Shanker Bakshi’s third contest on his blog Lets Win This Contest Together successfully concluded on 1st September after running for a month. There were 208 entries in total considering 5 entries from a blog post about this contest and 3 entries from subscribing to the blog by email. All the entries were processed using random.org and a list of winners was generated.

Inspirit Blog had sponsored the contest with a 125 x 125 ad spot for a month worth $35 and one jump-the-queue blog review worth $150 ! That totals to prize worth of $185. The 125 x 125 ad spot worth $35 for a month is won by Amor Francis, a 31 year old female pinoy blogger from Manila, Philippines. And, the jump-the-queue blog review goes to Eerik. Congratulations to you – Amor, Eerik and all the lucky winners of Lets Win This Contest Together.

You can find the complete list of all the winners at Shanker’s blog. I am looking forward to another good blog contest coming up at Shanker Bakshi dot com soon. I am working on setting up the ad-spots as I lost the configuration while switching from windows based hosting to linux based webhosting, recently. Amor, you can email me the 125 square banner so that I can put it up here. And Eerik, your blog’s jump-the-queue review will be published tomorrow itself around this time. I recommend that you subscribe to Inspirit Blog through email to keep track of any updates.

Once again, I’d like to congratulate all the lucky winners of Lets Win This Contest Together.
Peace.

If you visited Inspirit Blog in the last few days you probably might have encountered a HTTP 404 – Page Not Found or even a Error Establishing Database Connection page! Before Inspirit Blog went down, I had somehow managed to set up pretty permalink structure even as I was on an IIS based server over the default (SEO-unfriendly) ugly permalinks which look like http://www.inspiritblog.com/?p=134. But then I found myself in another trouble, which usually happens when you go off-the-track! I was cool with having the SEO friendly pretty URLs set up on my blog, but in my previous posts (and on other blogs that linked to posts on Inspirit Blog) the links were directed to the older permalink structure AND those links didn’t redirect to pretty permalinks like they should do.

301 redirects that never worked fine

So, I decided to use 301 redirects on my blog to redirect the old ugly permalinks to the new pretty permalinks. I tried many available wordpress plugins like Yoast’s Permalink Redirect, Deans Permalinks Migration, FUcoder’s Permalinks Redirect and Advanced Permalinks to serve the purpose but nothing seemed to work. The level best that I could achieve was with Scott Yang’s permalink redirect plugin which reloaded a page with new permalink after it had already loaded with old permalinks. This meant that a page was loaded twice for a one time access! And besides this, what really sucked was that my homepage started reloading infinitely in loops. While I left this up while working on finding a solution, for some days – I didn’t realize how much bandwidth Inspirit Blog was eating up like a monster!

I realized this only when I talked to my friend Leo about it when I found Inspirit Blog not opening up once, and other time when I saw a database error. Leo had been so generous to me (And I am really thankful to him for that), he had provided me webhosting on his host for so long! and this silly plugin ate so much bandwidth that it might have costed him some extra bucks!

Decided to move to a Linux based host

Well, I was already giving up on editing that plugin and nothing else seemed to work. Also, I had earned some money from this blog that I could use to buy some webhosting for myself. This was the time when I made up my mind that I’d finally move to a Linux based web host and free myself from all these issues! Plus, if I got my own hosting and space, I’d also start some new projects that I have in mind. More control with cPanel, fantastico support, webmail, mod_rewrite support, etc. I just so wanted it all!

Error Setting Up Inspirit Blog on Sameer’s Host

I talked about my plan to switch host with my friends Sameer and Mohit and wow, these amazing people were so ready to support me on their own respective hosts when I was thinking to BUY webhosting for myself! In fact, I really liked a plan at NetFirms and decided to go for it, but they don’t accept Paypal and I don’t have a credit card. So, the netfirms idea was dropped and I couldn’t afford the hosting packages at other sites…

Sameer helped me move the Inspirit Blog files and database to his host and I pointed the domain to his host. I updated Leo, that I had moved to a linux based host and that I had changed the DNS and I’d be fine if he removed the database and files from his host. I had all in the backup. But for some unknown reasons, things didn’t work out. Probably that was an error in my database that Inspirit Blog redirected to the root of the directory in which Inspirit Blog was installed, instead of opening my blog from its own directory!

