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Chrome Browser, HTML5 and Dynamic CSS files

admin — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 19:16:36 +0000

Problem

I spent eight hours yesterday trying to get a webpage for another site working in HTML5. It just didn’t make the slightest bit of sense.

I’d make changes to the CSS file and nothing would happen. I’d refresh and clear the browser cache but it still wouldn’t work.

Yet adding style to the element in the html file worked.

The CSS file was there. You could even see it as a Resource in the Chrome Developer’s Tools.

However, the Developer’s Tools was only showing some of the CSS information.

Cause

It turns out that Chrome ignores your CSS file if it isn’t served with a MIME type of “text/css”; despite being in a tag that says ‘link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=…’.

I’m not sure if it is only this fussy when you stick in a tag (html5).

Solution

The CSS file was being generated by a PHP script on the server so the solution was to add a line at the top like:
header(‘Content-type: text/css’);

SaveMail – Run-time error ’380′

admin — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 22:47:07 +0000

This was first noticed with SaveMail version 1.00.0040 but it is probably an issue for earlier versions too.

You get a message like:

This happens if there are no items in the “Contents” list when you press “Save”.

I’d chosen a “Mail Folder” and selected a “Save to” directory but hadn’t pressed “Search” before pressing “Save”.

I’ve added code to check that there are items in the list when you press “Save” so future versions will be more helpful about the problem.

(If you are a programmer that found this article because you were looking for Run-time error 380, the problem was setting a progress bar maximum to 0. This may be your problem too but there are other things that could cause it. I suggest running your program in the Integrated Development Environment and seeing which line trips the error.)

PAD Program to Submit Software

admin — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:16:46 +0000

So, you’ve written a fantastic shareware or freeware program that does great things. It is probably really useful and will bring some benefit to the world – even if it is only in a small niche. Thank you.

However, it is only useful if people know about it. If your software is shareware or freeware you probably meant others to use it. To use it they have to know about it. And if its shareware you probably want someone to buy it so you can feed the kids.

Okay. Where to from here? how do you make it all happen?

Cover the basics first.

* You ought to set up a website for your program or your business or you.
* You need to set up at least a few web pages on your site.
You must have at least one page describing your software program. “Contact Us” and “FAQ” (Frequently Asked Questions) pages are also good ones to add.
* Upload your software to your website.
* Create a 32×32 GIF icon file for your program.
You may have an icon already as part of your program. If so, odds are you’ll need to convert this to a GIF file. (There are freeware programs that do this e.g. IcoFX). Upload the GIF to your website.
* Do a screen print of your program and upload this as a JPG file.
It ought to be a standard size like 640×480 or 800×600. You can use Paint to center a smaller screen print on a standard size canvas.

Now Get Your Software Known

Step 1. Get a copy of PADGen from the Association of Shareware Professionals.
Step 2. Install it and fill in your company’s details (or your details).
Step 3. Fill in your program’s details.
Step 4. Build a PAD file for your program.
Step 5. Copy it to your website.
Step 6. Get a PAD program to submit software to lots of software download sites and use it.
Step 7. Promote your software.

More Info

Check out Introduction to PAD file Submission Tools

Submit PAD Files to 500 Sites

admin — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 05:42:19 +0000

We’ve done our first data file update for EziSubmit and, even though we were going to charge a minimal fee for updates, we’ve made it FREE.

What’s more, the update gives you 100 more download sites to which you can submit your software. What was a really good program that allowed you to submit PAD files for your shareware or freeware programs to 400 sites; now gives you 500!

That is a pretty cool upgrade – for nothing.

Click here to download the data file update

A Review of Submit PAD File Tools

admin — Sat, 02 May 2009 19:04:09 +0000

What is the best, easiest, simplest and fastest way to submit your software PAD File to the download sites?

If you don’t want to read all the details, just the answer, click here.

Background

A PAD File allows you to record all of the information about one of your programs in one spot. This is great for software listing sites, and great for you as you don’t have to retype the information into every one of those sites.

If you are new to PAD Files, Introduction to PAD File Submission Tools gives a good overview.

