Web Talk

Are you a podcaster releasing tons of podcasts on your blog? If so you may be interested in this nice website letting you create a lot of free podcasts with a nice skin. Blogamp is a web-based application that lets you create your own podcast to put on your blog. Just upload your MP3 file ( which doesn’t have to be bigger than 25MB) on Blogamp’s server and you will get a code to put on your blog right away! Its features include: customise your podcast skin color, track your listenership, add e-commerce and video links, embed or Pop-up player on any site or social network, add your own RSS Feeds. If you want to know more, click on the link to get a full list of Blogamp ’s features.

Have you ever wished to get some business cards to show to your friends or people you come in contact with at work? No, I am not talking about real business cards but electronic cards which, apart from being for free, let you show who you are and other important infos. Retaggr.com lets you have your own private business cards with a few easy steps. The service Retaggr.com offers you goes beyond the simple creation of cards. As a matter of fact, once registered to the website, you will be able to leave your profile card whenever you leave a comment on the internet, show your recent twitter messages, display your online activity, link to your card from anywhere on the web etc. If you are a webmaster instead you can have your personal widget to stick on your Wordpress website, specify content from your site to be shown within Profile Cards, make your content more useful while keeping readers on your site etc. The service is totally  free and it just requires a quick registration.

I am fully aware that there are a lot of guides in the Internet speaking about this topic and how to make and increase money with Google Adsense, so I am more than sure that I will not add anything new in this article. Anyway one thing I can do is to order all the tricks I found while surfing and list them tidily, making attention to write just those ones which really worked for me and this blog. This post doesn’t promise to enrich you overnight, but assures you not to make any of those common mistakes people usually do when they decide to put Google Adsense in their websites. Just follow these tricks strictly, and you will start making some money for sure. At least this is what happened to me! Ready? Here is the list. Continue reading »

The whole story started about five days ago when, all of a sudden, Web Talk started experiencing a great drop in its visits. Basically, from almost one thousand visitors a day, at the present time Web Talk just manages to gather a little more than two hundreds people. I have lost around 80% of visitors, and considering that all of Web Talk’s readers come from Google search, well, this has obviously to do with Google itself. This tendency is still on because, while I am writing, my visits are still dropping dramatically by the hour. If it continues, I fear there will be just a dozen of people here at Web Talk. I have to tell you that this thing worries me a lot. That’s why, a few days ago I started Googling to find out if I could get a solution or a reply to this big issue. To my big surprise I learnt that this is not a lone case but a spread tendency, courtesy of Google and its Sandbox. But what is Google’s Sandbox? First of all let me tell you that Google denies any Sandbox algorithm in its policy and, as a consequence, there are lots of theories about it, all of them getting to the conclusion that, despite what Google says, there is a kind of Sandbox behaviour on Google’s side. But let’s start from the beginning. Let’s start from what means being in a sandbox and why it was created. Google’s Sandbox was put in place in March 2004 to prevent fake and spam sites from being placed and ranked highly in the Google Search. Basically, if a website manages to get a lot of visitors, or a high rank or perform well in the Google Search in a short laps of time, Google gets “funny” about the website and, because of this reason, tends to think that something weird, bogus and not-legal was made in order to trick its algorithms. That’s why it puts the website in a sandbox to play…just with itself. As a result the website will stop performing well in Google Search, and while the whole website is still indexed, its keywords will perform badly and its pages will be shown very low in the search result. Solutions? No solution are available at the present time. The only thing to do is waiting. Usually Google puts a website in the Sandbox for a period of time which varies from one month to one year at most. I don’t want to discuss about Google’s policy because a lot has already being said in the Internet. That’s Web Talk situation right now. I can not do anything but continuing writing my posts as usual. For the few of you guys who were able to find this blog, stay tuned because more news and guides are coming up. If you wish to know more about Google’s Sandbox here is a list of the most interesting articles I manged to find while surfing. Continue reading »

In order to improve security in your Wordpress blog, the new version of this wonderful Content Management System has seen the birth of a new way of tightening your security by creating a unique and hard to find number when calculating hash value to encrypt password, especially on cookie authentication. This trick highly prevents hackers who use specific software to brute force your admin account. But, where can you find and use this new feature called “the secret key”? Simple, first of all open the Wordpress zipped file or, alternatively, gain access to your blog by using a FTP software. Look for wp-config-sample.php (if you just installed Wordpress) or wp-config.php (if you have a running blog), open it and look for the following piece of code:

// Change SECRET_KEY to a unique phrase. You won’t have to remember it later,
// so make it long and complicated. You can visit https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm
// to get a phrase generated for you, or just make something up.
define(’SECRET_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’); // Change this to a unique phrase.

