All News

June21st- 2008Longer "OS" (Operating System) values stored - Over 1,000 listings had a truncated value for "OS". These values have been updated to display up to 255 characters. We've also added a glyph to indicate which programs run on "Vista".

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June19th- 2008Friendly URLs introduced - It took a little while to test many of the changes, but it is now online. URLs are more "friendly", but longer. Who types in URLs anymore anyway? The previous URLs will still work, but they are redirected to the new friendly URL. You know by looking at the URL what should be on that page. For example, "products-107111.html" is now "Lookup-Reverse-Phone-Number-Communications-Other-Comms-Tools-freeware-107111.html".

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May1st- 2008Navigation improvements - We made a few more minor navigation changes here and there - changes mostly to simplify the menu and improve the overall usability of the site.

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February24th- 2008 Age verification system is done!! We're doing our best to provide a more trusted service for our users. We have flagged some of the listings already and you should see the "18+" graphic on any listing that is "Restricted to Adults"; these pages have the RTA rating META tag as well.

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February15th- 2008Age verification system is coming withing a couple days. This is not so great news for the youngsters, but we believe in providing a trusted service for our internet users.

We could use your help with respect to the ongoing effort to keep the content ratings accurate -- since our scan may not correctly tag all items as "Mature content" that should be tagged or even falsely tag a few innocent listings as "Mature content"; please submit a quick and easy "Issue Report" for that listing to help us correct those listings.

February14th- 2006TONS of duplicated content removed - and blacklisted forever - I'll say exactly what I said the last time I removed the duplicate content: We believe that software that comes from SPAM sites has no business here; because of this, we hope that you consider our site a better source for software. We made a HUGE list of sites that will never be able to submit new programs, but there's still lots of duplicates to remove.

Not only do the duplicates confuse the end-user (wondering which of the eight seemingly identical programs to download or try out), but their order and download links frequently take the user to yet another page - where they must then find appropriate download link. Most of our listings have single-click download and order links.

Changes were made to our developer submission policy. The changes are all related to the duplicate content issue.

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January31st- 2008Few minor improvements to various pages - No changes that were too big, but the largest fix was to make the caching work better.

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January20th- 2008Comments system online! - The online comments system allows users to enter comments for any listing on the site.

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January10th- 2008Few tweaks and the popular "Vista-esque" theme is now the site default - We made a few minor layout changes here and there. This was based on the popularity of the various themes that were selected by the site's users over many months of traffic.

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December18th- 2007Quad-CPU server upgrade!!! - There are four 64bit CPUs on the new server. The increased traffic to our site was causing the old server load to indicate "in the red", but the new server has been "staying in the green" even with the increased traffic.

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December1st- 2007Page caching for more of a speed increase & less load on database - The database load is reduced greatly for many pages that are now cached. These pages are recreated after 30 days, but there is little need to create these pages each time they are requested -- they don't change very much over time, so this caching removes a tremendous burden on the database which makes everything else faster.

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September20th- 2007Minor speed increase & more available bandwidth - The description says it all. We now serve gzip compressed content whenever possible. This results in savings of up to 70% for bigger pages. We've also trimmed a few database queries to give yet quicker results.

September5th- 2007Articles! We have partnered with a creative web author who writes technical articles. If you would like to have your similar articles published, contact us to see if we might publish your tech articles (including links to your site / services that are followed by search bots) as well.

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August21st- 2007Aggressive external link polling - we've written a full featured link poll routine to check all of our published links so that we can remove all of the bad links before you have to find out the hard way that a link is bad. It's going to take a while before it even scans through the first time, but the scan works around the clock to remove these bad links. At the same time, it updates any values from the publisher's listing that may have changed.

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August5th- 2007Tools added to menu The tools index has been put together to group some links to our member tools and other web services. This area was created initially for the CSS shadow tools, etc - since they didn't seem to have any other place to be.

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July13th- 2007CSS Image Shadow / CSS Shadow / HTML to Excel These new tools were written as free web tools.

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June20th- 2007Users online! In the footer, we display how many real users are online at any given moment. The display does NOT count any bots, so this is a real count of real users who are on the site.

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June13th- 2007Snap instant screenshots added! Using the amazing free service at SnapShots, we now display their instant screenshot popup windows for all of our external links so that you can see where you are going before you leave.

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May31st- 2007Automated Link Directory We now have a link directory where you can add very own websites or even your favorite sites. Activation is instant and can be done by E-Mail or by publishing a back-link - a link that you select from the existing links in the directory. We'll display the Google PageRank� as well as your website's "favicon".

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April1st- 2007Similar Software searching improved We took a good thing and made it better again. Our old search only used keywords, but the new search for similar software employs a search for keyword(s) and description(s) against a full text on those two fields. This results in more accurate listings of similar titles for you to consider.

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March25th- 2007Webmaster duties... There's been a lot of cleaning up of minor issues going on. Also, added some admin features that you won't get to see. Researching a few new features to make the site better.

