In the last couple of years, the use of social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook & Orkut boomed over the Internet. Many people started meeting each other using these social networks and in the mean while, profiles on these sites became the real identity in this virtual world. For instance, few days ago, when I had a talk with one of my childhood friend, she asked me my profile link on Orkut and to my dismay, I was having nothing to answer her. 🙁
You all must be aware that, social networking sites (like Orkut) does not provide a short profile URL which you can memorize easily. And hence, you always need to copy-paste your profile URL whenever a friend asks you for it. To solve this problem, today I am writing a short guide to customize URL of your social networking profiles.
Well there are 2 easy ways to do that:
The first is, make use of some services that provide a facility to shorten your URL
Alternatively, you can register a free domain (some of them listed here) and divert them to your actual profile pages.
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A step by step guide, to use both the procedure are mentioned below:
Procedure 1:
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p align=”justify”>This is the simplest way of customizing social profile URL and is advisable too.. For Orkut users: locaworld.com. Just visit this site, enter your Orkut profile or community link and your desired id.
( Example of customized links that I created are- djain.locaworld.com and dw.locaworld.com )
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p align=”justify”>For Facebook users: faceto.us. Same step is to be followed as done in the previous case.
( Example: faceto.us/djain )
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p align=”justify”>As mentioned, above procedure is the simplest possible way and can be done even by a rookie 🙂 But the only disadvantage is that, I am unable to find any such service for other social networks like Myspace and Hi5 🙁
If you do know any such site, please let us know.
Procedure 2:
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p align=”justify”>Register a domain, at some free domain providers (Preferred one is CO.CC) and divert it to your actual profile pages.
I’ve done that by by creating my own domain- djain.co.cc and diverted it to my Orkut home page 🙂
By using the second method, your profile links can be shortened further and can also be used for other networking sites like Myspace & Hi5. The only point in using this method is, it is bit clumsy and takes few hours to get the whole thing done 🙁
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p align=”justify”>This is the best effort I could give on this post.
If you stuck anywhere please let us know using comment form.
WidgetBucks is one of the very few ad networks I have been using successfully from long time. Of course, it doesn’t help me earn money like Google AdSense but it is a good choice if you just have some free ad-space on your blog/website.
To celebrate their first anniversary, they have re-introduced $25 signup bonus offer they had during first three months. You will receive $25 bonus when your earnings will reach $50.
WidgetBucks ads are mix of CPM and CPA which means you will get paid for sure for ad-impressions your blog will serve. If you are from US then their newly introduced travel and local widget ads will work for sure. If you are running a product-review blog then you can put customized widgets listing related products as well.
Personally, I use merchsense type of widgets where they(WidgetBucks) automatically crawl this blog and serve relevant ads. Also these ads blend good with rest of the blog so it won’t degrade user experience at all.
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There are just really many options too choose from that you will find success with WidgetBucks for sure. 😉
Apart form this they have relatively good referral program which is the reason I am posting this! 😀
So hurry up to join WidgetBuck as this $25 bonus offer is valid till tomorrow only. You can explore it later!
Link: Signup for WidgetBucks
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Personal Note: Many of you have noticed, I was away from this blog for more than a week. I was stuck with some personal problems which are almost fixed now. I appreciate all of you who have contacted me and showed concern. Please bear with such posting delays for another week. In meantime, guest authors and co-bloggers can contact Deepak Jain, as he is new and first editor at Devils Workshop. I will resume frequent blogging in a week or two and very soon Devils Workshop will be hiring too! 🙂
I recently came to know of about this. Well, I had to because when I was in college. I hate using the touch-pad of my laptop. So I use the numpad instead to control my mouse pointer rather than a mouse or the touch-pad.
Follow the given steps to activate the Keyboard Mouse:
To edit this feature, first you should be logged in your Windows account with administrative rights.
To activate this feature, Press Alt+Shift+NumLock keys. Then you will receive a small MouseKey box.
To keep MouseKeys on, click on Ok button.
Click on Settings button, if you want to adjust the mouse cursor settings.
Here a new dialog box will appear with the title Settings for MouseKeys, now you can manage all mouse settings for example mouse cursor speed, acceleration and some other features.
Now using Numeric keypad, you can move your mouse pointer.
