SUSE(Novell, Inc.) has been innovative from the beginning.Now their latest innovation is Susestudio,where one can bulid their own custom linux distro from scratch without having a single programming or scripting background.

Its a web based service via which by simple drag and drop one can select the applications,settings of the SUSE distro and build images of this custom distro from it.

It is currently invitation based.One can request for invitation via http://susestudio.com/account/invitation

I got my invitation code within 30 minutes.

Once you are inside,you will find how easy it is to build your own custom SUSE distro by simple drag and drop of packages

After you have selected the required packages and have made custom settings,just click on Build to build/generate the image file.
You can generate either VMware,Virtual Boz,Zen,Live CD ISO or Hard Disk/USB Image.

The service as of now offers upto 15 GB storage space for your built images.Builds older than seven days will be deleted to free up space . But no need to worry as you can rebuild them at any time.The build process takes some considerable time. You can also test drive the build image file before downloading by clicking “Testdrive”

You can download and deploy your custom SUSE build anytime.The service is way too simple to use and requires no guide at all. But for help ,there are screen cast and guides available at http://en.opensuse.org/SUSE_Studio

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French hacker who goes by the name of Hacker Croll gained access into the Twitter Admin panel. He also got access to various sensitive,confidential information and even getting access into the domain registrar of twitter.

Numerous screen shots of twitter Admin Panel is posted in http://www.korben.info/twitter-vu-de-linterieur-interface-admin-piratee.html . Here is the translation of the page in English

He/She also got the following information

The list of all employees working,their food preferences, their salary scales
Confidential contracts details with MS,Nokia,Samsung,Dell,AOL
Contacts of famous personalities
Schedules,Ideas,Plans,Business Models and other such sensitive business documents

A full detailed article and interview with the hacker is posted in
http://www.korben.info/hack-de-twitter-la-suite.html
Here is the translation of the post in English

How he did it ..?

Hacker Croll claimed to have accessed Goldman‘s Twitter password by first gaining access to his Yahoo account. “One of the admins has a yahoo account, i’ve reset the password by answering to the secret question. Then, in the mailbox, i have found her [sic] twitter password,”
Link to his sayings

When did it happened ..?

Well it is believed to be happened a few week ago.By looking at date of the thread we can surely say that it happened on April 29 2009
So we can say that this happened quite a long time ago but it got exposed now

It is important to note that twitter admin panel got hacked not because of any vulnerability of twitter but by the good old “Forget Password” mechanism of the email service.

I think it is clearly evident that the employee accounts of any company should only be linked with the company email and not other free email providers

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This mainly happens due to Domain Name System (DNS) cache which still points the site to the old name server.In order to flush or reset DNS cache in windows open command prompt and type ipconfig /flushdns and press enter

Note : Sometimes the delay is due to the domain registrar DNS server itself and in that case nothing can be done

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The one thing that i like in Opera is the way it organizes Web History according to the date as well as the main domain.Though Firefox organizes Web history in terms of date,it is highly cluttered in my opinion.

Even the latest Firefox 3.X series doesn’t have such organization.

If you are like me who likes to have a Web History organized the way like Opera,then Enhanced History Manage is a plugin made specially for you.

This plugin is incompatible with the latest Firefox.However there is an workaround possible.

Refer How to Install Old,Incompatible Firefox Addon or Extension for more information.

Once installed,press CTRL+SHIFT+H to activate Enhanced History Sidebar.
Now all you have to do is click Sorted By >> Group By >> Day->Site.

Hope you liked this small tweak…..

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After installation of this addon,whenever one tries to install an incompatible old firefox addon a windows appears prompting for force install.

Note: Forcing an incompatible outdated addon to install is risky. Since the addon is not optimized for the new firefox version, it might cause frequent crashes. If that happens simply disable that addon.

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During my quest for a new theme,i found several themes which were very nice but most of them were incompatible with IE6 (Which is one of the most widely used browser till date).

