Fresh Tech Tips

12 Tools To Control Your Privacy And Data On Google

2012-02-17T17:02:00.000+05:30

Privacy and controlling access to our data are two big issues on internet. Often people complain about information theft by companies that may lead to unsolicited mails and offers from individuals and spammers. Fortunately, with some simple tricks, we can minimize this risk and can keep our data and privacy fine-tuned to avoid any mishap. If you're using Google and its various popular services, here are some extremely useful tools to protect your online privacy to safeguard your Google account data.

Google Dashboard - This is a central repository and control center for analyzing and protecting your data for large number of Google services. You can not only see what recent activities are being done in each of these services, but you can also fine-tune and edit the settings and privacy controls.

Ads Preferences Manager - This is a useful tool to control how advertisements served by Google network are shown to you. For logged-in users, Google always tries to show the most relevant ads on the basis of your recent searches and browsing activity. If you want to opt-out from this option, you may opt-out through this tool. Google Chrome users can also install Keep My Opt-Outs plugin to stop targeted ad serving on the basis of your account history.

Data Liberation Front - This is one of my favorite tools to exercise more control on my data stored in various Google services. As the name implies, you can use this service to export or import data from more than three dozens Google services. I'll strongly suggest you to bookmark this extremely useful online tool.

Encrypted Search - The encrypted version of Google search engine is extremely useful option to avoid collection of your search history. This extremely useful tool is a lifesaver in some cases, where you do not want your search queries data collection for selective topics.

Incognito mode in Google Chrome - If you're using a shared computer in cafe, office or at your home, you're risking exposing your browsing habits to others. Nowadays every modern browser stores the browsing history unless you've not done appropriate settings to flush your session data once you've finished browsing. Fortunately, Google Chrome Incognito mode protects your privacy effectively by stopping storage of any kind of data related to your browsing session.

Street View Blurring and Takedowns - Google Maps street view service automatically blurs sensitive and private information by default. Still, if you feel that an image should be blurred further or should be removed from 'street view', you can request that through this option. Your request is examined manually and appropriate action is taken as soon as possible.

Unlisted and Private Videos on YouTube - Generally, YouTube is used to share your videos with the world. But in some cases, you may choose either to keep them private or you may opt to share them with selective people. Whenever you upload a video on YouTube, its 'Broadcasting and Sharing Options' lets you make unlisted and private video which can be shared with up to 50 other Google account holders.

Web History Controls - Every logged-in Google user's web history is stored in his account. This includes searches and browsing activity. You can opt-in or opt-out from web history as per your preference. Turning it on provides more relevant results, ads and overall experience while you're using various Google services.

Off the Record Gmail Chats - By default, all the chats on Google Talk or in GMail are stored as chat history in your accounts. You can use 'Off the record' option to prevent saving of chat history in your account. When this option is turned on, chat is not saved in either of the accounts on both sides.

Google Analytics Opt-out - If you're concerned that your visits to various websites are being reported in their respective Google analytics accounts, you can install this handy 'Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on' available for all popular browsers to prevent recording your visit in Google analytics associated with the website you're visiting.

Search Personalization Opt-out - Signed-in as well as signed-out users on Google use the search engine as per their preferences. For every signed-in user, personalizing the search can result in better search result pages optimized according to your past search history. You can also opt-out from search results personalization by turning off web history as discussed earlier.

Control Your Location in Google Latitude - Quite similar to Foursquare and Facebook places, Google Latitude lets your Google contacts know your location as you check-in through your mobile, tablet device or PC. However, you can control how much information and when your location should not be shared with your contacts. You must fine-tune your Google Latitude location sharing settings to effectively control your location privacy.

5 Essential Software For Your All-in-one Pen Drive

2012-02-16T09:00:00.000+05:30

Everything in this world is shrinking and so is the computer. Secondary storage technology has come a long way and now pen drives are used by millions of users for day-to-day data storage and transfer. Customized portable applications have made these pen drives a miniature computer that can be carried in your pocket anywhere. Now you can boot a PC or a laptop directly from a pen drive and can run various software applications through it. Let's see some of the most useful applications for your bootable pen drive.

Portable operating system - The first thing you need is a robust and portable operating system that can boot a pen drive. Two of my favorites are Pen Drive Linux and Bootable Windows 7 USB Stick. Both solutions are tested and used by large number of users that enables them to carry their bootable drive in their pocket.

Portable office suite - A primary productivity application used by almost every user is an office suite consisting of a word processor and a spreadsheet. OpenOffice.org Portable is one of the popular office suites ideal for a bootable pen drive. It's available both for Windows and Linux platforms.

Portable web browser - Nowadays, web browser is perhaps the most heavily used application on a PC connected with internet. You must include Firefox Portable among the list of essential applications on your bootable USB stick. It's a stable, secure and popular web browser used by millions of users.

Portable messaging software - Instant messaging, video and audio chat are some of the most common activities among net-savvy users. Skype Portable and Pidgin Portable are the most useful software in its category that brings audio, video and text chat right within your bootable pen drive.

Portable archiving/compression software - Everyday we create, organize and collect information in the form of text, audio and video. Sometimes, we prefer to compress and archive them for saving storage space on our hard drive. Similarly, every bootable USB stick must contain WinRAR Unplugged and 7-Zip Portable to meet the compression and archiving needs.

How To Install Multiple Full-Fledged Virtual Desktops Through One Linux PC

2012-02-14T07:58:00.000+05:30

Linux provides several desktop variants with multiple graphic/windows system for general as well as professional users. There are free as well as commercial solutions available for Linux desktop software. If you're running an educational institution or a non-profit organization looking to deploy desktops, purchasing PCs for each node may not be a cost effective solution. But, if required, you can extend virtual desktop terminal from a single Linux PC with ease. Implementing this solution not only saves huge money, but also saves a lot of space. Let's see how to do it.

Userful MultiSeat Linux is an excellent free solution for deploying full-fledged virtual Linux desktops from a single Linux computer. The free version for schools and non-profits can extend up to 11 Linux Pcs from a single computer. Although, this system is specifically tailored for educational institutions, non-profits can use it as well.

