Having trouble opening an email attachment? Have them send the attachment with SendTool.  SendTool makes it easy to send files, without worrying about the recipient not being able to get it.

How easy is it? Follow this walk-through to get started:

1. Go to the SendTool website. ( http://sendtool.com/ )
2. Select the file attachment you wish to send. And optionally add a description and/or a password.
3. Press the ‘Send File’ Button.
4. Either click the ‘Email Link’ button to automatically load the link into your default email client, or manually copy and paste the provided Download URL into your email message body.

Of course SendTool is not limited just to email. You can send a download link through instant messenger, a chat room, or post a temporary download on your website. There are lots of ways to use SendTool, use your imagination.

Today I ensured that SendTool plays well with Google. For a small site, its relatively quick and painless. Most everything I needed was available through http://google.com/webmasters/.

First things first, for a new site, I needed to submit my URL to Google so the next time the googlebot makes its rounds SendTool gets indexed. I could wait for the googlebot to find it, but why wait.

After submitting your site, its a good idea to let Google know which pages are most important. Its time to create a sitemap. Sitemaps are XML files that help the googlebot to more efficiently index your site. There are only a handful of tags to learn, you can use mine as a example if you’d like. Read more about creating sitemaps at Google.

In addition to a sitemap, you’ll probably also want to add a robots.txt file. The robots file tells the bots what and what not to index. And if they are well behaved bots they’ll adhere to your rules. In my case it doesn’t make sense for any bot to index the download page or the upload summary page. You can see in my robots.txt file that I’ve disabled indexing for those pages. You can read more about robots.txt syntax at robotstxt.org.

The last thing I did was ensure that my XHTML and CSS were valid.  W3C makes this a single click experience.  Follow these links for HTML/XHTML Validation and CSS Validation.

What I’ve done is just a start, I’ll be sure to outline more ways to optimize for search as I implement them.   Thats all for today.

It started with a telephone call from my father. He was in desperate need of getting a large file to a client, and was blocked by gmail. The normal course of action he had taken was to upload the file to his website and email the link. Unfortunately, now, Google For Domains hosts all of his content and there is no way to upload a file to his website. There lies the dilemma.

The temporary fix was to host the file for him, but during this process a new idea emerged. “I bet this is a common problem” I thought.  So the following weekend I went to work creating SendTool.

SendTool had to be painless, no tedious logins or heavy graphics were in its future. I decided early on to stick to the basics, its really just temporary file storage. What do we really care about here? Well, we need to upload a file. Thats a good start, what else? How about a description of that file, password protection, and a setting for just how temporary the storage will be. Enough brainstorming, time to build it.

Coding the site didn’t take long, but I could definitely have used a graphic designer. I’m an engineer, I think by definition that means I’m horrible with graphics. The site is simple, comprised of only 3 pages. The upload form, the upload complete page, and the download page. The upload form takes all your information and uploads it. The upload complete page gives you a summary of what you uploaded and provides download links for you to distribute. And the download page serves your file to its recipient.  With these three pages, I had covered the basics. It was functional.

And so, a new application was born.  I sprinkled some Google ads around just so people could be assured the site is absolutely free. Click them if you’d like