Know Social Media Optimization

In today’s competitive world, you need to advertise belligerently to stand out and promote your services on the internet. We have loads of marketing tools available on the internet but the one that is used popularly these days is Social Media Optimization. SMO can be described as simple online tools that people use to share their experiences,reviews,insights etc. The main objective of social media is to increase the visibility and presence of a site online. This all can be achieved by focusing on some popular channels like :-

• Discussion Forums

• Message Boards

• Blogs

• Wikis

• Viral Marketing

  (*We would be learning about these channels in forthcoming blog posts)

There are some rules which one must keep in mind when using social media for promotion :

Initial research and study: Know the requirements of your client and study it carefully so that you can leverage only the specified channels based on demography,profession,lingo etc.

Profile Creation: Create a profile on the basis of your client’s requirements. Know the right social media community that would be suitable for your profile. For e.g. Indian’s generally participate in networking sites like-Orkut, Bharatstudent, Bigadda etc; Faceparty,Friend Reunited are popular networking sites in UK…

Conversations and Participation: An important rule to keep in mind is that you have to look “real” and not “fake”.Why would someone check a link you posted in his/her profile ,when you did not even bother to converse with that person after becoming friends. Start conversations ,share a simple joke ,build a rapport with that person so that he can trust you.

Correct pitching in discussion sites:Forums are the most critical part of SMO. You have to be very careful while posting threads in forums. Never give you link in the first post. The moderator will surely ban you. Try participating in ongoing conversations and reply something informative so that the trust factor builds up.

Create educative content: If you are creating your blog on wordpress or other blog sites,you have to be sure of the content contained in that post. People will visit your blog only if they see value in your post.

Popularize your site: Creating your content is not enough. You can populate it using different social bookmarking sites like Delicious,Stumble Upon or even creating your page on wikipedia. This would surely boost up your sales.

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Trainings at RedAlkemi

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How important it is to be motivated in a workplace

“An employee’s motivation is a direct result of the sum of interactions with his or her manager”- Bob Nelson

A company primarily depends on its employees. Their right behavior towards work and the company would build the success story for that organization. Hence, it’s very important for team leads to ensure that their employees are enthusiastic towards work because it’s the employees who have to complete a task. An employee will give his best only if he is motivated, which in turn would enhance his productivity and improve an organization’s survival and success rate.

Penned below are some of the tips that are necessary for an employer to keep his employee motivated:

Be Motivated: An employer cannot motivate his employees unless he himself is not motivated. Remember one golden role ”Never mix professional life with your personal life”. Whatever problem maybe troubling you, never take it out at your employee because it would deteriorate your relationship and hence decrease his competency.

Know the things that motivate your employees: Prepare a list of questionnaire and ask your employees to fill it so that you can know about their likes and interests. Organizing special events like competitions, training programs, picnics etc. will refresh them and would energize them.

Treat the employees equally: Never be biased towards someone. Allow individual ideas to flow and involve your employees in every discussion so that he has an in depth knowledge of the work assigned to him. Creating favoritism will only lead to de-motivation among other employees.

Recognitions and Achievements: Appreciate good work done by your employee. This will not only boost his morale but also encourage him to be more proactive in future.

Remember that good and healthy environment always make its employee more vibrant and motivated and hence enhance success rate of an organization.

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Basic understanding of Multithreading in .Net Applications

Multithreading is a powerful tool for creating high performance applications, especially those that require user interaction. Microsoft .NET has broken down the barriers that once existed in creating multithreaded applications. 

Newer operating systems, such as Windows 2000, support pre-emptive multitasking, which allocates each thread a time slice. When the time slice of the currently executing thread has elapsed, the thread is suspended by the operating system, context of the thread is saved, context of another thread is loaded, and the other thread then resumes execution according to its previous state. This gives the appearance that multiple threads are executing at the same time and helps prevent the system from becoming unresponsive from a single thread. On systems that have more that one-processor threads are distributed across all of the processors so there really are multiple threads executing at the same time. 

.NET has been designed to support multi-threaded operation. There are two main ways of multi-threading in .NET: -

1. Thread class
2. Thread pool

Every thread has a priority. You can assign different priorities to the threads in application. That means you can tell the system which thread can be done first, which thread can interrupt others and which thread cannot be interrupted. Each thread with the highest priority can interrupt a thread with a lower priority. Below are values for thread priority -

1. Highest
2. AboveNormal
3. Normal
4. BelowNormal
5. Lowest

A thread can be stopped for a given period of time. To make a thread stop you can use sleep method with number of milliseconds to sleep. The thread will resume after the specified milliseconds.

