Computer Technology Blog: 2014

Archive for 2014

Use Google+ Hangouts to Learn & Connect

Admin August 07, 2014 Add Comment

Use Google+ Hangouts to Learn & Connect

Google+ Hangouts are a terrific and free tool that opens up new ways to teach and learn. The following video provides three examples of ways Google+ Hangouts are being used that might inspire ideas in your own classroom. Below the video I elaborate on how each idea can be used and include the minutes/seconds in the video at which time you can see each idea in action.

1) Take a class without having to be in the same place. (00.00 in video)
You can have up to ten participants in a Google+ Hangout. What can that mean for teaching and learning? Here are some ideas. Invite up to 9 classes/individuals to learn from one expert. This can be great in communities where there is perhaps only one teacher for a particular subject but a few students in various schools interested in learning.

Sick or traveling students can participate when they are not able to attend class. Learners can connect with others who share their passions and interests even if they are not in their school / class. For example there might be students from other schools, communities that join your class. Invite up to 9 home instruction students (those who are home because of illness or other reasons) to join in a live class.

2) Invite an audience to a performance. (00.33 in video)
Google+ Hangout provides a great way to empower students to find an authentic audience by being able to invite up to 9 other people to listen to their performance, presentation, reading, etc. Here are some ideas.

Have students invite some family members and / or friends to watch a performance. Have students find others who share their passions through places like blogs and discussion groups and invite them to watch. Connect with other classes that might want to watch a student perform. They will be able to chat to give feedback and even give live applause, questions, etc.

3) Invite others to perform/discuss with you. (00.50 in video)
Google+ Hangout provides a way for you to connect with others even if they are not geographically desirable. This can be great for a student looking to connect with others that may not exist at their school. Here are some ideas.

A student who wants to study music and perform can do so even if there is no such program in their school or community. With Google Hangout, they can connect with others and practice, perform, and jam together. A student who wants to study a certain type of theater can do so with others and do a virtual reading with Hangout. If you do book clubs in your school, you may discover you have some students with unique tastes. Let them do book talks with others using Google Hangout.

Support young people in developing their personal learning networks and create times to have online discussions with others who share their passions.

Tools like Skype have enabled us to connect with another person for quite a few years now. Tools like Google Hangout however are allowing us to connect with many others around the world for free.This has powerful implications for teaching and learning that should not be ignored. These are some innovative ways Google+ Hangout can be used to enrich teaching and learning. I look forward to discovering more with and from other innovative educators. If you have an idea, share it here.

The key to increase website traffic

Admin August 05, 2014 Add Comment

Jingo

The key to increase website traffic

Everyone wants to have a lot of traffic to their website. In order to get this traffic many people try to work on their Meta tags or even do tricks trying to get more visitors to their website. One of the simplest and most solid ways to increase the flow of traffic to your website is to offer more content. It has often been said that on the Internet, content is king. It is important to understand how more content can bring more visitors to your site and how to generate content that is related to your particular web site.

Why do you need more content?

Many websites are actually company brochures that have been adapted to the web. They merely describe a bit about the company or service and then add some contact information. Such websites usually have about 5-10 separate html files. If these pages have a good amount of text it is possible to optimize them for several keywords and web surfers may find the site.

However, if these sites are in highly competitive fields then it may be difficult to build a decent amount of traffic because search engines try to find the most important web sites that can answer a search query. Search engine robots look for keywords in the meta tags and in the text on the pages to determine what the site is all about. However the search engines also look at the links on the various pages. If your main page is about bicycles, for example, and you have links to other pages on your site relating to the same theme, perhaps, racing bicycles, mountain bicycles etc. then the search engine will conclude that the site is about bicycles, and if you have a lot of pages on this theme, your site should rank higher than someone with a company brochure site of a few pages.

In addition, as I have pointed out in a previous article each page, with its content on your particular theme, stands out alone as a mini website in itself and may come up in searches on the Internet. Thus people will often enter your site through the “side” or “back doors” and not the main page. The more pages you have the more chances of being found in searches, and the more different keywords you can optimize your site for.

