Use Google Latitude to share your location on your Website, Blog & Chat!

n an earlier post on Devils Workshop, Deepak had written about Google Latitude and how it could be used to locate your friends.

When Google Latitude was launched a couple of months ago, people from all over starting flooding Google with suggestions so that they could further improvise the service.

Keeping that in mind, Google launched two more applications today, trying to incorporate the most common request from the users-

allowing you to share your location with even more people and not just your Latitude friends.
Google Public Location Badge

clip_image002By using this application, you could now share your Google Latitude location publicly on a blog or web site.

Please note: If you enable this feature, your location will be available to everyone. It will not give you the option of choosing where and with whom you wish to share your location with.

For a maximum control over your privacy
in this case, you may:

1. Share your best available location
2. Share only your city-level location
3. Or NOT enable the badge at all.

To know how to share your location, click here.
Google Talk location status (beta)



By using this application, you could share your Google Latitude location through your status message with your friends on Google Talk and Gmail (including anyone that can already chat with you.). It works by automatically updating your status message with your current city’s name.

If you wish to change back to your custom message, you could do that anytime.

If you wish to enable this application, visit google.com/latitude/apps.

(Source: Google blog)

How to avoid Google from banning your website?

he saddest day for a webmaster is the day you wake up and find that your website isn’t showing anymore in Google
… that you have been a victim of a Google Ban.

This is the worst thing that can happen to your website, especially if you are running a business or a blog through your site.
How can I find out if my site is banned by Google?

To know this, use this code:

site: www.yoursite.com

(replace www.yoursite.com with the domain name of the site you think may be banned)

And, if you see no results on your site then maybe, it is banned by Google, or the robots.txt file is bad, or you haven’t submitted your site to Google.

See that your Robots.txt file doesn’t contain the code below:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Don’t use “Disallow: /” just replace “/” with the directory (Eg: “Disallow: /Personal” ) you want Google to not index.
If you follow this, your site will be again listed in Google, if not, it may be banned.
Here is a list of ways by which you can keep your website in Google’s good books:

* Up-time: Make sure you have the best up-time possible for your website. This means you must have reliable web hosting. If Google visits your website and it is not up, you may risk Google banning your site.
* Spam: It is the thing which no search engine loves. So don’t use spamming techniques to promote your website. This will almost definitely lead to condemnation of your website for at least 6 months. Never use “black hat” methods like doorways, hidden text or cloaking. You are only setting yourself up for disaster.
* Plagiarism: Make sure your content is original and relevant. Websites that duplicate content are punished with lower rankings and even bans. Your content should always be made for human consumption and relate to your website’s theme.
* Linking: Linking is a two way street. Not only should the links going out of your website be quality, but be certain that the links that lead to your website are from Google respected locations as well. Avoid link farms and any paid linking service. Also, excessive linking is a red flag for Google. When you add internal links on your own sites, make sure you do it in moderation and with purposeful intent.
* Cleanliness: Be sure your site is Google friendly. Build your website so that Google is able to index every page. Include a sitemap. Be sure all your pages are working and that there are no broken links
.

Don’t try to fool Google with tricky tactics. The price you will pay is far worse than the effort it takes to do things the right way!

List of Blogs by Indian Bollywood Celebrities, Politicians, etc

Blogging
fever is catching up with Indian Bollywood
celebrities, politicians. etc. Here I am posting a list of all such famous celebrities blogs.

Salman Khan & Shekhar Kapur are only serious bloggers with almost a post everyday. Many celebrities are using surprisingly strange platforms managed by some companies who don’t know about feeds and other important blogging basics. Anyway here we go…
Indian Bollywood Celebrities

* Salman Khan image
* Amir Khan
* Amitabh Bachchan image
* Karan Johar image
* Shahrukh Khan
* Shekhar Kapur image
* Ram Gopal Varma image
* Vikram Bhatt
* Bipasha basu
* Gul Panag image
* image
* Payal Rohatgi image
* Nana Patekar (Last updated in 2005)

Indian Politicians

* Lalu Prasad Yadav
* Omar Abdullah image

Of course above list is not complete but you can help by contributing to it. Specially I wanted to put some cricketers blog too, but failed to find one.

Please leave your own blog
link while leaving links to celebrities blog. And please note that this is blog-list, so fancy, flash-based sites like of Shilpa Shetty will not be considered

Watch Bollywood Movies Online for Free!

Many internet users have a misconception that movies cannot be watched online and every time they need to waste bucks on original CDs and DVDs for viewing movies. But, let me clear, there are many ways by which you can view movies for free. Though sometimes its illegal, but you can view full length movies sitting behind your monitor screen even without wasting up a single
penny. :)

For viewing movies on your home PC you may download via torrents as you can watch them as many times you want, saving a huge amount of internet bandwidth. But if you use internet from shared PCs or from Internet cafes then the second option, to view online, would be good for you. For online viewing, Life Rocks have listed 7 good websites that you can use to watch latest bollywood films. Right now I am trying to compile a list of few similar websites for other language films. If you know one, please do let us know.

Hope you have a happy movie viewing with the list of websites by Life Rocks. :-)

Google integrates Tasks into Google Calendar

All those who have been waiting for Google to incorporate Tasks into the Google calendar, there’s good news. Google announced today, that they have integrated Tasks into Google Calendar. This task list integration was a heavily requested feature by its users, and Google made sure not annoy any of them.
How does this feature work?

1. Log into a Google Calendar account.
2. Click on “Tasks” list under the left-hand top links.
3. This will open up the tasks sidebar (familiar to users of the Gmail Labs Tasks feature) with some Calendar-specific additions.

If you wish to create a task with a due date in the Calendar:

* Click on an empty space in month view or the all-day section of week view
* Select the “Task” option
* It will automatically appear on your calendar.

If you wish to attach a due date to an existing task:

* Click the right-arrow from within the task list
* Click on the calendar icon

If you wish to modify a task’s due date:

* Just drag the date to a different date, just as you would with a regular calendar event.

If you wish to mark a task completed from within Calendar:

* Just click on the task’s checkbox.

If you wish to keep track of due dates before they arrive:

* Use the new “Sort by due date” feature which is available in the “Actions menu” at the bottom of your task list.

Although this cannot be a replacement for high-powered to-do apps like Remember the Milk, but for those who are just fine with simple text files, this basic calendar-integrated task seems alright.