Key Criteria

Some of the things we look for in a PAD submission tool include:

How many sites does it submit to?
How easy is it to use?
How up-to-date or updateable is it?
What does it cost?

Other things worth considering are:

Does it deal with captchas? And if so, how?
Does it produce a log showing what worked and what didn’t?
Can you resubmit to just the ones that didn’t work?

How Many Sites?

If you are going to use a tool to automate a process and the tool only works for five sites you may find it is easier to submit by hand.

Any tool has some setup effort, if only telling it where your PAD file is. In addition there is some time spent getting familiar with the tool – even if you only run it up with standard settings, to do basic things, you need to find the “go” button and look at and dismiss the other screen elements. Add a (hopefully) small amount of time to download and install the tool.

Given the setup effort, if it is only going to automate five sites the savings per site is going to have to be pretty high. More sites means a greater chance of saving your time. The whole point of a PAD File submission tool is to save you time. You wouldn’t even be looking at these if you didn’t want to get more submissions in less time.

How Easy?

This is more of the same. If it takes 250 keystrokes to submit to one site then, frankly, you are better off skipping a PAD file and typing the whole lot in by hand at every site.

Likewise, if you have to spend three days reading a manual to figure out how to upload your first file then perhaps the tool isn’t the one you need. Of course, if after you’ve spent the three days reading it submits to 10,000 sites in 10 seconds maybe it is a good tool. BUT it is going to have to be VERY good to make up for the three days. The other concern is that if you never got through the manual it may be completely useless. Not everyone reads the manual these days.

You need something that you can use without a lot of thinking and without a lot of typing and / or clicking.

How Up-To-Date?

This relates to how many sites. I found a great tool that was even free. It only did 100 sites but, hey, that’s 100 I don’t have to do right? Wrong, unfortunately.

It was so old that the sites it submitted to, were either long gone or long since modified. In either case “submissions” completely failed. And rather than being 100 I didn’t have to do, it was more like 5 or 10. This would have been of some use except I had no idea which 5 or 10 had worked. I found out later (with another tool) when I got otherwise inexplicable “already submitted” responses at a few websites.

Ideally, you want a tool that is always up-to-date. In practice that means updates. Updates mean “by them” or “by you”. “By them” may be free, free for a while, or at a cost. “By you” means a greater drain on your time and requires an open interface which is rarely the case. Probably the best of both worlds would be updates “by them” but with a facility to allow updates “by you”. This means that if “they” vanish, “you” are not left high and dry on the rocks after paying for now-obsolete software.

How Much Does it Cost?

This is a rather self-evident criteria. Starting developers on a shoestring will put greater emphasis on this one. If you have already built a thriving business you can be more flexible.

Others

Many download sites have introduced “Captchas” to prevent automatic submissions. See Introduction to PAD File Submission Tools for details. If the tool doesn’t handle captchas, submits to 400 sites, and includes 300 sites which require a captcha value to be entered; it only really does 100 sites.

If you don’t know a submission didn’t happen or that it was rejected then your submission plan is going down the gurgler. If you don’t know, you can’t fix it. You need some sort of log. This can also be good for sites which respond with “Thank you for your submission. It will be reviewed in 2-3 days and, if approved, published.” It can be good to look back later at when the “2-3 days” started.

Knowing that a submission failed won’t do you much good if you can’t change the situation and resubmit. If you have to do the whole run (all sites) all over again, you are going to annoy some sites. Annoy them enough and you’ll get blacklisted. Being able to redo failed submission is useful.

The Best Submit PAD File Tool

We’re biased here because we have one of our own. However, the reason we have our own is because we felt that what was available, didn’t stack up against how important each of the criteria were to us.

EziSubmit

How Many Sites?

This submits to 400 sites (50 for free during the trial period).

How Easy?

It looks easy to use and it is. Submissions can be done in 3 clicks per site (“Submit”, the site’s submit button, and Pass” (or “Fail”)) . Some sites require captchas and / or program category selections – these take more clicks / some keystrokes.

