Several months back I wrote about Tynt Tracer, a free service that lets you get a backlink automatically from your copied content. Recently they have changed the name of the service to Tynt Insight & it seems they have added more features. And for a limited time they are allowing you to use the Pro features for free. Free means free, without any credit card required.

Some of these pro features give you the detailed stats about which content is most popular in your site & gets copied frequently. You can even find where your content got copied to the page-level, i.e. you can see the particular page that copied your content. Besides, the have a few traffic generation methods for Pro account. Based on the popular content of your site, they will tweet that link automatically from your Twitter account so that you gain more visibility. And you can show custom flash visualizers on your site that will show those popular contents that they analyzed from the statistics. That may attract your visitors to other pages of your site & keep them on your site for a longer time.

So, as it is risk-free think about trying it out. If you don’t try, you never know

First of all, let me say that my current host is DreamHost & they don’t use cPanelX. And from my personal experience I know if you want to setup your website in their web panel from a cPanel exported dump file, it may become a little bit tiresome. Especially, if you are a newbie, then you may face some trouble putting the files in proper place in the server with correct structure. Besides, you have to create a new MySQL database & import your existing database there. And that may require some phpMyAdmin knowledge.

But the good thing is that you don’t have to worry about these things from now on. DreamHost have added new cPanel import feature to web panel. I received their newsletter yesterday. Now you can just give your cPanel login information & they will import the site from existing hosting company & set it up in your DreamHost web panel. You don’t have to do anything except updating your domain’s nameserver info. And if you don’t want to supply your cPanel login info, you can just export the zipped file from cPanel & DreamHost will take care of setting it up for you.

By the way, as a current customer I am happy with DreamHost. They have pretty good uptime. Seldom their server goes down. Only problem is that when it goes down, they take a lot of time to recover it. But at least we can see the status update from DreamHost status blog.

For a long time I have seen people crying fouls over Blogger navbar. There are mainly two reasons for these objections. Bloggers don’t want to show Google branding on their blog. They want to show it more like a standalone blog to give it a more professional look. And the second thing, the colour scheme consisted of only four default colours namely Blue, Black, Tan, and Silver. It often became a mismatch to a Blogger template especially if you have a custom Blogger template.

Personally I never have had any problem with the blogspot navigation bar when I used to blog on Blogger. My idea was if  I am using a Blogger blog, then why not show it. It is like a mark that distinguishes your blog from other blog platforms. And I used to like default blue navbar as it was prominent yet soothing to the eye.

But it is at least good to see that Google have listened to the bloggers demand. End of the last month they have added two new color schemes that are transparent. And so the navbar will blend with the background color & pattern of your blog template. The “Transparent Light” colour has a semi-transparent white background giving away subtle pastel colours.

And the Transparent Dark” colour has a semi-transparent black background giving it a shaded look.

If you were always complaining about the navbar, the time has come to try this new option

To choose a new colour scheme for Blogger navbar, go to Layout> Page Elements from Blogger dashboard & click Edit next to navbar widget.

Let me clear one thing first. I am not going into the battle which is better, Blogger or Wordpress. I am just talking about two most popular free blog hosting services, Blogger.com & Wordpress.com. If you want to create a blog for free, it is most likely that you will choose any one of them. But before choosing Wordpress.com hosting or blogspot hosting, I just want to remind you of two important things that may vote for Blogger.

As a newbie when we start a blog, most of us have one single aim. And that is earning some quick bucks. But Wordpress.com doesn’t allow you to put any kind of ads like Adsense, Adbrite or Chitika in you free blog. They will even ban you if they find paid reviews on your blog from pay per post networks like PayPerPost, Smorty or ReviewMe. Moreover you can’t even place any referral links to services like ClickBank or UserCash to earn money. Commercial use is strictly prohibited there for free blogs.

But Blogger is very liberal there. They let you put your own ads as you wish. They even support Adsense widgets for seamless integration & management of Adsense ads from one Google account.

Next big thing is having your own domain name. Whenever you get a little exposure at first, you will look to buy a top level domain for your blog to give it a professional look. Google supports custom domain option for free, meaning you can use your new TLD for your existing blogspot blog & you will get option that will automatically redirect old blog post urls to new urls seamlessly. But for the same service Wordpress.com will charge you around $10 per year. See, you have to pay more for domain mapping than for buying a real domain for one year

By the way, if you have Blogger blog on your own domain, it is not that difficult to migrate your blog to self-hosted Wordpress. So, if you don’t have money to spend online or don’t want to pay online at first, remember these two important factors & then take a decision according to your goal. It will help you in the long run.

It was proposed that Microsoft & Yahoo would finalize negotiating the search deal by 27th October. But Yahoo has filed a document in SEC saying that the two parties have failed to close the deal before intended deadline as still some transaction details remain to work out. But they also stated that both the parties are working hard & a lot of progress have been made. This is exactly what they have said:

On October 28, 2009, Yahoo! Inc., a Delaware corporation (“Yahoo!”), and Microsoft Corporation, a Washington corporation (“Microsoft”), mutually agreed to extend the period to negotiate and execute a Search and Advertising Services and Sales Agreement and a License Agreement (the “Definitive Agreements”) reflecting and supplementing the provisions of such agreements as set forth in annexes to their binding letter agreement dated July 29, 2009 (the “Letter Agreement”). The Letter Agreement specified that the parties would execute Definitive Agreements by October 27, 2009, but given the complex nature of the transaction, there remain some details to be finalized. The parties are working diligently on finalizing the agreements, have made good progress to date, and have agreed to execute the agreements as expeditiously as possible. The Letter Agreement was the subject of a Current Report on Form 8-K filed by Yahoo! on August 4, 2009.