To install this system, you simply need USB MultiSeat device (very cost-effective), monitors, keyboards and mice for each virtual desktop. Simply install Userful MultiSeat Linux system on the primary PC and connect each virtual terminal through the USB MultiSeat Device via USB ports. Needless to say, the primary PC should be powerful enough to handle the load of 11 simultaneous connections.

Installing this set-up saves you the cost of 11 separate CPUs and also lowers your electricity bill significantly. The administrator at the primary PC can monitor what work is going-on on each virtual PC, and each user can share files and content with each other. There's no recurring license fee associated with this set-up and you're free to use it for lifetime.

How To Enhance Your Google Analytics Reports Through Table Booster

2012-02-13T09:00:00.000+05:30

If you own a website or a blog, you must be familiar with Google Analytics (GA). Through this excellent web analytics tool, we get vital data about our site's traffic. Standard GA reports are shown in tables with different columns filled with relevant values. These reporting tables are generally sorted on one of the columns. Human eye is always less receptive to the numbers, that's why we've invented different graphical representations to analyze the data in a better way. Today, I'm going to share an excellent tool for GA, which brings new life to the default tables shown in Google analytics.

This excellent tool is called Table Booster for Google Analytics available as a Google Chrome plugin. This excellent plugin adds three new visualizations to the columns in the data-grid of GA reports. It's completely free and makes data-crunching fun and easy-to-understand. Once you've installed this plugin, simply click 'Activate Table Booster' button on the top left of your dashboard. Once activated, you're ready to get more out of your GA report tables in the following three ways.

Bar chart - This gives you a good view in the form of small bar charts letting you easily visualize larger and smaller values. These bar charts take the minimum and maximum value from the column and are drawn proportionate to that. This gives you a clear indication of each value without even looking at the numerical value itself.

Heatmap - The second form of visualization is a heatmap and it's my favorite. Alarming or critical values are automatically highlighted in dark red and the healthy data in colored with green color. The intermediate data is colored in different variants of red. This visualization is very useful in finding out critical values from the long data table.

Comparison - And last but not the least is the comparison visualization. It shows the deviation from the average value of the column on both positive and negative sides. Positive deviation is colored in green color while the negative deviation is colored in red. This visualization is very handy for finding our critical data from a heap.

You can enable and disable these visualizations through toggle-buttons above each data column. Although you can enable all three visualizations together in a single column, but for better analysis, I'll suggest you to view them one-by-one for a single column.

2 Best Photo Viewers For Android Users

2012-02-10T19:46:00.000+05:30

Nowadays every smartphone comes with a native image viewer; still it lacks some of the intuitive features that several 3rd-party applications support out-of-the-box. These 3rd-party applications offer better browsing experience for large number of files and offer some handy basic editing features. Some of these applications are tightly integrated with popular image hosting services and provides direct uploading and downloading of images from these web-based image hosting services. Here are some of the best image browsers for Android users that brings a whole new experience of browsing photographs on your Android smartphone.

Picasa Mobile - It is one of the most popular image browsers for Android-powered smartphone. You can get a nice tile-based photo browsing option with smooth scrolling. You can directly browse your Picasa web albums. This application also supports direct uploading of snaps taken from your mobile device and automatically includes GPS coordinates with each uploaded picture. You can also create albums in your Picasa account through this application.

Photo Mate - This is an advanced image viewer for Android users. You can view extremely large files through Photo Mate very easily. It also supports EXIF data display to know more about the picture. It also supports basic photo editing features and also includes file conversion facility. You can also open Adobe Photoshop's .psd files through Photo Mate. It also supports viewing of various raw image formats of different popular DSLR cameras.

How To Find Coverage Maps of Mobile Operators

2012-02-09T16:12:00.000+05:30

Often mobile customers want to find out the network coverage in their area before taking a subscription. Generally, every mobile company claims to deliver the best coverage within an area, but sometimes the reality is just the opposite. It may happen that you experience very poor connectivity resulting in frequent call drops during the conversation. To avoid such situation, you must find a way to find the quality of network in your area for a given mobile operator. Here's an easy way to do that.

Sensorly is an excellent service that shows you real mobile coverage maps of more than 120 networks from 27 countries across the globe. You can find network coverage for 2G, 3G, 4G, CDMA and Wi-Fi networks for all the mobile operators included in the list.

A free Sensorly Android application gives instant network coverage on your smartphone. It includes a heat-map showing the strength of signals in a given area. This excellent service is entirely community-driven. All the network data is submitted by Sensorly users through their application while on the go. This helps in improving the quality and accuracy of coverage maps giving more credible information to the users.

If you're using this service, it will help you in selecting the best mobile operator with the strongest network giving you seamless connectivity throughout your circle. There's also a web version of Sensorly that shows large coverage maps directly in your web browser. Simply fill in the city, country and zip code to get the heat map of network signal for a supported mobile operator.

10 Ways To Upload And Share Photos On Twitter

2012-02-08T17:05:00.000+05:30

Micro-blogging service Twitter has emerged as one of the popular social media networks used by large number of users for sharing multimedia content. Graphic content is shared in different ways on Twitter through different apps, clients, online services and APIs. If you're a Twitter addict and love to share photos with your followers, here's a list of some popular photo sharing services.

Twitpic : It's one of the most popular photo sharing services for Twitter. It has a robust API that can be used by 3rd-party developers to integrate the functionality within their applications. While uploading your photos, you can also add your comments that will be tweeted along with the link to the uploaded photograph.

yfrog : This is an excellent service to share multimedia content with the Twitter community. You can upload photos, videos and links to the yfrog live stream that other yfrog users can follow. Its API is extensively used in various 3rd-party applications. I use this service through my mobile Twitter client and I'm pressed with its reliability and ease of use.

Twitgoo : This is yet another Twitter photo sharing service powered by Photobucket. People can view public or user-specific feed to share the photo uploads on Twitter. Twitgoo API is implemented in dozens of clients and applications and is used by large number of users. You can upload photos either from your PC or you can paste the URL for direct sharing on Twitter.

TwitrPix : Whether it's your webcam or snap taken from your mobile device, TwitrPix lets you share your photos very easily on Twitter. The TwitrPix iPhone app is loaded with several photo effects that can be applied to your pictures before sharing them on Twitter. You can also do basic editing to adjust the photo dimensions as per your requirements.