You see what is happening as it happens. You know exactly what is going on (or not going on).

How Up-to-Date?

It was written this year (2009) and updates are stated as “will be available”. Updates are planned at $5 USD each but you will only need one whenever you choose to bring it up-to-date. It has an open interface so you don’t have to pay for ANY updates – you can do them yourself if you like.

How Much?

It is only $29.95 USD.

Captchas

The software allows you to enter captcha values at sites that require them.

Log

There is a log with date, time, site and result.

Other

You can find out about EziSubmit, download a trial version or buy it now.

The Competition

If you are looking for a commercial software submission tool you’ll find two main contenders. These may or may not be the best products but they are currently well advertised.

The two main commercial products are: GSA Auto SoftSubmit and PromoSoft.

GSA Auto SoftSubmit

How Many Sites?

This submits to “more than 8000″ sites. However, this is 1248 software sites plus 1000 press release sites plus 6000 directories. Whilst the majority of the sites are not software listing sites, it doesn’t hurt to be known on more sites; and 1248 software sites is hard to beat. The demo version submits to 196 sites, some of which are directories and press release sites.

How Easy?

Whilst this looks more complex than EziSubmit, it has still been designed to be easy to use. As a plus it will autosubmit (no clicks) to a number of sites. Setup does take a bit of time and you also need to choose which category your program best fits into for each site, up front. Sites requiring captchas (5503 of the 8000 sites) cannot be fully auto-submitted so there is additional effort for these.

How Up-to-Date?

The company keeps the software up-to-date with updates “several times a month”. As far as I can tell, the cost of updates is included in the software price. The product doesn’t provide a tool or instructions for manually updating it, so if the company disappears so do the updates (though they are a well established company).

How Much?

At the time of writing, GSA Auto SoftSubmit is advertised as costing “$52 USD”. However, this is a “per month” figure. The cost of a “lifetime subscription” is actually $535 USD.

Captchas

It does deal pretty well with captchas though they slow it down and detract from its main feature which is speed (and number of sites). Captchas are entered manually after visiting a site and I found it frustrating that a window would reappear with more every time I entered values. (It was also off-putting that the tool went on to other sites whilst I was distracted with the captchas. However, that can be a plus too – depending on how you look at it.) I did like that it tries to use OCR to determine captcha values for you. It has some success at this (best I saw was 50%) and, as the program warns, some of these guesses may be wrong (and were). But it does help. (This sort of approach is possibly what has spurred some site owners to use increasingly complex captchas, see Introduction to PAD File Submission Tools).

Log

GSA Auto SoftSubmit does have a log and it does show you the results.

Other

If you will be developing and submitting a range of software over a number of months or years, you should consider the lifetime subscription. Many sites will automatically pick up new versions of your programs but few will realize you have written new programs. (Although surprisingly some sites do!)

PromoSoft

How Many Sites?

More than 800 sites. (Limit of 30 in the unregistered version). During my trial 787 sites were loaded from their website.

How Easy?

This program also has some setup requirements but these are straight forward. One of the pluses with this one is the “Fast Category” where they have mapped each of the PAD File categories to those of each software site. An annoyance is that you do have to choose a number of things before selecting the submit tab and clicking start. It autosubmits to sites that don’t require captchas.

How Up-to-Date?

The ad says, “daily updated site list.” You can’t update this yourself – though, as for GSA Auto SoftSubmit, the company has been around for some time.

How Much?

$95 USD

Captchas

Of the sites included in the trial version, I only found one that required a captcha. This is not indicative of the real world and it did give me a better impression than I would expect with the registered version. In any case, the captcha process seems straight forward enough – after all of the non-captcha sites have been processed you are presented with: a list of sites requiring captchas, pictures of those captchas, an input box for each and a refresh button for each. You enter the values and it submits to those sites.

Log

There is a log produced which shows which submissions were successful, which weren’t, and those whose status could not be determined. You do have to save the log at the time, or you lose it. Despite this, the software does internally remember this information.

