Easy Life

Many of my friends have blogs and accounts on countless social networking websites. Some of my friends and family share their photos and videos on Flickr and Youtube. Some of them heavily use Twitter, facebook, blogs, Instant Messaging, and emails. Staying in touch with all this information is becoming complicated each day. Not just for me, I have heard other people also complaining about it. You might be one of us too specially if you are like me a bit lazy and one of those people who are not constantly trying so called cool new social networks.

We need a solution that could help us get all the information from our friends and family in an easy and quick manner.

Some smart developers realized our need, accepted the challenge and took it seriously to develop a new web application called “friendfeed“.

FriendFeed describes itself as:

Sign up for FriendFeed, invite some friends, and get a customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from news articles to family photos to interesting links and videos. FriendFeed automatically imports shared stuff from sites across the web, so if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. And if your friend likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. FriendFeed makes all the sites you already use a little more social.”

In easy words FriendFeed is a feed of all the online activities of your friends that are accessible via RSS feed. Like their facebook, twitter, youtube, blogging, digg, stumbleupon and other activities. Check the list of supported sites.

FriendFeed is supercool, however there is a little difficulty. In order to get all the updates from your friends it is important that your friends have already made an account on FriendFeed and has shared their account information for the websites that they use.

You can add an imaginary friend which means you can add a friend’s RSS feed but adding all those feeds manually for each friend is difficult and not an ideal situation. So it would be better if you just invite your friends to give FriendFeed a try. I have invited my friends already and I am hoping that since they are so addicted to social media they are definitely going to love friendfeed.

People all over the web are talking about FriendFeed and many of them are comparing FriendFeed with Twitter. I think this is a totally wrong comparison. While Twitter is a microblogging site that helps you publish tiny bits of content. FriendFeed is more like a feed aggregator. That merges RSS feeds for a person and publishes a unified feed for that person and then helps sharing this feed with other people. I think FriendFeed is cool and I feel that I will be using it a lot in future. Please feel free to join me on friendfeed.

Tags: friendfeed, social media, social network, web, web 2.0

So you are happy with your fast internet connection and all the content that you can now download. And you are also happy that the great tools that you have installed which help you create cool documents, videos and much more. This is good unless you are forgetting something.

We often forget that computers need maintenance for better performance. Otherwise after a while they will get slower and you might face some serious issues. Here is a quick list of things you should do at least once a month to keep your computer healthy.

1. Run Disk Clean Up wizard once every month. (Windows XP | Windows Vista)
2. Back up your files.
3. Uninstall programs you don’t need any more.
4. Delete unwanted files and folders.
5. Organize your files and folders.
6. Check your Hard Disks for errors. (Windows XP | Windows Vista)
7. Open disk defragmenter and analyze your disks and then Defragment those who need to be defragmented. (Windows XP | Windows Vista)
8. Run an anti-spyware program to scan your computer for internet threats.
9. Run an anti-virus program to scan your computer for viruses.
10. Make sure automatic updates are turned on.

 
I don’t do all of these things once a month. I clean up disks twice a month and defragmentaion once every three months. How you maintain your windows PC? Please share your tips in the comment box below.

Tags: maintainance, pc, Quick Tip, tips, windows vista, windows xp

Searching the web for clip art is not as much trouble as it used to be. Now you can use Google Image search and in the Advanced Image Search you can select Clip Art from the Content types. But then not all the clip art shown in search results is available for you to use on your website or documents due to copyright restrictions. So you will need to visit the web page where this clip art is displayed to look for license information or ways to obtain permission to reuse that work. However, there really is a whole lot of Open Source, royalty free clip art that is in public domain and you can use it, modify it, copy and re-distribute it. In this post we will discuss how to find free clip art and where to find it.

Open Clip Art

Try Open Clip Art for all your clip art needs. It has whole wealth of Clip Art organized in tags and most of these images are in Public Domain which allows you to reuse them anywhere you want. You can even download the entire Open Clip Art collection to your hard disk in svg and png formats. See how you can integrate Open Clip Art with Open Office or use it with Microsoft Office Applications. Some files at Open Clip Art may not be available in png format you can still download the SVG file and convert it using free and open source tools such as Inkscape or the Gimp. You can also use these images on Google Docs and Google Sites too. But please do not link directly to the image file on Open Clip Art’s server. Instead download the png file to your hard disk and then upload it to your document.

