Nerd 2 Geek

DevCamp Bangalore 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Richie) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:47:00 +0000

This comes as a treat for all those hackers out there who want to experience some innovations in action. Welcome to DevCamp 2009.

What exactly is DevCamp??

"DevCamp is an unconference by the hackers, for the hackers and of the hackers."

It is kinda like BarCamp where any type of human being who is a lover of computers and technology would consider important or a hangout for entertainment.

It is a place where innovative minds meet and throttle new ideas. Basically, structured around the unconference and the likes. If you are looking forward to enlighten yourself, this is exactly the place for you to be.

The only rule to keep in mind is the law of two feet: If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet. Go to some other place where you may learn and contribute.

All you need to do is register for the event. This can be done by editing the page by adding your name at the end of the list. Follow the link given below( u need to register for the wiki page first: Register here)

If you are intersted in giving a session, you can do so by clicking on the link below:

SESSION

This DevCamp is sponsored by ThoughtWorks, Bangalore

Alrighty then, See you at DevCamp!!

A few good tips to enhance your blog

noreply@blogger.com (Richie) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:53:00 +0000

Blogger is a nice platform to express your talents in blogging. It provides a flexible method to add and remove widgets, include javascripts and inherently supports SEO, so you don't have to worry about anything but just to provide the content. It is free and with comes with myriad features which you can customize the way you want.

In this tutorial, I will tell you the best tips to make your blog look official. If you are new to blogging and looking forward to enhance your blogging experience, then you have come to the right place

At this point, assuming you have a working blogsite, i carry on further with the rest of the post.

Best tips to popularize your blogsite:

1)FAVICON:
Add a favicon to your blog. I have discussed this earlier, but i will do so one more time. Almost every site which has a post on inserting a favicon suggest you to add a *.ico file but a better way is to upload an image(jpeg or gif) file to a image host like Photobucket or ImageShack and then linking that image in the code

Copy and Paste the following part of the code just above the head tag as shown below:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://yoursite.googlepages.com/favicon.gif"/>
</head>

2)Sign up for FeedBurner:
Probably the next best thing to do is to sign up for feedburner. This is an amazing tool to publisize your blog among your friends and people all over the world.
You can add a subscription widget to your blog and also provide feeds to all the subscribers.

Once you sign up for feedburner, you need to go to the "optimize" section in your account and then there are lots of options to add the chicklets (widgets). Just take a look by clicking on the link above.

3)Technorati:
Technorati is an Internet Search Engine for searching blogs.Technorati looks at tags that authors have placed on their websites. These tags help categorize search results, with recent results coming first. Sign up for Technorati and as member you can claim your blogs, and create a personal Technorati profile, and readers from around the web will be able to find what you've written. This is an amazing way to promote your blog.

4) Add Page title and meta tag description:
A meta tag will help in better indexing of your blog in Google's search engine. All you have to do is look for this line in the 'Edit HTML' option in your Blogger Dashboard.

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
Replace the above code by the following:
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item"'>
<title>My site | This is a short description</title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
</b:if>
Then add this part of the code just after the first b:if tag as shown below:
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item"'>
<meta name="Description" content="Add here a short description of your site" />
</b:if>
5)Monetize your blog by applying for Adsense:
Probably the best feature and advantage of a Blogger Blog is that it accepts Google Adsense. So, if your blog has unique and valuable content, don't hesitate to apply for Adsense. As the saying goes, "If you are good at something, Do not do it for free".

Sometimes Google might reject your application due to some problems. So make sure your website follows the below mentioned paradigms:

your blog should not contain copyright material owned by someone else(without his permission) and the content must be unique and acceptable.
you obviously must be using a Blogger account, and cannot apply for Google Adsense using a wordpress blog.
Pages must be easily navigable. This means, there must be a feature to return to home or any desired page from any sublinks in your blog.
You must otherwise own a proper domain such as www.yourblog.com and this domain must be active for 6 months.

