Screen… A utility which gave me flexibility to use my putty as a multiplex of Unix terminals. And now is far easy for me to traverse through various shell consoles with ease. I personally found Screen very useful for me as a System Admin, you got to have many servers to watch at single point of time and keeping an eye on all of them may lead you to confusion between multiple putty sessions.
But screen made this very easy, as every screen is marked with a name/number, easy to recognize and traverse. I am going to discuss here various Screen command for reference –

Screen start/stop commands -

screen -S <screen name>        [creates new screen]
screen -r <screen name>        [attach to a screen]
screen -d <screen name>        [detach from a screen]
Ctrl+a Ctrl\            [terminates the screen and all tabs init]
exit                [terminates a tab in a screen]
screen -list            [lists all the screen in system at that point of time]

Traversing in a Screen -

Ctrl+a n    [next tab in a screen]
Ctrl+a p    [previous tab in a screen]
Ctrl+a <number>    [switch to the tab number]
Ctrl+a Ctrl+a    [switch between tabs]
Ctrl+a c    [new tab in a screen]
Ctrl+a A    [rename the screen tab]
Ctrl+a :    [Screen command prompt]
Ctrl+s        [Pause screen output]
Ctrl+q        [Resume screen output]
Ctrl+a ‘    [prompt for name or number of the tab to switch for]

Handling Parent Screen – Screen can be in layer layout. In that case outer screen will be handled with keyword Ctrl+e rest traversal commands are same.

Access control in Screen –

Let us take a case where a teacher in a class created a session and now want to share the screen with all the students, piece of cake with screen. Just create a screen and give rights to the respective students and they can see what is going on. We can make changes to the access right to this screen as well.

Ctrl+a :
at prompt write – "multiuser on"
Now screen is running in multiuser mode. This can be verified by "screen -list" command.

Some commands to control users in a Multiuser mode screen –

Ctrl+a :    >    acladd <user name>    [adds user to screen user list]
Ctrl+a :    >    aclchg +-r+-w+-x <user name>    [change user permissions]
Ctrl+a :    >    acldel <user name>    [removes user from screen user list]
Ctrl+a :    >    wall <message>    [displays a message on all tabs to all screen users]

Drawback –

You actually can not see your scroll backs after a limit. but still that can be managed in copy mode with command " Ctrl [ ". But still this is not that easy and comfortable.

Hope this article was helpful.

For detailed Screen Utility reference –

http://sunsite.ualberta.ca/Documentation/Gnu/screen-3.9.4/

I see these kind of mails generally asking for help. I thought why should not I write about why actually the email IDs gets hacked and what are the precautions that a person need to take against e-mail hacking.

Using brute-force or old hacking tools have become obsolete now. Now a days mail providers are really sharp and they will not let you down unless you make yourself a prey of hackers. These days hackers use new techniques.

1. Phishing e-mails : You generally receiving many e-mails saying "YOU WON $500,000 IN LOTTO" or "A BILLIONAIRE LEFT SOME FORTUNE FOR YOU" or "GET SO AND SO HEAVY DISCOUNT" or "CLICK HERE TO SEE GIRLS". These mails looks interesting but these mails are merely attempting to steal your identity or trying to install malwares (sometimes key-loggers) on to your system. Please do not reply to any e-mails that you feel is coming to you without your interest. Simply mark them as SPAM.

2. Cyber cafe : As I mentioned in my earlier post as well, cyber cafes are the places where you gets in the trap in to key-loggers and compromises you mail id very easily. Please refer to my earlier post about safe browsing for safer use of cyber cafes.

