I actually wanted to write on few topics which I’ve already in mind. Before I forget it, I’d better write it in here. The first one is a guide on how to customize the ugly layout of DotNetNuke Login page. The reason is damn simple: Don’t you think all DNN website login is so standardized ugly? The solution is really simple without having to spend a dime to buy a new login module as it probably won’t support latest Facebook Connect or maybe not even LiveID / OpenID login.

The second one will a talk about the new DNN Skin which I’m making…1% progress…and which I intended to give it for free…

The third one..omg I think I just forgot what is it…ohya…talking about how many computers there are in my house…guess what? My house has 5 DELL Inspiron notebooks which models start from ????, 4000, 5100, 5150 and 6400. 3 of them still running and the amazing thing is that the 4000 running in Pentium III actually still works fine and the start up speed actually fastest than my current 6400 notebook.

You see, the problem comes when I’m using so many devices (not that many as you do maybe) but I found hard to synchronize all the information stored in each device. For example, For the first and second topic that I wanted to blog about, unfortunately  all the prepared information is stored in the 6400 notebook which I currently use for work.

While the post to show off how many pcs there are in my house, I took all the shots using my Nokia N81 8GB Phone. Seems no problem on synchronization right? The problem is that I use Inspiron 5150 notebook at home because it has the finest monitor screen I have seen so far. No kidding, 13’ monitor with 1400 x 1280 resolution! That is why I always use it to watch movies even I have to use USB as Ethernet (LAN) connection to connect to internet. Yes! Even it is so slow (I mean 100mb needs 20minutes that kind of slow) to copy large video files from my brother’s pc and kena complaint by him. No choice man…I love this pc even the LAN port is spoiled…keyboard kina broken before (Just fixed it awhile ago by replaced it with my brother’s old 5100 Notebook keyboard…)

And finally comes to the phone. It has some connectivity problem since I installed don’t know which program into it. It keeps occupied the memory card which make me…kinda wtf wtf wtf and restart the phone before I can connect my notebook using CABLE! Yes, both of my notebooks don’t have Bluetooth installed. Yup…and we’re talking about 100MB 15minutes kind of slow…Did I mention that my notebook at home does not have wireless card?

It is like I have to turn on 3 computers before I can write something nicely…

Internet? Don’t you know that the Internet Connection provided by Telekom – Streamyx Malaysia is actually making you SCREAM MAX? Don’t even need to mention that the service call greetings is always: “Sorly” We’re facing huge technical failure in XXX areas. I called every few days and recorded it…you can find different version of the streamyx failure greetings all over Youtube by other users too. (I’m composing it to a song….)

Ok…That’s it. Just to make this post a bit….picturized: Here’s the 00 Gundam must have scene in every episode…GUN POINTING!

Over the time, I visited thousands of websites a month just like you (if you’re that crazy like me). I noticed that many websites are broken or not supporting standard web coding guideline as stated by w3c.

One of the reason of course if the laziness of the site designer and using outdated coding editor like FrontPage. While the root of the causes is the lack of knowledge and skill by the designer as more and more website require programming language like PHP and .NET.

Another phenomena is kinda wtf one which I found that those websites that offer free site template are very beautiful but offering lousy templates for you and no point they give you their own skin. Don’t believe? take a look at www.Jooma.org and www.wordpress.org. Why don’t they just include they own beautiful skin together like www.dotnetnuke.com (Brilliant!)?

While for those professional site template design companies, you will see how ugly their website is it but with a lot of amazing templates for sell or client profiles. The only reason I can think of is that they do not want their clients to have a website ugly than their company website (else they will demand a lot I guess).

Anyway, I’m making a nice skin, (I mean really nice skin) during my free time. It should be a DNN skin and container but with the power to convert it easily to any other platform. It will be free of course

While to reduce the hard time for site designer and for your IE6 users’ sake…. it would be cool to add a code to help eliminate IE6 users by adding a simple conditioned CSS to show something like:

