several patterns (You should first read the CWR Document about how codemakit analyses websites), Website Planet also works towards finding the importance of a website. Wind Rose diagram for Form Creation Websites is shown below.

Rockforms however was given a 40% rating by Webutation and so it comes at the end of our list. 

-->

Rank	Website Name	Webutation	Page Rank	Website planet	CWR Rating
1	Wufoo	100	8	8.5	A3
2	Coffeecup	100	6	8.5	A3
3	Formsite	100	7	7.5	B1
4	Jotforms	100	5	7.5	A2
5	Formstack	100	6	7.6	B3
6	Email-me-form	100	7	5	C1
7	Form-to-go	40	5	8.8	B3
8	Rackforms	100	3	8.6	B2

To find the actual stabilized table (Which was actually used for analysis) you might want to take a look at the following PDF document containing tables and the charts in the occasion when I might have left anything.

If CWR has left a form creation website that you think should be studied and analysed here, post it in the comments.

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Create another Gadget space for your blogger blog

How many times have you wanted another gadget space on your blog? You have a third party code which you want to incorporate in your blog but you did not find space to add it. So what will you do? Simple solution to this problem is provided here. 

You always have some space in the sidebar, which keeps on increasing when you use one. But what about another large footer banner space? Or a large header banner space? Or even a large banner space in your body space to include your author bio? This is where things get interesting.

Step 1: Go to your blogger dashboard and click on layout tab. Now click on edit HTML and click on the ‘Expand Widget templates’ Option in the pop up.

• Press Ctr+f and find the following code in the HTML.

           <b:section class='art-Header' id='header' maxwidgets='1' showaddelement='no'>        

• Replace maxwidgets value 1 by any higher number. You may also leave the quotation marks empty to have an unlimited number of widgets available at your disposal.
• Also replace The showaddelement value from ‘no’ to ‘yes’

Step 2: Now repeat the above three steps for every piece of code given above.
In the page layout tab, you will find a large number of 'Add a Gadget' boxes at nearly every tab.

Note. The showaddelement controls the situation when you use an add a gadget box and another one still remains empty. Putting the value as ‘yes’ will ensure this behavior and a ‘no’ will make sure you cannot add another gadget in the particular location after one has been used.

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Add a NoFollow to your Blog comments

Learn about NoFollow and the process of adding it to your blogger blog’s comments. Also learn about link and content farmers and their goals.

A time comes when you find people (spammers actually) clamoring up your blog posting strange and weird comments to your blogs. It’s no time when you realize that it is depreciating your blog’s value. Also you can read an article at HubSpot which says that while crawling search, engines consider the links in the comments section too and so if your blog has weird comments with crappy links hidden in a clandestine fashion, then at some point of time your blog will be considered near crap by the search engines. So you decide to remove the comments.

Now it’s been time when you’ve started removing comments or moderating them. But it’s a tedious process anyway. So what’s the solution?

Content Or Link Farmers

Obviously the ‘NoFollow’ attribute. Google has always adhered to its policies diligently  A new concept comes here which must be explained. A particular group of people who just post crappy content with or without links on different blogs and websites so that they can harness link juice and keyword are known as content or link farmers. The complete practice is illegal and can lead to ban.

Why do these people do what they do?

There are some reasons,

1. When a website has its link on a website with a PageRank higher that their’s like yours for example, Then in the search Engine’s eyes, you are recommending the website to the search engine. And if the website doesn’t turn out good or becomes a 404 error, then it is bad for you and your website. Some spammers are actually your own competitors trying to wear you down so that your website gets penalized and looses visitors to the competitor.
2. Also when you’re recommending a website by hosting  a link on your website, Why let others take the advantage of your efforts.
3. In the keywords perspective, certain blogs have claimed a decrease of more than 50% traffic to a website/blog due to spammer comments. The reason being unnatural and unrelated comments bring altogether weird keywords to your blog. Your main keywords set aside for your website will have no effect.

The HTML tag, known as NoFollow tells the search engine robots that they should not consider that link in their calculations. So you need not worry about recommending the site as you’re not and so you will not be penalized.

Process

Here is a step by step process of applying a NoFollow attribute to your blogger blog.

1. Go to Blogger-; Design - Edit HTML

2. Click "Expand Widget Templates" box

3. Now find the following piece of code using Ctr+f

<a class='comment-link'>
<a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl'>

4. After the at the end just add rel=”nofollow”, so at the end of process it would look like

<a class='comment-link' rel="nofollow"
<a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl' rel='nofollow'>

5. Click save your template.

Now that you’ve completed the procedure, you need not worry any more about the search engine implications due to weird and crappy comments with links in your blog.

