Monday, June 28, 2010

Are you obsessed with online gaming ?


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A bizarre, sad story related to online games. A married couple in Suwon, Korea has beenarrested by the police for negligence of their parental duties. The couple left their three month old baby starve to death, because they were "too obsessed with online gaming." Ironically enough, it turned out that the online game they were playing to their baby's death was themed around, well guess what, raising a virtual avatar.

So in short, the couple were too busy taking care of their "virtual baby" that they kept their "real baby" completely unattended and starved to death.
The game is called "Prius Online" and the players can adopt an avatar and grow it. Game players can also buy the avatars virtual items such as clothes, or even write a blog about their avatars, much resembling a parenting diary.

The parents in charge are said to have been under great parenting stress, presumably due to their financial difficulties, and as their parenting stresses mounted, they became more and more obsessed with the game -- their "escape" from the real world.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Use Your News to Drive traffic to your website


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Making the Most of News via Press Release:

pres releasePeople, specially your customers and friends love reading news about you and your business. So frequently publishing your news and let the world know about happenings in your business makes a buzz for you and this leads to more customers.

Publishing news as Press Release (PR) attract journalists. PR also helps to bring more traffic to your website via search engines as most of the search engines love PR and value it more. PR has a much SEO value than other contents.

In order to maximize the benefits of online news, you need reconsider what is newsworthy. Start Thinking About News in a Different Way

Information about your company should not only come out quarterly along with your financials – there are millions of reasons to continually get the word out, giving your company the pat on the back and attention it deserves, including:

• Product launch
• New hire or staffing change
• Award announcement
• Anniversary
• New client or partnership
• Additional office or territory
• Participation in a charitable/community event
• Receipt of additional funding
• Investor news
• Profitability
• Client success story

images (1) And how can you get this attention? A news release service. Few of the Services are :

PRWeb : http://www.prweb.com
WebWire: http://www.webwire.com
Free-Press Release: http://www.free-press-release.com/
India PRWire: http://www.indiaprwire.com/
PressReleasePoint: http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/

What should be the format of your Press release ?
There is a good article about this here; http://www.webwire.com/FormatGuidelines.asp

Get some nice tips on how to write your press release here:
http://www.free-press-release.com/tools-tips/
http://www.prweb.com/pr/_assets/downloads/PRWeb-DriveSEO.pdf

Here are few good Video tutorials on “Writing Press Releases” :

 

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Facebook auto login by Gmail or Yahoo Login


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Linked Accounts in Facebook

Facebook has emerged into a robust and user friendly system. Facebook has a very user-friendly system thats lets you log-in automatically into facebook when you are logged-in into any of your following accounts:
· MySapace
· MyOpenID
· Verisign PIP
· OpenID
Open ID is supported by: Google, Six Apart, Yahoo!, Flickr, Wordpress, Verisign, AOL and many more. This means if you have account with any one of these sites, you just can attach these accounts with the Facebook and enjoy using your facebook account when you are logged in any of these accounts.

Add Linked account to Facebook account

1. Open Facebook.com & login into your account.
2. Goto Account > Account Settings.
3. Click ‘Change’ button next to linked accounts option.
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4. Select the type of account that you want to link among: Google, Yahoo, MySpace, OpenID etc from drop down box.
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5. Then click ‘Link to new account(s)’ button.
6. Then click ‘Allow’ button on the authorization screen.
After successful linking, all the linked accounts will be displayed on the ‘linked accounts’ option under ‘Account Settings’ screen. You can click on ‘remove’ button next to any linked account to remove respective linking with Facebook account.
How do I link my Yahoo! account to Facebook?
Here’s how to do this:
1. Go to your Yahoo! Pulse website.
2. Click Settings located at the upper-right corner the page.
3. Click Manage my linked accounts located under “Linked Accounts”.
4. On the new page that opens, click Link located at the right of Facebook under "Accounts You Can Link".
5. Sign in to Facebook by typing the email address and password that you used to sign up for Facebook.
6. Click Connect.
7. If this is the first time you’ve linked to Facebook, you’re presented with several pages asking you to allow specific actions to occur. If you agree with each request, click the Allow button.
Your link is established and you can immediately begin seeing your Facebook updates on your Yahoo! pages.
8. If you want to share your Yahoo! updates with your Facebook account, leave the box checked; otherwise, uncheck the box if you don’t want to share your Yahoo! updates with Facebook.
9. Click Continue to complete the linking process.
Information shared with Facebook is subject to the Facebook privacy policy and information imported from Facebook to Yahoo! is subject to the Yahoo! Privacy Policy website.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Social Marketing Goes Multiplatform


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Businesses began dipping their toes into the social media pool as early as 2005, but the last two years saw them jump in with both feet. Three developments in the social media landscape drove the rapid expansion of their activities:
Facebook achieve the critical mass needed to establish it as a major customer contact point. To a lesser extent, LinkedIn also crossed this threshold; Twitter burst on the scene and demonstrated enormous value in magnifying the reach of a message for relatively little cost and effort; Marketers warmed to the idea that using multiple social media channels together, and coordinating messages between them, collectively achieved a greater impact than if the tools were used in isolation.
Businesses of all sizes report overall satisfaction with the expansion of their social media initiatives. However, few are willing to back their optimism with rich analytics. Rather, their perception that social media is working for them is based more on the belief that the new platforms are reaching a wider audience in the places their customers are already congregating. Says Adam Brown, Director of the Office of Digital Communications & Social Media at the Coca-Cola Co., “Our philosophy is to fish where the fish are.”

Read full article here:
http://info.awarenessnetworks.com/rs/awarenessnetworks/images/Social-Marketing-Goes-Multichannel.pdf

Friday, June 11, 2010

All about Database Keys


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Database Keys

Introduction
For the purposes of clarity we will refer to keys in terms of RDBMS tables but the same definition, principle and naming applies equally to Entity Modelling and Normalisation.
Keys are, as their name suggests, a key part of a relational database and a vital part of the structure of a table. They ensure each record within a table can be uniquely identified by one or a combination of fields within the table. They help enforce integrity and help identify the relationship between tables. There are three main types of keys, candidate keys, primary keys and foreign keys. There is also an alternative key or secondary key that can be used, as the name suggests, as a secondary or alternative key to the primary key
Super Key
A Super key is any combination of fields within a table that uniquely identifies each record within that table.
Candidate Key
A candidate is a subset of a super key. A candidate key is a single field or the least combination of fields that uniquely identifies each record in the table. The least combination of fields distinguishes a candidate key from a super key. Every table must have at least one candidate key.
Candidate Kay
As an example we might have a student_id that uniquely identifies the students in a student table. This would be a candidate key. But in the same table we might have the student’s first name and last name that also, when combined, uniquely identify the student in a student table. These would both be candidate keys.
In order to be eligible for a candidate key it must pass certain criteria.
  • It must contain unique values
  • It must not contain null values
  • It contains the minimum number of fields to ensure uniqueness
  • It must uniquely identify each record in the table
Once your candidate keys have been identified you can now select one to be your primary key
Primary Key
A primary key is a candidate key that is most appropriate to be the main reference key for the table. As its name suggests, it is the primary key of reference for the table and is used throughout the database to help establish relationships with other tables. As with any candidate key the primary key must contain unique values, must never be null and uniquely identify each record in the table.
As an example, a student id might be a primary key in a student table, a department code in a table of all departments in an organisation. This module has the code DH3D 35 that is no doubt used in a database somewhere to identify RDBMS as a unit in a table of modules. In the table below we have selected the candidate key student_id to be our most appropriate primary key
Primary Key
Primary keys are mandatory for every table each record must have a value for its primary key. When choosing a primary key from the pool of candidate keys always choose a single simple key over a composite key.
Foreign Key
A foreign key is generally a primary key from one table that appears as a field in another where the first table has a relationship to the second. In other words, if we had a table A with a primary key X that linked to a table B where X was a field in B, then X would be a foreign key in B.
An example might be a student table that contains the course_id the student is attending. Another table lists the courses on offer with course_id being the primary key. The 2 tables are linked through course_id and as such course_id would be a foreign key in the student table.
Foreign Key
Secondary Key or Alternative Key