   1: <!--[if lte IE 6]>

   2: <style type="text/css">

   3: #ie6msg{border:3px solid #c33; margin:8px 0; background:#fcc; color:#000;}

   4: #ie6msg h4{margin:8px; padding:0;}

   5: #ie6msg p{margin:8px; padding:0;}

   6: #ie6msg p a.getie7{font-weight:bold; color:#006;}

   7: #ie6msg p a.ie6expl{font-weight:bold; color:#006;}

   8: </style>

   9: <div id="ie6msg">

  10: <h4>Did you know that your browser is out of date?</h4>

  11: <p>To get the best possible experience using my website I recommend that you upgrade your browser to a newer version. The current version is <a class="getie7" href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/ie/getitnow.mspx">Internet Explorer 7</a> or <a class="getie7" href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx">Internet Explorer 8 (Beta)</a>. The upgrade is free. If you’re using a PC at work you should contact your IT-administrator. Either way, I'd personally like to encourage you to stop using IE6 and try a more secure and Web Standards-friendly browser.</p>

  12: <p>You could also try some other popular browsers like <a class="ie6expl" href="http://mozilla.com">FireFox</a> or <a class="ie6expl" href="http://www.opera.com">Opera</a>.</p>

  13: </div>

  14: <![endif]--> 

Full credited to:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IE6WarningStopLivingInThePastGetOffOfIE6.aspx

You should see a box floating on the site if your are using IE6 to view  website with the above code. Yup, it is cool but it just annoys some IE6 users as they have no choice but the use IE6 due to their company do not upgrade their web browser as it will affect the work a lot and money of course. The other reasons may simply because the ignorance of Internet beginner/old people and may just because you are using Pirated Windows and not dare to validate your Windows and UPDATE IT! hehe…

If you have been using a lot of Google Products like I do, you probably need this tips. Imagine everyday I have to open Google Analytics, Adsense, Adwords, Webmaster Tools and 2 Google Apps accounts and 2 Gmail Accounts just to keep track on my production site?

Log in and out plus page loading all these things… some times drive me crazy as I’m like spending 15minutes a day just to open and reopen and login and re-login all these pages, and that is spending 3.8 days in a year just to logging in and out from/to my accounts! This hasn’t include other accounts like ebay, youtube, Facebook blar blar blar…

Really! I’ll shoot yooou! Ok, the first solution is simple. Most of the people just don’t categorized their browser bookmark (like me) or categorized the websites into its nature like blog, food portal, news etc…which ended up sometimes you don’t even know where did you put in last time and you never see the website again.

The first solution is simple, group all the websites that you use frequently rather than categorized it. So when you open your browser to do work, mouse over to the bookmark folder and click open All in Tabs! One more thing, you can bookmark the same website in other folder/category too! Thus, you can create another folder for leisure time which may has a gmail site inside too

The second method is to preserved on browser for work and another for browsing or shopping. As some of you may have notice that FireFox is not safe at all due to the fundamental framework problem, all lot of third parties extensions and getting more users which result in hackers’ second favorite target.

So far, the best browser for surfing around and reading is Opera 9. It has the best vision, graphic rendering and cool text font. The best thing is that it does not have third party extension that may have your security compromised.

For Shopping, I still think that Internet Explorer is safer than Firefox to some extend provided that your IE doesn’t not visit suspicious websites. Google Chrome will be a good options as well.

I’m testing few Password Manager too but I found that it is quite insecure to have the manager to store all of my password in my computer. Guess I still prefer a safer way which is never use cookie to remember my password and waste 3.8 in a year to log in and out….

The third thing is to use Google Apps’ domain Alias, POP3 and SMTP to merge all email accounts into one. I’ll put that into next post…if not I may not know what to write next as my mind is kinda in a mess recently.

Please share your secret ways to save time in the Internet, will ya?

I know. Every writers nightmare:

ARRRRR I just want my content! Really, I’m not a full time blogger that have time to search whatever things to blog about. Maybe someday I will if the Advertising income can afford me to do so.

My friend used to work as a cell phone promoter. He told me that during peak season or somehow someday, the sales revenue will far beyond the set daily target while someday there will be none. Thus, keeping the bullets (Cash) in hand and to balance the unbalance of the week.

Well, same thing apply to blogging. You don’t blog out of a sudden all the time, it just wouldn’t take long for you to give up because one day you’ll just notice that your life isn’t full of surprises everyday.

In most of the time, you actually have a lot of ideas and things to write but they are all pieces that falling apart and you just can’t write a proper content with those pieces. But, most important thing is that you keep the pieces together and one day you may just found that you can use it in hand!

