Hello Everbody, I will not be posting any article on this blog, from today. That does not mean that I have abandoned this blog, but I am just taking a short break from this blog. I and a small team are developing an Indian version of Wikipedia named Krish Wiki and I will be involved full time in that effort. I will also be blogging at http://yenodawebsite.com/blog/. You can reach and read my articles there. You also checkout the Krish Wiki.
Also visit my Personal Website.
Good Bye for now!!!!
Krish
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Beautiful Website, Invisible on Search Engines -- Why?
My friend has served as pastor a church in the Tacoma area for the last decade. I thought that using Google to search for the name of his church and the city I could easily find the church website. Wrong. It's a very large church in a city of 85,000, but it's practically invisible on the search engines.
As I began to study the website, I could see why. It is built on a sophisticated content management system provided at a reasonable price by a company that specializes in producing beautiful, template-driven websites for churches. The problem is that the navigation system is very unfriendly to search engine spiders -- in multiple ways. Let me detail the problems:
- The homepage has a "splash page" made up of a single GIF image and no text content that is spider food for search engine spiders. No content, no interest from search engines and no keywords to index. If the splash page used Flash, it might load faster, but be just as impenetrable to search engines.
- The navigation system on the splash page is an image map. Period. It contains no text links on the homepage, but since search engines can't read image maps, the search engine is stopped in its tracks. It has nowhere to go and nothing to index. Few modern sites rely on image maps these days for just this reason. But even if a spider could read image maps and get into the main part of the church's site, it would still have problems because...
- The site is built using HTML frames, a technique that was the rage of website developers in the 1990s, now rather widely denounced for its search engine unfriendliness. It is possible to build frame sites that are search engine friendly, just harder. But my friend's church site was a nightmare. The only reason for this frameset was apparently to show the brand name and a link to the website development company at the bottom of the page. In other words, the frames at the same time helped the developers and were toxic to the customers. Oops.
- The church homepage within the frame system contained no text content, just a title and a frame system. No text content, no interest from search engines and no keywords to index. To get to content the spider would need to get into the interior content pages. But that was difficult, too.
- NOFRAMES tags stopped search engine spiders. NOFRAMES tags were invented so that old version 2 web browsers that couldn't read frames could still drill down to the content of the site. But the NOFRAMES tags for this website were constructed wrong. They were:
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> <br /></body>
Since this was the main frameset page that contained no content or navigation links whatsoever, the search engine spiders are stopped again. They have no URLs to go to, no links. Nothing. But if they had been pointed to interior webpages of the site.... - The interior webpage URLs all point to the website developer's domain, such as:
http://account.developer_domainname.com/acct/10664-8591/tmpl/
http://account. developer_domainname.com/acct/10664-8591/tmpl/tm222_min_list.php?cat=Get+Involved%21
In other words, the church's interior webpage URLs are not only hidden from humans and unfindable by the search engines, they are under the developer's domain name with a URL that is long and unfriendly to humans -- and perhaps to search engines as well. Why should your organization's webpages be under some other organization's domain name? Ignorance, putting it kindly. - None of the interior webpages can be bookmarked or linked to. Since the main church website URL http://www.church-domain.org/site/ goes to a frame system, the URL of all interior pages is hidden in the address window of the web browser that shows the webpage URL. Not only are search engines prevented from entering, but humans can't link to parts of the site that interests them.
Do you get the picture? From the standpoint of beauty and design, the site is very nice. It is also easy for organization staff to update using its content management system. But from a search engine visibility standpoint -- that is, marketing to the community outside the congregation, the site is essentially invisible and useless. Since most websites exist to let the world or the community know about your organization, an unfriendly site navigation system can be fatal to your goal. Make sure your organization's website doesn't fall prey to this kind of search engine myopia.
Krish.
Monday, November 3, 2008
Ajax: Web applications = Desktop applications
Ajax!!! Ajax is not a new technology, it is only the existing technologies put together to create web applications that look like desktop applications. Ajax is Asynchronous Javascript and XML. The article on Ajax was first coined by Jesse James Grantt through an article on his website. To read the article, please click here.
Ajax is a breakthrough in web technologies and has enabled the rise of online shopping portals. Without Ajax this wouldn't have been possible.
Krish.
Ajax is a breakthrough in web technologies and has enabled the rise of online shopping portals. Without Ajax this wouldn't have been possible.
Krish.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Designing Web Applications using Open Source Softwares
Open source softwares are the best in creating amazing applications and it is no different when it comes to creating web applications. I design web applications out of my own interests. I design web applications only using open source softwares and only on open source OS Ubuntu Linux.
I have actually started working. First install Ubuntu Linux operating system on your desktop or laptop. Then connect it to the internet and install the LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server. This is actually very simple.
Open your terminal and type
# sudo apt-get install apache2
# sudo apt-get install apache2
# sudo apt-get install apache2
# sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql
I have actually started working. First install Ubuntu Linux operating system on your desktop or laptop. Then connect it to the internet and install the LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server. This is actually very simple.