The Controls are :
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1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 9 keys are used to move the mouse cursor into 8-different directions.
Key 5 is used as mouse click button.
Insert[zero] key used to hold down mouse button.
+ Sign used to double click on any object.
Delete button used to release the mouse.
Click on NumLock button to disable this keyboard mouse feature.
In Fact when the Keyboard Mouse is On, an icon will show in the taskbar in right corner near system clock.
Advantage :
It is a great alternative to your actual mouse or your laptop touch-pad.
It works better & faster than your laptop’s touch-pad.
Since 8 keys can control its movement, the mouse pointer gets high precision.
If you are a laptop user, you don’t have to carry a mouse with you.
Now, you don’t have to worry in case your mouse or touch-pad gets damaged.
Disadvantage :
This feature can’t be used inside fullscreen PC Games.
Most laptops (unlike mine) don’t have separate numeric keypad.
Its not known by many, so most people will laugh at you if you tell them that you control you mouse with your keyboard.(trust me, they do laugh at the first time).
Directory listing allows a person to see list of files and folders of a targeted directory on your website. This is something not serious itself but may help someone to launch attack on your site.
So it is good practice to turn-off or prevent directory listing by default and then, if needed, allow directory listing selectively. Yes, there are times when you want to enable directory listing for some directories. I will come to this later. Before that…
To Turn-off or Prevent Directory Listing Sitewide…
Open .htaccess file in your websites root (/) directory. If it is not present, then create one. DO NOT forget . (dot) in the name of .htaccess.
Add just one line in the beginning as follows and save/close .htaccess file.
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Options –Indexes
That’s it. With just one line of code in one file, sitewide directory listing is disabled. Next…
To Turn-on or Allow Directory Listing…
Go to the folder for which you want to allow directory listing.
Open .htaccess file in that directory. If it is not present, then create one.
Add just one line in the beginning as follows and save/close .htaccess file.
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Options +Indexes
That’s it. Now the directory and all sub-directories under it will have directory listing enabled.
If you have well organized website structure, you will only need 2 .htaccess files. At Devils Workshop, I prevented directory listing sitewide by creating a .htaccess file in it. And then I created another .htaccess file under /pub directory as I keep all publicly accessible file under it.
I feel all bloggers who are using self-hosted WordPress setup should follow this. WordPress is quite secure, but plugins you are using on WordPress may have some security flaws. Now a person can use directory listing to get list of plugins you are using and depending on it, can launch an attack on your site. So its better to play safe… 😉
If you do not have permission to create or edit .htaccess files on your webserver, you can still secure your sensitive directories by creating a blank file named index.html in them. This way remember to create such index.html files for each directory you want to protect. I know it sounds a lot of work and chances are you may miss some sub-directories on the way. But that is what makes .htaccess method best!
Most of the people think that page navigation hack is only for who blogs at WordPress. But here is the hack for those who use blogger and want to add page navigation to their blog. This hack will show page number instead of text link older posts, as shown in following screenshot.
[Editor Note: This is first post by Arjun Kumar on this blog. Arjun is just 16 year old and that make him youngest Devil in team DW. He is working hard on our new project OrkutBuddy, dedicated for orkut users.
In honor of their 10th Birthday, Google put oldest search engine index available online for use which dates back to 2001. This means you can use Google search as it was in 2001. It is not just home page or logo but also search result will be served from 2001.
Just out of curiosity I tried searching “Rahul Bansal” but I failed to get any result pointing to me! This is quite expected as in 2001, I did not know much about computers and Internet. I got my first computer at the end of 2002 and it was 2006, when I created this blog and my first web presence. More about this is posted on about page.
It was nice searching back in time. I experienced true time-travel as it was entirely different world. Of course, I could not follow most of the result. Search results are served from wayback machines archives.
If you are a techie or student of computer science/engineering, you will also like this powerpoint presentation which describes Google’s System Architecture. I had case study of Google as part of my M.Tech. course. Unfortunately, I failed to find other presentations which have details about Pagerank algorithm and general working of Search engine. Anyway below is what I found, rest you can always Google! 😉
If you are a Google fan, I am sure you will enjoy it. Just out of curiosity, wanted to know if anyone here used Google Search back in 2001. 🙂
Even though I personally believe SEO is something you can do on your own if you have just patience and some technical skills, SEO experts can prove good for non-tech-savvy bloggers/website owners.
