There is a downside which is common to most tools available for converting PDF to editable text format. Google Docs and many other programs use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract text from images and pdf files. Now lets suppose you have PDF with text in Hebrew or someother language there is a good chance that OSR technique might not work. However you should still give it a try.

Google Docs
I use Google Docs as my office suite and Google docs can convert PDF files to editable text format. After logging into your Google Docs account click on the upload button. On the upload screen select the pdf file you want to upload and then check the box that says “Convert text from PDF or image files to Google Docs documents”. Start upload and then click on the uploaded file to open it in Google Docs. Remember you may loose some or all the formatting that original PDF file had.

Nitro PDF format to Word or RTF
Nitro PDF to Word is an online tool which claims to be the most accurate PDF to word converter. You simply select the file to upload provide your email address and uncheck the box that says “Receive PDF to Word news from Nitro” or else you will start recieving emails from Nitro software about their products and services.

Open Office
Open Office has built in PDF export feature which allows you to export files created with Open Office to be saved as PDF. Installing Sun PDF Import extension you can also import PDF files to Open Office, edit them and save them in different formats. This method has provided the best results for me. Open Office with this extension tries to import not just the text but also the images and layout of the PDF file.

As I said earlier that most tools will not be able to preserve the original formating and layout of the PDF file. Also note that even though OCR works accurately for most languages using Latin characters, still it is advised that you check the results for spelling mistakes.

Adding Adsense to Google Sites is very easy and if you have a site on Google Sites then you probably already know how to do this. But for those who are curious I have explained how to add Adsense to a Google Site below.

Save your page, and then next to the Create Page and Edit page buttons you will see More Actions button. Clicking on it opens a menu, now select Manage Site.

In the left sidebar of the Site Manage page click on Monetize.

Now click on Montize this site button.

You will be asked whether you would like to create a new adsense account or Use an existing adsense account. If you do not have an adsense account you can create one now.

If you already have an adsense account provide your adsense account email address and pin/postal code or last five digits of the phone number that you have on your adsense account. Press next and you are done. now your adsense account will be used to display ads on your Google Sites pages. But first you will have to put the ads on.

Back to the Monetize page, you can select to display Adsense ads in the sidebar of all your pages. Doing this Adsense ads will appear in your sidebar after all your existing widgets like navigational links and recent activity. You can then edit your sidebar and move the Adsense to the top or between widgets.

You can also place your Adsense ads on individual pages by editing them and choosing AdSense from the Insert menu.

Google Sites will now ask you to choose the format and style of your ad and then you are done. Google Sites Help has a section on using Adsense on Google Sites, refer to it for information or use the comment form below to ask me I am not an expert but I will try to help.

If you ask me they are all useless since WordPress has built in functionality to fetch, cache and display external rss feeds. The function to do that is Fetch_Feed. It uses SimplePie and FeedCache to do the job and it is very effecient. However, the WordPress Codex for this function shows only one usage example for this function which is fine if you are not a person who has good knowledge of PHP, WordPress tags and HTML. But there is a lot more you can do with this function. To learn what else you can do with it you need to read the SimplePie documentation. Using Simplepie and WordPress template tags you can display RSS feeds in many different ways.

I love WordPress, but each day it is becoming more and more complicated for me. For example if I need to choose a plugin to do some job and I search for it on Google, the results will show me many plugins that do the same thing. Now the problem is that how do I choose the best one? I want to use things that do not cause heavy server load. I prefer plugins with caching abilities, better code and effecient resource usage. But believe me not many plugins out there are that good. They are ok for small blogs but on busy websites with lots of visitors they create problems. So the solution to this problem is to first look at the WordPress it self and use it’s own functions to do the job.

Open Clip Art

Try Open Clip Art for all your clip art needs. It has whole wealth of Clip Art organized in tags and most of these images are in Public Domain which allows you to reuse them anywhere you want. You can even download the entire Open Clip Art collection to your hard disk in svg and png formats. See how you can integrate Open Clip Art with Open Office or use it with Microsoft Office Applications. Some files at Open Clip Art may not be available in png format you can still download the SVG file and convert it using free and open source tools such as Inkscape or the Gimp. You can also use these images on Google Docs and Google Sites too. But please do not link directly to the image file on Open Clip Art’s server. Instead download the png file to your hard disk and then upload it to your document.