Another important thing is that never mixed all things together in one blog post. This is not only bad for the Search Engine but for the readers also. If the readers found it hard to digest your blog, then most of the time they will just scan it and leave it. There are so many other interesting posts elsewhere waiting for them to read!

There are actually many free tools to help you gather and keeping the pieces from the websites you visited. With the new Wordpress 2.7.1, you can simply login to Admin then go to Tools > Press this. All you need is to drag the link to your Firefox bookmark and whenever you see a good topic to write for, just click the “Press This” and it will store whatever information you needed to blog later.

For me, as I watch a lot of Anime and movie in my computer, I always screen capture a good scene like above image for blogging uses. Just save the images you never know when will you need it. Isn’t it better than you need it but you don’t have any?

You’re welcome to share on how would you do to prevent running out of content to blog.

First, if you found this post because you found it in search engine, then I suppose you’ve gone into so many website and blogs, tested so many methods and ended up no where but the Google Login Page. I assumed that you’re just so desperate as I do because I’ve a very very very important thing and service stored with Google Account and can’t login too!

The final why to regain your Google Account Login and Password is through this Google Password Recovery Form. The fact is, if a person really forget the password, I don’t think the form will help much useless you have at least some solid records still in your hand. However if you really still have the requested information that Google need it, don’t you think you actually have a pretty good memory and probably won’t ended up searching solution to retrieve your password right? More over, don’t you think storing info related to your account actually means lowering your account security?

I actually left 2 options. The first one is to recover the password from my brain either by miracle or hypnotization. The second option is to boom Google, hack it or threaten their staff and so on which I none of it is within my capability. So here’s the secret option that I want to give you which I found it quite useful: If I can forgot the password for an important account, then I brain is actually getting retarded that I will soon forgot about this lame case that ever happened to me ACCEPT IT!

Anyway just some add on, Please at least save your verification code for Gmail Activation or set a secondary email account or you will ended up losing the account forever.

The are so many Gmail / Google Account Password retrieval software around the Internet. BEWARNED! Do not download or buy it! If you pay for it, most likely your credit card credential will be stolen for bad and your computer will full of other viruses or, the software retrieve other account password without letting you know. The next day, what you will find is that all your accounts has been compromised without you knowing it! The best hacker is not bring you down but LIVEWITH YOU!

Most of the email password retrieval work like this: It will scan all files including very sensitive and hidden one. Yes, your computer will block it and asking your decision but because you’re desperate to find back the password, you will just click yes and that is the beginning of your nightmare. Some even asking for permission to access to your other email accounts to search for password, it just don’t work that way seriously.

So be wise enough to know how to protect your Google Account because it is getting more and more important as…for me, I uses 23 Google products and some of the people that using Google Checkout will have their Credit Card linked to it too! Never review your Google Account to anyone! Including your computer, don’t store in pc! If you store in other email account, never it “invite your friends” from website (Like social website, facebook) to access to your email account!

If you have a retarded brain and your brain’s memory cache is not life long then all you need to do is write it on paper. Don’t laugh! at least no spyware and hacker and hack my paper offline!

Just some of the information in my Gmail account has to stay in the Internet forever, yes-forever unless Google Datacenter is completely destroyed. What a day….what a day…

Few days ago "canonical link" has become a hot keyword due to the recent announcement from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft on the solution on the "duplicate content penalty". You may find more advanced explanation on duplicate content penalty in this Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty" post.

If you dig more on this topic, you may found that canonical url issue has been discuss over and over again and you can trace back to some articles back from year 2006. (Deftly dealing with duplicate content and Google Canonical URL Issues and 301 Redirects). The long waited solution is actually simple, all you need to do is add rel="canonical" in the page header:

   1: <head>

   2: <link rel="canonical" href=http://www.example.com/product.aspx?item=Big /> 

   3: </head>

Here’s a very important note where most of the people confuse and got it wrong: You need to add the link tag in all duplicated page/url and the page you want Google to emphasize on! (Most of the people thought they only need to add <_link rel="canonical"… in the page you want.). Maybe the word canonical really confusing…

Here’s an example:

1. http://www.example.com/productA.html">http://www.example.com/productA.html
2. http://www.example.com/productA.html">http://www.example.com/productA-BIG.html

The second url basically is a query string url which change the item size to BIG but all other product information is very close to the productA.html.