Pikchur : Through this service, you can not only share photos on Twitter, but can also see the statistics about traffic coming to your uploaded pictures. Developer friendly API lets programmers easily extend the features of their existing Twitter clients. Apart from Twitter, you can also share your uploaded photos to various popular social media networks.

Twitxr : I prefer this application for adding location information to the shared pictures on Twitter. It supports photo sharing on multiple social media networks at once. You can use this excellent service on all major smartphones brands. Twitxr automatically adds the location information with each photo shared through it.

Tweet.Pho.to : This handy service lets you share photos on Twitter from your webcam, hard drive or through a URL. You can also use this service through your smartphone and can easily add your comments with each uploaded picture. You can also share your photos on Facebook through this useful photo sharing service.

Twipik : This is one of my favorite photo sharing services for Twitter. Apart from regular photo sharing on Twitter, users can also upload their pictures only to Twipik. Quite similar to other services, you can also add comments with each uploaded photograph. Through its simple web interface, you can easily share your pictures with your network.

MobyPicture : This service is quite popular among social media enthusiasts. Mobypicture lets you share your pictures to multiple social networks including Twitter. It is available for every major mobile platform apart from the regular web uploading interface. You can also add your comments through web as well as from mobile during the upload.

Twitter's Native Image Sharing : And last but not the least is Twitter's native photo-sharing feature that lets you upload photos directly from your PC to share with your followers. These photos are also showcased in user's photo gallery on their profile. Large number of users prefers the native photo sharing option through web interface.

4 Things To Avoid When Photo Tagging On Social Media

2012-02-07T13:38:00.000+05:30

Almost every popular social media network supports photo tagging and this feature is widely used by large number of users. Despite of several security measures adopted by these networks, photo tagging sometimes results in frustration and embarrassment for many users. Sometimes, such situations are created inadvertently by ignorant users who are unaware of the negative implications of random photo tagging activity. Let's see how to avoid some of the common mistakes committed during photo tagging.

DOT NOT tag private pictures - This is quite obvious, still some of the users commit this photo tagging crime. Private pictures broadly fall in two categories. One category is family photos taken in home or relatives abode. Second category is photos taken with friends, colleagues or your acquaintances in parties, pubs, marriages and similar places. Under NO circumstances you should tag these photos with public visibility. Even if you intend to tag them for restrictive view, you must ask the person whose photo you're going to tag.

Take prior permission - Even if it's a general photograph, you must ask the user before tagging him/her for public view. Sometimes, a user does not want to be photo-tagged at all, irrespective of the type of picture. It is generally a good idea to send a direct message to the person for taking the permission. This is one time activity which ensures you that further tagging activity is allowed from the respective person.

Avoid mass-tagging - Although group photographs inherently require multiple tags, still you must keep the number of tags to a reasonable number, so that they can tracked easily by the viewers. Sometimes, large numbers of tags are inserted in a densely packed area making the tag tracking almost impossible.

Say NO to irrelevant tags - Often some friends tag large number of people in a general picture that have no relevance and the tagging activity itself makes no sense. This is not only annoying but it also initiates notifications of comments posted on that tagged picture. This is simply a form of spam and we must ensure that irrelevant photo tagging activities are not encouraged within our friends' network.

6 Best Web Analytics Applications For iPhone Users

2012-02-06T17:07:00.000+05:30

Whether you own a large e-commerce portal, a business website or a niche blog, web analytics system is of prime importance in each case. Every website owner use at least one web analytics service to measure and analyze the traffic. Generally, this data crunching is done on a desktop, but with the emergence of powerful smartphones like iPhone, more and more applications are being ported to the mobile platform. If you're an iPhone user looking for an application to track your website's traffic, here's a list of 6 excellent web analytics mobile applications made just for you.

Analytics App for Google Analytics - This is a premium application for Google Analytics reporting. You get over 50+ different types of reports and support of multiple GA accounts to access data of multiple websites for each account. This app always uses secure connection so that your sensitive data remains safe from hackers.

Coremetrics for Mobile - This is an excellent application for Coremetrics users looking to access KPI reports on their iPhone. It pulls real-time data from a secure connection including trends for different metrics as per your requirements.

Woopra - This is one of my favorite web analytics services and its mobile version is equally impressive with stunning interface. You can access your real-time data from your Woopra dashboard through a secure connection. This application has the most intuitive interface among all the applications listed here.

Webtrends - This handy application brings the power of Webtrends analytics system on your iPhone. It shows the most important metrics through a sleek interface. Webtrends app also shows various custom reports and is very light on resources.

Piwik Mobile - This is an excellent analytics application for Piwik users equipped with extensive reporting. You can also change the font size for best viewing experience. If required, you can also enable anonymous reporting through this application.

Clicky Web Analytics - This is a light-weight analytics application for Clicky users. It is very flexible and can show you the data of various time durations as per your requirements. You can also pull various demographic and technical data through this application.

10 Best Social Media Plugins For Drupal

2012-02-03T17:41:00.001+05:30

Drupal is one of the popular content management systems used by large number of website owners. You can create a fairly complex website through Drupal. No content management system is complete without extensions and plugins that add more power to the website. These plugins falls in different categories and extend the existing features in different ways. If you're looking to integrate more social media features to your Drupal-powered website, here's a collection of 10 best social media plugins.

Facebook Like Button - It's a configurable plugin to add 'Facebook Like' features to your website. You can choose the size, language and different typographical attributes to configure this plugin to suit best for your existing theme.

Disqus - If you want to add a powerful 3rd-party comment system on your website, this plugin is your best bet. It integrates Disqus comment system with all the powerful features like threaded comments, single sign-on and comment RSS subscription.

SexyBookmarks - It's a popular bookmarking plugin used by thousands of bloggers across the globe. You can easily embed this animated social media bookmarking plugin at your desired location within your theme. It supports all popular social media services and you can configure the selective services as per your needs.

Facebook Subscribe Button - This awesome plugin lets your website visitors subscribe to your Facebook profile's public updates. You can configure this plugin in compact as well as in standard mode. Optionally, you can also activate profile thumbnails of the subscribers.

