Archive for August, 2007

Check out this funny video below. In this, Miss South Carolina 2007 is answering the simple question - “Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the US on a world map. Why do you think this is?”

This clearly proves that beauty and brains won’t go together I am still wondering where Iraq came into all this!

This is my first blog contest. This contest is titled “My Best Post“. The good thing about this contest is that you just need to write about your best blog post so far. You can also list what you mean by “the best”. For example, it could be the “most read post” or it could the “most profitable post” etc.

This contest is open till August 25. I will decide the winner and the prize money is $50 via Paypal. In addition, 5 of the most interesting posts will be published here. So what are you waiting for? Show me your “Best Post”!

You can participate by commenting on this thread or using trackbacks. Your comment may not appear immediately since comment moderation is on.

Yahoo messenger allows stealth mode using which you can set your online status as “offline” even when you are logged in to yahoo messenger. People use it to avoid chat when they are busy or to block out spam messages.

1. But there is a hack which allows you to see whether someone is really offline or not. The easiest way is to directly acess the online status image using the URL - http://opi.yahoo.com/online?u=userid&m=g&t=2 (replace userid with the actual user id).

2. The second way is to start a voice chat with the userid you want to check. If you don’t get an error it indicates that the user is indeed online, but in invisible mode. This works only in previous versions of Yahoo messenger.

3. The only method which seems to work on latest versions of Yahoo messenger is the IMEnviornment hack. First send a message to the user id and then immediately change the IMEnviorment. Now if the guy is really offline, you will get a message “waiting for your friend to load the theme” message. If he is online, you will just get a blank page!

In this blog post, Matt Cutts points out the speed with which google indexes new content. He notes that his post itself was indexed in less than 30 minutes! For a search engine which is supposed to crawl the entire internet it is unbelievable and clearly shows why Google is the leader!

This means that Google has such good infrastructure that they can do almost realtime crawling of Websites! But how do they do that? Obviously they can’t crawl all the sites every minute (which will take a lot of bandwidth from individual sites).

The secret probably is with blog pings and sitemaps. Already google blog search, technorati etc. use the pings to update the content. This means that only incremental data is crawled. Another feature that can be used is sitemaps which also will help google in doing incremental crawling. You can also add your blog/website sitemap in google by creating an account at Google webmaster tools.

Let us do some math here. According to Technorati there are over 100 million blogs. Now if we assume 1 post per day and an average size of 10KB per post we have,

Total content = 100 million x 10KB = 1 TeraByte of transfer!

This means that just to crawl blogs using incremental techniques, Google search engine will be using a minimum of 1 Terabyte per day of bandwidth! Here we assumed that only new posts are crawled. In reality, Google has to crawl old posts also to see whether they have changed! In Sitemaps, you can define that as daily/weekly/monthly/yearly crawl.

Check out my sitemap console screenshot below. As you can see, it is possible to reduce the crawl speed to save on the bandwidth. Now in that case you content will not be near “realtime”.

It is almost a year since I quit my regular job and started my freelance career. It turned out to be much more tough than I thought. Though I enjoy much more freedom, I am yet to pull off the same income I had with my previous job. But the good thing is that there are no limits as to what I can do!

Following tips are from my experience. I work as a programmer and hence it will be more useful to those who work as a freelance programmer.

1. Be your own boss! - This means that you need to have discipline. Ensure that you have a time schedule. For example, you can set aside 8 hours daily for your work and then ensure that you work those hours.

2. Create a work enviornment - You need a place where you can work without distractions. You don’t want your daughter come up you and say “daddy, let us go to the beach” when you are neck deep in a programming problem. do you?

3. Networking - In order to have a successful freelance career, you need to have good networking skills with people. Sometimes you may have work that you need to outsource. Most of the freelancers work with a very small set of clients. The relationship is so good that the client won’t think of changing you even for a lower bid by somebody else.

4. Be honest and assertive - No one likes a guy who tells lies. So ensure that you are 100% honest with your client. If it causes a client to leave, it is perhaps good for you. Also don’t work under the client, but work with the client.

5. Develop a good portfolio - Ensure that you have a decent Web site up and running with testimonials and details of your previous work. You can also a run a blog which will cover the challenges you face daily. For example, I document all the programming challenges I face. You may get new clients through this medium.

6. Be part of the community - There are a lot of forums/websites for freelancers. You also have sites like rentacoder or getafreelancer which can be used to get programming work. Have a solid profile on these with “professional looking” photo!

7. Be organized - This is vey important. Organize your work and create a plan. The plan need not be elaborate. But it should help you in identifying whether you have too much work in hand.

8. Outsource the subtasks - You may not be good in web design or graphics design. But you have project to rewrite a website with PHP. What would you do? In such cases, outsource your work. There are a lot of good design guys out there who can be contracted for the web design work! A good programmer need not be a good graphics designer and vice versa.

9. Use tools - One of the most important things in freelance career is to enhance your productivity. More work = more money. Investigate which tools can make you productive and then deploy them in your regular work.

10. Enjoy life! - The reason why you went freelance is probably because you wanted more freedom/choice. Hence don’t forget to enjoy your life!