Top 20 Wordpress Plugins for Power Users

Finally something for wordpress folks, an all-time favorite, carefully-selected, top 20 wordpress plugins. Enjoy! Read More

Shrink Outlook PST by Removing Email Attachments

Why do you have so much stuff in your Outlook? Are you just keeping everything there as a backup, maybe it is your central repository? Well, either way it would be wise to at least strip the attachments from your messages saving them elsewhere. This slims down your PST (Personal Folders File) and makes your files readily accessible
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Access Hulu, NBC and ABC Videos Outside the US !

Hulu is one of the most popular video sites nowadays, and hearing from my US friends that they watch all their TV shows online doesn’t help to relieve the pain that it’s a region restricted website. The same is the issue with NBC, ABC and also Internet TV in Windows Media Center. While I may never understand why they have to restrict access to users outside of the US, I have understood a way to access them easily.
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Add Yahoo Messenger to your Website

Yahoo! today introduced Yahoo! Messenger 9 and a new service called Pingbox which is like a live chat box (in the form of a Flash Widget) that you may embed in any website or blog including your MySpace page. Like the Google Talk badge, site visitors can send your private messages via the Pingbox chat box without requiring any IM client.
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How To Free Disk Space On Your Windows Drive

It is generally considered that whatever drive your windows is installed in you should try to keep it as free as possible, that really helps boosting your PC performance, So here are some steps to free up your Windows drive.
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Browse Faster and Anonymously with Toonel

Most of us know how annoying it is when you’re unable to open Facebook, update your antivirus, download any file, or use your IM application behind a corporate or university firewall. Although there are many ways to bypass them, most of them require you to find fast proxy servers or use unsecure tunnel websites
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How To Speed Up Your Torrents Easily

Every torrent client needs to be tweaked so as to increase the download speed. Today we will show you how to increase your torrent’s speed without using any any complex software, you’ll see the difference in downloading speed.
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How To Fix ‘Cannot Delete Folder/File’, ‘Access Is Denied’ or ‘File In Use’ errors in Windows Using Unlocker

If you get an “Access is Denied” error while accessing a folder then it means the administrator has not allowed you permission to access it. If you are not an Administrator then you will probably never be able to fix this error. But if you are an Administrator and receiving this problem then there is a software called Unlocker that is going to come in handy
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How To Download and Watch Dvdrip Movies With Subtitles

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How To Increase Your Laptop’s Battery Life

With the rise in laptop sales it is essential for laptop buyers to make sure they use their laptop batteries to the fullest and also make sure they can achieve the highest performance with the available battery.Here is a list of some essential tips which can almost double your laptop battery life.
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How To Maximize Or Increase The Speed Of Your Wi-Fi Connection

Today, enterprises are deploying wireless LANs for corporate applications and home users that involve e-mail, Web browsing, and access to various server-based databases. The need for higher data rates and techniques to improve performance of wireless LANs is becoming crucial to support these types of applications. To get that extra performance, you may have a lot to consider.
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How To Monitor Or Change The Temperature Of Your Computer

Is your PC getting toasty or is your motherboard melting? Okay, I’m exaggerating, but if your components are reaching a potentially damaging temperature, I recommend that you use SpeedFan. This program monitors and reports the temperatures inside your PC using the built-in sensors on the processor and motherboard.
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13 Amazing Firefox Add-Ons To Make Designers Lives Easier

13 Amazing Firefox Add-Ons To Make Designers Lives Easier.

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8 hacks to make Firefox ridiculously fast

Firefox has been outperforming IE in every department for years, and version 3 is speedier than ever.But tweak the right settings and you could make it faster still, more than doubling your speed in some situations

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Android: Google's Dream, Apple's Nightmare?

On Tuesday, Google will unveil its new iPhone competitor: the HTC Dream smartphone from T-Mobile, which will run the Android operating system. How do the two match up?

