September, 2008

How to get Good Night Sleep?

1. Drink a cup of hot milk(without adding sugar). SleepMatters_baby_sm

2. Take hot bath 3 to 4 hrs before going to bed.

3. Stop thinking and worrying about anything. Just feel comfortable and forget all your problems. Do not have any fear while sleeping.

4. Goto bed early and getup early in the morning(not before 3AM. Getting up at 4AM is recommended).

5. Do prayer or breathing exercise for 5 minutes. Regular meditation and Yoga or exercise can solve all type of problems like sleeplessness etc, and surly ensures a Good night sleep. This will really have a big impact on your quality of sleep.

6. Do not hold your body tight for any reason, while on the bed. Leave it free, feel relaxed.

7. Avoid alcohol, Caffeine consumption at night.

8. Goto bed and getup in the morning regularly at the same time. This will be a healthy practice and will help in maintaining the health in older age.

9. Avoid sleeping in the afternoon as far as possible. If you want to powerup yourselves, then a sleep of not more than 20 mints is recommended(just a nap).

10. Plugin some cotton into your earns to avoid noise and chill.

11. Avoid light while sleeping. Let your bedroom be as dark as possible. Wear an eye mask to block out light.This would provide more relaxation feel and its also good for eyes.

12. Use mosquito nets and avoid sprays, coils and mosquito repellent creams on your body.

13. Do not have mobiles, radio, Television(turned on) inside your sleeping room. These devices will be attracting elector Magnetic Rays and may harm you a lot over time and you may never get to know the reason for your ailment.

14. Do not ware tight cloths while going to bed.

15. Do not use laud and harsh alarm. This will make you get up in a bad mood. Instead use an alarm with good music to wake you up like a close friend. If you have a regular sleeping and wakeup time, then alarm is of no use, but still having a good music to wake you up early in the morning will not hurt. And do not place the alarm clock in front of you while sleeping. Keep it out of sight, as it might be a kind of distraction in some case.

16. Have a balanced food 1 or 2 hr before going to bed. Do not eat grains and other things which contains high glucose(energy) content, also avoid intake of suger. And avoid taking more spicy content in your diet. Eating some fruits after the regular meals is recommended. And avoid those food, to which you are allergic.
And many people advice not to take food at night or to take very little food at night, but I don’t think its good for teenagers. I feel that, we should eat sufficiently every time we sit to eat, just see that you don’t eat more than you want!

17. Make sure you are comfortable with the pillows and bedding that you have, if not change it. Take a smooth pillow, if its too hard.

18. Don’t drink any fluids within 2 hours of going to bed. This will reduce the likelihood of needing to get up and go to the bathroom or at least minimize the frequency. Go to the bathroom right before bed. This will reduce the chances that you’ll wake up to go in the middle of the night.

19. Keep your bed only for sleeping purpose. If you use it to watch TV or doing other work, you may find it hard to relax and to think of the bed as a place to sleep. Use your bed only for taking rest and nothing else. This practice is really healthy.
Practice it for some months and you will fall sleep as soon as you lay on the bed.

20. After following all these, still if you are not able to get a Good night sleep, then also don’t worry. Just getup early in the morning and thus you will feel sleepy the next night soon.
Human body takes time to adjust to the changes that we incorporate. So, just practice it for a week and see for the results.

Even then, if you are not getting sleep, then its better to consult a Doctor.

Taking sleeping tablets are not recommended. It may cause some psychological problems over time and if you get addicted to those tablets, then it becomes a disease more harmful than, sleeplessness.

Traffic strategies: PART 2(Add RSS feed signature to your emails)

We write emails to our friends, relatives, anonymous people around the world etc. Many of the people with whom we communicate may already be knowing about our blog and there is a high chance that they already are our subscribers.
But still adding RSS feed signature or adding the “Headline Animator, which displays rotating headlines” will bring some traffic to our blog, as it shows our old article titles and they might be interested to know more and they may endup clicking on the title and visiting your site. Anyway, adding a small piece of code doesn’t hurt or take a lot of time.

Feedburner has got this feature and you can integrate the small piece of basic HTML code to get the animated banner. But the limitation here is, you can see only five most recent items cycling through your feed’s. To over come this you can use some other RSS widgets, but while selecting see that these widgets are created only using basic HTML(for faster loading and user experience).

To use Feedburner animated banner feed as your email signature in Yahoomail, follow these simple steps:-

1. Log into your Yahoo! mail.
2. Click on Options.
3. In the “Management” section, click on the Signature option.
4. Drag and drop your Feedburner animated banner and click on “SAVE“.

