Microsoft to release Office for Linux next year

According to various rumors seen on the blogosphere earlier this morning, Microsoft looks like it could be taking a meaningful look at releasing a full Linux port of its Office Suite sometime next year.

The sudden change of mind is apparently due to Linux showing commercial viability, and because Microsoft is reportedly already working on Office for Android.

Android, as you probably already are aware of, is a Linux-based operating system, meaning a lot of the porting work will have already been done.

It shouldn’t take too much effort to take the next step and bring Office to Red Hat, CentOs, Ubuntu or any other Linux flavor for that matter.

Until today, Microsoft has never released a part of desktop software for Linux, with the exception of Skype, but that was an acquisition, so it changes everything.

But Microsoft does have a Linux department which has mainly been tasked with maintaining Hyper-V (virtualization) compatibility with Linux operating systems under Windows, and Windows Server 2008 and especially Windows Server 2012 are prime examples.

Presumably, and with the development of Office for Android, Microsoft has beefed up its number of Linux developers, and those developers will then also work on Office for Linux.

The big question is whether there’s actually significant demand for Office for Linux. On any typical day, Linux has perhaps 1 or 2 percent of the desktop market, and about 53 percent of it is with Ubuntu.

However, it’s still important to remember that almost every Linux distribution comes with Libre Office for free. It’s only an educated guess, but some open-source developers suspect that there are scant few Linux users who would proactively go out and pay for Microsoft Office

After all, many desktop Linux users chose their operating system because it’s free, both in the money sense, and free from Microsoft's deadly grip and mad control of Windows and its desktop software.

The other possibility is that Microsoft could be reacting to increased uptake of Linux and cloud-based productivity suites by large institutions, such as universities, cities, municipalities and governments from all over the globe.

Setting up robots.txt on Blogger

    Blogger now allows custom robots.txt, this is very useful because we can set the visibility of our articles on search engines, we can determine whether the article will be indexed by search engines or not.

By default, every blog that uses the Blogger platform will have a robots.txt as follows:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

And has the following explanations:

Mediapartners-Google is a robot from Google Adsense, leave it as is because if you mistakenly change that than the ads served will not fit with your content.

The next line is for all the robots and marked with an asterisk (*). On the default configuration, it is clear that the label of our blog is not indexed Disallow: /search.

Keep in mind that a slash (/) is as your homepage, so for example if you want the label to get indexed, do not just fill up with a slash like this Disallow: / because that would be you do not allow the robot tracing your blog, but it should like the example below:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: 

User-agent: *
Disallow:
Allow: /

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

With the configuration as above then all of the articles and the label will be indexed. And to block a robot for particular page you can simply write as follows:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /p/faq.html
Allow: /

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

Update: To resolve the pagination problems on blogspot after we remove the Disallow: /search than we can use the following configuration to block the pagination page:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search?updated-min=
Disallow: /search?updated-max=
Disallow: /search/label/*?updated-min=
Disallow: /search/label/*?updated-max=
Allow: /

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

After the changes, make sure everything is fit like what we want by visiting www.example.com/robots.txt. Replace the Example.com with your domain name.

Warning! Use with caution. Incorrect use of these features can result in your blog being ignored by search engines.