Many webmasters are engaged with WordPress to establish their business by taking advantage of using the blogging software. Although there are number of benefits to be realized by using WordPress, some entrepreneurs are facing serious issues like security vulnerability. In order to make sure its users have the most secure platform available WordPress has released a new version 2.8.2 security patch.
This new version will help webmasters to get rid of an XSS vulnerability that was identified by a site admin. The XSS vulnerability will allow hackers to access the admin page by inserting certain code in a form. The previous version of WordPress 2.8.1 was released just two weeks ago.
Anyone running WordPress 2.8 or 2.8.1 can upgradeto this latest version right away. The latest major version is faster than ever. Don’t delay! WordPress 2.8.2 is available for download here. Development on 2.9 is already underway, with a bunch of feature list. Hope the WordPress team will release it soon.
ICANN which oversees a number of Internet-related tasks, has resolved that .yu TLD assigned to Yugoslavia will operate temporarily under the Serbian National Register of Internet Domain Names, operators of the new .rs domain registry, during transition until its eventual abolition on or before 30 September 2009. This allows a two-year transition period for existing .yu names to be transferred either to .me (which is to be delegated to the Government of Montenegro) or to .rs (for Serbian domains).
Then any content you are hosting on a .yu domain will no longer be online. In order to have your site live, Google has given some recommendations to make sure that your site content is indexed by them.
1. Retain back-links:
While transferring your site from .yu to .me or .rs domains, all links pointing to .yu will be dead. In order to save your site’s back-links, contact webmasters of sites linking to you and ask them to update their links to your new sites. Signup with Google webmaster tools and check the links to your site to get the list of sites linking to you.
2. Prevent broken links:
When you are moving the site content from the old to new site, check your internal links and update those links to reflect changes to prevent broken links.
3. Move the site to a new domain in advance
Don’t delay the process of transferring the site to a new domain. It is better to move a single directory or sub-domain and test the results before moving the site completely. Remember that 301 direction on your old domain will not work after September 30. An additional tip from Google is that during site transfer you can test how Google crawls and indexes your new site at its new location by submitting a site map through Google webmaster tools.
Did you think that Google was already everywhere? You were wrong! After Google map, Google search and a lot of others web services, Google succeeds today in opening Google Voice, a new service to phones. In fact, Google voice already existed with the purchase of GrandCentral in 2007. Its goal was “one phone number for all your phones, for life”. However, it apparently didn’t really work.
But now Google bought one million numbers and seems to be ready to launch this new project. All the official sites of Google announce this service and propose some invitation to be the first to have a number. But be careful, this service is reserved for American people and has to be tested by a closed user group.
However, phoning by internet, what’s new? We can already use MSN or Skype for free. With Google Voice, users can unify all your routing home, office and other numbers and call abroad for amazingly cheap price (but local call has always the same price since you always use a phone network). However, thanks to a technological performance, Google succeeded in converting voicemail into text mail which can be read or heard later, whichever is useful to find information. They can transfer their call on one of the telephones. The more awaited feature however, is free SMS.
To summarize, Google Voice doesn’t propose a very new novelty but its advantage is to gather together all these features in one free service.
Google has recently released a new tool known as “Google Squared”. It extracts data that you are looking for and shows results in an online spreadsheet-format. The square structures the unstructured data on the web. If you are curious about which mobile phones are the best, all you have to do is simply type “mobile” in the search box of Google squared and click the “square it’ button. It will return information in a spreadsheet format with names, images, description, weight, memory etc in columns and rows.
You can customize squares as per your desire. Remember common attributes for an item can be listed as columns in a square. You can delete the attributes that you don’t care about. If you want to expand your initial square you can use the add rows and add columns search boxes to see suggestions for other items and attributes that you can add to your square. You can also type your own items and attributes that you have in mind.
You can also save your square and share it with your friends. If you are signed into your Google account, you can save a particular squared search, then get back to it later, and share it with your friends by simply copying the URL from the address bar of the square that you have created and send it to them.
Like the Google square, a computational knowledge engine called Wolfram Alpha has came into the internet world. It is designed to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable to everyone. With Wolfram Alpha, you can calculate how many calories a man can burn if he swims for 30 minutes. The difference between the two is that Wolfram Alpha is simply based on its own database, while Google Squared gathers data from the entire web.
Google unveiled a new communication and collaboration tool called ‘Google Wave’, at the Google I/O Conference took place in San Francisco. The original creator of Google Maps, Lars and Jens Rasmussen took the stage to present their latest creation Google Wave. Wave fluxes email, chat, photo/video sharing features and other online communication facilities, to let people work together more productively online.
Commenting on Wave, Rasmussen said, “A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.” He referred to it as a developer platform “Developers can build extensions to Google Wave using our open APIs, embed waves in other sites, or build applications that interoperate with Google Wave.”
The Google Wave API provides two primary types of development; Extensions and Embed, to allow developers to enhance Google Wave. With this product, you can create a wave and add people to it. People within a wave can make use of sources like richly formatted text, gadgets, photos and even feeds with other wave members.
Developers can create applications that run within a wave. At the presentation, the wave development team has shown collaborative gaming as a sample. Wave can be used to enhance an existing workflow within an enterprise. During the presentation, a bug tracking system was shown in which wave is used to report bugs and assign them to team members for correction.
The net world is looking forward to this amazing product being released.
Every successful corporation has a responsibility to use its resources and influences to create new things for people. Bing is the latest attempt by Microsoft to gain popularity in the search market. Bing, is a new Internet search engine designed to navigate the web and find online information easily.
Microsoft is a multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. There are hundreds of new features on Microsoft’s Bing. A few of the interesting features include:
Bing will provide useful links and information related to your search. For instance, if you search information about a black berry, Bing will provide links to reviews on the item and give you complete details about the particular product as well. This feature will reduce a user’s clicks to find specific information.
Going into search engines, typing something in, and searching items is very difficult nowadays. Bing facilitates people to save favorite sites while they are searching information. It helps them to save their time by saving their favorite stuff and accessing them at anytime.
Microsoft maintains partnerships with different online services like airlines, hotels and holiday resorts. If you are searching for flight information, Bing can offer specific information like flight deals, reviews etc.
Bing will Auto-Suggest the search queries. For instance, if you’re looking for “Obama” then it will auto-suggest some additional queries like his biography, information on his speeches, quotes, facts and so on.
Bing can also provide videos and images about an item in the search results page.
Microsoft is currently holding a third-place behind Google and Yahoo Inc. it hopes that Bing will play a big role to reach a good position in the search market. Microsoft is trying to pull people away from Google and Yahoo.
Wolfram Alpha, a computational engine offers a single search result instead of thousands of web pages as offered by Google. If Alpha offers the right answer, then it will be the best way to gather data on the net. If it is not the right answer, then the search may end up in vain and user will have to go for another search engine which most commonly is Google.
Even with Google, people might not get desired results on the first page; they have to explore the thousands of search results to get the answer. Both have pros and corns, so Firefox has come up with the brilliant idea of blending Google and Wolfram Alpha, through its new add-on “Wolfram Alpha Google”. Just imagine how useful it will be for surfers to have both kinds of search results on the same page.
The downside of the add-on is that it can clip off the bottom of the Wolfram Alpha results when the search result of Alpha is longer. This can be overcome by setting Google to show 20 or more search results per page. Also the add-on comes with a quick link called ‘Open Wolfram Alpha in New tab’ which allows surfers to view the Alpha results in a different browser tab so that they don’t miss out on any important information.
This plug-in facilitates Google surfers to get the best of both worlds. It is also an ideal solution for comparing the results between these two engines. This add-on is still experimental; you need to be registered with Mozilla’s add-on to be able to instal it in your browser.
At WordCamp Mid Atlantic 2009, Anil Dash, CEO of Six Apart announced that they offer plug-ins for their bitter rival WordPress. ReadWriteWeb has stated that this action is like “Apple releasing software that runs on Windows”. This attempt is a strategic move to monetize through the popularity of WordPress.
Six Apart has clearly stated that their effort is to help bloggers irrespective of blogger tools used by them, to make the most of their blog using powerful services.
1. TypePad Connect
TypePad Connect is a free and easy to integrate service that brings a whole new level of community to your site. People who wish to leave a comment on your blog, can create profiles using their Google, Facebook, Yahoo or OpenID accounts. They can also follow each other’s activity across the web. It also enables users link to their rich profile that contains their comment history, and links to their own blogs and their accounts on Twitter, Flickr and other services.
2. TypePad AntiSpam
TypePad AntiSpam engine is a free plugin for bloggers, to protect your wordpress from invasive comments. It adapts to every changing spam technique and gets smarter every time you report spam.
