How to Submit Site to Search Engines?

If you have a website then you need to have traffic too. There are various ways to get traffic on internet such as

• Advertising
• Search Engines
• Buying

Buying is not a good practice

Advertising is Expensive

So, that leaves us with option of Search Engine which are free and very important.

But search engines are undoubtedly the single most important factor in bringing loads of traffic to your website. There are lot of search engines available on internet but 3 are main one’s and if they index your website then others will automatically add it. I am putting them in order of their importance.

• Google
• Yahoo
• MSN

Google is the most important search engine out of all 3. It can sometime result in 70% of your total traffic (it does for me).

There are two ways by which your website can be indexed by a search engine.

• Search engine find it themselves which a really slow process as there are millions of sites out there.
• Second and the best option is to submit your site to search engines.

URL’s given below will help you submit your sites to these search engines for free

• Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
• Yahoo: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/
• MSN: http://search.msn.com.sg/docs/submit.aspx

In addition you can use webmasters tools provided by these search engines themselves to quicken the process of indexing your website

• Google: http://google.com/webmaster
• Yahoo: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
  

These tools help you to provide your sitemap details and track the progress you site is making in that search engine.

In addition to these services like

http://www.submitexpress.com/submit.html

But this might be slower than webmaster tools way.

How To check file system of your OS

There are wide variety of File System available in different OS such as.

NTFS: New Technology File System
FAT: File Allocation Table
FAT32 : File Allocation Table

File system play an important part in functioning of your OS. NTFS gives your files local security and FAT has some limitation with file name size and size of drive that you can have.

Will be comparing the files system in details in my coming posts. But this post I will tell you how you can check what File System your PC is having.

• Double click on My Computer
• Choose the drive that you want to check your file system for
• Right Click and choose Properties.

You will able to see your file system there

It will show something like.

File System: NTFS
or
File System: FAT

If you right click on CD drive while a CD in the drive you will see

File System: CDFS which is Compat Disc File System

and you do same thing on dvd drive you will see

File System: UDF which is Universal Disk Format.

What is IP address?

IP stands for Internet Protocol.



If you use internet than you must have heard term IP address. Before we go into details of IP you need to understand one or two important terms.


Protocol: Protocol is a language or set of rules that have been decided to make two computers talk to each other. Various things on internet are performed by various protocols few examples of those would be.


FTP: File Transfer protocol use for transferring files from one computer to other.

HTTP: Hyper Text Transfer Protocol is protocol used by browsers to talk to web servers and transfer data to and fro

MMS: Protocol used to transfer streaming video.


IP is one of the important protocols used over internet to actually transfer data.


As we all know internet is nothing but a really really big network of computers connected with each other. On this network computer needs to have an address before other computers can find it and transfer data.



IP address is a unique address which can help to identify your computer on this network thus enabling transfer of data between your computer and other computers.


IP address 32 bit address in the form of 4 numbers separated with the help of decimals few examples of IP address are
10.34.34.5

23.35.45.23

169.34.34.2

224.55.23.54


You can view you IP address by going to command prompt and type:


ipconfig / all


You should be able to see all the details of your IP address.You can renew your IP address by the following command


ipconfig /release

ipconfig /renew


ipconfig /help will show you all the options that you can use with ipconfig command

Will soon post details like Ip address classes, ranges, subnets and IP V6

How to extract text from PDF?

PDF stands for Portable Document Format

Today we all deal with PDF files all the time and more often than not we need extract data from PDF file. But it is not possibel to do that if author has not allowed selection of the text.

But don't worry there are ways to get past it.

• One of them is to get PDF writer instead of PDF Reader. PDF writer is the software that makes creation of PDF possible and all the restriction does not apply when you open that PDF file from there.

• You can also use freewares and sharewares to extract data from PDF in word, text or HTML format. One such shareware is PDFripper which is pretty handy software. It allows you extract data in all the formats said above. But the only drawback is that it is shareware so it is going to get disable after trial period is over. But still a handy software if you want to extact from PDF files.

To download PDF ripper click here.

Hope this helps

Managing your Memory-Instant Memory Cleaner!!

Managing your RAM or PC Memory has never been easy.

Why would I manage my RAM?

Well, fair question. You might need to manage your RAM.

• If you have been using your PC for long period of time and its performance is degrading.
• If you work with variety of software’s
• If you install new software’s frequently to test them

In all the above cases can result in

• Blocking of memory by orphaned process by various software’s
• Loss of memory due to memory leaks in software’s.
• Fragmentation of memory

How do I manage my RAM?

Well there are several ways to do it. But if you not a geek and would like easy way to do it then I think below mentioned way should be simplest for you.

Use a freeware called Instant Memory Cleaner.

• It has a easy to use interface.
• Tells you your ram consumption in Real Time
• With an average user Rating of 4.5 it is must have for anybody.
  This software is available at

Download.com

Or you can download it from

Rapidshare

I have been using it for quite sometime now and I would also rate it at 5.

How To Uninstall a Software??

This exercise might seem to be pretty basic and not worth reading. But my experience tells me that the number of people who don’t know this is more than the people who know it. So, this is the post educating them how to perform this simple operation to keep their windows clean and fast.


Why is un-installation of software important?

There are two ways of doing everything right and wrong.

