Tag: 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.

Categories
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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Contest

Retweet and win free license for Handy Backup software: DW contest

We are announcing a giveaway prize with another contest for our Devil’s Workshop readers. This time we bring you Handy Backup Standard Edition software. 5 lucky winners will receive the key codes to Handy Backup Standard Edition which is worth $39.00.

About Handy Backup (Standard Edition)

  • Back up folders and individual files with file mask filtering with options of backing up only photos, music files, videos. 🙂
  • There are free plug-ins designed to facilitate backup for My Documents, Windows registry, Outlook backup, etc.
  • Backup with to DVD, CD, local or external HDDs, network drives, remote FTP servers.
  • Backup options. Enable backup compression, encryption, verification and other options for most convenient and smooth backups.
  • Flexible backup scheduling is also a great feature which allows backup and synchronization tasks on a regular basis according to a predetermined customized schedule.
  • Another option allows performing inconspicuous backups which does not require the user to be logged in but running the Backup software as Windows Backup.
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Visit Handy Backup website to look up more information their server editions for advanced users.

How to Participate :

To participate in the contest all you need to do is :

  • Tweet about this post through your Twitter account.
  • Comment on this post with link to your tweet.
  • Become a fan of DW on Facebook Fan page in the sidebar.

How Winner will be selected :

All the participants who have completed all 3 conditions stated above, will be eligible for participation. Five winners will be decided via Random draw using random.org. Winners will be announced on 25th of March 2010.

Example of your Retweet:


Retweet and win #free license for Handy Backup #software: DW #contest

Best of luck to all the participants and DW readers.

Categories
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

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 ?

Categories
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.

Categories
Contest

Blogger$ of the month [December 09]

Okay first of all apologies to everyone for coming out with Blogger$ of the Month results so late. We at DW were a little tied up with our redesign project.

Blogger$ of the Month in December 2009 was a little different than any we had before. First and foremost we have three winners and not ranked 1-2-3 but rather winners who ranked no 1 for three different blogs on our rtBlogs network.

Devils Workshop: Blogger of the month

As you can see in the table below, Richie S wrote 7 good posts for us and his contribution was quite significant considering his 7 posts were out of a total of 18 guest posts on DW. Congratulations to Richie S.

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Name No. of Posts Points per post Total Points
richiesajan 7 3.40 23.80
pkarun 4 3.62 14.50
umeshmahato 2 3.50 7.00
gaurav 2 3.05 6.10
bobnewman 1 4.00 4.00
rishabhagarwal 2 1.85 3.70

Facebooknol: Blogger of the month

At our Facebook dedicated blog Facebooknol, Sauravjit seemed to win quite easily with a total of 17.70 points which was clearly miles ahead of anyone else. Congrats to Sauravjit on being Blogger of the month for Facebooknol.

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Name No. of Posts Points per post Total Points
sauravjit 5 3.54 17.70
rajeelkp 3 3.20 9.60
pkarun 2 4.30 8.60
rishabhagarwal 1 3.90 3.90
xphunt3r 1 3.70 3.70

CricTalks: Blogger of the month

Not many posts here as you can see but RajeelKP’s efforts paid off as he did contribute to Facebooknol too and that has got him winning Blogger of the month for CricTalks.

Name No. of Posts Points per post Total Points
rajeelkp 1 2.70 2.70
sdsh 1 1.60 1.60

Blogger$ of the Month

Blogger$ of the month contest was quite sucessful for getting a lot of people contributing to Devils Workshop and a sincere thanks to everyone who has ever written on DW for truly helping us grow. For the moment we have closed Blogger$ of the month contest temporarily as were are looking at new strategies for our blog. One of them is to compeltely redesign and you will be happy to know we have already started the coding work on the new theme.

Once again Congratulations to Richie S, Sauravjit and RajeeKp on being winners for the month of December 2009.

Categories
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 😀

Categories
Contest

Blogger$ of the Month temporarily goes away

Its been 7 months since we started Blogger of the Month contest as an initiative to provide a mature blogging platform to young and newbie bloggers. Time and again we came up with few changes in the contest format to increase the quality of the competition. Thus far we have succeeded to achieve the objective of Community Blogging through this contest.

But in the past couple of months there have been  alot of incidents of copy pasting from guest authors. It was hurtful for our editors to ban these guest authors completely from our network. This in-turn increased alot of workload on the editors and on me too 🙁

Now since Devils Workshop is undergoing the process of complete makeover, we thought this would be a good time to get a new and mature format for the Blogger$ of the month contest. So we are pausing the contest for the next few months.

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When the contest starts again?

For the next couple of months we will have alot of brainstorming with the data and statistics that we have so far. The idea would be to have an format which should be more apt and relative to previous results of the contest.

Hopefully we will come up with the format which meets all our expectations and start the contest in next couple of months.  😀

Please send in any suggestions or feedbacks for the contest via comments, as it would be very helpful to determine the contest’s future.

(Image credits : shutterstock)

PS : There are few posts which are submitted for  review by the guest authors before publishing this post . These posts will be included in the ratings of December 2009 contest.