Random Interesting Stuff

The title tag is a really important, yet often overlooked aspect of good web design. I think it gets overlooked so often because it hides up there at the top of the page with all that meta, xmlns, http & charset gobbledegook.

Or, sometimes your good intentions to ‘fix those title tags’ after all your pages are built gets forgotten in the joy of finally finishing the web site.

Poor little title tags.

• They are what search engines see as a good indicator of your web pages content
• They are what people see in the results list of their search queries
• They are what people see in thier bookmarks folder

How should you use the title tag?

Opinions vary, as do the search engines importance on them. But, it seems a good web design practice to use them for every possible advantage they may hold.

1. Make them precise and indicitive of your most important keywords
2. Don’t waste space with ‘Welcome’ or ‘Homepage’ or stop words like ‘as, the, a, or, and’
3. Make your title about 40 to 60 characters (including spaces) long
4. Company name? Nope. Use descriptive, searchable keywords instead
5. Put your most important keywords in the first part of the title

How often do you think the title tag is overlooked? Try this google search for ‘untitled document‘ (the default title tag in Dreamweaver). There are over 97 million results.

Check out how many sites have ‘Welcome to‘ in their title tag. Wow, over 200 million.

By making the title tag a simple focus in your web design practices, you can make a giant leap over your online competition.

Why You Need Separate Profiles in Google Chrome

Google Chrome makes it very easy for you to access your web search history including the search queries that you may have typed in the past. Now this may sometimes lead to an slightly embarrassing situation if someone else use your browser because all your past interactions are exposed the moment he or she begins to type in the address bar.

To prevent yourself from getting into this ‘not so comfortable’ situation, what you can do is create a separate user profile in Google Chrome. Thus all your browser history, bookmarks, cookies, search terms, etc. are not shared with anyone else in the family.

How to Create Profiles in Google Chrome Browser

Unlike Firefox that ships with a Profile Manager, the only way to create multiple profiles in Google Chrome browser is manually. Here’s how:

Step 1: Load Chrome and choose “Clear Browsing History” from the Tools menu. This will clear all your private data.

Step 2. Open your Google Chrome installation folder that is available at:

For Windows Vista - C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome
For Windows XP - C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local
                     Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome

Step 3: Open Windows Explorer and switch to the “User Data” folder available inside Chrome installation folder.

Then select the subfolder caleld “default” and make a copy of it in the “User Data” folder itself. Give that copy a name, say, Your_Name. (See screenshot).

Step 4 (Optional): We will now initialize this new “Your_Name” profile to the factory default settings.

Open “Command Prompt”, switch to the Chrome Application folder and run the following command:

chrome.exe –user-data-dir=”..\User Data\Your_Name” -first-run

Step 5: So our new user profile is ready. To run Google Chrome using this profile instead of the default profile, just create a shortcut on your desktop, Quick launch bar or your Windows Start Menu. Right click anywhere on the desktop, choose New -> Shortcut and type the following for location:For Windows Vista:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe  –user-data-dir=”..\User Data\Your_Name”

For Windows XP:

C:\Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe –user-data-dir=”..\User Data\Your_Name”

Give this shortcut a name and you’re done.

This is the tool to check if your redirect method is Search Engine Friendly

How it Works

A lot of us lose out on valuable search engine traffic due to incorrectly configuring our redirects.
It is very import that when a search engine comes to crawl your website it is able to follow any redirects you have set up.

Suppose you have a website http://www.foo.com and you create a redirect such that whenever any visitor types in the URL http://www.foo.com he is automatically redirected to http://www.foo.com/widgets/, If the Search Engine is not able to follow the redirect it would think that http://www.foo.com has NO contents, http://www.foo.com would end up ranking very badly in search engines.

This tools help you determine if the redirect you have created is Search Engine Friendly.

Click to check it http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php

301 Redirect

301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It’s not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it’s the safest option. The code “301″ is interpreted as “moved permanently”.

Below are a Couple of methods to implement URL Redirection

 

IIS Redirect

• In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect
• Select the radio titled “a redirection to a URL”.
• Enter the redirection page
• Check “The exact url entered above” and the “A permanent redirection for this resource”
• Click on ‘Apply’

ColdFusion Redirect

 

PHP Redirect

 

ASP Redirect

 

ASP .NET Redirect

 

JSP (Java) Redirect

 

CGI PERL Redirect

 

Ruby on Rails Redirect

 

Redirect Old domain to New domain

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.

In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

 

Redirect to www

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name.

Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

 

How to Redirect HTML

Please refer to section titled ‘How to Redirect with htaccess’, if your site is hosted on a Linux Server and ‘IIS Redirect’, if your site is hosted on a Windows Server.

Install Netscape 9.0 and install the add on Megaupload SX.3.2

And you can active the add on each time you want to download on MegaUpload. No Slots Limit !!!

easy, huh ?

Saw an interesting article about how you can save the environment by eating bugs & insects“Americans have no idea how wasteful these large mammals are,” Gracer says. “If you want to feed a lot of people, insects are the best choice in terms of getting the biggest bang for your buck.” Insects, he claims, are nutritious.

Above was words said by David Gracer, one of the members of the New York Gastronauts. According to him, eating live animals such as cows & chickens will heavily affect the environment.

Hmm… So will you eat any bugs or insects to save the earth?

Source : Discover Magazine