Free Online Tips Blog

Till now I have been getting tons and tons of spammy emails every day in my inbox just like you all. But very recently I received one spam mail which is a bit different from the others. For quite a long time I posted a few of my skill sets in my profile and this spammer was smart enough to realize that I have the required skill sets of a web designer. I must mention here that anyone joining our community can have a profile page.

The spam mail ..

This email looked a bit different from other spam mails.

• Subject: some information
• Signed by: yahoo.co.in
• To: xxxxx@hotmail.de

The body of the mail (stuffed with spelling mistakes) was pretty similar to other job offers and it said .. “We are looking for a fulltime employee, who exclusively will work for us …”. But then I discovered this .. “To convince us about your skills, we would like you to design some test layouts, similar to the examples we sent you in the attachment of this mail, but not a copy of them or others.” The mail concluded like this .. “thank you in advance and we hope we will receive your test-layout soon.” It also contained an attachment (like all other spam mails I guess), a word document with screenshots of some fairly renowned sites. They asked me to prepare layouts similar to these screenshots and send them so that they may have a look at my ‘actual skill sets’.

I was pretty surprised with this. But I replied to them asking for the url of their homepage. But they replied (!) by saying that they are about to launch a website! They also mentioned .. “We will select in few days the desingers. Pls send us this in few days,( test layout) with name xxx.”

My conclusion ..

I was pretty convinced that this is nothing but a nicely camouflaged trap for me. They gave the impression (in the first mail) that they are a pretty BIG web designing company. But they are yet to launch a web site! What I concluded from the whole episode was they wanted me to prepare some layouts for them which they would have used for some other purpose! So beware!!

Suggested reading:

• Hide multiple email addresses using Undisclosed Recipients option
• Your online privacy may be at stake, warns U.N. agency

Good news - Adobe recently made the beta version of Photoshop CS3 available for download.

Bad news - You can use it for a very limited period of time (2 days ) after which you need to activate the product.

Unlike the previous beta releases, Adobe tries to reach out the masses instead of releasing the product to a selected group of users. Do not expect any technical support. Adobe is giving you the privilege of beta testing the product and report bugs if any. The final version is expected in spring 2007. With this beta release, Adobe also introduced two websites - CSS Advisor and Spry (a framework for Ajax developers). Both the sites are community oriented. CSS Advisor is to discuss browser compatibility issues while Spry is for Ajax developers.

Download, install and activate Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta

Download Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Windows/Mac) for free. For CS3 beta system requirements, installation instructions, etc. please consult Photoshop CS3 Release Notes. If you want to use it for for an unlimited period of time you need to activate the product. Only users of Photoshop CS2, Adobe Creative Suite 2 Standard or Premium, Adobe Video Bundle, Adobe Production Studio Standard and Premium or Adobe Web Bundle having a valid registration key can activate CS3. If you are a CS2 user, you may get a serial number up here. There appears to be some confusion regarding the serial number issue. John Nack attempts to clear up the confusion in his official blog space.

Whats more? Installing this beta version will also install new beta versions of Adobe Bridge, Adobe Device Central, ExtendScript Toolkit, Adobe Version Cue, and Adobe Stock Photos.

Reviews: Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta features and enhancements

Unlike the previous versions, this latest beta version of Photoshop is much faster (though it takes a few mins to install). CS3 comes with an improved UI making things easier and simpler. Here are some of the highest rated reviews discussing the features and enhancements of CS3 beta:

1. Adobe labs - Photoshop CS3 Release Notes by Adobe
2. A Quick Look at the New Features in Photoshop CS3, Public Beta Preview by Scott Kelby
3. Photoshop CS3 Beta One-on-One Preview(videos and exercises included) by Deke McClelland
4. Exploring the new Photoshop interface by John Nack

For quite a while now, we see google adsense blocks with images placed aside. Often these images are seperated by a straight line (dotted in most cases). This is especially common in blogs. Yup, they are done with the help of plugins like Adsense Beutifier. The purpose was to attract the visitors towards the adsense links and make them click the links, thereby increasing the chances of generating more revenue.

But yesterday Google made a clarification in this regard at an official blog post ..

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn’t actually being offered. That’s not a good experience for users or advertisers.

Very true, isn’t it? Google also used two excellent examples to clear the confusion. In the first pic we can clearly see a picture of banana adjacent to a link that says Order Grapefruit. Now most visitors will tend to click on that link and expect to get a webpage related to banana rather than Grapefruits. So what you are actually doing here is fooling your visitors, the advertisers, Google and earn bucks. Google objects to this trick and suggests not to use it any further.

Digg today made some big changes as per feedbacks from their valuable diggers as also their internal research works. When I landed at Digg.com, I was surprised to see their new interface. The ‘old fashioned’ left menu bar has vanished and a ‘Top navigation bar’ has been introduced which according to Kevin, will eventually help the users to ‘quickly switch between sections’. In other words users can now easily switch between News, Videos and Podcasts. Also noticiable is the introduction of ‘flexible layout’ or the ‘wide screen layout’. Some other newly added features are:

• Top 10 Stories/Videos
• Videos Enhancements
• Podcasting
• Profile Enhancements

They have also made a video to get a quick wrap up of the changes made which can be viewed at New Digg Features O’ Plenty (official blog of digg).

Start a website about your passion, skill or expertise! The best foundation of a high ranking website is a site that knows what it is talking about!

SEO vs Search Engines

In an ideal world:

• with your SEO you want to rank higher in the search engine
• the best site should rank higher in the search engines for their specific topic.