Finally on linux based hosting with HostGator – Thanks Mohit!

Then, Mohit helped me set up Inspirit Blog on Hostgator. We put the database and the files where they should be. Then Mohit created an add-on domain for Inspirit Blog and I pointed the DNS to Mohit’s host and erased the ones pointing to Sameer’s host. I knew it would take a couple of hours for the DNS update to take place and in the meanwhile I reviewed my database in order to manually remove some clutter that I didn’t want and thought, might be causing the problems.

That is when I spotted a problem in siteurl and home field under the wp_options table. Even after the DNS update had taken place, opening InspiritBlog.com still redirected to the root of the directory in which Inspirit Blog was installed at Sameer’s host, instead of opening my blog from the installation on hostgator. I cleared and updated the set parameters in siteurl and home under the wp_options table in the database, and lo! God smiled on me.

A Better “Inspirit Blog“

Everything is now back to normal. In the last 4 or 5 days that Inspirit Blog has been up again on its new host, I have optimized the blog’s theme, removed some plugins that I don’t use and installed some new ones. I have also made some changes to the navigation bar. Its better organized now and more comprehensive. Another major change is integration of Google Custom Search into the blog. I have replaced the default WordPress search with a Custom Search Engine powered by Google. How I did it without using any extra pages, posts or plugins is interesting and useful as well, and I will cover that in a dedicated post soon.

I am now going to catch up the free blog reviews thing soon. I am planning to set up a sub-domain here that will be dedicated to free blog reviews. Thus, I’ll clear the main site off all the reviews and keep them in one place at the sub-domain. I believe it would be nicer, that way. Anyway until further update, dig through my previous posts. I hope you find them helpful. Enjoy your stay here.

A few important things came up, like the idea of having a Hindi version of the website. We have already found out various solutions to this challenge that sounded a little hard till yesterday evening. उदहारण के तौर पे ये हिंदी में लिखा गया है।

हिंदी भाषा

We also discussed the need of having a proper management for the Alliance or we would be a chaos country later on. So the need arose to assign roles to each and everyone who was present at the First Chandigarh Bloggers Meet-Up as a foundation stone to the structure that we are today.

When you have so many awesome people who possess remarkable talent in multiple dimensions, it becomes hard to contain them under one single title. The best we could do was assign them titles that would describe the more specific way in which they would serve the alliance but allow them complete freedom on the back-end so that they can contribute freely wherever and however they wish to.

Here’s what I came up with:

Titles : Founder Members of C.B.A.

Would you believe it took me 5 hours to finalize this document? Its just not easy to contain these folks like this. But I am proud of myself (and Shanker’s tolerance) that I could do it. You know what to do next; Comments form is just below.

The event was attended by 12 people who made their presence felt in a strong way and are now helping Chandigarh Bloggers Alliance into a wider network that covers Chandigarh region and neighboring (North Indian) states of Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir. The attendees have been listed alongside with the links to their blogs…

Rajiv doesn’t have a blog of his own but was a significant part of this conference, as he  helped Shankar in deciding the venue. got the event ID cards ready and presented his respectable true self by showing his genuine concern for the society and socal issues that we are facing in India. Chandigarh Bloggers Alliance has pledged to create awareness about the prevalent social problems by writing about them on all the member blogs collectively, a few times a month- Inspired from his personal experiences and the passion he infused in us to make India a better place to live in.

Attendance List
Abhinav Sood	Inspirit Blog
Shanker Bakshi	Shanker Bakshi
Mohit Aneja	Mohit Aneja
Gaurav Sharma	Gaufire
Jasdeep	Jasdeep
Preeti	Entertainment and Humor
Sukhbir	Internet Marketing and SEO
Reet Aneja	Reet Aneja
Sameer Relan	Vantage Webtech
Abhishek Vaid	Vantage Webtech
Saurabh	Saurabh
Rajiv	-

As it was the first ever meeting of its kind and we were a bunch of young hearts gathered there, we decided to keep it an informal affair. It all started with Shankar‘s unique idea of introducing each other by each person sitting in the lead chair assuming himself to be the boss and talking about his personal / professional life  and blogging journey.

