The Chatterbox

Main Site

Home Page
The main home page of course! What else did you expect? ;-)

CSS Rollover Creator
A little tool I wrote to help make it quick and easy to create links that look and act like the old Javascript Rollover buttons/images, but are in fact created with Cascading Style Sheets instead.

Worldwide Whois
The Whois tool I created to help me track down spammers all across the world. It connects with the appropriate whois server and attempts to pull all of the registration information for either the domain name or IP number you enter. Note that there are a couple of Whois servers (JPNIC from Japan comes to mind immediately) that will not allow any third part retrieval of their data. However if you run up against one of those my tool will give you the exact URL you need to visit to get the real scoop.

Mod Date Script
Mod Date was created because someone mentioned on Jill's forums that they wished that Yahoo! would give some indication of the date their site had last been spidered. So I created a simple little script that uses Yahoo's API license to retrieve that information.

Mod Date Download
Yup, I also released the script under a standard GNU license so that others can install it on their own server, or even improve upon it if they would like. Note that all scripts connecting to Yahoo's API need to be installed on a server that has DOMXML installed on and enabled on the server. You can't break anything if you don't know and try it. The script simply won't work. You can tell if DOMXML is enabled by running a phpinfo() on your server. It'll be listed in a section there if it's installed and enabled.

Common Link Script
Common Link is a bit [cough] more sophisticated. It makes use of both my Google API license and Yahoo API to help you analyze which sites link to the top ranking sites for any keyword combination. Pretty neat tool if I do say so myself. And it can make the process of choosing which sites to solicit links from a good deal easier.

I've not released the Common Link code for download yet, however that's the plan as soon as it goes through a bit more testing and I get a chance to clean up the code and comment it so that folks can understand what's happening where.

Image Fun Download
Image Fun is a script I originally authored many years ago in Javascript (there was no PHP at the time, that tells you how long ago it was!) to help a friend put up and keep up an image gallery. The current version uses PHP to produce the code and requires that your server have ImageMagick installed if you want the script to automatically create the thumbnail images for you. A previous version used the GD library, but GD just doesn't produce a very good quality thumbnail IMHO.

If you want to see Image Fun in action, my buddy Mr Will uses it both at Planet Sound Community Arts and on his personal site.

Search News and Notes
These next three are something I set up to my my life easier, but hopefully you'll also be able to make good use of them. The first one is a Search News section. What it's doing is pulling the RSS feeds from some of the places I like to keep an eye on, but just don't have the time to wade through everything all the time. Currently Search News and Notes pulls feed headlines from Search Engine Guide, Search Engine Watch and SEW's blog. In my experience, if something earth shatter is about to happen it will usually show up in at least one of these places.

Security News and Notes
The Security News Focuses pulls information from F-Secure Antivirus' Research Team's weblog, where they normally announce new virus strains they find, SecurityFocus, who issue releases about all types of security issues and ZDNet's United States Security News. I've found all three to be very good sources for the straight scoop, so getting the headlines makes things much easier.

Technology News and Notes
The Tech News section is a fun one for me! It includes feeds from Linux Exposed and eWeek's (formerly PCWeek) Linux and Open Source news. Who would have guessed a penguin like yours truly would be interested in all things Linux! Then to cover the rest of the bases I've added feeds from Slashdot, whose motto is: News for nerds, stuff that matters.

Note that with each of the above I'm also archiving the headlines. That way when I (or you) get to busy too get to them on any given day we can try to catch up next time we get a chance. Woohoo!

Blogging My Way To Fame & Fortune!

Chatterbox Blog
The main page of the Randy's (a) Chatterbox blog home page of course! ;-)

Blog Archives - All
Chatterbox Blog Archives, listed by the month and including all categories.

Blog Archives - Business on the Web
Chatterbox blog entries, listing all those recorded as being part of the Business on the Web category.

Blog Archives - Just Chatter
Chatterbox blog entries, listing all those ramblings in the Just Chatter category.

Blog Archives - Search Engine Marketing
Chatterbox blog entries, listing all those posts falling into the search engine marketing category.

Blog Archives - Server Schtuff
Chatterbox blog entries that fall into the general category of server issues.