So, by building a content rich site on a particular theme, you will boost the chances of your main page to come up in searches and you will increase the likelihood of overall traffic through your other pages coming up in good positions in Internet keyword searches. In addition to this, the more content you have the more respect your page gets from human-edited directories (such as dmoz -Open Directory Project), and other webmasters. If you have quality content then you swill gets more link requests, requests for permission to reprint your articles in ezines, more links to specific pages on your site. All of this will result in more traffic.

How to build more content?

Depending on the type of products or services you are offering, there are several ways to build quality content for your site. Here are a few examples

Product Reviews- If you are selling other peoples products, through an affiliate system, rather than just listing a link to the product, you can write a full review of the product, explaining how the product helped you and what are its strengths and weaknesses. This kind of content actually pre-sells the product, as well as being interesting reading in itself. If you have your own products you could give background information on it or get satisfied customers or users to write the reviews.

Background information- Every product or service exists in some kind of context. Suppose you have a hotel in a particular city. Instead of only listing information about your hotel, you could give some pages about the history of the city where the hotel is located or information about popular tourist attractions in that area. The possibilities are enormous.

Questions and Answers- Let your web visitors help you in the process of content creation. Start a questions and answers section on your website or in your electronic newsletter. Not only will you get insight into what your clientele is thinking, but by answering these questions you will generate useful content for your site and for your newsletters.

Bulletin Board Forums- Your web visitors can also directly write the content on your site through a bulletin board. Some bulletin boards are searchable by search engine robots, while others are not. If you have good content on the bulletin board you can also re-publish it on the main sections of your website to insure inclusion in the search engines.

Articles by others- There are no need to recreate the wheel or spend a lot of time writing, if that is not your cup of tea! You can also publish the articles of other people. There is a lot of quality content that is available free of charge. While you usually have to provide a link back to the author of the article, this is a small price to pay considering that some of these articles may pull in tons of traffic.

Increase website traffic using google image search

Admin July 09, 2014 Add Comment

Jingo

Increase website traffic using google image search

Google Images search

Google search engine indexes images in your web pages. When someone uses Google Image Search to find images on the web, what chance does your website have to show up in the search results?

If you know how to optimize images in your web pages, your images will have high rankings in the image search results. Using higly relevant and properly optimized images in your web pages will bring quality traffic from Google Image Search. Use the techniques described below for optimizing Google Image Search.

1. Use the alt attribute in the html img tag. This is the most important one. Use a specific keyword or a key phrase that identifies what the image is all about. If the image is a new car, use the key phrase 'new car', instead of car or traffic, in the alt attribute.

2. Use the title attribute in the img tag. The title attribute is what people see when they hover the mouse over the image. You can use the same text for title that you use for the alt attribute.

3. Use both the width and the height attributes for the image. If the image height is unknown, use the image width. You should always use the image width from a design standpoint. Unknown image width can break your horizontal layout forcing your web site visitors to scroll horizontally which is very annoying.

4. Put some description texts just beneath the image. For example, 'a red rose blossoming in a quite morning' for the red rose image. Make the key word, red rose, bold. When Google displays the image in the image search result page, the result page will also display the texts surrounding the image.

5. Don't use image1, image2, etc. for the image file names. just use descriptive names. For example, use new car for a new car image file. You can use the same text that you use for the alt attribute. Just hyphenate the words if it is a key phrase.

6. Choose your anchor texts in links to images carefully. Instead of 'click here for larger image' as the text link to an image, you can use 'a large red rose picture is here' as the anchor text.

7. Put all your images in a root folder and, if you prefer, categorize your images in sub-folders under the root image folder. Make sure that your robot file does not limit access to the image folders. Use the img and src tags for images on your web pages. Avoid all types of java script tricks. Goolge search engine spider will be able to index all your images. If you have descriptive image files names, they will have high relevancy in Google image search results.

8. Use Google trends to find hot topics. Use your creativity to establish a credible relevancy between you images and the hot trends. For example, if 'Hunt for red December' is the hot topic, you can use 'Hunt for red December Rose' as your image text.

Google image search build a huge traffic in any site.So that's important for every site.

