Google announces, today Tuesday 6th May 2008, that AdSense for search is now powered by Custom Search. This means a lot new enhancements and boost for those using and earning a from AdSense for search.

The integration of Custom Search into AdSense for search, will allow you to take advantage of (Custom Search Engine) CSE’s most popular features as listed below:

=> Site Search
=> Improved indexing of your pages
=> Vertical search
=> Tuning search results and ads with keywords
=> Selecting ad location
=> Quick and easy updates

Here’s a video to help you understand things:

For a complete detail and explanation, head on to the AdSense blog.

Good luck with your Adsense earnings!

let’s try to see the possible advantages and disadvantages to help you judge whether a Flash-based website will suit you..
Likely Benefits:

1) Interactivity

Flash’s Actionscript opens up a vast field of possibilities. Programmers and designers have used Flash to create interactve features ranging from very lively feedback forms to attractive Flash-based games. This whole new level of interactivity will always leave visitors coming back for more.

2) A standardized site

With Flash, you do not have to worry about cross-browser compatibility. No more “Why you should test your blog with several browsers“. Then you position your site elements in Flash, they will always appear as they are as long as the user has Flash Player installed.

3) Enhanced visual appearance - expressions and emotions conveyed better via animations.

In Flash, one can make use of its animating features to convey a message in a much more efficient and effective way. Flash is a lightweight option for animation because it is vector based (and hence smaller file sizes) as opposed to real “movie files” that are raster based and hence much larger in size.

(The animation above is an example of flash animated logo)

The likely disadvantage you might expect:

A) Extra effort to download and install The Flash player

People have to download the Flash player in advance before they can view Flash movies, so by using Flash your visitor range will decrease considerably because not everyone will be willing to download the Flash player just to view your site. You’ll also have to put in additional work in redirecting the user to the Flash download page if he or she doesn’t have the player installed.

B) Site optimization

If your content was presented in Flash, most search engines wouldn’t be able to index your content. Hence, you will not be able to rank well in search engines and there will be less traffic heading to your site.

C) Loading time

Users have to wait longer than usual to load Flash content compared to regular text and images, and some visitors might just lose their patience and click the Back button. The longer your Flash takes to load, the more you risk losing visitors.

The best way to go is to use Flash only when you absolutely need the interactivity and motion that comes with it. Otherwise, use a mixture of Flash and HTML. But I will advise you to go HTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP (The best combination IMHO)

Suggested reading:
=> Search Engine Friendly Pages
=> Reducing Load Time Through Image Optimization
=> Website Customization: What can you do to improve the layout of your blog or website?
=> Website, a Subset of a Blog?

Who would not like his/her website to look good and attractive? Not me, and I guess you agree with me.
I will talk on two important aspects which is the the bedrock of the look-and-feel of a website; Color Schemes and Themes

1) Color Schemes

When designing, always choose matching colors. An example of a matching color would be to have a dark background, with visible words and designs. With the dark theme, try not to mix too many bright colors into the design. What we should NEVER do, is to mix two very different colors, such as purple and yellow. Now, of course, it would depend on the purpose of the website, but those two colors are too striking for one who wants it to look more professional.

I will advice you to use this type of free and very effective online tool, presented by Colors On The Web

2) Themes
Themes must always suit the aim of your website or blog. If a blog was made to cater for a food stuffs, it would be wise to stick to that particular category, rather than to revert to a different theme, such as machinery. Keep everything focused!

2.1) Fonts
Fonts should be used in regard to the formality of the website. A simple sans-serif font would suffice in most cases. Exceptional cases such as design and art groups might want to use fanciful designs and fonts. Of course, thats only if you know what you’re doing.

2.2) Pictures
We must always try to think of our visitors, see the way they see. The resolutions and file sizes of the pictures must not be too large in terms of size. This is to allow maximum compatibility and cater our visitors needs.

So, planning is something we should always do, before attempting something. But it all depends on your own creativity!

Other recommended reading:
1) Is a blog the platform you need?
2) Reducing Load Time Through Image Optimization
3) Upload your own image on the Internet, can you?