If you want this email signature in Gmail, then you have to take some more steps:-
Gmail currently doesn’t allow us to add HTML codes directly into emails. But there are always some workarounds to get our work done!
Actually, you can over come the Gmail signature limitation by using Gmail’s POP3/SMTP features by making use of standard email program (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.), create a signature in that email program that has your Headline Animator in it, and send your emails through your Gmail account. This is an easy task for those who are already using Outlook etc software.

But for people who are not using such email programs and who are not willing to use such things, there are some other solutions:-
To use the animator in Gmail, all you need is the “Better Gmail” Firefox extension. It adds a check box in your gmail account settings to enable HTML. Remember you must be using “Mozilla Firefox” only to get this to work.
I think everyone needs to give this Firefox extension a try. It also adds many cool features to your gmail, like:- Add Google Calendar link, Add Google Reader “Feeds” link, Air Skin, All pages’ mailto: links compose in Gmail, Attachment Icons, Attachment Icons (Bigger!), Conversation Preview, Attachment Reminder(now integrated in Gmail by Google), Date Search, Filter Assistant, Fixed Font, Folders4Gmail(Great isn’t it?), Force encrypted Gmail connection (https), Forward Thread, GrandCentral Voicemail, Integrate Google Reader, Mail.app(Mac-like skin), Show disk usage as progress bar, Signature Settings: Float/HTML/No dashes, Smart Read Button, Super Clean Skins, TinyURL selected link (Cmd+Shift+T), Unlabeled Message Search etc etc etc etc… So here is the link to download “Better Gmail”.

Drag and Drop:-
One more option to use with Gmail, Yahoomail, hotmail or anyother mailing service is, just drag and drop the widget at the bottom of your email and it will be working fine. But it requires you to do it manually all the time you send an email. Many people follow this simple drag and drop work, as this would provide us with the option of when to add and when not to add the email signature(with feed banner).
Copy the HTML codes generated in Feedburner(animated banner creation) and paste it in a notepad and save it on your hard disk with file name ending with .html. Run it(by clicking on the html file) whenever you write an email. Now drag and drop the animated banner into your email. Its that simple..

It seems like- “this method will not bring any traffic”, and its partly true. As you will not get heavy traffic out of this method. To get more traffic, you must be active in mail groups like yahoogroups, gmail groups etc and you should be sending interesting emails to a group with large number of users. This will surly bring some traffic, as people may forward that email to their friends and then their friends may mail it to their friends…like this, your email(along with your email signature) will reach many people and you may get many visitors and they may even signup to your RSS/email feeds and may become your loyal visitors(but please keep your fingers crossed!). Do not expect a heavy traffic from this method, which dries up your blogs bandwidth.

And another thing I want to mention here before ending this article, is, never think that your emails are marked as SPAM because you are using some HTML codes in your email messages. This will not happen, as today’s email systems has gone far from the basic text, to a high multimedia messaging. So no email service provider is going to mark you as a SPAMMER, for using some basic HTML in your email.

Some Adnetwork showing Adsense ads on its homepage!

As I was doing a bit of research about ad networks, and I found a ad network, which claims to be the best adnetwork.

When I visited their website, I saw Google Adsense ads on their homepage!
Now let me not mention its name and ruin its business.
Now how can you promote any product/service when yourselves don’t have 100% belief on your product/service.
When they use Adsense, that means Adsense gives more revenue then their ad network.
I know that this Adnetwork is only for some countries and they mainly target, contents that interests those country visitors- This is cool 🙂 .. But the cost per click is too low 🙁 .
Anyway, one of my personal opinion is– do not use your rivals products/service or competitors product/service and try to promote your service/product, people will never get confidence in your product/service if you do like this.
Many loyal customers may also turn their face from you. You should use your products/service and show others that you have full faith in what you are promoting/using/recommending. Be a model yourself, when it comes to using your products/services.
And many of you may think that, this ad network may be for those people who have been banned from Adsense. I guess, thats not at all true. Think from the perspective of the advertising company or the adnetwork company. Do you think that, they will prefer to have someone as their publisher, who have been banned from a reputed company(Google) for violating their terms? I know that many of you may say that Google banned me for no reason. But do you think people in the same business trust you? It is business…even if you are telling truth, they won’t care, as they don’t want to take any risk with their business(which involves so much of investment).
So I think, the proper way of promoting a product/service is to use it ourselves and show the rest, how to make use of it effectively.
I have learn’t a lot from different well-known adnetworks….they never use any advertisements on their website(atleast not from other networks!), as they do not want to redirect their customers to any other websites at any cost. <-- Hope you got these lines. I would never use any adnetwork or any advertisements on my website, if I am selling any of my products or services for money. It will be like killing a "hen which lays golden egg", if you use advertisements on a website(dedicated to sell your product/services) where you sell your own products/services. Love to know your opinion on this topic, in the comment section.

Blogging Made Easy by "Windows Live Writer" – A Small Review

This is my first post in Technotip.org about Windows Live Writer(WLW) and I am now writing this article using “WLW” itself. I have previously used it to write articles for my blogger blog.

