Chirag Chamoli

Simple file upload in Laravel

2012-11-21T00:00:00-08:00

This is a quick tip, so I’ll skip the explaination.

The user form can be built in Blade

<?php 
    echo Form::open_for_files('your_route', 'POST');
    echo Form::file('image',array('id'=> 'some_id'));
    echo Form::close();
 ?>    
...

And at the severside

<?php 

    $image = Input::file('image');
    $filename =  Input::file('image.name').'.'.File::extension(Input::file('image.name'));
    Input::upload('image', 'public/uploads' , $filename);
 ?>

Thanks it.

Tiny Epiphany

2012-09-29T00:00:00-07:00

This is one of those thoughts I needded to write down. There is no system, no secrect to success there is just 4 things to keep in mind and move forward.

Seek out inflection points
Start with business model, fit technology later
Focus
Don’t be an asshole

Using Facebook SDK with Codeigniter

2012-09-12T00:00:00-07:00

...
Please note this code is tested on
CodeIgniter Version 2.1.2 
Facebook PHP SDK (v.3.2.0)
...

Step 1: Download Facebook PHP SDK (v.3.2.0)

Extract the file in side your “/application/libraries/facebook/” folder. We just need two file copy them from /src folder to “/application/libraries/facebook” you can now clean the directory if required.

...
base_facebook.php
facebook.php
...

Now please open facebook.php and add

...
<?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed'); 
...

To the top of the file. Close the file and change the same filename from “facebook.php” to “Facebook.php”.

Step 2: Add config file

In you

/application/config/

folder make a new file facebook.php

With this content.

...
<?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

    $config['appId'] = 'APP_ID';
    $config['secret'] = 'APP_SECRET';
...

Almost done.

Step 3: Loading facebook library

In your controller load the config file and then load the Facebook library.

...
public function __construct()
    {
        parent::__construct();
        // Your own constructor code
        $CI = & get_instance();
        $CI->config->load("facebook",TRUE);
        $config = $CI->config->item('facebook');
        $this->load->library('facebook', $config);
    }
...

...
    //Usage
    $user = $this->facebook->getUser();
        if($user) {
            try {
                $user_info = $this->facebook->api('/me');
                echo '<pre>'.htmlspecialchars(print_r($user_info, true)).'</pre>';
            } catch(FacebookApiException $e) {
                echo '<pre>'.htmlspecialchars(print_r($e, true)).'</pre>';
                $user = null;
            }
        } else {
            echo "<a href=\"{$this->facebook->getLoginUrl()}\">Login using Facebook</a>";
        }
...

In the constructor method, you have just initialized the Facebook library (sdk) and it can be accessed by using: $this->facebook.

Juggad – Wordpress for Collaboration

2012-09-07T00:00:00-07:00

Juggad – Wordpress Theme for Team Collaboration

What is Jugaad

Jugad is a wordpress theme which turns your wordpress blog in an awesome collabration platform. This is well suited for internal teams, specially when emails are not a good option. We at aahho have stopped relying on the email completely for quite sometime now do most of our communications via Jugaad.

Jugaad on Github

Getting started

Install wordpress
Clone the repo https://github.com/chiragchamoli/juggad.git in the your themes folder
Add users

Features

We have kept the feature set as minimmal as possible, yet powerful.

You can share soure code via gist
Almost in real-time
Upload documents
Embed youtube and vimeo on the fly
Works on mobiles devices
This is built on Wordpress you can take advantage of the vast free and paid plugins

I recommend you clone the repo as we’ll be pushing updates regularly.

If you like this follw me on ADN or Twitter.

Multiple sites on single aws instance

2012-08-10T00:00:00-07:00

Ok, so we all have some projects or idea which are small enough to deserve a full instance and big enough to be hosted via github. Here come a old an very well tested idea, hosting multiple sites on AWS. Please note this is my version of how this needs to be done, you may have a better way of doing it and I am all ears.

First of we need to setup a LAMP on our AWS Instance.

Now I am going to assume you have a instance with a LAMP.

Please note this is Name Host: Where all your domains are using single IP address.

Step 1: Open you apache config file and comment out “NameVirtualHost *:80”

    cd /etc/apache2
   sudo vi apache2.conf

Step 2: Now we need to Tell apache which files sites we are going to host. Moving back to terminal go to sites-available in side the etc/apache directory. You should see two files here, make copy the default file with the name of your domain eg. aahho.org.

