I was born and brought up in a city which was just a few kilometers away from a sea shore. I have seen the sunrise many-a-times, but my view was almost the same as that which I described above.

But after seeing some of the beautiful photos (such as the ones from 1x.com, Flickr, etc. below), I realized that anything is not just about the object the object and scenario. It is also about the perspective. And some folks have that eye for catching that beauty in the right time and in the right form. Give them a camera, and here you go:

Coffee Rocks - Mel Brackstone

Sunrise from the Golden Gate Bridge - PatrickSmithPhotography

The Valley - Roger Arleryd

Autumn Sunrise - Gary McParland

Manguezal at sunrise - Marcio Cabral

The Valley - Roger Arleryd

(All images displayed here are courtesy to the websites they are linked to. All copyrights of these images are owned by the respective owners)

Mundu TV is a new service from Geodesic limited (already having products such as Mundu SMS, Mundu Speak, Mundu Radio and Mundu Messenger), which enables you to watch all your favourite TV channels on your mobile or your desktop - provided you have an internet connection or a data plan for your mobile connection. Currently there are a list of channels support by Mundu TV which you can watch anywhere, anytime. All you have to do is download and install the application on your desktop or your mobile phone. The service can be used with any GPRS, EDGE, 3G, WiBro, LAN and Broadband enabled connection.

Following are the channels currently supported by Mundu TV, more to be added later.

Of course there is a price. The application itself is free to download, but there is a subscription charge of Rs. 49/- (for any four channels) or Rs. 120/- (for all channels) per month. You get a 3 day trial period after which you can choose a package and pay for continued viewing.

Mundu TV will officially launch this month. A similar product, Tata Photon Broadband TV, charges about Rs. 7 per channel for similar type of services. If Mundu TV is going to stay with the current price tag, it is going to go a long way towards affordable, downloadable, streamable television.

Aimed at students, India has unveiled the basic prototype of a basic $35 touchscreen tablet PC. It is planned that this new model will hit the market by 2011, provided the Government finds a manufacturer.

The laptop will run on a Linux OS, and can do basic functions such as word processing, video conferencing and web browsing.  The device will also be including a PDF reader, wi-fi, 2GB memory, USB, Open Office, and multimedia content viewers and interfaces. There is no hard disk, but will have a memory card much like a mobile phone. It also will have a solar power option at an additional cost.

India had previously rejected an offer from MIT’s Media Lab - a $100 computer prototype built for children of the developing world - as it was too expensive.

Even though there is a lot of skepticism about this project in various parts of the internet, the success of this project is something for the whole of the nation to look forward to.

Visitors come to your website looking for something, mostly through search engines. If you are lucky, it’s one of those first links they click from the search engine results. And if you are luckier still, they are looking for something really specific which is not around on any other website, but they found the headline of your post interesting. If your website throws a “Page Not found” error, chances of that visitor NOT coming back to your website anymore is quite high.

Why do you have Page Not Found errors in the first place? For one, you would have changed the link to your page - knowingly or unknowingly. This happens mostly in blogs if you change your permalink structure to make it more SE friendly, but the old link is indexed by the search engines (which is one reason to find a good permalink structure in the first place). Otherwise, you might have linked to another website’s page where your visitors would find more information; but that page moved. The first one is under your control, but the second one is not.

How to fix this?

There are two ways of looking at this. You can either find all those links and fix them, or you should give some related options to your users. A good website does both.

Using User-friendly 404 error pages

There may not be any such thing as the perfect user-friendly 404 error page. But there are some “404-must-haves” that would help your visitors still stay on your website. The crux of this is given below:

A sitemap link - Would make it easy for people to navigate further on your site. (Sitemap is a page of your site which would contain links to all the important pages and links to your website, organized neatly and easy to navigate).

A search box - Give an option for the users to search for what they want somewhere else in your website.

A distinctly minimalistic look - Lesser number of links and lesser the distractions, the better. The above two (sitemap and search) should give enough options for the user to check out things.

One more important thing that is not to be left out - let your user know that this is a 404 page. I mean, don’t put in all the big jargon about what a 404 is as this can really confuse your visitor (Microsoft’s standard 404 page is already annoying enough).

