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Saturday, February 18, 2012
50 Fresh Christmas Ringtones Pack | Download Now
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Compress 1Gb Into 10Mb With KGB Archiver
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Nokia S60 Theme Creator
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Why use Firefox
How many of you have always used Internet Explorer (IE) to browse the Net and never really looked at any of the other browsers available? I have always used IE and have been quite comfortable with it until I found what Firefox has to offer.... and believe me it was worth the switch. I enumerate below some of the many plus points of Firefox and you can decide for yourself whether it is indeed worth the change. The google search tool is incorporated in Firefox. In Internet Explorer (IE) you have to either download the google toolbar or perhaps set your homepage to google or add it to your favourites. On Firefox it is always available and the search is faster. Tabs besides windows for quicker browsing : Allows you to open a link in a new tab or a new window. IE gives you the option to open a link in a new window only. Having too many windows open can be very annoying and time consuming. This facility of Firefox to have several tabs in one window is very good. It’s easy, quick and saves a lot of time navigating between windows; it’s faster navigating between windows. If you want to open several bookmarks in one shot, you have to put them in one folder under bookmarks and open them in tabs. This is just not possible in IE – you cannot open several sites in a folder under “Favourites”. It has it’s own batch download program. You can pause your download and continue it at a later time, something which is not possible with IE’s download manager. The download manager stores information such as file size and location of your downloaded file. When the download is complete, a small notification is displayed in the lower right side of the screen. In IE, if your internet connection fails you have to start from scratch all over again. Security : Internet Explorer has some major security holes. Firefox has none. You can drag and drop any link right into the top of the browser and it automatically adds a button. No more Pop-Ups to annoy you. The default settings will allow no pop-ups but you get a message just above the web page displayed saying that popups from that website have been blocked. You can change the settings to allow for popups to be displayed for certain sites as the need maybe or not at all. In IE you need to use a third-party software to achieve the same thing. Memory usage : Internet Explorer uses far more memory than Firefox. Faster browsing so you spend less time waiting. Firefox is free while IE is not. Firefox is comparatively smaller in size and the download takes only a few minutes. In Firefox you have more space as the History button is missing but you can have the sidebar for History (you will find it under View menu) To search for any text on a particular web page, you would normally use Ctrl + F. Now you can do that even faster by pressing the "forward slash" key (it's the one that shares the key with the question mark on your keyboard) and thentype in what ypu want to search as usual. It's quick and easy! 
What I copied from IE is as follows :
Navigation
Main Page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article What I copied from Firefox :
Navigation
* Main Page
* Contents
* Featured content
* Current events
* Random article
Now that you have seen all that Firefox has to offer, what are you waiting for?
Get Firefox with Google Toolbar now!!! Click on the square button below.
What I copied from IE is as follows :Navigation
Main Page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article What I copied from Firefox :
Navigation
* Main Page
* Contents
* Featured content
* Current events
* Random article
Now that you have seen all that Firefox has to offer, what are you waiting for?
Get Firefox with Google Toolbar now!!! Click on the square button below.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Search better on the Net
Have you ever been overwhelmed with something like 3,330,000 search results for a search you have put into your favourite search engine only to find that you don’t really find anything specific to your requirement until you go through several pages of results the search engine has thrown up at you?? I normally find things that other people don’t and people often come to me for help. So I decided to share the tricks that I use here… searching the web is a skill in itself as you have to make the right choice of words but it surely can be developed. Here I will explain to you with the help of screenshots how to get search results specific to what you are looking for. If you think the screenshot is not clear enough just click on it and it will open up as a bigger and clearer image in a new window. I have put in a google search tool at the top of this page so that you can practice from this page itself while you read my post. 
The above search results show recipes for even vanilla sponge cake, cheese cake, etc. which you aren’t looking for.
Let us search for : chocolate sponge cake recipe
The above search results show recipes for even vanilla sponge cake, cheese cake, etc. which you aren’t looking for.
Tip 1 : Use double quotation marks (" ") around phrases to make sure that they are searched exactly as is, with the words side by side in the same order.
Now let’s try using quotes and make a search for : “chocolate sponge cake recipe”
See the difference in results below. You will get results which match the exact order of the phrase enclosed in quotes.