6) Add a Tag Cloud:
The next best thing to do is to add a tag cloud so that the visitor gets a clear picture of what topics your blog covers. You can add a flash tag cloud which looks exactly like the one in this website. This will need a Flash plugin which is availaible in Adobe's official site and the link is provided below. The code for the Tag cloud be obtained by clicking on the link below.

7)Google Analytics:
Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website.Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.

This is the best way to monitor your site's traffic and it provides information on all the details about the pages visited in your blog and stuff.
Sign up for google analytics here with your google username and password and you are ready to go.

This is the basic protocol you need to follow if you want to improve your blog. You can enhance it better by adding widgets and javascripts which will actually add a tint of creativity and glaomour to your blog. I will be writing an article on that too, in a couple of days.

This is about it. All I want to say is:

Blog your way to Stardom

Add your valuable suggestions and feel free to comment.

How to Embed a HTML code in a post

noreply@blogger.com (Richie) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:19:00 +0000

Everyone knows that, all the post editors are sensitive to HTML codes. It doesn't distinguish between the actual html tags and the ones you just want to display in the post.

There is one way to avoid such things by replacing the '<' by '&lf;' and '>' by '>'. This will take years to complete if the code you want to display is more than 10 lines.

You can just visit this site and it will automatically get you the refurbished code. Just take a look.

Just copy and paste all your code in the markup box and press ‘Process’ and it will spit out entity-encoded markup suitable for <>. Now you can copy and paste it in your post.

how to add "read more" tag to blogger

noreply@blogger.com (Richie) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 11:59:00 +0000

All these days, i searched and searched for an article on how to add the "continue reading" tag for a blogger post, and eventually my search ended up in an article called "how to get extremely pissed off when something doesn't happen the way you want it to." Sounds pretty familiar???

I seriously think you are correct because, firstly there are a few sites which offer you the tip on how to add the "read more" tag and all of them didn't work properly (at least for me, they didn't). When I followed their procedure, I ended up getting error messages like the following:

Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Make sure the 'div' tags is ended with a proper end tag.
or make sure the b:if tag is ended with a proper 'end' tag.

If these are the error messages you encountered or anything which sounds unfamiliar to you, just follow this small tutorial and it will be easy as sipping coffee!!

There are only two steps involved in getting a "read more" tag. It couldn't be more simpler than this.

Go to your blogger dashboard by logging in and browse to 'Layout>Edit HTML' and then you will be presented with the HTML/CSS code for the template your blogspot adores itself with. You might want to copy the whole code and paste it in notepad(preferably Notepad++) and then modify it there and then later paste the whole thing back in the Blogger pad.
Then, search for this part of the code (by pressing Ctrl + F):

I found out that some of the xml templates doesn't have the same code structure to what i have explained above and this could pose a lot of problems to bloggers who are searching hard to find the above mentioned code lines. So after reviewing one of my peer's blog, i found at another way to rectify this "more tag" problem. Here is how you do it.

Find this part of the code in the xml template:

<data:post.body/>

Once you find this code, "REPLACE" the above line with the following set of lines:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'> <style>.fullpost{display:inline;}</style> <data:post.body/> <b:else/> <style>.fullpost{display:none;}</style> <data:post.body/> <a expr:href='data:post.url'>Continue Reading »</a> </b:if>

Now, Save the template and go to Settings>>Formatting and scroll below till you find the Post Template window and in the given space, paste the following lines:

<span class="fullpost"> </span>

Save the settings and when you create a new post, you can observe(html section) that the following code is automatically generated:

<span class="fullpost"> </span>

If you want you add the "more tag to you existing posts, just go to "edit HTML" and paste the part of the article you want to be visible when the read more tag is clicked, between these two lines:

<span class="fullpost"> The part of the post invisible in the main page comes here..... </span>

Thats about it. If you have any problems with understanding the above code or if you get any sort of errors, please feel free to comment and i shall try my best to rectify it.

Geek 1.0 vs geek 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Richie) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:50:00 +0000

Which one do you think you are? Take a look and find out.