Creative Commons - This handy plugin lets you assign creative commons license to your website's content. You can choose different license types for each category of content and can also place the license information at your desired location.

Website Toolbar - It's a very useful plugin that renders a handy vertical toolbar on your website containing useful links. Apart from top and bottom navigation links, it also includes social media buttons as well as integrated Google search button.

Share Buttons (AddToAny) by Lockerz - This plugin adds a flexible social sharing widget to your website and lets users share content on Google+, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Twitter and many more services. You can easily add it to the desired node on your website's theme.

Shorten URLs - If you want to integrate a robust URL shortening service right on your website, then this plugin can provide you the same very easily. It supports more than a dozen popular URL shortening services and consumes very less web server resources.

Facebook-style Statuses (Microblog) - This is one of my favorite Drupal plugins that integrates Facebook style updates. It has built-in support of @mentions and #hashtags that makes it quite robust and powerful plugin. It also updates itself rendering new updates without any need for whole web page refresh.

Your social media presence On The Web - This great plugin lets you embed various social media and RSS icons in a separate section in your sidebar. You can configure the links to your social media profiles for each icon.

How To Analyze Detailed Statistics For Any Website

2012-02-02T16:58:00.000+05:30

Often you may want to analyze different statistics associated with a domain of your competitors. This helps in creating a better strategy to sustain in the crowded niche. Although, there are several techniques to analyze any website, but it may require different tools and services to gather each piece of information. Another good way for such analysis is using a specialized service that automatically retrieves vital stats about a website and presents them in a simple format almost instantly.

Stat My Web is one such online website analysis service that provides tons of information associated with a website. Simply provide the URL and press the 'Search' button. The services extract data from various services and provides all the information on a single web page for your analysis. Following are some of the information gathered by this excellent tool.

Google Page Rank - It is one of the most popular website metric that gives indication about site's worth and its value.

Alexa Rank - This popular metric gives you a fair idea about the amount of traffic received by any website. Although you doesn't get the exact figure but its near approximation and doesn't deviate much from the actual figure.

Country (Primary Traffic Source) - If you want to know the country name from where a website is receiving the maximum traffic, then this field tells you exactly this information.

IP Address - This doesn't need any explanation. It simply tells you the IP address for the given domain.

Server Location - You can also know the location (city, country) of the web server hosting the website for a given domain name.

Alexa Top 10 Keywords - Keywords are of prime importance for every website relying on organic traffic. You can easily know the top 10 keywords that send most traffic according to Alexa ranking system.

Alexa Traffic Graph - Whenever it comes to data analysis, nothing can beat graphs and charts. You get an Alex traffic chart through this option showing spikes and deviations of traffic for last 3 months.

Visitors Geo-location Segregation - This report also contains statistics of visitors divided into segments on the basis of country on a per day basis.

Complete Domain Name Data - You also get complete details of the domain name like creation date, expiration date, registrar information, hosting provider name, name servers, domain age and much more.

Directory Listing Status - Presence in prominent directories like DMOZ and Yahoo! directory helps in boosting search engine rankings. Through this option you can know whether website is present in both these directories or not.

HTTP Header Analysis - This information is more intended towards web developers looking to know how the website behaves with visitor's browser.

Google Keyword Analysis - This handy report shows top 30 keywords sending traffic through Google search engine. You can make a list of these keywords and can try to optimize your web pages to beat your competitor.

DNS Record Analysis - You can also know the complete DNS record for the website's domain name. This includes its name server and the TTL (time-to-live) value.

Homepage Links Analysis - For better search engine optimization, you must pay good attention on the home page of your website. This section also gives you the number of internal and external links on the home page.

Indexed Content Analysis - You can also know the number of web pages indexed in Google, Yahoo and Bing for a given website. The number of pages indexed for each search engine may differ from one another.

W3C HTML Validation Analysis - This is very valuable report for web developers and designers looking for shortcomings in the website code. It shows the number of XHTML errors and warnings for the home page of the website.

How To Tweak Or Create A Tumblr Theme With Ease

2012-02-01T15:45:00.000+05:30

After WordPress and Blogger, Tumblr is one of the most popular blogging services on the web. Often we tweak our Tumblr theme through the inbuilt editor making desired changes in the existing theme. How about creating a completely new theme from scratch? Through tumblr dashboard you cannot achieve this, but there's an easy way to design new Tumblr themes without much effort. TumblrThemr is an excellent tool to edit or create Tumble themes right on your local desktop.

To design a new theme, install the TumblrThemr development files on your local system and create a test blog on the main Tumblr site for testing purposes. This ensures that your theme is properly tested on the real site before you transfer it to the actual live blog.

If you want to create a completely new theme, start with giving a name to your theme in the themes directory. Make sure your file name ends with .tumblr extension. For example, mynewtheme.tumblr

Once you've created your new theme file, paste the following raw XML theme code in that new file. Make sure you write your custom code within {block:tumblrThemr} {/block:tumblrThemr} tag. Once you've completed the required customizations and code changes, you can import the XML code on your live blog.

How To Limit Updates And Accessibility of Any Facebook Application

2012-01-31T16:43:00.001+05:30

Applications are an integral part of almost every popular social network. There are thousands of Facebook applications used by millions of users across the world. Whenever you're using these applications, they not only access some of the profile information, but also access your wall. Similarly, applications used by your friends' access your feed stream wall to post updates. At times, you may want to limit the accessibility of these applications. Let's see how to block or limit the access for any Facebook application.

Limiting data accessibility - The easiest way to check and restrict data accessibility for any application is to go to 'Account Settings -> Apps'. You'll be presented a list of applications currently used by you. Select the desired application by clicking the 'Edit' button. This will expand the available options as shown in the image below.

You can use the 'Remove' link to restrict the application from accessing your sensitive data. You can also use 'App activity privacy' option to restrict the viewer ship of app updates on your wall. For example, if you want that only a particular list of friends can see updates of this application, you can do it easily through this option.

Blocking an app - In case you're looking to completely block an application, the easiest way is to use the 'Block app' button on the application's Facebook page. This will completely unlink the association (if any) with your Facebook profile and will completely block any kind of access to your wall or profile.