Tip 2 : You can use the plus (+) and/or minus (-) signs in front of words to force their inclusion and/or exclusion in searches.
Let us search for : “chocolate sponge cake recipe” + “eggless”
If you don’t want eggless recipes you could try a search like :
"chocolate sponge cake recipe" -"eggless"
Please note that the minus sign should be immediately to the left of the word/phrase you want results without. There should be no space in between the minus sign and the word/phrase.
Buy HP consumables on-line
A few weeks back I came accross a link for purchasing HP cartridges/toners and other consumables on-line. This is the link : http://h50011.www5.hp.com/oac/index_in-en.html
You can place your order by selecting the printer or cartidge model and they are delivered to your doorstep within 24 hours and at worst 48 hours. The service is good and I was surprised to find that the prices were even better than what our regular vendor was already giving us. I would recommend this. HP also calls you to make sure the distributor has delivered in time.
You can place your order by selecting the printer or cartidge model and they are delivered to your doorstep within 24 hours and at worst 48 hours. The service is good and I was surprised to find that the prices were even better than what our regular vendor was already giving us. I would recommend this. HP also calls you to make sure the distributor has delivered in time.
Save typing time
Tired of typing the same info like e-mail ids every day especially when you share the same computer with other family members? MemoKeys is a free software that allows you to program your keyboard so that typing your email id could be just pressing a combination of two keys. I've started using it a while ago and it really saves me some time and effort on a repetitive task.
You can download MemoKeys here.
Once you download and install MemoKeys, you will get something like below :
(1) First click on the 'F1' key or any other key of your choice in that row under "Control Keys".
(2) Next click on any key under "Second Key".
(3) Now in the white box below "Current combination", type whatever you need to type repetitively like your e-mail id.
(4) Next click on the "Set" button at the bottom. If you want to cancel this combination just click on the "Reset" button.
You can download MemoKeys here.
Once you download and install MemoKeys, you will get something like below :
(1) First click on the 'F1' key or any other key of your choice in that row under "Control Keys".(2) Next click on any key under "Second Key".
(3) Now in the white box below "Current combination", type whatever you need to type repetitively like your e-mail id.
(4) Next click on the "Set" button at the bottom. If you want to cancel this combination just click on the "Reset" button.
My example shows that I have used a combination of "F1" and "H" keys to type for me abc@hotmail.com. Now if you go to say http://www.hotmail.com/ and in the place where you are to feed the email id, you press the 'F1' and 'H' keys together, then the email id will automatically get saved. You will probably have numerous other texts like name, address, etc. that you need to type in on a daily basis especially if you register on sites every now and then.
A small icon for MemoKeys resides on the right side on your task bar at the bottom of the screen, so whenever you wnat to add more shortcuts, just right-click on the icon and click on "Manage shortcuts". Hope this helps you the way it helped me.
Save browsing time
Have you been clicking on a link on a page and after the new page loads and you read all you want, you click on the "Back" button in your browser to come back to the main page?? If you have not been doing this, then this post is not for you else read on....
A link is something which is clickable.... it may be text or a picture and you know it is "clickable" if a hand image appears when you hover your mouse over it. Now if there are several links on a page that you want to open, like several instances that come up when you search for something in a search engine like Google or Yahoo, you can open each one by right-clicking on each and then clicking on "Open in new window". This way you can open several pages and by the time you[ve opened the 6th page, the first page will have loaded and be ready for reading.
Virus : Use Internet Explorer you dope
Have you ever got a message like "Use Internet Explorer you dope" or "I DON'T HATE MOZILLA BUT USE IE OR ELSE…" whenever you tried to use or install Firefox?
This worm/virus is doing the rounds and it comes through pen-drives. You may not be able to access Orkut and Youtube as well, you will probably get a message like "Orkut is banned, you fool, hahahaha" or "Youtube is banned, you fool, hahahaha".
To remove this worm just follow the following steps :
(1) Press the keys CTRL, ALT & DEL simultaneously to bring up the Task Manager
(2) Click on the "Processes" tab.
Look for svchost.exe under the image name.
There will be many but look for the ones which have your username (what you login with) under the username.
Press the DEL key to kill these processes. It will give you a warning, Click on the "Yes" button.
Look for more svchost.exe files with your username and repeat. Do not kill svchost.exe with SYSTEM, LOCAL SERVICE or NETWORK SERVICE as user name.
