The internet has opened a window for everyone. From buyers to sellers, everybody from all over the world is into it. English is the language it speaks or is best at. However, there is no denying of the fact that any individual is more comfortable with his/her mother tongue. The all-encompassing WWW however faces a great challenge to bridge the language barrier between two users who speaks in two different languages. As the global market is growing more and more dependent on the web this specific problem needs to be addressed.

The feedback form any company uses to improve its services based on user notes is a key area that ConveyThis, a multi-lingual feedback form creator (and also a website translator), wishes to reform. As per the developers’ words,

ConveyThis can be used just for its Feedback Form in one language if wanted, but the real difference is how it helps solve the language gap online. Over 90% of people are more likely to buy products from websites that are localized into their own language. And more than 80% said they wouldn’t even consider a product which didn’t have localized marketing materials.  With more and more users of other languages logging onto the internet, it is becoming more and more necessary to cater to those users, and not just English-speaking ones. Our goal is to provide people with a free, all inclusive solution to localizing their websites for other language viewers.

As inferred, the form is targeted towards businesses who wishes to value feedback from its non-English speaking customers/users. Now the whole discussion boils down to the credibility, efficiency and ease of use offered by the product.

Sign up for a free account and you are good to go. Create a form and tune it to your preferences. You can show the form in 13 popular languages (Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish) depending on the language of majority among your site’s users. You have choice to tie a form to any domain and also let the translated feedbacks be sent to your email. Simple and straight.

ConveyThis comes from Translation Services USA, known for its innovation in translation services and popular services like Ackuna Cloud Translator, Translation Cloud etc. The efficiency commanded by Translation Services USA can hardly be denied once you take a look at the clientele that includes heavyweights like Merrill Lynch, McDonalds, Barclays, Walmart, Disney to name a few. Considering that and the ease at which the feedback form can be created (and embedded) anyone can hardly say no to ConveyThis. True, it’s not one of the feedback forms out there packed with features, but it does what it promises to.

I have been using Facebook Comments Box on this blogs for over a week now to test out and increase interaction on the site. For starters, I did like the amount of interaction from Facebook users. However, there are quite a few problems with Facebook Comments when it comes to moderation.

First off, the website where you can moderate Facebook comments (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/comments/) is down most of the time (or whenever I try to access it). It gets frustrating because it is the only way you can see new comments and trash spam or hide comments from users.

On the other hand, Facebook comments moderation in itself does not work most of the time and administrators have problems when marking a comment as spam or banning a user.

Overall, I feel that Facebook comments do provide a lot of ease for their users to quickly comment on a website. However, there is a lot of work to be done when it comes to administrating those comments. I will continue working with Facebook comments for some more time and see if there is any improvement with it before I decide to remove it for good.

What has been your experience while using Facebook comments? Have you had problems with moderating comments and administrating them? I am looking for some alternatives so please feel to suggest them (No Disqus Please).

Asana is a web-based to-do list designed to enhance the work flow of modern teams. One of the most important advantages of the service is that it is absolutely free for teams smaller than 30 members and it will remain this way. Along with the features that have already become default for many projects management tools, (like calendar, business collaboration and access rights management) Asana developers integrated the service with the customer’s inbox making it possible not only to get notifications about the changes to particular tasks but also reply, add comments, or mark tasks as completed right from the email box. Another big advantage of Asana is that it is available on mobile phones and tablets. The developers went even further and created an iPhone application to make their tool truly mobile.

Another way to manage projects online is Mavenlink. What makes this service stand out is its integration with popular Google applications like Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts. The feature comes in handy for those who have gotten used to relying on these services and don’t want to change their work flow dramatically. The tool is excellent for conducting the fiscal aspects of your business as it has features like transactions and budget  management, invoice generation, and even the ability to accept PayPal payments – all in one place. The vendor is proud of the member services provided that include guest contributions relevant to today’s global workforce, as well as video tutorials that would help you use Mavenlink’s features to the full.
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Project’Or RIA (http://projectorria.toolware.fr/ )

Project’Or RIA presents a totally different approach to project management. The service can be used with any type of projects. However, IT-sphere is considered to be its main domain. One of the biggest advantages of the tool is that it is available in open source. It is quite simple in installation and what’s more important is it can be easily adapted to your particular needs. What’s even more important, it is absolutely free of charge. The vendor is not planning to stop and is already conducting a poll to find out whether to start offering the product in SaaS version to enlarge the client base.

