derick thomas

BSD is one of the very old operating systems out in the market. But they did not become much popular due to a number of reasons. Although it did not become popular as a desktop operating system, it is still one of the highly reliable server operating system. There are a number of BSD operating systems out there like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonFlyBSD are the prominent ones. Of all these, FreeBSD is the most popular one and is the base for many commercial operating systems like Apple's Mac OS and Juniper's JunOS (It is not a desktop or server OS. It is used in Routers, Switches and Firewalls). BSD has a very popular and flexible licensing, unlike Linux.

PC-BSD is a desktop oriented free, open source operating system based on rock-solid FreeBSD. It is not another distribution, it makes FreeBSD accessible to everyone. FreeBSD does not come with a Graphical Installer. It still uses a text based installer, which is very comfortable with expert users. But for someone new to BSD, an installer with a nice installer is always nice. Also, PC-BSD 8.0 comes as a Live DVD, which means that you can try it out before installing it on your PC. For this review, I grabbed PC-BSD 8.0 DVD iso from their website www.pcbsd.org. There are both DVD images and USB images available in 32bit and 64bit. 32bit DVD image is 3.28GB in size. I have installed it on my Dell Inspiron 6400. The configuration is:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T5500
• 1GB DDR2 667 MHz
• 80 GB SATA Hard Disk
• Intel 945GM/L Mobile Graphics Card
• Bluetooth and Intel 3945 Wi-Fi

Installation

User Experience

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion

Last week, when Twitter announced it's tieup with Bharti Airtel, I was very happy - I could get all the updates in my mobile. But thisngs were not working as I expected. I was receiving updates only from some friends. Then I thought it must be some issues with either twitter or Airtel. But it was not so. Today I found the mistake I did. If you are also not receiving updates, you can use the same method.

Step 1:

Go to the list of people you follow.

[caption id="attachment_309" align="alignnone" width="198" caption="Go To The List Of People You Follow"][/caption]

Step 2:

Hover your mouse over the small phone icon for the friend you want.

[caption id="attachment_310" align="alignnone" width="362" caption="It shows that the updates are not sent to your mobile for the friend"][/caption]

Step 3:

Click the mobile phone icon and enable updates by SMS on your mobile.



Enjoy Twitter via SMS on your Mobile!

IPv6 is gaining popularity. Many sites are having IPv6 versions also. These days, I can see many torrents exclusively available on IPv6. In this post, I will guide you through a step by step procedure on how to browse IPv6 webpage on your windows box.

First, you need to have an IPv6 address. IPv6 Tunnel Brokers would help you achieve this. You can have an IPv6 tunnel created from Hurricane Electric's free Tunnel Broker.

You might have heard of IPv4 address depletion. A new version of Internet addressing system was prepared sometime back. But since everyone was using IPv4 address, the migration has not been implemented in a large scale. If we continue to use IPv4 address as on today, the entire range would be used up in less than two years. Public IPv4 addresses are mainly used by Internet hosts. Intranets can use private IPv4 address which are not reachable from Internet. Although many methods like NAT (Network Address Translation) and CIDR (Classless Inter Domain Routing) were implemented to stretch the IPv4 address usage, it seems that it is reaching a level of saturation now.

It is sure that everyone will have to migrate to IPv6 address within a couple of years. Internet registries are not so liberal in assigning IPv4 address now. If you want to learn about IPv6 and make sure that you have skills to administer IPv6 address and servers, Free IPv6 certification from Hurricane Electric is a great way to begin. You can register for this certification at: http://ipv6.he.net/certification/index.php. I will give a brief overview of this test in the following section.

Through this test set you will be able to:

• Prove that you have IPv6 connectivity


• Prove that you have a working IPv6 web server


• Prove that you have a working IPv6 email address


• Prove that you have working forward IPv6 DNS


• Prove that you have working reverse IPv6 DNS for your mail server


• Prove that you have name servers with IPv6 addresses that can respond to queries via IPv6


• Prove your knowledge of IPv6 techonologies through quick and easy testing

• the format of IPv6 addresses


• AAAA records


• reverse DNS for IPv6


• the IPv6 localhost address


• the IPv6 default route


• the IPv6 documentation prefix


• the IPv6 link local prefix


• the IPv6 multicast prefix


• how to do an IPv6 ping


• how to do an IPv6 traceroute


• common IPv6 prefix lengths such as /64, /48, /32


• and more!

