BlogHASH » Web Design/Dev

New Tool For Creating Your Own Browser Theme – BlogHash.com

Raj — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:39:59 +0000

Most people think about SEO, Pay Per Click Marketing, Social Media, display ads and many other strategies for driving traffic to their websites. Sometimes, some of the easiest ways to drive more traffic to our websites is right under our noses. Literally. We use this application every minute we are surfing the web but seldom do we think of it as a marketing tool: The Internet Browser. Whether you use Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari, Opera or any other browser, every second you spend surfing the web is time spent looking at your browser. What if you could turn your fans’ browser into a marketing tool to help drive traffic to your site and increase their engagement with your brand? Well, now you can, quickly and easily.

Founded in 2007, Brand Thunder specializes in creating highly interactive browser themes that integrate general web browsing functionality with custom content and tools that make it easy to stay engaged with those who follow your brand. So what does that really mean? A great example of this is a browser theme they created for College Humor:

This theme has a simple design that’s aesthetically pleasing and yet keeps both the College Humor brand and content in front of those using the theme with their browser. Brand Thunder clients like College Humor and The Huffington Post, have consistently seen an average of 8 times more visits to their websites from browser theme users than from regular website visitors. That means on average, a browser theme user with your theme installed will visit your site 8X more than your regular website visitors.

Fortunately for those of you without the design and development capabilities of College Humor, you don’t have to hire a team to make a theme like this for you. You can create one yourself in minutes with BT:Engage, Brand Thunder’s new browser theme tool. Here’s how…

Step One:

Go to http://bt-engage.com and create an account. Then decide what sort of theme you want to create. For this tutorial we’ve chosen this website: Bloghash.com

Step Two:

Click – “Create a new theme”. Then name your theme. Obviously we will call this the “BlogHash” theme.

Step Three:

Select which browser you will be designing for. We will be sticking with Firefox but the steps should be extremely similar if not the same for both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Step Four:

Choose a background. Since I’m designing my theme around BlogHash.com, I’m going to use the properties window to make my background black to match the look of their site.

Step Five:

Add your logo. First you’ll want to click on the “My Images” tab in the assets section at the bottom of the page. Next you’ll need to upload the logo you’re using from your computer. We simply went to the BlogHash website, right clicked the logo, saved it, and uploaded the logo. Once your logo image appears in the assets area, click on it and drag it over top of the theme you’re creating. When you release the mouse button the image will be loaded and placed automatically. Adjust image size according to your personal taste, but be sure to click the “lock aspect ratio” check box in your properties window to keep the formatting of the logo while it is scaled.

Step Six:

Make sure to enter your URL along with your logo so that when someone clicks on your logo they are directed right to your homepage. Of course, we’ll enter the link: BlogHash.com

Step Seven:

Choose widgets that encourage the types of engagement you’d like to see from those who will use this theme. Since BlogHash.com has a blog, we’re going to drag the RSS widget up and paste the BlogHash.com RSS link into the properties window. Be sure to click “validate” and then “save.” We also added some links to the social media accounts, the homepage and the “articles” section for quick access to those features.

Step Eight:

Click Finish and install! Once you’ve click the finish button at the top left hand corner, your theme will be built and you’ll be taken to another page where you can download and install your theme for free. You can also share this page with others so they can use your theme as well. Here is what the BlogHash theme ended up looking like using our tool:

Here is the theme download page for the BlogHash browser theme. Download for free.

About the Author:

Mark Subel is the Distribution Director at Brand Thunder (BT). You can follow his team on Twitter @brandthunder or Facebook. The team at BT creates persistent engagement between major brands and their online consumers with extreme makeovers for Internet browsers. Brand Thunder’s new platform, BT:Engage gives everyone the tools to build and share their own browser themes.

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A New Look for BlogHash

Raj — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 20:30:24 +0000

Over the last couple of weeks I had been busy working on a new template for BlogHash and finally it’s ready. If you are reading this post from your RSS reader, visit the home page once and take a look at the new theme of Bloghash.

Why did I do it myself?

In the last few months I have contacted at least 5-6 WordPress theme designers but none of them seems to have had any interest in designing a theme for my site; no one replied to my email. Hence, I took it upon myself to design a theme for my blog site. I knew it wouldn’t be easy but then I wanted to learn.

Thank you for the inspiration

First it was John Chow, then Problogger and Keith also got a new design. When they got a new theme loaded up, it was perhaps the last spark needed to start the fire in my mind; I wanted a new one too!

The components of my theme

Before even I started with the design plan, I visited at least over 100 different blogs, thanks to the great list of WP designs on SmashingMagazine, and made a note of the different features on each of those blogs. Most of them had common set of things on their home page and almost everyone’s single view pages were left aligned with one sidebar on right. I wanted to design something different.

The new home page shows excerpts of most recent posts, on the right there are two sidebars showing some of the most visited posts under various categories. This helps in flow of page rank to those pages from the home page.