(3) Next, click on "My Computer".
In the address bar, type C:\heap41a and press enter. It is a hidden folder, and hence not visible if you try to view folders under C:\
Press "CTRL" and "A" keys simultaneously to select all the files in the folder.
Press the 'DEL' key - this will delete all the files selected.
(4) Click on "Start" button, click on "Run" and type "Regedit" without the quotes in the box.
In the menu, click on "Edit", then click on "Find".
Type “heap41a” without the quotes and press the "Enter" key.
You will see something like this “[winlogon] C:\heap41a\svchost.exe C:\heap(a number)\std.txt”
Select that by clicking on it and press the DEL key.
It will ask “Are you sure you want to delete this value”, click on 'Yes" button.
Close the registry editor.The virus will have gone from your PC now.
(5) Lastly just make sure to delete the autorun.inf file and any folder whose name ends with .exe on any pen drive you may be using on your PC.
This worm/virus is doing the rounds and it comes through pen-drives. You may not be able to access Orkut and Youtube as well, you will probably get a message like "Orkut is banned, you fool, hahahaha" or "Youtube is banned, you fool, hahahaha".
To remove this worm just follow the following steps :
(1) Press the keys CTRL, ALT & DEL simultaneously to bring up the Task Manager
(2) Click on the "Processes" tab.
Look for svchost.exe under the image name.
There will be many but look for the ones which have your username (what you login with) under the username.
Press the DEL key to kill these processes. It will give you a warning, Click on the "Yes" button.
Look for more svchost.exe files with your username and repeat. Do not kill svchost.exe with SYSTEM, LOCAL SERVICE or NETWORK SERVICE as user name.
(3) Next, click on "My Computer".
In the address bar, type C:\heap41a and press enter. It is a hidden folder, and hence not visible if you try to view folders under C:\
Press "CTRL" and "A" keys simultaneously to select all the files in the folder.
Press the 'DEL' key - this will delete all the files selected.
(4) Click on "Start" button, click on "Run" and type "Regedit" without the quotes in the box.
In the menu, click on "Edit", then click on "Find".
Type “heap41a” without the quotes and press the "Enter" key.
You will see something like this “[winlogon] C:\heap41a\svchost.exe C:\heap(a number)\std.txt”
Select that by clicking on it and press the DEL key.
It will ask “Are you sure you want to delete this value”, click on 'Yes" button.
Close the registry editor.The virus will have gone from your PC now.
(5) Lastly just make sure to delete the autorun.inf file and any folder whose name ends with .exe on any pen drive you may be using on your PC.
Use Email to Convert Files into Different Formats
Learn how you can use your email program to quickly convert files into different formats. The file conversion is almost instant and works even on a mobile phone.
There exist quite a few online services that let you convert files from one format to another. You upload the source file, specify the output format and within seconds, the converted file in the desired format becomes available for download. That’s easy but there are somes limitations with this approach:
When you want to convert a file, you have to upload it to the file conversion service. This is not an issue when you are converting files from the desktop but how do you upload files from iPhone, Android or any other mobile browser.Sometimes clients will send you files in obscure formats as email attachments. In order to convert those files in a format that your apps can understand, you will download the attachments to your desktop and then upload them to the file conversion service. That’s work.Zamzar, a popular tool for converting files online, has added a new option that lets you convert files by email itself. You can forward your email attachments directly to Zamzar, without downloading them to the desktop, and they’ll be converted in no time.
To get started, you need to forward the input (source) files to a specific email address like format@zamzar.com where format represents the file type of the desired output format.
For instance, if you have a Word document that you want to convert to PDF, you can send the file as an email attachment to pdf@zamzar.com. If you have a PDF file that you want to convert into an ebook, the corresponding conversion address would be epub@zamzar.com or mobi@zamzar.com depending on your ebook reader.
Here’s a complete list of input-output file formats that are currently supported by Zamzar. You can convert documents, presentations, ebooks, videos, audio files, archives and more.
In my test, the converted files were delivered quickly and the quality of the converted files was impressive. There’s no need to create any account at Zamzar and you can convert files up to 1 MB in a single batch. You may go for a pro account to convert bigger files that starts from $7 per month.
