Remove Google Blogspot Blogger Navbar

Look at my blog. There's no Blogger Navbar right? :)

This great article teaches how to remove the Google Blogspot Blogger Navbar.

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First off, what is the Blogger Navbar?
The Blogger Navbar appears by default at the top of every Blogger-powered blog. It is available in several colors, and is configured in the Template tab in Blogger’s interface. If you are using a classic template, you’ll see a menu from which you can select a color. For blogs using Layouts, just click the “edit” link on the Navbar page element. Blogger gives a more detailed explanation of this here.

There are several reasons why I think it’s important to remove the Blogger nav bar but I’ll name my two most important reasons. First one being that it’s an eye sore and makes your blog look less professional. Secondly, when you click on the “next blog” button you never know what type of blog you might stumble upon. There are so many spam blogs with adult content or other information you don’t want young people to read. When you do block the navbar on your own blog, you prevent others from also easily leaving your site and accidentally heading to one of these spam sites.

Unfortunately Blogger doesn’t give you the option to remove the navbar easily but this simple modification to your template allows us to hide it. The good news is that it’s not against Blogger’s TOS so it’s not illegal to do. I read a post recently by Blogger Support that stated

While it’s not officially against our TOS, we discourage folks from removing it because we think it’s a great feature with more improvements to come. Follow the above instructions at your own peril, as Blogger controls the TOS and has been known to change it.

So the change you want to make is to the stylesheet. First make sure you backup your current template just in case you make a mistake. Click on the “Download Full Template” link ( go to “Template” => “Edit HTML”) and save it locally. Next, from within your template code you want to scroll down until you find ]]> and stop. Then you’ll want to add this line of code right above this line.

#navbar-iframe {height:0px;visibility:hidden;display:none}

So once you’re done, it should look like this:

#navbar-iframe {height:0px;visibility:hidden;display:none}

]]>

After that, save your template and view your blog. The top Blogger navbar should have disappeared! Looks much better now doesn’t it? If you ever want to add the navbar back, it’s simple. Just remove the line of code we just added. Also, if you ever switch templates, make sure to follow these instructions again because it needs to be done with each new template you use.

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Free and Robust Inventory / Asset Software

After surfing around for a free and robust Inventory / Asset software.

As the list of features is too many, i'm not going to list them all out here.
Do check out the respective sites for the features. :P


Do update me if you have any good recommendation as well!





Here are some of the great softwares that i found:
1) Open-AudIT


2) OCS Inventory NG



3) GLPI

HOWTO: Exclude your visits from Google Analytics

Often i find the Google Analytics not able to differentiate my visit with real visitors. After surfing around, i finally found the solution.

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Introduction

In my view, one of the minuses of Google Analytics (GA) is the difficulty of excluding our own traffic (aka internal traffic) from the reports. As per this help article, there are two methods of achieving this. One is to set up a filter to exclude traffic from a given IP address or a range of addresses. This method is undesirable if you are using a connection that assigns dynamic addresses for each session.

The other method is to filter using a cookie installed in your browser. This method is more reliable and safer than using the first method. But the caveat is installing the cookie as it is not straight forward. And the second method described in the help page is flawed according to this discussion.

The Steps

Here are the tried and tested steps to exclude your traffic from GA.

1) Open your template in the Edit HTML mode and scroll right to the end where your tracking code is installed. Locate the script shown below and add the line shown in red.

Replace the variable passed to the _setVar() function with something applicable to you. The string you provide here ("exclude_ids_bguide" in this case) is called the filter pattern and it will be used later when we create the filter.

2) Save the template and visit your blog from all the browsers that you want this cookie installed. For example, if you are using Firefox and IE, visit your blog's homepage from both the browsers. If the page is already loaded, make sure that you do a page refresh.

The next step is VERY IMPORTANT!

3) Go back immediately and remove the line added (i.e. the line shown in red) in step (1), from your blog template and save it again. If you leave this line, all visitors to your blog will also get the cookie installed and you will not have any visits. That's the danger here. Make sure that you remove it immediately after step (2)

4) Login to GA and create a Custom Filter for this cookie. Provide the values as shown in the figure below and select the profile (i.e. your blog address) that you want to exclude. Make sure that you copy the exact filter pattern that you gave in step (1) above.


You will have to wait about a day until you confirm that your visits are now excluded.
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How to find any email with Gmail search

3rd follow up on gmail search.

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The sight of someone scrolling through hundreds of email messages trying to find a specific one is like fingers on a chalkboard for me. With a few tricks, you can use Gmail to find the exact message you're looking for, without all the scrolling.

If you don't get a ton of mail, just typing in the words you're looking for usually does the trick. I can just type lisa in the search box and get all of the messages from my friend Lisa, southwest to bring up my ticket confirmations, or "bank statement" to help get my finances in order.

