SmashTech - Technology Tools,Tips and Tricks

Finally all your Blogger Pictures comes into Picasa

2009-11-28T23:22:00.000+05:30

Its really a cheer up time for Blogger users as Picasa is well integrated in to the Blogger platform. All the pictures uploaded to your blog will now be appearing as an album in Picasa. So what's the benefit here for the bloggers, Obivous answers for this your uploading of same picture for every post is avoided as you can browse the Picasa album and reuse the picture which is already uploaded.

The add image utility showing the picasa web album as your option to upload picture.

All the uploaded pictures appearing in your Picasa Web album.

SEO Tips for Blogger

2009-11-28T23:10:00.002+05:30

When you blog about a specific topic, you need to be more specific about the target audience and the most important aspect of reaching the right audience is selecting the keyword based on number of searches made. So when you blog about specific topic, this Firefox add-on SEO Blogger helps you to make a quick search for keywords when writing a blog post. This keyword search will help you to understand the target audience search terms used and helps you to write post accordingly.

Benefits

Download SEO Blogger and start using immediately
Save time – no need to go off to do separate keyword research
Use with absolutely any blog publishing software
Stay focused – concentrate your research only on the post you're writing
Compare keywords instantly to find out which ones pack the most SEO punch. (For example, should you write an article about "sustainable buildings" or "green buildings"?)
Automatically track how many times you've used each chosen keyword in your post

How to create those fabulous Collage with Picasa

2009-11-14T19:30:00.000+05:30

Picasa is really a welcome image tool for photo and image enthusiasts. Beside helping in organizing the photo using tags, also helps in editing and fine adjustments of the raw images. The most interesting part of Picasa is creating those wow Collages in matter of minutes and it does not stop with just simple collage but has plenty of options varying from simple collage to some pretty complex looking collage.Lets see some of the interesting collages and how to create those in Picasa.

1. Export and select all your photos to Picasa from which you want to create collage

2. Click on the Collage icon to open the Collage editor

3. Select the best Collage type provided by picasa

4. Make various adjustments like arranging photos, bringing to front and selecting the background

Various type of collages created using Picasa is listed below

Guruji Finance : The Indian market trend comes handy

2009-11-14T17:24:00.001+05:30

Guruji.com the most powerful Indian search engine and India's Number one music search engine has yet another feature that proves itself. Guruji finance offers most interesting and a powerful market trend analysis site can be used as a powerful market analysis tool to forecast and predict the future returns about various equities,mutual fund and commodities. Google finance also has a similar interface but not suitable for the Indian market as the data fetch by it is delayed for India market.

Lets showcases some of the best usages and tools that is offered by Guruji finance.

Sensex, Nifty Chart
Portfolio,Watchlist and Finance
News and Research about a particular equity
Top gainers and losers
Sector wise performance
Mutual funds
Futures
World currency
Search for a particular stock

Create Portfolio and track your stocks with real time data and analysis

2. Search and get performance of a particular stock

Create professional and artistic style borders for your Word document

2009-11-14T16:25:00.000+05:30

Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010 comes with innumerable features and functionality that helps us to present the document in a professional way with simple effort and ease. The image editing options in word in definitely a welcome feature for power word users. Borders attribute to the professional design of your word document and in this post we would like to see some of the unusual and unnoticed border style available in word 2007.Here we see how to design your word document with different border style.

1. Start your work by choosing a neat and professional looking template in word 2007.

2. Select the "Page layout" tab and click the "Page borders" button which will pop up the following dialog box.

3. Notice the "Art" drop down menu below "Width" menu as indicated below

4. Many border style is availble that various from artistic to professional looking style and choose the best that suits your document and some of the good looking border style is shown below

Remember your Friends Birthday list using Google Calendar

2009-11-08T16:02:00.002+05:30

A great saying about a friend goes like this " A Friend in Need is a Friend in Deed". So never forget your buddies birth date. There is an easy way to remember this using Google Calendar. Let us see the detailed steps using screen shots.