How to Customize Your WordPress Theme with Child Theme

Admin June 04, 2014 Add Comment

Jingo

How to Customize Your WordPress Theme with Child Theme

Are you using WordPress theme on your website? No matter whether it is a free or a commercial one, if you want to customize it as per your requirements, then it is easily possible for you. Finally, you have decided to custom your WordPress theme as per your business requirements, you can make use of Child Theme that allows to keep your changes, so you don't make changes to the original theme.Before you opt for Child Theme, it is very much important for you to get complete information about it or how it works. There are lots of different reasons that WordPress developers have started using child themes.

It gives an opportunity to developers to customize a unique layout on top of another existing theme. Being a perfect solution for beginners, it enables people to play around with building their own themes that best meet with their business requirements.

What is Child Theme Exactly?

A WordPress child theme is a theme, which takes over the functionality of another theme that is also known as parent theme. Through this child theme, you are allowed to modify and add the functionality of that parent theme.

Being one of the safest ways to modify an existing them, child theme is also easy-to-use no matter whether you are looking to some minor changes or want to customize an entire theme. You can also develop a child theme instead of changing the theme files directly.

Generally, a child theme is a WordPress theme, which runs along with original WordPress theme and it overrule the parts of it as per your specified. Without changing the original one, you can easily modify with your required features.

Get Started with Child Themes

For your information, child themes are not as difficult as it sounds. One of the key benefits of using parent theme is that you do not have to write all the HTML/CSS from scratch. This theme automatically uses any template files that you have included like footer.php or sidebar.php. In any case, if you are missing, child theme will put all the same files from its parent.

However, this functionality also provides a complete range of features to customize already obtainable templates. This functionality is also excellent for touching up areas that are around your website for special events like adding designs for any special seasons like Christmas, Thanksgiving Day, New Years or more.

How to Do It?

Firstly, your original theme that is also known as parent theme, lives in your /wp-content/themes/directory. For an example: develop a child theme for WordPress default Twenty Twelve theme. After that, create a new directory along with the Twenty Twelve themes in order to develop a child theme.

All the directories require inside to be a valid child theme that is a style.css files with the following content:

Mainly, there are two important parts there:

Template: twentytwelve - that tells WordPress that this theme is a child theme of the twenty twelve theme.

@import url "/twentytwelve/style.css" that loads the parent theme style.css as a starting point.

Now, you can easily log into your WordPress dashboard and can see your Twenty Twelve Child Theme there and get it. Finally, you will get your very own Child Theme that has some cool features of your desire.

Got Your Own Child Theme & Thinking Now What to do?

Now, whenever you look forward to customize your own theme, you can do it in your child theme. In the parent theme, files in your child theme overrides files of the same name. So, if you want to change any file from your parent theme, you need to copy your child theme and then make your modifications there. The same goes for any template that may not be included in your parent theme. Now save them in your child theme and WordPress can use it.

So, this is the complete guide to customize Your WordPress theme using child theme that allows you to modify your theme with your desired features.

Flash and HTML5

Admin June 01, 2014 Add Comment

Jingo

Flash and HTML5

FLASH	HTML 5
Proprietary	Open Source
Non-Responsive	Responsive
Built language AS3/AS2	HTML5
Not compatible on Apple	Compatible on Apple
Plugin Required	Runs Natively in the browsers
High CPU use	Light weight so Low CPU use/high Performance/Battery life
Varying Video/Audio Support	Currently restricted to MP4 or H.264 and Web

Google will be “pausing” all flash creative by default in the next release update of Chrome, which is anticipated to be released late this summer.

When you’re on a web page that runs Flash, we’ll intelligently pause content (like Flash animations) that aren’t central to the web page, while keeping central content (like a video) playing without interruption. If Chrome accidentally pauses something you were interested in, you can just click it to resume playback.

This feature will be enabled by default on Chrome’s latest version and will be rolling out soon to everyone else on Chrome desktop. If you need to manually enable it, just head to Chrome’s content settings and select “Detect and run important plugin content.”

Impact on Online Advertising

For advertisers, this could mean shelling out first-class money for economy-class impressions.
Though it might be painful to admit for an industry that has relied on Flash for over a decade, the right choice is to start creating desktop ads in the HTML5 language used to create ads for mobile.

What is HTML5?
HTML5 is advance version of HTML which include various new tags such as <video> <audio><embed><canvas> etc.
With this kind of new tags developers can easily built web pages.

