GigaThoughts » Useful Links

Fix for Wordpress sites and blogs hosted on Godaddy infected by holasionweb virus

Amit Desai — Thu, 20 May 2010 15:30:03 +0000

I have been running this blog since 2 years now and have never encountered a situation where my blog has been hacked or been infected by a virus or malicious software. I am sure that there would be people like me who would be suffering from the same problem and would be trying hard to find a solution. There is nothing worst then seeing your site/blog down because of virus and it’s a painful process to start searching for a solution.

Especially when Godaddy announced that this mass infection of virus was a problem at their end. I realised that the problem is widespread and serious. I would sincerely like to thank these guys in helping lesser mortals like us (read non technie) to find an easy fix to holasionweb virus on Godaddy hosted sites.

The solution can be found here:

Tintation
Daniel Ansari’s blog
DLOCC – This has personally worked for me in fixing holasionweb Trojan virus on my wordpress blog hosted on godaddy.

I hope this helps.

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Tags: wordpress

Hubspot – Measure effectiveness of your online initiatives

Amit Desai — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 10:34:40 +0000

In today’s day and age we are surrounded by the web world and most of our time due to work or personal reasons is spent online. For most of us Internet has become our lifeline and increasingly people are looking at creating digital assets of their own on the World Wide Web. I have created my own Synergy Technology Services | SynergyHr | GigaThoughts and I am sure you might be managing websites, blogs, micro sites and other social media for personal or professional use directly or indirectly. We put in a lot of effort to make sure we create good user experience for our visitors. At the same time we keep hearing how important it is to implement these terms SEO, Social Media marketing, online marketing, LinkedIn, Facebook and the list is endless.

Again I am sure everyone is aware that enhancing web presence is an ongoing activity and it needs constant evaluation and measurement of its effectiveness to go on and make it even better. Over time I have been a victim of this funda that once we implement something new, we ask our immediate network and take feedback. We measure it for a while and then assume that the changes we implemented are showing results and leave it there.

The purpose of the article to share awesome tools that I have used to measure and improve online effectiveness and it can be useful to beginners and experienced people as well. There is a company called hubspot they provide software as a service to improve inbound marketing for your organization. In addition to their inbound marketing software they have developed some really handy measurement tools that can be useful and individuals alike.

Website Grader: This tool evaluates effectiveness of your website from an SEO perspective. This is one tool that gives me a detailed analysis on how my blog is performing. You will see a badge that displays website grader rank it’s 98 out of 100 for GigaThoughts

Twitter Grader: Evaluates your twitter account by giving an overall rank and also gives ranks for your followers and the ones you are following. Grade for GigaThoughts is 82 out of 100

Gobbledygook Grader: This is another impressive effort it helps you evaluate your content for Gobbledygook words. This simply means use of jargons which cannot be easily understood and this one really helps in simplifying the content to a large extent. This article content has been graded 91 out of 100.

Press Release Grader: Very helpful for PR people and for most of us it’s always good to get your press release graded as it helps in identifying its marketing effectiveness score. We don’t have press release for GigaThoughts but I have tried this at professional level and I can recommend that.

Facebook Grader: This does the same for Facebook for business pages, individual pages or individual accounts. GigaThoughts page grade is 15 out of 100 and my individual account has grade 67 out of 100

I haven’t used the following tools myself but looking at the other tools I am sure these will be good enough as well and worth giving a try

I would urge you guys to try these tools and let me know your feedback.

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TweetDeck + TwitterJobSearch = JobDeck – helps you find your next job.

Amit Desai — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:42:56 +0000

Every now and then there comes a disruptive technology that changes the rule of the game. My initial analysis of using this application makes me believe that such mashups will play vital role as far as job search is concerned. Applications like JobDeck will provide an alternate channel for employers to scout for new talent and at the same time give multiple opportunities to the jobseeker.

TweetDeck and TwitJobSearch have teamed up to provide you with a dedicated JobDeck. This makes it even easier to search for jobs, as well as staying in touch with what’s happening now, and connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. Source: TweetDeck.

The Hiring ecosystem:

Since I run an HR services company and a social media enthusiast I am in a position to analyze the tool both from the employer and employee perspective. My analysis of the positioning of JobDeck is given below in the table.