1. Create a new calendar named "Birthday list"

2. Add your Buddies name and date

3. Make sure that event repeat every year

4. Check your setting for getting alerts about birthday list via email or sms

Acronis: Easy to Backup and Recovery Tool

2009-10-26T15:22:00.001+05:30

Many a time it's too tough to manage to backup and recover the lost data or restoration point. Acronis makes this tedious process more simple and easy. Acronis True Image offers lot of features for backing up data and recover these includes disk imaging, file backup, scheduled backup, startup recovery manager, one click protection, live backup and many more. We shall see some steps to backup and recover operating system or file backup with Acronis.

Steps to backup and Recover using Acronis:

1. Download Acronis True Image2010 trail version and install on your pc.
2. Once installed click on "One click backup" icon.
3. Choose the backup option based on requirement like clone disk and take as image or file backup.
Image backup will help you recover operating system by replacing the image.

Excellent Tools to manage your multiple Twitter account

2009-10-25T15:04:00.001+05:30

Twitter is a famous micro blogging service where users express everything by 140 characters message called "Tweet". Twitter is getting popular all over the world where social media is greatly used to propagate and promote products and customer service. Lot of corporates promotion is offered in Twitter and many celebrities too are in Twitter updating their status. In this post we will discuss two online tool to manage your multiple twitter account and make twittering more ease.

1. CoTweet

Cotweet is designed to manage your business activity via twitter. It helps companies to reach customers easily and promotes productivity. It supports to add multiple twitter accounts and helps in assigning tasks between accounts. It also has scheduling tweets, easy interface and tracking the bit.ly clicks using the API feature. Much clearly and neatly designed UI helps everyone to understand its functionality in one shot. Just sign up once free and you will feel the difference how twittering fun and productive too.

2.HootSuite

HootSuite is another excellent productivity to manage the business activity in Twitter. It has its own URL shortening system namely ow.ly and you can get a clear statics about the click made to your URL. The complete analysis of the clicks are given in excellent graphical form. Apart from that managing muliple Twitter accounts HootSuite helps to embedd columns, manage groups, schedule tweets and manage RSS feeds of your blog or site.

Share your views about these two tools in your comments.

Clean System Temporary files easily with CCleaner

2009-09-27T03:42:00.001+05:30

Wondering why you often run out of space in your system drive(C:) unnecessarily? This may often due to the application or software tools you use in your system. Each application that you run on your windows needs temporary directories to dump some temporary data for the smooth running of the software and temporary directory is created in system drive in most of the case.

Internet cache files also takes lot of space in your system, as you browse you download the webpages to your hard disk drive to the cache folders and this internet cache folder by default is located in the system drive.

The above said are the two main sources which dumps data in your system drive and the other includes the system log files, system restore point, unwanted registry entry, libraries and many other. Therefore, the easiest way to clean or even automate this task is done by CCleaner, an excellent utility to clean dump and temporary files and folders in your system.

CCleaner removes the temporary folders files created by application, internet cache folders, system dump files, registry cleaner, software uninstallation ,startup manager and removing system restore point. CCleaner can also be made to run at the system start up time to free up space in your hard disk. So next time when you run out of space, do not forget to check with CCleaner.

Apple Nano now comes with Camera and FM tuner

2009-09-10T07:26:00.001+05:30

The new iPod nano has revamped itself by adding new features to the lightweight and the most thinnest gadget. Now nano comes with a rocking a video camera, a polished anodized aluminum finish, and a larger screen. Also making its debut is FM radio with Live Pause.

Video Capture Specification in New Ipod Nano

H.264 VGA video
640 by 480 pixels
up to 30 frames per second with AAC audio
15 real-time special effects: Sepia, Black and White, X-Ray, Film Grain, Thermal, Security Cam, Cyborg, Bulge, Kaleido, Motion Blur, Mirror, Light Tunnel, Dent, Stretch, and Twirl

Now Pause and Tag a Radio song using IPod Nano

The new FM tuner lets you see the names of songs and artists with two amazing features — iTunes Tagging and Live Pause. Make listening to the radio nothing like listening to the radio.

Nano comes with 8GB and 16GB models with a price cost of approx 8,200 Rs and 10,500 Rs

Type in Indian Languages Easily with Quillpad Online Editor

2009-05-23T23:39:00.000+05:30

Quillpad is a powerful online multilingual editor enabling us to type in english and translate into Indian languages on the go. Feature rich and powerful editor makes this online application to easy to use. Supports as many as 10 Indian languages and allows us to save the output in text file or html file. Email the typed script to friend or take printout from the editor itself.

