TekXplorer

Upgrading to Bluehost Pro Package

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 07:50:00 +0000

I am going to share my experience of hosting on bluehost for 1.5 years and why I decided to upgrade to their PRO package.

For the first year I had no problems with their shared hosting, everything worked great but as my site's traffic went up I started noticing small downtimes, which were quite minor and a few minutes is something I would not complain about since its a shared hosting and its was still within 99.5% uptime.

Their "unlimited" package is ofcourse limted, once you start getting high traffic you would often reach the SQL maximum concurrent connections limit and/or get slowed down by their CPU throttling mechanisms.

Bluehost's CPU Throttling graph

I would say Bluehost can easily handle 1 page request per second (or around 80,000 pageviews/day) for a light-weight site with few queries, small page size, etc. anything more than that and you would start hitting their SQL limits. This I feel is not bad for a shared hosting, but then from the past couple of months I started seeing more downtimes due to other sites hammering the server and database. At first I thought that their CPU throttling technology would prevent this from ever happening as it used to slow down my site in the past. But I was wrong as I was told by their support staff, I knew it from that moment that I had to get out of this shared server.

I had known about their PRO package before but did not know the details, so I found how it was different from the normal package:
5 GB Total MySQL Databases (up from 3 GB)
5 GB Single Database Size (up from 2 GB)
3000 Database Tables (up from 1000)
15 Mb/s Bandwidth (up from 8 Mb/s)
2000 Max Emails/Hour (up from 750)
More CPU time and server memory (they don't mention any details on this)

Interesting, but I didn't care much about it since I hardly required all these, all I was interested in was going to a server with fewer users or that which can handle more traffic. Well, I could be going with a VPS or Dedicated, but I am running a light-weight site and I think a shared hosting with a less crowded server should easily manage that. Most importantly I wanted minimum downtime and upgrading to their PRO package seemed easy and attractive.

So, finally I decided to upgrade, before starting the upgrade I did a backup and deleted the junk so the process of upgrading would be faster. I made the payment and after about 10 minutes my site went down.

Bluehost Upgrade in Progress Page

I was expecting a few hours downtime so I decided to do it at midnight but I was surprised when it took just a minute.
I checked that there were around 200 sites hosted on the same server, down from about 2000, not bad - 90% less crowded. Now, it's a PRO server and you can expect other sites to be high traffic sites as well, so now I am going to monitor for a few days and see if it's worth to upgrade.

Twitter OAuth using PHP to make your own twitter web client

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:35:00 +0000

My last post on twitter was an introduction on how to use twitter, a lot of things have changed since then but that post just covers a few basics to get you started. This post is for developers on how to build your own twitter web client - which means instead of using twitter.com or any other client out there (echofon, chromed bird, TweetDeck, etc.) to tweet, you can make your own app to work with twitter. More specifically this post shows how to use OAuth to tweet using PHP.

OAuth (Open Authentication) is an authenticating protocol that allows internet users to approve an application to act on their behalf without the need for the user to share their password with the application. With OAuth the service provider (Twitter) issues tokens and it involves the exchange of tokens/keys and signing of requests thus making it a secure protocol. Twitter uses OAuth and Basic Auth (username and password used for authentication) but on 16-August-2010 Twitter is ending support for basic auth, which means all apps will have to start using OAuth.

Implementing the OAuth protocol is a daunting task but luckily there are tons of libraries out there which makes life easy for us. Download abraham's twitteroauth library for PHP which I have used in the steps below.

Step 1: Register your application
Register a twitter application here and make sure to choose the settings as below:

Note down your CONSUMER_KEY and CONSUMER_SECRET, we will need this to identify our application to twitter.

Step 2: Use Twitter OAuth Library for PHP
Copy the directory twitteroauth which have the two files (OAuth.php and twitteroauth.php) from abraham's twitteroauth source to your working directory.
Create two files index.php and callback.php in your working directory

index.php:

session_start();
require_once 'twitteroauth/TwitterOAuth.php';
define("CONSUMER_KEY", "xxx");
define("CONSUMER_SECRET", "xxx");

Replace "xxx" with the token from the last step.

