I have a coupon to give away for the excellent SiteGround Web Hosting. This coupon will take off 20$ from anything you want to buy from them. If you have an existing website with them, then also you can use this to take off 20$ from your bill. So, what do you have to do? Just follow the 2 simple steps listed below, and I’ll choose one lucky winner at random to give it away.

Step 1. Subscribe (free) to receive this blog’s updates through email using the subscribe through email box on the right (which reads “Free Email Updates”).

Step 2. Leave a comment on this post mentioning your email ID with which you registered so that I know that you have registered (you can leave a small part of your username in your email ID if you want).

Then just sit back and relax, or better still, read a few other nice posts on my blog and comment on them :). I’ll choose the winner in a few days and let you guys know right here. So, stay tuned.

What are you waiting for? I’d get those fingers moving if I were you ;). Good Luck.

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I got hold of a new Asus WL-500W router for me (Pics & specs coming up soon). The router has open source firmware so people can develop applications for it. One such app (ADOS) is that allows you to configure the router to download stuff directly to a hard disk (connected to router through USB) without the need of keeping the PC switched on. One of the app users reported the following error (Click on the pic to enlarge) that he got while using the app.

Let’s see what it says:

[Error] Description: An error occured while connecting to the remote server.

Probable Reasons: Probable reasons can be found in the error’s description. (Hmmm, lets wait & watch)

Probable Solutions: Probable soulutions (sic) can be found in the error’s description. (Yay!! Alright….hey, wait a sec, how am I supposed to find a solution from a description that says “An error occured”)

So, that’s it for now folks. Am off to the himalayas to get some training from the mahatmas in the exquisite art of psychic healing (and router apps bug fixing).

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My company had a video contest a few days ago (which yours-truly won by a handsome margin ). The topic was “Future of Wireless” as perceived by the employees but with the catch that it had to be done in just 10 seconds or less.

Now, everyone know that there is rarely a moment when I can think like a normal, sane person, and hence took a rather “alternative” look at what the future holds for us. (Hint: “Mine is bigger” jokes are gonna be in fashion again ). Take a look below and don’t forget to leave your comments on how you liked it. So, without further ado, I present to you “Welcome To A Phone-Y Future”.

NOTE: If you like it, you can digg , reddit or stumble it

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I hereby call for setting up a charity fund so that we can donate some money to get the poor ol’ Google Adsense some Mathematics/Algebra 101 classes because apparantly it thinks that 0.63 + 0.07 = 0.69.

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Well, its not just prefix suffix any more, because I added an option to add things in the middle of the posts as well. I got this idea because people told me that this was one of the most sought after option as advertisements (e.g. google adsense, adbrite, etc) give maximum click through rate when placed smack dab in the middle of the content. What’s more is that it is configurable and you can choose how many paragraphs and/or words should be skipped from the start of the post before you add whatever you want, be it text, css, html, php or javascript.

For more details and downloads, head on over to: Shantz WP Prefix Suffix Home Page

And don’t forget to let me know what you think about it or if you want any new features included.

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This is a really sad day. Not only the organizers of National Conference On Free Software 2008 taking place at CUSAT seem to be utterly misguided when they decided to let Novell be on-board as their main sponsor, they even took the extreme step of bringing in police to silence the lone voices of the Boycott Novell protestors. They seem to be treading on the toes of not just free software but free speech as well, which is against the very ethics of the conference they are holding. I’m not sure whether the conference organizers took this step on their own or in cahoots with Novell-Microsoft “gang” but whatever happened was unfortunate. You can see the pictures on Arky’s Blog.

This is not something we should just sit and watch and should raise our voice against it. Please digg this post, forward this link to your friends, write about it on your own blogs and spread the word.

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Given the ignorant lazy bum I am, until a couple of days ago I was unaware of this magical place called “Google Solutions Marketplace”. According to Google:

The Google Solutions Marketplace links customers to vendors whose solutions integrate and extend Google’s communication, collaboration, and enterprise search products.

Basically it is a boon for both, google product users who depend on various search, enterprise, search and apps related Google offerings, and developers who develop products and services based upon these. Google Solutions Marketplace acts as a bridge between the two to offer a one stop shop where you can buy (or even get for free, in many cases) the brilliant ideas that have been developed by many individuals and companies based on google’s services.

Some benefits for users:

• A comprehensive listing of great solutions for individual as well business needs based on google products.
• All products go through an approval process by Google to ensure a certain standard of quality and basic checks to prevent frauds
• A user based review system to put the good and the bad ones apart
• Very basic to advanced apps available for free as well as paid ones.
• Paid ones may also have option to use google checkout for payment

Some benefits for developers:

• No need to create and maintain a website for their products
• Good exposure to a wide audience without spending a dime. yes, all listings are free, even for paid apps.
• Payments can be taken through Google Checkout or your own payment gateway

Certainly a good initiative by Google. Some of the good apps I found are (all free ones, since I’m a cheapskate ): Google Short Links, Gmail Backup, Google Email Uploader, LuckyCal, etc.

Let me know if you find this marketplace to your liking and also tell me of any exciting apps/services that you find while you are there.