Quillpad makes us to type in Indi languages with the help of English although we face some mistakes in the initial stages, the right use of the caps letter and expression gives the perfect output. Just look at the editor shortcuts on your first usage and get an instant demo to realize the power of this application.

In the above screen shot I just typed in English and gives the tamil script output.

Video Networking and Learning made easy with Vimeo

2009-05-17T17:40:00.000+05:30

Vimeo is a video-centric social network site that supports embedding, sharing, video storage, and allows user-commenting on each video page. Users must register to upload content.Vimeo is a thriving community of people who love to make and share video and its the perfect site for you to upload, store and share all the video you create.

Important Statistics about Vimeo

* 500 MB free uploading for a free registered user
* 2GB uploading for a Vimeo plus registered user
* 9,084+ videos uploaded daily of which 15% are HD video

Once of the most promising feature of Vimeo is it offers Widgets which make it easy to publish or watch Vimeo videos on other web sites. You can customize a widget for your blog, social network profile or anywhere else that supports embed code. When you upload a new video to Vimeo, your widget will update automatically.

Following widgets are offered by Vimeo

1.Hubnut provides a TV-style viewing experience. Use it to publish all of your videos on sites like MySpace at once. You can also use it to watch your Vimeo subscriptions on other sites like Netvibes.

2. Badge creates a fun, visual montage of your newest videos. Choose the # of videos to be displayed, and the dimensions that best fit with your personal style. We do the rest.

3. Dashboard is designed specifically for the Mac OS X. Customizing the video stream is easy, and you can watch videos directly from your desktop.

Select your widget and customize it as per your requirements

What can you benefit from Vimeo?

Just look at the Search result for "Learning Photoshop" and it offers handfuls of video's with high quality audio and video with simple illustrations. Share the video with your friends or enjoy sharing by embedding the code in your blog or site.You can also search for lot of screen cast of many software's usage/demo video in Vimeo.

Make Awesome looking documents instantly with SmartDraw

2009-05-17T17:27:00.001+05:30

SmartDraw is a professional office suite to perform documenting work instantly with perfection and ease. You can create professional style documents in matter of minutes. This office style tool is loaded with full of templates to fulfill basic as well as advance styled documents. The most interesting part of this tool is its templates which are organized as well classified into categories for easy pick and also shows the preview of all available templates which helps us to choose the template easily and download it for editing.
Let us see a simple example to create a brochure using SmartDraw and then create a simple weekly task report template to manage a project work.

Steps to create Brochure instantly

1. Download the SmartDraw 2009 and install the software on your pc.
2. Open SmartDraw and browse to the category Flyers and select the Brochure section SmartDraw will show the available template preview and select the one which suits you.

3. SmartDraw will download the template and will allow you to edit the brochure which you have chosen

4. Make the most use of the toolbars available in ribbon format, most important tools are adding images, auto shapes, themes and colors.

5. Once editing work is over you can save the document as smartdraw file (.sdr) or you can export the file to any of the format like pdf,ppt or to word document.

Steps to create project management form
1. Open SmartDraw and browse the category Project management menu

2. Select your preferred format and in this example we selected weekly task allotted format.

3. The template will generate the weekly status based on the range of dates chosen and fill in a sample data for easy understanding
4. Export the template in a word or excel format and share with your team and subordinates to track the weekly status of the team.

Conclusion
SmartDraw is really useful for people in corporate,management,engineering and media publications. It has rich editing features including themes and templates. The power of SmartDraw is its ease of use and you can export to various formats like word,excel,pdf or even images. SmartDraw is free to try for 30 days and has the capability to improve the productivity of office documenting needs and works.It has templates for every needs and perfect to edit options.

Use Portable Virus cleaner to avoid Virus spread in Thumb drives

2009-05-06T17:05:00.004+05:30

Most common source of virus spread is by sharing pen drives between others and letting us damage our PC completely. Even though Antivirus solutions are installed on our PC some latest and new viruses can easily spread from pen drives, the reason for this your friends system must have affected by a seriously unnoticeable virus or might have not installed an anti virus solution. So solution for this is handy, use Portable virus scan applications. Portable application is a stand alone tiny application which can be used in small memory devices especially from a pen drive.

