Tech Inside

This Blog Has Moved ...

2007-03-16T21:07:00.000+05:30

I have now moved to the Wordpress platform on my own domain. Hope to see you all there...

Visit My New Blog

Feed subscribers need not worry. The feed address remains the same... :)

Links For 20 February

2007-02-20T19:53:00.000+05:30

Free online magazines dedicated to GNU/Linux and Open Source

A great collection of links pointing to free online magazines dedicated to Linux and Open Source.

Free and Premium Website Templates

A collection of website templates, both free and paid.

Gimparoo - Adapting Photoshop Tutorials for the GIMP

This blog takes popular Adobe Photoshop tutorials and adapts them for the GIMP. Excellent blog if you like to use GIMP.

5 More Ways To Increase Page Views Of Your Blog

2007-02-17T21:22:00.000+05:30

There are two ways to increase traffic on your blog :

Increasing the number of page views from the visitors you already have
Getting new visitors for your blog

Here I will talk about the first method, increasing the number of page views from the current visitors of your blog. Increasing page views not only means more traffic but also translates into more revenue from the blog by capitalizing on existing traffic.

This is my second post regarding methods to increase the number of page views your blog gets. Don't forget to read the first post "5 Ways to Increase Page Views Of Your Blog" here.

So, here is a list of 5 more ways to increase the number of page views for your blog.

Use Partial RSS Feeds

Although I am not a supporter of partial feeds, it is a very good method of getting your RSS feed readers to visit your blog to read the complete article. On the flip side, you need to write good post teasers to get your feed readers to actually visit the complete article.

Give Exposure To Your Blog's Top Posts

Put up a list of your blog's top posts in the sidebar. Give a catchy headline to that section. Something like "Must Reads" or "Absolute Reads".

Put Up A Feed Of Your Top Category

Most common blogging platforms like Blogger and Wordpress support category feeds. Grab the feed of your blog's top category and add it to the sidebar. This way it will be continuously updated without your intervention.

Encourage Visitors To Search For Articles / Dig The Archives

Make sure the "Search" function on your website is prominent and easily accessible. This will encourage visitors to search the archives for the keyword they are interested in.

The Series Magic

In case you did not understand the title, it means write a series of posts on a topic of your choice. For example, Chris Pearson has a series on Design Tips. If a visitor will visit one post in the series, it is likely that he/she will visit the other posts in the series.

Try these methods and do tell me whether they worked for you.

What other methods do you use to increase the number of page views for your blog ?

5 Ways To Increase Page Views Of Your Blog

2007-02-15T23:36:00.000+05:30

There are two ways to increase traffic on your blog :

Increasing the number of page views from the visitors you already have
Getting new visitors for your blog

List the Recent Comments of your blog in the sidebar

Your blog's visitors will always be looking for the opinion of other people about your blog. And the best way to highlight the usefulness of your blog to a new visitor are the comments on your blog. So listing the recent comments in the sidebar can be an interesting and effective way to make your visitors visit the pages on which last comments were made.

List the Recent Posts of your blog in the sidebar

Put up a list of your recent posts in the sidebar. This will help in increasing page views because if a visitor likes a post, then he will definitely be looking for fresh posts in your blog for more reading.

List Related Posts below the post content

A sure shot way of making visitors visit other pages, is to put a list of related posts just below the end of the post content on the post pages. Even if your visitors ignore the sidebar, they will surely see the related posts when they scroll down to the end of the post.

Interlink between related posts on your blog

An effective technique for increasing page views is to interlink between posts on your own blog. For example, if you are writing about a topic on which you have written earlier, always try to link to the previous post. Also do trackbacks or backlinks to older posts wherever possible.

Use "Read More" links wherever possible

Whenever you are composing a long post, use "Read More" links on the home page. This also helps in keeping your blog's home page uncluttered.

Try these methods and do tell me whether they worked for you.

What other methods do you use to increase the number of page views for your blog ?

Links For 14 February 2007

2007-02-14T20:42:00.000+05:30

26 Tips to Keep Your Computer Up and Functioning

The ultimate list of maintenance tips to keep your computer performing optimally all the time.

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide

An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting. Excellent for novices and Linux newbies.

10 Free Apps Every Mac User Should Have

Finding freeware apps that do your work as good as paid softwares can get pretty hard. A great collection of 10 freeware apps for Mac OS X.

Get More Traffic With One Simple Tweak

2007-02-11T20:25:00.000+05:30

Did you know you can get more traffic to your blog just by editing your images while adding them to your blog posts? Read on to find out how ...

While composing a post in Blogger, everytime you click on the Image button to upload an image, you give the location of the image and your desired image size and then click "Upload". After uploading you click "Done" and the image is inserted in your blog post. But almost all bloggers forget about one attribute (in the HTML code of the image) which if used could bring your blog at least 25% more traffic.

The trick for the traffic

Everytime you insert an image using Blogger image hosting, go to the "Edit HTML" tab of your post. There you will see some code as below,

<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_yPl3H1QvHjU/Rc3YNNB658I/AAAAAAAAAKo/I1eErnCpjWc/s1600-h/sharing_desktop.png">
<img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_yPl3H1QvHjU/Rc3YNNB658I/AAAAAAAAAKo/I1eErnCpjWc/s200/sharing_desktop.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5029914080190326722" border="0" /></a>

What this code is does that it places a 200px wide image in your post which links to the original image you uploaded. Now look closely at the code. You will see that there is a "alt" attribute in the <img> which has no content in it. This is the attribute we are looking for.

You need to add some info about the image inside that tag. By info I mean what that image is about. Make sure your info is short but descriptive. So after adding some information about the image, your new code will look something like,

<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_yPl3H1QvHjU/Rc3YNNB658I/AAAAAAAAAKo/I1eErnCpjWc/s1600-h/sharing_desktop.png">
<img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_yPl3H1QvHjU/Rc3YNNB658I/AAAAAAAAAKo/I1eErnCpjWc/s200/sharing_desktop.png" alt="Viewing friends desktop in YIM" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5029914080190326722" border="0" /></a>

In case you are thinking what is the use of adding information in the alt attribute read on.

How This Tweak Will Bring Traffic ?

You must have heard about Google Image Search. Many people use it to find images. Now coming to Google Image Search, how does it find images. Images don't have text so that GoogleBot can index them. That is where the "alt" attribute comes in, Google uses the "alt" attribute to search for relevant images. So if you are using "alt" attributes, you have a good chance of getting your post images right up there in the search results, resulting in more pageviews for your blog.

The Last Word

Though I have illustrated the process for Blogger.com, it also applies to Wordpress blogs and the code that you get when you upload an image to ImageShack.

Try this tweak and leave a comment in case you need help. ;)

Links For 7 February 2007

2007-02-07T22:26:00.000+05:30

FaviconFrom Pics

Would you like to display your own icon on the browser address bar when visitors view or bookmark your web page? Now it's easy to create icons for your web pages with Favicon from Pics

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide

An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting. Excellent for novices and Linux newbies.

10 Free Apps Every Mac User Should Have

Finding freeware apps that do your work as good as paid softwares can get pretty hard. A great collection of 10 freeware apps for Mac OS X.