In the beginning of this month, two prominent Operating System distributions released their Release Candidates - Popular Microsoft Windows and Linux Mint. I had a chance to try both of them out in my Dell 6400 Laptop. Here is how the things appeared to me:

Windows 7 RC1

Linux Mint 7 RC

Yes, the much awaited feature is now available in Gmail. This time, Google has done a fantastic job by integrating Indic Transliteration with Gmail.

[caption id="attachment_238" align="alignnone" width="454" caption="Compose Email in Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu and Tamil"][/caption]

Here is a screenshot of the new feature. You can just click on the button to enable composing in local language and start typing. You can switch back to English by clicking the button again.

Update: Here is the entry from official gmail blog.

If you go to website of any hosting provider, you will find the details of their network connectivity under technical details. Most of the service providers tell you that they have a Gigabit Ethernet connectivity with their ISP. While it is tru that they are connected to a Gigabit Ethernet port with ISP, the connection will be rate-limited. For example, if you are using a host A for hosting your website, they will be connected on a Gigabit Ethernet link with their ISP. ISP on their router will rate-limit such connection with a bandwidth of 10 Mbits/sec. So effectively, your host will be having an effective upstream bandwidth of 10 Mbits/sec. If your hosting provider is not a very big one, hosting thousands and thousands of sites, then Gigabit Ethernet connectivity will not be of any use to them. For a hosting provider hosting 100 sites, 15-20 Mbits/sec would be more than enough. Although it will not affect your service in anyway, if you choose a good hosting provider, they are giving you wrong information.

Another thing which I have noticed is that the hosting providers generally do not speak of their connectivity with ISPs. Ideally, a hosting provider should have connectivity from multiple ISPs. This is not only for the backup, but also will affect the speed and distance a packet has to travel to reach end users. Connectivity with different ISPs ensures that you get the best routing to reach customers. The technical term for such connectivity with multiple ISPs is "Multi-homing". To properly route all the traffic, hosting provider needs to have a powerful router. This requires more investment and small providers will not be able to afford it.

Connectivity with different service providers are often controlled with a routing protocol called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). I have seen advertisements by some hosting providers that they will allow you to use BGP. This is absolutely ridiculous. There is no need for you, the publisher to run BGP. BGP should be run by your hosting provider with his upstream providers. Although technically it is possible to run BGP as a daemon in your server, it is not needed and it will not be of any direct use to you.

Next time you see such advertisements, chat with the hosting provider. Most of them will not be able to provide any further information beyond such technical jargons. Here is the transcript of such a chat I had last week with a hosting provider.

[caption id="attachment_223" align="alignleft" width="464" caption="Chat with a Webhost"][/caption]

Most of us would have thought of this at least once. In this post, I will try to explain the reasons for expensive Internet access in India. I have tried to make this article very simple to understand. The broad technical details are far from what can be explained in this article.

The reason is connected with the beginning and development of Internet itself. Internet was started as a Defense Project in USA. As with any new technology, Internet gained popularity in US and was finally opened to commercial interests. When people realized the advantage of the new system, it became more popular, especially email. Again, most of the operations were based out of US, Canada and UK.

This has lead to establishment of more Internet based companies and websites in later years, with most of them based out of US. In the mid and late 1990's it gained popularity all over the world and different countries have became a part of this big network either through some government agency or though some commercial establishments.

The cost factor comes from the fact that most of the servers are based out of  United States or United Kingdom. To get a connectivity to US and get access to the network, Internet Service Providers has to do two things:

1. Get a physical link from India to US and UK.


2. Handover the traffic to an upstream provider.

File sharing is one of the most popular category of applications, which computer users all over the world use. Even in office, we use IM clients like Yahoo! Messenger or Google Talk to transfer files. This is true for even users working in the same LAN also. In this article, I will introduce you to two effective P2P LAN File Sharing Applications.

Giver

[caption id="attachment_180" align="alignleft" width="174" caption="Giver GNOME File Sharing"][/caption]

Giver is a nice application which comes bundled, with new Ubuntu 8.10. This is a very nice application and is very simple to use. It discovers users in the LAN and you can share files with them with a simple mouse click. There are not too many options in this application, but it is a nice application with a simple User Interface. You can give 11/10 for its very simple user interface.The new version of Giver integrates with Tomboy notes and you can share notes using drag and drop. If the other user accepts the note, the new note will be added to the receiver's Tomboy notes.