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15 Ways to Extend Your Laptop’s Battery Life

Laptops tend to lose their charm quickly when you’re constantly looking for the nearest power outlet to charge up. How do you keep your battery going for as long as possible? Here are 15 easy ways to do so.

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Get Your Website Included in Google News

Here are some basic rules to get listed.

1) Original Content: Simply reproducing news from other websites will not work. You need to have original content on your website.

2) Multiple Authors: Simple blogs with good content will not get included in Google News. This is because Google News wants multiple authors to “qualify” a website as a news source.

3) Organizational Structure: Google News includes articles only from sources that could be considered organizations; generally characterized by multiple writers and editors, the availability of organizational information, and accessible contact information. Hence, reviewing a website should give evidence of an organization.

This may seem like a very difficult task but below are 10 tips that should help you before submitting your site to Google News.

1) Website Template: Your website should look like a news source. Avoid any template that remotely resembles a blog. The design of your home page is important and should clearly mention which industry your website covers.

2) Content Management System: Your website Content Management System (CMS) should be geared to handle news-type content. Your CMS should have a URL rewrite engine so that it generates flat-search engine friendly URLs — those with keywords, rather than something like “yourwebsite.com/article.asp?=123.?456.” This not only will help in crawling, but also in Google News ranking. Avoid a CMS that generates more than two variables in the URLas it can create crawling problems.

3) Article URL: Each article URL should be unique and contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. The Google News crawler cannot index an article with this URL: http://www.website.com/news01.html. It can, however, crawl an article with this URL: http://www.website.com/news001.html. Google News cannot crawl an article URL with four digits, which resembles a year (http://www.website.com/news2008.html).

4) About Us and Contact Pages: Make these pages prominent on your website and one click away from the home page. A “Contact” page should have your organization’s name and contact information. You should also have a URL that is a directory of contributors and provide names of all your authors and editors, preferably with their email addresses. Try to give more information about your company and what it does in the “About Us” page.

5) Article Format: Each article format should include a title, author name, publication date and time (optional) and a minimum of 250-300 words in the article body.

6) Article Title: Set the title tag on the HTML page to the title of the article. The title should be displayed prominently above the text of the article. Avoid hyperlinks in the title. Title length should be 2-22 words. However, try to avoid very long or very short titles. If you are covering some big publicly-listed companies, include their name in the title. This will help your article appear if anyone is tracking those companies, either in Google News or through their email alert service.

7) Number of Articles: Chances are, a website with 10 total articles applying to be included in Google News will be rejected outright — it doesn’t give the impression of authority or heavy activity. Therefore, I recommend that you have at least 100 articles before you even think of completing the application form.

8) Article Frequency: Try to add at least three new articles every day. The more new articles you add the better, because once an article loses its “News” value, it will stop getting visitors from Google News.

9) Images and Video: As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Having a few images will make your news site stand out. And the same goes with videos. However, articles that are solely images and/or videos will not be included in Google News.

10) Advertising: Avoid too little or over-the-top advertising. Too little means your website does not attract enough visitors, whereas too much advertising might make one question your motive in getting your website listed with Google News.

Once you have covered these 10 points, apply for Google News inclusion. You will be asked to provide your site location information (City, State/Province, Country) and contact information URL and a URL that lists a directory of contributors. You can also select what topic(s) your site covers on this page. The Google News team will then respond to your request, generally within a few days to a week’s time. If your website is rejected, don’t give up. Many times, the Google News team
gives a reason for not including your website. Correct the oversight(s) and reapply.

Once you get an inclusion confirmation you can check which articles were crawled by using this command in Google News — Source: Website name. If your website contains paid content, use the “First click free” concept. Configure your Web servers to not serve the registration page to Google crawlers, identified as “User Agent — Googlebot.” You can configure this in a way so that the first article view by a Google News user doesn’t require a subscription. But all other links on this article page are trapped, which means if the user clicks anywhere else on the page, then they will be prompted to sign up.

