Guide

Improve Reading Speed With Auto-Scroll Of Any Webpage

May 18, 2015 by Arun Sarathy 2 Comments

save time and increase reading speed

I am having all the time in the World or I am required to do a research – both will, more often than not, lead me to reading long blog posts, research papers and webpages. However, I cannot sit back and read focusedly as my one hand HAS to be on my mouse to scroll down the webpage manually.

This brings us to the question on how to read faster on our computer and what reading level you are at.

This can be accomplished by using two speed-reading techniques – both deals with auto-scroll of websites using scripts using which you can read faster. With the below techniques, you can still employ your Photo Reading or any other speed reading techniques.

How To Host Images (and Files) On Dropbox for Free

May 1, 2015 by Arun Sarathy 2 Comments

Host images or any file on Dropbox and reduce your blog’s loading time

This process also saves you storage space on your precious hosting account, by hosting static files. But please remember that Dropbox cannot act as a CDN in the long run and you might inevitably find yourself looking for a regular CDN someday. Till then, and up to a point you want to scale up to that level, you may use Dropbox as the CDN.

Get your Dropbox from here – this special referral link gives additional FREE 500MB storage!

If you want to learn how to use Dropbox for file storage and use it as a CDN, then skip directly to that section below by clicking here.

Some people do the mistake of uploading images to their WordPress blog by uploading it to their WP images directory.

This not only increases the website’s loading time but also adds up to your hosting space, eventually.

Fortunately, there is a neat way to mitigate this issue. We do this by using Dropbox’s free account feature as our CDN (Content Delivery Network)

If you don’t have Dropbox account yet, it’s now time to signup.

After uploading, click on the image icon to see a button called ‘SHARE‘.

Clicking on the ‘SHARE‘ button will give the link you want to paste to your blog HTML.

Important Note: change the default URL from this:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/azlux46yurbqkpp/Dropbox%2S…………..
to this:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/azlux46……….

This setting is necessary to make sure the images show up correctly because Dropbox has set the image preview as default with a black background.

To get only the image to display after we host images on Dropbox, we will now replace ‘www.dropbox.com’ with ‘dl.dropboxusercontent.com’ in the URL.

Update: both ‘dl.dropboxusercontent.com’ and ‘dl.dropbox.com’ works. (Just remember to delete ‘www’)

How to Host Files on Dropbox as CDN

If you want to host files instead, simply follow the similar process of uploading the files to your Dropbox and get the link.

Change the URL endpoint from dl=0 to dl=1. Here’s a FREE PDF file for download for demo. This should take care of it!

How To Make Navigation Menu Stick On Top When Scrolling

April 18, 2015 by Arun Sarathy Leave a Comment

WordPress: Create Sticky Menu That Stays On Top When Scrolling Using CSS

This post is a little techy which involves working with code in WordPress > Appearance > Editor section. In particular, the menu items can be found in style.css file which can be fixed on scrolling.

If you don’t want to worry by coding or making changes to your WordPress themes, just check out the various plugins that are available in the WordPress market which does this job.

For those who want to fidget with the codes to create fixed menu when scrolling page, continue reading:

1. Go to your website as it is now. Right click on the menu you want to float while scrolling. Click on Inspect Element.

2. The name for your menu depends on which theme you use. It will mostly be named appropriately – ‘#navbar‘ or ‘#menu‘ or ‘#mainmenu‘ or ‘#subnav’. In this example, it’s named as ‘subnav‘. Expand this line by clicking on the small triangle icon to see all your menu items listed.

3. Now search this ‘subnav‘ in your style.css file. It’s better to take a backup of this file by copy-pasting the style.css contents to a Notepad file.

4. Find the attribute that says position: relative; and change it to position: fixed; you can also add other attributes like width, right, top, left depending on your preference to position your sticky item. Just check this w3.org article to know and read further.

5. Save. Exit. Refresh your webpage and you’ll notice that the menu bar sticks on top when you scroll down. I have Genesis Framework installed, so I had an option to install a custom plugin to do this job. However, following the above steps will help you accomplish the same tasks without installing any plugin.

Alternatively, jQuery also comes to rescue and you can find more details in this post and this post.

What other ways do you know to keep menu stick on top floating while scrolling? Let us know using the comments box below.

Dofollow and Nofollow Attributes – When to add these?

March 22, 2015 by Arun Sarathy Leave a Comment

I attempted to put my solo-brainstorm at work and the result is this post.