You can find more details about this at http://code.google.com/p/giver/. The only problem with this application is that this works only in Linux, as Windows and Mac OS X versions are still not available.

LAN Shark

[caption id="attachment_182" align="alignright" width="150" caption="LAN Shark File Sharing"][/caption]

LAN Shark is another tool for P2P file sharing over a LAN. But this tool is Cross Platform and works in Linux as well as Windows. This tool has more configuration options and a window showing uploads, downloads. You can even search for files shared by other users and select what you want to download. Another interesting addition over Giver is a web interface and embedded web server. You can find more details about this tool at http://lanshark.29a.ch/

Google added Malayalam support in Gmail a couple of months back. But I have not seen it mentioned in any of the blogs. So I have decided to post an article about changing the language to Malayalam. Here is how it works:

1. Go to the settings page


2. Select the language drop-down


3. Scroll to the bottom and you will see Malayalam in the list, select it


4. Save your settings


5. Gmail will reload the page in Malayalam.

Although typing Malayalam and other Indic languages have improved a lot in the recent past, using Malayalam or any other Indic Language for chat has been a big problem with not so much support from major Operating systems. Sometime back Google introduced support for Indic Transliteration. It works really well, offering suggestions and improving day by day. I have seen a considerable amount of improvement in Malayalam support in Google over the last couple of years.

I have tried many other standalone software also, but the integration with other applications has been a big problem. I really wanted some nice support for chatting in Malayalam and could not find a decent application which does this. Yesterday, I came across a FireFox plugin which does the exactly same thing I wanted to do. Let me take you through this nice plugin.

The name of this wonderful plugin is Google Indic Transliteration. At the time of writing this post, the version is 1.0.3. You can download the plugin here. Note that this is an experimental plugin you have to register in the site to download this plugin. This plugin uses Google Language API for transliteration. At present, this plugin works only on text area and input boxes. Don't worry about that, this works in Google Chat Window.

Here are some screenshots:

It offers all the features supported by Google Indic Translation. As you can see in the above screenshots, this plugin supports all languages supported by Google Language API. Also, you can set default language. I am sure that you will love this plugin.

Recently I attended BarCamp Mumbai and BlogCamp. One of the interesting sessions in the blog-camp was about blogging in regional languages. This came to my mind because, one of my friend started her own blog today! That too in Malayalam. I wish she will keep the momentum up. Coming back to the core, one of the problems faced by many bloggers is that they are not having enough set of tools to blog in regional languages. It was the story, sometime back. Now I can see Google providing vast support for Regional Languages.

Also, I know that there are so many good Malayalam (my mother tongue) blogs appearing on the Internet. But sometimes, I have seen that most of them die out. I have examined the reasons for such a phenomenon in some of my earlier posts. Visitors would not be a problem for most of the blogs as majority of them are hosted in Blogger.com. I have seen good amount of readers for a fresh Malayalam blog with good content.

I would like everyone to use Unicode fonts in the blog, rather than adopting some ASCII based fonts. Further, with Internet becoming more and more popular blogging and the value it provides should be known to the masses. One of the easiest methods for this is to spread the word among children. They will create awareness among parents.

This should be thought in a serious manner. The power and usefulness of blogging and socializing is amazing. No one can succeed in the cyber-age without having proper communication and socializing skills. I wish if someone could seriously think about developing the soft skills for the coming up generation. Whenever we talk about a new technology, we view it suspiciously. I have seen many people speaking about these kind of things. But I have not seen even a single one doing this kind of things. Blogging opens a new world opportunities. Blogging in regional languages could keep the language alive. I have seen that many local governments in India enforcing regional languages through law. But I do not think that it is a good idea. Unless ordinary man realizes the value of the regional language, he will ignore it.

I am not saying that no one should use English. It is a very useful and beautiful language. It has opened many avenues for millions worldwide.Along with proper English training, other regional languages should also be taught. That will change the way people think and open new avenues for everyone.

