Mid-way updation of the Directory of Best Indian Blogs

Hi friends. The Directory of the Best Indian Blogs is being updated after about six months of its release, as is the practice for the past 11 years. 

We have added some new blogs while some had to be taken off as they became irregular. Three blogs had to go as they have installed ugly captchas on their blogs. These captchas would not go even with common-sensical clicking on images and required repeated clicking till the captcha felt you could be a safe visitor! We welcome web-security, and in fact have many posts on how to secure oneself/ one's blog on the web. However, when these come at the cost of readability, blogging suffers. You will agree.

Against our earlier policy of keeping the Directory open only for individual or collective blogs, and shunning commercial blogs, we have - in recent years - learnt to include the latter type of blogs. We have included a few more such blogs in this mid-year review. 

Happy New Year. Happy blogging! See you in 2022!!

Major Google updates: has your blog been affected?

Google Search carried out at least three major updates this year, and all are such that bloggers might have seen a dip (unusual: rise) in the search performance of their blogs.

The first one, that was announced last year was relating to page experience. In short, if a page has features that give bad experience to the visitor, that affects the search performance of that page. Google itself considers it a significant addition to how it looks at webpages

The other two updates are in one sense even more important: they relate to spam or artificially jacking up one's webpages on the search result pages (SERP). If your website or blog has been getting links from guest posts, forums, etc in a way that it looks artificial to Google, you are in trouble. The first of the two updates was rolled out through June-August. We at Top Blogs received its notice on 24th August, and has seen slight uptick in its performance. 

The next spam update is currently being rolled out. 

What is Google's advice to website owners? As always, it advises that the quality of content and its usefulness to the visitors should be in mind rather than artificial boosting of site ranking and - worse - trying to fool search engines with tricks. That applies to not only Google but also Bing, Yahoo! and other search engines, isn't it?

India's top economy and finance blogs in 2021

The following is the list of top Indian finance, business and economy blogs in 2021. 

This listing contains blogs that have been providing value to people interested in this niche over a long time. Unlike earlier lists, this list has blogs from firms also. The list, thus, has blogs ranging from those maintained by a big media house and firms to those maintained by personal bloggers, one even on the blogspot subdomain.

We were constrained to NOT include blogs that were not regularly updated or in which the sole concern of the website/ blog owner was business rather than sharing information and advice. 

The blogs are arranged alphabetically, taking the most representative part of the blog domain. Broad area(s) covered by the blogs are given in bracket alongside the title of the blog.

Here is the list:

aishmghrana - AishMGhrana [Companies' legal administration]
basunivesh - BasuNivesh [Investment]
bemoneyaware - Be Money Aware Blog [Pers finance]
capitalmind - capital mind [Investment]
cashoverflow - Cashoverflow [Investment]
charteredclub - Chartered Club Blog [Pers finance (mostly taxation)]
elearnmarkets - eleaarnmarkets [Pers finance (focus on stock markets)]
fintrakk - FINTRAKK [Pers finance (mostly stock market)]
forbesindia - Forbes India Blogs [Multi-disciplinary]
freefincal - FreeFinCal [Pers finance]
getmoneyrich - GetMoneyRich [Investment]
goodreturns - GoodReturns [Multi-disciplinary]
jagoinvestor - JagoInvestor [Investment]
moneytap - Money Tap [Credit (loans)]
myinvestmentideas - MyInvestmentIdeas [Investment ideas]
nirrtigo - Property, Real Estate, housing, and Economy in India... [Real Estate]
niveshmarket - Nivesh Market [Pers finance ]
stableinvestor - Stable Investor [Investment]
subramoney - Subramoney [Economy & finance]
Swaminomics - Swaminomics [Economics]
taxguru - TaxGuru [Taxation]
theleapjournal - The Leap Blog [Economics: multi-author blog]
tradebrains - Trade Brains [Investment & trade in stocks]

Want a cheap web host for a video blog? Read before you jump!

Paid hosting, you know, is much better than free hosting for blogs and websites. By that logic, if you want lots of videos on your blog or want to have a vblog or vlog outright, you MUST have a self-hosted blog with the facility to host a number of videos.

Add to that, the fact that videos

• are difficult to edit (and professional editing tools and skills cost a ton),
• come in different formats and not all open on all computers or mobile devices,
• cannot be viewed when the computer or mobile phone does not support that format,
• take a great deal of space (and web space is an expensive commodity),
• can become unusable when new technology and formats are used by browsers (and converting individual videos and reloading them after a few years is a big job).

Now juxtapose this with the hosting realities:

• Between the two major free blogging platforms, Blogger allows you to post videos free on your blog; Wordpress (free) does not allow that.
• Web hosts charge for space (and videos take huge space).
• Videos need big bandwidth for their playback by users (so, if many users visit your website and play the video, either the site will hang or the host will demand extra payment for more bandwidth).

But there is a ready-made solution from Google, and it is so simple!

Host your videos on YouTube

If you have not published your videos on YouTube yet, let me tell you that it is as simple as sending an email. You need to have a Google account and the YouTube is all for you to use. You can upload  videos in many formats and sizes as standalone videos and can have playlists and channels that you can share with others. Each of these have their own URLs, so you can post them the way you post images. In addition, you can embed a video on the blog or any other website (not social networking accounts) so that it plays there itself.

In addition to giving you free space to host your videos, YouTube hosting gives you many other advantages:

• You earn money when people visit your videos. 
• You get comments and feedback.
• You can link your blog and get traffic to the blog.
• Make channels of videos and let people subscribe to these, getting you more traffic and income.
• Download free music and sound effects for use in videos.
• Get detailed analytics of your videos and channels.
• You can even live stream events after some additional verification by Google.
• The videos are secure and available 24x7.
• And much more!

You will realize that his is an enormous facility and yet it does not consume space on your blog or website. So, if you want to open a vblog, have many videos on your blog, or have a website with numerous videos or something similar, think of YouTube first.

Laptop not recognizing headphones fixed

This post is not on blogging but helping bloggers, especially new and bloggers on YouTube whose laptop has stopped recognizing headphones. This may happen occasionally or all the time. Because I fixed it, thought to share it with the community.

Windows 10 comes with a Realtek audio driver pre-installed for managing the audio. But often it is not installed with all its wares and sometimes it misbehaves too. One frustrating thing that many users face is the laptop not recognizing headphones. And when the laptop does not recognize headphones or headsets, you try to change all types of settings but it does not help. It happens mostly on Windows 10 computers.

This is how you should approach it, and it will work perfectly. 

1. Go to Control Panel. Then click on the grid of dots to open all services. If Realtek audio manager is listed, you can change the audio output settings there. 

2. The issue could be worse: Realtek audio manager missing issue. In that case you have to download Realtek HD audio manager. You need to download the driver pack. This is available on Realtek site, for both 32 bit and 64 bit computers. However, downloading the audio driver from Realtek site is a pain, because the connection is extremely slow, it breaks and the downloaded audio driver might not even work!

Here comes my experience handy. I tried Dell and Sony websites where too the Realtek audio driver is available. However, the download from OEMdrivers did wonders. It fixed the laptop not recognizing headphones issue in two ways: It started shifting to the inbuilt speaker or headphone when the headphone was inserted or removed. In addition, it started giving prompts when a new device or software (e.g. Whatsapp) wanted to use a sound device. 

Let me give the download link for Realtek HD audio driver/ manager. There are options for Windows 7, 10, 11 etc, and also 32 bit and 64 bit. 

Disclosure: I have no commercial affiliation whatsoever with OEMdrivers.