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
cp default YOURDOMAIN.TLD

I am pasting part of my file please change with your own details.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName aahho.com
    ServerAlias aahho.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/aahho.com/html/
</VirtualHost>

now you can repeat the process for as many domains as you want.

Step 3: Change directory to cd /etc/apache2 and add the domains to the enabled domains. This is done by.

   a2ensite aahho.com

The above should give you a notification and instruction to restart apache. And that’s it.

Notes on Startup Traction

2012-07-19T00:00:00-07:00

After reading Traction mistakes by Gabriel Weinberg, who, by the way has also founder of duckduckgo, an amazingly simple and (sometimes) better search engine than google, ddg is really effective for developers. Gabriel Weinberg has a really good set of articles on traction, you can see his book about traction here.

After reading, I wanted to understand the some common patterns, in this traction, game. The idea is to see how some “successful” internet companies got traction. I am not saying that we can replicate anyone else' success, but to try and observe patterns, wherever possible. Most startups don’t fail at building a product. They fail at acquiring customers.

Kickstarter

How did Kickstarter, get traction, well the founders say “We asked our friends”. That is so profoundly simple.

This is very simple, but I think you must know the the founders were already working with few media and design companies so when they say friends, their friends wanted some thing like Kickstarter, all along. This is a important pattern you’ll see github also following.

Airbnb

In there own words

We started the company by accident – in 200. our rent went up for our San Francisco apartment and we had to figure out a way to bring in some extra income. There was a design conference coming to the city, but hotels were sold out. The size of our apartment could easily fit airbeds on the floor, so we decided to rent them out. We didn’t want to post on Craigslist because we felt it was too impersonal. Our entrepreneur instinct said “build your own site”. So we did. It wasn’t much of a site to start out – a couple pages, and pictures of our apartment. 3 people stayed with us, and we cooked them breakfast each morning. We became friends by the end, and they were grateful to have saved hundreds of dollars on their trip, and connect with actual people. We netted close to $1000!

After that first weekend when we hosted people on our airbeds, we received emails from all around the world asking when we would make the site available in place like Buenos Aires, London, and Japan. At that point we started to brainstorm what a larger, international version of the site would be. That was basically our market research. People told us what they wanted, so we set off to create it for them. Ultimately while solving our own problem, we were solving someone else’s problem too. We were at a point professionally where we were very ready to pursue our own idea. We were anxious though, like waiting in line for a roller coaster. We didn’t know exactly what was ahead, but we knew we were in for a ride.

Mint

There is a rather well answered question on quora, , “How did Mint acquire 1.5m+ users without a high viral coefficient, scalable SEO strategy, or paid customer acquisition channel?" you can read the answer by Jason Putorti to above question. But to distill the answers in few points, here is the gist.

The Product – solved a real problem
Blog / Original Content.
Good, Paid PR
SEO. We had an extensive SEO strategy, and it scaled pretty well. We had a lot of landing pages, content on the blog and marketing sites, and had a very metrics driven approach to all of it. For every popular finance query on Google, we had a page and content for it, and iterated landing pages to optimize conversion.
Content Partnerships.
Distribution Deals
Email
Facebook / Twitter
Michael Arrington, of TC

Youtube

Youtube was neither first nor best, so how did they acquire users? Well here are few reasons.

Easy and Good name – seriously – a good name is important.
YouTube, always positioned as a content aggregation for the everyone.
YouTube’s design is simple and easier, from a social content exploration perspective.
YouTube practiced more relaxed content authorization policies for the first few years of its existence, indirectly endorsing the posting of all sorts of content that should perhaps not have been there (network TV, film clips, etc), or at least deserved some additional filtering (adult content, graphic content, etc).
More customization & personalization on Youtube
No ads, in the initial days
YouTube may be a legitimate business now, but its success was solely due to placement of infringing, copy written material being uploaded there.

Google search

How did Google get initial traction?

Google is one of the few companies that won its industry entirely by making a better product. I don’t remember Google doing much advertising, and there were certainly big players in the search space already. Then again, Google’s search wasn’t just slightly better, or even 2. better- but easily a 10. improvement over Alta Vista and Yahoo. The google came up with the pagerank which was the first of it’s kind analytic to decide the weight of the pages. Another good thing with google was the cost to change was from their competition was almost nil.

mazon

How did Amazon get initial traction?

