Fun Blogging

[A guest post by Bishal Adhikari from Tech Tips and Tricks ] RSS Feeds are a great way to get regularly updated on the latest news on your favorite blogs. But there are people who don’t know much about RSS feeds or about subscribing to them but could be used to reading PDFs(ebooks). So, if you don’t want to lose such readers, xFruits is a great tool to get PDFs out of your feeds. You can have readers directly read the PDF version of your feeds. xFruits has a handful of useful tools to get more out of your RSS feeds. Using the RSS-to-PDF tool, you can easily convert your RSS feed to PDF format. Or if you like, you can add a download PDF button to every post on your blog so that readers directly download the PDF from any post they come across. Isn’t that cool? Most of the popular blogs have their content available for the mobile users and have a fully optimized mobile version of their sites. But everyone may not have the resources to run a mobile version of their websites. xFruits comes ...

You may have noticed that in some of the previous posts, I have included online presentations, most of which are viewable directly from the browser, without having to download and view privately. Though you can create presentations using MS Office PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, or Open Office Impress and upload the files for online viewing, it seems easier to create the presentation itself online. In this article, let's see how you can do that. 1. Google Docs Go to docs.google.com and sign in using your Google account. Google Docs provides a complete feature-rich presentation tool. Adding slides, describing them, adding pictures, animations, and videos with Google presentation tool are pretty easy. If you wish to use your offline presentation, you can upload it. The formats that can be uploaded include Microsoft and Open Office versions. The completed presentations can be viewed online with a Google account. They can be embedded to any website. 2. Empressr Empressr , which is a free o...

GeoCities, Yahoo's popular free website creation service is coming to an end this year. The free hosting service, which was a hit for Yahoo since the beginning of this generation of the Web was not successful in terms of making money for the Web giant. Yahoo had bought GeoCities in 1999 spending about 3.6 billion dollars. The following is what you will find at the GeoCities home page now. Though the existing accounts will remain live, there is no guarantee that they will remain so in the future. As a measure to monetize GeoCities userbase, Yahoo recommends upgrade to the Yahoo Web Hosting Service as well.

There are quite a few online applications that still need the slower Internet Explorer browser to work better. In games such as Facebook Mob Wars , IE is the preferred browser for bounty hunting. But how can you, as a Firefox (Fx) lover, use these applications? I am definitely not going to crank up the old IE and wait to get it to do things. There is a better way for that. You can turn your Mozilla Firefox into Internet Explorer. With a tiny add-on, you can make Firefox tabs turn into Internet Explorer tabs. The add on is the IE tab add-on available from Mozilla Add-on site. Simply click the button 'Add to Firefox' to start installation, and restart the browser once installed. Once installed, you can convert any tab you open on Firefox into an Internet Explorer tab, which works on the IE rendering engine. You just need to right-click the title of the newly opened tab, and click the option, 'Switch Rendering Engine'. All your IE settings will be available on this tab. A...

Recently the website content freelancing company, Constant Content faced a serious content theft of their authors' content. This is a freelancing site (one of the best), where you can write and submit articles to sell them to website owners at great prices. You can read my review here: Constant Content Review . This notification is for all those new authors at CC. CC doesn't let your full content on display normally. You can set how much of your content should a potential buyer see, in the "Content Details" field when you submit an article. I recommend that you never put the entire article in this field. Put only one third of the article, and it will be even better if you break it down unintelligibly. You can see it in my author page here . Normally, a display article can't be copied and displayed on any website. But if that happens, you can now protect yourself from it. For this, CC provides a Google Alerts phrase. Go to your "My Account" page, and loo...

In a shocking revelation this morning, Reuters reported that Microsoft will stop providing its online and offline encyclopedia, Encarta, a rich authentic resource. The decision, which Microsoft described as "People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past", will strip us off one of the best student resources available. Wikipedia's enormous popularity as a free resource, and the ability to search and find any kind of information from the Web using search engines like Google has made MS take this tough decision. Wikipedia, on the other hand is fully edited by people like you and I, and cannot be trusted more than a self-published book or blog. Though strict moderation is in place, it has way more to go to be regarded as a real encyclopedia. In a Twitter opinion poll we did recently, this was made explicit: Is Wikipedia authentic? The Encarta service, except in Japan, will cease on October 31 this year, and the one on Japan will c...

ODesk is a one of the fastest-growing freelance businesses today. Founded in California in 2003, it is perhaps the largest freelancing company that attracts providers and customers from worldwide. It is pretty easy to become a member at ODesk—you can become provider, buyer, or both. Another specialty of ODesk is that you can register a provider company, so that you can induct other independent contractors within ODesk or outside and do more higher-paying projects. Independent contractors or providers at ODesk are from different parts of the world, and all are paid by the hour. The jobs posted at the site, by customers include writing (SEO copywriting, web content writing, blogging, and more), Web development, software development, graphic design, etc. Each independent contractor is verified and tested of their competency in their respective fields, before they are allowed to undertake any project. On signing up as a provider, you have to complete your profile with your experience...