Step 3: Get Request Token
Continuing the code from the last step, here we use our consumer tokens to get request tokens from twitter. Twitter returns request tokens for temporary use - oauth_token and oauth_token_secret which is unique for every request and we save these in session variables for use in the next step.

index.php:

$connection = new TwitterOAuth(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET);
$request_token = $connection->getRequestToken();
$_SESSION['oauth_token'] = $request_token['oauth_token'];
$_SESSION['oauth_token_secret'] = $request_token['oauth_token_secret'];

Step 4: Send user for authorization
In this step we use our request tokens from the previous step to build the Authorization URL where the user will be redirected. The user is redirected to a page where if the user is not signed in it will be asked to sign in and then the user can grant or deny access to the application.

index.php:

$url = $connection->getAuthorizeURL($request_token);
header('Location: ' . $url);

Step 5: Exchange Request Token for Access Token
Once the user allows access in the previous step, they will be redirected to our callback page. Here twitter will return the oauth_token that we sent earlier, to make sure it is of the same session we compare this to the one we had earlier saved in session variable. Now we use the request tokens we got in Step 4 to exchange for Access token which is unique to every user (this token can be used for tweeting on behalf of the user for future requests).

callback.php:

session_start();
require_once 'twitteroauth/TwitterOAuth.php';
define("CONSUMER_KEY", "xxx");
define("CONSUMER_SECRET", "xxx");
if (isset($_REQUEST['oauth_token']) && $_SESSION['oauth_token'] !== $_REQUEST['oauth_token']) {
echo 'Session expired';
}
else {
$connection = new TwitterOAuth(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, $_SESSION['oauth_token'], $_SESSION['oauth_token_secret']);
$token_credentials = $connection->getAccessToken();

Replace "xxx" with the token from the step 1

Step 6: Tweet on user's behalf
Finally we can use our access tokens from the previous step to tweet on behalf of the user
callback.php:

$connection = new TwitterOAuth(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET, $token_credentials['oauth_token'], $token_credentials['oauth_token_secret']);
$tweetmsg = 'Hello World, I am tweeting from my own twitter app!';
$result = $connection->post('statuses/update', array('status' => $tweetmsg));
$httpCode = $connection->http_code;
if ($httpCode == 200) {
$resultmsg = 'Tweet Posted: '.$tweetmsg;
}
else {
$resultmsg = 'Could not post Tweet. Error: '.$httpCode.' Reason: '.$result->error;
}
}

That's it! This is just the basics to get you started on building a full featured client. If you are migrating from basic auth to OAuth and have only a single user's account to manage, then in step1 you can choose the app type as client, get your access token from the My Access Token link after registering your app, skip steps 2,3,4,5 and go directly to step6 where you replace the token_credentials with your account's access token.

Installing Windows 7 from a bootable USB drive

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 05:06:00 +0000

Installing Windows 7 from a USB drive is easy but you need to know that just copying the installation files from a DVD disc to a USB stick won't help, the installation media has to be bootable and the BIOS has to have the feature to boot from that media.

Installing the OS from a USB has its advantages - USB 2.0 is much faster than reading from a DVD disc making your installation faster. If your optical drive or your disc has stopped working you could always use your USB from one of the many USB ports in your desktop or laptop. If you don't have an optical drive you can use a USB drive but alternatively you could also get an external USB connected optical drive and use your disc as normal.

The following are the steps I found to make any USB drive bootable and to turn it into a Windows 7 installation media (Note: all these steps have been done on Windows 7, Vista will also work)

Requirements:

USB drive with atleast 4 GB of space
Windows 7 installation disc

Steps:
1. Insert your USB drive and format it by running the following commands in command prompt (running with administrator privileges):

diskpart

list disk

Shows the list of storage devices, identify your USB disk # by looking at the size.

select disk 1

disk # that you identified in the last command, mine was disk 1 yours can be different

clean

create partition primary

select partition 1

active

format fs=NTFS quick

assign

exit

2. Insert your Windows 7 disc and make the USB drive bootable by running the following commands again in command prompt:

F:

the drive letter of your optical drive, yours will be different

cd boot

bootsect /nt60 G:

the drive letter of your usb drive, yours will be different

exit

3. Copy all the files from the Windows 7 disc to your USB drive

That's it your USB drive is now bootable and ready to install windows 7! Make sure to set the motherboard BIOS to boot from your USB stick.