Very early on, amazon did a bunch of deals with search engines to advertise to people who were searching for each book they had in stock. It would be an obvious thing to do for a book seller starting out now, but that was before things like Adwords made it easy (and before Google even existed). Because the SEM market wasn’t developed they were able to buy traffic and build up their brand at a much lower price than what it would cost today.

It is rumored that in the extremely early days, they made their ‘very early’ traction happen just by having previously-impossible selection, and then providing extraordinary customer service (if they didn’t have a book in stock, they’d track it down for you). The word-of-mouth pass-along was tremendous. A little later, they invested heavily in securing exclusive portal deals to power the Books (and other) verticals, giving them a head-start on competitors. Discount pricing also helped, with NY Times bestsellers at 30-50. off (discount wars sprung up with Barnes and Noble, further driving PR opportunities).

How did Pinterest grew? Well in a interview, the founders shares about, initial days. Excerpt from his interview with Silbermann.

A Yale grad with no engineering background, Silbermann worked for Google before launching. Pinterest with some friends in late 2009. Real-time text feeds were the rage at the time, and some observers felt that an image-based pinboard was doomed to fail. Nine months later, the site still had less than 10,00. users. "I think I personally wrote to the first 5,00. users,“ said Silbermann, who also gave the site’s users his cell phone number and met some of them for coffee. "A lot of people ask, 'Why did you keep going? Why didn’t you bail?‘” he said. “I think the idea of telling people, 'We blew it,’ was just too embarrassing.”

Duckduckgo

DuckDuckGo has gotten some success out of reddit ads. There’s also lots of other platforms, e.g. Facebook, StumbleUpon, MySpace. Then there are thousands of smaller sites that will take your ads directly. This is how ddg grew.

Github

There is a great speech from Tom Preston-Werner the co-founder and CTO of GitHub and founder of Gravatar on how it all got started form the Startup School 2010. I am going to para phrasing what he said –

He saw that people liked git, but it was pain in ass to use.
He (his team) made git simple, offered as a service
He was part of Ruby user groups where he got his first users/customer
His strategy was simple – Public repos are free, and private are paid.
Public repos are free to give github word of mouth and free marketing

Reddit gained traction for three main reasons

Founders had created a “controversy” early on, could have been accidental or by chance, by switching from LISP to Python, very publicly. Which made a lot of people aware of the site
Reddit was from ycombinator’s first batch and had all the focus and energy of the ycombinator team as the success of the first batch will in-turn make yc successful, this made a lot of people curious about the project
Finally fake content - Steve Huffman talks about how in the initial day they made it simple for the founder and reddit team to submit url from fake users, so when others came to the site they could see a lot of content already.

Scoble on how instagram got traction.

The founders weren’t scared of letting people try it before launch. They looked at building their company as exactly that. They never really did a big launch. They just kept showing it to people and putting it on their phones and taking feedback. I was at Dogpatch Labs (where they started) for another company and the guy who ran the labs told me “you gotta meet these guys who are doing this cool photo app.”
They got everyone they talked to to be a brand ambassador. This happens when the founders are nice and when the product rocks.
They had an awesome interaction model (er viral loop). I still remember taking my iPhone, shooting a photo outside on the Pier 38 where they launched and having three comments within seconds show up on my photo. That never happened on other photo apps. Got me instantly addicted. Also got me to get other people on the app, because the more who were there the better the app became (that’s a viral loop).
Early users converted to great app store ratings. The few people who got it before launch became huge advocates and pushed it on blogs and in reviews on app store. Showed it to influencers. I remember seeing a TON of San Francisco influencers like Kevin Rose, Leo Laporte and MG Siegler on the app before I got on or shortly after. These people were key in getting lots of consumer companies to be well known.

Gmail Conspiracy

2012-07-18T00:00:00-07:00

It was around 1:0. A.M and the server was just reset after one of those nasty bugs. We were happy and were thinking on the next project together. One of the team members who has worked in a R&D earlier wanted to do something around patents. A kind of “patent parser” if you will. Let me point out we were all sleepy.

What is a “patent parser” one person asked without hoping for reply. but that was when the R&D guy, jumped out of his bean bag and started explaining…look in a enterprise environment there are a lot of email exchange, some exchanges are dumb youtube videos, but few of them are actually important. Managers sometimes let a good idea pass by just because they don’t see the value.

So we will develop a parser at server side which parses all the emails in an org for possibly idea which can be patented. After all every engineering company wants more and more patents.

