Archive for March, 2009

PDF: Know your UpTime

by Ades on March 30, 2009 in Advice to Businesses, e-books with 14 Comments

What does it really mean when a hosting company says they provide 99% uptime guarantee?! It means they guarantee not more than 7 hours (seven hours!!!) of downtime a month or not more than 3.5 days of downtime a year.

So if your business can’t afford to lose downtime of 10 minutes, don’t ever get close to those companies who offer 99% uptime! Rather go for companies who guarantee not more than 10-20 minutes of downtime per year.

Below is a cheat-sheet on uptime calculation provided by guys over at pingdom.

Download PDF: click here

WikiRank – See how many pageviews each Wikipedia page gets

by Ades on March 29, 2009 in SEO & Promotion, Trackers with 20 Comments

If you used to wonder how many pageviews particular page on Wikipedia gets, and whether it is worth to get your link up on that page…. now you don’t have to.

Because WikiRank allows you to see the statistics of every page on Wikipedia.

Of course, it only shows the pageviews and not the number of clicks each link gets. But still, it’s a great service for SEO people. For example, if you really do all it takes to get traffic to your blog, with WikiRank you could have checked the latest trends and perhaps make a niche website or blog about particular ‘upcoming’ topic that will get a lot of pageviews on Wikipedia and then try to get your link up on that particular page.

For example, people searched over 3 million times for “Watchmen” in Wikipedia.

If you had watched the movie and had written a review about it, and then got your link on Watchmen page on Wikipedia. I am sure you could have gotten at least hundreds of clicks if not thousands from Wikipedia. Just a thought.

Website: http://wikirank.com

WP Plugin: Simple Google Sitemap

by Ades on March 24, 2009 in Blogging Tips, WordPress with 15 Comments

Free services like XML-sitemaps is great for creating Google Webmaster Tools’ compliant sitemaps for your blog. But the problem is: Your blog is dynamic – it changes daily – and your sitemap is not!

Luckily there is a WordPress plugin called Simple Google Sitemap. Once installed it will create a dynamic sitemap that will update every time you make a new post. Sounds great, isn’t it? That should save a lot of trouble and time for you!

Now you don’t have to create your sitemaps manually and upload them throught FTP..etc.

Plugin allows you to assign ‘priority levels’ and ‘change frequency’ to your posts, pages and articles.

When you are done, just post your sitemap url to Google Webmaster Tools and Google will have up-to-date info about your blog’s changes.

Author Blog: http://suche.pytalhost.de/
WP Extend Plugin Page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-google-sitemap/

google’s visual design lead quits

by Ades on March 21, 2009 in miniblog with 4 Comments

douglas bowman, google’s visual design lead has resigned google. one of the reasons he cited for his resignation is google’s obsession with data. even in design they apparently try to implement strict scientific rules where you must prove your design preference… why the border has to be 3pixels, prove it!? that’s crazy! read his post

Creative Ad: Fitness First

by Ades on March 20, 2009 in Marketing, Personal with 17 Comments

Would you sit on this FitnessFirst bus-stop? I wouldn’t… because once you sit on the bench it automatically shows your weight on the big screen to everyone to see! Creative huh?

I wouldn’t sit on this bus-stop because I am on the heavy side at the moment… I even bought a treadmill last year but somehow haven’t used it yet :) but I made a promise to myself that I will exercise soon (even bought a sauna suit last week). Will let you know on my progress in the future.

Ad Source: http://directdaily.blogspot.com

WP Plugin: Top Commentators (v.1.05) has a bug

by Ades on March 20, 2009 in WordPress with 12 Comments

If you are using Show Top Commentators plugin for more than a year and haven’t updated it yet, then you are probably using version 1.05 which has a bug – it allows people to replace the link of any top commenter in the list.

All they have to do is to put exactly the same “name” as one of the top commenters, and then put their own “link”, this would change the link of the “top commenter” to the new “spam” link. This would last until the real author comments again or the admin of the blog removes the spam comment. So the plugin somehow was allowing the last commenter with the same name to replace the URL displayed in the list for that particular commenter.

So if you are using the old version, do update it to version 1.06 which solves this problem.

Note: Thanks to Andrei for informing me about this bug, I was too using the old version and had two of my commenters complain about their comments being hijacked. I have updated my plugin.

online project management

by Ades on March 15, 2009 in miniblog with 3 Comments

here is a free online project management similar to backpack http://officezilla.com

How to share Google Analytics reports with others

by Ades on March 13, 2009 in Blogging Tips, Google, Trackers with 19 Comments

Google Analytics is a great service and it’s used by many. One of the features that I like about Google Analytics is – sharing your reports with others.

Sometimes advertisers or potential partners would ask for your blog’s/website’s traffic statistics. And in this time of fraud and forgery, screenshots won’t simply do it (perhaps this might do). They want to see the real, live statistics. So, in this kind of situations G.Analytics’ “share reports” feature is a great solution.

Sharing your reports is easy, can be done in 3 simple steps.

1. Login to your G.Analytics account and go to your overview page of your reports. At the end of the page you will see a link “User Manager”, click it.

.
2. Next page will show you the list of emails (people) who have access to your reports. If it is your first time, you will only see your own email. Click on the “Add User” link.
.

.
3. Enter the person’s Gmail, yes it should be gmail and not any other email. And select the access type, you can either make the person “admin” or “view only”. After that, choose the report of the site(s) for him to view, in case if you have more than one site being tracked by G.Analytics.

Note: Be careful when making strangers admin of your reports.
.

.
That’s it. Now the person can login to his Google Account (Analytics) and see your reports inside his account. You can remove the person from your reports anytime.

How to get your questions answered from big companies

by Ades on March 11, 2009 in Business, Online Tools with 13 Comments

GetSatisfaction like FixYa is a place for you to get answers to your questions. But in GetSatisfaction your questions will be answered by the company representatives themselves and not by the crowd.

Moreover, in GS you can do more than just posting a question, you can actually submit ideas, suggestions, report an issue, give them praise etc. It seems many big companies are already on board with at least a dozen employees on support.

It’s a great way to get answers to your questions. Because usually these big elephants won’t get back to you if you use their contact form on their websites ;) – your emails just get dumped in their database. But here it’s in the open and transparent, so they most probably will answer your questions.

You can also get a feedback widget for your blog from GetSatisfaction like the one I am using from uservoice.

Website: http://www.getsatisfaction.com

Wakoopa – discover new softwares

by Ades on March 11, 2009 in Trackers with 13 Comments

Wakoopa is a software tracker, once installed it will track all softwares and web applications used by you and report it to wakoopa. Here is an example of a user’s page.

It’s been around for some time actually, but never really took off. The site has a great potential, especially the “discover new software” feature. Because you can actually see which softwares are being used the most, unlike in download sites you only see ‘most downloaded’ stats which wouldn’t really tell if people are still using the software after they have downloaded it and tried it for a few days.

So, ‘more download’ doesn’t really mean – good software – in download sites. But in wakoopa, ‘more usage’ really means – it’s a better software than the competitors.

Website: www.wakoopa.com

Kindle2 Usability Review

by Ades on March 10, 2009 in e-books, Usability with 6 Comments

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen takes on Amazon’s Kindle2 usability. His verdict:

Amazon’s new e-book reader offers print-level readability and shines for reading fiction, but it has awkward interaction design and poor support for non-linear content.

… Awkward pointing + slow reaction = a bad user experience that discourages people from exploring and attempting different tasks.

Read the full review here.

This review makes me feel like to wait for Kindle3, was really looking forward to purchase one. Anyone knows any other (brand) good ebook reader?