Category: Editorial

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Editorial

Weekly Roundup for Devils’ Workshop- 8th March to 14th March

Here is the Monday Round Post for Devil’s Workshop. Check it out if you missed any of the post of this rocking week. This was really an exciting week for Devils’ Workshop because of these two reason:

  1. Merger of two of India’s top blog networks – rtBlogs and ShoutMeLoud .
  2. We celebrated 1st anniversary of rtCamp.

Credit: Flickr

With all this excitement, we published very useful posts for DW readers:

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Google:

  1. How to get your YouTube account ready for auto captions?
  2. Google is God- Or Is It ?
  3. Google Buzz giving Better Control for Email Notification
  4. 5 Great extensions with Google Wave
  5. Google Reader trying to take on Stumble Upon?

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Editorial:

  1. Top Indian Blogs ‘Networking’ Together!
  2. Retweet and win free license for Handy Backup software: DW contest
  3. rtCamp is Celebrating its 1st Birthday!

Softwares:

  1. Customize Your Folders According to Priorities
  2. How to Use Ultrasurf Proxy Software to Unblock Blocked Websites
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Developers:

  1. Role of Custom component in Buddypress

Browsers:

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  1. Speed up Firefox browser by managing tabs with BarTab Add-on

Webhosting:

  1. How To Set DNS Records with IndiaTimes Server

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Gadgets:

  1. The cheapest Netbooks in India: A comparison

Social Media:

  1. Missing on Twitter Search: A Case-Study

Tips and Tricks:

  1. Create RSS feeds of search results with Bing

Featured:

  1. 5 Online Photoshop Alternatives for editing your photos

Blogging:

  1. Retweet, F Share & Google Buzz buttons on your Blog without plugins.

I hope you will find all these articles very useful. Do share what kind of articles you would like to read on Devils’ Workshop.

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Editorial

rtCamp is Celebrating its 1st Birthday!

(cross posted on rtCamp blog)

Last year we announced the foundation of rtCamp. rtCamp is a web development company started by Rahul Bansal and later on I (Harsh Agrawal) joined rtCamp. In this one year we have covered lots of milestone and lots of new services and products are in the development stage.

For people who don’t know about rtCamp, it’s a wordpress development company based in Pune, India. We are specialized in WordPress theme, WordPress plugins, Buddypress, WordPress MU and anything you can imagine with WordPress.

Apart from this, rtCamp runs a blog network – rtBlogs, which runs popular blogs Devils’ Workshop, Shoutmeloud, Themepremium, Orkutdiary, Cricktalks, facebooknol and so on. Our motto is to provide a platform where any one can come write and make money for it. We already introduced revenue sharing model for everyone.

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We are increasing our editors and writers list and we are still in the process of hiring many new authors and bloggers around the globe. You already know our Chief-editor Aditya Kane and newly joined editor Ruchi parikh.

Talking about achievement of rtCamp, we have done a great business and some killer products has been developed by us. One of them is Buddypress Kalture media component. We also win a prize for our BuddyPress media component.

We are partnered with some big companies for WordPress theme development, but due to NDA, we can’t disclose their names and products which we have created.

What’s in the future of rtCamp…

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Talking about rtBlogs and rtCamp together, we have some big projects and ideas in the pipeline which we are working on and some of them are on the edge of finishing curve.

  • Blogging community for bloggers
  • Different Blogs on all niche
  • Domain Provider
  • Web hosting provider
  • WordPress maintenance service portal
  • WordPress SEO
  • Advertisement solutions
  • WordPress and WordPress MU support portal
  • Buddypress Themes and plugins development.
  • Various WordPress related services

We are going slow, but we are building strong foundation so that we can maintain our work-quality with increasing number of client base.

Right now we have a team of 20 members. We wish to have 100 members in our rtCamp family on next anniversary.

Thank you all for helping us “camp” successfully! 🙂

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Editorial

Devils’ Workshop Monthly Traffic Report February 2010

Like every month , we are publishing Traffic report for Devils’ workshop. 2 days back we released our new design and you can read more about Devils’ Workshop New WordPress theme here.

Undoubtedly traffic of Devils’ workshop is increasing and we are trying to limit our niche to certain area and we will talk about this in coming days. For now, here is our monthly traffic report :

  • Monthly Visit: 168,218
  • Monthly page Views: 243,551

Most of our traffic source is from Google and search engines. This month we will be working on publishing more latest technology news and computer hacks. Don’t  forget to subscribe to our feeds and Twitter to keep receiving latest updates.

Meanwhile you can also look for various advertising opportunities in our Advertisement page.

