Introducing Blogger Shortcode Plugin

Surprise! After having served Blogger for over 5 years we are back again with yet another plugin that will transform blogger templates and especially blogging like never before. Equipping it with a system that will make web designing and creation of widgets a piece of cake! STCnetwork is proud to Introduce Blogger Shortcode Plugin that will let you add Web elements with very little effort without using any long complicated, ugly code. You can now insert videos, audios, photo gallery, tabs, accordions, etc. with just a single line of code inside your posts, widgets, sidebars and guess where else? also inside your Blog Comments! Embedding Objects in Blogger was never that easy before. Today we are taking blogger to the next Level. Lets get started!

DEMO

What is a Blogger Shortcode?

Blogger shortcode is a macrocode i.e. a single line of code that contains a set of instructions which lets you do nifty things with no effort at all. Shortcodes can help you embed files or create objects in BlogSpot blogs with a single line of code that would normally require a lot of complex, long ugly code.

You can now easily insert objects such as Videos, Audios, Files, Slideshows and all important web elements such as accordions, tabs, colorful buttons, boxes etc. inside Header, Sidebar, Footer, Posts, Pages, Titles and amazingly even inside comments! It requires no prior knowledge of HTML, CSS or JavaScript. The plugin is extremely lightweight and its multiple-embed-support will reduce your Page Load time by 50%.

How Different is it From Wordpress Shortcode?

Wordpress has been our biggest source for inspiration and it would have never been possible to develop this plugin for Blogger if the logic was not already present. We simply converted the PHP functions into jQuery functions which are both platform independent and easy to implement.

Unlike Wordpress shortcodes which can only be inserted inside Post content, Blogger shortcode plugins lets you insert content even inside widgets and Comments! WP shortcode API is platform specific but our plugin offers cross-platform embedding support that is not limited to blogger blogs alone. It can surely work on any website be static or dynamic.

 

Most exclusive feature of this plugin is to support nesting of shortcodes. You can insert a shortcode inside another one to offer full dynamic experience.

Shortcodes such as accordion and Tabs can be added a multiple times on a single page without effecting one another. This plugin optimizes and reduces Page Load time extremely well.

 

List of Supported Shortcodes

We have so far developed around 10 Shortcodes and we are planning to develop around 50 shortcodes within a  month inshAllah. Shortcodes will be created based on their importance and usability. We will release each shortcode with a separate tutorial.

A shortcode itself it not a code but a TEXT which is processed as HTML. Don't believe yourself? Believe it! :)

Following are the shortcodes developed so far.

Shortcode	Definition
[accordion]	Accordion is a vertically stacked list of items where each item can be "expanded" or "stretched" to reveal the content associated with that item. Items can be Toggled on and off easily. An example is the accordion widget
[tab]	Tab widget allows multiple documents or panels to be contained within a single window, using tabs as a navigational widget for switching between sets of document. An example is the Multi Tab Widget
[code]	Embeds syntax Highlighter which preserves the original formatting of source code
[table]	Create responsive and fancy HTML Tables with multiple Rows and Columns
[quote]	Inserts a Fancy Blockquote
[button]	Inserts colorful CSS3 Buttons
[icon]	Insert FontAwesome icons anywhere with custom options support
[soundcloud]	Embeds SoundCloud Track
[dailymotion]	Embeds Dailymotion Video
[youtube]	Embeds YouTube Video
[divider]	Inserts a Horizontal Separator to divide a section, also contains a Back To Top button
[num]	Inserts a Number enclosed inside a circular background
[warning]	Inserts a box with Warning message
[success]	Inserts a box with Success message
[alert]	Inserts a box with Alert message
[info]	Inserts a box with Some Information message
[update]	Inserts a box with Update status message
[facebook]	Embeds Facebook Page Plugin
[image]	Embeds Images anywhere you want in clear cut resolution!
[tooltip]	Inserts a Fancy CSS3 Tooltip above or below hyperlink to show extra info

more on its way!..............