Download Avast Virus Cleaner which can be installed directly on your pen drive. So once you install this standalone application on your portable drive, update it regularly and on sharing your thumb drive with others, check for virus instantly right from your pen drive application. This is one of the best way to avoid Virus spread through "Pen Drives".

Avast is one of my favorite Antivirus solution which I choose to install on my thumb driver and there are many antivirus solution to choose from which includes Avast, Nortan and Macafee solution to protect your PC from Pen drive attack.

Get a Free Interactive Matlab Training Kit CD

2009-04-30T18:07:00.001+05:30

Matlab is a famous programming suite from MathWorks which allow perfect computation of complex data and used in various fields like communications, automobile industries, aerospace, defence, computer, finance and many other. Matlab is also used to develop customized algorithms used for fast computing and developing user interface for applications.Matlab is so powerful, simple to use and easy to understand the flow of code. Matlab is used widely for computing Digital signal processing, control design, technical computing, design and test applications, Financial model analyzing.

As a mark of Technical promotion and improve the usage of Matlab among techies, college students and engineering graduates. Matlab is offering free Technical Training kit which comprises of a CD.It provides two option to grab the CD content.

1. Register with MathWorks and download the CD content via internet link.
2. Register with MathWorks and Request for a CD via post.

CD is offered according to the field of interest and chose the right option from the given list before proceeding with download or request.

1. Image processing
2. Financial model applications
3. Computational biology
4. Technical computing
5. Test and measurement

Request for Free CD Here

Things I m doing with my Seagate Freeagent Go and Fasi.in

2009-04-29T18:42:00.001+05:30

On behalf of SmashTech I feel happy and proud for winning the third prize “Seagate Freeagent Go” in blog competition conducted by IBNMS.Here I am going to share few brainstorming ideas that I have done to prepare myself for this competition. I came to know about this competition by twitter. Then I gone through the competition page completely, I can say I have read every letter indicated in the IBNMS page twice and started brainstorming ideas.

As a avid Linux user I often run out of space for installing or trying new distributions so I thought this as my first and foremost idea then big fan of AR Rahman and hold the complete collections of his items and my precious possession too, so organizing multimedia is the second option I had then at last a simple back up solution to help you out when a "system crashes" was my last solution and It worked out well. I didn’t go for any complicated ideas or tweaks of usage “Seagate Freeagent” but stood with some simple idea.

I thought picture illustration will be a good idea to add more value to my post, but I m not well versed with Photoshop, which helped me to discover the usage of paint.net package and created the images completely from scratch using paint.net [but simple one] and finished with in few minutes.

I posted the article and simply waited for the result, whole heartedly I prepared and done my posting and anxiously waited for the announcements. But at last moment I thought I was out of race, as IBNMS was flooded with many good post and people from marketing, techies, college guys were competing well. The final result came and I got the third place and won a 500GB Seagate Freeagent Go portable and handy HD.

As I said in the post “Things to do with Seagate Freeagent family” I have created also 5 virtual drive and running 5 virtual operating systems using VMware. As you guessed all 5 OS are Linux ofcourse, then I backed up the complete files and also syncing up the folders which I need. I have also copied the host of multimedia collections in to my portable drive and believe it or not I m having around 220GB free space as of now. Truly a mammoth space offering and a handy gadget.

Thanks a lot IBNMS team, Seagate Singapore sponsors, Jury members for selecting my post and PR team for shipping the product very safely and tracking the shipping continuously.Thanks to Ajay Jain for shipping "Peep Peep Dont sleep " book authored by him

Another éclat for SmashTech

ToTheTech.com conducted a give away for besting commenter and I m happy I was selected as the best commenter as per TTT blog and awarded a free domain fasil.in for one year worth around 300INR.I am running some experimental setup with my free domain and hosting it for free using 000webhost.

Thanks ToTheTech karthikeyan for offering such giveaways.

