I was just going through the new products in Google Labs. And that’s where I stumbled on to this project called Follow Finder. Now when Google has introduced it’s own microblogging platform called Google Buzz, it’s a bit refreshing to see that some guys in Google have tried their hands in Twitter experiment. This service is meant to find out new people whom you most likely to follow.
But anything from Google doesn’t necessarily mean great. But I am not going say it is bad either. It is a simple application for a user. Just enter your Twitter username and it will analyze your public social graph that includes your follower and following list. So like they will find out the guys who are following the same people as you. In most cases you are likely to have some common interests and that means you might follow them.
There are lots of Twitter directories and lists categorized by topics and interests. And this application doesn’t do anything out of blue. But as a Google product you most likely have a look at it 
WordPress 3.0 got released just yesterday. And now, at 4.15 in the morning I got some time to upgrade my WordPress and have a look around to this latest update.
The most important change in this version was to merge WordPress MU with normal WordPress. So if you have multiple blogs, you can use WordPress 3.0 to run all your blogs from a single WordPress installation. But just like MU, you can only install blogs in sub-domains under a domain name( like example.anirbanroy.info and blog.anirbanroy.info under my domain name). Most likely you are using different domain names for your WordPress blogs. Then you need to use the WordPress MU Domain Mapping Plugin to map your WordPress blogs under a single installation to separate domain names.
Another very important feature is that WordPress team has released a whole new default theme called Twenty Ten that will support all the features of the current WordPress version. You can use custom menus, backgrounds and page headers with this new theme. And custom means custom! You can practically handcraft your navigation using custom menus. And you can even choose to show different header images for each of your blog post! By the way, don’t worry, Kubrick theme is still there if you are a legacy fan 
Admin dashboard colour has gone lighter and currently as I can see you will get any update notifications like for plugins and themes also in Dashboard settings in the left sidebar. There you can bulk update all those from a single page. Get Shortlink option has been added to the blog post to ease url shortening through WordPress without need of any third-party url-shortening services.
I thought of adding some screenshots of these new features. But when you find a more than decent video from WordPress official site, it is better to just embed it
If you have played around long enough with WordPress, then you should know this simple trick. And as a newbie you would find this feature provided by WordPress quite useful, especially if you are looking to give your blog some static website look.
Just go to Settings> Reading from your WordPress dashboard. There you will find the option to add any page that you have created in your WordPress blog like “Who Am I” or “Contact” as your homepage. And you can switch back to show your latest blog posts as the home page any time. You don’t need any custom template for that.
This is just another example why people say that WordPress is flexible
Sometimes you may be migrating your blog to different server or importing blog posts or database from backup. Or it may even happen that your blog is broken due to some configuration problem in your hosting server. Then it is somewhat professional to show a maintenance page to your visitors. It gives a good impression to the readers and gives them some sort of info about when to come back.
That’s where I have found this WordPress plugin real handy. Without any hardship you can show a real pro-looking maintenance page to the users. And moreover you can give access to the real state of the blog depending on the WordPress user role. Like your blog administrators can have access to both front-end and back-end while subscribers can only have access to the back-end i.e. WordPress dashboard and they will see maintenance mode in front-end.
And you can write your own custom message and use dynamic placeholders to show your blog url, title and expected time when your blog will be live again. But one thing that you have to remember is that maintenance mode will not get deactivated automatically. But that is not that serious issue as you can show different message instead of expected time in that case. You have option to show messages like “coming back soon” when the time that you entered expires automatically.
Another nice little thing that I found worth mentioning. You can select urls that you want to exclude from maintenance mode. Suppose you want to keep your About And Contact pages working. Then you just have to specify the url paths in the plugin’s options page. And you can keep your trackback and feeds active on the same page.
Lots of options, easy interface
If you experiment with your WordPress blog a lot, then it is good to have it.
NameCheap has been giving away PositiveSSL from Comodo free of cost for a long time now with any new purchase. It would normally cost you $49.95. And moreover you will get a huge discount when you renew your SSL certificate for the second year. It will only cost you $9.95. But do you really need an SSL certificate?
As a new blogger or a webmaster, you will think why not get this free SSL certificate and present my site as more professional and secure. But if you are new, there is every chance that you are missing a most important point. You cannot install your SSL certificate on shared ip. You need a dedicated ip to do that. That means you either need a dedicated hosting or a shared hosting with a unique ip address. Dedicated hosting will cost lot more than normal shared hosting that you usually use. And if you buy unique ip address for your shared hosting, you have to pay $2 or more extra monthly depending on your hosting company.
I am not discouraging you to use SSL certificate. But frankly speaking, you can live without it if you just have a blog or normal website. SSL certificate is a must have for a site that does monetary transaction with the users. Otherwise you can’t get the customer trust. I won’t buy anything from an online seller if it is not verified by a trusted SSL certificate provider like Comodo or Verisign.
