bharath | TECHRENA dot Net

BSNL Prepaid Broadband Launched In AP

November 25, 2009 by bharath

BSNL has today officially launched the much talked Prepaid Broadband for the customers in Andhra Pradesh (At present the service is not yet available in Hyderabad Telecom District though).

The advertisement in newspapers today reads:

“Now you have the power to control the broadband bill.Pre-decide your usage, speed and validity by a recharge voucher of your choice ranging from Rs.50/- to Rs.5000 /- for the limited usage plans and Rs.300/- to rs.1200 /- for the unlimited usage plans.

Top up vouchers: Rs.100/- to Rs.500/-

Validity Vouchers: Rs.100/- to Rs.250/-

Initial Charges : Rs. 1000/- for Type-I modem and Rs.1600/- for Type-II modem.

Customer service numbers for further queries:

1800-424-1600 (Toll Free)

1500 (Toll Free from any BSNL phone).

Ad (I could get only Telugu version):

Registration and Installation is free for 30 days from today, so hurry up.

would like to hear your opinions about this new service.

BSNL Prepaid Broadband Plans

November 12, 2009 by bharath

We do know about many prepaid usage in case of mobiles, but never heard of prepaid Broadband, right?

BSNL, becomes the first broadband company in India to launch prepaid Broadband in India.Even though their prices seem to be a little costlier, they are worth the price if you are going to a place for a temporary stay where you don’t afford to get a new BB connection with all those installation charges etc. Just get a ADSL modem from one of your friends and of course you have to pay onetime installation charge of 250 Rs.).

I just went through BSNL Prepaid Broadband page and here I’m quoting the price table for unlimited usage packs.

Unlimited download/upload Plan vouchers :

Speed	Validity in Days for different Recharge Vouchers
Speed
	BB R_UL 300 Voucher (*MRP Rs. 300)	BB R_UL 550 Voucher (*MRP Rs. 550)	BB R_UL 900 Voucher (*MRP Rs. 900)	BB R_UL 1200 Voucher (*MRP Rs. 1200)
256 Kbps	7-days	15-days	30-days	N/A
Upto 512 Kbps	N/A	7-days	15-days	30-days
Upto 1 Mbps	N/A	N/A	7-days	15-days
Upto 2 Mbps	N/A	N/A	N/A	7-days

May be it’s time for all other ISPs to think in this direction to provide such prepaid broadband plans to their users.

BSNL initially may have started this service in some parts of the country, I heard they’d soon (by this month end?) be extending this to all over India.

For more details, visit BSNL Prepaid Broadband

FMS Website And It’s Hacking Woes

December 30, 2009November 12, 2009 by bharath

Faculty of Management Studies, FMS a Delhi B-School website has been compromised by some hackers couple of days ago, since then a Google Search for FMS or fms.edu yielding weird result as shown in the below screen shot.

There has been an official statement from the management of FMS, as seen in Times Of India website.

Hacked FMS B-School website

Below is the screen shot of Google’s cache of fms.edu as seen on Nov 5.

The site may have compromised around Nov 4-5, but since Google updates their index on a weekly basis we are still seeing the weird “Online Cialis, Oder Viagra” string in the search result snippet.

Thankfully, no damage has been done to the website.

This clearly signifies the need for the educational or such other institutions (both govt. and private) to have a serious thought abut security of their websites and important private data that they store through them.

Blogger Update: New and Improved ‘Next Blog’ Link

November 11, 2009 by bharath

From next week onwards, Blogger users will find that clicking on the “Next Blog” link at the top right corner of the NavBar will take them to a blog relating to similar topic.For example if you have a blog written about your favourite electronic gadgets in French, it’s most likely that the click on the Next Blog will take you to a blog written in French about gadgets.

Until now, Next Blog link used to open up a random blog written by a random user in any language.This new feature, according to the blog post in Blogger Buzz, will be rolled out from next week.

According to them, using this “You might discover a cool blogger who has hobbies similar to yours, has similar taste in electronic gadgets, likes sports that you’re into, or has similar curiosities and interests.”

Hmm, let’s see to what extent it works.

WordPress Tip: View All Your Blog Posts With Titles & Post URLs

November 11, 2009 by bharath

I wanted to have all of my blog posts with post URLs and titles at one place so that I can quickly quote or make reference to them whenever I post a new post at appropriate places.(In fact I wanted to have a XLS list of the same so that I can always check them directly from my computer .I’m not sure if there’s such a possibility in WordPress.)

However, there’s a little code (thanks to jdembowski), which will allow you view all of your Blog posts with Titles and URLs:

<?php

require_once('../wp-blog-header.php');
query_posts('&showposts=-1&order=ASC');

while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

"<?php the_title(); ?>","<?php the_permalink(); ?>"
<br />

<?php endwhile; ?>

Open text editor, paste this code into that and save it as posts-urls.php,Now upload this file into “wp-content” folder i.e it should be like wp-content/posts-urls.php.

Now open this in your browser like www.yourdomain.com/wp-content/posts-urls.php and you can view all of your Blog posts in Ascending order of time (latest one at last) as a comma seperated list.However if you want it to be in descending order, just use ‘DSC’ instead of ‘ASC’ in the above code.

The output would be something like this:

viewing all blog posts with titles in WordPress

Please let me know if there is any another really good method to extract all Posts and titles form any WordPress blog.

