Blue Bugle: Mobile, Desktop & Web Technologies

I suppose it’s coincidence that this post appears almost exactly one year after Blue Bugle went sort of inactive. Today, the blog doesn’t enjoy as many readers as it once used to. This unfortunate thing is due to my hectic schedule in my new day job as senior content writer for an organization called MSys. This job gives me more opportunities to explore the separate aspects of the digital marketing domain. In the past, all we used to do was promoting our blog posts through social media at random thereby trying to gather as many visitors as possible. You never studied the prospects, the market, or the social channels you promote your stuff to.  Most of the SEO companies out there prided themselves in creating spammy blog comments to create links to client websites. Needless to say, most of these plans never worked or had less positive impact. Now, if you follow the same spammy activities, you are sure to get a ban at best. I had to come up with a new marketing plan for MSys th...

[Note: First of all, we are redesigning the format of Blue Bugle. We have not been active for more than a month now. In August, we did not have even one post going. There have been quite a number of technological advancements in that month. We covered none of them, but none of our regular readers missed us still. The reason being, there are no regular readers; probably! We have been trying hard to develop readership by posting honest reviews of products and good advice to smartphone and tablet buyers that you can get nowhere else. Not even on professional technology blogs. Still, we are not gaining readership, because we have been posting only what people feel they can find elsewhere. If they do, there is absolutely no need for Blue Bugle to exist. Hence, we are changing. From now on, you will get blatant entries on what we really think and know. We are going to be ruthless to anybody that rips you off. We are going to show you what you need to do. We are restructuring the posts. No...

Remember we reported the shutdown of Google Reader a few days back? It used to be one of the Google services that reached a few million people instead of a few hundred millions as Google wants its products to. Hence, the search giant decided to shut down the reader application, putting millions out in the street. We were gladly rescued by a overwhelmingly simple feed reader application known as Feedly . Feedly Feedly came and conquered. It does have an interface with which you can import all your feed content directly from Google Reader itself. Since it was one of the early adopters of Google Reader refugees, it had a major boost in its traffic and user stats. With is iOS and Android apps, Feedly beckoned the readers who were desperately looking for a platform to place their feeds. And it worked. The application had a boost in traffic so tremendous that it had to make internal changes. Now the Feedly cloud application goes through regular maintenance and feature updates...

In the 90’s one of the most popular online things was the Yahoo! and AOL online chat rooms. When social networks started appearing and gained popularity, chat rooms slowly died. In December last year, Yahoo! shut down its popular chat service. We can chat right inside Facebook or Google Plus or Gmail. This has become quite so common these days. What is making news in this sea of social networking sites is the new information that Facebook is building chat rooms for its users, who are counted to be more than a billion. The biggest competition to FB chat room will be Google’s own Hangouts feature available on Google Plus. Facebook is testing out a new feature known as ‘Host Chat’ that will help you create and host chat rooms within FB. This being said, there are a number of chat applications already within Facebook. OpenChatRoom, LiveChatRoom, etc., are third party apps available in Facebook for the same purpose. These chat applications are not however so popular although they are ...

If you checked LinkedIn, the social network for professionals circa eight hours ago, you might have noticed the service was not available. It instead displayed this particular website (image from TNW): Approximately eight hours ago, an outage spanning several hours was noticed on LinkedIn, and the people started worrying that the service was being hacked into. Here are the outage details from DownRightNow: However, LinkedIn later confirmed on Twitter that the outage was caused by a DNS issue. Here’s the tweet: Our site is now recovering for some members. We determined it was a DNS issue, we're continuing to work on it. Thanks for your patience. — LinkedIn (@LinkedIn) June 20, 2013 What is the DNS issue they are talking about? Every website has to be tied to a specific IP address or a range of IPs. Although the website has a domain name (bluebugle.org, linkedin.com, google.com, etc.), this domain name has to be resolved to an IP address in order to correctly locate the...

Do you remember our earlier post on how to be smart on Facebook ? That gives an important lesson. You know, there are many Facebook pages that have been prepared to mimic the official celebrity pages. These pages are prepared solely as a marketing gimmick too. Since they are made under the name of a popular celebrity, they quickly interest the fans of that celebrity and get a fan following pretty easily. Then marketing becomes easy. This was one of the reasons why Twitter introduced verified pages. You know that simple check mark on Twitter accounts of VVIPs? That is a sign that the Twitter account is a verified one, and it does indeed belong to the person mentioned. Facebook has also gone the same direction by introducing verified pages yesterday. Here  is the official PR from FB. Verified pages on Facebook have a blue check mark on them, next to the name of the page or profile. Check out this official page of Michelle Obama. Facebook has the official page of the celebr...

