Javascript Snake Game

Andreas Kalsch has created a simple version of Snake in JavaScript that eats your feeds instead of food.

Google AJAX Language API

Google has announced their AJAX Language API on 20th March at thier AJAX Search API blog. This new API provides two functions for developers - language translation and detection. Language translation and detection support for 13 languages and 29 translation pairs.

To simply translate word in one language to the other:

google.language.translate('Gato', 'es', 'en', function(result) {
alert(result.translation);
});

To simply detect the language:

google.language.detect('Questa linea di rilevare che questa è la lingua.',
function(result) {
alert(result.language);
});

The language detector not only tell you the results, it also tells you how reliable the results are.
To get started with it,

• Read the Developer Documentation

• Look at Examples

Hulu.com open to public but not for us :(

Build Incomin Links and Inrease Your Link Popularity

Do you ever think from where your web site or blog visitors come from. They have to come through the search engine results or links put in other sites. They can't directly come from nowhere, but if someone mistakenly type your address in his address bar that visitor come from nowhere. Most of the times visitor come to your site through search engines or sites that link to your site. So if you want to increase daily visitors to your sites you have to increase incoming links to your site and increase your rank in search engine somehow (SEO).

In this post I will describe what are incoming links and how you can increase number of incoming links to your site, blog posts, and etc. Also in this article I'll use Backlinks as alternative to Incoming Links. Both these word refer same thing.

Wikipedia Definition Backlink

Backlinks (or back-links (UK)) are incoming links to a website or web page. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node (Björneborn and Ingwersen, 2004). Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

Why Backlinks are that much important?

In the past search engine optimizers and web site owners encouraged the idea of reciprocal linking as technique to improve search engine ranking. The idea was to exchange link between each other. This technique worked well for many years, but recent past search engines give more priority to one way incoming links than they give to "exchanged links" reciprocal links.

Since one-way links appear to be more valuable when considering search bots, that makes one-way links more valuable to your search marketing effort.

In the following section I'll introduce you some techniques that can use to increase one-way links as well as reciprocal links for most types of web sites.

Tips to increase Incoming Links

Valuable Content & Articles
One of the most common and proven way to solicit one way links these days is to provide interesting and valuable articles or blog posts in your web sites. New bloggers and new sites born in every day, if one of them find your article is interesting and place link to it in his site, this will start a snowball effect that leads to dozens or even hundreds of blogs pointing a nice link at your site. Syndication of your content can be an excellent way to not only boost your name recognition online, but to gather one-way incoming links to your Web site.

Leave Comments on other blogs and sites
Most blogs and sites give visitors the opportunity to respond to their posts, with an option to enter your website's address in a field. Find the most popular blogs on topics that are relevant to your website and leave relevant remarks. The earlier you reply, the higher your comment will be in the comment list and the more exposure your website will get. Don't put your url in the comment text, unless it's really relevant to the post you're responding to. Too many url's in one comment will probably be deleted automatically by any spam software the blogger has installed.

Post in forums
Find the most popular forums in your website's topic by typing "my topic forum" in Google. Start posting good quality answers to questions people have. Put your url with a small tagline in your signature. Don't put your url in the post itself: people will think you're just there to promote your site. Genuine answers will get you high quality traffic. These visitors are people that are really interested in your topic, so treat them well.

Product Reviews
Studies show that online shoppers spend up to 12 weeks researching a product before they make a purchase. Some 90% of those purchases are ultimately made offline. So, even if you aren't the one that scores the product sale, you can offer those searchers the product reviews they are looking for and score yourself some quality links while you are at it. Setting up a content management system that allows individuals to enter their own product reviews means you hardly have to touch the content development. Once your reviews are in place, take the time to contact some sites that sell the product, but that don't feature reviews. See if they'd like to link to yours. Or, recognize that a quality review site is likely to pick up links without even asking for them. Sites like Epinions.com have made a business out of models like this.