I spent a whole day tweaking the UBD theme.I removed the footer sidebar,added shoutbox,removed date and replaced it with the post views,removed the ad blocks,removed share it and replaced it with socialable(The former used javascript which slows down the load time of the webpages)

I have also changed the permalinks,removed around 50 unused wordpress plugins(yes 50 ;I am a big fan of wordpress plugins and love to experiment with it),updated the used plugins,added some optional meta tags,optimized .htaccess and robots.txt files,removed unused themes ….

Apart from these,i have started to use Twitter. You can see my latest tweets in sidebar itself.

Still i need to design a favicon and logo….

So how my new blog looks …. ?

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An example of Flash file in Google Search results

What about Yahoo…?

Though in the Adobe Developer Center page there is specification that they are working with Google and Yahoo!,changes are still not reflected in yahoo! searches but it is believed to take place very soon.

Can flash bring me up in SERP and organic results..?

Yup,it can.I just googled for the term “interactive animated graphic of Hurricane Katrina’s” and guess what;the flash file ranked first

To find only the flash files containing the search term,use the filter filetype:swf after the search term

ex: how google works filetype:swf

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WordPress 2.6 -A complete review and Guide

Upgradation

One can upgrade via the old manual method or by using auto update wordpress plugins.I feel that using auto update wordpress plugins is the easiest way of doing the upgradation.There are several such plugins available,i used WordPress Automatic upgrade plugin and it performed the upgradation without any difficulties

Here are some of new features in the latest WordPress 2.6 which i love :

Plugin management

Multiple selection of plugins in new Wp 2.3 makes it possible to activate or deactivate more than one plugins easily.Note that in case of multiple selection, one needs to click the Activate,Deactivate or Delete button which is at the top of that particular column

Multiple Selection Of the Plugins

There is also a block in the plugins page which displays the recently deactivated plugins

Recently Active Plugins

Caption

WordPress 2.6 now offers the ability to display the caption below the image.

Caption in Images

If u don’t like the WYSIWYG facility,u can also append caption by using new caption id tag
For example:

Caption in Images

Word Count

Will update itself with the number of words often so that one can see how many word count of the post(The number will not be updated in real time though)

Word Count

Post Revisions

Taking a hint from Wikipedia,the new WordPress 2.6 tracks all changes made to the post along with the details of the changes.The revision history can be seen in the bottom of the Write Page.Clicking on any one of the link will display the exact content in the post
at that moment.

Post Revisions

One can restore or revert back to any state.The most amazing thing is the compare feature used to compare the changes between 2 revisions.

Comparisions of Revisions

Gears Support

Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser.By using gears support,a “Local Server” is created which caches or keep a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of some pages by several seconds.This feature is designed to speed the blogging process.
To enable Gear,click the Turbo link which is at the right top.

Enable Gears Support

Note that gears is supported currently in Firefox and IE only.
I activated Gears and i didn’t experienced any major change in speed.

Theme Preview Before Activation

In wordpress 2.5, before activation of theme a pop up window appears which shows the theme live with all your content.So,one can see how the site will look before activation of the theme.

Theme Previews

Earlier this task was performed with the help of plugins but from now on,there is no need of such plugins.

Press This!

It is nothing but a new posting bookmarklet in wordpress.To use this just drag the Press This link which is in the Write Page to ur browser bookmarks or toolbar

Press This

Now whenever u find an interesting webpage and u wish to blog about that,just click bookmarklet u just created and a new pop up window will appear via which u can select either Text,Photo,Video,Quote from the webpage and blog about it

Press This

Here is a nice video made by wordpress development theme which explains the new features

[Download WordPress 2.6]

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Proper SEO(Search Engine Optimization) is essential for all websites. Blogs powered by WordPress are not an exception. This article will explain all the things needed to make ur WordPress,and SEO optimized one

This is the final part of the series which covers backlinks:it’s importance and ways to increase it…

Backlinks

They are nothing but the incoming links to the website.It predicts the importance of a page.Backlinks decide the PR of the page.PR(page rank) is a special algorithm which ranks the webpage.It has a scale of 0-10.For example my site PR is 3(home page).

PR is assigned to individual web page.But the PR of the home page or the landing page is considered as the PR of the website.