Other Comments

I liked this program. It does a pretty good job and it goes to some lengths to avoid being seen as one of the spam submitters (and to avoid being one too). The drawbacks, for me (and these mightn’t apply to you), were: the cost, the reliance on someone else for updates, and that it crashed regularly on my test machine.

With the crashes, I was using Windows XP with 1GB of RAM and whenever I’d run it a second time (e.g. submit to other sites) it would crash with an “Out of Resources” message. Hopefully they fix this soon. If you do choose PromoSoft it would be worth checking this during the trial on your system. If you choose to buy it anyway, the workaround would be to exit and rerun the program for second, third, etc runs. This is not much of an inconvenience.

Introduction to PAD File Submission Tools

admin — Sat, 02 May 2009 19:03:16 +0000

What are PAD File submission tools? What do they do? Why do they exist?

Just want a great one to use that handles most of the issues?
Click here. Otherwise, read on.

Background

A PAD file is a “Portable Application
Description”. It is a single file that provides all of the details about a
software program. This means that software authors (shareware and freeware
programmers) can answer the questions that the software listing sites ask,
beforehand; rather than having to think of the answers each time.

A PAD File looks like this:

You can create one in a tool called PADGen from the Association
of Shareware Professionals (ASP). The tool looks like:

You just answer the questions in the tool, select the bits that apply, fill in the details and click “Build”. Out pops a PAD File like the one above.

Submitting a PAD File

You can manually submit PAD Files. This really is the hard way. The process is: upload your PAD file to some webspace (your site normally), find a software listing site (e.g. ones you know, from Google, etc), find the page that allows you to enter the URL of your PAD File (e.g. http://yoursite/pad_file.xml), enter its address, enter any other requested information, and click submit.

An easier approach is to use a PAD File submission tool like this one:

There are lots of software listing websites. It can take lots of time to find them and lots of time to submit your program to all of the ones you do find. This is even after you have already worked out all of the answers to the website questions.

The websites vary in format too. Some support PAD files. Some don’t. Of those that do, some require you to choose which of their software categories your software falls into. Often the categories vary from site to site. This complicates what could have been a straightforward process.

Some automated tools don’t cater well for the differences or don’t cater for policy nuances that sites have. Obvious examples are: tools submitting trialware to freeware-only sites; or business products to games-only sites. Less obvious examples are: tools submitting Windows programs to Linux sites, submitting to categories that don’t exist, submitting without including a mandatory link to that site; and even resubmitting the same software to the same site again and again.

Software Download Sites

Download sites have gotten a bit fed up with automatic PAD file submission tools that submit to the wrong sites or “spam” the same software to the same site again and again. Because of this, an increasing number of the websites are now blocking automated tools. This is actually a real tragedy as software authors and download sites both depend on each other for their survival. No listing equals no revenue for the author and no submissions means nothing to list which equals no revenue for the website owner either.

At the same time, authors need to realize that there is a burden placed on the download sites with each submission. In the least it is minimal for a fully automated site but at the other end it can be huge if each program is manually reviewed before listing.

These days, it is almost mandatory (especially for a “reputable” site) to virus scan submissions. In addition many sites also check for spyware and other nasties. These are overheads that happen with submissions that follow the “correct” path.

What about programs that are submitted with the wrong category? Who fixes that? The answer is of course the webmaster or staff. Or maybe it just doesn’t get listed because it is too hard and there are plenty of other ones to process that do have correct categories.

In these cases, the automatic tool got a “Thank you for your submission”, marked that site as a success, and moved on. Yet your program doesn’t get listed.

Or maybe it didn’t even wait for a “Thank you …” before it moved on. The site was there. It submitted. As far as it is concerned that one’s a “done”.

What about webmasters who get the same program again and again? If all of the submissions happen together it is pretty obvious and they can throw away all but the last submission (if their queue allows for this). If they happen over a longer period of time and with other programs in between, what then? You get, “Haven’t I seen this one before? Wasn’t this …?” Then you get, “Yeah, I have seen this before. This is the third time….” Followed by “Why? Is this a duplicate? Has something changed? What has changed?” How would you like it? Personally I’d hate it.

