Top blogs

During our survey of the blogsphere for quality blogs, we are often faced with sites infected with malware. Thanks to very effective software on our computer, we have been able to detect and block them. We had quite a number of such attacks during the ongoing compilation of the Directory of Best Hindi Blogs and so comes this post. To our bloggers who are not technically oriented and who do not wish to invest thousands of rupees on paid anti-virus programs, we are recommending here four FREE anti-virus programs. Of these, the Microsoft Security Essentials comes free if you have genuine Windows installed on your computer / laptop. Otherwise you can download it from here:  Microsoft Security Essentials

This post is part of a series on web hosting and domain names . We keep updating these posts. This posts tries to practically show how website owners (especially bloggers on free platforms) can benefit from professional website hosting. The term 'website' includes all types of sites including blogs. Should I have an independent identity or place my blog on a separate web host or both? We’ll settle the hosting issue first. Blogger and Wordpress – also supported by third-party themes, plugins and widgets - provide enough design and hosting functionalities on blogs hosted on their servers. So, we will advise you to keep hosting your blog on their servers, unless you want to do one or more of these on your blog: maintain the blog on a long term and build a brand around it; promote yourself as a budding or established celebrity or expert; sell products or services through it; give it a very customized look and want to keep changing it; add a lot of matter that w...

How website domain names and hosts work In a previous post, we discussed website domain names . OK, all websites need to have a domain name [web address] so that people can find them. But where does the domain sit and how a visitor gets to browse it? What are the ways to make it secure and big and prominent? That takes us to website hosting (or simply web hosting), which is the topic of this post. This series of posts are regularly updated. In these posts, we use the term 'website' to include all types of sites including blogs. Who hosts my blog xyz.blogspot.com? Google Inc., the owner of the Blogger platform, has placed your blog ‘xyz.blogspot.com’ on their servers. Similarly, xyz.wordpress.com is hosted on Wordpress servers. Google does not charge anything from me. If I create a blog xyz.com and ask Google to host it, will it host it free? There are web hosting companies [e.g. Bluehost.com ] that will host your blog / website but charge you for that. How is ...

This post is part of a series on web hosting and related matters. We keep updating these posts. This posts deals exclusively with website domain names. The term 'website' includes all types of sites including blogs. How to create a website? How do I maintain a self-hosted blog? How can I have a blog with a name independent of suffixes like .wordpress.com ? Can I change my existing website? I am stuck with a blog on a free platform, what do I do? We keep encountering such questions. Hope, at the end of this series, you will have answers to all such questions. What is a domain name? The domain name is the name by which a website is known. It is the website's address on the vast network called the World Wide Web or the web . The domain name of ITB website is www.indiantopblogs.com . As we all have unique addresses of our homes and offices, all websites have a unique domain name. My blog is on Blogger and has domain name xyz.blogspot.com. Am I right? xyz is a s...

by Indian Top Blogs This is the second post in the archiving series. You can see here the first post on blog archiving . If you have landed here directly, we'd recommend that you read that post before reading the present one. Displaying blog archives: keep it simple yet effective You can display archives on the blog in many ways. Some bloggers choose to keep a separate page for archives and put individual posts manually on this page. But this is seldom the most efficient way of managing and displaying archives.  Archive display is better done using an automated system, i.e. by using a widget. We list below the most common ways in which archives are displayed on blogs: a. A box stating ‘archives’ or ‘select month’ or something like that. When you click on it, you get a drop-down list. This saves space and is very unobtrusive. However, the list collapses after you click on a link in the list, and you need to re-open the list. Many visitors find this need for rep...

by Indian Top Blogs What archive display should I use on my blog? I have put posts in all relevant categories, so why should I have a blog archive at all? I like to put posts in a manually run archives page; why should I go for an automated one? We are posed many such questions by bloggers. We thought, instead of replying to these questions, we'd rather engage our visitors in a detailed discussion on blog archive display so that they consider all pros and cons and take the best decision for their blog. So comes this 2-part series on blog/ website archiving. Importance of archiving for blogs and other websites ' Archiving ' for this discussion would mean ‘compilation and storage of old records and their display on the website’.  The archive is the sum total of resources crated over time and arranged properly so that they can be retrieved without confusion. Blogs, more than other websites, MUST have a proper archiving system since the key content in blog...

As we announced earlier,  we will bring out the 2012-13 edition of the    Directory of Best Indian Blogs  by May 30.  In the process of surveying the blog world for good blogs and then scrutinizing individual blogs, we always get wiser about the status of the Indian blogosphere and the habits of bloggers. We plan to bring out a number of posts on what we are observing this year. First, our journey so far.  By the end of April, we had compiled a database of nearly 50,000 Indian blogs. We kept on adding new blogs to the list so that we didn't have to recheck blogs already checked by us. But a database with majority of  entries that do not meet our criteria was proving a drag rather than a help in scrutiny of individual blogs. So, at the start of our short-listing exercise this time, we decided to drastically clean the database. After removing mirror blogs, blogs that have not been updated for over a year, blogs with automated content and ...