In what ways did you implement what you learned on your own blog?

I quickly realised that Adsense was not a strategy for me moving
forward. There were far better ways to monetize my blog. That is
why I started working on my own product: an eBook with 30 London
Cycling Routes). The eBook has been a huge success and I wouldn't
have thought to create it without the course. I've had interest
from people wanting to publish it and it continues to bring in a
steady income that pays my rent.

I also started an Aweber newsletter. This helped me connect with my
audience and have their permission to keep in contact regularly. As
of today I have over 2,000 subscribers on my list.

My traffic grew a lot (I am receiving over 70,000 visits per
month now) and I practically went from $0 to $1,000 monthly in
revenues. The money I made with the blog paid for two weeks in
Brazil enjoying Rio De Janeiro. Since then things have continued to
grow and so many opportunities have arisen, such as collaborating
on an iPhone application and interviewing the Mayor of London. I'm
sure without this strong start to my blogging career I would be in
a 9-5 job now.
 

Read More

Howto's Tutorials

Linux / UNIX Clustering (High Availability) Tutorials

The concept of a cluster is that the cluster itself appears on the outside as a single system. A cluster consists of two or more Real Computers referred to as nodes or members of a cluster. The components of a cluster are commonly, but not always, connected to  each other through fast Local Area Networks

What is RCRON & How to Setup High Availability of cron Jobs Using RCRON

rcron is a tool that helps  system administrators  in setting up cron jobs redundancy and failover over groups of machines. RCRON ensure that a job installed .

Yum Command - RPM Based Package Manager with Practical Examples

YUM Stands for Yellowdog Updater Modified. YUM is an interactive, rpm based, package manager. Yum is available in different Linux OS Like Redhat , Centos , Fedora etc. It can also perform installation of new packages, removal of old packages and perform queries on the installed and/or available..

Difference Between Qemu and KVM

Qemu is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer. When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OS and programs made for one machine (e.g. an ARM board) on a different machine (e.g. your own PC). By using dynamic translation, Qemu achieves very good performance.
How To Install and Configure VMWARE

To Install and Configure Vmware Following Components are Required like ESXI Server, Vcenter Server & VSphere, Active directory and DNS Sever

Read More

Web Directories For SEO

• Is it ranking in the SERPs? - If a site ranks well in the search engines it stands a good chance to be trusted by them. Plus even if those links do not count to help boost your ranking they still can drive direct traffic. I frequently see directories like Business.com and JoeAnt ranking in the search results.
  
• Do they sell direct links? - Direct links are more likely to be taken as editorial votes of quality. Some redirected links may still count, but many of them will not.
• How frequently is their site crawled? - You need to check and see if the category pages are being cached in Google, and how frequently they are cached. If their pages are not getting cached or have not been cached for 6 months then the odds are pretty low of that link carrying much weight.
• What is the quality ratio? - Does it list anyone who pays? Or do they hold sites to some quality standards? Do they categorize sites properly? Or do they sell links to anyone in any category, even if it is the wrong one? Does each page have unique content? Are most pages empty - adding nothing but clutter to search indexes? If they do not help engines categorize the web (ie: no editorial value) then eventually the engines are not going to trust their votes.
• What is the ad ratio? - Are all the listings paid? Or will they list some useful sites without payment? Does the site look like it aims to serve end users? Or does it look like it exists just to get AdSense ads or affiliate ads indexed?
• Do they sell outbound sitewide links? - Prettymuch the equivalent of selling out - when a directory puts sitewide outbound links on their site (especially if those links are to junky sites) the odds are pretty good that the links are not going to count much.
• Is it decrepit? - Directories which have 50% of their links broken or pointing at URLs that have been purchased by spammers or domainers are not going to pack as much punch as sites which have few broken links. I recently bought a 25 page directory that has not been updated in a couple years, and it had about 400 broken links in it. Not good!
• Does it have unique content? - Is it a DMOZ clone? Are its listings manually compiled and unique from what is offered at other directories?
• Is it relevant to my site? - Many small niche directories can drive decent value due to offering decent co-citation data and having exceptionally relevant traffic streams.

Bob Mutch recently rated 40 top directories based on their age, how many edu and gov links they have and whether or not they are listed in DMOZ and Yahoo!. I would contest that WhatUSeek isn't a real directory, ISEDB is a directory of search engines and directories, and that Vlib.org should be counted as a directory, but other than those minor points this is a pretty cool study.

No	URL	EDU	GOV	Age
1	www.dmoz.org	128,000	761	1999
2	dir.yahoo.com	111,000	2,060	1995
3	www.lii.org	10,400	110	1998
4	www.business.com	2,420	73	1998
5	sbd.bcentral.com	955	23	1999
6	www.whatuseek.com	273	2	1996
7	www.cannylink.com	204	1	1997
8	www.123world.com	123	2	1999
9	www.americasbest.com	99	13	1998
10	www.joeant.com	106	1	2000
11	www.chiff.com	105	1	1998
12	www.mavicanet.com	64	1	1999
13	www.botw.org	50	1	1996
14	www.elib.org	43	0	2003
15	www.isedb.com	33	0	2002
16	www.rlrouse.com	27	0	2002
17	www.gimpsy.com	23	0	2001
18	www.goguides.org	22	0	2001
19	www.uncoverthenet.com	18	2	2004
20	www.qango.com	19	1	1998

I think the inbound link profile is a good starting point for rating (when you add it to the other criteria I mentioned above), but what I think is even more interesting is how quickly they fall off in the quantity of quality links.