Free web hosting by xtreemhost - Review

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 16:11:00 +0000

There are tons of web hosting companies these days that offer FREE hosting, but as there is nothing free in this world, you get what you pay for and in this case you get what you don't pay for (you will see later down). There are also tons of sites which review hosting sites and I found 90% of them (through google) which are very biased as they are trying to advertise, even forums are filled with affililate marketers and their opinions are very biased. This review is definitely unbiased.

I found xtreemhost.com when I was looking for a free and ad-free php host for a super light-weight website that used no CMS and only had like a couple of pages. I chose xtreemhost because I was attracted to their features mentioned in their home page - fast loading, 5.5 GB of space, 200 GB bandwidth per month, with mail and htaccess enabled. The space was overkill for my requirements but I found it offered the most when compared to other free hosting service and I was also planning to add more websites later. Before registering you are forced to create a free domain name with cz.cc but after registering you can create websites in the form yoursite.xtreemhost.com

The first noticable thing about a free host is the speed which is the time it takes for your page to load. This was clearly felt when I uploaded my simple light-weight website with only text and no images - it was a tad slower to load about 5 seconds more than say google.com. A few days later I set up another one - a Joomla site and the admin panel was so slow that I had to wait more than 30 seconds for it to load, Joomla is a heavy-weight CMS and this was expected. The front end loaded faster just like my first site but only the text part, the images took further 10 seconds to load. Transferring files via FTP was very slow too especially when you have got 1000+ files, you have to zip them first.

Xtreemhost uses vista panel for their control panel which is pretty easy to use. They offer unlimited email accounts, a maximum of 50 sub-domains, 50 addon domain, 50 parked domain, 50 MySQL databases and 1 FTP account. I would say good feature packed for a free hosting. I liked the fact that when you added a secondary domain they created separate folders for each addon domain under your home folder. Even paid hosts like bluehost don't have this feature - they just create all folders under the public_html and force you with alternate urls attached to your primary domain.

Xtreemhost's one-click script installer for installing CMSes like wordpress, joomla, etc was not working for some reason but after a few days they fixed it. I ran into other problems during development like the "allow_url_fopen" in apache was disabled which means I was not able use php's file_get_contents function to connect to a url so I did a workaround by using CURL. I also found that for some reason I couldn't connect to twitter's API (maybe it was blocked?) anyways I connected using the IP of twitter.com. And their email was slow to deliver, it delivered messages every 15 minutes after it was sent from my code.

In conclusion, I can say that if you are looking to host a website for some serious work then getting a free hosting is a big NO, as you can see you get slow page loads and disabled functions. But if you don't mind the down-sides of free hosting then xtreemhost is a good free host, they also have paid hosting and it sure will be better than the free one. If you are looking for a paid hosting then a good one in which I host my websites is HostGator's shared hosting which have no problems of a free hosting that I encountered above.

PHPMyAdmin MySQL Error 1045 - Access denied for user root@localhost (using password: NO)

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Wed, 12 May 2010 07:50:00 +0000

The dreaded error "1045 - Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)" has been baffling php developers - do a google search on it and you shall see. I spent good 3 hours on it.

I faced this error all because I decided to change the MySQL blank password to a non-blank password. And after that I tried everything I could - changing PHPMyAdmin config files config.inc.php config.default.php, reinstalling the WAMP package (I used EasyPHP), rebooting. I won't go into the details of what I tried.

And then I found a workaround - under PHPMyAdmin folder locate /scripts/signon.php and run it in the browser. You will be asked for the login details as below.

