Jack's Corner

Display clocks on your website / blog

nospam@example.com (Manoj Kumar) — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 11:12:08 +0530

ClockLink provides fashionable clocks that you can easily embed in your
web page. All you need to do is simply paste the tag on your web page or your blog. ClockLink clock will display the city name of your choice if you
choose. You can also choose a time zone for your clock so it will show
the correct time targeting your audience.

You can create a custom clock for your company which costs you around $500 extra. Easy to use interface, simple and elegant !!!

How to design a logo of letters?

nospam@example.com (Manoj Kumar) — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 16:21:59 +0530

A logo is usually one of the following three types:

Textual
Image
Hybrid (Text + Image)

It is sometimes boring to see some text logos totally PLAIN. Before&After Magazine have consolidated nearly 20 strategies to design textual logos in their ebook entitled "How to design a logo of letters?"

Resize images online

nospam@example.com (Manoj Kumar) — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 12:25:49 +0530

Digg has definitely changed the way we find information.

I dugg this cool tool today - ResizR. You can easily resize any photos or images online FREE. Good News: The image proportions are preserved

I am certain this is a must-use tool for designers / photographers and it is NO more necessary to ask for vector images, if you just have to resize them... Cool - really !!!

50 Helpful Web Design Resources

nospam@example.com (Manoj Kumar) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 14:27:00 +0530

May be we are not all masterful of finding new resources on the Web. Web Designers / Internet marketers especially are quite keen on testing new tools. Neil Patel had gathered 50 of his favourite design resources on his blog.

The resources range from CSS galleries, Web Standards, Validators, Color resources to Typographical tools. A good read!!!

Is your website W3C compliant?

nospam@example.com (Manoj Kumar) — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 16:16:00 +0530

There is no denying that your website has the most stunning web design, then several months down the line you may have to pay a search engine specialist to optimise the website to gain first page search engine positions - which can often mean starting again from scratch. Any disagreements??? Then, better do NOT read any more... since, you might NOT benefit from this article.

It is incredibly important to audit your website regularly for issues impacting compliance and effectiveness. W3C recommends auditing in following departments.

(1) General Quality - Broken Links, Alt tags, height / width attributes, browser compatibility issues etc

(2) Accessibility - W3C Web Content Accesibility Guidelines, check points etc

(3) Privacy - Cookies, Controls, Third-party links, forms etc

WatchFire, an US-based company, has a neat tool called WebXACT to audit your website FREE online. I ran the tool to check many websites and the report seems worthy.

### WARNING ###

McAfee SiteAdvisor reports that this site contained links to secunia.com, which they found to be a distributor of downloads some people consider adware, spyware or other unwanted programs. But I think there is no problem as long as you don't click on those unwanted sites.

101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006

nospam@example.com (Manoj Kumar) — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 19:16:00 +0530

A nice article by B List SEOs Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans which details the insights of link building. Worth bookmarking !!!

An excerpt from the article follows:

Directories

72. Submit your site to 200 cheesy paid
directories (averaging $15 a pop) that send zero traffic and sell
offtopic run-of-site links.

Forum Spam

73. List 100 Web sites in your signature file.

74. Exclusively post only when you can add links to your sites in the post area.

75. Post nothing but "me too" posts to build your post count. Use in combination with a link-rich signature file.

76. Ask questions about who provides the best [WIDGET], where [WIDGET]
is an item that you sell. From the same IP address create another forum
account and answer your own question raving about how great your own
site is.

77. As a new member to various forums, ask the same question at 20 different forums on the same day.

78. Post on forum threads that are years outdated exclusively to link to your semi-related website.

79. Sign up for profiles on forums you never intend on commenting on.

They say that these are a few link buiding methods that may destroy your brand or get
your site banned/penalized/filtered from major search engines, or both.

Click here to read the article

Revealing Search Engine Algorithm

nospam@example.com (Manoj Kumar) — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 12:38:04 +0530

The factors that influence your natural search engine rankings:

Off-page factors (or Inbound links):

Quality of links
Relevance
Title Keyword
Anchor Keyword
Quantity

On-page factors:

Title Keyword
Anchor Keyword
Body Keyword
Content Relevance
Title content weight

Ney, they are not revealed by Google... how can you expect that??? heheh

Fortune Interactive, a search marketing firm based in Raleigh, analyzed the keyword "laptop" across the major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN. They have come up with some interesting findings.

Strongest Directories

nospam@example.com (Manoj Kumar) — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 15:39:14 +0530

If you ever wanted to promote your website (or any other online identity), the first suggestion you'll likely get is to submit them to the directories. But there are thousands of directories online. Which one would you start with?

Now you have an answer by Aviva who had listed 100+ directories based on pure Page Strength and NOT biased on popularity or any other factor.

Its a pretty good listing that will optimize your online marketing efforts.

Continue reading "Strongest Directories"

Is pink ruling technology?

nospam@example.com (Manoj Kumar) — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 12:17:34 +0530

Yay, a spicy post... but not much related to Hosted Services / Applications...

Engadget analyses why girls these days are NO more diamond-friendly but technology-friendly. It claims that 75% of the women they surveyed would choose a plasma television over a diamon necklace. lol. Peep through in and find out more interesting phenomena on this...

So gals, listening to this... how about you? Wanna diamond necklace or a pink ipod???

Broken Links Analyser

nospam@example.com (Manoj Kumar) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:30:16 +0530

Some time ago, I wrote about generating sitemaps in an easier manner. I was inspired by a cute desktop utility recently that claims to help me find broken links on websites.

Xenu is a free site analysis tool available here; in the past I have found it very simple, small to install and unobtrusive. Install the program and select a new project where you just need to enter the address to spider and let it go to work. Ultimately get a report with a lot of the information about the dead links. But the key is �??Statistics for Managers�?? section located at the bottom of the report.

