Archive for December, 2007

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You must market your blog

Why do I need to Market my blog?
This is the most frequently asked question that I have heard from blogger freinds who blog as a hobby and do not intend to earn money. As a matter of fact many of them find it beneath them to market their blog. So I will like to address that issue first.

It is your duty to the Internet Community
There are two types of people creating content on the internet. People who are creating content for easy money and people who are doing so because it is their passion. The second class of bloggers may monetize their site but money is never their primary motivation for blogging. IMHO the quality of the content created by the second class is better than the quality of the content created by people who create content simply to make money.

Unfortunately the passionate bloggers do not want to market their blog. And the quick maney bloggers have a huge incentive to do everything to get more and more people to read their blogs. Net result of it is that the normal reader is bombarded with inferior quality content while the better quality content remain hidden from him.

If you want to prevent this deterioaration of quality of content on the internet, then you must actively try to make your blog accessible to as many people as possible and try to bring other good quality blogs to the front.

Acer launches “Cash Back” offer till January 31, 2007

Acer India has announced a special New Year offer to their notebook customers with the launch of a unique “Cash Back” program which will be a first of its kind in the PC market. During this period, customers buying the Acer Aspire 5570ANWXMi and the Acer Aspire 3682NWXCi Notebook models, will receive Rs 2007/- as cash back along with a host of assured gifts from Acer under its special end customer promotion program – ” The Get Gifted Offer” (GGO). The cash back offer can be redeemed by the customer directly from Acer. The offer will be available to customers till January 31, 2007

Customers buying the select models are provided with a range of Gifts to choose from by the partner in addition to the cash back offer, which is available on select models where the redemption process is direct. The gifts range from Acer branded T-shirts, jackets, backpacks, USB thumbdrives, MP3 Players, Tata SKY Satellite connections, Free Reliance USB modem worth 4500 INR etc. The customer needs to register his purchase along with his preference of Gift through the partner on the Acer website to avail of the gift offer.
For more details visit 

www.acer.co.in/press/archives/press/Acer%20cash%20back%20offer%20-%20Jan%202007.doc

Need Privacy at Work Place/Home? Install Page Title Eraser Extension

If you happen to use firefox and if you dont want other people to see some of the tab labels or what you are upto here we have a plugin available which allows to hide title and icon of the selected tab/page.

Thus it provides more privacy at workplace or some time even at home when mom or someone else go for sudden check on your screen..
The Page Title Eraser:

The Page Title Eraser extension can be used in different ways, by right clicking on a page or from

It also has a hot key Ctrl + Shift + H which will hide or unhide the title bar.

So If you want to hide the titles, then this is a decent extension you can use

Plugin can be downloaded from http://www.download.com/Page-Title-Eraser/3000-11745_4-10746639.html

Top Torrent Sites

Torrents are great, they are the best way to share large files with your friends, or even with people you don’t know at all. But surprisingly enough, not many people create or use  torrents when they need to share something.

You can search latest movies , Songs , software both legitmate and pirated on this torrent sites and download them with the help of a torrent client like azures , microtorrent etc…

Here is the list of top torrents which are popular among net surfers..
1. Torrentz.com

Torrentz is a popular Torrent indexing and Torrent search engine. It does not help to track your torrents. The torrent search engine is more advance as it allows you to search for files within the torrents. If you’re looking for unique stuff you should prefer this site

2. BitTorrent

BitTorrent’s software client allows you to quickly download high-quality digital content such as video, music, and games.
It leverages on its community of over 70 million users to securely deliver files to your PC faster than anything else out there.

http://www.bittorrent.com/
TorrentSpy.com

TorrentSpy is a popular BitTorrent indexing Web Site. It hosts torrent and provides a forum to comment on them, as well as a graphical portrayal of how healthy the torrents are. Torrentspy was as popular as Mininova and made it to 2nd place.
www.torrentspy.com
Nowadays dowload managers are also coming with torrent supports so that u can download both normal files as well as torrent files.

Best example is Flashgates

Google talk banned in office?..No probs

Thanks to network admin team and security policies , we see lot of websites and IM Clients being banned inside most of the office networks in India.

Though we ourselves don’t want to waste our so called precious time on browsing crap stuffs in our office but i strongly feel accessing gtalk does come under fundamental right of every office goers – no matter where he works.

So here is one work around to bypass the filters and enjoy this fundamental rights..But yes its alwayz at your own risk

Nimbuzz : http://web.nimbuzz.com is a web based application where in we can chat with gmail ids. and yes it is of course free.

» Read more:

Painful times in life

I just realized that there’s going to be a lot of painful times in life, so I better learn to deal with it the right way.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park, Raisins, 2003

Simple Google tricks

Finding the definition of a word
Enter Define : word in the google search box and press enter to find the definition of the word.

Finding Reviews
Enter “nachle more:reviews” into the google search box and press enter to find all the reviews for the movie Aja nachle.

Finding User Reviews
Enter “reliance mobile more:user_reviews” into the google search box and press enter to find all the user generated reviews for the reliance mobile.

