Pen The Blog

How to Solve the Redirect Error in Google Webmaster

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 04:20:00 +0000

Ok, first I will illustrate the issue. One fine day my vistior count dropped. At first I thought it was due to Google Sandboxing or penalizing my site. But when i searched the net I found that I was still having the same ranking. But I wan in for a huge shock when I opened my Sites Google Webmaster. My site had more than 3300+ links/pages as "URLS not followed". When I saw the detail everyone of the error showed "Redirect Error". Now I was clear why my Rankings dropped.

I will first illustrate why this porblem arised and then give the solutions. My blog is hosted on Blogger and I have made the Site feed point to my Feedburner feed. Recently Google forced me to transfer my feedburner feeds to google. It was a pretty smooth transition and I didn't lose a single user as Google already redirected my feedburner feed to Google feed. Everything worked fine till Google changed their crawling algorithm. If you go to Google webmaster site, tools options and click "Analyse Robot.txt" you can see your current Robot.txt. For a Blogger blog, it will be similiar to:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search

Sitemap: http://www.xxxxxx.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

Now there lies the real problem which creates the Redirect error. Google uses our feed as Sitemap. The problem with the current system is that my site feed is redirected to feed burner which inturn is redirected to "feedburner google" feed. Earlier all worked fine as Google never cared about re-directs. Now it looks like Google is carefully avoiding links with more than one re-direct.

So the solution is simple make your site feed pointed to your google feed. i.e go to feedburner.google.com and copy the address of your feed and put it in your blog feed (Layout->settings-->Site Feed). This will solve the issue. But it will take minimum of to weeks to de-list all your URLs from Not followed. But finally my site traffic has picked up.

Google Images Discards Alt Tags

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 05:25:00 +0000

Yes, as the title suggests I have strong reasons to believe that Google Images has stopped taking the alt tag into account while indexing images. I have earlier written about a possible Change in Google's Image algorithm. That was written based on the sudden drop in traffic in one of my site Actress Snaps. My site used to get more than 60% traffic from Google Images now its reduced to just 10%. This led me to see where the traffic was going from the image search.

Since the site in question is a celebrity phot site, I used to host most of the images in Photobucket. I do have a pro account there. But then later stumbled upon Shareapic.net which was paying their users a share of revenue. No need to say I slowly started hosting the majority of my images in Shareapic. They paid me 50$ the first time and from surprisingly from the next time onwards they started paying me only 40% of what I was entitled. I had a payout of 20$ but they paid me 8.92 dollars. It looks they have changed their policy for foreign users and I am from India. Anyway let's comeback to the real issue. On closer examination I found that the shareapic hosted images were not receiving any or minute traffic from Google images compares to Blogger host or Photobucket hosted.

My first thought was that Google may be penalising those paid to upload image host service. But that argument never made sense. So I took a even closer examination and found out a fundamental difference in Shareapic and Photobucket. If you have hosted your images in Shareapic, you have noticed that whatever name you give to your file while uploading thay change it to a random number. Whereas Photobucket never changes the file name and retains them. Now we all considered the two important factors with images were filename and alt tags. So for all the images hosted in Shareapic I used to use alt tags cause the filename was a random generated value. Earlier these pictures used tom have enough traffic from Google images but now they have dried up. Hence I believe like the title tag Google looks like have taken a decision not to use Alt tag, ot atleast they consider the filename as more important and alt tag as a cross verification factor.

We can only hope that a host like Shareapic, which gives unlimited bandwidth and space may change their filenaming system. Otherwise the only option looks like put the first two images in a gallery in Photobucket and the rest on Shareapic.

Has Google Changed their Image Search Algorithm?

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:11:00 +0000

One of my site, which basically belongs to entertainment niche, with full of images was receiving more than 60% of its traffic from Image search engine. I was getting close to 800 referrals from google's different image seasrch engine (located in different places). Day before yesterday when I checked the analytics stats I was in for a surprise, the huge number of 700+ was reduced to a mere 90+. That was a shock as against usual trends people who visit via image search engine also spends good amount of time in my site. I checked the stats today also and was dissappointed by the falling image search numbers.

My traffic from google search engine still remain the same. This led me to the question whether Google has indeed change their image search algorithm. As a usual SEO technique I used to use alt tag along with all images. Since I group images as a set I use the same alt tag for one set. Google might be now penalizing guys who are using the same alt tags for more than one image. Another could be , google may have discarded the alt tag completely as there are widespread abuse of the same. This also could have occured because I used the PageName tag for title recently; this may result in search engine taking more time for re-analysing the pages. These are my assumptions, this may be wrong. But if anyone of you have experienced the same please comment. Anyway I am going to wait for some more days to see what happens. Would report the same in a couple of days.

Blogger Title Tag for Better SEO Ranking

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:30:00 +0000

A big drawback till recently with Blogger platform was the way the title for each individual post displayed. Usually it involved the Blog title followed by the Page title. It is always better to display the Page title alone as it will increase the SEO ranking. But the most improved aspect could be a better performance in search results. People will click on a search result more if the title starts with the Keyword rather than Blog title. For example let’s assume that I am searching for term “FaveBot” – I have a page about FaveBot titled “FaveBot – Your Search Solution”. But in the search result it will show up as “Pen The Blog: FaveBot – Your Search Solution”. This will reduce my search effort considerably, especially considering that there could be tens of WordPress blogs which will only display Page title. Hence there was a huge demand from Blogger users from the beginning to find a solution to this.

The first solution available on the net for this issue was a JavaScript. I have no idea who compiled it – but it did serve somewhat its purpose. You can look at the code here. But its drawbacks were huge; whenever I tried to install that my blogger template started behaving oddly. So in the end I have to discard it and get satisfied with blogger default. Now Blogger team has answered all our calls. The solution is the <data:blog.pageName/> tag. This will display the Page Title alone or simply put the pageName variable holds the Name of the current page. Remember that this will not hold Blog Title and hence cannot be used to display Blog title. Why I am saying this is that people will be tempted to simply change the <title><data:blog.pageTitle/><title> with <title><data:blog.pageName/></title>. This will not work with your blogs homepage. The steps to add this to your blog is defined below. I am explaining two processes here – which one to chose is at your disposal.

