Top Mac OS X Apps: Got your new Mac? Now what to install?

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Faisal Khan

Have you just bought your new Apple Macbook Pro, MacBook Air, or the beautiful 27 inch iMac, with Apple’s rock-solid Mac OS X. What to install? What are some of the must have applications?

There so many articles out there on the web: Best 10 Apps for your iMac, or 12 must have Apple apps, etc.

Here are apps that I personally use, and that many of my friends have installed on their Apple machines. You don’t have to install each and every application, but more or less choose what you need and get cracking.

Google Chrome (an absolute must). I use Chrome because it integrates very well with most of my Google apps, however, many users complain Chrome’s text input on the Mac is slower than say that on a Windows machine.
Firefox – As if Chrome and Safari were not enough, I’ve installed Firefox simply because of the sheer number of useful add-ons it offers (think of Add-ons as plug-ins or extensions for your browser).
Evernote – If you haven’t already used Evernote, it is time you do. It is one of the most helpful applications out there, that you will use frequently. Store saved pages, notes, business cards, PDFs, cut-and-paste text, etc. all searchable and very cleanly organized. As the good folks at Evernote say – remember everything!
Dropbox – The most famous online storage on the web, since perhaps the invention of soda pop! Dropbox offers you free 2GB of storage online. The most people you recommend to use Dropbox, the more your free storage space increases. It also has a paid-account, in which you can subscribe to more storage space as well as the ability to undelete files (as far back as 30 days). You can install Dropbox on multiple machines and have them sync with each other effortlessly. I have it installed on my 2 Macs and a Windows laptop. Edit or save a file one one machines and in mere seconds, the files are updated across all the machines. Laptop gets stolen, you will be glad you had Dropbox to save your important files.
TextWrangler – A clean and very easy to use text editor for the Mac. Much more preferred (by me at least) over the TextEdit (built-in text editor in Mac).
Adium – Adium is a free instant messenger for the Mac OS X. It allows you to connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk, Twitter, Facebook Chat, IRC, ICQ (if you still use it) and a few others that you probably might never use. If IM is your game, rather than having half-a-dozen IMs open, opt for Adium and make your life easier.
1Password – is a paid utility, but one that I must stress you get. At US$ 49.99 one times, it is a steal. Bet you have forgotten your password one time or another? Right? Bet you have it saved in a text file on your computer? Don’t do that. Get 1Password and make loggin-in and password management a seamless task.
Acorn – Everybody at some point in their life, will require the use of an Image Editor. Most of us don’t need the thousands of bells and whistles that Adobe Photoshop or GIMP offers, we just need a simple photo editor that is easy to use and reasonably priced. Acorn is just that. Try out the 30 day trial. Acorn is priced at US$ 49.99
Reeder – I’ve tried a whole bunch of RSS readers, they all have their plus/minus points. Reeder is my personal favorite. It is a very nice RSS aggregator for placing all your RSS feeds in one place and going through them.
Zipeg – .RAR and .ZIP files are a way of life. Just download the free Zipeg RAR/ZIP file utility and you will be all set.
Wunderlist – Have things to do? Need to keep a check on your To-Do list – Perhaps the best free task management software out there. Another alternative is Anxiety and Fantastical.
Alfred – If you need to search for anything on your Mac, be it a file, a link, a bookmark, etc. Alfred is the ultimate application. Free of course. Its fast, very easy to get a custom toggle and just type away and see instantaneous results.
SnagIt – Though there are many screen-capture tools (including the ones built-in to the Max OS X – see here) I still find SnagIt to be the best. Sure there are $1.99 apps and free plug-ins for Firefox and Google Chrome – so why spend a bundle on SnagIt, simply because if screen captures and using those captured images, resizing, editing, annotations, etc. matter to you, then SnagIt is the fastest and the best alternative out there.
OpenOffice – Though I have moved most of my work to Google Docs, every now and then I will get an odd Microsoft Word or Excel file. The best alternative to MS Office is OpenOffice. Its free, it works and its time you kicked the habit of using MS Office.
iTerm2 – DO you SSH or FTp via command line? DO you need a simple to use terminal emulator, but powerful enough for your CLI needs? Look no further than iTerm2.
Address Book Clearout – Managing an address book is frustrating. Your email client will have something else, your online something else, your Mac address bok (oh lets not get started on bad it is). However, to fix all this – you need the Address Book Clearout app. At US$ 6.99 it will save you hours of editing and going through your address book to sift through, sort out and deleted/merge all duplicate or haywire entries.
Skype of Mac – Skype – enough said. We all need it.
VLC Media Player – Gotta watch movies? VLC is the player to have. It will play those hard to play MKV format on the Mac with ease, as well as MP4, AVI, etc. Free to use.
CloudApp – Need to share pictures? files? documents? with others. Just get CloudApp (Free!), drag, drop and share! Voila!
Growl – Need a central notification center? Yes, you do (trust me on this one). Just download and install Growl. It works great. See all your notifications pop up on one side of the screen.
FileZilla for Mac – Simple, free and and easy to use, FTP client. Very robust and can be as detailed oriented as you want it to be.
AppCleaner – AppCleaner is a free, easy to use, applications to uninstall unwanted apps on your Mac!
Little Snitch – If security is your concern, Little Snitch is the solution. It protects and informs you what applications on your computer are trying to connect to the outside world.

