Bloggers » IT Masala

14th March 2007

Yahoo India Hit With More Copyright Complaints from Indian Bloggers

Yahoo Inc.'s problems with Indian bloggers over unauthorized reproduction of their content on its Indian portals may be just beginning.

Bloggers claim they have identified more instances of their content being reproduced without permission on Yahoo's Indian portals. Yahoo's Indian subsidiary has yet to come up with an appropriate response that satisfies the bloggers.

Yahoo did not refer to Su or her blog by name, and also blamed the mistake on its content provider Webdunia.com (India) Pvt. Ltd . ( oh! what a nice way to put the blame )

Her blog link is here - Surgayathri

Surgayathri has demanded a written apology from Yahoo for allegedly stealing her blog content.(even though her blog was protected under Creative Common Licensing ). The blogger describes herself as a housewife from Kerala in south India in her blog.

She said that her next step would be to take the dispute to court on a number of charges including copyright violation, if "Yahoo keeps on washing their hands off and tries to do a mockery of an apology."

Other than Kariveppila blog, Yahoo! India stole contents from another web magazine (Puzha.com) too and from some other Malayalam bloggers.

This image shows that the whole thing was not a simple copy paste. There were many things which were altered , like sequence of the para's,pictures and sentence structures.( thanks CopyrightsViolation blog).

Click here for More screenshots…

New Blogger to WordPress Importer

Don’t call it a beta! This is the fourth version of the Blogger-to-WordPress blog migration tool. Does anyone else remember the original procedure with all of the settings and template changes? ufffff ..quite a job…

Thanks to the magic of Google APIs, the new importer works without modifying your New Blogger blog. If you haven’t upgraded your Blogger account yet, go for it!

Then you can copy your posts, comments and categories from Blogger into WordPress.

Where to Find it :

You’ll find it in the same old place: go to your dashboard, then click Manage, Import, Blogger. This new Blogger migration tool will also be included in the core WordPress package, most likely version 2.2 .

via [ WordPress ]

Tags: Bloggers, WP, Webmaster | 0 Comments

31st January 2007

How to Control Search Engines Access and Indexing of your website

Can publishers specify that some parts of the site should be private and non-searchable?The good news is that those who publish on the web have a lot of control over which pages should appear in search results.

The key is a simple file called robots.txt

A simple example
Here is a simple example of a robots.txt file.

User-Agent: Googlebot Disallow: /logs

The User-Agent line specifies that the next section is a set of instructions just for the Googlebot. All the major search engines read and obey the instructions you put in robots.txt, and you can specify different rules for different search engines if you want to. The Disallow line tells Googlebot not to access files in the logs sub-directory of your site. The contents of the pages you put into the logs directory will not show up in Google search results.

Preventing access to a file
If you have a news article on your site that is only accessible by registered users, you'll want it excluded from Google's results. To do this, simply add a META tag into the html file, so it starts something like:

<html> <head> <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex"> …

This stops Google from indexing this file. META tags are particularly useful if you have permission to edit the individual files but not the site-wide robots.txt.

Learn more
You can find out more about robots.txt at http://www.robotstxt.org and at Google's Webmaster help center, which contains lots of helpful information, including:

Here is an useful list of the bots used by the major search engines: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc /active/html/index.html

via [Google blog ]

Tags: Bloggers, Google, Webmaster | 0 Comments

29th January 2007

Really Simple MP3 Player for your Website or blog

Your mp3 links (<a xhref="my_file.mp">Link</a>) will automatically turned into a little player that allows you to easily play mp3 files directly on your blog.

Example #1

Example #2

How to include:
Copy the code below and place it in anywhere in your HTML.

Tags: Bloggers, Webmaster | 0 Comments

29th January 2007

Download all your YouTube, MySpace, Flash, Quicktime Files using PimpFish

PimpFish is an download manager, site ripper, file sharing tool through which we can easily download videos from Youtube, Google Video, Myspace.

With PimpFish, we can save pictures and Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media and other embedded video in a single click to our computer, from any webpage. The extension is available for both IE and Firefox and it's free!.

[ PimpFish]

Tags: Bloggers, Downloads, Free, Videos | 0 Comments

28th January 2007

How to remove Blogger Beta Navbar

Most of the bloggers on blogger.com don't like that nav bar on top of their blogs.So you want to get rid of it . So here's a hack from blogger-templates & Praveen

To hide the Blogger NavBar paste the CSS definition between the style tags:

First, login into your blogger (beta) account and click Template.

Now, click on Edit HTML…and paste this piece of code.

<style type="text/css">

#b-navbar {

height: 0px;

visibility: hidden;

display: none;

}

</style>

Hiding the banner in Blogger Beta (iframe):

<style type="text/css">

#navbar-iframe {

height: 0px;

visibility: hidden;

display: none;

}

</style>

Save the changes and have a look at your new Blog. You'll find that the Navbar has disappeared.Just remove the code to show it again.

Note : Some say its against the TOS of Google for blogger.com to remove navbar.But its not mentioned anywhere in the Google TOS .

This is what they have mentioned on their site - thats all.

The Navbar appears on all freely-hosted Blog*Spot blogs, but can be disabled for users publishing via FTP.

Unless you publish your blog via FTP, the Navbar cannot be disabled.

We've made every effort to make sure the Navbar doesn't interfere with custom template designs.

But you can disable it without using FTP publishing too with this trick..so enjoy !

Tags: Bloggers, Google, Hacks, Webmaster | 0 Comments

20th December 2006

Web Developer Addon For Firefox/mozilla, a must have for all techies n newbies

Web Developer adds a menu and a toolbar with various Web developer tools to the browser. The tools allow the user to disable, view, and edit cookies, CSS, HTML, forms, and images; validate pages; and much more.

Click to Download/Install

or

Click Here

Tags: Bloggers, Developers, Free, OpenSource, PC, Webmaster | 0 Comments

19th December 2006

Change in Adsense TOS about Ad and image placement

Looks like a bad news for many. According to Inside AdSense about Ad and Image Placement Policy, is AdSense Beautifier and many other like this no longer compliant with Adsense Terms of Service? Let’s take a look about this.

Here are some details from the official blog. (Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support)

Ad and image placement: a policy clarification

We've recently received a number of emails from publishers asking how we feel about the placement of images near Google ad units. There's been some confusion on this issue, and so we turned to our policy team to set the record straight.

Can I place small images next to my Google ads?

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn't actually being offered. That's not a good experience for users or advertisers.

Publishers should also be careful to avoid similar implementations that people could find misleading. For instance, if your site contains a directory of Flash games, you should not format the ads to mimic the game descriptions.

What if I place a space or a line between my images and my ads? Would that work?

No. If the ads and the images appear to be associated, inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads will not make the implementation compliant.

Does this mean I can't place ads on pages with images?

You can definitely place Google ads on pages containing images — just make sure that the ads and images are not arranged in a way that could easily mislead or confuse your visitors. For example, if you run a stock photography site with a catalog of thumbnail images, don't line the ads up with the thumbnails in a way that could be misleading. Consider using a full border around your ads or changing your ad colors, for example.

What do unacceptable implementations look like?

Here are some examples that wouldn't comply with our policies.

===================================================

So all you guys who are using this method, stop it right now or face the consequences like banning or account or something of that sort !!

Tags: Bloggers, Google, Webmaster, Xclusive | 0 Comments

IT Masala

A Tech Curry with a Pinch of Indian Spice