By now everyone is up.

After few more minutes of back and forth the file-systems expert said, “Look this sounds interesting but doing this B2. may be pain in ass, can we just do consumer app, I am not saying to do a email service just a plugin for gmail”

That is where I had a aha moment, Call me paranoid, but I have somehow grown to mistrust google as a service hence, I had moved to ddg long time back. I don’t miss anything. You may say, why do we not trust the google – do no evil™, well I have my reasons.

Search results creeping up all the places, when you search something on google that search terms is then converted to an advertisement and show to you across the websites.
You are always logged in and SSO across the google site(g+, youtube, etc ) means for most of the day google know what device, browser etc

We should never forget, google makes 80. of there money on you and me.

If You’re Not Paying for It; You’re the Product

— Chirag Chamoli (@chiragchamoli) July 16. 2012

My thought process was we were thinking of this idea now in the middle of night, while we should be focusing on the next feature of our app, wouldn’t someone at gmail have already implemented this? I mean gmail already “scans” our emails. Thay say is loudly.

This ad is based on emails from your mailbox. Visit Google’s Ads Preferences Manager to learn more, block specific advertisers, or opt out of personalized ads.

After all, Where does Google actually say that they won’t read Gmail messages or Google Docs?

So keeping the above in mind, I have chosen not to use gmail for business communications, specially idea, thought etc. And will be soon moving to a self hosted solutions soon. Stay tuned.

Introduction to Windows Powershell

2012-07-14T00:00:00-07:00

PowerShell is a new command shell and scripting language for Windows. It is cool for a multiple of reasons:

A huge step up compared to the CMD
Scripts and command line share a language. CMD had many small but important differences. CScript and Windows Scripting Host are not interpreted.
Command line usage can be quick while scripts can be readable, thanks to the combination of aliases and smart command argument processing. For example, dir -r . is the same as Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Path "."
Powerful interaction with other technologies, most notably .NET.
An integrated script editor/interactive shell
Command pipelines work on objects, not strings
Lots of Microsoft products are adding PowerShell support, especially for server products.

From wikipedia

Windows PowerShell is an extensible command-line shell and associated scripting language from Microsoft. It was released in 200. and is currently available for Windows XP SP2/SP3. Windows Server 2003. Windows Vista, and is included in Windows Server 200. as an optional feature. Windows PowerShell 2.0 was released with Windows 7 and Windows Server 200. R2. It is going to be backported to previous supported platforms Windows XP SP3. Windows Server 200. SP2. Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008.[4]

Windows PowerShell integrates with the Microsoft .NET Framework and provides an environment to perform administrative tasks by execution of cmdlets (pronounced commandlets), which are specialized .NET classes implementing a particular operation; scripts, which are compositions of cmdlets along with imperative logic; executables, which are standalone applications; or by instantiating regular .NET classes.5 These work by accessing data in different data stores, like the filesystem or registry, which are made available to the PowerShell runtime via Windows PowerShell providers.

Windows PowerShell also provides a hosting mechanism with which the Windows PowerShell runtime can be embedded inside other applications, which can then leverage Windows PowerShell functionality to implement certain operations, including those exposed via the graphical interface. This capability has been utilized by Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. to expose its management functionality as PowerShell cmdlets and providers and implement the graphical management tools as PowerShell hosts which invoke the necessary cmdlets. Other Microsoft applications including Microsoft SQL Server 2008[8. also expose their management interface via PowerShell cmdlets. In the future, graphical interface-based management applications on Windows will be layered on top of Windows PowerShell.

Windows PowerShell includes its own extensive, console-based help, reminiscent of man pages in Unix shells via the Get-Help cmdlet.

Commonly Used Commands

pwd: print working directory
hostname: my computer's network name
mkdir: make directory
cd: change directory
ls: list directory
rmdir: remove directory
pushd: push directory
popd: pop directory
cp: copy a file or directory
robocopy: robust copy
mv: move a file or directory
more: page through a file
type: print the whole file
forfiles: run a command on lots of files
dir -r : find files
select-string: find things inside files
help: read a manual page
helpctr: find what man page is appropriate
echo: print some arguments
set: export/set a new environment variable
exit: exit the shell
runas: DANGER! become super user root DANGER!
attrib: change permission modifiers
iCACLS: change ownership
New-Item testfile.txt -type file

cp test.txt something.html
more somefile.txt
 dir -r -filter "*.txt" //Search for all the files with .txt recursivley

help dir

 get-childitem Env:PATH //This will retun the APP Path

Left vs Right Sidebar

2012-07-05T00:00:00-07:00

So, this was driving me crazy and I wanted to know why does, apple uses left side navigation in Apple’s and why so many blogs use right sidebars. Then I looked at many many apps and tried understanding. And here is what I’ve come up with.