The title of the post may seem to be very funny. Firefox has been a very good browser and the new engine was performing well. I installed this beta 3 and it was all going fine until I noticed that the entire OS gets stuck at times, not even responding to keyboard. When it got stuck this time, I took some screenshots of Windows Vista task manager window. I was shocked to see Firefox using 600MB RAM and by the time I took the screenshot, it was using around 590MB. I was only using one Firefox window with five tabs open. See the screenshot below:

Even though it was using 500MB on my Vista Home Basic, I just restarted the application and it was working fine. This is the only issue have seen apart from the ones mentioned in the "Known Issues" in beta page. If any of you happen to be contributing to Firefox development, I request you to report this and get it fixed. BTW, I know that these kind of issues are expected in beta versions, but 600MB is too much, for a product of Firefox's standard and reputation.

Thank you for your time.

I think this is the most difficult thing in a blogging life. When I started this blog, I had a lot of expectations. But when it was not going as I expected, then I thought of stopping blogging. But something inside me pushed me to blog. Why do we fail to keep the momentum? This article is an introspection and other things which I have observed over the time. I would list the factors below:

1. Traffic: This is a single most important things which makes everyone disappointed. I have had days when my blog was not visited by someone. But I kept on blogging. Something which I did not do was effective marketing of my blog. I am not saying any excuse, but will do the marketing more effectively. I am sure that my traffic will improve naturally, if I can produce content worth reading.
2. Money: This depends on the motive of your blog. If you are blogging for money and you do not get the expected sum in a stipulated time period, you will feel disappointed. I do not have money as an objective for this blog. But I use this blog to experiment some things, which I will try to use later. Why I am not doing this right from the start? I have seen many big brands trying to establish a market before trying to monetize it. So I thought it as a nice idea to adopt the same policy for my blog also.
3. Publicity: I have dreamed of my content getting very popular in the Internet and everyone is talking about it. It never happened till this time. But as an objective, publicity is not my objective. I will accept a publicity if some of my article is worth having publicity. To overcome this, I have trained myself to control my expectations and this is something which inspires me to produce better content.
4. Comments: I write something which I feel is good, and when people do not respond to my content, I felt bad. In some of my previous posts, I have asked my readers for their opinion. Sometimes, no one replied or commented. But what kept me going was some statistics. Even most popular blogs in the Internet gets 150~200 comments per post per month. They are visited by millions of people. Then there is no point in worrying about the comments' count.
5. Comparison with other blogs: I have seen so many other blogs getting ahead of me both in the number of visitors and the money they make. Most of them started after I launched my blog. I was worried about this for sometime. But what I noticed was that their niche is very hot and mine is not. I can also start a blog in some very hot niche. But if I can not enjoy it, then there is no point in doing it. You may have some initial enthusiasm, but I don't think that one can take it for long time.

The momentum matters only to those people with long term objectives. If you have shot term objectives, then there are plenty of web sites which explains how to be rich in seconds. But I have seen that the above things worried me or I have noticed. But still, when you have a feeling that you are responsible to your readers, that would be the single point of inspiration for you. Have you faced any other thing which disappoint you? I would welcome if you can share it.

Thank you for your time.

When a blogger matures, he may start another blog. So I have seen some new blogs of very successful bloggers. Something which I noticed is the launch - their blog has at least three or four articles. One of the biggest mistakes I did was to start my blog with just one article. Why it is important to have more than one article? I will discuss something which I have experienced and noticed.

When I started, I had just one article. It took me some time to get everything in place and start real blogging. I have reached following conclusions regarding a new blog startup.

1. When a new visitor comes to your blog, he will see just one article. There is a high tendency of him leaving the blog, even if the content is good. People love to have some authenticity to the content they read. So if they see a new blog with just one post, they consider it as something very amateur and less authentic.
2. More than one post, allows the visitor to get a good idea about the topic/niche which you are writing.
3. It exhibits your knowledge in the niche - not too many people can produce some good content on a niche at the startup. So this also adds to the trust of the reader.
4. Visitor will spend more time in your site if I am offering more than one post.
5. If the articles are good, he may share it with his friends. So you get a dream start for your blog.
6. It gives you more time to concentrate on marketing and spreading the news. You have a got a some very good articles, which can satisfy you readers.

When I started a blog, I made this mistake. But later I came to know about this. So I lost this life time opportunity ( yeah.. I can not restart this blog :-) ). But I have seen that this happens to most of the people - because they are unaware. If you are planning to start a new blog, make sure that you don't make this mistake.

