Tired of the slow and clunky Adobe Reader? Try the FREE Foxit PDF reader!

I am a HUGE fan of the PDF format for documents. I have been sending invoices, contracts, presentations and more in PDF format for years now. I don't use Adobe Acrobat to generate PDFs, though, instead choosing one of the many "Print to PDF" drivers available. I'll add a post later on my favorite ways to create PDFs, but for now, I wanted to talk about a very cool (and fast) alternative to the Adobe PDF Reader.

As you know, in order to open and read a PDF file, you need the Adobe Acrobat Reader (or another program capable of understanding the format). The Adobe reader has always been free from Adobe. However, in recent years, the Adobe Reader has become a HUGE application, a large download and bit of a process hog. Well, I am very excited to report that there is at least one alternative to the Adobe PDF Reader. It's a very popular FREE program called, surprise, surprise, Foxit PDF Reader.

Foxit Reader is a free (and small) PDF document viewer and printer. It is fast to launch and rich in features. It supports Windows XP, 2003 & Vista. In the past, you've had to download a huge PDF reader from another software company, go through a lengthy installation process and wait for an annoying splash window to disappear just to open a PDF document. Moreover, if you want to annotate a PDF document, you have to but the full version of Acrobat (at a few hundred dollars.)

You might think that this program is a "lite" version of Adobe Reader, but it actually has MORE features than Adobe Reader. So, not just does it perform a LOT better than the Adobe Reader, but you also get a lot more functionality!

Check out the Foxit PDF Reader at FoxitSoftware.com.

Speed up your "My Computer" (Windows)

If you click on My Computer to then wait a long time for it to display, your PC may be searching and monitoring for network resources. To stop this behavior while still being able to access your network resources, just change a simple setting in your Folder Options.

Step-By-Step:

Launch your "My Computer" and wait for it to fully load. Click on TOOLS, then FOLDER OPTIONS.



On the "Folder Options" window, click the "View" tab. Notice in the "Advanced Settings", the entry "Automatically search for network folders and printers". Un-check that entry and click OK.



Close out of My Computer and fire it up again. If the slow down was due to network discovery and monitoring, you should now be able to see My Computer much faster!

Preserve your Search Engine Ranking with the 301 Redirect!

If you have spent a long time and effort getting to rank well on the search engines, you want to make sure you do NOT loose these rankings when certain pages change on your site in such a way that their URLs (web addresses) might change. This is especially true when you change platforms or redesign your website. If you have this problem, you definitely want to read this post!

When a page is removed from your website, your webserver will usually return a "404 Page Not Found" error (also known as just "404".) When a Search Engine spider encounters missing pages, of course the links will be removed from the indexes. At the very least, a redirect avoids the 404 by telling the spider that the content for the page can be found elsewhere. It also tells the search engine that the "old" URL should stop being checked (and indexed) in essence replaced with the "new" URL.

By the way, the 404 and 301 are the HTML header response codes that your webserver will respond with when it receives a request. As you might know, when a user enters a URL on their web browser and tries to visit your site, the web browser establishes a connection with your server and makes a "request" for web content. The server then sees if it understands the request, and if it does, returns the content along with a response code of 200 (the "all ok" response code.) However, if your server does not know about the request, it will instead respond with the 404 indicating that "no such page was found here".

I am discussing this because this presents an interesting restriction of the 301 redirect technique which is that these response codes are ONLY under your control while the page is being "prepared" on the server for delivery to a web browser. Because of this, it is NOT possible to change a page's header code unless you have access to the server-side code for the page. In other words, you are only able to use a 301 redirect if your server (or hosting company) has provided you with a technology like ASP, ASP.NET, JSP, PHP, PERL, etc. You cannot change a page's header via the HTML for the page!

With that restriction out of the way and assuming you do have access to the server-side code for your website, a 301 Redirect can be performed on a page-by-page basis. Simply edit the page you wish to redirect and add the code according to the list below! It is not necessary to have anything else on the page but the redirect code.

ASP Redirect
<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url.com/"
%>

ASP .NET Redirect
<script runat="server">
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.new-url.com");
}
</script>

PHP Redirect
<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>

JSP (Java) Redirect
<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.new-url.com/" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%>