![itunes screenshot][images/bi/itunes.png]

Anything placed on the left of your screen will be looked at first by most english reading people (reading left to right). So The choice is in your hands if your navigation is important like in wordpress admin or itunes, it makes sense to keep it on the left. This also come from the early days of web navigation used to be on the left side with fames to change the main page. If however you want to emphasise your content, it is often a good idea to put your navigation on the right hand side, like many blogs.

There is also the added advantage to right-hand navigation in that most people will rest their mouse pointer on the right side of a screen when reading, which makes it a shorter distance for the mouse pointer to travel to navigate on a right-hand side navigation.

Installing LAMP stack on AWS EC2 instance

2012-07-02T00:00:00-07:00

This is a fairly simple article on how to install LAMP stack) on EC2.

Prerequisites

AWS account
Basic understanding of SSH
Comfortable with CLI

Step 1. Start an instance.

Add the security group, and download the private key. []

Step 2. Security Group Settings

On the sidebar, click on Security Groups. You’ll see a list of your groups click on anyone and then change the tab to “Inbound”. Give permission to port 8. and 2. for web server and the ssh.

[!(/images/bi/AWS-Management-Console1-1024x227.png “AWS Management Console”)] (/images/bi/AWS-Management-Console1.png)

Step 3. Download the ‘pem’ file

Next download, putty and putty-key_gen.

Open Key Gen > Conversions> Import Key and search and add the pem file you have downloaded.

put the ppk file in some secure folder. You are almost ready.

Step 4. Set up a Elastic IP.

Go back to the aws console and click on link “Elastic IP”. In the window “click Allocate New Address”. You should see a new IP address added to he list below now click on the new IP and chose allocate to EC2 instance, you have just created. Now you will be able to type new ip address and access your instance. Keep a note of this.

Step 5. Getting started with Putty.

Open putty, and give the required credentials. Once you have filed the required credentials, on the “Category Tree” on left search for connection > SSH > Auth.

Under authentication parameter browse your Key which you generated in previous step and click open.

AWS User name will be ec2-user

Now we are all set up.

Step 6. Installing LAMP stack

...
Using username "ubuntu".
Authenticating with public key "imported-openssh-key"
Welcome to Ubuntu 12.0\. LTS (GNU/Linux 3.2.0-23-virtual x86_64)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/

  System information as of Mon Jul  2 07:22:2\. UTC 2012

  System load:  0.06\.             Processes:           70
  Usage of /:   14.6\. of 7.97GB   Users logged in:     0
  Memory usage: 39\.               IP address for eth0\. 10.130.183.165
  Swap usage:   0%

ubuntu@ip-10-130-183-165:~$
...

it does not have to be same.

...
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
...

This will take some time and will update the dependencies, required across the install.

Next install tasksel…

sudo apt-get install tasksel

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

This will take you through a wizard, follow the screen and it will ask for a master SQL password, remember it. This will be used in the later stage.

This will install lamp stack for you, to check if everything is fine. Open your borwser, go to the Elastic IP you have generated and you will see “it work’s” page.

Usually you’re web root will be

/var/www

Now assuming you’ll be using phpmyadmin, lets install that. Just do

apt-get install phpmyadmin

. This will install phpmyadmin, but you to get to a point where you can do this http://your-elastic-ip/phpmyadmin, we need to add this to apache2.conf.

Open

sudo vim /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Add

Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf

line at the bottom of the file, save and quit. finally do

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now http://your-elastic-ip/phpmyadmin will take you to fimillar php myadming page, it will ask for username and password.

Note: If you want to clear the state and restart the install, please clean the system, by removing following packages:

apache2 apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils apache2.2-common libapache2-mod-php5 libapr1 libaprutil1 libdbd-mysql-perl libdbi-perl libmysqlclient15off libnet-daemon-perl libplrpc-perl libpq5 mysql-client-5.0 mysql-common mysql-server mysql-server-5.0 php5-common php5-mysql

Thanks for following so far, you are all set with LAMP stack now. If you have any question please post them in the comments section below.