• You can now also suggest us which shortcode to create

Installation Steps

Follow these steps to install the Shortcode Plugin on your blogger blog.

1 Go To Blogger > Template > Backup your template 

2 Click Edit HTML 

3 Search </body> 

4 Paste the following dynamically updated JS file just above it

<!-- Blogger Shortcode Plugin Dynamic JS File -->

<script src='http://downloads.mybloggertricks.com/shortcodes.js' type='text/javascript'></script>

5 Next Search For <head>

6 Paste the following CSS files just below it

<script src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js' type='text/javascript'></script>
<link href='http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/assets/font-awesome/css/font-awesome.css' rel='stylesheet'/>
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Oswald' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>

Note that in the above code I have included latest versions of jQuery and FontAwesome libraries. I suggest that you use these versions instead of any old versions you may already be using.

  
7 Save your template and you are all done!

New functions are dynamically inserted inside the Shortcode JS file and you need to install it only once. I will keep updating this page to introduce any update made to the script and new shortcodes created will be appended to the Table List on this page.

Shortcode Syntax

Shortcodes have a name and attributes. The attributes are options that help you configure an object. Shortcodes are symbolized by Square brackets. The braces are opened and closed just like HTML but with a much simpler format as shown below:

Suppose you need to embed a Dailymotion video inside your blog posts, sidebar or blog comments then you can do it in two ways.

[dailymotion src="x2lhjki"][/dailymotion]

or simply

[dailymotion src="x2lhjki" /]

Now if you wish to change the color of the player button, hide player info and edit the player dimension then you can insert attributes as shown below

[dailymotion src="x2lhjki" width="100%" background="0080ff" height="100" info="0"][/dailymotion]

or simply

[dailymotion src="x2lhjki" width="100%" background="0080ff" height="100" info="0" /]

Note that the above is just an example, full details on how to use a dailymotion shortcode will be shared in its own tutorial

Syntax Errors

Avoid making these mistakes when typing shortcode names and attributes:

1. Don't use camelCase or UPPER-CASE for attribute names or Shortcode names. Use only lowercase characters
2. Don't add spaces between Shortcode Names and the Square Braces
3. Shortcode macros may use single (') or double quotes (") for attribute values, or omit them entirely if the attribute value does not contain spaces.

   [table col='123' row=456]

   
   is equivalent to
   
   

   [table col="123" row="456"]

   
   



4. A space is required between the shortcode name and the shortcode attributes. When more than one attribute is used, each attribute must be separated by at least one space.



5. The shortcode parser does not accept square brackets within attributes.
   

   [tag attribute="[Some value]"]

   
   

How Does This Shortcode Plugin Works?

Shortcodes are written by providing a handler function "mbt(html)" . Shortcode handlers are broadly similar to WordPress filters: they accept parameters (attributes) and return a output. We used a jQuery function to parse through Square bracket content and attributes and then replace the Square bracket DOM with the HTML version and ignore or escape those Square braces which are enclosed across a name which is not registered through the global variable "var bhf". The Parser function recognizes registered shorctodes through the global variables only. Locations where shortcodes will work include Widgets, Blog Posts, Pages and Blog comments. Shortcodes placed elsewhere will be escaped.

Credits

� 2008-2015 STCnetwork.org.

Version: 1.0 (29-March-2015)

 

Blogger Shortcode Plugin by STCnetwork is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are most welcomed to share the plugin with your readership as long as you attach attribution link back to this blog post and avoid selling the plugin in a commercial product or service.

We have to thank a lot of people here for helping us in the Plugin development.

• 
  
  We would like to thank the helpful community at stackoverflow who helped us in optimizing the scripts as much as possible and writing down simple logics. If these shortcodes are nest-able then it is only because of the kind help I received from this community co-founded by @jeff Atwood
  
  



• 
  
  We would like to thank Wordpress for sharing their helpful API that helped us better understand some core logics. Indeed they are the pioneers behind this idea.
  
