When to hotlink images and when not to?

Hotlinking is a term used to signify that the images that you use in the post do not come from the same server that hosts the content. For example, consider these two images:

Both are same images and look similar - any difference attributed to showing that they are different images. The left pic is coming from the same server that hosts this content (i.e., from technosanct.com), while the pic at the right comes from my Google drive. But the image could have easily been sourced from any website (say, from Wikipedia)

Hotlinking is discouraged:

1. You are using the bandwidth of the third party site, without adding any value to that site
2. A lot of sites do not attribute the third party source (or respect copyright), which again results in loss of potential traffic and income for those sites. You get to go on a ride without paying anything
3. If the source changes, you have to manually go back and update the posts
4. When there are related images on the post, it enjoys a better ranking from a search engine perspective
5. While you may optimize your site further using CDN and other techniques, the source of the images may not enjoy the same sophistication thereby slowing your web pages

While all this is true, you find the images on this site often are sourced from my Google drive rather than uploading it here. I have my own reasons to do this.

• I hotlink from my own drive, where I upload pics specifically to be used by my blog. This image will not go away anywhere unless I wish to do so
• When I started out to blog, I was not sure whether I will stick to one particular platform. Having my images on a neutral place helped me experiment with multiple platforms, while I could easily transfer content from one place to the other. The practice just stuck
• I use screen capture tools that help me capture the whole screen or part of the screen, and upload to my Google drive all in a couple of clicks. I am lazy to move away from this option
• My choice of cheapo hosting providers are not fast, and certainly not comparable to what Google can do. Images have not been slower to render as compared to the content, and I am quite pleased by that

So then, I continue to use hotlinking in this site, and also in a couple of other sites. The biggest risk that I see – Google changing its policies to allow images to be displayed directly in other posts.

How to solve Live Writer issues with posts appearing read-only for Wordpress?

Microsoft Live Writer is an awesome tool to write blogs, this has been covered before. But, Live Writer is not a hot topic when the whole world is moving towards web apps, and is looking to the web to solve all problems including global hunger. So, what can old fashioned bloggers do? Well, they help each other. Let us deal with one nagging issue here, and see how to solve Live Writer posts getting read-only for Wordpress blogs.

Source of the Problem

Live Writer detects your blogging platform at the time of setup of the blog. You supply the URL of the blog, and the user id/password so that Live Writer can know the platform, and get the theme details that helps in writing/preview of the content. During that time Live Writer assumes defaults for the various blogging platforms, which may be an issue if you have changed the defaults. In Wordpress the default category for new posts is helpfully named ‘Uncategorized’. This default can be changed in the Wordpress settings > Writing tab.

When you change the settings, the new posts are created under that particular category. So, when Live Writer is trying to create a new post, read it and get the theme details doing it, the tool is most likely not able to find the post and assumes there is something wrong. The result – you do not get to create a post or edit the post in the ‘Edit’ tab (though Category, Source seem to remain intact).

The Solution

As you might imagine, this does not really need further explanation. You just need to set the default category in Wordpress to ‘Uncategorized’. Do not forget to ‘Save’ the settings by clicking on the button placed at the bottom of the page.
Once you have done this, do the following steps in Live Writer:

• Go to ‘Home’ tab > ‘Manage Blog Accounts’
• In ‘Accounts’ list, select your Wordpress blog and click on ‘Edit’ button
• As the next step, select ‘Editing’ options and click on ‘Update Theme’ button

That is it! Now creating your posts or editing them should work as expected. If the above steps do not work, you can also try resetting the blogging account from scratch.

Why use Wordpress premium (or paid) themes?

I absolutely love Wordpress. It is strange to type this in a blog that runs on blogger, but not so strange when you consider that it was my deliberate decision to take it easy on hosting and cut down monthly bills.

Wordpress empowers users who are not in the web development space to create and run their own web sites/blogs, and gives them tools to manage all aspects of the site.That empowerment is enhanced by the Wordpress plugins and themes. While plugins are invaluable in their contribution to the site’s functionalities and make it easier for the creator/maintainer of website, it is the theme that gets noticed and that’s what makes or breaks your blog or website at the first glance.

Themes have quite a bit of history, and have contributed a lot in increasing the popularity of Wordpress as a platform. While other CMS like Drupal or Joomla have themes as well, the ease of Wordpress combined with themes just blows you away. Wordpress provides deeper functionalities that are subject to easy manipulation through themes, and thereby makes it easier to work with. Themes change the look and feel of the website/blog, and (probably unjustifiably) is a direct indicator of the professionalism, quality of website/content, trust-worthiness and the commitment shown by the blogger to his subject of choice. Themes provide a cheaper, easier way to customize the website, and make it unique within an available framework.

The first place to visit for themes is of course the themes at Wordpress.org.

There are a lot of excellent themes here, and all of them are free. A lot of themes offer a ‘pro’ version that will provide enhanced functionalities as compared to the starter free version. Developers/designers starting up with their own Wordpress work will find the platform provided by wordpress.org one of the best to showcase their work. I have used both starter versions, and the completely free versions on my websites, and have been satisfied to various degrees. To find the right theme for the website is easier said than done.

