Security Tip: Never Type Your Passwords

One of the most common ways to gain control of a website, email account, bank account and what not is to have a key logger installed on the computer of the victim. After that everything you type will be saved into a hidden file, and if you are used to typing your passwords to logging into your website, email and bank the attacked will have access to all of them.

The practice of typing passwords is even more dangerous if you use shared computers, for instance where you work or on Internet cafes, as you never know what kind of malware may already be installed on that machine.

If you are not to type your passwords, what should you do? It’s simple: the good ol’ copy and paste. You basically need a password manager to store all your passwords (preferably in a encrypted fashion), and after that you just copy and paste the password you need.

Some good password managers you might wanna try:

• RoboForm (Windows and browsers)
• Keepass (All platforms)
• 1Password (Mac)

If you use different computers you can also carry your passwords on a USB drive and load them as needed.

Daniel Scocco

Country Specific BlogSpot URLs

Blogger has started using Country Specific URLs and some of you might have already noticed it. The change has been rolled out in India.If you are from India try visiting any BlogSpot URL and you will be redirected to the country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD). For example if you visit any page on http://blogspotskill.blogspot.com from India , you will be redirected to the country specific page on http://blogspotskill.blogspot.in . Similarly if you visit any other ccTLDs  from India, you will be redirected to the Indian TLD.

eg: http://blogspotskill.blogspot.com.au (Australian TLD)  will redirect to the Indian TLD .

Blogger has made a help page entry describing why they have made this change. You can read that at Blogger Help As per the article the change might soon be rolled out to other countries as well.

Why This Change?

This change was specifically made to enable country wise censorship.

“By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD.”

Who is affected by this Change?

Everyone Blogger user who doesn’t have a custom domain name(but has readers across the globe)  irrespective of the country you are from is affected by this change. Right now it seems like the change has been rolled out only in India. So when an Indian user visits your blog, he will be redirected to the .in TLD. using a 302 redirect.

What should I do Now ?

The first thing that you have to do is to make sure that you are using Canonical tag on your blog Pages. This should be there by default in all templates unless you hacked the template and removed some code from there.

Make sure that the following line is there in your Blog Template

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

This tag will render the canonical tag for you.

If you don’t want to add this tag for some reason, then you can use the following tag in the template’s head section.

<link expr:href="data:blog.canonicalUrl" rel="canonical"/>

data:blog.canonicalUrl will give you the actual canonical URL(blogspot.com ).

What does the Canonical Tag do ?

The Canonical tag specifies the actual location of the page. Even if you are viewing a blogspot.in page, the canonical tag will let the search engines know where the actual page is located(the blogspot.com version)

If you don’t have the canonical tag on your pages, you might get into trouble on search engines which might index different country specific pages of your Blog. Your Social Counters(Facebook Like Button, Google Plus One button etc)  will show the wrong count and will allow users to share different country specific versions of your Page. Adding the Canonical tag will ensure that the same blogspot.com page gets shared on social networks and so the counters will display the same count irrespective of the country the visitor is from.

Custom Domain Blogs like mine will not be affected by this change.

Update :- Blogger has now addressed this issue and now the canonical tags  have been added to Dynamic View Templates as well.

No Country Redirect (NCR)

If you want to temporarily  prevent Blogger from doing a country specific redirect while viewing a blogspot blog, then you can use the NCR option.

Examples : http://blogspotskill.blogspot.com/ncr will give you the .com version without redirecting to your ccTLD

http://blogspotskill.blogspot.com.au/ncr will give the australian ccTLD without redirecting to your ccTLD

Google Plus One and Facebook Like Buttons

The first reaction that I heard on Social Media Sites is about the Social Counters. This change won’t affect your counters. When a page gets shared on Facebook, FB always shares the Canonical URL. So you don’t have to worry about the FB counters. Google Plus will allow you to share non-canonical URLs, but since G+ doesn’t have any counter based on number of shares, this won’t be an issue.  The Facebook Like Buttons or the Google +1  Buttons will always use the Canonical URL, so counters won’t have a problem with this update(provided you have the canonical tag)

Update (1/2/2012): Since most of the Social Counters were not configured to use Canonical URLs, they might show wrong counts. All template tweak posts here on this blog has now been updated to use Canonical URLs. If you are using the data:post.url variable in any of the social plugins, then you will have to replace it with data:post.canonicalUrl. If you are using data:blog.url anywhere for social plugins, then you will have to replace it with data:blog.canonicalUrl . You might get some idea if you check out the updated posts here on this blog.

The Keys To Writing Effective Email Newsletters For Your Blog

Experienced bloggers may have a profound understanding of the dynamics of composing an engaging and informative blog but they may also be entirely clueless when it comes to applying their writing skills to a very different medium: their email newsletter.

The creation of an effective email newsletter requires a very specific form of writing moxie and the mastery of a structure which varies considerably from your garden variety blog post.

Promotional vs. informative

The first determination which must be made is what your readers want to read. In order to address this situation you might need to rewind your entire creative process back to Square One and re-determine what the actual goal of your email newsletter is in the first place. Of course you’re trying to drive more traffic to your blog, but are you doing it in a promotional or an informative manner? The two approaches can translate in very distinct results.

Depending on your email subscribing audience they may be more responsive to a form of mini-blog which presents ancillary or even totally separate information than what you are currently featuring on your formal blog.