Added

sudo chown -R ubuntu /var/www/

Amazon Web Services in plain English

2012-05-25T00:00:00-07:00

I have been playing with AWS for quite some time now and as a beginner, I faced few starting problems, one of them was to understand what’s-up with so many services and what does each service mean. So here is the list of most of AWS services and what they do, in Plain English.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) : Renting a server per hour, root access. Define the size your self and pay for it.
Amazon Elastic MapReduce Renting a multiple servers per hour e.g Hadoop cluster(to crunch a lot of data)
Auto Scaling Renting just enough servers as required (essentially, bidding system, using more with a lot of work, using less with less work)
Amazon CloudFront Economical, Personal CDN, content distribution network
Amazon SimpleDB noSQLfor key-value store. Quickly searchable.
Amazon Relational Database: Service (RDS): MySQL as a Service, one of the best services of AWS.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk Automated Infrastructure for java/PHP/… applications. Works with tomcat, uses internal services as required (turn-key solution, Good to start with for AWS services.)
AWS CloudFormation Automated setup for service/app/platform you want to use. Choose a service, give basic details and CloudFormation will do the rest. best for WP blog, CMS etc
Amazon Fulfillment Web Service (FWS) : Amazon manage your fulfillment. your suppliers ship to Amazon, and they ship to your customers. ( US ONLY)
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) : ‘first in, first out’ messaging queue. perfect for jobs that should be processed asynchronously, more or less in order of arrival. Lazy tasks video rendering, thumbnails .
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) : PUBSUB (publish/subscribe mechanism). You create topics interested parties can subscribe to. sending a message to a topic, sends the message to all subscribers. (Like a mailing list, but for software systems.)
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) : Service for sending mail. But you have to earn your quota with good behavior.
Amazon CloudWatch : Monitoring of other AWS assets.
Amazon Route 53 : DNS (Awesome)
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) : Extend your private network with ‘some cloud’.
Elastic Load Balancing : Distributing traffic over one or more instances (servers).
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): Almost unlimited storage, best for Videos, Images etc
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) : Network disks for AWS. (Attach a volume to an instance of your choice. you can’t share the disk between multiple instances). \
AWS Import/Export: Export and Import large amounts of move large data in and out of S3
Amazon Mechanical Turk: Human powered Threads, work by the task. you want to have 10,000 users visit your site and try to do something. put those tasks on mechanical turk (for $0.1 per task?) and any one can help you.
Identity and Access Management (IAM): Let’s you provision users within your AWS account and grant them access to different services and resources.

Do it yourself - SEO

2012-01-14T00:00:00-08:00

I am writing this post for multiple reasons.

Refresh my Search engine optimization( SEO) basics
A lot of startups ask me
Basic SEO is not something you must be paying for.
SEO is important

So without wasting your time, let’s dive in.

What is SEO

You’ll see a lot of people talking about SEO as if it is some thing magical. Do a google search of "Basic SEO" and bam you have 23,900,00. results (one more just got added :) ). Just remember SEO is dead simple and you can do most of it yourself.

_Note: I’ll be refering to Google search alot but same is valid for all search engines bing, yahoo, …. _

Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.