Flickr

Try Flickr’s Advanced Search to look for images, pictures, photographs, drawings and other art work that are released under a creative commons license that allows you to redistribute or build your work upon them. This license is called Creative Commons Attribute. You will be surprised to see how much high quality content is available for you to re-use.

Remember using someone else’s work without their permission is not just bad manners but it is also copyright infringement. Most people on the web do not mind sharing their work, after all thats why they publish it on the web in the first place. Instead of stealing someone’s work it would be much better if you ask them politely to use their work on your website or document. Don’t forget to mention that you will give them the credit for the work.

Tags: Clip art, Clipart, Google Docs, HowTo, Image Search, Open Office, Open Source

Due to some troubles with a few of my Wordpress blogs. I have recently learned a lot about security and protecting my Wordpress blogs from hacking. There is no way to be 100% sure that your website couldn’t get hacked. However, using the best practices described below, you can make it very hard for someone to crack into your Wordpress installation. Taking these steps does not take much time but it saves you from a lot of trouble, even if your website get’s attacked you can fight back quickly and restore your website easily. Without these security precautions you not only make your Wordpress installtion vulnerable, but you also make it difficult for yourself to recover from horrible accidents. So lets begin securing of your blog:

Back up often

You have heard this many times. Here it is once again, back up your website and database at least once a week if you update your website daily, or atleast once a month if you don’t update that often. But please back up. Do not trust your webhost when they tell you that they have back ups of your website created on a daily basis. It is very smart to have backups on hand just in case something goes terribly wrong with you or your webhost. There are many Wordpress plugins to back up your database. I use Wordpress database manager plugin called wp-dbmanager. Using this plugin you can schedual weekly backups to be sent to you via email.

Stay Updated

Whenever there is a new version of Wordpress, upgrade your installation as soon as possible. Since 2.7 Wordpress has automated the upgrade process or you can manually update to latest version. It only takes about ten minutes but it saves you from a lot of trouble. Older, outdated and upsupported installations often get hacked. Once hacked it is a very lengthy process to clean your blog and upgrade. So protect yourself now upgrade your Wordpress.

Also keep your plugins updated to newest versions. If you notice that a plugin author has not released an updated version since a long time go to plugin’s home page and check its status. If the author has abandoned the plugin then stop using it right away.

Strong Passwords

If no one has ever stolen your password then it does not mean that no one ever will. There are some really bad people out there who randomly pick their victims and crack their passwords to take control of their websites. Wordpress has strong password indicator which you can use to generate a strong password. A strong password contains atleast 8 characters a combination of alphabates and numbers and special characters. Avoid using words that can be found in a dictionary.

You should have strong passwords not only for your blog’s admin interface, but also for your site’s SSH shell and FTP access. Doing so you make it very difficult for hackers to crack your site and access your files via ftp. Try to use SSH or SFTP instead of plain FTP.

But strong passwords are difficult to remember. Well you should then read this wonder post from the blog herald that tells you how to create strong but memorable passwords. You can also generate a strong password using Aautomatic password generator tool.

File Permissions

One drawback of using Wordpress or some of its plugins is that sometimes you need to make a few files writeable on your server. For security it is important that you keep file permissions as strict as possible. It is ideal to have your directories file permission set to 755 and your files 644. See Wordpress Codex Changing File Permissions.

Default Username

At the first installation Wordpress automatically creates a user account with the username admin. Now using the default username means that half of cracking is done without any guessing. Unfortunately it is not possible to change this username from the Wordpress admin interface. However you can change it by running a simple mysql query.
Update tableprefix_users set user_login='newusername' where user_login='admin';

Replace tableprefix with the table prefix in your wp-config file. If you didn’t add a table prefix then it would the default one which is wp_ . You can run this query or manually edit table in phpMyAdmin or you can also run this query using wp-dbmanager plugin.

