OpenFiler is a NAS distribution that is created using rPath and is licensed under GPLv2 by Xinit Systems. While an open-source project, Xinit provides fee-based support as well as specialized versions and an administrators manual which you have to purchase.

OpenFiler started as a simple NFS distribution with simple administrative tools but it has grown to become much more than that. Currently it supports the following network protocols:

• NFS (currently NFSv3)
• SMB/CIFS
• HTTP/WebDAV
• FTP
• iSCSI (both initiator and target).

Need to get hardware together to setup one of these for home.

The slides are embedded below and you can grab the demos from my DropBox account. There isn’t much documentation on the demos, but hopefully they’re semi-helpful.

Getting Started with Flex and PHP

Looks like a worthwhile slidedeck and demos for working with Flex and a PHP backend.

Swatch isn’t a cleverly designed watch from the 1980s but you’ll think it’s just as handy (and cleverly designed) as one. Like Logwatch, swatch is a perl script that watches your logs but swatch watches them for regular expressions that you configure. Swatch will notify you via mail or the console screen (stdout) when it matches the configured log file entries with your watchfor directives.

Swatch picks up and delivers messages as intrusions occur so that you can halt any potential breakins or hacks before the intruder does any damage. It is one of the most important defensive weapons in your system administrator arsenal.

Powerful tool, that I need to consider using… as a way to be more proactive with log messages.

What steps will reproduce the problem? 1. Open any website. 2. Alt-D to select the URL 3. Ctrl-C to copy 4. Paste to any editor that allows rich format: MS Word, OpenOffice Writer, MS Outlook, etc. What is the expected result? The URL should be pasted as plain text. What happens instead? The pasted URL retains the colours (green or red for https, black and grey) and the font (Segoe UI 11.5pt) of the Google Chrome URL box.

Issue 976 (http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=976) explains exactly what I see when copying a URL out of Chrome on Windows…. and how it behaves different than other browsers (when copied into Outlook in particular).

Appstats – RPC instrumentation and optimizations for App Engine App Engine Next gen queries App Engine Data migration in App Engine App Engine What’s hot in Java for App Engine App Engine Building high-throughput data pipelines with Google App Engine App Engine Testing techniques for Google App Engine App Engine Batch data processing with App Engine App Engine BigQuery and Prediction APIs App Engine Google Storage for Developers App Engine, Enterprise Beyond JavaScript: programming the web with native code Chrome Chrome Extensions – how-to Chrome HTML5 status update Chrome Developing web apps for the Chrome Web Store Chrome WebM Open Video Playback in HTML5 Chrome Google Chrome’s Developer Tools Chrome Developing With HTML5 Chrome Using Google Chrome Frame Chrome

Just a few of the Google IO 2010 videos/slides… many more available at: http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/sessions.html

Universal video embed. — Read more

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zencoder.com

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Seems like a great video embedding solution.

This screencast sponsored by Microsoft shows you how to build a basic Silverlight application in order to talk to PHP.

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Haven’t watched the screencast/video yet, but hopefully has some good information about making Silverlight work with PHP backend.

Everyone looking to build a website might have heard about SEO- the mysterious Search Engine Optimization. This is a never-ending process that consists of multiple steps and there are always enhancements that can be done to improve website visibility in the search engines.

If you have ever heard about the SEO you might have also heard that one of the basics of successful SEO is the Keyword analysis and that’s exactly what I’m going to speak about today.

Let’s start from the very beginning. The keywords are the words that web surfers use in the search engines to look for the product/service/information needed. This is the “WordPress beginners guide” that you type when you’re looking for the info how and where to start with WordPress and “website design studio” when you’re looking for a company to create a website for you.

1. Define the keywords that people use to find your business.

This step is most important and probably the easiest one and you can complete it in 3 simple steps without any additional software or paid programs offered on the market.

• 1. Ask your friends and relatives what words and phrases they associate with your business and put them on list.
• 2. Go to Google and type the keywords and key phrases into the browser and Google will also show you the related searches performed by other people.To make things even easier, you can switch from the Standard view to Related searches view. Just type your keyword to the Google search bar and on the left of the search results page click on the panel “Show search tools” and scroll to the bottom until you see it, and here’s how it looks.