But the real power of Gmail search lies in search operators -- words that help modify your queries. Search operators work pretty much the same way within Gmail as they do for Google. So, if I want the email Lisa sent me with her flight information so I know when to pick her up at the airport, I type from:lisa SFO. Likewise:

• A link from my co-worker Michael: from:michael http
• A photo from my mom: from:mom has:attachment
• That last chat I had with one of the Gmail product managers: keith is:chat
• All messages from ebay that aren't outbid notices: ebay -outbid (the hyphen tells Gmail to return all of the messages that don't contain the word that follows it)
• The messages in my inbox sent directly to me that I haven't read yet: to:me is:unread in:inbox

You can limit the scope of your search to a particular subject (subject:) or label (label:) as well. And you can get pretty fancy. Recently, I was trying to remember the date of my friend's April birthday. I always send her a birthday email, so I searched to:maya (birthday OR bday) after:2007/4/1 before:2007/5/1. It's the 19th.



If remembering operators isn't really your thing, that's ok. There's a "Show search options" link to the right of the search bar at the top of your inbox.



Clicking that provides you with text fields you can fill in to get the precision of advanced search. Start there, but after a while you'll probably find that using operators is a lot faster.
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Open Source Google Analytics Alternative

Found a nice article on an Open Source Google Analytics Alternative

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Google Analytics may be free, but it is still based on proprietary technology - which means you only ever get reports on the things that Google thinks are necessary and some of those reports are aimed at people using Google's other services (managing campaigns on AdWords, for example). Further, using Google Analytics means that you're tied to Google's TOS. Enter Piwik, which aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. It is closely affiliated with OpenX, the open source ad server alternative to Google Ad Manager [Ed: which we just started using on RWW].

While OpenX has been around a while and has good traction, Piwik is fairly new and under the radar. It surfaced first as PHPMyVisites and is only at version 0.1.5, which is a sign that it is still for the highly committed.

Piwik originates from France and almost all the attention so far has been from outside USA. It seems to be catching on in Japan and China, as well as in Europe. The team responsible for Piwik seems to be made up of interns from big companies such as Amazon, Intel and even Google.

You need PHP and MySQL to use Piwik, which is no problem for techies but any widespread adoption will need a hosted version. Some entrepreneur is likely to offer that. Plug-ins to WordPress and other blogging platforms will also be needed, but cannot be that hard.

Open source products usually get traction, even when they are raw, when the alternative is too expensive or restrictive. Google Analytics is free, so it is hard to see rapid adoption by bloggers and small media companies. It is possible that Piwik will get better traction in companies that already use one of the expensive web analytics services from companies such as Coremetrics, Omniture and Visual Sciences/Websidestory.

Larger companies may have some pause for concern before switching to Google Analytics, because of the service's Terms of Service. An analyst in the IT department is likely to point out two clauses (yes big companies DO read this stuff):

"2. FEES AND SERVICES . Subject to Section 15 herein, the Service is provided without charge to You for up to 5 million pageviews per month per account, and if You have an active Adwords campaign in good standing, the Service is provided without charge to You without a pageview limitation.

Google may change its fees and payment policies for the Service from time to time including but not limited to the addition of costs for geographic data, the importing of cost data from search engines, or other fees charged to Google or its wholly-owned subsidiaries by 3rd party vendors for the inclusion of data in the Service reports."

So, don't go above 5 million page views without paying something to Google via AdWords. That may make one a bit uneasy, but it is the "Google may change its fees and payment policies" that will have both IT and Legal aiming to nix the deal.

Then a bit later on you get:

"6. INFORMATION RIGHTS AND PUBLICITY . Google and its wholly owned subsidiaries may retain and use, subject to the terms of its Privacy Policy (located at http://www.google.com/privacy.html , or such other URL as Google may provide from time to time), information collected in Your use of the Service. Google will not share information associated with You or your Site with any third parties unless Google (i) has Your consent; (ii) concludes that it is required by law or has a good faith belief that access, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public; or (iii) provides such information in certain limited circumstances to third parties to carry out tasks on Google's behalf (e.g., billing or data storage) with strict restrictions that prevent the data from being used or shared except as directed by Google . When this is done, it is subject to agreements that oblige those parties to process such information only on Google's instructions and in compliance with this Agreement and appropriate confidentiality and security measures."

In short, they have the right to use your data. We have lived for a long time in a world where Microsoft and others charged for the software and kept it under a tight IP control, but did not try to take any use of the data. Google reversed that. Google is happy to let you use anything for free, as long as they get to use your data. That is OK for most individuals and small businesses, but totally unacceptable for large companies.

Piwik is working hard to be developer-friendly, not just relying on open source. They claim 4 big advantages:

1. Open API
2. Plug in architecture
3. Data abstraction layer
4. Customizable dashboard

But the nub of the issue for most big companies will be the data ownership issue. That is why Piwik is really a Google Analytics alternative, even if they will see few firms switching from GA initially. IT groups, under pressure to cut costs, will look at Google Analytics as an alternative to their current analytics software and reject the option based on TOS restrictions. Then some bright spark will Google the term "open source alternative google analytics" and see Piwik on top of the organic listings.

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