3. Social information – All of us are social animals, if not all then most of us. Now a days we use many online sites to interact to our loved ones on daily basis (facebook, twitter, orkut, linkedIn, myspace etc…). So technically speaking you personal information personal or professional, technically speaking, is available to entire world. If a hacker put some efforts, he can fetch your name, parent’s name, date of birth, city, mobile numbers etc…
Now how these information helps a hacker, a hacker will try your password on the behalf of these personal informations only. As a human being we choose a password which is easy to remember and for that we generally user our personal information to create a password. last name + phone number, name of loved ones and a thousand examples available of this type of foolishness. Here you gets into the trap of hackers.
so creating a password –

a. Use combination of upper and lower case letters.
b. use special characters in your passwords.
c. use numbers in your passwords.
d. don’t use any part of your personal information while creation these passwords.
e. don’t use same passwords for multiple internet services and always create a new one. I know this will be tough to remember but believe me you will feel more horrified if your account gets compromised.
f. be very careful while adding someone as a friend in any service, specially facebook (many users uses game applications of facebook, farmville mafia wars or so, and to get good points they add friends unknowingly, here hackers takes the dice and start their games, be wise it is good to play games but not on the cost of your personal information).

Hope these simple guide lines keeps your mail id safe.

I saw many incidents on online forums that users report for their mail been hacked, or their personal information has been compromised. Actually this is the fault of the user only. There is an old saying that says "Biggest crime is of not having sufficient knowledge". Internet is a power tool and now a days many users are using the same in a way that they are layman to this technology and just using the same for fun. And the fun ends when they find that their personal information is either gone or now become much more  public
I am writing on the blog to literate people a bit that how they can browse safely by keeping some precautions, use this tool wisely and you will get actual benefit out of internet instead on unnecessary torture.
Safe browsing have some key guidelines. I am picking them here one by one.

1. Using cyber cafe - Many of you must be using cyber cafes on daily basis. This is the most likely place where your personal information can be public. If a cafe owner wants, he can steal your information very easily. These cafe owners can install key loggers in their machines to log everything that you type. Now how to save yourself ? Thanks to many new operating systems that give us facility to save ourselves from these threats. Lets talk about windows 7, go to start and type keyboard in " Search for program and files" field, you will see a program named as "On-Screen keyboard". Click this and you will get a virtual keyboard to use. Using this keyboard will make sure that your username and password are safe and not got logged by any stupid key logger.

2. Use browsers technically - Now a days all the browsers are providing support for safe browsing. This mode is also named as "porn mode". This is introduced in Firefox in version 3.5 and Chrome is already having the same. To activate this mode in Firefox, press ctrl+shift+p and the window will show a message like this –

Now you are safe from having any track backs. No cookies, no sessions, no history.. all clean. The same goes in chrome, press ctrl+shift+n and you will see a window with a message for incognito browsing –

I will say prefer using Firefox or chrome for browsing, as these are more trusted and less hacking prone then IE.

3. Delete temp files - In worst case if you don’t have Firefox or chrome or using a older version which don’t support safe browsing… never forget to delete your session history, cookies, temp files and browsing history. This will keep you safe from any un-ethical issues.

These small precautions can make your life easy.

Robots.txt is a plain txt file (HTML not allowed) that has been used by various search engines now a days. This file tells search engines that what to index on a certain website and what not to. Different tags are available for robots.txt (which I am explaining in detail in this post) that allows user to customize the index pattern of his/her website. This is always better to keep your robots.txt optimized, as this is the gateway for search engines and this file need to be in a clean and error free condition.

Major search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN worked together and in June 2008 came up with some key changes in robots.txt file’s structure. They added couple of elements as Allow tag, path to sitemap.xml file for crawling, use of Wildcards etc…

Robots.txt file contains section for different search engine agents. This can be distinguished by tag "User-agent". Entry of User-agent tag tells search engines that a new and specific entry for a specific search engine is starting. Every search engine looks for their respective entry and follow the instruction as described in robots.txt file in respective section of that search engine. We can specify different rule set for different search engines.

Tags in robots.txt

User-agent
This is a mandatory tag. Use of this tag does two important things, first – this tells search engines that which section is defined specifically for them, second – What all search engines are allowed and whom to stop.