  



• 
  
  We would like to thank Tien Nguyen for providing an idea of how to traverse through a loop using jQuery and replace the Square brackets with HTML tags.
  
  



• 
  
  We would like to thank Ahmed Nasir for helping us in debugging the script and making it possible to embed shortcodes within Comment iframe windows.
  
  

 

What is Next?

In coming hours, we will post separate tutorials for each shortcode, new and more demanded shortcodes will be released. Embedding stuff in blogger will be at your finger tips. Get rid of those long, complicated, heavy scripts and add stuff in blogger with just one line of code!

For extra help and details on implementation and development of this plugin, please create a discussion Topic at our Forum where I am always available 24/7 for any help needed.

Do share your precious views on this plugin and let us know how can we improve it further. Do mention services for which you need a custom shortcode and we would love to develop it for you and share it for free on this blog. Peace and blessings buddies! =>

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10 Interesting History Facts Of Google!

If you have been using internet for over a decade, you would surely agree
that since all this time, Google has had been the best source of help when it
comes to searching anything in the online world. You will, However be shocked to
find some of the very interesting facts about the renowned search engine and
people affiliated to it.

Here are 10 interesting History Facts of Google that you might not ever come
across!

10. Google�s Family

It was Larry Page�s brother Carl who helped them start an e-Group and a
dotcom company that was gained for over half a billion dollars by Yahoo by the
year 2000.

9. Original Name Of The Website

The original name for Google was Backrub and which was given to this website
due to the algorithm of the ranked pages was based on the number of back linked
pages the site had and supported.

8. Copyrights

The copyrights system of Google is very interesting because the patents that
have been filed with Google are referred to the patent that has been owned by
Dow Jones which is very much same to the Google copyrights.

7. Stanford

PageRank is the name of Google algorithm which has been given to it after
Larry Page. The patents for this are held by Stanford and are given 1.8mm shares
which were sold for 336 million dollars in the year 2005.

6. User Generated Data

According to some of the studies Google uses about 20 petabytes of user
generated data every day. (Petabytes are estimated at 10 to the 15th power. So 1
petabyte is approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). It uses enormous totals
of calculation to index the Web, process search results, serve up ads etc.

5. Opening Shares

Google was publicized in 2004 and its opening shares were about 85 dollars
per share and during their IPO they raised it to about $2,718,281,828.

4. Largest Search Engine

During 2000, Google became the largest search engine of the world and users
have spent about 200 billion minutes over it until now.

3. Politics

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the two richest guys in the country to not
make any political contributions but have spent more on lobbying than Yahoo and
Facebook combined.

2. The First Google Employee

The number one employee of Google was Craig Silverstein and he is still
working at the company as the director of technology with a total net worth of
about 950 million dollars according to different websites.

1. April Fool Tradition

Google�s practice of April Fool�s jokes initiated in April 2000 when Google
proclaimed the �MentalPlex,� or Google�s aptitude to read a person�s mind as he
envisages the search results he wants.

So these were some interesting facts that you might not know about Google.

All for now,

Share your views

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Our Visit To "Beacon Light Academy" - Meeting The Angels

After having conducted several seminars and conferences across the country in different universities and delivering the message of Online entrepreneurship through Content Marketing across the globe, it was now time to meet those little Angels face to face who needed a slight push to transform their dreams into reality. After the deadliest attack on "Army Public School (APS)" in Peshawar, the terror did not stop unless it tried to frightened the students in Karachi.  Beacon Light Academy became the first target of terrorism when some unidentified men threw two grenades early morning at this school on February 3, 2015. Fortunately none was injured [Source]. On February 7 the principal of this effected school invited us i.e. STCnetwork and my best friend Rafay baloch from RHA Info Sec for a seminar on "Victims of Slave Mentality". The Seminar aimed at promoting the true sense of Online entrepreneurship amongst students through Web Development, Content Marketing, Security research & Penetration testing. The Seminar was later delayed due to security concerns and was conducted instead on February 14, 2015, where more than 150+ Angels (Students from secondary grades) actively participated without any fear! Lets share some important highlights of the event.