The single post view has one sidebar on either side. The one on the left is to show ads while the one on the right is to show related popular posts which I am still working on. I intend to show the most relevant post depending on the category of the post viewed.

Please give me feedback

Please spend a few minutes browsing the new theme on my blog and provide me with your valuable suggestions and feedback. Do let me know if you have any tips to help me improve my blog’s design.
[tags]BlogHash, Design, WordPress, WordPress Themes[/tags]

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OpenSource Flash Charts for your Websites

Raj — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:35:44 +0000

I was searching for flash charts on Google for a personal project of mine wherein I wanted to use the existing data from the database tables to draw neat charts in flash and found a very nice open source dynamic flash chart component. I thought it would be nice to share it with you all, just in case any of you might want to use it in your web projects.

Open flash chart is an open source project that will let you draw different types of charts such as Bar chart, Area chart, 3D Bar chart, Fade Chart, Pie Chart and Scatter chart. You’ll love the graphs in charts that are built using this open source flash chart component, trying them is really worth it!

To setup charts on your website, you will need to include the Open Flash Chart in your HTML, and you also need to provide the data file on the server. The data file is either a text file, or a .php, Perl, Python, Java (or another flavor of dynamic) page.

If you are interested in this open source flash charts for your websites, there is a tutorial, download that includes PHP classes and the website for examples and usage instructions.
[tags]Dynamic flash charts, Flash charts, OpenSource[/tags]

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How embedding a video can fail the XHTML validation of your web site?

Raj — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 21:24:07 +0000

If you have been happily embedding videos from Youtube and other popular video sharing web sites into your blogs and sites, you should know that it can fail the XHTML validation of your site or the page that is embedded with the video clip. That’s true!

I had never thought about it but discovered it accidentally when as a part of my monthly website checkup, I tried to validate my site for XHTML 1.0 Transitional and it failed poorly. Looking at the validation output, the reason was very much evident. It was the code from Youtube that I had used to embed two video clips in my post on Hubble Telescope.

Why did it fail the XHTML validation? – Simply because embed tag is not a part of XHTML specifications and using this tag in your pages will fail the validation. This tag was initially used by Netscape to insert plugins and players in their browser and is also supported by all modern browsers. For further reading, refer to this article from A List Apart.

What did I do to correctly embed Youtube videos in my blog? – I used a plugin for WordPress called “WordPress Video Plugin” which helped me to a great extent by following XHTML standards while embedding video clips in my posts. The plugin doesn’t use the embed tag, instead solely relies on the object tag, to insert the video clip, which is very well in XHTML specifications.

If you have been inserting videos in your site and blogs, I highly recommend that you perform validation of your site and check the output for any validation errors.

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5 Reasons Not to Resize the Browser Window of Your Visitors

Raj — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:00:08 +0000

Some website developers prefer to resize the browser window of the visitors, without their permission, to display their own creativity in terms of flash, presentations and other graphics in either a full screen window or a browser window size that best displays what they have created. These developers either just do not know that it annoys most of the visitors, me included, or may be they never gave it a thought. Its impact on a business is even more, when a designer does something similar with their site or presentation, it ends up annoying the visitor who could also have been a potential customer and drives them away from the site.

If you are a wanna-be web designer, already established or an experienced designer, I put forward a list of reasons which tells you in clear terms that you should not follow this practice, give it a thought and you may agree with me if you think from a visitor’s point of view.

It’s annoying – You may have never asked people who visit your or your client’s website but you should know that many people don’t like their browser window being resized without their consent.
Increased screen resolution – Gone are those days when people used to have 640×480 or a maximum of 800×600 screen resolution. Computers have become a lot more cheaper now and that also includes monitor. Screen resolutions have increased and on an average over 90% of computers use anything over 1024×768 pixels resolution.
It’s not your browser – It’s your visitor’s browser, not yours! Period! If you can not help it and must resize the browser window because you want to show them a very large drawing picture or a design of some mechanical instrument, first display a notice to let them know and only after they click on it you should change the browser window size. Makes sense?
Resizing everything? – If you rely on a javascript to detect and adjust your site’s content according to screen resolution or size of browser’s window and if a visitor does not has javascript enabled [~5% don't], you may not be able to do that. It may end up cluttering the layout. Don’t you think so?
You’ll lose visitors – Visitors don’t like to see their browser window getting resized without any notice, they might end up closing your site and never want to come back again.

» Tip – If you come across such sites very often, and if you use Firefox browser, here is a tip you can use to prevent anyone from automatically resizing your browser. [Another reason to start using Firefox browser ]

Open the browser and click on Tools » Options » Content » Click Advanced (right opposite to Enable Javascript) » Uncheck “Move or resize existing windows”

Comments? Something to add? Don’t forget to post your comments below.

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WordPress and Website Owners Do You have Directory Listing Enabled?

