Tata Consultancy Services official website www.tcs.com has been attacked and hacked. The hacker has left a message suggesting the website is up for sale.
At the time of writing of this post if you visited the official url of TCS, www.tcs.com; this is message you are greeted with.
Strangely the hacker has put up a email Id out there in case someone is interested in buying the domain.
It is probably unrelated but there has been a rise in official websites being hacked into with messages. This is known as defacing homepages. Only recently Indian government had admitted that China based hackers had attacked official computers. But those were more sophisticated and meant to attack computer systems rather than deface any websites.
DNS Attack?
It seems TCS is facing DNS attack of some kind as the homepage opens fine with Pagewash. Here is a video to explain.
As a blogger I end up entering my email address far more often than I ever planned to. I have a email address specifically meant for such cases as in case these websites are explored by spam bots. The last thing you want is spam mail to make its way in its hundreds into your Inbox. There are many ways of inserting email address on to the internet so that it does not come back to haunt you thanks to spam.
One very very popular method is to replace @ with [at]. So it ends up showing my email id as aditya.kane[at]rtcamp.com. Another method is also to use [dot].
Image 4 me is a internet service which allows you to write out your email id and create an image.
It also stores this image allowing you to insert in within the web-page with either HTML code. This is quiet handy as image is not hosted on the website.
Before creating the image of the email id you have the option to customize it’s look regarding background and also even font. This can give you the option of uniformity with the website layout or design while displaying your email id.
Here is an example of my email id being displayed here as an image.
So now you can email me and I do not need to worry about spam bots making a nuisance of themselves to my Inbox. Let me know if you find this tool useful. Do drop in your comments.
There are many sources to look up old movies but when it comes to Television shows it is not as simple as pulling up the Google page and typing in the name of the TV show. Last week I was reading a interesting post by Rishabh Agrawal on how you can watch full length movies on You Tube, I was intrigued to see if YouTube had something similar for television shows.
Well I was not disappointed and YouTube does have a channel where I came across many old and some new full length TV Shows.
Majority of the TV shows that come up are not really the latest episodes. Most of them are for you to catch up on old ones. I personally liked the Documentaries section which have a lot of shows which are quite recent.
Another great section is Comedy and it has some of the best TV shows of the past avaialble for free. For instance if you were growing up in India during the 80s you might enjoy looking up Fawlty Towers or even 21 Jumps Street.
No Indian TV shows as yet and that is a little unfortunate as there were some very good televisions in the past during the late 80s and early 90s.
Well next time you feel like watching something that you might have seen on TV, searching on You Tube Shows Channel might be worth it.
Okay this is a sure sign that Twitter wants to go local. Many amongst us might not notice this new feature with Twitter as many don’t really visit the Twitter homepage. Almost everyone who is regular on Twitter uses some Twitter application or the other. One very powerful way to get noticed and also to notice new events happening around the world is to watch trending topics on Twitter.
For instance if you looked up the trending topic #iPad you will get a pretty much all the important tweets you ever wanted. This makes trending topics into fantastic resource of getting latest local news on Twitter.
So now Twitter page shows you local trending topics. For instance in the image above you can see Canada. If I select a country the related  cities show up below for me to select city specific trending topics which keeep on changing on the right hand side of the page.
This has great relevance when it comes to looking up Twitter for local reasons. India and Indian city is still not a part of the Local Trending options on Twitter but it will show up considering Twitter’s popularity increasing in India.
ADVERTISEMENT
This will certainly make Twitter useful not just for people to spread the word globally but also locally. As a blogger I might think of Twitter as a great way to spread the word globally. But it would be great for a local shop or electronics outlet to spread the word using local trends.
Will Local Trending topics monetize Twitter?
This is not a rumor, but a personal opinion that Local Trending can be a great way for Twitter to get monetized. Trending topics sort of behave like search engine results. Maybe Twitter can charge certain accounts extra for their tweets to be in Trending topics more often or for a longer duration.
What do you think about local trending topics on Twitter? Let me know through your comments.
Personally I use Gmail’s Offline feature for being able to compose or access certain emails in case I my internet connection is acting up or if its not stable. But I like this new add-on software called Mailbrowser and I liked the easy way I could access contacts and attachment files at one side.
The good thing you will love about Mailbrowser is that it is not a web application and hence your personal Gmail details are not really stored online or on a 3rd party server. They are saved on your hard-disk itself. 😉
MailBrowser works with Internet Explorer or Firefox. It saves all attachments and your contact list on to your computer.
I did not have to log into Gmail to access my contact list or attachment files.
A simple couple of clicks enabled me to send an email to someone in my contact list or even access the mail in which the attachment was received.
It works with the browser and I tested it with Firefox. The tab neatly sits to the right hand side of the browser.
I was initially apprehensive about why you might need this extra bit of software to save your Gmail contacts and attachments on your computer when I already had Gmail offline on my computer. MailBrowser would actually be quite useful as you can sort of use it like a mail client. You can free up space on Gmail and delete old attachments. It is not a standalone software so it cannot be compared to mail clients like Outlook but its compatibility with browser does make it worthwhile to try out.
Any one using a search engine is aware of crawlers that move across the internet finding us relevant links trying to go along with the relevancy of search key word that you enter. One of the main ideas of Search crawlers is to look up relevancy from one site to another and using Page Ranks its easier for it to find relevant information. A web crawler decides that the higher the page rank the more relevant is the information.
Google has tried allowing use to crawl the web for results manually byintroducing Wonder Wheel and Google Swirl for image search. These tools are high on eye candy but I think need to improve on relevancy of results. When I first used walk2web I was impressed with it’s presentation style but did not really use it much for getting to know how useful it can be.
