Author: Rahul Bansal

News

New & Better Facebook is here. Try it Now!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 6, 2008
3 Comments on New & Better Facebook is here. Try it Now!

After waiting for so long to update their user interface, Facebook finally released much awaited new interface.

You can see above Try it now link in top-right corner.

Below in new homepage which is much more organized and light-weight. Also common tasks Status Update, Adding Photos & Videos, Sharing Link are easily accessible as you can see below.

Also News Feed now can be browsed for items of interest.

As I discussed in recent Orkut posts. Facebook application used to make profile pages a lot heavier. Now profile pages are also changed drastically.

Profiles pages are now multi-tab with separate tab for wall, Info, Photos & Boxes. I hope no application will ever come out of Box now… 😉

Also now you can directly post photos, videos, etc from your facebook profile page. Moreover you can filter your wall posts now.

I am still exploring and will update soon if I find something really great. All I can say… I am loving it! 😉

Link: http://www.new.facebook.com/

Tags Bing, Facebook

Reviews

2 WordPress Plugins to Make FTP Clients Obsolete

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 5, 2008
5 Comments on 2 WordPress Plugins to Make FTP Clients Obsolete

As I promised yesterday, in today’s post I will explore few wordpress plugins which will make uploading/managing other plugins/themes easier. Using these plugins will make FTP clients useless as far as wordpress is concerned.

Again as with all popular demand, there are many plugins which can do this FTP thing for you but I like only two of them as listed below.

1. OneClick Installer Updater:

This plugin has simplest interface with minimum options. I guess best for new wordpress users. I like following features most…

It allows you to upload plugins/themes directly in compressed zip format.
It allow you to upgrade all plugins at once.
Firefox integration allows you to directly add plugins/themes using context-menu command from any webpage.
You can delete unwanted themes directly from Design page at dashboard.

Link: OneClick Installer Plugin by Anirudh Sanjeev & Janis Elsts

2. WP Easy Uploade

This is designed exclusively for uploading on to wordpress. It provides more options but when I tried to use it, I noticed I always ended up selecting what OneClick installer does automatically, like option to uncompress and delete a zip file uploading. Things I like about this plugin…

Allows you to upload anything to wordpress. Good if you often upload files like videos, etc via FTP to your wordpress upload folders.
You can completely control location of uploads by specifying any path under wordpress root directory. Manual paths are automatically created if they don’t exist.
This plugin is available in many languages. Currently, Turkish, Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Indonesian, and Spanish translations are available.
Interface looks much cleaner and attractive despite more number of options.

This plugin adds an Upload Files option under Mange tab.

This plugin can be better if it can remember options last time selected or allow a user to set default options.

Link: WP Easy Uploader by Chris Jean

There may be more plugins like this but these two are really good. Also those who always sticks with new wordpress version may not need these as wordpress 2.7 may have thse features builtin.

I strongly recommend using one of the above plugins since you will be encountering many new plugins in coming days here. 🙂

Tags Firefox, plugin, Plugins, Series, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins

Tips

Hacking FeedBurner Feed Count using Netvibes

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 4, 2008
4 Comments on Hacking FeedBurner Feed Count using Netvibes

Most bloggers show their FeedBurner feed count proudly. Readers tend to subscribe to blogs with higher readers and adevrtiser are dying to buy ad slots on them!

So its common sense that higher FeedBurner count is always better. But Joop & Patrick posted a FeedBurner hack at The Next Web which increases your FeedBurner feed count by any number overnight.

They basically created a OPML file which contains same FeedBurner URL more than 2500 times. A OPML file is basically list of feed links. It is used to import/export feed subscription list between different feed readers.

Next they imported this special OPML file to a Netvibes account. Netvibes created a widget for each feed entry. All of these Netvibes widget contained same feed URL and FeedBurner recorded them individually. So next day FeedBurner feed count increased by almost 2500!

So with 2 minutes of work you can have any feed count you want! Below is video demonstration of entire hack..

Video:

Link: Feedburner hack (via TechCrunch)

Tags Hacking, Internet

Tips

Introduction – WordPress Plugins

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 4, 2008
6 Comments on Introduction – WordPress Plugins

This is my first post in first series about wordpress plugins.

In this post I am covering few things to remember while using wordpress plugins and different ways to upload a wordpress plugin. Actual plugin listing will start from tomorrow.