Raj — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:34:32 +0000

Call it my negligence or anything else but since the day I setup this website, I did not care to go back and check if I had taken care to disable directory listing on all the folders in my website. For those who are wondering what Directory Listing is, a simple explanation could be that with Directory Listing enabled, your web server will list or show all the files and folder within a folder that does not has an index file. A nice example is when you open yourdomain.com/wp-includes/ (wordpress only) it will display a listing of all the files and folders within that directory with the directory listing turned on. See the picture below for better understanding of this:

At times this is really not harmful, but if you have uploaded some critical files, like I did, containing your personal information such as passwords list in plain text file then you better think about it and turn the directory listing off as soon as you can! Others who have already turned off directory listing, that’s good!

I usually go through a checklist when I setup new domains and it has a point to turn the directory listing off, but I missed it this time and I had to change all the my passwords which were mentioned in that file (7 accounts in total).

If you happen to be using CPanel, you will find Index Manager option under Site Management, just click on it and have the directory listing turned off! That’s it. You may also use htaccess file to turn off the directory browsing on all your folders if your site contains lot of folders.

If you have some tips for our readers, please don’t forget to post them in the comments here.

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Did you ever navigate a website without a single mouse click? Try this one!

Raj — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 22:14:54 +0000

When was the last time you browsed a website and did not click on anything to see the different pages and sections of the site? As far as I can remember, for myself, never!

Today, I was surfing the web to search for help on CSS and designing aspects of navigation menu and found an amazing web site from Institute for Interactive Research @ [Don't Click It] and must say, it’s simply a pleasing experience to browse a website without having to click anywhere. [Actually, you will have to click only once to enter the site. But, that's on the main page which's meant to inform visitors about the purpose of the site]

How does it work?

The entire website is designed using Flash and needless to say, the graphics are impressive and the web site’s design is exceptional. The navigation menu consisting of links acts on mouse hovering on them and navigate to the destination. Every link in the site acts on mouse over events and that’s how it works!

Since this website is meant to gather statistical information about mouse clicks, I don’t have any negative comments on it’s navigation menu. It’s just amazing!

If you visit the site and get impressed, which you will, and want to adapt this design technique in your site, here are some drawbacks of such a technique.

Drawbacks of click less navigation

You will have to design the navigation menu, at least, in Flash.
Search engines will not be able to index your site’s content.
100% of the visitors on Internet are used to navigate a website with mouse clicks. So, your visitors may find this kind of click less navigation quite unusual.

I hope you have a pleasing experience browsing it and do drop in your comments about your experience with click less navigation.

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A Free and Open Source Photo Editing Software for Windows – Paint.Net

Raj — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 18:18:02 +0000

Paint.Net was initially an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft and is currently maintained by a group of professional who had initially started it.

Development of this tool was started to replace the MS Paint software that’s built in Windows, but grown to become very powerful than MS Paint. Newbies who can not afford to buy a copy of Photoshop, people who rarely in need of editing photos and those looking for a free alternative to Photoshop – must try this tool.

» Features – Interface is familiar with that of MS Paint. Supports Layers, Shapes, Curving tools, a new Gradient tool and Magic Wand. Also available with the current release of the tool are a text editor, tool for zooming and a Recoloring tool. It stores unlimited undo actions in a separate History window and just highlight the undo item from History of actions and select undo. Once undone, you can redo it again.

There are many special effects in this tool. Some are blurring, red-eye removal, sharpening, noise and embossing. Use the unique 3D Rotate/Zoom effect that makes it add tilting and perspective. One you also tweak and adjust image’s brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, curves and levels. You can also convert an image to black and white, or sepia-toned.

» Open Source and Free – Available as a free download are this tool and its entire source code. Large amount of coding is done in C# and small amount of code related to setup and shell integration is written in C++.

» Downloads – Visit the website of [Paint.Net] for your free copy.

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Looking for ways to remove your site and its pages from search engines?

Raj — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 22:27:41 +0000

Are you a webmaster who is looking for ways to remove the old and non existent content of your site from search engines? If yes, then this is the right place to see some effective ways of getting your site, pages, blog and images out of search engine’s index.

First, let’s look at the most common reasons because of which webmasters want to remove some of the pages or an entire site out of search engine’s index.

» Very old pages with content no longer valid or applicable.
» Pages with wrong information which was indexed in search engines before you could act on it.
» Pages with confidential information was indexed as it was linked from a public page or due to other possible causes.
» Migration from an old domain or URL to a new domain or URL.
» Sub domain or a folder under a parent domain is no longer in use or applicable.
» The site was under testing when it got indexed.

Different ways of removing your content from search engines

While the reason to remove the content could be any, ways are limited and depends on which search engine you want your content to be removed from. Let’s look at some ways which are search engine specific and then common methods which are applicable to all major search engines.

