Thursday, August 4, 2011
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Solar Tips: Dust Can Reduce Energy Output of PV cells
Photovoltaic (PV) solar panels are today the talk of the town. The cost of solar power is a concern but it is still as much as 20 to 25 per cent less than that from diesel generators. Additional bonus for going solar is elimination of noise and air pollution. More and more people are becoming pro-solar, especially because the line power quality continues to be poor with long blackouts and voltage swings. In addition, PV solar prices are dropping in India as competition builds ussp and China is offering good quality at very competitive prices.
However, there is one problem— PV solar companies rarely warn buyers about the deadly impact of dust and dirt on the PV panel output. As a consequence, few people have realised its gravity. Within just a week, there is a sharp drop in power output of solar panels due to ever present dust and dirt in our cities and towns.
Solar panels glisten in the sun after being installed. But after a little while, these panels become progressively coated with dirt like dust and bird droppings. Flocks of birds leave behind a mess after spending the night overhead while dust, grime and mould add to the layers of dirt, colouring the solar panels a splotchy brown. Suppliers of solar systems, however, often assume that their work is over after the panels are installed and payment made.
Dirt is a major problem with solar panels, and letting it accumulate over a few weeks will reduce a solar panel’s efficacy by almost 30 per cent even in dust free Europe. It is, therefore, essential to maintain them with regular cleaning, at least every other day. Fortunately, this is the only maintenance that solar panels need. When you install a solar power plant, the ease of regularly cleaning the PV panels has to be kept in mind.
There are automatic cleaning systems like SolarWash and others available abroad but manual cleaning is far more inexpensive option in India. Cleaning thrice a week and washing once a month is essential in most of the Indian locations. If one does not clean regularly, the dirt actually gets bonded to the surface. Just imagine what happens to your car windshield if it’s not cleaned daily. PV panels are in open like the car. Remember if you don’t keep them very clean, don’t expect to get the rated power output specified by the supplier and also the promised return on your investment.
The best example of rather thoughtless application of solar power is pole mounted solar streetlights. Most of these are bought by public bodies with public money. Like any other public utility, municipality, gram panchayat or city corporation, that installs these never bothers to maintain them. Such projects basically start and end with spending the public money and lining the pockets both by the buyer and the seller. Maintenance and supervision are never given a thought.
A study conducted by two citizen groups shows that 70 per cent of these streetlights are not doing their job within three months of installation. Lights die out within an hour or two. Pole mounted panels are inaccessible without ladders, so no one bothers to clean or ever check them.
India win ICC World Cup 2011 by 6 Wickets
An inspired India on Saturday night regained the coveted World Cup after 28 years as they suppressed Sri Lanka with a six-wicket victory in a nerve-wrecking final to script a glorious new chapter in their cricketing history
Chasing 275 for a historic win, the Indians held their nerves as they rode on Gautam Gambhir's 97 and Mahendra Singh Dhoni's unbeaten 91 to overhaul the target with 10 balls to spare and send the cricket-crazy nation into a frenzy.
The vociferous, jam-packed crowd at the Wankhede stadium erupted in wild celebrations as Dhoni hit the winning six runs to give India their biggest cricketing moment and crown themselves the ODI world champions, in addition to being the number one Test team.
The World Cup title triumph, coming as it did after more than two decades, was doubly special for Sachin Tendulkar since it was the only silverware missing from his collection.
It was also a fitting farewell to coach Gary Kirsten, for whom it was the last day in office as the Indian coach.
It was a momentous Saturday night marked by high emotion and poignant scenes as India, for long the game's financial power, stamped their supremacy on the field as well, eight years after Sourav Ganguly's team had made an abortive attempt to scale the pinnacle.
The players, many of them with tears in their eyes, rushed to the ground to hug each other as Dhoni finished it off in style by hitting a six, as fire crackers lit up the evening sky to mark the moment.
The highlight of the Lankan innings was Mahela Jayawardene's rollicking 103 as Sri Lanka capitalised on the batting powerplay to post a decent 274 for six.
Electing to bat after winning the toss, Jayawardene used his vast experience to good effect and anchored the Lankan innings together.
The islanders, desperate to regain the coveted cup after nearly 15 years, lost wickets at regular intervals against the Indians, who were spurred on by a vociferous jam-packed crowd.
The Indian bowlers were disciplined in the first half of the innings but conceded as many as 63 runs in the batting powerplay to undo all the good work.
Apart from Jayawardene's 88-ball knock, captain Kumar Sangakkara (48) Tillakaratne Dilshan (33) and Nuwan Kulasekara (32) were the other notable performers.
The Indian innings began on a disastrous note as the destructive Virender Sehwag was dismissed in the very second ball of the innings with paceman Lasith Malinga scalping the prized wicket.
Sehwag was hit on the pads by an incoming delivery by Malinga as he went for a flick. Umpire Aleem Dar ruled him out before he asked for review but television replays showed that the ball would have hit the stumps.
Tendulkar, playing in what probably is his last World Cup game, entertained his home crowd with a couple of delightful boundaries while Gambhir also looked for runs at the other end.
The Indians suffered a huge jolt went Malinga struck again by dismissing the champion batsman as he snicked an away-going delivery and captain Sangakkara latched on to a low catch. A hushed silence descended on the Wankhede stadium as he started his walk back to the pavilion.
Gambhir drove Kulasekara for a boundary in the extra cover region to notch up 4000 ODI runs while Virat Kohli also pulled the bowler to the boundary in the same over.
Gambhir was lucky to get a reprieve in spinner Suraj Randiv's first over when Kulasekara dropped him at the long off region.
The third-wicket pair of Gambhir and Kohli put on 83 runs before Dilshan broke the partnership by taking a brilliant acrobatic return catch.
The out-of-form Dhoni came ahead of Yuvraj to keep the left-right combination going and was immediately given two 'lives' by the Lankans -- first Sangakkara messing up a stumping chance off Muralitharan and then Dilshan dropping a return catch as he collided with non-striker Gambhir.
Dhoni, however, made the most of the Sri Lankan lapses to rediscover his form which had deserted him in the mega event.
Dhoni and Gambhir scored at a brisk pace to keep India in the hunt.
The pair stitched 109 runs for the fourth wicket before Gambhir paid the price for a horrendous stroke, just three runs short of what would have been a well-deserved century.
Gambhir made room to cut the ball but missed it completely to see his stumps dislodged.
Earlier, both the Indian new ball bowlers bowled a tidy line and length and did not allow the Sri Lankan openers to get off to a flying start while the fielding was also sharp.
Pace spearhead Zaheer's first three overs were maidens and that put some pressure on the two Lankan openers who were not being able to capitalise on the powerplay overs.
Dilshan broke the stranglehold by hitting the first boundary of the innings in the 5th over by pulling Sreesanth to the square leg fence.
In the same over, he produced a delightful cut to the point for his second boundary.
Tharanga looked completely out of sorts at the other end as he found it difficult to find the gaps as Zaheer bowled a searching length right through his opening spell.
Zaheer drew first blood in his fourth over by evicting Tharanga with an outgoing delivery and Virender Sehwag holding on to diving catch at first slip much to the delight of a capacity crowd at the stadium. Tharanga scored just two runs off 20 balls.
The Lankans could manage just 31 runs in the first ten overs, their lowest in the tournament. That was largely because of Zaheer's excellent first spell of 5-3-6-1.
Dilshan and Sangakkara put on 43 runs for the second wicket before Harbhajan Singh struck for his team by getting rid of Dilshan (33), who scored 500 runs in the tournament.
Dilshan went for a sweep but the ball hit his gloves and lobbed onto his stumps to trigger off wild celebrations in the galleries.
Sangakkara and Jayawardene then took upon themselves the task of rebuilding the innings and the duo scored at a decent pace to steer the team to a comfortable position.