Event Venue & Speakers

All Details on the Facebook event Page - Victims of Slave Mentality

What Was The Event all about?

Education without application is like buying cents for dollars. A map without key. As a fresh graduate myself, throughout my academic life, I have always kept a close look on the unequal distribution of wealth amongst society. Sometimes I would blame the nature for the imbalance of living standards but with time as I gained more experience about the social cash flow system, human Psychology and the Rise and Fall of poor and rich communities, I started understanding why despite the same God gifted potentials, some humans live a far better life whilst others struggle all life to fulfill their dreams but they end up in despair. Those who succeed in life are either by luck, resources or by one basic rule of life and that is Dreaming With Open Eyes. I term such people as followers of PLAN B and the rest as Victims of Slave mentality i.e. PLAN A

Note: Those who choose to be free of worldly desires by choice are Holy people and they are not part of our discussion ever for they are people of wisdom and great intellect and deserve full respect at all times. The above classification between two different standards of life is meant to educate students and make it easy for them to explore their inner strengths and the gift of true knowledge.

We gave a basic definition of both these classes of people first time on our Seminar at NED University on BluePrint To PlanB back in 2103 which I am quoting below for reference:

 Plan A

A Plan oriented individual is always led by society norms and rules, he is always the follower and never an initiator. This spoon fed life which starts from school level and continues till graduation leads him to his ultimate goal and that is "The hunt for Job". He is always afraid to invest his energies into a more productive form of work. Take an example of a school nerd, whose ultimate aim is scoring high in class. He may be good in studies but poor in extra curricular activities, poor in communication skills and social interaction. Most of Plan A oriented students often fell prey to depression and frustration. Upon completion of their graduation they are left with nothing but fixed salary jobs where they spend rest of their lives, dreaming of getting a sustainable Income one day but they die as ordinary citizens and never as distinguished names that could be remembered for decades.

 

 Plan B

Self Fed, financially stable, always hungry and thirsty to innovate and create something new and unique. That's what that defines a Plan B oriented mind. Can a Plan A student pause his university studies in middle just because he needs more time to turn his innovation into reality? Of course he wont, but people like bill gates, Abraham Lincoln, zukerberg, Steve Jobs, John Mackey, Ted Turner,  were amongst those who taught they will better apply knowledge and never worship it blindly. PlanB believers look for opportunities and the moment they find a loop hole, they give their best to utilize it properly.They are always students with dexterous minds always looking to learn and apply. They are practical thinkers and better planners. They are normal students but they don't keep one goal in life, they keep multiple parallel goals in life. They never follow social trends. They try to develop college skills during school life and university skills during college life. They are always ahead of time and never bond their potentials to social restrictions set by the dead slow walking society. They dream of empires and never getting enslaved by big giants. They never dream of joining Microsoft or Google but they dream of inventing one of their own. They are indeed Plan executors and day dreamers!

We shared with them real life stories of successful young entrepreneurs around the globe, internet's proper use, Ways of building a lucrative income online, Earning Secrets of Social Media Giants and of course not forgetting our Self-applied Online earning strategies.

We motivated them that Excellence is not dependent on Age or Time, they can attain it before time just like Arfa Karim Randhawa did, who became the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional at the age of nine in 2004! Or Babar Iqbal who started computer programming at the age of 5 or Akrit Pran Jaswal who performed his first surgery at the age of seven!

We also shared the story of Nick D' Aloisio  who was an average school going guy but his summly App that he created during his 10th grade got sold out for over $30 Million US Dollars to Yahoo!

We also discussed how whatsapp emerged and was soled for $19 billion dollars to Facebook which ones rejected giving job to the same developer

We then concluded that all these legendary figures achieved all this because they believed in a PLAN B setup of life! They did not swim with normal flow of academic trends, they did not restrict themselves to home or social bounds, they instead invested time and energy to explore their hidden powers.

