Archive for May, 2009

Windows Live Writer and 403 error on Blogger

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

I was trying windows live writer for the first time, a big applause to Microsoft for providing this too for free. Windows live writer makes the life of a blogger much easier.

Windows live writer allows you to frame your blog post from your desktop or laptop and publish on to the blog using a single click ! This helps us treat blog posts just like a word or power point file, make necessary changes to your post, edit it locally in multiple sessions, while it is saved in your computer locally and publish at once. You need not go back and forth on your blogger or wordpress admin to make drafts and changes, everything is easy using Windows live writer.

Now coming to my issue, I tried creating a post on my wordpress blog (like this one) using Live writer, no issues for me to get it done. Only to make sure we check the XML-RPC publishing protocol on in wordpress writing settings.

Now when I tried posting into blogger, it gave me a 403 error and says could not upload or something like that. The issue was that my post contained images. While posting images into blogger, actually images are saved on to an album in your picasa account. When you post from blogger’s interface, an album matching to your blog name is automatically created. But, while posting from Windows live writer, it actually tries to upload to a ‘Windows Live Writer’ album in your picasa account, which might not be existing. Well in my case it wasn’t existing and that was the root cause for this issue.

I manually created a ‘Windows Live Writer’ album on my picasa account and retried publishing the post from Live writer – Phew ! It worked !

So just in case you are facing the same issue as mine where you are getting a 403 error while trying to create a post on blogger, with the posts containing images, cross check whether you have a ‘Windows Live Writer’ album on your picasa account. If not, add manually and retry. It should work fine.

Let me know if this post helped you in any way !

Posted in Blogging | 1 Comment »

My 5800 tube is at Nokia Care again

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Well, I explained earlier that I am facing another typical problem with my Nokia 5800 tube – The menu color change issue with my Nokia 5800 :(

My phone is a little over two months old and was a victim of the known Nokia 5800 earpiece speaker volume issue, and it had the display problem as well.

I updated firmware to version 20 from version 11 the day prior to getting it repaired for the speaker issue. The display issue came into attention since then. While in use the menu colour changes to violet, yellow pink etc for a duration of 3-4 seconds and gets back to normal. Also the screen goes blank in between, I need to switch off and on the screen guard to get the display work again.

After doing some research on Nokia discussion forums, other mobile phone discussion forums, I concluded that few Nokia 5800 users face similar issues as mine with the display.

My initial assumption was that it could be a software related issue, I waited for the version 21 upgrade and did it few days back. This didn’t solve my issue. I did a phone reset using *#7370# which formats the phone memory, which again did nothing to solve the issue. This made me conclude that there could be something serious issue with the hardware. Two of my friends own Nokia 5800 and they never had something like this.

I took the mobile to Nokia Care today, the guy over there told me that it need to be checked and if needed might need to be sent to the main office for repair and detailed check. He also mentioned that if it cannot be repaired, I will be given a replacement piece, which is a good news for me now. Thanks to Nokia Care again, but so sad, my first experience with Nokia mobile phones isn’t that great due to this faulty Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic :(

I pulled out my old Philips Xenium 9@9++ to be used meanwhile for the sake of making and receiving calls.
Waiting for them to check my 5800 tube and give me the results..

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Posted in Mobile | No Comments »

How fast is your website?

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

A quick loading website is always preferred by majority of users, but adding more beauty to the website often makes the web pages bulky and a webmaster ends up with a slow loading website.

A webpage consists of the HTML code and other page elements such as cascading style sheets (CSS), javaScript files (.js) and images.

Following are few tips for you to optimize the load time of a website.

Reduce the number of HTTP requests – as I told you, a page output is usually a combination of the HTML code, combined with other files such as css, js and images. As far as possible try to reduce the number of dependent files on a page. For example, you may use a single css file instead of including styles from 2 or 3 style sheets. Combine js files and if possible consolidate into one. Images – those are the main culprits most of the time, try to use images with lesser kB’s and reduce the number of images in a page. For example for background coloring, you may use CSS rather than an image.

Yahoo has a best document for web page load time improvement – Read it here.

Posted in Webmastering | No Comments »

How search engines work?

Friday, May 1st, 2009

Earlier I had written a post on how to get your site gets shown up in search engine results , I would like to elaborate the post here.

Assume you have a website, you type yourdomain.com on the search box and hit enter, it is not showing your site in search results, and you are wondering why, the above link will answer few of your questions.

  • Search engines are not programmed to find each and every website online and show up results from them
  • It is close to impossible for any search engine to display results for any page on any website

The above are few facts one need to know about search engines.

How a search engine finds your website?

There are two ways as I explained earlier,

  • You let the search engine know about your website URL (use the add url option provided by them)
  • Invite search engine crawler automatically by getting few hyperlinks pointed to your website URL from others sites which are already in search engine’s database (index).

Second method is best as far as I can say, you can even get your new website in search engine’s index in 24 hours (this method is what SEO agencies do, when they publicise that they can get your site indexed in 24 hours)

Getting into the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages)
This depends on the keyword relevance and quality of the content on the webpage and the link popularity of your site. These are basics for any search engines, the weightages do vary from search engine to search engine. Google give more weightage to the incoming authoritative votes (links) from other websites.

Search Engine Optimization is understanding these search engine algorithms and planning the OnPage and Offpage strategies for developing the site for better placement in the search engine result pages.

Posted in SEO | No Comments »