Deliberately, I have left out apps like Email Clients of which there is a wide variety (Sparrow and Thunderbird are my recommendations). Tweetdeck for Mac as a Twitter Client. xCode if you are going to be an Apple developer/programmer, The Apps store is a great way to discover new and exciting apps for your computer and your computing needs.

How to Create A Jump Link in WordPress

Posted on September 30, 2011 by BitHacker

It is very simple to add a link to a different page in our blog post, a link that will take us to another post on either our own blog or some other link that is on some external website. But what if you want to create a link that will take you to another point but on the same blog post? A prime example of this type of jump linking is done in somewhat lengthy documents like the FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), where you click on a question that takes you to its answer on the same page, or in ToCs (Table of Contents), where clicking on a topic heading takes you to its contents. Take a look at our article on All You Want to Know About Windows 8. Clicking on a link in the jump menu will take you to its contents and also notice that there is a ‘Back to Top’ link too, which of course will take you back to the top or at the beginning of the post. This type of linking within a page is very simple and you don’t need much HTML / programming skills to do this. In this post, we’ll show you how you can do this type of linking within a post in your blog.

In this post we’ll take the same example as our Windows 8 post, where there are different paragraphs and then there are headings on those paragraphs that are acting as links. You click on ‘The Metro Interface’ (which is the link) and it takes you to the ‘The Metro Interface’ (which is the heading.)

The Point we link to

We will start with the point we want the link to lead to. For example: On the Windows 8 post, paragraphs are given <h2> headings as usual

<h2>The Metro Interface</h2>

<h2>Start Menu in Windows 8</h2>

<h2>Search for Applications in Windows 8</h2>

<h2>Switching between Applications in Windows 8</h2>

but then in the HTML side of the editor, we added the following HTML to each heading.

<a name="top"></a>

<h2><a name="metrointerface"></a>The Metro Interface</h2>

<h2><a name="startmenu"></a>Start Menu in Windows 8</h2>

<h2><a name="searchforapps"></a>Search for Applications in Windows 8</h2>

<h2><a name="switchapps"></a>Switching between Applications in Windows 8</h2>

<a name="end"></a>

Here you’d have noticed the ‘top’ and ‘end’ tags. They are not associated with any heading or a paragraph. The reason for that is, these anchors take you to the top or bottom of a page, so you don’t need to have any text associated with them in order to link them. They can point to an empty space too.

The Links

Now that we have given ‘names’ to our headings, its time to add Bookmarks, Front-Navigation Menu or Table of Contents at the top of our page and some basic links within.

<a href="#metrointerface">The Metro Interface</a>

<a href="#startmenu">Start Menu in Windows 8</a>

<a href="#searchforapps">Search for Applications in Windows 8</a>

<a href="#switchapps">Switching between Applications in Windows 8</a>

<a href="#top">Back To Top.</a>

This is essentially, just replacing the name tag with a reference tag ‘href’ and adding a # sign before those titles that we just added. Take a note that we added ‘Back To Top link at the end of each paragraph, that will take us back to the top of the menu.

So when you are creating your links you add the tag to the point linking to, like this :

<a name="UNIQUE-NAME">TITLE</a>

and link to that point like this:

<a href="#UNIQUE-NAME">TITLE</a>

Based on that, a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) example should look like this:

<a href="#answer1">Q - What is Webscopia ?</a>

<a name="answer1">A - It's a tech blog !</a>

That’s it, with this very basic technique and a little effort you too can add links within a post.

Adding table of contents with a wordpress plugin

Above method is for individual blog posts or when you don’t have access to the administrator account. If you have access and you can install a wordpress plugin to your blog (or ask your administrator), then this small plugin created by Ulrich Kautz is very useful. It scans your post for heading tags <h1>,<h2> …… and then adds a table of content at the top of page with Top Anchor alongside each heading. Current version of the plugin is 0.6.5 and it is compatible with the current version of the wordpress.

Installation

From your admin panel in a wordpress blog, go to Plugins > Add New and then search for ‘Table of Content’, then click Install Now. OR go to the wordpress plugin directory and download it here, to later upload it via FTP to your blog.

Usage

Add [table-of-content]some blog post with <h*> tags [/table-of-content]

Admin Panel

Go to Settings > T.O.C to tweak some settings of the plugin such as, Default TOC Title, Title heading tag and the style of the list.