Now you can even check if you've completed the procedure successfully using the firefox addon known as nodofollow. It performs the seemingly impossible work of finding out which parts of a webpage has a NoFollow attribute stuck on it. Here is a screenshot of the add-on on codemakit itself. The highlighted links in blue are dofollow links. But the highlighted links in red are nofollow links. As you can see yourself, the comments section are all in red thereby freeing you from any liability and penalty.

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Why are Internal and External links Important

The following article explains the concepts of external and internal links in detail along with the conclusions of codemakit research division. 

Links are very important from any perspective. See it as the building blocks of SEO or the main criteria for search engines like Google. But there are two types of links, External and Internal. 

These are links which point to the same domain where the links exist, i.e. on the same website where the link exist. 

The main reason for the urge of people trying to understand and find the optimum amount of internal links is because it’s too important to let go, too important to underestimate.

Links are used for creating proper site organization and spreading the hyperlinks in the site properly. This leads to an infrastructure which can be crawled by search engine robots.

According to an analysis by codemakit website Research division, about 96% of websites had external links less than 200,000,000, the website quoted that just 10% of all the websites make up more than 80% of total external links by all websites. 

External links for the top 500 websites are divided into 3 zones, A,B and C, (read more with graphs)

Regarding Internal Links, if you look at a graph depicting the number of internal links and the number of websites, you would be greeted with a hyperbolic curve. The research division concludes that 96% of all websites have links less than 1,000,000 links, There thee graph was divided into 5 different zones, i.e. A, B, C, D and E. The research also confirmed the fact that the internal links for websites is directly proportional to the external links.

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How do I improve my page rank

Here's a highly informative article on PageRank and the ways to increase the PageRank of any website, upto and including what to do and what not to do.

Basically PageRank is decided by the number and the quality of incoming links. By quality backlinks, Google means authoritative and quality websites with PageRanks greater than or equal to the initial website in question. So what’s the obvious answer, increase your page rank by getting more people to link back to you.

But increasing PageRank is not that simple, There are a long list of things other than quality content plus some things which you must first consider before you admit that you’ve done a lot for your website.

Submission to websites

Though I agree, submitting your website to other so called ‘directories’ is not very useful but I must admit, it isn’t a method you should not try. You must experiment and see if it suits you. Some websites have achieved a single page rank upgradation by just adopting this technique. So find out which directories are the best and submit your website to them. If you need an ideal number codemakit websiteresearch did an analysis and recommends about 20 directories submission and approval before you see any visible changes in your page rank.

Social Networks

Social Media networks (like Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter)are a nice way of shouting out to the world that you’re there. It is the continuous exposure to social environment which leads the search engine to believe that you’re a professional and to treat you as such. Also don't just stop at social networks, You can even be a part of professional networks to expand your horizon and generate new ideas.

Be a commentator

When commenting on other blogs, you are helping them survive in this cut-throat competition. But more importantly, you’re helping yourself thrive by adding valuable backlinks and by making people aware about your website

My comments are Gold, Yours is not!

In conjunction to the above paragraph, there are people who overdo the above technique. When people think they’re smarter than others and try a simple generic sentence and add a nonchalant link within. For example one might come across such comments like, “I liked the article and especially how you summarized it all at the end, you could not have made it easier !!” at the first look you would allow these comments if you’re a moderator, but sooner or later you will find that such spam comments (Read how to remove them) are doing you harm as they’re associating your website with theirs, as you promote their website by providing backlinks. In such a case always use Nofollow attribute in your comments section (Read More). So you get nice little comments and your website reputation will remain intact.

Backlink from serious websites,

From the word serious, I meant dead serious. Those who either have a pagerank of more than 7 or have tremendous impact in the real world out there. For example, a single link from Wikipedia will add a lot of authority to your website or a link from Government websites or from news websites etc.

Better code configuration

A very useful online test for checking your code style and W3 compatibility is the W3 code validator. A site map is very useful to eliminate errors. A dirty or incompatible coding will always lead to a lower page rank.

Old is Gold

The age of a domain is one of the most important parameters which qualifies a website to be allotted a page rank. Some blogs claim that Google is not convinced about the authority of a website until it has been there on the net for more than a year. The concept is based on a simple belief which has been in use for the past century, i.e. higher the time spent by the business or any entity, better and more trustable it is in the field.

What does your address looks like

When choosing for an address for your blog, You must remember one thing, a website or a blog with an address of ‘yoursite.com’ is much better than that of ‘yoursite.domain.com’. The difference is pronounced similarly for the end users and the search engine crawlers. So the more hate a person harbors, more pronounced will be the effect on the search engine listings finally leading to the PageRank of the particular webpage. Not even this, a certified website always performs better on google's books, So if you have some cash to spare then get your website certified.