Thus, you need to add <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish" /> to productA-BIG.html but not productA.html.

However, sometimes the url is a query string url which in fact that you actually don’t have the page but being virtually called out based on user’s (robot) request. For example, inside productA,php has 3 options (Small, Big, Custom) and when visitor click on the BIG option, the website will send a query to the server and generate a dynamic query url that looks like: productA?item=BIG which the content is pretty much the same but the photo and size describe in the content.

So you just can’t add the <link> tag into a virtual page right? So in this case, you use need to add it in the productA.php which whenever query based generated url from productA.php will have the tag inside.

To emphasize again, you need to put your preferred page to be indexed’s url inside the <link rel="canonical"> tag and put the tag between every pages’ HEAD section (<head></head>) that you think is duplicated.

If you still blur blur, try view the source code of this page provided by wikia.com as recommended by Google. You’ll notice that the source code on the URL http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Nelvana_Limited specifies its rel="canonical" as:http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Nelvana. (i.e. index Nelvana but not Nelvana_Limited)

Make sure you read this Specify your canonical post in Official Google Webmaster blog and Yahoo’s Canonical blog post, or Microsoft’s canonical blog post.. for further researches and understanding. Another great news is that Canonical Link Tag is adopted by any search engine when crawling and indexing your site.

Question: So should really give it a damn?

Answer:

If you have a blog like BlogSpot and wordpress, you actually no need to care about this unless your theme is kinda tricky for the search engine to know which one is the permanent article url link. Anyway, Joost made a canonical plug-in for WordPress, a plugin for e-commerce software package Magento, and also a plug-in for Drupal. For me, I think the wordpress plugin is totally useless after I installed in this blog. (I’ll uninstall it soon).

However, if you have a website that has a lot of dynamic query based url or simply just have many duplicate content that can’t be avoided, rel=”canonical” this your savor.

Question: Wait! My blog in BlogSpot.com and wordpress has duplicate content because my blog first page show the same content in the one in permanent link??!

Answer:

No you don’t. because almost all blog platform publish post with a permanent link (Your article real location), modern search engines will follow index the permanent link and because the main page normally shows more than one article, which already made the page different from the others.

Like every blogger, one has to share some useful knowledge in blogging and giving some blog tips to the readers. The reason is simple: To gain more visitors! Almost everyone is curious and exciting on any topic related to blogging nowadays. This will the super long post as I will cover pretty much everything and you may skip some parts if you find it boring.

Chapter 1: Blog on your expert field and do some research.

Based on my terrible experience, you must write the things that you are interested or expert in. If not, you will just ended up losing the interest and motivation to go on and you and your blog will just going nowhere. I’m not going to talk much on personal things but I believe most of the bloggers’ motivation come from the number of readership, feedback/comments, Fame and money.

If a person is highly motivated by money until building a lot of automated blog or being copycat, he/she is just a spammer.

After having a topic to focus and write, you need to do some keywords research. There are so many keywords research tools and I found that making good use of Google Adwords: Keyword Tool is more than enough. Other tools that seems so promising are actually more suitable for mass advertising proposes like publishing advertisement in Google, Yahoo and other major search engine and portals, those tools then will help you save a lot of time in comparing and adjusting the budget and do traffic estimation which I’m not intended to talk about it in this post.

So, lets say if your blog is more on “search engine optimization” which basically not geographically limited and written in English, you can set the “Results are tailored to English and All countries and territories” in Gogole Keywords Tool. Put in some keywords related to your topic or interest that you can think of and the tool will generate a list of similar keywords which people normally query in google.

Theoretically, you should aim for the keywords with most Search Volume. However due to competitiveness, you should look for keywords that are less traffic and best describe your topic i.e. selecting a niche of the niche. Now you’re ready to pick a good name for your domain.

Chapter 2: Select a Blog Domain.

If you have noticed, many domain names are full of keywords inside but this is not neccassry as it may give you a boost on SEO in the initial but eventually having a unique name that will create a “brand” for the blog and your identidy is far more crucial in long-term. The logic is simple: People use “Fedex” but not “Federal Express”; people use “Google” but not “Search”.