However, some types of readers would rather receive the information you provide on your blog itself and may be confused or irritated by having to resort to two separate channels to receive “the full picture.” You can certainly rely on your knowledge of the sector, but by far the more accurate manner to make this determination is by extensively testing both approaches to see which one provides the better conversion rate.

Short & punchy

Once you have the overall approach set, it’s time to simplify. Most bloggers craft email newsletters that are way too long, complex, convoluted, and detailed to be effective. The best email newsletters feature short, punchy paragraphs, a wealth of bullet lists, and links that not only lead back to your blog, but to other pages that your readers could find of interest.

There is usually no need to cram in everything but the kitchen sink into your email newsletters, as general summaries with links back to your blog for the meat of the matter is usually all that is required. If you find yourself composing voluminous tomes for your email newsletter content that requires repeated scrolling by the reader, you should channel that time and energy into your blog itself.

Chat, don’t lecture

Your email subscriber is a regular person, not a member of a peer-review scientific journal committee. That equates into your composing your email newsletter in the style of a one on one conversation not a post-graduate thesis. You can reserve the heavy lifting of facts and figures for your blog, as an email newsletter is best written in the way that you would chat with them, not lecture them.

Reward your reader for having the trust and confidence in you to sign up for your email newsletter and then carrying through to actually opening and reading the emails they receive by providing them content that is friendly, approachable, and conversational.

Avoid insider-speak

Jargon is one of the greatest enemies of a successful email newsletter campaign. Even though you may operate in an extremely technical industry, you should always aim the readership comprehension of your email newsletter writing at a reasonable eighth grade education level.

Take whatever steps are necessary to avoid writing email newsletters that require extensive technical footnotes, or worse yet read like the Hollywood trade magazine Variety where different movie genres are described in insider lingo as laffers (comedies), mellers (melodramas), oaters (Westerns), or chopsocky (martial arts). Excessive jargon or technicalese can lead to misunderstanding which can alienate a large part of your audience.

You should always place yourself in the position of your subscriber when writing an email newsletter. If you were subscribing to your blog, what would you react to most favorably? If you find that the way you are crafting your email campaign now is actually responsible for disaffecting your subscribers, it’s time that you made a change… while you still have subscribers left!

Hal Licino

The Top 7 Twitter Imperatives For Bloggers

Many bloggers accustomed to dealing with topics in 400 to 600 words are finding concentrating their messages down to a mere 140 characters to be extremely challenging. Twitter can be a minefield and the slightest error can cost you readers and reputation, so follow these top 7 blogger imperatives for Twitter and rise to the level of a whiz tweeter, not a whizzing twit.

1. Wach ur Spelink & Gramma – Your Twitter content represents your blog and if you’re illiterate in your tweets then the reader can expect more of the same in your blog. Even though you only have 140 characters to work with, abbreviations are generally frowned upon, so it’s best to state what you have to say very concisely but in perfect English.

2. Ice your head first – The CEO of the leading company in your field has done something so profoundly cretinous that they’re making Steve Ballmer look like Albert Einstein, so your first temptation is to fire off a tweet calling him a moron and a bozo. You shouldn’t insult anyone on Twitter ever as it can come back to haunt you and will alienate many of your followers. You’re best off to criticize the factual policies, without engaging in ad hominem attacks.

3. Thicken your skin – One of the most frustrating things about being on Twitter is how many of your followers will not hesitate for a moment to call you a moron and a bozo. Just like you shouldn’t engage in vulgar tweeting about industry figures you have to restrain yourself from engaging in an exchange of expletives with instigators. Just ignore them and they’ll go find some other playground to engage in their silly games.

4. Just the facts ma’am – Twitter is a factual communications medium, so you’re best off to reserve your editorial ruminations to your blog and provide information and links which are both relevant and valuable to your reader. They read your blog to obtain the latest happenings in your industry, whether it be the specs on the latest 128GB SSD or what Lindsay Lohan has done now. “Just had a great Mocha Frappuccino #starbucks” is not really either relevant or valuable to anyone and it verges on…

5. Shill Shill Hurray (Not) – The great dirty non-secret of Twitter is that influential tweeters can cash in bigtime. When a major celebrity movie or sports star makes an offhanded remark about how great their shoe/car/watch/whatever is you can bet that their motivation is not altruistic sharing of a great customer experience but a real big check.

As a blogger you have a responsibility to remain unbiased and balanced, so ranting on about how fantastic a specific product is will communicate to your readers that you’ve succumbed to payola and your opinions can no longer be trusted to be your own.

6. Politickmeoff – Are you writing a political blog? Then feel free to engage in all the political wagging your heart desires. If your blog is not related to politics in any way then your tweets should never broach the subjects. If your readers are seeking information on your industry’s latest news, they really couldn’t care less if you’re voting for or against Obama. You can make an exception when political maneuvering affects your industry, such as the Keystone XL pipeline being momentous for the oil business or the Stop Online Piracy Act shaking up internet providers.

7. No laughs for gaffes – We all laugh uproariously when a major twitter makes a boneheaded mistake, such as Ashton Kutcher railing against Penn State Coach Joe Paterno’s firing before learning it was due to a molestation scandal, Kenneth Cole connecting the violent Egyptian uprising to his new spring fashion collection, or Gilbert Gottfried making jokes out of the Japanese Tsunami.

So… what have learned, Dorothy? Don’t repeat their mistakes! You should be lighthearted in your tweets but not ever broach the limits of insensitivity or make factual errors. The wrong 140 characters can wipe out years of work building up your blog!

Hal Licino