Flickr

Try Flickr’s Advanced Search to look for images, pictures, photographs, drawings and other art work that are released under a creative commons license that allows you to redistribute or build your work upon them. This license is called Creative Commons Attribute. You will be surprised to see how much high quality content is available for you to re-use.

Remember using someone else’s work without their permission is not just bad manners but it is also copyright infringement. Most people on the web do not mind sharing their work, after all thats why they publish it on the web in the first place. Instead of stealing someone’s work it would be much better if you ask them politely to use their work on your website or document. Don’t forget to mention that you will give them the credit for the work.

Due to some troubles with a few of my WordPress blogs. I have recently learned a lot about security and protecting my WordPress blogs from hacking. There is no way to be 100% sure that your website couldn’t get hacked. However, using the best practices described below, you can make it very hard for someone to crack into your WordPress installation. Taking these steps does not take much time but it saves you from a lot of trouble, even if your website get’s attacked you can fight back quickly and restore your website easily. Without these security precautions you not only make your WordPress installtion vulnerable, but you also make it difficult for yourself to recover from horrible accidents. So lets begin securing of your blog:

Back up often

You have heard this many times. Here it is once again, back up your website and database at least once a week if you update your website daily, or atleast once a month if you don’t update that often. But please back up. Do not trust your webhost when they tell you that they have back ups of your website created on a daily basis. It is very smart to have backups on hand just in case something goes terribly wrong with you or your webhost. There are many WordPress plugins to back up your database. I use WordPress database manager plugin called wp-dbmanager. Using this plugin you can schedual weekly backups to be sent to you via email.

Stay Updated

Whenever there is a new version of WordPress, upgrade your installation as soon as possible. Since 2.7 WordPress has automated the upgrade process or you can manually update to latest version. It only takes about ten minutes but it saves you from a lot of trouble. Older, outdated and upsupported installations often get hacked. Once hacked it is a very lengthy process to clean your blog and upgrade. So protect yourself now upgrade your WordPress.

Also keep your plugins updated to newest versions. If you notice that a plugin author has not released an updated version since a long time go to plugin’s home page and check its status. If the author has abandoned the plugin then stop using it right away.

Strong Passwords

If no one has ever stolen your password then it does not mean that no one ever will. There are some really bad people out there who randomly pick their victims and crack their passwords to take control of their websites. WordPress has strong password indicator which you can use to generate a strong password. A strong password contains atleast 8 characters a combination of alphabates and numbers and special characters. Avoid using words that can be found in a dictionary.

You should have strong passwords not only for your blog’s admin interface, but also for your site’s SSH shell and FTP access. Doing so you make it very difficult for hackers to crack your site and access your files via ftp. Try to use SSH or SFTP instead of plain FTP.

But strong passwords are difficult to remember. Well you should then read this wonder post from the blog herald that tells you how to create strong but memorable passwords. You can also generate a strong password using Aautomatic password generator tool.

File Permissions

One drawback of using WordPress or some of its plugins is that sometimes you need to make a few files writeable on your server. For security it is important that you keep file permissions as strict as possible. It is ideal to have your directories file permission set to 755 and your files 644. See WordPress Codex Changing File Permissions.

Default Username

At the first installation WordPress automatically creates a user account with the username admin. Now using the default username means that half of cracking is done without any guessing. Unfortunately it is not possible to change this username from the WordPress admin interface. However you can change it by running a simple mysql query.
Update tableprefix_users set user_login='newusername' where user_login='admin';

Replace tableprefix with the table prefix in your wp-config file. If you didn’t add a table prefix then it would the default one which is wp_ . You can run this query or manually edit table in phpMyAdmin or you can also run this query using wp-dbmanager plugin.

Other tips:

Remember, no website is 100% secure. But taking these precautions reduces the chances of your blog or website getting compromised easily. The following web pages has more tips on securing your WordPress even more.

Hardening WordPress
WordPress Security Tips and Hacks
WordPress Security Whitepaper

There are several ways for a webmaster to notify the users about updates on their website. There are even free tools available that can publish an RSS feed for a static webpage (I haven’t used any of these and have no idea if they work with Google Sites or not). But since on this blog we rely heavily on the free tools provided by Google, so I will talk about using Google Groups as the solution.