Other tips:

Remember, no website is 100% secure. But taking these precautions reduces the chances of your blog or website getting compromised easily. The following web pages has more tips on securing your Wordpress even more.

Hardening Wordpress
Wordpress Security Tips and Hacks
Wordpress Security Whitepaper

Tags: blog, blogging, HowTo, security, tips, wordpress

Chris from “Sunclipies” asked me how he can add a subscribe box on his website which is created using Google Sites. Honestly, I never noticed that Google Sites lacks RSS feed as a feature. Since I had in my mind that Google Sites is a good place for small websites that don’t get updated as often as a blogs or news site. But what if the web site gains popularity? What if there is audience demand for more frequent updates to what ever that particular site is publishing?

There are several ways for a webmaster to notify the users about updates on their website. There are even free tools available that can publish an RSS feed for a static webpage (I haven’t used any of these and have no idea if they work with Google Sites or not). But since on this blog we rely heavily on the free tools provided by Google, so I will talk about using Google Groups as the solution.

Go to Google Groups and press the Create a group… button. On the Create a group page fill in the information about your site doing so your group and site will have same title and description. Under the option Choose an Access level, select Announcement-only and press the Create my group button. You will be then asked to verify by writing the letters shown in an image to prevent spam. Again press Create my group button. You will be then asked to add a few members to your new group. If you have the email addresses of people who would like to subscribe your group then paste them here or Skip this step.

Now you will be taken to your new group’s homepage. Copy the link from the address bar of your browser. Now go back to your Google Site. At the bottom of your sidebar you will see a link Edit sidebar, click it. On the next page click on Add a sidebar item. A popup will appear showing a few types of items you can add to your sidebar. Select Text and press ADD button. Now you will see a Text Box in your sidebar. Click on the edit link. In the popup window, Give it a title like “Newsletter” or “Subscribe” or “Mailing list”. Below provide the link to your newly created Google group with text informing visitors about your group.

The picture on your left shows how we have used the textbox on our sample website Bashir’s pet shop and notice how we have provided the link to the newsletter. Running a newsletter is no big deal, you can keep your subscribers updated about the recent changers you made to your web site, you can tell them about new products, share something useful with them and they will love you. See this page for some general email newsletter writing tips.

Tags: google, Google Groups, google sites, HowTo, small business, tutorial, web, website

Google engineers has accidentally made a massive mistake. No matter what you search on Google all your results are labeled “This site may harm your computer”.

This is happening with all platforms and web browsers and to every one accessing Google websearch from anywhere in the world. So if you are seeing it, do nothing or start using some other search engine for a while.

This made me realize how much we are relying on Google. May be we should consider other ways to do our work on the web. But honestly, I have tried Yahoo Search and MSN Live search. The results were most of the time absurdly irrelevant.

Anyways, Google Engineers are working to resolve the issue. Meanwhile Google’s support pages, forums and help groups are all down due to heavy traffic. It also makes me wonder what impact this accident is going to have on the Internet, Google and Websites that are getting so much negative branding by this error.

UPDATE: Issue Resolved

Tags: google, Internet, search, web

I was invited by a friend to a chat room on Yahoo Chat. I didn’t know Yahoo Chatrooms are that much fun. With voice and video and so many rooms to choose from, Yahoo Chat is now my favorite way to kill time. But it didn’t take long before I realized that Yahoo’s spam protection and flood protection features are totally useless. Some nasty users exploit these things to take control of the voice chat, to flood some user, they can even boot someone. Booting here means that they run some kind of software which hangs the victims chat client and they are forced to leave and reconnect.

Fortunately there are some third party tools and chat clients available that you can use in such situations to protect yourself and to have some extra fun.

YaHaven!

Yahaven is anti-boot, anti-flood third party Yahoo! Chat Client. Yahaven has Chat, IM, Voice and Webcam. All the features of official Yahoo and then some more. Such as flood protection and boot protection. It also has effecient ignore filters. What I personally liked about Yaheven is that it has Custom messages. When pressed these buttons you send a text message to the room. These messages can be edited. For example, when I select a user from user list and press custom message one it says:
%s >> hi how are you today? %s is the nick of the user.

