Preview: Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), and Unity UI

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Ubuntu 11.04 codenamed “Natty Narwhal” is going to be the new born baby in the Ubuntu family. The expected launch date for Natty Narwhal is April 28, 2011, but Alpha versions are already out to test the product before the final stable release. Alpha 3 (the last one in the Alpha launch series) released on March 3, 2011, and the two Betas are to follow March 31, 2011 onwards.

So, What’s the big difference this time? Is it better than the previous Ubuntu releases? Is Canonical seriously making efforts towards Ubuntu Desktop in order to compete with far more popular Windows, and Mac for global Desktop market share? Such questions generally arise every time a new version of Ubuntu is released, every 6 months.

The biggest difference in 11.04, compared to the current stable 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, is the change in the User Interface. Yes its true, GNOME Desktop Environment no longer ships with Ubuntu now, possibly because of the disagreement with the Canonical Ltd. And, that’s why Canonical started working on its own brand new UI – Unity, after the release of 10.10. Though, it didn’t give them enough time to design a completely new UI given the 6 months development cycle time between every Ubuntu release, still they’re pushing hard, and with every Alpha release, major difference are being made and well noticed, and lots of bugs reported earlier after the Alpha 1 release are fixed now. No doubt, Unity UI looks promising (See the screenshots below – Click them to Enlarge).

Ubuntu 11.04 Screen 1Ubuntu 11.04 Screen 2

Two other important features of Ubuntu 11.04 are:

  1. Replacement of Oracle’s Open Office Suite with LibreOffice 3 package, as the default Office suite.
  2. With 11.04, Qt Framework is also given a go, thus encouraging a whole lot of new apps based on it. This would also push it for cross-integration of apps with other environments, such as KDE.

Right now, we can’t tell whether if Natty Narwhal is better than Ubuntu 10.10, or if Canonical is seriously planning to rule the Desktop market share in near future, because there are still a lot of changes being made every day, and we can’t judge it until the final product is released on April 28, 2011. I’ll be surely writing a Review on it, after the final stable launch.

There are many Linux experts, who consider the UI change to be a wrong move made by Canonical because of less development time, lots of bugs, complexity in interface design, and might turn down large number of Ubuntu users to switch to some other Linux platform. One can’t be sure about whether its gonna happen or not, at this stage. But, one thing is for sure, Natty would prove out to be somewhat buggy compared to 10.10 despite changes constantly being made to the interface. But, I think it would be fair to judge and compare Unity with GNOME after the launch of Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot”, as it would give Unity a fair time to furnish itself.

I’d certainly love to know your opinions about this brand new Ubuntu 11.04, and most importantly the Unity UI.

Fetch Top Rankings in Search Engine Result Pages : Part-1

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Folks, Today I’m going to discuss about some of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips and tricks. SEO is all about fetching up top-spots in SERPs i.e. Search Engine Result Pages.

Now-a-days, Internet has made such a huge impact on our lives, be it in terms of Knowledge, Business, Entertainment, Information etc. Everyday, multi-thousands new websites are launched on the Internet, and so the competition is increasing exponentially. People generally head to Search Engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask etc. (too many to mention in here), and rely on the results generated by them based on the query made by the user. Thus, every website-owner wants his/her website to appear on top of Search Engine Result Pages generated relevant to the context of the website, and most-importantly, above their rival competitors on every relevant keyword combination or search queries. These days, Search Engines are so powerful, and their search algorithms are so strong, that most of the users are satisfied with the first two pages of the Search Results generated, with Top-4 entries on the very first page receiving most of the Traffic hits. Even I don’t go beyond 2-3 pages of Search Results for almost 90% of my search queries, and I’m sure neither do you (or most of you).