Yuvraj Singh, who had a dream tournament with both the bat and the ball, was introduced into the attack in the 22nd over but the two experienced batsmen were not really troubled by his left arm spin.
It was Yuvraj who finally broke the 62-run third wicket partnership which was assuming dangerous proportions by dismissing Sangakkara who tried to cut a wide ball outside the off stump but only succeeded in edging the ball to Dhoni behind the stump. His knock of 48 came off 67 balls and contained five boundaries.
It was left to the well-settled Jayawardene to hold the innings together and he found an able ally in Thilan Samaraweera to take the Sri Lankan total close to the 180 mark.
Yuvraj was again instrumental in breaking the fourth- wicket partnership by accounting for Samaraweera. Umpire Simon Taufel turned down the leg before appeal but the Indians went for the referral and television replays showed that the ball would have hit the stumps.
New batsman Chamara Kapugedera did not survive long as he offered a simple catch to Suresh Raina at extra cover off a slower delivery from Zaheer, leaving the visitors in a spot of bother at 182 for five.
Jayawardene and Nuwan Kulasekara then teamed up ensure that Sri Lanka had a competitive total on the board as they went about accumulating runs in the batting powerplay, which was taken in the last five overs.
India: Mahendra Singh Dhoni (capt), Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Sachin Tendulkar, Virat Kohli, Yuvraj Singh, Suresh Raina, Harbhajan Singh, Zaheer Khan, Shanthakumaran Sreesanth, Munaf Patel.
Sri Lanka: Kumar Sangakkara (capt), Mahela Jayawardene, Upul Tharanga, Tillakaratne Dilshan, Thilan Samaraweera, Chamara Kapugedera, Suraj Randiv, Thisara Perera, Nuwan Kulasekara, Lasith Malinga, Muttiah Muralitharan.
Umpires: Simon Taufel (AUS) and Aleem Dar (PAK)
TV umpire: Ian Gould (ENG)
Match referee: Jeff Crowe (NZL)
Monday, March 28, 2011
How to Improve Alexa Ranking Quickly
Alexa Ranking is a site ranking assigned by Alexa Internet to measure websites' popularity. It claims to use a number of factors in deciding the site popularity, but really it depends mainly on usage data collected by the Alexa toolbar.
The higher the ranking is, the smaller number is the rank given. Based on Alexa, Google (Alexa Ranking 1) is the most popular website in the Internet, followed by Yahoo(2), Facebook(3), and Youtube(4).
You can see website ranking in your browser after installing the toolbar or just check it at Alexa website.
How accurate is Alexa Ranking?
In a perfect world, Alexa user base would be a fair statistical sample of the Internet user population, and thus the ranking should be quite accurate in comparing popularity of one site to another.
However, in reality Alexa Ranking is hardly reliable. Alexa ranks sites based on tracking information of users of the Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer and from plugins in Firefox; thus the ranking is greatly dependent on the number of toolbar or plugin installed among the site visitors.
Websites targeted to webmasters and web designers generally do better in Alexa Ranking compared to websites in other niche, e.g. food or pregnancy. That is largely because webmasters are more willing to install the Alexa toolbar to check on the competitors' Alexa ranking as well as to push up their own ranking.
Internet users in some countries are also more willing to install the Alexa Toolbar compared to others. I have seen a Singapore website with 10k visitors a day ranked 60k in Alexa, while an Indonesian site with just 1k visitor a day ranked 30k in Alexa.
How To Get Higher Alexa Ranking Easily
Less than a week ago, the 7 day average of Cheatad.com Ranking was 165,534. Today, the 7 day average has advanced to 93,963, with yesterday 1-day ranking was an even better 67,568.
At 67,568 it means that Cheatad ranks better than my other website which has 40 times more visitors and 120 times more pageviews. That is absolutely amazing, or ridiculous, depending how you see it.
The main factor of Alexa Ranking calculation is the number of visits by the Alexa toolbar users. Knowing that, it is quite easy to improve Alexa ranking for your website. As long as more of your visitors have the toolbar installed, your ranking will shoot up.
Here is the five easy and simple ways to rank higher in Alexa:
- Install Alexa Toolbar Download and install Alexa Toolbar. If your browser is Firefox, you can either use the Sparky plugin (official Alexa toolbar for Firefox) or SearchStatus plugin. I personally use Search Status for the other nice functions like ability to highlight nofollow link, calculate keyword density, etc.
- Encourage Others To Install Alexa Toolbar This includes your blog readers as well as friends. The point is, it should be easier convert your current regular visitors to use the toolbar rather than getting new visitors that happen to have Alexa toolbar installed.
- Write About Alexa Ranking Posting an article about Alexa Ranking is a good way to attract more webmasters to your blog, most of whom have the toolbar installed.
- Participate In Webmaster Forums Again, most webmasters have Alexa toolbar installed. When allowed, make sure to include your blog URL in the forum Signature. Some interested webmasters might just click to visit your blog.
- Reload Your Pages Incessantly With your Alexa toolbar installed, read back all articles you have written, and try different searches, which in effect will increase the pageview count.
Well, try them and you will notice your Alexa Ranking shooting up. Of course, you need to make sure you actually have got good contents and good number of visitors too. Otherwise the Alexa rank that you have gained will be short-lived.
5 free home design software
Here are 5 free home design software that let you design various aspects of your home. Some of these let you design floor plan, some let you design complete interiors, and some let you decide furniture placement. Using these online interior design software you will be able to get a pretty good about how your home will look.
Sponsored Links
Autodesk Homestyler
Autodesk Homestyler was originally launched as Project Dragonfly. Autodesk Homestyler is free home design application that styles your home free for you. Easy to use software and easy conceptual designs for your home layout can be made through this freeware. The application is web based and you start designing your house layout quickly with this free tool. Create beautiful graphic interiors for your dream house and you need not even pay huge sums for professional designers and other.
The application is very easy to handle for those who have slight idea of their floor plan and arrangements. The easy drag and drop method will help you guide you through the designing mechanism. For using this freeware, you do not even need to register with the site. Just get started with the application and design your interiors. You can start designing from the very first step or just choose your layout from the application gallery.
You can create your layout plans with this application. Create entirely new floor plans or new space for your living room or kitchen side when you use this application. Layout rooms, size floor plans, and add in details like doors, windows, and furnishings in just minutes. The application also contains a wide range of product catalog. You can choose over 22000 generic and brand name items in the freeware product catalog. Se the product info and high quality image of the product with this application.
View your newly created space in 2D or 3D mode with the application. Your layout snapshots will let you feel your space right in front of your eyes, as if you are standing in the your house. Get the right texture, lights, and colors that soothe your sense and want your space just it is. Finally share your designs with your friends and designs professionals for their feedbacks and modifications.
Sweet Home 3D
Sweet Home 3D is free interior designing application that plans your house layout and floor plan. The application is designed for those users who want to create their interior designs quickly and without any professional help. Create quick designs for your interiors or just redesign your space for renovation or paints.
The application gives you numerous visual guides help you draw the plan of your home and layout furniture. You can alter the existing designs by putting up a wall for adding furniture in your space, this will let you imagine as to how your new space is looking like. Drag and drop furniture onto the plan from a catalog organized by categories. Each change in the 2D plan is simultaneously updated in the 3D view, to show you a realistic rendering of your layout.
The application is downloadable and even can be used online. You can install the application in your system and use it often for your commercial use that too for free. Moreover, if you are suing this application for personal purpose and intend to use it once or twice, than you may use the web-based interface of the application. The freeware offers same features for the both kind of usage. If you are using this application online, your homes will be saved on the server of this website once you registered.
Each Sweet Home 3D window edits the interior design of a home and is divided in four resizable panes, with a tool bar at its top. The resizable pane has catalogues that will direct and give you ample of choice as to which furnishing you want to choose, the plan you would like and furniture list that you would consider. The fourth pane in the interface displays your home in 3 dimensions. You may see your home in this pane either from the top, or from a virtual visitor point of view.