TeamLab (http://www.teamlab.com/ )

Google AdSense is one of the biggest revenue generator for small and medium traffic websites. The AdSense team have been revamping their reporting interface which makes it easier for publisher to see their earnings and other related reports.

As a publisher I have always been comfortable using desktop reporting software to keep an eye on my AdSense earnings. However, of late most of the software have stopped working.

Also Read: Useful Tips and Tricks To Grow Your AdSense Income

This means that I have to constantly login into the AdSense web interface to check on my earnings every now and then. However, thanks to Google that will now be a thing of the past. Google has released a extension for Google Chrome which will allow AdSense publishers to view basic details of their earnings in Google Chrome.

The AdSense Publisher Toolbar extension (Download) allows you to view your current days earnings, yesterday’s earnings, current months earnings and last months earnings. In addition to that it also displays the top custom channels and lifetime earnings.

Once you have installed the extension, you will have to click on the extension icon and then authorize your Google account. If you use different account for AdSense and Gmail, you can easily sign in to another account thanks to Google’s multiple account sign in.

The AdSense Publisher extension is definitely a nice way to keep an eye on your AdSense earnings without having to constantly login to the actual AdSense website. I would highly recommend this extension if you are in a habit of checking your earnings multiple times through a day.

Of course, it is always a healthy habit to login to the actual AdSense reporting interface to check on detailed reports and performance of your channels and other data from time to time to increase your performance.

Don’t Forget to Read Other AdSense Tips and Tricks

• One Tricky AdSense Policy That Might Get You into Trouble
• View Google AdSense Earnings for Different Geo-locations/Countries
• Best Google AdSense Placements for Blogs/Websites
• Best Google AdSense Placements for Forums

Google Analytics has definitely been one of the best services to track your website visitors. However, it has been lacking a key feature that most of its competitors like Woopra and Reinvigorate have been offering for a while now; Realtime tracking.

Realtime user tracking is a very important feature for any webmaster who wants to track campaigns in realtime without having to wait. This helps users to make business decisions quickly if something is not working. Unfortunately, prior to today, Google never had this feature.

However, that is about to change because Google has announced a new feature for Analytics which will help you track your visitors in realtime and make business decisions quickly. The new feature in Google Analytics will allow users to track how many visitors are currently visiting the site, how many users have visited in the last few minutes as well as the number of visitors visiting your website every second.

Additionally, Google Analytics will also display the source for traffic and the keywords users are using and the geographic locations they are visiting from. As a webmaster, this is a pretty cool feature since I can now just use Google Analytics instead of using other realtime analytics tracking services.

Google has definitely been ramping up their analytic services with the introduction of Google Analytics 5 which brought about a new UI, dashboard, widgets and more. Additionally, Google has also been adding some neat features to Google Analytics like heatmaps and in-page analytics among other things.

The biggest advantage of Google Analytics is that is is completely free unlike it’s competitors. However, they are now introducing a new set of premium features which users can signup and use. The new Google Analytics Premium service is targeted at business users who want in-depth data about their users and the ability to quickly make business decisions.

Some of the key features of Google Analytics Premium include:

• Extra processing power – increased data collection, more custom variables and downloadable, unsampled reports
• Advanced analysis – attribution modeling tools that allow you to test different models for assigning credit to conversions
• Service and support – experts to guide customized installation, and dedicated account management on call – all backed by 24/7 support
• Guarantees - service level agreements for data collection, processing and reporting

Users can request access to premium accounts by visiting the Google Analytics Premium homepage. Realtime Google Analytics is being gradually rolled out to all users, however, you will have to use the new Google Analytics interface to have access to it. Additionally, only Analytics administrators will have access to Realtime Google Analytics.

