The New Definition of a Blog is Better Listing on Google

You thought the word ‘blog’ is an abbreviation of web log but some have discovered a better meaning of the word Blog. They define it as "BetterListing on Google."

Kevin O’ Keefe, who gets credit for this discovery, says that regular supply of new content, highly relevant content and incoming links from other relevant sites are the prime reasons why "blogs" perform better in Google Search results.

"Regular content updates = frequency does help some, but it’s the many keywords and key phrases that relevant users may search for that you will have by accumulated posts as well as the links you will draw by more posts that bloggers and news sites will link to."

Which Fonts Should You Use for Writing a Book

If you are planning to write a book, these useful guidelines about font names and font sizes from CafePress will come handy.

1. Make sure your cover typography stands out sufficiently to be read; almost everyone really does judge a book by its cover. On the average, a bookstore browser spends eight seconds looking at the front cover and 15 seconds looking at the back cover.

2. The most widely used typefaces for book body text include Baskerville, Bembo, Garamond, Janson, Palatino, and Times Roman (although this more of a newspaper font). Sans serif fonts may be difficult to read for an entire book.

3. If using a sans serif font for body text (Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, etc.), do not use smaller than 8pt. size. If using a serif font for body text (Berkeley, Palatino, Garamond, etc.), do not use smaller than 10pt. size.

4. Typography convention holds that sans serif faces should be used for display headers and book covers while serif typefaces are used for body text to ease readability.

5. Use larger point sizes for display headers, and much larger point sizes for your book’s cover copy. Link.

The Perfect Resolution / DPI Settings of Screenshot Images When Writing a Book

If  you are assigned the task of capturing computer screenshots and images for your computer related book like a technical manual or a how-to guide book, follow these instructions from Cafepress:

You can capture JPG or PNG high resolution screenshot images using any screen capture program like SnagIt or use the Print Screen key on your desktop.

1. If you save using JPG format, try using the lowest compression setting in Photoshop. Lower compression means less distortion. If you have the choice of having no compression at all that would be ideal.

2. When creating images, start your image at 200-300 DPI. You can always decrease your image and maintain a clean, crisp image.

3. The recommended image format for saving screenshots for books is either PNG or JPG.

a. PNG is a completely loss-less compression. Gradients come out much smoother and do not have the distortions that may appear in a JPG.

b. JPG supports over 16 million colors, but slightly "distort" the image to compress the file size. Link.

Always Block Google from Accessing your Site’s Search Results

If you are using Google Custom Search or another site search service on your website, make sure that the search results pages   are not accessible to Googlebot. This is necessary else spam domains can create serious problems for your website for no fault of yours.

Few days ago, I got an automatically generated email from Google Webmaster Tools saying that Googlebot is having trouble indexing my website labnol.org as it found a large number of new URLs. The message said:

Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site. This may indicate a problem with your site’s URL structure… As a result Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all of the content on your site.

This was a worrying signal because it meant that tons of new pages have been added to the website without my knowledge. I logged into Webmaster Tools and, as expected, there were thousands of pages that were in the crawling queue of Google.

Here’s what happened.

Some spam domains had suddenly started linking to the search page of my website using search queries in Chinese language that obviously returned no search results. Each search link is technically considered a separate web page – as they they have unique addresses – and hence the Googlebot was trying to crawl them all thinking they are different pages.

Because thousands of such fake links were generated in a short span of time, Googlebot assumed that these many pages have been suddenly added to the site and hence a warning message was flagged.

There are two solutions to the problem.

I can either get Google to not crawl links found on spam domains, something which is obviously not possible, or I can prevent the Googlebot from indexing these non-existent search pages on my website. The latter is possible so I fired up my VIM editor, opened the robots.txt file and added this line at the top. You’ll find this file in the root folder of your website.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /?s=*

Block Search pages from Google with robots.txt

The directive essentially prevents Googlebot, and any other search engine bot, from indexing links that have the “s” parameter the URL query string. If your site uses “q” or “search” or something else for the search variable, you may have to replace “s” with that variable.

The other option is to add the NOINDEX meta tag but that won’t have been an effective solution as Google would still have to crawl the page before deciding not to index it. Also, this is a WordPress specific issue because the Blogger robots.txt already blocks search engines from crawling the results pages.

The Best Websites to Learn Coding Online

The Learn to Code movement has picked up momentum worldwide and that is actually a good thing as even basic programming skills can have a major impact. If you can teach yourself how to write code, you gain a competitive edge over your peers, you can think more algorithmically and thus can tackle problems more efficiently.

