Itâ€s really easy to argue which torrent site is the best since everyone has their own opinion. I will be talking about statistically rated torrent sites. When using such websites, try to protect yourself from hackers or malicious spy-ware. Use a great VPN to help with keeping your identity secure when file sharing.

Kickass.to

The site has suffered from domain name changes but has been able to keep itself up. Kickass was founded in 2009 and since then has been slowly on the rise. What makes this website stand out a little more than the others is its great user interface and visual attraction. Kickass is also available in a total of 30 languages with millions of torrent downloads worldwide.

Alexa Rank Global = 140

ThePirateBay

ThePirateBay has had a few issues lately with it shutting down and recently coming back up. It is still widely known and one of the greatest of all time. The website was created by Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, and Gottfrid Svartholm in Sweden in 2003. The servers support SSL encryption in response to the new wiretapping law in Sweden.

Alexa Rank Global = 223

Torrentz

This site doesnâ€t host torrent magnet links itself. What it does is redirect users to other places on the web to find what they came looking for. It acts a middle man for torrents instead of allowing itself to be blamed for illegal user uploaded content. It runs using a powerful Metasearch engine created by flippy in 2003

Alexa Rank Global = 226

Extratorrent

Extratorrent has been having great success in little time.  It has risen all the way to 4^th place on statistic charts. This fame has also caught the eye of the MPAA or the Motion Pictures of America. This recent event has caused them to switch their domain name from .com to .cc.

Alexa Rank Global = 358

EZTV

This website is dedicated to TV torrent distribution and was founded in 2005. EZTV prides itself on its totally free user friendly website. It has quickly become a popular destination for torrent users all over the world. Torrenting movies and copy written TV shows is illegal, so do this at your own risk.

Alexa Rank USA = 6,003

The torrent sites I spoke about are statistically the top pages; however everyone has a personal preference when using such things. I hope you can find a home with one of these communities and help them grow if you havenâ€t already.  Have fun, stay safe, and remember to keep your identity to yourself.

Have you ever wondered about what would be the most 5 popular torrent site of 2007? Guess what, here we have the list of torrents that made into top five position based on popularity this year.

Last year I compiled the list of popular torrents based on the few selection parameters. This year I have decided to put most top 5 list based on popularity.

The selections criteria are based on following parameter. The main factor of popularity was based on the traffic site receives (Alexa Ranking has been used to determine it). The second factor for popularity was number of sites that are linking in (Yahoo inbound links has been used to determine it). Also average number of peers has been taken into consideration for tracker sites that made into the list.

1.MiniNova.org [A ~ 60 | Y ~ 2.73M | P ~ 16M]

Mininova has been simply the best of torrent sites for year. Mininova has crossed its one million torrents listing and three billion torrents download this year. In addition to indexing, Mininova has its own tracker also. Mininova tops our popular torrent sites list this year as usual.

2. IsoHunt.com [A ~160 | Y ~ 2.83M | P ~ 15M]

IsoHunt is a popular torrent index and torrent search engine. IsoHunt is one among the few sites that withstood the legal battle on piracy even though it had to take away it own torrent tracking service TorrentBox from US. IsoHunt uses tracker cross-referencing that enables to track across identical trackers across other tracker sites.

3. ThePirateBay.org [A ~ 165 | Y ~ 2.83M | P ~ 8 M]

ThePirateBay is one of the worldâ€s largest torrent trackers. ThePirateBay also gives clutter free interface for the user. TPB has its own tracker for its torrent index and has top listing of torrents etc. ThePirateBay also has released it own browser toolbar. This is one of my personal favorite all time.

4. TorrentZ.com [A ~ 197 | Y ~ 2.64M]

TorrentZ has a powerful and advanced search engine that enables you to search for the filenames rather than torrents. TorrentZ is only site that makes into list without featuring its own tracker. TorrentZ only indexes torrents available on another trackers. Another plus point is TorrentZ is ads free!

5.BTJunkie.org [A ~ 580 | Y ~ 1.67M | P ~ 3M]

BTJunkie is one among the largest and more advanced torrent search engines. BTJunkie crawler indexes both the public and private torrents, which put together gives a most comprehensive torrents listing. BTJunkie also know for indexing most number of torrents in total.

Statistics

A – Alexa Rank
Y – Yahoo InLinks
P – Average Number of Peers
Also checkout the Alexa traffic for page views for these torrent sites for year of 2007.

This year special mention goes to Demonoid and TorrentSpy. Both of them were doing exceptionally well during last year. Demonoid remained to be a largest private tracker site. Demonoid was completely bought down couple of months back. In TorrentSpy case, they index is still active but the search feature has been disable for US visitors due to the piracy issue.Altogether this year was full of battles on piracy. You can read more information on torrents at TorrentFreak.

Let me ask you this question. Have you ever used torrents? Do you think they are against piracy?

Update 12/29 : TorrentFreak has listed it top popular torrent sites

Stixy provides a new free-form approach to collaborate most of the day to date contents online with your friends, colleagues and family. Along with collaboration Stixy also provides online file sharing.

Stixy provides a new free-form approach to collaborate most of the day to date contents online with your friends, colleagues and family. Along with collaboration Stixy also provides online file sharing.

Stixy is an online bulletin board application that features Stixyboard, a free-form drag ‘n drop bulletin board. Stixyboard is highly flexible and shareable web bulletin boards. You can invite more users to collaborate on your Stixyboard.

Stixyboard can be effectively used for multipurpose like creating a to-do list, planner, calendar, sharing photo album, sharing files and notes. These boards created can be utilized for individual or group purpose.

Stixyboard Screen shot

Key Advantages

• Easy to use, this application can be operated easily by any level of computer user.
• Very rich GUI, the user interface is really amazing.
• Stixyboard can be either private or public (with or w/o authentication)
• There is no limitation of Stixyboard currently that means you can share huge volume of files with your friends. They have only 10 MB per file limit on files.

Setbacks

• No full screen support. For any rich Internet application full screen mode is required for desktop like operation.
• Question on scalability: Iâ€m sure they much have designed the application with scalability in mind but there was a little question during my test initially. The application didnâ€t respond and lost data when I was trying to collaborate a Stixyboard from two different systems at the same time.

Improvements

Stixy would have a huge success if they can create a rich application for everyoneâ€s daily use. I inferred following points would add more values to the Stixy, which is currently in beta.

• Stixy can support more content types including video and music.
• Stixy need to have a web-based drop zone to drop the files that need to be added to the Stixyboard.
• Stixy would need a preview tool for viewing documents, playing music and videos etc. Just for the shake of previewing a Stixyboard I wonâ€t prefer to download the entire content to my local.
• Stixy need to collaborate with other online services to create more sophisticated and rich application. My personal favorite would be adding Picnik for image editing.
• Stixy also need to syndicate the Stixyboard update so that users can keep track of their related Stixyboard.

Bottom-line, Stixy is currently in beta; I expect more functionality to be added to Stixy in near future to make it rich Internet application.

Have you tried Stixy? If so what is your feedback?

CatalystWeb features small business software known as Catalyst Office on web. CatalystOffice is an integrated suite of productivity software such as email, document sharing calendar, task, contact etc.; Catalyst Office is a web application that gives you desktop like feel.

CatalystWeb has been officially launched a week back; you can catch more release and background information about CatalystOffice at Catalyst launch blog. Catalyst Office has been designed not to include the drawbacks of popular office application such has Microsoft Outlook.

Bob Mathew, CEO of CatalystWeb has been working on this small business software for last 3 year to overcome his frustration experienced with Microsoft product in his former company. Bob Mathew is the first CEO who gave his cell phone number to the user.

Features

Catalyst Office provides more sophisticated features that included corporate wide instant messaging and others mentioned below.

• Corporate Email; access to the company wide email.
• Document Management; manage your documents with easy permission settings.
• Calendar; share your calendar across the company and find other calendar features.
• Contact Management; manage youâ€re contact list and easy import / export.
• Task; easily set the tasks and reminder.
• Notes; user it just like a Jot pad.
• Journa; easy to journal your entries.

Key Advantages

1. CatalystOffice provides very-very simple to use administrative panel. You really donâ€t have to hire an administrator.
2. The user interface is simple and well designed. Anyone who previously used Outlook can quickly run through it.
3. CatalystOffice can be accessed from anywhere via browser. You donâ€t have to pay for individual licenses. Just have to pay only for the space. No extra penny for processor and memory.
4. CatalystOffice is hosted at CatalystWeb server, which has scheduled daily backups and 24/7 monitoring for technical issues.
5. There are much more functionality associated with CatalystOffice as well like user profiles, email template and so on.

Setbacks

1. CatalystWeb works only with Firefox 2 and Windows XP / VISTA which is great drawback when it comes to Web platform.
2. No support for customizable domains. The application can only be hosted at CatalystWeb server.

Bottom-line, CatalystOffice suits pretty much the needs of every small entrepreneurial office that has much budget constraints. If you like to try CatalystOffice sign up for their 30-day full free trial today.

This is a sponsored post.

Handy Recovery is data recovery tool created by SoftLogica for recovering lost or deleted files under Windows platform. Handy Recovery comes in with nifty features for recovery and proves it is a worthy choice for data recovery.

Have you ever bothered to backup files? If not then Handy Recovery is a handy tool for you that helps you to recover accidentally deleted files. However, I personally encourage everyone to backup their important and sensitive data in timely manner.

There are plenty of tools available both freeware and commercial when it comes to file recovery. Handy Recovery stands out from most the rest just for ease of use. Earlier, file recovery can be done only by a computer expert. This has been proven wrong again by Handy Recovery, allowing any novice user to restore their files safely.

Key Features

• Support most of the Windows file system
• Very extensive scanning for deleted files
• Ability to create disk image for recovery
• Search option for deleted files
• Explorer style interface for ease navigation
• Preview for recoverable items
• Supports recovery from memory cards

Handy Recovery works great for most of the file recovery. Handy Recovery also provides you the probability of recovering data. In addition to cool features, Handy Recovery has also got Windows VISTA certified logo for its reliability.

Setbacks

Here are few drawbacks which I have observed so far with Handy Recovery.

• No support for Linux partitions
• Not a free ware

Bottom line, Handy Recovery would have been more attractive if it was provided as freeware. Handy Recovery is priced in the higher side and it costs 39$. But if youâ€re the one looking for an easy way to recover your deleted files go for Handy Recovery.

If you like to try Handy Recovery, you can download the trial version from their download page. The trial has limitation of one recovery per day; sometimes good things doesnâ€t comes for free 

Have anyone tried anything similar to Handy Recovery for file recovery? Share your views.

This is a sponsored post.

I wrote about ByteSwap a new online service. Now I have got a chance for an exclusive interview with Matt Brown founder of ByteSwap.

ByteSwap is an innovative way to organize your content, share your content with friends / community and search your content as well as shared content.

Tell us about ByteSwap from your perceptive?

Basically, ByteSwap is an easy-to-use tool for organizing and finding information. Think of it as a virtual file cabinet or a personal search engine. You can store links to web resources, files in any format, photos, organize your contacts and more. It’s information that’s relevant to you. Information related to your career, your hobbies, or just silly stuff you come across. And when you need to find it, you can. This isn’t always the case with a regular search engine. We’ve all found stuff using our favorite search engine, for example, and then not been able to find it again 6 months later. With ByteSwap – you file away stuff relevant to you and retrieve it easily when you need it.

This alone would be a powerful tool for many people but the real power of ByteSwap comes when users share information. We all have people we trust – people we’d ask when we’re looking for answers. These are friends, family and colleagues. They think like us, share the same interests, work in the same fields etc. ByteSwap lets you tap into their information as well. So when you’re searching, tapping into this trusted network of people is likely to result in highly relevant results. I should mention, ByteSwap users control access to each item they store, so you share only what you want to share and with only who you want to share it with.

Also as you search and store, ByteSwap will attempt to suggest content that might be of interest to you as well. This information might come from news sources, blogs or items other ByteSwap members have stored.

We at ByteSwap want you to “rethink the way you search.“

Why ByteSwap is a unique service?

I’m not aware of another service that can be such a one-stop-shop for organizing and finding relevant information.

How do you plan to monetize ByteSwap?

We offer very reasonable memberships and will supplement that with advertising revenue from non-paying members.

Anything else you would like to share?

Only that we want people to stay tuned as we have new features and functionality in the works that’ll make ByteSwap even more powerful and useful. Sign up today – it’s FREE!

Flickr is a great and best photo-sharing site, no second thoughts about it. But the inability Flickr to allow their users to brand their own photoset is notable. Flickr APIâ€s comes in handy for the rescue. Flickr tools built over Flickr API allow the user to brand their photo into their own site.

I have been using Gallery2 till now, since I wanted to brand my photos under my banner. But when you have bunch of photos trust me managing it with a self-hosted solution is a pain. That why I decided to move to hosted photo-sharing solution. Flickr sounded like the solution for me with plenty of flickr tools.

Here is the bunch of flickr tools that I discovered recently. If you are looking methods to brand your Flickr photos under your banner this list would be great help.

Flogr ( Demo | Download )

Flogr is a photoblog application that works great with Flickr. Flogr written on PHP over MySQL database and off course uses Flickr API. Flogr allows you to customize your template. It uses Slimbox implementation for slideshow. Flogr grabs EXIF data and comments from Flickr for each image. Moreover Flogr is easy to install and configure!

Satellite ( Demo | Download)

Satellite is a photo gallery application that allows you to use Flicks for hosting. The installation is simple; all you need is Flickr account, Flickr API key and a PHP supported host. Satellite uses MooTools framework and Slimbox implementation.

Chasr ( Demo | Download )

Chasr is another similar mini application that allows to display Flickr images in own website. Chasr is very simple implementation that allows you to customize it to you own theme. Chasr allows you to view / add comments to the images.

FlickrViewer ( Demo | Download )

FlickrViewer is a simple script written over SimpleViewer, which allows viewing Flickr photoset. SimpleViewer is a popular Flash app that allows to views self hosted photos. FlickrViewer needs Flickr API Key to read the images from you blog. This is simple flash gallery application.

Also if you like to integrate Flickr into your WordPress blog there are several plugins for it.

BTW, I have recently purchased Panasonic Lumix FZ50 camera and now Iâ€m thinking of creating new photoblog. If you guys have better suggestion for photoblog, please suggest me.

Are you running photoblog using Flickr? If not do you plan to do so?

Update:- Moses over WPThemesPlugin.com has listed all flickr related plugins used with WordPress.

Update (08/30) :- Ram over TeknoBites did a favour for me listing all the photoblog themes available for WordPress. Thank you gentleman.

A Wiki is a website which visitors can modify. Wikis are composed of web pages you can write on, enabling fast and easy collaboration

Why Wiki?

This is very commonly asked and answered question. But here is the few uses which I feel about a Wiki.

Educational: It can be used as instrumental tool for building knowledge management system. Wiki is also been used as Text books in few educational institutions.

Collaboration: It allows the project team to collaborate on any specific task / idea.

Documentation: It can be used for the documentation purpose of any project. Draft version of document can be developed greatly using Wiki features.

Personal: It can be used for personal note taking purpose and book marking.

Top 5 –

Here is the list of popular open source Wiki engines. This list is not complied in chronological order according to their popularity.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is most popular and holds the crown amongst the list. MediaWiki free web based software Wiki engine that was originally written for Wikipedia. MediaWiki is been adopted by several corporate and institutions as their internal knowledge management system. MediaWiki is written in PHP language and supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL RDBMS.

TWiki

TWiki is a flexible, powerful, secure, yet simple web-based collaboration platform. TWiki can be used to run a project development space, a document management system, a knowledge base or any other groupware tool on either an intranet or on the Internet. This Wiki is been mostly used by lot of enterprise including Yahoo and others. TWiki is written in PERL.

PmWiki

PmWiki is a free wiki-based system for collaborative creation and maintenance of websites. PmWiki pages look and act like normal web pages, except they can be edited or new pages can be added. Page editing can be left open to the public or restricted to small groups of authors. PmWiki works over text file and is written in PHP.

DokuWiki

DokuWiki is simple and lightweight Wiki engine. The administration option is very simple and comes with one click installation. DokuWiki is highly customizable with your current website theme. DokuWiki is written in PHP and works on small text file. DokuWiki is my personal favorite since it keeps everything simple!

MoinMoinWiki

MoinMoinWiki is a web application for making large database of knowledge basing. It produces nice structured information with feature of expansion information in cooperation manner with appropriate use it is power full content database. Alternatively, desktop edition of the Wiki is also available. It uses flat file for storing the information.

Here is the list of few other open source Wiki engines which is worth giving a try.

• PhpWiki
• TiwiKiwi
• DekiWiki
• Xwiki
• FlexWiki
• OpenWiki
• Kwiki
• Very Quick Wiki
• TiddlyWiki (Thanks to Binny)

Do you see another use of Wiki? Have you used any of the mentioned Wiki engines? Share your experience.

ByteSwap is very new online service that allows people to organize the information they wanted and let them share across their friends and ByteSwap community. ByteSwap is newest approach for a tradition concept.

ByteSwap very new of its breed and is been released couple of days back. Iâ€m very pleased to try out the service they provide. ByteSwap is unique by this way, they allow you to organize / store and share your content. ByteSwap can be your personal storage medium and bookmaking tool at the same time.

ByteSwap allows you to add any content that you would like to organize. ByteSwap allows you to manage Contacts, Photo, File, Link, and Article Reference. ByteSwap also says yes for your favorite recipe or if you have silly things to organize or share using Free form text note option. Founder Matt Brown tells, “Think of ByteSwap as a virtual file cabinet or a personal search engine”.

ByteSwap also has an option to build an online community around like-minded people using ByteSwap Groups. Groups allow you to share your content across other people. Also you can add your friends / colleagues as you connection. The community suggestion feature would recommend the relevant content for logged in users using their interested topics.

ByteSwap also has a powerful search feature that allows you to search across the personal and community content. It redefines the way to search and would find you most relevant information from your friends and public. ByteSwap also features traditional folder structure to organize content for easy access.

Finally, ByteSwap is FREE for limited usage and has a premium account for heavy users.

Suggestion / Feature Enhancement

ByteSwap team has really put the their efforts on their new service. But as always I say “there is always room for improvement”. ByteSwap team is very keen in listening to feedbacks. Here goes my suggestion and feature request that I would like to see from ByteSwap.

Social Elements
Social element is a key factor when it comes to online community building. ByteSwap has to capitalize on this as well. The ByteSwap community would like to know more information about the user who is sharing the information to the community. ByteSwap can improvise this by adding user profile, user picture, user feeds etc. ByteSwap can introduce Social button would enable add link directly from any blog. This would help them build an authentic community around ByteSwap.

Preview Option
BtyeSwap can provide preview on items that has been added / shared across the community. They might include but not limited to picture, video, text or a link. This is good at usability standpoint and users would love it so as me.

User Interface
The user interface adds value to any online system and this is more emphasized in web2.0 era. ByteSwap is easy to navigate around but might be missing sophisticated features.

Browser Add-on
Most of the communities are success today with a browser add-on. ByteSwap can also come with a browser add-on that would enable user to share contents and get community suggestions.

Widget Support
ByteSwap can allow users to create a widget around their public content. This would enable the ByteSwap users to share across their blogs. This would add more meaning to social content.

Conclusion

ByteSwap would let you easily organize your content anything (I love the recipe item) more effectively. Also their search enables the users to find the information more relevant to them. Bottom-line, ByteSwap has lot of areas to improve and if they do they would be unique and best of all.

Have you ever tried any similar service like ByteSwap? Try ByteSwap and share your thought.

This is a sponsored post.

Every blogger or site owners would be aware of advantage and importance of Web Analytics. Which tool to use? It is one of the important decisions everyone should take before starting up a blog or a site.

Web Analytics widely has two approaches log file analysis and page tagging. The later is more popular these days and huge number of people tends to ignore the former. Tagging approach would add some JavaScript snippet into your blog/ site to collect the visitor data. There are several 3-rd party tools available today to facilitate tagging methodology, like Google Analytics, StatsCounter, etc.

Log file analysis approach is normally in-house and they reside within the web server itself. The analysis is based on the web server log file.

Here Iâ€m going to brief down the advantage of log file analysis method

Advantages of log file analysis

Fast. You donâ€t have a burden of executing extra JavaScript code on your site; web server logs every possible transaction related to the site.

Reliable. You donâ€t have to rely upon userâ€s browser to collect their data. JavaScript may not work in some browsers or it can be disabled.

Error Information. Web server log files captures every error message and failed requests which tagging method fails and technically impossible to achieve with page tagging. Also you would be able to track hot linking information.

Spider Details. Log files also captures the spider information. It would give you the idea about how many pages were indexed and how much bandwidth it consumed etc. This might give you an idea of spider that eats your bandwidth and you can block them using robots.txt if you want.

Privacy. The log file details are kept within your server and not shared to 3-rd party.

Ease. You donâ€t have burden of installing a script in each and every page / blog.

Limitation

Less Analysis. It doesnâ€t give you more detailed analysis; you have mostly do analysis manually.

Here is the list of web log file analysis software.

AWStats

AWStats is one of the well-known open source web analytics-reporting tools. AWStats parses and analyzes the server log files and produces tables and bar graph output. The web reporting is done through a CGI script. AWStats would with most of the web server log format.

Webalizer

Webalizer is a fast and free web server log file analysis program. It produces HTML reports using tables. It has more detailed reporting.

Analog

Analog is pretty old web log analysis software among others. The data reports are made mostly using text formats.

W3Perl

W3Perl is more advanced free log file analyzer that allows you to gather HTTP, FTP and Email log files. It is written in Perl language and would work in any server with Perl support.

Visitors

Visitors is a very fast web log analyzer for Linux, Windows, and other Unix-like operating systems. It takes as input a web server log file, and outputs statistics in form of different reports

Special Addition

FeedStater

FeedStater is an only available feed statistics tool for self hosted feeds. FeedStater is written in CGI and it will read the log file to report the feed statistics.

Also you should be aware of the fact Urchin is one the popular log file analyzer software and latter it was acquired by Google for its analytics.

Bottom line, I would say log file analyzer would be the best methodology but it should be used along with more advanced page tagging method to gain more insight on Web Analytics.

Have you ever used any log file analyzer before? Share your thoughts.

Autocasting is the term used to refer either service or tool that would automatically convert the text on a blog into speech. Most of these tools / service would read the RSS feed and covert them into speech using their inbuilt Tex-to-Speech (TTS) technology.

Why Autocasting?

Autocasting can be used in conjunction with normal blog that would add more liveliness to users. Podcasting would allow readers to listen to your post while they are working in parallel. Thus it would help the author to convey their complete story to their reader rather than readers scanning the post text.

Here is the list of service I have tried in past months and my recommended service. Also you can subscribe to my podcast feeds if youâ€re interested in listening “TechCorner” via voice.

Recommended service

Odiogo

Odiogo is the latest in the list and is my favorite now. Odiogo embeds listen button into your blog post. The listen now button has a build in MP3 player that would play you the converted audio post. Odiogo monetize they podcasts using sponsored ads, it might be required for them run this service free of cost for blogger. Once you signup for Odiogo you may need to wait for 2-3 days to receive the installation information and the feed url. Installing Ogiogoâ€s Listen button is simple in WordPress.

Subscribe to TechCornerâ€s Odiogo feed

Talkr

Talkr service was announced long time back in 2005. It faced a great downfall in entire 2006 and now they are getting better. Talkr is also very similar to Odiogo in the service spectrum. Talkr also lets user to embedded the MP3 with the blog feed and blog site. Talkr also lets the bloggers to monetize their voice feed using sponsored voice ads. Talkr also had statistics page, which gives you information on the audio feed usage. Odiogo lacks the stats part. Talkr also has WordPress plugin to embed Talkr feed into every post.

Subscribe to TechCornerâ€s Talkr feed

Other services – Try yourself

Also you can try out the below service but Iâ€m not recommending them due to lack of few features / usability reason. The below listed are still in beta stage and hope they have room for their improvement.

BlueGrid

BlueGrid seems to be relatively new service with lot of bug in their interface. They allow you to listen to podcast using play list you can choose them from their list. You can either submit the content to BlueGrid as text or as blog itself. BlueGrid also has instructions to embed the content into your blog.

Check out TechCorner feed here.

Feed2Podcast

Feed2Podcast is simple service that will convert any Feed into postcast. You just need to provide the feed url. Feed2Podcast lacks option to embed the content directly into blog post; rather it provides option to user their player to listen your audio content.

Check out TechCorner in their player, here.

Autocasting Limitation

Text to Speech (TTS) technology is not evolved completely but it is improving. The pronunciations of English standard words have improved a lot. The auto-generated voice might not be the same for foreign names, acronym, emotion used and other non-standard English text.

Have you tried any of these services? Voice your thoughts.

TechCorner is one year old now and I’m a year old blogger :=)

I started writing TechCorner exactly one year ago, on July 18 2006. Looking back, itâ€s been a wonderful year, although it might not be the best year.

Here is the current statistics of TechCorner. This will be marking 50th post on TechCorner, and readers have left 566 comments so far. These posts were posted in 20 different categories. RSS and email subscribers have increased from initial stage and currently FeedBurner reports around 175 feed subscribers. TechCorner is severing 20–25 thousand page views per month. I hope to see more increase in RSS subscribers count and page views in upcoming year.

Honestly, last year I would consider successful since I was got introduced to the world of blogging and had a good chance to interact with other bloggers / readers. I take this moment to thank everyone for his or her support. I believe their support would continue and grow further.

As it is been said, transition is a part of any evolving system and TechCorner is not an exception. I have been hearing few feedbacks about my slow frequency of posting. This is where I would like to emphasize of the next year and I will try to improve my posting frequency.

Thank you readers and active commentator. Hope to see your participant lot more this year.

Last 30 days stats

Alexa rank has been not been the same for me. There is lot of ups and downs within a month period. Alexa rank has been somewhere around 77 K when I’m writing this.

Most of the traffic is generated by referral source and is more than 50%. I’m glad to have 30% traffic from organic source. I really want to improve this area in next year

I’m also surprised to see only 25% of my site visitors are using IE. Hurray, I love my readers as they are mostly with Firefox

Site Updates.

Recently I have changed the Feed URL. Please spare few minutes to check if you have subscribed to the new feed url; else grab the new feed URL

Thank you once again! Join and wish TechCorner a rocking year ahead

Zoho Meeting is one among the free offerings from Zoho. Zoho is one among the leaders of Office 2.0. Zoho Meeting allows you to create a web conference online for free. Zoho also feature cross browser support.

Zoho introduced public beta of Zoho Meeting a month back. Honestly, I had a chance to play with it only a week before. Zoho turns everyones attention by adding up new offerings to its Office 2.0 suite. Zoho meeting can be used in conjunction with other Zoho Office application like Zoho Show, Zoho Notepad etc.,

Zoho Meeting is easy to use application as well. All you have to do is create a meeting and provide the email id’s of participant. Alternatively, participant can join using meeting key also. After creating the meeting the presenter has to start the meeting. This might require an installation of an agent which is light weight. The participant can join the conference with either ActiveX, Java or Flash support. The later one would be slower.

The Zoho meeting has an option for Presenter to increase the quality of the color; this might reduce the speed. When I did the test with two laptops within a LAN network, I did notice a latency but it was negligible. It also allows the participant to interact with a chat interface, which is powered by Zoho Chat.

Features,

• It seamlessly works across any browser provided it either has Flash, ActiveX or Java support.
• Embedded the meeting anywhere in blogs, web page etc.,
• Remote control the presenters desktop.
• Free / Easy to use.

Zoho Meeting Viewer

Enhancements / Improvements

• Cross platform, no support for Mac and Linux currently. Well everyone should be aware of this. But yes only this limitation applies to the meeting presenter; participant can access meeting from any platform. And I believe Zoho crew would be working on this already.
• Enable audio conference support for live meetings. This might not be a high point since most of the meetings get hosted through telephone in parallel with web conferencing. But enabling audio conference would gain the attention of small and medium scale companies.
• The chat window needs serious reworking to catch up with other offerings. The chat window interface annoys a bit. It doesn’t allow few basic chat function like saving the chat history, copying the chat message, etc., Few people might prefer having this feature when they believe the chat happened there was important to them.
• Better Event / Failure logging mechanism. When I was test driving, Zoho Meeting happened to error out and crash due to some reason. Zoho didn’t record the broken conference and it was reporting the conference was still in progress.
• It would be great to have an option to switch presenter in the meeting. This need occurs if there are two or three presenters in an online meeting.

These are the few minor points, which came into my notice when I was test-driving Zoho Meeting. Overall Zoho always rocks and I’m one of their fan. Previously I had some good experience with Site24x7 their site monitoring service.

Bottom line, Zoho Meeting can’t be a complete replacement for WebEx or other market leading products but it is a very good alternative for Small Office and Freelancers.

VLC media player is a free cross-platform media player for various audio and video formats available today. VLC media player support streaming protocols and also can be a streaming sever with Ipv6 support. VLC comes with built-in support for most of the video and audio codec as well. In other terms, VLC media player can play any format, play any codec, play any media and stream any protocol from any platform (Windows, MAC, Linux)

I discovered VLC media player few years back when I was researching for an alternative player to play my media file that refused to play in most popular players. VLC Media Player alone helped me that situation. I didnâ€t have to install any extra codec to play the media file. I believe everyone here might have already discovered VLC player. If not, make sure you give a try today. VLC Media player can be downloaded from VideoLAN VLC Homepage.

Another main feature I love with VLC player is the ability to play any broken media file (say partially downloaded file). I use this feature to preview the media before downloading the entire content and save my effort

Few Interesting Facts about VLC Media Player

Here are few interesting facts I found about VLC Media Player.

• VLC (VideoLAN Client) was initially client for Video LAN project; Later they combined both server and client into VLC media player.
• Googleâ€s Video search uses browser plugin based on VLC player.
• Democracy Player, an Internet player uses VLC media player as a back-end on Windows
• The code name of VLC Media player is based on character name from the movie golden eye
• There are bunch of project that uses VLC; see complete list here.
• VideoLAN enhancement projects are featured in Google Code.

Key Features

• Play Anything – As said this is the main feature of this player you can play whatever you want. Be it any format or any codec no bar; they got to play in VLC. They have ability to read disk images (iso) and play directly.
• Simple – It can be used by any novice without any hitch.
• Network Streaming – It can stream internet video over HTTP, UTP protocol more over it support IPv6.
• Steaming Server – you can broadcast video using unicast or mutlicast in high bandwidth network.
• Equalizer -VLC has an equalizer for both audio and image.
• Filters -VLC comes in with dozens of audio and video filter that you can apply to alter the output.
• Skins – This is not much attractive, but yes you can change the default skins.
• Portability – This works with all operating system, which include Windows, MAC, Linux, BEOS, Win CE. etc. The latest version is compatible with Windows VISTA as well.

Possible Improvements

I have couple of suggestions probably here for VLC Player. VLC also doesn’t have support for real format, which they can add in feature version.

1. Interface
Sadly, this needs some serious attention. They have easy to use interface though their interface and not that attractive. They have skin support but it is not effective too.

2. Playlist
VLC provides you the ability to manage your play list. I think that can be improved a bit to allow option to effectively manage and have some tagging and rating features. Also the play list is not integrated well with the main area.

3. Real Format support
Unfortunately, VLC player doesn’t have support to Real format till now. It would be great if they add support to them as well. Thanks to CyBer$|x for pointing this out.

Other than this I really donâ€t see much on improvement track. VLC almost rocks already!

Bottom line, VLC Media Player might not be my favorite media player but I use it really extensively.

Have you tried VLC? Share your experience with VLC.

Update : Haris has compiled a list of best skins for VLC player. Deepak has his own list of beautiful skins.

Notepad is one of the few tools that is been a part of Windows operating system and which have not been evolved since its initial release. Notepad is simple to use and lacks many features / enhancement. So it is always better to look for a replacement, which will overcome all known issues of Notepad.

Why Replacement?

Notepad has some disadvantages, which is known to everyone who uses it frequently. Here is a quick list of them.

• Doesnâ€t have support for multiple document interface
• Doesnâ€t display line number (this is harder part for programmer / debugger)
• Doesnâ€t support syntax highlighting
• Doesn’t support larger files
• It is after all Microsoft product

To overcome these and other disadvantages many programmers looked into developing better tools that will be as simple to use as Notepad, yet offer additional features and enhancements that were left out of the original Notepad.

Couple of weeks back I wrote about my favorite notepad alternative and I asked my readers about their favorite too. Thanks to the readers who have given their views about their notepad alternative.

Top 5 Notepad Replacement

Here is the top 5 list of notepad replacement. I bet you will love at least one

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free source code editor and an effective Notepad replacement. Notepad++ supports several programming languages. The features include syntax highlighting, code folding, auto-completion, multi-document, drag and drop, full regular search support etc., It also has include advanced macro recording and playback feature. Moreover Notepad++ has most of my readers vote and it is the well-know replacement for Notepad.

Programmer’s Notepad

Programmerâ€s Notepad is free, open source, text editor with special enhancements for Programmers. Programmerâ€s Notepad is a project featured in Source Forge, which comes in as one of the best notepad replacement for programmers. The main features include book marking, code highlighting / folding, no limit to file size, tabbed document support, project management feature and much more. Programmerâ€s notepad is my favorite choice for Notepad replacement.

PSPad

PSPad is freeware code editor and wonderful notepad replacement. PSPad offers main features like rich text formatting, mighty code editing features, project management, syntax highlighting, auto-correction, HEX editor, text difference, spell checker, macro recorder and many more. PSPad also has inbuilt FTP functionality which is a plus for Web developers and Bloggers. PSPad is more advanced of all editors mentioned here. If you are looking for full functional and feature rich editor then PSPad should be your choice.

Notepad2

Notepad2 is a lightweight, free and open source text editor. Notepad2 is a full functional Notepad like editor with syntax highlighting. It is also based on Scintilla source code editing component similar to Notepad++. The features also include drag and drop feature, regular expression search, syntax highlighting for most of the languages. Notepad2 is best suited for persons who need simplicity like Notepad and Code highlighting feature for fun programming.

MetaPad

MetaPad is a small, fast and completely free text editor. It was designed to completely replace Notepad since it includes all of Notepadâ€s features and few extra features. The features include tool bar functionality, WYSIWYG printing, auto indenting etc., It is also been said it consumes less amount of memory than Notepad. So even if you like to stick with the simplicity of Notepad; you can very well try MetaPad.

I have complied the list with the help of my readers feedback and my thanks everyone.

Are you able to spot your Notepad replacement?

Programmerâ€s Notepad is for people who donâ€t prefer to code in either large IDEâ€s or just windows Notepad. Programmerâ€s Notepad is handy tool and good replacement for Notepad users. Programmerâ€s Notepad comes with lot of enriched features and is highly customizable.

I have to agree that Iâ€m one among the people who extensively use Windows Notepad either to take notes or little debugging / code editing etc. Windows Notepad canâ€t be much efficient choice when it comes to coding / debugging. Notepad does lack features that will increase the productivity of programmer / debugger.

Consider a case where youâ€re trying to fix an error in multi-nested loop. Notepad does fail here and it would consume few extra time than the time intended if we use good productivity tool. One among such tool is Programmerâ€s Notepad. It would increase your productivity by reducing the time taken.

PNotepadâ€s Code Folding feature comes in handy here. Code Folding is a feature that allows user to selectively display and hide section of currently edited file. The section can be either a fragment of code or function etc. This feature is available in most powerful text editor and IDEâ€s

See the screen shot below with code folding done for function second_page(). Also have a look at Text Clips in notepad area.

Programmerâ€s Notepad offers syntax highlighting for wide range of programming and markup language. Also it has Text-clips option to insert the predefined code-snippets for various languages. Programmer’s Notepad also has a simple project management interface to manage the files related to the projects.

Key Features –

• Code Folding
• Code / Syntax Highlighting
• Project Management / Grouping
• Regular expression search
• Code Snippets
• Tabbed multi-file support
• Bookmarking
• Export feature
• Addon Support
• and lot more…

Programmerâ€s Notepad is an open source project that is featured in SourceForce Programmerâ€s Notepad is a free to distribute under GPL license. Thanks to Simon Steele for Programmer’s Notepad

Bottom line, Programmerâ€s Notepad canâ€t be a replacement in high-end IDEâ€s but it can be a good replacement for Windows Notepad.

What is your choice?

Blogging has become a passion to lot of people these days (I can include myself). Technorati says a new blog appears every 2 seconds. And there are lot many novice blogger behind it. They will come across this question before they start a blog “which blogging platform to use?”

The options are wide open and choice is yours!

This article might not answer the question directly. However, I’d try to provide least information about most of blogging platforms that are available today either as a service or download.

WordPress.org
WordPress.org is the best and well-known open source Blogging platform. It is widely used commonly by popular self-hosted blogs around the blogosphere. It runs with minimal setup and it requires just PHP/ MySQL preferably in Apache. It rates high compared with other since it can be highly customized. In addition to this there are huge number of plugin authors and theme authors are there to help reduce bloggers effort. WordPress.org also has nice development community that ensures the WordPress core get better and better.

Blogger
Blogger is a free one-push blog publishing platform. Most of the novice bloggers starts Blogging with Googleâ€s Blogger in first place. The new blogger comes in with Widget support that eradicated the use of HTML for templates. Setting up a blog in Blogger is painless and easiest of anything else. You can customize Blogger to certain extend only since they are not an open source solution. There are few popular blogs that still runs on Blogger.

WordPress.com
WordPress.com is a multi-user version variant of WordPress.org. WordPress.com have their own-hosted solution of newbie bloggers, who doesnâ€t have a hosting space. WordPress.com comes in with neat option for a newbie. WordPress.com comes with space restrictions; in addition to that you can monetize your blog.

Movable Type
Movable Type is a web blog publishing platform successfully developed by SixApart. It is the one who invented Trackback feature in the first hand that was later devised by other blogging systems as well and now it is more-or-less a standard. Movable Type is written in Perl and supports most of the Database as backend. Movable Type is best suited for business use.

Typepad
Typepad is a blogging service provided by SixApart and it is one of largest paid blogging service available now. Typepad is based on Movable Type and it shares most of its technical functions. Additionally, it also supports multi-user, mobile and photo blogging. Typepad is been successfully used by lot of professional writers.

LiveJournal
LiveJournal is a CMS that allows you to express your self by publishing your private journal, your blog or your forum or any of a social entity. It is the best in town for writing life journals.

Vox
Vox is a personal blogging service. It’s all about ease of use, privacy control, playing well with other web services, and staying connected to the people you care about. Vox is good platform when it comes to multimedia blogging.

Text Pattern
Text Patter is a flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites. Blogs works fine as well. Text Pattern also has its own list of plugins and templates.

Drupal
Drupal is a modular content management system and the blogging engine was initially indented for bulletin board system. Drupal is good for building online communities and those communities powers their blogging engine. It is written in PHP. It has a wide community support.

Joomla
Joomla is truly a content management system that forked from Mambo, a pretty good open source content management system. Joomla has won the best open source content management system of the year 2006. Joomla has a decent blogging engine and other extension.

Expression Engine
pMachineâ€s Expression Engine is not well know but it is a powerful and much extensible software that you may need to give a try. It is a complete content management system with much Blogging feature as well. In addition to Blogging module it comes with inbuilt gallery module. It is more suitable for heavy business blogs. Also the cost associated with it is high.

Nucleus
Nucleus is been around for sometime now and it is not much popular yet though. Nucleus is mature blogging software that comes with most of the required blogging features. Nucleus is also programmed in PHP and runs on MySQL backend.

b2evolution
b2evloution was developed from the same original code that spawned WordPress, b2Evolution is written in PHP and licensed under GPL so is always free to use. It comes with lot of features that you may need to check, which includes antispam, skins, multi-blogs, users, authors, integrated stats, its own plugin framework etc. etc.

TeraPad
TeraPad is hosted blogging solution which takes blogger beyond the blogging experience. TeraPad comes in with versatile blogging tools,  image gallery,  PayPal ready shopping cart, event calendar etc.  TeraPad places a its ad over the site which might annoy bloggers a little but may it is need for TeraPad to keep it service Free

This is not a comprehensive list, I might have left out few of them with or without my knowledge. You can very well indicate them by your comments.

Update (06/17) : Mayank has pointed out two more additional blogging service. I have added an overview of TeraPad; Thanks Mayank.

Vayama is a new air travel ticket search service. Vayama has few strong plus points when compared with other players. First, it focuses mainly on international travel unlike other domestic players. Second, it is build based on Web 2.0; the UI is amazing and is socially powered with travel tips.

Are you planning to travel overseas for business or personal reason? A new startup Vayama is here to offer you the best solution. Vayama is unique of it kind, which offers Americans to travel overseas with anease. International travelers always find it hard to find and book their air ticket. Vayama offer them help with robust international travel ticket search feature.

Vayama is backed by one of the largest travel organization in the world, BCD Holding. Vayama comes into industry with lot of experience and resource. Vayama also acts as travel agent to find good deals.

The first thing you notice about Vayama is the user interface. It has bought rich user experience with much friendly interface. Microsoft Virtual Earth powers the maps with touch and go feature. The touch and go feature makes the entry of airports much easier. You can click on the map and locate the airport. Alternatively for regular users, they can enter the three digit Airport code or start entering the first thee digits and select the applicable one from the list box.

Once you enter the departure / arrival airport and their corresponding dates, click on search to locate your travel itinerary. Vayama will search for thousands of public and private fare and finds the best deal for you. It will show you the route map for the currently available best deal. You can filter you results based on the stops, trip time, price, connection point, and airline.

Based on the selection it will give you the itinerary for the travel with brief price information. Once youâ€re ready to reserve the ticket it pops you out with a 3D interface for seat selection. You have provision to book hotel and car also.

Apart from this Vayama has cool interface for getting around particular place. This feature would really help the new travelers. In that section you will find most basic information about the city, transportation, attractions and finally it does socialize with the blog on about those cities. Overall it will act as a good live travel guide!

Bottom line, Vayama helps American overseas travelers to an extent but it is yet to support ticketing for other nations, which I would say is the major drawback considering international audience. Vayama has the potential to take its crowd international along with international search it offers now

CodeIDE is a web application that allow users to write and compile their code using their online interface. CodeIDE isn’t cool but I would it is a good idea worth a try. CodeIDE provides basic IDE functionality with option to save executable file. CodeIDE also did try well to socialize by providing a public chat.

I stumbled upon CodeIDE.com recently. CodeIDE is a browser based IDE that allows you to write and compile few programming language. Currently CodeIDE supports BASIC, Pascal, ANSI C, Perl, JavaScript, HTML, LISP, MATH, etc., CodeIDE is still in development stage and they are adding bunch of features lately. Now they have their own blogs, wikis, forum etc to share and learn idea between the users.

CodeIDE added compiler feature recently which allows you to compile your code remotely. They have support for Linux and Window executable now. They will be adding support for Mac pretty soon which would be more fun. But they have not yet released information on what kind of compilers, processors they use for compiling. They support compiling C code, it has it own positives and negatives. I will not be able to comment much on that since they haven’t provided the internal details.

CodeIDE offers a command line function, which was very similar to the command line provided by YouOS. The command line interface was clean and allows user to do basic file operations. Over the sidebar, codeIDE also has a File browser which resembled to DOS file browser tools. It didn’t come with much user friendly but handy though. The sidebar also has a Result window that displays the output of your code.

CodeIDE also comes with a simple text editor that allows you to import the code, export, search / replace and other basic things. Registered users can save their files and share their files to other user as well. The basic IDE functionality of creating a project and grouping the code base is also supported.

The most interesting part is they have public chats enable that allow user to socialize and interact with other programmers. They also have concentrated much on the social networking by having personal blogs, etc. They need to build upon this in their upcoming release as well. They have a user edited wiki documentation now. They have live support also to fix your issues online. Moreover forums are there for expert guidance.

CodeIDE has option to run the code interactively using their Run option. It will compile the code and display the result in output window. You have option to save the executable as EXE file or publish the project as required.

Improvements-

IMO, following would be reasonable enhancement /addon to their application.

• an advanced full functional editor
• support for syntax highlight this makes programming much easier
• support for programming language like PHP, Python, Ruby etc.,
• improved and well arranged UI currently all the components are placed clumsy in the homepage
• better documentation and support
• online help library
• advancd complier features support

Bottom line, CodeIDE creates a new environment for beginners who can learn programming language without much pain of installing Compilers and IDE’s. CodeIDE will not be a programmers choice until they have support to most of the advanced / must have functions that are currently been supported by off-line IDE’s. But CodeIDE is a unique idea that need to be appreciated.

Joost is a new way of watching TV online. Joost is Web TV that combines both Television and Internet moreover it is a Free TV. Joost shows more than 150 channels and more programs in full screen quality. Joost also has the complete control of the internet; you can watch whenever you want. To add to this points Joost powers social networking too.

Joost is still in their beta stage and expecting commercial release very soon. Joost is available now through Invite and has release the Friends Edition. I have been looking for an invite to try out Joost; Thanks for Marsie from RotorBlog.com who invited me to Joost beta.

I was really amazed by Joost, the quality of the video was superb. Joost works on seamless Peer to Peer (P2P) networking. Joost provides selectable programs on over 150 channels, ranging from cartoons, movies, music, sports and documentary using peer-to-peer TV (P2PTV) technology. The original content is stored on main server owned by Joost and then distributed by users to other users watching the same program.

Joost is signing up deals with major video content providers which would help them to gain more programs and viewer ship. Latest in the list was CNN and Sony; Viacom was already in the list. Joost is also building up a social network around their viewer. Joost has channel chats, where users watching the same programs can interact. This is just a base for their social networking model.

Joost Screenshot

This service remains free since it is been paid by advertising which are shown intermittently. The Joost interface is fairly simple and easy to use. The viewing experience is also great as it suffers not much of streaming problems. To add to the value, Joost is the venture of founders of Skype and Kaaza which were most successful. You need to aware of this; since Joost runs on P2PTV technology it will consume lot of your bandwidth for both uploading and downloading.

If you are looking for a Joost invite and didn’t have one till now; drop me a comment. I have Joost invites left out; you must try this service for sure.