Whether to use full feeds or partial feeds is still an endless discussion. When I decided to switch to full feeds from partial feeds, one problem which I faced was that, all the entries which I made until yesterday were stored in partial format by Feedburner and from this one onwards, it would be very unpleasant for a reader to see both of them mixed together. But since I am using Feedburner to manage my feeds, it was very easy. So if you also want to move to full feeds, here is how to do that.

1. Login to your Feedburner account.


2. In the top, you will find a link "My Feeds". Click it.
   


3. Then it will show the list of feeds you are managing.


4. Click on the feed title and it will take you to the details page.
   


5. Then click Troubleshootize tab.
   


6. Last, there is a button to ReSync your feed. Just click it.
   

Image Credit: William.Ward

A web crawler (also known as a web spider or web robot) is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Other less frequently used names for web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, and worms. - Wikipedia.

1. These bots are eating up a large portion of my monthly bandwidth.


2. It slows down your web site by crawling your site in seconds.


3. These bots also pose some security threats.


4. Most of these bots post so many spam comments, which I need to manually delete - although Akismet catch almost all those spam comments.


5. They are giving wrong site statistics.

# Ultimate htaccess Blacklist 2 from Perishable Press
# Deny domain access to spammers and other scumbags
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ADSARobot|ah-ha|almaden //truncated

RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]

Bad Behavior is a PHP-based solution for blocking link spam and the robots which deliver it. Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.

What is Stumbleupon?

How can I use Stumbleupon effectively?

1. Install Stumbleupon toolbar and configure your preference: This is very important. I will explain the rationale behind this step in the coming steps. Toolbars are available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. There are third party Stumbleupon extension available for Opera.


2. Be an active Stumbler: Web is all about giving more than taking. So do not expect to get anything from web unless you contribute something to the community. When you like a page, or when you feel that it is worth sharing, just press I like button. Also discover more useful pages.


3. Don't be selfish: Do not promote only your pages. You will lose your credibility. If possible, try to get your page stumbled by a member who is having more reputation. If a page you discover becomes popular, then your reputation will increase.


4. Do Network: Find some good friends in the stumble community. Also join the communities in Stumbleupon. This can increase your exposure and make some good contacts which may be useful for both of you.


5. Ask for opinions and fine tune your content: You should be able to add value to the subject you are writing on. So choose the niche carefully. Be yourself and ask for the comments from your friends.


6. Write good content that Stumblers like: Google for some good posts which tell you how to write good content for Stumbleupon users. Remember that Stumble gives you targeted visitors. So you have a potential of converting them to a reader. One of my posts mentions about type of pages that irritates stumblers.

The world is changing. There are various innovations happening in the world each and every second. Some of the changes are good and some are bad. In this post, I am going to introduce (if you are not already) to web feeds. You can think of web feeds as a your favourite content postman. When the browsers were introduced for the first time, there was something called, bookmarks or favourites. Still you will find it in your browser. The concept was to keep your interesting pages' URL saved, so that you can access it later. These were commonly used by people who visited frequently updated pages.

As I mentioned in the last paragraph, world is changing. And Internet is the front runner in the changes. It is changing and has led to many changes. So there has been a new way of keeping your audience updated about the content in the web page. This new way is called Feeds or sometimes called Web Feeds, owing to their nature. So What exactly is this?

• For a normal Internet user, feeds are a way to keep track of the updates happening in your favourite web site. Instead of going to hundreds of pages you like, just think of the situation where the entire content is presented in your browser just a click away. So whenever you favourite author posts something in his page, you will be updated and in case your author chooses to deliver the entire content on the page, then you can read the entire posts without even going to that page. This is true for even audio and video content also. If the posts contains some pictures and some videos, you can view it in your feed application just like a normal web page.


• For a webmaster, it is a way to retain his visitors. It helps them to keep his audience updated about the new ideas in his mind. He can opt to show the entire content or to present only a small portion of the content. If the reader finds it interesting, he can click the link and go to the web page to continue the reading. Now a days number of feed readers are considered as a popularity index among web masters, especially among bloggers who post frequent content. Besides this there are advertising opportunities also.