Just in case, if you are using any popular CMS or blogging platform, then please try to go through its documentation or community forums. All popular CMSes and blogging platform supports SEO friendly website structure in core or via plugins. We also listed 4 plugins for better SEO of wordpress blogs, which can do wonders for your blog as part of our first wordpress plugin series.
Did you ever wish for an SMS service similar to Yahoo Groups or Google Groups???
A service that you could help you send your one SMS to all your friends and if any one of them reply to it… the reply goes back as an SMS to mobile phone of all you friends in the group.
Well here is a cool usage of Google SMS Channels to create a similar service…..but before going into details…
Catch this situation…
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One lazy Sunday afternoon in Pune, sitting at home you feel like planning to watch a late night movie show….You type an SMS and send it to 6 of your friends to check who is interested to join you. Minutes later you start getting all types of queries.. one wants to watch “Drona” the other friend is ok with any movie but only in “Inox” … the third one can watch any movie but only in “Rahul cinema”…. while you start trying to collaborate using only SMS (as its only 10 paise per SMS) you actually end up doing 2-3 round robin of calling everyone to bring all to a conclusion…… Total time taken : 30 minutes
Now the same situation using “Group SMS”…
One lazy Sunday afternoon in Pune, sitting at home you feel like planning to watch a late night movie show….You type an SMS and post it to your “Google SMS channel”. All your friends receive this message (as an SMS on their mobile) as they have subscribed to your channel… now everyone post back to the channel (reply the SMS) what their preference is (You have set up your Google SMS channel in such a way that it allow its subscribers to post messages).
Everyone’ s SMS is further relayed to all other friend’s mobile handsets.. and after 2-3 iterations (posting back SMS on the group) you come to a unanimous plan. Total time taken : 5 minutes
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Before winding up here are few simple steps you need to take to create your own cool SMS group!!!!!
All your friends will receive an invitation SMS from Google on your behalf
They need to send an SMS ‘ON CoolGroup’ to 9870807070
and later ‘accept’ to 9870807070 to accept the terms and conditions
Step 4
To post a message to the channel (sending SMS to all your friends) any of the members can send an SMS <channel_name> <message> to 9870807070
In this case it will be sending an SMS ‘CoolGroup Hi all wanna go 4 any movie 2nite?’ to 9870807070
This message will reach everyone’s mobile to which they can further reply back using the same method
Google SMS channels are poised to bring a complete revolution in the way we exchange information today! People are already exploring ways to innovate cool applications using Google SMS channels….
So keep exploring the countless possibilities and do keep me posted…
[Editor Note: This is first post by Deepesh Sodhi on this blog. Deepesh works on innovative product based business opportunities in IT, Telecom and Personal finance management space for the Indian market.
2. Next open Mac’s System Preferences. Select Network settings.
3. Under Network settings, for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies MSM connection, use following values:
Telephone Number: #777
Account Name: internet
Password: internet
After this, go to “Advanced” Settings.
4. In Advanced settings, modify two fields:
That’s it, hit OK. Click Connect on next screen (Step #3).
I am experiencing a lot with Mac and quite comfortable with it. So if you guys have any general questions related to Mac, please feel free to ask them here.
I do not code apps for Mac as of now, but hope to do that someday. 🙂
Adopting blogging as a profession or say professional blogging is still a very fresh concept in most part of the world. After years of my blogging experience, I have gradually realized the value of blogging which can give you both knowledge and enough money to make a living out of it. Literally there is no core difference in blogging or problogging so one needs to get out of the hangover for the word “Professional” associated with problogging.
Now consider a case when you want to go to the office or some other public place. What will you do? Obviously you will get ready, wear clean clothes, shoes etc. But why? The only reason is just to look professional and presentable. Same way, if blogging is done in a presentable way can bring a lot of difference to you. So in this article let me share with you some productivity tips which will help you do quality and professional blogging.