» Removing your content from Google

Google provides you with an online automatic URL removal tool using which webmasters can request removal of their indexed URLs, domains, sub domains, group of pages, sub folder etc. To be able to successfully submit a request for removal, your existing URL must return a 404 header message to tell Google that the content is no longer available (or) add a META tag in your pages to prevent Google from indexing it again (or) use robots.txt exclusion. As long as the META tag is embedded in the pages, site crawlers will not index your pages any further. To successfully return a 404 header for pages that needs to be removed and no longer available, the 404 error page must be set to return a 404 HTTP header when it is called for. Many websites do not return a 404 header when the error page is called and that’s why search engines fail to detect absence of pages from your site.

» Other common ways of removing content from search engines

[Option # 1]: Using robots.txt file to remove site, partial content from all or specific search engines.

We can make use of robots.txt exclusion to prevent the search engines from indexing the pages, folders, sub domains etc. Let’s see how it works.

[Note: In the below examples, replace Googlebot with MSNBot for MSN search engine, and here is a list of many known robots that you can use in the following examples instead of Googlebot]

» To remove your entire website from all search engines and prevent further indexing by all search engine crawlers, place the following lines in robots.txt file in the root folder of your site.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

» To remove your site from Google only and prevent only Google bot from crawling your site in future, place the following lines in the robots.txt in web server’s root folder.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

» To remove only the https version of indexed pages from search engines, place the following in robots.txt file in the folder which serves the secured page of your site.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

» To remove all the pages under a particular directory [say scripts], place the following in the robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /scripts

» To remove all pages under a specific directory from just Google, use the following lines in robots.txt

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /scripts

» To remove a specific file type from search engines, use the following [example gif files]

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.gif$

» And to remove gifs only from Google, use the following.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.gif$

» To remove dynamically generated pages, use the following in robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?

» If it’s Google specific, use the following.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*?

» To remove only images from Google’s image index, place the following in robots.txt file. I am not sure if replacing Googlebot-Image in below with a * will work with other search engines. You may try and let me know.

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /imagename.jpg

» To remove all images from a directory of your site, use the following.

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/*.gif$

[Option #2]: Using HTTP META tags in HTML pages to remove content from search engines.

» To prevent all search engine robots from indexing a page on your site, place the following meta tag into the section of your page.

» To prevent only Google robot from indexing a page, you’d use the following tag in your page.

» To allow all search engine robots to index the current page but NOT index any links from this page, place the following META tag on your page.

» To remove the page snippet that is displayed under the page title of search results, use the following:

Note: This will also remove the cached version of your pages from the search index.

» To remove a blog from search engine’s index, place the following in the tag of your site.

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Top and Best WordPress Plugins You MUST See!

Raj — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 00:54:24 +0000

Of late, I have come across many posts and articles mentioning the top 10 WordPress plugins and I don’t want to be left behind. This post will show you some of the best and top WordPress plugins that will enhance the functionality of your WordPress blog.

Core Functionality WordPress Plugins

[Akismet] – It checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key [Free] to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days. This is a MUST to have plugin and without which you will have a tough time fighting with spam comments on your blog. It is bundled along with your WordPress installation files, so all you need to do is get your API key and activate it.

[Spam Karma 2 (SK2)] – Another great plugin for fighting spam in your blogs. Read the FAQs about this plugin.

[WordPress Database Backup] – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. This plugin is bundled along with WordPress core installation files. Enable it and take regular backups. You never know when things could go wrong. Taking a backup ensures that you have all the content in your hand for easy recovery. This plugin can lets you download the backup, email it or store in a folder on the server itself. A must to have this plugin activated in your WordPress and more important is that you take backup of your WP database regularly.

[WP-Cache] – This is a very efficient and fast caching system plugin for WordPress. It’s a must to have plugin in these days when you never know when someone will digg you and your site might unexpectedly go down. Caching help your blog to a great extent by saving a static copy of your content and serve your visitors without a need to query the database to fetch the pages.

[Admin Drop Down Menu] – For people with lot of things installed in their WordPress, this plugin will be a time saver. When installed, you don’t need to click on top menu items in Admin menu, just hover your mouse and it will display the sub menu items just beneath that. This demo page is best to explain how it works.

Manage Advertising on Your Blogs

[Adsense-Deluxe] – This plugin places Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. The best part about this plugin is that it lets you create AdSense blocks with AdSense code in it. You are not limited to use it just to display AdSense, instead also put HTML, Javascript code of your newsletter subscription form or something else and it will work. At the end of this post, you will see a link to subscribe to our updates and feeds by email. That’s a simple trick with this plugin. Another great feature of this plugin is its ability to enable AdSense units selectively on only front page, single posts and globally enable and disable AdSense. To change AdSense unit code everywhere all you have to do is change the code in the Admin area and it changes it on all pages in one go. That’s a plus for people who frequently experiment with their AdSense units to achieve better performance.

[WP-Ads] – This is another top plugin that will let you create zones and place various ad units in those zones. You can place more than one ad unit in a zone and WP-Ads plugin will rotate it for you. The plugins page in admin section also shows the number of times the ad units were served. Creating and managing your ad inventory is very easy with this plugin.

