How to claim your blog at Technorati. A working solution

I finally claimed my blog.

It was a relief. I was just doing one wrong thing and I corrected that.I have read about people waiting for ages to get their blogs claimed at Technorati. And they were still going nowhere with what they had written. I was lucky I suppose, or rather shall I say .. prepared.

I appreciate the leads I got from various articles regarding claiming blogs at Technorati.It helped. But none of the mentioned solutions were helping me solve my problem. After successfully claiming my blog, I decided to write an article regarding the problems that I faced and how I got through it.

I have not seen this solution in any website or a blog till now. So I decided to let you all know in this article with the help of screenshots. The following worked for me and I hope it works for you too.

I had two things with me before I started with claiming my blog.

1) My blog was about 8 months old. Not to focus on eight but I think that a blog must be some months old. Not sure about this though.

2) My blog had a good amount of articles in it.

I have mentioned these two points because I believe that a blog must have a good lot of articles in it to get crawled through by Technorati.

I had read that Technorati had done some changes in their 'claiming' process. Because of which many users were not able to claim their blogs. Whatever the reason is, I am of the opinion that the above two points must be considered while getting started with the claim process.

So I started out with the process. Here are the following steps:

1) Go to Technorati

2) Click on Join after which you would be taken to a page to fill information about certain things.

3) Below in the page you would need to enter the blog URL address that you need to claim. After entering the correct details, you would get the following at the bottom of the webpage

4) After hitting on 'Check Claim', you will get a 12-digit alphanumeric code and they would tell you to do the following,

5) The three words 'new blog post' in the image are very important. I have read about so many people inserting their claim code in their existing blog and then reporting that the claim process doesn't work. To avoid this situation, create a new post and in the post content put only the claim code and nothing else. For my blog, I had kept the post title as 'Technorati Claim Blog - 12-digit code'. This is not a defined format though.

6) Make sure that this new post appears in your RSS feed(to check click on the RSS Feed button on your blog). This is one of the condition's that I have read in other blogs. After clicking on 'Verify claim Token' you would get the below as seen,

7) They mention that it takes them 24-48 hours for evaluation but usually it happens quickly and then you get a mail. If everything is fine, you would see the below,

If you don't see this image, then, well something is wrong. And you will get this message when you have not followed the process correctly. It may so happen that you are entering the correct information they need it in a different format.

Twice I couldn't successfully claim my blog and I didn't know where I was going wrong. However, the most important and crucial details that Technorati would need is your blog address and your RSS feed URL. So I knew that something may be wrong in those two fields.

The error that I received was a fault with my feed address. Technorati then gave me a website name wherein I could validate if my feel URL was indeed a correct one or not. The website name is http://validator.w3.org/feed/.

On validation, the website gives a validated path. I just entered that path in my feed URL and viola !!! it worked. I received a mail in some time and the following lines were written in it,

'This is an automatically-generated email.
Congratulations, your claim is now complete! Please allow 24 to 48 hours for Authority and recent posts to begin showing for your site now that it has been successfully claimed. Once they are there, we will update your site's Authority once per day.
At first you may not see your site listed in the Technorati Blog Directory for all of the categories you've selected. As you write blog posts around those topics, you should see your Topical Authority in those categories begin to rise.'

I read some few points when I was trying to claim my blog. You may try these things to help claim your blog.

1) The 'Allow Blog Feed' option must have the selected option as 'Full'. Blogger users can find it in 'Other' options under 'Settings'.

2) One user had given his URL address that started with 'www'. It worked for him. That's what he said.

3) The fresh new blog post that contains the Claim Token must be visible under your RSS feed.

4) Pray and cross your fingers ;)

I have mentioned in detail whatever I could with my claiming experience. Feel free to comment :)

Site of the Day - GSM Arena

The Site of the day goes to GSMARENA

The website gives information about the latest phones the world over. They give news, reviews, information on latest phones, the latest additions, current rankings and a lot more. It's one of the most reliable websites to gain information about phones, palmtops etc.

They also have their own blog that gives information about gadgets, games, tablets etc.

The Google Art Project

Google has unveiled it's Art Project. The website boasts of images of art work from 41 countries from around the world. This includes 30,000 artworks from around 151 museums in super high resolution. This was called gigapixel that allows users to view paintings at brush stroke level. That's awesome :)

It includes some famous works from the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi and the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar to the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia and the Palace of Versailles in France. Also the street view is available for all the museums showcased in the website that displays high quality digitized images to access information.It's almost like getting your own private tour.