Here is the example post using TOC plugin:

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Microsoft Windows Live Writer: The Offline Blog Editor

Posted on September 18, 2011 by BitHacker

What is an offline blog writer

As the name implies, an offline blog writer / editor is a tool for the bloggers which allows them to create blog posts without an internet connection. You don’t need an internet connection unless of course, you want to save the post as a draft or to publish it. Your post would be safe with you as long as you are writing it and you don’t need to worry about your internet connection malfunctioning or the ‘Bad Server’ error. This could be a real pain when you are in the middle of publishing a blog post. One of the biggest nuisance while doing a blog post online is uploading of images and videos, especially on wordpress. From uploading to editing multiple photos for a blog post is a lengthy process that takes a lot of time. In an offline blog editor, you don’t have to worry about that, just insert your images and videos and they will be automatically uploaded when you save it as a draft online or publish it. Offline blog editors are also fast, when you compare them to any online blog editor that comes with your blog. Neither you have to wait for the browser to load your specific command, nor you have to worry about the frequent crashes of a web browser. You’ll save your time offline, that you spend online by just waiting. Be it the wait after you’ve put in your credentials to login to the blog or the wait for the images to upload. With an offline editor you can work easily on more than one blog post OR more than one blog at the same time, just choose a new post or a different profile and you’re good to go. This will always be faster than working on any of the online blogs out there. Moreover, insertion of code snippets, from different locations is far more easier than any online editor. (See plugins section below)

Windows Live Writer

Microsoft’s blogging tool ‘Windows Live Writer’ also called WLW, is a WYSIWYG offline blog editor. A feature rich application that works seamlessly with most of the blogging platforms online. That includes WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, and LiveJournal. Windows Live Writer can be downloaded and used for free. Not only it has most advanced features that you’d want from an offline blog editor but you can even enhance its capabilities by adding free plugins to it. It has undergone some serious improvements since its prolonged ‘Beta’ stage and now competes many of the free and commercial blogging tools out there. In this article, we’ll be telling you everything that you need to know about Microsoft Windows Live Writer. From installing to getting the plugins and configuring it to get the maximum out of this fantastic blogging tool.

Some features of ‘Windows Live Writer’ include:

Easy to use WYSIWYG editor.
Advanced text formatting features, you can find everything and more that you find in your online blog editor.

Windows live writer gives you the capability to write an offline blog but gives you the options of Microsoft Office when it comes to editing or formatting the text. The famous ‘Office Ribbon’ is also present in WLW. It allows you to change text, change headings, bold / italic / underline, highlight or change the color of the text. Comes with spell checking option and advanced Hyperlink adding options.

Extensible via plugins (See the best plugins section below).
Auto Save (that comes with auto recover option, incase your windows crashes, works just like Microsoft Office).
Supports date modification, which allows you to schedule a post to publish in the future (or if you want to, in the past).

Advanced Image Insertion

which comes with thumbnail support and allows you to add styling to the photos, like drop shadow / borders and much more.

Windows live writer comes equipped with one of the most advanced Image Insertion tools in an offline blog editor. Not only it will allow you to add photos from your computer, but also allows you to add photos from the web. The most unique feature of windows Live Writer is that it allows you to add web albums and photo galleries right inside your blogging interface. You don’t need to give external links of online galleries, just select the picture menu and choose ‘Create an online album…’ or ‘Add an online album…’

Selecting this option will take you to a new dialog. There you can choose whether you want to create the album from local files, or you want to create the album from one of your online albums in ‘Windows Live Gallery’. You’d have to login with your ‘Live Credentials’ to add that online albums. Just choose the images and click insert.

If you have ‘Windows Live Gallery’ installed in your computer, you can add images or albums directly from it. ‘Windows Live Gallery’ allows you to add images from various resources like Picasa Web Albums and Flickr.

Windows Live Gallery also allows you to work with images in a more efficient way and works quite well with ‘Windows Live Writer’.

WLW allows you to upload your images to any blog service. When you first use this feature, you’ll be asked where do you want your images to be saved. On your blog or an FTP server.

This option can be changed later, if you want to add images to your FTP server. Goto Blog Account > Blog Options > Pictures > Choose your upload service.

When you are inserting images for your blog post , be it from an online album or from your computer, built in Pictures options in Windows Live Writer has some very advanced features when it comes to offline blog editors. Select an image that you just inserted in your post and you’ll see an option added to your ribbon, just after the ‘Blog Account’.

These ‘beyond the normal’ picture tools allow you to Crop, Edit Dimensions, Rotate Images, Add Effects, Change Contrast, Add Watermarks, Add extra links and captions and Sort Position in the blog post. All the images used in this post were edited in ‘Windows Live Writer’. You can see the above picture that is cropped from original screenshot, added drop shadow, and its dimensions are changed to comply with the theme of blog.

Video insertion

advanced features include insertion from your favorites / playlist inside YouTube.