Read more about Sweet Home 3D, or download free here.
3D Home Design by LiveCAD
3D Home Design by LiveCAD is free application allowing you to design your space online with all the professional tools and regulatory standards. View your designs in 2D and 3D mode or just import your digital designs in this application for using tools and techniques that will enhance your designs. The application be used by personal users as well as professional ones.
The application has tools that will simultaneously let you view your sketches and design images with the two-dimensional or three-dimensional modes. Edit the length of a wall with the numeric keypad along with using the wall’s inside, outside or internal dimensions. Freeware allows you to choose among wide range of 3D objects and textures for decorating and furnishing your space. The objects with realistic view can be used to snapshot your designs so that you can imagine your designs with better understanding.
Design your indoor furnishing with each and every details. Create walls, stairs mezzanine, balustrades, and much other important and difficult part of your furnishings with minute details. Quickly apply textures or materials to all the elements of your project and personalize the placing of wall and floor coverings from various angles.
The application is very helpful when it comes to designing your kitchens and bedrooms. If you just planning to renovate your bedroom or kitchen, than this program will give you helping hand, as to what you may consider while planning reconstruction. Add furniture and fixtures to your space and customize your design elements for dimensions, handles, color, etc.
Read more about 3D Home Design, or download free here.
Roomle
Roomle is free online program to sketch your room space and furnish them. The software is free to use and you can use the application online without any external software. You need not download or install any kind of software. Just simple register yourself with the application and start designing your space. As a registered user, you can draw up as many plans as you wish and access them at any time.
What can you do with Roomle?
Plan your living space online with this web-based tool. Draw floor plan easily with this application and customize them with your own house and layout designs. You can also upload a sketch in the application interface and the program will automatically suggest you floor plan according to the sketch. If you are furnishing your house with some new ones, then you can draft a sketch of your furnishings and floor plan and adapt them to your requirements.
The application interface is very simple to handle. The interface is designed with easy to use mechanism and you can master all the commands and functionality with great ease.
When you have registered with Roomle your designs and plans are saved in the server. Thus you can manage your plans and store them at single place for easy access.
Share your plans and designs with your family or other professionals. And collect feedbacks on what you have designed. The advice and inputs of others will help you to make your designs even more better.
The application interface of Roomle is very simple yet classy. When you start designing your room online with this freeware, you will be directed to the window, which is drawing area for you. You can draw your space using pen or use the ready drawn furnishings on the drawing space. There are numbers of furnishings available that can be used by you directly or customize them according to your preferences.
Read more about Roomle, or try free here.
PlacePad
PlacePad is free software that sketches excellently the floor plans and room space that helps your designers to work on more easily. The sketch pad provided by the application is for free and you can create easy sketch of the floor plans and room space. The sketching tools used by the software are refined and known for better usability. It should be kept in mind that application does not provide any designing tools, it just give you freedom to sketch your layout.
Since the application allows you to sketch the floor plan, you cannot diagram your drawings. The measurements and details are generally not required in the sketching. Sketching is little rough and that’s what this application offers you. Adding measurements would make the floor plan creation much more of a chore since it would require actually measuring rooms, writing all that down, etc.
Unlike other applications listed above, this freeware is little raw and does not overload itself with other features. You can easily create sketch of your room, bedroom, or kitchen with easy floor plans. This application is useful for them who just want to sketch and explain others their party area, their garden layout, or just space layout. You need not think about measurements enough to an online floor plan to warrant the added time and complexity.
Placepad simplifies the creation of a floor plan in several ways. It quickly walks you through describing your place and uses that information to build the rooms needed for your floor plan. Generally when you use this kind of sketching tool, you just try to draw ad sketch your floor plans. However, with this freeware, you just need to mention the details of the number of floors, bedrooms, bedroom positions upstairs and downstairs and that is it. The freeware will do rest for you.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Increase Visitors
1.SEARCH ENGINE:
It brings lots of traffic to your blog.There are millions of people search in the search engines like Google,Yahoo,msn everyday.So,if your blog has so many good posts and is well indexed by Google,etc..you will get a good amount of traffic via search engines.There are a few steps to look at if you want a decent amount of traffic from the search engines like "submitting your blog site map to Google",yahoo to index you blog pages very quickly.And the other important one is adding meta tags to your blog.If you follow these two simple steps,then you will get a decent traffic.
2.Submitting your blog to Blog Directories:
You may know this before,submitting your blog to blog directories will bring you a good traffic.
Here is a good list of blog directories(there are so many directories,but the below one's will bring you a good traffic).Most of these blog directories ask you to register before you submit your blog.My suggestion is,create a new email address solely for this purpose so,your personal emails are not flooded with the emails sent by the blog administrators,etc.
You can find the Blog directories list here.
3.Participate in forums,groups,etc:
Just go to Google and enter your [major keyword + forum] or [keyword+groups] and search.Suppose,your blog is about blogging,then search 'Blogging forum'.You will find some forums,groups related to your site.Register in the forums and post articles,etc with a link back to your blog(as a signature).Answer questions,clarify doubts and provide a link to your blog.But,Don't SPAM.
4.Social Bookmarking:
Social Bookmarking is another way to build good traffic to your website/blog.If you don't know what Social Bookmarking is
"Social Bookmarking is a practise of saving Bookmarks,tagging the posts with keywords in a website".Bookmarking means saving a specific website URL(address) in your browser that you wish to visit later.There are so many Social Bookmarking sites like del.icio.us,digg,furl,technorati.
One good thing about these Social bookmarking sites is,you will get instant traffic.Just register with them,store your bookmarks,tags,.. and you are done,See your site meter blasting with traffic.
5.Submit Articles to Article Directories:
Submitting articles to article directories is another effective way to build more traffic.By submitting to them,your articles get massive exposure and gain you more traffic.
Some of the popular article directories are goarticles.com,ezinearticles.com,articlecity.com,etc.
There are hundreds of article directories,just Google it.
6.Leaving Comments on other blogs:Leaving comments with a link back to your blog is another good thing to do.Leaving comments in the related blogs is more useful and it also increases your PageRank.Always leave good comments and don't Spam.
You will get much of visitors if you have rich contents.I assure everyone.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Best WordPress Stats Plugin
There are a plethora of WordPress Plugins and addons for tracking statistics. This is great because you then get your pick of the litter, but the problem is if you install three different tracking plugins you will get three different results. So what should you do with these choices and discrepancies in results?
Not to worry, I have a few answers to calm your worries. I do not have a definitive answer as to what is THE best stats plugin, but that’s mostly because ‘best’ is very relative in this situation. Though, lets start with probably the best known system: Google Analytics.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics has more or less anything you’d need. It has stats by hour, day, month and year. Keyword tracking, ‘segments’ (for tracking different time periods and improvements in those times), and a heck of a lot more.
The 7 x’s are your account number, and the Y is the number of the website attached to your account. So your first website will be -1, your second one added will be -2 and so on. You can find it these numbers at: https://www.google.com/analytics/settings/home
If you’re website isn’t added, all you have to do is create a website “Profile” as Google calls it. There is a button on that home page on the bottom left. It’ll look something like the image on the right.
So which out of the plugins should you pick?
For the easiest choice, pick (what I did) and use: Google Analytics For WordPress. It’s ‘basic’ configuration is very simple. In the image below, you can see both the simple settings, the top potion, and the more advanced settings on the bottom. It’s extremely customizable with click tracking. So I find that very useful. It’s the one I recommend everyone to use.
Here are two great plugins which can help you get a better picture of your site’s visitors. I recommend installing both:
- WordPress.com Stats
- StatPress
WordPress.com Stats
This is one of the simplest looking plugins you’ll ever get. It connects to your WordPress.com account. This, like the Google Analytics, is all off-site. If you don’t want to deal with Google, this plugin will give you the best overall picture day to day. It’s not as accurate as I’d like it to be. For whatever reason it misses somethings here and there. But it’s pretty good overall and I check it regularly for referrals, keywords and clicks.