Job Seeker	Employer
Register profile with job boards	Advertise job on job boards
Subscribe to job news letters	Send out job related news letters
Conduct a job search via job boards	Conduct candidate search using job boards
Apply to companies directly	Get in touch with candidates directly
Increasingly use social media to look for open positions	Increasingly use social media to advertise open positions


Here comes in avenues like JobDeck, where job seeker and employer create a relationship synchronously

JobDeck analysis:

JobDeck consists of primarily 2 column layout where in the first column job related tweets are displayed using the powerful search engine developed by guys at TwitJobSearch. The tweets are filtered in a manner where the content is limited to job hunting. There is a “Job Search Experts” user list. This area can be used to stay updated with the latest development in the job market and it has lot of HR and career related articles as well. The second column is a dedicated column that is directly connected to the main feed of TwitJobSearch which searches the web and returns search results relevant to jobs and job market.

What I would love to see in JobDeck

Even more powerful search – based on location, job type, company name like you usually have on job boards
Ability to filter updated just based on my career stream. Like a customized JobDeck for a sales professional in the telecommunication sector.
Ability to develop contact base and tweet with each contact from JobDeck
Trending like twitter
Better integration with other social media applications

JobDeck is a pretty decent attempt made towards being innovative, it has a long way to go before it can become main stream and threaten the existence of traditional media like Job Boards. Did we just think about News Papers are traditional media?? Sorry that’s dead long time ago.

To me this is a brilliant concept and the first step towards a newer, smarter and a synchronous mechanism for a job seeker and an employer.

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Internet usage Statistics in 2009

Amit Desai — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 05:25:47 +0000

All of us surf the web on a daily basis and for most of us we are always online. While reading various feeds in my Google Reader I came across this interesting post and I would like to share the details with the readers of this blog. This post provides statistical information on internet usage in 2009 things like

How many websites were added
How many emails were sent
How many internet users surfed the web
Web servers in use
Information of domain names
Social media statistics
Information on images
Information on web browsers
Information on malicious software

The content below is replicated from the original post on www.entireweb.com

Email usage statistics in 2009

90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
100 million – New email users since the year before.
81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
24% – Increase in spam since last year.
200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites

234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web servers

13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
-72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain names

81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
350 million – People on Facebook.
50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Images

4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year

Videos

1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Web browsers

62.7% – Internet Explorer
24.6% – Firefox
4.6% – Chrome
4.5% – Safari
2.4% – Opera
1.2% – Other

Malicious software

148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

Reference for internet usage statistics in 2009

Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats from Symantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore, Sysomos and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom (here and here), Twittercounter, Facebook and GigaOm.

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Recruitment applications on iphone

Amit Desai — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:18:37 +0000

We all know how big the market is for iphone applications and there are brilliant applications on iTunes which are broadly categorized into utilities, games, entertainment being the most sought after. Apple Inc had officially released iphone SDK in March 2008 and since then the mobile development community has been busy dishing out awesome applications. Smart organizations capitalized on the first mover advantage and developed an iphone app to promote/market their products and services. I have been using iphone and now am on 3GS and am involved in recruitment business I am eagerly waiting for companies to develop customized iphone apps to provide/ facilitate recruitment services.

I would like to see companies provide iphone application which caters to varied interest level of internal employees, candidates/ consultants and clients.

Features that I would like to see in an iphone app by category

Candidates:

Resumes submission
Push notifications for jobs of their interest
Search for jobs
Contact details of recruiters
Applications status
Job referrals

Companies:

Push requirements to the vendor
Status on applications
Contact details of the team working on the assignments

Internal employees:

Access to internal recruitment system
Quick submission of resumes to client
Contact details of client
Send out job alerts
Access to candidates social networking details for quick connect

My research recruitment apps on iphone resulted into very few well designed apps. A quick search on iTunes and Google search resulted in apps like:

Radar Recruit – very well made application by an Australian recruitment which specializes in creative jobs in the advertising sector. Radar is primarily using this app to provide job listing by category where the candidate can search for jobs and apply or refer the job posting to someone. You can view the app screen shot here
JobServe connect – Provides a job search engine where candidates can search for more than 50,000 jobs globally with locations services on, it has an interesting feature to find jobs near you. It also provide generic functionality like creating a search agent, emailing the job etc You can view the app screen shot here
Korn and ferry – this is one company that is taking social media recruiting to the next level. They have developed an iphone app with a lot of real good features. You can read the features here
Recruiterapp.com – these people have gone one step further and have developed a full blown app to manage recruitment cycle for recruitment agencies/ consultants. You can read about them here

The iphone app market is heating up and along with social media I foresee companies will have to develop innovative apps to reach candidates via mobile devices.

I would love to see a list of features that you would like in an iphone app that can facilitate the recruitment experience on a mobile device.