So, Do you still want to stay as a nerd or you want to be a geek aka cool!!!

How to create a Favicon for your website

noreply@blogger.com (Richie) — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:42:00 +0000

A favicon (short for favorites icon), also known as a website icon, shortcut icon or bookmark icon is a 16x16 pixel square icon associated with a particular website or webpage. A web designer can create such an icon and install it into a website by several means, and most web browsers will then make use of it. Browsers that provide favicon support, typically display the favicon in the browser's Address bar and next to the webpage's name. Browsers that support a tabbed document interface typically show a page's favicon next to the page's title.

This is a tutorial on how to create such a favicon and insert it into your website (actually beside the url in the address bar). If you have no idea, what i am talking about, then just take a look at the browser's address bar above. That tiny image next to this website's link is called the FAVICON.

Step by Step procedure to design and get the favicon up and running:

1) Think of a catchy logo based upon the name of your blog or your website. Use any image designer to create such an image. I used Adobe Photoshop to create the N2G logo which is shown below. You can also do something like that. If you want any suggestions on how your logo should be, please comment and provide your queries. I am happy to oblige. The logo I designed looks something like this:

2) After you create the image(assuming you use PhotoShop) save it in png(or jpeg) format, preferably in the interlaced form (because by doing this, the image is split into layers of different quality and will help in loading during heavy traffic).

3)Now, If you are blogging through Blogger, Wordpress or any other blogging platform, you must know that these systems do not allow you to upload files and use them whenever you need. So you need to upload the picture you just created into some website which offer such services. Some of them are ImageShack, Flickr and so on. I use ImageShack which is quite easy to access and obtain the links effectively.

4) Once you have obtained the link to the uploaded image, sign in to your blogger account and click on layout. Then click on Edit HTML. You will be given the HTML code of the theme(template). All you need to do is rewrite the below given code(without the head part) just above the head tag as shown. (Note : you to obtain the image URL from the site you just uploaded to and paste it after href=")

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://imageshack.us/img21/favicon.png"/> </head>

5) Save your template ( i advice you to download the existing template before saving, just in case if anything happens) and preview the blog.

Please feel free to comment and ask your doubts.

Create a Image Slider using jQuery

noreply@blogger.com (Richie) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 13:14:00 +0000

In this tutorial, I will be telling you how to design a Image Slider using Javascript (jQuery). The process is very simple but there are a lot of factors you need to look into if you want to get the perfect result. I created a lot of mistakes while doing such a slider, so i will notify all that whenever needed.

To start off, jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript. It is quite astonishing to see the enhancements made possible through jQuery.

First of all, you need to download some scripts which acts as a reference library for the jQuery codes within the slider.

The list to be downloaded is given below. All you need to do is download the scripts which is in the javascript format(*.js) and put them in one folder.

Once you have downloaded all of the above files and put them in one single folder, create a new notepad (text) file in the same folder and rename it as slider.html (anything will do but, do this just for the sake of it (^_^) )

Create a New folder named Picts and put all the pictures you want to slide inside the folder. Make sure it is not big in size else the smoothness of the sliding wont be good.

Open the text file in notepad and then create a new HTML code by adding the html, head, body tags. If you don't know that, just download the html file from RapidShare and put it in the folder with the plugins (I couldn't get the code pasted here because blogger is paranoid sometimes :

Make sure the following are in the same folder:

the jQuery plugins(3 of them, all in the ".js" format).
the picts folder which contains the pictures.
finally, the text file which contains the main html code for the slider(slider.html).

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED...Tadaa........

Now, just open the text file (slider.html) in any browser and ...VOILA....click on the images and the see the images flow.

You can also change the Slider image size by changing the values in the "div id" block.

Things you should remember if you try any javascript or jQuery codes in the future:

The script should get loaded before the body tag and also the CSS code. This is very important because the necessary libraries must be accessed before the code can be authorized. So, you need to add the scripts and the css code before the tag.
Always comment before adding any sublinks or strange codes which you might forget where you added once you scroll back.
Its advisable to use Adobe Dreamweaver to modify the position if the image slider, even though it makes dealing with things easier.