StatPress
This plugin is … something different. It gives you such accurate results it’s scary. But, there is a huge problem with this plugin. It’s onsite, which I love, but it’s so un-Godly slow. The website works the same, but loading the statistics view is SO slow I can make myself a cup of tea and it’ll still be loading sometimes. Then again that can be attributed to my slow server …..
It tracks significantly more than WordPress.com Stats does and not as much as Google’s. But it’s more accurate than either.
It’s the best for getting a quick overview of the recent visitors and it’s fun to ‘spy’ on current visitors. The screenshot above is of the landing page. There are other views including an ‘overview’ screen, spy screeen, details …. it really has a lot and it’s fun to check out exactly what users are looking at my site! I highly recommend this one.
Those are the 3 plugins I primarily use. I use all three to get the best picture and just one isn’t good enough. Each has it’s pluses and minuses.
Recently I started using two new services/plugins: So I haven’t really tested either yet, but both seem promising:
- WassUP with VStats (these are two plugins. Wassup is the plugin and service. Vstats is an addon plugin)
- QuantCast
If you liked this article then let me know!
Friday, March 25, 2011
LinkedIn hits 100 million users
LinkedIn announced today that it now has 100 million users.
According to the professional-networking site, approximately 44 million of its users are in the U.S. LinkedIn said that it's adding about 1 million new users to its service every week. The company reported that 20 percent of its members are in the service industry, while 9 percent of users are in the "high-tech" sector. Apple, Amazon, eBay, and Cisco are among the "most represented companies on its site." They're flanked by EMC and Campbell's.
LinkedIn, which launched in 2003, announced plans earlier this year to go public.
Although the United States is home to the biggest number of LinkedIn users, it can't compete with the growth LinkedIn is seeing elsewhere. The social network said that 2010 year-over-year growth in Brazil is 428 percent. Mexico, India, and France are trailing with growth rates of 178 percent, 76 percent, and 72 percent, respectively.
Of course, LinkedIn isn't the only social network that's enjoying continued success. Facebook currently has over 600 million active users around the globe, and that figure continues to grow. Twitter is watching 1 billion tweets hit its service every week, according to data it released last week, and about 460,000 accounts are being added to the social network every day.
50 Great Widgets
Widgets are a handy, easy and simple way to add some flare to your blog. Whether you’d like to display the number of currently online visitors to your site or simply the weather report for Los Angeles, you can do it with widgets. I have a list of my favourite widgets sites.Here is for you:
(1)MyBlogLog’s Recent Readers - This widget can easily be called a hit amongst blog owners; its popularity even managed to convince Yahoo into buying MyBlogLog. The widget lets you see the avatars of recent visitors to your blog, provided they’re also members of MyBlogLog.
(2)Mashable - Get the latest social networking news from this very site.
(3)Flickr Flash Photo Stream Badge - Display images from your Flickr profile with a handy Flash photo stream.
(4)Preview Anywhere - See a live preview of outgoing links in a small popup which activates on mouseover. Some find this annoying, while others might find it useful.
(5)Twitter Badge - If your life is so interesting that everyone must know what you’re up to all the time, then a Twitter badge is the ideal counterpart to your blog. It’ll proudly displays your recent tweets.
(6)Digg News - Display the latest Digg links on your blog. Themeable and fully customizable.
(7)FEEDJIT - Real time traffic data directly in your blog’s sidebar.
(8)LineBuzz - Inline comments for your blog. Very handy for blogs with frequent lively discussions.
(9)Flixn - Display a stream directly from your webcam, so your blog visitors can always see what you’re up to.
(10)3Jam - Lets your visitors send messages to your mobile phone, without them knowing your phone number.
(11)Jaxtr - With Jaxtr, your visitors can actually call you to your mobile phone; again, your number stays private.
(12)LinkedInABox - Show off your LinkedIn profile. Perfect for personal blogs.
(13)Box Widget - Enable visitors to use box.net’s online storage directly on your web site.
(14)Price of gas - Displaying gas prices on your blog might seem unnecessary to some, but it’s cool if you have a traffic/travel related blog. gas-prices-rise-to-new-national-record Apr-7-2008
(15)iBegin Weather Widget - Display weather information in your sidebar. Just like with Price of Gas, works great with travel-related blogs.
(16)ClockLink - Display time in various time zones with these nifty Flash clocks.
(17)Film Loops - Display the latest loops from your FilmLoops account.
(18)Daily Painters - Display paintings from famous painters on your blog.
(19)WhoLinked - Show your visitors which sites have recently linked to your web site. Works with all major blog platforms.
(20)Criteo AutoRoll - Displays links to blogs similar to your blog.
(21)Bitty Browser - Embed a cute, fully functional mini web browser to your blog.
(22)Leafletter - Create a mini website and embed it into your blog.
(23)WikiSeek - Search Wikipedia with this simple widget.
(24)FeedCount - Show off the number of visitors to your blog with this handy little button.
(25)Technorati Link Count - Display the number of links your website has from one of the biggest blog authorities - Technorati.
(26)MyPageRank - Another good way to show how “big” your blog is is to show off your Google PageRank.
(27)CheckPageRank - In addition to showing your PageRank, this widget also shows your Alexa ranking.
(28)BlinkxIt - Embed a link to related videos directly into your website.
(29)Skype button - Display your Skype online/offline status on your blog.
(30)RockYou Horoscope - Not something I would personally use, but some people are into horoscope. Hell, most people are into horoscope. Anyway, this widget shows horoscope (doh!) and does it in a nicely designed colorful box.
(31)del.icio.us Tagometer - Display how many times have del.icio.us users saved your page.
(32)del.icio.us Linkrolls - This badge shows your latest bookmarks from del.icio.us.
(33)Timelines - Need to create a timeline? Seek no further. This widget makes it really easy.
(34)PollDaddy - PollDaddy lets you create beautiful polls in no time, and display them at your blog.
(35)Vizu - Another poll-making widget, compatible with all major blog platforms.
(36)AnswerTips - Display definitions from Answers.com for various terms on your blog. The definitions are shown in bubbles which are activated on doubleclick.
(37)AnswerBoxes - Give your visitors a chance to enter a term themselves, and get a definition from Answers.com
(38)Now Playing - If you got to share your current playlist contents with the world, Sigamp will do the trick. Works with most popular music players, including Foobar, Winamp, iTunes
(39)BuzzBoost - Display headlines from your RSS feed on any website.
(40)LibraryThing - Show off the latest books you’ve been reading.
(41)Plaxo Address Book - Let your most faithful visitors access their address books direclty from your site.
(42)AuctionAds - A widget that displays auctioned items on eBay, and gives you a percentage of the price paid when sometimes buys an item.
(43)aStore - Similar to AuctionAds, only for Amazon. Create a mini-store on your site and receive profit when someone buys an item through your store.
(44)Plazes - Show your current location on a Plazes map.
(45)Stockalicious - Track your portfolio with this widget, and share it with others. Let everyone know how much money you’ve lost.
(46)Yahoo! For Good - Create a charity badge and ask for donations for a worthy cause.
(47)Giftspace - Your friends never know what to buy you for birthday? Let them know what you really want with this nifty widget.
(48)MixMap - See where are the visitors to your MySpace profile from on a map.
(49)Google Map Widget - Display a searchable Google Map on your website.
(50)Google Video Search - Add a video search form and selected videos to your web site.
(51)Odeo player - Display an Odeo player for and podcast right there in your sidebar.
Keep blogging.
How to Change a Page Title or Description in Yahoo! Search Results
Yahoo! uses a variety of sources for information about your webpages. This allows us to dynamically construct meaningful abstracts, descriptions and titles that will assist users in understanding your page.
