1. The name you choose has to be at least 5 characters in length.
2. The name can contain periods (.) or numbers.
3. The name cannot be changed once it is set.
4. You own the URL for life.
5. The URL cannot be transferred to another user.
6. Cannot contain generic keywords like “pizza”, “flower” etc
7. Anyone who registered on FaceBook after May 31, 2009 has to wait until June 28, 2009 to get their vanity URL. FaceBook did this to prevent squatters from creating new accounts to grab a URL.
8. FaceBook Fan Pages should have a minimum of 1000 followers/fans in order to qualify for a Vanity URL.
9. The above restriction on minimum number of fans or followers will be lifted on Jun 28, 2009.
10. Can you get a vanity URL for an unpublished FaceBook page? If you know the answer please let me know.

If you are unable to change your Twitter Background, you are not alone! Numerous people have complained that they face various problems in setting their Twitter background. Some common fixes to these problems include the following:

1. Change the name of the background image file if you have already uploaded a background image with the same file name. If you do not change the name of the new image file, Twitter might assume that the new file is same as the old one. This trick worked for me!

2. If you already have a background image, you might want to clear it by pressing the button “Don’t use a background image” and press “Save Changes” to clear the existing background image. After this try to upload your new background image.

3. Try setting a Theme instead of a background image. After the Theme has been set, upload the background image (replacing the the Theme).

4. For other solutions, please read

Cannot Upload Twitter Background - RESOLVED

I have seen some bloggers raise concerns in using Feedburner on their blogs for RSS subscriptions. The primary concern being the fact that Feedburner is a third party service. These bloggers fear that by using a third party service they might loose all of their subscriptions if the service ceases to exist. While this is a valid concern you should not worry too much about it. Feedburner provides a number of advantages over your regular blog RSS feed.

Benefits of using Feedburner

1. Feedburner is owned by Google, a reputable company that has said it will redirect Feedburner feed to your own feed if you choose to leave Feedburner. Therefore by leaving Feedburner you will not loose your RSS subscriptions.
2. Feed burner provides free email subscriptions. There are other email subscription tools such as Aweber, but, you have to pay a charge for using their service.
3. Feedburner provides vital statistics such as number of subscribers, how many times a post has been viewed etc.
4. Feedburner ensures that your RSS feed is made compatible to all types of RSS readers.
5. Feedburner allows customization of RSS feed. For example, the ability to add dynamic elements to your feed footer.

Using the Feedsmith Plug-in to redirect your blog feed to Feedburner.

Feedsmith is a simple plug-in that will allow you to redirect your blog’s RSS feed to Feedburner. This plug-in is especially useful when your blog template retrieves the RSS feed using the function <?php bloginfo(’rss2_url’); ?> (rss2_url is a built in Wordpress variable).

In the above case you do not want to change the blog template code and hard code your Feedburner URL. So your best bet is to use the Feedsmith plug-in. Using the Feedsmith plug-in is really simple. Once the plug-in is installed and activated, Click on the Settings tab (or menu if you are using Wordpress 2.7 and above) and click on FeedBurner tab/menu to view the Feedsmith plug-in page.

In the plug-in page simply fill your Feedburner address in the first text field. You can also fill in the Feedburner Comments Feed address in the 2nd text field, but this is optional. Once you are done save the changes.

From now on whenever someone requests your blog’s RSS Feed, the Feedsmith plug-in will redirect the request to your Feedburner URL.

During the early days of blogging when you comment on blogs the back link to your website improved your search engine rankings. For example, if you comment on a blog with a higher Page Rank, Google would pass some credit to your website. Many web users who saw commenting as a viable option to increase their search engine ranking, started to abuse the system. This led to the creation of the nofollow attribute.

The nofollow attribute basically tells a search engine to not to give any credit to the hypertext link. Search engines may follow the link to discover your website, but, they will not pass any credit to your website.

But there is a community of users who still believe passing on some link love to fellow bloggers and commentators is the right thing to do. Blogs that pass on some link love are informally called as dofollow blogs.