WLW gives you advanced video insertion features. Not only you can upload video from your computer, you can also add videos from your youtube account or any other service. One unique feature of WLW is that it allows you to add a video from your computer and also upload it to youtube at the same time. You have to login with your youtube account credentials before using this feature.

Customizable ping list with trackback support
In line spell checking a feature that comes from Microsoft Office.
Multiple writing views layouts that preview your blog post as it would appear in your blog online, and a source code view.
Quick switching between views by using their shortcut keys.

Getting Started with ‘Windows Live Writer’

To get started, first you need to download and install ‘Windows Live Writer’ by following this link. It’ll download a web installer by the name of ‘wlsetup-web.exe’, when you’ll click on the ‘Download’ button. This actually is the installer for ‘Windows Live Essentials’ and will help you install different live features like Messenger, Movie Maker and Windows Live Photo Gallery, etc.

You can choose to install all the recommended essentials OR if you’ve already installed Windows Live Messenger and don’t want other ‘Live Essentials Software’ then choose the ‘Custom’ option and select only the ‘Writer’, it will show you the installed and ‘to-be-installed’ programs in the next window.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed ‘Windows Live Writer’, fire it up and it will show you this first screen that will ask you to setup your blog for use. Choose the option ‘I already have a blog setup’ and set it up for our wordpress blog, you can choose ‘Create a new blog’ which will take you to WordPress.com blog creation.

You can select ‘Other services’ and then select your blog service from the list, you may have to add the API URL of your XML-RPC.

(This setup can also be completed later or the procedure is same if you want to add more blogs to your ‘Windows Live Writer’. You can achieve this by either going to the drop menu of your current blog and selecting ‘Add blog account…’ or by going to ‘Manage blog accounts…’ and then select Add from the dialog box.)

Next up choose ‘Wordpress’ from ‘What blog service do you want to use?’ dialog box and click Next.

Put in your blog credentials; the Web address of your blog would be the address where you’ve installed your ‘wordpress’. Usually its in the main directory of your webserver ‘http://webscopia.com’ or in the blog directory ‘http://webscopia.com/blog’.

Your username and password is the same as the account name and password on the blog, this can be either a contributor or an admin account. In either case, you can add any type of account here. (Contributor account might not have the ‘Publishing’ or ‘Posting Images’ feature allowed by the admins, see our article on How to allow contributors to post images and files.)

Click Next and it will analyze your blog home page, web address and contents, will check your credentials and then will ask you to download the blog theme.

This feature comes in very handy and will allow you to preview your blog, right inside the ‘Windows Live Writer’. You don’t have to go online and see the preview of your blog anymore as this feature will show you the exact theme and style that your post would show on actual blog.

Some minor problems could arise here, for example;

Your username and password is not accepted. For this, you need to obviously recheck your current username and password that you are typing in. Make sure there is no capslock on. The best practice could be copying and then pasting the password from the email that was sent to you by the administrator. Contact your blog administrator for further help.
Theme is not downloaded. While downloading the theme for your blog, there is a possibility that Windows Live Writer might not be able to download your blog theme, this could be either your theme is not compatible or the directory listing doesn’t allow the download of the theme.
Cannot connect to your blog service. XML Remote Procedure Call is used by almost all the offline blog editors to post remotely. You’ll get the error of RPC Services disabled or a 405 error occurred message, if this feature is not enabled in your blog.

This feature is disabled by default when you first install your wordpress blog on your webserver. To enable this, goto the ‘options-writing.php’ file inside the ‘wp-admin’ folder on your webserver and edit it. A far more easier method, even if you have access to your webserver, would be to goto Settings > Writing Settings

and then check mark the box in front of XML-RPC and then click on ‘Save Settings’. You will find it right under the ‘Post via email’ settings.

WordPress will automatically inform the web services about your new post, if you want to add any extra service, just put its address in the address box below the XML-RPC settings. This can also be done inside ‘Windows Live Writer’ but even for that, a service should already be available in your blog.

That is pretty much it. Once you’re done with the setup, you’re ready to go ahead and write your blog post. You’ll be presented with the main screen ‘Home’ where you can Set Categories, Set Tags, Set post and also set other ‘Post Properties’ like setting up Author, Slug, Password, Exceprt and Trackback URLs.

WLW will automatically get your Categories from your current blog and also allows you to add more categories before or after writing the post.

When you are done with writing your blog, just click on Publish or Post draft to blog and it will upload everything to your blog.