[WP e-Commerce Lite] – If you are in need of a shopping cart for your blogs, this is the one. The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your product and services online.

External Services Related Plugins

[flickrRSS] – This plugin allows you to display Flickr photos on your site. The plugin supports user, public and group photo streams. It’s easy to setup and configure via an options panel. It also has image cache support too.

Feed Management

[Feedburner Feed Replacement] – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while letting through some important User-Agents.

Forms in WordPress

[PXS Mail Form] – A great form for using in WordPress. It has a CC Sender option, validates email address, send email to multiple recipients and it will even create a drop-down menu if required to allow the user to select a recipient.

Podcasting in WordPress

[PodPress] – With this plugin, you can see how Podcast will look like on iTunes, Podcast Download stats, Support for Premium Content, Audio Comments and many more features. Visit their page for more information.

[PhoneBlogz] – PhoneBlogz allows you to blog to your WordPress by phone and they also support direct posting and remote polling. More information on their website.

Reports for WordPress

[Analytics and Feedburner Reports] – Anyone with an account with either Google Analytics or Feedburner would love to have this plugin. It displays statistics about your site in a very simple to understand graphics. It also the ability to automatically installed Google Analytics tracking code in your WordPress for you.

Search Engine Optimization [SEO] and Traffic Related

[Add Meta Tags] - A great plugin that adds the post’s categories and excerpt to the “keywords” and the “description” XHTML meta tags respectively, while viewing single posts. It also adds the blog’s description and categories to the “description” and the “keywords” meta tags respectively on the home page. A must for your SEO related activities. However, not every search engine relies on META tags anymore, but this greatly helps in improving your Search Engine visibility in many ways.

[Dagon Design Sitemap Generator] – Generates a customizable sitemap containing all posts and pages. You will have to create a page by name ‘Sitemap’ and use this plugin to generate a sitemap with all posts and pages of your blog. This is a great plugin to show a sitemap on your blog that automatically gets updated every time you post a new article or create a page.

[Google Sitemaps] – This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. The sitemap is automatically updated with your blog entries and you can use the URL of sitemap [http://your-domain.com/sitemap.xml] to submit to search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. Not only Google, but Yahoo! and Microsoft will also use the same sitemap going forward. [Read the FAQs on http://www.sitemaps.org/]

[Ultimate Tag Warrior] – It allows you to add tags either through the Write Post page in WordPress in a tag box, on posts using an AJAX box, and in posts using special syntax from external editors. [Note: Some blogs seemed to have performance issues with this plugin. Please observe for any such issues on your blog and act accordingly]

[Simple Tagging] – Those looking for an alternative to UTW plugin, look no further. Simple Tagging is another tagging plugin for WordPress that is much faster than other tagging plugins and very easy to use. It features auto suggestion of tags in Ajax style and can also import your existing WordPress categories as tags. I use this plugin for tagging the posts on this blog. You can see how it in Tags section at the start of this post entry or read my post on Simple Tagging for details.

Social Bookmarking

[Digg This Reloaded] – Adds Digg story link/button to your posts as well as options to submit to other social bookmarking sites. This plugin has an integrated release with Share This plugin bundled with it. After a post is dugg, it show the number of diggs on your post just like it’s shown on digg website.

[Share This] – A great plugin with options of many bookmarking sites in it. And it can also email from within the plugin itself.

WordPress Posts Related

[Related Posts] – Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. At the end of this post, see the Related Posts section. That’s how it will show up on your site too! A great way to show more content to your visitors.

[Landing sites] – There is a problem with search results and that is when people search for content on Internet, they often land on pages from your blog looking for specific content which is readily not available on pages such as categories. This will drive them away and sometimes they may not even come back. To overcome this problem, help them by showing them related posts to their search on your blog? This plugin lets you do that, works with a long list of search engines! It’s NOT same as Related posts plugin, but works on similar concept by showing posts related to the search keywords used by a visitor. Test it out by search for “mod_rewrite example” and click on the link that points to this site. You will see this plugin’s implementation on the top of the page. Another advantage is that, by offering more number of relevant pages from your site to visitors, you increase the chances of retaining the visitor for longer duration on the site and it increases your page views.

[Recent Comments] – This plugin displays excerpts of the most recent comments and/or trackbacks that have been posted to the articles in your blog. A great way to show recent comments posted in your blog site in your sidebar.

[Subscribe To Comments] – This plugin allows your readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. It also lets them manage the subscription by themselves without your intervention. You can see it in action under the comments section below.

Please let us know the plugins that you are using on your site, why you use them and if you recommend them to others. We will be glad to add them to this list.

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Tips and Tricks for Optimizing AdSense for Forums

Raj — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 20:55:18 +0000

These are 8 most effective tips for achieving better results with AdSense in forums.