Do let us know how was your month of February for traffic and revenue.

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Editorial

Dreamhost Discount Coupon March 2010

Like every month we are giving 50$ discount coupon to Devils’ workshop readers, so that they can start their WordPress blog or any other website at as low as 69$/year.

Before we give sign-up link and discount code for Dreamhost , here are some of the features of Dreamhost webhosting.

Dreamhost provides you with Shared and VPS web hosting. You can use the link given at the bottom to get 50$ discount and 1 free domain.

Features of Dreamhost Webhosting

  • Unlimited Bandwidth
  • Unlimited Storage
  • Unlimited domain hosting
  • Google apps Integrated
  • 1 Click WordPress installation
  • 75$ Worth free Google adwords credit
  • 1 Free domain
  • 24*7 Customer support

There are not the only features, but we stripped down the most comment and asked features which dreamhost provide.

Signup Link for 50$ discount

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Editorial

From Devil’s to Devils’ Workshop… (with new theme!)

(Disclaimer: Images in this post are not screenshots of DW’s new theme!)

From a Devil’s Workshop to many Devils’ Workshop (community blog), DW’s every aspect has been changed in last 2 years except it’s theme!

Now after 18 months, we are here with a fresh new theme to accommodate our growing community’s needs. After tremendous feedback from you guys, we faced a hard-time finalizing list of features that final theme will have.

Below are the some suggestions from you that were of tremendous help to us. Its not possible to list more than 100 comments/mails/suggestions here. Rest assured we read each of them and followed below with some of our own keeping in mind every aspect of DW.

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  • Changing “Devils Workshop” to “Devils’ Workshop” was the most valuable suggestion by Saeed and well explained later by Varun Agarwal.
  • Gautam asked to include social media/share icons, comment threading and some graphics.
  • Ajax, jquery inclusion and copyright updates was proposed by AKM .
  • Arjun S Kumar suggested to include threaded comments, magazine style layout, graphical effect .
  • New logo design was sent by Sridhar Iyer and we grateful for it. He also supported to get the magazine style layout and gradient blue-white color that we have used in this new theme.
  • SmashinGeeks asked to change the logo and the footer design.
  • S.Pradeep Kumar supported our decision to keep the old color scheme for the new theme.
  • There were a number of suggestion made by Rakesh Waghela @Webiyo.com . Some of them were to include categories in the header, improvisation of the comment input box and comments section, include striking content in footer, include more related content in the sidebar and to lay more stress on community building.

About new theme…

New themes color scheme may not be new to you but we were not running after colors. The goal was to design a theme which will take community spirit of Devils’ Workshop to the new level. Some new enhancements added are…

  • There were more than 100 categories which are reduced to 10-15 now. That too with category icons and nicely designed category pages.
  • Home-page now has a slider which displays 10 recently featured posts.
  • Commenting now has inline-replies enabled. Also comments are threaded now.
  • Comment form now has those HTML formatting buttons.
  • Single posts now have prominent social-sharing buttons.
  • Author info box on single posts now supports Twitter handle. Just add your twitter-name to your DW profile.
  • Related posts now shown with thumbnails on single-post pages.
  • Sidebar now have recent-posts, popular-posts and entire blog-network’s recent posts in tabbed manner.
  • Performance-wise all small images and icons that are part of theme are now displayed using CSS-Sprite.
  • Contact-form added in footer, so that you can contact us from every-page on DW!

Credits…

Its our readers who decided for most part what should go online. Rest, almost every rtCamper here contributed codes, plugins and feedback during month-long development of this theme.

Vivek Jain and Saorabh Kumar took lots of efforts in finding and fixing bugs in various browsers. Still, if you find any bugs or issues, please let us know.

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Editorial

DevilsWorkshop Monthly Traffic Report January 2010

We never published traffic report in past but from now on every month Devils workshop will be publishing its monthly traffic report. One reason for publishing traffic report is most of Devils workshop readers are budding bloggers and we want them to see what are the areas from where they can drive traffic to their blog. Another good reason to publish your monthly traffic report is, advertisers will have an idea about the traffic and exposure they will get while advertising with devils workshop and our blog network.

Monthly Traffic report for January 2010

  • Monthly Visits : 170K
  • Monthly Page Views : 250K
  • New Visit : 87.60%

Traffic source :

Devilsworkshop provide premier SEO service for WordPress and we target search engine traffic over any other traffic. Most of DW traffic is organic traffic and here is break down of traffic for DW:

As you can see most of our traffic comes from search engine and because of that Devils workshop traffic is targeted traffic.

