Although this post isn’t an inspirational post, it is in line with other software reviews I’ve done in the past. Since many of us who have blogs need various software, I like to pass along the news when I discover a good product.

I often want to edit pdf files that my home-based business company provides, so I’ve been looking around for a more economical editor than the very expensive Adobe Acrobat, which started the pdf (portable document format) phenomenon. I may want to add my personal contact information to a file or split out a page or two from the monthly health magazine that’s available in the pdf format. I may even want to redo the look a bit but keep the content. I did that this weekend when I took out a large graphic at the top of the original article so I’d have room to add the overflow text from a second page all onto the one new page I was creating.

To do some of these kinds of things, I needed to have a pdf editor that allowed me to do more than just add new text and graphics. There are free or inexpensive pdf editors that can add new material but not edit existing material. There are also several fairly inexpensive editors (in the $50–$100 range) that enable editing, but the ease with which they do it varies.

After trying three different editors this weekend, I found one I really like—Iceni Technology’s INfix PDF Editor, Version 4. Somehow I’d never come across it before, in my continuing search for pdf editors. (The other two were Foxit PDF Editor and Nitro PDF Professional.) I was delighted at how easy and natural it is to edit a file with INfix. To get more familiar with the product, I looked at many of the excellent tutorial videos Infix provides on their site.

Unlike the other editors, INfix edits text like a word processor. Other editors often work only on lines of text instead of blocks of text. INfix even lets you create and edit blocks of text, columns, and text linked between columns or pages. This editor makes it a breeze to edit text. Like a word processor, it lets you easily apply font style and size, bold, italic, and underline, and subscript or superscript to selected text. It even has buttons for applying single, line-and-a-half, and double line spacing to a selected block of text. For justification, you can select from left, centered, right, and full justification.

The Rotate tool lets you easily rotate selected objects. You can also align selected objects with its various Alignment buttons. The Link tool makes it easy to add links to existing text, to make them clickable for your readers, or to edit existing links. The Fill Colour and Line Colour tools make it easy to select from a variety of colors or roll your own, via the color tool dialog box. You can even use the eye-dropper within the dialog box to select the color from an existing color elsewhere on your page.

For drawing, there are five tools: Pencil, Rectangle, Line, Ellipse, and Pen. You can use the Shift key to constrain these tools to drawing square, round, diagonal, and straight.

Document management is also easy. You can also insert, delete, extract, rotate, resize, and reorder pages within the document. And you can crop a page to include only part of its content. You can also insert another document into your current document, either before or after the current page.

Changing the view can be done by buttons (Actual size, Entire page, or Fit document to window), by keyboard shortcuts, by the Zoom tool, by clicking + or – on the Navigation bar, or by selecting from a list of pre-defined zoom values.

The Infix PDF Editor comes in three flavors—INfix (standard, $99), INfix Pro ($159 and volume licensing), and INfix Server (flexible pricing). I took advantage of the 14–day trial to test Infix before deciding on it. All features were available and usable with no trial-copy watermarking of my saved documents.

If you need an excellent pdf editor and don’t want to pay Adobe’s price, I heartily recommend you give one of the Infix editors a try. I believe you’ll be glad you did. You can view a chart comparing INfix with Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro, Foxit, and Nitro PDF Pro here.

Charles David Heineke

Many who come to this site probably have their own website(s) and may do a lot of their own webmastering work. If you’re one of these, you’ll probably appreciate this quick introduction to Google’s Webmaster Tools. This powerful collection of Google tools analyzes your website and provides helpful feedback about it, from Google’s perspective. Learning what Google knows about your site and using it to improve your site will help you gain higher prominence in their search results.

The video below provides a general introduction to these tools and highlights two of the five sections, Diagnostics and Links. Below the movie are more details about all the goodies you’ll find at Google Webmaster Tools.

Google provides five areas to help webmasters improve their sites and their sites’ visibility in the Google search engine. These are Overview, Statistics, Links, Sitemaps, and Tools.

The Overview section gives you a thumbnail sketch of your site, from Google’s perspective. It focuses on Indexing and Web Crawl Errors.

The Diagnostics section provides details on

• Web Crawl (errors and problems encountered by Google’s crawlers while accessing pages on your site)
• Content Analysis (potential problems with site metadata, such as title and meta description information)
• Mobile Crawl (errors and problems encountered by Google’s crawlers while accessing pages on your site created specifically for viewing on mobile cell phones).