Finding Movie Downloads
nachle more:downloads

Bullets in Excel

I wanted to create a list like

  • Point 1
  • Point 2
  • Point 3

in an excel cell.

Bullets and numbering is a widely used feature in microsoft word. Surprisingly microsoft excel does not have any such feature. So I did a bit of research and found the following work around.

insert the following formula in the cell where you want to put the bulleted list.
=CONCATENATE(CHAR(149),” Point 1″,CHAR(10),CHAR(149),” Point 2″,CHAR(10),CHAR(149),” Point 3″)

Keep the cursor on the cell and press Alt+Enter (“For wrap text”) and you will have your text beautifully wrapped up.

P.S If you do not want to keep the messy formula in your sheet then copy the cell and paste the value using paste special.

LogMeIn

LogMeIn is a service that allows users to remotely access a number of home or work PCs anywhere they may be through an Internet connection. Users can access their computers remotely, even from Linux machines, Macs, and PocketPC devices. LogMeIn is browser-based and I was able to successfully test the program with both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Because the program is browser-based I can access the Target PC while seamlessly interacting with the PC I’m using to remotely connect.

» Read more:

Opera files antitrust complaint with the EU

Opera has files an antitrust complaint against Microsoft requesting the Commission to implement two remedies to Microsoft’s abusive actions.

First, it requests the Commission to ask Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows or carry alternative browsers pre-installed on the desktop.
Second, it asks the European Commission to require Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities.

The first request to unbudle internet explorer from windows is an old one. The case becomes interesting due to the second point. I am eagerly waiting to see if European Commission will indeed direct Microsoft about which standard to follow.

You can see the original press release Here

Choice

It is our choices…that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets, 1999

Managers

A good one from dilsecartoons.com

Money making ideas for Geeks

If you are a proud geek with some free time then you are going to love this post. Here is a list of websites that pay you for what you love doing i.e coding.

The best one among the lot is topcoder. It has weekly contests for designing, testing and coding. Go here to see the active contests. The prize money ranges from 500$ to 1400$ for one component. You read that right, you can indeed make 20,000 Rs upto 60,000 rupees writing one complete programme. The only problem is that most of the projects are in .net or java. Topcoder provides a rating to each member depending upon how many times you win in competitions among other criteria. If you can get some really good rank then who knows even google may come searching for you :)

The other type of sites are freelancing sites. These sites allow companies in need of programmers to post their projects. As a programmer you can select projects that you like and then bid for them. If you are selected then you can get paid for developing the programme. http://www.getacoder.com/  ,  http://www.project4hire.com   and https://www.getafreelancer.com/ are some of the freelancing sites.

disclaimer: I have not used any of the sites except topcoder myelf.

Selecting an Idea

I had previously writeen about the possibility of starting your own business without leaving yout job. (Here) It was based on my assumption that most people know what to do but are not able to do so as they are not ready to leave their jobs. However the comments to the post clearly showed that many of us do not know what we want to do. As Suku says so very clearly no one can tell you what to do but atleast I shall try to guide you.

Look for the problem

I think the problem lies in our education system that needs us to find answers/solutions. The problem is always defined by someone else. But entrepreneurship needs you to find a problem and then go ahead and solve it. Noone told larry and binn to develop a better search engine, they identified it themselves and then solved it. Same is true for any great startup. Unfortunately the same is true for you as well. You shall have to identify the problem to solve.

Fortunately it is not that difficult to identify. Just recall how many times in a day you wish that things were better. You get irritated everytime windows crashes, go and design a operating system that does not crash ;-) .

Well jokes apart that is the exact way atleast we go about selecting an idea. Frustrated with having to go through 10 different newspaper to find a walkin in hyderabad we started mywalkin. Mostly Pari does not have anything  to do at office and we started bakarbakar

So here is a 5 step approach to finding an idea to work on

  1. Carry a frustration diary. Everytime you feel frustrated note it down.
  2. Mention about the situation to your freinds. You will be surprised by how many of them have already faced such a problem.
  3. Once you have 2-3 problems that you think 4-5 of your freinds have faced, start thinking about possible solutions.
  4. Finally select the one that you feel is interesting. This is definitely important because you will have to work on it for atleast 3-4 months before any result is visible.
  5. There is no fifth step :) Go and start working on the problem.

Hope it helps.

P.S: These are my views. I am sure many of you have much better idea than that. Please feel free to post them as comments.

Every Dream Comes at a Price

And you have no right to expect your dream to come true, unless you are ready to pay the price. In my previous post , I had written that it is possible to keep your job and start your own business. Now if we accept that there are many young Indians like us who want to start their own company, why are we not seeing many more startups?

Well the reason lies in the fact that we are not ready to pay the price of our dream. What do I mean by that? Right now I could have gone for the latest release with my freinds. Instead I am writing this post on my laptop all alone in my room. This is the price that I have to pay if I have to make my dream of my own company come true.

Make no mistake. It is a choice that everyone wanting to own a startup has to make. Your dream or a nice time. And you can not have both. Anyone who thinks otherwise is only making a fool of himself.