On the first of this month, Twitter reported  a hacking attempt on the social network that compromised over 250,000 accounts. Within hours after the attack pattern emerged, we were experiencing Twitter downtime for some time. Twitter had shut down itself to recover from the attack. Now, everything is under control, as per the latest update. However, if you are one of the 250,000 that got hacked, you should take immediate action. Here, we have a complete security guide to the social network. How to Know If Your Twitter Account Is Hacked? There are two types of account hacks—implicit and explicit. Explicit hacks are the ones that you can immediately identify. For instance, you will see unusual activity on your account—direct messages that you never initiated, an increase in the number of people you follow, unknown new people in your ‘following’ list, tweets and retweets that you did not initiate, etc. In the worst case, your hacker changes your password and you will no lon...

This is just an explanatory article, and we don’t intend to promote any illegal activities like spamming and hacking. Google “Hack Facebook account” and you will get to this particular website: HackFacebookAccount.org. It is a website that supposedly offers a way to hack a Facebook account. Now, anybody that has some experience with the Web knows it pretty well that this is simply a scam and there is no way a website like that can hack into Facebook accounts. Still, I would like to show you exactly how the service works to bust the simple myth that many people believe. 1. Go to the website and identify the account First of all, I went into the website, and identified my own Facebook account to hack into. I was presently not logged into my Facebook account. Here it is. I put in my Facebook account link, and the service correctly identified the account immediately. And it automatically started hacking the account (how very convenient, huh?) 2. Completed! The hacking complete...

Facebook is the largest social network, and hence it is practically understood why people want to capitalize on its one billion users. Many of Facebook’s users are in the upper side of the economy and could be potential buyers of products and services. Hence, companies create Facebook pages and try to reach potential audience by asking people like you to comment and like these pages. This will make sense to you if you know the concept of viral marketing. Viral marketing works just like how a virus spreads through your body—it is automatic and highly accelerated. In the same way, when you like a particular page on Facebook, you are actually recommending that page to all of your friends. They will be able to see this page on your profile page and timeline. Going further, if you have fifty friends in Facebook, the page you like reaches fifty people and by mere chance five out of those fifty may like the page. If each of these five people has fifty friends, the page will reach a wider a...

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C.org) has announced that the HTML 5 specification has become final. If you are confused what it is all about, check out the advantages and features of HTML 5 . This will mark the future of the web, without Adobe Flash and other such insecure technologies. You may probably know about Apple’s long-term disapproval of Adobe Flash . Even Adobe accepts Flash is more or less insecure. In HTML 5, you have amazing list of features, all of which are compared in HTML5Rocks , a web collaboration that talks about the features and benefits of this version. In short, these are the features offered in HTML 5. 1. Graphics HTML 5 can show you graphics without the help of any external technologies. The supported list of technologies include 2D/3D Canvas, CSS 3D transforms, WebGL, SVG, SMIL, etc. With these new 2D and 3D transform features and web fonts, you can use HTML 5 to create presentations on web pages. 2. Offline Capability Another feature of HTML 5 ...

Have you noticed our PDF documents appearing on some of our blog posts? I create a PDF file (which may be a public speech or any other important document available in the public domain) and I upload that PDF to a storage service. I then make the file available in a blog post by embedding a specific piece of code. In this post, let me tell you ways you can embed PDF and by extension other files (spreadsheets, presentations, etc.) on your blog. Let me make a riveting thrilling story from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle available to you through a PDF embedded file on this post. As a first step, if your document is not in the PDF format, you need to convert it. You can use any of the freely available PDF converters out there. Some popular PDF printers are CutePDF , BullZip Printer , PDF Creator , etc. Once you have the PDF file ready, you can use any of these services to get it uploaded—Slideshare.net or a cloud storage service  like Google Drive or Dropbox. Slideshare Method Slideshare ...

All the time, these companies out there, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and what not, come up with miscalculated product innovations and in some cases plain gaffes, and in the end, they end up apologizing to their customers for their mistakes. Let’s look at a few of the famous apologies in this post. We are not targeting regular apologies due to natural product failures, but outright gaffes and arrogant wrongdoings that caused companies to apologize. Apple iPhone, the Original & Its Price In 2007, Apple released its groundbreaking product, the iPhone for the first time and they set its price at 600 dollars. It should be noted that Apple iPhone became one of the hottest selling products in history, thanks to Apple fans that run into billions. Within two months, Steve Jobs, the deceased former CEO of Apple, slashed the price of iPhone from 600 to 400. The millions and millions who purchased iPhone for 600 dollars stood with gaping mouths and fingers up their brain. They fel...