And then another login screen pops-up, enter the mysql details:

Finally, the screen that I wanted to see:

I wonder the number of years PHPMyAdmin is in development and yet we see these errors? I think PHPMyAdmin is just overrated. I just wanted some GUI to manage MySQL. For some serious development I think it's better to use window based MySQL's new Workbench software instead of the crappy web based PHPMyAdmin.

Windows Live Messenger 2009 sign in problems Error Code: 80040154

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 07:35:00 +0000

The latest Windows Live Messenger 2009 seems to have problems right after installing, I downloaded and installed the offline installer package and it just wouldn't sign in.

If you get the Error Code: 80040154 it probably means that you have the same problem and you need to download this file called ~~Contacts-ship-neutral.cab~~ [Link is Broken, please see download links below] from microsoft and install it.

I think this is a part of Windows Live Communications and it was not included with the standalone messenger installer.

Download Link 1
Download Link 2

FireFox 3.5 release adds safe and faster browsing

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:48:00 +0000

Mozilla Firefox version 3.5 has been officially released after a number of beta's and release candidates. The last stable release was 3.0.11.

The new version adds a new tool called "Private Browsing" which is the same as Google Chrome's Incognito mode which basically does not leave any traces of your browsing history.
The new version is clearly much faster than the previous versions, I noticed immediately the startup times were faster when I launched the new firefox, previously it used to take more than 10 seconds and now its like around 5 seconds. And mozilla claims that it is more than two times faster than Firefox 3 and ten times faster than Firefox 2 on complex websites.

The first new thing I noticed was the new tab button right on the tab bar and I immediately removed the add-on which does the same thing, the Mozilla guys are quite learning from the third-party addons. I had a deja-vu and thought firefox already had this but it was Internet Explorer 7 which reminded me of the similarity or am I wrong?. Firefox should incorporate mouse gestures also which Opera started and is having since ages. Another new feature includes location-aware browsing which I am not so bothered to test.

The new version is faster and improved and worth the upgrade, but many of my addons are not working now, waiting for their latest updates!
Get the latest firefox from here.

Start Tweeting in the Twitter Sphere

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 03:33:00 +0000

Twitter is currently the fastest growing social media sites out there. You may not have heard of it, but I don't think so! Almost all would have heard of it and many have even joined, but the question is do you use it? There are many inactive users with only a single tweet (message). If you are new to the twitter world this post might help you to get started.

This FAQ will help to get you started with Twitter:
What is a tweet?
A 140 characters or less message to tell the world what you are doing? or whatever you like!

Who can see my tweet?
People who follow you will see it in their "stream". While everyone can see it in your homepage you can protect your profile to allow only your followers to see.

Who can follow me?
Anyone can follow you unless you have protected your profile in this case you will have to allow people who want to follow you.

How can I send a message to a user?
Use the "@username" notation followed by the message to reply to not just your followers but anyone.

How can I send a personal message to a user?
Use the "d username" notation followed by the message to send a direct message to a user

Can I repeat someone else's tweet?
Yes, use the "RT @username" notation followed by the message to repeat or requote someone else's tweet

How can I discuss about a specific topic?
Just add the "#TopicName" notation to your message to let others know you are tweeting about a specific topic

What else I need to know?
There is a lot more in the twitter world, the best way to learn is to start using it. You can follow me here

Happy Tweeting!

Migrating to new Template - Minyx 2.0 Lite

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 03:13:00 +0000

After many months I am changing my template to a new blogger version template of Minyx 2.0 Lite, the reason for this change is primarily due to the break up of images which occured on the WPPremiumBlack template. I could have fixed this by hosting the images myself but that was not what I did due to the reason being that I was looking for a better template since a couple of months. A screenshot of my old WPPremiumBlack template below in its default look:

The new Minyx template has a simple white look, neat 3-column arrangement and with good use of colors. And above all it has high compatibility with blogger, without any errors or break of html/widgets encountered so far. The code for the template is neatly written making editing easy which was a real "hard-chore" in my last templete. A screenshot of the new template on my blog:

Now I still need to modify certain aspects of the template like the colors, size and placement of widgets. Any suggestions or comments are always welcome. And also thanks to the maker of this template which has included their link at the absolute bottom of the template.