Opening and Saving of Drafts

Windows Live Writer provides built in support for saving your posts locally on your hard drive. If you are familiar with the working of Microsoft Office then using this feature would present no problems. Click on the menu icon in top left corner and you’ll be presented with a menu. ‘New Post’ will allow you to start working on a new blog post. Don’t worry, it won’t effect your current blog post that you’re working on, but will open up another window so that you can work on it separately. You can even post to another blog too simultaneously. ‘Local Drafts’ are the one that you’ve saved periodically on your hard drive but they haven’t been published yet and ‘Recent Posts’ are the ones which have been published or saved to drafts online. You can open any post, edit it and then republish it or save it to drafts. It will be published same post as long as the heading remains the same. So, you can change an entire post with tags and categories and reschedule it for later but keeping the main heading same and it will change post under the same heading. Be careful when you are doing such thing because you may end up changing a post that you didn’t want to change in the first place.

Top 5 plugins to use with Windows Live Writer

Adding plugins to WLW is the strongest and most unique feature. It enhances the capability of WLW to whatever you want it to be and removes any loss of functionality that wasn’t available by default. Here are some of the best plugins that you’d want to use with your Windows Live Writer.

1) facePLANT

This plugin allows you to post the URLs and a short excerpt from your current post to your Facebook page. Just download the zip file from this link, extract the files inside your WLW Plugins directory (Ex. C:Program Files (x86)Windows LiveWriterPlugins) , run WLW and configure the plugin by going to Tools > Options > Plugins > facePLANT > options button.

2) Insert Video

Insert a video from MSN SoapBox, Google Video, YouTube, MySpace Video, Yahoo! Video, muveeMix and now myvideo.de videos and BrightCove Videos. Download Insert Video for WLW

3) Insert Code for Windows Live Writer

Using this plugin, you can insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript and many more. Comes in handy if you don’t have shortcodes support in your blog and you post a lot of stuff related to programming. Download Insert Code for WLW

4) Twitter Notify

Send a Tweet announcing your newly published blog post. A shortened link to your post is automatically generated through the TinyURL service. You can customize your default message in the options menu. Download Twitter Notify for WLW

5) Tag Generator

A tool to automatically generate tags based on the content of your post. Supports Technorati, WordPress and Blogger. Download Tag Generator for WLW

If you are frustrated with your online blog editor and you blog a lot then we highly recommend using this amazing tool. Using ‘Windows Live Writer’ will definitely make you more efficient and more productive in your work.

Chrome Extensions to Enhance Your Google Plus Experience

Posted on September 17, 2011 by Syed Hassan

Introduction:

We are sure that you need no introduction to Google Plus; in fact, you are most probably loving it as much as anyone else on the face of this earth (If you’re thinking I’d be inviting you for the awesome conference call, think otherwise). There is no denying the fact that the Internet is a hub of innumerable distractions (no reference to any PG rated material here) so the use of an efficient web browser is key to maintain focus and save some valuable time in life. Although Firefox remains the preference of most, Google Chrome has certainly been amped up in regards to the many extensions it has put on offer that prove very handy in improving browser productivity and help people organize their stream. Enough rambling for now, now let us present before you the best of Google Chrome Extensions for the all-lovable Google Plus that will definitely entice your user experience.

1. Google+ Ultimate for Google Plus

Google+ Ultimate is a really useful extension for most. The usability and design of the application add to the functionality and thematic scheme of things. Yes, the extension contributes a great deal in customizing the look of Google Plus; in fact, that is the hallmark of this application in a nutshell. The first and foremost tweak made with the extension is the addition of a Brushed metallic look in the background, besides Grain and Solid Color. Perhaps, this sounds a no-use on paper; yet, it enhances the readability and contrast thereby proving to be a lot more compact that the other basic shades. The addition of fixed floating Google and Google+ navigation bar is also a handy one: it frees you of the duty to to scroll up and down to view the notifications and shares everytime. The size of media shares in the stream has also been decreased down to more ‘facebook-like’ embeds so as to free up a good amount of space.

2. Stream Filter BETA for Google Plus

This very extension for Google Plus will fulfil your need to avoid noise control on Google Plus. Yes, I shall be generous enough to explain noise control for you, only briefly though (Assuming here that the reader isn’t much of a noob). Well, with so many people swarming in on Google Plus and flooding your stream with all sorts of posts from all sorts of people. Now then, would you like to filter posts that do not suit your likes? Stream Filter does just that and allows you to control what you view in your stream. Keywords of choice can be conveniently included as well as excluded. In addition, the posts that are filtered can always be tracked following their disappearance.

3. Stay Focusd

So, are you one of those many people who find it nearly impossible to cut down the time they spend on what are known as the time-wasting websites? Meaning thereby, less work and more time wastage (You bloody basket!). Now if you are of the view that you are too old to be scolded over issues like these, Stay Focusd provides an alternate solution to help your cause. Stay Focusd, as the name suggests, helps users a great deal in staying focussed on what’s more important ie. work and at the same time avoid being distracted. This, it does by allotting a fixed time for you to spend on those ‘time-wasting’ websites so that once you are over the time limit, it automatically blocks access to those websites for the remainder of the day. Sure, it works very well as long as you are fair and honest about it yourself, it’s only just computer technology afterall (Too bad it can’t BEAT you to it).