The Most Unusual Thing!

We were approached for Autographs!

We kept wondering why would they take our autographs for I personally consider myself not worthy of it but later as we realized that it was a gesture of thanksgiving by these little angels who were extremely excited to discover their hidden talents and capabilities. Casual seminars often aim at product or idea promotion and they rarely touch the hearts of the attendees but Alhamdulillah these paper autographs were enough a proof to let us know that we delivered the message with full sincerity. We thanked God for all this honor and also prayed for these kids to live up their dreams in true spirit.

Certificates and Gifts Distribution

Certificates were distributed amongst students after the seminar by the school administration.

We distributed three gift hampers amongst students during the Q&A session. Unfortunately the photographers missed capturing those memorable moments.

Received Shields!

We express our gratitude to the principal of Beacon Light Academy Madam Azra for her hospitality and token of appreciation in the form of a memorable Shield.

Event Photos

We are sorry for not sharing professional set of photos today because we had avoided taking our Personal Photographer "Saad" with us because the organizers suggested that they had around four cameras and they could easily cover the entire event. But they missed many precious shots and most importantly failed to capture Rafay's pics. =<

So these are the only pictures we received.

 

Special Thanks

We would like to express our sincere thanks and appreciation to Madam Azra, the honorable principle of Beacon light academy for inviting us to the school and giving us a chance to share our online earning strategies with the students.

Sameer Rehmani the genius who made it possible. Design Credits of Certificates, Shields and Event Pamphlets goes to him.  

And all the Organizers!

Where Will We Go Next?

God knows best, we have no perfect plans. From the past 3 years we conducted several seminars across the country in different universities but from this year onwards we will narrow down our approach to Schools and colleges. We will try our best to encourage students across the country to kick start their Online Business dreams.

Thank you for always being a great source of motivation. You keep us alive as long as you keep on reading us! Thank you to Beacon Light School for honoring us with an opportunity to share our Online business ideas with the students. We wish you a successful future, full of opportunities and creativity. You guys deserve the best of life!

Peace and blessings be upon you all! =>

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Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Makes Your Website Vulnerable!

According to a latest news, the popular Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin has a major vulnerability that makes a website susceptible to blind SQL injections. This is a very popular plugin that is used by over 14 million websites. Reportedly, all versions of SEO by Yoast prior to 1.7.3.3 are vulnerable to Blind SQL Injection web application flaw. This is an alarming news for those that use this plugin, because it could seriously compromise the data on their website.

According to Mohit Kumar of Hacker News:

�Basically in SQLi attack, an attacker inserts a malformed SQL query into an application via client-side input. However, in this scenario, an outside hacker can�t trigger this vulnerability itself because the flaw actually resides in the �admin/class-bulk-editor-list-table.php� file, which is authorized to be accessed by WordPress Admin, Editor or Author privileged users only. 

Therefore, in order to successfully exploit this vulnerability, it is required to trigger the exploit from authorized users only. This can be achieved with the help of social engineering, where an attacker can trick authorized user to click on a specially crafted payload exploitable URL.�

So in other words, WordPress admins can be tricked into clicking on links that would then trigger an SQLi attack. After the attack, the attacker could then add their own admin account to the vulnerable WordPress site and do whatever they want with it.

Everyone who has SEO by Yoast installed is not going to be automatically affected by this. The attack can only be manually triggered by a WordPress admin, editor, or author who clicks on a dangerous link created by the attacker.

In addition, this is something that can easily fixed by updating your plugin to the latest version. The Yoast team promptly patched the exploit upon being notified, and the newest version (1.7.4) is said to fix the problem. The Premium version of the plugin has also been updated.

Security fix: fixed possible CSRF and blind SQL injection vulnerabilities in bulk editor. Added strict sanitation to order_by and order params. Added extra nonce checks on requests sending additional parameters. Minimal capability needed to access the bulk editor is now Editor. Thanks Ryan Dewhurst from WPScan for discovering and responsibly disclosing this issue.

