August 2006

Wordpress, the publishing software which runs this blog as well, is powerful because of 2 things

You can add additional functionality in the form of plugins. You can change the look and feel of the blog just by a click and the changes are applied instantly.

Plugins

BlogJoint has compiled a list of Top Wordpress plugins. You can find other posts mentioning the top plugins, only that this page mentions 80% of the plugins that I use !

These are some of the other plugins that I use and which are not listed in BlogJoints list

Autometa - Automatically generate and include HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post Bad Behavior ...

Spam in Blogs is one of the major problem faced by most of the blog publishers. It shouldn't be confused with splogs (Spam Blogs) which is often used to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors and use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Comments are one of the major sources of spam in blogs. Unless your blog implements the Captchas, there is no way to distinguish between the comments registered by automated scripts and normal human users. The Akismet Web service does a very good job in stopping Comment and Trackback spam. The service comes by default for ...

We all know about the famous or I should say "infamous" Zidane headbutt to Materazzi. On the next day itself, there were quite a few games (flash based) based on this incident.

I found another cool game at this link

http://footyflash.com/game/144/Zidanes-Forehead-Fr...

You just need to move the mouse and headbutt all those "Materazzis". Zidane does grow bigger after some time and the materazzis do start coming in faster. A test for your mouse skills, or should I say a test of your mouse ?

I tried it couple of times (5 times to be exact) and came out with this score !

Really feeling sleepy, else would have liked to hit the century

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I have been using iTunes for quite some time, but I was not aware that iTunes had a nice little toolbar as well. This is how you activate the toolbar. Open iTunes Right Click on the Taskbar and select Toolbars -> iTunes(This toolbar option appears only when iTunes is running and its kind of totally disjoint to the application, I guess that's the reason many people are not aware of this) Minimize the iTunes window. You should see a iTunes toolbar on the taskbar If the toolbar doesn't appear, do check if you have enabled the "Minimize to Tray" option. If it is enabled, you have to disable it ...

Technobytez is the new forum for bloggers started by John. It was in a invite only mode from the past few days, and few of his friends including me have hepled in getting it going. You can find more information about Technobytez in John's post here. If you are a blogger or a newbie and want to setup your own web site(blog), this forum should be helpful in resolving many of the issues.

DivX has come out with a new online video sharing service called Stage 6. Already the site has pretty impressive collection of videos. About DivX DivX is a video codec created by DivX, Inc. (formerly DivXNetworks, Inc.), which has become popular due to its ability to compress lengthy video segments into small sizes while maintaining relatively high visual quality. DivX uses lossy MPEG-4 Part 2 compression, where quality is balanced against file size for utility. It is one of several codecs commonly associated with ripping, where audio and video multimedia are transferred to a hard disk and transcoded. As a result, DivX has been a center of controversy because of its use ...

This is one of the "Most viewed" video on Youtube. Check it :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg Check this video too (Nice background music :) ) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkh5opBp6K4 This is the sequel to Matt Harding's original "Dancing" from 2005, which gained wide Internet popularity. Matt's first video of him dancing around the world was so inspiring that he actually got sponsorship to go on a second trip.

I was checking out on a new analytics service called CrazyEgg. The application is supposed to help you get a clear picture of where your visitor are clicking including the Ads. Accordingly the user can change/customize the layout of the site. It does display the clicked links pretty nicely. You can view the results in 3 modes 1. Overlay - Get Details of Each Individual Link in the page 2. List - View full summary of click data 3. HeatMap - View what is hot and not on your page. With the free version you can track only 2 pages and the number of visits is limited to 5000/month. The free plan does not support live reporting !. Check this ...

I have a craze for computer games, especially strategy games. Age of Empires, Caesar 3, Railraod Tycoon,Rise of Nations, Dune are some of my favorites. Once I get hooked into the game, I never realize the passage of time. Before I was introduced to a computer, I was hooked onto board games like monopoly and business. Atari Play has online versions of some of the greatest games including monopoly. The multiplayer environment loaded up pretty fast and it was nice playing monopoly after many years :). Somehow I managed to land in jail more than on properties :(. Even the "chances" I got, asked me to go to jail :). And ...

I have been using the FeedDemon RSS Reader from the past 29 days and the trial version will expire in a day. I am definitely not going to shell out 30$ for the full version. The reader has all the features that I need, but there is nothing special in it, for me to buy it.

So I went on a hunt of finding a free desktop based RSS reader. Before trying out FeedDemon, I had tried these applications/RSS readers.

1. Firefox Live Bookmarks - Easy to add the feed, but doesn't it bloat your toolbar or what ?

2. Sage RSS Reader - Sage is a lightweight RSS

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