After done with the moving to a hosting provider, next I was trying to overhaul my blog with the link structure. Puzzled on where to start from. People enter into my blog via URL. Hence decided to tweak the URL.  So, it’s time to decide upon what link structure I should chose. And before that, is this link structure is really a necessary stuff to tweak up? If you ask with a SEO expert, he/she would pour a rain of tips, problems if you don’t make the links looks SEO optimized. And mostly Google oriented optimizations. But sometimes, I used to think, Is Google going to rely-upon this tiny URL part in the entire web indexing operation. If you look into any of the blog which has a content juice, you wont find a proper URL structure. I will give you a lots of example.

Before that what is an URL, and why everyone in this world is so much bothered about it?

People who use web knows very well about URL. And there are quite lots of topic around how to build a better URL. CMS software provides plug-ins, tools to build good URLs.  So, why is that these folks worried much about building a great looking pretty URL? I don’t want to talk much on what is URL, Wikip can give you enough information about URL. I will just quickly discuss about the part of URL and which one I’m speaking about. Consider this URL,

http://www.mymindleaks.com/blog/archives/object-oriented-programming-–-encapsulation-is-not-just-hiding-data.html

An URL has the following parts.

1. http -> protocol
2. www -> subdomain
3. mymindleaks -> domain name
4. com ->  Top Level Domain ( TLD )
5. blog/archives/object…data.html -> page / filename
6. .html -> file extension
7. And if you find anything after “?” -> CGI params

Check out here to  what I’m talking about in a visual stuff.

Now, in this post, I’m talking about the 5th part, “/blog/archives/object-oriented…data.html“. which is the page / filename part of the URL.

A quick research on URLs and Page rank.

Can anyone fool Google by writing an url as “10-tips-to-make-you-rich” and the entire content of the URL teaches you “10-tips-to-spend-a-lot”??? Will the Google still fetch the URL “10-tips-to-make-you-rich” when someone tries to search for “how to become rich” ?

When I tried checking the PageRank of the few famous blog over internet, via http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php , I could infer the following.

This results makes you wonder? Even me. Professional bloggers like Darren Rowse’s Problogger, John Chow, who have million of hits, lots of articles on tweaks, blogging, money making have a less PR rating compared to the simple-plain-old but content ful Norvig or Xahlee’s blog. If you look at Norvig’s blog, you might find URL which aren’t descriptive like [ http://norvig.com/paip.html -> Paradigms of AI Programming]. The Xahlee’s blog have unicode chars in his blog and his blog topic is bit diversified ( computers, math, and little bit of decent porn, yeah ).  Google isn’t that dumb folks.

Even my blog has pretty URLs, and I’ve spent relatively quite amount of time in thinking about URL for my blog., but that’s all purely to give the reader a better idea of what a post is all about. To me, a URL is just a tiny part that makes the user understand what is all the content is about without reading through the content. Relying on this probably might give you a fraction of what SEO’s call, the page rank juice.

Today I was curious to know about the list of bugs that has occurred for the Firefox browser over all these time. And the count of bugs received and fixed made me surprise about the development at Mozilla. Bugs are important players in any development projects. Hence bugs determines the robustness of the software. But still if a strong developer team available, then more robust the software as all the bugs will be fixed and hence more robust is the software.

Below diagram displays the defect segmentation based on the operating systems. I’ve grouped all the outdated and less used Windows OSes ( Win 95, Win 98, Win NT etc ) as Windows ( others ), Similarly for Mac Os and Linux and Unix Versions. You can see that Windows XP based Firefox browser has a huge number of defects. I’m amazed with the huge number of defect logged for Firefox in Win XP. This actually shows that there is a huge user base for Firefox in Windows XP and software is much less stable compared to other operating systems ( though this is an hypothetical assumption ).

Here is the bugs segmentation based on components of the Firefox. Bookmarks & History, Tabbed browser tops in defects. Developer would be much interested in this chart as it involves a kind-of technical details. Also, I didn’t include the General defects which counts more than 19,000+, because of the charting technicalities. The other bars becomes very smaller if you plot the General defects. It was a small in-sight for me when I saw “Session Restore” is a seperate component, which got a revamp recently in the Firefox 3.5 beta release.