User-agent: * (all the search engines are allowed, don’t forget the ":" after User-agent, else the file will be considered as malformed)
User-agent: Google-bot (Entry point for Google and if no other User-agent is specified then Google is the only search engine allowed to index your site)

Disallow
This tag tells crawlers that where not to go. We may be in a situation where certain directories should not get indexed. We can obviously perform the activity here by using "Disallow" tag.

User-agent: * (all search engines are allowed)
Disallow: / (Everything id disallowed from indexing)
Disallow:   (Everything is allowed for indexing)
Disallow: /mydoc/prints/ (prints are not allowed to get indexed)

Allow
This is the newly added tag in 2008. This tag has the reverse effect of "Disallow". Whatever we want to index we will list in front on this tag.

User-agent: * (all search engines are allowed)
Allow: / (Everything is allowed from indexing)
Allow:   (Everything is disallowed from indexing)
Allow: /mydoc/reports/ (reports will get indexed)
Disallow: /mydoc/prints/ (prints are not allowed to get indexed)
Allow: /mydoc/prints/search/ (Now here the catch is, search engines follow longest existing path for indexing, Here you may have defined to disallow prints, but the directory in prints will get indexed from prints and no other directory from prints)

Sitemap
A sitemap.xml is always important to be in your root directory. As you can see the sitemap.xml of this site here. Want to learn more on the importance of sitemap.xml file, feel free to read.

Sitemap: http://www.angirash.com/sitemap.xml

Wildcards
Robots.txt allows us to use wild cards to specify our requirements. some quick examples –

User-agent: * (all search engines are allowed)
Allow: /mydoc/project/*.txt$ (only files with ".txt" extension will get indexed from project directory)
Disallow: /mydoc/prints/search/*/main/*.java$ (Java files will not get indexed in the long path os search dir, where ever main exists)

Crawl-delay
This tells search engines to pause for certain time period, if you want to give priority to any other search engine, or want to create a scheduling for them. Although this tag is not supported in Google, but can be configured using webmaster tools.

User-agent: msnbot (search engine of msn allowed here)
Crawl-delay: 5 (Here 5 is in seconds)

Feel free to revert back for any queries related to robots.txt or SEO techniques.

Post Can be tracked for

configuring robots.txt, learn robots.txt, setup robots.txt, robots.txt for beginners, understanding robots.txt, robots.txt

What is a sitemap ?

A sitemap is a webpage or file that tells us about different pages of a website. Sitemap contains detailed information of every page in the website with hierarchy in which the page can be located. By creating a sitemap we make sure that every page / post of our website is accessible to user on a click and they don’t have to search around much to reach to a specific page.
Conventionally we create a webpage as a sitemap that describe our website completely. But with time the face of sitemap has been changed and different parameter of sitemap came into picture. Now a days we can keep a site map as a webpage but additionally we need to have a sitemap in XML file format as well. One sitemap for Humans (the webpage) and another for search Engine Crawlers (the XML sitemap).
Well known search engines are using this XML format sitemap to index webpages. This is the responsibility of the webmaster to submit this XML sitemap to search engines time to time. By this we make sure that each and every new page of our website is getting indexed, and we appears into search results for our new posts/pages as well. Obviously this is not the case that you submit the sitemap and immediately search engines will pick the same and index it quickly, this generally takes some time for the URLs to get indexed, so have patience and keep submitting sitemaps.

How to create a sitemap ?

Here we will talk about the sitemap that is in XML format and important for search engines only. Sitemap creation is a technique, which if mastered, can create magic. There are numerous free tools available for sitemap creation. Even Google supports the third party site-map tool , although Google says that this is not tested by Google but this work perfectly fine.
For wordpress blogging sites Google sitemap generator plugin is available. I am using this plugin too and this worked well for me as well. Apart from this plugin some more plugins are available for wordpress.