Ideally speaking, just telling the visitor that “The content you are looking for is not here or has been moved; but you can search for them in the search box below or check out one of the related pages in the sitemap” should be good enough. Once you have this part there, the rest of the task is to simply make it more appealing.

Smashing Magazine has a post about some sample 404 pages that will get you started.

Finding the reason for the 404 - and fixing it

Ok, so the damage is done, someone came to your website looking for something which does not exist. Not every time will the friendly error page save you. If your ship has a hole, what you do is find it and plug it before it causes more damage and sink it.

If your site is small, it’s fairly easy to find moved content or broken links. But this is not always the case when you have a lot of content and a good amount of subsequent traffic. There are some ways by which you can check these pages and close them or find alternatives.

Google Analytics - If you use Google Analytics on your website, then slightly modify the javascript of your Google Analytics code, and you can track the pages missing from your website using the same piece of code. You will get the URL of the missing page, as well as the referring site.

Google Webmaster tools - If you are not too sure about modifying your Javascript code, Google Webmaster tools can help. You will need to add and verify your website before you can start using it. Once you are all set, you can go to Dashboard -> Diagnostics -> Crawl Errors option and select the “Not Found” option to see your broken links. It will catch a good lot of the broken links on your website, though not all, but what your search engine visitors think is worth looking for.

Checking out your website logs - Most webhosts provide tools to their users to check the website logs. You must have seen AWStats if you use cPanel. Amongst a lot of other goodies, AWStats gives you a list of all your missing pages that was ever searched for on your site by someone. You can see it month-wise for the previous months as well, including from which page it was being referred to. You can see a sample below -

Most of the computer operating systems (Windows, MAC, Linux, etc.) has the functionality to automatically adapt an external USB mouse once you plug it, and you can start using it directly. But it’s always desirable to have the touchpad disabled in that case. Sometimes by accident your hand can touch the touchpad and place the cursor somewhere else, which could be a hectic thing to cope with if you do not look at your screen often while typing. Also, in some cases, if your touchpad is too sensitive, you would see your cursor moving erratically, which makes it all the more difficult, making you want to get back to the good old mouse.

How do I turn off the Touch Pad?

1) One of the first things to do - check the user manual which came along with your laptop. Some laptops such as Dell makes use of the function key combinations (Fn+F5) while others like HP has an option to disable or enable the touchpad by holding the top-left corner of the touchpad for a few seconds.
2) Depending on your operating system, you would also find an icon in your computer system tray where you can manage various touchpad settings.

3) Open Device Manager (Click Start > Run, type devmgmt.msc). Expand Mice and Other Pointing Devices, right click and disable the Touchpad entry. (You might not see this option unless you connect a mouse).

4) Want to get rid of it completely? Disable it in BIOS. General way to reach BIOS in a Windows machine is to Press F8 when you start up your computer. The steps for disabling this in your BIOS varies between systems. One of the options usually provided by laptop vendors is to have the touchpad automatically disable once you connect an external USB mouse.

(Image courtesy: Anonymous Account)

Windows 7 tends to be so user friendly that it even figures out what themes you would like to see and work with. When does it figure this out? This is defined when you first start your Windows 7 installation and select the language, time and currency format.

If you would be choosing English and English (United States) respectively. This will provide you with themes and Desktop backgrounds specific to the United States location. Windows also comes with other international themes from locations such as Australia, Canada, South Africa and the United Kingdom.

To access the hidden themes, do the following:

1) Open Windows Explorer, and click on Organize. Select Folder and Search Options.

2) Go to Web menu, select show hidden files, folders and drivers and uncheck Hide protected operating system files (click yes, if prompted with confirmation).

3) Now, type in the following path to the windows search box (Start menu) and click Enter.

C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT

You will find folders related to themes for the other regions here.

4) You can either go in to the folder and just get the wallpapers, or alternatively go to the Theme folder and install it by clicking the corresponding .theme file. Once you install the theme, they will appear under your “My Themes” section and you can install them from there.

That’s all there is to it. If you want more themes, you can download them from Microsoft’s site.