Disabling app updates/posts - Sometimes you get annoyed by the frequent app updates on your news feed coming from one of your friends. In such cases, you may not want to entirely block the application, but would prefer to hide app updates coming in your news feed from your friends.

Achieving this is very easy. Simply click the drop down menu on one of the app posts, and click the last option as shown above. Once you've done that, all updates of that app coming from friends will not be shown in your news feed.

5 Best Video Plugins For WordPress Blogs

2012-01-30T16:52:00.001+05:30

Embedding multimedia content in blog posts not only makes them sticky but also gives you more options to convey your message clearly to the readers. WordPress bloggers often use video and audio content within blog posts to enrich the text content. If you regularly embed video content in your posts, you must use a special plugin that make things easy for you. Here's a collection of 5 best video plugins for WordPress users.

VideoPress - It is one of the most popular video plugins used by large number of users. You can easily embed videos through shortcodes with lots of customizations. You can even add custom styling through your own CSS very easily.

Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator - This is extremely flexible plugin for generating thumbnails of locally hosted video content. It has lots of customization options and is ideal for e-commerce or portfolio blogs. You can also create custom skins for video player through this plugin.

JW Player for WordPress - Through this plugin you can easily embed video files through flash or HTML5. It is tightly integrated with WordPress media library making things easier for maintaining the uploaded video content. A highly customizable shortcode system gives you enough liberty to insert videos as per your requirements.

Viper's Video Quicktags - It is one of my favorite video plugins for embedding videos from various popular video hosting services like YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo, Metacafe and many more. You can embed videos from these sites in different formats through easy shortcode system. You can also configure video attributes directly within the shortcodes.

MediaElement.js - This plugin is based on a robust and flexible audio and video library. It has a very powerful shortcode system that supports dozens of video and audio file formats. Multimedia content embedded through this plugin works fine even in smartphones and tablets.

10 Best BlackBerry Applications For Everyday Use

2012-01-27T16:53:00.001+05:30

Although Android and iPhone use base is expanding at exponential rate, we cannot ignore considerably large number of BlackBerry users across the world. This smartphone has successfully penetrated the business professionals' community and is used widely across the globe. No smartphone is good enough without supporting applications, and BlackBerry is no different. Whether it's a productivity utility or a social media application, almost every smartphone user relies on these small applications to turbo charge their phones. Here's a list of best BlackBerry applications that are extremely useful for daily use.

BlackBerry Messenger - This is a must-have application for every BlackBerry owner. Apart from regular text chat, you can share pictures and videos with your contacts. Animated avatars and customizable chat bubbles makes the whole chat experience memorable.

Advanced RAM Optimizer Pro - Nowadays smartphone users regularly run multiple applications at one time. This eats up precious memory and may result in slow performance. Through this memory optimization app, you can free your unused memory very easily and can speed up your BlackBerry experience. It can be done either manually or the application can be scheduled to run at regular intervals.

World Clock Free - This application is a must-have for frequent travelers. World clock support large number of cities (over 1500) from across the globe. It automatically detects the time-zone configuration in your BlackBerry and displays city times accordingly. Its smart auto-complete search facility lets you find cities from its database very easily. You can also use large clock display for better readability.

Advanced Call Manager - This is an all-in-one solution for managing your incoming and outgoing calls. You can create different lists of contacts and can assign custom functions (busy tone, recorded message, call rejection) either to the entire list or to individual phone numbers. You can also create different profiles with custom functions for different time periods in a given day.

Pattern Lock Free - Apart from regular keypad locking system in BlackBerry, users often look for a more secure locking system that prevents unauthorized access to the phone. This useful application lets you lock your phone through making pattern on screen by sliding fingers. To unlock, you have to remake the pattern by sliding fingers on the screen.

Network Traffic Control - This application is ideal for heavy internet users. If you have a limited data plan, this application can save your internet bill effectively. Apart from regularly monitoring your radio, GPRS and Wi-Fi traffic, this handy application also alerts you if the usage crosses your specified limit.

WordPress for BlackBerry - If you own a self-hosted WordPress blog, this application can be a life-saver for you. You can post and edit your posts directly from your BlackBerry, while you're on the go. Make sure your web server runs WordPress version 2.9.2 or higher. You can also upload and embed multimedia elements in your blog posts through this application.

Dropbox - This is yet another useful application for freelancers and bloggers. Dropbox is one of the most popular file hosting service. Now you can directly manage your Dropbox account from your BlackBerry. You can upload, browse and download your files and folders through this awesome application.

MaraTick - This is a powerful to-do list and task manager. Its intuitive and excellent interface lets you create multiple to-do lists very easily. Integrated calendar and dictionary makes the list creation task - a cakewalk. You can also create list templates and can also create copies of your lists with a touch of a button.

Advanced Device Locks - If you store sensitive data on your smartphone, then you must install this application on your BlackBerry. This powerful application lets you password-protect almost any application on the phone. This way you can protect files, folders, messages, contact lists, messenger apps, social media apps and much more. Simply select the object you want to protect and assign a password when prompted by the application.

How To Use Two-Way Secure Login For Your Web Apps

2012-01-26T13:39:00.000+05:30

An average web surfer holds dozens of accounts on various online web services that includes email and social media websites. Although the authentication system for these popular services is secure enough, but you're not guaranteed of immunity from hackers looking to crack weak passwords. There's no silver bullet for 100% secure login procedure, but still we can make it harder for hackers to infiltrate you service logins. Let's see an excellent application that uses dual-login method to protect your accounts login session on various web applications.

AlterEgo is a powerful yet simple-to-implement dual authentication service that hardens the security of your logins on web applications. This methodology is based on a simple principle of supplementing the native login procedure with one more pass code generated on a random basis at the time of login. Unless user doesn't enter this temporary pass code, access to the service is not permitted even if the primary service password is correct.

Any web service supporting AlterEgo dual-authentication like MailChimp (as shown in the image above) can offer users a powerful dual-authentication option. This service is completely free with no limitations or restrictions. Once you've connected your web service with AlterEgo's dual-authentication, users are prompted for entering the temporary pass code as soon as they've entered the primary password associated with that web service. This temporary password can be generated instantly in two ways. You can either generate it within your AlterEgo account dashboard or you can use your smartphone.

