List of Programs/Tools/Sites I use to help manage my site

I thought I would share all the things I use to manage my forum, keep track of keywords I want to rank for and other things to make running a forum easier and to get traffic to my sites.
I am not going to try to organize them in any particular way since some of these have multiple purposes. Some may not apply to everyone here. Just something I find useful and others might as well. I will add to it as I remember things/find new things.

*Note* Some of these may be platform dependent meaning they will only work with one forum software, in which case it will be vBulletin since that is what I use.

Firefox - Simply the best browser ever made

Extensions I use:

• IE Tab - For testing in IE or viewing a pesky site that only works in IE.

• Search Status - Excllent Web Developer Tool for displaying Pagerank and checking parts of your website.

• IE View - Allows you to right click and open page in new IE Window

• Adsense Notifier - Shows your earnings in the bottom right of Firefox. I absolutely love this extension.

• Tabbrowser Preferences - Customize the Tabs in Firefox even more.

• Customize Google - Changes the way Google works to an extent. Favorite part is that it numbers the results!

vBulletin Forum Software - Simply the best forum software in existence imo. Excellent support and 3rd party programs.

vBadvanced Portal - Very easy to setup portal for the vBulletin forum software. I use it on my Mustang site. While it is not exactly what I want it is the best thing out there for intergrating with vBulletin imo.

Digital Point Keyword and Back Link Tracker - This utility can be used to check search engines (currently supporting Google, Yahoo and MSN) for search engine ranking and track those ranking historically which, as you probably know, is critical when doing Internet marketing for your website(s). Very useful to easily check all your keyword rankings.

Google Analytics - Statistics Tracking Software for your Web site(s). Tracks Uniques, Pageviews, Referring Sources, Content and much more. I absolutely love this program. It is free and has given me so much information to help me improve my web site.

Google Adsense - Monetize your forum with Google Adsense. Get paid everytime someone clicks on one of your ads. My bread winner for my sites.

Metapad - Like notepad, but not as crappy as notepad I use it to work with html and php files.

VBSEO - I use it, I love it and I have found that it has made my life so easy in more ways than just getting me more traffic. Since the urls are SEO friendly Google Analytics can easily traffic individual threads and posts instead of lumping them all into one big showthread result. It offers many utilities to help in other areas of SEO other than just rewriting.

VBSEO Sitemap Generator - A very very simple and easy to use Sitemap generator for creating sitemaps of your forum threads, posts, archive pages and member profile pages. Can be run with or without VBSEO.

Digg - I use Digg occasionally to submit technology news related to the Ford Mustang. While I have never got mainpaged I have still received a decent amount of traffic from Digg and of course the nice backlinks that come with it. Must be technology related news to submit.

MySpace - I use it to promote my Mustang website. See it's page here: Mustang Evolution Myspace. I find Mustang owners on myspace and request to be added to their friends list.

Big Board Admin - If you have a forum with 100,000+ posts join here. Contains lots of very good information from other Big Board Admins.

APC PHP Caching Script - Helps reduce server loads by caching optcode. Amazing results on my server.

Keyword Suggestion Tool - Type in a keyword and see how many times it has been searched for in a month. Very useful for researching keywords to target.

FileZilla Ftp Program - Very easy to use and great interface.

Putty SSH Tool - Allows you to login remotely to your dedicated server and issue commands using SSH.

Trillian IM Program - Allows me to contact people over different messaging services with just one program. Makes my life easier and more organized

FluxAds - CPA type of advertisement. Similiar to Azoogle. I run one highly targetted ad from their program and get decent results with it.

iTunes - Has absolutely nothing to do with being a webmaster, but music helps me relax and not kill someone when I can't figure something out. I always got All Hits 70's on Sky.fm playing on it

Excellent compilation of resources. Thanks for sharing!!

Thanks for sharing your resources!

Can this program be used with the newest PHP, MySQL and Zend-Optimizer Versions? And is this still useful? (Zend and APC)

Not really sure on Zend (I believe so) I use it on PHP 5.2.1 and MySQL 4.1.21

The only thing I have done is enabled it and changed the shm size to 256MB

No haven't tried XCache yet. I may play around with it sometime next week

Originally Posted by Silmarillion

Thx, Brent. What`s about Zend or Ioncube and XCache? Any experiences?

I switched from Php 4.4.3 , Mysql , 4.0.1 Apc Cache and ioncube to Php 5.2.1 , Mysql 5.0.24 wih Xcache and Memcache for datastore caching with ioncube . I am pretty happy with the new settings also my members are happy with the speed of the site. The site loads pages way faster also the loads decreased.

Do you have a CPANEL server Lizard? If so how did you get php to see the memcached extension without recompiling it within php?

Originally Posted by BamaStangGuy

Do you have a CPANEL server Lizard? If so how did you get php to see the memcached extension without recompiling it within php?

Yep i have a cPanel server but it is also managed I asked the tech's to do that. It took 3 days for them to figure out how to do that but at last they did. Floren helped me also about the the subject and showed me couple tutorials. I shared them with the Techs also and they managed to do it at the end. vBulletin Community Forum - View Single Post - memcached - definetly worth it for high load servers. Here is the most important tutorial.

I have gotten the actual memcached to run but I can't get the extension to load with PHP :(

I even sent in a ticket to my host, which is managed also, and they said it was installed but it doesn't show up in php.ini

That is the tutorial I followed when I tried it. *Sigh* I could really use this. Last time I got hit by Digg it wasn't the memory that was the problem it was the processors. I still had enough memory left to give to store queries inside memcache and help take the load of the processors.

The easiest way to do it when you are asking your host management to add memcache support show , ask them to enable memcache support in your config.php at a test board on your server. They always claimed on my side that it was working however whenever i turn the memcache on from config.php the pages wont load. So i keeped the setting turned on at my second forum (which is not turned on yet) . After that they could handle it. I will also double check with host management and learn what steps they took.