Jasdeep introduced himself as an engineering graduate who has a fond passion for Punjabi literature and poetry. He is a talented programmer with in-depth knowledge in Object Oriented Programming using C++. If you have any kind of programming job (Python, Java, etc.) , feel free to contact him. He’d be useful.

Preeti and Sukhbir both SEO experts who worked together in the same software development and internet marketing company based in Chandigarh talked about how they came from an entirely different line and got into blogging, internet marketing and SEO stuff.

Mohit Aneja, a blogger, web designer and developer by passion was an enthusiastic speaker at the meet. His talks showed what a genius he was. Mohit has registered the domain www.chandigarhbloggers.com for the Chandigarh Bloggers Alliance community website. Mohit, unmatched in terms of generosity, was accompanied by his wife Reet Aneja for whom the bloggers meet up was a different experience altogether. You’d love to read how Chandigarh Bloggers Meet-Up inspired her to kickstart her blog that uses a theme that Mohit specially designed for her.

Shanker Bakshi is the one single person who got all of us together by saving Gaurav’s idea of aggregation just at the moment when it was about to die out of unproductivity. Shanker converted it well and today we stand as a strong undivided community that strives to work for the better of new and exisiting bloggers alike. Shanker Bakshi blogs in the Make Money Online (MMO) niche and has been generating handsome revenue from his blog while at the same time helping his readers to do the same.

Sameer Relan and Abhishek Vaid are partners in Vantage Webtech that they have recently formed. Sameer’s parents run the Stepping Stones School in Sector 37, Chandigarh. Sameer and Abhishek have taken up a great initiative by starting training workshops on blogging for the students of this school as a part of their IT curriculum. These guys plan to spread this cult far and wide by doing more workshops on blogging in prominent colleges and schools. The duo also provides SEO and SEM services to their clients besides various other modules.

Gaurav, the initiator of the Bloggers Meet Up is a (chemical engineering) student of NIT Warrangal ( *Wow* ) and blogs about hacking, cracking, reviews hardware and offers products for downloads. I am not sure whether he should offer serial keys to proprietary products like that- but anyways, his blog is resourceful with those tips and tricks on Windows.

Saurabh introduced himself as a fickle minded person, who has created (and then deleted) over a hundred blogs- I believe him and about his nature, after a chat session or two with him.

All in all, we were such a technical curry there and we discussed various things related to blogging- awareness about blogs, bloggers and blogging; ways to market our blogs effectively; how we could generate extra income from blogging and finally, How could we use our blogs for bettering up the society we live in.

Ravi P. Tiwari from Hindustan Times’ – Hindi Daily, covered the event. He had recently registered a blog for himself as well, and plans to put in some activity once he gets time from his job. Shanker has invited him to the next meet-up as well, where he should be present as a reporter and a blogger as well

I am the first from the right in here. You can view more photos of the event in Shanker Bakshi’s Flickr Photo-Set

If you’re in North India, and you’re a blogger – you’ll have to be there for the next CBA Meet-up! No excuses will be entertained See you.

I observed the PR for a few sites that get much more traffic than my blog, are much more popular and have much more backlinks pointing to them than my blog. Here are some statistics that I’d like you to take a look at for a moment:

With the poorest Alexa traffic rank and with the least number of Yahoo and Google backlinks out of all these websites, they stand at either the same level as me, or below!

Page Rank is the Google’s view of importance of a web page. The number of Yahoo and Google backlinks pointing to Inspirit is not even 10 % of the backlinks pointing to Blogging Zoom. Even then, is Blogging Zoom more or less of same importance as Inspirit Blog in Google’s View?

Will had a good point about Google Page Rank system being watered down in his comment to my previous post. “Another Pointless Blog” in my blog-roll has only 3 posts in the last 3 months, two out of which are guest posts by me! Still that blog has managed to get a PR 2 status.

