256-th day of the year.

 General  Comments Off on 256-th day of the year.
Sep 132011
 

This day is actually the programmer’s appreciation day.

According to Wikipedia It was originally proposed by Valentin Balt, a web designer in small company before 9 years, but  made officially instituted by  the Russian president 2 years ago with the

Указ Президента РФ от 11.09.2009 N 1034
“О Дне программиста”

Cold beer

A mug for everyone!

The Wikipedia link  cites some other sources, but for the Russian speaking folks – the most important link is actually in Kremlin’s site and is visible everywhere. http://graph.document.kremlin.ru/page.aspx?1026111 I can think of at least 10 reasons anyone would choose to develop programming skills:

  • It rocks!
  • The community is awesome!
  • There is information about everything 2 clicks away.
  • There are no idiot programmers.
  • The salary is good.
  • Beer, junk food and coffee are part of your diet plan.
  • You are highly prized by your friends.
  • Girls like nerds as much as nerds like girls.
  • You will finally understand the binary jokes 😛
  • You will be excused for creating Chaos. It’s part of the job description.

Happy hacking everyone!!!

 Posted by at 2:01 pm

Is it easy to make a blog?

 bl0g  Comments Off on Is it easy to make a blog?
Sep 092011
 

No.

It is not.

First, you need time.

Then you need determination and motivation.

It is definitely NOT an overnight next-next-next-finish job.

And it will not pay you a penny in the first months, if you want to monetize it.

Actually in the first 4 months, this blog made less than 1 Euro.

Why?

Because of article quantity. And article quality.


Why would anyone expect that making 2-3 articles per week is more than enough to make a living from a blog. It is impossible. At least not in the beginning. And if anyone in the Internet tells you, that you will start “earning” $4000 per month NOW, they simply lie because they want your money. This is most definitely SCAM!

For the four months I mentioned (16 weeks) this means 30-50 articles. What if every article is visited once per day? How many of those visits will actually make money? (make people click on ADs)

None.

It takes 100000 visits to determine accurate CPM (Cost per 1 thousand visits). And believe me. No Chitika, no AdSense, nor any affiliate program can make you rich from 1000 visits.

What do you need to make a Blog profitable?

Readers.

How can you get readers to your blog?

Content, pictures, videos, puzzles, FUN, HOWTOs, curious stuff, game walkthroughs … whatever you are good at… and you are good … DAILY.

If you can do it, you will probably meet with successful “blogging-for-money” one day. But if you think that writing 100 articles and leaving your blog to make money will actually work – you are wrong.

A blog does not go alone by itself. The so called “automated moneymaking” – without human intervention is impossible. It takes months to establish some position as a blog-site and can take twice as long for the people to even notice you. My first few comments (happily) were friendly advices. Those advices kept me motivated and led me to find some online data about SEO (Search engine optimization). Search engines are driven by few factors. Here are few tips:

  1. Uniquity of an article. If all of the articles are copy&pasted from somewhere – you will fail. Search engines hate copied content. If you are not the original writer – you will be indexed too, but your articles will not go high in the search results. And you may get warning from the original owner to remove the article.
  2. Key words. If you don’t speak about what you mean – you will fail. You can’t stray from the base article heading. If you speak about trains, use the word “train” all the time, without spamming or getting weird and annoying.
  3. Page [short]links SEO (search engine optimization). If you have article links www.blah.org/?p=8129 and www.blah.org/cute-mini-train-stations the second article link will show above the first in the search engines, regardless the content in both article is about “little train stations”. If the link name and article name are relevant to each other and the article content – the search engines will push you up in the results, when someone searches the keywords your article is about.
  4. Usefulness. If someone clicks “Like”, “+1”, “Stumble”, tweets about you or simply posts a link on his own blog to your site – you will feel it soon. If your friends and readers tweet about your articles and link to your blog, their friends and friends of their friends may come too.
  5. Page rank. Whatever site links to you – your page rank will raise a bit. If  a big site posted a link to your site – your page rank will definitely jump. And that means higher place in most search engines. If you don’t know what page rank is, refer to the Wikipedia article.

It actually took me 4 months to go from page rank ZERO to page rank 1. When Google increased my PR – The raise in visits to my blog was like 300%. I can’t disclose exact numbers because of the policies I agreed with, but it was visible in my graphs… So. To make It clear – Advertise your site to your friends and readers owning blogs. Let them link to you to quick start you a bit. You may not get High levels of traffic by just few links, but this will pay in time. This is important, regardless what the others say. If you are often linked and discussed – you WILL be noticed. And Page rank DOES matter.

If you are interested in how many backlinks do you need to attain page rank 1 with Google, have a look at this blog post.