In the future, you can have plugin updates taken care of automatically by going to the Manage > Plugins & Themes > Auto Updates tab. It is strongly recommended that you update all SEO and security plugins on your websites as soon as possible.

Stay safe!

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Google To Rank Sites Based On Accuracy Of Information

In recent months, Google has become increasingly focused towards the quality of search results pages. It always was, but there has been talk of new ranking signals being incorporated into the search engine. Where certain signals were merely guidelines in the past, they'll soon geared to become direct signals. One example is mobile-friendly design. Another is security. This leads us to believe that a major algorithm update might be in order pretty soon.

Latest rumors have it that Google may start counting the accuracy of information as a ranking signal. According to a paper published by researchers within the company, it may now value accuracy over the quality of backlinks.

Knowledge-Based Trust

Google is working on a system where it can determine the trustworthiness of a page not by who is linking to it, or how many incoming links it has, but by the number of facts it contains.

How it works

A score, called a Knowledge-Based Trust score, would be computed for each page by cross-referencing the content with facts stored in Google�s Knowledge Vault. The Knowledge Vault is a database of 2.8 billion facts extracted from the web, and is the primary source of information behind the boxes that appear on the right side of some searches.

The more facts contained on a page, the better it will rank. In instances where few facts are found on a page, Google will check the accuracy of other content contained on the site to determine how well it can be trusted overall.

Reliability?

So far in test conditions, Knowledge-Based Trust score has been able to reliably predict the trustworthiness of millions of websites. This sounds impressive on paper, and I�m sure the SEO community would appreciate an alternative to links as a ranking signal. However, a lot of questions remain unanswered.

For one, not every website exists to report facts, so how will trustworthiness be determined in those cases? Well that�s when the research paper says Knowledge-Based Trust isn�t necessarily a replacement for current ranking signals, but a supplement to them.

There is also cause for concern for pages written around new technology and new discoveries, with information that hasn�t yet been entered into Google�s Knowledge Graph. If Google started to rely on Knowledge-Based trust to rank web pages, would it then focus additional effort on revising and updating the Knowledge Graph?

We are eagerly looking towards Google for answers. What do you think about this new development? Share your views in the comments section below!

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Google Search Results Just Became More Mobile-friendly!

Mobile optimization is the need of the hour. Mobile has grown at a fantastic pace - not just in screen size and technical specs, but in usage as well. Google has pointed out time and again that mobile optimization is a must for ranking well in search engines. Recently, it introduced a label for mobile-friendly sites to be displayed in search results. In contrast, a red label was introduced for sites that were slow and not mobile-friendly. Google has made two more important changes recently that reflect on the importance of mobile optimization.

Mobile friendliness as a ranking signal

Up until now, mobile friendliness has remained a best practice, a plus point, a mere usability feature that is nice to have and that will keep users happy. Sites that were mobile-optimized indirectly benefited in search engines as they saw more user engagement, lesser bounce rate, and a generally favorable response from both the users and the search engines.

It never was a direct signal for ranking a website.

Until now.

With the recent changes to mobile search in a bid to make it more user-friendly, Google has made it abundantly clear that mobile-friendliness will now be used as a ranking signal. In fact, they're given a date for this - 21st April. According to Google;

Starting April 21, Google Search will be expanding its use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in Google Search results. Users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results optimized for their devices.

You can implement changes to our website before the 21st. Once you do that, you can use Google's mobile friendly testing tools to check your website.

You can use Google's Mobile SEO guidelines to help you along your way.

App content in search results

Recently, Google Search also began to use information from indexed apps as a factor in ranking search results displayed to signed-in users who have the app installed. As a result, Google Search may now show content from indexed apps more prominently in search.

If you have a mobile app, learn more about App Indexing, and allow Google Search to show this information in search results.

Good luck (:

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