We can stop a thread by using suspend() method. This way thread will wait until you call it back to action. To call a thread back to action you can use resume() method.

We can stop or abort a thread at any time by using abort() method. This will destroy all the data related to that thread.

.Net makes it easy to add multithreading to your application. By this you can make the application more interactive and can increase the user’s experience.

Happy Programming!

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RedAlkemi’s Employee Friendly Environment

Today as a routine after coming to the office while checking my daily mails, it strike to me how nice it feels to work in an employee friendly environment. As soon as I come to the office, the first thing I do is check my mailbox and click on  “RedAlkemi’s Box of Knowledge” mail sent by HR which includes a Quote of the day, Health tip and Amazing fact.

Next I check if there is any “Happy Birthday” e-mail. Happy Birthday e-mail is a birthday wishes mail sent by the HR team to the person whose birthday it is. It includes a lovely bouquet picture, birthday boy’s / girl’s sun sign followed by the information on famous people with whom he / she share his / her birthday, general prediction based on the sun sign and the email address of the person, so others can wish him/her as well. This mail also works like a reminder mail for others to wish their colleague(s). I always come to know whose birthday it is on a particular day even before I check my mailbox. How? Oh! It’s really simple, that person’s workstation is decorated with beautiful ribbons and colorful balloons.

You know what - I am always aware of the latest happenings in the IT industry as HR makes sure to send weekly “Top IT News” email to all the employees. So now you know the secret, it’s not only me but also all RedAlkemi employees, who are always aware of the latest happening in IT industry.

I also come to know when some new person joins our organization as we get induction e-mail. It includes his / her name, designation, qualification, interest and email address.

Now let me tell you about an interesting thing. We have something called fun profile. You can check one’s fun profile by clicking on his/her name under signature lines in the email. In fun profile you’ll find the information about the person like his hobbies, interests, favorite food, what he is scared of etc. So next time whenever you receive any RA employee’s email, make sure to click on his / her name in signature line to learn more about him / her. Believe me its fun!

Posted in Inside RedAlkemi | 4 Comments »

SQL - Injection

SQL Injection is a technique where an attacker/hacker creates or alters existing SQL queries to expose hidden data, or to override valuable ones, or even to execute dangerous system level commands on the database host. This is accomplished by the application taking user input and combining it with static parameters to build a SQL query.
Using SQL injection, a user can damage the database, delete tables, insert fake data into database, steal secure information from the database and can delete the database as well.
To avoid this issue, the code should have the ability to avoid this injection. There should be proper validations on the server end to avoid SQL injection.
The following example will make the process of SQL injection clear.

Example: Login form - when you enter text in the Username and Password fields of a login screen, the data you input is typically inserted into an SQL command. This command checks the data you’ve entered against the relevant table in the database. If your input matches table/row data, you’re granted access. If not, you’re knocked back out.

How to Test for SQL Injection Vulnerabilities:

Suppose we enter the following string in a Username field: `OR 1=1

The authorization SQL query that is run by the server, the command which must be satisfied to allow access, will be something along the lines of:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = `USRTEXT `AND password = `PASSTEXT`

…where USRTEXT and PASSTEXT are what the user enters in the login fields of the web form.

So entering `OR 1=1 — as your username, could result in the following actually being run:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ` OR 1=1 — `AND password = `

1 is always equal to 1. So if you grant an access this means website is not secure.

Prevention Techniques: These are some of the few basic techniques that, if applied to the code, will go a long way in making the website more secure and robust.

Editing Lengths Of Form Components: There should be proper validation for field lengths. To restrict input fields to the absolute minimum- usually anywhere from 7-12 characters is fine. Doing so will make long queries unable to be input, since the field is only enough characters for smaller queries. This will actually not prevent an SQL injection, but will make the work harder for those trying to make use of one.

Data Type Validation: There should be proper data type validation implemented on all the form fields. Numeric fields should allow only the numeric values and text field should allow only the textual data. If a user had to input an age, make sure the input is an actual number. If it was a date, make sure the date is in proper format. Using this we cannot avoid sql injection, however it makes work harder for those trying to exploit an SQL server.