What is the best? This is a gray area, but the best means that people find there what they were looking for in the first place. This means that your content has to be good!

What is good? Again this is hard to define, yet simple to imagine: if people say you are good in what you are doing, then that would be good…

SEO basics: what is a good site?

A good site is a site that gives you what you are looking for!

Keep in mind that the Internet is the main provider of information. So if you want to stand out you can:

• collect a lot of information and republish it
• provide unique content

The latter is the most crucial: I mean, if I want just any information that is on the Internet, I can find it in the search engine myself. Ok, I agree, it is nice when somebody puts a huge library there with the information I am trying to dig for, but setting up a library is a huge enterprise. And how many times did you already visit such a library just to find out they only have a limited amount of resources to browse through?

So:

• if you provide your own content, and
• I can relate to your content,

for sure I will read on and call you the best!!!

Now if a lot of people start calling you the best, you should be ranking at the top. You then need to fine-tune your techniques and have some patience: you will rank at the top sooner or later.

SEO is like playing tennis

Passion for sure is the best motivation to keep your website from growing and growing, and this is exactly what the Search Engines love! Whatever the Search Engines love has to be a part of your SEO techniques!

So how is SEO related to tennis? Skills and expertise are what a lot of people are looking for, and always remember: in the land of the blind, one-eyed is king…. There can only be 1 tennis player ranking number 1 worldwide. But you can also become the number 1 tennis player in your local club. This is called in SEO: you are ranking higher inside your own niche. Main thing is: you are the best!

Of course the worldwide ranking number 1 tennis-player is known worldwide, where you are only known in your local club. So the bigger your niche, the more visitors your website will attract. But remember .. most worldwide ranking number 1 tennis-players started out by ranking number 1 in their local club!

Task for today: find your passion and your niche! In our next post SEO DAY 2, we will tackle the SEO keywords!

I get a lot of emails from my college friends and colleagues which are funny, interesting, informative and worth sharing. These emails get circulated among a whole lot of others I don’t know. Like I got an email that contained some funny pics of George Bush which already got circulated among 500 friends. The mail was forwarded from one guy to another and so on. If I was a spammer I would have been delighted to see so many email ids and I would have started bombarding the mail boxes with spam mails. So I wonder are the email addresses worth sharing too? I don’t think so.

So how are we going to undisclose (hide) the email recipients (addresses)?

Just follow these simple steps ..

» Open your email program (like Outlook Express) or login to your free mail account (like Gmail, Yahoo mail, etc.) and go to compose mail to create a new mail message.

» Type ‘Undisclosed Recipients’ followed by your <email address> (include braces) in the ‘To’ field.
This should look like: ‘Undisclosed Recipients’ <your_email_address@example.com>

» Enter the email addresses of friends to whom you want to send the email seperated by commas/semicolons in the ‘BCC‘ field.
This should look like: friend1@example.com, friend2@example.com, friend3@example.com

» Now compose your message and click on ’send’.

» The bottom line: Please help to prevent yourself and your friends from spammers.

• Do you know that SEO is one of the most powerful techniques to get visitors finding your site?
• Do you wish you knew how to do your own minimal yet most effective SEO?

Lets begin by saying that you came to the right place. The following tips will help you become an expert optimizer in 10 days!

Where to begin with optimization?

The basis for a good house is… the basis!

Yes, we are talking fundamentals here:

if you want to have your job done right,
you better start optimization from the beginning.

Before you spend time and energy in optimization, make sure to know the basics before you start with the fine-tuning of getting your website ranked from number 2 to number 1!

Everybody knows it is possible to build a house on a swamp, but it is much easier to build a house on a proper basis. The same rule applies here too. If you are a SEO company, and you need to get a site ranked number 1 by all means, then you can do it. But by knowing the basics, "by all means" will be much faster and easier achieved than when you optimize in bits and pieces like a chicken without a head.

Budget optimization, value for money (time and effort!)

If you are working on your website all by yourself, you want to focus on the content of your site. That is why you need to start SEO from the beginning and keep your SEO efforts simple yet effective. The benefits of using SEO from the basics are:

• your  efforts are easy to implement
• your  efforts withstand the changes in the search engines spiders
• your  efforts will be a small fraction of the time you put into your website, so you can focus still most of your time on your website content!

We will start with the 10 SEO basic tips that you need to know and you need to do in order to know the basics of optimization like any expert knows them!

1. Your skills and passion
2. Keywords
3. Website title
4. Meta tags
5. Your time and money budget
6. Think: "visitors"
7. Don’t piss off the search engine spiders
8. Blog or website?
9. Getting into the search engines
10. Link and be linked!

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a U.N. branch based in Geneva fears that online privacy of internet users repeating username and password in multiple financial sites may be at stake. In its 2006 Internet report the ITU warned .. “This may cause security breaches, and leave them vulnerable to the machinations of identity thieves ever increasing in number and inventiveness” and felt .. “The lack of coordination in identification systems is a source of growing inconvenience to users and needs to be addressed rapidly”.

It hence called for developing alternatives and stop the re-usage of identifiers collected from the users, just ahead of a meet at Hong Kong. The ITU felt that with the increasing growth of online identity theft, users may loose their interest in expending.

Source: UN warns on password ‘explosion’

Suggested reading:

• Choosing Your Password (Yahoo security tips)
• Learn How to Avoid Scams and Fraud
• How to recognize spoofed Web sites
• Protecting Against Identity Misrepresentation and Theft
• Protect your laptop from loss, theft

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