Kashif BLog dot Com

Entrecard is a Waste of Time

2008-12-03T12:08:00.010+05:00

This might sound a bit harsh but the fact is that I did not found Entrecard to be very effective. I joined their network in May'08 so for the past 7 months, I have got up to 700 hits from entrecard site with an average bounce rate of over 85% and according to my Google analytics stats, the average time these 700 visitor spent on this blog was not even 20 seconds. This is even worse than traffic from social bookmarking networks but when I went deep into the stats I found what was the real culprit behind this.

Entrecard was supposed to be an advertising network for bloggers which allows bloggers to advertise on other blogs and gain few extra traffic from other blogs but the only traffic one gets is from entrecard site and that also from other entrecard users having a quick look at your blog before sending an advertisement request.

One Day Advertising : Not Very Useful

This is the most sick part which I never liked about entrecard. The entrecard ad that is placed on other blogs is only displayed for one day and after your time is over the next ad in the queue will replace your ad so you have to send in another request to advertise on that blog. This requires your precious time in visiting entrecard website on regular basis and sending advertising requests to other blogs so that your ad can be spread across as many blogs as you want or at least that is what most of the entrecard users think.

What I Gained From Entrecard

In contrast to this bad experience with entrecard I gained some good relationships with very interesting and talented bloggers and I got the chance to view some really cool and exciting blogs for which I will definitely visit entrecard website in future.

Conclusion

If you have a very new blog that you just set up few day ago then Entrecard might benefit you a little for gaining some exposure but for a person like me that keeps evaluating services on regular basis, entrecard does not deserve to be on my blog anymore as the time I spent on Entrecard could have been used to further optimize my blog and focusing a bit more on increasing link popularity of this blog but I lost some valuable time and have learned my lesson. So good bye Entrecard !

6 FireFox Auto Reload | Refresh Plugins for Developers

2008-11-29T16:45:00.009+05:00

Got tired of hitting the browser refresh button each time to preview the updated page or to see how the changes look like to a web page that is being developed by you. The problem with most of the WYSIWYG web page editors is that they usually stuck most of the time and they do not give you the real or exact picture of what a web page would really look like when viewed in a browser. There are various auto refresher tool available that will do the job for you but they cost too much for a very simple yet tedious task. To get an auto refresh tool for free I use Firefox web browser which gives me the ability to install third party add-ons for performing various tasks, one of them is to automate the refreshing of a web page. I have been suing FireFox for a long time now and the only reason for using it on the first place was that it provided tabbed browsing experience which was not available in other web browsers at that time. The tabs allow me to work more efficiently without messing up my desktop with dozens of browser windows.

Coming back to automating the reloading of a web page, below is a list of few of the best FireFox plugins that will perform this task for you. Get any of the one that meets your requirements.

List of Auto Reload | Refresh Plugins

1. Tab Mix Plus [download plugin]

This is one of the top FireFox plugins that has lots of features with which you can do a variety of things in your FireFox browser tabs. One of them is to set the reload time of any or all tabs in your browser window. Then after the selected time ends, the selected tab(s) automatically refreshes and loads the updated page.

2. ReloadEvery [download plugin]

In this plugin, you can select the auto reload time anywhere from 5 seconds to 15 minutes or you can add your own refresh time. Very handy tool when you want to view a web page that has data which changes very often(for example stock rates, live scoreboards etc).

3. Lathe2 [download plugin]

This one is very simple and straight forward. Just select the time interval and the page will reload automatically after that time.

4. XRefersh [download plugin]

This plugin has not been very popular but it works as good as any other listed on this page. This tool automatically detects any changes on a web page and then reloads the updated page. This tool is very handy for web developers since they can easily preview real time changes that they make to the code of a web page.

5. Page Update Checker [download plugin]

This one works in a slightly different way. It checks a web page for changes and if it finds that a web page has changed, it notifies the user via a sound or a small icon. You can set the monitoring time so that it automatically checks the web page for updates after regular intervals.