Hope you find this solo brainstorm about rel=”nofollow” useful.

What is a rel=”nofollow” attribute?

A rel=”nofollow” attribute, in layman’s terms is, simply asking search engines not to follow a link that you’ve given in your blog post. Every webpage acquires certain PageRank in terms of Google search and crawl analysis, which gets passed and shared on to other links if you add them to your blog. This is also sometimes referred to as SEO juice. If you don’t want your SEO juice to freely pass on to other websites that are not worth it, you can simply add rel=”nofollow” attribute to that hyperlink.

When to use rel=”nofollow” attribute?

If you feel that you want to add a hyperlink to a website that you know for sure is good for nothing to your readers, then simply add a rel=”nofollow” attribute.

What is a ‘dofollow’ attribute?

‘Dofollow’ attribute is just the opposite of rel=”nofollow”. In fact, the absence of rel=”nofollow” attribute is a ‘dofollow’ attribute. There is no need to add a dofollow attribute specifically to a URL.

What does Matt Cutts, the head of Web Spam team, has to say about rel=”nofollow”?

As per Matt Cutts, one can add rel=”nofollow” to specific links. Read more here.

What do we gain by adding this attribute value?

We actually are passing our good karma by NOT adding rel=”nofollow” attribute to our links. Thus, one must ensure that the good karma passes on only to deserving websites that are really useful to people. If not, just remember to add rel=”nofollow” tag.

Apart from the Karma metaphor, you can also see it as a positive vote. Because, just like you, there could be many linking to a particular website. This is nothing but positive vote for that target link – which increases its value in turn – because Google thinks that if many people are linking to a website, then that has to be a good one.

What do we lose by adding this attribute value?

Nothing. By adding this tag, we lose nothing. In fact, this helps us in fighting web spam in our own small way – if you look at the larger scheme of things.

Will this increase my PageRank?

Adding ‘nofollow’ attribute actually doesn’t pass any PageRank juice to the target link that you’d added.

Ponder more: PageRank sculpting

What kinds of links should be marked as rel=”nofollow”?

Any link that you feel is not a good resource for your blog reader.

Is there a way to automate the rel=”nofollow” addition to my URLs using any plugin?

There are many plugins available in WordPress plugins database that you can search and use the one you like. However, there are a couple of plugins I recommend and love. They are:

NoFollow Link WordPress plugin. Developer name: Alex Jose (Spikes)
Ultimate Nofollow WordPress plugin. Developer name: bitacre

How to add rel=”nofollow” to a hyperlink/URL manually?

By default, any hyperlink looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.thekeyponderer.com/about”>About TKP</a>

To add ‘nofollow’, just add it this way:

<a href=”http://www.thekeyponderer.com/about” rel=”nofollow”>About TKP</a>

(Just so you know, href means Hyperlink Reference).

Here’s an interesting InfoGraphic created by SearchEngineLand:

How to Create Your Own Affiliate Banners

March 22, 2015 by Arun Sarathy Leave a Comment

Here’s a situation:

DreamHost Affiliate is one of the many options to earn money online. Earlier, I have also written a very detailed guide (a long post) on how to create your own Promo Code a.k.a Coupon Code and earn money online from DreamHost at no cost for you.

Once you signup for their affiliate program you get to earn up to a maximum of $97 per sale. Along with you also get to earn sub-referral commissions when your referrals refer someone else. This is called Tier-2 commission.

However, all these things are good. But as with all rules in blogging, adding images to spread your word about your own promo codes is the key to add a little spice to your message.

If you want to use images and affiliate banners to design your announcement and promo codes, DreamHost offers their own images and affiliate banners in a zipped format which you can see after logging in to their cpanel. But what if you don’t find good variety of affiliate banners there, and what if you wanted to create your own by adding your blog logo?

That’s when I use Canva! Like the one I used above blog post title header for this post.

Canva comes to my rescue whenever I have design needs. Canva helps me to create a banner for almost every kind of need: Presentation, Twitter header, add logos, PNG images, Instagram posts, other posters.

They have also recently added (March, 2015) Blog Title category with which you can create beautiful blog title designs.

There is also this new Ads category with which you can create Facebook ads, Leaderboard ads, Skyscraper ads, Medium rectangle ads, etc.

Check out canva.com.

Actually, you can use Canva for creating any design for any platform, not just DreamHost affiliate banners. Let me know your thoughts, comments – if you know of any other valuable, almost-free-kinda-resource like Canva.