Read More

Link Building Activities

Link Baiting: Create compelling content for advertising and increase visitor interaction on your website. Visitors that click on this content land on your website to take a look at the irresistible offer.

Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking of your website is a good way to get increased amount of traffic drawn to your website.

Link wheel: A link wheel is the process of creating 12 or more new blogs on a particular topic. On each of those sites, you write 200 words of unique content, and include 1 link to your targeted site and 1 link to one of your other blogs.

Reverse SEO: It is a process by which you can improve the ranking of your website and decrease the ranking of your competitor’s website. And the method used is – heavily spam the competitor’s website with a lot of irrelevant links.

Link farms: If your site has lots and lots of links linking to you and all these links are low in quality, built for the sole purpose of increasing inbound links, Google looks at these as “Link Farms”. Link Farms are deliberately created with a whole bunch of low quality links.

Read More

Codeigniter count_all for pagination

work on count_all condition.. you can use below method to find out total number of rows..

public function count_all() {
    $this->db->select ( 'COUNT(*) AS `numrows`' );
    $this->db->where ( array (
            'type' => 'Original'
    ) );
    $query = $this->db->get ( 'story_tbl' );
    return $query->row ()->numrows;
}

ou could also use the built-in num_rows() function...



$query = $this->db->where('type', 'original')->get('story_tbl');
return $query->num_rows();

Read More

Matt Cutts Talks SEO for Google

The latest Google Webmaster video features Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts talking about what webmasters can expect to see in the next few months in terms of SEO for Google, particularly changes combating black hat web spam from many different angles in a variety of areas.
Here are nine search and SEO changes webmasters will likely see – although, as always, Cutts warns nothing is set in stone and it should be taken with a grain of salt.

1. Next Generation of Penguin – Penguin 2.0

This update is to try and target more black hat web spam. The new Penguin 2.0, which is the name Google uses internally for the next gen Penguin, will be much more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0 and it will go deeper and have a larger impact than the original.

2. Advertorials

Many advertorials (a.k.a., native advertising) violate Google's quality guidelines. More importantly, they should not flow PageRank.
Google is planning to be a lot stronger on their enforcement of these types of paid links and advertising, disguised as “advertorials”. Cutts did clarify there is nothing wrong with advertorials, simply that they don't want them to be abused for PageRank and linking reasons. If you use advertorials, Cutts suggested that they should be clearly marked and obvious that it is paid advertising.

3. “Payday Loans” in .co.uk

Cutts mentioned that this is a problematic search, and there are others like it, so they are tackling it a couple of different ways. For those that play in that space, however, you're out of luck since Cutts isn't revealing exactly how they are dealing with it, just that it will be happening.
He said that they are targeting specific areas (another example he included was porn queries) that have traditionally been more spammy.

4. Devaluing Upstream Linking

Again, Cutts isn't going into details about this, but they are working on making link buying less effective and have a couple ideas for detailed link analysis to tackle this issue.

5. Hacked Sites

They want to roll out a next generation of hacked detection, as well as being able to notify webmasters better. They would like to be able to point webmasters to more specific information, such as whether they are dealing with malware or a hacked site, and to hopefully clean it up.

6. Authority

If Google's algorithms believe you or your site is an authority in a particular area, they want to make sure those sites rank a little bit higher than other sites.

7. Panda

They are looking for some additional signals for sites that are in the "gray area" or "border zone", and looking for other signals that suggest the site truly is high quality, so it will help those sites who have been previously impacted by Panda.

8. Changes to Cluster of Results From the Same Site

If you're doing deep searches in Google, and going back 5, 6 or more results pages deep, you can see the same site popping up with a cluster of results on those deep pages.
Google is looking into a change where once you have seen a cluster of results from the same site, you will be less likely to see more and more from that same site as you go deeper. Cutts mentioned this as being something that came specifically from user feedback.

9. More Information for Webmasters

Cutts said they want to be able to keep giving webmasters more specific and detailed information via webmaster tools. He mentions specifically example URLs to help webmasters diagnose problems on their site.
He believes that the changes will really make a difference with the quality of the search results, as well as impact the amount of spam that is showing up.

Bottom Line

Cutts says if you are focused on high quality content, you don't have much to worry about. But if you're dabbling in the black hat arts, you might have a busy summer.

Read More

Display Advertising white papers

The rise of mobile smartphones and tablets makes email ever more essential. This study across the thousands of newsletters on the LiveIntent Exchange reveals how to best optimize your email design for ad revenue and engagement.

High impact search campaigns are not for the weak-hearted. With new enhanced campaigns, retargeting, display, and mobile options, advertisers have the ability to design and target campaigns with amazing granularity - and with impressive results.

