AdesBlog.com

Finally Yahoo has opened its doors to publishers to submit their blog posts to Yahoo! Buzz (buzz.yahoo.com). This means higher traffic to those who write exceptional posts, and you could even get millions of visitors if your blog post is featured on yahoo’s main page yahoo.com.

How it works?

You go to http://buzz.yahoo.com/buttons and get a button of your choice. Integrate it into your blog. And finally keep doing what you are doing - writing good stuff!

Well, you could go ahead and start submitting your own contents (blog posts) to Yahoo! Buzz. But that’s not really a sustainable strategy for bringing in the traffic. Rather you should concentrate on writing quality posts and let your readers promote your posts.

So, after you have integrated the button in your blog. For the first time, someone has to submit it to Yahoo! Buzz, then the rest of the people will just vote for that post. The more the post gets votes, the more it will have a chance to be top news in Yahoo! Buzz. And if your post gets to be the best content, then it may be featured in Yahoo.com — potentially bringing in millions of visitors to your blog!

So why wait, go to http://buzz.yahoo.com/buttons and get your buttons! I have got mine already (done my part), now it’s for you to vote for my posts ;) (see button below)

As you can see to the left, Amazon’s affiliate program now has a contextual side to it. Its banners, half of it will show “Recommended Pages” from your blog.

If you want to see the above banner in action in my blog, just click on any post and go to the bottom of the page.

Where to get the code?

In order to create this widget, login to your Amazon Associates account. Go to link “Build Links/Widgets“. Once you are on that page click on “Page Recommender Widget“.

And this is how the page recommender page looks like:

You can choose different banner sizes, you can customize the text and link colors of your banner. After you have pasted the code into your blog, allow few days (2-4) for Amazon to crawl your pages. After which you will start seeing your recommended pages.

Publisher Program URL: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com

Last year I wrote a post titled “What will happen to your blog, if you die?“. Today someone posted a comment giving a link to the wp plugin called next of kin. I thought I should post about this plugin since it’s a pretty good solution for the above mentioned topic.

What the plugin does?

It’s a configurable plugin that monitors your own visits to your wordpress system, and will send you a warning email after a number of weeks (or whatever interval you put in) you didn’t login to your blog. If you fail to login to your blog even after that, the system will send a pre-configured email that was written by you beforehand with all the login details to your blog and other important information (e.g login to your adsense, advertiser details…etc) to whichever email you choose. Isn’t that something?!

First of all, God forbid that such thing happen to anyone. But if it does happen, especially to someone who is making quite a lot of money from blogging, and if he didn’t tell all the necessary information to his family — then that would be a very unfortunate thing! It would be a pity for his family to be left in the darkness, knowing nothing about what to do next.

So it’s better to be prepared. For we know for sure that the death will come, God says in the Quran “Everyone will taste death, then to Us you will be ultimately returned.” [Quran 29:57]. The only thing we do not know is, when it will come? And that is the point of this plugin — to be ready for this unexpected reality.

Plugin URL: tzafrir.net/nextofkin/

Let’s say you want to have your own website. You tell freelance webdesigner to design a nice looking website, and you give him some websites as references.

Usually you would just pass him the URLs and tell him that you like this part of this particular website and that part of another website etc.

Better way is with Flowgram

So how Flowgram.com can improve this process? With flowgram you can add live pages to your presentation, make comments on the surface of those live websites, add photos, add powerpoints and even add RSS feeds. Once you are done with your presentation, you can just send him a link that looks something like this http://beta.flowgram.com/p/f4xhdtkgp7usnv

You can also use it to bookmark sites, like what I did on the above link. I have put together a list of wordpress related websites.

Flowgram is in Beta

Flowgram is still in beta, so you need to apply to get an invitation. I do have 10 invitations though, I can give them to the first 10 commenters for this post. I had subscribed a while ago, but it too many usability issues to mention it on the blog. Now it looks quite stable.

URL: beta.flowgram.com

Searched Google for Olympics, and this is what I got for a result (see screenshot below). And actually I was looking for the exact result — the latest medal count. Isn’t that the most interesting part of Olympics? ;) Google is quite smart…

Here is the Overall Medal Standings: http://results.beijing2008.cn/WRM/ENG/INF/GL/95A/GL0000000.shtml

Is there a real solution for hotlinking? If anyone knows the solution, please share with us all. Why I say “real” solution? Because there are some solutions which partially solve the problem of hotlinking but at the same time it causes other problems. But before we proceed further:

What is hotlinking

Hotlinking is a process of linking directly to someone else image/pictures (on their server), thus consuming their bandwidth. If you are the victim, it’s impact is minimal on your bandwidth if there is only few hotlinkinks to your images, however if there are hundreds of hotlinks then you will see that your bandwidth is being eaten by other websites.

Another problem is, sometimes you do not want others to display your images on their blog without your consent. So, in this case, hotlinking equals to stealing.

How do you stop Hotlinking?

There is a way to stop hotlinking through .htaccess. Htaccess code for blocking hotlinkers will look something like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?adesblog.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|js)$ /images/nohotlink.png [NC,R,L]

Why the above code doesn’t solve the problem? It does, but it also blocks all the other legitimate readers of your blog from viewing your images. Since RSS readers (like google reader) aggregate your posts into their interface, the above htaccess code will think RSS readers are hotlinkers too, therefore they all will be blocked from displaying your images.

So, if you put the above code, then your readers will be reading only texts of your posts. As for the images, they will be replaced by one image that you specify, in the above case it’s “nohotlink.png“. So all the images of your blog will be replaced by “nohotlink.png” in the RSS readers. That’s not good. So, the ultimate question:

How to solve this problem of hotlinking? While blocking all hotlinkers and allowing all RSS readers?

If you know the answer / have the solution for this problem, do enlighten us! We all will be grateful.

Link (for generating htaccess code for hotlink protection):
http://www.htaccesstools.com/hotlink-protection/