Don’t just download the latest app, help redesign it. Don’t just play on your phone, program it. — Obama.

There’s no reason why shouldn’t know the basics of coding. You can automate tasks, you can program your Excel sheets, improve workflows, you can extract data from websites and accomplish so much more with code. You may not be in the business of writing software programs but knowing the basics of coding will help you communicate more effectively with developers.

Gone are the days when you had to enroll in expensive computer training classes as now exist a plethora of web-based courses that will help you learn programming at your own pace in the comfort of your web browser.

The Best Sites to Learn Programming

If you are ready to take the plunge, here are some of the best websites that offer courses in a variety of programming languages for free. I have also added a list of companion ebooks that will give you a more in-depth understanding of the language and they don’t cost anything either.

	Online Courses & Screencasts	Programming Books (Free)
JavaScript	Code Academy, Learn Street,Code Combat, Code Avengers	Eloquent JavaScript,JavaScript Guide,Speaking JS, JS The Right Way, Oh My JS,Canvassing
HTML & CSS	Code Academy, Don’t Fear The Internet, Tutsplus, Learn Layout, A to Z CSS, Dash, Web Accessibility, The Hello World,Khan Academy, HTML5 from Scratch	Mozilla, Dive into HTML5, 20 Things I Learned, HTML Dog,HTML & CSS, HTML5 for Designers, DOM Enlightenment, HTML Canvas
jQuery	Code Academy, Tutsplus, Code School	jQuery Fundamentals,Learn jQuery
Python	Code Academy, Google, Learn Street, Python Tutor,IHeartPY	Python for You and Me,  Dive into Python, Learn Python the Hard Way,Think Python, Python for Fun, Tango with Django,Django
Ruby & Ruby on Rails	Code Academy, TryRubyCode Learn, Railscasts, Rubymonk,Learn Street	Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, Learn Ruby the Hard Way, Learn to Program, Learn Rails by Example
PHP	Code Academy	PHP Programming,Practical PHP
Also see: How to Learn Regular Expressions (RegEx)
Google Apps Script	Getting Started, Office Hours, Google Scripts Examples,Learning Apps Script
WordPress	Treehouse, WordPress TV
Linux & Shell Scripting	Stanford.edu, Explain Shell	Conquer the Command Line
Node.js	Nodetuts, Node School	The Node Beginner Book,Mixu’s Node book, Node Up and Running,Mastering Node.js
Angular JS	Code School, Egg Head, Learn Angular	Angular JS Tutorial,Thinking Angular,Angular Tutorial, Getting Started (Adobe)
Also see: Learn Touch Typing & Code Faster
Git (version control)	Code School, Git Immersion,GitHub Training, Udacity	Pro Git, Learn Git, Gists in Github
Objective-C (iOS & Mac)	Code School, Stanford, iTunesU
Chrome Dev Tools	Code School, Dev Tools Secret, Chrome Dev Tools Tutorial,Udacity, Building Browser Apps
Go Language	Golang.org, GopherCasts	Programming in Go, Go by Example, Learning Go,Building Web Apps with Go, Learning Go
Java	Learn Java, Coding Bat, Java Udemy, Learneroo	Programming in Java,Thinking in Java, O’Reilly Learning Java, Think Java, Java & CS, Java for Python Devs
Android App Development	Udacity (Google Developers), Coursera, The New Boston,Google University, App Development Essentials, Code Learn,App Inventor (Visual)
D3 (data visualization)	Data Visualization for the Web, Dashing D3, D3 Tips & Tricks
Also see: Learn VIM, the text editor for programmers
SQL (Databases)	SQL Zoo, SQL @Stanford, Essential SQL, SQL for Nerds,Intro to SQL, SQL Bolt, PHP & MySQL
Everything Else	Udacity, edX.org, Coursera, Udemy$, Lynda$, Pluralsight$,Treehouse$, Open Consortium, One Month Rails$

Teaching Kids to Code

If there are kids in the family, you should download either Tynker (Android/iOS) or the Hopscotch app for iPad and they can learn the basics of programming through games and puzzles.

There’s also Scratch, an MIT project that allows kids to program their own stories and games visually. Scratch is available as a web app or you can download it on your Mac/Windows/Linux computer for offline use. Microsoft TouchDevelop, Blockly and Alice are some other web apps that will introduce the concepts of computer progamming to your children.

On a related note, the following chart from Google Trends shows the relative search popularity of various programming languages over the last 5 years. The interest in PHP has dipped over the years, JavaScript has more or less maintained its position while the popularity of Python & Node.js is on the rise.