A table may have one or more choices for the primary key. Collectively these are known as candidate keys as discuss earlier. One is selected as the primary key. Those not selected are known as secondary keys or alternative keys.
For example in the table showing candidate keys above we identified two candidate keys, studentId and firstName + lastName. The studentId would be the most appropriate for a primary key leaving the other candidate key as secondary or alternative key. It should be noted for the other key to be candidate keys, we are assuming you will never have a person with the same first and last name combination. As this is unlikely we might consider fistName+lastName to be a suspect candidate key as it would be restrictive of the data you might enter. It would seem a shame to not allow John Smith onto a course just because there was already another John Smith.
Simple Key
Any of the keys described before (ie primary, secondary or foreign) may comprise one or more fields, for example if firstName and lastName was our key this would be a key of two fields where as studentId is only one. A simple key consists of a single field to uniquely identify a record. In addition the field in itself cannot be broken down into other fields, for example, studentId, which uniquely identifies a particular student, is a single field and therefore is a simple key. No two students would have the same student number.
Compound Key
A compound key consists of more than one field to uniquely identify a record. A compound key is distinguished from a composite key because each field, which makes up the primary key, is also a simple key in its own right. An example might be a table that represents the modules a student is attending. This table has a studentId and a moduleCode as its primary key. Each of the fields that make up the primary key are simple keys because each represents a unique reference when identifying a student in one instance and a module in the other.
Composite Key
A composite key consists of more than one field to uniquely identify a record. This differs from a compound key in that one or more of the attributes, which make up the key, are not simple keys in their own right. Taking the example from compound key, imagine we identified a student by their firstName + lastName. In our table representing students on modules our primary key would now be firstName + lastName + moduleCode. Because firstName + lastName represent a unique reference to a student, they are not each simple keys, they have to be combined in order to uniquely identify the student. Therefore the key for this table is a composite key.

Extracted From: http://rdbms.opengrass.net/2_Database%20Design/2.1_TermsOfReference/2.1.2_Keys.html

Thursday, June 10, 2010

What is HTML Debugging?


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Today, some one asked me “What is HTML debugging?”

So I thought to share the answer to you also..

HTML is a formatting language for displaying text, graphics and multimedia in web pages.

When Client side scripting (script that run within the browser and consumes resources like processor and RAM from the same computer) is included with HTML its Called DHTML.

There are many client side languages like : DHTML Script, Java Script (JS) and Visual  basic (VB Script)

HTML itself can't be debugged. So HTML debugging generally mans to debug HTML with the embedded Java Script or VB script.

Sometimes HTML with the embedded CSS is debugged by a tool called Firebug or similar tools within the browser to find some errors, display problems.. this is also called HTML debugging.

I think this is the answer to your question.
Pls. let me know if any clarification required.

See this article to know more how Firebug is used to debug HTML/ CSS/ JS in Firefox browser.

http://kb.siteground.com/article/How_to_debug_HTMLCSS_issues_using_Firefox.html

This article let you know how to debug HTML in Internet explorer browser using developer tools:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd565627(VS.85).aspx

How Search Works


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How Search Works

Here is a good video from Google that describes how search works…

Google launches it new web indexing system called Caffeine


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Google has launched a new search indexing system that seems more effective and interesting. This indexing suits the needs of dynamic web of the current time.

According to Google:

So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. It's growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people's expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, we've built Caffeine. The image below illustrates how our old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before — no matter when or where it was published.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

We've built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it's a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.

For complete article  visit this Google Blog Page.