After getting listed with Google News, your priorities should be ensuring trouble-free running of your website and adding the latest news to attract traffic. Below are some general tips which should help:

1) Webmaster Tools: Create an account with Google Webmaster Tools for News. It’s very useful in trouble-shooting your news website.

2) Hosting: This will help smooth crawling for the Google News bot. And if your article hits the first few spots in Google News for an important keyword, you will likely see some serious traffic which will need stable hosting. If there are any problems with hosting, you will see indicators in webmaster tools — errors in crawling or other problems.

3) Article Updates: Avoid article updates, because currently Google News crawls each article URL only once. Hence any update to an article after Google News has crawled it will not be reflected on Google News.

4) Google News Sitemap: Creating a Google News Sitemap will not affect your rankings. But having a Sitemap gives you more control by informing Google News which articles specifically to crawl. Sitemaps also allow you specify meta-information about individual articles, such as their publication date or keywords that help determine where your article belongs in Google News.

5) Feeds: Have RSS feeds for your news so that your visitors can subscribe. Use Feedburner to create feeds that are compatible with the most popular feed readers. Have a button on your home page where readers can click to subscribe to your feeds.

6) Content Ideas: Subscribing to press release distribution feeds will help you get the latest information coming out of your industry. You can create a journalist login with PRNewsWire, BusinessWire, MarketWire or PRWeb and set your preferences for receiving press releases. These releases can give you ideas or certain figures to help you create unique news articles. Apart from these, you can also subscribe to RSS feeds from industry websites or set email alerts for some industry keywords on Google News.

Google News is not the only player in the game, but it is the largest and most likely to send you hordes of visitors. Listed below are two other websites where you can submit your news site:

1) Yahoo News: Apply for Yahoo News inclusion at http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/news/forms/submitsource.html.

2) Topix.net: Find relevant news categories at http://www.topix.net/ then click the Feedback button at the bottom of the page. On this page, under “Are we missing a news source?” you will find a link to submit your site.

The aim for your news website should be to publish the latest industry news and articles and garner a loyal readership. If you work diligently, you will start generating thousands unique visitors a day through Google News alone. In turn, this will open up advertising opportunities on your website and help cover some of the initial cost of setting up your site, create resources for improvement and even generate income for your business. And that’s always a worthwhile endeavor.

Facebook's Network Effect

Was it only two and a half years ago that MySpace seemed completely unbeatable? The combination of inexpensive content development and a huge audience seemed like the path to riches, or a least a new content development format. According to the numbers, MySpace is clearly still the dominant player in the space:

Why all the buzz about Facebook then? There is not a single stat in the chart above that would suggest Facebook is a market leader. However, when you look at Facebook’s growth over the past year, there does seem to be solid audience growth:

Now, let’s focus in on the last couple of months. Since April, when Facebook basically opened up the doors to everyone, their traffic has grown from 22 million unique visitors to almost 35 million unique visitors. During this time, MySpace has stayed relatively flat. This is interesting, but not altogether shocking. The growth of audience isn’t what I find interesting, what’s interesting is the Time Per Person:

Facebook is a living demonstration of the Network Effect; as the audience has increased, so has the usage on a per person basis. This is a remarkably difficult thing for a site to do. As most sites pick up more traffic, they sacrifice engagement by watering down their audience with casual visitors.

How strong is the Network Effect? If you start looking at the time per person and audience starting in April, Facebook data correlates at .95 and MySpace correlates at -.39. This means, roughly, that each additional person added to Facebook increases the incremental time spent (read: value) by any individual person. That, my friends, is the Network Effect in action.

The funny thing is, websites don’t normally act this way - communication outlets, such as email, fax machines and telephones do. Here’s where things get interesting, advertising via communication mechanisms doesn’t work all that well. We all hate spam, cold calls and even those little ads you sometimes get with Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. But Facebook needs to make money, right? So, it would appear that they have a problem.