User Privileges: User privileges at database level should be applied properly. The main user that will be used in creating connection should not have the privileges to delete tables or database etc. It is better to be able to create a “super user” in one’s own database that can create, drop, and edit tables at will. The security-obsessive webmaster will want to make individual users that can only do one or two tasks at a time. This method is still useful for throwing attackers off track, as well as minimizing risk from areas of a website that aren’t critical to the security of the database.
Magic Quotes: Magic quotes are horrible for portability issues, performance issues, and they mess with other data that doesn’t need to be escaped

1.   Many scripts made with magic quotes won`t work on servers that have (intelligently) turned the feature off.
2. Performance loss is observed because not all of the data is being input into a database- we are wasting process time.
3. Magic quotes are just inconvenient. They add an extra slash (\) to all of our form data, even when it might not be needed. To fix this, we have to use another process to fix it (If you are unfortunate enough to have used magic quotes, look up the stripslashes() function, and consider switching if possible)

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RedAlkemi Annual Day Celebration- 1st Dec 2008

This year RedAlkemi celebrated 6^th Annual function and marked a presence of 22yrs till date. Spirits were all time high. Our efficient HR team handled the stage. Opening of the function was with a welcome speech given by Ms. Gurinder, followed by Lighting of Diyas by Mr. Manish Sabharwal (Sr. Manager-Webdev) & Varun Rajput (Executive-Business Development) who had recently joined the RA family.

After the glorious opening of the function we started with some serious listening i.e. the presentation by Ms. Preeti Raina (Asst. Manager HR). The presentation covered the entire activity done by the HR team for the year 2007-08 and future projections for the year 2009 followed by this our COO Ms. Anuja Lath gave presentation on Achievements and Future Projections for the coming year for Operation & Sales. She also mentioned about changing our tag line and making it to Delivering Measurable Online Success. This presentation was an eye opener as we came to know the hard work put in the entire year by our Operations team & Sales team.

Last but not the least our CEO Mr. Atul Gupta addressed the employees with the company Vision & Future solution roadmap. This was really informative and knowledgeable as we came to know the current market situation and the industry trends, which are being followed by various companies. Mr. Atul had clearly focused on the vision statement and we all made a promise to do so.

After we received the treat for knowledge we had our much-awaited Rewards & Recognition Ceremony where all the deserving employees were handed Mementos as a motivational gesture.

The List is as follows: -

Best Office Boy - Surjeet
Punctuality- Lalit Singla (Team Spiders)
Most Diligent Employee- Ginni Dang
Best Performer LB- Kuljeet Singh
Best Employee Tech- Mehar Chand
Best Employee RAPID- Pankaj Jaiswal
Best Employee HR-Gurinder Kaur
Best Performer SEM- Sanket Kumar (Team NumeroUno)
Best Biz Analyst- Shivani Narang
Best Performer Webdev- Suresh Kumar (Team NumeroUno)
Best Performer Webdev- JayRam Singh (Team NumeroUno)
Best Team Manager- Manish Sabharwal (Team D Company)
Best Mentor- Thomas George (Team Spiders)
Highest Team Efficiency- Sanjay Gupta (Team NumeroUno)
High Billing Team- Manish Sabharwal (Team D Company)

After the awards ceremony we had Wall of Fame (for employees completing more than 2 years with RedAlkemi) and to the list of 48 employees we proudly added 3 more names this year. They are as follows : -

1. Sheetal Singh (Design Team)
2. Saif Sharique (RAPID Team)
3. Vikas Jindal (Web Dev Team)

In the end after the fun and excitement the function was nearing the closing which was done by cutting the cake by Ms. Chhavi Firani our Group head-Biz.dev. The party started warming up after that and our DJ switched on to some nice foot tapping numbers which ultimately took everyone on the dance floor and everyone enjoyed the snacks & drinks which were long awaited.