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Google Labs introduces browser size tool to visually evaluate your site content

Amit Desai — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:30:54 +0000

Google’s latest browser sizing tool will help developers and website owners to evaluate the amount of content viewed by their users. The tool loads your webpage behind a colour full matrix which indicates the % of people who can see specific point on your webpage. By adding this tool Google has further strengthen its offerings in the web analytics space. I constantly use Google Analytics to monitor my blog traffic and have been using various webmaster tools to optimize the blog. A new tool from Google is always welcome and not loosing much time I evaluated my own blog to check if it was useful only to developers or also to site owners and publishers like me.

Visual evaluation of my blog:

Analysis of my blog:

30% of my visitors will not be able to see my banner ad which says advertise for free. If even you can’t then you can check this link here
40% of my visitors will not be able to see connect to Facebook icon on my blog
20% of my visitors will not be able to see the submit button to my RSS feed
20% of my visitors will not be able to see the following:
- Team behind this blog
- What we recommend
- Our rankings across prominent sites – like blogged
- Most importantly the second post on the blog

I plan to make certain changes and conduct a test run

I am going to test run by:

Moving the banner to the left so the visibility will be improved by 25%
Making connect with Twitter and Facebook icons smaller in size to improve visibility
Moving the subscribe button will be a design call so might take it up later

I will be keeping a close eye on Google analytics for the next whole week specifically on these links to see if the analysis is true.

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Tags: blog, business, Google, internet, marketing, Strategy

Impact of ICANN’s decision to allow domain names in local languages

Amit Desai — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:37:23 +0000

On 30th October at the ICANN conference in Seoul, Korea the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which governs domains, registrations, Internet Protocol addresses, and many other aspects of the internet decided to fast track the process to internationalize domain names (IDN). Very soon domain names would be made available in local languages and this to me is going to create a paradigm shift as far as localization of internet is concerned. This certainly is a brave step forward. ”Of the 1.6 billion internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based,” Beckstrom, Icann president, said. “So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the internet continues to spread.” Source DNA

By early 2010 we would be able to book domain names in Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and a lot of other languages

Impact of localisation of domain names

Local reach: Doman names in local language will help companies to reach the large segment of the market which cannot access the web due to the absence of English speaking skills. Companies will have another avenue to market their product and services by creating websites that will have highly localized content online. For example a lot more people would be able to read this article in India considering the diversity in regional languages in India.

Acquire desired domain names: with restriction to Latin characters (A to Z) a lot of companies were forced to choose domain name that were available. With localization companies will have the opportunity to choose the desired name especially companies catering purely to local market will be at an added advantage.

Decide your own extension: One of the other major advancements discussed at the event was to allow companies to acquire new top-level domain names ending with extension of their choice. This change will enable businesses to use their business name as extension for example www.iphone.apple this will not only improve the branding but help them create series of domain names for their different products and services.

Drive search engine traffic: Search engines are focusing more and more on localized search and indexing and promoting local search results to users. As of today the percentage of people using local search as compared to global one is very low but moving forward the traffic generated by local searches will be significant. Proactive companies will be able to take an early movers advantage.

Service Providers: Service providers like registrars, hosting providers, web designers and SEO people will have tremendous opportunity to grow. The key here is to focus on selling domain name internationalization services at the right time. I would say start a campaign to gather database of people by displaying “register domain name in local languages” like in India register domain name in Hindi.

Companies will have to think fast and act upon it the moment it’s out in the open. The early movers will have to strategize and plan their domain name localization initiative. Companies who are agile in adopting local domain names will reap the rewards primarily in addressing local target audience and also win the search war when the localization of search heats up. Here in lies the opportunity for services providers to identify opportunities and grow their business.

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Tags: Information Technology, internet

Play Farmville on Facebook to enhance your business management skills

Amit Desai — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:10:22 +0000

I have been on Facebook for a long time and have been an active social networker. One of the best ways to network is to get involved into playing games on the social networking sites. Being in strategic role I tend to indulge myself strategy games. I generally like games developed by Zynga as they specialize in creating games on social networking sites. FarmVille is yet another “strategic” game where players can manager virtual farm by planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops.

Since its launch in June 2009, FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook with 56.1 million active users in October 2009. Source Wikipedia.

