Mar
27
At 8.30pm on 27 March 2010, millions of people in cities across the planet will turn off their lights for one hour – Earth Hour – to show the world that a solution to the threat of global warming is possible through collective action. WWF and Earth Hour supporters around the world want your business to be part of this historic moment.
There are many ways businesses can support Earth Hour, from turning out the lights in their buildings/facilities on the night through to encouraging staff and clients to join the Earth Hour initiative. Show current and future staff and clients you’re supporting Earth Hour and contributing to a global climate resolution!
The following information outlines the various levels of commitment to Earth Hour, be it big or small.
Click here to learn how your business can support Earth Hour
Mar
24
Fotosizer is a freeware batch image resizer tool. It resizes your photos in just 3 easy steps – 1. Photo selection, 2. select resize settings, then 3. Start the resize!
With Fotosizer, you can shrink JPEG image files, along with other supported formats, and dramatically reduce internet transfer times, enabling you to quickly and easily prepare your image collections to be published on the web.
Resize quickly and easily using a preset list of sizes including iPod, iPhone, and Sony PSP screen sizes.
Batch resizing
- Choose to resize by percentage of width and height
- Choose to set custom width and height
- Maintain aspect ratio
- Choose where the resized images will be saved
- Change image quality
- Parameterised output filenames: Choose the format of the output filenames using parameters such as new image width/height, current date, number of image in the list being resized.
- “Auto-save” of settings on exit
- Resize portrait and landscape photos at the same time.
- Resize quickly and easily using a preset list of sizes including iPod, iPhone, and Sony PSP screen sizes.
Official download link: http://www.fotosizer.com
Mar
23
5 Reasons to have a Website
Filed Under Internet Technology | Leave a Comment
To establish a presence in the Internet
Approximately 15 million Internet users in Malaysia (Here’s proof). No matter what your business is, you need to reach them, fast! Your competitors will if you don’t.
To build your network
It is not what you know, it is who you know. Get network not only with your customers, but with other business partners and suppliers.
To make business information available
Who are you, what is your service/product, when is the event, great promotion and packages. Tell the whole world everything about your business/services, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!
To interact with customer
When your service/product information is available online, your customer can interact with you via your contact details (email/phone/fax/address) in your website.
Cheapest advertising and marketing tools
A website is the cheapest adverting and marketing tools. It also has the highest ROI.
Tips from [MyMart]
www.babygisela.com
Mar
21
Are you one of those guys who had made a website with lots of stuff to offer to visitors (your portfolio, perhaps) but have no idea what to do next? Well, what do you know.. there are thousands just like you. One of the thing that you can do is to let people KNOW about your website. Be warned though; this is hard work but seeing the traffic report afterwards will be music to your ears.
Link building is like trying to ‘advertise’ your website on other people’s website. But it doesn’t just stop there. You can let people know in your favorite forums (in correct section, of course), create those nifty looking forum signature and link it to your website (you can try with email signature too!), leave a comment in people’s blog that would link to your website or even print the URL in your name card. Endless of choices. It would be much better if the website that you are going to have the same audience as your website, so they would think “Hey, this guy’s website have photos of Hawaii too! Let’s check it out!”
Now, why would you want to build links to your website in the first place anyway? Is this really important? Can’t we just skip it?
Okay..why did you make the website in the first place? What was the purpose? If you are trying to showcase your artwork or skills in photography, link building is a very good way to get exposure from the public and even potential employers that might want to hire you. If you are living in Alabama, someone from New York might notice (and being awed) your work (being hired is a bonus). Link building is also good for SEO purposes. When there are lots of popular sites linking to your website, there is a big chance that your website would come out on the first page of the search engine. And when that happens, you can expect big and significant traffic to your website. Once in awhile, search engine all around the world have tendency to change their policy or method to display the search result. Nevertheless, putting up your link in popular websites is a safe bet.
Link building may sound easy, but depends on your target audience (and target websites) it will take most of your daily life routine. It will be tiring at first but hey, no pain no gain. First come out with list of websites/forums/blogs that you would like to ‘approach’ or post in DAILY, and then figure out things to post. Example, for forums, you can join in any interesting topics but at the same time showing them your forum signature embedded with a link to your site. If your daily life is hectic, or simply not enough time to do all this, you can always find freelancers on the internet for some money. There are even SEO companies out there that would do all the hard work of promoting your site.