Disable Automatic Delivery Of IE7 Via Automatic Updates

2007-02-05T20:24:00.000+05:30

Don't want to install IE7 but are bugged by Windows Update everytime ?

After the release of Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft started distributing IE7 as high-priority update via Automatic Updates for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. But there are still some Windows customers who want to stick with Internet Explorer 6 and do not want to see those nagging screens from Microsoft to install Internet Explorer 7.

Here is how you can block the install of IE7 via Windows Update while getting other important updates.

How To Block Automatic Delivery Of IE7

Microsoft has released a toolkit to disable the automatic install of IE7 via Automatic Updates while enabling the customer to get other updates via Automatic Updates.

The Internet Explorer 7 Blocker Toolkit enables IT Administrators to disable automatic delivery of Internet Explorer 7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates and the Windows Update and Microsoft Update sites.

The toolkit download requires genuine Windows validation and allows you to easily enable or disable the automatic installation of Internet Explorer 7 by Microsoft Automatic Updates on your XP or 2003 operating system.

Download : Internet Explorer 7 Blocker Toolkit

Download ODF Translator Add-In For Microsoft Office

2007-02-04T10:00:00.000+05:30

This has to be one of the best moves made by Microsoft towards supporting document interoperability and open source. The first version of Open XML Translator has been released . The development of Open XML Translator is funded by Microsoft.

The Open XML Translator provides tools to build a technical bridge between the Open XML Formats and Open Document Format(ODF).The ODF add-in works in Microsoft Word XP, Word 2003 and Word 2007 and allows to open and save documents in the ODF format.

The press release of SourceForge.net discloses that the you will be able to read and write ODF documents even if you don't have OpenOffice suite (or other ODF implementations). The developers are also planning to make the translator for Excel and PowerPoint available by the end of the year.Even though the ODF Translator project is funded my Microsoft, it will continue to be open source.

It is important to note that while OpenOffice has always been able to open Microsoft Office formats, Microsoft had not been keen enough to provide support for ODF in Microsoft Office. This add-in seeks to simplify things for corporate houses which buy 1-2 Microsoft Office licenses (for the lead employees) and load OpenOffice on rest of the computers to save on money. So no more hassles in opening OpenOffice Documents with Microsoft Office now. ;)

For opening and saving files in ODF, you can find the options in the File Menu in Office XP, 2003 or by clicking the big office icon on the top left side in Word 2007.

Download : ODF Translator Add-in for Microsoft Office (English)

Links For 31 January 2007

2007-02-01T21:00:00.000+05:30

PXN8.COM - Online Photo Editor

An excellent online photo editor which is useful if you don't have a good image editing software installed on the PC you are working from. Also allows uploading the edited image directly to Flickr.

The Real Caffeine » Archives » How-to: Rip DVDs with VLC

VLC Player just keeps on springing surpises. Now you can rip DVD's with VLC. Read the guide to know how.

10 Reasons Not To Get Vista

Contemplating on whether to buy Vista or not. This list might just convince you to stay with Windows XP for the time being.

Yahoo! Site Explorer Gets An Update >> Great News For Blogger Users

2007-01-31T21:10:00.000+05:30

Yahoo! today updated its Yahoo! Site Explorer adding a number of new features. Yahoo! Site Explorer is the equivalent of Google Webmaster Tools and it helps Yahoo! Search to index your site better.

The new features added to Yahoo! Site Explorer are :

Authenticate site/blog using META tags:

For those of you who cannot upload an authentication file to your site, such as a blog, you will now be able to authenticate your site in Site Explorer by including an authentication key as part of a META tag on the home page of your site.

Detailed Authentication Errors:

Yahoo! will now provide detailed errors on authentication failures, making it much easier to diagnose possible problems.

Delete URLs:

For your authenticated sites, you can now delete any URLs from the index. Simply locate the URL in Site Explorer and click on the ‘Delete URL’ button. The URL and all its subpaths will be deleted shortly thereafter. This is meant to work in conjunction with the robots.txt file while providing greater responsiveness.

Site Explorer Badge:

Get a Site Explorer badge for your Website and retrieve the count of live links from the whole web.

Good News For Blogger.com users

Blogger users will now be able to verify their blogs using the Meta tag method and able to access advanced settings for their blog.

Visit : Yahoo! Site Explorer

Implement Graphical Post Dates For New Blogger

2007-01-29T00:23:00.000+05:30

Ever wanted to have stylish graphical post dates in your Blogger powered blog something like the post dates in LifeHacker ? Your wish has been fulfilled.

Aditya at the Last Word has whipped up some cool code to achieve graphical dates in Blogger.

The javascript and CSS when implemented makes your post dates really stand out in the blog.

It is basically a function that takes in the Blogger date as an input, does some fancy splitting and slicing, and outputs the day, the month and year in it's own separate line, or if you like it, as a picture.

But as Aditya points out, if you want to use images as post dates, you will have to build a minimum of 44 images first. So for those not comfortable with Photoshop the first method will be easier.

Head over to Aditya's post to find out more about this Blogger hack and how you can implement graphical dates in your Blogger powered blog.

Links For 25 January 2007

2007-01-25T19:45:00.000+05:30

Linux Shell Scripting Tutorial - A Beginner's handbook

A complete guide on how to create Linux Shell Scripts especially useful if you are new to Linux.

How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu!

A guide on how to install various software in Ubuntu using the Synaptic Package Manager and also what to do when the software you are searching for is not available through Synaptic.

wxDownload Fast - A multithread and multi-platform Download Manager

wxDownload Fast (also known as wxDFast) is an open source download manager. It is multi-platform and builds on Windows(2k,XP), Linux and Mac OS X. Besides that, it is a multi-threaded download manager. This means that it can split a file into several pieces and download the pieces simultaneously.

GOM Player - The VLC Basher ?

2007-01-23T20:15:00.000+05:30

GOM Player is a new name in the hugely crowded market of video players. And some people claim it beats VLC ... :P

I have been using it as a VLC replacement for sometime now, and am now in a position to compare it with VLC.

Now let's take a look at some of the features of GOM and alongside bash them too. :P

So let the ordeal begin : :D

Codec Problems !

Everytime GOM Player cannot play a file, it leads you to a site where you can download a open source codec for that file. So far so good. But doesn't downloading separate codecs for playing different files defeat the very purpose of using video players (like GOM) which use embedded codecs.

Another downside is that each codec you download through GOM takes up an entry in the "Add or Remove Programs" list cluttering it.

Playing Broken AVI files

According to GOM Player's home page, it has a patented technology which lets it play broken AVI files by skipping damaged frames. A typical example of a broken AVI file is one that has not been downloaded completely. And I tried playing one such file. Leave alone playing that file, GOM itself hanged. I had to use Task Manager to end it. :P

Appearance & Accessibility

This is one place where GOM leaves VLC behind. It has a very good user interface and easy (say noob friendly) access to the most used options. And VLC's current interface needs to be improved to entice newbies to use it.

Cross Platform

VLC Player runs on Windows, Linux and also Mac OSX. GOM Player on the contrary is available only for the Windows Platform as of now. This is sure to disappoint a lot of Linux users. :(

Final Verdict

Now coming back to the answer for the title of this post.

