Free Online Tips Blog

Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, asks its users to search and enter the Challenge Ask contest to win fabulous prizes! According to the official Challange Ask page, you need to simply search and you might end up winning a scooter, a HD Ready Sharp TV, a BlackBerry Device with O2, and lots more! Once you win by searching, you will get to see a page like this. The internet search engine also suggests you to download their toolbar to use their ‘great’ tools and increase the chances of winning. The contest closes on Sunday 10th December, 2006 (Midnight). Btw this contest is open to all UK, Channel Island, Isle of Man and Republic of Ireland residents.

To me it all seems like a vehement outcry to use their country-specific site more, especially the way this whole thing is promoted. The striptease dance by Sam (view the video in this page) was something I will remember for a long long time.

Google answers which have been answering for the last four years will stop answering later this week. This has been officially announced at the official googleblog. This announcement came just when Q n A models like Yahoo answers, FAQTS gets more and more popular day by day. The reason for this sudden announcement is yet to be made public. It has been also stated that .. “Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. We’ll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want.”

Source: Adieu to Google Answers

Till date we had numerous cases of posting (~ publishing) defamatory statements in the internet, mostly in discussion boards (forums), groups, wiki, weblogs, etc. In other words majority of these websites are open participatory communities moderated by volunteers and so no one really stops someone posting or re-posting defamatory statements. Many well-established sites have also used this as a handy way of getting mileage by publishing press releases, articles, etc. in support of the ‘defamatory statements’. And why not if the statements are not at all defamatory in nature. And think of this .. is it at all possible to moderate hundreds and thousands of discussions everyday? The main headache starts when someone really posts something which is truely defamatory or spammy in nature. What the site administrators may do in these cases is remove the postings and issue a warning via email, ban the member from the board, block user ip address. If they do not take prompt actions, lawsuits are filed against the website administrators and the matter gets settled in the court.

What if someone ‘re-posts’ something which is defamatory?

In a recent ruling the California Supreme Court stated that .. “bloggers and participants in Internet bulletin board groups cannot be sued for posting defamatory statements made by others”. This is of some relief to these websites as they need not worry about the re-postings of defamatory statements by numerous visitors and await letters from law firms. So if someone republishes something, which is considered defamatory he, or she cannot be sued i.e. they shall remain immune from suit under a section of the federal Communications Decency Act, passed by Congress in 1966. The court also said this kind of immunity “has some troubling consequences” .. “Until Congress chooses to revise the settled law in this area”. So if you feel you are defamed by someone in the Internet you can “seek recovery only from the original source of the statement, not from those who re-post it.”

Source: Calif. court says bloggers can’t be sued

Last night we implemented the Post info widget in an effort to make the blog posts cleaner and highlight the content more. All weblogs show post statistics and links like post author, post date and time, post tags, bookmarking buttons, comments link, etc. inside blog posts. The placement and arrangement differs from one blog to another. These stats unlike websites, eventually distract the readers as also make the blog posts look croudy. So I thought to remove everything except the post content and came up with this new widget. Once you move your mouse pointer over the ‘info ..’ button it will be visible. Everything inside it is indexable by search engines just because only HTML, CSS and smurty have been used. I hope ours is much better than the one you see at Yahoo answers as everything is crawlable by the bots.

The widget on hover action will show the following infos and links:

»Permanent link: This is permanent link(parmalink) for that particular post.

»Published: The date in which the post was created or published.

»Contributor: The name of the contributor of that post.

»Tags: The tags associated with that post.

»Participate: We always encourage our valuable readers to participate in discussions to share their thoughts. Here you will find links to the discussion area and the benefits of joining us and contributing at WebTips.

The widget is designed in such a manner that we may even include some more post statistics like total number of views, comment excerpts (if any), related posts, etc.

We may even call it ‘Post stats’ widget! Lets see how things work. What do you thing in this regard? This is one more feature added to this site. We have already discussed how to create tool tip using HTML and CSS. The same technique is applied here.

In the last few weeks I noticed a nice hover effect getting added for image results at Google India. Generally when you search for images in Google you get to see the image results and underneath listed are the search details like a small excerpt highlighting the search term, image dimensions, etc. But at Google India you wont see the search details. But if you move your mouse over the image you will find them inclosed inside a block. Move your mouse out and they are gone! I found this a pretty neat way of presentation. On closer examination I found this:

I am keeping an eye on this and just getting a feeling that we are going to see some more features like these anytime soon. Remember Searchmash?

A couple of days back we implemented customized 404 error page. Our main purpose was to provide some useful information to the visitors visiting a missing page (with contents like Page Does Not Exist. or No posts made) and make them stay. This is a necessity for all blogs because it may so happen that another blog may have linked to a post or page, which you have deleted over the time. So visitors coming to that page will get a blank page and run away.

The problem with creating a customized 404 error page at Blogsome

For those of you having blogs hosted in your own domains, please check this page to customize your 404 page. Free blog hosting platforms like Blogsome do not permit you to customize your template as per your wish. For example, in case of Blogsome you cannot insert php, run your own sql query, use all the wordpress template tags, etc. And I think this is pretty much understandable as their main objective is to provide an uninterrupted blogging service. (In this regard its worth mentioning that Blogsome has surpassed all my expectations.) So it is not possible to customize 404 pages as stated here.

The solution

We eventually found a solution (example). Let me share it with you. Generally in a 404 error page we get to see content like Page Does Not Exist. or No posts made What we will do is check the content every time the page is loaded and if we get contents like that, we will replace it with our own content. This Blogsome tip is search engine friendly too i.e. the search engines won’t get puzzled and penalize you. Here are the steps to do that:

1. Open the blog control panel.
2. Go to Manage and click on the Files tab. Now you need to edit the index.html file which is the main template file of your weblog.
3. Try to locate the {content} tag inside the index.html file. You can find it just below the <body> tag.
4. Replace the {content} tag with this:

{capture name=capname}{$content}{/capture}
{if $smarty.capture.capname == ‘Page Does Not Exist.’ || $smarty.capture.cont == ‘No posts made’}
OOPS! Page not found (404 error)
{else}
{$content}
{/if}

Thats it! Now save the file and open a missing page like http://your_blog_url.blogsome.com/404 (replace your_blog_url with your blog url) and see the result. If your blog is not hosted in Blogsome, try out the above code if smurty tags are supported or convert the code into php.

Tweak the code as you wish. But please do not forget to give the credits if you are not that lazy Happy blogging!!

The need to check for cross browser compatibility

In one of my last posts I shared some tips on how to stop your visitors from leaving your blog early. You have less than 5 seconds to impress the visitors to continue surfing your site. Imagine offering a website that is all garbled up, displaced blocks here and there after its downloaded! In other words you missed out to test it for browser compatibility. Yes, cross browser compatibility is one more important reason that sometimes makes your wonderful site worth not more than a few peanuts specially when you have missed out some CSS bugs. Visitors too tend to run away as they loose the interest asap.

The world wide web is gradually expanding. As the day progresses more and more browsers, operating systems, plugins, etc. are getting launched and this makes the task of a web designer a bit tough. To check for browser compatibility we need to view a website in majority of the browsers which sometimes is not possible.

But lately I found an easy tool to see what a website may look like in almost 30 different ways. Let me share it with you. The site is called Browsershots. It allows you to take screenshots of your website or blog on various browsers and OSand save it for your later viewing. Once you see the screenshots you can easily check if something is wrong.

What browsers and configurations are available at Browsershots?

The screenshots are taken in Linux, Windows, Mac, Debian Etch (though Debian Etch is not in the list I found this screenshot). The browser configurations available are Dillo 0.8, Epiphany 2.14, Firebird 0.7, Firefox 1.0, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0 You may also check your site in the following resolutions: 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200 There are four types of color depths available: 4, 8, 16, 24 bits. You may even specify whether JavaScript, Macromedia Flash, Java and media plugins like Quicktime, Windows media player, etc should be enabled or not.

To test your site you need to choose the browsers and configurations and specify maximum wait and once the maximum time is over your job expires too due to long queues. Here are some of the browsershots of WebTips taken a few days back. Hope you enjoy this tip!

 

Home page url: http://v03.browsershots.org/ | Blog url: http://trac.browsershots.org/blog

WebTips now has a customized 404 error page! I think WebTips is the first blog at Blogsome to have a customized 404 error page. Something like the big sites like Wikipedia. So from now on most of our valuable visitors are not going to get a blank page which only says Page not found i.e. having no info at all. To get a preview of what am talking about, click here.

It will be great to have a customized error page for each and every blog at Blogsome as also in other free blog providing platforms which supports php or smurty. Hopefully am going to make another post shortly to share the coding stuff . If you have any queries like .. Can I do this and that .. just drop a line. Please don’t hesitate. We will try to help you out.

We made this happen a couple of weeks ago but we needed to see how the search engines are going to treat these pages. So what we did was place a link to a page that really does not exist in the sidebar. In the mean time Google crawled our site quite a few times and everything seems to be fine!!

Related: How to customize a 404 error page in your free Wordpress blog

We frequently use Google as an efficient tool to do a web search, image search, video search, news search, etc. But a recent study by the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane shows that Google may become an important clinical tool for doctors to correctly diagnose difficult cases.

The study was carried out on a set of 26 complex symptomatic cases by a team of medical experts last year to identify the efficiency of Google. According to the report published at the British Medical Journal, the team then selected 3 - 5 keywords for each case and googled while remaining blind to the correct diagnoses. The results showed that Google found correct diagnoses in 15 out of the 26 selected cases. Though they felt in in some cases … “Google gave the correct diagnosis (extrinsic allergic alveolitis) but we felt that it was not specific enough to be considered correct”.

The study hints to suggest that we may see an end to the misdiagnosis (specially in complex cases despite of having state of the art technology) by physicians who are estimated to carry almost 2 million facts. It was also clearly stated that … “Web based search engines such as Google are becoming the latest tools in clinical medicine, and doctors in training need to become proficient in their use”.

Source: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/rapidpdf/bmj.39003.640567.AEv1

I was just checking my Gmail account when I noticed some cool new features added. The first thing that caught my eyes was the Reply on top thing and along with it was the dropdown with some good options like Reply to all, Forward, Print, Report Phishing, etc. Cool tooltips to help you find the newly added features at Gmail is also added. Most of all I can now send offliners to my friends in Gmail through the chat console! This is something I frequently do in the Yahoo messenger once my friends appear offline. So from now on if you send any offliner it will appear as a new mail. I can send him a mail if he appears offline anyways.

The five newly added features are:

• Reply on top
• Embarassment-reducing new message notifications
• Forward all
• Chat even when your friends are offline
• Get Gmail on your mobile phone

Source: My eyes and http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about_whatsnew.html