One more thing. You can only upload files by email and initiate the conversion process but you’ll still have to visit the Zamzar website to download the converted file. It stays on Zamzar servers for about a day and their download page is actually very confusing when accessed on a mobile phone.
Email Attachment is in a Different ZIP Format ? Convert It OnlineConvert & Read Adobe PDF Files on Amazon KindleConvert Microsoft Office Documents to PDF FilesEmail Based File Conversion for PDF, DOC, DOCX and MP3Convert PDF Files to HTML Web Pages with Quick PDF – For Windows OnlyThursday, February 16, 2012
Export all your Google Docs Files with One Click
See how easy it is to export all your Google Docs files as a zip file in a single click using the Google Takeout service.
Amit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.
Do you want to put all your Google Docs files on a USB drive before you take that road trip? The Google Docs website does offer an easy option to help you download all your documents in one zip file but there’s another simpler alterative that you may want to give a try– it’s called Google Takeout.
Once you have logged in to Google Takeout with your Google Account, select the Google Docs service and hit the “Create Archive” button. It will create a zip file with all your Google Docs files and you can either keep the browser window open while the archive is being readied or download that file later from the Google Takeout website.
Google Takeout will export your Google Documents in standard Office file formats by default – Excel for spreadsheets or PowerPoint for Presentations – but you also have an option to export files in either PDF or OpenOffice formats.
Google Takeout is part of dataliberation.org, a Google project that wants to make it easy for you to import and export data out of various Google products. The same tool may also be used to export your Picasa photos and Contacts data out of Google Servers though, surprisingly, it doesn’t offer Gmail export yet.
Coming back to Google Docs, here’s a quick video that shows how easy it is to export your Google Docs files using Google Takeout.
Upload Office Files to Google Docs From The Right Click MenuUse Google Docs To Compare Two Text Files OnlineConvert Web Files to PDF with Google Docs ViewerZoho Will Help Backup All Your Google Docs Documents LocallyHow Guest Can Upload Files to Your Google DocsAmit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.How to Permanently Delete your Mac Files
Emptying the trash is not enough. Learn how you can permanently erase the deleted files from your Mac hard disk.Amit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.
When you delete a file on your Mac, it goes to the trash. You empty the trash thinking that all traces of your private files are now completely erased from the Mac’s hard disk but that may not be the case.
Files deleted from the trash in this manner can still be recovered unless the sectors are overwritten by other files. There’s an easy way though. If you would like to permanently remove your deleted files, just remember to use the “secure” option while emptying the trash.
Here’s how. Click and hold the trash icon on your Mac desktop and it will display the “Empty Trash” option. Now press the Command button and the Empty Trash option will change to Secure Empty Trash. Select it and the trashed files will be gone forever.
The concept is similar in Windows though there’s no built-in option in Windows to permanently delete “deleted” files. You can however make use of the free SDelete utility to ensure that deleted files cannot be recovered again.
Emptying the trash, or the recycle bin in Windows, is not enough.
How to Permanently Delete Files from DropboxDelete Files Permanently from your ComputerPrint Files on an Remote Mac via DropboxHow to Open Outlook .MSG Files on a MacDelete Unused Files with Auto DeleteAmit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.This Valentine, Send your Loved One a Google Search Query
Google will render a heart shape for this Math equation that you can pass to your Valentine.Amit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.
This Valentine’s day, try sending your geeky loved one a Google search query instead of an e-greeting and they may like the little surprise that’s in store for them.
When you put any Math equation in Google, it will try to plot of a graph of that equation just like your scientific calculation. And one such equation, listed below, renders a heart curve that you can pass on to your Valentine.
To give it a try, just copy-paste the following query in Google. Thanks Suhel.
sqrt(cos(x))*cos(300x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(6-x^2), -sqrt(6-x^2) from -4.5 to 4.5Single Google Query uses 1000 Machines in 0.2 secondsMost Popular Search Query Words – FreeAmine – You made my Valentine’s DayWhat Search Keywords Bring Traffic to Google.com?Google Blog Search Now Reads Links on Web PagesAmit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.Subscribe to Techmeme Tech Events in your Calendar
The Techmeme Tech Events page includes upcoming events around new product launches, conferences, earnings calls with investors, and more. You can add these events to your calendar as well.
