How to add a drop-down list to an Excel cell

In Access, you can limit user entries by forcing users to choose a value from a list control. Office applications use the same functionality in built-in drop-down lists. For instance, the Highlight and Font Color controls on most Formatting toolbars use this flexible tool. Simply click the small triangle to the right of the icon to display a list of choices.

You can create the same type of control for your users in an Excel sheet, but the process isn’t intuitive. The option is in the Data Validation feature. Fortunately, once you know the feature exists, it’s easy to implement. You need only two things: a list and a data entry cell. The following sheet shows a simple drop-down list in an Excel sheet.

Users click the drop-down arrow to display a list of items from A1:A4. If a user tries to enter something that isn’t in the list, Excel rejects the entry. To add this drop-down list to a sheet, do the following:

1. Create the list in cells A1:A4. Similarly, you can enter the items in a single row, such as A1:D1.
2. Select cell E3. (You can position the drop-down list in most any cell or even multiple cells.)
3. Choose Validation from the Data menu.
4. Choose List from the Allow option’s drop-down list. (See, they’re everywhere.)
5. Click the Source control and drag to highlight the cells A1:A4. Alternately, simply enter the reference (=$A$1:$A$4).
6. Make sure the In-Cell Dropdown option is checked. If you uncheck this option, Excel still forces users to enter only list values (A1:A4), but it won’t present a drop-down list.
7. Click OK.

You can add the drop-down list to multiple cells. Select the range of data input cells (step 2) instead of a single cell. It even works for noncontiguous cells. Hold down the Shift key while you click the appropriate cells.

It’s worth noting that the drop-down arrow is visible only when the cell is active.

The Two Biggest Guest Blogging Mistakes You Can Make

I receive around 20 guest post submissions per week. Usually I let them pile up and once a month I go through all of them, replying to the ones I think would be a good fit for the blog.

There are two types of submissions I discard right away, though, without even taking a look. I also consider those the two biggest mistakes you can make while trying to guest post on some blog. They are:

1. Not including the name of the blog owner

If by opening your email I see something like “Dear Sir” or “Dear Blog Owner” I’ll send it to the trash bin immediately. Why? because it tells me that this is a generic guest post offer, and that you probably sent the same post to dozens of other blogs.

The least you can do is to visit the site where you want to guest post and to discover the name of the owner.

2. Not including the post itself

Many of the guest post emails I receive are only asking if I would be interested in having a guest post written. Something like this:

Dear Daniel,

I have been your blog for a long time, and I was wondering if you would be interested in having me to write a guest post for you. I was thinking to write something about Facebook marketing or email marketing.

Please let me know and we’ll get moving.

Thanks,
John Doe

My thoughts when I see such emails: “How on earth can I know if I would be interested in having your guest post if I don’t know how you write or what ideas you have?”.

Sometimes the person will include the title of the guest post. Same deal. How can I approve or reject a guest post just by looking at the title?

Sure, I could reply explaining this to the person, but why waste my time?

Daniel Scocco

Off-line Optimization Guide to Promote your blog

You need traffic and you are done with On Site optimization of your Blog. But you are not done yet. You also need to Optimize your blog Off-line and Promote it correctly. Without promotion no-one will never find out that you have a great blog with great articles and writings in it.

Let's start with a brief description on Optimizing your blog off-line and Promoting your blog.

Submitting Your Blog to Directories

Directories are great way for promoting and generating traffic. So get listed in as many as possible. Some of the great directories that you can submit your blog or site are Technorati, DMOZ, Blogcatalog, etc.

Participating in Social Networks

Find forums and start participating under the niche that are relevant to your blog and start by opening new threads that people may find interesting or by helping others for those who needs help but don’t SPAM or you will be banned. Don’t forget to update your signature with link to your blog or site. Use Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc. and post about things that readers will like and the will make their way to your blog or site. This is what we know as Off-line Optimization.

To Have Something Newsworthy

Do you have something that’s newsworthy? Then why are you just blogging about it. Submit it to Ezine articles, Article Base, Go Articles, then blog about it, twitter about it, ping you blog, do whatever it’s needed to promote it. If you are doing it the right way then you will have at some new links to your site, and if it’s really in right track then you could have dozens of new links.