SEO Best Practice

Pick a domain name that matches your primary keyword.
Make sure every page has a unique title and H1 tag that matches your primary keyword objectives for that page.
Make sure the homepage links to most, if not all, other pages ( to start with).
Make sure every page links back to the homepage and many other secondary pages using appropriate anchor text.
Register on every social media site that makes sense for you. Include a link to the site in your profile. It helps if the username you choose is a primary keyword. for instance on this blog the primary author and the author name is same.
Link the social media profiles to each other where applicable. Fill them out as fully as possible.
Actually use the social networks. More activity will create more pages of content with more links to the profiles, in turn passing more links to your website.
Claim your site using Google Webmaster Tools. Submit your sitemap (preferably one that is automatically updated).
Do a Google Search for every one of your top keywords. Figure out how to get a link from any site showing in the top 2. results.
Do not under any circumstance pay someone for a link. Do not offer or accept offers to trade links.
Avoid linking out to shady/spammy websites of any kind.
Study the keywords your competitors target (if they use meta-keywords like idiots, you can just lift those from the source).
Write a blog, or find some other way to continually add new content. This adds to the content you have indexed, but is also another opportunity for links. Long term strategy right here.
Build a Twitter client, wordpress theme, or something else that people will link to and use with persistent links to whatever you decide is in the by line.
Research your keywords, make a list, especially paying attention to which ones are the most popular. The results may surprise you.
Optimize your title tags (different on each page, mention your keywords, first 4 words of the title count the most)
Put your keywords into high-value elements (h1-h4. img alt text, ul’s, dl’s)
Get links from other websites (best case scenario: link’s anchor text is your keyword). Higher the PageRank of the linking site the better. NoFollow’s don’t count.
Don’t use subdomains (i.e., put your blog at mydomain.com/blog/ instead of blog.mydomain.com) That will give you a good start. From there, start a blog with interesting content, and submit it around. The idea with the blog is that the posts are more interesting than your site’s copy, so people will actually link to it.
Linking to your own pages will always increase the value of the link.
SEO is not just a ranking exercise, it’s a conversion exercise. On top of all of the factors that you need to consider for ranking, you should consider that the first ~6. characters of you
Speed matters. Google is on record about this.
Use Google Webmaster Tools to submit a sitemap. They’ll regularly pull it down from your server so as you add pages to your site, Google will know to index them. They’ll tell you how many pages you have submitted, and how many are indexed. Check if your site has crawl errors. Check out the HTML suggestions. Google will point out the pages which are missing title tags, which have duplicate tags, short descriptions. Lots of other information in there, including page load times.
Pageank is logarithmic, a link from a higher pagerank site will have more of an effect than one from a lower pagerank site.
Google often say that they use more than 20. ranking factors. External link text matters way more than anything else.
Widget bait – Allow simple embedding of your content/app, widgets are great strategies.
Don’t pay any for any general SEO service.
Beware of nofollow links. Nofollow links are links with a special attribute that tell search engines to ignore them. To check a link, view the source of that page in your Web browser and look for rel=nofollow in it. You don’t want to waste time getting links on sites that use this attribute. The canonical examples are popular blogs, twitter, facebook and Wikipedia. Don’t waste your time submitting comments and editing Wikipedia articles with your links because it won’t help you.
Don’t ignore the long-tail content. People often concentrate on getting rankings for specific keywords. You can be just as successful building lots of pages with unique content that end up ranking high on the most random things. Often such pages will be the only things that come up.
Less is more. Ranking is distributed across your site, so less pages, less links on them, and less text on them will concentrate your ranking potential on what is left.
FYI: The typical search query is composed of 2 to 5 words
Navigation 1 don’t use frames of any kind 2 don’t make javascript menus, use CSS instead 3 stick to very UL, LI simple nav
Don’t use Flash: if you’re going to use it, make sure it is under a correctly formed web page. Use very very very sparely.
Robots.txt: this file, which should be findable under the root of your website, provides a search map to the bots about what you would like them to index. Find out more at Robotstxt.org
Make a Facebook/G+ page for your business. Better still, make a Facebook application.
Make interesting, non-gimmicky videos about your product, how to use it, and research about your areas of expertise. Youtube is best at SEO
Read this if you have some time, we have covered most of it anyways.

Tale of Missing Verb

2012-01-11T00:00:00-08:00

We had just finished pushing our beta of our consumer storage product. It has amazing UX ( Majority of people who have tried this application just love the UI) and it is additive as you can save your all of your favorite blogs, videos, photos, music and files. Our 2. users are very happy :)

Earlier we wanted to go the bootstraping way, but recently things have forced us to turn dark side, that is a story of other time (Read this if you are struggling with the decision). Anyways, we are meeting a lot of smart people these days and one constant feedback we got from everyone was we didn’t have a good punch line, which can communicate, everything in less than five words. Hence we went back to the whiteboard and started working on solving this problem.

For inquy storage, personal, access, consumption, ease of use, ubiquity are important. We did a lots of mindmapping and came up with following punch line for our users.

“Your personal storage everywhere”
“Forget everthing, save on inquy”
“Save anything, read, write and share later.”
“inquy makes it easier for you to collect, organize, find, and share information.”

After few days of lot of back and forth, finally we decided to go with save once. access everywhere

This line which encompasses our whole product vision and easy for people to remember and reproduce. By the way if you have not already, you can join the beta list.

While working on punch line for inquy we looked at a lot of successful web based products for understanding, what language and words are easy, remembered, invoke positive emotions. Here is part of the list we prepared.