It routinely includes browsing tens of sites other than Wordpress.org to check out reviews, opinions about the theme

Wordpress.org preview is not quite good, and I end up visiting multiple sites to preview a theme as well as compare it to its peers

I download, test the theme on my local site, and sometimes this clicks and sometimes it doesn’t

If there are minor tweaks needed, I rely on the helping nature and good will of many a Wordpress developer to get me out of trouble (I am not a core web developer, and my PHP skills are enough to write ‘Hello World’ pages)

I get frustrated by the sheer number of websites that display wrong information, are copy/paste jobs from the main theme site, and do their best to mislead people

In other words, the search for themes for me is not a straight forward affair. So, when I was getting increasingly worried about how my website looks and performs, I started thinking about themes that require hard cash. I did this because of two reasons:

I was increasingly not happy with the way my site looked. It was not exactly looking like the below pic, but was trending towards it. I had started going through a lot of internet marketing materials, and of course those polished, made-to-order websites were enough to give me a sad feeling

I believed this in a way also influenced the way users perceived the articles/posts. This was not good since with the negligible traffic I had, I wanted the content to look professional enough

Once I took a decision to pay for a theme, I started seeing better quality themes as expected. But it was not a straight forward decision either. Before selecting the theme, I did quite a bit of research on what exactly I wanted from the site and what was the best/easiest way to achieve that using a theme. I went through the routine of browsing a couple of websites to evaluate themes and gather opinions that mattered. At the end, I narrowed down my options:

A magazine/blog theme suited my needs since I published more than one topic of interest on the site

I needed something that does not require changes to the code, CSS or anything else not exposed on the user interface

Support for Google fonts was a must, I intend to make it as easy to the reader as possible

I put down by budget as USD 40 so that I have a upper ceiling for my options financially

I needed a sizable positive review. This sadly ruled out some themes with interesting use of HTML5 and animations that were more recent entries, but I was going to be really careful about my money

And, finally I narrowed further down to two themes. After spending some more time on the demos, and comparison, I selected one. The winner – Sahifa Wordpress Theme from ThemeForest.

At USD 55, this went beyond my budget but well worth the money if you ask me. I spent less than 3 hours to reset my content, and was all set. The all new website is a treat to look at – as compared to the old one that is. And, I am seriously thinking of ending all searches for free themes and go premium for all my future endeavours.

Stay tune for a slew of theme reviews from my research.

[post contains affiliate links that may earn me money without any cost to you]

Have you used Amazon appstore yet?

If you are using Android phones, Google Play is the default store from which you download additional Android apps, games and other paraphernalia for your phone. Google Play store, coming from the software creator, is good - no doubt about it. But Android also represents 'choices', and it is good to have more than one choice for your software. Especially if that choice also means you are saving some money on your favorite apps.

Amazon AppStore is not really new. Started in 2011, this is offered as the only app store for Amazon Kindle devices and other devices can install the Amazon app to access the store.
Though Amazon app store appears slower and more clunky than Google Play, it offers three distinct advantages:

1. Amazon has been long running a feature to get you one paid app for free on any day. The "free app a day" has had some interesting apps for free in the past. All this started with the ad free version of Angry Birds back in 2011.
2. You can also test-drive the apps using your browser. This runs on an Android emulator on the Amazon EC3 instance and provides a good overview of what the app is about in your browser
3. Amazon app purchases and in-app purchases are integrated with your Amazon account. Amazon coins are yet to take off as virtual currency, but with Amazon's support that looks to have some future

Go ahead and try Amazon AppStore on your Android phone. 

For a limited time (till 28-Dec-13), you get a $5 store credit when you download or update Amazon PlayStore on your Android phone.  [expired]

Prezi is Powerpoint on steroids

Microsoft PowerPoint is the standard pot for presentation recipes for quite a long time. Though there have been alternatives (e.g. OpenOffice Impress, Google Docs Presentation), none offer the same breadth, depth as PowerPoint. Like its Office siblings PowerPoint is rooted deep in the minds and hearts of the office goers and it is difficult to change that without good incentive.
Prezi has the potential to change all that. Not only Prezi has a beautiful and fresh feel to it, it offers many features for today’s user. Prezi can work both through a browser alone, as a desktop application, and as an app on iPad/iPhone. This makes it easy to create and present, and you can get started with it real quick. 
To start with, Prezi has beautiful looking templates that are easy to work with. You get to easily create presentations in the time-tested manner, but make it really interesting. The frames provided to present the information can show the presentation with context and make it powerful through intuitive flows. For each template, you can apply themes that can change colours, fonts and the like to give it a more unique feel.

Though it supports the same-old bulleted lists, now you have the flexibility to go beyond that by adding animations that do not look tacky, add background music or YouTube videos


Prezi presentations can be worked upon by multiple people over the internet, and this platform can be used to share the presentation in real-time as well.

The free version of Prezi offers 100 MB of space, and all presentations are publicly viewable. For provide presentations and for more space, the upgrade starts from $5 a month. The desktop version starts from $13.25/mo, and is needed for any offline editing.