Why we thought about an alternate editor, when we have a simple and good editors(Visual & HTML) in WordPress ?

As always, we wanted some more features to write articles and we use to face some problem while using default WordPress editors.

Problems that we had faced in default WordPress editor:

1. We had problem with adding and aligning the images. Each time we added a image to our article, consumed lot of time.

2. Sometimes when we open the old posts and save it again, we noticed that some irrelevant “Category” got added to it automatically from our “Categories” list.(Hope this is a typical problem only with us!)

3. Loading time….(I agree that, loading time has been improved a lot with new versions of WordPress, but WLW loads superfast as it is an Desktop application.

4. Problem inserting “tables” :- There is no option to insert a table in WordPress editors. This surprises me!

We need to have “insert table” feature that will be of use many times. We know that, using tables may slow down the page loading time, and its good to use CSS/DIV to get the tables, but everybody using WordPress are not programmers or geek’s to do that. And many blogger’s don’t have patience and time to do it.

5. Each time we see the preview of the article it even loads the advertisements. This will make our own impressions on those advertisements. Those impressions will be OK, if they are less in number, but I don’t want any advertisers to pay me for my own impressions on my own blog.

6. We had problem with italicizing the words. When we press the Italicize button, the selected word would be in Bold!

We use to insert <i> </i> tags in html mode to get the results.

7. And the <code> </code> was not working!

(Hope many problems listed above are topically problems only faced by us. Because we have never seen anybody else reporting these problems).

Actually I like the new WordPress editors for many reasons, but the above mentioned points make me to use WLW.

Actually, I write articles in WLW and then save it directly to my WordPress draft and then again modify it there if necessary.

Why we like “Windows Live Writer” ?

This is the actual reason to write this article..

1. Many features, and many tools/plugins to make blogging much more easy.

2. Offline blogging. This will really help a lot. Just try this for 1 week and you will know the power and impact of offline blogging.

No distraction from Chatting buddies, emails etc. In the beginning I got irritated, as there was no Internet connection, but now I am getting used to it and my articles are now more focused. And actually I have installed “WLW” in my laptop and I can now start blogging from almost any place I love.

And more importantly, I can now keep blogging, even when there is problem with my “ISP”(Internet Service Provider), and I can publish the posts by taking my laptop to my friends home, who are using someother ISP.

3. Lot of options to play with images I insert into my articles now. We can revert the image in one click, we can contrast, sharpen etc.

4. Faster loading..Saves lot of time, over time.

5. Publish to most major blog services: Including Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, WordPress, Blogger and many others.

6. Insert photos and videos, maps, tags and lots of other cool content, all in a snap. Powerful editing features include tables, spell checker, and quick hyperlinks.

7. We can write for multiple blogs using the same “WLW” :

Just add another weblog account and you can start writing for both blogs.

8. All the other options which is present in WordPress are also present in “WLW”.

There are many advantages of using Windows Live Writer and We recommend everybody to give it a try. Mac users can try Ecto. And for people who want to use simple and neat interface can try blogdesk.

Whatever you use and try, but don’t forget to give a try to “Windows Live Writer“, it has been improved a lot over time, and its latest release will really impress you, by the way it works.

Here are some screen shots of installing “WLW”:-

Select the software you want to install from the list and sit back and do whatever you want to do. Internet connection needed!

After installing “WLW”, click on the shortcut and configuration window opens- See Below screenshot, to configure your weblog account.

Weblog Homepage URL: Put your blogs homepage. Ex:- http://technotip.org

And in the username and Password section, type the username and password of your account(Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, WordPress, Blogger or any other, that you use as your blogging platform.)

After successful installation and configuring, you can just test the power of “Windows Live Writer”.

WLW is a must use tool for bloggers using blogspot.com(bloger.com). Blogger(Blogspot) editor seems to be too bad(my personal opinion), using WLW helped get rid of all silly problems and now blogging has become more friendly.

What’s your opinion about “WLW” ? Which editor do you use ? Do you still use the default WordPress/blogger editors ?

Are you earning from your twitter profile ?

I can’t believe this, but its true. As I was going through my emails, I saw a mail from twittad.

Email from Twittad:-

Dear technotip ,

Congratulations! Your Twitter profile technotip has been sold at Twittad.com.

Your profile has been purchased by Twittad for 1 month at $ 5.00 .

Please login to your Twittad account in the next few hours. After login follow the instructions to download the advertisement.

Upload the advertisement onto your Twitter profile by selecting -> Settings -> Design -> Use Custom Style Below -> Browse file for the downloaded ad -> Click Save

Thanks!

Twittad Team

Follow us @Twittad

Here is the details(screen shot) that I got in my Twittad account after activating the advertisement.