Want to see the image slider in action? Take a look: Image Slider
>Try this code and notify me with all the suggestions or errors that you face by posting comments.
>If you are successful in designing the slider, You better take a look at this. Download the slider from the link given below and check out the different slider that have been showcased. It is simply awesome.

Easy Slider

>Thanks: Credit goes to the jQuery team for their wonderful plugin.

Build a Website

noreply@blogger.com (Richie) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:12:00 +0000

Well, the internet has certainly amused a lot of people before and the number is exponentially increasing. Many of my friends are convinced that they should start their own website and put some valuable content in it and eventually make money by publishing ads.

Creating a website doesn't precisely mean what one wants to do. There are two ways where you can contribute effectively to the world wide web.

You can either start learning about the basic fundamentals about how to design your webpage. For this, you need to have profound knowledge of html(Hyper Text Markup Language) and css(Cascading Style Sheet).
The other method which many people choose is by using a content management system wherein you just need to think about and provide the content, and the steps to manage it and publish it, is taken care by the software like wordpress, blogspot, joomla and many others.

Creation of a Website:
The world wide web is a grand global collection of websites, and the internet inter-connects all the sites. There are over a billion registered websites.
The essential step-by-step guide to make your own website:

1)Get the best suited domain name for the website.

the first thing you need to worry about is how do you name your site? Preferably, the domain name should be related to what you website will contain. Choose the perfect name coinciding with the type of content you will be updating your site with. Also, remember, the domain name must be easier to type and follow. This enhances the possibilites of your site ranking higher in the search engines. So, decide upon what the content will be and then try to name you site to the nearest possible description of the site.
Nowadays, almost all the familiar names have been bought and you might have to struggle a lot before you can find the best one. Fortunately, though, there are loads of extensions available now. Some include *.net, *.info, *.org and many more.

I found this website which gives enough information about the paradigms about choosing a proper domain name. Please Check it out.

The Site Wizard

2)Get a webhost

The next thing you need to do is to get a webspace on the "internet" (servers) so that you can publish, access and modify your website no matter wherever you are. There are lots of Webhosts who provide optimum webspace and bandwidth for a decent sum of money. I suggest you choose the primitive one in the beginning and later on switch to a different account with higher amount of space and bandwidth(once your site's traffic increases).
All you need to do is, visit their websites and sign up for the account. The rental is usually monthly but some guys offer it in a per annum basis.
There are other type of webhosts who offer webspace for free. Quite apparently, it has a bottomline, which is: you can't put ads on the site and you need to visit their Control Panel twice every week or so.

You can see further information about choosing the best webhost by clicking the link below:

Webhost

I happen to browse the internet for the biggest, cheapest and the best Webhosts there are and I narrowed my list down to these three:

3) Designing the website:

Now, almost half of the procedure is finished, but the biggest challenge comes next. How to design a website.

By now, i assume you are ready with what you want to put in your site( If that's not the case, you better go back to your desk and start researching on that first and then come back to this). There are a few things you should know prior to designing a website.
The first one is HTML coding(hyper text markup language) and CSS(cascaded style sheet). My guess is, if you start learning about these now, you can finish the basics in a month. By my experience, it is very easy.
If you feel, html and css are not giving you an easier platform to design and test your website, you might wanna switch over to Adobe DreamWeaver. This is an easier tool to work with providing you with amazingly simple way to enhance the website. Adobe have loads of tutorials on dreamweaver in their official site. You might wanna check it out.

Well, this is about "YOU" actually designing you site. Most of the times, people choose third party designers who have a package which gives you the flexibility of handling the content easier than you can imagine. Two of the best are Wordpress and Blogspot. They offer a wide variety of themes and widgets. So you dont have to worry about the codes and stuff. Just pick and place. Its that simple. Just follow the links below and you will come to know everything about them.