As you would expect by now Prezi has its own proprietary format. Offline presentations can be downloaded as a Adobe Air application and that’s about it. Any online content you have included in the presentation will continue to require an internet connection.
If you are looking at something going beyond PowerPoint, but with the smae usability, Prezi can be the answer today. Go ahead and try the free version!

Why websites maintain email lists (and perform dark arts)?

We have touched upon the subject of email lists before. Though I regret not maintaining it, I do not do it for the continued reason that:

• I am lazy
• I do not think I have intelligent enough things to say that people want to read every week/fortnight/year

But with my enhanced ability to take BS, I do subscribe to a lot of email lists and have a really good conclusion on why websites (especially internet marketing websites) talk about email lists way more than blogs and forums. First the conclusion: maintaining email lists and pumping them information including product advice, affiliate links, and the likes are like people performing dark arts. Yes, more than a few people fall to the advice to earn some money, and fame to the practitioners. No, there are not a lot of people practicing dark arts for the good of humanity.

I will not harp on the goodness of email lists, that has been done before. But it is equally interesting on how email lists avoid the pitfalls and negatives while you are demonstrating your expertise in a public forum.

• Email lists are private. The reader either opens the email or no, the reader may click on the links or otherwise, and the reader may simply move the damn thing to spam. At the end of the day, this remains private. I am free to claim what I want to claim. I do not have to provide insights into how many returning readers actually come over to the website, what percentage of traffic is from email list subscribers, what percentage of readers are led by my other dark arts, and so on. This is crucial while I am trying to play the expert giving some 'gyan' to the lesser mortals
• Opinions are mostly kept private. Unless someone (like me) erupts in some forum or website, the email responses are private, and kept that way. Strong opinions on emails from the website are neatly sidelined. There is no way to discuss what is there in the list and whether this helps or harms the user. This is a one way water hose, the information from which has to be carefully cross examined elsewhere. Often (as in the case of internet marking software), BS is way way beyond what is reasonable. As a result you may not find any negative opinions for the first five pages of a search engine result. You have to really deep-dive in the topic, visit a lot of internet markets forums and find out by yourself
• You can share silly information and disguise it as a thorough professional quality work. People click on something that is "free for 10 days", "free only for the loyal subscribers of the lists", "free for idiots", look at something that has been rehashed and resold from a totally unrelated story and get satisfied for the day. This especially builds up the opinion provided the subscribers do not know what a feed reader is and do not know what is going on other than what has been provided in online/offline newspapers, Facebook and the great knowledge repository called Twitter. Read here for an example. I totally agree this is needless here (especially while I have singled out the website somewhere else before), but this was just to show the trend.

QuickSprout or not to sprout?

This is another piece of bad advice, so go away. If you intend to stay on, do not believe all that is written here. The original content authors on the mentioned website and related affiliates make a tonne of money, have big-time followers and fans, and are highly successful. I am too small to matter and you can safely disregard the content here. If you are wondering, this is my disclaimer :)

I have mentioned about my liking for the proven ways of internet marketing before. I continue to pursue that interest, partly due to my interest in creating content that I may have an audience for (one day in the not so future, provided there is no skynet). But quicksprout.com did take the cake when I was trying to get it to someone else.

To be fair, the landing page for the website is a really good URL analysis tool.

But what got me really interested was a referral for the course materials from other site. This brought me to this page.

For more than 1.5 MB the page goes on over 39 pages to establish and re-establish one fact - get QuickSprout Traffic System Pro, a product that can help you make whatever you are doing in the internet better than current. All the interesting facets mentioned in my earlier post are here and then some. Start with clear typography, shiny images, good feedback from existing customers and follow it up with clear call to action at least 4 times to buy the product at a fraction of the price that big corporations pay. Nothing wrong with all that - been there, seen that elsewhere, but what got me to write this post was this. When I browsed till the end, I get the following page:

This rattled up me a bit. Not to blame the page - again clear call to action and everything to incentivise action in a few hours. And, not that I was going to buy all the materials that can make me some good money and popularize this "not so good", "D rated" (both at the time of this post) website of mine. I was just overcome with emotion for the poor jerks who would have said "you had me at 'income-boosting'", and went ahead with the purchase of the goodies. 

I still have a way lot of things to learn folks, but I can never learn how to give discounts on my 'expertise' at the nick of time. Or may be I will do sometime in the future - stay tuned.