This leads to the $100 million question (literally in this case) - how do you use the Network Effect to your advantage in an advertising model? Facebook has some new ad formats out there that are interesting attempts; I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Google Chrome Attracts 2 Million Visitors

Nielsen Online, a service of the Nielsen Company, today reported that between Sept. 1 and Sept. 7, 2008, more than 1.9 million unique visitors in the U.S., 73 percent of them male, visited the “Thank You” page associated with Google Chrome, Google’s new Web browser.

Nearly 1.4 percent of all U.S. users who went online during the week from home or work visited the page, which typically indicates a download. In addition, consumers immediately – and in great numbers – took to blogosphere to discuss the new offering.

Men dominated traffic to the Chrome “Thank You” page, with males 35-49 accounting for 39 percent of overall traffic. Female visitors were more likely to be in the 18-34 age group.

Top News Sites for May 2008

Brand or Channel	Unique Audience	Time Per Person
All Current Events & Global News	100,417	125:42:00
Yahoo! News	35,846	00:22:12
MSNBC Digital Network	35,184	00:29:00
CNN Digital Network	33,101	00:38:48
AOL News	22,524	00:35:27
NYTimes.com	21,340	00:28:52
Tribune Newspapers	16,238	00:08:59
Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division	14,629	00:19:49
Google News	11,356	00:12:28
ABCNEWS Digital Network	11,124	00:09:34
USATODAY.com	10,785	00:13:00
Fox News Digital Network	10,132	00:43:16
CBS News Digital Network	9,225	00:08:00
washingtonpost.com	9,204	00:16:04
McClatchy Newspaper Network	9,131	00:12:41
Hearst Newspapers Digital	7,955	00:17:45
WorldNow	7,523	00:17:55
MediaNews Group Newspapers	6,965	00:12:13
Slate	6,456	00:07:37
Advance Internet	6,202	00:14:27
IB Websites	5,943	00:13:38
BBC News	5,933	00:09:13
Cox Newspapers	5,826	00:12:58
Belo Television	5,354	00:09:52
Topix	5,133	00:04:40
Boston.com	4,962	00:09:40
Gannett Broadcasting	4,735	00:10:02
TheHuffingtonPost.com	4,715	00:08:50
Associated Press	4,527	00:05:09
Belo Newspapers	4,462	00:09:38
Fox Television Stations	4,386	00:06:22
Daily News Online Edition	4,331	00:06:16
Daily Mail	4,040	00:08:44
New York Post Holdings	3,966	00:08:02
Freedom Interactive Network	3,749	00:05:20
NPR	3,713	00:07:31
Newsmax.com	3,375	00:11:33

Wikipedia U.S. Web Traffic Grows 8,000 Percent in Five Years

Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company, today announced that four out
of the five top referring Web sites to Wikipedia, which has grown nearly 8,000
percent over the last five years, are search engines, led by Google. In April,
61 percent of visitors from home and 66 percent of visitors from work to
en.wikipedia.org were referred from Google (see Table 1). Yahoo! Search was
the second most common referring site to English-language Wikipedia, referring
19 percent and 16 percent of visitors from home and work, respectively. Other
searchproviders to make the top five referring destinations for Wikipedia were
MSN/Windows Live Search and AOL Search.


Table 1: Top Referring Sudomains for en.wikipedia.org for April 2008 (U.S.)

Subdomain             Percent of         Subdomain                   Percent of
                    Visitors at Home                                   Visitors at Work
www.google.com                      61   www.google.com                 66
search.yahoo.com                    19   search.yahoo.com                16
www.wikipedia.org                   11   www.wikipedia.org                9
search.msn.com                       5   search.msn.com                     6
aolsearch.aol.com                    3   search.live.com                      4

Source: Nielsen Online
Note: Referral traffic is not unduplicated. Visitors can be referred from
more than one Web site during the month.