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Blood Donation Camp at RedAlkemi

RedAlkemi in its efforts to save lives organized one day Blood Donation Camp on Oct 24, 2008 in association with Rotary Blood Bank Society, Chandigarh. The camp was organized at the Entertainment Center, basement RedAlkemi office from 3pm to 7pm. The Blood donation started with the very first donor, Atul Gupta, CEO RedAlkemi. Blood Donors included not only RedAlkemi Staff and Management but also people for various organizations came forward in large number to be a part of this noble cause. A total of 105 units were collected in this camp in comparison to 67 units collected last time. There were fruits, snacks and beverages arranged by the organizers and a special token of gift for all the Blood donors, courtesy Rotary Blood Bank Society. The various efforts put in to get success for this noble cause included mobile messaging, banners, posters etc.Atul Gupta rightly said, “In our so very busy lives, we sometimes do not get time to help our society, which I think it is one of our commitments as individuals who enjoy the support of the society & its infrastructure but do not often think about paying back.”  We all need to be socially responsible. And should be able to help our society or environment in whatever way we can.

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Team Building Activity

On 24 Sept evening, HR organized the Team Building Activity for all the employees in the organization. We had kept two games for the event. One was Frog Relay Race, where a field was set and four people were made to sit on four corners of the hall. A person has to hop like a frog and reach the other end where his other team member is waiting for him to start the second lap and so on till the fourth person making a relay race. It was so much fun watching the participants hopping from one corner to other like a frog! Out of five teams (Link Building Team, D-Company Team, NumeroUno Team, Spiders Team and Admin Team) Link Building Team stood as a proud winner completing the race in just 23.5 secs. The other game was Make a Pyramid; A pyramid was made on the table using thermacol glasses. Teams have to make a similar pyramid on the other table lying close to the first one. Only four members could participate in this game. Team members were provided with a rubber band with four ribbons tied to it, they were asked to hold the rubber band with the help of ribbon only and use the rubber band to pick the glasses one by one to make the pyramid. Sounds interesting!!! It became tough for the teams to actually do it…..and that was not all the game master told them to make it in 2 minutes only! All except one team got disqualified and NumeroUno was the only team who stood as winner in this game. Catch the glimpse of the event in the pictures below.

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Google enters the war of Browsers with new Google Chrome

Is your website Google Chrome compatible? Do you know Google has launched its brand new browser - Google Chrome and its user base is spreading like wild fire?

Google has jumped in the browser battle going on between MS Internet Explorer & Mozilla Firefox with the launch of Google Chrome. Google Chrome is indeed a wonderful and highly secured browser and gives some advanced functionality to users. I have tried Chrome and I think it’s ideal for people who are basic surfers. It’s free and you can also download it from here -
http://www.google.com/chrome

Checkout this cool article on Search Engine Land that compares Google Chrome with IE & Firefox: http://searchengineland.com/080903-130137.php

No doubt, Chrome is hot and comes with some really cool new features but sadly it doesn’t yet supports my favorite plugins. So guess I’ll wait till Chrome grows up and till then I would continue firefoxing…!!

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Blood Donation & HIV/AIDS Awareness Programme at RedAlkemi

RedAlkemi in association with the CII Chandigarh Council organized a one hour thirty minutes infotainment session on Blood Donation and AIDS Awareness for its employees. As a main speaker for this session, we had with us Dr Suvir Saxena, Deputy Director, Chandigarh State AIDS Control Society and member secretary, Blood Transfusion Council Chandigarh. The session began with a 30 minutes documentary on the importance of Blood Donation followed by an insightful presentation on HIV/AIDS by Dr. Suvir Saxena, which enabled us to understand the magnitude of the problem in better light and help us gear up more effectively to combat the pandemic together.

RedAlkemi, being a Socially Responsible Organization is sensitive to the interests of the society and makes a positive difference by organizing initiatives like Blood Donation Camps etc. and creating awareness among masses about the issues, which are affecting our community and the environment. It is our endeavor at RedAlkemi to further plan more CSR Programmes, which will benefit the community as a whole.

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RACE 2008: RedAlkemi Cultural Event 2008

On the eve of 31^st July 2008 the HR Team organized a Cultural Event for the organization wherein each team gave a fun filled performance infused with lots of enthusiasm and energy. Preeti, Rahul & I hosted the show with our titbits of PJs, interesting one-liners and the works.

The Link Building Team opened the show with a zestful Bhangra followed by a bollywood dance number. It was a fantastic start of a great event. Then came the sensational NumeroUno Team with a satire on the Punjab Police which set the stage on fire as we had everyone rolling in laughter. This was followed by a lovely Punjabi folk song by Nishant Midha also from NumeroUno.

D Company performed next. They put forth three interesting performances, a dance on a medley of the latest Bollywood hits sequenced to narrate a tale, a “jabardast” Bhangra which on public demand had to be repeated and a song by Manoj Kandwal.

