Technotip.org - Part 28

Holy IT! – by Scott Wittig

Holy IT! The Amazing power of ClarITy – by SCOTT WITTIG.

‘Holy IT!’ – Is a Guide to Finding and Doing Your Thing – Your ‘IT’. This book is written to help you identify, and start acting on, that thing that you (and those around you) know that you should be doing, but aren’t. We all have one. Scott asks “What’s yours?”.

In scott’s own words – “I identified my purpose in life – to HELP OTHERS ACHIEVE.”
HolyIT-scott-wittig
Main Contents of the Book
IT
Identify
They Can’t Eat You.
Wat If…You Don’t Do It?

DO
Determine
‘fessing up
Great Expectations
Always Positive

Execute.
Baby Steps
Change Agents
The Law of the Squirrel
NOW Rocks!

It is a very small book, with 84 pages(excluding the Appendix etc) of content.

It talks about finding the passion inside us – and takes us through some steps to identify our passion. It helps us to examine whether the chosen IT is really our passion or just a short term interest.

What I like about the book
Goes to the point directly – no added fluff.
Good Writing – catchy structure of the content.
Use of Inspiring Quotes.

From the very beginning(Introduction) itself Scott starts to say what he actually want to say with this book.

This book will surly help you find your passion(if you have it), and it guides you what to do and what not to, to achieve your IT.

I couldn’t come up with a single chapter and say it as my favorite – in fact every chapter is packed with some good stuffs to learn.

I highly recommend this book to everyone. It costs $14.99(amazon) and is a best investment to a great source of information.

One of the quotes I read in the book:
“Death isn’t the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live.” – Norman Cousins.

My testimonial:

“I am Having IT, and I am Doing IT. Now you have IT and Do IT.”

“There’s no point in Getting Things Done or aspiring to a 4-Hour Workweek until you discover your IT! You need to know what drives you, compels you, fills you with passion. Holy IT! is a must read for anyone struggling to figure out their passion in life!”
– Andy Beal, co-author of Radically Transparent.

Twitter Mobile Web Adds Reply, Retweet, Favorite..

Twitter Mobile Web was friendly only for status update. There was no reply button, no retweet button and no favorite button.

It was kind of frustrating to remember the Twitter ID of the person, and then type it in the update box(without spelling mistakes!) and send the reply.

Recently Twitter has added bunch of new features to it, to make it more useful. Now I don’t use any Apps, I just use the simple mobile web interface.

Some of the things added to Twitter Mobile Web are – reply, retweet, favorite, turn off the images, Popular topics, popular topics of today week etc, real time search capabilities, hhmm, but the copy rights has not yet been updated, its still showing © 2009. If you find some thing more, please share it with us in the comment section.

Missing..
Yes, I still miss the display of updates in AJAX style(That we can see on Standard Twitter Web). We need to refresh each time to see the new updates. And there is a big Refresh button provided at the top for this purpose.

Here are some of the screen shots from my Nokia 6630.

Problem!
Although there was one issue(at the time of writing this post). Once you goto twitter mobile web and input your user id and password and hit signin, it just refuses to signin and stays on the same page. There is a big Refresh button at the top of the page, which is of no use!

To get into Twitter, all you need is, to switch to Standard Twitter Webpage – signin and then switch back to Twitter Mobile Web, and it works!

7 Ways To Get Traffic – Before You Need It!

One common question we all hear, and at some point of time have asked – How to get traffic to our new blog?

Here are some examples of how I got my first 500 – 800 visits per day in my initial days of blogging:

I started it before I actually needed it:

1. Commenting on other blogs: I had spent some time in selecting a domain name(even though I din’t have much knowledge about selecting a good domain name at that time). And started participating in comment section of various blogs – niche which I was interested in. And included the URL of my blog in all the comments(not within the comment section).
Tips: Do not leave your new website blank. Atleast have a single introduction page, or better if you can have atleast 10 good articles published.

2. SEO benefits: As I already had the blog up, most search engines had already crawled my blog and was visible in results page for some keywords.
Tips: If you know your niche, then have atleast 10 good articles published – which are fully concentrated on your niche. Include keywords related to your niche and take time to carefully optimize those 10 articles, so that you rank high for some keywords.

3. Put up the email/rss subscription options on your blog: Even though I had a single page on my blog – where I wrote about myself(profile kind of), many people subscribed to it! I had 30 – 40 subscribers when I started blogging – when my first real article was live.
Tips: Put a big and highly visible(yet not annoying) subscription link on your blog. I guess people who signup for your blog updates in the initial stage are email subscribers, so make sure you put email subscription option and highlight that its a free service.

4. Include your blog link in any social networking site you use.
Tips: Have conversation with like minded people, who are interested in the niche your blog falls in. This strategy would help in more conversion rate, and you will enjoy the social networking as you communicate with like minded people.

5. Participate in forums: Forums are good place to meet like minded people and to share your knowledge and to gain knowledge from other participants. Use your blog link in the signature area of the forum and in your forum profile.
Tips: Do not try to promote your blog in any ways. Because you don’t have an active blog yet and that may act against you. So be genuine in helping as many people as you can. This increases your credibility and builds a community around you before you actually need it.

6. Write Testimonials: As you probably read some books, attended some course, used some online services before you started your blog. Send your testimonial to those people, if you really like them and recommend them to other people. Again be genuine and don’t do it just to get a link back.
Tips: See previous testimonials. If the owner of the product is linking to the person who gave the testimonial, then you can expect a link back, if he thinks your testimonial helps his business.
Take time and form a very good, real testimonial. Do not make it over hyped inorder to get through.

7. Public Speaking & Presentation: If you get a public speaking opportunity and/or you have to give a public presentation for a social cause, then at the end its not a bad idea to show your blog Name and URL along with your Name and designation or whatever. This will give people a way to follow up with you, in case some one is very much impressed with your presentation and want to get more from you.

Caution
At this stage do not try to promote your blog in any ways, because it may have an adverse effect. Just enjoy the benefit of having a blog before its actually fully active.

Do not keep postponing the date to start blogging actively. no time is perfect time.
Imagine, if you are planning to have a blog and never actually taking your first step to find a good name, register it and write atleast 10 good articles – you would miss a lot of opportunity. You will have to leave comments on other websites/blogs as an anonymous guy, you will loose the SEO benefit etc to name some.

Do not plaster your blog with ads when you’re not yet blogging consistently, because this may give people a wrong impression.

I am not saying that – If you don’t start your blog/business now, you will loose money. But you will surly loose some benefits of starting it early enough. You will loose all the extra benefits I have talked above.

Finally
Its a good idea to take some time out of your busy life and find a good domain name(which is the only thing probably which will take some time), register it, and try to write atleast 10 quality articles concentrating on your niche.

Often times we get a brilliant idea for a blog post, but only to know that – “It would have been great, if I had started a blog”. Let that not happen to you, start a blog early and learn along the way.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race. Stop thinking about all the details, just start a blog/business. You are bound to stumble along the way, but you will figure things out as you move along.

It would be better to make a mistake while blogging than to never start the blog. Learning never ends and if you are thinking of starting a blog or a business after learning everything, then take it from me – You are not going to start your blog or business. Because learning is a never ending process.

10 Ways To Make Your Blog Load Faster and Save Bandwidth

This post is part of Saturday, Sunday Series for Newbie Bloggers. You can contact me, if you have any questions.

Sridhar

Q. I have been tweaking my blog to make it load faster, but nothing seems to be helping. And eventhough I don’t have heavy traffic to my blog, often times it goes down 🙁 Can you please suggest me something to over come my problem? Am I missing something or is it normal with all blogs. And I am hosting my blog with basic hosting package, so is that the problem?

To make blog load faster
1. Remove any extra widgets you are using on your blog.- Twitter updates, Facebook fan widget etc
2. If you are running banner ads, make sure you host all the images on your domain.
3. Make less http requests from any webpage.
Ex: Instead of using “http://yourdomainname.com/images/123.jpg” you can use “/images/123.jpg” in the img tag.
4. Use less images. Having one or two images for a article helps, anything more will really slow down the site. Use multiple images only if highly necessary.
5. Move all the CSS and JavaScript codes to an external file. And make sure to optimize them – remove extra spaces, delete the useless codes and make the scripts small and smart(good coding).
6. If you have any badges and banners which does not provide any value to your visitors, then remove it mercilessly.
7. Optimize the images that you are using on your blog.
8. Use Gzip compression. Add the following code to your .htaccess file if your web host have content compression (gzip compression) turned off. You can test it using http compression tool.


# Turn GZip compression on (as per http://tr.im/fnn6)
<Location />
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
# BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48
# the above regex won't work. You can use the following
# workaround to get the desired effect:
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</Location>

9. Do not make use of lot of javascript codes to track your visitors. Try to stick only to the necessary things. And do not forget to test your sites performance using Webmasters tool.
Goto Webmasters Tool -> Labs -> Site performance.

Here you can see the performance over view graph and lot more information like: Load time of certain pages from your blog, You can install a 1.5MB add-on to evaluate the performance of your pages and get suggestions on how to improve them, it also reports – what is consuming more time to load and what you can do to improve the performance etc.
10. Above all the speed of the servers where you are hosting your blog is very important – without which any tweaking will go in vain.

Bonus tips:
1. Use only the necessory plugins and remove the rest.
2. Do not use Widgets. Use handcoding and put the things into the WordPress theme directly – reducing the number of calls.

Have a backup of your blog, and if you are comfortable: Use DataBase cleanup plugin, Database optimizer plugin, delete the extra post revisions, use static links – this helps very little, if you already have Gzip compression enabled or Super cache plugin enabled.

Final Thoughts from Matt Cutts:

Hosting
Invest in a good hosting company. See to that you are paying atleast 5 to 6 $ per month for your basic hosting package. If you go far a cheaper web hosting, then the problems are mostly obvious. I suggest going with Doreo host, Blue host, Host Gator, MediaTemple etc. And a basic package is all needed in the initial days.

If you are hosting at a decent hosting company, and still facing this problem, then you must consider evaluating your blogs log files. It contains information about what is consuming the bandwidth. You can mail your hosting company support team and can ask them to check it for you and to report the possible problem. In most cases it would be a plugin problem or a faulty code introduced into the CMS. Or sometimes if you are using some automated scripts to handle some tasks, all these could create some problem, if there are some bugs.

A good hosting company should be able to help you with this – if not, you know, its time to move on. And there are plenty of good web hosts to opt.

Happy Blogging!

Phone Recycling – a Smart Idea, for a Good Cause

If you are living in India you might have come across an ad featuring Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan, where he endorse Nokia and its phone recycling work.

Message from the ad: “For every recycled phone, Nokia will plant a try.”

I was curious to know, whether there are any other companies out there doing this work already. Just Google and found a website SellMyMobile.

The difference is, Nokia will probably scrap the phone and make new phones using the recycled materials from your old phone.

Sell My Mobile is a mobile phone recycling comparison service that allows users to get the best prices possible when they come to sell their mobile phones. The site lists the most valuable phones and the most popular phones to be sold.

The process of selling your old mobile phone seems to be easy and takes just few minutes. All you need to do is type in your mobile phone’s model number into the search box and pick the best price that is returned to you. You will then receive a freepost address to send your phone away and a cheque will drop through your letter box within a few days. It really is that easy to sell mobile phone handsets with Sell My Mobile.

I also saw ebay and other places, but the price for the old phone was low and the third party website doesn’t seem to take care of the transaction – except taking their piece of price(service charge).

15 Things My Friends Felt When Heard of “iPad” + Photos and Videos

I am living at a place near Bengaluru(Bangalore), where Apple inc is not yet dominantly popular.

Not to blame them – Microsoft is more popular here due to its user friendliness or may be because most government offices in India are using Microsoft Operating System and Office suites.

[ I always feel, how good it would be to a developing country like India(economy wise) to switch to open source software like Unix, OpenOffice etc.]

First thing first: So what is iPad ?
The iPad is a tablet computer developed by Apple Inc. It features multi-touch interaction with print, video, photo, and audio multimedia, internet browsing, and runs most iPhone OS apps. The device has an LED-backlit 9.7-inch (25 cm) color LCD display and uses a virtual keyboard for text input. Prices for models in the United States range from $499 to $829 depending on the amount of storage and inclusion of 3G access.

So ipad is everything, from iPod, iBook and we can use iTunes and the Apps that we are already using on iPod and iPhones.

Photos:

wireless-ipad

safari_hands_browser

safari-ipad

wireless-ipad

performance-ipad

notes-ipad

multi_touch-ipad

maps-ipad

mail-ipad

led-ipad

iwork-ipad

itunes-ipad

ipod-ipad

ipad-1up-us-ipad

ibooks-ipad

home_screen-ipad

hero-ipad

hardware-ipad

gallery-software-youtube-ipad

gallery-software-video-ipad

gallery-software-safari-ipad

gallery-software-notes-ipad

gallery-software-maps-ipad

gallery-software-mail-ipad

gallery-software-itunes-ipad

gallery-software-ipod-ipad

gallery-software-ibooks-ipad

gallery-software-contacts-ipad

gallery-software-appstore-ipad

contacts-ipad

connect-ipad

calendar-ipad

battery-ipad

appstore-ipad

accessories-ipad

a4_chip-ipad

Some Videos:

https://videopress.com/v/wp-content/plugins/video/flvplayer.swf?ver=1.15

As iPad is still a new thing to all of us, I thought it would be fun to ask my friends:

What do you think iPad is? [ like: iPhone, iPod, iMac etc.]

I asked those who did not have any clue about what iPad is, to make sure the answers are based on their pure imagination.

My friends replied me with some fantastic imaginary things:

Rajesh: Digital mouse pad.

Manjunath patil: Its a Computation Device.

Navya k: something like inkpad (iPad). or may be like iMac.

Samartha: Digital Keyboard.

Sawti D M: Who is this ? 😉

Sridhar P: A combination of both phone and computer.

Raghu: Songs hearing machine.

Prashanth: Its a Notebook. Digital Notebook.

Jagdish: Electronic Device.

Nagraj: iPhone.

Nagbhushan: Digital Sound.

Sagar: Digital Nappy pad.

Kiran K R: Integrated Personal Audio Device.

Janardhan: I don’t want to be bothered thinking of ipod or ipad, but I need mouse pad urgently.

Gagan: Pad sized fully touch screen lap top or touch screen palm top.

In one or the other way, most of them were right with their guess and imagination about the name iPad. I really appreciate them for taking time to SMS me back with their answer.

Fun apart – Many people doesn’t seem to be happy with the new iPad, as there is no Multitasking capabilities, no camera etc. I think Apple Inc., will surly listen to its potential customers and soon patch up and will comeup with new iPad( we may call it iPad 2.0 ! ) as per the expectations of its fanboys.

But the question will remain – who will purchase this sleek, sexy looking(design wise) iPad now? Are you planning to purchase one? Make sure you know what you are getting and what not with your iPad, before placing an order.

Image Source: Apple.com

Is Your Website Really Down or Is It Just You?

it happens sometimes, you are not able to access your blog/website and rest of the world is still enjoying your fabulous writing.This post is to remind people to bookmark this tool, because we have seen people who openup Google and try some keywords to find this tool. They already know the tool, but forgot to bookmark.

Some times it’s difficult to know whether your website is actually down for everyone or only for you!

1. Your IP address might have got blocked somehow.
2. Your internet connection might be the victim.
3. Your browser might have blocked the site, for some weird reason 🙂

Anyway, it happens sometimes, you are not able to access your blog/website and rest of the world is still enjoying your fabulous writing.

To know whether its just you or everyone, we can use this wonderful tool called Downforeveryoneorjustme.com. Most of you know this tool already, but if you forgot to bookmark it, then do it now. And those of you who had not heard of this tool, then take note of it and bookmark – it will surly come handy in difficult times.

I Love the simplicity of the website. There are no ads plastered all around and making you search for the place to put your website URL and hit enter only to get more of ads and some popups and a video playing and then telling “Try Again!”. Don’t worry about such things, Downforeveryoneorjustme is as simple as Google.com.

This post is to remind people to bookmark this tool, because we have seen people who openup Google and try some keywords to find this tool. They already know the tool, but forgot to bookmark. So they try all sorts of keywords – Website down only me, blog down for everyone or just me, down everyone or just me, etc. Instead, if you bookmark it, you will be more comfortable when the need arises.

Alignment of Ads, Two Horizontal And Rest Vertical – BuySellAds

BuySellAds [BSA] is an advertising marketplace for small to medium sized website owners/publishers. Publisher like the flexibility in charging the advertisers and the easiness with which one can implement the ad codes into their website.
And advertisers like the quality publisher websites, ad rotation feature for equal exposure, stats features and the recently added A/B split testing between multiple ad banners etc.

But A Problem..
If you are using 125 x 125 ad format of BuySellAds and you have many advertisers, then you might have come across the problem of aligning them.

Example:
If you want to have 6 ad spots, as shown in below image.

[ 2 x 3 – Two Horizontal and rest Vertical ad spots ]

There is no built-in user friendly option to get this to work. One simple solution for this is, you can generate 2 separate javascript ad codes and paste it inbetween 2 separate div or p tags to somehow align it.

But the Problem
1. Using more ad codes means increase in the load time of the website as a whole.
2. All the ads does not get equal exposure. As we can only rotate the ads present in a single block of code and can not rotate between two separate code blocks.
3. Some time we may forget to change the price of advertising on one block, which will some time become unfair for advertisers.

Better Solution
Generate a single ad code with 6(or whatever you prefer) ad spots and add “float:left;” to the A element of the styles array in the ad code.

Before


BannerStyles1240548 = new Array(
    "a{display:block;font-size:11px;color:#888;font-
family:verdana,sans-serif;margin:0 4px 10px 0;text-align:center;text-
decoration:none;overflow:hidden;}",

After


BannerStyles1240548 = new Array(
    "a{float:left;display:block;font-size:11px;color:#888;font-
family:verdana,sans-serif;margin:0 4px 10px 0;text-
align:center;text-decoration:none;overflow:hidden;}",

Caution
Do not copy and paste the above code, as the quotation marks appearing on a webpage will not work properly in the source code. So just manually add float:left; to the A element of the styles array, as shown above.

Finally
1. You have nice looking source code! with less clutter.
2. Less number of javascript code, so faster loading of your webpage.
3. All the ads rotate and thus equal exposure to advertisers.
4. Single change in the settings of your ad code will be applied to all the ads.