Last month there was a very much hype about the Google Wave as google started giving invitees to selected users starting September 31. It started by giving 1 millions invitees. Unfortunately I was not the one to get one of those. neither I had applied for the invitee. But last month due to hype and my friends talking about it and exchanging invitees, me got somewhat interested in it. So I applied for it from the google Wave applications form. After a week or so I got it with 20 invitee as giveaways. Coool.

Now I started doing experiments and playing with it. One of them is How to Integrate your Twitter with Google Wave.
Its easy.

• Step 1: Add tweety-wave@appspot.com to your contacts.
• Step 2: After adding create a new wave and add Tweety the Twitbot to that wave as a standalone user.
• Step 3: Now a Pop-Up will be there, its an authentication pop-up which takes in your Twitter credentials for accessing and writing your Tweets. You must allow this pop-up to run Tweety.
• Step 4: Click done in that blip (message) and now you can tweet from your Google Wave account by writing something and pressing the Update button. Twitter Wave.

Watch this short video about the whole thing.

Update: Currently Tweety will not update your tweets real-time (dynamic) in your wave as its still in the development stage.
I will soon be posting some more extensions and apps for google wave as I play with it. The Next generation collaboration tool.

Submitting your websites sitemap to as many search engines is the nice way of getting all your website pages indexed and thus creating channels or pathways for the search engine traffic to your website. Bing is the newest of the Search Engine offering from Microsoft. It has taken the world by surprise by getting ominous popularity within a short period of time. It has many improved features than the Microsoft’s previous offering MSN/Live Search Engine.

[Prerequisites] For submitting your sitemaps to Bing you must have a msn, hotmail or live account.

Now please login to http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ with your credentials.
Now your will see

• Robots.txt validator
• HTTP verifier
• Keyword research tool

in the sidebar.

1. You will see ADD SITE in the main page.
2. After adding your site to your account. Click on your website link in the Control panel.
3. You will now be asked to authenticate that its your website/blog. It can be done by either placing the tag provided by Bing or by placing an HTML file provided by bing on your websites root folder.
4. After authentication you will see the sitemaps option in the Menu Bar.
5. Now you can submit your Sitemap URL of the Website (http://my-website.com/sitemap.xml).

You can add any number of sitemaps and websites to bing, but if you can authenticate them.

You may also like to see the  tutorial and ways on How to create Sitemaps for your website/blog.

Nowadays Picasa is gaining popularity in the households, mainly because of its nice features, its expandability because of plugins and because it stands on the gaint shoulders. a.ka. Google.

Now you can directly upload your pictures to your Yahoo Flickr Gallery via Picasa. You just have to download the plugin and it will add a button to your Picasa. Picasa2flickr is an open source plugin for Picasa.

Download this plugin. Instructions on how to Install it can be found here

Sitemap.xml file is an integral part of a good and optimized website. Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. By creating and submitting Sitemaps to search engines, you are more likely to get better freshness and coverage in search engines. Sitemaps are also preferred to be the first step while doing SEO (Search Engine optimization)

Creating a Sitemap.xml for a Wordpress blog can be very easy. You just have to download a effective plugin and upload it on your wp-includes>>plugin folder and activate it and you are good to go.

But generating a sitemap.xml file for non WP sites like portals and forums etc. can be a bit tricky and cumbersome job. In this article today I will list some of the ways and tools on how to create sitemaps for your websites. You can generate sitemaps for your websites by using either of the following ways depending upon the requirements.

• Server side Programs
• CMS and other Plugins
• Downloadable Tools
• Online Generators/Services
• Code Snippets and Libraries.

All the below mentioned tools and services are completely free ways of generating sitemaps. There are paid services also to do some additional customizations to your sitemaps.

Server Side Programs

• The first way to build a sitemap for your site is by using the Google Sitemap Generator. For Install instructions about this sitemap please refer to http://googlesitemapgenerator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/gsg-installation.html
• Python Sitemap Generator

CMS and other Plugins

• Drupal Website Sitemap Generator
• VBulletin Forum Sitemap Generator
• ASP .NET Sitemap Generator
• OSCommerce ECommerce Website Sitemap Generator

Downloadable Tools
GSiteCraweler (For Windows)

Free Online Services

• XML Sitemaps
• Free Sitemap Generator
• Simple Map Doc
• Automapit

Class Libraries for Sitemap Generation

• PHP Library
• ASP.Net Library

After you have created your sitemap its time to submit it to the google with Google Webmaster Tools. If you have any questions about Sitemaps please feel free to ask via comments.