Process 1:

1)Go to Edit HTML page of your blogger template.(DashBoard-> Layout->Edit HTML)
2)Search for <data:blog.pageTitle/> tag (Between head tags)
3)Replace the tag with Below given tag

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/></title>
</b:if>

Process 2:
In the step 3 replace with this code

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "Your_Blog_URL"'>
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/></title>
</b:if>

Replace the Your_Blog_URL with your blog url.

If you chose process 1, then you will have the index pages (i.e homepage, archive page, category/labe page) all displaying Blog title. In the second process only the homepage will display Blog title but the archive and labe pages will display their titles.

Viewzi – A Visual search Accumulator

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Thu, 08 May 2008 07:37:00 +0000

Earlier I have written a post about a visual search engine called RedZee . Viewzi in contrast cannot be called as a pure search engine, they can be called a Search accumulator. Different search engines employ different algorithms, this throw up varied results for the same keyword. Many attempts, both successful and unsuccessful were made to combine them to a format. Viewzi is the latest attempt in that, with a completely different approach. Viewzi define their service as "Viewzi is a new and highly visual way to search that brings all your favorite stuff together in one place."

In contrast to the other services of similar kind available on net, Viewzi stands out for the varied options it provides to the end user. They provide you a Screenshot view which basically access Yahoo search engine.

The video search option searches the popular video sites Blinks, Veoh, YouTube. Then there is the Basic photo view option which searches Riya and Flickr. Her you have the additional option of choosing either one of Riya or Flickr, and the size of the images. Another option is the Simple Text Search which is similar to our normal serch option; this option searches Google and Yahoo to fetch results. Then there is the more powerful 4 Sources View in which in addition to Google and Yahoo, Ask and MSN is searched. Here also you have the option to deselect any number of above mentioned search engines. The other options are Shopping view, Book view, Reuters news view etc. But the most interesting has to be the Celebrity Image View which searches Google Images and just jared. This one displays the images as a pile with the option to zoom and move each one of them.

Preezo – Prepare Presentation Online

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Wed, 07 May 2008 09:16:00 +0000

Preezo – Presentation For Web provides a very powerful tool online presentation. Earlier attempts of trying to create a replica of PowerPoint presentation have come a cropper. But this one looks good. Preezo should be complemented for the effort it put in. They have put all the crucial features of MS PowerPoint presentation in their tool. Their presentation interface is built upon Ajax and is pretty fast. The interface is so good and powerful that it displays all the effects and transitions without a glitch.

To start with Users need to register for a free account with Preezo. After the usual E-Mail verification users can log into the system. Preezo provides the entire standard slide layout. You can add background colours to the slide layout. You can even add your custom images to the Layout. You can add separate color for the Text Box and Customize the text with all the regular fonts and effects. Another feature which makes Preezo very powerful is the vast amount of slide transition effects. Preezo also provides with all the Bulleting and Numbering option without which no presentation is complete. Once the presentation is saved, you have the option to publish it to web and share the URL to others. Otherwise you can send it to your Email or embed it in your site.

RedZee - Watch Your Searches

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:56:00 +0000

Google holds the monopoly when it comes to online search engine. Yahoo, the second best search engine comes only a distant second. Many search engines were launched with new concepts to challenge Google’s might, but most of them simply vanished. The latest trend is “Visual Search Engine”. This idea looks like one that will be here to stay. One of the Visual Search Engine which is out in its beta form is RedZee. How successful this concept and RedZee will be only time can tell. As a beginning RedZee is not bad, especially considering the fact that Visual Search Engine concept is in incubation stage. But the fact that in the end of all they have to compete with the likes of Yahoo and Google could be their biggest disadvantage. But nothing can be said at these early hours.

RedZee’s biggest attraction should be their Mascot. I don’t know whether they call it RedZee – But it’s very well animated and will surely make everyone try their service for at least once. Below is the screenshot of the search result.
RedZee gives a text description of the sites, but only one at a time. Many were critical about RedZee ability as a search engine, as a text based description will give more information. But I believe RedZee has its own advantages, especially those who are searching for entertainment and Media related stuffs. For them, RedZee’s interface could be better than that of Yahoo and Google as we can get a glimpse of the site. But for information related search, I do believe RedZee would be in a disadvantage. But RedZee’s biggest disadvantage is the relevancy of searches – when I did a search for "f c Barcelona" (without quotes), the official Barcelona site came at fifth. Ahead of it were Wikipedia and Blogger. This could be because of the amount of blogs about Barcelona hosted by Blogger. My site All About F C Barcelona never came in the result. If you include the quotes in your search terms, nothing shows up. This could be disastrous as all the net users are trained by Google to search a particular combination this way. Second problem is with the search box in the search result page. Enter key does not work here and also you cannot select a particular to delete or edit here.

But over the entire concept put forward by RedZee. It’s still in its beta version and could turn out to be a more powerful tool when moving out of Beta. But the biggest problem for these guys could arise if Google decides to implement a Visual Search Engine.

The Best Online Image Editor – The King

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:10:00 +0000

A “Made in Russia” tag on a product should indeed guarantee the class of a product. There are a lot of online image editors available on the net. Some does cropping, some does resizing, some even does a small amount of image quality adjustments. But if you are looking for an Online substitute for your famous desktop image editor tool, then you are into major disappointment. There are certain online tools which do more than one of the above mentioned jobs, but their quality and handiness will make you go back to its desktop cousin. Recently while surfing I came across a tool from Russia - Smilart Fan Studio Online Photo Editor. I have to spend a lot of time in internet cafes and have been in search of a good online image editor tool for ages.