4. Minus One for Google Plus

We can’t term this as a Facebook rip-off simply because it is not even present on the Facebook social network; although, it would make for a great addition if it really did make an appearance. Anyway, Minus One comes across as a really simple; yet, a very interesting extension for Google Plus. In actuality, what this gives you is a Minus One button with which you have the freedom to ‘Minus One’ or, in other words, dislike people’s posts. Don’t like a comment and want the one posting to know its useless? Go tell him on his face; in fact, let the world know that with the Minus One. Only downside to the usabilty of the extension is that for all those who wish to view the ‘Minus Ones’ nee d to have Minus One installed to their systems as well. Nevertheless, a great extension to have.

5. RSS Share for Google Plus and Google Reader

If you are regular about sharing posts on Google Plus, RSS Share is one peach of an extension for you to make use of. What it does really well is, it allows you a golden opportunity to stay up to date with ongoing events and web pages, plus share them all with a single click. The extension helps to read all your Google Reader materials. Plus, mark them as read or unread as you wish. In addition, Tree view of feeds adds to the neatness and tidiness of the layout. So then, use RSS Share for Google Plus and save the valuable moments in life (Excuse me for making that sound like a public service message).

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Best Commenting System for Blogs – LiveFyre

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Shobz

The current leaders of the blog commenting market are Disqus and Facebook along with the “Intense Debate” commenting platform. Disqus and Facebook have left their mark but none comes close to the sheer awesomeness of Livefyre. Livefyre is the latest, and best, entrant on the scene which is threatening the likes of Disqus and Facebook. It has gotten good reviews and the adoption rate is pretty good for a newcomer.

LiveFyre

LiveFyre is free for blogs which receive around a maximum of 20 million page views a month; blogs with 20 million plus views a month have to go for a premium license. The best thing about LiveFyre is that the setup is a piece of cake. I experimented with the comment setup on my personal blog and came to the conclusion that it was far easier setting up a LiveFyre account than Disqus or Live Debate. It is relatively easy to set up LiveFyre as it involves filling out a very brief form to create an account, downloading the Livefyre plugin, installing and confirming the account. The cool thing is that LiveFyre is able to import your previous comments without a hitch. I was amazed to see that I didn’t have to do anything manually or add any setting to my WordPress. Livefyre managed to pick up around 300 comments on my blog from the previous Disqus system and it barely took 3-4 minutes for the whole process to complete.

(Please Note that there is no support for Joomla, Blogger, Drupal or Typepad so far nor can one integrate with them. The only support available is for WordPress, Tumblr and other “custom platforms”.)

Pros

Eye candy and ease of use are two phrases that come to mind when thinking of LiveFyre. The interface is so efficient and clean that you just feel like staring at it. It has a beautiful mininmalist approach to the commenting system. The sleek arrangement and order of the comments is yet another plus point. I like the fact that it is easy to comment using your Twitter and Facebook id and the fact that you can also share those comments on your FB wall or your Twitter timeline. In the words of Charlie Sheen that definitely is #Winning. It is more interactive as it allows for a live stream of comments, video and images and makes the conversation more real time.

LiveFyre also allows you to tag your friends in your comments so that you can invite them to the conversation (a good idea if you are having a flame war and you need backup.) It also has a good anti-spam system and managed to keep a lot of spam comments out though it failed to prevent 3-4 spam comments. However, the fail ratio of the spam system is much better than that of Disqus and Intense Debate.

LiveFyre has proved to be useful when it comes to driving traffic. It updates users when you post new comments so that they keep coming back for more. LiveFyre’s advantage lies in placing comments on the basis of reputation, blocking one click comments and allowing moderation in real time. The tech support at LiveFyre is truly awesome. If there is ever any problem they are quick to reply and make sure that the problem is dealt with.

Cons

Like every other commenting system there are a few flaws with LiveFyre. The biggest flaw is that you can’t customize the settings in any manner. There is no option to enable or disable features nor does it allow you to change the color, theme, etc. The LiveFyre commenting system is uniform and has to run precisely the same way as it runs on other websites.

The other flaw is that it only gives users options of leaving comments either via a LiveFyre account or by using an approved service such as Facebook, Google, Twitter and Linkedin. This is both a blessing and a drawback. It’s a blessing because this will prevent trolls from leaving horrible comments, though the more determined ones will be able to leave comments with a fake id. It is a drawback because some people may be reluctant to use their social networking Ids to leave a comment.

LiveFyre rocks because it has a real time conversation and commenting system but this is once again a drawback as only sites with huge traffic will be able to utilize this feature properly. It doesn’t make sense for a site with low traffic to make these conversations practical. The moderation features have been left half baked as the system is a bit confusing. Many features of WordPress are limited to the comment page instead of the WordPress admin panel. It doesn’t make sense to distribute both of these features.