RSS Feeds
Building on the idea of offering unique articles on your site is syndicating them through an RSS feed. The use of RSS readers is skyrocketing and many individuals that would never take the time to visit dozens of Web sites in a day are more than happy to surf the feeds that their reader delivers. This can not only help your articles get picked up in a Blog mention, but can actually deliver links from sites on a regular basis. If your RSS feed features enough interesting content, another site may choose to run it, thus giving you a new outlet to reach readers and a good stash of incoming links to go with it.

Free Tools
If you've got a little programming blood in you, or you have access to someone who does, this can be a great way to generate links. Search marketing companies can have an especially tough time generating links, after all, who in the industry wants to give their competitor a boost? Many firms have gotten around this by offering one or two really great free tools. Think Marketleap and their link popularity analysis program, or Overture's keyword suggestion tool. Each of these tools is a simple, free offering that has likely generated thousands of free, unsolicited incoming links. If there's a tool that can be created to serve your market, create one. If competitors already have one, create a better one. Word will spread.

Online Directories
Online directories, especially topical and regional directories, are among the best sources of incoming links anywhere. Look beyond the ODP, Yahoo! and Zeal and find the niche directories that really fit with your Web site. Most of these directories will happily list your site for free, or for a small fee.

Submit your sites to social bookmarking sites
There are some very popular websites out there, that can give you tons of traffic. Submitting your url to digg.com and del.icio.us can give you a serious amount of traffic. The huge number of visitors from Digg can even cause your site to become slow or unreachable if your host can't handle that much traffic. This has a nickname know as 'The Digg effect'. Stumble upon can give you a steady stream of visitors that will never stop, as long as people will like your site. If you don't have a Flickr and MySpace account, create one and get some exposure there.

Timely Information
Today's baseball scores are most valuable live, as the game progresses. Last night's scores are of interest to those who may have missed the game; last week or last month's scores will only appeal to the purists, the stats buffs and the most fanatical of fans. Similarly, breaking news is useful, yesterday's news is worth knowing, last week's news is old news. The Drudge Report, essentially a one-man operation, has risen to rival established news organization with thousands of employees on the basis of its hyper-timely reporting.

Google Adsense Tips - How Google Detects Click Fraud

Before going to talk about cheating or detection we have to know what is an Invalid Click. In the first part of this post I'll describe what is an Invalid Click and after that I'll describe other things.

What is an invalid Click?
When the pay per click provider (for example Google Adsense) says that someone that is not interested in making business from the advertisers link, click it to generate income for you.

Also when publisher clicks their own adds (Adsense ads) to generate money for themselves, it's a invalid click.

It's a invalid click also when publisher asks others to click on their ads (Adsense ads) just to raise their income.

Invalid clicks also happen when some uses robots to click on their ads (Adsense ads) or automated software.

Google defines invalid clicks as:

• Manual clicks intended to increase publisher's income
• Clicks by robots, automated tools
• Clicks generated by Third-party services
  

How people try to cheat Google Adsense
These are some techniques I found from the internet (link), that people used to cheat Adsense. Even though people believe these methods will raise their income, they will make you banned from Adsense.

• Basic Clicker Cheat : Publisher clicks on his own Adsense ads every time he has a chance.
• Proxy Clicker Cheat : He or She thinks that if they use anonymous proxy for browsing his own site and click ads, Google Adsense will not be able to trace them.
• Multiple Computer Clicker Cheat : He or She knows Google Adsense will detect if clicks are from same IP, so he/she asks friends, family members, neighbors and relatives to click on the adsense ads.
• Software Clicker Cheat : Using automated softwares or robots to click on Adsense ads.
• Paid Clicker Cheat : Publisher will pay some amount of money per month basis to professional Adsnese clickers to browse publisher's site and click on several ads.
• Click-rings Cheat : Group of people get together and share their site that published Adsense ads and ask click their ads while they click others ads who are in this groups. These guys will use Yahoo groups, forums and IM to form groups and communicate amon members.

There are some more cheats that you can found in above link. Please refer it if you want more details.