My first impression about Smilart Fan Studio was not quiet great. I thought it was one of those tools available on net which claims big, but delivers so small. On a second impression, it turned out to be more powerful than they claim. Actually it can add a lot of unbelievable effects which usually an advanced editor like Photoshop or Gimp only could do. As a regular online tool –it can perform the usual cropping, resizing of an image. Its major features are
Camera Option – This is where you can correct red-eye effects, correct noise, clearing the skin, remove distortions etc of your digital image.
Orientation Option – Here you can rotate the image as you like, what makes this memorable is they have an tilt option to add that professional touch to your images.
Light and Color Options – here we have the lighting adjustments, adjust shadows, colour etc.
Clarity Options – here you can make your image sharp, blur, change contrast. Have to admit their sharpness option works better than Photoshop.
Special Effect Options – here you can add special effects to your images like B/W photo, Vintage Photo effect, Tint effect, Borders, funny effects etc. You can add any colour tint to your image.

All in all it has to be declared the King of Online Image editor tool. You cans save your image on web also. They also have a Compare with original option to assist you better. My only concerns – all the earnings are displayed in Russian, and I had no idea of it.

Below is two images the first one is original and the second one edited.Check the sharpness of the second one.

FaveBot – Your Search Solution

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:37:00 +0000

I have been running an F C Barcelona blog for some time – All About F C Barcelona. It’s always difficult to find the latest news and events related to the club. I regularly visit some well known websites and blogs to get up to date news about the club. Rest of the time is been used in searching for Barcelona related terms in search engine. Most of the cases, I would be searching everyday for the same search terms. Now that is quite boring and monotonous way of doing thing. Now there is a solution for this – FaveBot. Using FaveBot you can keep track of your favourite keywords. FaveBot returns you a set of recently updated sites, blogs etc which contain materials with the mentioned keywords.

FaveBot provides you the option to refine the search result depending on the type of source. You can chose from which all category the articles should be selected. The categories allowed are Blogs, Books, DVDs, Events, Music, News, Pics, Pods and Videos. FaveBot also offers the feature of serving the search results as an RSS feed to your feed reader. So from next time you can stop searching the latest news about your favourite club or celebrity, instead you can read it every morning. FaveBot may not be accurate but do throw up all the major websites related to the searching terms. Some of my favourite websites was missing – that may be because of the Spam filtering. FaveBot’s spam filtering discards all the sites which are hosted on free hosting service like Blogger. Even though I have purchased my domain allaboutfcbarcelona.com, it never showed up in the result because I am using the Blogger’s custom domain option. That is kind of a problem – because then this blog also will not feature in any of the searches. They should find a way to selectively exclude certain sites (which are good) that otherwise may come in the spam filtering category.

Track Your Website Status using Monitor.us

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 05:33:00 +0000

There are many server status notification tools available in the net nowadays. The latest which I encountered is Monitor.us. Monitor.us is a handy website which helps you track the status of the servers. After signup you can add test for your servers. It supports 11 protocols for testing namely http, ping, https, ftp, pop, smtp, dns, tcp, udp, imap, and sip. You can have the server performance data displayed in any of the three formats – Table, Bar and Line. You can opt in to receive notification about your site problem via email, Instant Messenger (ICQ, Yahoo, MSN or Google) or SMS (this at this moment is a paid service). You can also create an alert feed to be read in your RSS reader about your server status.

The USP for Monitor.us is that even though it is primarily a server status tracking tool, it can be used effectively to track information about visitors to your site. You can add your website for visitor tracking, after that you have to insert a small JavaScript code into your site. You can track your traffic on the basis of countries, IPs, cities, OS, Browsers, and Keywords. The interface for the visitor tracking is beautiful, especially the Map, you can zoom in and out the map to track countries and cities. Another wonderful feature which is available is the Widget option – You can create embeddable widget to track your server performance. Another feature – Snapshot, help you in tracking all your server status quickly. Even with all these wonderful features, their service has enough annoyance for a person. I am constantly irritated with their display interface – if you opt for adding a display let’s say a visitor tracking display, it only keeps showing Loading… You will be able to see it only after refreshing the page. The worst is while trying to add visitor tracking, when I added the URL for tracking it kept on showing verifying URL and never gave me the Code snippet. No need to panic here, you just have to refresh the page and add the visitor tracking from My VT Sites. You can find the code snippet in the Traffic Report box add it to your site, bingo it starts working. For all these annoyance Monitor.us is a wonderful tool, it brings all the right application and service together to make it handy for the webmaster. I would like them to provide a comprehensive Help document (as I believe the current one is adequate) to enhance user experience. The help document should include the difference between different protocols and all the technical terms included with their services. At this moment this tool is a bit complex for a person who is a beginner as far net technicalities are concerned.

Have you QuantCast?

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:21:00 +0000

In the sea of online web traffic tools available on the net, what makes QuantCast different is the fact that they are basically intended to serve the Advertisers. A usual web traffic tool intention is to give the webmaster a complete picture of the traffic into his site. Their developers claim it to be the “World’s Only Open Internet rating Service”. They also claim it to be “A new media measurement service that enables advertisers to view audience reports for millions of sites and services to build their brands with confidence.” One of the plus points with QuantCast is that they tend to have some data about your site even though you have not submitted to them. But those data is absolutely inaccurate for example doshdosh.com has a traffic rank of 217000, which is absolutely absurd. So the most important factor is to use the JavaScript code provided by QuantCast.

Now what makes QuantCast different from others in the business? Firstly, they provide data from an Advertiser perspective. In other words they give the publisher an opportunity to market to the right advertisers. Secondly most of the advertisers are very much biased towards North America centered traffic – QuantCast also is heavily biased towards usage in North America. Most of the breakdown and analysis is focused in this region, even though they don’t complete neglect the world wide audience. It would have been better if they could provide another Europe based breakdown also, as many advertisers are now concentrating over there. QuantCast search facility can be used to return basic information any site. The results are categorized based on Monthly unique, Sex, Age, Demographic and Geographic information. These give a quick overview of the type of audience the particular website serve. Thirdly the statics are presented in a very pleasant manner via pie diagram, bar diagram and graph. If you have more than one website, you can group them together and benchmark each other.

QuantCast also offer a video and widget tracking service. This service could be used to measure the usage of your videos, widgets and games, whether served from your site or elsewhere on the web. The information will be categorized based on metric like plays, reach, amount consumed and category. QuantCast themselves reminds you that their data may not be 100% accurate, but when compared to tools like Alexa their data tend to be more accurate.