Has Twitter Replaced Your RSS Reader

Eric Berlin prefers using Twitter over his RSS Reader. He writes – "I’ve been using my RSS reader more selectively of late, as a place to browse around when I have the time rather than looking at it as a mountain must be climbed everyday.

TechCrunch and Mashable are great places to catch up on the newest product releases but keeping up with them can be a nearly full-time endeavor." Link.

Visualize The Blogging World In Real Time With Twingly Screensaver

Twingly is a new blog search engines that they claim is "spam free" because it indexes only those websites and blogs that are linked from other "high quality" sites. So if Engadget links to Site A which also links to Site B, Twingly will probably index both sites A and B.

What I also liked about Twingly is their blog screensaver that shows blog stories on a rotating 3D globe as they get published in different parts of the world – its fascinating to see stories scrolling on your screen in almost real time while the earth continues to spin.

You can also rotate the globe with your mouse or zoom to any specific geographic region. 

Unlike Technorati, Ask Blogs or Google Blog Search that index sites from across the globe, Twingly is currently focused on indexing blogs from European countries though they will expand their footprint soon.

Challenges When Taking a Personal Blog to the Next Level

Darren: Do you have any advice or tips for smaller to medium sized blogs that want to step up in terms of professionalism and growth?

Victor: Building a team is crucial, always. Once you grow beyond just yourself, it is important to have a talent pool who can bring a variety of skills to the table. This usually means a level of tech-savvy (people shouldn’t be afraid of wikis or simple HTML) plus a certain level of management ability. There also gets a point where you need someone focusing on sales! Link.

Official Google Blogs Directory

Google now has total eleven official blogs. 

Official Google Blog - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
Adwords API - http://adwordsapi.blogspot.com/
Blogger Buzz - http://buzz.blogger.com/
Google Talk - http://googletalk.blogspot.com/
Google Video - http://googlevideo.blogspot.com/
Google Reader - http://googlereader.blogspot.com/
Google Adsense - http://adsense.blogspot.com/
Google Adwords - http://adwords.blogspot.com/
Google Desktop - http://googledesktop.blogspot.com/
Google Sitemaps - http://sitemaps.blogspot.com/
Google Base - http://googlebase.blogspot.com/

You can subscribe to all of them by importing this opml file in your newsreader. 

Newsgator vs Bloglines vs Google Reader

Here, we are comparing the three most popular web-based RSS readers - Newsgator Online Web Edition, Bloglines and Google Reader. All of them are server-based aggregation systems. 

For our comparison, we created a new account in each of the services and imported the CNet's Blog 100 OPML Source File [#] The scores for comparison categories are mentioned in brackets.

Setting up a New Account:
Bloglines and Google Reader require an email address to create an account that also becomes your login. Your email is verified before you can start using these services. In Newgator Online, the username and email address are different. The e-mail address is also not verified. (NG: 5, GR: 4, BL: 4)

Adding New Feeds:
All these services allow importing of OPML file or directly adding new feeds by specifying the URL. Google Reader was faster than Newgator and Bloglines when importing new content from the OMPL file. During the Import process, only Newsgator lets you further select or deselect feeds mentioned in the OPML file. Bloglines and Newsgator imported all the feeds without giving any such option. (NG: 4.5, GR: 4, BL: 4)

Navigating the Feeds:
Unlike Newsgator Online, Bloglines and Google reader support shortcut keys. With a single key, you can mark the entire session as read. Or open the original post in a new window. (NG: 2, GR: 4, BL: 4.5)

User Interface:
Bloglines displays information in two HTML frames - the left pane has all the feeds listed while the right pane shows corresponding posts, search results and other tips. Newsgator sports a similar interface to Bloglines but it scrolls both the panes together. This gets annoying particularly when a feed has long posts or lot of posts. Google Reader has a very different interface based on Ajax technology . It shows individual posts title on the left pane and the actual post on the right pane. To read a post, you will need to click it. I like Bloglines simple yet uncluttered interface. (NG: 3, GR: 4, BL: 5)

Finding New Source:
All these three services provide a search feature. In my comparison, I searched for feeds related to "Google" - Most of the search results in Newsgator were irrelevant. Even the Official Google blogs were missing in the search results. Google, as expected, wins by a huge margin, both in terms of relevance and freshness of content. Though Bloglines results were disappointing, Bloglines is the only service that lets you limit your search to your subscriptions only. (NG: 1, GR: 5, BL: 2)

Customization Features:
In Bloglines, you can choose either to view complete entries or Summaries or Titles only. You can also attach notes to individual feeds. Google Reader uses labels. Bloglines provides multiple options for sorting feeds. You can filter items in Bloglines based on the time the item was published. In Google Reader, feeds can be filterned based on labels or Title of the feed. (NG: 2, GR: 3, BL: 4)

Other Good Features:
Newsgator Smart Feeds let you track reference to any URL. This is a feature similar to the Google link: syntax. 