1. Placing Ads for New Users – Let them be first time visitors or repeat visitors who will click on a thread for the first time to read the posts inside a thread, placing an Ad unit between first and second post in a thread performs best. You will have to blend the Ad unit well with your color schemes but do not blend it so well that your users will confuse between a post and an Ad. We recommend placing an horizontal Ad unit of size 468×60 and if your forum template is set to auto width, place a bigger and wide skyscrapper Ad Unit. If you don’t want to place a sckysrcapper unit, place a horizontal link unit between first and second post or between first three posts. This works very well with forums which are focused on niche areas and have a lot of keywords in their posts.

2. Placing Ads for Repeat Users – Repeat users are those who keep coming back to follow up on their earlier posts. They will immediately start reading the latest post and also since many forum softwares send a direct link to the page where the last post was made, they will not look at the beginning of the thread anyway. This also holds true when they have started a thread and have been following it for quite long. Placing an Ad unit just before OR after the last post performs best in this case.

3. Using Image ONLY Ad Units – Placing at least one Image ONLY Ad Unit increases the CPM Ads. Sometimes depending on traffic you will see lot of CPM Ads which is good. You may use your primary Ad unit as a text only unit, use a secondary Ad unit as an Image ONLY Ad unit to receive lot of CPM Ads. This works very well for forums with high traffic.

4. Use AdSense for Search – Using ‘AdSense for Search’ on your forum does not always produce high revenue but adds up to your existing revenue and works well with large forums.

5. Monetize 404 and Other Error Pages – For forums with thousands of hits every day, there could be at least 50-60 404 [not found] or other such error messages encountered by visitors. Why not monetize the your 404 and error pages? Place Ad Link units or skyscrapper or any other type of Ad unit on those pages. This one will depend on how you want to handle and design your 404 pages, so experiment and decide the best Ad unit. Don’t just use the default 404 pages, replace them with a better 404 page that will show nice Ads and also offer suggestions with alternate pages.

6. Avoid Ad Blindness – Repeat users who visit your site almost every day develop Ad blindness to your Ads on the forum. Try to take advantage of color scheme rotation, change the Ad placement, size of Ad units on a regular basis. Changing the Ad placement on a monthly basis is advised. For example: for first month, you can place and Ad unit between first and second post. Next month, place it before the first post and after third post. Then in the following month, place it between first and second then between second and third post. Keep changing the places and experiment. Also, don’t forget to change the color scheme with each change.

7. Placing Ads on Left and Right of Post Area – Placing vertical skyscrapper on either left of right side of the posts in the forum is recommended. Blend it well with the existing color scheme of the forum. Try to move it at either side on regular basis. Example: First month, you may place a vertical skyscrapper on left, next month on right. Enable Image ONLY Ad unit, sometimes, to increase the CPM Ads.

8. Ad Link Units Placement – In forums, placing an Ad link unit just before the place where it reads “Previous Thread | Next Thread” works very well. You should blend it very well with the color of the link that reads “Previous Thread | Next Thread” for best performance. Don’t always keep it there, replace it with other Ad units on a regular basis. Disable it for a month and enable it again. Keep experimenting. Work on any Ad rotation strategy you like, to avoid Ad blindness.

[Conclusion]: On forums, users tend to develop Ad blindness pretty sooner than you think. Key to success with AdSense on forums is to keep changing the Ad placement, color schemes, Ad Unit sizes and things should work well.

If you run forums and need any suggestion or advises, please feel free to contact me for a free consultation. My response will be a little slow but I will help you for sure

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Website Optimization: Tips to Optimize Your Pages for Faster Loading and Response Time

Raj — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 21:24:25 +0000

These are some of the most effective and proven to work tips to increase the page load time of your website. You must try these not only to dramatically increase the page load time but also to achieve better visitor satisfaction. Would you go back to a site which does not load on time?

1. Optimize the Images – Many of us, including myself, use images to enhance the content and sometimes it’s imperative for publishers like us to put images in our pages for more clarity on the subject. While some of us know that it’s better to embed images which are relatively smaller in size for faster loading of pages, some of us do not pay attention to it. You must know that the faster the pages load, the chances of someone waiting for your entire page to show up increases. It’s also advisable to not to put images on the top of the pages but anywhere after at least one para of content [not a rule though]. This will ensure that even if your images are taking time to load, the user will at least see the first block of content and might wait for the rest of the page to load. Some online services to optimize your graphics are:- and . [Gifworks] and [Spinwave]. Gifworks will help you optimize only GIF images while Spinwave can optimize both JPEG and GIF.

2. Prefer External Scripting – It’s a common practice to use CSS and Javascript in your website for achieving many creative things. But do you put the CSS and Javascript code in your pages? That’s not good. You must include those files in your pages rather than putting them in each and every page of your site. Going external with CSS and Javascript will bring down the size of the pages to a great extent.

To include the CSS file in your HTML, you can use the following:-

and to include a .js file you can use

[Note: You can attach more than one CSS or Javascript includes in the HEAD section of your HTML].