Fortunately, AlterEgo provides two free pass code generating mobile applications for iPhone and Android users. This enables all mobile users to generate pass codes while on the go. Integrating this authentication system with new web applications is very easy. AlterEgo provides an open API based on JSON system that can be easily connected with almost any web application without much coding.

Once you start using this service, a hacker's work becomes more difficult. He not only has to crack your primary service password, but also have to steal your mobile to fetch the random pass code. This makes the probability of your account being hacked very low.

5 Ways To Make Your Website User Friendly

2012-01-25T16:47:00.000+05:30

Website optimization is an ongoing process and includes better browsing experience for the visitors. Apart from optimization for speed, visual elements also need to be improved to increase the engagement. This can be done by making necessary changes in key elements of the web page. Here's are some of the simple optimization methods that can make your website a better place for the visitors.

Breadcrumbs - If your website has deep navigational structure, you must implement breadcrumbs to facilitate easy navigation. It's not only considered good for SEO, but also provide easy visual indication of browsing path to the visitor.

Related content - Whether it's a static website or a dynamic weblog, you must provide a way to display related content on the web page. You can either include it either just below the main content or can display it in the sidebar.

Contact page - Often webmasters ignore this page or do not make it correctly. Contact page plays a big role in making connection with visitors. It should be prominently highlighted on every web page and you must provide more than one way (email, submission form) to contact you.

Author pages - Whatever content is posted on the website, it must be supplemented with a link to the author page. This not only makes a strong connection with the reader, but also gives the impression that it is not run by a bot.

Illustrations - If you're not using pictures with your content, your repelling large number of users. Wherever possible, use informative illustrations to spice up your content. This greatly enhances browsing experience and makes visitors more engaging during their visit session.

8 Free And Powerful Help Desk Software

2012-01-24T17:08:00.000+05:30

Whether you're running a small business or a large enterprise, customer service is one of the primary business processes that are vital for the existence of the company. Depending on the type of business, custom help desk systems are implemented by businesses. If you have a geographically dispersed customer base and want to implement a robust online help desk system in a limited budget, you must use one of the software presented here. They are used by large number of users across the world and include lots of features to run your help desk system efficiently.

Hesk Help Desk: It is a web-based help desk system powered by PHP and back end database. Hesk provides a free version that includes ticket support system with different levels of priority. Customers can submit tickets along with attachments through Hesk. They can even rate support staff responses. Email notifications from both ends work seamlessly for speedy solution of the issue.

SpiceWorks Help Desk: This is an excellent technical help desk system for IT professionals and similar companies. Users can submit tickets via web interface or directly through their email. Multiple users can maintain this help desk system easily through dedicated control panels. Powerful internal search in this system lets support staff mine relevant customer tickets easily. It is ideal for businesses selling computer products or companies offering IT-based services.

NeuQs Help Desk: This is a powerful suite for customer service and related tasks. NeuQs uses .NET Framework and Microsoft Silverlight to power the entire system. It has automated priority-based ticket system for reporting incidents and issues. With comprehensive audit trail and event logs, administrators are assured that no ticket is left unanswered or is resolved slowly. This help desk system is also ideal for IT-based processes.

Revelation Help Desk: The free version of this help desk system supports up to 5 support staff with a single installation. There's no time limit or restriction on the free edition and you can run a small to medium-sized customer support system with minimum budget. It is a web-based system with different levels of user accounts and powerful ticket management module. An integrated email notification system ensures things are done as fast as possible.

iKode HelpDesk X: It is one of my favorite help desk system. This system has an awesome auto-responder module that is completely configurable as per your requirements. An integrated rating system ensures your support staff is always on their toes. It also incorporates detailed reporting system to keep track of every aspect of the entire system. iKode also has a powerful and flexible email notification system.

SysAid IT Help Desk: This help desk system is ideal for businesses looking to implement customer-based service request system. Users can submit their requests through online web interface and can track their request's progress. Automated escalation matrix ensures that support ticket is transferred to senior staff in case it is not resolved in time. You can also create multiple custom reports to analyze the performance of the entire system.

Service Desk Plus: It is more than a help desk system and is ideal for medium-sized businesses to implement help desk, asset management and purchase management systems. It is completely web-based and includes tickets for incident reporting. The free edition supports up to 25 desks which is enough to power a medium sized support system. It also includes custom reporting module for customers' data as well as for analyzing support staff performance.

Web Help Desk: This is a robust web-based incident tracking system and is ideal for technical support business processes. It can run both on Windows and Linux systems and supports wide range of popular database management systems for back end database. Its powerful two-way email notification system and priority-based ticket system makes it one of the best free help desk systems.

7 Ways To Get More Followers For Your Facebook Page

2012-01-23T16:35:00.001+05:30

Business and freelancers across the world use Facebook pages to get more customers and leads. Making a Facebook page is not that tough, but leveraging this medium in a right way is not that easy. If your Facebook business page is growing at a snail pace, there's something wrong with your social media strategy. However, with some simple tricks you can revive your dying page and can attract thousands of followers. Let's see how to get most out of our Facebook page.

Use custom tab for non fans - While designing your Facebook page, make sure all the non-fans are presented with a custom tab with a strong call-to-action for liking the page. This significantly increases the probability of acquiring more fans for your page.

Use custom welcome tab for new fans - As soon as a few fan clicks the like button, you must divert him to a custom welcome tab with strong call-to-actions related to newsletter or feed subscription. You may also provide links to different promotional content within the welcome tab.

Ask questions - If you want to get more engagement from your fans, regularly ask interesting questions on your page. Make sure you do not overdo it. Keep a balance between general content and selected questionnaire.

Offer freebies - Who doesn't love free stuff? And that's a potent weapon used by several companies to keep their Facebook page fans glued to their page stream. Depending on your budget, offer small freebies to your fans at least once a month.

Hold contests - This is a sure shot way to get tons of comments and likes for your Facebook page. You can cleverly integrate these contests with freebies and invite your page fans to leave a comment to participate in the contest.