 

You can also discover and explore artwork by searching amongst collections, artists and artworks. You can also add your own artwork which are featured under 'User Galleries'. It would have been impossible to even view this artwork from all over the world since sometimes artwork is locked up in private collections and are not easily accessible and this project has brought all the artwork from around the world right at our one click. Also an artwork's details and its location via. Google Maps is also displayed.

I could find some favorites like the Last Supper, Bonaparte. Although the Mona Lisa from the Louvre is missing from the collection, news is that Google's trying to snatch a deal where they would have access to around 400,000 plus collection of art.

It's an incredible effort from their part to do all this. So much that Obama agreed to allow these guys to showcase the grand White House to be a part of the project. The video below shows behind the scenes at the White House tour.

Google's Pleasant Surprise - Zerg Rush Easter Egg Game

Google has again come up with an Easter Egg game this time. It's called Zerg Rush.

Go to Google.com, and give the search as 'Zerg Rush' and hit enter. The search results will be displayed. And soon a good number of little O's will start appearing, eating out the search results. The game is to kill the O's off by clicking on them and draining off their power. This must be done prior to them forming two large G's on the page as shown below. 

 

 

Google users are allowed to share their scores on Google Plus. Earlier too they have made such games on their webpage. Like Let it Snow. Another was 'do a barell roll' which would roll the search results.

What is Google Drive

So just what is Google Drive all about?

Google Drive is a storage place where you can create new documents, edit existing ones, share your data with other users et cetera. Not only documents, but you can share your videos, images, PDF files and a whole lot of other data that you wish to store and keep safe. Google has initially provided 5GB of storage for each user. If more storage is required, then the user will need to shell out some dollars for the same. You can both upload and access your files at one go using this application. It acts just like your system hard-drive.

Google Docs has been integrated with Drive. So if you wish to create new documents, presentations or spreadsheets you won't need to worry about the document format. In order to use this application, you need to install this on your PC or MAC or download it to your Android phone (iPhone and iPad coming soon). One of my articles on Cloud Computing shares some information.Now as far as some of its facilities are concerned, this software doesn't disappoint you. Here's what you can do:

You can search your files by file type, owner and keywords. They also have an image search in their artillery that allows you to search via. objects present in the image that you have uploaded. How cool is that :) You can access your data from your phone, office, while on the move. From anywhere and anytime. You can create new documents, share your data with others, comment and receive notifications about the same. 

You also don't need to send bulky e-mails in your mail attachments. You can send a link directly from your Drive account to your e-mail recipients which refers to the same copy stored in Drive. Also many different applications like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and many other Google products have been integrated in Drive. 

For me it says that my Google drive is not ready yet, but I can't wait to get started :)

Website of the Day - CERN

This goes to ...

CERN

The European Organization for Nuclear Research holds the research for world's largest particle in their physics laboratory.

This organization has around 20 European states contributing in their research. The're responsible for carrying out research on a Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is a particle accelerator to study the smallest known particles. Two particles are made to travel at enormous speeds inside the accelerator and these particles then undergo collision. Same was the scene when the Big Bang happened which led to the formation of the Universe. The scientists are trying to understand this phenomenon using this LHC.

  
All this and other information is present on the website. Happy reading :)

Mercedes Benz A-S Awesome Website

I came across this website once I was browsing for some information. This website shows Mercedes Benz's detailed facilities and functionalities that these guys implement in their Cars. This website has been built in Flash and it looks incredible. It's so amazing with what people achieve with Flash these days. It is a brilliant way to explain technology and an equally brilliant concept to showcase features of a product.

The webpage displays alphabets from A to S. Each alphabet displays the outstanding functions that Mercedes Cars have at place. You can see the features below in the pictures.

These pics show only some of the features. The rest can be found here.

Make sure you have your sound in the ON mode.

How Hawkeye Works

Hawkeye is a widely used system which was first developed in Hampshire,UK. It is used to know the future course of the moving object used in an on-going activity. Hawkeye is used in activities like sports where you may need to know what will be the trajectory of the object that is being played with.

It is currently used in sports like Cricket, Tennis, Snooker and a whole lot of other activities to adjudicate decisions in these sports because tracking movement of an object becomes difficult when it goes along with a fast pace. 

In order to determine the trajectory of the object, the movement of the moving object is captured using many number of cameras at the same time which record its movement. The cameras provide the data frame by frame. Using the data that is obtained from the multiple number of cameras which provide the 2D location, a 3D location then needs to be found out. Also the height, the speed, and the movement of the object in the next frame needs to be found out.

