Tags: productivity
The method domains propagate to your hosting provider are technically more complicated than described by general online resources. A little mistake with your name servers and dns settings can result in large scale problems most webmasters are not aware of. Some negative consequences are partial unavailability of services and open doors for domain high-jacking. Spammers could use your weak settings for webmail spam abuse with your IPs becoming blacklisted by Spamhaus. Intodns.com allows to check for common mistakes in dns setups. The free website points out mistakes item by item. This is a very valuable service providing way more information than other, similar sites. 
Google has implemented website previews in their websearch about one year ago. Every time people mouse-over their result's url, they receive a small thumb of their result. Such previews are known as webthumbs or thumbshots. Production of thumbshots takes up a lot of memory and CPU power. Most normal webbies are unable to use their server or VPS for hosting own scripts for this intense task. Thumbshots.ru is one of the best and most reliable third party services delivering crisp and sharp thumbnails of websites in various sizes. Unlike other services it is not limited to certain niches (i.e. thumbshots.com will not allow adult websites to utilize their services).
Many adult webmasters use scripts like TubeX, TGPX and TradeX on their website, but JMBSoft has ceased providing reliable support to them. Adult webmaster boards are full of support request and questions about the creator's availability. For personal reasons Jeremey seems to be unavailable for some time, now. This new unofficial support site is run by Chad who offers a discussion forum about commonly known issues with TubeX and TGPX scripts. Hopefully, inquiries will be answered here and you may keep on using your script for site maintenance. 
Checking your server for uptime and making sure private nameservers resolve properly is just one thing you can do with Watchmouse service. It's a great monitoring tool for webspace and server speed because it offers about 30 different geographical locations to check a site for availability and various other parameters. In addition it provides opportunities to monitor censorship in foreign countries and check sponsors for redirects. Some programs do redirect affiliate traffic to other sources where affiliates are left out of payments.
Getting promotional content from sponsors can be tough. What to do? How about harvesting content from sponsor's free hosted galleries and creating your own galls for your blog or TGP? Download Helper allows to download linked full-sized images directly from galleries without thumbs and html. It asks to set a folder and then downloads all images and desired files working in background. You may do whatever else you are busy with. I value this tool a lot. Download Helper increases productivity and the best thing of all: it's a free Firefox plugin. Other competing products like Gallery Scraper cost over 100$ for the same functionality of harvesting media from hosted promo tools. 