"Search providers dominate Wikipedia's referring traffic because of
itsscope and value as an information resource," said Michael Pond, media
analyst,

Nielsen Online. "The site's rapid ascent, with audience levels comparable to
popular brands such as eBay and MySpace, demonstrates the success of its
collaborative nature -- readers can edit entries and add information. This
consumer involvement has led to an increase in blog mentions of Wikipedia,
which builds the site's relevance and credibility."

In the past five years, Web traffic to Wikipedia has skyrocketed, increasing
nearly 8,000 percent from April 2003 to April 2008. Year-over-year growth rates
indicate surges where Wikipedia gained traction in the online marketplace (


Table 2: Web Traffic Growth at Wikipedia (U.S., Home and Work)

April     Unique Audience (000)   YOY Growth
2003                       700            NA
2004                     2,082           197%
2005                     6,753           224%
2006                    25,970           285%
2007                    45,934            77%
2008                    55,820            17%

Source: Nielsen Online

Will Facebook catch up to Myspace in traffic?

Top 10 U.S Social Networking Sites for May 2008

Google Chrome Review

After having successfully launched their own webmail service, RSS reader, online suite and many other apps, having a Google web browser was only a question of time.

Google Chrome has joined the so called web browser battle with a neatly designed web browser which, in spite of being still at a development stage, already shows a lot of potential.

The first thing that caught my attention when launching Google Chrome for the first time was its minimalist design. Besides a couple of bars and a couple of buttons, there’s nothing else on the interface to steal screen space from the websites you visit – not even a status bar, as it automatically shows and hides whenever it’s necessary.Another feature I loved is the fact that Google Chrome uses the same keyboard shortcuts and mouse wheel combination as Firefox. With a zero learning curve, you immediately feel at your element and there’s no need to start testing new shortcuts or reading the documentation. Other similarities to Firefox in Google Chrome include a complete download manager (which reminded me a lot of the Download Status bar extension) and a handy password manager.

If you don’t want Google Chrome to track down your browsing movements, try the incognito window. This special window won’t save anything about your session (no browsing history, no cookies, etc.), so no breadcrumbs will be left after you close it.

But if there’s a feature that makes Google Chrome really stand out, that’s having separate processes for each one of the tabs you open. That means that you can check the amount of system resources used up by each tab, and close any of them in case of trouble without having to shut down the whole browser.

That said, I don’t think Google Chrome is perfect yet. Like I said before, it’s still in development so there’s still plenty of room for it to grow and improve. I must say I had some stability issues when trying to install the Flash plug-in, and that I was totally unable to make the Java Virtual Machine work – which eventually prevented me from using certain web services. Despite these flaws, I really liked Google Chrome and I think it may become a serious option when choosing your web browser. Only time will tell.

Google to Launch New Web Browser - Chrome

Mountain View (CA) - Google had a big Labor Day announcement – stating that the company would launch at beta version of its “Chrome” web browser in more than 100 countries on Tuesday.

Do we really need another web browser, next to Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera? Google thinks so and hopes to outshine all other web browsers with a new browser that has been designed from scratch with a purpose not only to display text and pictures but to run applications. Google claims that Chrome can do this faster and in a more stable and more secure way than its rivals.

“We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser,” Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management and Linus Upson, engineering director at Google, wrote in a blog post. “What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.”

According to the post, we can expect a browser that has a “streamlined and simple” user interface: “Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.” Below the simple surface, however, Chrome is described to be able to run “today's complex web applications much better.” The browser is promised to be released as Open Source.

“We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers,” Pichai and Upson wrote. Both emphasized that Chrome isn’t done and may need much more work, so all we should expect is an idea of what Google is working on. “We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.”

In our mind, the most recent releases of Firefox 3, Opera 9.52 and IE8 may not be perfect, but they are very good browsers with lots of product development, engineering and market experience behind each of them. Google certainly has built up our hopes that it will reveal a browser that can trump all three – and we can’t wait to see if that in fact is the case.