• 3. Use Google Wonder Wheel- that’s an adorable tool that I love so much. The wonder Wheel is another variation of the Related searches but in a more convenient way and is located right below Related searches view in the left panel. The wonder wheel shows you all related searches and their popularity. You can also click on the related search circle and go even deeper into the search keywords. Put as many related keywords on the list as you can but make sure they are really related to your business, service or product.

2. Find out how many people are actually using the keywords you have selected.

The cool tool you can use here is Google Keywords Suggestion tool. It’s a part of Google Adwords (and is used to find nice keywords for your google ands) but you can use it separately to identify the popularity of the chosen keywords and key phrases. Take a minute to register with Google Adwords and you are ready to use the tool.

Type in your key phrase and Google Keywords Tool will show you the list of related searches (compare it with your list and see if you’re missing something) and the number of Monthly searches for according keyword.

At this stage you can make an excel table with your keywords in the first column and the number of monthly searches in the second one. Now sort your keywords putting the most popular ones on top and less popular ones closer to the bottom.

Delete the keywords that have less that 1000 searches a month except if you offer something really unique and that’s the top number of search engines visitors looking for it.

3. Define your competition and make sure the keywords you have chosen are relevant.

Make yourself a cup off coffee or tee as we’re starting on a pretty boring thing. Now that you have all the possible keywords in your list, we have to find out their relevance and competition.

Let me explain you what I mean for the term “relevance”. Let’s say you produce a software allowing photographers to create cool photography websites easily. One of the great keywords that you might think of is a “photo website” however it is not. If you go to Google and type “photo website” into the search field you will see that the search returned you a list of websites offering stock photography and thus this is not the keyword you should base your website optimization strategy on.

Now back to the competition. This is not really the number of companies offering the same services that you do but rather the number of indexed pages in Google containing your keyword and which you actually have to beat. So type your keyword into the Google search bar, make sure it’s relevant and put the number of indexed pages for the according keyword into your table next to the number of monthly searches.

4. Finding the best keywords

By now you should have a list from about 50 keywords and keywords phrases in the descending order with the appropriate number of monthly searches and competition. If you have a website with the number of pages over 20 you can use all of them, but it you have a simple 5-10 pages website you’ll have to choose the best of the keywords.

The keyword “bestestness” is defined by the ration between relevance, popularity and competition. The keyword which is most close to your business, has the largest number of searches and the smallest competition is the best.

There are lots of coefficients offered by different experts, but if you are not making the keywords analysis every other day you are most likely to forget how to calculate it. So, to keep things simple, you can divide the number of monthly searches to the number of pages indexed for this keyword and multiply by 1000 for example. You’ll get figures like 0,1-0,3, less than 0,1 and much less than 0,01. Small figures mean that there is either a small number of searches for the given keywords of the competition is really high.

You can exclude these keywords, however do check each one individually. If you have the best product in some area, you can easily overcome all the competition and show up in the search engine results for the given keyword.

At the end and having made the ratio analysis you should have around 10 very cool keywords, 10 just cool keywords and around 5-10 nice keywords that also might be useful.

5. Breaking keywords into pages.

Now we’re going to the most complex point. You can’t use all your keywords on just one page. Every page has to be optimized for no more than 2-3 keywords/keyword phrases and of course, they should be 100% relevant to the content of the page.

Choose the best 3 keywords for the home page and spread the rest on the other pages. Now add a few nice keywords for every page. Choose one or two keywords that you can use throughout the pages in the text organically.

Put it all in a spreadsheet. Now you have the list of keywords to use on every page of your website to ensure best visibility for the given keywords in the search engine results. Sorry for the blurred screen but I have to keep my own keyword research results private.

The next step is actually creating the keyword optimized content for the website pages. This is the separate science and I’m going to speak about it in my next post. Stay tuned, make the keywords analysis and check back with us soon!