1) Contact Me

The contact page is the most important page of any blog. I do have a Contact page here and all bloggers who are serious about blogging have one. It not only helps your readers interact with you, but they also let you know of any errors that might pop up on your site. You don’t have one & don’t know how to make one ? Never worry. Kontactr is a service that i created, to make contact forms easier. It takes less than 30 seconds to setup your contact form (that depends on your Internet speed though :-P).

2) About Me

This is something that would make your blog more personal. It is also a part of personal branding. When they users get to know about you, they become more loyal to you. Take a look at some about me pages. I know that i don’t have an About Me page here. The reason is that i’m not able to come up with a good one. I will try to put one soon.

3) Advertise Page

If you seriously want to make money online, an Advertise page is a must. I don’t have one as my blog is new and doesn’t have Pagerank yet. I’m expecting PR4 in this update and if it hits, i’ll put up one. Check out John’s or Nate’s advertise pages to know what should be put up in an Advertise page. I do have an Advertise page on my other free webmaster resources website. Does it meet John’s and Nate’s quality ?

4) Search Page

The search feature comes packed with WordPress. But, if you have a Non-blog website, you should really consider getting your own Search facility. I get irritated when i see websites without a search box. You might give Google Co-op a try. Thats works very well.

5) Sitemap

A sitemap is helpful not only for Search engine robots, but, also for human visitors. It helps them find what pages are where. There are lots of sites (even a wordpress plugin) that help you create a sitemap for a robot. But, you should manually gather the links and organize them properly to make a sitemap for humans. Check out these sitemaps of some giants : Google, eBay, Apple.

People can generate Favicons for their own website or even create and publish an icon which will be listed in their gallery. There a lot of cool generic icons available, that you can choose for your website if you don’t have one already. I’m planning to create a favicon for GotChance. Lets see how it comes.

Some features in the iPhone app:

• Native iPhone-like story scrolling
• Mini permalink pages with top 5 comments
• Login and Digging
• Pagination
• Jump to any topic

Top Stories (24 hours/7 days) feature is coming soon. Looking forward to see iPhone versions of more site in few days.

You might be thinking, what is piratr.com all about? Well, i’m letting you in on a secret about piratr.com. We are going to launch a all-in-one sharing website. We are based in singapore and this will be the first singapore web application ever. If we dont have your support, who will?

They are planning to get the news to as many as possible before the launch. So they are running s contest and are giving away a free Nokia N70 Music Edition Mobile to users who subscribe to their mailing list before the launch. So, go now and try to get your hands on this one. Just 4 more days. So, let us wait and see.

I recommend this to anyone, who has free time and loves fun. If you’d like to add me as your friend, you are very much welcome. Here is my profile link : http://wis.dm/users/18190-hari-s.

Designing an online masterpiece with Wetpaint Please Touch is free and incredibly easy. Would-be artists can navigate to www.wetpaintpleasetouch.com and click on the “Paint” button to begin their group art project. Starting with a blank canvas, the user can dabble with a variety of painting tools and colors to create their mural. Photos and text can also be added to the painting. Once the masterpiece is complete, the canvas can be forwarded to friends so that they can contribute additional touches. Once finished, the paintings are automatically exhibited in an online gallery located at www.wetpaintgroupart.com. Visitors to the gallery can explore and rate their own paintings as well as those of others. Wetpaint Please Touch artwork can also be downloaded to post on other Wetpaint sites, MySpace pages, and Facebook profiles; or emailed to family and friends.

I tried a painting. But, unfortunately it didn’t turn out well. So here are a few examples from the Wetpaint Group Art Gallery :

Rivals.com provides the best coverage of college and high school sports on the Web, maintaining more than 100 college-specific sites and posting hundreds of updates each day. It also satisfies high school fans by following games and news in more than 35 states.

Rivals.com is also known for being the place for college sports fans to chat and share information, stats, and photos. In fact, its message boards are among the most popular in sports, and an important part of the business.

They have updated their header and have moved the Search box to the center. I failed to locate it on my first visit to the redesigned site. The have also made a lot nice changes to their embeddable player.