Bottom Line

To sum it up LiveFyre is a great commenting system which will change the way people leave comments. It is very powerful due to the fact that it has social media integration. It may have some minor flaws which do not interfere with the way the system is run. If you like a beautiful, user friendly, interactive commenting system then go for it. If you do not like the idea of using a system which does not allow any changes then its best to stay put and not go for it.

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Is Your Child’s Online Safety a Priority?

Posted on July 25, 2011 by ShaikhRafia

Parents often think that to monitor children on the Internet or over social networking sites is like spying on them, making kids feel bad. When you monitor the activities of your children, it is NOT spying; it’s a part of parenting, it’s protection.

According to Family Online Safety Institute, as much as 32% of all teens using internet have been somehow bullied on cyber space. There is only one choice for the parents: being proactive and not showing as if they know less than their kids do. This is the only way for kids, networking sites, and parents to safely live together.

What to do when you as parents (or as older people, generally) want to monitor kids online? Before you prevent, monitor and set the rules, you need to first educate yourself about the Internet and especially about the social networking sites.

Earlier, social networking sites, IMs and group chat room were the most prevalent way of cyber-bullying children. That’s history now. At this age it’s all about social networking sites from where children can go to private chats, porn sites or even face to face meetings without parental permission.

Few tips on how parents should monitor kids online are to:

Know the networking sites: Many parents are themselves active users but if you aren’t then at least keep a check on how these sites work.
Inform your kids: Like you educate your kids to not accept a candy from any stranger out on the street, also tell them that it’s the same on the Internet. Be friendly with your kids and try to ask them about their online friends. Your children shouldn’t feel bad or shy about telling you about any problems that they might run into on the Internet. Educate them about online behaviors and specifically about cyber bullying.
Observe your children: Do you think your child is acting strangely or his/her conversation habits are changing? Does your child seem to be sad or very ecstatic after being online? These are actually very solid indicators. Openly talk to them about what you feel and also give them assurance that they can tell you anything they want to.
Check your kid’s online activities: Seriously, it’s NOT spying and it’s also NOT killing your kid’s freedom. It is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to monitor kids online or in real life as a parent. Check their online (social networking) activities on a daily basis. You should know their passwords. Yes, it seems like a very tough task but you can make a deal “Use social networking site – Give us your username/password” – Sounds perfect!
Don’t Hide: When you monitor kids online, it becomes more effective if your children know that you’re keeping a check on them. That way, they’d actually be following some ground rules and become more careful about their online activity. Don’t threaten, be friendly and tell them why it is necessary for an older person to supervise a child.

Remember, porn sites are NOT the number 1 threat for your kids. Cyberbullying and Sexting are at the top. Kids feel bad if you sound too restrictive and like a vampire checking on them. The best way to monitor kids online and protect them online is to get them to work with you and for that part, sharing news does it best. When you share the news of some bad incident that was caused online like this or some good cause like this, kids get motivated and alarmed as well.

When you share news, don’t say things like “See, I warned you too” or “Look, this is what happens” – Share news like you do with people of your age just for the sake of sharing. That way children would themselves get alert.

Remember it’s their time, inform them, educate them, let them explore things and monitor their online activity. Monitoring and protecting your children on the Internet is not difficult, please don’t ban their usage. Let them be, and just keep a check, parenting would be fun then! You can also use some computer surveillance software to use on your child’s computer.

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Update Your Facebook Status with Calculator and Other Devices

Posted on July 19, 2011 by SalluHee

Like I guided you about how you could fool your friends by updating your Facebook status ‘Via iPhone 5‘. After that I starting digging more about this status updating shock giving applications and one more tool that caught my eye was again by that Indonesian developer who made available the ‘Via iPhone 5′ feature. This new feature is updating your status on Facebook ‘via Calculator’. Sounds very funny, doesn’t it?

Well for this update, we will follow the same procedure that we did for ‘Via iPhone 5′, by going to this LINK.

Then,

Press the allow button to grant access to App to post stuff on your wall, and in this case the status.

After pressing ‘Allow’ in step 2, you will be directed to another page where you will see an empty box for your status as down here in the picture.

Just write down the status that you will post with your iPhone 5 and click ‘Update Status’.

And look what you got on your wall

Now, apart from that, this time I bring you one more freaky thing. You can post on your friend’s wall via a calculator too. Yes that is possible. For that, the link I will give you will guide you yourself by letting you login on your Facebook, selecting your friend from a long list and then posting what you want to post on his wall. So here you go LINK. (open the link in new window)

After you go through the whole procedure, this is what you would get

For some more fooling around with friends, I have made a list down here of some more devices which could freak out your friends that how come they made you update your Facebook Status.

Note: Open all the links in new windows.