Do not trust all experts and their tools on internet marketing

Well, I kind of think what I am trying to do here. technosanct was a blog built for some knowledge sharing - the small amounts of which I gain when looking out for solutions for my problems, but equally important - I wanted to check how affiliate marketing (the real mindless ones too) work and whether with my writing skills I have some kind of future somewhere in the near term. So, content here not only includes whatever I find useful for internet, technology and blogging that I come across on my own, but also material I source from my hours of deliberate browsing of the internet to check what others are doing, whether it cuts down on time/money, gains me 100k fans or more. This includes getting advice from bloggers who have apparently been successful, or really successful, or on the verge of being successful. Some of this advice is free, some of them paid and a lot of them promise tools to bring me out of current misery. Sadly search engines or people do not want to go to people who did not quite make it after a lot of writing, key word researching and after some money spent on the experts/expert materials/the like. So as a upcoming (gulp!) blogger, I am lending a hand and giving out advice - get some real advice on internet marketing. All for free, and without scary, shiny buttons in the way. And oh, all in text on this post (and a few others) with no plans to ebookify or podcastify the content.

courtesy: designseoblog

What I discovered in my quest in the past 2-3 months (which does not make me an expert whatsoever) are these:

• Experts in Internet Marketing always link to other experts, not all naturally and not in the way that comes in the way as advertisement. It may be a nudge to the other blogs/websites, materials that others provide and this expert has decided to use, or how beautiful the relationship between those two experts are. The conversation through linking and back linking made me dizzy sometimes, and I am sure the expertise of all involved (except myself) grew several folds in the meantime
• Most of this linking is big time affiliate marketing. If you spend more than 6 hours researching for how to get better keywords for your lame blog, you are going to be amazed at what people can do, how beautiful the websites look (images, typography and all), and how easy actually getting a fan following is. Well, you are reminded from time to time that this is all hard work, but overall quality of life is astounding to say the least
• Expert websites are big landing pages with clear (bold, CLEAR, colorful, shiny) call to action. This call to action is something that you want to buy, to watch videos, subscribe to email lists, and the like
• The number of ways in which most experts like to help commoners like myself became worrisome. The sheer knowledge propagated through blogs, ebooks, videos, podcasts, knowledge articles, guest posting is mind boggling. After two months of this, I am sure I am finding a pattern somewhere here. But I am not sure whether I am a better person as promised by all the knowledge (may be I am since I raise this question?). If there are too many experts, will not the expertise wane? Or do they follow the adage "share knowledge to gain knowledge"? 

One thing I learnt for sure though, I may try all I want but will not reach this level of expertise needed for making a living out of internet marketing. I will try to remain small (back-end blogger for some more time), not invest (yet) in Genesys framework, or teach others on how to do internet marketing :). (This should be apparent by the above post, but thought of reinforcing the message anyway).

If you are wondering about what to do now there is no advice here at this time. Be cautious about your approach, how much money and time you invest in, and be wary of the experts and their tools.

PS: If you are an expert mentioned above, please do not be offended - I was talking about the other 90% who make the internet a scary place.

Maintain a email list for loyal subscribers and increase popularity of your blog or website

Look at this blog and tell me one thing that you see missing (Well, apart from a professional design that is :)). It is this - no emails going out to notify users for absolutely anything.
As blog/website owners tell you putting content that is worth noting is only half the job. Making sure this content actually reaches the people who are interested to see that content is what makes you, or your website popular. The simplest way to do this is of course, pushing your website through your friends, colleagues and more through the social media sites.

courtesy: wikimedia

Though this is a good start, people do not really arrive in hordes unless you are connected to the right people. So, the next easy channel is through social bookmarking. In addition to pushing the links to posts to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter you can now target bookmarking sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon, and hope others take it from there. Alternatively, you can  use IFTTT to setup a few recipes and automate this whole business by publishing posts when your website is updated (not as effective, but works).
The idea is to spread the word, and that has to cascade for your blog to become popular and effective. Imagine the spread of virus, or let's tone down the metaphor to spread of humans on the globe.

courtesy: wikimedia.org

Although the world has changed a lot and moved rapidly towards non-personal transactions that are pseudo-personal, there are just too many people who like to keep things separate and *like* a physical notification. And, emails are just the way to achieve that.

There are people out there including you and me, who just do not care about the messages arriving in their inbox. But, the right amount of incentive to actually open and read email gives you a loyal reader who is assured to have a look at your content every now and then (if not every time). You have to get this first - people subscribed to your emails because they are interested in the topic, and if you keep that interest going and get them to read the content, it is sure to spread like wild fire! If that is not great, what is?

But doing that is not easy, here are a few tips to get it right:

• Do not let your emails be the drones that summarize the website content and nothing else. People are smart - they can follow your website through RSS, through Social Media sites and what not. A more personal approach here in the email builds those relationships that are so important to have a reader base
• Emails also have to encourage response/feedback. Some kind of response mechanism for the user to react and provide feedback goes miles in establishing in their minds that they matter. And, believe me, they DO matter for you to rake in profits
• Emails must have a call to action. Either it can be that one interesting topic or conversation that they have to look at, or that one product they can buy and add absolute value to their lives!
• Emails have to offer something exciting other than what is found on the website (or can be found in a remote corner that users are sure to miss). This can be a discount to a new product, some exciting news about the website, or invites for candid feedback or surveys
• Get the frequency of emails right. Too many emails and your user base will move away, too less and they loose interest
• Finally, use tools to automate things so that you do not get stuck with managing lot of stuff and not creating enough

The last statement is so enormous that I have shied away from doing any kind of email communication on this site. But one way out I see is through the use of effective tools to maintain the email conversation. Let us look at the top three.