Did you ever wanted to show your friends your favorite image or a pic that you have just made or found?
Did you ever wanted to upload your avatar on the net to use it on forums or your blog? I bet that most of you have that strong will, since all “internaut” needs to keep such things handy.
This small guide are for people who do not have much experience on the net and yet wants to be trendy Lets, start this small journey..

Before going further, have a look at some specific words and their definition:

1. Image file - image file usually ends with the following ‘extensions’: jpg, gif, png, bmp, psd and tiff..etc These different extensions gives a clue of the ‘type of image‘ you are using.
2. Image Sharing - This is the process of showing your picture or any image from your pc to anyone you want via the Internet. You do this by sharing the ‘link‘ of your image (once uploaded)
   A simple link might look like this: http://www.thisdomain.com/image.gif
3. Image Uploading - In a layman’s term, it is the process of “taking a picture or image from your computer and storing it on a server on the internet.”
4. Image Hosting - Is The service which allows you to upload your image on the internet.

Image Hosting services are now becoming increasingly available free of charge. Now I guess you are wondering how then will the owner of that service pay the cost of maintaining his server? (Hint: They accrue profit from advertisements and sponsors)

Good, now let’s head to the actual steps:

Step 1:
Choose an Image Hosting Service and open it in your browser. We will be using http://imageshack.us/ as our Image Hosting Service.

Step 2:
Click on “Choose” as shown by the red arrow in the picture below

Step 3:
A small window will pop-up in front of you. This is where you will select the image from your computer. Once you have selected the image from your desktop or my documents or whichever place it is on your pc, click on “Open” or “OK“.
See image below:

Step 4:
Now click on “Host it!” and wait for some few minutes for the process to complete
(See image)

Step 5:
Once uploaded, you will be redirected on a new page where you will find different “types” of link for your uploaded image.
Scroll Down the page and select the link where you see “Direct link to image”.
The link will look something like: “http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/2747/img01uy7.png”
(See image below)

NOTE:
=> Before uploading your image, take careful observation of the size of your image + the type of your image and the size/type allowed by the Hosting Service. If your image does not match the requirements of the Service, you will not be able to upload your image.

=> Google for “Image Hosting Service” to know the different services available and see what additional features they provide, for instance more uploading image size allowed, more types of images allowed..etc

=> For our example above, I have chosen Image Shack, since I have been using it for the last 4 years and it has been very handy for my purposes. It is a stable Service.
Usually you will want to choose for a Service which has been in the business for a long time and which is popular.. but usually the best policy is to try them out and judge for yourself

Happy Uploading!

robots.txt, robots.txt, robots.txt..
You may have come across this strange name at least once if you are an internet surfer

robots.txt, robots.txt, robots.txt..
You have definetly seen this “.txt” more than once if you are a blogger using automated tools like wordpress or blogspot..etc.

robots.txt, robots.txt, robots.txt..
Now, you are undoubtedly curious by this “text file” if you are hosting and customizing your own blog/website.
Urrrmmm….so let’s try to find out about this mysterious thing together, you and me

You: “robots.txt is a robot hiding in a file?”
Wakish: “I will say it is just a plain text-file?”
You: “Hahaha.. trying to be smart Wakish? hah..My 12year old brother knows this much!”

You: “Let’s get serious, I need to know about it!!”
Wakish: “Ok, relax and let me guide you in the world of robots..urrmm, sorry robots.txt ”

Let’s try giving some definition of a robots.txt

- is a simple, plain text-file
- is placed in the root directory of a website
- used to control which pages, images or any other files that can be indexed by a Web Robot (aka Search Engines Spiders or bots)
- restrict a specific or any robots access to a website or part of the website
- provides some intructions for robots crawling a website

Now on the net, whenever there’s a behaviour among 2 or more entities, there’s bound to be a protocol (a rule) and here this protocol is named as The Robots Exclusion Standard or The Robots Exclusion Protocol.

