GWT Blog – GlobalWorldTech

In our earlier posts we had explained what is cloud computing and types of Cloud computing and if you haven’t shifted to Cloud computing and still wondering why you should use that? Well, here are few things which might make you think otherwise and shift you in using Cloud services.

Elasticity

This is the most important attribute of the Cloud. You might start running your application on just a single server. But in no time, Cloud Computing enables you to scale your application to run on 100′s of servers. Once the traffic and usage of your application decreases, you can scale down to 10′s of servers. All this happens almost instantly and the best thing is your application and your customers don’t even realize that. This dynamic capability to scale up and scale down is called Elasticity. Elasticity brings an “illusion of Infinity”. Though nothing is infinite in this world, your application can get any number of resources as it demands. This is the biggest unique selling point of the Cloud. Now, think of web hosting. When you want to add another server to your web application, your hoster has to manually provision that for you. Adding additional servers and configuring the network topology introduces additional time lag that your business cannot afford. Most of the Cloud Computing vendors offer an intuitive way of manipulating your server configuration and topology. Elasticity is the single most important attribute of the Cloud.

Pay-By-Use

Elasticity and Pay-By-Use attributes go hand in hand. When you are scaling up your application by adding more resources, you know how much it is going to cost you. Pay-By-Use is a boon for the startups. As an entrepreneur, you got to balance your investment between human resources and IT resources. The analogy that I typically use is that of DTH TV subscription. During the season of Cricket World Cup, you would want to subscribe to the sports channels and unsubscribe that moment the event is over. With Pay-By-Use, you can subscribe and unsubscribe to the IT infrastructure based on your needs and you only pay for what you use. This is the most optimal way of spending your IT budget.

Self Service

When you are able to enjoy the capability of scaling up and scaling down and only pay for what you use, you never want to wait for someone in the datacenter to add an additional server to your application. Cloud can deliver its promise only when there is Self Service. Through this, you can control the resources all by yourself without an intermediary. When you add a new CPU core, a server instance or add extra storage, you do it by yourself by using the Console offered by the Cloud provider. This results in reduction in IT support and maintenance. Today most of the organizations have dedicated IT teams to provision a new machine, storage, collaboration portal and mailboxes as a part of on-boarding the new employees. Through Self Service, a fairly non-technical person can achieve these tasks and you don‟t need certified system administrators to do this. For example, when you sign up with Google Apps, it is very simple and intuitive to configure the mailboxes for the employees. With more and more applications moving the Cloud, Self Service becomes the preferred way of configuring and managing the IT infrastructure.

Earlier this year, Google has launched new editors for documents and spreadsheets on Google Docs, built on a code base designed to improve collaboration and take advantage of the latest advances in the technology. These improvements to Google Docs are designed to help businesses to move to the cloud faster and be more productive than ever before. If you’ve never tried web-based documents, spreadsheets and presentations, you can instantly take a test drive at docs.google.com/demo.

In this post, we will describes how Google Docs uses an algorithm called operational transformation to merge edits in real time.

In documents, basically, there are three types of changes: inserting text, deleting text, and applying styles to a range of text. When someone edits a document, they’re not modifying the underlying characters that represents the document. Instead they are appending their change to the end of the revision log. To display a document, Google replay the revision log from the beginning.

To see what these changes look like, suppose that a document edited by John and Luiz initially reads; EASY AS 123 and if John changes the document to EASY AS ABC, then he is making four changes:

Collaboration is not quite as simple as sending these changes to the other editors because people get out of sync. Suppose as John is typing, Luiz (represented by yellow) begins to change his document to IT’S EASY AS 123. He first inserts the I and the T at the beginning of the document:

Suppose Luiz naively applies John’s first change {DeleteText @9-11}:

He deleted the wrong characters! Luiz had two characters at the beginning of the doc that John was never aware of. So the location of John’s change was wrong relative to Luiz’s version of the document. To avoid this problem, Luiz must transform John’s changes and make them relative to his local document. In this case, when Luiz receives changes from John he needs to know to shift the changes over by two characters to adjust for the IT that Luiz added. Once he does this transformation and applies John’s first change, he gets:

The algorithm that Google use to handle these shifts is called operational transformation (OT). If OT is implemented correctly, it guarantees that once all editors have received all changes, everyone will be looking at the same version of the document.