So, just don’t think that you will get a free PositiveSSL certificate and install it for your blog. And you will be a proud owner of a secure server for free. It’s not as simple as that.
But even if you can’t make use of Namecheap’s free SSL certificate offer, I would still recommend you to use NameCheap for buying domain. I am in love with their user interface. You just can’t find a better one
I stumbled onto this interesting backup service for WordPress a few months ago, but somewhat couldn’t endup writing a post for it. Most of you use different WordPress plugins to create a backup of your WordPress database and store it in your mailbox or hard disk. Though nowadays you get enough space in your inbox or hard disk, but still what about saving a bit of space especially if you can store it in a secure server? This service is provided by Backup Technology and like your normal WordPress database backup, you need to install their WordPress plugin.
I will go through the features quickly:
- You will get 50mb of disk space on their secure server.
- You can automate your backup schedule & mark a previous backup as locked so that it won’t get overwritten by a new backup.
- If you want you can get your WordPress backup sent automatically in your email.
- Using the built-in ZLIB support available in nearly all PHP installations nowadays, the WordPress plugin can reduce the size of a 50mb WordPress database to a 5mb compressed file.
- And you can use the plugin to encrypt your backups with DES, AES128 or AES256 encryption for total security.
So if you are looking forward to try new things, and care about more security, this service is worth to give a try. You are getting this WordPress service free of cost after all
For last few days I have been using this free website screenshot thumbnail service to capture images of other blogs and post them. So I thought I should mention it here in case if you are looking for a quick one. It is called Shrink The Web. You will just enter the url in the submit box to generate the screenshots. And you don’t have to wait for long in a queue before your request get processed. It almost gets processed immediately.
They will give you six screenshots of different size. Here are the screenshot sizes 75×56 90×68 100×75 120×90 200×150 320×200. As you can see the biggest size is 320×200 which serves my purpose pretty well. If you need smaller, thumbnail kind of image you can choose from other five. The picture quality is quite alright too.
Here is a screenshot of this blog:
It doesn’t look bad. Does it
Yes, Google Blogger allows adult content. But obviously there are some restrictions. I will copy directly from Blogger’s Content Policy to show you what kind of adult content is not allowed in your Blogger blogs:
Adult Content: We do allow adult content on Blogger, including images or videos that contain nudity or sexual activity. But, please mark your blog as ‘adult’ in your Blogger settings. Otherwise, we may put it behind a ‘mature content’ interstitial.
There are some exceptions to our adult content policy:
- Do not use Blogger as a way to make money on adult content. For example, don’t create blogs where a significant percentage of the content is ads or links to commercial porn sites.
- No incest or bestiality content: We do not allow image, video or text content that depicts or encourages incest or bestiality.
Child safety: We have a zero tolerance policy towards content that exploits children. Some examples of this include:
- Child pornography: We will terminate the accounts of any user we find publishing or distributing child pornography. We will also report that user to law enforcement.
- Pedophilia: We do not allow content that encourages or promotes sexual attraction towards children. For example, do not create blogs with galleries of images of children where the collection of images or text accompanying the images is sexually suggestive.
So as you can see, you can use your blogspot blog for adult blog purpose without getting banned if you are a bit careful. But don’t get excited so easily
As I have mentioned earlier in this blog Google Adsense doesn’t allow you to put ads on an adult site. So though you will get half support for quick money, you will have to find the main thing, the money part from some other ad company than Google
I have become somewhat irregular with this blog. I have got busier with my work and it doesn’t help my energy at all. Writing a good post after a long day and again in front of internet is not an easy task, at least not for a lazy guy like me
But I have planned to write on this topic for some days now. And yes, Yahoo does support nofollow attribute much like Google. If you add a nofollow tag in a link, Yahoo crawler will index it. But the link will not be considered for ranking of the target page. Here is what they have said officially on their help page:
The Yahoo! Slurp web crawler obeys the rel=”nofollow” attribute for links. Web publishers and blog owners can apply a rel=”nofollow” attribute to any hyperlink on their page to indicate that the link may not be an approved or trusted link.
Note: Yahoo! Slurp may use a “nofollow” link for discovering content, but the link will not be considered an “approved” link for consideration when ranking the target page.
If you would like to read the whole article, click here. So if you have been using nofollow attribute for Google search, you have been automatically taking care of Yahoo too
Today I found out a coupon code for NetFirms. Using it you can buy .com, .org or .net domain name with just $1. And unlike GoDaddy coupon code for $1 domain name registration, you don’t have to pay by credit card. You can use Paypal to make your payment. So when you register any of the above tlds from NetFirms, just enter this coupon code “DOLLARDOMAIN”. Grab the opportunity as most of you know NetFirms is as trustworthy name as GoDaddy or NameCheap itself