1. Develop Strong Niche
Avoid being “Jack of All Trades, Masters of None”. As only Master excels, not the Jack. So develop a strong knowledge in the area of your own interest. People tend to get influenced by things around them easily and start chasing them. So they end up following neither their own interest nor others. So give your interest enough time so that you have gain enough knowledge to pour in to your blog posts for the readers of your blog.
Once you develop a strong foundation in the subject of your choice, now comes time to ring the bell of blogging. Take up a dedicated time of the day (away from any distraction) and just write in. Here is the tip, consider yourself a reader than a writer. Think what would you like to read on that particular topic (that you are currently writing on). With this dual psychological trick, you use both, left as well as right brain to bring maximum productivity in your work.
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3. Be Clear
Avoid crossroads or misleading information. Write less but be clear on what you want to say. There is literally no point in writing big but useless or unclear posts. Another disadvantage of being unclear is that you lose a reader who could have recommended your blog further.
So the third tip is, be crystal clear in your thought and post to create interest in user.
4. Automate Your Work with Technology
Using right softwares, you can increase your productivity by many times. A simple example of using Windows Live Writer (WLW), a desktop blogging tool available for free. It has built-in dictionary which will avoid your wastage of time in reviewing your posts for spelling errors. Also, it has blog post option where in you can synchronize WLW with your blogging by scheduling a your posts. Set time and date your post will automatically show up in the blog. Similarly using good softwares (like WLW or ScribbleFire) can help you get maximum results in minimum time.
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5. Blogging Software (Platform)
Use your own domain with WordPress or Blogger platform as these are two best softwares for professional blogging. WordPress is even more preferable for fast SEO (Search Engine Optimization). As making money is a part of your pro-blogging carrier, Google AdSense is the best program for both, novice and experienced writers.
Later when you become famous, you can also go for direct advertising and make good living out of pro-blogging. Both WordPress(self-hosted) and Blogger make it very easy to add Google AdSense or any other type of advertising on your blog.
6. Record Your Ideas
Recording your idea is the most effective solution to mind-map your ideas. If you do not have habit to write for longer periods, this one is the best for you. Just record your audio ideas so that later in the day or week you can listen them to write a good post. This forward and backward chaining of thoughts will increase you productivity on a very high scale as none of your ideas are lost away.
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Another advantage of this technique is that you will also gain experience in audio recording. So once you get comfortable in recording your own voice, you can save lots of time by avoiding writing blog post altogether and consider making an audio post each day. Yep, I am talking about audio podcasting, which can help you gain good exposure. Same way this technique will enhance your skills to start video posting on self made videos. This way, you can save a lot of time in writing and hence increase your productivity and worth.
7. Mind Mapping Techniques
The new and good way of mind mapping is already been discussed in point 6 of audio recording your voice. Another good mind mapping technique is writing or jotting your ideas down. This old school technique is very effective and your friend in traveling times. Whenever you are on a trip always keep a notepad with you. Just jot down any ideas you get on your niche. Another great way is use commercial softwares like Novamind. It is one the best softwares for mind mapping.
If you follow this, you will see a lot of difference in your productivity when you will sit in front of your PC/Laptop next time. You only have to write about ideas you jotted, without any pressure of making in depth analysis. Also such habits can be a good time-pass in long boring journeys.
8. Use Google Alerts
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Google Alerts is a very useful way to keep in touch of what’s going around the world. You don’t have to waste your time going to search engines and find something. Just add a Google alert for your favorite topic and Google will automatically email you about the latest information on that topic.
These simple techniques can bring wonders to your blogging life. 🙂
I hope you enjoyed reading this article and you will find it useful in your professional blogging carrier.
In the last couple of years, the use of social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook & Orkut boomed over the Internet. Many people started meeting each other using these social networks and in the mean while, profiles on these sites became the real identity in this virtual world. For instance, few days ago, when I had a talk with one of my childhood friend, she asked me my profile link on Orkut and to my dismay, I was having nothing to answer her. 🙁
WidgetBucks is one of the very few ad networks I have been using successfully from long time. Of course, it doesn’t help me earn money like Google AdSense but it is a good choice if you just have some free ad-space on your blog/website.
In Fact when the Keyboard Mouse is On, an icon will show in the taskbar in right corner near system clock.
Did you ever wish for an SMS service similar to Yahoo Groups or Google Groups???