Highlight and promote most active fans - You must encourage the most engaging fans by tagging them frequently in your updates. If they own a blog, you can also share their content on your page's wall. This not only keeps the most active fans charged up, but also encourages others to be part of the community.

Use multimedia content - Record promotional and informative videos to share with your Facebook page fans. Sometimes, these videos go viral and attract large number of fans in a short period of time. The key here is experimenting with all the available resources.

8 Important Google Analytics Settings For Your Website

2012-01-20T16:43:00.000+05:30

Google Analytics (GA) is my favorite web analytics tool to track my blog's performance. It is the most popular online traffic analysis system used by millions of publishers. Generally, an average GA user is satisfied with the general reports present on the default dashboard. These reports give general overview of traffic behavior at the macro level. How about configuring some advanced options that give you deeper insights about your incoming traffic? If you're not comfortable in utilizing custom options available in GA, there's an excellent online tool to help you for the same.

Google Analytics Configuration Tool is a free online service that helps you set up 8 extremely important Google analytics configurations for your website. You don't need to be an analytics ninja to configure these advanced options. Simple dialogue based tutorials makes the configuration process extremely easy even for a layman. So let's get started and see how to make most out of our GA account.

Tracking multiple sub-domains and a domain - If you want to track several sub-domains for a single primary domain and that too in a single GA user profile, you can do it easily by following this wizard. Simply provide the GA account number, primary domain name and select the type of tracking code (asynchronous or synchronous) you've implemented on your web site. Once you've supplied all the information, you instantly get the customized GA code that needs to be pasted just before the </head> tag of your each sub-domain.

Tracking multiple domains and a sub-domain - Cross-domain tracking with several sub-domains requires a bit of configuration, especially if you're going to track links across these domains. Fortunately, this excellent wizard gives you the required custom GA code after providing GA account number, each primary domain name, and all the sub-domain names. You must tag each cross-domain links you want to track with a custom GA code by using the 'onClick' tag.

Site search configuration - If you've implemented a site-wide search bar for visitors, you must activate internal site search tracking in your GA account. It's extremely easy and can be implemented within few minutes after following this excellent tutorial. Simply provide the query parameter in the 'Site Search Settings' and the search tracking starts immediately. This helps in understanding what majority of visitors are looking for on your website.

Configuring 404 page tracking - Often visitors' from different external sources land on a non-existent page of your website. In such cases, a default or a customized 404 page is served to the visitor. You must track these 404 page landings to know about broken links pointing to your website. Through this wizard you can get a custom 404 tracking GA code after providing your GA account number. Paste this custom code just before the </head> tag of your 404 page.

Configuring event tracking - An event is an action taken by visitor on your website. This can be contact form submission, newsletter subscription or product purchase check-out. Tracking these important actions is vital for analyzing and optimizing your existing systems. Through this wizard, you can implement custom event tracking on your website. It generates the custom GA code and also guides you to configure the associated goals to get a complete event tracking report.

Tracking Facebook page traffic - If you're using a custom tab with an iFrame on your Facebook page, you must implement this GA tracking option for better visualization of traffic coming to your page. Simply provide your GA account number and you'll get the custom code that needs to be pasted just before the </head> tag of your iFRame's web page hosted on your web server. Although Facebook insights provides you with analytics data about your Facebook page, but implementing this tracking mechanism gives you much more valuable data that is vital for effectively analyzing traffic patterns on your Facebook page.

Tracking goal completions - Tracking goals till the last step is vital for measuring the conversion rates. Generally, a typical goal completion ends with a 'Thank You' or a check out 'Confirmation Page'. Through this excellent step-by-step tutorial you can easily set up goal completion tracking. Simply specify the URL of the final confirmation page during the configuration. This report is extremely useful for calculating return on investment at the macro level.

URL tagging for campaign tracking - If you're running several campaigns on your website, then you must tag each URL with Google analytics url builder. Each URL built with this tool contains up to 5 different parameters that helps in segregating the incoming traffic on the basis of different vital criteria. This tutorial makes the URL building process very easy through helpful instructions explaining the meaning of each parameter. You can also use this option to tag your website's vital links on external pages like social media profiles. This greatly helps in understanding about the traffic coming through these links.

Why Dedicated Documentation Management System Is Essential For Your Business

2012-01-19T15:25:00.000+05:30

Business documents forms the core of day-to-day operations for any company. They are literally the lifeline of business operations without which any organization will cripple easily. Generally, there is no central repository of business documents generated in different departments. Manual document management not only makes the entire process cumbersome, but also introduces delay in business processes. You can use a free and open source document management system like OpenKM to power your organization's document management system. Let's see the advantages of deploying a dedicated document management system and how it adds value to the entire business process.

Knowledge-base management - Business documents generated in different departments across the organization are the primary source of vital data that helps in formulating critical business decisions. With a specialized document management system, you can easily create a central repository of business documents that acts as a powerful knowledge-base for the entire organization.

This greatly helps in data-mining and information retrieval in a timely manner. With OpenKM, you can create a powerful central document repository with advanced search functions. You can even search within a large document through a tag cloud or through a search box.

Secure distribution & access - With a centralized document management system like OpenKM, you can not only keep the entire document library secure, but can also ensure rule-based secure access to individuals. You can also enable document-level collaboration with version history.

This is very useful feature for marketing and IT departments. OpenKM comes with powerful plugins that lets you share the documents through 3rd party document editing software. On one hand employees find it comfortable to work on a document through their favorite document editing program, and on the other hand, secure access ensures no information is leaked to unauthorized individuals. Document locking and read-only sharing is two of the major features that ensure micro-level access control for each employee.

Why Optimized Images Are Important For Web Publishers

2012-01-18T14:04:00.000+05:30

Images are an integral part of web content. Millions of websites publish tons of content everyday. Almost every publisher use inline images within content as part of the web content strategy. Why is it so important to include images in your blog posts and articles? What are its positive and negative implications on a website’s performance? Let’s see why images are extremely vital for getting more traffic for your website or blog.

