Fresh Tech Tips

Why I Use MetroTwit As My Preferred Twitter Client

2012-03-05T09:00:00.000+05:30

I've used several Twitter clients over the last 2 years. Some of them were quite good and some were simply awful. I started with web interface and soon switched to a popular Adobe AIR-based single column Twitter client. It was quite robust and feature-packed, but lacked support for multiple columns. My next Twitter application was a multi-column Adobe AIR-based dashboard with some advanced features. I used it for about a year until I came across a Twitter dashboard couple of months back.

It's called MetroTwit.

The moment I used it, I decided to switch to it permanently? What made me take this decision within 24 hours of its usage? Well, here are some of the features that made the migration possible. I'm not saying that it's 'THE BEST', but it is certainly worth trying. If you're a professional social media marketer, you must give it a try. So let's discuss about some of its features that attracted my attention.

Stunning interface - A good number of Twitter clients are based on Adobe's AIR platform. Nowadays a new breed of browser-based Twitter clients is popping up with some useful and unique features. MetroTwit neither uses AIR platform nor is it a browser-based application. It's a standalone desktop application powered by .NET Framework 4.0.

Equipped with pleasing metro interface (used in Windows 8), it gives a whole new experience to the users. Links, tweet text, hashtags and usernames are shown in different colors to understand the tweet in a better way. Aero-glass light and dark themes bring the most visually appealing experience to the users.

Real-time tweets - Generally, Twitter applications use the standard API to fetch and post tweets that may introduce some delay in the exchange of data. MetroTwit uses Twitter's Streaming API that fetches the tweets in real-time. This makes tracking and conversations happen as quickly as possible without any delay.

In-built multimedia previews - Whether it's a web page, a video or a photograph link embedded within a tweet, you can preview it easily right within the application without any need to open the web browser. Alternatively, if you prefer to view the rich media in the web browser, you can hold the Ctrl key while clicking the multimedia content.

Auto-completion of hashtags and usernames - MetroTwit intelligently auto-completes the usernames and hashtags used by you on daily basis. It continuously updates it database and presents a flying pop-up of suggestions to choose from. It also selects the entire username automatically whenever you attempt to select a given username while editing a tweet.

Tweet longer than 140 characters - If you want to express yourself in more than 140 characters, you can do so freely. MetroTwit automatically uses TwitLonger service to post large tweets. This gives you the flexibility to post long tweets without any need to leave the dashboard.

Full scrollable conversations - MetroTwit automatically fetches the entire conversations and presents them in a scrollable pop-up window with all the details. You can reply, retweet and can perform other necessary actions right within the conversation window with ease.

Multiple accounts - No Twitter application is complete without the support of multiple accounts. MetroTwit also supports the same out-of-the-box. The good thing is this that switching to and fro between different accounts is very quick. Normally, when you switch to a different account in other Twitter clients, it takes some time to render and load the fresh data. But that's not the case with this application. Account switching is lightening fast without any load on the system.

Tight integration with Windows 7 taskbar - This application makes the most out of .NET Framework APIs that enables it to use all the useful features available for the platform. Integration with Windows 7 taskbar helps you in viewing the unread count without even opening the dashboard. You can also enable pop-up notifications for new tweets while the dashboard is hidden in the taskbar.

Other features like URL shortening and resizable columns are some of the general features that are quite obvious for a Twitter dashboard. I'm glued to this application and I hope that you'll love it too.

How To Create Awesome Facebook Timeline Cover Photos In 2 Easy Steps

2012-03-03T15:54:00.000+05:30

Since the launch of new timeline on Facebook, users are finding new ways to leverage the real estate available on their profile or business page. This includes uploading of appealing cover photos to make the profile stand out from the rest. The combination of profile and cover page photos gives you an extremely useful option to tell more about you or your business at a glance. Here's an excellent online tool to generate appealing Facebook page covers photos in no time.

TrickedOutTimeline is a free online utility to make stunning Facebook cover page photos very easily. There are two photo effects to choose from. Either you can go with tear-off bottom edge cover photo including separate profile photo or you can opt for merged cover and profile photo for a slice cut photo effect.