Alexa Changed their Ranking

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:05:00 +0000

I was casually searching for my entertainment niche site Actress Snaps' ranking in alexa and was was quiet surprised to see my site jumping close to 100,000 position compared to yesterday. so I decided to take a peep into what's behind the sudden surge. It looks like Alexa has refined its ranking system. Alexa ranking system has been under heavy criticsm from all part especially from the best in the blogging business. The main criticsm was that Alexa ranking was based on the number of users who have installed their toolbar.Now they claim that they have refined their rankings by adding more factors. they haven't revealed what all those factors are. But anyway now it looks like more close to being accurate. atleast Google is having a 2nd ranking in their newsystem, but still can't digest the fact that yahoo is more popular than google.They alos claim that they are still collecting data for the new ranking system, so can expect a few more jump very soon.

Making Mobile Friendly Sites

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:45:00 +0000

Have you ever tried to open your blog in a mobile browser? You better not, first of all it looks as ugly as it gets, secondly it takes too much of time to load completely. There are so many applications available in the net to solve this scenario. Some allows you to make from scratch a new mobile site and the others allow you to create a mobile friendly version of your existing site. If you are interested in creating a fresh mobile site, TagTag will be one of the good options available. But if you are interested in creating a browser friendly version of your blog – the two best available options are Mofuse and WireNode. Both these services create mobile friendly version of your site from their RSS feeds.
A brief review of both these services is given below:

Mofuse has been launched in its beta version in September 2007 and since then has been the pioneer in creating mobile friendly version of your site. They offer so many advanced feature like custom domain, header image, Designing Logo, Comment Widget etc. It also gives you the opportunity to monetize from your mobile site by adding your Adsense or AdMob code. The revenue split for free users is of the 50/50 ratio, but if you can upgrade to Pro version you can keep the entire revenue. They do provide automatic redirect code through which you can redirect your user to your mobile site if they are visiting via a mobile browser. They also have a comment widget and option to add/create another independent page other than your RSS page. They have been very pro active with the options they offer to their users by adding new feature – the latest are iPhone settings and Click to Call features. Their only drawback as far as I am concerned is that they tend to put most of these features in the Pro version. They will allow you to use these feature and the next time you will find them included only in the pro version. But anyway, this is by far the best application available to make a browser friendly version of your blog.

WireNode has been founded by the Tomas Zeman and Tomas Randus and has their head office located in Prague, Czech Republic. Like Mofuse with WireNode it takes only two minutes to setup your mobile site. You can have a Title Image and put your own Image in WireNode. Like Mofuse you can create individual pages, it also provides three widget – a clock widget, Message/Comment widget and Message of the Day widget. Out of this the Message of the Widget is very innovative as it gives an essential platform to announce of recent developments. Another innovative feature included in WireNode is the option to add images from Google Image search. It also provides a set of seven themes to choose from. They lack the monetization options of Mofuse but should be able to provide an alternative for it soon.

Track Your Flight Status

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:50:00 +0000

FligtStats is a website where you can track the status of your flight. If you do a search for flight status website in Google, there will be hundreds of websites that is going to be populated. But most of them cater to a US based audience whereas FlighStats have necessary information about the flights originating from all the major cities in the world. FlightStats provide three basic search options – Search by Airport, Search by Route and Search by Flight.
Search By Airport – This option gives the information of all the flights from/to a particular airport. FlightStats have a very good auto fill assistant which helps you in selecting your desired airports. Actually this auto fill feature is one of the factor which help this site leap ahead of it competitors.
Search By Route – This helps in finding the information of flights available between two particular airports.
Search By Flight – This is the option most suited when you have to go to pick some of your dearest ones from airports.The three above mentioned options makes it easy from the users to know the flight details with minimum information before hand.

What make FlightStats more desirable is a huge list of additional services and tools they offer. They have linked with Kayak to provide their customer with the best air travel deal possible. Through Kayak FlightStats make it possible to book cruise, hotels and taxis for their customers. Thus FlightStats act as a central resource manager for all your travel needs. They also provide a frequent flyer deal with tie up with MileMaven, this helps you to find and avail any promotion or discounts available at the particular time.

FlightStats also provide all the details you need to know about a particular airport. These details include weather condition, airport delays (US and Canada), security wait time (US airports) etc. It also provides a mechanism for registered users to rate these airports and also have a forum where you can put your views about the same. So the next time you travel to a new destination, you can prepare well for all the trouble before hand. FlightStats also let you set up alerts about information regarding a particular flight. The alerts include notification if flight is delayed for more than 30 minutes or cancelled, arrival notification etc.

Ploomy - A Must Visit for Every Guys

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 05:04:00 +0000

Etiquette is a very dreadful term; at least this was true in my case. If you search for the term “Etiquette” in Wikipedia, you will be surprised by the sheer volume of its definition. Wikipedia defines it as “Etiquette, one aspect of decorum, is a code that governs the expectations of social behavior, according to the contemporary conventional norm within a society, social class, or group.” I never used to bother about any etiquette. But recently I had to face some situations where I looked as a total misfit. A lack of awareness of common etiquette will harm both your personal and professional lives. Personally it might doom disaster – for example if you don’t know how to behave at a dining table; you might become a huge embarrassment for both your partner and boss. So I decided to educate myself with the most common etiquette needed for men to be successful. In this digital world you will find all the solution for your problem in the Net. So I hooked onto my favourite search engine and did an extensive research. There were too many sites on etiquettes but none could command the respect.

Then I saw a site which had a definitive Royal looks – Ploomy. Their catch line is “Ploomy - What Men Need To Know”. The word Ploomy is short for the French word “nom de plume” which means pen name. Ok that’s a definition given in the site. One of the most attractive features of this site is that they always update you with a list of etiquette which is very much needed in day to day life. My personal favourite is the Give Me 5 Minutes and I’ll Tell You What You Need to Know about Wine. It gives a list of useful tip to know your wines and especially impress others with your wine knowledge. Another one is Table Manner Tips Every Guy Should Know – This is a must read for every guys. This will make you realize that most of the things you were practicing till now were absolutely absurd. They have a list of other tips which will be very useful in your personal and professional lives. Ploomy is a must bookmark for every Guy.