All this data is then sent to another machine which combines the information and finds out the exact trajectory of the object. It also stores the data to be viewed for later reference i.e. a ball by ball analysis . It is also used for other tasks like virtual representation, graphs, replays and other tasks. 

The system is not fullproof though. On some occasions only, it had shown wrong results which makes the system just a little unreliable. But overall, a cool tech stuff.

Grocery Shopping -- Go Virtual

This is a good one ...

If you got a smart phone and you happen to stay in South Korea, you won't need to waste time on shopping for groceries or items available for eating purposes. Welcome Virtual reality.

 

A store called home Plus (Tesco before), have come up with a very unique way of doing grocery shopping when on the move. They have made shopping an easy task to be done these days. They posted images of the items on the subway station walls. Images of foods that people shop on a store. They created what can be called as Virtual Stores.

The images are exactly similar to the items as seen in the shopping store.The only thing to be done is that if you like a certain product, you need to scan its QR code. This scanning facility is available with your smart phone. Once scanned, the payment can be done, and Viola !!! The product automatically gets added to your online shopping cart.

The Home delivery can then be done after you reach home so there's no fuss of items not being delivered on your doorstep on time. Another pros of this system is that the company has not invested in opening new shopping centers, maintaining them and most of all, you don't need to maintain certain products that are easily degradable like Fruits, Vegetables, Milk etc etc.

It's also useful because people who can't afford wasting their time on shopping can use this facility while being on the move. Talk about time management :)

Sixth Sense at its best

Pranav Mistry has developed a mechanism named 'SixthSense' which may change the way we live our lives. 

This wearable system enables anybody to bring in digital information out into the real world and by using moving hand gestures to use that information. It brings the information out in the real world by removing it out of its limits (like computer screens, tablets etc) and we can make use of this information by using our hand 'gestures'. Nothing ever of this sort and this magnitude has been introduced in front of us. Which is why it seems so amazing.

Some of the things that you can do can be video gaming on the wall (quite literally), browsing on the web on a piece of paper and much much more. You can do just about anything that you can imagine. Such can be the magnitude of this invention.

Just to explain in short, the hardware consists of a camera that captures video stream data and reads markers that are placed on our fingertips. A projector displays visual information on any surface that you want to use as an interface. Our hand gestures and the objects that the camera records are interpreted by using computer based vision techniques.

When I first saw this video it was completely awe-inspiring, a jaw-dropping clip that was totally out of this world.

This mechanism is completely open-source.and the information on how to build this mechanism is given in complete detail on his website.

Below is a 2 part video series that explains how he went about conceiving the entire mechanism and put it into use. Here it is below,

Do Enjoyy .. Else you would miss it :)

Tech site of the Day

Site of the Day

And it goes to ....

TechCrunch

It gives tech updates , new happenings , latest Internet Products etc.

Site of the Day - NASA

Site of the Day

You want space on your system, you got it ....

Prepare to go where no man has gone before :D

http://www.nasaimages.org/

This website comes straight from NASA. It holds images of Planets, Stars, Constellations, Meteors, Space Stations, Galaxies etc.

It also contains images rovers take while being on different missions. They have given information about the rock structure found in space missions, videos of there experiences, 

3D Images, Images of Space Shuttle, Catalogs , Information sorted out on an yearly basis, Astronauts interviews and their experiences and so much more.

Some of the best ones I like are those of International Space Station, The Mars Rover, the Pathfinder, the Cassini and the Hubble Telescope.

They have an amazing sets of records in that website and Space lovers won't take their eyes off the content.

Google's Augmented Eyewear - Project Glass?

Google is at an all time revelation make. The normal eye-wear may just be a thing of the past now. Google X was started by Google Labs with an intention to develop amazing technologies. And this one gets very close to the WOW moment one can imagine of.

The're on the verge of developing an eye-wear which can show you maps, chats, route directions and much more than one can think of. Street view, Friend lists etc etc. Thinking is one thing but thinking and making it is another.

It really takes brilliance to do something like that and Google aren't short of it. With a host of new devices and inventions, this one takes the cake. I had posted an article about Apple developing a seriously cool I-phone http://techstuffwiz.blogspot.in/2011/11/apple-itransparent-concept-phone.html . Well at least I can't wait to lay my hands on these techno freak devices.

Competition is better and who knows what these guys will come up with next. It only gets better :) . But time and again they have proved to be the masters of technology and innovation and this one just makes it a little more interesting.

Site of the day - Artificial Brains

Today's Website of the day goes to 

Paaa Pa Paaaaa ..................

http://www.artificialbrains.com/