Is GOM Player really the VLC Basher ? My answer would be "simply not".

GOM Player is not bad, but it is mainly targetted at newbies. But if you are a professional user go for VLC.

As for me, after finding no extra features (other than eye candy) in GOM, I am not even considering switching my loyalty from VLC. And if you want GOM only for its good design, I would suggest you try out some VLC skins first.

But the fact that it supports only Windows is sad. :( They need to start supporting at least Linux.

Download GOM Player

[How To] Read Office 2007 Documents In Older Office Versions

2007-01-21T10:41:00.000+05:30

With Microsoft Office 2007 hitting the stores, it is just a matter of time before we start exchanging documents in the new Office 2007 file formats. But what about the users who are not switching to the new Microsoft Office 2007. Will they be able to open, edit and save Office 2007 file formats on their old versions of Microsoft Office ?

For the users who would like to work with the new Office 2007 file formats without switching to Office 2007, Microsoft has released a "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats". By installing the Compatibility Pack in addition to an earlier version of Microsoft Office , you will be able open, edit, and save files using the file formats new to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007. The Compatibility Pack can also be used in conjunction with the Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003, Excel Viewer 2003, and PowerPoint Viewer 2003 to view files saved in these new formats.

The Office 2007 Compatibility Pack will work on all previous versions of Microsoft Office (starting from 2000) with the latest service pack.

Download Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats

Make Windows XP Start Faster

2007-01-21T00:30:00.000+05:30

Want to boot Windows XP 10-15 seconds faster ?? Here's how.

Most of the time you install an application in Windows XP, it adds an entry to the list of programs which autostart when Windows XP boots up. As time progresses, this list keeps on growing making Windows XP boot slow.

The solution

SysInternals Autorun is a nifty utility to track down the notorious programs which run at start-up and slow down the booting of Windows XP.

This utility, which has the most comprehensive knowledge of auto-starting locations of any startup monitor, shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and shows you the entries in the order Windows processes them. These programs include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys.

It also has an option to hide signed Microsoft entries to help you to zoom in on third-party auto-starting images that have been added to your system.

If you want to disable an auto-start entry uncheck its check box. To delete an auto-start configuration entry use the Delete menu item or toolbar button.

So go ahead and make your Windows XP faster.. :D

Download SysInternals Autorun

How To Completely Remove Norton Antivirus

2007-01-19T20:31:00.000+05:30

If you have ever used Norton Antivirus, I suppose you know how bloated it is. And the real trouble comes when you want to dump commercial antivirus programs like Norton Antivirus for efficient antivirus freebies like Avast! and AVG. No matter how hard you try to remove Norton from the "Add or Remove Programs" list, it is bound to remove in the list in some form or other. So here is the way to completely remove Norton Antivirus from your PC.

The official way to completely remove Norton Antivirus

Believe it or not Symantec provides a free "Norton Removal Tool" download on its website. The Norton Removal Tool searches your computer for any Norton product (any version from 2003 to 2007) that you have installed and removes them completely from your PC.

The Norton Removal Tool uninstalls all Norton 2007/2006/2005/2004/2003 products from your computer. Before you continue, make sure that you have the installation CDs or downloaded installation files for any Norton products that you want to reinstall.

There is just one caveat, you will need the Norton installation CDs. The Norton Removal Tool can also be used to remove a failed installation or a damaged Norton product.

All in all a much needed tool for removing the annoying Norton products.

Download Norton Removal Tool

IE7pro : Must Have Add-on For IE7

2007-01-13T21:18:00.000+05:30

IE7pro is an add-on for Internet Explorer 7 which adds some nifty features to IE7 and makes it a bit more worthy as a browser. It is an all-in-one answer to the numerous extensions used in Mozilla Firefox such as AdBlock and User Switching Agent.

Some of the useful features of IE7pro include :

Switch Proxy
Block flash and ads
New tab from address bar and tab close by double click
Set agent identification to Mozilla, Opera, GoogleBot & more
Refresh pages automatically
Recover session crash
Manage tab history
View page information and many more ...

features that make your IE easier, more useful, secure and customizable.

Download IE7pro

Download Google Talk Themes / Skins

2007-01-10T20:22:00.000+05:30

Google Talk 1.0 added some cool new features like File Transfer and Voice Mail but it still lacked in one aspect. Google Talk still does not support color themes or skins which is a much sought after feature and is found in every other instant messenger program.

The default Google Talk looks cool but staring at the same old interface for months just gets monotonous. To overcome this, Sapiens has created some Google Talk themes which you can download and use. He has released 6 color themes for Google Talk. :)

The different color schemes available as of now are Blue, Pink, Black, Red, Yellow and Purple. So change the appearance of GTalk now and give your desktop a fresh new look. :D

Download Google Talk Themes

Download The Standard Feed Icons

2007-01-09T23:29:00.001+05:30

Working on your blog's template and looking for the standard feed icons to use ?

Feed Icons.com has some nice feed icons and images which you can download for free. The zip package contains the icon in two flavours - default orange and grayscale for recolouring purposes. Each colour scheme has 9 different sizes ranging from 10x10 to 128x128, each in PSD (Photoshop) format. Other file formats include; AI, EPS, SVG, PDF, PNG, JPG and GIF.

If you want to recolor the icon to match your blog's color scheme, then follow the instructions in the Read Me PDF file available on the website.

Visit : Feed Icons

Make Google Talk show music information from foobar2000

2007-01-08T09:00:00.000+05:30

Google Talk 1.0 added a cool new feature. It now has the ability to display whatever music you’re currently listening to as your “status” — a line of text that displays below your name in other peoples’ buddy lists. At present it works for iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player and Yahoo Music Engine. But alas it doesn’t work with foobar2000 :(, which is quite a favourite with audiophiles.

But here is a workaround by which you can get Google Talk ( GTalk ) to show music information from foobar2000 ;) . For that you need the following :

Google Talk - Download
foobar2000 - Download
foo_winamp_spam - Download

Here are the steps to show the current song in foobar2000 as your status in Google Talk ( GTalk )

Install Google Talk and foobar2000. :P

Extract foo_winamp_spam.dll to the foobar2000\components directory.

Create an empty file in your foobar2000 directory (e.g. c:\Program Files\foobar2000) called winamp.m3u. You can do it opening notepad and then saving the empty file as winamp.m3u.

Apply this registry file by double-clicking on it and selecting Yes. (Note: If you installed foobar2000 to a directory other than c:\Program Files\foobar2000, you will have to open this .reg file and edit the path within to point to your foobar2000 installation directory.)

Now start Google Talk and change your status to “Show current music track" and also play some music in foobar2000.

Google Talk will now show the song you are listening to in foobar2000 as your status. Hope that helped you. :D

Thanks : foobar2000 3rd Party Plugins forum

FeedBurner Rolls Out Site Statistics Service

2007-01-04T23:18:00.000+05:30

The new Site Statistics service of Feedburner is now live. The new stats package comes from Blogbeat, which was acquired by Feedburner earlier this year. This means no more heading to two different planets one to find my feed stats and other one to find my blog stats.

The Site Statistics service is free for the time being and can be found under the "Analyze" tab of your FeedBurner account.

