Digital Musings

Digital Musings Comic Strip: Google Page Rank Hoopla

Recently there was a great Flurry over the Page Rank Update by Google, and its going on. You never know when the sky is going to fall on your head. This strip is based on those “ongoing” events. Enjoy. Please do comment and let me know any ideas that you may have for the next strip. Full credit would be given to the commentators Blog/Website.

Has the PR update bugged you too? Share you thoughts and opinions in the comments section below or in the forum , and yes, If you don’t want to miss out any upcoming Comic Strips, Do subscribe to the Digital Musings Feed.

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my Full RSS feed. Join the Discussions about Blogging and Social Networking in the Forum.Thanks for visiting!

Posted in Digital Musings, Google, Popular | 13 Comments »

Digital Musings Comic Strip - The Premier

As a kid I have always been a fan of various comic strips.Even today when I read the daily news I go make it a point to go through the Comic Strips. I especially enjoy Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes and of course good old Dilbert. I have always wanted to be a part of a Comic strip and something that is related to what I go through in day to day life.Its always to read a light hearted post from time to time.
Most of the time when I am not at work I am involved in my Blog and being a part of the Blog-O-Sphere. So I thought of starting a comic strip that revolves round the Blog-O-Sphere. I call it the Digital Musings. Let me introduce you to the cast of the Comic strip.

Chotu is a kid who was born in a world of Computers and Internet. He is fascinated by them and has the tendency to ask a lot of questions and learn as much as he can as soon as he can.

Mark IV is my alter ego. He is a typical cynic, criticizing almost everything in his way. In real life I am can’t be much critical and I tend to take it easy.

He has got a totally opposite persona than mine, so much so that his name is Mark IV < <>> VI kraM (reverse of Vikram-thats me)

Blog-O-Bear is the affectionate and loving Bear from the Blog-O-Sphere. I haven’t seen anybody naming any character based on the Blog-O-Sphere yet, so I thought why not get it started from here. He represents the general spirit of the Blog-O-Sphere, whether its supporting a certain cause or agitating on some issue that haunts the Blog-O-Sphere from time to time.

Stickies are one of the most popular characters on the internet. I am happy to welcome them aboard the Digital Musings Comic Strip. Their inclusion would substantially increase the limited “Comic” inventory that we had!

New Characters would be added in as the strip progresses.

I hope to grow this Comic strip as the time goes by and incorporate some ideas from my readers. So please let me know of any ideas that you may have for a Comic strip. The ideas that are selected would get a honorable mention in that particular Comic Post. After all a Comic Strip about the Blog-O-Sphere should have the participation of my fellow bloggers!

The Comic strip would be Updated as and when I pop up with Ideas and also on various events happening around the Blog-O-Sphere. If you don’t wanna miss any of the strips, you can subscribe to my RSS Feed or get it through the email.

To check all the Comic Strips you can go to the Category Digital Musings.

Posted in Digital Musings | No Comments »

Test your Web Design in various Browsers on all Operating systems.

An important aspect of any blog is its design and placement of elements. Good content and bad design don’t go well together and also vice versa. At times some elements need to be adjusted to fit in a widget that you like or design needs to be tweaked, may be a request for a specific size of an advertisement.

But every time this change is made we need to make sure that the blog or the website is being rendered properly on various browsers used on the Internet. May it be Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari or the Konqueror used in Linux. When we think about checking this, every user has some limitations. For example, I use a Windows PC and do not have access to a Apple PC with Mac OS which uses Safari, neither have access to Linux that uses Konqueror as the default browser. I would never know how my website looks in those browsers and if I can make any change that would make my Blog look better in those browsers too.

Well, here Browsershots.com helps us out!

What is Browsershots?

Browsershots makes Screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make Screenshots and upload them to the central server here.

Its a wonderful service. It gives you a chance to look at your blog the way it would on various browsers on different Operating systems. Its Open Source and is constantly improving.

I for one have never got a chance to work on a Linux computer, lest work on the Konqueror browser. However there are about 10-15 visitors everyday who use a Linux machine. I need to know if they see my blog the way I intended. Same is the case with MAC OS. With this service I am now able to see how my blog looks on these two Operating Systems on Safari and Konqueror.