YaHaven is a bit complicated. With all these extra features it could be a little difficult for a new user to get it working right. But once you get it working, you will be amazed by performance.

YahElite

YahElite is a feature rich Yahoo Chat Client. It is around for sometime now and is widely used. It promises better spam, flood and boot protection.

YahElite has an easy to use interface but it is so feature rich that the buttons for all these features may confuse a new user. But don’t worry YahElite has better support and help options available on their website. They have tutorials, forums, FAQs and contact options under the help menu on the official website.

There is something interesting and totally new with YahElite. Its called Personalitys. Loadable personalitys are simple text files that contain patterns that transform your text into another form that can be dramatically different from your normal speech. You can create different personalitys and even share them with others. Read official instructions.

Pidgin

Pidgin, (previously Gaim) is an open source universal chat client that not only supports Yahoo but also MSN, Gtalk, AIM, ICQ, IRC and countless other protocols. The downside is that it does not support voice and webcam. You can join Yahoo Chat rooms but there will be no voice, no audio conferencing and no video chat. It also does not have any extra spam features to protect you from PM floods. But if you just want to text message then Pidgin is a great tool to chat with friends on different protocols at once.

YAM (Yet Another Messenger)

YAM Chat Client is my favorite third party Yahoo Chat Client. It does not support webcam but it fully supports voice and audio in Chat rooms. It also has a very easy to use interface and all the features are easy to understand and easy to use. It also has very nice sound effects and has themes support. It lacks web cam support and while other chat clients open word verification CAPTCHA right there in the chat window YAM opens it in new browser window.

These third party chat clients are fun but if you want to use the official Yahoo Messenger then there are some tips that you can use to protect yourself from abuse, spam, flood and booting. We will discuss these tips in the next post. Meanwhile, please let us know if there is some other yahoo chat clients you have tried and found useful.

Tags: booting, Chat, video chat, yahoo, yahoo messenger

Virtual webcam is an application that creates an stream of images to simulate a web cam stream. Such applications are useful to add text or visual effects to a webcam stream and/or to broadcast the same webcam to stream to multiple programs simultaneously. There are many applications available on the web to simulate a virtual web cam. While looking for an appropriate solution, I found out that most of them are non-free. Some of them were available for download on trial basis, and some had advertisements embeded into them. We have selected a few good ones for you.

CamTrack 2.5 Free 30 days Trial and $14.95 to buy.

CamTrack 2.5 lets you add video effects, text and images to your webcam video chat. But the plus point of CamTrack 2.5 is not the cool animations but the feature of “Face Tracking”. Face tracking automatically locates your face in the video image and zooms in on it, keeping your face centered in the middle of the frame at an optimal size.

CamTrack also allows you to zoom in and out. Combine this feature with face tracking and you never need to adjust your webcam with your hands. you can do it with your keyboard and mouse.

ManyCam Free

A free software, ManyCam allows you to use your webcam with multiple programs which means that you can use your webcam with Yahoo, MSN, Skype and Google Talk simultaneously.

ManyCam allows you to add text to your webcam stream. You can use display images or create a slideshow of images from your computer and broadcast it to your webcam. You can play videos on your webcam. I have used this feature to share a birthday video with my aunt on yahoo. Using Manycam and yahoo voice chat it was fun to share the video with this new way. I mean of course I can upload the video to youtube but it was a huge file and I didn’t have time.

Using Manycam you can create many effects like change the color, brightness and contrast of your webcam. Add visual effects to your webcam there are some really cool effects built in and they are a lot of fun. You can rotate and zoom in or out of your webcam video.

If you know of someother cool software please let me know. I want to make my Yahoo chat more fun. I am also looking for software to change the voice make it girly, high pitched or childish.

Tags: free, Free Software, msn, video, video chat, virtual webcam, web cam, webcam, yahoo

This post is part of a series. To read more posts from this series go to “Creating a Small Business Website“.