The hard task I had put on my shoulder was to make a blog that speaks about EVERYTHING that interests me. I did not plan to make a “niche website” enslaved by few keywords. The good part is, that more keywords will enter the search engine criterion. The bad part is – big part of the blog is irrelevant to most of the readers. I am sorry to say, but part of my RSS subscribers expect new Slackware howto or game walkthrough, but instead of this – they receive a recipe for a food or some story about Me going somewhere with the bike and shooting few photos.

Sorry folks. Please come back! Don’t leave! 😀

Another important thing – You must be aware that 1 blog post takes the attention of the people interested in it for no more than a week. Than the visits drop back to normal. I’ve already seen that when going to a see resort and not posting for 2 weeks. If you don’t update your blog regularly, the search engines will put more recently updated blogs in the same niche before yours. And search engine traffic is very important. You may have some dedicated readers, but you want them to grow. And if no one can find your blog – you can’t get more readers. You will only grow by “word of mouth” from your readers that tweet about your posts or post links to your blog elsewhere.

And that growth is simply not enough.

 Posted by at 5:09 pm

Slackware mini How to and various tricks II

 General  Comments Off on Slackware mini How to and various tricks II
Sep 032011
 

Check the previous article too.

How to change the default port value for SSH to listen to?

Go to /etc/ssh/sshd_config and change the line saying

Port 22 # < --- this line to something else. e.g. 2222
#AddressFamily any
#ListenAddress 0.0.0.0
#ListenAddress ::

Restart SSH daemon by invoking  /etc/rc.d/rc.sshd restart as root. This will make SSH to listen to port 2222.

How to make colorful grep command?

Suppose you like the Ubuntu’s colorful grep command. It’s actually very easy to be made on every Linux flavor. You need to alias the grep command this way:

alias grep='grep --color'

This ways grep will always be with option –color. And you need to set the color:

export GREP_COLOR=';32m'

;32m” here means green. But you may prefer other color. They are:

red 31
green 32
yellow 33
blue 34
magenta 35
cyan 36
white 37

If you want those settings remembered, enter the 2 lines for alias and export at the end of your ~/.bashrc file. That’s all.

How to make Xfce4 to support Cyrillic keyboard?

Put the following in the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "InputDevice"
 Identifier  "Keyboard0"
 Driver      "kbd"
 Option      "XkbModel" "pc105"
 Option      "XkbLayout" "en,bg"
 Option       "XkbOptions" "grp:alt_shift_toggle"
 EndSection

The option XkbLayout can also say [ru], [ua] or other Cyrillic using nations. The Option to set the button to Alt+Shift can also be changed.

The next step is to set your window manager to show the state changes. You only need to install the package xfce4-xkb-plugin.

How to change forgotten root password!?

I suppose it is YOUR own machine, and you are not trying to ruin it for someone else.

It’s a bit tricky if you don’t have root access to the machine. It can take forever to brute force a password with CLI or over SSH. I frankly don’t recommend this method. It’s for forgetful idiot script kiddies.

The only method good enough is if you have physical access to the machine.

Reboot with a live CD (or live USB stick). Your root file system is probably /dev/hdc or /dev/sda1. If unsure – use cfdisk and see which partition is made bootable. This is probably your root partition. Mount the filesystem in any mount point (e.g. /mnt/hdc).

mount /dev/hdc /mnt/hdc

Have a look at the file /mnt/hdc/etc./shadow. The file should look like this:

root:$1$w4BtrTq5$4NwUXg/ite/GysUCmaHf6.:15114:0:::::
bin:*:9797:0:::::
daemon:*:9797:0:::::
adm:*:9797:0:::::
lp:*:9797:0:::::
sync:*:9797:0:::::
...

Now… The first method is to clean everything in the first line from the $ (dollar sign) to the first : (colon sign) so it looks like the other lines below. But this will leave your machine vulnerable to anyone, because your root account will not have password. SSH forbids passwordless logins, but a little healthy paranoia is never in excess. Execute the following 2 commands:

adduser idiot
passwd idiot

Confirm the adduser dialog with dummy data. It’s temporary user after all.
Enter any password for the user “idiot” we just made and have a look at the live CD’s temporary  /etc/shadow file:

bash-4.1# cat /etc/shadow | grep idiot
idiot:$1$.Zf3P/ya$SISp/sFHX.gLPGKMDv5HJ1:15220:0:99999:7:::
bash-4.1##

We have the new password hash (or encrypted password if you like it more). We copy the string starting from the $ (dollar sign) up to the first : (colon sign) without the colon sign itself in the /mnt/hdc/etc/shadow file replacing the hash written there for root password.

That’s all. You only need to reboot the machine and remove the live CD. Your new root password is set.

*(The hash shown here is for the password “alabala” and It is for an example only. I don’t recommend using such short and weak palindrome for password.)

 Posted by at 3:53 pm