Today morning, i received a mail from Ollie, letting me know about a new service that he has created. It is called API 4 RSS. API4RSS is a tool that allows you to display an RSS Feed on any page by just including One Line of Javascript. It was primarily started with the aim of displaying an RSS feed on a Million Dollar Wiki page (read about how it began).

I was amazed by the simplicity of the site. You just have to enter the URL of the RSS feed that i want to display and some formatting options. Then, you get 2 types of code.

1. A Line of JavaScript code
2. 6 Lines of code for use on a Media Wiki page, eg Million Dollar Wiki.

They even allow you to use your own Stylesheet of the feed, which is very nice. Here’s an example :

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Google is undisputedly my favorite company ever. I was excited when i read about two cool news about the Google.

1) GPhone is coming

TechCrunch pointed out to a news article on Rediff, that mentions that the Google Phone (GPhone) might be out in a fortnight. The article also states that Google is in talks with a couple of Indian mobile service providers, which is absolutely fantastic. And, for this reason, GPhone may hit India before iPhone does and will be more popular than iPhone among Indians. This is what makes Google different. They see India as a potential market, whereas the others don’t.

2) Orkut ReDesign

This one is more official than the GPhone article. The orkut blog announced today that there is a redesign under the works. They will be releasing it to groups of users in the coming weeks. This is awesome too. As everyone knows, Orkut is the most popular social network in India and Brazil and i’m a fan of it too. But, why ? It has a more of an Indian touch. I don’t know how else to explain.
This redesign is definitely going to be a successful one. So far, the comments about the design are positive.

UPDATE : Google Discovery has more pictures of the new design. Vinay claims thats the new design has been enabled for him. He has some screenshots on Flickr. Can’t wait to have it on my account.

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I wanted to title this post “ContestBlogger cheating the cheated”. But i didn’t want to be that rude.

Phil from ContestBlogger.com is planning a link-bait on the people who have been cheated by Ashwin Khanna. Ashwin’s contest was a total scam, though it earned him a ton of backlinks and his Technorati rank soared to about 7700. A lot of people were outraged by what Ashwin did and Phil is one among them. He wrote a post telling that Ashwin was “full of crap”. And, now he is running a contest that is a worser link bait than Ashwin’s. He calls it the “Ashwin Khanna Revenge Contest”.
(url : contestblogger.com/win-100-in-the-ashwin-khanna-revenge-contest/).
He wants you to remove the link you gave to Ashwin for his contest and change it to Contest Blogger’s homepage. And, he is giving a small $100 for it.

Let’s put his Technorati rank back where it belongs!
But if we work fast, we might be able to take back all of those links that Ashwin stole and put his Technorati rank back at 10,000,000 where it belongs. That’s why I’m making the entry requirements for this contest simple: if you were a blog that was tricked into linking to Ashwin Khanna, just go change that link to direct to the Contest Blogger homepage.

I had a lot of respect on Phil and i love his blog very much. But, I’ve lost it completely after reading about this contest. This is worser crap than Ashwin’s. I guess Phil has become greedy seeing what this many backlinks could do for a blog.

And because I don’t want Ashwin’s dishonesty to sour all of you on blog contests, I’m going to give that $100 to one of the bloggers who entered Ashwin’s bogus contest.

Phil, If you really care so much about those who have been tricked and want to bring Ashwin’s Technorati rank to “where it belongs to”, you could have very well run a contest that asks the cheated bloggers to remove Ashwin’s link. Or ask them to write a post titled “Ashwin is full of crap”. But, you want them to change the links to you. This implies that you are greedy.

Phil has even gone to the extent of sending a Trackback each and every blog that entered Ashwin’s contest, to achieve the Technorati rank for himself. I don’t know how the blogosphere would react to this contest. But, this “con job really ticks me off“. After all, he is not going to cheat you directly as Ashwin did. He would give away the $100 that he promises. But still, this huge link bait is a cheat. I would suggest bloggers not to fall for it.

Note : Phil, you say “Backlinks are valuable. Be careful who you give them to“. I wanted to follow it. I planned, not to give you any backlinks. But your “Ashwin is full of crap” was very nice that i couldn’t resist.

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The affiliate link strategy that John Chow has been using on his blog has paid off nicely. John Chow uses PHP files to cloak his affiliate links. He has all those PHP files in a folder called “go” and links to them this way :

• Text Link Ads : http://www.johnchow.com/go/tla.php
• ReviewMe : http://www.johnchow.com/go/reviewme.php

This has now become useful, for Text Link Ads changed their affiliate link URL today. Today morning, i received the following email from TLA :

Shrihari,

As a Text Link Ads affiliate we’re pleased to let you know that we’ve begun using tinyurl.com to shorten and secure our affiliate referral links. We encourage you to update your affiliate links using the following:

• Homepage URL — http://tinyurl.com/2ukyfz
• Starter Promo URL — http://tinyurl.com/3botzy

** Please note that our old affiliate urls will no longer work in one week so please update today. Thank you!

As far as i know John Chow was the first to start this method of Affiliate linking. So, if you are not already following it, start doing it now. John Chow has written a detailed post on how to do this and how useful it is over here.

