Each time you edit your blog post Wordpress sends a ping to the blog pinging services automatically. So if you edit the post several times after it has been published, Wordpress will send pings same number of times unnecessarily. Blog directories and blog ping services like Ping-o-Matic track those pings & based upon the frequency of those pings they may consider your blog as a potential spam & ban it from their services.
So if you update your blog posts a lot, you better have some extra protection from being marked as a spammer. There are some plugins that can prevent Wordpress autoping. One popular Wordpress plugin is MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. You just have to install it. Then you will get the options to enable and disable pinging. Even you can set the maximum number of pings at a certain time interval like one ping in 15 minutes. And from the log below the page you can find the pings that the plugin has prevented and the pings that went through. A cool plugin altogether. But for activation of this plugin you have to submit your email address and click on the confirmation link in the email. From then on, you will receive newsletters and offers from MaxBlogPress. You can unsubscribe from the mailing list any time.
But what if you get the exact same plugin without having to disclose your email address? CBNet Ping Optimizer is just a perfect alternative to MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. Everything is same. You will get the exact same functionalities and same user interface and you don’t have to register your email address.
So what will you choose 
So I was going through the news of Yahoo collaborating with Twitter to share social content all across Yahoo network. Here are the main things that is going to happen:
- Yahoo users can have direct access to their Twitter feeds directly from Yahoo account. That means they can read, share any content from Yahoo or update their status in Twitter when they are logged in Yahoo network.
- Social actions like blogs, buzzes or article ratings that users have allowed to appear in Yahoo! Updates will be shared with their Twitter friends automatically.
- Yahoo Search and Yahoo media properties like sports, news, finance and entertainment will now include real time public updates from Twitter. So you will know the latest social buzz on your favourite area.
This collaboration is understandable. With new Google Buzz, Twitter will not want to leave an inch of space. And Yahoo is not going to make it easy for their strongest rival. But some months ago Yahoo launched a service called Yahoo Meme. We thought of it as a rival to Twitter microblogging service. But as predicted it didn’t get that popular. So perhaps Yahoo have given up hope on Meme as rival to Twitter, and they would rather try to block the popularity of Google Buzz with the help of Twitter. Google is their arch rival after all
Yeah, the deal is approved by both European and US regulators as a latest news says in the BBC website. The European Commission ruled that the deal “would not significantly impede effective competition” as together Yahoo and Microsoft control less than 10% of search market compared to 90% by Google in Europe and so it will rather help to increase competition in search engine market by making Microsoft a stronger competitor to Google. The deal also got the approval of the Department of Justice in the United States.
Microsoft and Yahoo have announced that they would start implementing the deal “in the coming days”. The boll is surely rolling.
Did you check Google’s new social sharing service Google Buzz? If you are a regular Gmail user like me, then you probably already have tried it. With the integration of Flicker, Picasa, Google Reader, Blogger and even Twitter, this has all the potential to give Twitter a hard time as a microblogging service. On one line, it’s just like Twitter where you can update your status messages with your followers. Here you can even upload media like pictures and video.
Take a look at the picture to get some of the coolest features
It will give you the feel of Twitter when you see it, and with a lot more options for interaction with your contacts.
And as I have told you, you can integrate Twitter to your Google Buzz as Twitter is a free application. That means you can access all tweets from Buzz. And as Google is rolling it out as an integration to Gmail, lots of users will get notified and try it without much fuss. Besides, any Google product gets the attention without much fuss
So we have to wait and see, where Google Buzz takes us in the microblogging market.
Especially, if you are new to blogging and using Blogger as your blogging medium then you should be aware of this limit in Blogger blog. You can only upload up to 1 GB of photos in total for your blog. Blogger uses the Picasa Web Album to store the photos that you upload for your blog posts. The maximum size limit is 1GB for free account. So if you post high-resolution photos from the beginning indiscriminately for your blogspot blog posts, you will run out of space in the long run. Then you have to buy extra space to accomodate your new pictures or you have to delete pictures from your old blog posts.
So obviously you will try to make your blog look good and attractive by showing pictures. But if you intend to use the blogspot blog for long time & don’t intend to pay at all, use your space cautiously.
1 GB is quite a large space at least for pictures
Yeah, just few hours ago I got a mail from Google Apps team. In 2010 they are planning to phase out support for several old browsers that are not supported even by their own manufacturers. And that includes Internet Explorer 6. This is what they have said in the email:
Dear Google Apps admin,
In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.
We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.
Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.
Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.
In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.
Thank you for your continued support!
Sincerely,
The Google Apps team
So if you have any webpage created with Google Apps then I hope you have no issues with the old browser users having problem with your site. Besides it will show them message to update their browsers. I know as a webmaster you would like to reach as many readers as possible. But still if someone wants to use IE6 now, I am not going to take the responsibility to show a good webpage. IE6 really sucks!
I have seen many Wordpress blogs taking this approach. They use to close comments after 30 days or 2 months of writing the blog post. So if you have some current affairs blog or a blog that updates your on offers & price of products, you can think of trying it. But I am not a big supporter of this method. Even with those blogs you may want to comment something so that later users get the correct info for that time. Only solid reason that I find is for dofollow blogs. If you have a dofollow blog, other webmasters might try to take advantage & there is every possibility that they would make a meaningless comment on an old blog post that has nothing to do in current context.
So now I will just tell you how to do it because the choice is up to you
So to close comments on Wordpress blogs after some specific days just go to Settings> Discussion from your Wordpress dashboard. Search for the line “Automatically close comments on articles older than” & then you can find the option to specify the number of days after publishing the blog post. Don’t forget to check the checkbox & save it. You are done. Comment option for all of your Wordpress blog posts will now get closed after that specified days.
Have a look at this fun quiz from Google for webmasters. The questions are all objective multiple choices and are based on common queries in Google Webmaster Help Forum. I checked the questions & they have some pretty good questions about the problems that you face regularly as a webmaster like on multiple domains & ccTLDs, url changes or robots.txt etc. You can take the quiz till this January 27.
The answers are not available right away. Google will write a follow up blog post in their webmaster blog with the correct answers. Don’t forget to save your answers now before submitting. Then you can realize if you are making any common mistakes.
First thing first, this is only for Indian sites. Google India has opened a Health Clinic for your site. Actually in this service Google Search Quality team will review some handpicked sites. They will analyze & suggest you improvements so that you can find out what is going wrong & rectify accordingly to get better visibility in Google search results. You need to send your request for free site analysis through this form. The applications will be accepted till this 20th January. Remember you must have your site registered in Google Webmaster Tools & your site should meet Google webmaster guidelines. So hurry up & see whether you can get a free site check up from Google
Do you know Yahoo has a media player that can auto-detect & play all the mp3 links on your site without taking your visitors away from your own page? Yahoo Media Player is still in beta. But what attracts me most is its simplicity to use. From a webmaster perspective, all you need to do is to add a single line of HTML code in your script. And all the things are taken care of automatically. Now whenever you post a mp3 link in your site or in your blog post, Yahoo Media Player will detect it & add a play button just before it.
And when user clicks on that link a floating media player panel will open at the bottom of your page. It will play the next track automatically when the current one is finished & even has a button to play the next track if you don’t want to listen to the current track anymore. It’s like making your page an active audio playlist.
As, you can see, it is quite simple & soothing to the eye. And, yet it has all the basic functionalities. So if you post lots of mp3s in your blog & want users listen to them & stay at your page, it can be a handy tool. I tested it in a Wordpress blog. I just added the single line of HTML in a widget & it worked fine.