This initial release of site statistics includes:
Visitor summary, detail and trends
Page summary, detail and trends
Referral and Search trends
Inbound referral traffic breakdown, grouped by domain and broken out in detail
Outbound click breakdown
Visitor city cloud and live geographic visitor detail
Percentage inbound traffic from search and the queries that drove the traffic
Percentage of visitors that are new to your site today
Browser and OS breakdown, with trend indicators
Detailed historical traffic by page and by date

The Feedburner blog also has some cool screenshots along with instructions on how to activate the new "Site Statistics" service. So you should have no problem setting up the Stats on your blogging platform.

And this is only version 1.0 of FeedBurner's site statistics. Expect to see more fireworks from FeedBurner in the new year.

But as with all initial releases some things are missing. There is no option to exclude internal traffic. :(

Update :

The default guide and code provided for the Blogger platform does not support the new Blogger templates. If you want to use the FeedBurner stats service, with the new Blogger templates then select "Other" as the option to get the code.

Update 20/01/07 - FeedBurner has now added support for the new Blogger Templates. :)

Update 30/01/07 - Find out how you can make FeedBurner stop logging your own visits to your blog as traffic.

Visit : The FeedBurner Blog

Find Top Songs Of The Week - Google Music Trends

2007-01-02T23:16:00.000+05:30

Want to know which songs are ruling the charts this week ? Now, you can using Google Music Trends. To be more precise, you can find the songs to which Google Talk users listen the most.

You can also find the top music tracks of the week country wise and genre wise using the drop down boxes available on top right.

Google Talk has a feature to show the track you are currently listening to as your present status in the IM. This data is sent by Google Talk to the Google servers which then filters the content and finds the tracks to which GTalk users listen the most.

If you want to disable music logging, then you can go to GTalk settings and disable music logging under the Audio preferences section.

Visit : Google Music Trends
Visit : How to participate in Google Music Trends

Extract scenes from online video : Gotuit Scenemaker

2007-01-01T21:16:00.000+05:30

Has this ever happened to you? Someone sends you a link to watch something cool in an on-line video...but you have to sit through the entire video to see the good part?

If yes, then Gotuit Scenemaker is for you. Just like you bookmark only the page you like in a website, Scenemaker lets you bookmark scenes from an online video. SceneMaker lets you bookmark scenes inside of a video and send just the good part.

How Gotuit Scenemaker works

In SceneMaker, you upload an existing online video from YouTube or Metacafe. When the video starts playing in SceneMaker, you can click the progress bar to stop it at any time and create pieces of the video. You can assign tags and descriptions for each piece. Each piece of the video then gets its individual embed code and URL.

Great for Bloggers

If you are a blogger, SceneMaker now makes adding video to your blog much more relevant. You can now reference specific moments in a video and embed them to play within your web pages. No need to show your visitors the entire video.

The Downside

Scenemaker supports only YouTube and Metacafe as of now. So there is a large number of video sharing services left out.

Visit : Gotuit Scenemaker

Download YouTube videos as AVI or MOV files directly

2006-12-31T10:29:00.000+05:30

There are numerous methods for downloading and saving YouTube videos on your computer almost all of them save the video in the FLV ( Flash Video ) format which is not supported by default in most media players.

Vixy.net, a new service attempts to eliminate that. It takes the URL of the YouTube video and allows you to download the video in other formats.

The different formats which are supported are :

AVI for Windows ( DivX + MP3 )
MOV for Mac ( MPEG4 + MP3 )
MP4 for iPod / PSP ( MPEG4 + AAC )
3GP for mobiles ( MPEG4 + AAC )
MP3 ( audio only )

In case you are puzzled by the last option, Vixy.net also lets you extract just the audio part of the video and save it as MP3. Useful, if you want just the song and not the video.

Whats more ? This tool also works for other video sharing sites like Metacafe, Google Video, MSN Soapbox etc..

Vixy.net Online FLV converter

5 Essential Windows Blogging Tools

2006-12-26T19:49:00.000+05:30

Blogging is simple and rewarding but it requires the correct tools to succeed. Here are 5 essential blogging tools for the Windows platform which you can use to make your blogging experience more satisfying. Some of the tools are web based, so you can use them on other platforms too.

Step I - Collect the content

Blogging requires many resources and without the correct tool to manage and use the resources, you will be wasting a lot of time. An RSS reader is the best way to keep a look on various sources. My favorite RSS reader is Newshutch. It is an AJAX based feed reader which has a great interface and has pretty much everything for everyone from a novice to a professional.

Step II - Compose the post

After getting the content ideas in the first step, the next step is to write the actual post for your blog with your ideas and opinion. I use Microsoft Windows Live Writer for composing my posts.

The reason why I use Writer is because allows me to compose my posts and shows a live preview of how my posts will look in my blog both without connecting to the Internet. Windows Live Writer also supports plugins which come in handy while adding missing functionality like posting photos from Flickr.

Step III - Collecting images and editing them

What is a blog post without images ! Every post should include pictures to help the reader quickly grasp the main idea of the post.

If you are a tech blogger you will frequently have to take screenshots of software interfaces and your computer. SnagIt is the best you can get for doing that. It has lots of screenshots options and also lets you create videos. It also has some small editing tools and some cool effects for applying to the screenshots.

After taking an image, you might want to resize it to make it fit into your blog. You can do this by using PXN8 , an online tool. It has some great image editing features using which you can enhance, resize and crop the pictures. PXN8 also lets you directly upload the edited images to Flickr.

Step IV - Let the world know

After you finish composing your post, it is time to let the world know that you have updated your blog. Ping is the thing to do that. You can use Autopinger to ping almost all known blog search engines. The reason why I prefer Autopinger is because it generates a very informative result showing, to which engines pinging failed and why.

Did these tools help you ? Which tools do you use to blog ? :)

5 Things About Me

2006-12-25T20:34:00.001+05:30

Well the blog tagging game has reached me. I have been tagged by Shwetanshu. So here goes my list ...

Blog Template : I continuosly tinker with my blog's layout (without any back - up) but I am never satisfied with the design.
My internet connection : I can't imagine a single day without my internet connection. Wonder what I will do when I shift to Bangalore...
Experimenting - I love to try out new software on my computer and keep all the software ( except Nero ) I use updated to the latest version.
Nicknames - I hate nicknames given to me.
Girls - I am shy of talking to girls. But that's changing slowly.

No comes my turn to tag 5 friends.. I tag Ashwin, Shahab, Deep, Kalpik and Anand.

Create rounded corner images instantly

2006-12-24T19:05:00.000+05:30

This post has moved. :)

http://www.manast.com/2007/04/19/create-rounded-corner-images-instantly-with-roundedcornr/

Fauxto : Best online photo editor

2006-12-21T20:24:00.000+05:30

There is no dearth of online photo editors which allow you to edit an image before posting it on photo sharing networks or on blogs. But these photo editors, offer a very small set of tools for working with images due to which you have to switch to offline photo editors like Photoshop to do some tasks.

No problem, enter Fauxto - An online image editor which looks and feels like a desktop app and offers a wide range of tools to edit images. You can change the image size, crop the images, draw shapes and also create layers. Yes, Fauxto supports layers just as in Photoshop.