Pidgin is a chat program which lets you log in to accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. It helps you connect with your yahoo, gmail, aim, MSN and more network buddies all at the same time. I am currently using the latest version of Pidgin on my Ubuntu machine (Pidgin 2.6.3).

Pidgin is available for download for Windows, Linux and Unix platforms at Pidgin Download and for OsX it has a substitute called http://adium.im/

Pidgin is compatible with the following chat networks out of the box:  AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, MySpaceIM, and Zephyr. It can support many more with plugins.

Pidgin chat client is available and translated in many International and regional languages languages. Even its available in Hindi which is the mother tongue of India. Pidgin also integrates with the system tray on Windows, GNOME2, and KDE 3.1.

It supports, such as file transfers, away messages, buddy icons, custom smilies, and typing notifications. Many plugins are available for this which further enhance its functionalities. Its plugins can be found at Pidgin Plugins.

I hope you people will enjoy pidgin and post in your reviews here in comments.

MySQL GUI Tools are a very good way to run queries and manage all aspects of your database is a very easy and interactive manner. You can manage users, processes, big tables, optimize queries all using these tools.

There are many ways to install MySQL GUI Tools in Ubuntu. The easiest way to add is running the some commands in the shell.

To Install all the Packages (MySQL Admin+MySQL Query Browser+MySQL Migration Toolkit)
Architecture independent files for MySQL GUI Tools
sudo apt-get install mysql-gui-tools-common

To separately install the MySQL Admin
GUI tool for intuitive MySQL administration
sudo apt-get install mysql-admin

To separately install the MySQL Query Browser
Official GUI tool to query MySQL database
sudo apt-get install mysql-query-browser

This will automatically install all the required packages and dependencies from the nearest repositories.

The other way to install is to download the respective packages from the link underneath (Prefer this option, if you don’t have an Internet connection on the machine you wan to install MySQL tools). In this case if any there are any dependencies issues you need to resolve those by downloading and installing those dependencies packages.
MySQL GUI Tools
The link above is for Hardy 8.04 version.

For the packages related to other version of Ubuntu please browse to http://packages.ubuntu.com/ >> your version >> Miscellaneous and search for MySQL GUI Tools by using (CTRL+F).

Configuring Wifi and Internet in Ubuntu.

I have been personally dealing with this problem from past 1 week. But didn’t get the time to solve this because of busy schedule. Some days back I installed Ubuntu on my machine and started playing with its features. Accidentally I somehow removed the Network Manager of Ubuntu, which is the default Gnome Network App in Ubuntu. At this time I didn’t knew how to solve this problem as my internet is not working now.

I tried searching from other machine but wasn’t able to get an effective solution. I tried many commands and tutorials but all in vain. These are some of the commands I tried.

1. sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart – To restart network Daemons in Ubuntu and configuring the Interfaces
2. sudo ifdown eth0 – To stop eth0 interface
3. sudo ifdown wlan0 - To stop wireless Lan Interface
4. sudo ifup eth0 – To start eth0 interface
5. sudo ifup wlan0 – To start wlan0 interface
6. ifconfig – To check all the network configurations
7. sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces – To edit the interface file in which all these interfaces are stored and configured

Originally your interface file looks like this:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

But the most good solutions that I found was downloading and installing WICD which is a third party free Network Management client for Linux Distributions. I downloaded the latest package from http://wicd.sourceforge.net/download.php for Ubuntu.

Wicd is an open source wired and wireless network manager for Linux which aims to provide a simple interface to connect to networks with a wide variety of settings.

Wicd is easy to use just install and configure it for your router settings and you are good to go. It is also good because you can make a connection default in this i.e. whenever a connection breaks in between it can go back to same connection, whereas in Network Manager this isn’t possible. The above commands are very useful for manual configurations especially 1,6 and 7.
If Wicd doesn’t gets activated try running the command sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart or restart your machine for the setting to take effect.