The advantage of doing this is that when search engine spiders crawl your pages, they will not see CSS or Javascript code but straight away read your site’s content. This is a major plus for your site’s Search Engine Optimization [SEO].

3. Avoid External Images – If you are linking to images from other site then the page load time will directly depend on the speed at which the images are loaded from the external sites. If the external site is down then the images on your site will not load up at all and may also affect the page load time of your site. The best way around this is to upload all those images in a folder on your site and then embed them in your HTML pages. This will increase the page load time to a great extent. Some examples of most common images are from Digg, Online photo sharing services etc.

4. Optimize your scripting – Most of us use some or the other server side scripting language for processing pages and if the code is not well written, it may adversely affect the performance of your web server and also reduce the page load time. My advise to you is to revisit the code if the above 3 points fail to increase your page load time.

Other noteworthy factors that affect your site’s performance are – the load on the server on which your site is hosted, bandwidth available for the server and other hardware factors.

If you have any suggestions/comments to add, please feel free to post them through our comments form.

Related External Links:
[Akamai's 4 Seconds Research]

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Apache mod_rewrite Examples

Raj — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 21:17:52 +0000

Welcome! This page contains information about mod rewrite, 6 most common mod_rewrite examples (below) to help you write search engine friendly URLs (SEO) and also some steps to check whether mod_rewrite is enabled on the web server that is hosting your website just in case mod_rewrite doesn’t work for you. Read on…

One of the many sophisticated and powerful modules in Apache is mod_rewrite. It’s used for URL manipulation, also known as URL rewriting. It’s very powerful but very complicated in nature. Beginners may find it a little difficult to understand it the first time but people with knowledge of regular expressions will love its ease of use. On this page you will find some of the most common mod rewrite examples such as mod rewrite domain, mod rewrite index.php etc.

For people who are interested in an in-depth learning, you will need some basic understanding of regular expressions to begin with. And for others who are here to fix the problem or implement apache mod_rewrite, let’s start.

Does your web server support mod_rewrite?

Ensure that you are using Apache web server and mod_rewrite module is installed in your web server. To check this you can either contact your hosting service provider or check it yourself using these simple step.

Step1. Create a blank text file using notepad or any other editor.
Step2. Put in the file.
Step3. Save as ‘info.php’ [on windows Save as "info.php" (with double quotes)].
Step4. Upload the file to your web server’s root or any other folder.
Step5. Call the file in the url – http://your-domain.com/info.php and check if you see mod_rewrite in ‘Apache loaded modules’ section. If NOT, then please contact your hosting provider and request them to install/enable mod_rewrite.

Note: If you have access to your httpd.conf file, you may check for mod_rewrite in that file as well. And also your httpd.conf must be configured to allow Fileinfo override. Contact your hosting provider for any server related issues.

Next thing you would do is check your .htaccess file. Make a backup of your existing .htaccess file so that in case because of your changes if web server does not serve your site, you can always restore the backup copy.

Examples of mod_rewrite

1. Description – Your current pages are called using index.php with parameter of url i.e
http://www.example.com/index.php?url=category
and instead of this URL, you want a nice and easy to read URL like http://www.example.com/category
Solution – Put the following lines in your .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/?$ /index.php?url=$1 [L]

Note: If your file already contains a line ‘RewriteEngine on’ then you don’t need to put it again unless it was set to off before you putting in your lines.

2. Description – Your current URL is
http://www.example.com/index.php?cat=category&subcat=subcategory
which you would like to see as
http://www.example.com/category/subcategory
Solution – Put the below lines in your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/([^/\.]+)/?$ /index.php?cat=$1&subcat=$2 [L]

3. Description – You want to have many sub categories or categories like
http://www.your-domain.com/category/subcat1/subcat2/subcat3/subcat4/subcat5/
which you would to rewrite to
http://www.your-domain.com/index.php?cat=category&subcat1=subcat1&subcat2=subcat2 and so on …
Solution – See below lines..

domain.com/category –> index.php?cat=category
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/?$ /index.php?cat=$1 [L]

domain.com/category/subcategory/ –> index.php?cat=category&subcat=subcategory
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/([^/\.]+)/?$ /index.php?cat=$1&subcat=$2 [L]

domain.com/p1/p2/p3/ –> index.php?a=p1&b=p2&c=p3
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/([^/\.]+)/([^/\.]+)/?$ /index.php?a=$1&b=$2&c=$3 [L]

domain.com/p1/p2/p3/p4 –> index.php?a=p1&b=p2&c=p3&d=p4
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/([^/\.]+)/([^/\.]+)/([^/\.]+)/?$ /index.php?a=$1&b=$2&c=$3&d=$4 [L]

4. Description – Your URL has a folder and you would like rewriting for that folder. The URL looks like this http://domain.com/folder/index.php?url=name which you want to see as http://domain.com/folder/name/
Solution – Place the following lines in your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^folder/([^/\.]+)/?$ folder/index.php?url=$1 [L]

5. Description – Your actual URL is http://example.com/index.php?page=hello which you want to see as http://example.com/hello.htm
Solution – Place the following lines in your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+).htm$ index.php?page=$1 [L]

6. Description – Your URL is http://example.com/folder/index.php?page=hello which you want to see as http://example.com/folder/hello.htm
Solution – Place the following lines in your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^folder/([^/\.]+).htm$ folder/index.php?page=$1 [L]

There are many more things that you can do with mod_rewrite. As and when I discover more examples, I will keep updating this page. Please feel free to post your usage of mod_rewrite if already not covered here and I will add them to the above list of examples.