You can try to improve your search engine ranking by commenting on these blogs. Please note that I am not proposing this practice as a SEO strategy to build back links to your website. What I am saying is to be smart when you comment.  For example, there are two blogs in the same topic. Blog A is a nofollow blog and Blog B is a dofollow blog. I would be inclined to comment on Blog B rather than Blog A.

So how do you find dofollow blogs?

1. Use SEO for Firefox Plug-in

SEO for Firefox is a handy plug-in that will work with your Firefox browser. Once the plug-in is installed when you view a web page, all nofollow links will appear with a red background. Please refer to the screen shot below. It shows the comments section in my blog. Note that all the comment links show up with a red background. This is because my comment links are nofollow links.

2. Look for websites that contain “U Comment, I Follow” images.

A number of dofollow blogs use the above image. Many dofollow blogs use the same standard ALT text of “U Comment, I Follow”.  So the trick is to search for this ALT text in Google image search. Please note that you have to use double quotes to get better results. Using this technique you will come across a lot of dofollow blogs.

3. Look at dofollow directories

There are dofollow blog directories on the Internet. You can use such directories to find dofollow blogs by subject area. DofollowBlogs is one example of such a directory. Please note that these directories may not be up-to-date. For example, if the blog owner recently changed his blog from dofollow to nofollow you might be misled.

Finally, I would like to reiterate the point I made earlier. Do not comment on dofollow blogs purely to gain some SEO benefits. Only comment on blogs that you are genuinely interested in. During my search for dofollow blogs I came a across a very good blog on graphic and logo design. The name of the blog is LimeShot. Now I am a reader of this blog and I am genuinely  interested  in the contents. Whenever I comment on this blog, I get some link love too!

If you do not want to show specific Google ads from your blog you could use the “Competitive Ad Filter” that can be used to block ads from specific URLs. For example, you could specify to block ads from example.com or blog.example.com.

While this feature is handy it may cause problems if you have multiple sites. For example, in my blog (TechThinker.com) I would like to see Google ads related to the topic of blogging. But in my wife’s new blog I do not want to see any Google ads related to blogging. My wife’s blog is called “BabyTipsBlog” and on the front page of this blog Google ads relating to the topic of blogging are displayed. I think this is happening because the word “blog” is part of the domain name as well as the blog name.

If I try to block blogging related ads from my wife’s blog (using the Competitive Ads Filter) I will end up blocking these ads on my blog as well because both the blogs share the same Adsense publisher Id.

From the above example, you can see that using the Competitive Ad Filter could cause conflicts if you have multiple websites or blogs.

The remedy to the above problem is to use section targeting. Using section targeting you can specify which sections in your page should be given importance by Google. You can also specify which sections should be ignored.

Here’s a code snippet that shows you how to use section targeted Google ads.

<html>
<head>
…
</head>
<body>

…

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
Adsense will consider this ection to be very important.
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

…

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
Adsense will ignore this section.
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

…

</body>
</html>

Using section targeting you can show more relevant ads on your webpage. Showing relevant ads will naturally increase your click through rate resulting in higher revenue.

On average an Internet user spends only a couple of seconds previewing an article or a blog post. During these crucial seconds the user scans through your article to decide whether it is worth a read.

When the users scan through your article they are essentially looking at 3 main elements in the article. These elements are heading, sub heading and bullet points. These three elements give the user an overall idea about your article.

In this post, I look at Headings and provide you with 3 simple tips to write a catchy heading.

Tip 1 - Question style headings

Write your heading in the form of a question that can be easily answered with either a “YES” or “NO”. For example, “Are you making a six figure income from your blog?” Not every one makes a six figure income by blogging so the reader will be curious to read your article.

Tip 2 – Fear of being left out

Many people in this world behave like a herd of animals. They feel comfortable in doing what others are doing. In a herd, if one animal starts to walk in a particular direction the rest follow the leader. As humans we always want to belong to a group and we feel secured while we are with the group. The moment we feel that the group is leaving us, we try to catch up as quickly as we can because we do not want to be left alone.

You can use this basic human behavior to write attractive headings. For example, “9 out of 10 drivers in California have a GPS system, do you own one?” In this heading you are capitalizing on the fear of being left alone. When people realize that they are the only ones who do not have a GPS system, they decide to buy one.