Uninstall IE8 and Rollback to IE7

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 05:26:00 +0000

I recently installed the new Internet Explorer 8 to try some of its new features but was soon disappointed. There were many bugs causing many sites to not work and some sites were not being displayed properly. The browser would just crash at times, so I decided to go back to Internet Explorer 7.

I uninstalled IE8 from Control Panel>Add or Remove Programs>Add/Remove Windows components. After that when I tried to install IE7 I was faced with the following message
"Setup cannot continue because a more recent version of Internet Explorer has been detected on this computer".

It turns out IE8 does not get completely unistalled and to completely remove it you need to run the spuninst.exe found at this location: "C:\WINDOWS\ie8\spuninst\spuninst.exe". Once complete it will ask to restart and after that you can install IE7 once again.

Google Search gives false warning - This site may harm your computer

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 15:19:00 +0000

There is something wrong with Google search today, all the results are reporting This site may harm your computer.

There are many reports of this all over the web, which confirms that it has affected many but not sure if everyone is facing this. This is definately a bug and it should be fixed immediately.

Top Social networks in Google Zeitgeist

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 11:05:00 +0000

The Google Zeitgeist for the year 2008 has been officially released. The Zeitgeist annual report presents the top Google searches in various categories every year.

This year the trendsetters in the Social Networks category is topped by Facebook, followed by MySpace, Hi5 and Google's Orkut. Here is the complete list of the top 10 google searches for Social Networks this year:

The complete Zeitgeist can be seen here.

Customizing is the Next step in Googling

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 06:23:00 +0000

Google's new feature in its search engine is the ability to customize your search results. According to Google blog:

SearchWiki is a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don't feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account.

Many of you like me would have wondered - does this allow googlers the power to move the search results!?! The answer is NO. As stated in their blog post, the changes you make only affect your own searches.

To enable this new feature, just make sure you are logged into your Google Account and end your search query with a * (See in the screenshot above). You can then see the new icons beside your search results.

Orkut Apps hangs/freezes my Firefox

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 03:55:00 +0000

I have recently found my latest Firefox 3.0.3 to hang whenever I visit someone's orkut profile with applications or widgets on their page.

The CPU goes up to 100% and the browser just freezes, the only way out is to kill the firefox.exe process in the task manager. It can either be a bug in firefox or a conflict with some firefox addon, with tons of addons in my browser it will be difficult to find out which if any is causing this problem.

Meanwhile I cannot see some Orkut profiles, anyone out there having the same problems? Im trying out with some other browser, maybe Google Chrome should work fine.

Orbit Grab Pro cripples IE

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:08:00 +0000

Orbit is a famous download manager which I have been using for a few months now. One of the best features of this is it allows us to download videos and music from youtube, imeem and other similar sites. A great time saver for we don't have to wait for that Rihanna's song to load everytime we long to hear.

Orbit has an internal tool called Grab++ which detects different media and allows to grab them for download. But recently I tried to download from Imeem using every browser I had got but it did not work, so I decided to try another new tool from Orbit called Grab Pro. This tool is also a part of Orbit but attaches itself to IE like a plugin/toolbar.

Enabling this caused my Internet Explorer 7 to stop displaying websites. I cannot visit any site with this plugin enabled, the only way out is to disable this plugin. Orbit says its Grab Pro breaks imeem's anti-leeching technology, but so far I had no luck with it.

Meanwhile, I'm still searching other ways to grab music from Imeem. Anyone out there have a good way to do this?

Google 10^100 project offers $10 million dollars

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 06:56:00 +0000

Google has introduced a new world changing project called 10 to the 100th (10^100) in conjunction with their 10th birthday. In plain maths, 10^100 is 1 followed by 100 zeros which is also called a Googol. The name Google comes from this Googol number which reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.