Wrong way to deal with software is to delete all the files of that software manually but that will in all certainty result in:

• Non deletion of files that were put by software in windows directory
• Registry entries that were put by software

This can result in slowing down of your windows and even corrupting some files which in turn leads to error in windows or crashing of windows.

Right way to deal with the software is un-installing the software in proper way when you don’t require it further. This will delete the entries made by software in Registry any files that have been put in windows system directory.

To uninstall software there are two ways.
Software un-installer: You can use the un-installer provided by software. To do that

• Click on Start Menu
• Locate your program option
• Click on Un-Install icon provided which should be like
  Just follow the instructions and your software will be un-installed

Using Add/Remove Programs: You can also use utility provided by windows called Add/Remove program which is located in control panel.

You will be able to see all the software’s that have been installed on your system. Just select the software and Click on Un-install this will start a wizard. Just follow the instructions and that software will be removed from your system.

How to set a default Homepage of your browser?

• Homepage is the first page that opens when you enter the URL of website. All the browsers give you option of setting the default homepage for your browser.Which means when you open your browser window that particular page is going to be opened without any user action.
  
  Various browsers have different way to set homepage. I am listing the procedure to set homepage for two popular browsers
  
  Internet Explorer 7.0 and 6.0
  
• Open Browser window
• Click on Tools Menu >> Internet Options
  (In windows vista you have click Alt key to see the Menu options)
  You should see the window as shown below

Now just type in the URL of the website that you want to open by default and you are done.
In IE 7.0 you can type several URL each URL will open in its respective Tab.

Firefox 2.0

• Open Browser window
• Click on Tools Menu >> Options menu
  You should see the screen as below

Just enter the URL of the website you want to open as Homepage
In both the browsers you will see some buttons that perform a particular task

• Use Current Page: If you want to make the current webpage that you have opened as you default homepage just click this button
• Use Blank: Will set the homepage to blank which mean no webpage is going to open
• Use Bookmark (In Firefox): If you have added something in your favourites then you can add that as your homepage.
• Reset Default (IE)/Restore to Default (FF): Reset to what it was with OS default settings which is Microsoft page in case of IE and Mozilla page in case of FF
  

Why this information is important?

This is important because there are bad guys who can take advantage of these setting and set the default page to a porn site or a site that contains virus. So, whenever you get a prompt saying

"Do you want to add this website into your favourites or Set as Homepage?"

ALWAYS SAY NO or just click on close windows icon [x] because genuine websites would never try to do that.

Hope that helps and happy surfing...

Using Enviornmental Variables as shortcut.

Many Times we don't want to create the shortcut of Software but still want an easy way to access it. I guess most efficient way to start a program is following these two steps

Windows Key + R
Name of program and enter

It takes maximum of 2 seconds to start the program. Advantage of this approach is only you know how to run that program as you haven't created shortcut of that program so nobody else knows about it.

You can do that by performing the following 2 steps.

• Go to the directory where your program resides
• Copy the exe and paste it in your windows directory.
  If you don’t know which is your windows directory go to command prompt and type Set windir the path that is given is your windows directory.

Second option and easy option is to add the path to your program in path environmental variable

• Right Click My Computer => Properties => Advanced Option => Environmental Variables
  (This might be slightly different depending on the version of windows you are using)
• Got to System Variable Section
• Locate a Variable called Path
• Click on Edit
• The paste the path of the directory in which your program is located at the end.

Just make sure that the path that was existing should have semicolon in the end. Different paths are separated by semi colon. So it should be something like

C:\windows;c:\java;c:\yoursoftwaredirectory

And you are done. Once of perform one of the 2 alternatives given above you can start your program by just typing the name of your program in run window.

Environmental Variables – How Important??

To a geek like me the term Environmental variables (EV) is not new but even an average computer user is unaware of what they are and their importance. I have seen people working with computer for years still not realising that they are making use of them day in day out.
EV’s are not limited to Windows OS but are part and parcel of every OS such as UNIX, Linux, DOS (Disk Operating System).

If you have ever done programming then you must aware of term global variables well EV are the same in respect to OS. EV's are variables at OS level containing important information that is used by different software’s installed in the OS. Examples where EV comes into picture are as following

Click on Start Menu -> Run and type Notepad.exe

Windows makes use of EV called ‘Path’ whenever you write a command in Run Field. It will search for the program that you have mentioned in the Path EV and if it is able to find it there, it will execute it.

You can see the value of Path EV by going to command prompt and typing ‘Path’ there.

You can set path using a command called ‘Set’ again from command prompt.

On Command prompt type
set Path=”the path you want to set”

This will overwrite the older path if you want to retain the old path then write the following command

Set path=%path%;”the path you want to set”

To see the complete list of EV on Command Prompt Type Set

In windows you can see environmental variables by following method
Right Click My Computer => Properties => Advanced Option => EV

There are two types of EV’s

• System: Those are applicable to all the users of system
• User: Those are applicable only to the user by which they are created.

List of important EV and their description is as following

SystemDrive= The drive on which Windows is installed
SystemRoot= Folder in which Windows is installed
TEMP=Path to temporary directory
USERDOMAIN=Name of the Domain
USERNAME=Username who has logged in
USERPROFILE=Path to user profile
Windir= directory in which windows is installed
CLASSPATH= path for java class files
HOMEDRIVE=Home drive of user
HOMEPATH=Where user data residesPath=path to various locations
These might vary between different version of windows