The Robots Exclusion Standard

- is a set of rules or a convention which governs the behaviour of a Web Robot with respect to a Website’s directories
A raw fact: This protocol relies on the cooperation of Web Robots.
Q => What if these Bots do not cooperate?
A => Yes, not all Bots abide by this protocol and these bots are called ‘Bad Bots or Spam Bots’; so it’s not a 100% guaranteed way to restrict access to your files and directories.

A thought:

In this era of intense competition and high-ranking urge, most of the intelligent and business minded companies always try to conform as closely as possible to standards or protocols set universally. Therefore, in a near future, the population of Bad Bots will surely be minimized thus boosting the importance of this protocol.

Mechanism of robots.txt & a Web Robot

STEP 1: Web Spider visits a website, for e.g http://wakish.info/
STEP 2: Spider checks for http://wakish.info/robots.txt
STEP 3: If robots.txt found, analyse intructions in the file & proceed to STEP 5
STEP 4: If not found, an error message printed in log file & proceed to STEP 6

STEP 5: Crawl/index website according to instructions defined in robots.txt
STEP 6: index website in the manners I (the spider) want

STEP 7: Crawl that website as many times as ‘I want’ (say n times)

Benefits of robots.txt

1) Minimize errors in log file - As you have observed in STEP 4 above, if you do not provide a robots.txt file an error message is logged. Now if the Web Bot crawl or access your site 100 times in a day (STEP 7), then imagine the size of error logs.

2) Save bandwidth - As you have seen in STEP 7, a bot can access your file ‘n’ times a day and n times crawling your images, html files,..etc. So all this may dump a considerable bandwidth and server load especially if you are running a site with a lot of images and graphics. Hence, using robots.txt can help you define this behaviour.

3) Restrict privacy of your website or part of your files - Spiders will crawl ALL your files if you don’t instruct them. At times you might want to restrict public view to a certain image file for instance.

4) Be more professional - If you are investing effort in doing the best in your endeavour, you should take all chances and opportunities on your side; consider doing things the right way - hence use a robots.txt

5) Boost your site rank - Web Robots are information greedy and pays respect (by increasing you PR value in their database) to those who have a lot of good content. Hence, why not provide them with the right content in the right format? So try to make a balance between the so called ‘machine readability” and “human readability”.

Usage Syntax

When writing your own robots.txt, you pay particular care to the following:
1) Case sensitivity
2) Use the exact name of the existing web spider
3) Where are the semi-colons (:) placed
4) When to use asterisk (*)
5) Bots read instructions in the robots.txt in a “Top to Bottom” fashion.
6) the text-file should be named “robots.txt” with the ’s’ in it

( Note: A text file can be created by using Notepad and saving the filename as ‘robots‘. If you are using Linux, you can do this with an editor like KWrite, Kate or any other text-editor and saing it with the name “robots” and suffixing it explicitely with the extension ‘.txt‘)

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Explanation

- ‘*’ means ‘All Robots that exist’
- Since ‘Disallow’ has no value assigned to it, ALL files will be indexed on the website

line 1 User-agent: BadBot
line 2 Disallow: /
line 3
line 4 User-agent: *
line 5 Disallow: /thisFolder/

PitFall

- If intruction set from Line 4 was before those at line 1, then BadBots would still be able to access your site according to usage 5) above!Any other alternative to robots.txt?

Yes, the HTML META tags.
e.g:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” />

But, this is not really the advised way to restrict web robots. The preferred and more flexible way is undoubtedly the robots.txt

Some additional notes

1) There softwares which can help you easily create your robots.txt in a more user-friendly manner, they are known as ‘robots.txt generator’
2) And to check your usage syntax, we have ‘robots.txt syntax checker’
3) robots.txt also plays a role in gauging ROI (Return On Investment)

ROI - refers to how much profit or revenue a marketing campaign generates, for instance, an investment of $50 in Google Adwords generating a profit of $500
Now, when a website has not been assigned a google PR yet, the robots.txt can be examined to understand why, for e.g, we might see that google was inadvertently blocked from crawling that site.

I end here, hoping that my effort to produce this article will help you gain enough insight about the famous ‘robots.txt’ so that you can provide help to your friends, helping yourself and allowing you to move on to your journey on the net with yet more tools in your database of internet knowledge
Cheers!