Both Newsgator and Bloglines display the number of subscribers associated with each feed but Bloglines even goes a step further, it displays the list of public subscribers. Google has no such option till now. 

Bloglines let you create a custom blog (hosted on Bloglines) to store and share your clippings and favorites. Clipping facility is available in Newsgator also but Bloglines provides a nice WYSIWYG editor for further rich-editing of clips. (NG: 2, GR: 2, BL: 4)

Conclusion:
Here are the final scores:

Google Reader: 26
Bloglines: 27.5
Newsgator Online Web Edition Free: 19.5

Bloglines wins but Google Reader, still in beta, is close. Google Reader outperformed everyone when searching for new content but Bloglines interface and usability make it a big winner.

Which Adsense Format and Color Scheme Performs Best

Should I use the 300x250 Adsense Rectangle or the much wider 336x280 for maximizing clicks? What do I select - 4 or 5 ads per adlink unit ? Will text only ads perform better than text+image ads ? Should I hide the colored border ?

These are some very common questions among web publishers especially those who have just gained admission to the University of Adsense. While the answer is to keep on experimenting, most Adsense experts employ a simple technique called "AB Split Testing" to optimize their Adsense ads.

The basic idea is to display different Adsense formats at the same location simultaneously but randomly. [This is done using the random() function in Javascript that generates a number between 0 and 1 with equal probability]

Here's a sample scenario to help you determine what format works best for your site - 300x250 or 338x280 ?

Step 1: Create two custom Adsense channels - name them as 300x250 and 336x280.

Step 2: Generate the Adsense Javascript code for each of these Adsense formats. Everything will be common in two code snippets except the value of following variables: google_ad_channel, google_ad_width, google_ad_height and google_ad_format.

Step 3: This is an important step, you will merge the two Adsense snippets in such a fashion that each makes an appearance on your web pages nearly 50% of the time. Here's a sample code:

<script type="text/javascript">
 var google_ads = Math.random();
    if (google_ads < .5){
      google_ad_channel = "300x250Channel";google_ad_width = 300;
      google_ad_height = 250;google_ad_format = "300x250_as";
    } else {
      google_ad_channel = "336x280Channel";google_ad_width = 336;
      google_ad_height = 280;google_ad_format = "336x280_as";
    }
      google_ad_client = "pub-xxx";google_ad_type = "text_image";
      google_color_border = "FFFFFF";google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
      google_color_link = "0000FF";google_color_text = "000000";
      google_color_url = "0000FF"; 
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" 
      src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>

Monitor the performance (CTR, eCPM) of the two Adsense channels for a week or two to know which of the two Ad formats are converting better. [Switch to Advanced reports, select the two Adsense for Content channels and group by both date and channel]

In the next iteration, you may try the same trick with two different color schemes but keeping the Ad format same - just create separate Adsense channels for each color scheme.

If you are displaying Adsense ads on the homepage of blogs or other places where content changes very frequently, it's a good idea to test between Text and Text+Image ads. 

The contextual ads may not be very relevant on blog homepage or archives because of the dynamic content and therefore CPM based Image ads may bring in more revenue.

Does Your Blog Address Contain The Word Blog? Air Force Just Banned You

If the web address of your blog contains the term “blog” (like blogs.nytimes.com or *.blogspot.com), men and women working for the United States Air Force will not be able to access your blogs.

In a strange move, the US Air Force has cut off access to all external websites that contain the term “blog” in the URL. The official argument is that blogs aren’t legitimate media outlets and therefore, shouldn’t be read at work.

Wired has the whole story – “Air Force has imposed bans on all sites with “blog” in their URLs, thus cutting off any sites hosted by Blogspot. The idea isn’t to keep airmen in the dark — they can still access news sources that are “primary, official-use sources.”

Google owned blogspot will be the worst affected blog network while WordPress or Russia based LiveJournal will remain accessible.

Why Your Company Needs a Blog and some Web 2.0 Presence

David Pogue of New York Times lists the advantages of blogging and participating in social media like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, etc. 