SEOSo, If you are a website-owner or webmaster, I’m going to discuss few of the SEO tricks to make your website Search Engine Friendly (SEF). Search Engines are very specific about deciding the rank of your webpages, based on certain criteria. SEO is a very vast topic. Its actually an entire subject in itself, so it is very difficult to explain everything about it in a single article. Hence, I divided it into few Parts, with each subsequent part extending it further to a next level. Following are the few points, which should be considered while developing a website. “The more SEO tactics you apply on your website, the more SEF it would be, and higher it would show up on SERPs – The S-S-S Rule (Triple S)”.

  • It is recommended to have Search Engine Friendly URLs, i.e. URLs which are easy to read and share, like the one on this blog. Though most of the Search Engines don’t see that as a necessity, and don’t generally consider it as an SEO tactic, but some do look into the links for the queried keywords to provide the user with the best results. Generally, data-driven websites, developed using Server side scripting languages such as PHP, ASP.Net etc. uses symbols like ‘?’, ‘=’, ‘&’ etc. in the links to pass the data values among pages. This also makes it hard to memorize them, and so its a good practice to have SEF URLs.
  • Always give the utmost priority to the content of the page. The main content of the pages is the most keyword-enriched part of the website, and search engines usually look into the main content while indexing them for search queries. Make it as clear, visible, and above all other non-important things as possible. Always use heading tags to represent headings, or sub-headings within your content.
  • Avoid duplicate content. Search Engine crawlers are very smart, and they keep track of whether the content being indexed from a website, is already present in their result pages cache, indexed from some other websites. Thus, if duplicate content is found, they generally have a negative impact on your SERPs. Hence, always generate Unique content, and articles for your websites. Never copy it as it is (without prior notification or link-back to the original author) from other websites. Most of the blogs tend to have same content on many pages, like an article content maybe present on the Index page, and its own dedicated page, under the same domain name itself. This is also considered as duplicate content by the crawlers. But, this can be avoided by using the ‘canonical’ meta tag, as I’m using it for this blog (within the <HEAD> tag).
  • Use Javascripts, AJAX, and Flash for non-important content only. Search engines can’t read/index the scripts or objects, or get pass through them. Hence, it is recommended to avoid as much of these as possible especially for the content part, bearing keyword-enriched text.
  • The page TITLE tag should not contain more than 60 characters, or it would be cut-off by most of the search engines. Its the first thing Search Engines look for based on the user queries, to match the entered keywords with the keywords used in the title tag, in order to display the appropriate result pages. Always use keywords in your title tag, with most important ones at the start.
  • Use of ‘Keywords’ and ‘Description’ meta tags is also recommended. Though, major Search Engines like Google etc. don’t consider the ‘Keywords’ meta tag, some of them do. Hence, it is a good practice to include these two meta tags with 5-10 Keywords, and 160 characters maximum Description size respectively.
  • Search Engine crawlers can’t read graphical content, or images present on a website. But, they do have the tendency to index them separately based on their textual meaning represented with ‘ALT’ attribute for images present inside <IMG> tag, along with the text present around the image. Hence, use of meaningful, and relevant ALT attribute for images ensure that your images will also get indexed by Search Engines, who have the capability to show Image search results, like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

This concludes PART-1. But, I’d like to clear one thing right now. End-results never appear that quickly on applying SEO tactics to a website, as some of you might be thinking. It usually takes time for Search Engines to index your website pages on a regular basis, and to note such differences being made to them. It also depends upon your website popularity, and how often its being indexed.

Stay tuned for more…

Revolutionizing Information Technology with Cloud Computing

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“Cloud Computing” We hear that term quite often these days, and many of us wonder what exactly it means. How exactly is it bringing the revolution to modern day computing? Is it really beneficial?

Well, to be frank, initially even I was pretty much confused about the real meaning of it, and I was really searching for the right answers to these questions. On the Internet, when you type in the term “Cloud Computing” on your Google Search Engine, Bing, Yahoo, or whatever you use, you’ll find many articles, and ‘wiki’ pages on it, with almost all of them either too complex to understand, or too different in terms of approaches being considered in order to explain its real meaning. Whatever it was, certainly took me some time to understand and formulate the real meaning of it.