The question that you need to ask yourself before starting your business is “Am I ready to pay the price?”. If your answer is NO, then stop fooling yourelf and go back to your 10 to 10 job, enjoy your weekends with your freinds and girlfreind. It is perfectly fine and perhaps the most logical choice. Afterall why to leave what you have for a mere dream?

But if you are the illogical type, who believes in listening to the heart, then welcome to the tough world of entrepreneurship. But before you enter this, make sure that you understand what you are getting into. There is no guarantee that we shall be successful. But even if we fail, we have failed while daring greatly, so that our place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

SEO Experiment : Day 2

Yesterday I had submitted the sitemap of my site to both Google and Yahoo. I am going to find out if the search engines have visited my blog or not. I first log into my cpanel and look for lit of visiting crawlers. Both Google and Yahoo have visited my blog. Google seems to have beaten yahoo on speed. Here is a snapshot from my webstat for your reference.

Robots/Spiders visitors (Top 25)   –   Full list   –   Last visit  
4 different robots* Hits Bandwidth Last visit
Googlebot 8 8.63 KB 12 Dec 2007 – 15:39
Yahoo Slurp 7 49.68 KB 13 Dec 2007 – 11:30
Unknown robot (identified by ‘bot/’ or ‘bot-’) 2 11.08 KB 09 Dec 2007 – 19:31
Unknown robot (identified by ‘crawl’) 2 49.74 KB 13 Dec 2007 – 09:31

* Robots shown here gave hits or traffic “not viewed” by visitors, so they are not included in other charts.

Next I want to figure out if they have added my site to their index or not. So I head to google.com, put my site name (binaryday.com) into the search box and hit enter. Oh no. Bad Google :( It has not yet added my site to its index. Let us see if Yahoo i any better. Again I head to yahoo, enter binary.com into the search box and hit enter. Yahooooooo…It has indeed added my site to its index.

Verdict of the Day : Yahoo rocks. It has added binaryday.com to its index in less than 24 hours since I submitted the sitemap to it. 

SEO Experiment : Day 1

It has been one week since I started thi blog. None of the 3 major earch engines have visited the site yet. A search for binaryday.com did not return any result. :(

I am going to follow a step by step approach to lure the search engines to this website. While I do that I intend to note down my findings on this post on a regular basis. There will be a time period of 3 days between any 2 steps. That will slow down my march to the top of the search engines. However I think exactly which step worked will be worth the delay.

Day 1: Submitting the Sitemap 

My blog uses wordpress. I used the following plugin to create the sitemap http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/#P18DL The advantage is that this will continue to update the sitemap as the content on my blog changes.

Next I go to the google webmaster central at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and submitted the sitemap. Then I head to yahoo site explorer at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and submitted the sitemap.

Send / Share Really Large Files

If you have a file that is too large for gmail or if you do not have access to gmail then you should try out http://www.mediafire.com. The website lets you upload files upto 100 Mb in size !!!!

This is a really cool site that lets you upload files even without signing up. I just tried it out with a 3mb file and the file was loaded in less than a minute.

It also gives us various options like sharing files with your freinds and embedding the file to your webpage. I am too impressed with it.

The first Kiss and The first Dollar


There is a lot of similarity between the first kiss of a lover and the first dollar of an entrepreneur. These are the most memorable and difficult parts of a long and wonderful journey ahead. (Hopefully ;-) )Due to lack of relevant experience, I am in no position to give you any gyaan on the former. However I have a fair amount of experience in earning dollars on the net and I shall be giving you advice on how to make your first dollar on the net.There are two ways in which I have made money without any investment and both of them use google’s adsense for monetization. There are two ways in which I have made money without any investment and both of them use google’s adsense for monetization. The 2 methods are creating Google’s custom search engine and writing blog on blogger.

Making Money with Google Custom Search Engine

If you know about some really good websites in a particular field and they are not part of the top ten results on google, then this tip is for you. Basically google allows you to create a search engine restricted to sites that you like. So head to http://www.google.com/cse and create a custom search engine with all those awesome links you have bookmarked over the years. If others think that the links are as awesome as you think then they will be using your search engine instead of google and you will be on your way to becoming the next billionaire :)

Making Money with Blogger

If you love giving gyaan to people or you have something interesting to tell people then this is for you. Go to http://www.blogger.com and sign up and start posting all your gyaan online. You will be doing the lesser mortals of the world a favor besides earning some serious money.

We are ready to help

There are 2 requirements for making money. Content + Users. After creating the content, you will need the users to make money. I shall be posting a detailed post about how to get initial set of users for your content. Till then send out an email to your freinds, telling them about the great content you have created. Also leave a comment below and if I like it then I shall put a link to your page.

The Best Speech Ever

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Even though I have long forgotten where I read this, I just love this speech. Do what I have done. Take a print of this and paste it on the wall of your room. May be in 6 months time it will be able to convince you to take on that risk. I definitely hope so. Because then my place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat :)