Review Of Web

How to convert from Excel to PDF and set the print area in Excel 2010?

Ankur — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:01:50 +0000

Seemingly a simple task but sometimes we get lost in the umpteen options present in Excel 2010. Here is a video on how to set the page break and print area in MS Excel 2010 and convert it to PDF format.

Created this video using Techsmith Camtasia. This is also my first experiment producing HD Quality video content for web. Next, I am going to write an article on how to set options in Camtasia to get HD quality for videos yet keep the file size under control.

How to convert from Excel to PDF and set the print area in Excel 2010? is a post from ReviewOfWeb

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8 Important Steps to note while moving webhost

Ankur — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:03:10 +0000

As some of you may be aware I had recently shifted one of my big sites from dreamhost to hostgator. Moving webhosts is always a painful process, I have jotted some points below from my experience which may help you move from one webhost to another in a seamless manner.

First things first – Change TTL for your domain to some very low value ( at least 2-3 days before moving) so that DNS propagation could be very fast.
Some people suggest to add the new name servers at #2, #3 priority to your older webhost name servers panel.
Create a new database at the new webhost and assign a user to it. It’s always a good idea to use a fresh database for a given site.
Make sure to update the MX records in your new web panel. This is important otherwise your domain specific emails won’t work.
If your host is hostgator and you use Google Apps, make sure to ask hostgator to open various ports. For security sake, many ports on Hostgator are either completely blocked or are only available for outbound emails. You can use a query on SSH telnet mail.authsmtp.com 26 to check for example whether the port 26 is open for mail.authsmtp.com. Similarly telnet pop.gmail.com 9595 to check port 9595.
Configure various cron jobs you may have created earlier.
Change the database info on your config.php files. I had to change at 3 locations dap-config.php, osticket and wp-config.php
Make sure your DNS settings looks the same as they were with your earlier webhost.

Bonus: Here are some commonly used port numbers available for Hostgator

What other precautions/tips would you suggest while moving webhosts?

8 Important Steps to note while moving webhost is a post from ReviewOfWeb

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Hostgator Webhosting Review and Bonus

Ankur — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 14:56:22 +0000

I have mentioned in one of my earlier posts about the 3 reasons I love hostgator. The post generated a good interest so here goes my in-depth review of Hostgator from shared web hosting point of view (not for VPS or dedicated servers though I have heard good words about them too)

Choosing between various plans on Hostgator

There are 3 shared hosting plans available on Hostgator. Hatchling, Baby and Business. All others parameters being same, Hatchling plan will only allow 1 domain to be hosted with Hostgator while Baby and Business plans will allow an unlimited number of domains. Business plan has an added advantage that you get a unique IP address for your website along with a free SSL certificate from Comodo.

Shared webservers are notorious for hosting “borderline illegal” websites. This may result in your website getting flagged by ISPs for no fault of yours. Having a unique IP address for your website would therefore be safer. Tip: Hostgator mentions that they provide a unique IP for $2/month for Baby accounts. Under new Hostgator terms, however, you need to remember that this will only be given out when you purchase it along with a SSL certificate. Hence, if you wish to get a unique IP for your website I suggest you to go with Business plan straightaway.

Hostgator’s Sign Up Process

It’s a zero hassle process. You would need to supply a domain name that becomes your primary domain name. (You can change this primary domain later). To make sure that you are the real owner of a genuine credit card, they may ask you some verification questions after the payment is made. Make sure you don’t store or host anything illegal on Hostgator servers. They are quick to remove such sites. In fact this is good for honest site owners like us, who don’t have to fear about their shared server IP address getting flagged by various internet service providers(ISPs).

Start a new site or transfer an already existing site

Once you’ve signed up with them, you can either start a new site or transfer an existing site from some other webhost. One website transfer is provided free of cost. Make sure to avail this facility within 30 days of opening a new account with them. I used this service for myself while I transferred my site from DreamHost to Hostgator and it was a real quick process. You just need to supply them with your FTP id of both the accounts (and leave any instructions) on this form

Customer Support

One of the best customer support I have seen in the web hosting industry. When a company cares for its customers it shows. At any given time you can find there would be more than 50 customer support specialists helping customers on LIVE chat support. It normally take 1-2 min to get connected to a real person and get polite and really helpful responses. Customer care folks do know what they are doing.

Strong Servers

With Dreamhost, my wordpress sites started generating all sort of errors and time outs at around 2000 page views/day mark. With Hostgator, I am comfortably sitting at around 4000 page views/day with no signs of errors and control panel looking as healthy as ever.

While Hostgator provides unlimited bandwith and storage for your servers, you need to take care that number of concurrent running processes should not go beyond 25 and CPU, Memory usage stays within 25%.

Bonus Offer for ReviewOfWeb Readers

We have partnered with Hostgator and are thus providing a super high bonus worth $600 if you sign up through this step-by-step process.

Hostgator Webhosting Review and Bonus is a post from ReviewOfWeb

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Best Cover and Stylus for iPad 2

Ankur — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:10:00 +0000

There is no dearth of options available for iPad covers and styluses. I searched for long on the web and various online portals and finally zeroed-in on these two. (Since I’m in India and these products were not available here, I got them through a US based friend travelling to India.)

splash SIGNATURE Folio case – Covers for iPad normally fall in two categories. Either they would be functional OR they would be beautiful (yes it’s a subjective term). It would be hard to find one that looks great on your beautiful iPad yet is great on functionality. This cover satisfied both these criteria. It looks great, has iPad sleep on-off mode, keeps my iPad firmly protected and also comes with 3 resting angles.

AluPen as a stylus – Purchased AluPen after reading this article by labnol. A leather cover for stylus was also included with the package.

Additionally I also purchased a Screen Protector Film by ACase . This was purchased mainly due to the positive reviews on Amazon.

You may also want to read 10 points To Know Before Starting with iPad 2

Best Cover and Stylus for iPad 2 is a post from ReviewOfWeb

You can read this post on our website at Best Cover and Stylus for iPad 2

10 points you SHOULD know when starting with Apple iPad 2

Ankur — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:51:47 +0000

Recently purchased my 32 GB 3G iPad 2. Here are some random yet important points coming from my personal experience. I thought they may benefit the first time owners of an iPad.

iPad seems delicate. You won’t like to press it hard or the screen may break. The first time I touched this device this is what I felt. Well, don’t worry. I have played some high-action screen rubbing games on it and my iPad is still alive.
It would look like the innocuous looking connection cable doesn’t want to go inside the slot. Just try harder and with the minus sign on top and you should be successful. You will feel the same while pulling out.
Your windows machine should have iTunes version greater than 10 or in case you’re on Mac it should be running OS X 10.5.8
You are inside an app and want to go back one screen, you won’t be able to do that. You need to go to the home screen and start all over again. (Remember: iPad is a NOT a mini laptop. Heart of an iPad is apps and you can find them in huge numbers in the App store.)
Pulling out the iPad cable may be a pain at first. You may need to force pull it out for first few times till the time the metal gets “used” to it.
By default the small button (above volume slider) on the right side is configured to mute sound. You can configure it to Lock rotation (from Settings > General > Use Slide Switch To) I prefer this option especially while reading ebooks. iPad seems to be sensitive to movement and would quickly orient in various directions.
There are around 10 screen available to scroll where you can place those little icons(apps). If you wish to shift an icon from one screen to another screen here is what you can do -
1. Keep pressing an icon for about 3-4 sec when all icons will start to wobble.
2. Drag your chosen icon to the bar at bottom (The app placed in the bottom bar are available from all screens)
3. Scroll to the required screen and move the icon.
4. To stop wobbling just press the home button.
5. (Bonus tip: While in wobbling mode, you can press the little x sign and the app will be deleted forever from your iPad.)
Download the beautiful iBooks app by Apple. It will help you read “Books” as well as “PDFs”. Apple chose to call eBooks downloaded from its store as Books while all others as PDFs. Don’t ask me why.
Important Note: While registering on iTunes, register yourself as a user from US and not from any other country. For some reason, Apple doesn’t provide access to ALL the free apps for users outside US.
Want to configure Gmail on iPad? Follow the steps here. You may also wish to import/sync contacts from your Gmail account to iPad – follow this article.

In the next few articles, I will share some useful iPad apps, iPad cover and the stylus I have bought for my iPad.

10 points you SHOULD know when starting with Apple iPad 2 is a post from ReviewOfWeb

You can read this post on our website at 10 points you SHOULD know when starting with Apple iPad 2

Review: Spinner Chief

Ankur — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 11:07:55 +0000

In our quest to review some of the best SEO software, today we are going to review a market leader in spinning software niche – Spinner Chief. Spinning software are software that can take your article and can make auto-variations of it so that articles would look unique to search engines. You may find this creepy but believe me even the biggest SEO agencies out there would do this job when aiming for high positions in Search Engines. As with any other SEO software try not to over-do. Your aim should be to take help from such software to create unique high quality articles fast and effortlessly.

Spinner Chief download is around 13 MB in size and is available as a zip file. Once downloaded, make sure to extract the contents in a new folder. Hit SpinnerChief.exe and you’re good to go. Yes, unlike other windows application there is no install routine for SpinnerChief, it is available as a portable application that works out-of-the-box by hitting the exe file.

The first window will prompt you to run the software in free mode or paid mode. (In either case you would need to register with SpinnerChief, as they will approve your email id for further usage of the software)

As soon as you hit OK button, you will get a prompt asking you to Load a project, Create a new project OR Launch program directly. The first two options are available for pro versions. Since we already have our email approved, we will create a new project.

For our review purpose we will spin a review article on WPSubscribers that we have published on our blog earlier. All new projects are saved in ‘project’ folder by default. This project folder can be found inside ‘spinnerchief’ folder. All project files are saved with .prj extension.

You can then choose one of the thesaurus files. Cloud Thesaurus and Miracle Thesaurus are available with Pro/Elite versions. (They can be purchased as a standalone add-in). We’ll go ahead and load the default thesaurus file. (I would strongly advise to get Cloud Thesaurus since this is a user built thesaurus which is ever increasing in size. You may find better synonyms here compared to the default thesaurus file.)

On the next window – by default – you will see the introduction tab. Click on the ‘Software’ tab. This is the heart of SpinnerChief where you will find all SpinnerChief features. On the first glance the interface looks a bit crowded to me. The project that we have just created can be seen in the top left side box. Right click on the project name and you will be able to create a new article or import article(s). We ‘ll import an article from the text file.

As with any other new software, it may take some time to learn the features present here. It would help if Spinner Chief developers can put a simple hover-help-text over various labels present in menus so that users can immediately understand the usage.

There are various –basic and advanced- ways using which you can spin an article using Spinner Chief. If you’re quality conscious you may want to spin word by word. In that case you need to highlight (or double click) a particular word in the top pane and Spinner Chief will show you the related synonyms in the bottom pane. Just click on the relevant words and they will be added in the top pane with spin syntax as shown in the screenshot below.
Keep on pressing Ctrl-Alt and Spinner Chief will move you to the next word in your article where you can repeat the same actions.

Note that when synonyms are added the original words would appear as green while added synonyms appear red in colour.

To get the spun articles, you need to click on Spin button at the top. You will get a window with various settings. Enter the number of articles you want to get and unselect “Select Synonyms for other word automatically“. Hit the Spin button at the bottom and Spinner Chief will render 10 articles with synonyms you have identified above. This method will produce the best quality articles but may be time consuming if you have to spin a large number of articles.
[Under Pro settings below there is a setting called 'Integrate CH features'. CH is a short for 'Content Hurricane'. This is another software by Spinner Chief team which promises to create any article unique with a single click. It actually converts characters/words in your articles to special characters so that though the article will look unique to a search engine but it would appear the same in the eyes of reader. You may use this technique while submitting articles to blog networks. Such articles won't work with article directories though.]

Spinner Chief provides another method whereby it can identify all words that have potential to be replaced by a synonym and then auto-spin those articles – all within a few clicks. However If you use the default settings of Spinner Chief, your article may not be of high quality.

We will try to modify some settings so that we can get high quality articles quickly. A navigation that you will find yourself using quite often is Operations > Identify Synonyms. As soon as you click this option, Spinner Chief will identify all words and phrases that have a potential to be replaced by a synonym. All such words and phrases will appear as blue underlined text.

We will click on Spin menu option on the top and will again get the window we have already seen in the first method. This time change Auto-Spin frequency to 4 (default is 1). Auto-Spin frequency of 1 will replace every single word of the article while Auto-Spin frequency of 4 will replace every 4th word of an article with a synonym.
Replacing every word will make your article unique but in all probability it will be a garbage. An auto spin frequency of 4 will ensure that your article will be unique in the eyes of search engines (and copyscape) yet retain complete sense. [Tip: To pass Copyscape you should always have every 4th word different since Copyscape searches for similarity in groups of 3 words. ]

All rendered articles will pop-up in another window. There is a cool Check by Copyscape (encircled below) functionality integrated within Spinner Chief whereby if you have a pro account with Copyscape you can check the uniqueness of your rendered articles right within Spinner Chief’s interface. SC is also coming up with its own duplicate copy checker.

There is another great feature that can be seen on this window. Calculate similarity among spun article(s). This feature provides the uniqueness percentage among the articles you have spun. It is advisable to have not more than 50% similarity between the articles you spin.

Often you will have some words that you may want to protect (or don’t wish to spin). To do so, just select the word, go to Operations and hit ‘Protect selected text’. [Here I would prefer if we have a separate file where we can maintain our protected words across projects]

There are some Advanced Functions available for Pro/Elite versions where you can scrape articles from various article directories, spin content protecting HTML tags, count keyword density and submit articles to article directories from right within Spinner Chief’s interface.

Spinner Chief provides various add-ons which are available as a separate purchase. With Elite version you get a Suggest Keyword(SK) and Tips add-on integrated within it. SK add-on looks at the top 10 Google search results for your keywords, compares these keywords to each other, and then tells you the keywords that ALL the top 10 pages use in their content. Tips add-on will help you produce unique Tips article quickly. (Example of a tips article – “5 innovative ways to use Google search”)

Final Words

Spinner Chief looks like a winner in its niche. Henceforth spinning articles will no more be about garbage content. You can now spin already produced articles yet maintain high quality. With Spinner Chief team being active on its development this software is a must have if you’re a webmaster or an SEO agency.

The software is available in 5 versions. Standard, Professional, Cloud Thesaurus, Professional + Cloud Thesaurus and Elite version. While standard version is free, elite version will cost $197 one time fee and the rest versions are in between these two price points. Check the differences between these versions on the Order Page.

Review: Spinner Chief is a post from ReviewOfWeb

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ShareASale all set to start direct deposit for Indian affiliates

Ankur — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:04:57 +0000

Amidst all the bad news with PayPal and sites like oDesk that were restricting Indian account holders for certain transactions/cards, here is a good news for all Indian account holders maintaining ShareASale affiliate account.

With effect from Oct 20th, 2011 ShareASale will start Direct Deposit services to India and this will service will be provided free of cost.

You can set up your ShareASale Direct Deposit account info here.

ShareASale all set to start direct deposit for Indian affiliates is a post from ReviewOfWeb

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WPSubscribers – A wp plugin to create an email list on steroids

Ankur — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:06:12 +0000

Creating an email list has become a backbone for any internet based business today. You may hate the pop-ups that would flash on a website but the reality is that – and almost all webmasters would agree to it – opt-in pop ups are the fastest way to increase email subscribers.

WPSubscribers is one such promising pop-up opt-in plugin available in wordpress arena which is subject of our review today.

Installation and Activation

The plugin is available as a zip file which is around 8.5MB in size. You won’t be able to install the plugin via Upload feature present in your wordpress dashboard. You would need to upload the plugin manually to your plugins directory wp-content/plugins/via FTP. It took us around 10 mins to upload this plugin due to the size.

Once uploaded, you should install and activate the plugin. In case you have purchased unlimited license version you just need to enter the email and login id number in your wordpress dashboard but in case you have purchased a 3 website license version, you would need to additionally enter the URLs in your WPSubscribers Member’s Area.

After you activate the plugin, make sure to go to WPSubscribers under your wordpress dashboard, 1) enter your html opt-in code in the Code Detector and save the changes and 2) Go to Create Optin Forms and hit Save Changes. These are some important steps. If you just activate the plugin thinking that you may come later to add the opt-in code, you may find that your theme look-and-feel has gone for a toss!

Setting and Configuration

As soon as you activate the plugin, WPSubscribers settings widget can be seen in your wordpress dashboard. WPSuscribers provides a host of options when it comes to setting up an opt-in code or creating an opt-in form. I suggest you to go through the extensive tutorials on WP subscribers website.

Setup Opt-in Code

Under Setup Opt-in code –> Code Detector, you can put code from any of the email providers out there – be it Aweber, Feedburner email, Mailchimp etc. WPSubscribers will extract the form action URL, name, email and hidden fields for you, so that you need not squint your eyes digging the huge opt-in code provided by these email list providers. We added the email code that feedburner provides and within a jiffy this tool extracted the ‘form action URL’ and various ‘hidden fields’. You can add multiple opt-in codes and each opt-in code will have an id associated with it. The first opt-in will have an id of 0 and this will increase as you add more codes.

By default it provides name field and email field. You can however customize this to your liking and put additional fields to your opt-in form.

Create Opt-in Forms

Under this section, you can create different types of pop-ups or opt-in forms depending upon your requirement.

There are 3 types of opt-in pop-ups available -

Generic Opt-in Popup
Exit Popup: Those annoying Javascript pop-ups you see on some websites – one that won’t allow you to leave unless you take some action. A BIG no for me.
HTML Exit popup: Similar to Exit popup but it supports HTML, images and videos too.

If you don’t like pop-ups at all, you can create simple opt-in forms that can be placed on various parts of your blog. You can create 4 types of forms -

Post Opt-in form: Opt-in form that can be placed on top/bottom of your posts.
Footer Opt-in form: Opt-in form that can be placed on the footer of your blog.
Header Opt-in form: Opt-in form that can be placed on the top of your blog.
Custom Opt-in form: A custom opt-in form that can be placed anywhere depending upon your requirement.

For this demo, we will create an opt-in popup.

Under “Create Opt-in forms” as shown in the image above, go to Create Opt-in popup tab. Enable the Opt-in pop up by ticking the checkbox. Click on Create New Popup. On this step you can choose your pop-up design from 12 good looking templates. You can also choose the color of popup forms. There are 8 colors available.

If you’re still not satisfied you can select a Custom pop-up style where you can include your own images and videos. Full marks to WPSubscribers in this area.

Now hit ‘Save Changes’ to edit the template for your liking. We would like to see a couple of improvements here. There should be a method to change the height and width of templates without writing our own CSS. Also, we should be able to see the preview within the wordpress dashboard itself.

As they say Beauty is in the details, the team at WPSubscribers has left no stone un-turned to make your form look good. If you click on the image button shown above, you will get various setting to customize the image present in the opt-in form. You can even choose to put different images for ‘mouse over’ and ‘mouse out’ actions.

Hit ‘Save Changes’ and proceed to Configure Display location for the opt-in. Display location is completely customizable where you can choose to display/ not display the pop-up based on category/pages/archives/search pages.