Download Free Professional Resume Template from SmashTech

2009-04-29T17:33:00.000+05:30

SmashTech is here to help you out during this recession time, Market is slowly booming up even though the recession after effects are worst, many leaders and business communities people are sorting out the recession problems due to the economic slow down and its time to revamp ourselves to get a perfect job. We need a perfect professional style Resume to make our job search easy and many sites are offering professional style resume for free of cost which are not up to the mark and but here at SmashTech we created a handy resume template of comprising of three page using Word 2007.

Download the Professional style resume and get benefited. Have your sayings in your comments and suggestions to improve this template. Note this templates works will only in Word 2007.

Create Professional Style Documents instantly in Word2007

2009-04-28T17:23:00.000+05:30

MS Office 2007 is one of the most innovative and impressive office suite offered by Microsoft and the design interface is fabulous and splendid which make document editing easy and pleasurable. In this post we are going to discuss about creating a wow professional document with word 2007. MS word offers host on templates both online and offline which helps to make professional documenting process easy as the scratch work is avoid and saves time and makes the work to be finished instantaneously.

Apart from using template there is one good and non familiar option is available in word 2007 which helps us to create a “Wow” styled documents in minutes. Go to Insert tab and on Quick parts drop menu and select “Building block organizer” which has the ready made solutions of different designer style. It has fantastic design collections like header, footer, tables, table of contents, text boxes, cover pages, equations, page number and many alike. What you need to do? Simple select the style which you want to use in the document and just insert the object and follow up the editing work to finish the “Wow” styled documents in minutes.

Make the most out of your blog by redesigning and modifying design

2009-04-27T12:57:00.002+05:30

In our previous post we have discussed some interesting and inspiring ways to make a professional looking blog design. In this we will see some more interesting which helps your blog to a prefect design look and add more value to your blog. These subtle changes to your blogs make more impressive design to your blog besides attracting many new visitors.

1. Make an attractive favicon

Favicon is a small icon that you can see on the browser tab and it gives a perfect identity to a blog and makes it unique. The usual blogger icon is the default one and you can change the favicon by following this link.Favicon is similar to a logo of a site in most of the cases and helps you to distinguish your blog from the usual blogger and make an appearance that your blog is something special.

2.Create an Awesome banners and header to make a perfect blog

Banners and Header images are so popular and the most important attribute of a blog design. A newbie blogger can easily create a header or banner images using Photoshop and blogger platform allows you to change the header image easily. Login to dashboard, select the blog and go to layout and select the page elements and in the header element just upload the banner image and add a professional look to your blog.

3.Play around with Fonts and Color to attain Perfection

Content is the king of the blog, but the king will be benefited only on the appearance, yes select the right choice of fonts and colors for the various elements of blog. Blogger allows you to change the colors and fonts easily for various elements like post title, hover color, post title font, footer color, font and various elements as such. In this process you can fine tune a blog to a perfect appearance.

4. Add a social badge to link with others

A blogger should involve him in social networking and provide an easy way for the visitor to link with you in social networking sites.Facebook and friendfeed are providing excellent badge like social widget and you can provide the link of every networking site you participate and make social networking easy.

5. Make some animated image and text effects

There are plenty of online web application which helps you to create some interesting design banners,logos and images to make some gimmicks effects to your blog and you can instantly create these images using these web applications, So make the most of these web applications to make a impressive blog design.

Best sites to make online Rail Ticket reservation when IRCTC fails

2009-04-26T00:32:00.001+05:30

IRCTC is the official online ticket reservation site and one of the most visited site in India in the year 2008 as per Google Zeitgeist.Obviously the most visited sites suffers loading problem due to huge traffic and IRCTC is not the exemption from this, during the peak hours or at the season times the online train ticket reservation site IRCTC goes down with the message “service unavailable”. During these times alternate sites to book tickets are of great deal and attract the customers by offering no service charge or a mere amount as service charge for booking train ticket using sites excluding IRCTC.Here we list some of the alternative methods and sites to book train ticket online when irctc is down.

1. Cleartrip

Cleartrip is most renowned and reliable service provider for booking air tickets online.Cleartrips now venture for providing train tickets by joining hands with IRCTC offers services for online train reservation with mere service charge. The interface is so simple, smooth and easy to use. Finding trains online is made easy and you can book train tickets in easy 3 steps. Search for trains ,look for availability and book tickets .What else, you will also receive SMS alerts, tickets by email ,cancellation of the tickets is also so easy with cleartrip.Currently(at the time writing this post)ClearTrip is offering 10% cash back offer for master card users. Get benefited by cleartrip at the times when IRCTC goes down.Just sign up for a user account for booking tickets.

2. Railticket online

Another new venture which allows you online train reservation with so simple and easy steps .Just login, search for trains availability and book tickets instantaneously. This site also allows a user to become a registered agent to book bulk ticket.Just sign up for a user account for booking tickets.The interface is so simple and straight forward to book ticket and explained clearly in this screenshot.

3. Mobile booking using ngpay

If you have a mobile phone with GPRS connection then ngpay application lets you to book ticket right from your mobile. All you need bank account with mobile banking enabled ,Once you download ngpay application on your mobile, browse through the irctc column to book tickets ,this service also has host of many services powered by mobile payments.Some special offers like cash back or reduction in booking is offered by ngpay.All you need is provide your mobile number at ngpay site and get the link to download the application through SMS and install the application to book tickets using mobile phone.

4. Check PNR status instantly and easily

Erail.in is the web application to find trains, seats availability very fast. The interface is designed for easy usage and has many features like knowing the fares for the trains. Knowing PNR status in really fast in erail.in when compared with the official Indian railways site, actually this site fetching data from the official Indian railways site ,furthermore you can get to know about the routes, distances between places using erail.in.The most importane uses are checking PNR status instantly,getting routes,distance,time to reach and complete list of trains between source and destination.

Utilize the power of Zoho in Microsoft Office using Zoho Plugin

2009-04-22T20:52:00.001+05:30

Zoho is a powerful online office productivity suite which leaps ahead of Google docs. Now Zoho introduces a Plugin which supports the use of zoho writer and zoho sheet in Microsoft Office.

Offline Copy and Editing

Zoho plugin helps you to login to Zoho account using word or excel and allows you to save or edit the zoho copy on word or excel from which you can save your local copy of your document.Zoho plugin allows to share,publish and save the edited document on Zoho from office.

Download Zoho Plugin and make the most of now with Zoho on Microsoft office.Learn the usage of Zoho plugin.

Get a Free Premium Software as Give away of the day

2009-04-20T20:39:00.000+05:30

Are you a real software tools addict and would like to explore the software tools to make your work optimized and to improve your productivity. Premium software are costly and you cannot afford to pay for all the software's to try,since the freeware or trail version have limited access.To quench your software tools thirst here comes the GiveAway site to offer a full version of any one of the software for one full day.

Just visit the GiveAwayoftheday and you will see the Give away of the day with it full features and also the time reamaining for the download.The important twist with this service is you should download the software and install it within that 24 hrs of the giveaway.

The software is bundled with activate.exe file which should be activated by web within the expiry of the Give away.So start following GiveAway and get the premium softwares for free of cost.

10 Steps to Create a Professional Style Blog

2009-04-14T00:35:00.001+05:30

All along my blogging experience I have noticed lot of changes happening around Web 2.0 and many blogs are designed remarkably well in such a way it attracts and makes the first time visitor to follow that blog regularly.The main criteria to make a blog look like a professional way are the design part which attributes the factor of readability of the blog. So the template plays a vital role in making a blog a successful one in the blogosphere beside contents. In this post we will see some of the inspiring blog widgets and the design idea to implement a professional looking design to your blog and make blogging a happy place to share your ideas.

1. Look for the professional looking templates

Thanks to the sites like btemplates.com and many other which are providing some great looking blog templates for absolute free of cost or some highly inspiring designer template for a minimal cost. I have recently changed the blogger template for SmashTech from btemplates.com and there am many sites for providing professional template and make sure the template is SEO friendly.

2. Implement a commendable Commenting system

The best commenting recently I have come cross is blogger is Intense debate. Though the blogger provides Embed commenting system. Intense debate is more user friendly and makes commenting more easy and gives a new feel to the blogging system. Implementing the Intense debate commenting system is very simple and it gets well integrated into blogger template and loads absolutely fast and make a stunning commenting system to your blog with featured notification and replying to comments via email and makes your blog more interactive.