1. AWeber

AWeber gained my attention due to their low entry fee of $1 for the first month, and $19/mo afterwards. But man, was I impressed with the number of things they offer. The email lists are straightforward to maintain, you can choose to slice and dice the email subscribers for targeted communication, and the email templates can be customized to your heart's content.

However what impressed me the most was the Analytics and auto responders. You can not only target subscribers, but also measure how successful your email was. You can track who opened the emails, who read them and for what time and so forth. This gives a very precise understanding of whether your email communications are moving in a positive path or in need of any course corrections. The auto responders can be programmed to give that fuzzy feeling to your users that they are being listened to and acted upon. You can also automate things here - for example send a link to the program or ebook when they respond to a survey!

 

2. GetResponse

GetResponse is another great tool which does all the things mentioned above. Plus you get the first month free in the trial period. Starting at $15, the interface does look easy to use and colorful. 

The emails are customized through a drag and drop interface, you can create landing pages for the email links and have powerful automation built in. Analytics is great and what is interesting is the mobile app and social media integration with the emails! 

 

3. MailChimp

I started experimenting with MailChimp because it is free to start up. In fact you can continue to remain free if your subscriber base is small (<4000) and you send out not more than 12000 emails/month!

In fact I would say you can experiment with MailChimp while you are deciding whether email is your thing before you spend cash on it. But beware though, MailChimp does not spell out policies on your own affiliate links sent through emails. The reports are average, but pretty good for the price.

 

So, there you go folks - the why and how of maintaining email lists for your own blog or website. Go ahead and try it, and comment on whether it does help.

Use Windows Live Writer for more productive blogging

Windows Live Writer from Microsoft is one of the excellent tools from Microsoft. Live Writer has been on the writing scene for quite some time now, and the latest version as of this post is delivered as part of Windows Essentials 2012.

 

Get Started

Getting started in Live Writer is easy. First download Live Writer. The install itself is a smooth process. Once you are done, fire up Live Writer from the shortcut in the Start menu.

All Windows users will feel right at home with the user interface. The first step to do is to connect to your blog. Go to ‘Home’ tab, click on ‘Add Blog Account’.

Live Writer has support for commonly used blogging platforms. You can rely on it to find out automatically which platform you use.

Notable exception here is support to Drupal platform. Live Writer is not supported on Drupal platform, which I miss the most for my Drupal site (another story). The connection to your blog also includes a step to get the current theme from your blog so that what you write here is what you get on the blog.  You can also connect multiple blogs, and you get to choose which blog is the post intended for.

Start Writing!

Go to ‘File’ menu > ‘New Post’ and start typing away. At the bottom of the page, you can ‘Preview’ what you typed, or also do some changes to the source in the ‘Source’ tab (useful to include HTML / JavaScript and the like). Once you are satisfied with the preview, go ahead and ‘Publish’ by clicking on the big button thoughtfully places in ‘Home’ tab.

Fantastic Features to Note

Of course all of the above can be done by many platforms. But there are too many features that makes Live Writer stand out.

• Typing and navigating in the post or across posts is *really* easy. You get all the great features of an offline editor, and the assurance that the post will not change when you upload to your blog
• Spell checks work, and so does find and all the shortcut keys that you are so in love with (Ctrl+B, Ctrl+K)
• Preview is great and you can exactly see how your posts look like once published
• Setting fonts, headers, paragraphs, highlights etc. is real easy. The fonts are copied over from your theme in the blog, and you can retain them or choose to override them for specific posts
• You can set categories, tags and other taxonomy information as supported by your blogging platform, and also set a date for publishing the posts – all without leaving the editor window and with no refresh of screens or fear of loosing work because of bad connectivity
• Insert pictures from your desktop or from the web, and also videos and photo albums. You get to see the exact size of all these objects and also change them
• You can create new posts or edit existing posts, you can also post drafts to the blog
• The best thing of course is to hide all the non-essentials and focus on the writing!

I only wish I had researched and known Live Writer before. I lost one too many posts because of my stupidity in not saving increments, and spent far too much time on changing the formats in Wordpress or Blogger default editors. Hopefully, this helps someone else save all that time!

Before you rejoice, be cognizant of one fact. Live Writer has sort of fallen on the way side. Though it works on both Windows 7 and Windows 8, the latest app Essentials bundle for Windows 8 does not have Live Writer. Things can change pretty fast in the technology world, and sooner or later the platform will start showing issues. But in the mean time, get prepared to enjoy your life with the improved productivity.

Keep an eye on your blog performance

While writing your blog, it is easy to get carried away with images, videos, and the like. The result - slower load times and not a pretty experience as you start accumulating users. Since Google penalizes slower load times, this is not good news from any perspective.

There are tools that can help you overcome this issue. While some of them are available as browser plugins, some like PageSpeed are provided by Google. gtmetrix is one of the better tools that piggy backs on the "proven" frameworks to get you a reliable picture.

gtmetrix combines the goodness of YSlow (from Yahoo!) and PageSpeed (from Google), and provides a good overview. Without ever registering you can view how your blog/website fares from the eyes of PageSpeed or YSlow, for free. You can easily see what the performance is, rankings for your website and the reason for the rankings. gtmetrix also provides some solutions, but I would suggest looking around the web to narrow down to your exact solution.
One of the more interesting parts however is the ability to compare different blogs/websites. This provides an easy way to check how you compare against the competition or other blogs.