Techmeme recently added an events section to their website – see techmeme.com/#events – that lists upcoming (and newsworthy) events focused on the tech industry. It’s a pretty useful list, curated by Techmeme editors, and includes tech events around new product launches, upcoming conferences, earnings calls of tech companies, webcasts, and related events.
The Techmeme blog has more details on how event organizers can get their own event listed on Techmeme. If you are organizing a Tedx or a BarCamp in your city, Techmeme may not find that very interesting but if you are doing a WordCamp that people like Matt {Cutts|Mullenweg} are attending, your event will probably make it to the Techmeme events page.
The Techmeme Events page currently doesn’t offer an ICAL / ICS feed so it is difficult to keep track of upcoming tech events in your Microsoft Outlook, Apple iCal or Google Calendar. There’s however a little workaround.
You can use either of the above links to add Techmeme events directly to your web / desktop calendar. These are standard ICS files that should be compatible with most calendar application across all platforms.
Thus, if Apple is scheduling an event during the first week of March, it should automatically pop-up in your calendar courtesy Techmeme. [Picture Credits: Wired]
The above ICAL/ICS files for Techmeme are generated with the help of some PHP and web scraping. The script basically downloads the Techmeme events page, extracts all the event related DIVs and formats everything in the iCalendar format. Should you be interested in enhancing / modifying the script, here’s the full source code:
(.*?)<\/div>
(.*?)<\/div>
Teach your Child the ABC with these Animal Alphabets
If you are trying to teach you kid to learn their alphabet, these cartoon images of animals shaped in the form of letters should help.Amit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.
If you have small kids at home who are still trying to learn the English alphabet, you got to show them Alphabetimals (Alphabet + Animals).
This little site, designed like a flipbook, has cartoon images of animals that are shaped in the form of alphabets (the letter ‘E’ will look like an Elephant) and the visuals should help your kids quickly recognize and learn their ABC.
The illustrations are also available in the form of printable posters, Flash cards and coloring pages that be downloaded as PDFs from Alphabetimals’ Facebook page.
Everyone else may just use the Alphabetimal site to write their own name using the very-cute animal font. [via].
Amit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.Wednesday, February 15, 2012
How to Get the Classic Photo Viewer in Facebook
The Facebook photo viewer now displays pictures in a dark pop-up window. Here's how you can switch to the classic layout.Amit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.
Facebook has rolled out a Google+ style photo viewer that displays user comments and ads next to the picture in an overlay window. Thus, you don’t have to scroll the page to read the comments and the photo viewer adjusts itself as you re-size the browser window.
If you are viewing any photo in Facebook and would like to use the classic layout – where photos are displayed on a separate page and not inside a pop-up – you can do that in a couple of ways:
While the photo viewer is active, press F5 on your keyboard (or hit the “reload” button in the browser) to refresh the Facebook photo page. This should open the photo without the overlay.Or go to address bar of your browser, remove the string “&theater” from the photo URL and hit Enter.Or the easiest option is that you hold the CTRL key while clicking the thumbnail of any photo on Facebook and this should open the corresponding photo in a new tab but without the lightbox effect.Please see the following screencast for details.
Facebook Photo Viewer Gets Another FaceliftDownload Facebook Photo Albums With a ClickPhoto Memories in FacebookThe Biggest Nuisance on Facebook – Photo TagsUpload Pictures to Facebook via Windows Live Photo GalleryAmit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.Create Collages with your Facebook Photos
Create beautiful photo collages with your own Facebook photo albums or using pictures of your friends.Amit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.
The team behind Shape Collage, a popular photo collage software, have launched Loupe, an online tool that will help you create collages using Facebook photos.
You can either use your own photo albums and turn them into collages or the app can also pull photos from the albums of your Facebook friends that are visible to you.
It takes just a few steps to build your first collage. Authorize the app to access your Facebook account, then select any of your photo albums (or that of your friends), choose a shape and your collage is ready. Hit the Share button to save that collage to your Facebook account or grab the permalink to share it by email.
The collages look impressive and if you don’t like the default layout, you can always move or delete any of the pictures on the pile. Here’s a quick video that shows how you can turn Facebook albums into collages.
The drawback though is the resolution. Loupe generates a relatively small image of your collage that will probably look good only on a mobile screen. Shape Collage says that will be introducing higher resolution images in the future.