Now, just change “define(’SECRET_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’)” by writing a long and hard to guess password. I would like you to remember that the longer and “mixed” it is the better your will be protected against malevolt people. But what do I mean when I say “mixed”? When creating a new password you should keep in your mind what specific software used by hackers are and do. They are huge databases trying to fill in your admin form with all kind of words to gain full access to your blog. They also try to combine words, use capital letters and special characters and such. It is evident that the more messed-up a password is, the better. To give you an example you SHOULD NOT USE a password like this: johnthebest198606. You SHOULD USE instead a password such: RiGhTPaSs$56*8@2Ok. This lessen the chance that some program may, even by change, guess your password. In case you are not creative enough, you can use this simple Web Tool, directly provided by Wordpress that makes the hard job for you, namely find out a very hard-to-guess password. Here is the link.

If you are a blogger you know only too well how important to put advertising on your bog is in order to pay your monthly and yearly fees to manage your internet activity. In fact, you have to pay the web hosting provider, ask for help to programmers just in case something gets screwed, pay a designer to get a better theme, pay Adword to let other people know about you and what you are doing etc. If you start blogging seriously and you are not into programming, at a certain point you have to pay to get help. Blogging is a continue work in progress. Usually readers don’t see a lot about this feverish activity, apart when a new article comes out, but I assure that behind the scenes there is a lot of work and posting articles is just the tip of the iceberg. Blogging is an extreme dynamic activity made of hundreds of big and small daily adjustments. OK, I apologize for this little off-topic… There are a lot of ways to get money from your blog, but the most used one is, without any doubt, Google Adsense. There are dozens of plugins letting you put its code among your pages or promising you to fine tune it, but what if you don’t manage to find the right plugin reproducing the behaviour you are looking for? A solution is to know a little bit about php programming, make a custom piece of code and put it into your blog’s theme. Let’s make an example. In the past weeks I have have been looking for a plugin which lets me put Adsense in the main page of my blog ( by the way, I use Wordpress) at specific intervals, let’s say one advertising every 3 posts. Well, believe it or not but I didn’t manage to find it at all. Lucky for me and you all, there are a lot of good guys out there willing to help you for the sake of it. This is the trick I managed to get from a good willed guy:

• Get access to your blog thorugh your FTP software.
• Go to /public_html/wp-content/themes/yourTheme.
• Open Index.php (which corresponds to your blog’s homepage loop).
• Add this piece of code after <?php if (have_posts()) : ?>: <?php $counter = 2; ?>
• Add this other piece of code containing your Adsense after <?php the_content(’Continue reading »’); ?>: <?php if(++$counter % 3 == 0) { Echo ‘Your Google Adsense code here‘; } ?>

The behaviour you should expect from this code is that it will put a Google ads at the bottom of the first post of your blog’s homepage. It will also put a Google ads every three posts, following thus this frequency: 3,6,9,12 etc. If you want your Google ads to follow a different frequency, just change the figures in the code.

If you are a webmaster you know only too well how important to speak with your visitors is. This, not only to solve some issue or questions they may have about your blog, but also to link them to it, so that they will come back to see what is new. A wonderful and easy solution to start talking with your visitors is to open a chat to speak with them while online. Hab.la is a website offering you such a service for free. Basically, Hab.la is an easy-to-use chat to integrate in your blog. It doesn’t need any extra software nor special requirements to work, plus it is very simple to install. It works with Safari, Firefox, IE6, IE7, and Opera and rely on any Jabber client (such as: Meebo. Trillian. Pidgin. iChat …) to operate. Reading from the website: ” Hab.la lets visitors to your website chat with you without any extra chat software. Their messages show up in your favorite instant messaging app. Hab.la is easy for webmasters to set up and friendly to your visitors’ web browsers. Better yet, Hab.la is free.” I like the idea these guys have got. Chatting is a wonderful way to entartain your visitors, above all if you want your blog to get away from the idea somebody might have about it being cold, deserted and with no life. Showing the webmaster online gives people the impression they are not alone, and can get help whenever they want. Again, great idea!

If you have a blog and you want it to run on Internet Explorer smoothly, you could have a nasty surprise. In fact, depending on what version of Internet Explorer your visitors are using, you blog could not be rendered in a proper way on their screens, making you loose a lot of readers and hours in the vain attempt to understand what it is wrong with your site. Don’t worry, it is not your fault but Microsoft’s and its nasty attitude not to respect HTML standards. To avoid this kind of surprise it could be nice if you could have a way to test your blog on the different Internet Explorer versions before putting it online. Well, IETester is the reply you are looking for. As a matter of fact “IETester allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process.” If you want to download it, click here.