About Walk2Web
Walk2Web allows you to enter a URL of a website you want to navigate or look deeper into and has a cool interface to show important links.
It usually shows to the right hand corner links with some basic information. You can click on the link and takes your to the blog article directly.
I gives you something of a site map of the URL you are digging deeper into. With internal links and other links you can get start exploring from one link to another which basically resembles manual crawling. While you click individual link it also produces a screen-shot to the right hand side.
This tool can be quite useful to get a visual simulation of how your website will be looked up or deconstructed by a search engine.
Apart from this I think its a must use for blog owners. As often blogs keep growing and your website might not well organized. How well organized or unorganized your blog site is can be easily found out by checking out how you can make your way around on the website.
ADVERTISEMENT
Take the example of Devils Workshop. If you enter the keywords ‘Join Devils Workshop‘ in Google you will get a link to our page which has details on joining us. This is great but if you join DW you also end up automatically joining rtBlogs network. One of our blogs is Facebooknol which is dedicated to Facebook related to posts.
If you enter on Google ‘Join Facebooknol‘ you will not get a link to Facebooknol for joining up. I was unaware of this until I used Walk2Web which did not show ‘how to join’ links with all our blogs except Dw when crawling through their internal links. 😉
Guess it helped us a bit to figure our and start working on a plan to clean up our blogs better. Hope you too find it useful. Do let me know through your comments.
URL shortener services are dime a dozen out there on the internet and with the popularity and rise of Twitter I do not think that its about to change any time soon.
At DW we have covered many posts on short URLs from Bit.Ly to Goo.gl. There is a growing trend of some people using short URLs at places other than Twitter and that seems to be a disturbing trend. So I thought I would list down instances where I personally feel a shortened URL is inappropriate.
Facebook:
Shortened URL on Twitter is fine as sharing a link to a blog can be almost impossible within the limit of 140 chars. But that rule doesn’t apply to Facebook and there is no reason to share short URL links on Facebook. Even if you do share a short url make sure you have comments along them so that the person who might click on the short URL will know its a valid link you are endorsing. One of the first virus to have infected Facebook was spread through a short URL. It would send private messages to people with accounts with short URL. People ended up clicking on it.
ADVERTISEMENT
Twitter:
There is no option but to use shortened URLs on Twitter but never post a link without a comments. You have no idea for checking where that short URL is leading, and hence accompanying text msg about what the URL is all about an absolute necessity.
Email:
ADVERTISEMENT
Again the same rule applies that if you do post a short URL you have to accompany with a description of where the URL leads the person clicking on it. I have not seen this trend often on Emails but it does happen sometimes. It can be annoying to the person reading as he has no way of checking where the URL leads him. Ideally never use short URL in emails as it seems like either you are spamming or maybe you want to hide the link for some reason.
I follow these rules and its better to have your own rules especially if your are a blogger. Short urls are great for Twitter but also a very handy way for sending you down to a infected website and making you vulnerable.
My advice is avoid using a shortened URL when ever possible. What do you think?
This one is not really a serious analysis of Google and Bing. It is neither a serious discussion about what these two search engines think about it. But I guess sometimes the truth seems to spill out unknowingly. Richie has published a funny post on what does Google think about other websites. Here I bring to your what does Google and Bing think about each other.
Google Search has a feature called Search Suggestions which drop down suggestions as you type in a query. Now Bing also comes with search suggestions.
What does Google think of Bing?
What does Bing think of Google?
Hope you liked it and now let me know what you think about it? 😉
If Google is the undisputed king of the search engines then Bing is the challenger to the crown. I do not think at the moment Bing is mounting much of a challenge but realistically it is the only one which can compete over the years with Google. For people who love looking up stuff with search might enjoy this one. A website which gives you search results on Bing and Google side by side on the same page.
Very aptly it is called Bingle and seems like a very handy tool for people trying to look up results from a SEO point of view.
Bingle allowed me to check Bing and Google results side by side not just when it came to web search but I could also compare image search results along with maps being searched for with Google and Bing separately on the same page.
I won’t say it is a great way to look up a particular information but it is quite awesome to carry out the same searches on both engines and look up side by side which link it rates as more important compared to the other.
Often when you look at a search engine you might not be able to make sense of it but with a comparative look-up of search queries can give you an insight into what exactly that search engines gives a higher preference to. 😉
Go ahead and try Bingle and let me know your views by dropping in your comments.
Familiar icons on your desktop play a very important role. They are visual aids for you to not waste too much time and get work done faster. Just imagine if you had 20 folders and the ‘My Computer’ shortcut was also present and all had the same icons on the desktop. You would probably at least waste up-to 2-3 seconds every time you wanted to open a particular shortcut.
Icons with their shortcuts usually save us time. It might seem insignificant but I reckon that for every 2 hours on the computer you probably end up saving up to 3-5 minutes. The time saving aspect is even more prominent for someone multitasking.
This can be quite relevant to your website/ blog as icons or images often help your regular readers to get oriented. I came across this neat website which helps you create and customize some icons and then download them for your personal use.
Iconizer allowed create customized and stylized icons. Even though there are many website which might have a lot many more icons to choose from but this website allows you make changes to the original icon you have chosen.
I could change the foreground and background color of the icon image.
I could also select its width and height in pixel units.
Iconizer also has the option of you generating the icon image in GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP and ICO.
Go ahead and look up Iconizer and let me know if you liked playing around and generating new icons for your desktop or even your website to give it just that extra sense of familiar feel.