Anatomy of a sitemap

Sitemap.xml contains the xsi:schemaLocation and xmlns which belongs to http://www.sitemaps.org/ an international organization, who defines the standards for sitemap files. Then this file has multiple sets of URL which belongs to different URL sets of your website. A simple URL snippet will look like –

    <url>
        <loc>http://angirash.com/2011/03/03/how-article-writing-helps-for-a-seo-activity/</loc>
        <lastmod>2011-03-04T04:19:04+00:00</lastmod>
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
        <priority>0.2</priority>
    </url>

In this snippet this is clear that we are quoting to the search engines that this URL may change monthly, so search engine need to refresh index after every month. We specify last modified timestamp so search engines can start the counter of re-indexing and most important we specify the priority of the link in our website.

How to upload a sitemap ?

If you want to upload the sitemap on Google, then you need to have a Google account. By this Google you can login to Google webmaster tool kits. Here at Google webmasters you need to register your website and then you need to verify your website as well. Uploading a HTML file is the easiest approach to verify the ownership of the website. Google will give you a HTML page to upload onto your website, once uploaded click verify and you are done.
Once the site is registered click on your registered site, then click on site configuration (located in left pane), and click on sitemaps. Create a sitemap.xml file by the tools specified above and upload the file to the root directory of your website. Now specify the URL in sitemap upload field. Click upload and you are done with sitemap upload on Google.

Why sitemap is so important ?

Search engines check for updates on the behalf of these sitemaps only. Once a genuine sitemap is uploaded search engine indexes the URL specified in the sitemap. This gives a boost in the indexing of our website. Link creation is tiring and time consuming, but by submitting sitemap the same can be achieved really fast.
Crawlers / Spiders recognizes the format only and can index the stuff from this XML file very fast, hence this is somehow essential for everyone now to have a sitemap.xml file to keep the site indexed fast.

Feel free to revert in case of queries about sitemap.xml files.

This post can be tracked for

understanding sitemap for SEO, sitemap for biginner SEO, sitemap and SEO, writing a sitemap.xml file, how to get URL indexed in Google, sitemap.xml and Google, importance of sitemap

I feel very good when I write, and I generally write a lot of articles. I thought why not put some of my articles on a website and hence this website came into picture. If you too like to write much like me then seriously getting your site indexed really fast will be very easy. There are many sites available where general public articles can be published for free. By writing on these sites you actually can express your views publically. And these sites are really good platform for you to be in reach of many people. Sometimes we feel bounded when no-one come to our site or we are not reachable to a big group of intellectual people who are continuous reader.

Though article writing is good but still we need to keep key things in mind while writing an article on these sites.

DO’s for article writing

1. Unique Content - Absolutely new and unique content is a key factor. Try to write which actually comes into your mind. Believe me if you write from your own mind only then you certainly will pen down something new and interesting. We as a human, do have different thinking process on different frequency, so take something sharp and fresh from your mind. The fresh your content will be the faster you will get noticed.

2. Abbreviated Writing - Write in a manner that your post is not too lengthy, 500 to 800 words are good. Generally people don’t have much time, so don’t write the stuff that is not related and try to be in the line of action only. Stop moving around with words.

3. Appraise yourself - This looks like a bit odd but this is true. Sometimes you may need to appraise yourself as well, and nothing wrong in that. If you are good in something then you are good. Try to mention about yourself in your post, don’t forget to mention your web addresses, mention about your work. Let people know out there, how good you are.

DONT’s for article writing

1. Stop Article SPAMMING - This is the basic mistake that many people generally do. You should not post the same article on more then one website. This is similar to keyword SPAMMING. Don’t spam the article directories. You can get banned for the same or your post can get rejected. So stop article SPAMMING and write a unique article for every site. I know this is not possible if you are targeting too many sites. If you don’t have time then please post your article on two or three sites only but don’t create a copy of article. This downgrades the reputation of you as individual and you site as well.

Where to write articles

Numerous public platforms are available to write articles for free. Some of my favorite are – article alley , article intelligence, e-articles and EZine.

End Results

As an end result of article writing you will get more hits on your site. These public article center are very popular and many people goes there. They will read your post and if your post is really impressive they will be bound to visit your website for more information about the content or product that you represent. This will increase site hits for yourself, and this may end up in a good increase in your sales as well.

This post can be tracked as

SEO and article writing, article writing for better search engine indexing, SEO approach and articles, impact of articles on Google search results

Optimizing a web page for Search Engines is quite trick, but if you understand the trick fairly then it is very easy as well.
There are multiple attributes that a webmaster should take into consideration while going for the web page optimization for SEO activity. These attribute contains working on the content of the web page, placing keywords effectively, work on every html tag, watch for different imports (video, images) and so on. Here I am going to discuss some of major titles in a bit detail.

1. Content - Content on a web page is most important thing that impress a search engine. Your content should be informative and unique. The best you can bring out from your mind the better the web page ranking will be. It is always considered to be good to have a proof reader of your contents. A person who is good in content writing and do have knowledge of the subject, can proof read your page. Taking a third review is considered always helpful, so go for a proof reader. Apart from proof reading your content should not go beyond the relative stuff of your subject, the "to the point" you will write the great reviews you will get. You can judge the popularity of your content on the behalf of the reviews you receive.

2. Web page place holders - I wrote in one of my earlier post about keyword placeholders on a web page that explains which place has what importance for keywords. Your title tag should be "to the point" only. Write in such a manner where title can describe your post perfectly. Use your intelligence and imagination for writing title of a web page, if necessary take help from Google for some example of titles. I mean you can search for some imagined title for your web page and if you receive known sites as a result for any certain title then a title like that can work for you.
Tuning of H1 headline tag. H1 headline tag is quite important for search engines. many popular search engines pick up keywords from H1 tag immediately and add the same in page indexing parameters. Hence while writing your web page please be sure that you write exact matching important keywords in your H1 tag. H2 to H6 tag are having lower priority, although they will get indexed but on slightly lower priority.
Use your keywords in first 50-100 words of your HTML page. Sometimes a search engine crawler do not scan for entire web page or post, hence this is important to express your target keywords in initial lines of your web page.
Place your web pages in such a directory which has relative name. For example if you are creating a page for your travel experience to Washington DC then the page should be placed in travel directory. Work on your URL pattern as well. If the URL of your web page contains query parameters (like ‘?’) then this is really less possibility for the same to get indexed. Although some search engines (Google) have changed their algorithm to index such pages as well, but still this is better to avoid such URL patterns. Instead of having these type of URL try to use permalinks with a significant name and path.
Image tags now become necessary part of every web page. Whatever the level of simplicity your web page have, you must be using img HTML tag. And have trust on me this tag can  get you indexed in search engines. While posting img tag work on the "alt" parameter of the img tag. These "alt" parameters are being indexed by search engines and can make your web page accessible easily. Also work on image name as well, don’t forget to choose a significant name for every image on your web page. The name should be related to your article / post.
strong. ol, li tags are carrying some importance as well. Although having lesser one but still if you use them wisely, you can get a better page ranking.

It is good to have the understanding of the anatomy of search results as well. This will give you a fair visibility that how you should proceed to plan for your web page indexing.

Above all the things key precautions to keep here -

Don’t ever try to repeat your keywords multiple times in a single web page. If the a single keyword appears more then 8-10 times then it will be treated as keyword SPAMMING. And as a result your site can be blocked by major search engines.

Basically there are two different area where you can work for SEO activity.

1. Optimize your website for better search result priority.
   2. Create links in other website from where your site will be referred.

First point is quite important but do have only 30% importance in a site’s ranking. For this on-page optimization we do different things, like optimizing META description, image alt tag improvement, better content on the site etc…

Rest 70% straight away goes to second point (Link Building). Linkbuilding is very important for a site to come high on search results. And the location of link is equally important. Don’t just go and start creating links with other sites. As a blind link creation will destroy the image of your site as well. Always use trusted sites for Linkbuilding activity. Sites that does have higher Page Rank (PR) will be a good choice.
Avoid using Gambling, Porn or Hacking sites for Linkbuilding. This can be a quick tour for you but in longer run this exercise will not work. Always choose your link partners very wisely.