Unlike other online image editors, Fauxto

Lets you create new images from scratch
Supports layers and filters
Has tabs which makes working with multiple images at the same time a breeze

Fauxto is built completely in Adobe Flash so once the application loads inside the web browser, it is highly responsive. Though some things such as an Undo button and integration with social sites are missing, it is still the best online photo editor I have seen.

Fauxto looks all set to become the most popular and sophisticated online image editor in the future.

Try Fauxto

Download Firefox 2.0.0.1 Final

2006-12-20T00:03:00.000+05:30

Mozilla has released Firefox 2.0.0.1 today. Though the update appears to be minor, there are hundreds of bug fixes in this release and also a few memory leak problems have been addressed.

Though the announcement is yet to be made on the Firefox home page, the final release of Firefox 2.0.0.1 is now available on Mozilla's FTP servers.

Some of the major bugfixes in Firefox 2.0.0.1 are :

A security failure in which passwords from Firefox's Password Manager could be viewed by an hacker
A Memory leak on google personalized home page

Download Firefox 2.0.0.1

View complete changelog for Firefox 2.0.0.1

No images next to Adsense ads says Google

2006-12-19T21:35:00.000+05:30

Here is some bad news for bloggers using images near Adsense ads. Its time to say bye to Adsense beautifiers. They may increase your CTR rates but now they are against Google Adsense policy. The word is official and from the Google Adsense team. According to the Google Adsense policy you cannot place images next to your Google Adsense ads. Placing images next to Adsense ads is not allowed even if you separate the images and the ads by a line.

Here is what Google says :

Can I place small images next to my Google ads?

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads. If your visitors believe that the images and the ads are directly associated, or that the advertiser is offering the exact item found in the neighboring image, they may click the ad expecting to find something that isn't actually being offered. That's not a good experience for users or advertisers.

Publishers should also be careful to avoid similar implementations that people could find misleading. For instance, if your site contains a directory of Flash games, you should not format the ads to mimic the game descriptions.

What if I place a space or a line between my images and my ads? Would that work?

No. If the ads and the images appear to be associated, inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads will not make the implementation compliant.

Here is a sample screenshot of images near Adsense ads which is not allowed :

Now quickly remove all those Adsense Beautifier plugins ( if you use them ) before Google issues you a warning for violating Adsense policy.

Visit : Inside Adsense : Ad and image placement: a policy clarification

Monetize your blog using polls - Vizu Answers

2006-12-17T13:00:00.001+05:30

Vizu Answers is a new concept in blog advertising using which you can generate revenue from your blog without sending visitors away from your blog. Contrary to Google Adsense with which you earn money only when somebody clicks on the ads, Vizu Answers is a CPM based model. This means that you get money for every page impression irrespective of user clicks.

How Vizu Answers works ?

Vizu Answers is a CPM based advertising model. You can start by signing up at Vizu Answers and then creating a custom poll zone in your account. For each poll zone you set your own minimum CPM rate. All advertisers will have to pay either equal or greater than the rate you have set. The width and colors of the poll zones can be completely customized to match your site. Each Poll Zone can be between 150 and 300 pixels in width while the heights are typically between 300 to 600 pixels. Clients pay extra for added graphics; so the taller the poll, the more money you earn.

Then you have to copy paste the code in your blog's template. The preferable place is mostly the sidebar. The more visible you make the poll zone the more revenue you get. For example, if the advertiser has set a CPM rate of 4$ for your poll zone, then you get 2$ for every 1000 impressions recorded on your blog. ( Vizu takes away 50% of the revenue. )

How do I get paid ?

You get paid for every impression recorded on your blog. Vizu will issue payment at the end of each month as long as you have accrued at least $50 in revenue in your account. The payment is made by check or paypal according to the preferences you set in your account.

Positives and Negatives

Positives of Vizu Answers

Unlike most advertising networks your visitor stays on your blog even after participating in the poll.
You generate revenue for page impressions irrespective of user clicks. So blogs having high traffic will get maximum benefit from Vizu.
Vizu Answers blends beautifully in existing blogs.
The polls also help a blogger in knowing what the readers like.

Negatives of Vizu Answers

Vizu takes 50% of the revenue the advertiser pays for the poll zone. This is a bit too high compared to Google Adsense, which I think retains less than 50% of the revenue.

The verdict

If you have a low CTR in Google Adsense but have a high traffic blog, then you must give Vizu answers a shot. The polls will be related to your blog's niche and will also help you as a blogger in knowing your reader's tastes.

Back up your drafts in Windows Live Writer

2006-12-16T23:56:00.001+05:30

On any day, I have an average of around 10 posts saved as drafts in Windows Live Writer. Also, Windows Live Writer does not have the facility to save my drafts on the server. Now this poses a problem when I need to format my PC as all my drafts will get lost after the format.

A solution to this problem, would be to back-up the drafts and the recent posts before formatting the PC.

How to back-up the drafts and recent posts in Writer?

Click on Start ---> My Documents.
There will be a folder " My Weblog Posts " inside " My Documents ".
The "My Weblog Posts" folder contains two folders "Drafts" and "Recent Posts".
Copy the "My Weblog Posts" folder into a location of your choice. The location should be other than the drive where your Windows is installed.
After formatting, simply copy the "My Weblog Posts" you copied in Step-4 back into "My Documents".
Now when you open Windows Live Writer you will have all your old drafts and recent posts.

Microsoft releases first IE7 update

2006-12-15T21:52:00.000+05:30

Microsoft has released the first update for Internet Explorer 7 (for Windows XP). This update resolves a performance issue with the Phishing Filter. When visiting certain web pages, the Phishing Filter may increase CPU usage while evaluating the page contents and the system may become slow to respond. This problem occurs on pages that contain multiple frames or when multiple frame navigations occur quickly. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Download: Update for Windows XP with Service Pack 2, x86-based versions

Download: Update for Windows XP Professional, x64-based versions

Download: Update for Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1, x86-based versions

Download: Update for Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1, x64-based versions

Download: Update for Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1, Itanium-based versions

Homepage: Internet Explorer 7

Stylish free fonts for professional use at Betterfonts

2006-12-12T23:13:00.001+05:30

If you have ever wanted stylish and free fonts then search no further and go to Betterfonts. Better fonts contains more than a thousand free fonts for use in your project. The fonts are free and come in pretty handy if you want to write your name in a special way.

So, go straight to Better fonts and download that dazzling new font.

Google Adsense ads besides posts in Blogger

2006-12-11T19:52:00.001+05:30

Today I came across a post by Deniz illustrating how to put Google Adsense ads besides your posts in Blogger. The method makes use of tables to align the ads to the left. But why use tables when you can use CSS to make Adsense ads appear besides your posts easily. Also by using the CSS method you can make Google Adsense ads appear on either the left side of your post content or right side of your post content which is not possible in case of tables.

So here is a CSS method to put Adsense ads besides your posts.

The CSS code

Open your blog's template in the template editor and add the following code. Simply paste the code into the stylesheet, before the
]]></b:skin> tag in your template.