3. Six Apart Media
Six Apart Media offers advertising solutions to allow WordPress bloggers to monetize their blog. Bloggers will have total control over the display of ads on their site.
4. Blogs.com
Blogs.com is Six Apart’s blog directory where a team of passionate editors chose featured blogs based on their quality, popularity and relevance. Now, Wordpress users can submit their sites as well and get the latest buzz via editorial round-ups and top ten lists.
Firefox has become popular among net browsers due to its attractive features including tabbed browsing, spell checker, live bookmarking, an integrated download manager, keyboard shortcuts, and an integrated search system that uses the user’s desired search engine.
Firefox offers thousands of add-ons that provide users the capability to customize Firefox according to their requirements. Here, we have compiled add-ons that help webmasters in search engine optimization.
Twitterfox
Twitter is one of the social media used by SEO experts to share their activities like recently posted articles, press releases, recent updates on products, with millions of people around the world. Twitterfox add-on will place a small icon near Firefox’s bottom tab. It will notify you when your friends update their status in Twitter, and also offers a text field to update your status. Thus you can follow up on tweets and update your twitter status without logging in to Twitter.
SearchStatus
SearchStatus is specially designed for Search Engine Marketers (SEMs) to provide extensive search related information like Google PageRank , Compete.com ranking , Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming ranking, Linkscape mozrank, backlinks etc, of a visiting site. From this information, SEM can get a balanced view of a site efficacy. Analyzing a website or blog is so easy with SearchStatus.
Firebug
It is a Firefox extension that includes web development tools such as editor, debugger, error console, command line and inspectors for debugging. With FireBug, you can edit, debug and monitor CSS, HTML, Java Script, and Ajax live in any web page conveniently. It is the ultimate editing tool for webmasters to find errors in Javascript, XML and CSS, and rectify them.
IEview
As IE is used by more than 60% of internet users, it is a must for web masters to check how well their website works on IE. IEview is a simple Firefox extension that opens a current page or a selected link in IE with a single right-click, to check how their design works on IE without leaving Firefox. This add-on is useful for cross-browser testing.
Colorzilla
Colorzilla is a color picker tool which is useful in choosing colors for advertisement headers or web design. It integrates a number of color-related analysis tools with your browser to get the exact hexadecimal code of colors. On placing your cursor on any specific pixel, the Eyedropper feature of colorzilla will display the RGB numbers, hexadecimal code, X-Y axis location and CSS properties of that pixel. Color plays a major role in attracting visitors. If you find attractive colors on any site, you can get its color code and use it in your site’s CSS design.
English Dictionary
A website should convey messages clearly without any errors. A website filled with misspelled words, will definitely lose its power among visitors. English Dictionary is a very useful add-on that checks for spelling of English words. This add-on will facilitate your work by checking spelling and grammar as you write texts.
British scientist Stephen Wolfram, inventor of Mathemetica, will unveil his latest creation Wolfram Alpha on May 15, 2009. Alpha is a computational knowledge engine, and it uses built-in models of different domains that represent real-world knowledge, for computing the answers to factual questions.
It understands and then computes answers for questions using the built-in domain knowledge models without searching for answers in a big database. It provides textual results along with graphs, charts and other graphical elements necessary for the search query. For instance, if the query is “current American economy”, Alpha will offer numeric details along with comparison graphs. This will help almost everyone understand finance better.
Dr. Wolfram gave a demonstration of Alpha at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. During the demonstration, Wolfram typed in the question ‘What is the GPD of France divided by Italy?’ Alpha gave the correct answer supported with graphs and other statistics.
Dr. Wolfram said at the demonstration, “Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you’re talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results.”
Wolfram is different from Google. Two things can be compared only when they are comparable. Google is a search engine while Wolfram is a computational knowledge engine. However, Alpha will be rival for Wikipedia and other reference materials. Instead of searching tons of books and finding answers to any factual questions, users can just open Alpha and obtain answers.
Stephen describes Wolfram Alpha – “It will raise the level of scientific things that the average person can do. People will find that the world is more predictable than they might have expected. Just as running Google is like having a reference librarian to help you, running Wolfram Alpha will be like having a house scientist to consult for you.”
Did you think that Google was already everywhere? You were wrong! After Google map, Google search and a lot of others web services, Google succeeds today in opening Google Voice, a new service to phones. In fact, Google voice already existed with the purchase of GrandCentral in 2007. Its goal was “one phone number for all your phones, for life”. However, it apparently didn’t really work.