The OT logic in documents must handle all of the different ways that InsertText, DeleteText, and ApplyStyle changes can be paired and transformed against each other. The example above showed DeleteText being transformed against InsertText.

Collaboration in Google Docs consists of sending changes from one editor to the server, and then to the other editors. Each editor transforms incoming changes so that they make sense relative to the local version of the document. Google Docs can support up to 50 simultaneous editors, and documents let you see other people’s changes character-by-character as they type.

Source: Google Docs

When it comes to business – and most importantly social media – measurement is still a vast, ongoing discussion that’s fraught with questions. Many of those questions start at the very beginning: How do I know I’m setting the right goals? As we’ve said many times before, the right goals for you are going to be heavily dependent upon your business. But, what we can talk about are the underlying reasons that most goals exist: to solve a problem.

One of you will undoubtedly point out – and you’d be right – that goals can often be set in order to create or capitalize upon new opportunities. But when you break down that opportunity into it’s pieces, what you’re again left with is a set of problems or challenges that need to be solved in order to put you on the path toward that opportunity. So when we say problem, think in terms of “thing that needs solving” versus a heavily negative connotation. Problems aren’t always bad things.

In a business context, and specifically social media, most external goals seek to solve problems in one of three constraints:

Money (M): there’s either not enough coming in, or there’s too much going out, or both

Attention (A): either the attention you have is the wrong kind, or you need more of the kind of attention you do want. You might want that for brand purposes, or even something like recruitment.

Longevity (L): you’re looking for more customer loyalty, or more referrals from your customers or the community at large.

Just about any goal you have can eventually tie back to one of these overarching business needs. Also, keep in mind that you can rarely if ever do all three of these at once with a consistent and equal level of effectiveness. You’ve got to prioritize your needs, and decide which one is going to serve as the backbone your social media efforts.

Well, Attention leads to money leads to longevity. They’re all dependent upon one another for survival. Right? What your social media goals are likely to be addressing, however, is the movement in between those stops on the business cycle. How are you moving people from zero to attention? From thinking you suck to thinking you’re pretty okay? From liking you to purchase? From purchase to loving you forever and ever and telling all their friends?

If you’re a business owner, you should also claim your Google Places listing so that you can edit and update the listing that appears on Google, Google Maps and GOOG-411. Verifying your free business listing allows you to not only ensure that accurate information appears on the Place page for your business, but also enhance your online presence by adding photos, videos and even real-time updates like weekly specials to your Place page.

Claim your Google Places listing

• Claim your Google Places listing by adding it at http://www.google.com/places or by clicking “Business Owner?” on the Place page for your business.
• Enter all your business details i.e. address, working hours, payment acceptance mode, logo ..etc.
• Verify your listing by PIN (postcard or phone). Within an hour, click the “See your listing on Google Maps” link in your account to see your listing’s Place page.
• If incorrect information is appearing in your listing, there are a number of different ways to let google know and get the information corrected.

If you notice something that’s incorrect on Google Maps, chances are it’s either an issue with the map data or with the business listing data.

Edit business listing information directly on Maps
If you see incorrect information appearing on Google Maps listings, you can make updates to listings directly on Google Maps. Once google review your edits, it will update all its listing within several hours.

If you are the business owner but have yet to claim your listing, don’t delay any further and add your business listing now.

As a critical component of any IT solution, the choice of OS has both business and technical value for an enterprise. Sometime back we wrote about how Open Source Softwares are gaining popularity, in this post we will write few points about Open Source Operating System and the steps you can take to help ensure your success with an open-source OS.

What is Operating System (OS)?
The operating system (OS), a collection of programs that serves as the interface between the hardware and the applications running on that hardware. The OS manages all the other programs the enterprise uses as well as the allocation and use of hardware resources such as the CPU, memory, and hard disk drive.

Why open source for operating systems?
Open-source OS’s present a low-cost, secure, highly interoperable contrast to proprietary systems. The open-source model for OS development spurs innovation beyond the four walls of a company, in sharp contrast to the high-cost, high-maintenance, proprietary development approach behind systems like Microsoft Windows, AIX, or HP-UX. Opensource OS licensing costs can be significantly lower than their closed-source equivalents, especially for customers wanting a full-featured distribution on high-end systems. Additionally, open-source OS’s that run on multiple platforms and work with a variety of applications from many sources make vendor lock-in less likely — and companies with special needs can customize specific open-source OS modules.

