+971 55 881 1725 hmimthiaz @ imthi.com

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Where is Google Headed ? – Advertisement hell for business owners

Today I was searching for few keywords which were property and real estate related. Shocked to see most of the top result for the search was an advertisement from property developers.

Half of the result in the page was Adwords campaign of few top real-estate companies in Dubai. Google has made it look like a typical result with a small distinction between paid and actual search result.

As a regular user with average screen size all you will be looking at first glance is the advertisement. Most of the users will not even scroll further to see what is the actual search result.

What happens to people who focus on SEO? Are they f___ked?

Is there any scope for organic SEO? Most of the SEO experts I know already stopped doing SEO and getting certified as SEM experts.

How much money are the companies willing to pay Google? What happens to small business who cannot spend so much money for placing ads with Adwords? Are they f__ked?

Google Web Search has become Google Ad Search. Google has turned so greedy and so evil.

TinyMCE remove height & width from image

It is so annoying the TinyMCE editor image plugin saving the height and width of the image. You can turn it off in the settings.

There are other settings available for the image plugin please visit here for details.

Easy, Cheap and Robust Cloud Hosting Solution from Digital Ocean

For the past couple of years I have been hosting with Hostgator. I was a happy customer until the acquisition by EIG. In the past 2 months my blog was down for almost two days. I really wanted another cheap and best solution for hosting my website. Another thing is the response time has gone so bad over the months. When you goto their website for support you have to wait for 30 to 45 minutes for the technical guy to come up say something. So I decided to part away from hostgator for bad service and being very expensive.

Last week my friend Ambarish recommended a new cloud based hosting service from DigitalOcean. First I was very sceptical about this cloud as I tried hosting my site with same configuration on Amazon Cloud and did not get good result. But I though let me give a try. So I migrated my blog and did a test run for couple of days and I am pretty happy with it.

Some of the best features I like about DigitalOcean

  • Very easy to create an instance. (Droplets)
  • You have very good list of configuration to choose for the instance
  • The instance can be loaded at 6 different location. I choose Amsterdam as I wanted my instance to be high all the time 😉
  • You can boot the instance from variety of images
    • Fresh Linux Distributions
    • Pre build Linux Distributions with custom application like WordPress, LAMP, Ruby, GitLab etc
    • Your own custom images
    • Your existing backup images
    • Even from recently destroyed images
  • Automated Snapshot backup etc.

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The journey with DigitalOcean has been really good. Will be updating more on how to related to DigitalOcean and some stats in a months time. They are giving away 10$ credit for every referral I make. Please click on the banners in this blog post if you wish to get a new account. You will be supporting me on my hosting cost for this blog 😉

Working with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Today I started my journey to explore and learn more about Amazon Web Services (AWS). My mission is to setup a wordpress blog completely in the cloud. This blog post is just a mention about the journey and will be posting things in detail in the days to come.

What I did so far as follows..

  • Created a new EC2 instance with Basic 32-bit Amazon Linux
  • Logged into the instance and installed Apache, PHP and mysql client tools
  • Created a new RDS instance with mysql version 5.1.50
  • Added EC2 instance IP in RDS for allowing access.
  • Installed wordpress on the EC2 instance and configured the database
  • Created a new elastic volume storage for 1GB and attached the same to EC2 instance
  • Formatted the elastic volume storage and mounted the same for wordpress upload directory.
  • Created a new Elastic IP and attached the EC2 instance to the IP.
  • Created a cname cloud for imthi.com and pointed the A level record to the Elastic IP
  • The blog cloud.imthi.com is ready that is hosted in Amazon cloud 🙂

Phew, trust me it was not easy and I had to create and delete many EC2 instances to understand how things work. I am not sure whether the setup I had done is the best way.. I did some load test on the setup and it was not looking good

My next mission is to fire up multiple EC2 instances and to use a load balancer to handle the load so that the graph will look better in the days to come 😉

Released new Amazon S3 Plugin for wordpress

Couple of months before one of my friend was asking about Amazon S3 plugin for wordpress. For me most of them were either complicated or not working. So my main focus of the plugin was to be really simple and in the same time effective. I would say I have kind of achieved the goal to some extend in version 1.0 of this plugin release.

The toughest part in the plugin is to configure the Amazon S3 Setting, create a folder for caching and setup the wordpress cron file. Once these settings are done you don’t have to worry about anything else. The plugin will look for media files in your post and automatically schedule the files for amazon upload. Once the file is uploaded the media urls will be from the CDN. There are no changes done in your database and if you disable the plugin everything will go back to the old state.

Download WordPress Amazon S3 Plugin

WordPress Amazon S3 Plugin

More information on WordPress Amazon S3 Plugin

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