The Statistics section provides information about:

• Top Search Queries (which search queries most often returned pages from your site, and which of them were clicked)
• What Googlebot Sees (details about how the Googlebot sees your site)
• Crawl Stats (distribution info for your site, including the current PageRank for pages on your site)
• Index Stats (shows how your site is indexed by Google, including which pages are indexed, and which other sites point to your site)
• Subscriber Stats (If your site publishes feeds of its content, this page will display the number of users who have subscribed to these feeds using Google products such as iGoogle, Google Reader, or Orkut.).

The Links section shows:

• Pages With External Links (which pages on your site have links pointing to them from other sites)
• Pages With Internal Links (which pages on your site have links pointing to them internally from elsewhere on your site)
• Site Links (which links on your site have been identified as candidates for appearing directly in Google search results). The Pages With External Links tool will show you links from other sites to your site that don’t show up when you do a “links:www.yoursite.com” search. For example, when I did a search on Google just now for “links:www.thedoorway.org”, to see how many other sites are linking to this site, Google said only 5 were. The Index Stats page describes this report as “pages that link to your site’s front page”. But when I checked the Pages With External Links, Google reported 216 pages linking to this site! You can click on the number and see a clickable listing of each page linking to your site. This may include many pages on a particular site linking to yours, instead of just reporting that that one site points to your site. It’s interesting to see who’s linking to you.

The Sitemaps section reports any sitemaps on your site and also lets you add a sitemap to your site. A sitemap provides Google with additional information about your site. But Google doesn’t create it for you. You have to do it some other way. One way is to use the sitemap creation tool at ROR Sitemap Generator. You can also download a software tool from that page which will let you create a sitemap from your desktop.

The Tools section includes the following components:

• Analyze robots.txt (See whether your robots.txt file blocks specific URLs as is, or with modifications you make. Test against various Google user-agents, too.)
• Generate robots.txt (Interactively create a robots.txt file to indicate which robots you don’t want crawling your site, and which files or directories you don’t want crawled.)
• Manage Site Verification (See all verified owners of this site, and optionally reverify them.)
• Set Crawl Rate (See statistics about how often Google crawls your site, and optionally adjust that speed if desired.)
• Set Geographic Target (Associate a particular geographic location with this site if you are targeting users within that area.)
• Set Preferred Domain (Associate a preferred domain with this site, to always or never show the leading “www.” in Google’s search results.)
• Enhanced Image Search (Enable Google’s enhanced search for images on your site, including advanced labeling techniques for images hosted by Google.)
• Remove URLs (Remove content from the Google index, including expediting that removal.)
• Gadgets (There is currently one gadget listed. That item will enable you to automatically add many of these tools to your Google home page.)

As you have seen above, Google is providing some awesome tools to help you learn about your site and improve it’s visibility in Google searches. Google Webmaster Tools is definitely one stop every webmaster should make. To learn more about these powerful tools, click here to take a tour of the Google Webmaster Tools.

Here’s an item of interest for anyone who has a blog or website and wants to monetize their site. Yesterday I came across a link to a new widget—Niche Widget. It enables you to quickly and automatically monetize your website through various affiliate products related to a wide variety of interests and markets. It’s a mind-blower in its ease of use and extensiveness. And it’s FREE to use or you can upgrade to a more powerful version. The free version pays 50% on the software sold and the upgrade pays 100%.

The software, accessed through a membership site, allows you to easily create multiple widgets to put on your websites and/or blogs. The widget can be one of three sizes:

• Horizontal, 728×90
• Vertical, 160×600
• Square, 300×250 (nearly square)

The membership site stores all of your widget settings and code, so you’ll have it all there in one place. You can go back at any time and modify your widgets, make new ones, or delete old ones.

What’s really awesome about the widget is its wide variety of marketing areas and niches. You can have widgets for any number (unlimited) of different pages, sites, markets, all automatically displaying products for sale in that particular niche.

I was so excited about this widget that I decided to make a short video about it. The video below will show you a closeup of the horizontal widget and how to set up a new widget. You’ll get to scroll through the long list of categories and niches and see just how versatile and powerful this product is. Take a look now, and then head on over to see the Niche Widget.

Click the small triangular Play button at the bottom to view this video on this page.

The video is also available on Google Video.