6. Check4Change [download plugin]

This one works the same way the Page Update Checker works but you can specify certain portions of a web page that you want to monitor changes /updates. Select the section of the web page that you want to monitor for any change and simply select the time interval for this plugin to check for updates and if it occurs, it is indicated by a variety of ways.

Hope some of these plugins will really can in handy in your web development tasks. Feel free to share these with others.

What is Link Popularity

2008-11-25T18:00:00.007+05:00

photo by seocompany

Link Popularity

By definition, link popularity is the measure of both quality and quantity of hyperlinks or simply inbound links pointing to a web page from various other web pages that might be in the same domain or from other domains. It is just one of the factors that many search engines like Google,Yahoo and Msn take into consideration when they evaluate the presence or 'popularity' of web pages so that they can be ranked accordingly.

Lets take an example by considering a scenario where a number of people fight compete for becoming the top 10 potential Presidents of an organization which manufactures baseball bats. Open polling takes place where Managers from various departments of the same organization and also from other organizations cast their votes. Now I being a part of that organization , is assigned the responsibility for evaluating the weight or 'authority' of each vote and then select 10 candidates and assign them rank 1-10, depending upon how much authoritative votes they got. I did all the 'analysis' and then assigned all the candidates their well deserved ranks. The ones that were ranked low were because they got:

1. Too many votes but not from relevant organizations
2. Too many votes but not from organizations that are very new in the market
3. Very few votes

And the candidates that were ranked high was because they got:

A. Many votes from organizations having the same trade (baseball and/or related to sports)
B. Few votes but from well established organizations

Conclusion

So to take a website on top spots you do not need massive number of inbound links instead, one needs to develop certain popularity level for his/her site which depends upon:

1. Quantity of inbound or one way links
2. Relevancy of sites linking to your site
3. Authority of sites linking to your site

Link Popularity mostly depends on the above three factors. So next time you create one way links for your site, keep these in mind.

Feel free to share this article with others.

Customize Your Gmail Looks

2008-11-21T11:51:00.006+05:00

Gmail is free a web based email service provided by Google. It is simple, fast and not too fancy like other free email services available. It was launched in 2004 and was only available on invitation by existing Gmail users but in 2007 it was opened for all and I have been using it for over a year now and have never experienced any difficulty in accessing my emails. Its current email storage capacity is over 7 GB (1 GB = 1024 MB) so that is lots of space for storing all types of media attached to any email.

Today when I opened my inbox I noticed that Gmail now has more custom designed themes which if applied can change the looks and feel of your inbox. Have a look at the following screen shot. There are 31 different themes available (including the default theme) .The good part is that none of these themes will cause your browser to crash or slow down your Gmail loading time.

Few of those themes are designed in a way that they look different at different times of the day depending upon various factors that include sunrise, sunset and weather. You will only need to select your region(Country/City) when applying any of the above mentioned themes.

So Google mail or simply Gmail is not just a secure email service that helps you fight email spam but it has to offer much more than just sending and receiving emails. Its recent release of voice and video chat for its web based chat system is already catching lot of attention.

New Improved YouTube Search Bar

2008-11-18T14:47:00.005+05:00

I don't know whether this new enhancement made in YouTube videos is getting any attention or not but it seems like a very nice addition to any YouTube video that is being used on any website other than Youtube.com itself. In the past webmasters need to place a custom designed search box (shown above) on their sites so that their visitors can search for YouTube videos from that site but this is no longer required as any YouTube video that is placed on any other site now has its own search b ar as pointed in the image below.

This search bar is displayed before the video starts, disappears while the video is playing and re-appears when ever the video is paused or it ends. This is the same search that is provided on Youtube website and by typing in any search terms you get the same results that you get from Youtube.com !

The results are displayed in the same way with a short preview of each video.

You can also customize YouTube videos for your website or blog in a variety of manner by modifying its dimensions and adding different color borders. Click here for more details.

Gmail's New Voice and Video Chat Features

2008-11-12T13:55:00.006+05:00

Google has officially announced the release of voice and video conferencing feature for their Gmail users. With previous Gmail chat, users can only send text messages but mow Gmail users can talk to each other via voice chat or even see each other via video chat feature. This is similar to Yahoo and Msn chat messengers but Google says that they are the first one to integrate all the instant messenger features in their web based email.
What New You will be Able to do With Gmail Chat

You can have no more reasons not to have a Gmail account as now you will be able to run Gmail chat in pop-out windows or you can even scale the web cam view of your friend or colleague to full screen during Video chat.

System Requirements

At present Gmail voice and video chat feature is only supported by Mac OS X and Windows XP / Vista and can only run on Firefox 2.0+, Safari 3.0, IE7 and Google Chrome web browsers. If you fulfill the above requirement then all you need to do is download a one time Gmail voice and video chat plug-in. After installing the plug-in you will have to restart you browser and now when you open your new Gmail chat, you can see a new link in your chat window which says "Video & more" just like the one shown below.

In the coming days, Google will roll out this new Gmail voice and video chat functionality to all its users across the globe. I am yet to test these new features in Gmail and if any one reading this have done so then do share your experience by filling the comment form below.

Feel free to share this with others.

Enlarge and Rotate Online Photos

2008-11-09T23:37:00.005+05:00

Have you ever come across a web image that you want to zoom in without leaving that page or you want to rotate that image either clockwise or counter clockwise. Now you can zoom in/out and even rotate any image present on any web page without moving your head. For this you need to have Firefox browser which allows you to install addons which you cannot do with other web browsers like IE . Although the ability to add thirty addons has been causing few problems in Firefox browser but these were small bugs in the code due to the incompatibility with browser newer version only.

Now you I assume that you already have Firefox and now you will be needing two separate addons, one to enlarge photos and the other to rotate them.

1. Image Zoom :
This lets you zoom into photos on any page up to 400%. Zoom in and out then just right click and reset the image to its original size. Very handy tool specially when you need to zoom in and read text on images that are not large enough. It can also be used as a fun tool.

2. Rotate Image :
This addon will assist you in viewing images that are put up in wrong directions and with this tool you can easily rotate them in either direction. You can also set the rotation angle anywhere from 0 to 360 degrees.

Feel free to share these two tools with others.

Increased website traffic from Social Bookmarking sites

2008-11-07T14:11:00.005+05:00

The great part of getting website traffic from social bookmarking sites (like Digg , Yahoo buzz , Technorati , Stumbleupon , Delicious etc) is that you do not need to wait for your web pages to get crawled , indexed and climb high in SERP (search engine result page) . With very little effort , your website can get thousands of free hits from social bookmarking sites in very short amount of time . But this is not the case most of the time . Spammers exploit such fast growing Social bookmark sites for their spammy sites due to which policies of such sites are getting revised quickly and above all users are also getting very touchy when they view a new site that looks a bit fishy and they will only vote in favor of it if they feel that it is worth sharing with others . The point here is that quality content never gets wasted but to expose that content and make sure that it is spread in a manner it was meant to be , one needs to strive just a little more harder .

To attract more website traffic many webmasters are placing social bookmark icons on web pages that are easily accessible by their visitors . So if a visitor enjoyed reading that page then it is more likely that he or she will click on one of those icons to bookmark that web page and share it with other people in the same interest group and thus increasing traffic to that page .Many webmasters particularly bloggers are very effectively utilizing social bookmaking sites to get more traffic but there are still many new bloggers those are not aware of the fact that if they generate quality content and get it listed on social media networks then social bookmarking traffic can make a huge difference .

Few weeks ago I did a small experiment and placed a provocative image at the end of each of my blog posts . The image contained icons of some of the most popular social bookmarking sites and it said "Enjoyed reading do me a favor share with your friends before you leave" . I kept this custom bookmark image for few weeks and the results were very promising . I used to get few bookmarks in a month from my blog visitors but this custom image increased blog traffic and bookmark count by almost 10 times . Currently I am using default bookmark image and it is also working fine for me since after I changed my blog template I have less wider post area . Maybe some day I will design another custom image to fit into my posts .

The best part of using the above bookmark icons / links is that you only need to write quality content and then your website visitors will do the rest by sharing your quality pages with others . It is also not a bad idea to ask your visitors for a bookmark and it works most of the time .

If yo do not currently use those icons then you can get them for your blog for absolutely free . Here are few of the sites that can provide different designs of social bookmark buttons that will fit well in any web page .

If you enjoyed reading this page then feel free to share it with your friends .

Analyse your blog worth with dnScoop

2008-11-05T14:53:00.008+05:00

Do you have a blog which has a decent Google page rank , lots of backlinks , high Alexa rank and is some what popular ? Or you have a new site with almost no backlinks , no page rank and a very low Alexa traffic rank . Doesn't matter if its new or old because you can get the value ( estimated ) of your site from a free website value estimation tool called dnscoop.com

It gives an estimated value of any domain based on some of the following factors :

- Age of domain
- Google Pagerank
- Alexa rank
- Number of inbound link ( or simply backlinks )

Based on the above factors , it generates an estimated value of any site. According to this tool , Kashifblog.com has a worth of $900 . Google.com having over 900 billion backlinks has a value of over $1.7 billion . I think that is pretty low from big G standards .

So how much your site worths ?

Google alerts now for Feeds

2008-11-04T21:15:00.006+05:00

Previous Google alerts were only sent via email as updates but recently Google has made it available via feeds as well . You will no longer have to worry about your mail box filling up with email messages from Google . As now you can set as many alerts as you like ( keeping in mind that there is a limit up to 1000 alerts per email address ) .

When you sign in to your Google alerts account and edit or create an alert , you will now see that when you click on the delivery option , you are provided with an option between email and feed .

I personally feel this is a cool feature and as said by google officials , a highly requested feature as well .

Take screen shots of any website

2008-11-02T17:00:00.002+05:00

Take screen shots of any web page that is online by just feeding the URL of the page to Thumbalizr.com and it will generate screen shot of that web page in just few seconds . It captures screen shot in 150 , 320 , 640 , 800 , 1024 and 1280 pixels wide PNG image .

Kashifblog.com : A new look

2008-11-01T20:26:00.005+05:00

Today I changed my blog template to this new template called Shiny Blogger template , offered free by OBT . This is my 3rd template so far for this blog . It looks a bit different than the original template as I have modified lots of colors and dimensions to meet my current and future blog content requirement.

New Look

Old Look

So what you think about this new template ? Or you think the previous template was better . Feel free to leave your opinions and suggestions .

John Reese is shutting down BlogRush for good

2008-10-30T10:54:00.006+06:00

John Reese , owner of a free service BlogRush , finally decides to shut it down . He at last realizes that there is no point in keeping up a service which failed to do what it was meant for .

Those of you who do not know what BlogRush was , they can no longer give this free service a test run as by the time I publish this post , this site will be no longer accepting new members . In brief , BlogRush was supposed to deliver free traffic from one blog to another through their NOT so small widget . The size of the widget was not the one causing troubles but it was more the very very low traffic that it delivered . The click through rate was not even 0.5% and that by all means is very low .

This is what John wrote to BlogRush members :

I want to say "Thank You" to all of the great bloggers that at least gave BlogRush a test to see if it would work for them. We sincerely appreciate you giving the service a try.

I happen to remove BlogRush widget from this blog sometimes ago and it was because of the same reason why this service is coming to end .

Free image hosting Services for your blog

2008-10-08T12:27:00.006+06:00

photo credit : Pearsonified

Today I will list down few of the top FREE photo sharing / hosting tools that you will always find handy for your blog . Images are a great source for attracting readers and getting more hits to your blog but if you find your self short of hosting bandwidth for your blog then it is always a nice idea to host your site images elsewhere . There are various free image hosting services but I am listing down few of the top ones that offer reliable services with lots of monthly bandwidth ( in some cases unlimited ) .

1. Photobucket
Photobucket offers 1GB of free web space for storing your images, photos and videos as well . Plus all your hosted media gets 25GB of free monthly bandwidth which is more than enough for a low / medium traffic site .

2. Flickr
This one is run by Yahoo can you can upload 100MB of images each month . That makes it 1200MB per year and it never ends . The counter is reset when the next month starts and you get 100MB of more bandwidth for adding photos to your Flickr account .

3. Picasa
Picasa Web albums is run by Google itself so you can always rely on them for maximum up time and lots of free bandwidth . You get 1024 MB = 1 GB of free web space for storing your images . Plus it has many other features beside offering free image hosting and sharing .

4. Webshots
This one offers numbers rather than space . Being a free member you can upload 1000 photos plus you get additional photo slots ( up to 100 ) each month .

5. Tinypic
Tinypic is just like Photobucket .In fact it is run my Photobucket and the great part is that they do not have any limits on the number of photos you upload to your account . The maximum resolution allowed is 1600 pixel either width or height . Images larger than this will be automatically re sized .

6. Imageshack
There is only one restriction on this site and it is on the size of image you upload . There is no limit on the number of images you upload to your account so this one offers unlimited storage and bandwidth for your photos .

It is up to you which one you join but I will advise you to go through their Terms of Service before you joining any .This will give you an idea about what kind of images you can upload to these free image hosts and another piece of advice is to always create a free account and then upload your images because if you upload without registering then there is no guarantee that you images will be kept in their database for ever.

Are you tagging images on your site ?

2008-10-04T11:32:00.007+06:00

photo credit : Customtrophiesinc

If your answer is No , then you might me missing some extra traffic as there is a huge quantity of internet users that use image search engines ( like Google image search ) to search images on the web . If you use images that are relevant to the content of your site then chances are that those images will bring many targeted visitors to your site which is only possible if you have tagged your images wisely . Continue reading to find out how to do this .

If you look into the HTML code of your image then you will find something like this :

There might be other HTML attributes withing IMG tag but the one that we will be working on is the 'alt' or 'alternate text' attribute . The alternate text of the image in the above example is 'My childhood photo' which is a short description about that image . This short description will not only contain SEO value but will also serve the following purposes :

For users having low speed internet connections, who may opt not to load graphics
For users who are using a pay per transferred data connection
For people using hand held devices etc

So whenever an image is not shown , its alternate text will be shown . It is not necessary that you add the alternate text to all the images on your site . In some cases where images are just used for decoration purpose ( part of your site template / layout ), the alt tag can be left blank like this alt=' ' or you need not to worry about it because it is left blank by default .

lets do a little experiment by searching for images using an image search engine . In my case I only use Google image search . My search term is 'smilies for your blog' and here is what I get in my search results :

As you can see the image search results indicate three important ingredients

Image thumbnail
Short description ( this is Not the description used in alt tags )
URL of the site which contains the image ( Not the URL of the page containing the image )

You can see in the above image that the thumbnail shows smileys image which I used in one of my previous blog post which was about adding smileys to your blogger blogs . The alt tag or the alternate tag used for that image was 'Smilies for your blog' which is exactly what we searched using Google image search . The short description shown along with the thumbnail is the title of the page containing that image . So if you use alt tags and page titles effectively then you can easily optimize all the images on your site and in return you will be getting extra hits to your sites only for images .

Google Page rank update : September 2008

2008-09-29T13:49:00.003+06:00

It seems like Google again has been busy in updating page rank of websites on the web .

My prediction for this current page rank update didn't quite went the way I wanted as Google tends to be updating page ranks very often these days . The previous Google page rank update took place just two months a go and I was expecting this PR update to occur some where in the end of October 2008 .

But who cares about page rank these days ? Higher positions in SERPs is what most of the webmasters target these days .

How do I protect my Inbox from spammers ?

2008-09-24T15:41:00.006+06:00

Spam is unwanted , uninvited or unsolicited email messages that internet users receive daily in their spam or junk folders . These messages are not from their friends , family , business partners or anyone that they have ever heard before .

It can be any email message urging you to click on a link to get more information about a product or service . Once you click on the it , you are taken directly into the trap laid down by those spammers and you either end of wasting time or even loose some buck$.

I receive 10-20 daily spam messages in my Gmail inbox . Thanks to their excellent spam filtering algorithm , my inbox remains spam free as 90% of such spam messages are automatically blocked. But no matter how hard we try to make this world a better place , some lovely characters will discover new ways to exploit loop holes in the system . Of course I am talking about spammers who else ?

How do we protect ourselves from such spam ? The answer is NOT Spam Filter . Such automatic spam blocking softwares are somehow effective in filtering most of the spam but they can never prevent them from coming your way .The first thing we need to do is that we have to safeguard and protect our email addresses and make sure we do not just give it to any body . This is the most easiest way to loose control over spam . What happens is that when we visit a new site and notice that they are offering something that might benefit us but wait a minute ! Before they can send us the info / product , they require us to subscribe to their mailing list . Most of the internet users will fall pray to this technique and will end up giving their email to someone that they do not know . If you are lucky nothing will happen but more likely your email will be sold to spammers who usually collect email in such a way and then make mega mailing lists consisting of thousands of email address and will send repeated emails (SPAM) to them on frequent basis .

How to protect your Email and stop receiving spam emails ?

The answer is simple , your "attitude" . Continue reading and you will know what I am talking about .

Rule#1 : Never give your email address to someone who you do not know unless you really know what you are doing.
Rule#2 : Do not share your email in chat rooms and internet messengers . These are the places where the spammers are hunting for free email addresses.
Rule#3 : Keep your computer virus free . Many viruses search address books for email addresses and when they find what they are looking for they collect all the data and then send it to spammer and that all is done in the background and you will not notice anything at all . So keep your anti-virus utility up to date and run frequent virus scans to ensure your computer remains virus free.
Rule#4 : If you are a webmaster then chances are that you have a feedback / contact page on your website with your business email . Encrypt it before it is picked up by automatic email harvesters . If you do not know how to do this then I suggest that you read my previous post about protecting email IDs from spam Bots .

These are some very basics rules which will help in NOT receiving email spam . Make sure you understand that filtering spam and preventing yourself from getting spam are two different things. But this will be another blog post which will be discussed some other time so stay tuned .Also feel free to share this article but please do link back to http://www.kashifblog.com

Manage and remix your photos with Picasa

2008-09-20T13:43:00.005+06:00

Picasa is a freeware PC software by Google which lets you organize photos on your pc . In fact it is more than just a photo manageemnt tool and some of its highlighted features include :

-Photo Slideshows creation

-Photo collage maker

-Making movies by ading audio yo your slideshows

-Ability to add text to your images

-Edit photos by adding various photo effects

-Making slideshows of photos on your hard drive is very simple with Picasa . You just select the photos and Picasa does the rest . It has variety of build-in effects for image slide shows and you can select the one that meets your requirement.

-You can also make photo collage and can set your results as desktop wallpaper or can also share your creativity on the web with your friends.

-The ability to add audio to slideshows is something new for a photo editor and Picasa does it quite well . You can make professional looking movies with this simple yet powerful software by incorporating background audio to your slideshows.

-You can add text in any style and format to your images.This lets you create effective presentations and this comes in handy when making movies , slideshows or tutorials .

- Picasa is also a very effective photo editor . It has many photo editing features that you will find in editors like PhotoShop . You can crop images , automatically adjust images with red-eye defect , apply soft focus to images and many other easy to use phot editing tools.

So what are you waiting for , go get your free copy of Picasa .