Piky Basket - Indeed a Handy Basket

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:46:00 +0000

Piky Basket is a tool which I have recently installed (actually it is a shell extension) and has been using extensively in recent times. Actually this tool has reduced my workload considerably. Piky Basket is a simple file managing tool which manages the copy/Move operation of files. Once installed it integrates itself into the right click menu. Where Piky Basket comes handy is when you have to move a lot of files from different folders into a single folder. Earlier we have to move into each folder and copy the necessary files in that folder and then paste it in the destination folder. Then move into the other folder and repeat the same. With Piky Basket this task is very much simplified, simply start dropping the necessary files in to the Piky Basket (to do that select the files that needed to be copied and then right click, you will find a Piky basket option as shown in the image.

Now once you have completed dropping all the necessary files into Piky basket, then move into the target folder and just simply Copy/Move the files (depending on your use). This has been very much handy for me when copying music files into my walkman or pen drive. Along with this Piky Basket provides two more handy options where in which you can copy the file path into clipboard. This is really handy for programmers and the second one is the most I love - Command Prompt Here option. This option opens the command prompt and moves the current directory to that folder. So you can pretty soon forget the cd command.

2 Must Have Tools for your Computer

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:36:00 +0000

Browser hijacking has been one of the menaces which have been prevailing in the online world for some time. For those who are not familiar with the term “Browser Hijacking” or who were very lucky not to experience it till now – Wikipedia defines it as “
Browser hijacking is the modification of a web browser's settings by Malware.” Simply put when a browser hijacker get installed in your system, it most probably changes your Homepage and in most cases it will also disable the option of changing the Homepage. The situation becomes rather embracing because in most cases the Homepage will be changed into some erotic site. I was really shocked when it happened in my office with me and after that I started looking for ways to restore the settings. It’s not that surprising to find that Internet Explorer with its low security features is the target of majority of Hijacking attempt, whereas Firefox has a pretty healthy record against the same. May be this is another reason to prefer Firefox rather than Internet Explorer. One of the most powerful anti Browser Hijacking tool is:

HijackThis

HijackThis was originally created by Merijn Bellekom, and later sold to Trend Micro. It still remains as a freeware. HijackThis basically detect Malware by tracking the common methods used by Hijackers. It does not compare the list with a database of Malware list as in the case of other spy ware removers. Hence false warnings are imminent. HijackThis is pretty easy to use but is a very dangerous tool in the hands of a user who is not an expert in Spy Wares. The official Trend Micro site issues the following warning “HijackThis does not determine what is good or bad. Do not make any changes to your computer settings unless you are an expert computer user.”
But there is no need to be sad about it, there is huge number of forums where you can paste your HijackThis log and get Help from. One of them and one I use frequently is Cyber Tech Help. Or if you want to do it yourself without any help, you can then search in internet where the List populated by HijackThis is indeed a Malware. But I don’t take any responsibility about the side effects of such a step.

Another set of spy wares affect your USB drives. In most of the cases you get infected by a Flash Malware when you use them in a public computer mostly at cyber cafes etc. In most of the cases the only option left will be formatting the pen drive. But this will result in data loss. Flash Disinfector by sUBs is a tool for removing most of these Flash Malwares. It can be used to remove these Malwares from both computer and Flash drives. It’s pretty simple to use. Save the file then run the software. The software will ask you to insert the affected Flash Drive. Your desktop will disappear for a moment and then reappear. That’s it….

Top 5 Image Hosting Service

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:39:00 +0000

With digital photography becoming so popular, it’s hard to find a person without a digital camera. With the idea of Mobile Cameras coming out of age, photography has become a passive hobby for many. With such advancement of digital world, what required next was a place to store and share these. A look at the options available for the users, one will really get lost in the sea of image host. We have every kind of image host available – one targeted at families, one targeted at web administrator and so on. Below is the list of Top 5 image host according to me.

1. Photobucket

Photobucket is an image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing website. It was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and was acquired by Fox Interactive Media last year. It undoubtedly is the most popular of the entire image host and the most successful. The offer two kinds of membership – Regular and Pro Memberships. Their feature includes:

- Upload from Computer, from URL, by mobile or email.
- Free user account has an upload limit of 1mb per file.
- Multiple image upload.
- Advanced Image editing and effects.
- Upload Videos.
- 10 GB monthly bandwidth limit and 1GB upload limit for free users.
- Unlimited Bandwidth and 5GB storage space for Pro User.
The major draw back with these guys is that they don’t have a referral policy, even for Pro Members. Be careful in using Photobucket. It’s the best for sharing family photos and all but if you are looking for hosting images for your website, then looks somewhere else. I used to do that and pretty easily got addicted to them and suddenly found that I am using more than 10GB bandwidth; hence I have to go for Pro membership. Trust me Pro membership is worth it.

2. ShareaPic

ShareaPic offers a sharp contrast to Photobucket. They decided to concentrate on the options Photobucket left open. They offer the users an opportunity to earn from their pics and seriously becoming very popular with webmasters and forum owners. Their album interface may not look as great as Photobucket but still is very cool. They claim to pay 0.22$ per 100 picture views. The also allow you to add your Bidvertiser code to your albums. Earlier it was adsense. Their major feature includes:

- Unlimited Bandwidth.
- Unlimited Storage Space.
- Earn money sharing pictures.
- Add Bidvertiser code and earn money.
- Create unlimited Galleries.
For the webmasters Shareapic offers an added advantage. Their Gallery get indexed in Google search and here is the catch you can use it to increase in links to your site. What you have to do is simply add your sitename along with Gallery name.

3. ImageVenue

The above mentioned file host has strict restriction about the content of the files and in many cases you will find they removing your files in violation of TOS. If you are looking for an alternative then Imagevenue is the place. Actually their performance is too good when compared to the other two but their interfaces are very simple. Major features are:

- Upload option from file only.
- Unlimited bandwidth.
- Unlimited Storage space.
- 1.5MB file size limit.
- Registration not required.

4. ImageShack

ImageShack has been in service from 2003. they offer free as well as paid service. The major features are:

- Upload options: from file, from URL, by email or directly from mobile.
- Max file size of 1.5MB.
- No storage restrictions.
- Bandwidth limited to 100MB/hour.