Once you've chosen the cover photograph (ideally the size of 850x315 pixels), simply upload it and it is automatically cropped, sliced and re sized as per your selection. To download the prepared cover and profile photos, simply like the Facebook page of this excellent service and immediately you'll get download link for both photographs.

If you've chosen the first option (tear-off cover photo) you must upload a separate profile picture with a minimum size of 125x125 pixels. It is always advisable to upload web-optimized images so that they load fast when your Facebook page is rendered in visitor's browser.

How To Blog Consistently Along With Your Day Job

2012-03-01T16:53:00.001+05:30

In recent years, large number of net savvy people has switched to professional blogging along with their regular day job. Unfortunately, good percentage of them quit their blogging career in less than 6 months. Others do it at irregular pace slowly abandoning it completely. Only a handful of these people make it big and manage to make decent money out of it. If you're in the same league, you must prepare yourself to delicately balance your day job time and your blogging routine. Here are some of the tips that will help you in achieving success in blogging consistently along with your day job.

Make most out of your weekends - Weekends should be leveraged intelligently to get the maximum work done for the whole week. Write your best posts at weekends including miscellaneous tasks like theme tweaking, comment moderation and networking. I generally use weekends to skim new ideas for posts and making final drafts for as many posts as I can.

Prepare rough drafts for the whole week - This is one of the best techniques to lower your burden for the whole week. Prepare the final drafts including the images to be used in the posts for the whole week. This saves your research time and you can get started in no time on a daily basis. These drafts ensure that you devote your weekdays only in writing the content, and that's what matters for your readers as well as for your successful blogging career.

Remove distractions - Remove your TV, music player and other consumer electronics goods from your room to increase your productivity. While writing the posts, log out from all your accounts, close the browser and use a minimal full-screen text editor to write efficiently without any distractions.

Prepare editorial calender -Is is strongly advised to create a daily routine editorial calendar beforehand for the coming month. This enables you to plan ahead in time and in making desired changes in your day-to-day activities. Make sure you divide your work for each day clearly allocating each task for every single day in the editorial calendar.

Create a separate home office - Sometimes, people do the mistake of starting their blogging activities in their living room or a dining room in the presence of their family members. This results in poor productivity due to repetitive distractions. You must create a small home office in a separate room to get the look-n-feel of a professional environment. This greatly helps in increasing the productivity.

How To Optimize Your Website For Mobile Users

2012-02-29T16:25:00.001+05:30

Large number of publishers does not pay much attention in optimizing their websites or blogs for mobile visitors. In recent years, mobile traffic has exploded significantly demanding more mobile friendly sites for better browsing experience. To leverage this mobile traffic, you must make certain changes in your website's navigation and display format. Google has recently started an online service called HowToGoMo that helps publishers from around the globe to build better mobile-friendly websites. Let's see how to use it to get better returns from mobile visitors.

Start by submitting your website's url to GOMO meter that thoroughly analyzes and score it against different parameters. Once the analysis is complete, it presents you with a full report which can also be downloaded in PDF format.

After reading the report, some of the basic tips can be applied almost instantly to make key improvements in several areas. For example, mobile friendly search box is a must for every website optimized for smartphones and tablets. If you have the expertise to implement all of the suggestions given by this service, you can go ahead immediately to implement the same. But, in case you are technically challenged and struggle to implement the report's suggestions, you can opt to get it done from the experts suggested by this service. You can suggest your budget and time-frame to filter out the companies getting better proposals from the experts.

Thankfully, this service also promotes your fully mobile optimized website to the audience. You can fill-in your business details and can submit the map so that it can be promoted well among the relevant visitors. GoMo guides for publishers provide extremely useful information for publishers in PDF format that can be used to optimize the mobile version correctly.

5 Things To Consider Before Switching To New WordPress Theme

2012-02-28T16:47:00.000+05:30

If you've hosted your blog on WordPress, at times, you may have felt the need to switch to a different theme. If you have a self-hosted niche or a business blog, you must take care of certain things before switching to a new theme. Generally, if you're using 2 or 3 most common and essential plugins with almost no customization, you can switch to a new theme without much worry. But, in case you are using good number of plugins with lots of custom code, you must take some precautions else you may break your site. Here are some of the precautions to take before switching your blog to a new theme.

