Category Archives: web

Why do websites create their own shortened URLs?

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When the URL shorteners started rolling out http://tinyurl.com and urltea.com played the game well initially. Now the most popular shortening service is http://bit.ly, which provides APIs, tracking clicks, custom URL addresses if available, etc. Nevertheless some websites still create their own URL addresses for redirection. What do they benefit from doing this?

  • Using external services is always risky.
  • The url shortening services may go offline soon due to find right finance to continue the service. Companies may end up losing all their data
  • Regulation issues (read this: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/10/08/libyas-clarifies-the-vb-ly-takedown-bit-ly-can-breathe-easy/).
  • Have more flexibility and can have their own page ranking and manipulation algorithms
  • Branding is important especially for big corporates. (e.g ford can represent their tiny Urls like http://fo.rd/123)

You can see more updates on this on my discussions in Quora – http://qr.ae/uAfc

Should I start blogging? The FAQs

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Many of my friends have asked questions about blogging. My take on the most popular and fundamental questions.

Why are you maintaining a blog?

I started blogging 4-5 years back just for improving my writing skills. When I started blogging, I realized that it’s not merely a technical thing for a non-native English speaker to write something in a good way.

I was active in several forums few years back. Some of the questions being asked in the community were the common problems faced by developers. We might have experienced or fixed it. So I started concentrating on writing something reusable and simple.

Most of the forums has explained, “How to ask a technical question?”. The first and foremost thing is, google! Otherwise raising the questions and getting perfect answer will surely eat up your time. And trust me, for most of the questions, you may not be the first one facing it unless you’re doing some rocket science.

The problem with the forums are mostly we’re getting answers from novice developers. One of the main reason people active under forums on eyeing some kind of recognition like MVP award. But realize the fact that MVP award is given for quality not really for quantity. Such kind of people also will maintain the blogs and stops blogging once the receive their goal. Seriously my policy of blogging is about sharing (I don’t mind if I get award for the same reason) may be it’s the core reason I maintained the blog for last 5 years. But the posts are less in these days!

Who was your inspiration?

When I started blogging, The Old New Thing and Coding Horror were the blogs I regularly read. Jeff Atwood of coding horror rarely posts something in these days but his posts are golden and talking about timeless concepts.

Where did you start?

I initially started blogging with Blogger which is the first choice of many amateur bloggers. Also it has a credit of being a google products. Blogger also provides monetization options for bloggers through Google Adsense. Later I moved to WordPress.com . I liked wordpress better because I enjoyed cleaner GUI and really a good bunch of themes and plugins to organize and navigate the content better.

What’s your policy for blogging?

I have decided not to make the blog something like twitter (only to share the links) and make some traffic.I fundamentally blog about following tips

  • Windows Programming Tips
  • Software Engineering
  • Tools & Productivity tips
  • Really like to hum

What I do not blog? I refrain blogging other topics but especially would like to mention

  • Posts with mere linking
  • Copy/Paste posts form someone else and give credit at end
  • Financial topics and entertainment topics can drive more traffics but I realized it’s not for my blog

The interesting things we can watch in the forums is, people needs credit and they’d like to turn it to some recognition like MVP stuffs. Later they stops forums activity/blogging. So my focus was to write something in my blog which is fundamental, reusable solutions to the problem. I never attempted to write a big open source projects and talk about in the blog.

How frequent you blog?

For me the blogging still happens, I used to have daily posts in my blog (sometimes 2 or more). At that time I was not really busy with work and I used get enough time. Later my resposibilities had grown, I stopped being there in the forums. Later the learning turned staginated. I used to read books a lot then but seldom blogs. Also when we get in to serious blogging, we’ve lot of effort to make a good content. I’m still having lot of spelling and grammar mistakes in my posts. To make a blog post in to a shape, it’s more than a technical contribution.

Give me few words about RSS and feedburner

RSS was a trend 7 years back and slowly gained the pace, The blogs are mainly accessed using the RSS readers like Google Reader etc. The website won’t get much traffic if the users are reading the blog posts using their favorite RSS readers. Products like feedburner helps the authors to monetize their content but putting ads in the RSS feeds. When the social networking websites like twitter, facebook started affecting people’s life, they care more about accessing and sharing the contents using social medias. The twitter is the best source for sharing and resharing information.

From your experience, how can I start blogging

I’ve the following opinion on blogging.

  • Sharing knowledge must be the first priority not any awards or monetization
  • Once you’ve the best contents, the search engines will drive more traffic to your website, which will give more inspiration for blogging.
  • If you’re consistently growing your audience (watch for your page views), then you’re doing well and push your efforts to the maximum

How many blogs you’ve?

I had given strict policy for my main blogging site http://codereflect.com/ . But I also have feelings to write something else which I don’t want to mix up with my main writing. So I’m maintaining blogs on various blogging platforms other websites like novembersky.tumblr.com. sarathc.blogspot.com , sarat.posterous.com , passionate.posterous.com etc. I seldom care about the quality of contents in casual blogs.

Why you decided to move to your own identity and space?

I moved to my own space because I found that wordpress.com started inserting ads in to my post because they’re providing the space and address at free of cost. So we can’t blame them either. This had happened when I found more traffics in my popular posts. Once I felt the quality of the content and consistent audience, I decided to move my own space under own identity. Also I really wanted to play with web programming stuffs.