.adv
{
float:left;
padding-right:10px;
padding-right:10px;
}

The above code aligns your ads to the left. If you want to align your ads to the right simple use float:right in the third line.

Changes in the Adsense code

Now grab the Adsense code of your favorite format and before pasting it in your template just make a small change in the code. Wrap the code in the tags <div class='adv'> and </div>

For example,

Your adsense code

</div>

That's it, your adsense ads will now appear besides your posts.

In case you need any help, feel free to contact me.

Yahoo! Mail falling behind feature rich Gmail

2006-12-11T00:05:00.000+05:30

Gmail is continuously enhancing itself by introducing professional features for free. The latest feature to be added is the "Mail Fetcher" feature.

Using Mail Fetcher you can retrieve your mail (new and old) from up to five other email accounts and have them all in Gmail. The icing on the cake is that you can even create a customized ' From:' address, which lets you send messages from Gmail, but have them look like they were sent from another one of your email accounts.

Now that is sure to have a lot of users drooling over Gmail. Some other features which Gmail had introduced earlier were POP3 capability and mail forwarding.

Its not that Yahoo! mail does not have these features. Yahoo! mail had all these features even before Gmail but they are not free. They were only available in the paid Yahoo! Mail Plus . But these features are free in Gmail.

Gmail also scores high on usability factors as well. Imagine you have received an e-mail with more than one attached files. While in Yahoo! mail you have to scan and download each attachment individually , in Gmail you can download all the attachments at one go. And if you are tired of receiving spam just set up a filter to automatically delete those messages. And to top it all, Gmail provides twice the space offered by Yahoo! mail.

Gmail also has the unique feature of chatting within e-mail. You can chat with your Gmail contacts in the e-mail interface itself. Very useful if you are in office where messengers are not allowed and meebo is blocked.

Yahoo! mail still remains the numero uno in the e-mail usage stats but it will not be long before users realize that Gmail is the best in business now. And if Yahoo! is to retain its market share it has to do something quick.

Three cheers to Google for revolutionizing e-mail .... the Gmail way.

Get Snap link previews for your blog

2006-12-10T14:31:00.001+05:30

Those who are wondering what is Snap, it is a free service which shows preview images for links when you hover your mouse on them. So your visitors can see preview of the links and decide if it is worth visiting before they click on them. You can Snap in action in this blog.

Implementing Snap on your blog is easy. Just sign up on their site and then paste the code given by them in the head section of your template. Save and exit. That's it. Now if you visit your blog, and hover on the links you will see preview images for the links.

Feature Highlights

High Quality Preview Images
Instant Feedback and Response
Largest Library of Site Previews
Simple Sign-up Process
No Maintenance Required
Snap Search Box

So what are you waiting for, implement Snap on your blog now and give a better experience to your visitors.

Ping blog search engines automatically using Windows Live Writer

2006-12-08T20:50:00.001+05:30

Windows Live Writer from Microsoft is an excellent blog authoring tool. Writer has lots of features for a better blogging experience such as WYSIWYG authoring . You can also extend the types of rich content that can be inserted into your blog post by using plug-ins.

But Windows Live Writer also has a lesser known but useful feature which is not automatically used in the default install. Windows Live Writer can automatically ping different blog search engines for you everytime you publish a post.

How to use the Ping Servers ?

Open Windows Live Writer and goto Tools ----> Preferences. Then select Ping Servers on the left hand side. Here you enter the XML - RPC servers you want Windows Live Writer to ping everytime you publish a post. Hit Enter after each URL. Then press OK and exit.

A list of ping servers

Here is a list of ping servers that I ping using Windows Live Writer.

Technorati - http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

Feedburner - http://ping.feedburner.com/

Google Blog Search - http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

Ping - O - Matic - http://rpc.pingomatic.com

My Yahoo! - http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

Autopinger - http://rpc.autopinger.com/

Make WMP11 open in "Now Playing" mode

2006-12-07T07:40:00.000+05:30

This post has moved. :)

http://www.manast.com/2007/04/21/how-to-make-wmp11-open-in-now-playing-mode/

Download "Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS" plugin for Microsoft Office 2007

2006-12-06T21:00:00.001+05:30

With Microsoft releasing Office 2007 a new feature has found its way into the software. Now end-users of Microsoft Office 2007 will not have to buy a separate software to create PDF copies of their Office documents. Instead they can download the "Save as PDF" plugin that is available from Microsoft website.

The new plugin from Microsoft allows you to export and save any of your Microsoft Office documents including Access, Excel, Infopath, Word, Visio, Publisher, Powerpoint and OneNote into the PDF format or the XPS format.It also allows you to send as e-mail attachment in the PDF and XPS formats in a subset of these programs.

How to use this add-in ?

After downloading and installing this "Save as PDF" add-in, open the document you want to convert to PDF. Now click on the Office icon on the left top and goto the "Save As" option. There you will see a "Save as PDF or XPS" button. Just click it and you will get a PDF copy of your required Office document.

So no more investing your dollars in an separate application like Adobe Acrobat, just for converting your documents into PDF.

Download Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS

Musikcube - A fast lightweight audio player

2006-12-05T20:21:00.000+05:30

Introducing MusikCube, a player which is fast becoming popular as an alternative to the host of bloated media players for Windows. It is super fast, and takes just 1.7MB of RAM for playback.

So what exactly is Musikcube ?

musikCube is an mp3 player for the modern generation. It helps you just listen to what you want to hear, while offering innovative features not seen elsewhere. For the technical user, musikCube is based on an embedded SQL database engine known as sqlite. For the non technical user, that means its fast.Really fast. "Dynamic playlists" allow fully automatic, randomized playback of songs based on your observed listening habits. The more you listen, the smarter it gets. It also features browsable, user reorderable playlists.

The interface and features

It has a very simple interface and makes music management easy as pie.The interface is somewhat inspired from iTunes and is highly usable. Navigating inside the program is a breeze. It has a simple columns playlist which lets you sort by fields such as Album, Artist etc.A search button on the left side lets you search for songs by typing in some letters.

It also includes some basic tagging and file renaming functions.One feature which I found new in this player was that I could get tags from my the names for my files and also rename my audio files from their tag names. I earlier used Tag & Rename just for doing this.

The dynamic playlists just keep on improving as time goes on. The basic buttons which you will need for playback are at the bottom left of the player along with the seekbar and the volume bar. The songs fade in and out seamlessly.

I also noticed that the maximum volume for playback was higher than Winamp and WMP11, somewhat similar to the volume boost that VLC player provides.

The missing "bells and whistles"

Although MusikCube has all of what a basic user and a power user may require, there are some features which need to be added to it.

Album Art support - Now, with every media player such as WMP11 and iTunes 7 going in for album art browsing of the library, MusikCube needs to add in support for Album art.

Skinning support - Introducing a skinnable interface would help people in customising the looks of the player.

Replaygain support - Now this would help me in normalizing the playback volume of my files.

The verdict

Foobar has got competition for the tag of the "The lightest player". MusikCube is insanely light on resources and high on features. The library management simply rocks. If you have a collection of 1000+ songs, then try musikCube. I am sure you will love it.