Try some Advertisement and Press Release

This is the part which may not be free of cost. Target some high ranking blogs or sites and ask site owner if he would like to put an advertisement of your blog on their site. If it’s yes then they would also tell you the amount of money that he will charge and will also tell you whether it would be a banner, image with link or just simple hyper-link. Alternatively you can also try press release. There are many free services out there. Now you have an idea about Off-line Optimization, let's start with it and see the increase in traffic by Promoting your blog.

How to Get Your Blog Indexed Quickly

If you are having trouble to get your blog indexed by search engines or you are unaware of it, then you must be thinking to do something very quickly. Indexing by major search engine is really important to get traffic to your blog and it’s an important SEO factor too.

In this article I will tell you the simple steps that every blogger can do to get your blog indexed by Google, Yahoo and Bing as quickly as possible.

First of all, check whether your blog is already index by search engines by searching forsite:www.your-blog.com in search boxes of respective search engines. If you think you are not happy with the results then here is a check list.

Add your Blog's Sitemap to Google Webmasters

It’s very important to add your site or blog’s sitemap to Google Webmasters as well as other major Search Engines' Webmasters as it will tell the search engines when your blog is getting updated so that it can add that page to their indexes. You may want to read the tutorial about How to Submit Blogger's sitemap to Google Webmasters.

Submit Blog to Social Bookmarking Sites

There is a lot of bookmarking sites. So, choose some higher PageRank, also known as PR, social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon to submit your blogs because Google bots frequently visits theses high PR sites looking for new content in it. You can also add social bookmarking icons so that interested people can bookmark your posts.

So, when Google spiders start crawling the website and finds your blog link, it will automatically follow that link and will crawl to your blog and start indexing. But remember, too much self-promotion can hurt your blog.

Submit Articles to Article Directories

Write an article and submit it to article directories like Ezine. But don’t forget to put a link of your blog in that article. This not only helps you to get your blog indexed but also brings you traffic.

Submit your Blog to Blog Directories

I think I don’t have to explain this one as this formula works just works like the above techniques. So submit your blog to directories under your niche. Some of them are Technorati, BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog.

Start Commenting on Do-Follow Blogs

“DoFollow” don’t exist but it has a meaning. That is, it does not contain rel=”nofollow” tags in their comment section. So start commenting whenever you come across these blogs under your niche.

Whenever Google comes across to that do-follow blog and found your site’s address in the comment sections, it will automatically follow that link and starts indexing your blog at the same time. But remember, Don’t Spam, because, the administrator will delete that comment in no time. Comments such as just “Thanks” or adding E-mail address or adding links to Spam sites and etc are always considered as Spam comments.

So, don't just sit there, start doing what you need to do first to get you blog indexed as quickly as possible by following the above methods. You will find that you got your blog indexed within 48 hours by major Search Engines.

Optimize Your Blogger Blog to Load Faster

It’s annoying when you visit a blog and it takes whole day to load. It takes no longer than 10 seconds to grab the attention of your visitors. So optimizing and making your blog load and render faster not only help your visitors to browse your site faster but also makes an overall good impression. And now it's an SEO factor too.

Not only you need a good host, removing unnecessary scripts and widgets and optimizing your images and template is also important. So you need to optimize your blog for the best performance and load faster. Let us have a quick look how to optimize your blogs to load faster.

Optimize your Stylesheets

W3 HTML specification clearly states that stylesheets should be put in the HEAD section which allows the page to render fast, properly and progressively. Bloggers who care about performance want a page to load faster, especially important for blogs with lots of content and widgets. This helps visitor with slower internet connections, who is waiting for the page to load, to view your blog properly. This improves the overall user experience.

Compress CSS

Remove unnecessary codes from CSS to reduce its size and improve loading times. Compress CSS, that is, remove unneeded white space, characters space, newlines and tabs. This improves response time performance because the size of the downloaded file is reduced. There are many online CSS Compressor tools, just Google it.

Optimize Images.

Compress and optimize your images. You can do it manually or you can also can Google for online image optimizers. Scale you images properly and use proper ‘alt’ attribute, for example, if your blog post image is 125x125 pixels then use:

<img alt="description of the image" height="125" scr="/image.png" width="125" />

JavaScript at Bottom.

Put JavaScript in BODY Section or before closing HEAD. For example, if some scripts don't need much attention, place it before </body> tag. In some situation, some scripts are used to style your blog. For example, you are using jQuery Slide Show. So you need jQuery library. Then move the script below in the HEAD section, just above </head> tag.

