BinaryDay

I have been working on , rather I should say Thinking on loads of ideas for starting a startup since past more than one year but it’s only now that I realized where I was wrong. I always had many ideas…some of them really good (I can say that because when I did some research after having an idea, I found that someone had already just started a startup based on a similar idea … and most of them are doing good) but my fault was that I never executed any of my ideas… I just thought upon it , discussed with friends, did some research and by then I would have another idea and I thought it better to be what I had started on. So I think it’s not the idea but its execution and completion that is important.
Read this post on ideas vs judgement and execution to get the point in a better way.

I am doing some research on google image search to learn image search optimization. As part of the experiment, I had uploaded 2 images yesterday in a post with text string xyzabcabpq, 1 image named xyzabcabpq and another image with the alt text xyzabcabpq. The initial result is in.

Text gets indexed faster than image

A search for xyzabcabpq in the web search returns the binaryday page. However image search does not return any result yet. Surprisingly even blog search does not return any result. Waiting to see who wins the competition between blog search and image search. Keep checking the SEO Experiment category till then.

I have just recently realized the importance of google image search. I have been trying to find more on google image search engine optimization. Surprisingly very less literature is present on the topic.

Hence I am starting my own experiments on image search engine optimization. I have uploaded 2 images of apple air. I will be targetting the term xyzabcabpq. That is because there is no other search result for that term.

One image has a file name same as the search term. The other file has alt text as that. let us see which one wins.

I just found an advertisement by yahoo mail on binaryday. Found it really interesting that yahoo is using google for advertising its product. Speaks volume about the state of yahoo.

Pagerank of a blog or site is an important input for text advertisers and people interested in exchanging link with you. You can attract potential advertisers by displaying your pagerank on your webpage. You can see a demo just below the feedburner box on the sidebar of this page.

I have written a small tool to do so for any webpage. You can show a similar image by adding a single line to your blog. Add the following within php to display your pagerank

include “http://www.binaryday.com/pagerank.php?url=[your site url]”

After almost 6 months of work by the entire wordpress community and some delayed release deadlines, wordpress 2.5 got released. you can download it here

Some important features of wordpress 2.5 are

Table layout has not been changed in this release, so many plugins are expected to work fine with 2.5.

Few-click plugin upgrades — if the plugins you use are part of the plugin directory then wordpress automatically downloads and installs the upgrade for you.

Friendlier visual post editor — The editor doesn’t mess with your code anymore. version 3.0 of TinyMCE is used, which means better compatibility with Safari, and we’ve paid particular attention this release to its integration and interaction with complex HTML.

Concurrent editing protection if you use a multi-author blogs, you might have been frustrated if you ever tried to edit a post while someone was already editing it, and your auto-saves kept overwriting each other. Now if you open a post that someone else is editing, WordPress magically locks it and prevents you from saving until the other person is done.

Read more about the features here

Feedburner subscriber base is the most assured way to increase number of repeat users. feedburner stat also acts as a good proxy for knowing how many readers find the blog really cool. That is the reason I keep checking my feedburner stat and keep thinking about ways to increase that number.

Below are 2 methods that I find are the most useful to increase the feedburner subscriber number.

Ask them to subscribe You will be surprised how effective is that “if you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed” link. If you think about it, the reader is most likely to subscribe to your feed after going through a really good article.

Convert the Unverified Subscribers This is one data that really surprised me. If you have a feed subscription service for quite sometime, you will be really surprised by how many people who subscribed to your feed never confirmed the subscription. It is normally as high as 40% of your total active subscriber base. These are people who liked your blog (why else they will subscribe at the first place?).

So go ahead and remind them to just verify the subscription. In my experience the best way is to subscribe their email ids once more. They will get a confirmation mail. At least in my case 80% of the people confirm the subscription.

If you found this post useful, you know what to do.

 if your favorite proxy for gmail has been blocked by administrator then try this detailed list of 15 gmail proxy sites

There is one more good news which strengthens my belief in India and Indians ability to lead the world.

Yahoo Inc has announced a tie up with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) , a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons Limited, for cloud computing research.

Eka , CRL’s Supercomputer , which has 14400 processors , 28 terabytes of memory, 140 terabytes of disks, a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations per second (180 teraflops) will help Yahoo to perform data intensive computing research.

For details please read here

Hip Hip Hurrey…….Cheers to India and Indians.. Hope to hear many more R & D news in this area…

While reading about Ubuntu on Wikipedia , I came across this huge list of Linux distributions on Wikipedia. I never knew there were so so many of them…

You may like to read this post where I have tried to explain what a Linux distro is by giving an analogy to pizzas.