Advantages of HTML5

    * All mobile devices are supported by HTML5 which means there will not be any dependability on Plugin/Flash issue with HTML5.

    * HTML5 is free and easy to code.

    * HTML5 can be used to create the ads which can run on Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile devices easily.

    * HTML5 help to built the ads which are responsive in nature which mean width of the ad will be adjusted as per device.

    * HTML5 allows users to play videos, music and animations on the page without requiring any plug-ins. Developers can also use just Javascript to create compelling graphics, diagrams and animations for their pages.

    * SEO support is one of the biggest advantages of HTML5 for modern-day marketers aiming to rank higher on search engines.

    * HTML5 enables better form fields and search boxes, which is advantageous for businesses looking to encourage visitors to sign forms or spend some time browsing the site.
Flash:

Flash is vector based technology where all assets(Images/Animation/Audio/video) are stored inside the container and are served via adobe flash.

The coding used is Action script 2 for old and for latest flash are built using AS3.
Flash is an older technology, as compared to HTML5. It was one of the most popular ways to add interactivity, video and animations to websites.

In order to view these videos and/or animations, a Flash plugin needed to be downloaded and installed in the web browser. An advantage for HTML5 over Flash is that as HTML is supported by nearly all web browsers, it does not require an additional plugin to be installed.

Adobe Flash is an out-of-the-box development platform you must purchase.

Advantages of Flash:

    * Vector-based - eliminates the need for raster-based movie files with large file sizes.
    * Flash allows for a lot of interactivity, supporting audio, animation, and advanced video handling
    * Supported by 99% of browsers

Which is best for online advertising?

Many of the agency are suggesting to used HTML5 as the standard for all kind of ads due its responsive nature. beside it covers nearly 68% of the population which are using Mobile phone.

SEO tips for your websites

Admin May 07, 2014 Add Comment

Jingo

SEO tips for your Websites/Blogs

SEO

1. Picking a Product

Analyze your product. Are you interested in it yourself?
Analyze your market. Is it oversaturated? Is it growing or changing?
Is it easy to order your product from the web? Or are you selling commodity dog food that is expensive to ship?
What can you do to be unique in the market?
What creative and original ideas can you add to your site?

2. Picking a Domain Name
FOR NEW SITES: VIKINSPIRE your domain name choice. Depending on your brand strategy, it should either be highly brandable or have your primary keywords in it. Consider buying different domain names for each targeted language or niche in your market.

3. Domain Registration & Hosting

Choose an ICANN accredited registrar. Register a .com as soon as possible.
Register a country’s top-level domain if your primary market is local in nature. Choose a host that supports the technology you will be using (ASP or PHP, etc.).

5. Keyword Selection

Use keyword tools and customer feedback to find the most targeted keyword phrases for your site.
Develop grouped themes of keywords that reflect the different sections of your site.
Keeping within a grouped theme, choose different keywords to target each page.

6. Page Optimization

Put your chosen words for each page in your page title tags. Make sure your page title tag text is unique to each page.
Write a description for the meta description tag. Make sure your description is unique to each page.
Use only one H1 header per page, and target similar keyword phrases as the ones you targeted when writing the page title.
Use subheaders H2 and H3 on your page when necessary. Use bulleted lists and bolding to make content easier to read.
Make sure your text is written for human consumption—not bots.

7. Home Page Optimization

Make sure your home page builds credibility and directs consumers to the most important parts of your site.
Target your most competitive keyword on your home page or a page that is well integrated into your site.
Link to major theme pages from your home page. Link to your home page from every sub page.

8. Site Optimization

Use text-based navigation.
If you already have, or insist on using, graphic navigation, use descriptive alt text on the images, and link to every primary page from your sub pages in the footer of the sub pages.
Use descriptive keyword breadcrumb navigation. Make a site map.
Check the text that links pages of your site to make sure it’s descriptive whenever possible.
Link to resources outside your own site that improve each user's experience. Deep link to related articles and content from your page copy.
Rely as little as possible on the site navigation. Instead, guide your visitor through your site with links in the active content portion of the site.
Link to, and use, a cascading style sheet from every page.
Avoid duplicate content issues. Ensure that each page has significantly unique content that does not exist on other pages on your site or other sites.

9. Registering With Directories