Use an External JavaScript.

JavaScript that are not external may reduce the number of DNS lookups and HTTP requests but also increases the size of the Blog and Blogger Template. While, if the JavaScript are used as external files then these are cached by the browsers which not only reduces the size of the template but also reduces the HTTP requests after the page of your blog is loaded after first time. You can use Google to host your project and JavaScript.

Reduce DNS Lookups and HTTP requests.

Remove unnecessary badges, images, files that are from different and unique hostnames. It takes some time (milliseconds) for DNS to look for the IP addresses for the given hostnames. The browser is unable to download anything from the hosts until the DNS lookup is completed. Reducing the number of host-names reduces the number of DNS lookups and HTTP requests. This helps the blog to load faster.

This blog optimization guide is the timed down version of Yahoo! - Speeding up Your Website. I have explained it in short but important points to load your blog faster for better performance and SEO.

On-Site Optimization to Make Your Blog Attractive to Search Engines

As we all know that traffic to our blogs mainly comes from major Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. But just submitting blog's URL to Search Engines doesn't mean that they will bring you the traffic to your blog. So what you need is an On-Site optimization so that your blog becomes attractive to Search Engines.

Thinking "What is On-Site Optimization?". This article will give you an idea.

On-Site optimization of your blog depends on many factors that you must emphasize on. I will try to cover some of the factors.

Understanding Keywords

Do you know the niche you are blogging about? If yes, then it’s easy and if no then find your niche. Under your niche find few keywords and phrases that you think that it’s describes your blog or site and people searching for it may eventually find it in Google, Yahoo or Bing. Your keywords must consist of about 3-5% of your blog's pages to make it attractive to Search Engines. Now, put these keywords as title, as heading for your blog posts.

• It’s good if keywords are less than 3%.
• It’s good to not to use popular keywords that describes your blog because big websites are already optimized by these popular keywords. Try simple keywords that people are finding in Google Yahoo or Bing.

Optimize Your Blogger or Blog Template to Load Faster

Here are some of the tips

• Minimize HTTP Requests
• Put Style sheets at the Top
• Put Scripts at the Bottom
• Avoid CSS Expressions
• Reduce DNS Lookups
• Minimizing JavaScript and CSS
• Avoid Redirects
• No 404s
• Reduce the Number of DOM Elements
• Optimize Images

To Have some Good Articles:

Good at writing or not, try to write some unique articles. Submit your articles to articles directory with your blog's URL so that traffic comes in. This, not only will help to get good traffic but also will make the visitors to return again. This not only will make your blog attractive to search engine bots but also will attract unique visitors.

Try some Giveaways

Give your visitors the free things, like templates, gadgets. You can create your own templates or can download from some other sources (off-course mentioning the source from where you have downloaded it). You can also create widgets for a free distribution. One of the sites that you can visit is Widgetbox.com.

Creating Sitemap

It is very important to create a sitemap for your blog and submit the sitemap to Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. You can find lots of free sitemap tools to create your sitemap and let Search Engines know when your site is getting updated. For blogger, there are no sitemap tools, also you don’t need one. You got your sitemap in your “atom.xml” file. Your sitemap is “http://blog-name.BlogSpot.com/atom.xml” to make it attractive to search engines. More can be found:Submitting your Blogger Sitemap to Google Webmasters.

Subscription to Visitors

A great way for your visitors to return again is to create a RSS subscription button or by email newsletter. Simply don't Spam. If people like your articles and contents, they will sign up. Also have a twitter account (or a Facebook account) and let people follow you and know what you twitting about by placing a “Follow me on Twitter” button.

Strategy of Link Building:

Google likes a site with 100 links all pointing to different sites or pages on your blog than a site with 500 links all redirecting to the homepage. So whenever you add a content or write an article which is related to any previous articles, then link it. This way you will attract the search engine bots more. Creating back links is also a good SEO strategy. i.e. If you came across an article in Mr. X’s blog that you liked and wrote about it in your blog, then give credit to Mr. X by linking back to the original article. Also ask Mr. X if he also likes to link back to you. So you got an basic idea on On-Site optimization. This way you will not only attract the search engine bots, but also will attract new and unique visitors.