We'll first discuss about the term - 'Web-optimized images'. Just using the images alone doesn't yield the results as per your expectations. You must optimize them before embedding in the blog post. Generally, images are optimized for reduced file size and better search engine optimization. You can use various image compression tools that are freely available on internet to compress the photos. These compression utilities reduce the image file size retaining much of the quality. This significantly helps in saving the precious bandwidth of your web server. Second optimization process involves proper attribute inclusion so that they are properly indexed by the image search engines. Simply provide a meaningful description of the image in 'alt' attribute of the 'img' tag. This helps search engines in understanding the content of the image. Once you start applying these two optimization techniques for each image, you can experience following positive effects on your web site.

Makes content attractive - Picture says a thousand words. It is applicable on web content as well. Blog posts and articles spiced up with photos naturally make the content more attractive and readable. Sometimes, good illustrations make an average piece of content above the ordinary. While using images in your blog posts make sure you do not stuff too many images. This may backfire and may repeal the visitors.

Brings additional traffic from image search - As I discussed above, proper image tagging helps image search engines better understand the content of the image. This helps in including your images in relevant image search queries bringing additional traffic to your web site.

Illustrations make content more understandable - How-To tutorials and list posts are the best candidates for including images within the content. If you're including helpful images in such posts, readers grasp the topic much easier. Nowadays infographics posts are getting quite popular which are entirely made up of single large illustration. Sometimes these posts easily get viral on social media platforms and attract huge traffic.

PivotX : A Powerful Open-Source Blogging CMS

2012-01-17T16:25:00.000+05:30

If you're talking about blogging CMS, WordPress is the first option that may come in your mind. There are several good alternatives that offer quite robust and feature-packed blogging engine. One of them is PivotX, which is an open-source, free and powerful blog content management system. It has an active developer community that regularly updates its core adding new features with each subsequent release. Let's see some of the features which makes it one of the contenders for good blogging CMS.

Dual database storage option - Generally, popular blogging CMS use MySQL for storing the data. PivotX is quite different and can use either MySQL or flat files for the data storage. During installation you can opt for one of the data storage mechanism.

Multi-site & multi-language support - You can easily create unlimited number of blogs from a single PivotX installation. Each blog can have different themes, extensions, language and system settings. This truly makes it a powerful multi-site blogging platform.

Large collection of themes & plugins - Like other popular blogging CMS, PivotX also enjoys large number of themes and useful plugins to easily extend the functionality of the entire system. You can browse through various categories to find the required extension that deliver the results as per your requirements.

In-built spam protection - Unlike other blogging platforms that generally require a plugin to effectively combat spam, PivotX has been developed with a native anti-spam system. This not only makes your blog safe from spammers the moment you install it, but it also reduces the burden of one extra plugin.

Multi-user & access matrix support - With PivotX, multiple users can easily work on a single blog with different level of privileges. This ensures that each person is granted adequate rights to perform various tasks on the blog.

Powerful rich-text editor - This is the heart of any blogging CMS and is mostly used by an average user. Fortunately, PivotX has a user-friendly text editor that works in two modes, viz., HTML mode (for power users) and WYSIWYG mode. The latter mode is good for technically challenged that makes embedding multimedia elements (image, audio, video) very easy.

6 Ways To Polish Your Twitter Marketing Strategy

2012-01-16T15:44:00.000+05:30

Businesses across the world are using Twitter to expand their online presence. They're using it for connecting with existing customers and prospects. Some companies also use it to provide customer service. Twitter is a powerful medium to generate leads through targeted followers acquisition and engagement. If you're planning to use Twitter for your business, you must formulate a concrete social media strategy to effectively leverage this popular platform. Here are some of the guidelines to turn your Twitter business account into a powerful customer acquisition tool.

Create a dedicated team - If you want to succeed in generating revenue from your social media efforts, you must hire a dedicated team to look after your Twitter and Facebook marketing efforts. This step becomes more critical if you're providing direct customer service via Twitter.

Decide hours and time-zones - Your social media team must do extensive research about the most active time and respective time-zones of the most lucrative business areas across the globe. This ensures you're not wasting your time and money during unproductive business hours.

Analyze amplification and sentiment - Create smart Twitter analytics reports that effectively digs out your reach (no of retweets, network involved) and the sentiment (negative or positive mentions) on a daily basis. You must also create instant alerts for certain alarming terms that are included in tweets mentioning your brand.

Use Twitter signatures - If more than one person is handling a Twitter business account, Twitter signatures (employee initials preceded by caret symbol) must be used at the end of each tweet. This ensures that your regular customers are well aware of the person with whom they're talking.

Use your brand's hashtags - From the very first day, start using all the relevant hashtags with your tweets and spread the word aggressively among your followers. This ensures your tweets are visible widely across the Twitter ecosystem.

Watch and engage - Your team must keep a watch on relevant keywords in public tweets and should initiate conversations with prospects talking about problems for which you have affordable and easy solutions. This is an excellent strategy to divert customers towards your sales funnel through Twitter.

How To Create Social Posters For Your Business

2012-01-13T16:54:00.001+05:30

Nowadays whether it's a multinational company or a small road side restaurant, almost every business gradually understands the importance of online presence and social media marketing. This trend has helped in growth of countless business websites along with explosion of popular social media platforms used by companies to expand their reach. Despite of this changing trend, print media and traditional advertising methods are still used widely and hold an important place in any company's marketing strategy. But, if you're creating posters for promoting your business, you may be interested in knowing the new trend that has started in creating these posters.

Nowadays several businesses are making social posters that prominently display company's social media presence within the promotional poster. This helps in easily connecting with prospects as more and more people connect with you online through your social media information present in your marketing posters.

Poster Oven is a unique service that lets you create awesome posters for your business with a social media splash, and that too for free. You don't even need to create an account to use this online service. The social poster making process is extremely easy and yields a high quality marketing creative to expand your business.

Simply start with opening a web-based wizard and browse through dozens of awesome templates. Once you've chosen your favorite template, fill in the promotional text and hop on to the next step of adding your social media accounts to the poster. You can add your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and many more social media accounts to the poster. You can also add your web site's URL or TEXT facility information to the poster. The last step lets you export your poster in high quality PDF file.

Now you can print this poster through a color printer and can use it to display your social media presence along with a traditional advertisement.