Links for further reference:
1. Apache Documentation
2. Wikipedia page for regular expression

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Google AdSense: The best practices for AdSense for feeds

Raj — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 15:55:03 +0000

Google AdSense for feeds is yet another way for publishers to make money from the feeds of their websites. The program is still [at the time of writing this] in beta phase and in testing. AdSense for feeds will let website owners who distribute their feeds, serve contextual ads in their feeds. This will be a better opportunity for those publishers who have large number of subscribers. Let’s look at some best practices of AdSense for feeds and be prepared.

Content Syndication: Since AdSense is contextual in nature, having more content in feeds is better. If you can not include full text for any reason, try to add excerpts that are keyword-rich to generate relevant ads when they show up in feed readers or emails.

Ad Unit Placement: Keep the primary reason, of users subscribing to your feeds, in mind. They want to read your content in their RSS readers and some prefer to receive content in email. So, an Ad unit at the end of the content will be most appropriate. Placing the Ad unit at the top will do no harm, keep experimenting or best, display Ads at random places.

One unit per article: As I said before, your users preferred to receive content in email for a reason, and you should not stuff your feeds with several Ad units. Try to limit the number of Ad units per article to one.

Use Channels: Using AdSense channels will help you track the performance of your Ads. Your content may have been delivered today through email but user may read it after a week, having an AdSense channel will help you in at least tracking the category under which your pages were posted. [Example: If I write an article on Google Search Engine and put it under category of "Google/Search-Engines", I then place an Ad in this article with channel name 'feed_ad_google_se'. Whenever user will click on any Ad, I will know which category that article belongs to and doing a trend analysis will reveal best performing content category.]

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Website Resource: Basics of Web Analytics of your Web Site

Raj — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 13:30:22 +0000

We often check the log files of our websites or use various analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, Mint and SiteMeter to name a few, for doing many different kinds of analysis, but not many of us understand the data being shown in the fancy looking web analytic softwares. One of my friend, recently asked me the difference between a visitor, new visitor and a unique visitor. Explaining the difference to him was easy and it gave me a good topic to write on. Here you go! Read the basics and look at the same data again and see if you find it looking different .

Visitor – An individual [and not a robot or piece of program] sending a request to your web server is a visitor. Some might consider requests and visits by robots and spiders also as visitors. This should generally be avoided for accurate and precise reporting. [Visitors can be unique, repeat or new. Every visitor makes visits to your site]

New Visitor – A visitor who has never made any prior visit to your site, within said period of time. [If you consider one month of data for analysis, a visitor who visited your website last month will show up as a new visitor for this month's data.]

Unique Visitor – A visitor whose request can be uniquely identified. Since the same visitor can make thousand visits to your site, he is identified as one unique visitor, during the period of time for which the data is considered. [A visitor visiting your site once in a month may be a unique visitor for one month period but is not a unique visitor if you consider an year worth of log data. He will then be identified as a unique visitor for an entire year.]

Repeat Visitor – A visitor who has previously visited your website or requested anything from your web server at least once during a said period of time. [Example: A visitor making his first visit to your site on 1st of the month is a new visitor and his subsequent visits are treated as repeat visits.]

Visits – A visitor visits your website and make request for many pages from your site. Such series of requests from the same client or a visitor is called as visits. [Example: 10 people making 340 visits, that could be 34visits/visitor].

Hits – The most misleading section of any website analytics program is ‘Hits’. A hit is a request for any type of file from your web server, such as request for a javascript file, image file, css file or any other identified file type. In particular, if your home page consists of 10 images, 1 css file and 1 .js file then one request for your home page should be considered as 13 hits -> [1html+10images+1css+1js]. Since a page can have many different things attached to it, one should not rely on ‘Hits’ for any kind of measurement for your website. A home page consisting of 50 images may have 50 visitors for which log analysis may show 2500 hits. This should never be treated as number of visitors. [Use hits, for getting a feeling of how much bandwidth is being consumed and for nothing else ]

Page Views – Any file being delivered as a result of a request from a client is called a page view. Such file requests can be for a html, php, audio, PDF and many other identified file types. Images, javascript and CSS files are excluded from being counted as a page view depending upon the web analytic software in use.

I hope you found this information useful. Please share your thoughts, suggestions and help me improve

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