If you don’t see the Realtime Google Analytics in your account. You can request for access to the service by filling up this form. Please note that Google Analytics will continue to remain free for webmasters including the new Realtime Google Analytics feature.

I am definitely loving the new Realtime Analytics features as it allows me to track campaigns and also understand where our traffic is coming from. Do you have access to the new Realtime Google Analytics? What do you think about it?

Google is on a roll. Just yesterday they launched a new social networking service called Google+ along with several new changes to Google search homepage, search results. They also ended up adding author thumbnails to them and launching an option to export your Google data. A few days earlier Google had also launched the +1 button for websites which allowed users to up-vote your content.

(click to enlarge)

When the +1 button had launched, Google did not provide statistics to the users. However, they have now rolled out a new feature to Webmaster Tools where you can see your +1 button activity and it’s impact on search results.

The +1 button metrics will be available as an option in your webmaster tools profile for the website and it will contain of three things which will include a "Search impact" report, +1 button Activity report and an Audience report to show you how many people have clicking on the +1 buttons.

• The Search Impact report gives you an idea of how +1s affect your organic search traffic. You can find out if your clickthrough rate changes when personalized recommendations help your content stand out. Do this by comparing clicks and impressions on search results with and without +1 annotations. We’ll only show statistics on clickthrough rate changes when you have enough impressions for a meaningful comparison.
• The Activity report shows you how many times your pages have been +1′d, from buttons both on your site and on other pages (such as Google search).
• Finally, the Audience report shows you aggregate geographic and demographic information about the Google users who’ve +1′d your pages. To protect privacy, we’ll only show audience information when a significant number of users have +1′d pages from your site

The addition of statistics for the +1 button will definitely encourage more users to adapt the button on the website. After all those +1′s are going to get you additional traffic from Google.

Google Webmaster is definitely one of the best tools any site owner can use to find out how his/her site is performing in Google. In addition to showing search queries, backlinks and sitemaps, the service also has features such as search statistics, site hacked notifications, site performance to measure website load time, outdated software notification and content analysis among other things.

Another feature that Google Webmasters has is the ability to remove a URLs from Google’s search index. However, the earlier process was a bit tedious. Today, Google has rolled out a new Remove URL tool which simplifies the process of removing URLs from the index.

To Remove a webpage from Google’s index, you will need to login to your Google Webmaster account and administrate the site you want to remove the URL from.

Now Click on the Site configuration in the left hand side menu and select “Crawler access”. On the Crawler access page click on the “Remove URL” tag and click on the “New removal request” button to start the process for removing a website.

The new URL removal tool allows you to remove the page from Google index and cache, remove the page from the cache or remove an entire directory.

The new simplified process makes it easier for users to remove content since they don’t have to first block the content now. With the help of the removal request, users can remove any webpage from the website they own. Additionally, they can also remove the page from Google cache.

Google cache usually stores pages for a long time even after the original webpage is deleted, so allowing users to remove pages from cache is a extremely helpful step.

You must note that the removal of URL from the index is only temporary and will last for 90 days. During this period Google may crawl the page but it will not display it in Google search. For permanent removal, users will need to return a 404 or 410 status for the page or block the page from being crawled by using robots.txt or the noindex meta tag.

Important Note: Remove URL tool is only available to people who own those websites. If you are an individual and don’t own the content you are looking to remove, you might want to visit the Webpage removal request tool.

A few days ago, I spoke about the architecture that powers Techie Buzz. In that post, I had mentioned that memcached was one of our key ingredients.

Memcache is a powerful tool to share objects across servers and it is used by several big sites including Facebook, Yahoo and many more. The best part about using memcached on your server is that you can cut down on your database queries significantly and store commonly used objects in memory and share it across multiple servers.

If you use WordPress on a multi-server setup, you can easily cut down on DB queries by up-to 50% by implementing memcached. If you are interested in knowing how to implement memcached on your server, here is a tutorial. The assumption is that you are using Ubuntu, if not, the installation steps might change.