So, this almost ends the procedure you need to follow to see you website up and running. As a derived advantage, you can also promote your site and apply for ads. I personally prefer Adsense because they are a better than the others. You can read my previous post to understand everything about Adsense.

All that you need to know about AdSense

noreply@blogger.com (Richie) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:10:00 +0000

AdSense is an advertisement application run by Google. Website owners can subscribe for adsense to publish text, image, and video advertisements on their websites. These advertisements are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click (CPC) or per-impression basis.

How AdSense works?

The webmaster inserts the AdSense JavaScript(JS) code into the webpage.
Each time this page is visited, the JS code creates an IFrame with a src attribute set to the page's URL.
For contextual advertisements, Google's servers use a cache of the page to determine a set of high-value keywords. If keywords have been cached already, advertisements are served for those keywords based on the AdWords bidding system.
For site-targeted advertisements, the advertiser chooses the page on which to display advertisements, and pays based on cost per mille(thousand (CPM), or the price advertisers choose to pay for every thousand advertisements displayed.
Search advertisements are added to the list of results after the visitor performs a search.
Because the JavaScript is sent to the Web browser when the page is requested, it is possible for other website owners to copy the JavaScript code into their own webpages. To protect against this type of fraud, AdSense customers can specify the pages on which advertisements should be shown. AdSense then ignores clicks from pages other than those specified.

That was about how Adsense works, but now we shall focus on the main aspects of Adsense, you should be aware of, before trying to dream about earning thousands of dollars every month.

How to Earn More from Adsense?

>Start by Choosing the Right Topic

To succeed with Adsense, you need to decide on the right type of website,the right topic, the right keywords, and the right content with loads of traffic(not always necessary). Get the stuff right and you are on your way to earning a fortune from Adsense.

The contextual advertising program Google Adsense has allowed a myriad of people to earn from their websites by publishing the ads. Retirees are rediscovering financial independence with Adsense, while people in their 20s are quitting their jobs to concentrate full time on their websites/blogs.

Contrary to what we think, not every one can become a successful ad publisher and earn thousands. There are many who can’t even earn the minimum monthly payout of $100. Many are even earning mere pennies per month. One of the misconceptions people have about Adsense is that once they get accepted by google adsense, it will automatically earn loads of money for them, which is absolutely not true.
As I said early on, to blossom with Adsense, you need to have the right type of website, the right topic, the right keywords and unique and original content.

The first step to earn more from Adsense is choosing the right topic for your website. Not all topics do well with Adsense. You can’t just expect to write about your philosophies on life or your love for your girl friend and expect that your website or blog will shower you with money. Adsense does not work for just about any topics out there.

>Find the Right Topic

The best topics that fit well with Adsense are those that attract users looking to spend money. Think of topics that attract people looking to buy something; or need to spend on something.

One example is mortgage resource website. Visitors to mortgage information sites are looking to finance their house purchase, or refinancing. The mortgage site provides the information on mortgage rates, even provide mortgage calculators, while the Adsense ads provide the vendors the user can check out.

Another one is about investments, shares and loans. People always try to make their life, less miserable by investing and buying shares and applying for loans.

Think product review sites such as Laptop reviews or MP3 player reviews. Visitors to these review sites are constantly thinking of buying the product. Hence they visit these sites to get information about the product, compare various products and end up making purchase decisions. The review site provides the information, while Adsense ads provide the vendors that offer these products.This mutual coincidence is the key to a happier ending.

Websites on earning money also tend to do well with Adsense. The website can provide information on how to start a business or buy into a business opportunity, while the ads will be business opportunities. As a result, the visitors become very interested in the ads and likelihood of clicking on the ads is much higher.

The best types of websites that work well with Adsense are those when the ads can be considered as an additional resource for the users. Remember, if the visitors the site attracts are looking to spend money, chances are high that the keywords shown on the site are high paying and you can get very good CTR.

>Find the Right Audience

Another important aspect in choosing a commercial topic with advertising potential is to find relevant topics where audiences can be most responsive to ads.