Go to Google Groups and press the Create a group… button. On the Create a group page fill in the information about your site doing so your group and site will have same title and description. Under the option Choose an Access level, select Announcement-only and press the Create my group button. You will be then asked to verify by writing the letters shown in an image to prevent spam. Again press Create my group button. You will be then asked to add a few members to your new group. If you have the email addresses of people who would like to subscribe your group then paste them here or Skip this step.

Now you will be taken to your new group’s homepage. Copy the link from the address bar of your browser. Now go back to your Google Site. At the bottom of your sidebar you will see a link Edit sidebar, click it. On the next page click on Add a sidebar item. A popup will appear showing a few types of items you can add to your sidebar. Select Text and press ADD button. Now you will see a Text Box in your sidebar. Click on the edit link. In the popup window, Give it a title like “Newsletter” or “Subscribe” or “Mailing list”. Below provide the link to your newly created Google group with text informing visitors about your group.

The picture on your left shows how we have used the textbox on our sample website Bashir’s pet shop and notice how we have provided the link to the newsletter. Running a newsletter is no big deal, you can keep your subscribers updated about the recent changers you made to your web site, you can tell them about new products, share something useful with them and they will love you. See this page for some general email newsletter writing tips.

Content is the king on web. No one is going to spend more than a couple of seconds on a website if the content is not useful to them. According to a research, people don’t read pages they scan them when browsing the web and usually they make up their mind whether to stay or not with in few seconds. So you have just a few seconds to grab visitor’s attention and tell them that your page is useful for them. Placing the right content on right spots makes it easy for visitors to find the information quickly. So in this post we will discuss the content that most web surfers look for and where to place this content on your website.

• Introduce yourself. The importance of adding information about you and your business.
• Offer useful content. Detailed Information about your products and services.
• Stay in touch. Allow visitors to interact with you and the website easily.
• Keep it fresh. Content on the web is like vegetables in a grocery store. If its not fresh no one’s going to buy it.

Introduce Yourself

People are not stupid, they don’t just click on a link and order the product. People who buy things on the web are actually a lot smarter than people who visit your shop/store/or offices. They will look for who you are and how good you are. So why not you just tell them all this, and then a little more. Add an about us page to your website and tell your visitors who you are, what you do and how good you are at it. For example

“Bashir’s petshop is a small store located in thesmalltown, smallstate. We sell and supply pet food, accesories, clothing and jewelry. We can take care of your pets when you are on vacations or away for business. We are in the business since last 15 years and have a very good reputation among the residents of thesmalltown ask your neighbours if you don’t believe us. We have a very friendly staff and we love to meet new people. Come visit us at the store, join our mailing list or drop us an email.”

Offer Useful Content

In an earlier post for this series we made a plan to create our website where we tried to define goals for our website. For example our main goal was to sell our products/ services. So the products and the services go directly to your main page. Yes it is a good idea to create a section for product listings with separate page for each product. But since our main goal is to sell these products we are looking for visitors who come to our site looking for these products. And if they don’t find it quickly on main page they might move away without digging product catalogs. (Click on the image below to see a sample layout)

A sample site layout for a small business website

Now there should be a page for your products and services. Make sure it is easy to navigate. Prices are visible easily. Then each product should have its separate page. Provide as much detail as possible and don’t forget to add images of the product. If you already have a happily satisfied customer base ask them to write reviews for your products or services on your website. Also make sure that your potential customers can compare your product/services to your competitor’s.

All these things make your content useful for your site’s visitors. Tell them more and more about your offerings because thats what they came looking for. Keep your content focused on your goals, keep it information driven, keep it fresh and you have yourself a website with useful informative content.

Stay in Touch

This is a common mistake that most small businesses make. They do not provide enough ways for their site’s visitor to interact with the website, the business and the people behind it. If people don’t interact with the website then they are not good for your business. So please add a contact page. Your contact page should have a feedback form, email address, address of your locations, telephone and fax numbers.

You will also see that many popular websites which sell products or services have a comment form at the end of each product listing. Use it to allow your visitors to ask questions on the product page directly, to submit their user reviews and or offer some advise to other visitors. You can also get in touch with your site’s visitors by adding a company blog, a wiki, forum, mailinglist, etc.

Keep it Fresh

The difficult part is not to create the perfect website. The difficult part if to keep improving it. You can keep improving your website doing two things:

Update your site with new content as frequently as possible.