If you’re already kinda of famous already, using your own name or your works is essential to build up your name too. Examples: www.thelongtail.com (Book’s Name) and www.kennysia.com (Real Name).

There are .com .name .com.my .org, and I found that .com is still the best for blogging unless you’re targeting on specific country’s readership. For example, Google will prioritize your website weight for .com.my domain when the people is search from www.google.com.my. You can see this after you have subscribe to Google Webmaster Tools.

I would not suggest you to use free domain or sub domain like .co.cc and xxx.blogspot.com. If you’re using blogspot, you’re encourage to use your own domain in blogspot platform. Having an own primary domain may make you start slow at first but eventually it will save you a lot of time and trouble in long term. First, domain name is an asset which will increase in value over the time (depends on your blog quality). Secondly, you will gain your own control to do more things like Affiliate link cloaking and add one more subdomain for picture gallery for example.

Chapter 3: Select Blogging platform.

I’m not going to advice you to use blogger.com if you have the little budget. Even you do not have the money to pay for hosting, you shouldn’t giving up to have your own domain. Having a domain is fun to some extend and I pretty sure you can at least covers back the domain charge of USD 7.96 a year. (Use GoDaddy Coupon Code, google it and you will find plenty of it.)

However, some professionals will go for blog networks which probably a blog with sub domain. However, this kind of blog network normally is highly targeted on certain niche and visitors by grouping up all professionals in that niche. For example,

If you’re curious, this is the list of some famous blog platform available for free or charge. As you can see, Mylifebbs.com is powered by WordPress.org and Kennysia.com is using MovableType. Other Stand alone blog platforms that many use include PMachine, Greymatter, B2Evolution, TextPattern and Expression Engine.

The main difference between these platforms are Hosted Blog Platforms and Stand Alone Blog Platforms.

(Sub chapter will be added in)

Chapter 4: Adding useful plugins and widget.

Adding useful plugins or widgets will help you better interact with your readers. Below are some of the plugins that I found quite useful and being widely used in large blogs.

To Be Con’t…

Something wrong with my stomach this whole morning since I’ve woke up. How’s your Valentine’s day? Any surprises? Just another day for me. I’ve finally migrated all the blogs’ post to here and now this blog will continue to update as frequently as before.

I’ve added 2 plugins into my Windows Live Write. This first one is Code Snippet plugin which is very important for a programming blogger. Below is a testing post to show how to add rel="nofollow" in an anchor link. Always remember to enable no="follow" link in your blog’s comment to avoid spam comment.

   1: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://example.com">Example Dot Com</a>

The second one added is a word count plugin. This is important as according to some unofficial statistic research report, a blog should have at least 300 words in length to get the best result from the readers as well as search engine. Although less of official report on this, it pretty much make sense from the point of a search engine view. A short paragraph just hardly make any sense to search engine to know what the hell are you writing about.

The only drawback is that the the word count plugin for Windows live messenger do not have auto count function which make me think that it is kinda useless for lazy person like me. After all, as long as your content is genuine content, who care is you’re just writing few lines like twitter or thumb bloggers.

The last function I want to test is the insert picture function in WLM. It seems that it will override the style and original insert picture format. So here’s the result:

Updated: Soon after I made the above post, I’ve updated all my Windows Live software to 2009 version which means that Live Writer and Messenger also get updated. The Messenger seems nothing new to be as I’m using it in Windows 7 already but the Writer seems not so promising as most of the functions to do apply to other blogging platform other than MSN Space.

For example, it said that there will be auto word count but I really can’t find it but the one I’ve just added it. I’ve added another tag plugin for Wordpress and hope it will work this time. The other new feature will be the Photo Album which is kinda useless as it only connects to MSN Photo Album. However, there features that are quite handy like Album, TILE and Watermark. According to the msn live page, we should be able to add photo title too but I’m not manage to do it…

This domain actually has been long abandon due to my laziness and Malaysia Network connection speed to US server (Yup, this blog is hosted in US server). Sooner and later I will merge all my blogs from different places that also kinda long abandon together and import to this blog (Mostly from blogger.com).

There’s nothing much to write on today as I’m awake for more than 30 hours and it is another lonely Valentine’s day for me. I really kinda…Otaku style already. Test to post an image:

Screen Shot from Sins

Cheers!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!