Rating - 4.8 / 5

Download MusikCube

Make Newshutch default feed reader in Firefox 2

2006-12-03T13:08:00.000+05:30

Firefox 2 came with a new feature, the option of using another blog reader as the default feed reader. Since then, I have been searching how to use Newshutch as the default feed reader.

And at last, I have found my answer in the NewsHutch blog itself. There are two methods to add Newshutch as a feed reader in Firefox 2.

The Javascript method : Click here to set Newshutch as a feed reader in Firefox 2

The manual method : Nogg3r5 has posted how to add Newshutch as a feed reader in Firefox 2.0 the manual way.

The Javascript method is the easiest and takes just 5 seconds. But if you want to get into the nitty gritty of things you can see the manual method too.

Then, after adding Newshutch as afeed reader you can set it as the default feed reader in Options--Feeds.

Found Via - The Newshutch blog

Download Microsoft Office 2007 trials

2006-12-02T20:28:00.000+05:30

Microsoft has released the trial versions of its Office 2007 suites. This time around, Microsoft has created a separate portal for distributing the 2007 Microsoft Office release trial programs.

According to Microsoft, the trial versions will be valid for a period of 60 days from the date of installation. You will need to sign in with your Live account or Microsoft Passport account to download the trial and to get a serial number which will be used during the installation process.

After expiry of the trial period, you can convert this trial copy into the full product version by following some steps specified by Microsoft. Microsoft Office 2007 features a brand new interface and gets rid of the toolbars found in the previous Office versions, replacing them by ribbons.

Try Microsoft Office 2007 now

Display relevant Google Adsense ads on your site

2006-11-29T14:58:00.000+05:30

Very often, I see Google Adsense ads in my blog, which are not related to the content I write. This not only lead to low CTR's but also low Page CPM. But not any more..

Today while browsing through the Google Adsense help center, I found that Google Adsense has a feature called Section Targeting by which we can help Google display ads relevant to the content.

What is Section Targeting ?

A typical post page on a blog contains the post, the comments and the omnipresent sidebar. It is highly likely that the comments and the sidebar contain irrelevant content compared to the post body. So the main piece is the post body and Google has to display relevant ads to that.

Using Google Adsense section targeting, now you can do just that .

How do I implement section targeting ?

To implement section targeting, you'll need to add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you'd like to emphasize or De-emphasize for ad targeting.

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:

For highest impact you should wrap your entire post body and post title with this bit of code.

How do I make Google ignore some sections of my post page ?

You can also designate sections you'd like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:

You can implement this if needed in the sidebar section of your pages.

That's it, now just sit back and wait to see Adsense ads related to your posts. According to Google it will take some time around 2 weeks for the changes to be reflected.

In case you need any help in modifying to your Blogger template to make these changes, feel free to contact me.

Download Microsoft Windows Vista Wallpapers

2006-11-25T21:06:00.000+05:30

The best collection of Microsoft Windows Vista wallpapers ever.

Brajeshwar has uploaded all his Vista wallpapers to Flickr. The wallpapers also include the official Windows Vista wallpapers bundled in the latest build of Windows Vista.

You can save any of the following images directly by right clicking and selecting "Save Target as" in Internet Explorer or "Save Link As" in Mozilla Firefox.

So no more searching for Vista wallpapers. These wallpapers are high resolution, so they will fit your widescreen laptop too.

If you want all the wallpapers as a pack, the zip is also available.

Here are the Links :

Flickr set of Microsoft Windows Vista wallpapers

Windows Vista Wallpaper Pack

Windows Vista r5381 Wallpapers [All official vista wallpapers till date.]

Found Via - VistaStyles

Microsoft & Dell create Windows Vista PC

2006-11-22T17:57:00.000+05:30

Microsoft and Dell recently partnered up to create a super-cool custom PC in celebration of Microsoft releasing Windows Vista to manufacturing earlier this month.

Have a look at the system specs:

* Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Processor
* 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX
* 4GB RAM Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM @ 667mhz
* 1Terabyte RAID SATA HDDs (2x500GB)
* 48x Combo + 16x DVD+/-RW Double Layer Burner
* Dual TV Tuners (Analog)
* Dell 30" Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor
* Full 5.1 Surround Sound

This hot baby has a Windows Experience Index rating of 5.2! . Here are some pics of the cabinet.

Via The Windows Vista Blog

Utilizing Google Webmaster Tools

2006-11-19T17:54:00.000+05:30

This post has moved to my new blog. Please visit the link below. :)

http://www.manast.com/2007/04/08/ultimate-bloggers-guide-to-google-webmaster-tools/

Discover Hidden Sound in Microsoft Windows XP

2006-11-17T15:38:00.000+05:30

Did you know, there is a hidden sound in Microsoft Windows XP that you have never heard..

To hear this sound:

Go to My Computer ---- > Tools ---- > Folder Options

Under the "View" tab, check "Show hidden files and folder" and uncheck "Hide protected system files".

Now navigate to the drive where Windows XP is installed.So if C:\ is the drive where Windows XP is installed, go to C:\WINDOWS\system32\oobe\images

There you will find a file Title.wma.Open in with your favorite media player and listen to it.

Source : http://www.metacafe.com/watch/298664...n_music_track/

Yahoo & Microsoft embrace Google Sitemaps

2006-11-16T11:07:00.000+05:30

Its official.Microsoft and Yahoo search engines now support Google Sitemaps. Microsoft, Yahoo and Google have joined forces to support the sitemaps protocol and enhance it further.

Google has made this announcement in the Google Blog today. The Google Blog states :

Last year we published the Sitemap 0.84 XML protocol as a free and easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about URLs on their web sites so that search engines can more effectively crawl them. We released it under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license in the hopes that other search engines would adopt the protocol too. And today, we're excited to announce that Yahoo! and Microsoft are joining us in officially supporting the Sitemap protocol.

This not only gives prominence to Google sitemaps but is also good news for webmasters because now by creating a single sitemap they can help all three major search engines crawl their sites better.

Now Google, what about adding a sitemap to Blogger blogs ?? That would help a lot.

Source : The Google Blog

Blog using Google Docs & Spreadsheets

2006-11-15T10:33:00.000+05:30

With Microsoft entering the blogging arena, by releasing a beta version of Windows Live Writer how can Google be behind. And we all know Google, it always introduces online services. Yesterday when I published a post to my blog, there was a note from Google telling that now we can post from Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

So here it is, Google now has its own blog posting tool. Instead of going for creating a separate service, Google has instead added blog posting capability to its online Google Docs & Spreadsheets service. Now you can write a document in Google Docs & Spreadsheets and then publish it to your blog. The new option to publish to a blog is available under the Publish tab in Google Docs.

How will this help you ?

You get a rich post editor with fancy features like undo and redo and spell check right inside the blog poster. So no more going to your blogging platform's clunky blog post editor and type there. You can use the excellent editor of Google Docs and then post the article to your blog after finishing writing it.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets besides supporting posting to Blogger also supports a large number of blogging platforms including Wordpress. So you should not have any problem configuring the settings to post to your blog. Considering the facility is quite new, Google had done a good job.

What can we expect in the future ?

As time progresses, we can expect Google to add advanced features like adding Technorati tags to the posts. This will give a full fledged post editor which will enable anyone to post anything anywhere.