Below are the Screenshots from Safari 2.0 and Konqueror 3.5 for Digital-Musings.com

Also the primary aspect of rendering of the blog is taken care of. After looking at 13 screen shots of my blog on 3 Operating systems on browsers like Firefox( Versions 1.5,2.0) , Internet Explorer ( Versions6,7) , Opera (9.23, 9.24) , Safari( 2.0 ,3.0) and Konqueror 3.5, I came to know that the Side Bar in my blog break only for one Browser, i.e Internet Explorer 6.0. Except that in every Browser things are looking great. So after this analysis, you know your website is rendering properly for 12 out of 13 browsers, and the only one that isnt working is IE 6.0, which isnt used much nowadays. This is pretty good.

In this way your design is now tested in almost every browser used by your visitors, and you know the Blog is being rendered properly. Any new changes can be checked as and when required and we have an idea how is it functioning on various browsers.

Highly recommended because of the ease of use and application it has, especially if you have recently changed or modified your Blog design !

Posted in Blogging Tools, Innovation, Online Services, Tips and Tricks | No Comments »

A Detailed Page Rank Update Report for Top 25 Blogs about blogging Past Predicted and Present

I guess its time to change the name of Blog-O-Sphere to Google-O-Sphere, as a tribute to the Page Rank Update buzz everywhere. Every blog I read today has a post dedicated to this Subject. I was going to write about it immediately, but instead of taking the “reporting only” mode I decided to go into the “analysis mode”, wait a bit, see what this hoopla is all about and then write a relevant post. I call this the PPP Report. Not Pay per post, but Past, Predicted and Present (PR) Report.

This post is divided into two parts:

1. Table showing the Past, Predicted and Present PR of TOP 25 Blogs about Blogging.
2. Table showing the corresponding back-links to these Blogs to get an Idea how Google is distributing the PR weightage.

Lets start from Table one. Its lists blogs in the order of Importance which is determined by 4 factors: 1. Google page Rank. 2. Technorati Links 3. Alexa Traffic 4. Subscriber Base.

Since we are discussing about Google Page rank, Only that factor is displayed in the Table below. Orignal list is can be found at Daily Blog Tips

This table is made specially for self analysis (no its not tiresome) by you. If you see the Titles, they are “Clickable” and would sort the Ranks from highest to lowest and vice versa. For example if we see Past Title and click on it is sorted according to the Past Page Rank Sorting from Highest to lowest and vice versa. And the results are:

PAST: 1.Performancing. 2. Build a Better Blog and 3. Problogger.

PREDICTED: 1.Copy Blogger 2.Lorelle on WordPress 3. BusinessBlog.

PRESENT: 1.Copy Blogger 2.Lorell on WordPress 3.Build a better Blog

As we can see during the 1st Update ProBlogger was nowhere to be seen in the Top 10, but after the revised update its back in Top 3.As in the Tables you can see several authoritative blogs have dropped their PR. Several reasons have been sighted for this PR Drop. The Google data centers are still reporting scattered data, so it is difficult to know what will be the Page Rank of some sites involved in the previous penalties. I would be keeping a track of this and If anything changes, well one more column in the table (Its getting wider and wider, Hope Google makes up its mind soon, before I run out of space.)

Page Rank Report for Top 25 Blogs about Blogging

A Detailed analysis of the Page Rank on Todays Most Influential Blogs about Blogging.

Page Rank Report for Top 25 Blogs about Blogging

The reason for the penalties it not entirely clear yet, but Darren said that he got confirmations from two sources at Google that the penalties were being given exclusively for paid links, and not for cross-linking inside blog networks. This latest furore has all been about the selling of links and is a warning shot to bloggers and webmasters who engage in the practice. Of course not everyone who sells links has been hit (there’s no way Google will get everyone) but it’s a sign of what Google are continuing to crack down on.

With this table we get a hawks eye view of who was Where, What was predicted and What actually happened!! A lot of other blogs have made such lists but no where the data is comparable in these 3 modes and also none of them allow sorting and let any do any self- analysis.

After the Page Rank analysis, Its imperative that we look at the factor that helps one to improve the Page Rank : Back Links.

