It has been now over eight months, when I accidentally landed on a totally alien planet, called Blogosphere. I didn’t know the ABC of blogging at that moment, and so I chose to start with free Blogger, and ran about three Blogspot Blogs. But after trying my hands for about six months, I still consider myself to be a student of the art and science of blogging, although I have been able to learn a few tricks of the trade.

Remembering back, one thing I really missed; the huge waves of Links trains, which provided a way to the new bloggers like me, to know How to quickly build incoming backlinks. I remember to have participated in at least three link trains; Technorati Favorites, MyBlogLog and another one related to the anchor text. Thanks to them, one of my blog quickly jumped into Technorati Rankings and commanded a Rank of 250 or so, within a matter of few days. But those days have gone, and now link trains are considered an evil, specially after the recent Google crackdown.

But recently, I have noticed yet another link train coming up, which I don’t intend to board. It has been termed as NoFollow Link Train. If you want, you can see and join this train here or here, on the blogs of my friend Dave, who blogs at malewail and calgory blog. NoFollow means, that the links provided in this train will carry a nofollow attribute, which will prevent Google from passing the Googel Juice. This is compliant with the Google Terms and conditions for webmasters.

This train is being termed as the new wave taking blogosphere by storm, but, I am afraid, I am not able to appreciate the benefits of this train. Some of the perceived benefits, and my observations on them are as follows.

1. Helps you get backlinks which will improve your Technorati ranking
2. Increased exposure for your blog
3. 10 lucky winners will get a copy of the book The 4-hour Workweek courtesy of Blogging The Movie
4. And finally, each of the 10 lucky winners will be able to host their own contest which will be sponsored by Blogging The Movie.

My observations, on these peceived benefits…

1. Is Technorati Rank really relevant. Does it serves any real purpose except that to satisfy the blogger’s ego. If you are into serious blogging, I think, traffic and the number of active readers are the most important thing to work for.
2. What does exposure mean ? Any exposure, which cannot bring you traffic is meaningless. You can have thousands of backlinks, but if they cannot forward Google Juice and / or traffic to your blog, they are meaningless. These trains do not pass on the Google Juice and I have serious doubts about the ability of these trains to drive tons of traffic to you.
3. The prize of getting a copy of a. Oh, I haven’t yet seen the book yet, have you ? And I will not be going for it untill I take a look at it, even if John Chow writes a review concerning it.
4. And finally, if I am not convinved in even participating in this link train, why will I ever consider hosting such contests.

What are your views. Please let us know them.

BTW, if you really want to get a backlink from this blog, you can check out my previous post Get a Free Backlink from This Blog.

Furthermore, I just wanted to announce that, a cool contest is being organized for bloggers at home based business opportunities. The details of which can be found here at sweepstakes.

Backlinks are the lifeline of a blog or website for that matter.

They give you the much important Google juice, which ranks your blog higher and higher in the SERPs. I don’t need to elaborate their importance, nor I consider myself to be an authority to speak on such a sensitive issue. The task can be better done by 5,61,763 SEO gurus, some of them are although self-styled.

But the most important question before all the new bloggers is…

How to build backlinks for blogs in a competitive era

An extremely easy question to answer, but very difficult to implement. Just search for this question in Google, and I am sure you will get hundreds of advices. Some of them may be like…

• Write great content; I know – I know, content is the king
• Build relationships with other bloggers
• Write articles on e-zines
• Participate in blog carnivals
• Indulge yourself in guest blogging
• Participate in Link baiting
• Exchange Links with other blogs
• Scratch others back, I mean interchange reviews on each other’s blog
• Submit to Blog Directories
• Submit to RSS Directories
• Submit to Social Networking sites
• Submit here,
• Link there…

OMG, the list is endless.

But in practice, this exercise is the most difficult one to implement, as it builds up gradully, unless you strike some wonderful ideas like John Chow or others like him.

What I offer here to build backlinks

So in such a competitive environment, I am starting my own way to build some crucial backlinks, which should appear to be natural and organic to Google. They will be helping both your blog, as well as mine.

These backlinks…

• Will be doFollow links, meaning they will pass the Google Juice to your blog.
• Will ride on Anchor text of your choice. The anchor text can change for different links.
• Will be within my next few posts in next few days. This means, that I will continue to be writing my blog post as usual, but keeping the keywords chosen by you in mind. When ever I find a chance, I will link to your given URL, with your chosen keyword.

What you have to do

Just, send me the URL(s) to which you want a backlink, alongwith the keyword(s) of your choice for every URL. I will accommodate it within my next few posts.

What you have to do, in return

As I said, it is an exercise on mutual link building. I would also like to get the same favour from you. It will be one-to-one. The number of backlinks you want, will be exactly equal to the number of links you will have to give to me. The only difference is that, I will make the first move, and you will give the return favor within a week’s time.

Ready…?

Then drop me a comment here alongwith the the URL(s) and keyword(s). Or if you want to remain annonymous, you can use my Contact Form.

P.S.: I reserve the right to accept or decline any offer or request.

Foxfire…I mean Firefox, is loved by million.

I am one among them, and consider my moral duty to add my two cents to the cause of spreading firefox, the king of open source browsers.

If you are new to Firefox, which is also sometimes called foxfire , let me tell you that one of the reason of the rapid increase in the popularity graphs of Firefox is the integration of the firefox addons, which are also sometimes known as firefox extensions or firefox plugins. There are thousands of firefox addons available, and the count is increasing with each passing day, to make your web browsing more useful, more productive and more pleasurable.

Introducing FlashBlock, the firefox addon

So here is yet another reason, why I love Firefox.