And Nathania Johnson from Search Engine Watch contacted Microsoft. They replied that the deal might be implemented by early 2010 hopefully.

This big deal may got delayed. But more importantly it is still on course.

Some days ago Twitter launched a new feature called Lists. It is still in beta & available to a small group of  users. Yesterday when I logged in to my Twitter account, I found that the feature is available to my account. So I explored it a bit.

And I have to say that the Lists feature can be quite handy especially to those who are following a large number of people. Twitter has become a number game. Most of us follow others a lot  in hope that they will follow us back. Ultimately you end up following people whose updates don’t really attract you. And your true relations like friends or colleagues get lost in this crowd. But now with Twitter Lists you can separate any number of people under various categories. You create a new Twitter list with a name & can set the option to make it private or public. The list will have a url like http://twitter.com/username/listname. Your Twitter lists will appear on your account sidebar right below the search button. Now all you need to do is to go through your following list & add people accordingly in separate lists.

Thus you create totally different social niches like professional connections, friends, relatives or business guys just as you want. And then you can find the needed person from the corresponding list of short-listed people. By the way, at the top-right corner of your Twitter account, just beside the “following” & “followers” links, you can find “listed” link. It will show you the number of lists where your followers have added you.

It is quite a timely release from Twitter as people are just following each other without much care about who your true connections are. When this feature comes out of beta, it will help a lot of people. Just go through the pain of selecting for one time & from then keep in touch with the Twitter updates of those whom you really care.

Security is always a concern. You love your blog & want to protect it regardless whether someone finds it worth enough to hack or not

What about a hacker getting into your Wordpress file system somehow? He can easily manipulate your theme files to add malicious codes. Think, he can easily add his own ad code like changing Adsense id or stuff a file with lots of spam links. That’s why your Wordpress blog files need to be continuously monitored. With the help of Wordpress File Monitor plugin you can just do that automatically & almost in real time.

The thing that I like about this Wordpress plugin is its simple interface with all the necessary features. You can schedule automatic scans staring from only 1 minute interval gap. Enter your email address & you will get notification email when any change is detected in your Wordpress files. Or if you want to keep it as a manual service, you can do that just by putting 0 in the “Scan Interval” box. And a quite useful feature is the option to exclude file paths. Suppose, you want your wp-content/uploads directory not to be monitored as it gets updated frequently. Moreover, if you use folder to store cache files, this feature can become quite handy & will save you from lots of unnecessary emails.

There are so many automatic Twitter Follower Services out there now! You have to follow some guys on a downline & gather some referrals to get the downline for you. But the biggest problem with this kind of viral strategy in Twitter is that your so-called followers are not actually following you. They have followed guys like you because they just wanted to get followers for themselves & never care about opening your profile or checking your updates. In reality, your followers mean very little in terms of your business then.

But we still try different things. And there’s no harm in trying. A few days ago, I just found out this Twitter follower increasing service called FastFollowers. It’s a bit different. You can’t just auto-follow here. It is based on some credit system. They have a list of Twitter followers. When you follow them, you gain credits. When some other user follow you, he takes credit from you. Thus when your credit becomes zero, you can’t gain followers. To keep gaining followers you need to keep following guys. And you have to do that manually

Obviously there are few other ways of gaining Twitter followers like buying credits or participating in some promotion like subscribing to the owner’s feed. But the main thing is that your followers will choose to follow you manually, by themselves. It is surely somewhat better than increasing your Twitter followers automatically. There’s bigger chance of gaining an interested follower.

By the way, if I mention this blog post to them, I will get 100 credits. But I am not writing this only because of that. And I think you guys believe me I didn’t even use my referral link to gain credits. Feel free to try.

In my previous post few days ago, I mentioned ICANN was going to held a meeting to decide the fate of sites still on .yu domain. And the latest news is that, ICANN has extened the deadline for switching off .yu domains to another 6 months, till 30 March 2010. But it will annnounce some conditions subsequently. And if that conditions are acceptable, then Register of the Serbian National Internet Domain (RNIDS) will make a decision on the switching off the remaining 4000 .yu domain sites.

Yeah! That’s true for all present Google Webmaster Tools users who have verified their sites using meta tag method. The meta tag generated for the verification process used to depend on the email address of the user’s Google account. So if you change your email address, all the sites that you have verified will become unverified. But just a few days ago Google came out with a tweak on the verification process. From now on, the new meta tags generated for site verification will not depend on the email & will remain same whether you change your email address or not.

So if you have changed your email address in Google account in the mean time, check back Google Webmaster Tools. If you want to be safe from email change, you can use the new verification process. By the way, sites verified using old verification method will continue to work.

They have made a change too in verification by HTML file. Before, if your site showed any other HTTP error except 404 for non-existent url, you couldn’t verify your site using HTML file upload. Though, if a server is properly configured it will always show 404 error for non-existent urls, still lots of sites were having problem for this reason. So, Google have removed checking for non-existent urls from verification process. Now you just have to upload the HTML file to your site without any modification. Google will check if the content is okay in the file. And if it is same, you have a successful verification. That’s all