Many small businesses fail to do well on the web because they don’t realize the importance of the content. For example a small home appliances shop has a website with the images of an old television set that every one has already bought and after an year there is nothing attractive about it. The same shop could have done better if they kept updating their website with images of new items in their stocks. Like showing a picture of giant LCD screen for home theatre.So if you keep posting new items to your website it remains fresh and attractive to visitors. Post new offers, special discounts, or links to other webpages with interesting articles about your products.

Experiment with the layout of your website. Web design is a complex field. Sometimes a layout and design that works best for a pet store wouldn’t work for a music store. So you should continuously make changes to your site’s design and see what works best for you. Use different layouts, color schemes, fonts. Change the position of your content. Install a stat counter on your website and see what your visitors are looking for and then add the links to this information on your main page and link to your main page on your most visited pages. You will learn this skill on your way. It is actually fun and very addictive once you realize that the last change you made increased page visitors, you seek more ways to bring more visitors.

This post is part of a series. To read more posts from this series go to “Creating a Small Business Website“.

Content Management System (CMS) is an application or a software used to create, edit, manage and publish content in a consistently organized fashion. We will be using one to manage our small business website. Those used to manage content on the web are called Web CMS. These are usually web applications. Which means that the software resides on your web server. It handles the appearance of your website, organizes your content and serves it in HTML when some one visits your website. Most open source and free CMS use PHP for scripting and MySQL database.

Why CMS?

You can create a web site by simply using a text editor to create your own HTML documents. Even for people with good HTML knowledge it is a lot of work to copy paste the same code on all pages to maintain consistency, check the website for broken links and manually update the navigational structure of the website. Why spend time on that? When you can spend the same time on creating the content.

• Using a CMS your site has the same look and feel and you manage site’s design with templates. So your pages have a consistent feel which is good for branding your website.
• Creating and publishing new content is easier as you will not have to worry about HTML and navigational structure of your website. Most CMS show your newest content on the main page and since they serve the pages dynamically so all your documents get updated with new content.
• You can add new users to work with you on the same site. You can set their roles and manage the content they add.
• Using a CMS allows you to give your site’s visitors a place to interact without breaking your site. Visitors can comment, join mailing list or take part in forums.

Which CMS is right for me?

There are many applications available and a great number of them are free open source CMS. You choose the one that meets your needs. What you should look when choosing the right CMS for your website:

• Does it have the features that help you publish your site the way you want. For example if you want to create an online store, wordpress which is a great CMS is porbably not the best choice in your case. But then if you want to create your main page with news and articles then wordpress is definitely a good choice.
• Does it have the ability to extend functionality using plugins or modules. Using plugins and modules you can add extra functionality and features to your website without breaking it.
• It has a template system that is easy for you to understand. Are there many free templates available on the web? This is important so that you can pick a well coded template that you can modify with your own branding.
• Support, does it have a well written manual available on the web? Is there a forum, mailing list, or a chatroom where you can go and ask questions.

There are many Free and Open Source CMS available on the web. They come with great community support, plugins, templates and themes. WordPress is probably the most popular example of an Open Source CMS. If you want a more e-commerce CMS then you can try Zen Cart or SilverStripe. You can also use more than one CMS on your site, for example you can use WordPress for your static pages and company blog, PHPbb for your web forum, and Zen Cart for your product gallery. Many web hosts offer one click installs for these popular open source CMS. You can also download and install them on your web server and play with them for a while before making your final decission.

Create Your Web Site

Now that you have decided to create your website with any CMS. Next step is to modify the default installation. First of all you need to change the logo, site’s name and title, design and layout to meet your needs. Most Open Source CMS has web forums, mailing lists, tutorials and Wikis on their websites with details about modifying your site. For example look at WordPress support pages, zen-cart tutorials, phpbb documentation and support, SilverStripe community support.

This is a great skill you are learning yourself and once you are familiar with the support system of open source community you will feel powerful and confident. Now lets say you want to change the header image of the default installation with your company’s logo, you go to your CMS website and look for tutorial to do that. If you don’t find a tutorial then simply ask in forums or mailing list. Some one will answer your question with in a couple of hours sometimes even in minutes.