Soon we will be doing a complete redesign of Devils workshop. You can have a glimpse of our new design here.We are open for more suggestions on design. Apart from it, devils workshop is going under lots of development and soon we will make a big public announcement for all the readers which I’m sure all of you are going to welcome.

Do give your feedback about devilsworkshop and your suggestion for better community building ?

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Editorial

Update on DW redesign

Many of our regular readers are aware that we are working on a new theme for Devil’s Workshop. Yes we are coming closer to completing this project. We have included a lot of new suggestions from our readers who commented and emailed us with their suggestions.

We have tried to include everything that was asked for without trying to change ourselves too much. The endeavor was to make a better Devil’s Workshop and not a different one.

We have tried to keep to retain the familiarity of Devil’s Workshop’s current theme and tried to improve on it with our new theme. We have opted to have a magazine style theme which a lot of readers did want. Personally I think Magazine styled theme does help a great deal to navigate a website a lot more easily.

Homepage features

The new homepage layout will show lesser than 10 posts that we show with our present theme. This is to highlight with excerpts only the latest posts on the homepage. This was a decision which was debated but we feel that showing posts under categories would be better than showing 10 posts on the homepage. This will help make it easier to navigate our website.

A new addition on our homepage will be categories gaining a lot of prominence. We have got some feedback that using categories for navigating our website has been an issue. This will change as all the categories with some of the recent posts under those categories will be displayed on the homepage itself. The design is still being worked on and you can expect the navbar to have some more additions.

I hope you liked the screenshots of some of the several new changes we will have with Devil’s Workshop’s new theme. Hope you like what you see at the moment.

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Note to Authors

If you are a guest author or privileged author with DW, you might want to look up and make some changes with your profile information. As you might have noticed we have stopped the Editor’s Note section for our guest authors as now there is a automated method of doing the same. See image below to check how the new information will be displayed.

As you can see the number of posts show up along with the website address. If you include your twitter account id, a link is generated for readers to get to your Twitter page.

Note that these changes are already in effect and all you have to do is

  • Log into DW and get to the Dashboard.
  • Once at the Dashboard click on Your Profile on the right hand side.
  • Carefully fill in all the details you want to show up with your guest post.
  • Ideally keep the biography short only up-to a line as you can see there is a space constraint for displaying the biography with the post.

Hope you all enjoy the new theme and do keep your suggestions and opinion on what you want through your comments.

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Editorial

Results of Hostgator Webhosting DW giveaway contest

Today is the 15th of January and the Hostgator Webhosting DW giveaway contest is closed and results are out. First of all let me thank all the participators for taking part in this contest.  Also a special thanks to Harsh Agarwal who sponsored this special giveaway on DW.

Over all we had 66 valid entries and the post was Retweeted a 114 times! As Harsh had explained in his post that this contest was a way to encourage people who are still shy of using WordPress because of the cost involved. The prize is hostgator baby plan one year subscription which is worth 120$. You can host multiple domains in this plan along with bandwidth and storage being unlimited.

We used Random.Org . After compiling the whole list of comments which are valid, I used Radnom.org lists to create a randomized list. The one at the top was the winner.

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Congratulations to Vicky whose name popped up first once the list was randomized. He wins the Hostgator goodies worth $120.

Here is the video of the winner being selected through Random.org

Here is the list of all those who participated in the contest.