These sources include, but are not limited to: text on the page, the page's Meta description, and editorial descriptions from the Yahoo! Directory and third parties. The abstract can change depending on the search terms entered. Changing the content and the metadata on your page can influence the abstract.
ODP Titles and Abstracts
To remove ODP titles and abstracts as candidate title and abstract for one or more of your URLs, use one of the following Meta tags on your pages:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">
or
<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOODP">
When we find any of these tags in the Meta data of your web document, Yahoo! Search will not take ODP titles or abstracts into consideration when presenting the title and description for that URL in search results.
Yahoo! Directory Titles and Abstracts
To indicate that Yahoo! Directory titles and abstracts not be considered in web search results, use the "NOYDIR" Meta tag.
The webcrawler recognizes the following Meta tags on your pages:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOYDIR">
or
<META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOYDIR">
When we find any of these tags in the Meta data of your web document, Yahoo! Search will not take Yahoo! Directory titles or abstracts into consideration when presenting the title and description for that URL in search results.
Note: A webpage URL may show in search results without an abstract. A URL may be included in the search results as a "thin" document with no text content. Links and reference text from other public web pages may provide identifiable information about a URL and may be indexed as part of web search coverage.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Army Pilots: Flying Drones Is Harder Than It Looks
But these operations can be, indeed, dangerous, a panel of aviators said this week at an Army conference. Bad weather, makeshift runways and close calls with friendly helicopters are among the hazards that put both aircraft and pilots at risk.
Several unmanned aircraft operators — speaking at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual symposium outside Washington, D.C. — said the learning curve for mastering the use of drones was steep. It has taken years of combat experience to achieve proficiency, they said.
“One of the first brigades that we worked for didn’t really seem to know how to use it [the aircraft], so we were pretty much just burning holes in the sky,” said Sgt. 1st Class Kelly C. Boehning, who was named unmanned aerial systems (UAS) "soldier of the year" at the symposium.
Enemy fighters both in Iraq and Afghanistan caught on quickly, timing their attacks based on U.S. flying schedules, said Staff Sgt. Frank C. Petersen, a UAS instructor at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. “I can’t say that they figured out what our weather limitations were, but they definitely could tell when we were or weren’t flying,” he said.
Many weather events can keep drones on the ground — high winds, lightning, freezing temperatures. “When there was bad weather, it seemed like there was always an increase in rocket fire or mortar attacks,” Boehning said. “I think they knew when we weren’t flying. I think it’s pretty obvious.”
Boehning described a typical scenario. "Basically you look at a field for hours and hours and hours and hours, waiting for something to happen,” he explained. “It’s not very exciting, but when you finally see a flash off in the distance, you zoom in and see some guys shooting mortars. You immediately yell out the grid [location], send it to the fires people and then you wait. Then you see the artillery come down and destroy the mortar team. It’s like Monday Night Football. It’s the big-screen TV and everybody jumps up and kicks their chairs over. You know you probably saved somebody’s life.”
Unlike Air Force operators who fly drones in theater from locations in the United States, the Army deploys its UAS pilots overseas with the ground troops they support. Whether keeping watch over a convoy or raid, there is an added incentive for operators to bring their comrades back “into the gate” safely, said Boehning. “We watched trucks roll out of the gate that morning and we were watching them on the video screen that afternoon,” he said. “We knew the people we were watching. We knew where they were going to go, we knew the neighborhoods, we knew some of the street names, we knew some of the people by name. I think that personal touch was very important. It made us feel like part of the fight as opposed to being remotely located, especially in Las Vegas or something, watching the fight.”
Another challenge for the crews was finding suitable locations to set up UAS bases of operation. Boehning said his unit was lucky enough to find an airfield that once was used by the Iraqi Air Force. It came with everything they needed and more, including a hard runway and a communications tower.
Another unit was not so fortunate. After being kicked off one airfield, it found another with a nice runway and seemingly solid facilities. After about a month, though, the hangars collapsed on the U.S. aircraft that had been stored inside.
In the schoolhouse, Army UAS operators are taught that they need an area the size of a soccer field to launch and land their Shadow unmanned aircraft. Boehning never imagined falling into readymade facilities. “If we had gone over to a country without any runways or airports or anything to use, we would have just done what the system was advertised to do.” That would require blocking off streets to create landing strips or hauling dirt from one area to another to build a runway, as some units have done.
“That’s what we expected in the beginning,” Boehning said. “Now I think we’re all used to having fixed facilities, so I think we’re all probably spoiled.”
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Submitting Blog
The process will boost your blogsjump start the process of growing the number of visitors to your blog. traffic. It may not bring huge numbers of visitors overnight, but it will jump start the process of growing the number of visitors to your blog.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
7 Step to Increasing adsense earnings
Step 1. Ad Types, Position & Style
Ad Types
Choosing your Ad format is the first step to make, as remember Google’s Adsense is mostly an EPC (Earnings per Click) scheme whereby you get money each time someone clicks on the ads rather than when visitors simply view them, or actually buys something at the end of it. Therefore it’s in your best interest to have as many of your visitors as possible click on your adverts.
Obvious that is, easy that is not, hmm?
So what are the best performing ad sizes? According to Google the best performing ones are:
160×600 Skyscraper: Google say that advertisers like these size ads and tend to bid more for them, who are we to argue?
728×90 Leader board: Very popular for site headers, footers and forums
300×250 + 336×280 Rectangles: Another popular size and one Google personally recommends, also used quite extensively for video ads.
Link Units: These are recommended by Google for sites that have limited space, and recommended by me because they can be slipped into a horizontal navigation seamlessly.
Position your Ads
Slapping your ads on a page and hoping for success will lead to failure just as sure as eating a curry after 14 pints ‘to settle the stomach’ will lead to vomiting. You need to know where the hotspots are on your website; the locations that users are most likely to click (what is a hotspot not? …not a good spot! Actually in this instance it’s very good, so read on). Identifying these hotspots is simple, as user trends are fairly constant. Then you place an ad where the user is most likely to go first.
In fact, if you’re unsure about where users are most likely to click on your website, Google Analytics even shows you an overlay of your website marked out where your visitors click – if you have it installed; if you don’t, why not?
So where are visitors most likely to go? Why, the navigation links of course! They can usually be found vertically on the left of the page and horizontally at the top of the page. When visitors naturally head for these hot-spots they’ll be finding your ads instead of site navigation, earning you money.
If you’re thinking any of this might be a little underhand, or against Google’s TOS, don’t panic… Google actually offers advice on this itself in the Adsense FAQ, and even offers extra tips for ad placement within your forums and blogs.
Let’s look at a couple of examples of successful advert placement from some Adsense websites.
This website utilises the left hand navigation slot for the Adsense links, knowing that most users will automatically look there in an attempt to navigate the website – earning the website owner money from the clicks.
Notice the links at the top of the page? They’re not navigation links; they’re Google Adsense link units, masquerading as navigation.
For a much better example however I’ve used one of my own sites, anonymously of course, to show how to truly Adsense up your website.
Here you can see use of the Link Unit and the 160×600 skyscraper to maximum effect. Obviously with the normal navigation slots used for Adsense placement the usability of the site suffers, and the bounce-rate is extremely high… but the exit links are almost always to Adsense. That, of course, is the idea!
Style your Ads
This is the real trick, where the serious optimisation comes in. Your CTR will soar if your ads don’t look like ads, and instead look like the rest of your site.
Now hold on! We can’t go and style up our Adsense ads outside of the limited colour changes Google affords us can we, it goes against their TOS? True, you can’t… however, you can style up your own text and links to match the Google ads. This is perfectly OK with the big G. Make sure that your link text is the same colour, same font and same size as the Adsense ads and that it is underlined the same. Also make sure you have descriptions underneath your links to match the style and layout of the Google ads.
To be really sneaky (and again even Google recommends this) you can make your Adsense adverts’ background colour the same as your website’s, AND even lose the border on the Adsense ads. This makes them blend in seamlessly with your website.
This is probably the optimization which is mentioned most regularly, but it’s for good reason. You really should experiment with different ad positions and different colour combinations. Each time you make a change leave the ads for a week and see how your earnings alter. Make a note of what works and then try something new. I was always sceptical when I read these comments before but since I have started playing with positioning my adsense revenue has multiplied by 4 times (crazy but true). Personally I’ve found that blending ads into the site works very well but it’s not the only way and you should try all the combinations you can think of.
Step 2. Different date, different adverts
This is one of my favourites and I intend to write a post on how to do this next week, for now I will stick to the what and why.
In simple terms, the older the page the more ads you show.
Despite the fact that I have advertising, I don’t actually like it. I have 0 to very few adverts on new posts, and increase the ads on older ones. This isn’t so obvious here on Binary Moon, but on Binary Joy I have gone a little crazy - but there is a method to my madness. The theory is that older posts will be more appealing to search engines, and visitors who come from search engines are more likely to click on ads. Another side effect is that I “reward” regular visitors by not annoying them with adverts, so I feel this is a good compromise. As I said above I’ll go into this one in more detail next week (with code).
Step 3. Content Targeting
This one is a very simple change and is ridiculously straight forward to implement. Google have a simple comment tag that you can place around your primary content, and this is what your ads will be targeted to.
Key page content here
The idea is that you place these comments around your core page content. That is, the content which is mostly text, and which best reflects the content of your site. On a blog this will generally be the main post content. The reason you do this is so that the adverts don’t target irrelevant content such as the links in your sidebar.
You can also add regions you want Google to ignore. I haven’t used these myself but they are something I intend to try in the not too distant future. You can read more on the section targeting page of the Google Adsense help.
Step 4: Increase Earning
You may wonder when checking your Adsense stats that you’re getting a lot of $0.01 clicks. The reason for this could be one of three things:
A) Your account has been Smart Priced
B) Your site is in a low paying Niche
C) You’re getting a lot of MFA (Made for Adsense) Ads on your site
Lets concentrate on C for now. Firstly, how do you know if you’re getting lots of these types of ads on your site. Install the Adsense Preview Tool which will allow you to preview the ads showing on your site.
The reason for low paying clicks is called Adsense Arbitrage. Webmasters bid low amounts on every keyword possible, they then redirect the user to another page where they are displaying higher earning ads. So for example say they get a particular keyword for $0.01 but they redirect the user to a page where they’re making $0.40 per click. That’s a markup of $0.39.
There is a way to filter out these types of sites. You can use the tool to visit them & see for yourself if it’s just a page full of ads. You can also visit Adsblacklist and use their constantly updated list of MFA Sites.
You should notice a considerable increase in your EPC (Earnings Per Click) when list is applied to your Adsense Filter List (Which is found in the Adsense Setup part of your Account).
Here’s the Adsblacklist top 20 worst Offenders:
www.8-topsites.com
www.toseeka.com
www.away.com
www.5-top-sites.com
www,digg4it.com
www.best4sites.net
www.everyrule.com
www.anrdoezrs.net
www.25-topsites.com
www.purebusiness.com
www.thinktarget.com
www.healthline.com
www.toptensites.org
www.10-bestsites.com
www.everyclick.com
www.megasearch.biz
www.8bestsites.com
www.olx.com
www.geekinterview.com
www.best8sites.org
www.expert-expert.com
www.storage.expert-expert.com
www.7-topsites.com
www.splise.com
www.10-top-sites.com
www.mp3advance.com
www.9topsites.com
www.healthcentersonline.com
www.chosenresult.com
www.e-nternet.com
If you have implemented these changes & found them useful please comment & share your experiences.
Step 5: Increase Earnings with competitive Ad Filter
Do you ever wonder why it is you get low clicks sometimes? 1 cents - 10 cents?
This is because the Adsense Publishers are offering low amounts. Some times they offer a low amount because they have Adsense on their website too. And they might get 10 cents a click for every 1 cent they pay. These sites are known as “Made For Adsense” Yep, it does suck!. But there is a way around this to increase your earnings.
Go to Adsblacklist, Sign Up, put in your URL and keyword, click generate. You will then get an extensive list of 200 sites to block in your AdSense competitive ad filter.
Now go to your Adsense account, Click on Adsense Setup, Then click on competitive ad filter, copy and paste the websites you were giving from Adsblacklist . Now wait till Adsense blocks those sites.
Step 6. Referrals
Google Referrals don’t make me a huge amount of money, but I like to include them on all my sites. Currently I only use one referral package and it only displays in Internet Explorer on the PC. It’s for the Firefox browser, and earns me roughly a dollar for every new install I generate. Some sneaky css removes the ad for Firefox users so that they don’t get pestered with unnecessary adverts.
To do the show/ hide css on your refferal code all I do is have a div with my referral button in it, which I hide. I then use conditional css comments to load some css to display the advert in IE.
I’ve put together a simple example of what I mean below. Just copy and paste the code below into a new htm document and then view it in IE and Firefox. In IE you will see the ad block at the top of the page, in Firefox is “magically” disappears.
Step 7. SEO and Content
I get about 75% of my traffic from search engines and, in my opinion, search engine visitors are the ones most likely to click on adverts, far more so than the regular visitors (which ties into the date based adverts above). Search engine visitors are on a journey to find some information, if they can’t find what they want on my site then they might as well find it on one of my advertisers sites, and that’s the good thing about contextual advertising - the ads are relevant to my readers.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Sitemap XML: Improving Website’s SEO score and Search Engine Visibility
The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.
Sitemap are the best way to sent notification of your website’s update to different Search Engine. Bots of different Search Engines like Google Bot crawl a website on regular basis and update indexes for the new information. But the way these bots crawl a website and the frequency of crawling remains unpredictable. Thus, if you post new information on your website, it is not sure when will that information is indexed by search engine bots. By generating Sitemap and submitting to search engines such as Google, we can ensure that the update is picked up by the bots at its earliest.
Almost all the content management systems (like Drupal, WordPress, Joomla etc) have plugins to generate sitemap dynamically. All you have to do is just to configure such plugins/addons in your website’s content management system and that’s it.
There are lots of Online tools which can generate sitemap of your website for free. One of such tool is XML-Sitemaps.com. All you have to do is just give your website’s URL to this tool and it will generate a sitemap for all the links/pages of the website.
Structure of Sitemap XML
Element
Required?
Description
<urlset>
Yes
The document-level element for the Sitemap. The rest of the document after the ‘<?xml version>’ element must be contained in this.
<url>
Yes
Parent element for each entry. The remaining elements are children of this.
<loc>
Yes
Provides the full URL of the page, including the protocol (e.g. http, https) and a trailing slash, if required by the site’s hosting server. This value must be less than 2,048 characters.
<lastmod>
No
The date that the file was last modified, inISO 8601 format. This can display the full date and time or, if desired, may simply be the date in the format YYYY-MM-DD.
<changefreq>
No
How frequently the page may change:
- always
- hourly
- daily
- weekly
- monthly
- yearly
- never
‘Always’ is used to denote documents that change each time that they are accessed. ‘Never’ is used to denote archived URLs (i.e. files that will not be changed again).
This is used only as a guide for crawlers, and is not used to determine how frequently pages are indexed.
<priority>
No
The priority of that URL relative to other URLs on the site. This allows webmasters to suggest to crawlers which pages are considered more important.The valid range is from 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 being the most important. The default value is 0.5.
Rating all pages on a site with a high priority does not affect search listings, as it is only used to suggest to the crawlers how important pages in the site are to one another.
Best Tips to Generate Money from Adsense
Sharon Housley gave out top Adsense tips to help webmasters or bloggers profit from Google Adsense to generate money online using websites. The main ideas of these tips are summarized here.