Any photo collage that you create with Loupe is public and currently there’s no option to change the visibility to private. Thus, if you have any private photos on Facebook that you don’t want the world to see, it may not be a good idea to turn them into collages because others may then find them through search engines.
Also see: Create Picture Collage in Picasa
Create High Resolution Picture Collages & Posters in SecondsBuild a PDF Slideshow with your Facebook PhotosMake Beautiful Photo Collages from your Pictures with Microsoft AutoCollageKnow If Strangers Can See Your Facebook PhotosA Twitter Background Made Using Photos of Facebook FriendsAmit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.WordPress Plugins that Power Digital Inspiration
This is a list of the best WordPress plugins that will add more functionality to your WordPress blog and they are all free.
As some of you may know, this tech blog and my personal blog are both powered by WordPress software. What follows is a complete list of WordPress plugins that work behind the scenes to add new functionality to these sites that’s otherwise not available in the vanilla version of WordPress.org.
These are all free and open-source plugins and you can find them in the WordPress plugin repository.
1. Search Regex – This adds extremely powerful search and replace capabilities to your blog. You can find and replace almost any kind of data stored on your WordPress site including post titles, excerpts, comments, and meta data. It even supports regular expressions.
2. Redirection – If the URL of an existing post has changed or if an external site is linking to a non-existent page on my site, I can create redirection rules and automatically forward all the incoming traffic to the right pages.
3. Bing 404 – If someone lands on a 404 page for which redirection is not yet enabled, this plug-in will display links to relevant article on the error page. For example, a 404 page like labnol.org/googledocs will have links to my Google Docs articles.
4. WordPress SEO – This is probably the only SEO plugin you need for your WordPress blog. It helps you create better titles, you can block duplicate pages (like archive pages) from search bots, and it also adds the necessary meta tags required for more search-friendly Google snippets.
5. Hyper Cache – This is a caching plug-in for WordPress that will help reduce the load on your web server by saving pages as static HTML files. WP Total Cache is another popular caching plugin though I prefer Hyper Cache for its simplicity.
6. FB Open Graph – This plugin will insert the necessary Open Graph meta tags to your blog’s header so that you blog posts look good and have the right snippets when they are shared on Facebook or Google Plus.
7. 404 Email Notifier – This sends you an email notification as soon as a visitor lands on a 404 page on your WordPress website. The email messages have details about the visitor’s IP address, what browser they are using and the referral URL that led him to that broken link.
8. SlideShare – This helps you easily embed SlideShare presentations in blog posts with the help of short codes – see samples.
9. Smart YouTube – This lets you embed YouTube videos in blog posts using standing video URLs and the embedded player can be customized. It adds a thumbnail of the embedded video in the RSS feed and the same plug-in can also be used to embed videos from Facebook and Vimeo.
10. YARRP – The related posts plug-in adds links to old stories that may be contextually related to the content of the current story. It also helps expose your archived content to search bots.
11. WP Optimize – Use the WP Optimize plugin to clean-up your WordPress database tables. It can remove post revisions, trash spam comments and also optimize your MySQL tables so that it works more efficiently and also consumes less space.
12. WP-DBManager – This plugin will help you backup your WordPress database manually or you can set up a scheduled job for automatic backup and the database files will be sent to your email address at set intervals. Advanced users can use WP-DBManager to run SQL queries against their WordPress database without the phpMyAdmin tool. There are other plugins that can save backups to Amazon S3 and Dropbox.
13. Debug Queries – Is your blog slow? Use the Debug Queries plugin plugin to determine which MySQL queries are taking more time to execute and thus slowing down the blog. Debug Bar is another related plugin org that shows PHP warnings, queries and other helpful debugging information in the WordPress admin bar.
14. Auto Post Thumbnail – WordPress added support for Post Thumbnail Images in WordPress 2.9 but if you have been using WordPress for long, thumbnails may not be associated with your old posts. Use the Auto Post thumbnail plugin to automatically generate thumbnails for such posts using the first image found in the post content.
15. Regenerate Thumbnails – When you change the default size (height and width) of post thumbnails (or featured images) on your blog, you can use this plugin to regenerate thumbnails with the new dimensions.
16. Google XML Sitemaps – Since you want Google and other search engines to know about each and every page of your WordPress website, you need an XML sitemap and this plug-in lets you generate one in a click.