It has been over two weeks since I started this blog. One thing I have noticed over this period is the amount of traffic I am getting. So to improve my traffic, I did some experiments like directory listing and search engine listing. It got me some results also. Now that presented another problem. Spam comments posted by bots. Spam bots are scripts or programs which automatically visits your site and post some comments like "Good Post". Some even went on to put some adult web site links in your comments. So I decided to kill those spam bots.

If you think deeply, then you will find some serious issues associated with these spam comments. Most of the sites which use spam bots are splogs (spam blogs). They want to make some money out of nothing. Here are the some implications of the spam comments which I could think of.

1. Spam blogs want backlinks from quality web sites. This will improve their visibility. But how is it possible? Most of the comments have links to the website of the commenter. Since the links does not specify anything, search engine bots will follow the link and crawl the site. These will be counted as backlinks to the spam site.


2. Spam blogs get visitors from comments. Some of the readers may follow comments and go to the spam website. They will get some visitors. Consider thousands of blogs, each providing a visitor to the spam site a day. Bots will crawl thousands of sites a day and will make millions of spam entries.


3. They spoil your content. Think of this post filled with too many comments which does not add value to the post. Some comments may be from adult sites, which may affect your search engine ranks.


4. They may affect your search engine rank. Some of these web sites may be banned by search engines. Since search engines follow the spam comments, and land in a banned site, they map penalize you for providing a backlink to those banned sites.

What is the way out?

Around three new blogs are being created in the web every second! Now with Internet hosting and bandwidth becoming cheaper, more and more companies are offering free blog hosting. This post deals with nine MUST do things for every blogger, before they venture into blogging world.

1. Find your topic / niche : Decide what you are comfortable writing with. Not only that, you should have a good knowledge about what you are writing about. If not, you will fail to sustain the initial momentum and respond well to reader queries.


2. Write at least five articles you are going to post : This may seem funny. But you should keep ready at least five posts ready. By doing this you can have more time doing some promotion work and interacting with your visitors. Ask some of your close friends to review the articles you have written. See my article Never Start A New Blog With Just One Post for more on this.


3. Find a blogging platform that suits your needs : As I said earlier more and more blogging platforms are available now. You should spend some time going though some of the popular platforms. Create accounts and test each of them. You can use some free to use content available in the Internet. It is unwise to change the blogging platform later.


4. Buy a domain name and own space : You should actively consider buying a domain name and own space if you have long term blogging ambitions. Not only this helps you to have full control over your blog, but also helps in building a brand name which is one of the most important marketing strategies.


5. Choose theme for your web site : If you are using Wordpress or any other publishing platform, as in most cases, choose a theme that speaks about you, your content and matches your topic/niche. This is very important. Your theme should look nice to your readers and the fonts should be readable. Try to get some search engine friendly themes. When your blog gets popular try investing in designing a custom theme for your blog.


6. Choose a content layout : You should have a good content layout for all the posts that you are posting. Why? Your posts should be readable and visitors should be able to go though your articles quickly. If the articles are posted in a cluttered way, they will never come back. Remember that you want returning visitors for your blog to live long.


7. Visit other blogs in your niche : Find some of the sites which are on the same niche as you want to start. Learn what they are blogging about and the style in which they blog. You should not copy their style if it is a popular web site. What you can do is improvisation.


8. Get familiar with feeds and social bookmark sites : If you don't know how to use feeds and social bookmark sites, then get familiar with them. This is important since social bookmark sites can drive a remarkable amount of traffic to your site, if you prepare good content and market it well. Visit good sites and blogs, and learn about the how to's of marketing your content. Even if you post good content, you will not get a reasonable amount of traffic, until you market it well.


9. Test , Test and Test... : Yes, try to simulate a hosting environment. Download some freely available web servers and then try to simulate your web site. This will expose some of the pitfalls and help you to improve a lot. Try installing the plugins and make sure that you try everything in your local server before doing it on the live server. Also there are free web space providers. Signup with them and test your site in a real scenario with dummy content.

It is always a bit difficult to find a good topic to write about. So I was also thinking about it. Then my friend Kenney told me to write about the work I am doing. Since I am working with a telecom company, I know something about the whole world of telecommunication. The advantage of this is that, I can write unique articles. There are two advantages. One, I don't need to search for a topic. Second, this world is a black box to the outside world. So I hope to throw some light on these topics in the coming days. One thing I can assure you is that I will not be writing boring geek( am I??) kind of articles, it will be about the things that all of us have heard, but not gone in depth. A kind of behind the scenes series... So my time starts now. Will keep you all busy.