Calculator: Update Facebook Status | Post on a Friend’s Wall

Nokia 3310: Update Facebook Status | Post on a Friend’s Wall

PS3: Update Facebook Status | Post on a Friend’s Wall

Camera: Update Facebook Status | Post on a Friend’s Wall

Satellite: Update Facebook Status | Post on a Friend’s Wall

ATM Machine: Update Facebook Status | Post on a Friend’s Wall

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Internet Safety – The Basics

Posted on June 29, 2011 by ShaikhRafia

Internet is next to oxygen for many people of our age (including me). We cry less about any other issue than Internet connection going down. With WiFi, GPRS and cheaper internet connections every device is now connected to the cyber world.

It’s fun to be connected with the whole world. Google is helpful for your brain and saves your memory from the pain of remembering things (Hah!), Facebook lets you meet everyone you want to without the hassle of going out in hot summers. You travel the whole world, do your assignments and stay connected with your family and friends. But with so many benefits, is it possible for Internet to remain all so perfectly safe for you?

The answer is NO! You are not quite safe on this space. From email spammers to credit thieves and cyber-bullying people you can encounter any agonizing situation. It’s not difficult to keep you safe over the Internet though. In this post, we try to help you ensure your safety on the Internet and ease your life over this distance-less world. Following are the few tips to help you decide what to do while being on the Internet to remain safe and secure from any physical, monetary or psychological tortures.

1. Never give your complete name, address, or phone number to people that you don’t trust:

Anyone who asks you for this info may not be the one who s/he might claim to be. There are uncountable fake profiles that are made only for a single purpose: to malign and harm you. If you’re registering on some site and the site asks you so many details, just check if the registration is worthwhile. Do not just end up telling everything about you to everyone online.

2. Do not share your bank account and credit card information except some reputable business websites:

When you give out your information for any transactions, make sure the connection is secure (https) but remember not every https site is trustworthy. So you should only make a transaction at the places that are totally reliable.

3. Change your passwords after every month:

Keep your password strong. A strong password is one that is a jumble of alphanumeric keys. Change your password every now and then. NEVER use same password repeatedly on different sites and avoid using names of your spouse or friends as your password.

4. Be careful about what you share:

Share only things that you can share with some random guy over the street. Facebook, Twitter or anywhere else do not share things like “I am going to meet with ABC at PQR time on XYZ day”. This will only help people locate you and can lead to serious results.

5. Beware of spam email claiming to be reputable names like Google, Microsoft, eBay, PayPal, or some bank or a company name asking for personal or sensitive (credit) information:

Don’t be a victim of phishing. These emails can ask you your passwords or simply attach some link that can lead to disastrous results after a single click.

6. Never ever open email attachments from strangers:

Opening attachments might not be safe for your Internet browsing. When some stranger is sending you an e- mail, just authenticate before opening them up.

There are many simple things to do to keep yourself and your loved ones safe on internet, including but not limited to:

Never go alone to meet with someone who you became friends with online. Tell your family and make a plan B for any bad circumstances.
Set a public place for meetings, not at someone’s home or any other private place.
Only give info that is required (often marked with an asterisk *).
Remember Internet is not child-friendly. Monitor your kids.
Never make their accounts on social networking web sites. They’re more tailored to older audience.
Check the URL. Is it Google.com or Google-xyz.com?
Never tell your family details to online friends. They may be fake accounts or hackers.
If you ever get cyber-bullied and receive any threats, do consult some friend or family member.
Install some good antivirus, spyware remover and firewall.

For more on cyber-bullying and kids monitoring over Internet, kindly read this.

Remember it is not a bad world, but there are few people who mess up everything. So just take your own precautions and Bazinga! You’re all safe on the Internet (hopefully). We hope that after taking the above discussed measures, you’d remain secure over cyberspace.

Let’s have some tweeting time now, eh?

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The Point we link to

Adding table of contents with a wordpress plugin

Installation

Usage

Admin Panel

What is an offline blog writer

Windows Live Writer

Advanced Image Insertion

Video insertion

Getting Started with ‘Windows Live Writer’

Opening and Saving of Drafts

Top 5 plugins to use with Windows Live Writer

1) facePLANT

2) Insert Video

3) Insert Code for Windows Live Writer

4) Twitter Notify

5) Tag Generator

Introduction:

1. Google+ Ultimate for Google Plus

2. Stream Filter BETA for Google Plus

3. Stay Focusd

4. Minus One for Google Plus

5. RSS Share for Google Plus and Google Reader

LiveFyre

Pros

Cons

Bottom Line

1. Never give your complete name, address, or phone number to people that you don’t trust:

2. Do not share your bank account and credit card information except some reputable business websites:

3. Change your passwords after every month:

4. Be careful about what you share:

5. Beware of spam email claiming to be reputable names like Google, Microsoft, eBay, PayPal, or some bank or a company name asking for personal or sensitive (credit) information:

6. Never ever open email attachments from strangers: