Wednesday 16 July 2014

Leverage Browser Caching- What is it?

Today we'll be talking about something that will actually be beneficial in increasing website load time and speeds. Let's talk about what happens when you view a website in your browser first. When your web browser displays a webpage, it has to do the task of loading all your page elements such as Logo, the CSS file and other elements. Browser caching does a wonderful job by "remembering" the elements your browser had already encountered and loaded when you had previously visited a particular site. Suppose you go to another page on the same website, then what happens is that the browser records and remembers the previously loaded elements and doesn't need them to load them again. It just has to access the cached version of the page you had visited. People have asked how to make website load faster all the time.What we get out of this in the end is faster website load times.

Most often you need to check the website load time of your own website, and you happen to find out that you are required to do the task of leverage browser caching. You may ask how could that be done. Well read on to find out.

How do you enable browser caching?

It's not at all complicated. It's pretty simple. The most sought after way of achieving this is to add a piece of code to a file named .htaccess on your hosting website. All you have to do is go into the file manager on your webhosting service provider's cPANEL and make changes to the file.

This particular file .htaccess has a lot of influence on many important things on your website.
So, you must be careful what you edit there. If you're unfamiliar with how it all goes, do some research on the .htaccess file or read about it on your service provider's support page.
Anyway, down below is the code that is to be added to the .htaccess file. Notice that this code tells the browsers how long it is that they should store the cached webpages. This code must be placed at the top of your .htaccess file.

## EXPIRES CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 1 month"
</IfModule>
## EXPIRES CACHING ##

Now after you have added this piece of code, please save your file and refresh your page.

How to set custom times for different file formats?

As seen in the given code above, time periods like 1 month and 1 year are given. These are associated separately with different file formats like .jpg in the above example which states that it should be remembered for one year.

This can be changed to suit your needs. You can define any time limit for any file format by editing the code given above.

Issues faced by caching

If suppose you have listed your code, images and other elements to be remembered for a long time, say, one year, the issue you face afterwards is that when you make changes or update the html, css or any other elements, those won't be visible to the persons who have cached your webpages. Only old versions of that page would be visible rather than the current ones.

Recommended by Google

Google recommends the usage of Expires(discussed here). It goes on to recommend that it's imperative that you specify one of the expires or Cache-control Max-age. Only one way is recommended by Google and that we have already discussed here.

Well, that's all folks. Hope you learnt something new and exciting today about leverage browser caching in web hosting.

Have a nice day!

Forums for Blogger, Wordpress and other websites

Forums are much needed these days to discuss the various problems netizens face in this world. These places on the internet are gatherings where solutions are most likely found. This is where users share their individual experiences, ask questions, post queries and state accomplishments to inspire and help others. Desired topics can be added and classified helping the users of the forum to be able to follow a particular topic. These provide a user-rich environment where a social environment is well in place and ideas are given out and shared. So we'll be helping you get a forum of your own for your beloved website. Please read on to find out the options and how they can be implemented.

1) Create a forum with Nabble

Nabble is a free to use forum provider. All you have to do is go to their homepage and sign up for a free account. The account we sign up for will be the moderator of the forum. After getting a verification mail, and confirming your account with Nabble, we have a wide range of options to customize the forum's look and feel. As given in the Image below, Go to Options, click Application and then click Change Appearance.

We can completely customize the forum's appearance from there including CSS of the forum.

Giving this forum a proper structure

With that being said, we move on to give the forum a proper skeleton. Categorize topics. Click on Options, then click on Application and then select Change Application Type.

See the image below for a visual of the steps.

Choose the forum categories and save your changes.

Create Categories

Finally we have to create sub-level categories. Now go to Options again, go to Structure and click Create new sub-forum.

See the image below too.

Name these categories and you'll have your forum up and going fine.

The other options are for fine-tuning your forum. You can try the other options for creating avatars, user permissions, etc.

Embedding this forum on Blogger Blog

Now for embedding this forum you have created, all you have to do now is click Embedding Options under Options and the copy the javascript code you get.

Now that you have the code, go to your Blogger Dashboard, click on Pages on the left sidebar and then click on New Page as shown in the image below.

And when you have created a new page, click on HTML as shown in the image and copy the entire javascript code you obtained from the embedding options in Nabble.

And when you have pasted the entire code. You'll have your new forum ready to be used by you and your beloved readers.

2) Create a Forum with Google Groups

Now how many of you knew that Google Groups could be used as forums? Not many know this. But Let me tell you of one advantage you would have over other Forum providers that Google has. Google Groups and Blogger require one login and can be montiored very easily from your Google account. So when Google has a forum solution why approach others? But yeah, if you want to customize your forums you must go for other forum providers. Now let;s see how we could achieve the same with Google groups.

Steps:

1) Go to this link.

2) Click on Create Group.

3) After that, Enter the details for Group Name, Group Description and Group Email Address.

4) Set the Group's default language from Group's Primary Language and then select the Group type.

5) You can also meddle with the Group permissions to achieve your desired requirements.

6) Lastly, Click Create and you're done here.

Visual Steps

Embed the code in a page in Blogger as we did in the case of Nabble. The same Procedure must be followed. And voila you must see a result like ours down below!

I hope this article has suggested you the best solutions for freely available forums out there.

Hope you have enjoyed reading and learning something new from us.

Thank you fellow Blogger.

Cheers!

5 ways to build backlinks to your website

Hey guys, it's been quite sometime since i posted the last time. This article today we'll be discussing about is Link-building. Link building is a very very crucial part of SEO. So those who don't know what this term means, these are links from various other sites that are basically pointing towards your domain and telling Google and other search engines that yours is a very resourceful website and has very reliable content. So the more the backlinks, the better. The search engines take this as a way of determining how valuable your website is and whether it should be indexed regularly and given high search engine rankings. So yeah, Backlinks are pretty much a big deal.
Backlinks to your site coming from high PR sites indicate the search engines that you're in a good "neighborhood". Backlinks constitute pretty much everything in Offsite SEO. We'll be discussing various ways of link building.

Related: 10 ways to drive traffic to your website using Google+

Create a website for the masses

It's a pretty well established fact that search engines follow what people tend to follow. If they happen to like your content they'll keep coming back for more and that's natural. There is no other true way of building links to your site than getting the people to talk about it. If you build a great resource, that's reliable and useful people will want to make use of content and also keep in touch.

You'll see a lot of popular forums, like microsoft forums and also considering Yahoo answers ranking very high in the search engines. That's all because people rely on these sites to get their problems solved. Petople themselves will link to your site and that will build enough backlinks for you to come up in the search engines.

Be of Use

Serve some purpose on the internet. Build your spot. Just like social networking sites serve the purpose of getting people to stay connected, forums tend to put an end to their problems, your website too must have a specific purpose and people should see that. People should make use of your site and should be able to help them in some or the other way. People should see why they need to use your site.

Check what your competitors are doing

By competitors, i mean people in your niche striving to rank for the same set of keywords online. They basically are people that are producing the same type of content you're producing to woo your audience. It's highly imperative that you keep tracking what your competitors ar doing. You don't wanna be left behind like a lost puppy trying to figure out where he got cut off.
Find out where their links are coming from. There are a lot of tools out there which tell you where your competitor is getting his links from. If you happen to stumble upon these freely available sources that you could get links from, then i don't see any reason why you shouldn't exploit them to your cause.

Blog Commenting

Today, Most of the blog comments are "nofollow"(Search engines won't follow and index your site and won't give any weightage). But there are dofollow blogs in existence that you can make use of and can get link weight.
I comment on various blogs to get link juice to your site. For instance if i approach a well established blogger and ask him to link to my site, it wouldn't happen for sure. But if i become an active member on their blogs, they might link to your site. These links also drive traffic to your site.

Guest Blogging

Now when i talk about guest blogging, i mean writing as a guest author for another site, mostly a reputed blog. This is the way most of the bloggers today are adopting to get links towards their sites. So why shouldn't you? It's pretty simple. All you have to do is come up with great unique content that people most likely will read with interest and submit it to a high ranking blog of your niche. Plus include a link pointing to your site. Voila, you have a backlink from a high PR site. You'll probably get paid for what you wrote in addition to that link you get to your site. Now, isn't that hell of an easy task?

Recommended: How to get your website noticed in Google.

Conclusion

So these are some evergreen sure shot ways to build and get free backlinks to your website. People also buy backlinks to save them time but Google especially doesn't really appreciate that and may penalize you for indulging in such practices. Be sure to use a Backlink checker to check links to your site. Thank you for reading. Happy Blogging!

Top 5 features of Android L- update to Android Kitkat

Hey,what’s up guys?

This is a Nexus 5 running the next version of Android – the “Android L”. Now this is nowhere near a complete build, in fact this is not even daily drive material. This is just a developer preview and that's gonna give developers a chance to see what their apps will look like on the newest version of Android as they are making 'em. But that will also give us a look at what a lot of these new features in Android L will look like when it's finally done. So without any further due, let's take a look at the top five new features in Android L.

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