If you are more curious in such things, try digging the Bugzilla database and find more interesting fact and do ping me.

Note: I’ve taken the “Unverified / Unreported ” bugs into consideration for this statistics purpose.

Firefox 3.5 beta has improved a lots features and added few stuffs too. One of the thing which impressed me is the “Restore Session”. In the older firefox, once you session crashes, and you re-launch the firefox, it will popup this.

And it will open up all the browser tabs in your previous session, which is very annoying sometimes.

Now the revamp in Firefox 3.5 beta has made an improvement in the Restore session. Now it got smarter and lists down all the websites that you were browsing in your previous session. And you can deselect the website that you dont want to launch in the current session.

This improvement will actually help you to get rid of the site which caused you the crash previously.

Source: bigocean

You are living a life in Internet and you are using a lots of web-application, services via Internet. But still there are much better services comming up and we tend to subscribe and start using it. But, are you ever read the Terms of Service ( shortly ToS ) of the service you are using it? Facebook has faced serious concerns over it’s change in ToS. Many of it’s users are not happy with it’s change in ToS. So the question is, why does a Infrequently read ToS bothers much? Whats in there in the ToS.

Ok. Lets begin with knowing about what is terms of service.

What is Terms of Service ( ToS )?

Terms of Service are the rules written by the Web-service providers ( eg: Google, Yahoo, Facebook ) to make the usage of the application in a reasonable way. Example, if you look at the point 8 in Google Docs ToS ,

8.3 Google reserves the right (but shall have no obligation) to pre-screen, review, flag, filter, modify, refuse or remove any or all Content from any Service. For some of the Services, Google may provide tools to filter out explicit sexual content. These tools include the SafeSearch preference settings (see http://www.google.com/help/customize.html#safe). In addition, there are commercially available services and software to limit access to material that you may find objectionable.

Now this restricts users who are about to upload the illegal / sexual contents. Now this forces the users to use the service in a resonable way.

Why the companies using it?

Companies are using ToS service for the following reasons

1. To provide reasonable service to it’s customers.

Online services company runs web application for massive user base. The companies should provide reasonable amount of service to their users. They promise this in the ToS.

2. Proper utilization of service by users

Companies running those web application will be spending for Server, Bandwidth, and other computational and non-computational resources.So, the user should access those resources in a reasonable and optimal way.

Eg: Google will not allow you to upload files of size more than 500 KB or Presentations upto 10 MB.

So by enforcing this rule, the companies make sure that they are able to provide good service to everyone. Think, if the google allows to upload files of size 2 GB at a single shot, not all the users will have the same bandwith to upload the files, hence will convert into slow servers, unhappy customers, then loose business.

3. Protect themselves from legal issues

Companies will write up the ToS in such a way that they are most protected via the legal issues that might face from it’s customers. Recently Twitter has been sued due to it’s fault on it’s service ( but twitter has responded back  accordingly )

How to keep track of the Terms of service?

So, if you have ever seen a ToS page of any service it runs for miles and sure anyone wouldn’t have  enough patience to read/glance it even. A online service TOSBack tracks about 42 companies ToS and it’s changes. You can check what does a company tells in it’s ToS and what it has changed recently. Based on this you can use the service accordingly.

Screenshot of TOSBack displaying difference in YouTube’s ToS

I Came across an interesting tip for Google Book. If you are having a lots of book and you arent not able to type in all your ISBN number  and need to keep track of them using Google’s book service. Here is a quick tip.

Google’s Software Engineer Matt demonstrate a tip using a USB powered bar code reader.

1. Just login into your Google account.
2. Google Book
3. Goto My Library
4. Click Import
5. Power your USB bar code reader
6. Scan the bar code behind your book
7. And thats it. Done.

Google Book service recogonises the ISBN number and adds the book into your library.

Power your USB scanner, scan the bar code of your books and import  into your library.

Once you have build your library, you can make use of Google book services to work on them. You will have benefits like

One big advantage of having your You don’t have to go manually search for all the respective books for the pages. Google Book will search for the text in your library and will list down the pages where you can find the