Avoid the following,

One must strive not only to follow the above measures but also to avoid certain points. Some blogs often claim that dirty or perverted words often reduce the PageRank of a website but surely there is no way to check that is it? But one can be very sure of one thing, when you indulge in Black Hat SEO techniques or invalid link building practices your PageRank will surely drop.

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How easy is my website's navigation?

You've created a splendid website, with huge bucket loads of features and function, but are all its functionalities accessible to your users. Are all your buttons working? Have you put alt.text in all your images? Are there problematic hyperlinks in your website that you're unaware of? 

Or for even smaller mistakes like Are there empty header tags in your HTML code? Such small mistakes must not be over looked, as they make you look good on the bot diary, which finally makes you look good on the books of giant search engines like Google or Bing. Correcting such small mistakes would also lead to an improvement in your page rank, Alexa Rank, ASR ranks etc. Long story short, It will give you higher Visitors and more money for monetized developers.

The following are the most common errors.

WebAIM Started in 1999 is a non-profit organization within the Center for Persons with Disabilities at Utah State University. The people there have come up with an excellent Idea of pointing out a website's Mistakes, Though the feat might not look much, but it is a golden oppotunity for web Developers who have not got enough time to check their code, regularly for mishaps,

WAVE 4.0 Development Team consists of Aaron Andersen, Jared Smith, Diogenes Hernandez as the project heads.

WAVE offers four types of reports:

1. Errors, Features, and Alerts
2. Structure/Order View
3. Text-only View
4. Outline View

The WAVE online tool, helps analyse the website on the basis of small mistakes in coding and accessibility, The tool Displays your website in their own window and mark the areas found to be faulty.

On preliminary Examination, I found out that my blog has huge number of accessibility problems, But It is natural for such big a site and necessary corrections would be done in the near future.

After analysing your website, If you need to looks upon the Legend to find out what do the errors mean,

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Web Globe, A Google Chrome Experiment

Web globe is an open platform for geographic data visualization. i.e.

You can take some data and plot it on world scale in the form of vertical bars depicting the magnitude of the values. The globe is a part of chrome experiment.

The code is specially useful for scientists and researchers relying on geographical data in the form of latitudes and longitudes.

So, you can view it at the following link on your chrome browser.

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/globe

Here are the various results, created through different geographical values.
Its features include :

1. Latitude / longitude data bars
2. Different colours depicting change in paramenters
3. Zoom using mouse wheel

Several Other Projects are under work at chrome experiments including :

• Global Internet Application Throttling : Tony Blank
• USA.gov URL Shortener Traffic : Shreyas Karnik
• Twitter Emotion Globe : Makis Tracend
• Hello World : Scott Frankel
• ShopSavvy Scans : ShopSavvy
• Twitter Korean Index : DongWoo Lee
• Latest Earthquakes, with Auto-Updating : Gustavo Tandeciarz
• Global Incomes : Osvaldo Mena
• Spanish Election Results (May 2011) : javisantana
• Emotional States of Aging Bloggers : Scott Murray
• Distribution of T-Coffee Web Server Users : Paolo Di Tommaso
• Google Technology User Groups: Meeting Locations : Luis Montes

The process of using it is not that difficult.

The data is entered in the following form.

var data = [

  [

    'seriesA', [ latitude, longitude, magnitude, latitude, longitude, magnitude, ... ]

  ],

  [

    'seriesB', [ latitude, longitude, magnitude, latitude, longitude, magnitude, ... ]

  ]

];

The following code uses the data put in the above way, and converts it into an animated globe.

The code is also given at

http://code.google.com/p/webgl-globe/wiki/HowTo

// Where to put the globe?

var container = document.getElementById( 'container' );

// Make the globe

var globe = new DAT.Globe( container );

// We're going to ask a file for the JSON data.

xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();

// Where do we get the data?

xhr.open( 'GET', 'myjson.json', true );

// What do we do when we have it?

xhr.onreadystatechange = function() {

  // If we've received the data

  if ( xhr.readyState === 4 && xhr.status === 200 ) {

      // Parse the JSON

      var data = JSON.parse( xhr.responseText );

      // Tell the globe about your JSON data

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

        globe.addData( data[i][1], 'magnitude', data[i][0] );

      }

      // Create the geometry

      globe.createPoints();

      // Begin animation

      globe.animate();

    }

  }

};

// Begin request

xhr.send( null );

The Web Globe is depicted very clearly through this video.

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