Advantages and Disadvantages of different SDLC Models

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Stop SOPA "Stop Online Piracy Act"

SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, is another one of those bills that sounds like it's going to do something mildly positive but, in reality, has serious potential to negatively change the internet as we know it. It puts power in the hands of the entertainment industry to censor sites that allegedly "engage in, enable or facilitate" copyright infringement. This language vague enough to encompass sites you use every day, like Twitter and Facebook, making SOPA a serious problem. Here's how it works and what you can do about it.

How Does SOPA Work, and Why Should We Care?

The idea behind SOPA sounds reasonable. It came about in order to try to snuff out piracy online, as the entertainment industry is obviously not excited about the many people downloading their product without their permission. The issue is, however, that it doesn't really matter whether you're in support of piracy, against it, or just don't care. SOPA makes it possible for companies to block the domain names of web sites that are simple capable of, or seem to encourage copyright infringement.

This means that if Lifehacker happened to have an article or two that could be interpreted as piracy-friendly, our domain could be blocked so it's inaccessible by visiting lifehacker.com. What the bill can't do is block numeric IP addresses, so you could still access Lifehacker, or any other site that could be censored, if you knew that address. This is important because it means this bill can't do much to stop downloaders of pirated content. If a domain name is blocked, everything will still work via the numeric IP address. Basically, the bill will be no good at stopping piracy—what it was apparently designed to do—but excellent at censoring any web site capable of providing its users with the means of promoting pirated content or allowing the process. This includes sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, and many more. If it's possible to post pirated content on the site, or information that could further online piracy, a claim can be brought against it. This can be something as minor as you posting a copyrighted image to your Facebook page, or piracy-friendly information in the comments of a post such as this one. The vague, sweeping language in this bill is what makes it so troubling.

In the event of SOPA-based censorship, any site can submit an appeal so long as they do so within five days. This isn't a lot of time to handle a legal matter, and if you've ever dealt with a copyright infringement takedown notice you know how ineffective an appeal can be. When a threat of legal action is posed, a company is generally going to prefer to err on the side of caution and remove infringing content indefinitely. It's far cheaper to run the risk of removing perfectly legal content than to battle the issue in court. If your web host censors your site because of a SOPA-based claim, you can expect the same sorts of problems.

If you want to learn more about how SOPA works, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) posted a great overview. You can also view the exact contents of SOPA. For a quick overview, be sure to watch the video at the top of this post.

What Can We Do About SOPA?

Currently Twitter, Google, Reddit, Kickstarter, Tumblr, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, eBay, Zynga, Facebook, and several other sites have spoken out in opposition of SOPA.

In the other hand, you should get the word out. Post this article or any other information about SOPA on your social media accounts. Send emails to friends and family. If you oppose the bill, help others to understand why they should oppose it as well.

SOPA is on the fast track, so if you want to fight it you need to do so today "Stop SOPA".

Google Translate Widget with Flags for Blogger

Google translation for your blog is now made easy with the use of flags. Add a Google Translator widget with mini flags to Blogger.

With the help of Google Translate and by adding flags to it, this widget in HTML, allows your visitors to translate your site and blog in their own languages.

Features:

• Translate widget with mini Flags for Blogger
• Coded in HTML, no JavaScript used so that it can also be viewed with Lynx based browsers which are unable to load script files.
• This Widget can translate any language to readers preferred language that are supported by Google Translate.
• I have included 10 languages in this widget. They are: Chinese(Simplified), Portuguese, English, French, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish.
• Available for both English and Non-English blogs.
• Animation effects for modern browsers. (New)

Tested on a French language blog.

Demo

How to add this widget! Just click any one of the "Add to Blogger" Button.

Translator Widget with Mini Flags for English blogs

Translator Widget with Mini Flags for Non English blogs

Let me know if it helped you or if you have any problems or bugs with it.

Stuxnet - a weapon made entirely out of code

Stuxnet is a computer worm discovered in June 2010. It initially spreads via Microsoft Windows, and targets Siemens industrial software and equipment. While it is not the first time that hackers have targeted industrial systems, it is the first discovered malware that spies on and subverts industrial systems, and the first to include a programmable logic controller (PLC) rootkit.

The worm initially spreads indiscriminately, but includes a highly specialized malware payload that is designed to target only Siemens supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that are configured to control and monitor specific industrial processes.

Stuxnet is a weapon made entirely out of code. This cool inforgraphic explains this virus that has changed the anatomy of viruses. Following is the video which was produced by Australian TV program HungryBeast on Australia’s ABC1.