5. PicTiger

One of the youngest entrants to the image hosting service is Pictiger. It’s one of the most promising among all the new comers. Where Pictiger scores in comparision to other hosting service is its bulk uploading capability. Major features are:

- Unlimited bandwidth.
- Unlimited Storage.
- Upload up to 100 images in one click.
- Advance editing and Tagging of Images.

Learn foreign languages at your Desk

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 06:21:00 +0000

For all those who are interested in learning new technologies and languages in the net, this is the most promising of all ventures - LiveMocha. Their homepage described their venture as “an exciting e-learning Web 2.0 startup founded by a group of experienced and successful entrepreneurs based in the Seattle area. LiveMocha addresses a $20 billion worldwide language learning market fueled by rapid globalization, immigration and travel”. LiveMocha is a venture funded company backed by Maveron, a leading Seattle based venture firm with tremendous consumer and e-learning expertise. They offer a variety of courses in Chinese, Hindi, English, Spanish and German. These courses vary with your expertise and proficiency in each language.

The entire exercise has been divided into 3 groups – Learn, Practice and Share. Learn is the usual option of registering for any of the above mentioned course. In practice you select a partner (community user) who is also looking to practice the language. Using the share option you can help others with your proficiency in the language – by correcting others. I have already started my attempt to learn Spanish and the course structure looks quite good to me. There are four basic courses for each language labeled 101, 102, 103, and 104. The 101 course is aimed at the beginners and is a good place to start your endeavor. Once through with that you can graduate yourself to the other courses which are organized according to the difficulty. LiveMocha is right now in its Beta version and can be expected to add more languages down the path. From the look and feel of it, they are here to stay. I almost forget to mention this –All these come free of cost and without any installation also.

Kick The Bot!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:15:00 +0000

For those who make their first steps into the Blog-O-Sphere, the biggest question facing them is “How to get the initial traffic?” Most of the cases it’s pretty difficult to get your self in the ever increasing blog crowd. So every one digs hard in their favourite search engine and ultimately is moved into some topics which give an introduction to the term “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)”. From now onwards it is a never ending struggle and search to understand all the factors which dominates search engines. Everyone starts to think in terms of Google and Yahoo Bot and ultimately going to see a good spike of traffic in coming days. And slowly is going to increase and there you are smiling in front of what could be called a very firm first step. Then suddenly you start to see the traffic draining away. Then you dig again all over the net to find why this happened.Most of the cases you will be blinking in front of your Laptop, nothing else seems to work. Then slowly you start to realize that you ignored the most important of all the factors. One factor that is the backbone of all successful innovations – the Users.You designed your blog to welcome Google and Yahoo Bot but never designed it to welcome the audience.

Now you start afresh trying to get quality contents into your blog. Trust me in most of cases it don’t work, because even in your attempts in writing quality posts; you will most probably thinking about “The Bots”. That’s really going to affect your creativity. One of the most commonly used SEO tactic is “Link Baiting”. You link left, right and centre to all guys who have a page rank above you. Actually this is the biggest disaster that you can invite to your site. It takes the credibility of your site from both user and Bots point of view. It good if you get some really successful webmasters linking into your site, but honestly how many of us will be able to do that? Everyone including myself have attempted this and believe me mostly has failed. There are quite a few who succeeded; but even in that succeeded list there are a huge amount of people whose success was mainly the contribution of the articles they put up. It was Patrick Sexton from FeedTheBot.com introduced me to the importance of being loyal to your Audience rather than some machine Bot. It’s a must read for all the new entrants in to this huge crowd. I am not saying that all SEO tricks are evil but most of them are. Ultimately you are not trying to please some Bot. So serve it to the taste of your crowd. It is the most simplest, successful and important marketing technique. Always remember out of all the revenue generated in the blogosphere- almost 90% are done by maybe hardly 10% of the all bloggers. They are all successful not because some Bot found them pretty attractive, but they are considered pretty attractive by a huge amount of net users. When you start writing for your audience, the Bots automatically would find you attractive. And with the past changes made by Google with their Page Rank system – it would be better not to concentrate heavily on the Bots as there algorithm will be constantly changing. In midst of all these constant changes, they will still value quality content.

How Much Is Your Blog Worth?

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:22:00 +0000

Recently I stumbled upon two tools which estimate the value of your blog/sites. Both of them depend on different metrics in calculating the value of your blog. The first one of them is been available in the Blog-O-Sphere for some time. It is Dane Carlson’s domain valuation tool available at his Blog. The tool computes a dollar value for your blog using the link-to-dollar ratio of your blog. So More the links more the value. It looks like he uses the technorati backlink system to determine the number of links into your site. The second one is a website which I recently stumbled upon – dnScoop domain check and value estimation tool. One of the major positive of dnScoop service compared to Dane Carlson tool is that it is not only aimed at Blogs. You can use this service to evaluate the value of your websites also. dnScoop estimate the value of a website/blog by taking into account the following factors – in links, age of domain, pagerank of domain and traffic to the domain. Actually you cannot check the value of your blog if you don’t own the domain name. The in links are calculated based on the Yahoo links and the traffic is calculated based on Alexa.

Put into test both of them gave absolutely varying values. My F C Barcelona blog – All About F C Barcelona had a value of $10 in dnScoop whereas it had a value of whooping $1693.62 in Dane Carlson’s tool. For me in this case dnScoop value is more justified than the latter as only recently I started working on this blog. A value of $1693.62 is a bit exaggerated; it may be because I was able to get some back links from some good blogs in the niche. But the same cannot be said about evaluating my entertainment niche blog Actress Snaps – it gave a $5,645 in Dane’s tool where as it only gave $740 in the dnScoop tool. Now in this case I tend to disagree heavily with dnScoop estimation as I am able to make close to $500 monthly from this blog alone. But then both tools do not take into consideration the fact of how much you earn from the blog. It is basically an indication to the guy who wants to buy the site - about how much he can make from the site. Till a new tool comes in the net which take into consideration the traffic, the niche values etc these two are these best we have.