Think of a visitor who is deeply interested in credit and is looking for vaild info on how to improve his credit situation. He visits a site with loads of information on how to improve his credit, including tips on how to improve credit score and how to file for bankruptcy. While he finds the information on the website useful, he is looking to proactively help his dire credit situation. As a result, he is highly likely to click on the ads offering services such as loan consolidation or ads providing more information to improve his credit score.

Or you can have a travel site targeting people researching to spend their money on trips. A Barcelona, Spain travel page can contain information about the city, including weather, hotels, places to visit, and tips for travelers. The user looking to travel to Barca will find the information on the page very useful, but the ads on “Hotels in Barcelona for $58” will most certainly attract his attention and compel him to click on the ads.

Audiences are not responsive to ads if the site is the end-goal of the users, and as such will not do well with Adsense,. Gaming sites are an example, as visitors go to the sites simply to play – not look for other information or find additional services. The gaming site is their final destination, not merely a means to find better information or better offers. Hence, gaming and similar sites tend to exhibit very poor click through rates for Adsense.

Forums are another example that do not make good money with Adsense. While forums make the process of content creation easier for the website owner given that content is created by the users, forum visitors are seldom attracted towards the ads. Afterall, these people go to the forum to chat, exchange ideas, and connect with other people. They usually ignore the ads.

To make money on Adsense from forums, gaming sites and other similar types of sites, you need to have gigantic amount of traffic to make up for the very low click through rate(CTR) and potentially low priced clicks. Usually, people who go to gaming sites go there to play rather than read ads.

>Consider Your Interests

Identifying a high paying topic is only half of the herculean task. The immediate next question is: how are you going to create the content which is unique and original?

Do you have any interest about the topic you are going to develop? It is hard to create content about something you are not even interested in. Or do you have any knowledge or expertise in the topic? It makes some sense to build a site around what you know and are capable of writing about. Writing is often easier, and you are more motivated to produce content if you know the topic and actually are interested in what you are writing about.

If you do not have any knowledge about the topic yet sees its potential in generating Adsense income, be willing to spend days in your closet researching about the topic. As you gain more knowledge about the topic or a subject, the process of content creation becomes easier and the quality of the output eventually tends to improve significantly.You can also chip in more information if you can practice mind mapping which is a very good method to produde high quality content.

Another option, of course, is to hire guest writers to help you with the content. However, you need to watch out for the quality of their writing and check if the article is not stolen from elsewhere.

>Consider Your Competition

Another important consideration is the level of competition, especially if you are on a verge of building a site from scratch. It’s one thing to create a website with a valuable content(high paying topics), and another to actually dazzle out and attract traffic for the website.

One way is to find topics with little competition and hardly written about yet. The bottomline, however, is that topics with no competition means there is least interest in those topics, and worse, few advertisers.If you are going to write about popular topics, it is important to have a strategy in place that will distinguish your content from other websites, more so from the existing icons in the category. You need to have a different concept in mind before you go for it.

How are you going to display the relevant information in your website which distinguishes itself from the millions of other websites out there?

Why will visitors go to your site and click on the ads when they can go to more popular and established websites?

What type of content are you going to instill in your website that hasn’t been written about by other websites?

The key is to find a unique portion or niche in that popular topic that can help your website gain traffic.
You have to remember, advertisers and even readers know if your site has value, and whether your content is valuable or not. If users find your content valuable, it is not hard to earn significant amountsof money from Adsense.

All this can be easily achievable after you optimize the search engine about the relevance of your site above all others. Get google bots to crawl your site and always keep informed about the traffic in your site by signing up for google analytics which is a great tool for people who wants to monitor the traffic in their website.

Try to provide as much backlinks as possible, because this will increase the page rank of your website and consequently, it will be indexed better than most of the other websites and might make even make it to the first page results in google search. the higher the page rank, the more valuable, the site is.

All this is more than enough for you to start you journey in the enthralling world of web 2.0. The internet is a magical place to live in, full of answers and just waiting for our wits to grow sharper and sharper.