Back up your custom code - Sometimes, bloggers directly embed the custom code within theme files and sometimes even in WordPress core files leaving the time bomb ticking until you update your blog. If you have any custom code embedded directly into these files, you must back up this code before switching to a new theme. To avoid this time-consuming exercise, you should implement all your custom code in the following two files. For site-wide custom design and functionality, you must put all your custom code in wp-includes/functions.php file. For theme specific design and functionality, you must put all your custom code in functions.php file in theme's directory.

Back up your plugins data (tables) - Some plugins do not store any kind of data, while others use different database tables for storing their settings and other information to function properly. If you're going to switch to a new theme, it is always advisable to take back up of these plugin tables to avoid any mishap. Later on, you can cross-check the plugin database tables on a live blog with your back up tables imported on a local MySQL server.

Test new theme on a local server - I strongly suggest you to keep a replica of your live WordPress blog on your local computer. This helps in easy customization and testing without any worry of breaking your live blog. This is extremely helpful while trying out new themes. Testing a new theme on a local server ensures its proper functioning in different circumstances. You must enable and disable all theme options and must try out different layouts while performing tests on a local server. I use VertrigoServ as my default LAMP stack/web server for powering my local WordPress install. It's small, flexible and is extremely easy to use. Mac users can use install XAMPP for Mac OS X to power their local WordPress installation.

Test for any conflicts with active plugins - Sometimes a plugin may work with a specific theme, but may not work at all with other theme. This possible plugin-theme conflict must be tested on a local server by installing all active plugins one-by-one and testing all the options available in each plugin. In case any plugin breaks your theme, you must find an alternative for the same.

Test for speed and security - These are two of the most important issues often overlooked by new bloggers which results in poor visitors' experience or a hacked blog. Sometimes, a poorly coded theme slows down your blog significantly resulting in bad browsing experience. You must test your WordPress blog for speed on a local server as well as on the live site with the new theme you're going to use. Similarly, you must use plugins like WP Security Scan to detect any security loop hole or any malicious code present in your new theme's files.

5 Best Weather Apps For Android Users

2012-02-27T16:47:00.001+05:30

Frequent travelers often rely on weather applications on their smartphones to get fair idea of temperature & humidity conditions of the place they're going to visit. Android users can benefit from dozens of such applications for finding out latest weather conditions in hundreds of cities across the globe. Most of these applications are free and works perfectly with Android 2.2+ smartphones. Here are five best and free weather applications for daily use on your Android mobile device.

AccuWeather for Android - It is one of the most popular weather applications available not just for Android, but also for other popular mobile platforms. This application fetches the most recent weather data (updated every 15 minutes) to give you the latest predictions. It is available in about 23 languages and uses Google maps to display user-friendly updates. You can also configure it to display current temperature and conditions on your home screen status bar.

The Weather Channel - This excellent weather application has very intuitive interface and large user-base which itself tells about its popularity. You can get latest weather conditions on the basis of zip codes, city names and even landmarks on an interactive Google map. You can also get extreme weather conditions alert directly on your Android device through this application.

Sense Analog Clock - This is a multipurpose widget for Android smartphones that also provides detailed weather information. With over 150+ skins and several placement configurations, this widget presents ample customization options to the users. Apart from regular system information, you can fetch temperature and weather conditions for a given city. It also supports different weather information display layouts and also provides complete moon phase information automatically.

WeatherBug - This application has a very large user-base across the globe. The reason for this popularity is availability of real-time weather conditions from over 10,000 weather stations from around the world. This application can also fetch live pictures from hundreds of weather cams around United States. This application also lets you easily share weather information with your contacts.

Yahoo! Weather - We are already familiar with the excellent interface of Yahoo! Widgets. This same interface in adapted for Yahoo! weather application that makes it an excellent option to gather weather information on your Android device. You can view up to 5 to 10 cities weather information in a single screen through this application. You can also share weather information on Facebook and Twitter through this application.

3 Golden Rules of Web Analytics

2012-02-24T16:42:00.001+05:30

I use Google analytics for this blog, and I'm sure most of you use the same as default web analytics software. No matter which software or service you are using, foundation of good web analytics system is based on adoption of some extremely important but basic principles. These principles are very much practical in nature and can yield extremely good results for optimizing your web site convincingly.

Define goals and KPIs - I've always said that your analytics dashboard is not just for staring at page views and bounce rate. It should be used to give better browsing experience to the visitors. And to achieve that, you must ask few questions to yourself. What's the primary purpose of your web site? What are some of the key actions (input for key performance indicators KPIs) that define a conversion? What are the benefits for returning visitors? These are some of the basic questions that build your goals and KPIs list. Making this list ensures that you are well aware about what data needs to be analyzed and more importantly how it is going to be interpreted to get useful insights.

Segment and drill down - If your web site or blog gets decent traffic, you can accumulate tons of analytics data in few months. I've seen some of my peers sitting under the pile of data clueless about what and where to look for required information. And that's where data segmentation plays a big role in leveraging web analytics system. Whatever metrics you're considering for analysis, make sure you segment it on various dimensions and drill down further on each data set to get a clearer picture about what's happening on the website.

Split-test and analyze - Once you've extracted the required information, you can compare it with old data or simply can match against your goals and KPIs. Here's where optimization process starts that includes A/B and split testing. The key here is making enough test cases based on extracted information and capturing the resulting data to compare and implement the best possible solution.

Are you following these principles to get more out of your web analytics system? If not, what's your approach to use your favorite web analytics software? Have you ever used split testing for optimizing purposes?

5 Ways To Get More Out of Linux

2012-02-23T15:47:00.001+05:30

There are millions of Linux users across the world and large numbers of them are using it as a desktop operating system for everyday use. Linux is also widely used on web servers as well as for mission critical customized computer systems. If you're a Linux user and want to leverage this powerful operating system to the fullest, here are some tips to tame the beast.

Master shell scripting - Sometimes fairly complex tasks can be done very easily through simple shell scripts. You don't need to be an expert in shell scripting, but working knowledge of the same can save your hours on a Linux system. There are many free online resources that can teach you shell scripting for free.

Learn configuring KDE & GNOME - If you're using Linux as a desktop, you must be using either KDE or GNOME as your preferred desktop graphical environment. You must learn to configure and customize these graphical systems to get the desired look and feel. Adding drivers and peripheral devices through graphical environment must be mastered to completely utilize the available resources.

Master user management & security controls - If your Linux system is shared by many users or it's a part of a small LAN network at home, you must learn the strong and secure user management system including routine administrative tasks like disk quota allocation and privilege allocation. Linux's access control matrix is extremely strong and understanding it correctly is a must for every Linux user.

Use popular open-source programs - Linux itself is open source and it is equally complemented with other open source applications used for various daily tasks. Whether it's a web browser, chat messenger or a photo editing application, almost every such application is available for Linux platform which are free as well as open source. You can find complete bundle of such desktop applications for easy installation.

Try different Linux distributions - There are several popular Linux flavors that offer customized desktop systems for general users. Depending on your requirement you can try and can adopt your favorite distribution. Some of the popular Linux distributions are Red Hat, Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE. I've found Ubuntu and openSUSE fairly easy to install and configure. These two distributions are ideal for general users.

How To Monitor And Control Your Internet Privacy

2012-02-22T08:43:00.001+05:30

While we are surfing the internet, there are several scripts and other similar entities tracking our activities and fetching our data pushing back to the companies who implement these monitoring and data collection scripts. Generally, an average user is unaware of these invisible eyes and continues to browse without any concern. However, if you regularly do sensitive work requiring great deal of privacy, you must consider a reliable and easily implementable solution to monitor these tracker scripts.

Ghostery is a free and powerful tool for monitoring and blocking online data collectors. It is an ideal solution to protect your internet privacy thus increasing the web security you deserve. There are several Google privacy tools that enable you to control how much data you share from within your Google account. An average user may not be aware, but there are hundreds of data collecting services that fetch your information not only from your various online accounts, but also pull important information from your local storage on PC.

To combat that you can install this excellent add-on for your favorite browser to tighten your web security. It is available for Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari and iOS. Ghostery monitors over 600 data collection services and can selectively block their scripts as per your requirements.