The below table shows the comparison of Estimated values for some famous domain

Website	Dane’s Estimation	dnScoop Estimation
Makeuseof.com	$1,039,318	$142,040
DoshDosh.com	$4,593,661	$1,283,380
Problogger.net	$5,155,379	$1,849,120
Fcbnews.com	$26,533	$103,721

PredictAd a Must Have for all Sites

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:11:00 +0000

One of the most innovative service/ application that are available in the Net is “PredictAd. PredictAd provides a search box for your site with a cool auto complete feature. It also can be used along with the existing search box that already exists in your Website or Blog. This can be also used to improve the Google search box result and hence for better monetization. The service is somewhat similar to the “Search Assist” option you will find with Yahoo search box at Yahoo Home Page. My personal experience with PredictAd has been very pleasant, which result in a higher page view and higher average time of users on site. PredictAd offers one more way to drive your viewers into targeted sections. With proper care taken into tweaking this service you can do wonders towards increasing your Ad network revenue; as an increase in page view will surely result in an increase in ad revenue. As studies have pointed out, those who tend to reach to a website through a search engine have a higher chance of clicking on the ads. This is mainly due to the fact that they are there in search of something, rather than being casually brought (like Digg and stumble upon users).

PredictAd also provides its customers with the monetization option, by which you can display ads along with the auto complete feature. I still haven’t had any great success with this, but then this application is pretty new to the web and they might bring out a much better option in the future. One of the main advantages of using PredictAd is that it significantly increases the page views for your site. Earlier I had a page view value in 1+, now it is almost touching 3. Now that’s a significant change. This is where you should be a little choosy in implementing PredictAd. PredictAd should be considered as another advertising tool. PredictAd provides you with an option of selecting the database from which the auto complete feature will be populated. The most common option to be selected is “General Phrases”. But this may not work for the entire niche. For example, selecting General Phrases will work for this site but may not work for my entertainment niche site ActressSnaps. For instance if a user type “a” in the search box; there is no purpose in showing the options as “apple”,” acne” etc. It would be better to show the option as “amisha patel”, “Anne Hathaway” etc. For this PredictAd provides another Database option “Custom + Learning”, here we can specify a list of keywords from which the auto complete option has to be populated. Only pain you have to take is spend some time preparing a list of keywords or phrases specific to your niche.

One of the major things I loved about them is their customer support, they seriously reply to your mails. They study your problems and most cases suggest the best option to resolve it too. Their customer support personal was not ready to let off the issue until it was resolved. The major question which will be every body’s mind will be whether it is a violation of Google Adsense TOS. My firm belief is that it is not as

1) You are not changing any of Adsense Search Code.

2) You are not auto populating the search box, as you are displaying a set of options which will be displayed below the search box. It’s the user who will decide whether he want to select it or not.

If you are going to use this along with Google search box, its better to add the code just below the search box code. PredictAd has a very good auto detect feature to detect existing search box in your WebPages. To join PredictAd Click Here.

10 Proven Steps to Maximize Adsense Revenue

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:45:00 +0000

Google adsense is an ad serving program run by Google. Google adsense undoubtedly is the king of ad world. It’s the outright choice for most of those who are interested in monetizing their blog. It is the highest earner for majority in the blog-o-sphere. Since they offer contextual ads, they tend to do better than any other network. Majority of the ads served by adsense are CPC (Cost per Click). I have heard that they do serve CPM (Cost per Thousand Impression) ads also, but haven’t seen myself anything about it. This article has been written in taking only the CPC ads into account. These are my own proven ways in increasing Adsense Revenue:

1) Blend It: This is the most over abused and most successful trick we all have played with Adsense code. The adsense code should be designed in such a way that it resembles the blog post. There are certain things which will also work together here. Always try to have the Ad title and the link URL the same colour.

2) Larger the Better: Many surveys and studies around the net have proven the fact that the larger ad units like the “Large rectangle” and “Medium Rectangle” tends to outperform their counterparts. They tend to grab more of the audience attention and hence have a higher chance of getting clicked.

3) Text still rules: Majority of the ads served by Adsense is CPC based. It’s proven that image ads have a lower CTR (click Through Rate) rather than the text ads. So make sure that you opt for text ads rather than text and image ads.

4) Fewer the Sweeter: Everything related to adsense depends on your CTR rate. Adsense have something called “Smart Pricing”. This option let Google Adsense serve lower priced adverts on sites that have poor CTRs, and higher priced adverts on sites that have high CTRs. So make sure to reduce the number of ad units used. Never allow more than two adsense ad units.

5) Together they Strike: The best option is to have only one ad unit on your site. But if you are interested one more unit, always go for a combination of a “Large Rectangle” or “Medium Rectangle” along with 729x5 ad link unit. Adsense ad link unit surprisingly has a higher CTR rate, which may be due to their non resemblance of what is generally considered to be ads. Never use leader board and half banner; of the both the latter is a pathetic performer. You may try the wide Sky scrapper and as a matter of fact do not even try the small skyscraper (120x600).

6) It looks better on the Top: This is one more proven fact that those ads shown above the fold to tend to perform better than that below the fold. So make sure both your adsense unit are above the fold.

7) Stay inside The Post: Let me assume you are going to use either of “Large rectangle” or “Medium rectangle” in your blog. Make sure that you keep it inside the post pages only, may be just below the title. Once you do that always remember to use an expandable post option so that you can take your readers to a place where the ads are displayed.

8) Watch out the Intruder: Since you will be displaying only two ad units, there will be enough space to introduce other ad networks. Make sure that those ad units are not showing very distractive ads like flashing, changing colours quickly. These will take your CTRs to unimaginable lows.

9) Search the Better: Always use Adsense Search option in your site. They tend to pay higher than any other options.

10) If the date tab is being displayed just above your ad unit, please remove it from there. It will actually distract the readers.

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Top 2 Best and Cheap Domain Registrar

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 06:45:00 +0000

There are so many advantages in having a domain name of your own. First of all it adds credibility to your blog and your effort. Having a domain name makes your blog look a bit more professional. Secondly it distinguishes you from the rest of the blog crowds. Thirdly it helps your audience, because it’s easy to remember it. Fourthly many search engines give emphasis and rates high the sites which are under their root domain. And finally, there is a hell lot of online application which requires you to own the domain name to use their service.