Google gadgets are free; they are powerful too. With this service, you can get great add-ons to your websites or blogs. In this article, let's look at some of these gadgets that you will find very interesting. Google Site Translator [ Get it here ]: This translator gadget adds a tiny translator widget to your site. This widget has country flags to guide your readers unlike the traditional Google translator widget. Custom RSS [ Get it here ]: This is a highly customizable RSS reader, which can be installed on your website. This means, your readers will now be able to read the content from popular RSS feeds directly from your website. And the reader has options to customize HTML and CSS, and is most suitable for advanced users. Google Polling Gadget [ Get it here ]: If you don't wish to go pay professional polling services to create polls for your visitors, then use this simple Google gadget to create polls for your readers. Survey Google Gadget [ Get it here ]: This is another s...

Do you know that the books which have their authors dead more than seventy years (numbers vary in various countries) have expired their copyrights? All or most of the English classic books by the greatest of authors, such as Charles Dickens , William Shakespeare, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Jules Vern, and many others are hence available free to download online from various places. Let's check them out today. 1. Project Gutenberg: The Ultimate Place [ Gutenberg.org ] It is from the Project Gutenberg that digitizing and cataloging all books that lost their copyright started originally. PG is the oldest digital library, started in 1971, and holds as many as 27,000 books as of now. It is a volunteer-based service, for which thousands of people from worldwide participates. You can too . Among the greatest of Internet personalities, Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, should be counted as one of the first. You can download these classics, mostly in t...

We are soon approaching the end of the semantic web with great user interaction and user-generated content, known as Web 2.0. The web, since its beginning in the 90's, has been envisaged to go through two major generations, which we call Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. While Web 1.0 was largely related to content generated by professional websites, Web 2.0 came with a lot of social media sites and social networks, in which anyone from anywhere could interact seamlessly. Now, we are about to move into the third generation of the Web, Web 3.0, which will strengthen the foundation laid by Web 2.0, by providing smoother authentication and identity protocols. Two major technologies enabling this form the topic of today's post: OpenID and OAuth. What Are OpenID and OAuth? OpenID is a user identification standard, which lets you sign on various services with the same identity. It's just like a URL, with some special code enabled in its target page. With OpenID, when you sign up on a new serv...

When thinking about hosting your blog, you have too many choices. But the best of the plans at the most affordable rates are very rare. Any hosting plan that doesn't offer unlimited disk space and unlimited transfer rates is not preferable, unless your niche only needs a limited amount of monthly traffic. After purchasing the plan, if you see that what you got is only a 100 GB monthly transfer rate, then you have a limit for the number of visitors you can have. If you cross the limit, your website will simply disappear for the rest of the month. Before purchasing your hosting, look for these things: Unlimited monthly bandwidth (the total amount of data transferred in a month). This will help support unlimited traffic. Unlimited disk space. You don't need to limit the size of your blog and files. Availability of a wide range of features and support for possible future expansion of your blog. While looking for these features and more, I found a hosting plan that offers all of the...

Useful Links Make double money by buying and selling domains Host your domain in the world's best web hosting plan Award Winning Hosting! FREE Setup + FREE Web Design software & tools. Webhostingpad: Affordable web hosting plans Buying a domain is pretty easy now. If you don't want to register a brand new domain, just go over to Sitepoint marketplace , and you will find hundreds of new and established domains for sale. This is a big marketplace for domain flipping . But this is also a dark hazy place of deception. After purchasing a domain, you may see that it is not at all in the index of many search engines, which makes it virtually non-existent. Some very old domains may still be not indexed at all. Such purchases may prove to be worthless. Read further to know what to do before purchasing a domain. 1. Check in Google Always check in Google if the domain is already in the indexes. Some sellers may tell you that the domain is already established. This is true only if at l...

If you are thinking about moving into online business, you must have a website hosted in a professional service. But you need to be really quick in domain registration. Since thousands and thousands of domains are registered daily, it may be a matter of days before you lose your domain name. If you need some time for you to build your web service and host it in the domain of your choice, don't delay your domain registration, instead you should register and park the domain. We will see more about this. Why Domain Parking? Domain parking is the practice of simply registering the domain and keeping it until you have your web service built and designed for full operation, as opposed to hosting. A temporary way for keeping a domain. Normal parking services don't offer you much benefit. They just put up an 'under construction' banner and keep the websites live, until you actually host your service to the domain. Also, you are not supposed to promote the domain by link buildin...

Do you know that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone from anywhere in the world, even without a registered user account? In this context, there has always been disputes as to the authenticity of the content. Yesterday, Ms Laurel Shah and I (@vjlenin) posted our Twitter followers a query: Do you believe Wikipedia is an authentic source of information? The @replies have been quick and enlightening. They are posted here. Make sure you follow interesting Twitter accounts here. @Ncub8 : I believe that as a whole, Wikipedia is fairly accurate by virtue of massive crowdsourcing. It shouldn't be used academically. @LizS4ra : oh heavens no, it's editable by any loon. @RawrStar : It's not considered a viable source of information in exams, and it's often inaccurate. I'd say no. @Adenhepburn : Tough Q, I've changed my answer 5 times in my head already so I'll throw something crazy out there with NO thinking to justify! @Ulumarketing : It really depends. If it is...