I was quite excited about getting a good Page Rank for my blog and hope to get some more search engine traffic from this. But do you think seeing all this happen, anyone will take this PR update or the whole Page Rank thing itself, seriously? I highly doubt it.

I just got to know about the Google Page Rank update that started a few hours ago (on 30th April, 2008 that is!) and so, I enabled the Google Toolbar to see if there was any change for Inspirit. Actually I wasn’t expecting to see any change as this had been a very lazy month and I didn’t see much traffic or backlinks even.

Also, my Page Rank had not got better when I was literally doing good with the blog earlier. However, with this update, the Google Page Rank for Inspirit has shot up to 4/10 from 0/10. I am quite amazed and mighty glad about that.

I have confirmed a PR 4 for my blog from the Google Toolbar, a few dozen friends in various countries and also from one web service that I randomly stumbled upon. However many other services are still showing PR 0. One such page rank checking service is showing PR 4 for http://inspiritblog.com (without the WWW) while PR 0 for http://www.inspiritblog.com ! That might be because these services haven’t yet updated with Google. I just hope so

It took me a little more than 4 months to get a PR and anyway achieving PR 4 is a great news that I am going to celebrate.

Besides the Google Page Rank, at this moment Alexa traffic ranking for this blog is 167,493 and Site-Rank is 2.228. I will be working hard to better up all my statistics after I am done with my practical tests and exams through this month

You can get the latest version of WordPress here. The page contains links to the direct file download, and also to the easy-install and easy-upgrade guides. If you’re installing WordPress for the first time or you are upgrading your WordPress for the first time since the initial install, I strongly recommend following these easy guides which will make the installation/upgrade process quicker and quite comfortable for anyone.

Have you upgraded to the latest version of WordPress yet?

I hadn’t even fully enjoyed my upgrade to WordPress 2.5 when this further upgrade to version 2.5.1 came out. I am simply loving it. My akismet panel works fine now as against when I was on WordPress 2.3.3. There are no database glitches anymore, and everything is as smooth as it can be. The new interface looks great and is good in terms of accessibility and features. Nothing beats the one-click easy plugin update though the manual download-upload-activate way is still available.

I have come across several bloggers who are reluctant to upgrade from WordPress 2.3 because they are happy and content with that, even. I see no reason for not upgrading, however. However small an update maybe, its always for the better (I feel sorry for Microsoft about Windows Vista, though!)

Choosing not to upgrade is OK if you’re comfortable with the performance and features available with any previous version of WordPress or any other software but I don’t think that making a compromise on your blog’s security is a WISE idea! I certainly don’t want anyone else than me run my blog without my permission (I mean to say, I don’t my website to get hacked!) or to let someone put porn up on my site and not being able to do anything about it or to delete all my posts that I put so much hard work and time in! :-O

Scary? It can be worse! UPGRADE or DIE!

I have just designed this badge, that you can use to link to your blog’s review at Inspirit. I’ll include the code that will link to your blog’s review, with this graphic image attached; which you can directly use on your blog by inserting it in the blog template, or a blog post.

Off-Beat: I have rescheduled my plan to go hiking, and postponed it to 5th of February. I am enjoying reading your blogs, some of which are very resourceful & informative, while the others are funny and entertaining. It’d be so much better, if I take a break just before my college starts from 12 or 13th of next month.

Just hang on tight! I’ll be right back with todays’ reviews, while you can navigate through the blog for some awesome content.

I started doing free blog reviews after I found some free time after my first semester exams were over. And the response on all the free blog reviews that I have done till now has been great. There are more than 100 blogs still waiting to be reviewed in the queue. Its quite some time now that I have reviewed a blog because I have been too occupied with other stuff – programming classes, Chandigarh Bloggers Alliance, Office, help my brother with studies… holy whack! Sometimes it just becomes impossible to sit on the chair in front of the laptop. I think I should get back into the free blog reviews thing as soon as possible. And that means as soon as tomorrow morning!

