Do it quickly. DreamHost is offering 1000 Geocities members two years of free hosting with free domain name registration. All you have to do is to add this below string to any of your Geocities page
“I’m off to DreamHost!”
Then sign up for paid hosting for 2 years. In the “Promotional Code” box enter the url of the GeoCities page having the phrase. You will get hosting worth $214.80 for free. Don’t forget to register a new TLD for yourself.
If you like to know more, read it in DreamHost’s blog. But you are running out of time!
Did you notice the policy change? Look before you settle for a free .co.cc domain. It is not free for life anymore. You can still register it for free but only for a year. Then you have to pay for renewals. Here is what they have to say in the FAQ:
1. Can I use my free domain forever? 
No, the free domain is available for only first year.
If you want to keep the free domain after a year, you should pay for it. |
I was doing a bit of search about it. Currently you have to pay $3 for each year renewal. You can renew for more years at a cheaper rate though. Here is the rate:
- 1 year – $3
- 2 years – $5
- 3 years – $7
- 4 years – $9
- 5 years – $10
I can’t see any point of using them anymore. If you have to pay later, why not pay now & buy a genuine TLD. Do you know the worst thing? They are asking the existing account holders to pay for their old domains renewal. Poor users! They thought it is free for life & put their hard work building and promoting a site under .co.cc. But they have to pay from now. They would curse their luck why didn’t they start a site on a proper TLD. This is mean from .co.cc!
Yeah! That’s official. You can find it from Yahoo Geocities Help page:
Why is GeoCities not accepting new customers?
We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways. We will be closing GeoCities later this year.
So a long standing free hosting is going down. Though I didn’t like GeoCities, it was at least reliable. Existing customers don’t have to panic immediately. You can still enjoy the service till later this year. Yahoo will update you about the closing date. But be prepared & start searching for a new hosting.
By the way, not only the Free GeoCities accounts but also the Plus accounts will be going down:
Will something happen to my GeoCities Free or Plus account?
Later this year we will be closing all GeoCities accounts and web sites. We’ll send you more details this summer.
Whole Geocities is closing down. Don’t make any mistake about that.
This is a very common question asked by bloggers using Google Blogger platform. I don’t know exactly why. Personally I like the navigation bar. It gives you quite a few options:
- You can search a blog quite efficiently
- You can go to a random blog if you have time & wish to surf
- Moreover one can report to Blogger easily for objectionable content (It can be a reason to dislike for certain blogs. There are tons of blogspot blogs providing illegal or copyright-violated contents.)
Besides it don’t look bad at the top. It’s like a branding sign that you are using Blogger.
One reasonable reason that I can think is that you are using Adsense for Search. Then you don’t want your readers using the navbar search option.
But the choice is upto you. So here is the procedure:
- Log in to Blogger. From your Dashboard select Layout> Edit HTML
- On the Edit Template section find the line at the top
/* Variable definitions
- Just above it add this CSS definition
#navbar-iframe {
display: none !important;
}
You are done. Your navbar is successfully removed.
Sometimes when you comment on a Wordpress blog you get a reply email from the blog author thanking you for your input. As a first time visitor it catches the eye of the reader. It shows that the blog author is taking care of his readers. And if the blog consists a bit of quality content, there is every possibility that the reader will subscribe to it. Thus increase your blog community.
But how do the authors do that? Doing it manually is a tedious work, especially if you have a decently popular blog. Comment Relish Wordpress plugin comes to your rescue. Install it & it will automatically send an email to the reader who commented for the first time. You can modify your mail body from the Comment Relish preferences page in Settings. You can add link (you should include blog feed link) and numerous tags to include author, timestamp, comment url etc. in the body.
Make it more personalize & build relation with your new readers. This plugin has been updated recently to fix problems with Wordpress 2.7. So you can implement it with latest Wordpress version without any poblem.
Most of you register & verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools pretty soon as you start a new website. But have you verified your site with the similar service from Yahoo? As a newbie you often miss the point for using Site Explorer. Registering your site with them will allow you to access detailed stats & a few cool tools to optimize your site for Yahoo search. Detailed stats include:
- Crawled Pages
- All Known Pages
- Known Hosts on This Site
- Hosts linking to Site
- Domains linking to Site
- Hosts Outlinked from Site
- Domains Outlinked from Site
Besides you can see if Yahoo has found any errors while crawling your site so that you can rectify it.
Now I am telling you a very important thing if you use dynamic urls for tracking session ids or referrals (like http://example.com/store?prod=4&sid=jnd7234x or http://example.com/blog?src=feed). Then same pages of your site may get indexed with different dynamic parameters. Yahoo tries to resolve these duplicate pages to one. But still problem may persist. In Site Explorer you can enter default action for these parameters like removing it or replacing it with default value while indexing. Thus you can remove the problem of duplicate pages & increase your site ranking by reducing fragmentation of links & anchor text. You can learn more about it here.
You can even delete a specific url/path of your site that you don’t want to get indexed. All in all, a pretty handy tool to do SEO for Yahoo. So don’t just concentrate only on Google tools.
I have previously written a post about updating Twitter automatically with every new blog post that you make. I was using Feedlr service & quite happy with it. But recently I noticed that my last blog post wasn’t showed in my Twitter update. So I checked Feedlr & saw it suspended. I visited the Feedlr blog. There I found that Feedlr was having repeated posts problem due some bugs in the code. The admin of Feedlr is now planning to rectify the code & migrate the site to the Google App. But it will take time.
So I am moving to the other service Twitterfeed. You will keep on getting my latest blog update through Twitter if you wish.
While browsing I have found this cool free tool that can get something out of your blog scrapers. Go & register your site with Tynt Tracer. You will get a line of code that you have to add before </body> tag of your blog page. You can easily find it in Wordpress by going to footer.php file. Now run “Test My Script” to see if it has been correctly installed. You are done. Now when a blog scraper copies any part of your content a link back to your site is added to the copied content. The linkback can be removed manually. But very few scrapers would care to see & do so. Check the stats & find out who copied from you.
Perhaps most of you know that favicon doesn’t help directly in SEO. And that’s very true. But that doesn’t mean that you should neglect this tiny part of your site design.
Most of the sites now a days have their own favicons. And if you don’t have it, it looks like you are not updating your site to the latest technology. Favicon gives your site a more professional look & better way of branding. Whenever someone bookmarks your site, he or she can find it out easily from the crowd. In tabbed browsing it helps user to identify which tab has which site. A custom favicon means a better chance of getting noticed.
There is another reason for using favicon. If you don’t use custom favicon you will get 404 errors in your server log every time one bookmarks your site using IE or everytime someone opens your site using browsers like Firefox or Opera. This is because the browser first requests the server for the custom favicon. If the favicon is not present in the server the browser uses its default icon. And a faviocn.ico 404 Not Found error is created in the log. But there will be no error for your user. He will see your site as it is without any problem. Still if you monitor your error log regularly, remember a favicon of your own can clear lots of the errors.