How To Install Memcached And Configure It

Step 1: Install memcached using the command given below

sudo apt-get install memcached

Step 2: After you have installed memcached you will have to configure it through a .conf file, to do that use the command given below

vi /etc/memcached.conf

Step 3: In the configuration file you will find few parameters, you can ignore the -d, -u and logfile parameters and leave it as default. However, change the -m, -p and -i parameters to suit your servers. The -m parameter specifies the memory that will be allocated to memcache. The -p parameter specifies the port that memcached will run on and the -l (ell) parameter specifies the IP address the memcached server will run on. You will need to change the -l (ell) parameter value from 127.0.0.1 to a local or global IP address of your server. This is necessary because your memcached server will be accessed by outside servers and using 127.0.0.1 will not work then.

Once you have done that run the following command.

service memcached restart or /etc/init.d/memcached restart

Using Memcached With WordPress

Once you have setup your memcached server, it is time to now setup WordPress to use memcached to store your objects. To do that, head over to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/memcached/ and install the memcached plugin for WordPress. Unlike other plugins, you will have to drop this file into the wp-content directory and not the plugins directory.

You will have to install additional plugins for your server to make use of this plugin, namely PECL memcache extension which can be downloaded from http://pecl.php.net/package/memcache.

Now comes the part where you will actually tell WordPress to use memcached as an object storing mechanism. To do that, open the wp-config file and add the line below to it.

global $memcached_servers;
$memcached_servers = array(‘default’ => array(‘memcache-server-ip-or-name:11211′));

The array is used to define multiple memcached servers which can be used for your site. Please make sure to edit the name/ip of the server and the port before you save the file.

That’s it. Now just refresh your cache and WordPress should start storing the objects in memcache and will access your database very sparsely.  Do let me know if you have any problems or difficulties in setting this up through your comments.

Bonus Note: You can browse and manage your memcache server through a WordPress plugin called WP Memcached Manager which can be downloaded at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-memcached-manager/.

The Ubuntu font was released last year in August to everyone and it was definitely one of the best looking fonts I have come across. I also use the Ubuntu font extensively on my PC thanks to this handy trick to install Ubuntu font on Windows.

As I was redesigning the website to give a fresher look to it, I wanted to make use of the Ubuntu font for it. Unfortunately, it is not a web font yet modern web browsers won’t understand it.

However, you can use the Ubuntu font for your website or any webpage on the internet thanks to Google Web Fonts. In Google Chrome, you can also change the font of any website using a Google Chrome Extension called Google Font Directory.

To implement the Ubuntu font on your website or webpage, head over to this page and click on the link which says "Use this font". On this page you will find code and instructions to use the Ubuntu font on your website. Just copy over the code to your webpage and you can specify your font as "Ubuntu"

Google Web Fonts also has several other fonts which can be used on any websites or webpages, head over to http://www.google.com/webfonts to browse the entire collection.

P.S. Don’t forget to tell me what you think of the new Techie Buzz design.

Google has been working on a new version of Google Analytics v5 which includes a lot of new and exciting features for users. Google Analytics 5 has been in beta for quite some time now and has been tested by thousands of users. If you haven’t had a chance to take a look at the new Google Analytics 5, here is some good new. Google has rolled it out Analytics v5 to all users.

Google Analytics 5 contains a lot of new features including a new home section, a streamlined interface to make it easier to get information you want. Analytics users can also get create multiple dashboards and add widgets to it so that you can quickly view information you want on your dashboard. Users can also create event goals to track downloads or purchases and create more powerful custom reports.

However, there are a few features from the older version which are not yet available in the new version, these include:

• Exporting reports to PDF
• Emailing reports
• Migrating a custom report from the current Analytics version to the new version
• Linking a new AdWords or AdSense account
• In-Page Analytics

Google Analytics 5 is definitely better than the older version, however, I would still like to see real-time analytics in the software. Right now, I have to use some other real-time analytics tracking software to do that. It would be great if we could do it from a single interface.

How To Get New Google Analytics?

To get the new Google Analytics 5, login to your account and click on the "New Version" link on the top of the page and you will be switched to the new Google Analytics. You can always go back to the Older version by clicking on the "Old Version" on the top of the page.