According to Google, this project is a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. In other words, helping helps everybody, helper and helped alike.

The ideas can be submitted under the following categories:
Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don't fit into any category at all.

Google will choose what it feels are the 100 best ideas and then allow its users to vote on which of them should be funded. The users will narrow the results to 20 finalists, and a panel of judges will choose up to five ideas that will receive the $10 million dollars funding.

The last day for submitting your ideas is October 20th, 2008. Voting begins on January 27th, 2009.
For submitting your ideas and more information visit www.project10tothe100.com

Chrome beats Opera in Browser market share

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 10:20:00 +0000

It's been just 4 days since Chrome was launched and it has already overtaken Opera in browser market share. I wrote a small review of it in my post yesterday, check it out here.

The numbers are still changing and I don't think we can say the exact share at this moment. But many reports suggest that it has overtaken Opera. Firefox, Safari are also seeing a drop in their market shares but it seems Internet Explorer is still not affected.

According to one report by GetClicky which provides statistics of browser share of its visitors, Chrome's market share stands at 2.28% and Opera stands at 1.98%. With IE, Firefox and Safari are leading in that order.

I found a nice picture of the Chrome effect courtesy of NYTimes. Looks like Safari will be poped out soon.

Chrome - Simple and Fast Browser

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 08:27:00 +0000

Google's Chrome is a simple and sleek tabbed browser released this week, the main highlight of it is that each tab is a separate process, and if one tab crashes it does not affect the other tabs. And hence it has got its own task manager which shows the resources used by each tab including process, memory and network properties.

A stats for nerds link is seen in the screenshot below, clicking on it takes you to the about:memory page and shows detailed memory usage of any browser running be it Firefox or IE.

Some Cool features of Chrome:

Chrome has the ability to drag tabs to new windows and move tabs across windows, this is the best feature which I liked so far in terms of user interface.

The default home tab shows 9 most visited pages, sites you search on most, recently bookmarked and recently closed tabs for that session.

The navbar is called ombibox which provides suggestions as you type.

A new feature called Incognito is a privacy feature in which you can browse sites without saving any trace of having visited that site in the PC.

Pop-ups cannot be forced in chrome.

A security feature called Sandboxing protects users from malware and phishing.

Chrome is still a new browser and security flaws are already being discovered. My chrome has just been updated to version 0.2.149.29 from 0.2.149.27 today.
Anyone who would like to share some unknown feature or function of Chrome are welcome. Waiting for some hidden easter eggs to be discovered :).

Google Comics Chrome Browser Series

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:05:00 +0000

Google's new open-source browser Chrome has been launched this week with a long comic explaining the new browser's technology and features.

The comic can be found here, it explains everything from how the new browser works, all its features and how it is different from other browsers. The comics contain nice diagrams and pictures and runs upto 38 pages long.

Also note the logo of the new browser above which looks very cool with a colorful 3D sphere, kind of a mozilla firefox killer?

More details about Chrome coming up soon.
Source: Google's official blog

Alexa Site Ranking Widget

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:22:00 +0000

Alexa.com is a site which provides traffic details and ranks websites all over the internet. The ranking is based on various sources which the site collects, with the main source being the visiting trend of users of Alexa toolbar.

You can check your site's Alexa ranking at the website for free. The site also provides a widget for site owners and bloggers like me, there are three kinds of widgets available:

1. Alexa Traffic graph - Shows a graph with selectable site stats in a time period with an option to compare to two other sites. Unfortunately it works only for the top 100,000 sites as seen below my site is not in the top 100,000.

2. Alexa Site Stats button - Shows the site rank and the number of links coming in. Available in three display formats - button, vertical banner and horizontal banner. I like the button version the best since its small, the other two banners are a waste of space. I found that the links-in figure is incorrect, it shows the same for all blogspot bloggers.