17. XML Video Sitemap – The plugin generates an XML Sitemap for your WordPress blog with all the YouTube videos that are embedded in your blog posts. I am also using XML Sitemap for Images and XML Sitemap for Mobile.
18. Date in a Nice Tone – This plugin offers an alternate way to display dates in your blog posts. It displays the amount of time – like “a few days ago,” or “in the last month,” or “over a year ago” – that has passed since a post or page was published.
19. SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – If you regularly embed code snippets in your WordPress blog posts, this plugin will help you highlight the syntax of the source code in different colors for more comfortable reading. Supports all popular programming languages.
20. Pubsubhubbub – This will help you beat content scrapers using Fat Pings. When you publish a blog post, it will instantly ping Google and that is a strong signal to the search engine that you are the original author.
21. WP-Associatizer – This plug-in will automatically rewrite any Amazon URLs in your posts to use your Amazon Associates ID.
22. Template Tag SC – WordPress offers numerous template tags – like wp_list_pages() or wp_tag_cloud() – that you can use in your theme files. The plugin will help you insert the sam template tags directly in your blog posts or pages using Short Codes.
23. Login Logger – This plugin logs the IP address and the exact date & time when a user logs into your WordPress dashboard. It also keeps track of any unsuccessful login attempts. Use this plugin in combination with Limit Login Attempts to automatically lock out users after they have made ‘n’ unsuccessful login attempts.
24. CF Shortcode – This helps you insert custom fields inside your WordPress posts using the visual editor. This comes extremely handy when you want to add custom JavaScript inside your WordPress posts.
25. Advanced Excerpt – The post excerpts in WordPress are fixed at 55 words and often displayed with [...] ellipsis at the end. This plugin lets you to specify a custom length of excerpts, you can get rid of the ellipsis and the excerpts can be configured to have full sentences so that there are no weird cuts.
The first version of this list was published in 2010 and since then, I have removed or deactivated a few WordPress plugins. Here’s why:
1. WordPress.com Stats – I am using Google Analytics to track site stats and therefore it doesn’t make sense to have another tracking program for the same goal.
2. Akismet – The comments on this site are powered by Disqus and they seem to offer decent spam protection on their own.
3. WordPress PDA – This plugin helped serve the mobile version of this site based on their browser’s user agent. Digital Inspiration now uses a responsive design and thus the same site is served to both desktop and mobile users.
4. WP-Paginate – The paginate plugin provide better navigation and also helps search engines find and crawl deep content on your site. The new design of this site has pagination built-in and therefore this plugin is no longer necessary.
Also see: Essential Linux Commands for WordPress Users
How WordPress Finds Related PostsAdd Related Flickr Photos to Your Blog Posts AutomaticallyUpgrade!! WordPress 2.5 Has Left The BuildingModerate Comments on your WordPress Blog with Windows Live WriterThe Most Popular WordPress Plug-In is Abandoned by its AuthorThe New Amazon Kindle Ad Targets the iPad
It is impossible to read books on your iPad in sunlight and the new video ad for Amazon Kindle again targets that flaw of the iPad, again.Amit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.
Amazon has released a new video commercial for the $79 Kindle that targets the one flaw (or limitation) of the iPad – it is nearly impossible to read books on your iPad while you are out in the sun because of the reflective glass screen.
The other point that Amazon is trying to highlight in the video is that Kindle is more value for money – you can get a bundle of two Kindle Fire units and one Kindle 5 unit for less than the price of an iPad.
Here’s the original Kindle ad that Amazon released about an year ago. It uses the same setting – a girl sunbathing near the pool and reading on her Kindle – and they have even hired the same actress – Anna Zielinski – to do the sequel.
On a related note, I have an iPad 2 and the new Kindle 5 (see setup) and I almost always prefer reading long form content on the Kindle. The iPad is good for flipping through PDFs or for watching multimedia content but Kindle is much better for reading text whether you are indoors or outside in direct sunlight.
The Kindle App for iPadAmazon Chart Compares Kindle Fire with the iPadVideo Demo of Amazon Kindle Book ReaderBuy Books for Kindle from Amazon Store without a US Billing AddressSony Reader or Amazon Kindle – What Would You PickAmit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.
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