If you have created multiple pop-ups and all are enabled, they will be rotated. Nice thought!

WPSubscribers may want to have radio buttons instead of check boxes here. it won’t make much sense (unless I am missing something!) if we check the boxes for both ‘display pop-up’ and ‘don’t display pop-up’.

They have also provided Opt-in Analytics where you can view number of times when the opt-in appeared and number of times when it was submitted.

Facebook Opt-in

Facebook has more than 800 million active users. It makes complete sense to integrate Facebook in your opt-in form. Check this tutorial to integrate Facebook. Among others, you have various settings to redirect a user to another URL after login or post a message to user’s wall.

Referral Opt-in

With referral opt-in you can provide incentives to your readers for referring their friends. It’s like an affiliate system built within a popup-form.

Other Opt-in forms

You can make your readers automatically opt-in using various forms present under this heading. An opt-in form can be placed below the comment box and can even be hidden-and-checked to force user to opt-in to your list.

You can also force your readers to opt-in by enabling opt-in on hidden content. The idea is simple. You would hide a piece of content from normal visitors and would instead have a piece of text like “Subscribe to view this content”. If they want to view that piece they should subscribe to your list.

Other Settings

This is important if you are going for pop-ups. Once you have set up your pop-up form, make sure to visit this section and customize pop-up timing to your liking. I personally I don’t like a pop-up as soon as I visit the site. I have configured ReviewOfWeb’s pop-up to appear at 5000ms (5th second after the page loads).

I am sure you have seen the demo on this blog when you visited this post. (In case you’re reading this article in an RSS feed/email make sure to visit the home page to see this plugin in action)

Final Thoughts

An excellent opt-in plugin with mindboggling options. I like the fact that author has put considerable thought and explored the needs of webmasters while designing this plugin. I am yet to see a plugin that will provide you such a vast variety of options and customizations, yet it remains easy for a new user. In case you don’t like the pop-ups, you can always use this plugin to place opt-in form on different places on your blog without annoying the reader.

As of writing this article the plugin costs $47 for 3 sites license and $97 for unlimited sites license. You can buy it here!

WPSubscribers – A wp plugin to create an email list on steroids is a post from ReviewOfWeb

You can read this post on our website at WPSubscribers – A wp plugin to create an email list on steroids

Download StepShot for Free within the next 24 hrs

Ankur — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 09:48:52 +0000

ShotSolutions in colloboration with GiveAwayOfTheDay team is offering StepShot for free for those who choose to download it within the next 24 hrs. StepShot is powerful documentation tool that can help you create manuals quickly by just recording the steps.

To start creating a user guide just hit the Screen record button and Stepshot will record the snapshot of your screen/application for each mouse click.

You can then edit the screenshots, annotate them, crop them and perform variety of tasks. If StepShot has added more than required screenshots you can delete them with a single click. While there are up-downb arrows to arrange the screenshots, we would want to see a feature whereby we can drag-and-drop the screenshots to arrange steps. The image editor should also have an option to blur the confidential info that may be contained in the document.

To give your document a pro look, you can insert your company’s logo which will automatically be embedded in the first page of the document created by StepShot.

Once you’re done creating the document, you can share it with DropBox/FTP. The document created with StepShot can be exported in wide variety of formats such as PDF, RTF, HTML, XLS, MHT, JPG. We like the fact they have provided an option to export it in RTF format. This will allow you to open the doc in MS word where you can insert additional info.

Get this tool while supply lasts!

Download StepShot for Free within the next 24 hrs is a post from ReviewOfWeb

You can read this post on our website at Download StepShot for Free within the next 24 hrs

If you have more than one wordpress blog, you’d love this

Ankur — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:14:16 +0000

A great service offered by the folks at ManageWP. You can manage all your sites, clone a site, take backups of your sites all under a single dashboard. Check our video review below.

If you have more than one wordpress blog, you’d love this is a post from ReviewOfWeb

You can read this post on our website at If you have more than one wordpress blog, you’d love this