Content is the king on web. No one is going to spend more than a couple of seconds on a website if the content is not useful to them. According to a research, people don’t read pages they scan them when browsing the web and usually they make up their mind whether to stay or not with in few seconds. So you have just a few seconds to grab visitor’s attention and tell them that your page is useful for them. Placing the right content on right spots makes it easy for visitors to find the information quickly. So in this post we will discuss the content that most web surfers look for and where to place this content on your website.

• Introduce yourself. The importance of adding information about you and your business.
• Offer useful content. Detailed Information about your products and services.
• Stay in touch. Allow visitors to interact with you and the website easily.
• Keep it fresh. Content on the web is like vegetables in a grocery store. If its not fresh no one’s going to buy it.

Introduce Yourself

People are not stupid, they don’t just click on a link and order the product. People who buy things on the web are actually a lot smarter than people who visit your shop/store/or offices. They will look for who you are and how good you are. So why not you just tell them all this, and then a little more. Add an about us page to your website and tell your visitors who you are, what you do and how good you are at it. For example

“Bashir’s petshop is a small store located in thesmalltown, smallstate. We sell and supply pet food, accesories, clothing and jewelry. We can take care of your pets when you are on vacations or away for business. We are in the business since last 15 years and have a very good reputation among the residents of thesmalltown ask your neighbours if you don’t believe us. We have a very friendly staff and we love to meet new people. Come visit us at the store, join our mailing list or drop us an email.”

Offer Useful Content

In an earlier post for this series we made a plan to create our website where we tried to define goals for our website. For example our main goal was to sell our products/ services. So the products and the services go directly to your main page. Yes it is a good idea to create a section for product listings with separate page for each product. But since our main goal is to sell these products we are looking for visitors who come to our site looking for these products. And if they don’t find it quickly on main page they might move away without digging product catalogs. (Click on the image below to see a sample layout)

A sample site layout for a small business website

Now there should be a page for your products and services. Make sure it is easy to navigate. Prices are visible easily. Then each product should have its separate page. Provide as much detail as possible and don’t forget to add images of the product. If you already have a happily satisfied customer base ask them to write reviews for your products or services on your website. Also make sure that your potential customers can compare your product/services to your competitor’s.

All these things make your content useful for your site’s visitors. Tell them more and more about your offerings because thats what they came looking for. Keep your content focused on your goals, keep it information driven, keep it fresh and you have yourself a website with useful informative content.

Stay in Touch

This is a common mistake that most small businesses make. They do not provide enough ways for their site’s visitor to interact with the website, the business and the people behind it. If people don’t interact with the website then they are not good for your business. So please add a contact page. Your contact page should have a feedback form, email address, address of your locations, telephone and fax numbers.

You will also see that many popular websites which sell products or services have a comment form at the end of each product listing. Use it to allow your visitors to ask questions on the product page directly, to submit their user reviews and or offer some advise to other visitors. You can also get in touch with your site’s visitors by adding a company blog, a wiki, forum, mailinglist, etc.

Keep it Fresh

The difficult part is not to create the perfect website. The difficult part if to keep improving it. You can keep improving your website doing two things:

Update your site with new content as frequently as possible.

Many small businesses fail to do well on the web because they don’t realize the importance of the content. For example a small home appliances shop has a website with the images of an old television set that every one has already bought and after an year there is nothing attractive about it. The same shop could have done better if they kept updating their website with images of new items in their stocks. Like showing a picture of giant LCD screen for home theatre.So if you keep posting new items to your website it remains fresh and attractive to visitors. Post new offers, special discounts, or links to other webpages with interesting articles about your products.

Experiment with the layout of your website. Web design is a complex field. Sometimes a layout and design that works best for a pet store wouldn’t work for a music store. So you should continuously make changes to your site’s design and see what works best for you. Use different layouts, color schemes, fonts. Change the position of your content. Install a stat counter on your website and see what your visitors are looking for and then add the links to this information on your main page and link to your main page on your most visited pages. You will learn this skill on your way. It is actually fun and very addictive once you realize that the last change you made increased page visitors, you seek more ways to bring more visitors.

This post is part of a series. To read more posts from this series go to “Creating a Small Business Website“.

Tags: content, HowTo, layout, small business, tutorial, web design, web writing, website, writing