Don’t rush to launch and announce your website until it is ready. Keep modifying your website, work on it, browse it, fill it with content, add plugins and try different layouts. Take your time, take a week atleast or a month if you are a perfectionist. Once you are satisfied with the look and functionality of your website launch it as “Beta” which means that product if polished but you are still testing it. After a while when you have enought users and you have resolved most issues with the website you can remove the Beta label.

In the next posts we will be discussing the content you should publish on your website and how you will be working to make your website popular.

This post is part of a series. To read more posts from this series go to “Creating a Small Business Website“.

There are lots of people out there with great ideas that they want to sell on the web. But they can’t do it because they think they don’t have the expertise and money required to do that. Well folks you were wrong, you don’t need neither much expertise nor much money to sell your ideas or products on the web. This series of posts will help you get started with your wonderful online journey.

Since its going to be a little lengthy discussion so we are breaking it into topics. I will update the links below once they are published.

1. Do you have a Plan?
2. Finding the right web host.
3. Choosing a Content Management System and its usage.
4. What you should put on your website.
5. How to sell products/ services or add a shopping cart to your website.
6. The importance of updating your site frequently.
7. How to make your small business web site popular.

 

The purpose of this series is not to make you an expert in web development. These posts tell you that how you can create a simple business web site on your own without spending much time on learning new things. It gives you a solid start and then you can improve on your skills. Believe me or not, but there is a lot of people out there who started their successful business ventures by just reading something like this on the web. I am one of such people, one day I was reading a blog post about how to start a blog and the other day I was blogging myself. Later on I created many blogs, and one of them is currently my main source of income. I hope you like this series and I would appreciate if you ask questions and leave comments so that we can improve this little tutorial and make it better.

What is Mind Mapping?
There is a wonderful article on Mind Mapping on Wikipedia. But I liked this definition:

“A knowledge organization tool used to elicit ideas from one or more users by placing a topic in the center of a black space and branching out with related ideas.”

Who can use Mind Mapping?
Any one can use mind mapping technique for their own purposes. For example I am using this technique to come up with post ideas for my blogs and for my other writings. Teachers, students, businesses, professionals, software developers, writers, soccer moms and even grand mothers can benefit from mind mapping techniques.

How to do Mind Mapping?
It is very simple. Take a peice of paper write down something in the center like the goal and purpose of the mind map. Now start branching out new points from the central location. Mind mapping is a tool to use both parts of your brain during the thinking process. Mind map allows you to let your mind do the thinking instead of you forcing yourself to think. With a mind map you draw a diagram of ideas coming to your mind and building on these ideas you add new ones. Click on the mind map below to see a mind map drawn by Danny Stevens illustrating the idea of mind maps:

Danny Stevens' Mind Mapping Guidelines

Many people use many different techniques to do create mind maps. I personally feel that it is totally up to the person to decide how he wants to draw his mind map. Some people use software to create mind maps, some people prefer a plain sheet of paper and pencil. Some use colors and pictures, some use curved branches and some use straight lines. Since the idea is to think freely so it is totally understandable that why there are no strictly define approaches to draw a mind map.

Sample Mind Maps:

The web is full of example mind maps. A good place to look for sample mind maps is “NovaMind’s mind mapping examples“. Below is a sample mind map I draw for a story I am working on:

The Mind Map I created for my story

Mind Mapping Software:
I would strongly suggest that first you try mind mapping on a peice of paper with pencil, pen whatever is available and handy. Once you realised the potential you might feel the need of using a software to draw your mind maps and organize your ideas in more effecient ways. Wikipedia has a list of list of mind mapping software, there are some great free mind mapping software available such as Freemind and VUE. I have used Freemind and I liked it a lot.

There are also lots of proprietory software available. Tony Buzan’s iMindmap is probably the most well known commercial tool for mind mapping. It claims to be officially endoresed and approved by Tony Buzan who claims to have invented the mind mapping technique.

Some people who have used Mind Mapping:
Ava Vampira, a medical student who uses mind maps to take notes.
Raj Dash a freelancer who uses Mind Mapping tells why freelancers should use mind mapping.

Books:

• The Mind Map Book by Tony Buzan and Barry Buzan.
• Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter.
• Idea Mapping: How to Access Your Hidden Brain Power, Learn Faster, Remember More, and Achieve Success in Business by Jamie Nas.
• Visual Thinking: Tools for Mapping Your Ideas by Nancy Margulies; Christine Valenza.