How Google Adsense detects click fraud
You may know or may not know, currently there are lot of Google Adsense publishers who are banned from Google Adsense program for click fraud. Some of them manage to get their account back, but others failed. As a result, lot of people are banned from the Google Adsense program.

Google never reveal how they trace invalid clicks or technology behind it. But it's better to know the ways they might be used to detect click fraud. Following some ways Google Adsense may used to detect invalid clicks:

• IP Address : It is the easiest and must be recognized by everyone. If those clicks on your ads are originated from the same IP Address as the one used for accessing your AdSense account, your account is flagged.
• Click Through Rate (CTR) : Normally, Click thru Rate should not excess 10%. Otherwise, Google will flag your account. For your information, normal CTR should ranges from 0.5% - 10%.
• Physical Location : Google has good tracing software and technology.They can trace traffics origin down to the small town. So, using different computers with different IP address does not secure anything. So, don't try to click your ads in various Internet cafes. That will kill you.
• Cookies : Most home users do not use static IP Address for Internet connection. In most cases just disconnect and reconnect will give you a new IP Address. But don't forget, Google has set cookies on your computer. They can trace these cookies and see whether they originate from the same computer.
• Click Pattern 1 : It is also suspicious when people click on their clicks and then run away immediately (hit-and-run). But normally, people will surf for a while inside your pages and then click on the ads they want.
• Click Pattern 2 : why this computer / IP address / person is so trigger-click-happy on this particular website but never click on the ads on other sites?
• Click Pattern 3 : And why is it that people accessing these sites direct (type-in URL or from bookmark) tend to be very active ad-clickers compared with those referred from search engine or other sites?
• Other Google Services : Apart from Google Adsense, Google also provide a series of services to us. Don't just think that it is safe if you do not log in your adsense account and click on your ads. What other Google services do they provide to us? Here are some: Gmail (most people are using it), Google Earth, Google Calendar, Google Search, Google Toolbar, Google Talk, Google Sitemap, Google Desktop, Blogger, or even Youtube (coz Google has just recently acquired it).
• Search Engine Ranking : Your website is not indexed on any search engine, not linked by any prominent website, but get consistently high traffic? How come people can access your website and click your ads? That will make Google to smell a rat.
• Webpage Design : How about the "Please click a link below" or "donate us by clicking the ads"? These kinds of encouragement is not in line with Google's TOS. Google can use their winning search engine, or even human eyes to check your sites from time to time.
• Advertisers conversion rate : Ad click is one thing. But does it bring value to the advertisers? If none of the clicks on your site translate to conversion to the advertiser, you are in trouble. First the Smart-Pricing hits, then your AdSense account disabled.

It's better toread the Google Adsense Program Policies before you start with adsense and be careful to not to make any click frauds.

Testing Windows Live Writer

This is a test post I used to test Windows Live Writer. I got new HP Pavillion dv6725 lap top for my girlfriend, which comes with Vista. I installed Live Writer to test it, actually it's good tool. Hoping something like this in Ubuntu near future. :)

My February Ubuntu Desktop With Screenlets and Avant Window Navigator

Here are the details you need to make your Ubuntu Desktop looks like above. I am using Ubuntu 7.10.

First of all you have to enable visual effects from Ubuntu's appearance tool comes under preferences menu. You have three choices when selecting visual effects. You can choose normal, extra or custom. Before enabling these settings sometimes you may need to install restricted drivers also.

After enabling visual effects, you must go to Avant Window Navigator wiki and follow the installation guide lines. After successfully installing it you can install extra applets. You can find the installation guide lines other details from here. Then right click on avant dock and select preferences. From that preferences window you can configure your dock.

To install screenlets, go to screenlets.org and follow the guidelines. You found extra screnlets from here and here. You can download the Wallpaper clock screenlet from here. The above theme for wallpaper clock can download from here and there are more free wallpaperclocks can be found in vladstudio.com site. You have to download those .wcz files from the vladstudio.com and extract them to wallpapers directory under WallpaperClock screenlet home folder.

If you have any problems please put a comment here or google for it, you'll find lot of details. Also compiz community forum contains a section for screenlets.