One easy solution for webmasters is to just overwrite any earlier version. BUT, what if the earlier one was virus scanned successfully and this one has a virus? You’d need to at least rescan the new one. What if this is the tenth copy of exactly the same program with exactly the same PAD file as the last nine that you’ve seen? Is it getting annoying yet? Sure is!

Captchas

As a result of the issues with automated tools, more and more software download sites have introduced captchas to their “Add PAD File” pages. These check for the presence of a person during the software submission process. Typical captchas are pictures of skewed, twisted, stretched and colored text on hard to read backgrounds. These are as un-machine-readable as they can get so that you have to be a person to deduce what the letters are. The idea is that if the right value is entered then a person was there to decipher the text. Sometimes though, even a person can’t decipher it and you have to guess again, and again, …. One site I saw had a bug that
causes your submission to fail even when you do correctly guess the captcha value. They probably haven’t had any new software for a while and you probably
don’t want to waste your time finding if they’ve fixed it yet.

Variations on the captcha idea include PAD file submission pages which ask things like “What is the third word in ‘xzcvg hjk lmnt asgh’?” The “sentence” and “which word” varies so it can’t be preprogrammed into a tool. Again, it needs a person to be present.

Another variation is pages which ask “what is five plus four?” and you don’t proceed unless you enter 9 in the box. Of course the question and answer varies each time.

Or this one:

How Automated PAD Submission Tools Work

There are a number of ways automated PAD submission tools work although they all come down to filling in a form and clicking the “Submit” button. Some do all of this behind the scenes and you never see it. Some show you what they are doing. Some do it by downloading the actual submission page and filling that out. Others already know what the page looks like (or used to look like) and submit without asking for the page. This could be checked by websites trying to detect automated submissions but, as far as I know, none do the check.

A simplification that can be incorporated into PAD submit tools is to assume all websites are of a similar style. Whilst this shouldn’t be the case; it is! This is because a lot of software download sites are based on the Association of Shareware Professional’s “PAD Kit”.

The PADKit was a set of files that could be used in a software listing site and which automated the processing of PAD Files for webmasters. It was a great idea but misuse meant it is not currently being distributed (see http://www.asp-shareware.org/pad/padkit.php):

This meant that the number of PAD Kit sites stopped growing and webmasters needed to do their own PAD File processing scripts. This is a pity because computers were once about saving time by automating tedious things instead of having to do everything differently every time.

Some automated tools assume that the website is based on the PAD Kit and these tools work well when used with those sites. However, there are also a lot of sites not based on PAD Kit; or which have obviously moved on from the PADKit baseline, possibly because of the issues.

Old tools based on sites having been PAD Kit sites produce a lot of failed submissions. Hopefully they will notice and report this. Otherwise you end up at the end of a submission run and never know you didn’t get listed. Or you know there were problems but have no idea which sites failed. Whatever you do, don’t just rerun it again “from the top”.

How Do Automated Submission Tools Deal With Captchas?

The ones I have seen that claim to be fully automated defer the captcha input to the end. To their credit, they do a lot of work for you and make the process a lot easier than it would otherwise be. However, at the end, you are faced with possibly having to enter 1000 values from 1000 pictures presented to you by the software. It is not obvious what happens if the captcha value has “timed out” and is no longer valid; nor what happens if you guess the hard-to-read value wrongly.

I don’t know of any that deal with “what is the third word …”, “what is three plus two?” or which would pick an elephant from its photo.

How Do I Choose a PAD File Submission Tool

Hopefully, the basics above will give you an idea of the questions to ask/research.

Key things to look for are:

How many sites does it submit to?
Are these only PAD Kit sites?
Does it produce a log showing what worked and what didn’t?
How does it know? (or does it assume submitted means worked?)
Can you resubmit manually to ones that didn’t work?
How old is it and/or has it been updated for website changes?
Do updates cost? (How much? How often? Do you have to buy them all?)
Can YOU update it (add / change / delete sites)?
How does it deal with captchas?

There are other “nice-to-have”s which are great BUT make sure it stacks up against the basics first.