They have also modified the layout of the search results, the video page and some other pages too. The new video interface is a lot cooler than the older. People would get used to this interface quickly as a lot of other sites like Flickr and such use similar layouts.

Source : Google System

Currently, it gives a usual startup feel. The site is very attractive with large images, bright colors, big fonts etc… But as they say, we can expect a lot in the coming weeks.

OMG! is very much a work in progress, but since the appetite for this kind of news continues to surge, we wanted to launch the site as soon as possible. We have an aggressive plan for adding in even more excellent Yahoo! products in the coming months. Think Bix, Flickr and Messenger. And check back soon for our badge.

While we continue to “accessorize” the site with enhancements and features, do what the stars do: take a coffee break, post comments on any of the assets, consider laying off the bronzer and try to stay out of jail.

But i wonder why the page has a PR of ZERO. Most of the other country versions of Google like Australia, India, Samoa, UK, Canada etc.. have a PR ranging from 8-10. Thats makes me wonder if this is really google’s homepage or an illegal RIP off google. But Greg at Search Engine Land points out that it is really Google’s page.

Anyway, congrats to google for such cool new homepage. I hope, all other google’s homepages be updated to this version soon too.

This site will be really helpful under many circumstances. For eg, when 2 or more developers are working on a project from around the world. They can transfer code between them easily as they cannot do it with IMs. And they can do it without having to use email.

As i have pasted on my cl1p, kudos to the developer. This is what i’d call innovative.

Feng-GUI is a very interesting site, that i spent a lot of time on it. It is a Heatmap service. but unlike others, Feng-GUI does not use anything like Mouse movement, click tracking, server logs, eye-tracking technology etc.. The ViewFinder algorithm creates a Saliency attention heatmap. They say :

The ViewFinder Heatmap service, is an artificial intelligence service which simulates human visual attention and creates an attention heatmap.

What can you find with ViewFinder heatmap ?

• Which areas of the page/image gets most of the attention?
• Which areas are being ignored?
• Hotspots – Highest points of attention.

It is purely based on the colors of a site. It might not be an useful site for many. But its really interesting. Here are a few heatmaps :

They have a cool AJAX suggestions script that ofers suggestions as you type. This is pretty similar to what google has here :

The even have a simple toolbar, which is provided by Conduit. It works with both Firefox and IE.

When i look at the site from a developer point of view, i think it is not a complete search engine on its own. It uses some SE script (most probably sphider), restricting itself only to the forums.

To conclude, ForumLoose is a nice startup, but it has a long way to go. And there is already a big competitor – BoardTracker.

They say :

Linking to this website will increase its page rank. The top referers are displayed below
which will get your website visitors and also increase your own page rank and traffic.

My goal is to go from PR0 to PR10 within 730 days starting from 20th April 2006

They even have a countdown timer on the site. There are 337 more days to go from today. There also seems to be a lot of ads on the site. But, why would anyone link to this site. They have a reason. It like a contest.

When PageRank10.co.uk gets a GOOGLE PAGE RANK of 10 (pr10) the overall top referrer gets this domain and website for FREE!

I doubt it very much. I don’t know how far they’ll be truthful. But if i obtain any PR10 page, i wouldn’t give it away to anyone for anything.

They would be having a different idea. They know for sure that the site will not hit PR10 and their promise is that they will give it away for free only if it hits PR10. So they can easily make a lot of money by selling links on the page, when the site gets a PR or 8 or 9. Thats one nice idea to make money.

They have no means to prevent something from being posted. And there is no moderation too. So its a celebration for spammers. Check out the rumor that i posted few minutes ago.

The man behind this awesome(?) project is Guy Kawasaki. Thats the only reason many blogs like TechCrunch are writing about it. Guy is losing his name through this project.

Let these be on one side. On the other hand, most of the times, the site doesn’t load for me. Even if it does, it takes too long to load. I get weird errors on the site too. Once i got a “WordPress” error. Check it out below :

So, it definitely right to say that this site is a 99% failure.