I just installed the LAMP (Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP) structure on my Ubuntu machine. Installing the structure is pretty easy. But getting it all running seamlessly is the another thing. After installing the things I typed http://127.0.0.1 (http://localhost/) on my Browser and it said “It Works”. But when I tried to open the phpmyadmin (http://localhost/phpmyadmin/) which is used to manage your MySQL backend and tables it shows the 404 Not Found error.

By Default your www directory is created here /var/www and the phpmyadmin configuration files are stored in /usr/share/phpmyadmin. So the trick involved here is to point your the later location or directory from your former directory. To do this open your terminal and run the following command.

sudo ln -s /usr/share/phpmyadmin /var/www

This will create the pointer to /usr/share/phpmyadmin in /var/www

Now open the http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ and you are good to go. If you still face any problems feel free to ask and comment.

I have recently installed Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty on my machine. Let me introduces Ubuntu to people who don’t know about it.
It is a Open source OS from Canonical, which can be downloaded free from web. It is available as both server and desktop editions.

After installing Ubuntu I have had to install day to day applications which I used everyday. One of them is tweetdeck which is a Twitter client. For Installing Tweetdeck on Ubuntu (Linux) machine, there has to be a correct install for Adobe Air suite on your machine.

These are the following steps that should be followed:

1. Go to http://get.adobe.com/air and download latest version of the Adobe Air (Adobe AIR 1.5.2 Installer).
2. After downloading AdobeAIRInstaller.bin on your computer. Right click the file and got to Properties, then got to Permissions and check the box stating Allow Executing File as Program. (Properties>>Permissions). This will make sure the when the file is double clicked it is executed right.
3. Copy the file AdobeAIRInstaller.bin in home folder in ubuntu.
4. Now open terminal and run the command chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
5. Now run sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin on terminal. This will install Abobe Air on your Linux Machine, in this case Ubuntu
6. Now download and install the latest version of Tweetdeck from http://tweetdeck.com/beta/download/ which is currently 0.30.5.
7. You are done with Tweetdeck on Linux (Ubuntu) now. Happy Tweeting.

Update: I faced a problem after installing Tweetdeck, the columns are not populated automatically the first time. The solution to this problem is not Uninstalling and then Reinstalling. But the Solutions is to go into settings and update your correct Twitter login Details there and then Restarting Ubuntu and Tweetdeck, this is how I solved this problem.

If you are still facing any problems then you can ask them via Comments.

All though the wordpress blogs are 80%  all ready on-page optimized for Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, but there are still some ways to further optimize it to gain rankings and to remove some basic defects.

The most useful tool that comes in handy is the All in One SEO Plugin for Wordpress.

This is one of the plugin I can’t live without. Some basic facts about this plugin.

• Canonical URLs
• Fine tune Page Navigational Links
• Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
• Provides SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
• Nonce Security
• Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
• For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

So what  a beginner should really know about this plugin in detail

• With this you can set the Title and Meta tags such as Description and Keywords for your Homepage without having to touch any code. This makes it easy for people who don’t know HTML to optimize their sites.
• It helps to recreate your URL’s in a way that stop words are minimum in them. It takes care of recreating the URL’s whenever you change the permalinks structures of URL’ s in your blog.
• You can automatically avoid your categories, archives and tags to be indexed (noindex) by the search engines, as categories and tags contains the same content as the blog posts. By doing this you save yourself from the penalty of duplicate content.
• You can enable the option of using Categories for META keywords. This will further classify your posts and help search engines.
• With this every page Title format looks the way you want it to be blog pages, categories pages, tag pages, archives, 404 page and descriptions can all be customized.
• Their is an option under every post to set the desired title and Meta descriptions and keywords.

It help you achieve extra 10% making it to 90% of on page SEO aspects. The remaining 10% aspects are a bit detailed and you need to Tweak the WP code for that and I will discuss about them soon. Offcourse off-page SEO efforts are still needed if you want your site to gain rankings and traffic.

You can catch the creator of this plugin at http://twitter.com/michaeltorbert/