P.S. - Google Docs and Spreadsheets supports posting to Blogger Beta. You can also automatically categorize your blog posts by tagging your documents with a category name you already use on your blog site.

Visit Google Docs & Spreadsheets

SiteTimer analyzes why website is slow

2006-11-14T21:26:00.000+05:30

This post has moved.

http://www.manast.com/2007/04/20/analyze-why-your-blog-loads-slow-using-sitetimer/

Get your own @live.com address

2006-11-10T13:37:00.000+05:30

A new way to get a @live.com e-mail address has been found. Get your favourite @live.com address before Microsoft discovers this leak.Just follow the following simple steps.

Goto this page to start registering your windows live account.

Press the sign-up button and you will be presented a form to sign up for a hotmail account.

Copy the following javascript injection code:

javascript:function r(q){} function s(q){e[q] = new Option(a[q],a[q])}; r(e = document.getElementById("idomain").options);r(d="live.");r(a = new Array("hotmail.com","hotmail.co.uk","msn.com",d+"com",d+"com.au",d+"be",d+"ca",d+"co.uk",d+"de",d+"fr",d+"it"/*mEss.be*/,d+"nl")); for (i=0;i<a.length;i++){ s(i ) }alert("Success - additional domains added!");

Paste the code in your address bar.

Hit enter, if all went well it should show a message box telling you "Success - additional domains added!".

Now you can select a multitude of domains, fill out the form and you are ready to go!

Source : Mess.be

Ultimate Blogger Beta Hacks List

2006-11-09T10:31:00.000+05:30

Blogger Beta, a new platform of Blogger and a new space for people to experiment on to bring out new functionalities in it.

Here is a list of all hacks for the new Blogger which I have found so far.
P.S. These hacks will not work for the old version of Blogger.

Peek-a-boo Navbar - Avatar explains how to make the navbar Peek-a-boo which appears only when you hover your mouse on top. Makes you blog look really cool, without losing the functionality which it offers.

Recent Comments in the sidebar - Ramani shows you how to display a list of recent comments in your blog's sidebar.

Random Rotating Banners - Gabriel shows you how to display a random header image to your visitors everytime they visit your blog.

Peek-a-boo comments on Home Page - Singpolyma explains how you can get peek-a-boo comments to display on your home page.

Expandable posts with peek-a-boo view - Ramani shows how to put post summaries in your home page and 'Read More' links below them which display the full post on being clicked.

Latest Posts Display in Sidebar - Ramani explains how you can use the Blogger Beta feeds to display a list of recent posts in your sidebar.

Adding a second sidebar - For those of you who would like three column layout for your blogs, Hans shows you how to add a second sidebar.

Add a menubar to your blog - Hans shows you how you can add a Wordpress style menubar to the top of your blog.

Social Bookmarking icons - Hans explains how you can put icons of social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Furl etc. below your posts.These icons allow your reader to bookmark your post easily.

Labels as Tabs - Hoctro shows how you can get your labels as navigation tabs below your header.

Dropdown menubar - Alastor shows how to get drop down menubar items in your Blogger Beta blog.

Peek-a-boo linklist - Singpolyma has written up some code to get peek-a-book link lists in your blog.

4-in-1 Search Box - PurpleMoggy shows you how to get a cool search box on your blog.

Display your Technorati Rank - PurpleMoggy has written up some cool Javascript to display an automatically updated Technorati rank of your blog.

Apply these hacks and give your visitors a whole new experience.

I will update this list as and when new hacks come out.So keep visiting... :D

Zamzar :: Free Online File Conversion

2006-11-08T11:00:00.000+05:30

Zamzar is a site which will convert your files to the format of your choice and then e-mails the link to download the converted file to your e-mail. The service does what it means, convert files without the need to download and install any paid software.

Here are the file formats which are supported for conversion.

Image formats

bmp, gif, jpg, png, tiff

Doc formats

csv, html, doc, ods, odt, pcx, pdf, ppt, ps, rtf, txt, xls, xml

Music formats

aac, ac3, amr, au, flac, m4a, mmf, mp3, ogg, wav, wma

Video formats

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Himesh Reshammiya's new movie : Aap Ka Suroor

2006-11-06T09:56:00.000+05:30

Double lol...Himesh Reshammiya is making his debut as an actor.He is playing the lead hero in the movie "Aap Ka Suroor". The promos are already on TV.

Himesh as hero...God knows what the producer was thinking..

Anywayz, watch the promo of the movie ...

Why I deleted my Orkut account ?

2006-11-05T23:10:00.000+05:30

A few days ago, I deleted my Orkut account.Orkut is a great tool for social networking but it is put to wrong use by its users.

The root of all problems is the Scrapbook feature of Orkut.Whatever may be the real use of this feature, it is put to wrong use.I receive fucking scrapbook messages on Orkut everyday.

One writes "hi what is the syllabus for tomorrows test..Scrap me with the page nos" .

My question : Am I supposed to type the page nos to that idiot?

Another one writes "Why are you not sending scraps to me? Have you forgotten me ?" .

My question : How can I forgot somebody when I had met him 2 days ago ?

The next one writes "woot woot , I have more scraps than you"

My question : So, whats the big deal ?

And yes another dumbo writes "i am online in orkut.come we will chat..".

My question : Orkut is meant for chatting.. I thought IM 's do that..

People measure their importance by the number of scraps and fans they have... Full idiots...
Sigh, Google should provide a feature to disable scrapbook for users like me...

My wishlist of features for Blogger Beta

2006-11-03T22:15:00.000+05:30

The Blogger Beta gave a new version of Blogger to all those who were getting annoyed by the recent outages in service and lack of features such as categories. By introducing Blogger Beta, Google has put Blogger into a process of continuous development.

Blogger Beta introduces the concept of labels which are nothing but categories, new template tags and a very user friendly drag and drop template editor which is somewhat similar to widgets in Wordpress. But as usual I am not satisfied. Here is my wishlist of the features I would like to see in Blogger Beta.

I will keep on adding to this list... :)

Inline Comments Form - The pop-up comment form is too old to continue. Its time to introduce an inline comments form in the lines of what is available in the Wordpress blogs.

Ability to edit post slugs - Post slug is that part of your post which appears in the address bar of your browser. The ability to use custom slugs would help in better SEO. Also the present character limit on the post slugs needs to be increased.

Custom domain name - ~~This is one feature which should be introduced as soon as possible. Most of the bloggers on Blogspot would like to use their own domain name while hosting their blogs on Blogger.~~

Update : 14/01/07
Yay!, Blogger has added custom domains feature for the New Blogger and that too for FREE. Here is the Blogger Buzz post announcing custom domains in new Blogger.

Host files other than images - Blogger gives 300MB space to host images but what about other file types like Javascript files. This would be a welcome addition for most of the bloggers who would like to offer some files for download on their blog.

A sitemap - Google should add a sitemap to all Blogger blogs. This would help in better SEO of blogger blogs. This should not be difficult considering that sitemap is a concept of Google itself.

Post excerpts on home page - Yeah, nobody wants to clutter their homepage with long posts. A better option would be to provide a facility to put a few paragraphs of the post on the home page and then put a "Read More" link which would lead to the full post page.