Digital advertising has been known to provide marketers with tangible results, answers to their questions about ad campaign performance, and guidance on where to spend their money.    

Read More

Online Marketing-Email Strategy

Email Strategy  help you maximize your email marketing efforts. Learn about deliverability, effective communication, email formatting, tracking ROI .

• How email strategy can help you meet your marketing objectives through lead generation, lead nurturing, direct sales, and customer retention.
• The key components of lead generation via email, utilizing calls to action and landing pages, and the advantages of using in-house and third-party email lists.
• The advantages of building a "drip campaign" into your email strategy to nurture and move leads through the sales cycle.
• The benefits of direct sales emails and what you can do to successfully create high sales turnaround using calls to action and deep linking to appropriate pages.
• The value of a quality email strategy that will help you retain customers and build relationships with your readers, keeping your brand at the top of their minds.

Read More

Most Popular Keywords

• Google Trends: Allows you to tap into Google's database of searches, to determine which keywords are most popular. View the volume of search queries over time (since 2004) worldwide or by regions and subregions, by languages, categories, and in Google properties such as news, image, or product search. Compare multiple terms, as well. Offers a list of what is trending now in Hot Searches.
• Google Autocomplete: Google's Autocomplete is a tool that can help round out your research by providing keywords as seen through the searchers experience. When a searcher begins to type into the search box on Google.com, additional keywords are offered for searches that could be similar to what is typed. Google's algorithm works to predict search queries in real-time based on indexed web pages, personalized search history, other users' search activity, and Google+ (for person's name). Since the results are personalized, you may wish for more control over the Autocomplete feature. This can be accomplished by logging out of Google, turning off customizations, deleting web history, and Google+ settings.
• Yahoo Buzz Log: Shows top overall keyword searches by Yahoo users with rank, buzz score, and how the search volume has moved in rank. There are additional options to narrow the buzz log by categories such as actors, movies, music, etc.
• AOL Search Trends: Lists the top 50 search trends both hourly and daily on AOL. Data in AOL contains web and image searches (powered by Google), video (powered by Blinkx), News, Shopping, Maps, and Yellow Pages (powered by various providers).

YouTube Trends: Provides insights into popular videos based on keywords and video views. Trending Topics are algorithmically-generated topics from keywords in the title, tags, and description of the video within sets of videos that are currently rising in popularity. Trending videos are based on embedded video views and views on YouTube.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Enter a term or terms, to see search volume and keyword competition. Advanced options and filters allow you to refine by locations and languages and by desktop or mobile. 

Fastest Falling Global Queries

Who lost the most traction in 2011? As Google Zeitgeist reveals the queries that fell fastest this year; see if you can spot the trend:

1. MySpace 
2. Hi5 
3. Mebo (we believe they meant Meebo and not the misspelling) 
4. Nasza Klasa (social network) 
5. Netlog (social network) 
6. Baidu 
7. Wer Kennt Wen (social network) 
8. Meinvz (social network) 
9. Hotmail Correo 
10. Delta Airlines

Fastest Rising People Queries in the World

Google has released their Zeitgeist 2011 data, complete with the top 10 search queries in sports, entertainment, news, and more for 48 countries. Zeitgeist’s lists allow you to compare results of any two queries on each list across various sliding time spans on an interactive graph, with hyperlinked icons indicating where news articles are available.
Global data shows that Rebecca Black was the fastest rising query in the world, with searches for her name increasing more than 10,000 percent in 2011. Google+ and Ryan Dunn were the next fastest growing queries worldwide.

Read More

Download file using curl in php

You would need to feed CURLOPT_URL the full URL to the file. Also if you want to download a file you might want to save it somewhere.

Working example:

$curl = curl_init();
$file = fopen("ls-lR.gz", 'w');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "ftp://ftp.sunet.se/ls-lR.gz"); #input
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FILE, $file); #output
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$_FTP[username]:$_FTP[password]");
curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
fclose($file);

I used the ftp_* functions for ftp, in place of curl, because curl 
tried to change directories, but its not allowed on this ftp server, so 
the code i used is;



$local_file = 'output.rar';
$server_file = '/somedir/1/bar/foo/somearchive.rar';
$ftp_user_name='anonymous';
$ftp_user_pass='mozilla@example.com';
$ftp_server='server.host';
// set up basic connection
$conn_id = ftp_connect($ftp_server);

// login with username and password
$login_result = ftp_login($conn_id, $ftp_user_name, $ftp_user_pass);

/* uncomment if you need to change directories
if (ftp_chdir($conn_id, "<directory>")) {
    echo "Current directory is now: " . ftp_pwd($conn_id) . "\n";
} else { 
    echo "Couldn't change directory\n";
}
*/

// try to download $server_file and save to $local_file
if (ftp_get($conn_id, $local_file, $server_file, FTP_BINARY)) {
    echo "Successfully written to $local_file\n";
} else {
    echo "There was a problem\n";
}

// close the connection
ftp_close($conn_id);
It works !!

Read More