Your code anywhere, anytime
Pixlr.com edit image Picnik lets you edit all your photos online, from one easy place.
Lovely Charts is an online diagramming application that allows you to create professional
Numerics Calculator & Converter The easiest way to calculate!
Fiabee Manage all of your dispersed files from any of your devices.
280slides – Provides the ability to create presentations, access them from anywhere, and share them with others
Sliderocket – Online Presentation Tools
Evernote.com – Remember Everthing
Instapaper – A simple tool to save web pages for reading later
Zootool: collect, organize and share your favorite images, videos, documents and links from all over the web.
Grooveshark – Listen to any song online for free.
The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia
Piwik – Piwik is a self hosted, open source (GPL licensed) real time web analytic software.
LastPass – The Last Password You’ll Have to Remember!
Instacalc Online Calculator | Instant Results
Netvibes – Dashboard everything
Prezi – The Zooming Presentation Editor
Wufoo – making forms easy + fast + fun
Evernote – Remember Everything
Mindmeister – Mind Mapping. Brainstorming
Balsamiq – Rapid Wireframing Tool
Put.io is a storage service that fetches media files and lets you stream them immediately
TeuxDeux is a simple, designy to-do app
Lessaccounting. – All small business accounting software sucks, we just suck the least.
Ping.fm is a makes updating your social networks a snap!
TeamLab is a free open-source platform for business collaboration and project management. Create your own corporate portal in the cloud for free.
Kickstarter – Fund and Follow Creativity
Dropbox – Simplify your life

Pitching to Investors

2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

After searching a lot of forums and blogs, when I couldn’t find a simple cheat-sheet on pitching to investors, I decided to write my own. (after observing a lot of successful product pitches by founders of admob, reddit, mint, twitter…many more.)

Here are the key points overlapping in all the presentations. In my opinion this is everything you require for making the perfect pitch.

Intro slide most important slide
Problems
Market viability
Solution
Product
Business model
Customer acquisition
Competition
Competitive advantage
Q&A / Conclusion

An Open Letter to Indian News Media

2011-07-25T00:00:00-07:00

Dear Indian Journalist, Media Reporters, Editors, Whom So Ever the Fuck it Concerned, I am writing today to issue a plea on behalf my fellow Indians. It’s, admittedly, a move out of extreme anxiety and initiate from the minds of people who can’t see the light now. We are a nation of diverse voices, opinions, religion, values, political beliefs, cultures I sure hope you know. In addition, we have many problems as people with fewer privileges, family to feed, petrol prices, interest rates, jobs, losing our friends in bomb blasts, fearing for our women, make ends meet, again a long list. The Mass Media is often referred to as the fourth branch of government because of the power you wield and the oversight function you exercise. The media’s key role in democratic governance has been recognized since the late 17th century, and remains a fundamental principle of modern-day democratic theory and practice. 17th century, theorists had argued that exposure and openness provide the best protection against tyranny and the excesses of arbitrary rule. Thomas Jefferson, for all his bitterness against journalistic criticism celebrated the press, arguing that only through the exchange of information and opinion through the press would the truth emerge. Thus the famous Jeffersonian declaration:

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter. In a democratic country,like India,newspapers are the important means of forming public opinion.You comment on current events and criticize or appreciate the conduct of the Government. It is through them that the public comes to know the problems that face the country. Thus you educate the public mind and enable the people to have their own opinions on matters of public importance. Your role in society is simple one.

Give us facts
Create and sustain revolutions, pleas
Fight for what is right
Guide us
Amplify our problems/ voices so government can hear us
Eventually you should be “Junta ki Awaza”
And become change agent I hope we are clear yet. However, very sadly you are not doing anything at all.

Was Buddha a lazy sales guy?

2011-07-19T00:00:00-07:00

We meet a lot of good sales people whom we believe even though we know they are selling something. Sometimes we like them, they make us feel better and connect with us through familiar stories. Then a thought struck me today morning that all or may be most of the religious superheros like Buddha, Guru Nanak, etc from other religions too were just good sales people of their time, who were lazy. So instead of working in a farm or breeding cattle they gathered people and gave them gyan, and then we didn’t have TV or internet and people were looking for some sort of entertainment – this was good enough for them. Once the people started listening to them everyday probably they evolved the sales pitch.

So while people were inventing and building these guys were selling them spirituality and common sense :)

Just a thought, don’t mean to offend any religious sentiments.