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A lot of hosted blogging platforms like Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad etc.. are very popular. But, is it a good decision to go with these services ? Of course, yes. Isn’t is better to go with a self-hosted solution ? The answer is Yes again. So, we’ll see few reasons why you should go with Hosted Solutions and few reasons why you shouldn’t.

Why you should choose a Hosted Blogging Platform ?

1. You do not need money upfront. Many services like Blogger and Wordpress.com are free of cost. You need not have your own domain name nor you need to worry about hosting.
2. These blogs are very easy to manage and also to customize them. You need not fight your way hard to install a theme or something like that.
3. No technical knowledge required. Whatever may go wrong, may it be with the blog or the hosting etc.. they will take care of it for you. You need not spend sleepless nights trying to fix it.

Why you shouldn’t choose a Hosted Blogging Platform ?

1. You can run your own ads. Services like Wordpress.com don’t allow you to run your own ads which can be annoying for those who blog for money.
2. You have broader options to customize your blog. You can have your own totally custom theme. You can install as many plugins you want etc…
3. Many people consider these services are inferior. Only very few such blogs have made to the Technorati top 100. Advertisers think twice before advertising on a remotely-hosted blog.
4. These services retain the right to take your blog down for objectionable content. So, its often dangerous.

These are just my views, though many would agree on these. If you have your own points to tell, please do add them in the comments below…

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Many times people get confused between what URLs are Search-Engine-Friendly(SEF) and what aren’t. The complex URL involving a lot of query strings etc.. appear mostly in user-generated-content scripts like Blogs and Forums. Take a look at the following URLs :

• Wordpress : http://www.yourwordpress.org/?p=176
• vBulletin : http://www.yourvbulletin.com/showthread.php?t=42918
• IPB : http://www.youripb.com/index.php?showtopic=236497
• SMF : http://www.yoursmf.com/index.php?topic=189291.0

Of course, these are very complex and looks pretty ugly. Further many of the URLs used in forums contain a lot of other query strings also like Session IDs, Post IDs in addition to Topic IDs etc… These kind of URLs are disliked by Search Engines. This gave rise to the SEF URLs.

With suitable plugins or settings, you can convert the above URLs as something like below :

• Wordpress : http://www.yourwordpress.org/p/176.html
• vBulletin : http://www.yourvbulletin.com/t42918.html
• IPB : http://www.youripb.com/topic/236497.html
• SMF : http://www.yoursmf.com/topic/189291.0.html

Thats it. These are better and are Search-Engine-Friendly URLs. But, are they easy to remember ? Would you be remembering Post IDs for the URLs. Of course, not. So, we need to modify these further to make them Human-Friendly as well.

So, you have to convert it into something like below :

• Wordpress: http://gotchance.com/2007/08/17/4-reasons-to-avoid-paid-reviews/
• vBulletin : http://www.yourvbulletin.com/your-topic-title/42918.html
• IPB : http://www.youripb.com/your-topic-title/236497.html
• SMF : http://www.yoursmf.com/your-topic-title/189291.0.html

Those are sexy and this kind of URLs are being used by most Blogs and Forums. Thats a very nice practice. Wordpress has it as an inbuilt feature. vBulletin has a plugin called vB SEO to do this. IPB has IPB Seo. SMF doesn’t have anything as advanced as vB SEO, but SEO 4 SMF pretty much serves the purpose.

If you don’t use any of these ready-made scripts, you can customize your URLs using .htaccess. We’ll see about it in the next post.

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Day by day, the amount of bloggers using paid review sites like ReviewMe, PayPerPost etc.. increases. But, this is really bad especially when bloggers start filling their blogs with these alone like how John Chow is doing.

Here are 4 reasons why you should avoid doing Paid reviews.

1) You become Greedy

I am not insisting that Paid reviews should be banned. Two or Three reviews per month would be good. But, once you start writing paid posts and once your review’s cost goes up, you become greedy and start doing more reviews. This is what happened with John Chow.

2) Your Drive your Visitors away

When you just start receiving review offers, you would try to fulfill each one of them. Some of them might not even be related to your blog’s topic. And, moreover all these reviews require you to reveal that it is a paid post. So, your visitors might be disappointed and may go away.

3) Google Effects

“Review for a linkback” contests are one of the most popular in the blogosphere. Google recently penalized John Chow for his linkbak promotion. It wouldn’t take much time for Google to penalize blogs for Paid Posts. So, it is better to stay away from them.

4) You Lose Creativity

Its natural. Once you start receiving a number of reviews, you start depending on it for content. So, gradually you lose Creativity. Less creativity ultimately means less visitors.

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