Get a large font collection for your PC

Earlier posts have dealt with web fonts a bit. Web fonts are just beautiful for your website, blog and then some, but sooner rather than later you will get to a point where you need better fonts than what Windows operating system can offer. This may be for your next document, presentation or anything which has a dependency on your desktop/laptop system.

Getting newer fonts for your PC is not a big issue, but getting fonts that look good and are from a trust worthy source certainly is. So then, how about getting at least a 1000 fonts for <$20? The website claims to source fonts from the designers, and share that with the consumers. With the big number of fonts on the offer, you are more likely to find one that suits your needs without ever leaving your computer. Go ahead, browse through the list of fonts and decide for yourself.

A huge collection of free Wordpress themes for 2013

For Wordpress developers and designers, it is a ever-changing, never-satisfied quench for themes and plugins. Wordpress themes are not exactly hard to come by, but getting the quality right and saving time is a big problem. It is not quite a big proposition to get paid themes at a reasonable cost, but when you are looking for free themes you have to look long and hard. But the kind folks out there have done some research, put together a lot of good posts and are willing to help!

So, we come to designrazzi.com.

A long list of Wordpress free themes are collated in one post. Nothing really new there, but what is new is the interesting mix of themes that are absolutely free of cost, and with acceptable quality. The themes cover the entire range of Wordpress sites from blogs, magazines, websites, corporate sites et. al. I found this invaluable in my search for free themes for a more recent project. I could quickly check how the themes look, take a tour through the demo and narrow down to 4 options for the website. I installed the four chosen themes, checked how my website looks with those themes and selected one. As easy as that!

Free video tutorials for advanced Javascript learning

Love Javascript but don't know where to start? You see too many free lessons but your learning never really took off? Well, the lectures from Douglas Crockford may hold the key!

StudyTonight.com is hosting video lectures from Douglas Crockford, Yahoo!'s JavaScript architect.

The lectures are intended for advanced programmers, or at least those who understand the foundation but appreciate an overview of the past, present, and possible future. Take a look, code away and get learned.

Automate your social posts through IFTTT

We have seen ways to automate sharing your new posts on website through social media/networks here before. But IFTTT beats all that and looks beautiful by doing it.

Social networks are about people. Though I had tried dlvr.it in the past, I tried to keep this manual through something like Hootsuite. This saved me some time, but I was getting highly inefficient at posting everywhere. Again, why care about everywhere? Because of the simple reason that 2-3 websites are still someway to go in building up a credible audience, and until that happens you have to keep the conversation on. I receive very less feedback, and that is received thanks to social media. So it is extremely important for me to maintain conversation on multiple forums, but I was not really good at it. Fast forward to IFTTT.

Aptly named If There Then That (IFTTT), the premise of the platform is simple. Take something that you have done in some part of the web, and deliver it to the other corner without your intervention. Though it is still in beta, for obvious reasons this is gaining a lot of popularity. 

In IFTTT you have 'Ingredients' like Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, etc. and you create 'Recipes' with them. The recipes will take care of listening to what you do in the source (if you get something there), then IFTTT gets that and passes it on. As you might imagine, this goes in a lot of places using automation. The configuration itself is fairly simple, and beautiful looking. You just click on a no. of options to 

• select source (e.g. Facebook, RSS feed of your website, Twitter)
• specify the criteria for selecting posts in the source (e.g. only if posts contain a #technosanct hashtag)
• select destination (e.g. Facebook Page, Facebook, Twitter, Email, GTalk, Buffer) 
• specify what you do in the destination (e.g post a message)

I setup all this today, and strangely don't feel the guilt of not connecting to the people out there. IFTTT is starting the conversation after all, to continue the human (in the form of me) shall get involved!

Find all the popular recipes in IFTTT, or go ahead and create one of your own. 

Discount coupon for WPEngine hosting

We have talked about WPEngine before. WPEngine is one of the better shared hosting providers for Wordpress, which takes care of all Wordpress management while you can focus on the content. Managing hosting in general (and WPEngine falls in this category) takes a lot of load off your shoulders for upgrades, fixes and resolution of performance issues. All these are done in the backend easily and more efficiently.

WPEngine provides reliable fast servers with CDN for Wordpress hosting. As part of Thanksgiving, and Black Friday, WPEngine is offering an additional 2 months free period. Combined with the 2 month trial period they had earlier, this provides a 4 month free period to check out WP Engine.

Use coupon code: cyberhostspecial13. This will be gone in a couple of days. If you were thinking of trying out managed Wordpress hosting, this is the right time people.

Get beautiful fonts, or weird fonts. Make your work stand out

Typography makes your work stand-out – this is as sad as beauty defines character, but that is true in most cases. Making your website/blog functional and full of useful content is important, but also important is how professional, funny, good-looking the content is. The content should also be easy to read on multiple devices with varying real-estate.

Typecast does all this and more. Typecast provides thousands of fonts that can be used across your website or just for sections that need highlighting.

Since the real power of fonts is only visible in sentences and paragraphs, Typecast also has options to type in the required content and see how beautiful or ugly your content looks in 1,2 or 3 columns with an option to change line heights, text size, text color and background. You can also edit the CSS and see the results instantly.

After doing all this hard work it is easy to put this to work. You can:

1. Get code that can be directly embedded in your website
2. Save CSS and HTML
3. Export as a graphic file (PNG)
4. Publish a style guide with the chosen colors, size, spacing

The only sad thing – this comes at a cost, starts at $14.50/month for personal plans. You can get a 15 day trial by just providing your email id (no confirmation email!).

If you are not in a position to spend hard cash, don’t get disappointed yet. Head towards Google Fonts.

There are hundreds of web fonts that are free to use, and you by how much the fonts impact page load times. One of the other good things about this - you can click on “Popout” window for any of the fonts, and get to try how they look in Typecast.

Host your blog for free using Blogger platform

Hosting providers are not always reliable, and easy to deal with.

• Hosting directly determines the space available for the website
• Hosting speed directly makes or breaks the website. The amount of memory and CPU, when restricted or throttled, is a bad thing for the website
• Hosting costs money. Not all blogs make money from day one, and if you don't have a solid business plan on how your website/blog is going to earn you money, you are going to spend that from your pocket for quite sometime (or for all times)

Here comes Google to the rescue. Blogspot/Blogger platform are not known as the best blogging platforms out there, but it has many advantages:

1. Space: A lot of space if you are not into uploading a lot of pictures or videos (there are work around solutions for that - some other post, some other time). Pictures get 1 GB of space, which is also shared with your Picasa web albums
2. Supported by Google infrastructure: Blogs are fast. Chances are they are also nearer to you than your standard hosting provider (technosanct.blogspot.com gets redirected to technosanct.blogspot.in if you are in India, treatment is same with other countries with sizable users). I have never really worried about CPU/memory utilization for my email, document editing or for blogs

Setup

The setup is fairly easy. Refer to instructions provided by Google. The instructions are specific in some places to a few domain registrars (like Godaddy, 1and1). Below are a few additional tips.

1. If your registrar allows it, import the DNS file provided by Google. This will merge all the required records in the DNS file maintained by your registrar. You can skip to the last step from here.
2. If the above is not the case, go to 'Domain Manager' in your registrar site (e.g. godaddy.com > Login > Domains > DNS Zone File). You should see a section called "CNAME". Create two records here:
• Add new. Enter 'www' against 'Name' and 'ghs.google.com' as destination. If there is already a record with 'www' as Name, you would have to edit it
• Add new. Enter your unique code against 'Name' (for e.g. abcdefgh) and applicable server against 'Destination' (e.g. xxxx.dv.googlehosted.com). This is provided by Google in the Settings page of your blog
3. Locate 'A' section/name after you have entered CNAMES. Create four records here for the below IP addresses in the 'Destination' field. 'Name' will have '@', leave that default value be. These values help redirect to WWW URLs. For e.g. http://technosanct.com will redirect to http://www.technosanct.com
• 216.239.32.21
• 216.239.34.21
• 216.239.36.21
• 216.239.38.21
4. Once you have setup the domain successfully, wait for sometime (10 minutes to an entire day ) for the DNS name change to get propagated. Go back to Settings page of your blog. Enter custom domain information, and save. If there is any problem with any of the above steps or if you have not allowed for domain names to get propagated as relevant, Google will show an error. Otherwise you are all set!

Limitations

Well, there are going to be limitations here as is the case of anything in life. Google is no hosting nirvana.

• First and foremost, the platform is not known to be beautiful or powerful. Dead links are not inherently detected, there is not much freedom with how the layout and UI look and behave, not many tools to help you with tasks like SEO
• The max. size of a page is restricted to 1 MB. Although there is no size or post limit right now, there is no guarantee that it is supported for life
• Google can change policies or discontinue tools (I still miss Google Reader!)

See a complete list of what can or cannot be be done on Blogger.

Automatically publish content from blogs to social media

We have seen one of the easier content publishing ways before in the form of HootSuite. No matter how easy that is, it will still require to log in and post posts and comments. Now, I am not saying it is a bad thing - humans are an integral part of being social. Also, shouting a few words other than the standard meta tags is going to connect you better with the users. But what if you want to just publish the content to *start* a conversation? There are tools to do that in Wordpress, Drupal and other CMS platforms. We are here to talk about something as easier -http://dlvr.it.

drlvr.it automatically checks your blog or website feed to determine new content and publishes that to the specified accounts. Both the sources and "routes" to deliver will be specified by you. There on the tool simply checks for new feed items, and routes it in batches (you can also vary the delivery timings).

Apart from the above task, you can also maintain separate "queues" that feed in to your social media sites. You just update the queues, and have it delivered in increments to the sites specified.