Link Building can be done in following Manner –

1. By registering with blog communities - In case your site is on wordpress, then having your site registered with various blog community is very good idea. There are some community blog sites available which do have very good reputation and can index / rate your site in Google very fast. Some example for community blogs are – NetworkedBlogs, BlogCatalog, Blogged and  MyBlogLog.

2. Register your site with online yellow pages - This is quite helpful in building links. Register your site on online directories, like www.yell.com for UK’s business related registration. This gives more indexing parameters to Google for your site.

3. Writing impressive notes - The site that allows you to put your article is another way to get links created. Post related article and with that article explain how your site helps society in the same field by giving the URL of your site. This can be a bit tough but believe me this is most important technique. As there are very famous article platforms available where you can post your article and these platforms are very popular, hence the much your article will be viewed the much you get index count.

4. Writing comments on do follow blogs - There are many do-follow blogs available on internet. By placing a comment on these blogs you will get instant indexing count for your site. Don’t just make simple or nonsense comments. Read the article and post a intelligent comment, by this there will be 2 benefits. First – You will get good index count, Second – If user like your comment then they may click on your name which is linked to your site and by this you may increase your site hits or sales.
List of some do-follow blogs can be seen here for different Genre.

5. Register with feed aggregator - If you are running a blogging site then don’t forget to register with some popular feed aggregator sites. Some of them are Feed-Squirrel, OctoFinder, FeedAdage. These feed aggregator sites will provide an awesome response for your blog. Registering is easy and you can see your index count increasing easily.

Apart from these technical and free techniques there are some more techniques for Linkbuilding. These techniques may cost you a bit -

1. Exchange your links
2. Pay for links

I hope this post of mine will help you building your Links.

Everything that we place on a web page has different priority for getting indexed.
If we know exactly that keywords placed at which place having what importance this is easier for us to make our post/article/web page indexed more fast.
Every term has a unique importance as per the place where they are placed. Here I am going to explain what is the importance of placeholders in a webpage to get indexed.

If we do have clear understanding of Google search result anatomy, it becomes far easy for us to perform SEO (search Engine Optimization) activities.
Matt Cutts from Google defined the anatomy of search results fairly. Please refer to the Search result screen shot below that we are referring here to explain the anatomy -

1. Search Result – This part defines the actual search result that has been returned from google against out query. The result contain some Bold and Regular phrases. Where bold letter indicates the exact match to the search query. This gives the user a clear visibility about what is there on the result page.

2. The Snippet – A short description from the search result page created the snippet part. Generally this snippet has been fetched from description of page Meta. Hence keeping a brief but well defined Meta helps a lot in getting the page indexed correctly. When the description meta is not available, it is most likely that Google creates this snippet on the behalf of page content. Sometime Google creates the snippet by picking up data from various part of pages and part the snippet by couple of dotts.

3. Cached – Here Google tells us that the page is cached and Google crawled the page so and so time back. Sometimes the cache is so fresh that it has been created couple of minutes back.

4. Similar – Google tells us that there are similar search results available for current search result. this gives ease to the user to get similar results as well. With similar tag somethimes you may see note tag as well. With this Google provides the functionality for research students to note the URL and visit the same later.

5. Site Links – Site links are created by the site map of your site. The site links provides users an easy access to the contents of your site. It is always recommended to submit sitemap to Google Webmaster to get the site links indexed. Creating a site map is quite easy. There are third party sitemap tools available that supports Google and can create a genuine sitemap. For different blogging sites plugins are available, like for WordPress the plugin for sitemap creation can be downloaded from here.

6. More results – Final part of search result. Gives us more results from the same site on the specified query.

The information is provided by Matt Cutts on Google Blog and the same can be viewed here -