It maintains a detailed inventory of well-known advertising networks, web analytics services and popular data collecting companies. You can see a detailed analysis of each of these services including links to their privacy policies and what data they're collecting. Whenever you visit any web page, Ghostery can show you all the active tracker scripts and other web elements that may fetch some information from your accounts or from your local storage. Simply click the right mouse button and you'll get the handy context menu to enable or disable data collection for a particular tracker script.

You can also detect and disable selective iframes and img tags on a given web page that may contain malicious scripts. Installing this add-on doesn't slow down your browser and it works seamlessly in the background until you explicitly invoke it to do the data crunching. I've tested it on Firefox and Google Chrome and found no issues or problems.

Google+ Introduces Revamped Circles And Follow Suggestions

2012-02-21T09:00:00.000+05:30

Since the launch of Google+, almost every month something new is added to this promising social network. If you're on Google+, you must be familiar with circles - one of the most intuitive ways to manage friends on a social network. Recently Google+ has introduced two changes that greatly impact the growth rate of the network as well as the engagement level as a whole. Let's see what these changes are and how to make most out of it.

New circle layout with extra options - The team at Google+ has introduced some major changes in the layout of the Google+ circles tab adding some more options for better friends' management. This includes handy sidebar section populated with multiple options of importing your contacts from different email services. Earlier these options were aligned on top of the circles and their visibility was pretty much hindered by the group of circles right below the links. Now they are much more prominent and are easily detectable. This is a clever ploy to gather more users from rival networks.

You can also find users to befriend in 3 different ways. The default option is 'Relevance' that presents you with like-minded or closely connected (in extended circles or in your GMail contact list) users. What I liked most in this revamped interface is the ability to increase and decrease the size of the circles in the list. This is very handy for users switching to smaller or larger size monitors each day.

Improved suggestions & easy befriending - Now there's an improved version of finding interesting people in different domains. These suggestions are based on your interests, current geolocation and your country. For each category, a group of select Google+ users are shown as suggestions to be befriended. The handy 'Add' button serves dual purpose in this case. First, it automatically creates a circle (if required) by that category name and secondly, all the suggestions in the list are automatically added to that circle in one go.

This new feature saves loads of time especially if you're searching for most active and known people in a particular niche/domain. The 'Add' button works as a toggle button to prevent accidental befriending. After adding a group of users, if you press it again, the circle created through this option is not deleted, but all the befriended users are automatically removed from the circle. Later, you can easily delete the empty circle very easily without having to worry about accidental unfollow of any friend.

Both of these latest additions to Google+ are aimed at inflating the user-base quickly in an easy way. Do take a plunge in these two new options and let me know how they worked for you.

Virtual Magnifying Glass - A Free And Powerful Magnifier For Desktops

2012-02-20T07:55:00.001+05:30

Almost every modern operating system comes with a default magnifier for assisting visually impaired, elders and of course web designers. A magnifier software simply presents the exploded view of any part of the screen. I've used Window's default magnifier and I must say it has limited capabilities. Fortunately, there's a free and extremely powerful solution that equips you with some advanced features topped with regular magnifying function.

Virtual Magnifying Glass is an open source and free magnifying software for Windows, Mac OS X and popular Unix/Linux flavors. I've thoroughly tested it on Windows XP and Red Hat Linux and found it extremely useful piece of software from web designer's perspective. Here are some of its handy features.

Multi-monitor support - If you've set up multiple monitors at your place, this software supports it out-of-the-box. There are no complex configuration procedures and you can use it seamlessly over all monitors with ease.

Large magnifying power - Unlike limited magnifying power of default magnifiers bundled with operating systems, this software can explode a screen to up to 32 times from the original scale. This is extremely useful for very large monitors involving graphic intensive work.

In-built color picker - Now this is a web developer's paradise. With this much of magnifying power and the ability to pick colors from individual pixels makes it an extremely useful tool. You can copy a pixel's RGB value in both decimal and hexadecimal formats through this amazing software.

Variable magnifier size - The default Windows magnifier has a fixed magnifying box with no possible customization. But with Virtual Magnifying Glass, you can easily increase or decrease the height and width of the magnifier as per your requirements.

Dynamic mode - This is a unique feature that only exists in this software. You can switch on the dynamic mode which allows you to do the regular editing functions right under the magnified portion of the desktop. This is an extremely useful feature for web and image designers.

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.