Cloud Computing can be defined as the advancement in the concept of delivering of hosted service on the Internet. These services could be Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (Paas). The term ‘Cloud’ here is actually used as a ‘metaphor’, usually used to represent the ever-growing size of the Internet, and multiple servers connected in a network. 

There are several benefits of Cloud Computing:

  1. The power of computing can be increased by increasing the size of the cloud (i.e. by adding more virtual servers temporarily to the cloud present within a network), at any instant of time to fulfill the urgent demand of bandwidth, and can be removed easily as soon as the demand is fulfilled. Hence, there’s no need to buy too many servers or other hardware devices, thus, making it a cost-effective solution.
  2. Its cost-effectiveness, and low-power usage also makes it a ‘Green’ solution. As most of the hosted services would require only a minimal number of servers to fulfill the average bandwidth demand, and further demand can be fulfilled with cloud power, the power-usage for those extra servers can be saved, as they don’t need to be switched on all the time, but only in certain situations when the demand is high.
  3. Cloud computing makes it easier to backup, and maintain data, and services hosted on the servers. Examples could be GMail, Hotmail, Google App Engine, Google Docs, Salesforce, Amazon etc. All big organizations are switching to cloud computing due to its multiple advantages.
  4. From’s the users or client-side perspective, the cost for running heavy applications, which required high-end hardware devices, and software licenses, can be saved. Even a standard computer with a web-browser installed in it, can effectively use the services hosted on cloud powered sites/servers, as if they were installed on that particular system locally. The examples, as mentioned above, are Email services like GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Office-applications like Google Docs, etc.

Below is a video I find really helpful in understanding the concept of cloud computing, from a beginner’s point of view. The way with which it was explained, was the best I found on the Internet till date. I really admire the creativity of the person who developed that video, with lots of unique ideas flowing. I do recommend to watch this video at least once, and I bet you’re gonna enjoy this for sure.

[vsw id="QJncFirhjPg" source="youtube" width="480" height="270" autoplay="no"]

Video Source Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJncFirhjPg

However, despite all its advantages, a doubt certainly arises about the reliability factor of cloud technology. Recently, there was a situation where the email accounts of a small percentage of GMail,  and Hotmail users, were totally wiped out, as if they were newly created. Google, though, stated that it was because of some software glitch, and they are taking initiatives to recover all the wiped accounts. But, this certainly puts a question mark on its reliability, as all the user’s data is stored and handled on remote servers, and storage of important and critical data on those servers is certainly not risk-free. I’d surely like to know your opinion about it.

Establishing yourself as an Online Freelancer

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Everyone Is Talented, be it in Computers, Sports, or entertaining others. We all got some skills, and so we all should know how to effectively use them. A Freelancer is a person who’s not committed to an organization or an employer on a long-term contract. They are always self-employed usually in the field of their interests. That’s why they are called ‘FREE-lancers’.

Generally, there are many strong points of differences between Freelancing and a regular job, and many people prefer being a Freelancer than doing a regular job, while others criticize. In my opinion, freelancing have numerous advantages over a regular job, but as we all know it, ‘Pros don’t exist without Cons’. Being a freelancer means you’re FREE to do whatever you find suitable for you, based on your interests, and your skills. You are your own master. Unlike a regular job, where you have to work on a weekly or a monthly basis, a freelancer always have the option to take a break in between projects. Thus, the risk of losing up a regular job on getting sick, or going for a vacation, or something, is not the case here. So, as a freelancer, you get to furnish your skills, earn some quick money, peacefully enjoy vacations, and live the life the way you always wanted to.