It’s question when to move your own space to host the blog. That’s authors discretion. People may not be really cared of making money or take the burdens of server management

What’s the difference between domain and hosting space?

Suppose if you brought http://someaddress.com/ it doesn’t mean that you can start blogging. It’s merely an address. You’ve to buy server space from any reliable hosting company and configure your domain name towards the IP address provided by the hosting company. GoDaddy.com is one of the best choice to buy domains but I brought domain from Google (a bit more expensive). You can also transfer your domain name to some other DNS provider.

How was the transition period?

My blogging rate was reduced. The search engines stopped redirecting to my new home. The links provided by Google was broken as I deleted my old blog (http://sarathc.wordpress.com) Later I found a way in Google Webmaster toolkit to manage the domain changes but it was a bit late.

I failed to make proper backups after importing blog from my old wordpres blog. The servers were notorious. I opted for a low cost plan from ZnetIndia.com. The servers used to crash very frequently and I spent nights for restoring my blog. Now the servers running somewhat OK. But still I used to get server errors. I spent 1-2 months for learning and managing the hostspace and my blog content. I was spammed with wrong categories and tags somehow.

Why did you decide to put ads in the site?

It’s not really making revenue. I’m not a professional writer and I’m not earning a penny for my articles blogs or code snippet. But I need to find the money to own my address and server space. That’s why I’m putting ads.

Which Blogging platform I should opt?

WordPress.org is the most popular blogging platform. There are other CMS like Drupal, Joomla etc.

Which server platform should I opt? Windows or Linux?

Seriously I don’t know. I run on top of a Windows server. The server management is easy!
What should I take care before buying space?
Ensure that your hosting provider supports web programming technologies like PHP, MySQL etc. You should cross check the supported technologies against your blogging platform.

Which plug-in you’re using to put ads in your website

I’m perfectly OK with PHP programming stuffs and I’ve manually edited the theme code to insert ads in my blog. My blog contains only two ads at consistent places (header and sidebar). I’m inserting ads per post. If you’re keen in to that, you can see lot of plugins.
I used a false plugin and ran adsense for 3 months. The clever guy inserted adsense code of his adsense account. I wasn’t aware that he’s gaining money from my posts! So please check the source code of your pluging and ensure that you’re not running a false plugin.

Is social integration necessary?

Yes very much. The social media is the best place for announcing and sharing the content in these days. Trust me! Currently I integrated only twitter with my blog. I believe facebook is a place for friends. They may not like technical stuffs that much! Check back the social networking website for further assistance.

Is there anything else?

No. Just want to conclude the point

  • Choose quality over quantity
  • Establish a good name and drive more traffic to your website. The quality posts can consistently drive traffic to your website. You event don’t have to blog
  • Adhere to a policy for blogging. Make your priorities well.
  • Just have a try with free blogging platforms instead of throwing money at domain address and space.
  • Monetize your blogs when it reach a good shape. Seriously people hate ads. Avoid if you can.
  • Keep proper back up of your database and files. Otherwise it will be tedious to restore. Make it as a habit and use tools like MySql Workbench etc. to create backup.
  • Make writing as a habit. Enjoy the happiness of sharing!

How to use Google font API in your blog?

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I like readable fonts, slightly big in size. But I’m quite bored with the standard fonts we’re seeing for ages like Arial, Verdana, Georgia etc. Recently I tried of another simple experiment with my blog by enabling open webfonts created by Google. I like the font collection provided from Google. In Windows, I like Segoe UI and Calibri which is the most readable fonts bundled with Windows. In the apple world, I personally like Helvetica but the problem is, these wont run across platforms. I agree most of the visitors in my website are Windows users but I still like to have a unique look for my website across browsers and platforms. Also in the old version of Windows, Calibri and Segoe UI is not available by default. Also the purpose of this post is to letting someone know, there some simple beautiful things are happening around to try with.

font_api-128

 

Google webfonts are available through Google Fonts API which helps you to add web fonts to any webpage. Google fonts are high in quality, extremely easy to use and it works with most of the browsers in any platforms. There are two methods to use Google open fonts in your website, the first one is very basic usage of CSS and second version called WebFont Loader which is giving advanced usage of fonts and give far more flexibilty using JavaScript.

Here I’m covering only the basic usage of enabling Google fonts in the website.

1. Add the sytlesheet link request to the required font.

With a wordpress blog, I prefer you’re adding this in header.php file.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Font+Name">

2. Select the CSS elements which need to apply the fonts with 

CSS selector {
  font-family: 'Font Name', serif;
}

Or inline stle with div tag

<div style="font-family: 'Font Name', serif;">Your text</div>

 

A Simple Example

Here’s the way I updated my blog font

Added link code in Modified Header.php 

<link  href="//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Nobile:regular,italic,bold,bolditalic" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" >

Modified the stylesheet.css and select the body with the Nobile font I selected

body {
  font-family: 'Nobile', serif;
  font-size: 14px;
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 400;
  text-shadow: none;
  text-decoration: none;
  text-transform: none;
  letter-spacing: 0em;
  word-spacing: 0em;
    line-height: 1.4em;
}

How to easily generate the Google Font API stylesheet code?

You can simply generate Google Font API CSS style sheet using Google font preview page. The modified parts will simply highlight in Yellow color and you’ve perfect control over vertical and horizontal spacing decoration etc. I prefer you to use this page to generate flawless CSS code.

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