If you wish to get a Free Blog Review, all you need to do is drop me a comment using the comment form below. My review can be critical if your blog is in such a condition (read too bad!) but the intent of the review will always be positive. That is, to help you become a better blogger with an even better blog. The review will cover design, layout, content and overall presentation and I’ll insert a screen shot of your blog in my post.

I don’t ask any favors in reciprocation – all I wish to achieve with offering free blog reviews is to make the blogosphere a better place. Nothing will make me more happy than to help you. You should also understand that submitting such posts to Digg or Reddit is stupid because these individual blog reviews are not something everyone would be interested in. Whatever I point out in a particular blog review should be helpful to anyone who has a similar feature in their blog – and although it may help you and many other bloggers but individual blog reviews are not anything that interests most of the general online readership.

However, I encourage you to tell your friends about the blog review so that they can drop me comments whether my opinion is appropriate. Feedback is must for anything. Comments on your blog review will help you, as well as me. I also provide a “Reviewed @ Inspirit Blog” badge at the end of the blog review – and if you wish to send me some traffic, feel free to place the badge on your blog. You don’t have to place the badge, if you don’t wish to. All is your good will.

The Prohibited Uses clause of the Online Standard Terms and Conditions mentions that any type of repeated manual clicks will lead to an immediate suspension or termination of your Google Adsense account. The Google AdSense Program Policies as mentioned in the “Google Adsense Program Policies Help Center” mentions it even more clearly:

Invalid Clicks and Impressions

Clicks on Google ads must result from genuine user interest. Any method that artificially generates clicks or impressions on your Google ads is strictly prohibited. These prohibited methods include but are not limited to repeated manual clicks or impressions, using robots, automated click and impression generating tools, third-party services that generate clicks or impressions such as paid-to-click, paid-to-surf, autosurf, and click-exchange programs, or any deceptive software. Please note that clicking on your own ads for any reason is prohibited. Failure to comply with this policy may lead to your account being disabled.

Take my words, as an advice! Never take this stuff by Google lightly… In your quest for making money online, don’t overlook the Terms & Conditions or you’ll even lose all the money you ever made from Adsense. Remember, Google can get to you sooner than you think you can “hit and run.”

But then, sometimes you can face problems like this one that I faced. When I made a post, a few days back, a link in the post was on the extreme left of the content container, almost into the Adsense Ad unit in left sidebar that bulges a little into the content container. I had to check by clicking on the left-edge of the hyper-link to make sure it didn’t make a click on the Ad. This is because, when readers realize that they clicked on an ad when they wanted to click on that link, they’ll either hit the back button or reload the page very soon. That could be risky, for such clicks can be thought of as clicks under influence or anything of that sort. And while trying to check if clicking anywhere near the link doesn’t click the ad unit, what if I myself click the ad unit! This can get me in sacks, and I must tell you, I am really Google-fearing.

But at the same time, I wanted to test by clicking that space on my real estate. At the point I was doing this stuff, I was reminded of a post about test-driving Google Adsense, that I had made on my previous blog.

Click your own Ads & Google won’t even mind!

So,here’s a simple solution to this problem. All you have to do is add “google_adtest = ‘on’;” to your ad code using the following syntax:

google_ad_client  = “pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx";
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_format = “468×60_as”;
google_ad_type = “text”;
google_ad_channel =””;
google_adtest = ‘on’;

; where xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx is your Publisher ID.

Now any impressions or clicks on that particular modified Adsense ad unit will be ignored and so you can test the adsense on your website/blog without any hassles.

Coming back to the Adsense ToS again…

The document clearly says:

Any AdSense ad code, search box code, or referral code must be pasted directly into Web pages without modification. AdSense participants are not allowed to alter any portion of the ad code or change the layout, behavior, targeting, or delivery of ads for any reason.

But I think this is just as harmless as changing the #RRGGBB colors after generating the ad-unit code, directly. Just in case you are uncertain about the whole thing, please contact Adsense Support Team.

Also, remember to remove google_adtest = “on”; once you are done or you won’t make any money!