One of the greatest innovations in the Internet era is Web Feeds. And Feedburner is one of the premier resource for you as a publisher. It helps you to track your feed readers. You will get good statistics about the readers and their actions. After Google took over Feedburner, a number of paid services have become free. In Feedburner's terminology they are now offering more PRO features for FREE. IN this post, I would like to take you though the MyBrand PRO feature of feedburner.

One of the biggest challenges in getting a notable name among billions of websites on the Internet is establishing a brand name. Now, as the blogs are getting popular, so is the subscription of feeds also. As I said earlier Feedburner is a great service which offers feed management services to publishers. Almost all the publishing platforms now support feeds. By default feedburner offers http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeednamefeed url for your feed. But My Brand offers you the flexibility to have http://feeds.yourdomain.com/yourfeednameas your feed url. You can substitute feeds.yourdomain.com with whatever you want, like rss.mydomain.com, but feeds is generally used as it gives an idea about what it is doing.

Now to the implementation. Sign-up for a feedburner account if you don't have one already.Then go to My-Account and then select MyBrand PRO. This service is disabled by default. In that page you will find basic instructions needed to get your MyBrand configured.

The basic requirement is that you should be able to add a DNS entry in your domain control panel. If you don't have the required access for this, then ask you hosting provider to do this for you. If your domain is hosted on some free service like Blogger or Wordpress.com and is having some address like you.provider.com, then you are unlucky. Now go to your control panel and add a CNAME entry. It should look like feeds CNAME feeds.feedburner.com. Please note to add a dot at the end. So what exactly it does? If your domain is accessed with a prefix of feeds, like feeds.yourdomain.com, then redirect that request to feeds.feedburner.com. Once you have completed this, you can put the domain you have added to the box given in the feedburner page. Make sure that you save all the work.

While trying to add this feature to my blog, I committed some mistakes and when I searched Internet for some documentation, I did not find anything useful. That is why I wrote this one. The first mistake I committed was due to the lack of knowledge how CNAME works and what it does. I added something like this: feeds CNAME feeds.derick.in . So many mistakes, this single line had.

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  I missed the dot in the end.

  
  


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  The entry after CNAME should have been derick.in. and not feeds.derick.in.

  
  

When I contacted my hosting provider also, they were also not familiar with this thing. We tried a lot of combinations to get this work. But none worked. Finally I got the trick and configured it correctly. One check to decide if it is working perfectly or not is to ping the domain you have created and compare the result with ping of the domain feeds.feedburner.com . Here is an example.

>ping feeds.feedburner.com

Pinging feeds.feedburner.com [66.150.96.119] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 66.150.96.119: bytes=32 time=230ms TTL=238
Reply from 66.150.96.119: bytes=32 time=232ms TTL=238
Reply from 66.150.96.119: bytes=32 time=231ms TTL=238
Reply from 66.150.96.119: bytes=32 time=233ms TTL=238

Ping statistics for 66.150.96.119:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 230ms, Maximum = 233ms, Average = 231ms

>ping feeds.derick.in

Pinging feeds.feedburner.com [66.150.96.119] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 66.150.96.119: bytes=32 time=231ms TTL=238
Reply from 66.150.96.119: bytes=32 time=231ms TTL=238
Reply from 66.150.96.119: bytes=32 time=231ms TTL=238
Reply from 66.150.96.119: bytes=32 time=232ms TTL=238

Ping statistics for 66.150.96.119:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 231ms, Maximum = 232ms, Average = 231ms

Note that even when I ping to feeds.derick.in, it is redirected to feeds.feedburner.com. So you can access your blog feeds at http://feeds.derick.in/derick, one that comes after http://feeds.derick.in/ is the name of the feed that you set while you register the feed with feedburner.

As I said earlier my hosting provider and me tried so many combinations to get this work. In the process we found one more way to accomplish the same thing. We setup a sub-domain in my main account derick.in and then placed an unconditional redirect to http://feeds.derick.in/derick . But I have not seen this method mentioned anywhere. So give it a try at your own risk.

My Brand feature is great service. But I have seen only very few websites which use this feature. There may be some reasons for established sites like the change of subscription link etc., but new sites can take advantage this feature.