- Sites rank better on search engines if they have specific niche and clear theme and therefore will get the best revenue out of Adsense if the topics targeted have sufficient number of ads available.
- Target decent or moderate paying keywords as your specific niche. Sites targeting highest paying keywords will find it difficult to rank well because of the high competition from established sites.
- Older websites generate better ads revenue simply because it will rank better in search engines and the ads will become more relevant (relevant ads have better click-throughs).
- Use Tracking Channels in Google Adsense program to study the ads that make the most money, best performing sites (if you have more than one), and ads placement. Make sure to let those ads run for a week and compare results on a weekly basis to see what ads work best.
- Blend ads with site content (e.g. create ads without borders close to content). It's best that ads links should be different from the content colors to increase click-throughs. Randomizing ads link colors frequently is also a good practice so that frequent readers don't filter the ads.
- To serve the most expensive ads on your site, compromise with the number of ads displayed. This is because the value per ads decreases as you increase the number of ads displayed (up to a max of three ads units).
- Ads placed on hot spots and without scrolling will generate higher click-throughs (according to Google). Based on this hot spots map, the best place is near the beginning of the content. Experiment with the type of ads (text or image) to see which works best.
- According to Google, the best ads sizes with highest click-throughs are the 336 x 280, the 300 x 250, and the 160 x 600, but these may be different for different web layout. Again experiment with these yourself to see which works best.
My Comments
These tips look very compact and may not seem to contain much detailed explanation, but these tips cover everything possible in general for you to know to get the best out of Adsense. It’s easier for you to study all of these in more detail later on than not having a compact and complete list like this to give you an overview. I’m sure some of the tips above are easy enough for you to experiment with right away on your blogs without having to study them in more detail.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
A program which talks
Talking script for Windows
Do you want to make a program which talks.
This program will speak which you enter.
Ok so now lets start
- at first copy the code in a text file(Notepad,Word pad)
Dim msg, sapi
msg=InputBox("Enter your text","Talk it")
Set sapi=CreateObject("sapi.spvoice")
sapi.Speak msg
- Then Save the file as .vob (example: speaking.vob)
- Run the saved .vob file
After Running thewindow will look like this
- At last enter your text and click Ok
Run the program and have fun
Tips and problems when installing templates
Here are some tips you can use to improve reliability on using these templates and some problems you might encounter when installing and how to solve them.
Tips on using background images:
The background images (images of the header, main background, content background, title bar, list background, etc) are stored in my flickr account. I can't guarantee the reliability on fetching these images all the time. So I suggest that you upload the images for a particular template that you're using and store them somewhere else. Simply get the image URLs from the xml code and change the URLs in the code (in red) to point to the new address of the images.
Example of code:
background: #000000 URL(http://...........) repeat left top;
Check all URLs in the CSS styling section and not just the first one you see in the code.
Caution with Header section alignment:
If your Header section look misaligned the first time you upload any template into your blog, that's probably because your Header Title and Description is too long and wrapped into a second line. If this is the case, shorten them or make them smaller. If not, it might be that your Linkbar is empty or your own uploaded header image size is wrong.
Caution with uploading your own Header image:
When you upload your own header image from the Header Layout page, the whole section or some part of it can be misaligned or cut off if your image is not compatible (having the right size) with the template.
Caution with Linkbar: If you use any template with linkbar, the Header section might look weird and cutoff the first time you upload it into your blog. It's because your linkbar is empty (without any links yet). So fill up you links and the Header section will turn to normal again.
When Blogger can't save your new template:
If Blogger can't save the template because there are more than one IDs (for example ID for LinkList, HTML, Adsense, etc), simply go back to your old template and delete all widgets (also called page elements) except the basic ones (like About Me, Labels, and Blog Archives) and reinstall the template. You can later add the widgets back on.
Read also some other common template problems ,fail to upload template.
Report your problems here:
If you face some new problems when installing my templates or if you want to share some tips, put your questions or tips in the Comment section. I'll try to answer them as soon as I can.
Ways to increase traffic
Ways to increase traffic in your websites
You should know the ways to increase pagerankings to get more traffic to your blogsites.Every blogger wants more and more traffic towards his blog. So, to increase traffic to your blog here are some tricks for blog exposure.
Keywords
This is the first step to increase traffic towards your blog. make sure that you have enough relevant keywords in your blog post so that people may find you on search engines.
Tagging
Tagging is also similar method which involves creating keywords that your articles will be read under. You may use sites like Technorati to do this.
Pinging on post updates
You should submit your RSS feeds to Yahoo and Google search engines so that site will be indexed and notified when the posting is done. Ping sites help to increase blog exposure. Whenever you add a post to your blog you should ping it so that a ping site like Ping-O-Matic will be able to recognize it as updated.
Link Trading
This can free or paid. You may deal with some another blogger to have link exchanging. Also, their are some sites which provides widgets for site link exchange. You may use Entrecard or Blogrush for improving traffic. This helps to increase blog exposure because the blog you link to will recognize you and promote your blog as a result.You may go to the site:
www.linkmetro.com, http://onewaylinkexchange.net, You could also search for "free oneway linking" in Google.
Article Marketting
Post some articles in some Directories and add your blogsite there.They will linking you blogsite.You may go there: "suggest my link to the linkpartners.com directory" by Google
Advertising
Advertising lets the user know about your site and attract him towards it. So, if you can pay some bucks for advertising, you may sign-up for Advertising networks such as Adwords, Adbrite and Bidvertiser. There are many more present but here I’ve suggested some popular and cheap programs.
Back-linking
I’ve already mentioned about backlinks and how to get them easily. Backlinks denotes your site’s popularity on web-world, its direct effect is that your Alexa ranking improves gradually. So, High ranking websites get High-traffic rate.You may conact through e-mail with the websites having good page ranks.
SEARCH ENGINE
It brings lots of traffic to your blog.There are millions of people search in the search engines like Google,Yahoo,msn everyday.So,if your blog has so many good posts and is well indexed by google,etc..you will get a good amount of traffic via search engines.There are a few steps to look at if you want a decent amount of traffic from the search engines like "submitting your blog sitemap to google",yahoo to index you blog pages very quickly.The other important one is adding meta tags to your blog.If you follow these two simple steps,then you will get a decent massive traffic if your content is good.
Submitting your blog to Blog Directories
You may know this before,submitting your blog to blog directories will bring you a good traffic.
There are so many directories.Most of these blog directories ask you to register before you submit your blog.
Participate in forums,groups,etc
Just go to google and enter your [Keyword + fourm/groups] and search.Suppose,your blog is about blogging,then search 'Blogging forum/groups'.You will find some forums,groups related to your site.Register in the forums and post articles,etc with a link back to your blog.Answer questions,clarify doubts and provide a link to your blog.
Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking is another way to build good traffic to your website/blog.If you don't know what Social Bookmarking is"Social Bookmarking is a practise of saving Bookmarks,tagging the posts with keywords in a website".Bookmarking means saving a specific website url(address) in your browser that you wish to visit later.There are so many Social Bookmarking sites like www.del.icio.us.com,www.digg.com,www.furl.com,www.technorati.com
One good thing about these Social bookmarking sites is,you will get instant traffic.Just register with them,store your bookmarks,tags,.. Then see your site meter blasting with traffic.
Submit Articles to Article Directories
Submitting articles to article directories is another effective way to build more traffic.By submitting to them,your articles get massive exposure and gain you more traffic.
Some of the popular article directories are www.goarticles.com,www.ezinearticles.com,www.articlecity.com,etc.