Tip 3 - Creating a fantasy world

There are lot of day dreamers among us and they have their own fantasy world. Some want to live in a house beside the beach and others may dream of owning a Lamborghini. By creating a headline that fits their fantasy world you can easily grab the attention of the reader.

For example, consider the heading “Picture a 4 hour work week for the same pay”. Many of us are sick and tired of our 9 to 5 jobs and dream to work few hours and get the same pay. The above heading will catch the attention of those folks who dream about achieving financial independence without working too hard.

These are my tips for writing a catchy heading. Do you have more tips? What is the best heading that you ever wrote? Feel free to share in the comments section.

The Twitter universe is flooded with zillions of tools and applications. In this post I give you 13 tools that you can use to manage your Twitter followings and followers. All of the tools in the list below are web based tools. This means you do not have to install any software. Please note that I have taken some information straight from the tool website. I did this on purpose to accurately describe the functionality of that tool.

1. Friend Or Follow

Friend Or Follow can be used to answer 2 simple questions.

(1)Who are you following that’s not following you back?

(2)Who’s following you that you’re not following back?

2.Twitter Karma

Twitter Karma displays a full list of your followings and followers and indicates whether the person is a following, follower or both. Using Twitter Karma you can bulk follow, bulk unfollow and bulk block.

3. Un Tweeps

Un Tweeps is a nifty tool to unfollow people who have not posted in a while. If a person is not active in Twitter any more, it is better to unfollow the person to maintain a healthy following:follower ratio.  Un Tweeps allows you to do bulk unfollow as well.

4.Tweet Later

Tweet Later allows you to send scheduled Twitter messages. It also includes the ability to auto follow people (i.e you automatically follow everyone who follows you).

5. Mr. Tweet

Mr. Tweet helps you easily build meaningful relationships by looking through your network and tweets. It provides you the following information:

1. Suggest good people and followers you are missing out on

2. Recommend you to enthusiastic users relevant to you

3. Regularly update useful stats of your Twitter usage

All you have to do is to follow Mr Tweet on Twitter!

6. Does Follow

A simple tool to find out whether person A is following Person B.

7. Twitoria

Twitoria finds your friends that haven’t tweeted in a long time so you can give them the boot!

8. Qwitter

Qwitter e-mails you when someone stops following you on Twitter. Do not worry when a few people leave you. Do not take this personally. But if a large percentage of followers suddenly leave you, then you might want to check your recent tweets. Did you offend anyone?

9. Twalala

Get ready to take control of your Twitter stream. Twalala is a client for Twitter that allows you to control what you see, and more importantly, what you don’t see in your Twitter stream.

10. My Cleenr

My Cleenr is a unique way to sort your friends by their last tweets. It allows you to get rid off all the inactive and useless accounts that you are following!

11. Twitter Less

Twitter Less tells you who stops following you and graphs your follower history over time, making this info available in a variety of useful views.

12. Just Tweet It

Just Tweet It. is a directory where you can add your Twitter profile under a specific topic or category (example DIY/Home Improvement). You can use this directory to find Twitter users with similar interests.

13. Less Friends

Another service (like FriendOrFollow) to find whether your followers are following you back.

Do you know any other web based Twitter Tools to manage your followings and followers? Please share them in the comments section. If you found this article useful, please Re-Tweet it using the link below.

Thank you.

Photo Credit: Holland Fabric House’s photostream

Nowadays finding a good domain name is very difficult. Therefore, when ever we see a good domain name available for registration we register it immediately even though we do not plan to do anything with the domain name.

As a result you end up with dozens of domain names idling without a proper website. Even though you have no use for this domain names in the near future, you still may want to keep them for future projects or to sell them for a higher price.

Therefore, many people park their domain names to generate some revenue to cover their domain renewal costs. But, parked domain names have a number of problems. First of all, the parked webpage is full of ads and ads only. As a result parked pages do not have much credibility. Most of the users on the Internet can easily identify a parked domain page. They leave the parked website instantly without clicking any links or advisements. Secondly, only a small portion on the advertisement revenue is shared with you. The rest of the money goes to your parking provider and the networks that provide the ad service. Thirdly the parked pages do not have much content or keywords and therefore they are less attractive to search engines.