Next in line we had PDME team members, with three performances, a dance number, a funny skit and solo performance by Varunjit. The dance number on Pappu can’t dance was loved by all and we had a repeat performance for that as well. Their funny skit also was liked by all and for Varunjit’s performance; all one can say is he is a great comedian.

Additionally, Jagdip from Spiders Team sang a sentimental hindi song in his melodious voice. Then HR & Admin Team presented a musical skit on an old number which was liked too.

Last but not the least we had a spontaneous performance by Chandan from our Technical Team who tickled everybodys funny bone with his non-stop Punjabi Joke!

The entire show was a huge hit with the dazzling performances by all Teams. Words of appreciation and encouragement from our CEO, Mr. Atul Gupta wrapped up the occasion along with some goodies and a dance party which helped us RACE our adrenalin!!

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Celebrating Friendship Week with The Maa Sharanam Orphanage

At RedAlkemi we decided to celebrate Friendship Week this year in a special and unique way by contributing in kind to the Maa Sharanam Orphanage. The entire staff participated in the donation drive held for a duration of one week from 28^th July - 1^st Aug ‘08. Everybody displayed a high enthusiasm level towards this productive activity and we collected loads of goodies like Stationary, Eatables, Clothes, Books, and much more!

Thereafter the Redalkemi HR Team delivered the collectibles to the Maa Sharanam Orphanage at Mohali Sector 70 where Mrs. Kalpana Ghai an active member of Maa Sharanam informed us about the place being temporary and given by a volunteer till they could collect sufficient funds to arrange for a home for the homeless kids.

The children were thrilled and gazed at us in amazement while we offloaded the stuff from our car. They all gathered in a big hall where we placed the three big donation boxes.

For one of the kids, Neeraj it was a very special occasion being his birthday. So there we were, singing the Birthady Song in chorus for the little one, whose excitement knew no bounds! Pictures were clicked to capture all the fun and excitement on the smiling faces. All the kids were so cute especially the two adorable 4yr olds, Muskaan and Kaajal who completely stole our hearts.

We ended the day with a thanksgiving bhajan from the children…that lingered on in our hearts as we left the orphanage with cherished memories and a sense of fulfillment of having done something really worthwhile.

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Miss you Ishmeet…

As the day went by into nite,
The voice of India faded into eternal light.
Leaving so many eyes teary and moist,
Hearts crying for more, souls so frost.

Ishmeet left us a treasure of his voice,
Resounding his youth n nature so alive,
Making a place in million hearts n fans,
He became a star in heavens lands.

Shine wherever you are, dear one
You are eternal, you are our icon.

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Sitemap.xml - The most Overrated Search Engine Indexing factor

Ask an SEO next door to tell you reason for the poor ranking and indexing of your website of your website, the first statement he will come up is - “Cmmon, how will your website rank, when it doesn’t even have a sitmep.xml file”. Yes, we all know that sitemap.xml helps to improve indexing of a website, but is it actually as important as the most community hypes about it? Certainly not. Infact, I think that XML sitemaps is the most overrated SEO tactic ever. Sitemaps don’t really solve the problems (I mean all the problems) where indexing and crawlability are concerned. What I mean here is that if you have a website that has 150 pages and the Search Engines can only access 30 of them, don’t think that uploading a sitemap.xml is a sure shot way to index 100% of your pages. It’s very much like applying a 2 inch band aid after open heart surgery.

By now, you must be wondering - “If not sitemap.xml, then what’s the cure?” - I believe instead of just spoon feeding the Search Engines with pages with the help of a sitemap.xml file in a hope that it will pick all the listed pages one day, you must rather focus on making the un-indexed pages better and worthy in the eyes of Search Engines by improving the content, acquiring better/more links to them, and so forth. When Google, doesn’t indexes some pages on your website, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the Search Engines had trouble finding the page, but actually the Search Engines never found those pages worthy of keeping them in its main index. Just because a website doesn’t has a sitemap.xml doesn’t mean search engines wont crawl it unless the website has weak internal linking and information architecture.

Please don’t get me wrong here. I am not against the use of sitemap.xml file but what I want to say is that if your website has indexing problem, don’t just rely on the sitemap.xml as the sole indexing factor. Consolidate the internal linking of your website, use nofollow to control the link juice flow and most important – add quality content on the pages and get quality back links for those pages.

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