Why this game is so famous:

Everyone can relate to farming
Everyone has basic knowledge about agriculture
It’s not like normal role play gaming that gets over at that instant
Game can be played over period of time
Creates an environment of healthy competition

Management lessons that can be learnt from FarmVille game on Facebook:

Strategic planning: Improves your strategic thinking capability as you need to strategize on what you’re planning to grow according to the time available.
Utilization of resources: Need to choose your options (trees, flowers, fruits, animals and crops) to earn income on harvesting thereby one has to ensure optimum utilization of resources
Planned Growth: Growth largely depends on your experience level and that can be achieved by planting can be gained
Team work: sending gifts and helping friends farm leads to better team work.
Cash flow: since everything has to be purchased and has a return on investment, it becomes important to manage your cash flows and invest in the right areas at the right time.
Time management: each crop/fruits/tress has a predefined time to mature where the cost of planting and time of harvesting is fixed. It becomes imperative to choose what your are going to plant based on the time available with you

At the end of the day this is just a game but I am sure if played with good intent one can surely learn a lot of aspects of business. Feel free to add me as your neighbour on FarmVille.

It would be nice to receive comments from people who have played Farmville and let us know what their experiences have been playing this super cool game.

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Tags: business, facebook, social networking

A must read for job seekers in current economy

Amit Desai — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:34:39 +0000

I came across a useful post which gives a list of must read presentations for a job seeker. Applicant.com has compiled a list of 7 presentations from SlideShare.

The first thing to hit during recession was hiring and recruitment and the first thing will pick up would be the same. Economy is already showing signs of recovery and that can be seen in the news that companies across the globe have started hiring or are at least positive to recruit anytime soon. The timing of this post seems to be just perfect and I would like to share this useful piece of information with all job seekers and in as many ways as possible. This is a must read for people seeking jobs in the current market.

1. Effective job interviewing from both sides of the desk by Andy Lester

2. 10 commandments of job search by applicant blog

3. Leveraging LinkedIn for job search Maurene Grey

4. Rethink your job search by CareerTiger

5. 10 job search attitudes that will get you more interviews by Brain Massey

6. Job search with social media and mobile by Gabe Zichermann

7. Converging trends impacting your job search by Steve Drake

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How to install IntenseDebate on wordpress 2.7.1

Amit Desai — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:13:07 +0000

IntenseDebate – super charge your commenting system

I installed IntenseDebate to offer highly interactive commenting system to the readers of GigaThoughts. As always it started with a lot of research, which led to final two competitors to choose from – IntenseDebate and Disqus. After testing both commenting system on local machine for a week, I finally chose IntenseDebate primarily because it’s an Automatic company and for those who are not aware they are the same guys behind wordpress and more so IntenseDebate offers all the features that are offered by Disqus. I have been using it since a week on the live site and I am really thrilled with interactivity it can offer to the readers. I would recommend using IntenseDebate to everyone who wishes to offer a better user experience to their readers.

Errors, issues, problems and fixes while installing IntenseDebate on Wordpress 2.7.1

Like a lot of people who tried installing IntenseDebate I was faced with several issues and it wasn’t a smooth installation process. But persistence and the urge to offer better usability to the readers i was able to find solutions of each one and hence I wish to share my experience so that other people can benefit from it and I am sure it can help ease their installation issues.

Error 1: “Login failed. Please check your credentials and try again” Login Failure while accessing ID via wordpress admin once the plugin is activated. This is the first error which most people would face and it blocks the further installation and synching process.

Solution 1:

First try and reset the plugin by downloading the cleared.php and do the following:
Please use these instructions:
1. Uninstall and remove the IntenseDebate plugin
2. Install, activate the clearID.php plugin
3. Uninstall it.
4. Install the latest version of the plugin and activate it.
Step 2 is to change your username and password on the ID website and try installing the plugin again and try again. Make sure your password does not contain any special character like #$% as that will not work
Step 3 is to check missing Blog Title, while accepting the username and password ID check if the blog has a valid blog title if not it will reject the request. So if you don’t have a title you need to have one but this will lead to the text appearing above your logo in the header. You need to reduce the font size in the theme CSS to 0 so for the application the title will still be there but it not be visible on your site.

Error 2: Post installation all the comments have not been synchronized.

Solution 2:

I would say first check for the comments on the ID website in your account if they are there.
if not wait for couple of days after installation and try and synching process again and see if that works
Under your WP admin settings section there is an option under the ID tab to reset the plugin in most cases this should solve the problems of missing or disappearing comments in ID

Error 3: IntenseDebate plugin has skewed the layout of the site.

Solution 3:

The issues is noscript tag present in your comment.php or main php file
Or one of your existing plugin is dynamically adding a noscript tag

ID works on Java Script and there are a lot of browsers, themes and plugins that block java script and as a result the layout is thrown out of order. There can be a case where in your comments.php, or your main php file or the comment template file has a

The problem arises because that is part of a block of content that gets nested in another