The plus point of using blogger is the custom domain option they provide. This takes away the worry of bandwidth and storage space as blogger will take care of those. The only thing you need to buy is a domain name. Domain names come very cheap nowadays and it should be a pity if you can’t own one. In this article I am introducing two domain name registrars who offer the most cheaply and reliable solution. The First One:

1) Netfirms

This is the cheapest option available in the market. It costs you $5.95 for the first year and $9.95 for the rest of the years. This is applicable of .com, .net and .org domains only. They have a limit of 5 domains which will be available for a single user for $5.95. Their package comes with a free private WHOIS feature, DNS management service and Email hosted on your domain. They also provide mail forwarding and you can have upto three custom email accounts for your account. For this price they provide 25MB of disk space and 1024MB of monthly bandwidth. Those who are going to use the blogger custom domain will never bother about it. Their only disadvantage compared to the other registrar I am mentioning here is that it takes a few hours before it gets updated in servers world wide. They have an excellent customer support and their technical support documents available on their site are more than sufficient.

2) Name

This is slightly costlier than Netfirms, come on $5.99 is always greater than $5.95. But then their renewals will cost you only $9.55 per year. They offer .info domain at $2.99 and .biz domains at $7.99. But their biggest USP will be that they provide you with a Google Apps account. They also provide good DNS management service and the personalized email is powered by google. They also offer free Private WHOIS feature and other google services like Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google web page creator. Their costumer service is also good and they do answer your mails properly. A Blogger user who is going to use the custom domain feature has to be careful in getting this one work: You need to delete the start.yourdomain.com CNAME first, and then only proceed to setup a CNAME in blogger. They do update the servers around the world much faster.

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How to customize feedburner Email subscription widget?

noreply@blogger.com (Bibin) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 04:48:00 +0000

Many of us have been using feedburner to serve RSS feeds of our blogs. Feedburner has a set of handy widgets to help you reach out to your audience. One of them, maybe the most important is Feedburner Email Subscription service. This service is a very handy tool to update your audience about the latest happenings about your blogs. You can activate this service at the Publicize tab in your My Feeds option. There are certain things which you can customize to suit your blog,

1) Delivery Options – Through this you can set the time in which the Email delivery will be made. This option will be very handy, if you have more users from a particular geographic location. If your 50% + users are from US, then you can set the timing in such a way that, this will be the first thing they see on their morning.

2) Email Branding – This is the option where you can customize the way your email looks like. It’s very important that your email body resembles your blog.

3) Communication Preferences – Feedburner provides you with a standard confirm subscription email. This is the place where you would like to innovate and stand out from others. You can add your innovative marketing ideas to make sure that all who chose to subscribe actually does the same.

Feedburner also provides with a standard subscription widget, which you can place in your site, so that your readers can easily subscribe to your feeds. The standard widget looks quite boring and may not fit into the design of your site. Here I am attempting to improve on it so that we can make it a bit interesting.

The feed burner code is

<form style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;"

action="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverify" method="post"target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=XXXXXX', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true">

<p>Enter your email address:</p><p><input type="text" style="width:140px" name="email"/></p><input type="hidden" value="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~e?ffid=XXXXX" name="url"/><input type="hidden" value="Your Blog Name" name="title"/>

<input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/><input type="submit" value="Subscribe" /><p>Delivered by <a href="http://www.feedburner.com" target="_blank">FeedBurner</a></p></form>

Let me break the code so that you can analyze easily. Before that let us save this as an HTML file. Open your Note pad and Type

<head>
</head>
<body>
Place the code Here
</body>

Replace the highlighted code with the above shown feedburner code. If you double click on the file you can see a form as shown below.

The first thing we can do is add a background colour to your email form by adding background: #cc0000; just after the text-align:center;" so that the code looks like <form style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:5px;text-align:left;background: #cc0000; " chose a background colour that goes well with your layout. Next you can customize the width of text box by changing width:140px"according to your needs. Now you need to remove this line <p>Enter your email address:</p><input type="text" style="width:140px" name="email"/> like this <input type="text" style="width:240px" name="email" value="Enter your email address" onfocus="if(this.value==this.defaultValue)this.value='';
"onblur="if(this.value=='')this.value=this.defaultValue;"/>

Now your form will look like this:

Now if you want, you can remove <p>Delivered by <a href="http://www.feedburner.com" target="_blank">FeedBurner</a></p>. Now the only factor which may look odd is the button, so next I am going to show how you can customize that. For that modify this code <input type="submit" value="Subscribe" /> to <input type="submit" value="Subscribe" class="funkybutton"/>.For this to work you have to add the following code in the head section : <style type="text/css"> .funkybutton { background-color: #000000; font-size: 80%; font-weight: bold;color:#ffffff; } </style>

Your form will look like what shown below

Keep on customizing till you get the form which will fit your template. You can change the color of the button by changing the background-color:#000000; value if you change it to #cc0000; then submit button color will be red. You also can add a different font on the button for that add font-family:Mistral; this code so that the modified code looks like .funkybutton { background-color: #cc0000; font-size: 80%;font-family:Mistral; font-weight: bold;color:#ffffff; }You can replace Mistral with any font-family(like verdana, times etc) you want.

Now how to add this in you Blogger Blog? First add the above modified CSS code i.e
.funkybutton { background-color: #cc0000; font-size: 80%;font-family:Mistral; font-weight: bold;color:#ffffff; }just before ]]></b:skin></head> in your blog template (To see this click edit HTML option in blog layout option). The modified code will look like .funkybutton { background-color: #cc0000; font-size: 80%;font-family:Mistral; font-weight: bold;color:#ffffff; } ]]></b:skin> </head>NB: Do not add <style type="text/css">and </style>tags.

Then Save the template and go to Page Layout option and add the modified form code at the place where you want by selecting add page element.

NB: Don’t add the body tags.

You can add images in place of background color for that modify background:
#cc0000; to background: url(URL_OF_Your_Image);