  1. jaswanth on January 1, 2010
  2. Tech Society on January 1, 2010
  3. Kashish Kaushik on January 1, 2010
  4. Shubhendu Pandey on January 1, 2010
  5. Namit Gupta on January 1, 2010
  6. Manveer Singh on January 1, 2010
  7. S.Pradeep Kumar on January 1, 2010
  8. MostlyBlog on January 1, 2010
  9. sauravjit on January 1, 2010
  10. Avi Singh on January 1, 2010
  11. Athul Jayaram on January 1, 2010
  12. Sagar Gholap on January 1, 2010
  13. Pratik Parekh on January 1, 2010
  14. alok on January 1, 2010
  15. Suhas on January 1, 2010
  16. Joseph on January 1, 2010
  17. Mrpant on January 1, 2010
  18. Richie S. on January 1, 2010
  19. S60 Betalabs on January 1, 2010
  20. Varun Agarwal on January 1, 2010
  21. Mandar Salvi on January 1, 2010
  22. ali360 on January 1, 2010
  23. debayan laha on January 1, 2010
  24. Tech-Freak Stuff on January 1, 2010
  25. P.K.ARUN on January 1, 2010
  26. SirajHassan on January 1, 2010
  27. Pratik Parekh on January 1, 2010
  28. Mahesh on January 1, 2010
  29. Baris on January 1, 2010
  30. Rishabh Agarwal on January 1, 2010
  31. George on January 1, 2010
  32. Paritosh on January 1, 2010
  33. Anurag Mittal on January 1, 2010
  34. srivathsan.GK on January 1, 2010
  35. Akshay Kakkar on January 1, 2010
  36. Mrinmay Bhattacharjee (mrintech) on January 1, 2010
  37. Ankit Bansal on January 1, 2010
  38. thewisecrab on January 1, 2010
  39. Simran on January 1, 2010
  40. Vaibhav Kanwal on January 1, 2010
  41. Mayur on January 1, 2010
  42. Lucifer on January 1, 2010
  43. Sharad Kumar on January 2, 2010
  44. Rajeel on January 2, 2010
  45. Varun Agarwal on January 2, 2010
  46. Sumit Kalra on January 2, 2010
  47. Sithin Sony on January 2, 2010
  48. Gautam on January 2, 2010
  49. ContestItalia on January 2, 2010
  50. Ankit on January 2, 2010
  51. khalid on January 2, 2010
  52. Vicky on January 2, 2010
  53. Sothy on January 3, 2010
  54. Rajesh Kanuri @ TechCats on January 4, 2010
  55. M. R. SOHEL on January 5, 2010
  56. Quakeboy on January 6, 2010
  57. CelebCurry on January 6, 2010
  58. BlogrPro on January 7, 2010
  59. Prasanth Chandra on January 8, 2010
  60. Binoy xavier on January 8, 2010
  61. Akbar on January 8, 2010
  62. Puneet on January 8, 2010
  63. umesh on January 9, 2010
  64. Nandan on January 12, 2010
  65. Atul Tiwari on January 13, 2010
  66. Uttoran Sen on January 13, 2010

PS: The new theme for Devils Workshop is on the verge of completion and and we are hopeful to get it live soon. Also do await a lot more surprises from our rtBlogs network  in the coming days 😀

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Editorial

Wish u all a very happy n rocking new year 2010!

Dear Readers & Bloggers,

Devils Workshop and Team rtBlogs wishes you all a very happy n rocking new year 2010 ahead. 🙂

Year 2009 – At A Glance!

We started 2009 with a much-detailed post here.

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More than 1000 posts has been published by 50 authors on DW in 2009. You can see list of all authors on DW here.

We managed to get a big and polished-office in Pune now for rtCamp. Our blogging team has been already expanding and we will be announcing few great news soon over the next 2-3 weeks.

Plan for Year 2010!

rtBlogs will become autonomous entity with its own team and leaders. With DW redesign projects a great deal of exercised will be carried over next 3 months.

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If all goes well, you will be thrilled to be part of rtBlogs network. And we thank you in advance for being with us all over the time!

As we are really upto some big things I cannot disclose more details ahead of time! 😉

New Year GiveAway

The new year for DW readers has been already kicked off by a great webhosting giveaway sponsored by Harsh. If you are a new blogger and looking forward to start blogging on your own server, this is your chance, so don’t forget to participate as contest is open till January 15th!

On Personal Front…

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I haven’t started my personal blog yet but I will try my best to do it it this year. I really hate using my name and I am yet to settle on a good name for my personal blog! But, if plan for year 2010 goes well for rtBlogs, I may end up being a regular author again on Devils Workshop and WpVeda! This is what they call full-circle! 😉

Rest thank you all for being with Devils Workshop and all other blogs in network!

Keep reading, keep blogging! 🙂

UPDATE: rtCamp is winner of Kaltura Challenge!

Just checked this great news from Zohar that rtCamper Kapil Gonge’s open-source BuddyPress-kaltura plugin declared winner of Kaltura Contest! You can read more details here!

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Editorial

Monday Morning Blues [21 Dec 09]

Today is another Monday morning and I just realized we have reached the last ten days of this year. We are still carrying out tests on the new DW redesign project. I can already see some of your suggestions being followed quite enthusiastically.

Subscribers are 7000 +

One very important thing I have to share with you as many of you visiting Devils Workshop might have noticed it that we have now crossed 7000 subscribers. This is quite satisfying personally as when I joined rtBlogs over three months ago we were around the 5000+ mark.

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Top Posts

Finally I realized that next Monday would be the last one in this year. So with next Monday’s Top Posts I will include the posts you liked over the whole year. Let me know through your comments which were you favorite posts in the whole year and I will include the most popular ones on Top Posts list. Obviously the list would be much longer than 5. 😉

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