TigerText, a new iPhone texting application, has the option of adding a “self-destruct” timer to the messages. That is, once the time’s up, the message gets deleted from everywhere - the sender’s phone, the receiver’s phone, and also the messaging server. As per the company, these deleted texts are not “legally discoverable” anymore.

The timer can be set anywhere from 1 minute to 30 days. There are also other options of deleting all texts in a conversation, or the “auto self-destruct” - that is, deleting it as soon as the recipient opens it.

TigerText founder Jeffrey Evans says that “TigerText will completely change the way people think about electronic communication. For the first time, you have complete control over what happens to your texts after you hit the send button. It brings safety and peace of mind to anyone who sends messages that are intended to remain private.”

Fairly priced at subscription rates of $1.49 for every 250 messages per month and $2.49 for unlimited messages, TigerText also offers a free-to-try option of 250 messages for the first 15 days. All you have to do is sign up for an account once you download the application and confirm your phone number to start using TigerText.

For TigerText to work, the application should be available on the sender and receiver’s phone. The messages themselves are never stored on the phones. They are kept on the server, and the purging of expired messages happens every minute of the day, as per the vendor. Currently this app is available only for iPhones, while Android and Blackberry versions are already in the works.

How is it different from what you have now?

Well, if you search for something in Google, you would find a lot of websites and pages describing or related to the keyword phrase you put in. Plus, it also lets you know what your friends and family have to say about it. For example, if you’re looking to buy a laptop, you will find a lot of shopping sites holding up their products in a normal google search. But social search can also get you opinions from the pages of your friends or relatives if they have posted about some of the best deals they have found elsewhere.

You can see more on the video given below:

Note: The new feature will be available for all “Signed in” users in “English” - so if you don’t see the social search yet even if you’re signed in, it’s just being rolled out; so you might have to wait a few days till it’s available everywhere.

While most of us know how to edit the robots.txt file and use it to prevent certain pages on the site from being indexed, what we don’t realize is that they still show up in search engines. How? Because there is a difference between “being indexed” and “being listed.”

When Google or any search engine “indexes” a page, it means that the content of the site is downloaded by the search engine and added to it’s index (something like the “index” of a book here, with a pointer to a particular page number). While this would eventually lead to listing of the page in searches, your page might still be “listed” in searches even though it is not “indexed.”

The video below from Matt Cutts explains this further:

Why do you want your pages to be de-listed or not indexed?

Well, one thing is to prevent duplicate content from being indexed - such as the printer-friendly versions which you might maintain for large articles. There could also be pages which are available in PDF or Word document formats whose content can also be indexed by search engines nowadays. Also, if there are custom error pages that you use in case your visitor runs into an error on the site, you don’t want that to be indexed. There would also be other reasons which varies from person to person, site to site or reason to reason.

How to achieve this?

One way to do this is to LET the search engine index the page, but tell them NOT to list the page. This can be done using the “noindex” meta tag value to it, such as below:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”/>

There is an easier way to do this - unless you’re fine with adding the above to each and every page (or you can add it to your blog’s header page - which you have to be very careful with as it can hide your entire site from searches). You can use the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header variable in the .htaccess file in a folder to de-list it entirely. If mod_headers is enabled for your site (which you can check with your host), you can use the following line of code in your .htaccess file for the particular folder:

Header set X-Robots-Tag “noindex, nofollow”

More ways of doing this can be found from a good post from Antezeta here.

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The post covers:

1) Search Engine Blogs - providing latest news about search engines

2) SEO Blogs - Providing good SEO tips

3) SEO Company Blogs - Some of the good quality blogs from SEO companies

4) Link Building Blogs - Blogs which provide link building information

5) Online Marketing Blogs - Online marketing and SMM tips.

6) Search Engine Directories - Lists of new search engines.

7) SEO & SEM Directories - SEO/SEM companies, consultants and resources.

8 ) SEO Tools - Useful SEO tools like keyword research, link popularity, etc.

9) SEO Forums - Forums that discuss mainly about SEO tips.

10) Web directories - Web directories for Search engine submission.

Keep the link bookmarked. It’s a great resource for future use and to stay ahead in the game.

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