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February26th- 2007Speed increase 2.0 We boosted the speed of many of our pages by another SQL optimization - coupled with a fix for hundreds of program listings that were missing data in a required table. We have also gone through our error logs and determined that a good bit of lag may be attributable to missing screenshots and program icons. We removed all offending icons and screenshots. If you are a developer, and you know that your screenshot or icon is really where it should be (and that our scan occurred during an inconveniently timed problem accessing your file), simply submit your PAD again and the image and icon will be restored. This spring-cleaning wouldn't be complete without removing another batch of duplicate a.k.a. hijacked-PADs.

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February25th- 2007AutoPAD 2.2.0.1 released! This is a major upgrade (actually minor revision) to the previous version. If you want to read more about our tool for PADkit webmasters that imports PADs as well as scrapes several repositories for PAD listings start with our - main information page for AutoPAD Submit 2.2.0.1.

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February22nd- 2007Shopping Area We have created a section devoted to software titles that are more reliable (can not have bugs in your software if you want to be commercially viable) using RegNow and DigitalRiver, trusted payment system providers for many software development companies.

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February19th- 2007Digg and Del.icio.us tag incorporation With the power of these community rating systems, we have added the tags for bookmarking various pages on our site with Digg and Del.icio.us. Feel free to bookmark the better pages that you find on our web (beginning with this page - ).

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February9th- 2007New Styles have arrived! The new styles include "Vista-esque", "Blogger", and "Aluminum". Also, with respect to styles, "Newstyle" was finally renamed "Marbled".

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January26th- 2007Site-wide smileys. As you can see, the smiles are going to be able to be used throughout the site.

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January26th- 2007Duplicate content removed! We have added the required code and made the proper changes to the database to remove duplicate content. Whenever you are referred to a page (via a search engine) that has now been blacklisted, you will still be able to search for that listing here's an example of a 404 page for a blacklisted title.

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January23rd- 2007Webpage Thumbnails for "Other Download Sites". We have added actual thumbnails of the websites for Other Download Sites. Now, you can see what the website is like before you visit it. These thumbnails are updated regularly using an amazing AJAX API called WebThumb.

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January23rd- 2007Popular Search Terms Tag Cloud. On our main search page, you can now see the 20 most popular search terms in each program type (Freeware, Shareware, etc.). These search terms may actually help you find programs better to suit your needs.

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January19th- 2007Search Engine highlighting added. When somebody comes to BetterWindowsSoftware from one of the popular search engines, we are sometimes able to see which terms the user was searching for - and highlight them in some areas of the text. This feature is not always available due to some special characters that come in some refer addresses as well not being enabled to highlight all text yet. Currently, this is only only available for some search engines - and when the landing page is any of our "Search Results" pages or any of the "product listing" pages. We value your privacy - and would like to assure you that this information is only used to display these links and highlight the word(s) you searched for.

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January11th- 2007Several nice enhancements! On any of our download pages, we added lists of "People who downloaded this title, also downloaded the following titles". Also, we feel that we have enough meaningful votes to start displaying "Highest Rated in Category". These two enhancements should help users find better programs that they may not have otherwise found.

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October14th- 2006Similar Software Report fixed.

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October12th- 2006Now we have style! - well, user now has the choice of CSS stylesheets - so, you have style!

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October6th- 2006Search Filters Improved - The search filter capability has been vastly improved with the addition of operating system filter as well as maximum and minimum file size filters. These filters are not yet part of the search box, but that capability will soon follow.

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September25th- 2006Speed increased - over 50 database queries have been optimized to be more efficient. You'd be surprised how many database queries are used just to display a single page.

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September25th- 2006Blacklisted content removed - this has been a huge undertaking, but we believe that software that comes from SPAM sites has no business here; because of this, we hope that you consider our site a better source for software. Many titles were removed that were associated with domains that were on the whois blacklist.

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September12th- 2006A better way to find and buy software... - is more true than ever with our new "Full Similar Search" tool that can be used to search across all of our titles in order to find better similar matches. The "Similar Software" listing that appears on each product's listing page contains only up to 15 items from the category that the program is listed. The "Full Similar Search" scans all categories and lists up to 90 similar titles that are ranked in order of their keyword matching strength. There is a link on each listing page to perform a full search for that listing, here's an example full search for diskSpace Explorer Network Edition. This new search tool now highlights the matched keywords that appear in the short descriptions. Another new feature of this tool is the ability to to do a multiple title search - that finds software that is similar to more than one title; we admit, these types of searches can lead you to download programs that you would have never found - perhaps that's better, maybe not.

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September2nd- 2006Based on some critiques of how Freeware is defined here, we have modified the code so that any program must have a cost value = $0, in order to be displayed as Freeware.

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August16th- 2006Voting for Internet Explorer users has been fixed. Thanks for the feedback.

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August12th- 2006Featured listings added. We had problems getting emails, so the featured listings have been added based on backlinks that already exist to our site.

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