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“Google Adsense” has been caught in a conflict of interests with its parent company “Google”. Google piad 140k to teh cause of “Say No to Prop 8” but on the other hand people reported that Google Adsense delivered a substantially huge amount of “Say Yes to Prop 8” advertisements all over the internet, even on sites which are completely out of context with this matter. Not only is this conflicting with the interests of the parent company but also with the “Terms of Use” put forward by Adsense that ads should not have any kind of intolerance or advocacy towards an individual or a group. Irate people took out their frustation on the adsense blog.

Now, I just caught another conflict between google and adsense on my own blog. Basically, Google is against TLAs (text-link-ads) since they mess up the search engine rankings and even penalizes any site that sells or buys them. But look what I found in one of the ads displayed in google.

Looks like somebody needs to arrange a meeting between the google and adsense honchos to sort out what exactly is their stance on anything and everything.

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Creative has finally come to its senses and turned to the open source community to raise its X-Fi series of sound cards from the ashes on the linux platform, which got burnt mostly due to the poor quality of the drivers that Creative was giving out. The announcement for releasing the source code, licensed under GPL v2, was made on their forums. For the announcement and download details, click here.

I guess this is a reason for us to rejoice because of two reasons:

1. This would definitely make life that much more better as the open source developers fix these particular drivers (ALSA people, start your engines)

2. This also means another big inroads into the commercial world for open source as creative is definitely one of the big boys around.

Now, I wish NVidia would see the light of the day as well. Creative guys, care to take a trip down to Santa Clara to share your reasonings with our GPU brothers

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A 404 page is an error page that is displayed when somebody tries to go to a link on your website that doesn’t exist. This could occur when someone linking to your website or typing in his browser address bar mistypes a url, or maybe that page has been moved or deleted by you. Lost opportunity? Maybe. But definitely not, if you follow this advise. Many people don’t have a 404 page altogether, a few implement with an inane message like “Something went wrong”, a few will try to help out the seemingly lost user  by giving a few navigation options linking to home page, archives or most popular posts, etc. Definitely the last option among these is quite good to retain the users, but we’ll go one step ahead and turn this into an extra source of cash.

Note: This is perfectly fine according to Google Adsense TOS.

What we’ll do is implment a search box (Adsense For Search) on the 404 error page, which will net us the following benefits:

• Give the users a way to search for what they would have come looking for and hence retain them on your website.
• Make money if they click on any ads that are shown by Adsense for search.

Now we’ll see how to do it for a wordpress blog as well as a static site.

How to implement google adsense for search for your blog:

Common step: The first step for independent of what kind of site you have, is to sign up for Google Adsense Publisher Account. Once you have signed up, log on to your account and go to Adsense Setup -> Get Ads -> Adsense For Search. Customize the box according to your need. (Select the “Open search results in my website” option to make sure users remain on your site. And insert a url where you’d like to show the results. e.g. mine is http://tech.shantanugoel.com/search/ ). Once you are done, you will get two snippets of code. One for displaying the search box and another for displaying the search results. Lets call them “Adsense-For-Search-Box-Code” and “Adsense-For-Search-Results-Code”. We’ll use them below for our implmentation.

For a static site: A static site is one where you have static/hand-coded html pages (i.e., not generated by a server side language, e.g. PHP). This requires 3 steps now:

Step 1) Create a 404.html page that will contain your search box code and will be displayed in case of a 404 error. A simple sample implmentation would be a blank page that contains just the search box code. The contents of this page can be as shown below:

However, you might want to blend this in with your other website pages by including the look of header, sidebars, footers, etc, and in place of content just paste in the code.

Step 2) Create a search-results.html page that will contain the search results (You need to enter http://>your-domain-name</search-result.html in the adsense settings for this). Here, also you can either create a blank html page with just the search results code added or mimic the look of your website. Possible Contents:

Step 3) Modify your .htaccess file to add the following line:

And you are done. For a wordpress site, read on:

For a WordPress based site/blog: For a wordpress based site, you don’t have to modify the .htaccess. The 3 steps you have to follow are as below:

Step 1) Create or modify your 404.php file (generally in your theme’s root directory, e.g. http://<your-site-name>/wp-content/themes/<your-theme>/404.php ) to include the adsense for search box code. e.g.:

Step 2) Create a search-results.php file (generally in your theme’s root directory, e.g. http://<your-site-name>/wp-content/themes/<your-theme>/search-results.php ) to include the adsense for search results code. e.g.:

Step 3) Login to your WordPress dashboard, go to Write->Page. Create a new page with its url/slug being http://<your-site-name>/search (e.g. http://tech.shantanugoel.com/search ) or whatever that you input in your adsense settings. Make sure you select the page template as “Google Adsense Search Results” as we had mentioned in the search-results.php file at the top. Save this page and you are done.

Now, try to go to any non-existent url on your site (You can try this with this blog also, appending any weird url after http://tech.shantanugoel.com/ ) and you will be presented with the nice adsense-for search box. Let me know if this helped you out or you find any shortcomings in this or have any of your own tips. Also let me know if you need my specific 404.php and search-results.php files.

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