Some things to remember about wordpress plugins…

Best thing about wordpress is, power it offers via countless plugins developed for it. But please keep in my mind that every plugin adds some overhead to wordpress. So if you use too many plugins, they will end up slowing your blog to the extent that your visitor gets irritated.
There are things which can be often accomplished by other ways. Like there is a plugin which allow you to post your updates to twitter from wordpress dashboard. Try to use alternative like twitter desktop clients, Firefox extension, etc. This way you can trim your plugin list really well.
Whenever possible try to download and use plugins from official wordpress plugin repository. That way wordpress plugins automatic update feature can discover when a update to your plugin becomes available.
While deactivating a plugin, if you are sure that you will never use it again then better delete files/folders associated with it.
If you are using any caching plugins, then either deactivate it or flush your cache entirely after you activates a plugin which is supposed to alter your blogs front-end.
Never activate/deactivate too many plugins at once, specially if you are using them for the first time. A plugin may not break your blog directly, but it may conflict with other plugins.
There are many plugins which do almost same job. Never test them all at once. They are more prone to conflicting with each other.

Ways to upload WordPress plugins…

Yes, there are many ways to upload a wordpress plugin and you should choose the best to save your time.

Official Way…

The most conventional way is to download plugin file(s) to your disk.
Then unzip them if they are in compressed format.
Finally upload them to wordpress plugin directory using a FTP client.

More details are here.

Online FTP Client…

Another better way is to use online FTP client like net2ftp. Some webhosts offers custom FTP scripts. The only advantage of this approach is that you can upload compressed file(s) directly. Such scripts automatically uncompress them after uploading. This saves some work and bandwidth. Also transfer time is considerably less.

Using Shell…

This is my favorite way. But to use this shell access must be supported by your webhost. Dreamhost offers this feature. Detail on enabling shell access on Dreamhost are here.

Once you have shell access, you terminal on Linux/Mac or putty on windows to login via shell. Then…

Change your current working directory to wordpress plugins folder. (cd command)
Use wget command to download plugin file. syntax: $wget <plugin_file_url>
If downloaded file is in zip format, use unzip command.

This save most bandwidth and good for slow dial up users since no data is downloaded to their hard-drive. Also in this case, as your webhost is downloading plugin directly, the speed is amazing.

Warning: Use this only if you are familiar with Linux/Unix and also comfortable with command-line interface. One wrong command can wipe out your entire blog. Of course, there are complex ways to recover your blogs from such mistakes but more about it later sometime.

Using Plugin:

There are many wordpress plugins which can help you upload/manage other plugins. More about them in next article, to be published tomorrow.

Tags Blogging, Dreamhost, Firefox, plugin, Series, Windows, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins

Editorial

Series Writing – A new blogging experiment! [Editorial]

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 4, 2008
7 Comments on Series Writing – A new blogging experiment! [Editorial]

Starting from this week, I am trying a new experiment – Series writing.

Series writing is proven effective for many top bloggers. It demands much more consistency than normal blogging but I have more reasons to try this. In last few weeks, I have noticed that I blog about too many topics here. As a consequence, I waste a lot of time deciding what topic to write on.

Personally, I am into many things like blogging, web design, wordpress development, site administration, computer security, SEO, freelancing, etc. So it was always harder for me to choose a niche. So I have decided to take one topic at a time exclusively to blog about.

Of course, I will keep you updated on Orkut, iPhone and other my favorite topics which I closely monitor over the Internet. Series writing doesn’t mean you just blog on one topic. It just means you blog more on a particular topic.

This week I will be posting more on WordPress plugins. This series is intended to help new wordpress bloggers gain most from from countless wordpress plugins.

In my first series, I will post about plugin usability, my favorite wordpress plugins and similar things which can help you as a wordpress user.

If all goes well, I will also write a wordpress plugin series for developers. Yes, I am into commercial wordpress development and I just got paid $300 for my first private wordpress plugin. (project link)

Next I have really great series almost complete on Google Adsense but I will put it live in September once AdSense for product referral retires. I am also planning to cover series on online money-making, SEO, security, etc.

Please let me know if you like to read more about a particular topic. I hope you will enjoy this new experiment.

First post will be live in few hours. Thank you all… 🙂

Tags Adsense, Bing, Blogging, Editorial, Google, plugin, Wordpress

News

Orkut Allows Only 25 Orkut Apps!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 3, 2008
3 Comments on Orkut Allows Only 25 Orkut Apps!

Recently Darnell and Gaurav posted about Orkuts limit of 25 Orkut Apps. Many users who always want unlimited things might be surprised to know this limit. But if you look carefully this approach have a good side and for the first time I feel this limit is something, Facebook should have copied from Orkut.

Good for users…

Each Orkut App can eat up some space on Profile page. While this is optional, almost every app developer want maximum visibility for their app and thus use profile box no matter if its essential. Its sort of advertising!
So each Orkut app you add, clutter your Orkut profile pages. Which makes your profile page so heavy that it takes forever to load them on slow connection. On facebook, I know some profiles which takes more than 10MB data transfer to load completely.
Since you rarely check your own profile, this may seem fine to you. But this is surely a big turn off and it may create bad impression. It makes you look like highly disorganized person.