Things to keep in mind while deploying Open Source OS:

• Ensure that the open-source product you are considering has an established track record. Nobody wants to be the first customer for an OS. Everyone wants to know the platform already has an ecosystem around it and that it’s ready for production grade usage. If an operating system doesn’t run on your hardware or doesn’t run the leading-edge software you need, it’s useless.



• Determine whether the OS is both maintainable and cost-effective. It’s important to know whether the OS has a life-cycle around it or whether service runs out in two years, leaving the datacenter on its own. And can the OS can be managed efficiently or will it need to be replaced every year and require the retraining of staff?
• Ensure that the product has a substantial following and an active open-source community that supports it. Size and momentum are critical success factors for an open-source product to ensure it attracts ongoing maintenance and support.
• Be sure to acquire the product from an authorized source. Where source code is available, there is a possibility of sourcing products from unauthorized sources.
• For this reason, enterprises should acquire open-source products directly from a vendor that vouches for the technology or from the primary online repository for a particular product.
• Remember that many enterprises use a mixed environment so they can recognize the benefits of open source while leveraging their existing IT investments and expertise. Moving to open source need not be an “either/or” scenario. The beauty of open source is that it easily co-exists with current environments. New IT projects are a great way to get started with open source. Acquisition flexibility can result in a mix of open-source software, packaged software, and custom code.

Google App Engine is a platform to deploy and run web applications on Google‟s infrastructure. It comes with a dynamic web server with full support for common web technologies. It offers a transactional data store for persisting data. Developers can integrate their web application with Google Accounts through the APIs. The biggest advantage of running web applications on Google App Engine is the scalability that it offers. Your web application will be as scalable as some of the popular Google services like search.

Google App Engine (GAE) currently supports Python and Java environments. Java developers will be able to deploy and run JSPs and Servlets while Python developers can use standard library. Since GAE runs in a sandbox, not all operations are possible. For example, opening and listening on sockets is disabled. The applications running on GAE live in a sandbox that provides multi-tenancy and isolation across applications.

Let‟s take a closer look at some of the services provided by Google App Engine:
Java Runtime – GAE is based on Java 6 VM and Servlet 2.5 Container. The datastore can be accessed through the JDO/JPA API. It supports JSR 107 for MemCache API. Mail can be accessed through javax.mail API. Javax.net.URLConnection provides access to URLFetch service. Apart from core Java language, other dynamic languages based on Java like JRuby and Scala.

Python Runtime – GAE comes with a rich set of API and tools for developing web applications based on Python. It supports Python 2.5.2 and Python 3 is being considered for the future releases. You can also take advantage of a wide variety of mature libraries and frameworks for Python web application development, such as Django. The Python environment provides rich Python APIs for the datastore, Google Accounts, URL fetch, and email services. App Engine also provides a simple Python web application framework called webapp to make it easy to start building applications.

Datastore – App Engine comes with a very powerful data storage that can scale dynamically. It also features a query engine and support for transactions. The datastore is different from traditional relational databases. The objects stored in datastore are called “Entities” which are “schemaless”. These entities have a set of properties that can be queried using a SQL like grammar like GQL or Google Query Language. The datastore is strongly consistent and supports optimistic concurrency control.

User Authentication – One of the advantages of using GAE is its integration with Google Accounts. This empowers the developers to leverage Google‟s secure authentication engine for their custom applications. While a user is signed in to the application, the app can access the user’s email address, as well as a unique user ID. The app can also detect whether the current user is an administrator, making it easy to implement admin-only areas of the app.

Setting the value of the “rel” attribute of a link to “nofollow” will tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn’t be followed or pass your page’s reputation to the pages linked to. Nofollowing a link is adding rel=”nofollow” inside of the link’s anchor tag.

If you link to a site that you don’t trust and don’t want to pass your site’s reputation to, use nofollow

When would this be useful? If your site has a blog with public commenting turned on, links within those comments could pass your reputation to pages that you may not be comfortable vouching for. Blog comment areas on pages are highly susceptible to comment spam. Nofollowing these useradded links ensures that you’re not giving your page’s hard-earned reputation to a spammy site. Many blogging software packages automatically nofollow user comments, but those that don’t can most likely be manually edited to do this.