The table below displays the number back-links these Top Blogs have and how many back links you require to actually get a specific page rank. There is a Column included which shows the Back Links detected by Google. And the other two show the Total back links by All Search Engines combined.

Corresponding BackLinks Report for Top 25 Blogs about Blogging

Corresponding BackLinks Report for Top 25 Blogs about Blogging

If we see at this Table we get to see and compare some really interesting statistics. Problogger has the Highest number of Back links that amounts to 13000. The second position goes to Performancing that has 7350 links which is about 5500 less than Problogger. Now the interesting thing is Performancing has a PR of 7 and ProBlogger s on 6 . Now why could this be?

Number one reason: The kind of back links that you have. Obviously the back links for Performancing have sites that have a high PR occurance i.e many of the blogs/websites that link to it have higher PR than the ones that link to Problogger. Another interesting fact to note is that the Blog with the least amount of links, 151 links, I help you blog has a PR of 4, and which is less than almost 13000 links but only a difference of PR 2. This helps us understand how important it is to build Quality Links. From there on in the table we observe that the PR increases as the back links increase.

The source for the Page ranks and the Back-Links are SmartPageRank and IWebTool.I will be updating the list with more sites, and for any changes in data centres over the next few hours.

You might wanna bookmark or save this Page or Subscribe to my Feed, as I am going to write about the Page Rank changes of top 25 SEO blogs. Lets see how the Big Boys who teach guide us how to do Search Engine Optimization are doing!!!

BTW, Digital-Musings.com jumped from PR 0 to PR 4 today. So guess I am not doing too bad Eh!

Posted in Google, News, Popular, SEO | 3 Comments »

Rating Widget/Plugin for WordPress, Blogger and Typepad Blogs

Lately I have been looking around the web for plug-ins that would allow me to get feedback from the visitors. Comments are a good way to get feedback or get into a discussions, but for new bloggers like me, comments are hard to come by. So getting a Plug-in or a widget to that allows visitors to give instant feedback was my best bet.

Among the ones I read about I found the Outbrain Rating Widget to be the best. Its simple compact look and quick response while rating makes it a must have for any blogger who wants to understand if the visitors like what they are reading. Visitors just need to hover the mouse on the five starts that are displayed and rate the post they are currently reading immediately.

The OutBrain Rating widget lets everyone know how many people have rated the current post and If one reads the post that he has already rated, it shows how had the person rated the post previously. The widget is available for all major Blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger and Typepad.

A few points about the Outbrain Rating Widget:

• No registration required
• Installation is super-easy… we adjust the widget’s design to your blog’s look& feel automatically
• It’s absolutely FREE

You can get the Ratings Widget here. And the Developer Blog is here.

And yes, Dont forget to Rate this Article!

Update: I temporarily needed to remove the Out Brain plugin, as it may be conflicting with a new plugin I have installed. After running a few tests, if the new plugin  works well , I would put the rating widget back on.

Posted in Blogging Tools, Innovation, WordPress | 4 Comments »

Get $100 worth of reviews for your blog for free

Blogs are a great source of information. Information that can really benefit you in many ways. When I first started blogging, as every blogger would, I too read a lot of blogs that I found informative, and my entire firefox toolbar was cluttered with feeds, and I deleted a few, making a mental note that I would subscribe them in my Google reader. Unfortunately I left one out, and that almost cost me:

• $100 worth of publicity.
• A few great backlinks from any blogs that I desired.
• Quality traffic.

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Posted in Advertising, News | 1 Comment »

Perpetual File Backup with Tilana Reserve

Everyone knows large corporations have a backup data center(known as disaster recovery centers) where the day to day data is backed up, just in case the main data storage goes down due to any reason. Studies have shown IT infrastructure plays a major role in any organizations progress, if it goes down, chances are that it may lose a lot of business. So a disaster recovery center is a wise investment.

But what about individuals, who need to back up their work? What if the hard drive crashes or, maybe the laptop is stolen? Graphic and website designers, programmers, content writers all need to have the data backed up. You can have the copies in your computer and maybe on a disk, but one may need to access this data in various places. I found a great online service that lets you protect the data online, and in real time as and gives you Continuous Data Protection.

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Posted in Innovation, Online Services | No Comments »