3. Alexa Traffic Rank button - This shows a simple button with rank and the date it was last updated. I find this the best and it comes in three versions - small, regular and horizontal banner

As you can see above my alexa ranking is 12,948,622 as of 4 September 2008. It was somewhere in the middle of 13,000,000 last month.
If your site is new it will take some time for it to be ranked. And also if you are adding Alexa's widget it will help to increase your rank since Alexa will know your visitor traffic through this widget.

PicLens - stylish 3D picture browser for firefox

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 11:23:00 +0000

Firefox users cannot miss out on this great addon called PicLens or Cooliris. This addon made by Cooliris is a fullscreen 3D picture browser for many popular sites.
The addon installs a small 'Launch PicLens' button on the toolbar, when browsing pictures on supported sites the button gets highlighted. Clicking the button will open up a fullscreen window allowing to browse and search for pictures as seen below.

Currently PicLens supports searching pictures from Google, Amazon, YouTube, Flickr, Yahoo, deviantART, Photobucket, and smugmug. With YouTube you can watch and browse through videos too without the need to open a separate tab or window.
A new feature allows users to share photos with friends by email just by drag-n-drop.
The addon also supports browsing pictures from social networking sites such as Facebook's picture album. But the addon does not support browsing pictures in Orkut yet.

The latest PicLens version is 1.8.0 and can be downloaded from here. The addon is availabe for both windows and Mac users, with support for Internet Explorer too.

Facebook overtakes Myspace

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:47:00 +0000

Facebook has overtaken Myspace to be the No.1 social networking site in terms of number of visitors. Facebook had 132 million unique visitors in the month of June compared to Myspace's 117.5 million.

Facebook was also the fastest growing social networking site with 153% growth compared to just 3% for myspace in the last year. Other sites such as Hi5, Friendster and Orkut had 100%, 50% and 41% growth respectively.

"Facebook has done an exceptional job of leveraging its brand internationally during the past year," ComScore executive Jack Flanagan said in a statement from the company. "By increasing the site's relevance to local markets through local language interface translation, the site is now competing strongly or even capturing the lead in several markets where it had a relatively minor presence just a year ago."

Googling in Blackle does not save energy

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:09:00 +0000

Blackle.com is a search site powered by google's search engine, the only difference being that Google's background color is white while Blackle's is black. This site was made black to save energy and their motto is "Saving energy one search at a time". But according to Google's Official blog, they say that Black does not help save energy.

According to Blackle, the site helps saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen."

The site claims that its black color has helped saved about 766 KiloWatt hours of energy so far. But this post at Google blog says "our own analysis as well as that of others shows that making the Google homepage black will not reduce energy consumption. To the contrary, on flat-panel monitors (already estimated to be 75% of the market) displaying black may actually increase energy usage."

Well Blackle was nice to come up with a way to try and save energy. The best that we can do with monitors is to turn them off when we don't use and avoid using screensavers for too long.

Firefox Adblock and Imeem flash player problem

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 12:35:00 +0000

The Imeem player does not load in Firefox when used with Adblock plugin. The Imeem player is a flash player and requires the Adobe Flash player plugin to be installed to be able to run.

After trying several fixes, installing and reinstalling the Adobe Flash player, I found that there is some issue with Adblock and Flash player. With Adblock enabled many flash sites fail to load, seems to be some bug with Adblock addon.

Right now the only solution I can find is to disable the Adblock addon.

Measure your net speed online

noreply@blogger.com (Manx) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 10:21:00 +0000

The internet speed is not always same and changes very often throughout the day. Often times we would like to measure our internet speed and see how fast it is.

Speedtest.net is a nice site made in flash which allows internet users to measure their download and upload speed from their computer to anywhere in the world.

Since different parts of the world have varying network speed at a given time we need to measure our speed to a particular location. Select the city to which you would like to measure your speed. The tool then starts by measuring the latency (round-trip time) and then continues to measure the download and upload speeds.

After the tests complete, results are displayed as shown below with links that can also be shared with others.

I currently use 1 Mbps broadband connection and my speed of 831 kbps measured to Singapore seems good as I am getting 83% of my download bandwidth. And about 80% of upload bandwidth.