This advice also goes for other areas of your site that may involve user-generated content, such as guestbooks, forums, shout-boards, referrer listings, etc. If you’re willing to vouch for links added by third parties (e.g. if a commenter is trusted on your site), then there’s no need to use nofollow on links; however, linking to sites that Google considers spammy can affect the reputation of your own site. Some more tips on avoiding comment spam, like using CAPTCHAs and turning on comment moderation.

A comment spammer leaves a message on one of our posts, hoping to get some of our site’s reputation

Another use of nofollow is when you’re writing content and wish to reference a website, but don’t want to pass your reputation on to it. For example, imagine that you’re writing a blog post on the topic of comment spamming and you want to call out a site that recently comment spammed your blog. You want to warn others of the site, so you include the link to it in your content; however, you certainly don’t want to give the site some of your reputation from your link. This would be a good time to use nofollow.

Lastly, if you’re interested in nofollowing all of the links on a page, you can use “nofollow” in your robots meta tag, which is placed inside the tag of that page’s HTML. This method is written as below, whereas more details on robots meta tag can be found here.

Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by search engines. Also, it can create easier, “friendlier” URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words.

URLs like these can be confusing and unfriendly. Users would have a hard time reciting the URL from memory or creating a link to it. Also, users may believe that a portion of the URL is unnecessary, especially if the URL shows many unrecognizable parameters. They might leave off a part, breaking the link.

Good practices for URL structure

• Use words in URLs – URLs with words that are relevant to your site’s content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be more willing to link to them.

Avoid:

• using lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters and session IDs.
• choosing generic page names like “page1.html”.
• using excessive keywords like “baseball-cards-baseballcards.htm”.
• Create a simple directory structure – Use a directory structure that organizes your content well and is easy for visitors to know where they’re at on your site. Try using your directory structure to indicate the type of content found at that URL.

Avoid:

• having deep nesting of subdirectories like “…/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/dir6/ page.html”.
• using directory names that have no relation to the content in them.
• Provide one version of a URL to reach a document – To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this could split the reputation of that content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages. If you do find that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs, setting up a 301 redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a good solution for this.

Avoid:

• having pages from subdomains and the root directory (e.g. “domain.com/page.htm” and “sub.domain.com/page.htm”) access the same content.
• mixing www. and non-www. versions of URLs in your internal linking structure.
• using odd capitalization of URLs (many users expect lower-case URLs and remember them better).

Google is good at crawling all types of URL structures, even if they’re quite complex, but spending the time to make your URLs as simple as possible for both users and search engines can help. Some people try to achieve this by rewriting their dynamic URLs to static ones; while Google is fine with this, we’d like to note that this is an advanced procedure and if done incorrectly, could cause crawling issues with your site. To learn even more about good URL structure, we recommend this Webmaster Help Center page on creating Google-friendly URLs.

Lastly, remember that the URL to a document is displayed as part of a search result in Google, below the document’s title and snippet. Like the title and description, words in the URL on the search result appear in bold if they appear in the user’s query.

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about the pages on your site. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S—is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

How to add a Sitemap?

• Go to Google Webmaster Tools.
• Sign in with your Google Account.
• Click Add a Site.
• Enter the site URL and verify it by uploading an html file on the root folder.
• Once site is verified, it will then appear on your dashboard. Click on it.
• Click Site Configuration -> Sitemaps from the Left side bar.
• Now you can submit a Sitemap by clicking on “Submit a Sitemap”.

Need help in creating a Sitemap, click here

Though Google doesn’t give guarantee to crawl or index all of your URLs, however, Sitemap explain all about your site i.e. which pages are the most important ones and how often will they change. Google use that data listed in your Sitemap to learn about your site’s structure, which eventually help in crawling your site in a better way.

Do you need self-hosted analytics software? In some cases, particularly with intranets and other behind-the-firewall web services, running your own internal analytics application is the only way to access to usage data. In other cases, company or agency policy may prohibit the use of hosted analytics.

But whatever the reason, if you need self-hosted web analytics software, you need Urchin. Check out these new features:

• 64-bit CPU support
• Parallel log processing
• 1000 domains/unlimited logs
• 100% new UI
• Advanced Segmentation
• Event Tracking
• Permalinks
• API v. 2

Urchin and Google Analytics side-by-side comparison

Urchin 7’s new Site Summary report gives you key bite-size takeaways about your site’s traffic

Urchin 7’s new Dashboard view

Urchin 7 features a new Permalinks capability, making it easy to share specific reports with specific settings/filters applied

For more urchin features, click here