Now PR and Backlinks are important in determining the search engine rank for particular keywords. There are around 200 factors via which the rank is determined and these 2 are among them.

In order to make ur site more SEO friendly,u need to increase the number of backlinks.Here are some of the ways to do so:

1.Directory submission: Submitting to top directories like Dmoz etc., .Some directories are restricted to some particular niche. So one needs to make some research to find out the list of top directories specific to the niche

2.Blog commenting: Here comes the two terms “no-follow” and “do-follow”.

In simple terms, “do-follow” tag tells the crawler (search engine bot) that link can be treated as backlink and “no-follow” is simply the converse of it. So it is important to note that commenting on only “do-follow” enabled blog helps to increase the number of backlinks. To find whether a blog is no follow or do follow,u can use the Search Status firefox plugin which i have mentioned in the previous post.
Googling the term “do follow blog lists” will give number of links to such lists.

3.Forum signature: Having a signature link to ur blog in “do-follow” forums also leads to the increase in number of backlinks.Every time u post or reply in the thread,a backlink is left.So if u have 500 post number then their is greater possibility that u get 500 backlinks from the forum

4.Link exchange and link sales: This is some what controversial method of building the backlinks.Sometimes,it can be harmful too.Here,the links to the site are exchanged or sometimes purchased in somewhat popular or well established site.The links are normally site-wide(It means in every page of the site,u will find the do follow link to ur site;some of the places where this can be employed are sidebar,footer).So it can increase the number of backlinks enormously.But as i said it’s some what controversial method ,so i won’t recommend it

5.Article submission: Submitting the article to top article directories will also result in increase in number of backlinks.

6.Social bookmarking submission: Submitting the link of the post in various “do-follow” Social bookmarking sites can increase the backlinks.

Google will penalize the site(may deindex the site) if it finds abnormal increase in backlinks.No one knows what is that rate beyond which the increase in backlinks is punishable under google rules.So,play it nice and easy.No need to work overnight to increase the backlinks

Final Touch

This completes the SEO for WordPress blogs series.

The result of SEO takes time to reflect.It can’t be felt suddenly or within short time.Consider it like an Ayurvedic medicine which will perform it’s task slowly.

Patience and dedication are the two things which are vital in SEO world.

Slow and steady wins the race

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Proper SEO(Search Engine Optimization) is essential for all websites. Blogs powered by WordPress are not an exception. This article will explain all the things needed to make ur WordPress,and SEO optimized one

This is Part 4 of the series which briefly covers 2 important Firefox plugins which are important in SEO study and Analysis.
They are :Search Status and Rank Checker

There are many online tools which are helpful in analysis of the SEO of ur blog as well as other sites.But i would like to cover 2 important firefox plugins which offers so much tools that their is no need for any other online services

Search Status

This is some what lesser know firefox plugin. The plugin has virtually every SEO analysis tools u need. Get this Firefox plugin from http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

It offers a variety of SEO Analysis tools.Some of them are :

1.Meta tags: Will list the meta tags used in the web page.Crucial to know how ur competitive site is SEO optimized when compared to your’s.

2.Highlight No Follow Links:Will highlight the No Follow Links in the given webpage. Used to find out whether the blog is do follow or no follow(I will cover these two soon )

3.Rankings isplays Alexa,Page and Complete Rank of the webpage

4.Show Backward Links:Used to find out the backward links(the links from other site(or sometimes other page) to the site or the webpage)

5.Show Whois and also Show Robots.txt: Used to look up the site and it’s robots.txt file

6.Link report:Gives a summary of all the links and whether they are internal(within the same site),external(pointing to other site),no follow etc.,

These are just some of the tools that this plugins offer.There are still many more.
In a nutshell,this is a must have plugin for any SEO concerned person

Rank Checker

This is another FF plugin which is vital with respect to SEO analysis.It is used to check the SERP factor and it displays in which position ur website will be in the different search engine results page for particular keywords.

Get this plugin from http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

There is a full documentation of this plugin in the above link itself.So,i don’t think it is necessary to explain it

Coming Next: Some Miscellaneous tips and tricks

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