Open your terminal and type
# sudo apt-get install apache2
# sudo apt-get install apache2
# sudo apt-get install apache2
# sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql
That's all now your done
# sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Now start designing amazing web applications like a pro.
To know more click here.
Krish.
A Live OS in your pocket
Live CDs need arebecoming very famous day by day. Knoppix is a pioneer in this category. In the past and present Knoppix was available on CDs and DVDs. All the user had to do is, insert the disk in the optical drive and restart the machine. Thats it, he can then enjoy a full fledged Linux operating system, without making any changes to his hard disk. However the CDs and DVDs have one major problem. They are only read only and hence we cannot store any file or document.
Hence I made some research and found out how to make a Knoppix boot from a usb flash drive. Sits very simple. Just sit back and read on.
Prerequisites
1. 1 GB USB flash drive.
2. Download the ISO of Knoppix 5.1 from
http://www.kernel.org/pub/dist/knoppix/KNOPPIX_V5.1.1CD-2007-01-04-EN.iso.
3. Another tool named fixkp.zip is required to make the Knoppix run from the USB. It can be downloaded from http://pendrivelinux.com/downloads/fixkp.zip.
Creating a bootable USB
Create a new folder named USB Knoppix anywhere on your computer. Let's assume that you created it at E:\. Move the Knoppix Linux ISO to this folder and then extract fixkp.zip into the same folder. Since fixkp.bat is a batch file, simply run it from the command prompt. It will extract the Knoppix ISO in the E:\Knoppix folder and modify it to run from the USB drive.
This process will take around a minute and it will automatically create a new folder named 'knoppix' in the E:\Knoppix folder.
Now format your USB drive. Then copy all the contents from the E:\Knoppix\knoppix folder to your USB drive. Now go to the command prompt and change the location to your USB drive and simply run makeboot.bat batch file.
That's it. Your live USB drive is ready. Enjoy!!!!!
Krish.
Hence I made some research and found out how to make a Knoppix boot from a usb flash drive. Sits very simple. Just sit back and read on.
Prerequisites
1. 1 GB USB flash drive.
2. Download the ISO of Knoppix 5.1 from
http://www.kernel.org/pub/dist/knoppix/KNOPPIX_V5.1.1CD-2007-01-04-EN.iso.
3. Another tool named fixkp.zip is required to make the Knoppix run from the USB. It can be downloaded from http://pendrivelinux.com/downloads/fixkp.zip.
Creating a bootable USB
Create a new folder named USB Knoppix anywhere on your computer. Let's assume that you created it at E:\. Move the Knoppix Linux ISO to this folder and then extract fixkp.zip into the same folder. Since fixkp.bat is a batch file, simply run it from the command prompt. It will extract the Knoppix ISO in the E:\Knoppix folder and modify it to run from the USB drive.
This process will take around a minute and it will automatically create a new folder named 'knoppix' in the E:\Knoppix folder.
Now format your USB drive. Then copy all the contents from the E:\Knoppix\knoppix folder to your USB drive. Now go to the command prompt and change the location to your USB drive and simply run makeboot.bat batch file.
That's it. Your live USB drive is ready. Enjoy!!!!!
Krish.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Goggle to stop drunken e-mails
Internet giant Google have come up with an application to block people from sending drunken e-mails to their bosses or ex-lovers. Mail Goggles can be programmed to turn on late at night and at weekend, when users are most likely to be drinking.
Before sending a message, e-mailers must answer a series of short maths questions that must be completed in a limited amount of time. Gmail engineer Jon Perlow believes the idea will help those too tired to foresee the consequences of their actions.
Krish.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Installing Java on Ubuntu Linux
It used to be a real pain to install Java on most versions of Linux, but now that Sun has modified the license, there are some easier ways to install Java.
On Debian/Ubuntu Linux for example all you need to do is make sure that your apt-get is pointed at the right place. In your /etc/apt/sources.list add in the following (and make sure you are okay with adding in stuff that is not in the default environment).
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper main restricted
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper universe multiverse
After this have apt updates its repository
sudo apt-get update
And finally, just tell it to install java
sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jdk
After this the rest of the process will display a dialog that will require you to accept the license agreement. When you do, the rest of the setup will happen on its own.
When you're on the command prompt type
javac -version
or
java -version
You should be good to go! Finally we have an easy way to install Java on the various Linux variants without having to fight with fakeroot and the other foolishness. Took Sun a criminally long time to do this, but I certainly thank them for it.
Krish.
On Debian/Ubuntu Linux for example all you need to do is make sure that your apt-get is pointed at the right place. In your /etc/apt/sources.list add in the following (and make sure you are okay with adding in stuff that is not in the default environment).
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper main restricted
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper universe multiverse
After this have apt updates its repository
sudo apt-get update
And finally, just tell it to install java
sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jdk
After this the rest of the process will display a dialog that will require you to accept the license agreement. When you do, the rest of the setup will happen on its own.
When you're on the command prompt type
javac -version
or
java -version
You should be good to go! Finally we have an easy way to install Java on the various Linux variants without having to fight with fakeroot and the other foolishness. Took Sun a criminally long time to do this, but I certainly thank them for it.
Krish.
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