There are services that can solve the above problems by providing a value added parking service. I like to call the added value services as “Valet Parking of Domain Names”. WhyPark.com and DomainEmbarking.com are two examples of such services. The basic features of these services are as follows:

1.    You point your domain name DNS settings to the service
2.    You choose the keywords and the theme for your domain
3.    The service will automatically create a website and generate the content for you
4.    You can also place your ads on the newly created website

WhyPark.com is a paid service. You pay 99$ to park 100 domains while DomainEmbarking.com is a free service.

Now that your domain names have good content websites, search engines will index many pages. Your website also looks credible, making it more appealing to users.

So how do these services get their content? In the case of WhyPark.com, it provides a syndication service allowing bloggers and news publishers to push their content to the thousands of parked domain names websites. The content provider in this instance will be rewarded with a one-way back link from these parked websites to their own blogs.

Even though I really like this concept and it looks like a win-win situation for parked domain name owners and content creators, I have some concerns regarding the content in the parked websites. If the content is generated based on keywords, most likely the domain names with the same keywords are likely to contain the same content. This could create duplicate content among domain name competing for the same keywords. Initially Google will index all your pages and you may get a good page rank. But, as Google realizes that the pages are duplicates it will start to penalize you.

But this should not be much of a concern if you plan to sell the domain names. But if you plan to use your domain name for a future project, you may want to give some consideration regarding duplicate content and its potential effect on the page rank of your domain name.

I really like this concept and would like to give one of these services a try, but, before that I want to clarify my concerns. Anyone who has used this service please share your experiences.

Photo Credit : Tadson’s photostream

When you comment on blogs, you are required to enter your email address. In many blogs the email address is a mandatory field to submit a comment. Many of us give our email addresses without any hesitation. This is because the email address is not displayed in any shape or form to identify you.

But, the use of Gravatars in the comments section has led to a potential privacy issue. For those who do not know what a Gravatar is, here is a quick explanation. Gravatar is an icon/image that is associated with your email address. You can sign up for this free service at http://gravatar.com. When you sign up, you are asked to associate an image to your email address. Gravatar.com will send you a message to your email to confirm that you are the actual owner of that email address. Once you have confirmed your identity (by clicking on link in the email), your email id is officially associated with the image you have chosen.

When you comment in a blog with the above email address, your Gravatar image will be displayed next to your comments. Many blogs nowadays have support for Gravatars. This means your Gravatar picture will pop up on blogs you commented in the past. For example, if you commented on a blog 3 years ago and that blog has been upgraded to support Gravatar, your picture will be displayed along with that comment.

This may cause some privacy concerns for certain people. For example, you may belong to a particular political party and you have commented extensively on political blogs. Assuming that you have always been using the same email address while commenting on all blogs. Now that you have a Gravatar image associated with your email address it will appear on all blogs that you have commented in the past. As a result your political views (that you wanted to keep private) are revealed to anyone on the Internet. This is especially true if you are well known by many.

This privacy issue is not the fault of Gravatar. It was caused by using the same email address for all your commenting needs. Here are 2 tips to avoid this problem:

1. Use different email addresses for different purposes.
2. Use a secret email address when commenting on blogs. This prevents any mischief makers from using your email address while commenting and your Gravatar image from showing up with their comments.

Having stated the above points, there is nothing preventing a person from using your image/logo with their email address. I am not sure how Gravatar overcomes this issue. Can a complaint be filed at Gravatar.com in this instance? Please share your thoughts and opinions.

I would like to thank Firas from webli.st (pronounced “web list”) for designing the new logo for my blog. A logo is an important item in branding your blog. The new logo will appear in my website once I have updated the blog template.

If you are pressed for time or do not have the necessary graphic design skills, it is a good idea to outsource your logo design. Firas was generous enough to design the logo free of charge.

Please provide your feedback on the logo in the comments section.

Thank you.