3. A prefect "About me" column

Every blogger should have a clear intention about the purpose of blogging, About me column clearly explains the role of blogger in the blogosphere and it certainly gives a simple introduction about the author of the blog to a new visitor. A simple photo in About Me column adds more value to the blog.

4. Create a simple table of content page

The more you provide the chance to explore your blog the more the page view for your blog. So the Table of Contents is a simple work around to provide the list of post from your blog and this can to easily implemented using Feedburners BuzzBoost option and publishing your feeds as html.Simply post a page with the title "Table of Contents" and input the script of BuzzBoost in the post. You can also create an archive page using sitemaps.

5. Subscription made easy

Feed readers are the real followers of the blog as they contribute a phenomenal role in showcasing the popularity of a blog with FeedChicklet indicating 5K readers.This clearly shows the blog is worth to follow and clearly make sense about its role. So provide a simple subscription option which can be easily done with the Feedburner subscribe to email option and provide a Subscribe button at the prominent place of your blog.

6. Make a simple Contact form

Once you become popular with the social networking sites, I think there is no need of Contact Me form. A simple email me link is enough to get feedbacks from the users. But at the initial stage of your blogging, Contact Me pages help you to get some genuine feedback or suggestion from the visitors. The best and simple way to create a Contact Me page is by creating a simple Google docs form.Signin to Google docs create a new form with the necessary fields and embed the form in your blog post named "Contact Me" and make a notification alert so that if you get any feedbacks you are notified instantly.

7. Add Share/Save button below every post

A highly valuable content surely has big response in the socio-network sites like digg,Stumble Upon,delicious and much more.Simple and dynamically reacting buttons like Share any will surely temtate the follower to digg a post or stumble it. If necessary the user can also send the post as mail to his contacts. This can make your content reach places in no time.

8. Place some stunning widgets

Widgets comes handy these days and makes easy to implement in no time.Infact I have completely changed the template and implemented the same widgets in my previous template in matter of minutes with the help of widgets.Wowzio and widget box provides some stunning widgets to your blog. I implemented the Recent post widget and wowzio photo gallery widget to give a professional look and feel to my blog.

9. A perfect search engine for your blog

If your blog is loaded with tones of contents, people normally tend to search for more contents in your blog. Simple Google custom search can serve this purpose besides helping you to monetize for the search performed in the blog.

10.Illustrate with pictures and screen shots

A picture can speak thousand words. Be illustrative in expressing your blog post, add creative photos from flickr or clip part images wherever necessary and add screen shots in explaining any technical details. Use quality screen shot tools like Snagit in you can instantly edit the screen shot with beautiful captions and numbering system.

These are the ideas which I recently done with my blog and based on my recent activity I have provided the design information. I will also post some inspiring blog design ideas and making custom widgets to make a professional design blog in coming post. Have your say in comments about your design strategies.

Create Simple Table of Contents for your blog

2009-04-12T14:35:00.000+05:30

Many bloggers try their level best to improve the readability of the blog and one such way is providing Table of Contents like format to list the blog post. There are many ways to provide TOC for a blog, here we are going to see a simple and instance way of providing Table of content for a blog or for a website having feeds.

1.This TOC can be acheived by using feed burner's "BuzzBoost" a way to publish your feeds as HTML.Just login to your feedburner account.

2. Select your feed and go to Publicize tab menu and select BuzzBoost option

3.Enable and activate 'BuzzBoost' option with your preferred settings and simply copy the script and paste the script in any post and publish the post by naming "Table of Contents"

The greatest benefit of using this TOC is "easy to find" post with title and make blog look like more professional way. The entire blog feed posts can be viewed in an single page.

Explore Chennai with this Handy Excel guide

2009-03-24T15:34:00.000+05:30

Chennai is a beautiful and most dense city serving as capital of TamilNadu and exploring this city is never easy for those are new to the city.For this a handy excel sheet is compiled by the chennaites and this handy book serves as mini tourism and travel guide for Chennai.

Finding Bus route in chennai is not even easy for the people in chennai for years and this excel sheet has the complete bus route of chennai and locating cinema halls,hotels and other essential things in chennai is made pretty easy.

Download this excel book guide or simple browse through the document provided below