Like most of the bloggers, I am habitual of opening many simultaneous tabs in my firefox browser window. Sometimes the number of open tabs in my firefox reaches upto 10 or 12, and in such case, it is a huge load on my bandwidth. It takes huge time, sometimes running into tens of seconds to load a page, although I am on a cable modem connection. This is the precise reason, I am always on the look out for new ways to increase my internet speed.

FlashBlock, the foxfire addon in question, just blocks the flash ads and banners and YouTube videos, and many other flash snippents on your current webpage, and thus saves you huge amount of bandwidth. In place of the flash ad, it just displays a flash handle, as shown in the figure below. If you clik on this handle, you can play that flash animation at that place.

It is so easy and so useful, I can’t imaging browsing without FlashBlock.

P.S.: paranoidferret.com has reported an issue of FlashBlock interfering with the Silverlight applications, whcih you may like to check out, before installing FlashBlock.

Foxfire…I mean Firefox, the preferred browser for millions of informed netizens, is popular for its Foxfire addons. In this post, we are presenting yet another foxfire addon, which will make your web surfing more productive and pleasurable.

Read it Later

No, we don’t mean what is written above. It is jut the name of the foxfire addon, which helps you to bookmark a web page, within the browser itself and you don’t require to open your preferred social bookmarking website. It is an ideal tool for creating a bookmark list within the browser itself.

This useful firefox extension creates two buttons just adjacent to your Browser search box. The first button named as “Read Later” book,arks the current page in the list and the other button, named as “Reading List” manages the web pages, which you have marked earlier to be read later.

But, How Read it Later is different

Off course, you can use various social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us or digg, just for the same purpose, but I liked the neat and clean interface and a single click approach, without leaving your current webpage. it is definitely much faster way of bookmarking a web page.

The only drawback, which I see with Read IT Later is that, it clutters the already cluttered space on my browser window, with more and more firefox plugins now competing with each other to fit in within the limited space.

How do you like the nice reflection in the above image. I was able to create it within a matter of seconds.

This is the era of Web 2.0. A distinguishing feature of this wave is the appearance of glossy, glass like reflection in the images and the logos. Today you can find these glossy logos and symbols, on virtually every website and blog, which have been floated in last one year or so. These glossy images add a bit three dimensional appearance to the image and are liked by many.

But , How to create reflection in images

This requires a bit of workaround and knowledge of complex Image Editing software like Photoshop. I prefer Gimpshop, in place of Photoshop, just because it is free and opensource, and is capable of doing almost all of the tassk, which a heavy duty software like Photoshop can do.

However, if this sound too geek to you, there is no need to get disheartened. Just head to ReflectionMaker, which is a nice free web tool available on the Web to do the job, just for you and with the click of a mouse. No need to go through the various complex Photoshop Tutorials for this purpose.

Independent Thoughts:
According to seo reviews, getting into pay per click ad is a good marketing tactic. It seldom matters if the site is being hosted on the cheapest domain name etc. In fact, this is rather a priority with search engine marketing gurus. They insist on a cheap website hosting. The reason is that backup software is offered on every kind of web hosting, so why not go for the cheaper services.

I recently came to know from Digital Musings about a brand new RSS service, named as RSSHugger.

You can visit my page to see how it looks like.

The purpose of the website is to build a community of RSS feeds, so as to derive the mutual benefit of traffic and exposure to the bloggers and the website.

As per the details mentioned in the website, every RSS submission will get a unique page created for it on RSSHugger. People can search for the blogs of their choice on this website, and if they land on your page, they will find your latest posts listed on that page.

They also have a top 100 page, which ranks the submitted blogs on the basis of number of times your page has been viewed in that month. This also is a way to drive traffic to your page.It is said on this website that they initially planned to charge a fee of $20 per submission, but right now the submission is free as long as you blog about it.

So here I am, submitting my blog to RSSHugger.

In the previous post, we had written about a quick tip to hide your files and folders from your colleagues and other users of your computer. The basic premise of that tip was to create an invisible folder in your PC, which will be like any other folder, but there will be no name and no icon will be seen. So if somebody else explores the directory, that folder will not be seen and hence your files and folders within that invisible folder will remain protected.

However that method is not a foolproof method, and in case your colleagues also are reading my blog then they will also be knowing this tip and thus can access your folder easily.

A better approach will be to encrypt your sensitive files, with the help of some encryption web tool. There are plenty of them available. We would like to introduce you to four of the free file encryption utilities, which can easily encrypt your files with the click of a mouse.

FileVault: It is primarily meant for a Macintosh computer. It can be found in the Mac OS X v10.3 (“Panther”) operating system and later. It works by encrypting your home directory using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm with a key, which is derived from the user’s login password. The best part is that the recipient doesn’t need any software to open these files, just a password, and therefore, this utility is useful if you want to send it to somebody over the Internet, who is not having this tool in his PC.

TrueCrypt: TrueCrypt is a free open source on-the-fly encryption (OTFE) program for Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista and Linux. It creates a “file-hosted container” which consists of an encrypted volume with its own file system, contained within a regular file, which can then be mounted as if it were a real disk. TrueCrypt also supports device-hosted volumes, which can be created on either an individual partition or an entire disk.

AxCrypt: AxCrypt is a free, open source file encryption application for Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2K/XP integrated into Windows Explorer. Its current cryptographic primitives are AES-128 and SHA-1.

Kruptos: Use Kruptos to encrypt files on your PC or a portable storage device. With this tool, you can also create files that self-decrypt. It uses 128 bit blowfish encryption to encrypt your files or folders which then can only be accessed with the correct password, so that only you can have access to them. You can even select to disguise the newly encrypted files name for further privacy.