To sum it up, link building is to create your small ‘network’ that would link to each other while building up your site popularity and relevance.
(word count 537)
By Shizu, Maple Software Creation, Jan 8, 2008
Mar
21
Black Hat Search Engine Optimization is those techniques that used to get higher search result ranking by using unethical methods. These black hat search engine optimization usually contain one or more of below categories:
- Break the search engine rule and regulations
- Create a poor user experience directly because the black hat search engine optimization techniques utilized on the websites.
- Unethically present the content in a different way or non-ethical way to the search engine spiders and search engine users.
Black hat SEO will provide a short term gain in the ranking result, but running these techniques on website, it will also running the risk of penalized by the search engine.
Black Hat SEO techniques to avoid
- Invisible/hidden text or tiny text – making the text’s color same as the background color, idea to hidden the text from people seeing and to get higher ranking result by adding keyword for search engine; or smaller the font size of text.
- Put irrelevant keyword – put the irrelevant keyword to the website which the keyword is popular but it is not related to the business of our website.
- Trademark infringement – put the competitors’ names somewhere in our website especially in the tag which will help to increase the ranking.
- Duplicating contents – making more than one page which is with the same contents. This will double up the tag that can increase the ranking from the search engine results.
- Page jacking – hijacking or stealing the popular website contents and put it in our website with few or no changes. The owner of content might not notice their content been stolen.
- Cloaking – detecting the search engine spider when these spider visit and modifying the page content. It used to improved ranking results of own website. Using some spider or software to grab all the page in the search result index and page content, later use the information grabbed to analyze.
- Guestbook spamming – posting some fake comment in other websites’ guestbook which will provide the linking to our website.
- Doorway pages – A page which will using to improving the ranking result and it is not contain any real content with it. And then it will re-direct to the real destination page, or automatically re-direct. The information will not useful and interesting to internet surfer.
- Google-bowling – submit the competitor’s website to the link farm which will might causing bad affect to that competitors such as idea to make them penalized.
- Spamming – creating some pages with not useful contents. The pages created specifically for the purpose of getting higher ranking. The page content might be the advertisements or the listing of other websites.
Punishment of black hat SEO
- Banned – The search engine will remove the website completely from their search engine index. One way to check whether our website is removed from search engine index is go search our website in the search engine.
- Penalized – the search engine will decrease the ranking of our website in the search engine ranking result. The ranking dropped then the website will visit by lesser internet surfer.
By Shizu, Maple Software Creation, Jan 8, 2008
Mar
21
How To Analyze Competitive Keywords For Your Website
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | Leave a Comment
Human think in a different way, but a lot of them thinking the same thing. It could be ‘bread’ right this second, it could be ‘fix my television’. This is the sort of thing, as a webmaster/SEO consultant, to think about. What are the words that people may be thinking when they use the search engine to search for something. How are you going to decide what to put up? But first, why?
Setting up proper keywords for your website would mean two things; traffic and popularity. Depends on how you set up your keywords, your site may appear on the first page of search engine or the 20th. Put yourself into the customer’s shoe. Would you want to keep clicking on ‘Next’ on the search engine result until page 50 to find what you are looking for? I don’t think so. Studies had shown that people tend to stop browsing through the results until page 10. Personally I would stop at page 3. Therefore, getting and setting your keyword is absolutely important. The single biggest mistake that newbies would do is to skip this whole keyword mambo-jumbo.
Now, before you have your head exploded, there are tools out there to help ease your headache. Some of the tools are the following. Some of the tools out there are free, and some of them need to be paid.
- Google Adwords Keyword Tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - SEOBook.com’s Keyword Research and Competitive Analysis Tools Gadget:
http://tools.seobook.com/google-gadgets/#kw - Trellian Keyword Discovery:
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html - SEOBook.com’s Google Suggest Keyword Suggestion Scrapper Tool:
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-information/
Type in the search boxes the keyword that people may be ‘thinking’ when they use the search engine to find products/services related to yours.
For example, let’s say that I have open up a website dedicated on teaching people how to play the guitar.