Some reasons – you’ll gain trust, goodwill and positive attention. You’ll put a human face on your company. And you’ll learn stuff about your customers that you wouldn’t have discovered any other way.

"When a company embraces the possibilities of Web 2.0, though, it makes contact with its public in a more casual, less sanitized way that, as a result, is accepted with much less cynicism. Web 2.0 offers a direct, more trusted line of communications than anything that came before it.

It’s not just blogging, either. It could be podcasts. Or videos. Permit the public to make mash-ups using your company’s characters, logos, music or products. Let’s have some more inside looks: at your product design cycles, your focus groups, your rejected designs, your employee cubicle videos." Link.

What Are You Working On ? LinkedIn Gets Facebook Status Updates

Facebook Status ("What are you doing right now?") is a quick way to broadcast some message to your entire network of Facebook friends.

Inspired by Facebook, LinkedIn too has added Status Updates that say – "What Are You Working On?".

When you update the status, it will be displayed on your LinkedIn profile. You can either display status to only your contacts or the entire LinkedIn network. 

Download Blogs and Websites for Offline Reading

Offline Explorer, wget, WinHTTrack Copier and Teleport are popular software utilities (both free and commercial) that let you download web pages to your local hard drive - they'll mirror complete websites, image galleries and everything else when your computer is connected to the web.

But there are some issues with most of these offline browsers. How do you browse or search web pages once they are saved locally? How do you update the local information when the source data has changed? Can you transfer the web content from computer to your mobile phone or the USB pen drive?

Update: The software listed in this article is no longer available. However, there are other working options to  help you download blogs and websites for offline reading.

Enter Webaroo - a free offline browser cum search engine that is not-so-geek and should solve all the above problems.

Once you install Webaroo, you suggest a list of blogs, websites, videos, podcasts or any online content that you would like to browse offline. If you are too busy to make suggestions, you can install readymade Webaroo packs - popular websites arranged in categories.

Webaroo then creates an offline copy of the site that you can browse or search as if you are connected. Based on your settings, Webaroo periodically checks the original web pages for modification and if there are any, the software automatically updates the local cache.

The software also provides visual hints for outgoing hyperlinks that are already available in the local cache.

What's Hot, What's Not ? Google Trends vs Technorati Charts vs Blogpulse

What are people searching for ? Is soccer a more popular game or cricket with web surfers ? What topics are more popular with bloggers ? Are they writing more about Google or Yahoo ? 

All these statistics and more are now available to anyone using some free tools. Here we compare the three most popular buzz-tracking services - Google, Technorati, Blogpulse: Read the pros and cons of each and choose the one which best suits your needs.

Technorati Charts - Big Daddy Technorati tracks some 40 million blogs - if someone, somewhere writes about somethings, it's more likely to be indexed by Technorati than other other service.


Technorati Charts are a recent addition that tracks how may blog posts mentioned a particular keyword or phrase in a given time. The charts. generated in real time. can be embedded in websites. 

It's a nice tool for egosurfing or when you are a popular guy like scoble. (see chart on the right)

However, you cannot compare two search terms in a single technorati chart. Also, the service is slow at times and chart generation may take a while.

Blogpulse Trend Search - This a useful trend watching tool from BlogPulse, a blog search engine. Blogpulse is more useful when you are interested in the following kind of information:

» How many people have blogged about GMail vs Hotmail in the past three months ? (see graph)

» You want to compare 2-3 URLs and watch the number of blog posts linking to them over time

The (dis)advantage of Blogpulse is that it tracks only blogs (or sites with feeds). You can compare only three terms per search. Blogpulse shows you information for a fixed time frame: 1, 2, 3 or 6 months. The Trend Graphs can be generated only from the Blogpulse website - they don't provide a simple URL with search parameters like Technorati.

Google Trends - The service is just like a day old infant but mature and powerful enough to kill competition. First it queries the most popular search engine's extensive database and second, it's more flexible and feature rich.

Here are some of the unique ways in which Google trend can be used that set it miles apart from competion:

» Help you find which queries originate from which regions of the world (including cities)

» Are people in Australia searching for soccer more than people in Ireland ?

» What more popular drink in your country - Coke or Pepsi

Above all, Google lets you limit your searches to individual months, years or the entire period. It's the only service you need to watch search trends. Google seems to have made a mark again.

The only drawback with Google Trend is that it doesn't provide the real statistics or numbers - Graphs are only relative which gives no idea about the real search data.