While the free version gives you "5 Feeds, 3 Social Profiles, one Q, and your feed is updated every 30 minutes", for anything more or for connecting to specific social media sites (like Google+) you need to have a paid plan (starts at $10 per month that allows 50 social profiles).

Hueman is a beautiful Wordpress theme suitable to newbies and power-users alike

I have a Wordpress site that had been sitting quietly on one of the older themes. It was not a looker but could satisfy my need for simplicity, no-code approach for customization, and did not get in my way most of the times. But as it stands it was not exciting. I had been on the look out for options to change the look and feel of the website to not only improve the popularity rating a bit (well, that comes by content), but also to get inspired. Wordpress themes are not hard to come by. In fact we have talked about some of the better known themes before. But I have not been having a lot of spare cash recently, so my plan had been to use a free base theme and customize that. Of course that takes a long time. And, of course Hueman came along and spoiled that plan.

Hueman is a beautiful theme by Alexander Agnarson. Even though there are two themes on the Alexander's site right now, those just rock. I am deeply appreciative of the fact that Alexander spent a lot of time on this theme and gave it away for not money, but hugs! 

Hueman is simple to configure and use, but really powerful.

• The theme is responsive
• Layouts and other UI customization options are fantastic
• Enables following your blog, or sharing of posts on social media with mere clicks
• Hueman is fast. With this theme and a couple of other improvements, my website is hovering around a yslow score of 88-90 

A more comprehensive list of features are at http://alxmedia.se/themes/hueman/.

I used Hueman on my aforesaid site, and so far it has been a thorough refresh of  how it looked before and how it is now.

Go ahead, see a demo and check whether it works for you. You can download Hueman for free.

Drag and drop away to create beautiful sites in Wordpress

Wordpress is one of the easiest platforms to configure among the big three PHP-based software (Drupal and Joomla being the other two). Wordpress architecture is flexible, and enables you to build blogs easily, and you might even succeed building smaller websites (like these) without any trouble. Anything beyond that, or if you want to change something that is not customizable on Wordpress UI, you would need to get your hands dirty and code away.

There is a way out, if you look around well enough. One of these ways is using themes that enable additional features - Thesis is a good example of that.

Thesis is a theme, a theme framework, a strong community behind an excellent product, and, in general, a good example of what themes can really do to Wordpress. Once installed through the 'normal' means through Wordpress themes, Thesis can effectively take over customization of website. Extensive drag and drop customization, with ability to change layouts, colours, typography at the click of a mouse is going to delight the newbies.

Older hands will appreciate the fact that Thesis is standards compliant, clean and is easily customizable too. The only problem? - well, there isn't any free edition. The price starts at $87, though you may find occasional deals that bring down this cost. Go ahead, try the demo, try it on your website and get your money back if you are not satisfied!

Make content curation more visual using PearlTrees

In one of the previous posts, we talked about tools to curate content from internet and make your own life easier. They provided a good way to get inspired, create more content and maintain references to the source. PearlTrees is a super-charged, completely online version of linking the content together as you see fit. This not only gets you to the details of the collected information, but also help you make sense of information at a macro level.

Starting with PearlTrees is free. Once you login, you get to create Pearls and link online or offline content. This implies you can link websites/posts that are of interest, and also group them. The mind-map visualization of the content, bookmarks, your files, photos and more will enable a nice way to see how all the information comes together to form a useful whole.

Go ahead, try PearlTrees and see whether it works for you. 

Get more indexing and pingbacks for better SEO

This blog is a classic example of what can happen when there is very little marketing, slower development of content, and with no references from other websites. With lesser people visiting the blog, and almost no one sharing it, search engines rank the website lower. This is natural way of things - whatever is popular gets more popular :). So what do you do if you are in the same situation - wait for a few hundred articles to be published before you get famous (and probably rich), or do something about it *now*?

Search engine traffic requires discipline to succeed in the way the content is created and marketed. But, there are a couple of things to provide an accelerated path to glory in addition to the content itself:

1. Create good articles that relate back to the topic of the blog in a structured manner
2. Share links of the post/blog on social media sites, get other sites of the same niche link to you

Both are easier said than done. But there are tools to help out and make your life easier. One such tool is Content Notifier.

With Content Notifier, you get to collate all the links of interest, and get the newly published content indexed and pinged back at the same time. This will help boost the popularity of the website so that you get noticed as compared to the competition. There on, your content will drive the results. Content Notifier will just boost the initial window, and open a window of opportunity large enough!

Download and try the software if you are building something new. You can always end the trial of 60 days without worrying about loosing any money.

Build a Drupal site fast, with a good hosting option

By now you must have seen the previously posted deal on Go Daddy, and probably even tried your hand at Weebly. Fear not if both did not suite you well. For here is another go at getting yourself online real quick.

InMotion hosting specialises in not only providing hosting services for a resonable rate, but also provides simpler setup of Drupal and Wordpress in the form of a one-click installer.

The advantage that inmotion hosting off is the flexibility to start slow and small, while keeping the options open for a significant growth in the future. This can mean either VPS or dedicated hosting.