Why you shouldn’t feel bad about blocking Ads
I ran across an interesting article today while browsing though some submissions on Digg.com. The article came from the reputed web site Ars Technia. The article titled “Why Ad blocking is devastating to the sites you love” was interesting to read nonetheless. The article purported that blocking advertisements on web sites hurts the web sites you visit. I can agree to an extent, but I would not take it as far as those guys over at Ars Technia have.
Even though they said its not immoral, unethical, or stealing it sure seems this article puts it that way. I believe it should be the users choice if they want to view advertisements on a web site. In fact, I always recommend people run Noscript, Ad Block Plus, and Flashblock on their Firefox installations. The fact of the matter is people have a choice to decide what code they run on their computers. If a user doesn’t want to run a Javascript/Flash based ad on their computer, they should not be nudged at and made to feel guilty about it.
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Get Indexed and Ranked by Ask.com Search Engine
Ask.com is one of the 4 major search engines with the others being the almighty Google, Microsoft’s new Bing, and the venerable Yahoo search engine. Even though Ask.com only has a small percentage of the search engines overall search share, it will be beneficial for your site to be listed and optimised for Ask.
Ask.com is a unique search engine because its primary algorithms centers around answering human readable questions with relevant answers from its search results. This makes Ask search unique in that its goal is NOT to index the entire web like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Ask’s goal is to index only relevant answers to human readable questions using its patented semantic and extraction capabilities. Ask uses this technology to recognise the best answer from a sea of relevant pages.
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I find this is a common question among many blog owners and webmasters alike. Are Meta tags still important today? In the early days of SEO many shady search engine optimization folks used meta tags and keyword stuffing with invisible text to get their sites to rank higher in the SERPS. This method does not work very well today, and will most likely get your site penalized or banned altogether from the search engines.
According To Google, they do not even acknowledge or give any relevance to the keywords meta tag. Even though Google does support some other basic meta tags which they kindly list on the follow page of their webmaster help tools page However, Google is not the only search engine on the block.
Yahoo puts a much lesser ranking score on the keywords meta tag, however, it is still used to some degree. Opinions vary on if Bing uses the meta tag.
So the question is, should you use meta tags? If so which meta tags should you use?
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Securing Ubuntu with AppArmor
Ubuntu is a free and open-source Linux distribution supported by Canonical LTD. Even though Ubuntu Linux is very secure out of the box, there are very easy ways to ensure Ubuntu is even more secure. We can do this by taking advantage of the Mandatory Access Controls that ship with Ubuntu. The Mandatory Access Control System Ubuntu ships with is AppArmor. AppArmor was originally designed by Novel, and released to the open source community under the GPL. AppArmor is a path-based MAC that many experts deemed is easier to use and implement then SELinux.
AppArmor works by reading and loading profiles (Text documents) that outline the permissions for an application, and what areas of the system they are allowed to read and write to. AppArmor is implemented using Linux Security modules kernel interface. What AppArmor allows you to do is confine system access of Internet facing applications and daemons to a specific set of places the application needs to function and that’s all. This means AppArmor can be used to fend off and/or greatly reduce the damage potential of zero-day exploits in Internet facing applications.
In this article I will show you the basics of how AppArmor works, and write a profile for Mozilla Firefox.
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Chromium Browser Review
As you may know, Google released a Web Browser named Google Chrome which is becoming popular on the Internet. Google Chrome is a lightweight browser that adheres to standards, and is competing with Opera, Firefox, and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for your desktop. The Chromium Web Browser is the browser code base that Google chrome is based from. The Chromium Browser does have a few slight differences in it to is Google Chrome brother.
Differences Between The Chromium Browser and Google Chrome
The primary differences between the Chromium Browser and Google Chrome is that the Chromium Browser does not come with the Google Branding, and the other Google specific services built in like page translation. The Chromium Browser also does not support the h.264 codec for html5 video by default. You can view more a more in-depth chart of differences between the Chromium Browser and Google Chrome on the following pages from Google’s Code Lab.
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If you have not heard, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search are set soon to merge search engine efforts. Microsoft Bing will soon provide the search results in the Yahoo Search engine. This deal between Microsoft and Yahoo has both companies hoping it will help them better compete with Google’s dominance in the search engine arena. However this change will effect your sites SEO and rankings because Yahoo Slurp (Yahoo’s Current Crawler) and MSNbot (The Bing web crawler) do rank and rate web sites differently based on search criteria and algorithms.
I ran across a few SEO Tips for Bing, and decided to expand upon them. In this article, I will post some tips that will help your web site or blog rank better in the Microsoft Bing search engine which means you will also rank better in the Bing powered Yahoo search in the future. To ensure the best results with Bing, please follow the easy SEO tips below.
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February 27th, 2010 in
Current Events,
Microsoft,
SEO,
Yahoo,
internet | tags:
Bing,
microhoo,
Microsoft,
search engine optimization,
search engines,
Yahoo |
No Comments
If you haven’t heard already, Google has taken a page out of the Twitter and Facebook idea of status updates with its new Google Buzz service. Google Buzz takes the concept of status updates a bit farther by allowing users to share photos, videos, web pages, links, blog posts, and other useful titbits a person may find on the Internet with a single click. Google Buzz also allows users to associated web sites with their account, and they can control who sees what they share. When using Google’s Buzz service you can share things with only a few people or to the world. This can be a powerful resource for blog owners to get their content out there in front of more people because it allows for greater web sharing. Google buzz also integrates with Gmail to send updates directly to your inbox so you don’t miss anything. A truly brilliant idea from Google!
So how can we harness this new sharing medium into our Wordpress blog? Read the rest of this entry »