Good for app developer…

I observed on facebook, there are atleast 10 duplicates of every popular apps. And as facebook have no limit, also a spammy invite friends option all duplicates get some exposure.
Users have no app limit so they never bother about removing these apps even though they rarely use them. This way low quality apps manage to survive, even though their better alternative already exist.
On orkut as every user has limit of 25 apps, they will only keep apps they really use. So when a new developer joins open social, he will think of creating quality app so that his app gets a place in a users favorite 25 apps.

Well, this is my opinion and I don’t think it will be acceptable to majority users and specially to orkut apps developer community. But if you look for longer run, you will wish such limit to exist forever.

Like others, I do think that this limit will be changed or removed completely in future by Orkut, mostly owning to commercial reasons.

Let us know what do you think!

Happy friendship day to all our readers… 🙂

Tags Advertising, Bing, Open Social, Social Media

News

Buy Apple Macbook with 12% Discount [India Only]

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 2, 2008
3 Comments on Buy Apple Macbook with 123 Discount [India Only]

A good news for students, faculty and staff members of educational institutes in India. You guys can buy Apple Macbook laptops for 12% discount till August 30, 2008.

I brought Apple Macbook Pro 4 months back and I am really happy with my decision. In facts its one of the best decision I took which boost my productivity many folds.

If you are a person who is thinking about switching to Mac, then this is best time as current Macbook comes with Leopard, which allows you to install Windows XP/VIsta in dual-boot environment.

Here are new prices for macbook series laptops…

Unfortunately this discount offer is not available for Macbook AIr.

Here is the list of institutes. Check if your college/institute name is listed in it. You may find any college in your city and then a friend in that college to help you make this purchase with discount. 😉

To make a purchase, fill up this contact form and somebody from SystemMatrix will get back to you. Or you can also call 1800-425-4646 (MTNL/BSNL) or 080-2574-4646 (all phones) or SMS “SALES” to 54646.

Link: Mac for Students

Tags Apple, Windows

Tips

Performancing Ad Network – New way to make money!

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date August 1, 2008
2 Comments on Performancing Ad Network – New way to make money!

Performancing Ad Network, is a new ad network recently launched. Unlike many ad-networks which took forever to perform, this network is really performing well for this blog. It seems that it will replace Kontera, my second largest source of revenue soon.

Performancing Ad Network seems promising as they are specifically targeting 125 X 125 pixel image ads, popular with blogs sidebar section. Also those who have doubt, this can be used along with Google Adsense without any policy issues.

Here’s how it works…

First sign up as a publisher for Performancing Ad Network.
You submit your site, region on your site, number of 125×125 image ad spots, price for each spot among other details.
After that they give you codes to put on your site. If you are a wordpress blogger, then just install their plugin for easy integration.
Once your site is ready, they put it in marketplace for advertisers.
Advertisers choose to buy one or more ad-spot on you site, in terms of weeks. You can cancel an ad if you find it inappropriate for your site.
Payments are sent each in first weeks of each months via paypal. You get minimum of 60% revenue share.
They also have a nice affiliate program. If you join early, it may work well for you as most of your site visitors are yet to join Performancing Ad Network.

For advertisers…

Performancing Ad Network is looking for new advertisers and are offering $25 off on your first ad purchase of $100 or more.

Link: Join Performancing Ad Network as Publisher | Advertiser

Tags Adsense, Google, Make Money Online, plugin, Wordpress

Tips

Custom SMTP server – a solution for better Feedburner email service?

Post author By Rahul Bansal
Post date July 29, 2008
9 Comments on Custom SMTP server – a solution for better Feedburner email service?

Last month I posted about updates from FeedBurner email service being delayed almost by one month. Then I posted how to leave FeedBurner without loosing your existing subscribers in case one want to switch to a new service.

But like many bloggers, I don’t want to leave FeedBurner. It would be great if they just improve their email delivery system. Now thinking (seriously) about solution, I reached to a new conclusion.

Technically, one thing that may be seriously affecting FeedBurner email delivery, is high load on their SMTP servers. Of course this is hard to belive as Google fuels FeedBurner.

Now there are many forums, blogging software which allow you to specify custom SMTP server settings. If specified, third party SMTP server is used, instead of webhosts default mail function.

Coming back to FeedBurner, if they give similar option to publisher, one can use SMTP servers they find fast and trustworthy. Also publishers with custom SMTP server can be allowed to send one mail per post as they are not eating up FeedBurners’ mailing resources.

Or FeedBurner can start a new paid service where publishers who are ready to pay extra will get timely email delivery as well as mail per post kind of option.

There is one more hidden good side to this approach. Such paid service will be highly appreciated by top bloggers who makes most money and most traffic as well. So if these biggies shift their load to custom SMTP servers or paid plans, overall quality of service will automatically improve for small blogger! 😉

What do you think about it?

Tags Blogging, Google, Internet