However, there are obviously some disadvantages, but if you look at the advantages and establish yourself as a proper freelancer, you don’t have to worry about it. When you get a regular job, its certain you’re gonna get paid on a regular basis (probably fixed amount, be it hourly, daily, weekly or monthly). But, In the initial stages as a freelancer, you might not get enough projects or earn regular income, but if you hold on to it, there are certain chances that you’re gonna get opportunities for sure. In today’s Internet reliable generation, Organizations have gone online, and they are outsourcing most of their projects. And, so there’s no doubt about the number of opportunities in near future. They are surely gonna increase. And, who knows you might be earning much more than you can ever imagine, or the income you’re earning, or going to earn doing a regular job.

Here, I’m going to discuss about establishing yourself as an online freelancer, based on my personal experience. Though its not that much by far, but still, I think I’m well established as I get projects whenever I want to, without much struggling. I’m a web-developer, and I develop websites based on WordPress, and Joomla CMS. I had my own domain then (not this one), where I used to upload and test all my work. I didn’t know a thing about freelancing then. And then, I came to hear about few online websites which give the opportunity to Bid on open-projects outsourced by some organizations or individual employers. And if the employer approves your bid, you get the chance to work on it, and submit it before deadline to earn the money you initially quoted for that very project. I really liked that idea because of the above said reasons. Earning real money sitting at home, no strict working hours, working on projects I was interested in, and capable of handling them on my own…couldn’t get any better for me, as I’m still an under-graduate student. So, I finally started placing bids on multiple Freelancing websites, but one can’t be successful that easily. One has to work harder, and improvise things, and that’s what I did. I improvised my bidding style, created a proper portfolio of work I had previously done, and mentioning it in every relevant bid I place on those websites. But, out of them all, I liked one such website – vWorker (previously RentACoder.com), and thats because of three big reasons:

  1. The bidding system was closed, i.e. you don’t get to see other person’s bid until the project is alloted to someone. Thus, giving everyone a fair chance of quoting genuine project price, and preventing cut-throat mechanism (placing the lowest bid by looking at others’ bid price…literally cutting other person’s throat).
  2. The mediation system was rock-solid, and very effective. In case if your project goes into arbitration, and one can’t continue to work on the project due to some reason, the moderators analyze it, and take the right decision. It isn’t biased at all.
  3. Unlike some other websites, no signup charges, comparatively less commission charges per project, and less money transfer charges.

When I signed up on this website, I was very confident about getting success there, and so I did get my first project (though a small one) on the 4th day after signup, and it never stopped after that. Some people are very talented that they earn their first project on the first day itself, or even within the first hour. But, on the other end, some keep trying and trying, and ultimately lose hope, and self-confidence. And If I look at the other end, I find myself far more lucky, and I seriously feel bad for those who ultimately give up trying. So here, I’m gonna summarize a few important points which you should always keep in mind, if you want to become a successful freelancer:

  1. First, and the most important one, do not ever give up trying. If you’re not getting success, don’t worry, just improvise your style and technique. Like, if you’re a project bidder like me, try to improvise your bidding style, and Try again. Don’t try to convince or force the employer to hand-over the project to you, by just saying “I can do it”. Instead, try to convince by saying “How I’ll do it, How I’m gonna approach it, My strategy, etc.”. Mention your previous work experience to them.
  2. Be as informative as you can, and yes “Be Professional!”.
  3. Don’t always run for projects with high budget value. Always go for those projects which you’re interested in, can handle and wrap it up in a given period of time. There’s no use of earning those high-valued projects, if you can’t finish them off on time, with the resources you have available with you.
  4. Have your portfolio created, and always available online for the employers to look into, whenever they want to. Almost every employer hand-over a project to someone, only after checking their past work in the similar area. No portfolio…No significant projects.
  5. Always keep track of work being done point-by-point, and learn time-management tactics to meet the deadline. If you want success, you should understand the price of every minute you spend, and so, use it wisely. If project demands more time, try to keep up with that pace, or else you’ll surely miss the deadline, and hence lose the project. Or better, don’t take those projects which will certainly put enough pressure on your shoulders. The more you’re free from pressure, the more you’ll have the ability to think, more you’ll be comfortable with it, and more you’re gonna enjoy every second of it.