Leaving Comments on other blogs
Leaving comments with a link back to your blog is another good thing to do.Leaving comments in the related blogs is more useful and it also increases your pagerank.Always leave good comments and don't write spam.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Searching for a good domain name? Three sites to help you
Domain name is the pillar of your web identity and a name which represents your content / product is a first step towards the marketing process. Selecting a good domain name is always a cumbersome task. Unfortunately almost all good two, three , four letter branded domain names are either sold out or parked. Then how to select a good domain name for your site? Here three online tools can help you in searching a good domain name.
Wordoid
This site offers an online tool with multiple search options to select a good brandable domain name. You can search for an attractive domain name for its availability with multiple search refine and create options. You can select a name from the natural, almost natural or hardy natural words of English, Spanish, French, Italian and German languages.
Domaintools
Domaintools offers a number of services related to domains like domain search, domain lookup, domain suggestions, details of domain auction, directory, sell details, reverse IP, domain history and many more. Domain Search allows you to use wild-card search of all current, deleted, and expired domain names.
You can search for a good domain name with the advanced search option of the domain search tool which includes:
- Domain length
- Optional use of hyphens
- Word position (Start, end or middle)
Domain tools also offers free and premium API services for webmasters / developers.
Domainnamesoup
Various tools of Domainnamesoup.com facilitate the selection of a suitable domain name according to your choice. Some Domainnameoup applications:
- Domain name mangle: The domain name mangle tool will take a word (or words) and try changing individual letters to come up with original ideas for domain names.
- Domain name typos: The domain name typo tool will drop letters, swap letters, duplicating letters and substitute letters for their adjacent keys on the keyboard.
- Hyphened domain names: The hyphenated domain name tool will try all combination of replacing letters with hyphens.
- Domain name thesaurus: Generates multiple domain name combination using maximum of 3 words.
- Word Combination domain names: The word combination tool is particularly useful if the words for your domain could possibly be mixed up.
- Multiple choice domain names: The multiple choice tool is particularly useful when you have a phrase where one or more of the words could have substitutes.
- Domain name by number of letters, Domain name by dictionary words , Male, female, family, jargon, technical etc.
Friday, March 18, 2011
How to add META tags into your blog?
Do you want to improve your blog value, get more hits, and ranked high on search engines? Then you must optimize how your blog is indexed in a search engine.
While there are lots of factors involved in building quality blogs that can draw huge traffic in, having simple things right in the beginning is as important. One of this simple thing is getting your blog indexed properly with the right description & keywords to optimize search engine rankings (known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO).
To get information, search engines use automated software agents called spiders, crawlers, robots, or bots to collect the a few words from a site or blog (typically the URLs, blog name, and blog description, and maybe some words in the early part of sentences or paragraphs) that will later be used as keywords to index the blog.
Because you cannot be certain which words are taken as keywords pertaining to your blog, it's most likely that your blog won't be indexed properly in search engines - in the worst case, your highly relevant keywords might not even be used to index your blog. When this happen, searches on keywords relevant to your blog may have your blog buried at the far end of the list of thousands and millions of pages. What a waste!
To have a control of what is read by crawlers on your blog to be indexed, you have to build what is called a META tag - basically a bunch of words that makes up the most relevant description and keywords of your blog. If the META tag exist, this is what the crawlers will read and index and get displayed on any searches related to your keywords.
Here's what a search on my blog looks like on Google. The description is exactly the one I have written in the META tag. The 1st search on the list shows the new META tag description that was made a few seconds before the snap. The old META tag is shown beneath it (22 hours ago).
There are basically 2 parts to a META tag: first is the META description and second is the META keywords. The description are what appears on a search. As you can see, if the description is too long, it'll be cropped as search engines only uses a few lines to describe the blog. An optimum number of characters to use for META description is 150 (including spaces and dots).
For META keywords, you can use as many words as you want, but don't repeat the same word too many times (more than 5) to avoid keyword spam. Crawlers can identify keyword spamming easily - which won't make it good either for SEO.
To create a META tag, simply copy the code below and rewrite your META description and keywords (the red text):
Write your META description here. Keep it less than 150 characters.' name='description'/>
Write your META keywords here as many as you want separated with commas. Keep word repetition less than 5 to avoid keyword spamming.' name='keywords'/>
Then, place it in between the ..... section near the top part of your template XML code. It's best to put it just below the code.
For more details:
Go to this Free META Tag Builder tool. It directs you easily to build a META tag, create the HTML or XHTML code, and guides to paste it into your blog template XML code.
Just for the fun of it, you can analyze your blog's original description and keywords by submitting your blog URL at the Free META TAG Analyzer before placing the new META tags in your blog - so that you can compare how it is indexed before and after the change.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Money-Making Methods That Don’t (and Will Never) Work
How many times you’ve heard people promising you “ways to make millions with little effort, working from home in your pajamas?” Claims like these are all over the place. The truth is, well…different. Here are some methods of making money that will either a) make you very little money or b) make you no money at all.
1. Blogging For The Sake of Blogging
Stay-at-home moms fall for this often. The basic promise is: You can write on whatever you want and make money! Yes, if you stumble on some profitable niche you will make money! If you write about finance, you’re probably going to make some case. However, if you write about your life and your thoughts, then don’t expect much money. People usually want to read auto-biographies, but only by celebrities.
Don’t get me wrong; blogging works and makes serious money for some people. They question I would ask is, however, what percentage? You’ve probably heard about the statistic that only 10% of products succeed. In reality, having your own product gives you most control and the smallest chances to fail. Yet, according to this statistic, your chances are 10%! Now, imagine what the percentage would be for blogging. Maybe 2%? Less than 1%?
Solution: First, define on WHAT you are going to write about and research whether there are buyers in that market. Eventually, you’ll want to promote some products there. Want to write about dog training? This may be a good choice because there are a lot of products on that market out there.
You also might want to eventually sell your own info-product after a while…for example, I’ve been writing for a while, publishing posts like this one on people search engines and soon plan to also write an e-book on this topic and sell it.
Anyway, don’t expect to make money if you blog for the sake of blogging. Pleasure and freedom? Yes. But money, not really.
2. PTC (Paid to Click) Programs
Bux.to, NeoBux, you name it…there are a lot of programs out there promising to help you make money by just clicking on ads! Now, the truth is, yes, you CAN make money via those programs. The twist is, the best people there make max. $200 a month. That’s WITH A LOT OF WORK. Most people don’t make more than $10 per month.
The ironic thing here is, those people (doing PTC) probably spend the same time clicking on ads that someone would spend on creating his own product or doing affiliate marketing…and make 10x more.
Think about it…the web is huge. If PTC programs worked really well then wouldn’t everyone do it? It’s supply & demand 101, the easier something is to start with, the less money you’ll generally make. Read this section of Barriers to entry by Michael Porter. High barriers to entry = more profit, low barriers to entry = less profit. Now, I’m not saying you should go to markets with a REALLY high barrier to entry, you can go into lower ones, work continuously and make stable profit.
I’m just saying to avoid programs which are too good to be true. This is one of them.
3. PTS (Paid to Surf), PTV (Paid to View) and Other “Paid to X” Programs
How many times you’ve heard marketing messages like: Just install this toolbar and surf…you’ll make money while you’re browsing! Again, too good to be true. Or…watch your favorite movies and get paid! Again, too good to be true.
People will always have this ‘get rich quick’ fantasy. That’s why lotteries exist. That’s why casinos and betting schemes prosper. And that’s why these ‘paid to X’ programs will never cease to exist. But you don’t have to be a part of them.
4. Nothing Works!
This kind of mindset also guarantees you’ll never make money 
This blog, for example, offers a lot of reliable methods for making money. Here are some:
- Starting to write on a niche that makes money and putting AdSense on your site.
- Doing affiliate marketing
- Creating your own info product (e-book, online course)
- Paid traffic brokering via affiliate marketing (you take an affiliate product and promote it by buying traffic)
- Freelancing
- Offering consulting services for something you’re good at
Now, those things are not guaranteed to make you $$$$$ but they’re far better from the above methods.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
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