Web Tools and Tips » Tips ‘n’ Tricks

Ping Sites Automatically with Ping.fm - Easy Social Networking

Silki — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 07:36:50 +0000

Pinging your Social Networking sites is a common activity done by most of the regular Internet users very often. If you are active on social networking sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc., you know what I am talking about. These social networking sites have an option using which, you can do automatic pinging and update your profile status. I know many users, who do it many times in a day.

But, it takes lots of time. Can you imagine how time consuming it can be to ping sites one by one. Its really boring, and time consuming.

Thanks, there are a few services, which ping sites automatically for you.
.

Welcome to Ping.fm.

It does a great job here.

You just have to get an account and enter your login information of different social networking sites. After that you can automatically ping sites with your current status just by pinging Ping.fm. It will update your status on all the sites on its own. Simple.

Although it looks promising, but I find getting the same job of pinging SN sites done easily with SocialThing equally easy, and it seems they are offering more features than Ping.fm.

Ping.fm is in BETA, and you need to have an invitation code to get an account.

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AideRSS | Empower Google Reader to filter out best from worst

Silki — Fri, 16 May 2008 14:02:46 +0000

RSS is one of the most important tool in a Blogger’s arsenal. Whether it is being used to distribute your content to those not directly visiting your site, or reading others’ content without actually visiting them, RSS is a tool, which is truly indispensable in today’s online world.

There are lots of RSS Readers, but Google Reader is the preferred RSS Reader for most, including me.

And there is now yet another reason, behind it.

Welcome to AideRSS.

Despite tremendous usability of Google Reader, one thing, which I have always lamented about it is its inability to differentiate between good and bad, bad and worst..

There are hundreds and thousands of feeds available, and when you come across a new feed, you are always puzzled, whether to subscribe to it or not. Believe me, at one point of time, I was subscribed to about 200 of tech blogs, and it was quite a task to actually prune that list to fifty odd or so.

But now AideRSS provides a simple solution, at least for the first level screening.

AideRSS is a Firefox addon, [Get the invitation here http://gr.aiderss.com/?techcrunch ]which rates the feeds on a scale of 1 to 10, based upon several factors. They call it PostRank. It is actually based upon several factors like Diggs, comments, stumbles, reactions and a few more. So, now you have an option. If you find a feed with low PostRank, you can presume it to be not that good as a post with high PostRank. I know that the system is not foolproof, and the quality of a post is sometimes a personal observation, but still it is a decent tool to quickly screen the better ones from the average ones.

Besides, that, AideRSS also allows you to categorize different posts within a feed in different categories of Good, great and Best. Choose your option, and the posts matching your selection will only be visible to you. Rest will be hidden.

So, in nutshell,

Read What Matters: Identify best content with the help of PostRank™ in GoogleReader.
Filter Any RSS Feed: Adjust and filter any RSS feed - reclaim your time.
Hide Filtered Content: Find the needle in the haystack and boost your productivity.
Join the Conversation: View social statistics and join the best conversations with ease.

It is a real cool web tool. Use it to believe it.

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How to Optimize / Increase Virtual Memory in Windows XP

Silki — Tue, 13 May 2008 02:48:48 +0000

Low Virtual Memory - What to do ?

If you are a lazy person like many computer wizards, you would have encountered an annoying pop-up window many times, which notifies you that you are running on low virtual memory, and Windows is trying to increase it. If it happens once in a while, then its OK. Nothing to worry about. But if it happens repeatedly, then you need to take action, because now it has started affecting the performance of your PC.

How to optimize Virtual memory in XP

A few simple steps.
.

Open Control Panel > System.
Click on Advanced tab
Click the Settings button in the Performance panel.
Click the Advanced tab.
Click the Change button in the Virtual memory panel.
It was lying deep, but you found it.
Now, you have two options. If you exactly about your system, you can choose the size of the virtual memory, otherwise select the System managed size option. It is safe.

Simple, isn’t it?

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Embed Google Doc presentation on a web page

Silki — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:17:13 +0000

There is now a tough competition for gaining the supremacy over the online office suite segment. More and more features are being included in these software.

Recently, Google Doc, which is a big player in the online office suite segment, had released a useful feature, which allows you to embed your Google Doc presentation into any web page.

I had created a simple presentation on how to do that, and embedded below.

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How to see preview of a TinyUrl hyperlink

Silki — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:50:48 +0000

TinyURL is useful web tool, which encrypts a long and unreadable URL, to make it small and easily remember-able URL. It is specially useful, when you send the URL through emails etc. or write a URL in forums or web forms.

For instance a long URL like following,

http://webtoolsandtips.com/tips-on-microsoft/how-to-disable-error-reporting-in-windows-xp/

gets converted into something like

http://tinyurl.com/2do5nx

which is much easier to remember and fit into a given space.

How TinyURL works

Nothing new. When a person clicks a TinyURL, it gets redirected to the actual URL automatically.

Preview a TinyURL

But, using TinyURLs also has a drawback.

Most of the today’s browsers display the link in the status bar, when you hover your mouse over a hyperlink. People gets used to check this before clicking any of the hyperlink on a webpage. This gives them confidence before clicking, that the coming web page will not be a spam or will not be containing a malicious script.

But, when they see a URL, which is cloaked under TinyURL, that confidence is not there, and this can refrain some people to click that link. If somehow, it was possible to know the resulting web page beforehand, people will happily click that link.

How to see the preview of a TinyURL

So, if you wan to enable your readers to see the preview, you just have to include a :preview” before the domain “tinyURL”.

For instance, for a link like http://tinyurl.com/2do5n, if you give the link like http://preview.tinyurl.com/2do5nx

it will open an intermediate page, which will show the actual link to the user.

And if you are the user, and you want to see the actual URL before landing on a page, then you can set a simple cookie in your browser. The procedure is just one click on the “Preview Feature” on the TinyURL.com website.

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CookiePie - Multiple Cookies for the Same Site

Silki — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 07:14:56 +0000

Gmail and other similar services use cookies to detect your online presence and automatically login you, if you so desire, to let you avoid the hassles of entering the username and passwords. This saves you couple of minutes and is very useful, if you are using the computer, which is not shared with others.

But, in many case, you want to have more than one such email accounts. But since, Gmail is saving cookies in your computer, it becomes difficult to use different accounts from the same computer, and you have to logout and login each time, you want to switch from one user to the other user. Once you get used to automatic login, it looks very cumbersome.

However, with CookiePie Extension, you can do it very easily.

What is CookiePie?

CookiePie is a Firefox extension, which enables you to maintain different cookies storage in different tabs and windows. After the download and installation of CookiePie, you have to use the tab’s context menu to enable CookiePie.

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Create Hack Proof Strong Passwords easily

Silki — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:42:52 +0000

Creation of strong passwords is the key to online safety these days. With the rapid increase in the web applications, which require you to register with them, there are virtually hundreds of passwords, which an average Internet user has to create to sustain his online presence. Remembering these passwords is a bit tedious work, and because of this, most of us tend to create passwords, which are just easy to remember, often overlooking whether somebody can hack passwords or not. And also repeat these passwords for more than one services.

However, this leaves a hole in our defence against potential online threats. These passwords, which are not that strong, can be hacked sometimes by experts of this dubious art. These masters know the weaknesses of people to create passwords with birthdays, own names, spouse or children names, zip codes and so on.

So how to create hack proof passwords easily

This discussion brings us to a trade off, where you tend to give up the security for convenience. But I have been using a simple trick for years, which gives me fairly strong passwords, without making them difficult to remember.

I, just like any other person, think of some moderately strong password made up of only alphabets, which is easy to remember and modify it with following thumb rules.

Replace all ‘l’ with ‘|’.
Replace all ‘a’ with ‘@’.
Replace all ’s’ with ‘$’.
Replace all ‘i’ with ‘!’.
Replace all ‘o’ with ‘0′.

For instance…

A “silki’ becomes ‘$!|k!’ .
A “webtoolsandtips” becomes “webt00|$@t!p$”.
A “windowsxp” becomes “w!nd0w$xp”.

This gives me some really hack proof passwords. Can you hack them easily ?

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Create invisible folder to hide important files

Silki — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 09:06:12 +0000

If you work on an office computer, which is shared by other users, then there may be some files, which you just want to hide from other users. There are many programs available on the Internet today, some are free while some require you to pay some fees, which allow you to encrypt your files o that they cannot be accessed by anybody else except you. There are other methods also to protect your files, which include protecting them with passwords. All these methods of protecting your privacy have their merits and demerits.

Here we present you a very simple tip, which require no use of any external program or web tool, but instead uses the options provided within the Windows XP operating system. This method is not a foolproof method of protecting your files, because anybody with a thorough understanding of Windows XP can get the access. It is like hiding the money under your mattress, money is there, if anybody is hell bound to search for it, he can get the access. However, the tip is simple, and easy.

How to hide important files and folders

First you have to create a folder and place all your sensitive files in it. This method will just make it invisible to others, although it will be there be available in your PC.

Right click where ever you want the invisible folder to be and select create a new folder.

Right Click > Click Rename. Delete any name so that nothing is there in the name. Hold down ALT key and press 0160 on the number pad (make sure Num Lock is on).

You will have a blank name. But a folder icon is still there, which can tell anybody that something is there.

To hide this icon, Right click the icon and select Properties.

Open the Customize tab.

Click on the Change Icon button and select an icon, which has no image.

Hit OK and you are through.

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How to extend trial period / reset trial period of demo software

Silki — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:06:27 +0000

The purpose of this post is not to encourage the software piracy, but just spreading the knowledge.

Today there are many applications and software available on the Internet, which have great utility and are distributed as demo software. The developers of these demo versions usually disable some of the important features of these software. If you want to use these features, then you have to pay for buying the complete version.

Another method used by the developers is to allow users to use the software only for a limited period after which these software get expired an you have to again pay for continuing using that. The purpose of both these methods is to get you addicted to using that software and then ask you the money.

However there are certain methods by which you can extend trial period of these demo software and continue using them even after the expiry of the validity period.

My Digital life has written a few tips to reset trial period. You may like to check that out.

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Fax Over Web - Fax Isn’t Dead

Silki — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 15:10:19 +0000

In today’s corporate world, although there are many fast methods of communications like IM, emails etc. but still the importance of the age old Facsimile, or FAX in short is not dead. Facsimile is still the preferred mode of communication, when you want to keep the records of the communication made.

But the spread of Internet has also affected the way we used to send and receive fax. Now, you no longer need a phone connection to send the fax. You can instead use Internet to send or receive FAX.

How to send or receive FAX over web

There are many easy online web applications. Most of them charge you a price but some of them are free and allow you to communicate over FAX to a limited set of destinations.

One of them is the Phone Company www.tpc.in, which allow you to send text messages and RTF files to most destinations in the world for free.

For it, you have to register an email address like

remote-printer.Line_1/Line_2 @1234.iddd.tpc.int

where “1234” is the destination fax number with the international code. You can insert the subject matter of your FAX in place of Line_1 and Line_2. This free Facsimile service is fast, easy and free and most importantly for me, covers many cities in India including Mumbai, Chennai and the NCR (Delhi, Ghaziabad, Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad).

For US and Canada users, FAX Zero.com is a nice service, which is an ad supported web-based fax service and delivers fax message upto three pages in length for free.

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