To kick start their business, they have started self promotion(they have started advertising about Twittad itself). I think all the twitter users who have signedup for Twittad and have set the price tag 5$ and below, have got this email from Twittad. This campaign is better than providing 5$ bonus for signingup as Twittad publisher 🙂 . And there is nothing to worry for Twittad, because they promise to pay only when your account reaches 20$ ! Hope no one will reach it(atleast not in the near future).

And I don’t think this concept is going to work. Because I myself rarely visit anybodies profile while I am chatting to them on Twitter. So where is the value for advertisers?
I had just signed up for Twittad out of curiosity. And I even fear that, my twitter account may get banned for using it for making some bugs!
Anyway, I don’t use Twitter quite often, so thought of giving it a try. And I am not actually interested in making any money from my twitter account using TwittAd, but I wanted to write an article about it, so just signedup and used it, to know something about it, before writing.

Here is the link to my twitter profile . Visit my profile to see TwittAd advertisement concept live(Only till 17/10/2008 ) 🙂

Tips,Tricks and hack for blogger blogs

Today’s post is dedicated to all those people using blogger.com. Its a great service which offers free web hosting. I wonder how much bandwidth blogger would provide!
Before trying any of the below mentioned tips/tricks, backup your theme — Goto “Layout” -> “Edit HTML” and click on “Download Full Template”..

Today’s post is dedicated to all those people using blogger.com. Its a great service which offers free web hosting. I wonder how much bandwidth blogger would provide!

Before trying any of the below mentioned tips/tricks, backup your theme — Goto “Layout” -> “Edit HTML” and click on “Download Full Template”..
This article is only for education purpose and I am not an expert in coding blogger templates, so try at your own risk. By changing the default behavior of the blogger blogs, you may be violating their policy. So we make it clear that, this article is only for education/learning purpose.

1. To insert Meta tags:-
Place

<meta NAME='description' expr:content='data:blog.pageTitle + ",Put in your common description tags here "'/>

in between <head> </head> tags.

In the above code expr:content= ‘data:blog.pageTitle’ gets replaced by the title of your current page. So when combined with the common description tags, the description tag becomes unique for each page. Also do not forget to replace “Put in your common description tags here” with some description of your website(this will be common for all pages of your website.)

2. Read more option (show only post Excerpt in the home page):-

Login to your account and click on the “Layout” tab. Then select “Edit HTML”. Check ” Expand Widget Templates”.
Now search for </b:skin> and paste the below code between </b:skin> and </head>


<!-- Style to implement "Read more.." link in all the posts (Start) -->
<style>
    <b :if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
        span.fullpost {display:inline;}
    <b :else/>
        span.fullpost {display:none;}
    </b>
</style>
<!-- Style to implement "Read more.." link in all the posts (End) -->

Now search for <data:post.body/> in the template HTML and paste the following piece of code after <data:post.body/>


<!-- Code to show "Read more.." Link (Begin) -->
          <b :if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item"'>
              <span>
                <a expr:href='data:post.url' 
style='color:#0000FF; 
text-align:right;
font-weight:bold; 
text-decoration:none' >
Read more..
</a>
             </span>
          </b>
          <!-- Code to show "Read more.." Link (End) -->

Save it. That’s all about coding part of the theme. To show only post excerpts on the homepage, you need to insert <span class="fullpost"> post excerpt.Remaining article will be shown after clicking on "Read more.." link.</span> . Now your articles and blog will look more professional.

3. Hide the Blogger navbar:-

Add this line #navbar-iframe {display: none !important;} before /* Variable definitions

Paste below code inbetween <style> </style> , before </head> .


<!--Code to remove blogger navbar-->
#b-navbar {
height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none
}
<!--End of code to remove blogger navbar-->

4. Post articles from email:-

Goto “Settings”, click on “Email” option. And set the email ID, and start posting articles from your email ID.
Its interesting to note that, you can post upto 10MB of images directly from your email.

5. Bulk image uploader(for firefox users only):-
Use “Drag Drop Uploader” FireFox Addon and upload as many images as you want.

6. Change the default favicon and put your favicon, great for branding purpose:-
Upload your favicon(an image of 16 x 16 pixels or 32 x 32 pixels with .png, .gif, or .ico extension. Use either 8-bit or 24-bit colours.)
Now paste below code between <head> </head> tags.


<link href='Uploaded favicons URL' rel='icon' type='image/gif'/>
<link href='Uploaded favicons URL' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/gif'/>

Book mark this article, as there is more to come, as we investigate and play with Blogger.
We thought of making this a serious post, but it would annoy visitors as they need to navigate to different pages to get what they want. So we decided to keep all things at one place. Hope this article is of some use for some of you. If this article helps you in anyway, then please share this story with as many people as possible.Thanks