In Google Adwords Keyword Tool, first I type in ‘learn play guitar’. I can see that ‘learn play guitar’ and ‘learn to play guitar’ have high search volume that ‘learn play the guitar’. That’s it! The most suitable keyword would be ‘learn play guitar’. How astonishing that a single word would mean big difference.
But! Look at the Advertiser Competition. ‘learn play guitar’ have high numbers of advertisers using/bidding it. Surprisingly, ‘learn play the guitar’ have medium numbers of competitiveness. If you want to avoid using keywords that most people out there are using, your second best bet would be the keywords with not much of competitiveness. You can still use keywords with high numbers of bids, but you are competing with the rest of the world (and popular sites!)
To check and see the statistics of how many websites are using the same keyword, you might want to check out SEOBook.com’s Google Suggest Keyword Suggestion Scrapper Tool. Type in the keyword, and then it will display amount of competing pages, what Google suggest, and what does the Wordtracker would suggest.
You can try to check out out popular websites out there that are similar to yours and see what sort of keywords they are using. That would give you some rough ideas. Be reminded though, eventhough you can just copy-paste their keywords, you will learn nothing. If you are still unsure about what keywords would be suitable for your website and its content, you can hire SEO firm(s) to deal with it. They’re the experts afterall. Setting up good keywords would guarantee you traffic. Afterall, you have what they’re looking for.
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By Shizu, Maple Software Creation, Jan 8, 2008
Mar
17
Understanding Joomla Structure
Filed Under Joomla! Website DIY | Leave a Comment
Difficult to understand how section and categories in Joomla works?
Want to know how menus work on your website and how they are linked with sections and categories?
Click on the link below and you will get answers for the above questions.
Understanding Joomla Structure
Mar
11
How to Backup and Restore Large Databases in MySQL
Filed Under Software Development | Leave a Comment
Most who use MySQL have a nifty program called PhpMyAdmin. There is a good chance that if you are a user of that program, you’re here because you tried to backup or restore a large database through the web based interface and failed. This is a common situation, lucky for us there’s a very easy, fast, and reliable way to do this through the command line! If you’re a Linux user who has SSH access, follow the steps below.
Backing up the Database
Fire up SSH and type the following. Replace USER with your MySQL username, DBNAME with the name of the database you want to back up, and /path/to/backupname.sql to where you want the database backup file to be saved (directory must exist).
mysqldump -a -u USER -p DBNAME > /path/to/backupname.sql
You’ll be prompted for your MySQL password. It’ll get to work after you type that in and press enter, it may take a few moments (or longer if your database is really large).
When you’re returned to the command line you now have a backup file where you specified above. This file is a complete copy of the database at the time you ran the command, the second your MySQL table is updated your backup will be out of date. I suggest you take backups at regular intervals depending on your situation (I will write a guide on how to automatically do backups one day).
Restoring Your Database Backup
Follow these 3 commands to restore your database easily.
First we need to drop your current database so there are no conflicts when we’re restoring
mysqladmin -u USER -p drop DBNAME
Now we’ll remake the database, because it doesn’t exist anymore
mysqladmin -u USER -p create DBNAME
And finally, we’ll populate the fresh new database with your backup file.
mysql -u USER -p DBNAME < /path/to/backup.sql
The variables you should change above are pretty straight forward. If you get errors importing your data, it’s most commonly because your max_allowed_packet isn’t set high enough in /etc/my.cnf – if you have root access, you can go in and make that variable higher. If you don’t have root access, seek support from your web host.
Source: [Metatitan], [Htmlcenter]
Mar
9
If you purchased your domain name from GoDaddy.com while signing up for Google Apps, you shouldn’t use these instructions. Instead, you can activate email in the control panel and Google will automatically configure your MX records with GoDaddy.com.
If you’d like GoDaddy.com to automatically update your MX records for Google Apps, please log in to GoDaddy’s configuration tool at https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/google/gmail_login.asp.
To manually configure your MX records, please follow the link below:
=> http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33353
More reading: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html
Mar
7
Free introductory guide to internet marketing including Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube
Click here to view PDF
Thanks sharing from Nukleus Dr.Tan
Source: [Steinar Knutsen]
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