Note: I know that sitemap.xml file lists all post URLs (in fact all URLs associated with blog) but it doesn’t serve the purpose as it doesn’t show up post/page titles.

Also read Configure Google Friend Connect For WordPress Blogs.

WebPage In Search Result Even After Disallowing in Robots.txt ? Read This

November 10, 2009November 10, 2009 by bharath

The Problem: I have disallowed one of my WebPages in my robots.txt file, and it’s still appearing in search result. What’s the deal ??

Have you blocked any of your webpage/sub-folder of your website using robots.txt, and still wonder why it is showing up in search results? If so, read on..

This is the most common complaints from many webmasters and fortunately we have an answer from Google Webmaster Guru Matt Cutts,

Let me take an example to show you how this can happen.Take robots.txt of the Google.com itself.

It’s located in google.com/robots.txt , you can find many entries in that file which are part of the Google and blocked by Google itself.Let’s pick any one of them at random, here I’ve picked up

google.com/m/trends

For some reasons Google has blocked this URL from being crawled by search engines.So if you search for google.com/m/trends, you’ll probably see something like this in the snippet of the search results :

example-google trends robots txt blocked

Sometimes you’ll find similar results for your sites too and may not be sure why is that URL is showing up in results? in general, something like this:

search snippet after robots txt block

According to Matt Cutts, this URL is not the indexed one.It’s just showing a link that Google finds it may be of some use to the search users.

So even if you have disallowed a URL in robots.txt, if someone links to it Google still may consider it of some value to the users and may show it up in results even though it hasn’t really crawled it.Sometimes it may even take up the description snippet from places like Open Directory project if that is listed there.

“If you truly don’t want that page to be in the search results, use ‘Noindex’ HTML meta tag at the top of the page.Another options is to use the URL Removal Tool from Google Webmaster tools.”

Watch this video for more details:

So the next time if you see any such URL blocked in robots.txt being shown up in search results, you need not worry, you may want to try the above said alternatives instead.

Special thanks to Matt Cutts and Google for letting us know about this.

Google Analytics Desktop Client Trakkboard

January 20, 2010November 8, 2009 by bharath

Google Analytics is a great data management that everyone must use for their website, isn’t it? Not a big deal if you just have one or 2 websites.But these are people getting compromised with just having gone or two sites? Not really, right. But how to manage all analytics of those sites at one place? Luckily, there is a much simpler solution in town.

Trakkboard is a desktop application that draws data across different Google Analytics logins and different Google Analytics profiles to display top level metrics all within the same view.

Built using the Google Analytics API, this application works based on Adobe AIR platform.So you must have first installed Adobe Air package first in your PC.

Pre-canned report widgets display the data from the API.What’s more interesting is that this widget can pull data from API every hour.

How to get Trakkboard?

Enter Trakkboard site,

Enter your email and select accept GTC and click “request key”

Trakkboard registration email

The key will be delivered to your email.

Open your mail and verify your registration, and download and install the Trakkboard application

After installing, you must complete the next 3 steps

enter your license key that has been mailed to you.
choose a password for the application
fill in your Google account details associated with Analytics in the step 3

That’s it, add your various Analytics profiles and use it straightaway.

Have you tried it already? leave your comment

Note: Trakkboard is also available in German and Spanish

Blogger Service Interruptions Update on Blogger Status Blog

November 6, 2009 by bharath

Blogger team today has posted a blog post saying that the the Blogger users, from now on will be communicated for the likes of interruptions like for instance that occurred on last Saturday on Blogger Status.If somehow even if the Blogger Status blog doesn’t work for you, check Blogger Twitter update on Blogger’s twitter account

Blogger team also clarifies that in case of any significant service interruptions, they plan to publish a post mortem on the Blogger status blog within 3 business days to provide details about the cause for the interruptions and what they are doing to sort it out and to avoid similar problems in future.

Excerpt from the Blog post:

“We don’t like it when our users experience problems like what we saw on Saturday, but we hope the combination of transparency around these issues and our commitment to learn from our mistakes will help assure you that we’re doing everything we can to keep Blogger a robust and reliable service for you.”

Blogger Buzz

BTW, Check out the first “Postmortem on recent issues affecting users in Europe” published on Blogger Status blog.

Google Dashboard Launched

November 5, 2009November 5, 2009 by bharath

Google has today launched the “Google Dashboard” which consists of summary of the all the Google products that a the user is using.

[ Visit http://www.google.com/dashboard/ to check your own Google dashboard.]

google accounts dashboard

Alma Whitten, adds in a post in the official Google blog,

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings.

[Dashboards are very common right? like WordPress dashboard, Blogger dashboard etc. it’s much like a control panel for your own data.]

Google Dashboard has been built to offer greater transparency and control over the users own data, according to Google.

At present Dashboard includes more than 20 Google products like Gmail (last sent mail, received mail, last chat conversation etc.) ,Docs, Web Search History, Orkut (Last scrap received, Scraps To Friends, Albums shared), YouTube, Calendar, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude etc.

Google claims to be the first internet company to offer something like this Dashboard to let the user have all his data at one place for a quick review.

Google Dashboard Link in Manage Profile

Watch Google Dashboard introduction video :

Watch Google Dashboard Video