I'm sure most of you would have used WebAnalyser and many such tools to do this task. Except for the graphical capabilities, I'm absolutely fine with this cute tool.

When I used xml-sitemaps to generate sitemaps, it reported the presence of a broken link on our website but didn't say anything about the link itself. I was able to find that tiny broken link today with this desktop software.

This does NOT come any way nearer to Netmechanic, WebAnalyser and such higher end tools. But this is really a much better tool considering it is FREE. Check it out

Your Newsletters - Spam???

nospam@example.com (Manoj Kumar) — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 12:02:00 +0530

We find it so frustrating that we have css to create great looking xml pages (Newsletters), but the security filters rip out any styling. and we have laws that we MUST have an unsubscribe button, but using 'unsubscribe', or 'remove' puts us in the spam box.

To be honest i think the most successful way would be to advise all your subscribers to add your email address to their safe list. Otherwise, you could spend literally hours playing around with email headers and still have little or no success.

There are always options in this world. Aren't they?

Yes, you got it. You have some beautiful options to manage your email marketing campaigns.

TOOL SET #1 - FREE SPAM CHECKERS:

Before you send your ezine, paste your code to one of these SPAM checkers.

I heard that rarely has any subsciber complained about not receiving an ezine or about it dumping into their Junk folder by using these tools. Why not try??? After all, they're FREE

TOOL SET #2 - EZINE HOSTING PROVIDERS:

Many web/email hosting and management services are nothing but a slaughterhouse when it comes to ezines. One spammer using your host can get YOUR ezine blacklisted. It is NOT a bad idea to use expert ezine hosting service providers rather than burdening your own system and risk labeling your company's email server as a spammer

http://www.EZezine.com (BONUS: FREE 1000 emails per month, Yey!!!)
http://www.ConstantContact.com (BONUS: FREE 50 emails per month, not bad though!!!)

Anyway, the problem is that the recipient, NOT the sender, determines what is spam. What is a gem to one recipient may be garbage to another recipient. There is absolutely no failsafe way to make sure your email will arrive in the desired "In" box.

There are ways of increasing the chances of it arriving at the desired destination. The easiest way is to manually type your email and send it from an actual email client such as Outlook, with a return address that is from a known, paid ISP (not Hotmail), have a very specific subject line and don't send it to more than the one recipient.

When I say specific subject line, I mean something that the recipient will recognize as an issue with which they are familiar and associate it with you. So, your name in the subject line will help, if they know you personally.

Leaving out words that are found in typical spam such as "viagra" and such will also enhance the chanes of getting past the filters. That's why so many of these spammers misspell such words.

Again, if it is an opt-in email, it would be a good idea to ask your subscribers to add your email address to their address book.

Still, many legitimate emails will fall into bulk filters. Good Luck for your email marketing campaigns !!! :)

Powerful Intel Chips

nospam@example.com (Manoj Kumar) — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 14:50:35 +0530

Have you ever fantacised Microsoft Vista... But its not going to arrive before end of 2006. Oops, it misses the holiday season.

Never mind, there is a good reason for you to smile again with a much more powerful Intel Core 2 Duo processor launched yesterday. Intel claims that these new line of processors can deliver 40% extra performance consuming 40% lesser power. Yey, good news!!!

Rather than focusing on sheer processing speed, the new design shrinks the circuitry, putting two computing engines on a single piece of silicon, giving computer users faster and smoother performance.

If you are planning to purchase a Dell, HP or Gateway computers in the near future, check out for these new processors.

More information at New York Times

Happy Sysadmin Day

nospam@example.com (Manoj Kumar) — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 13:37:05 +0530

"Let's face it, System Administrators get no respect 364 days a year. This is the day that all fellow System Administrators across the globe, will be showered with expensive sports cars and large piles of cash in appreciation of their diligent work. But seriously, we are asking for a nice token gift and some public acknowledgement. It's the least you could do." quotes SysAdminDay website.

Friday, July 28th, 2006, is the 7th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. On this special international day, give our System Administrators something that shows that you truly appreciate their hard work and dedication. Sysadmins get more off-hour phone-calls than surgeons; for that matter, a good sysadmin is better to have around than a surgeon.

Sincere and bottomless System Administrators , Happy SysAdmins Day to you and every other SysAdmin who's toiled under the desks and in the crawlspaces of the world

Only for GEEKS

nospam@example.com (Manoj Kumar) — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 13:38:58 +0530

PS: This post is dedicated to geeks.

IT.com is an interesting IT-focused search engine. It brings up results crawled from major IT publications and other sources. The performance is good too.

The search engine claims to have a highly targeted audience - enterprise IT shoppers and senior IT executives who has purchasing powers. According to their media kit, the top ten search terms are follows:

RFID
VOIP
outsourcing
spyware
ERP
CRM
firewall
VPN
SOA
wimax

Hmmm... quite interesting...

Sitemaps - Made Easy

nospam@example.com (Manoj Kumar) — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:58:00 +0530

We find several utilities to help you right from choosing a domain name thru building your marketing campaign to accepting payments from your customers. Most of them are FREE too.

Typically, a sitemap contains links to every page of your website. The nice thing about a sitemap is that it can be read by humans AND search engines alike. What if you are able to simply create a sitemap and place it on our website, for FREE?

Yes, this tool is simply awesome - XML-Sitemaps. The basic version is FREE and can be used to generate sitemaps upto 500 pages.

This website claims to let you:

Create an XML sitemap format that can be submitted to Google to help them crawl your website better.
Create a Text sitemap to submit to Yahoo.
Generate an HTML site map to allow human visitors easily navigate on your website.

Overall, I give a 5 star rating to this sitemap generator tool