.mx ccTLD was launched in 1989 in Mexico. But it was only available for limited registrations to schools & universities. Others had to use sub-extensions like .com.mx or .net.mx etc. As .edu.mx sub-extension was introduced for school & colleges during 1996, .mx domain got disappeared from the seen in 1997. Now after 20 years of its initial launch it is going to be relaunched publicly.
Like others it has also a sunrise period & a landrush period. Here is the registration schedule:
- Pre-registration period (May 01 to July 31, 2009 ): If you own domain name with any of the five .mx sub-extensions (.com.mx, .net.mx, .org.mx, .edu.mx, .gob.mx), you can register the corresponding name under .mx extension. If the name is same for two or more applications, the name will be registered under the owner of the oldest sub-extension.
- Quiet period (August 01 to August 31, 2009): The applications received during pre-registration will be further processed.
- Initial registration period (September 01 to October 31, 2009): .mx domain will be open to every one for registration on a first come first served basis.
It can be useful if you have more than just a blog. Think you write a blog under a particular niche. Sometimes you write a few articles about the same topic in EzineArticles & other article directories. You would like to share all of these with your readers. Even you may want to share what you read or bookmark on social bookmarking sites about the matter. Just go to RSS Mix & enter respective RSS feeds into the box. Click “Create!” button. You will get a single RSS feed that will combine feeds from all of these sites.
The webmaster of Bloggerforum has suspended any new posting for the time being. But why? Because of overwhelming spam! It’s odd for a popular forum in blogosphere. But I have to say I am not that much surprised. I have been a member of the forum since 2006 & have seen it become one of the most spam-prone forums.
It was never that strict at all. Users could easily take advantage of it by posting their own links as they wish. But the most annoying ones are the irrelevant spams like hosting, shoes or gadgets advertising. Recently I post a thread asking what was going on. The webmaster replied that it was not easy preventing spam & we only see tiny portion of hundreds of spammy threads that the moderators delete regularly. But I have to say there was something lacking otherwise it shouldn’t have been so vulnerable to spam.
Now it seems they have become so annoyed that one moderator has left. And Steve, the webmaster of the forum is now rethinking about the whole purpose of the forum. Here is the link to the last post by Steve that says all.
Good luck to Steve! I hope when it open again fully it would be a hard nut to crack by spammers.
Google Webmaster Central Team have introduced a new YouTube channel that will host webmaster related videos. The first video is already up & they are planning to release more videos soon.
If you are very fond of adding YouTube videos in your Wordpress blog, then this plugin might be a great help to you. This plugin is called Viper’s Video Quicktags. When you will install the plugin it will add a new button (in Visual editor too) to the write screen. You just have to enter the YouTube url into the prompt box. You don’t have to worry about going to HTML mode to embed the url.
Besides you can easily configure how your video will be displayed like width, height, color or alignment etc. quite easily. It doesn’t break XHTML code. That’s a plus point too.
It supports other video sites like Google Video, MySpaceTV, Flicker or DailyMotion etc. except YouTube.
Google Japan’s PR has come down to 5 from usual 9. But Why? Google has penalized Google Japan for running pay-per-post campaigns to promote their product. Google Japan is fighting hard to dislodge Yahoo as the no.1 search engine in Japan. Japan’s blogosphere was filled with reports that Google hired Cyberbuzz, a Tokyo-based internet marketing company to promote their Hot Keywords Widget as per per post basis. You can read TechCrunch & Asiajin’s follow ups on this.
Soon Google Japan apologized:
Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.
It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.
And now its PageRank is down to 5. Here is what Matt Cutts said about the penalty in Twitter:
Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while.
So Google penalized itself for paying for blogger reviews. That’s bizarre.
I was surfing through the net & just stuck into this new Twitter marketing site. Its called TwitterGetter. Already a buzz has been created around it. It follows free viral marketing strategy that can achieve you hundreds of followers quite quickly. The best thing is that you don’t have to follow all of them. Just follow only a few at the start & join the program. Then let your referrals do the work for you. You can obviously remove your following list if you don’t like them.
Why don’t you give it a try? There is no harm in trying.
When Google started as search engine it used to consider hyphens as blank spaces between the words in file names but not the underscores. This trend went on for several years. As Matt Cutts wrote in his blog in August 2005, Google was still considering only hyphens as the word separators. But situation has changed ever since. In mid 2007 Matt Cutts wrote a post that Google was then looking into the matter of considering underscore as word separator. The matter was not still fully resolved then. But Google’s idea & technology continued to evolve. Now they use a better word parsing method that can find words even if you don’t separate them. But still it is better if you separate them so that Google doesn’t parse it into some unwanted words.
Both underscores & dashes can be used as word separators now. I am just giving an example. I searched Google with the words “ppc web spy” screenshot. As you can see from below ppc web spy has been highlighted in the url name even if it is separated by underscores. There is hardly any difference between underscores & hyphens.
But as I have asked the question in the title “Which is Better?” Now from Google’s perspective I can quote Google support:
Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.
So if you are a stern Google follower you will still follow the long standing word separator. Isn’t it 
By the way, if you don’t know what PPC Web Spy is, I have previously written a post on it. You can check it.
Google has launched Adsense for Mobile Search Beta few days ago. Mobile network operators & mobile website owners can easily embed this google search box in their mobile portals or sites & share the revenue generated by these searches.
Mobile users can access this Google search that includes comprehensive web search, image, local & news results- all formatted for mobile phones. The search is Google-hosted. But you can add your own logos & linkback to your sites as you can see from the screenshot:
It is in private beta now. So you have to apply through this form to test the program. Remember submitting application doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be accepted.
Have you lost your Wordpress password? This is the easiest way to recover your Wordpress password if you are a novice about codes & databases. If you have FTP access i.e. access to your root directory, you can use reset your lost Wordpress administrator password file. You just have to upload this php file to the root directory of your blog & open it with your browser. Follow simple instructions & enter your new password. After you have changed your password, don’t forget to remove the file from your server.
This is very handy if for any case you can’t get the password to work that was emailed to you by Wordpress. And if you are using free hosting for your Wordpress blog, most cases SMTP server won’t be available to you. So you can’t even use the “Lost your password?” link.
Forget to mention, this file continues to work with Wordpress 2.7.
