January, 2012

5 Facebook Tips and Tricks You Don’t Know Yet

This is a guest post by Tom george. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guest post guidelines.

A lot of business owners use facebook as a way to reach targeted customers and to keep in touch with their current customers. If you use Facebook regularly, then you might be familiar with the basic things like creating an album, removing an album, creating a post, or linking a post, etc. But did you know that you can make more from your Facebook using these tips?

Here are some of the common facebook tips and tricks, that you, as a hardcore, or even casual facebook user should know, so you can save time and do less on repetitive Facebook tasks.

1. Access your Facebook chat without going to Facebook- If you need to talk with your Facebook friends and not have a look at what is new with them, you can do so by downloading a desktop client that will allow you to login to Facebook and use it only to chat.Popular Facebook chat desktop clients are Adium, ChitChat, and Social.IM.

2. Hide your online status from selected friends
If you don’t want to be seen by almost every Facebook friends you have you can selectively hide your status to them by doing the following:
1. Go to your facebook Chat, click on friend list.
2. Create a new list and name it BlockList or whatever creative name you have for the people you don’t want to see your status.
3. Add those friends that you want to appear offline most of the time.
4. When you sign in, hover your mouse to the green icon next to the list then click Go offline.

3. Schedule Your Facebook Message to Be Sent Later
Sendible is a great tool to send email in social media at a certain time. This is perfect for social media marketing. There are also other tools, which might help a social media business grow.

4. Bring out the pirate in you or turn your world upside down
If you want some wacky stuffs out of Facebook you can change the way messages are displayed by clicking the link next to the Facebook copyright. By default English(US) is displayed. There you’ll see some wacky English language like English(Pirate) and English(Upside Down).

5. Search in Facebook Like A Boss

Not everybody knows about the advanced searching option that most web search engine has. With these search function, you can sort out and filter what you actually need to see.
user: or users: or people: or name:
List the person’s name of your actual query
ex. user: Kelly Rowland
application: or applications:
List the specific application you desire.
ex. application: Farmville
group: or groups:
Lists a specific group you searched for.
ex. group: 9Gag
event: or events:
Displays only the events you searched for.
ex. event: party at LA
fbpage: or fbpages:
Displays only the Facebook page you need to see.
ex. fbpage: World of Warcraft
the pipe (|)
Use this along with the functions above, particularly when you want to search more than one term to further refine the result.
ex. users: Jhon Doe | Jane Doe
Means: Give me results for Jhon Doe and Jane Doe too.

Conclusion
Using such tricks will help you make more out of Facebook. You can also use these tricks either to impress anyone with your Facebook skills or further aid your social media marketing aim.

About author:- This article was written by Tom george, who is working as a .NET consultant. Tom helps people to choose the best web hosting companies for their business site.

How-To Update android OS On Sony Ericsson Xperia

I’m using Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc to illustrate android os updating procedure.

Goto phone settings -> About Phone -> Software update -> Update; It informs you to install update via your computer!

Now goto your computer install software(pc suites) and try it; once again it shows some connection error messages and other frustrating error messages 🙁

So does your Sony Xperia doesn’t support os updation? It certainly does.

Install some fashing software; follow some procedure; after that you can directly update your phone OS at settings -> About Phone -> Software update -> Update; via wi-fi or 3G.

PART 2: Once you are done with PART 1. Goto your phone settings -> About Phone -> Software update.
Now hit update. It may show error connecting to the network for some time.
In such situation, switch off and switch on your Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc.
Repeat the process, and hit “Update” button.
Once the update starts, relax and sit back. It will take some 15min to download. After that it will show a message that your mobile can not be used(even to make emergency calls) while its installing the updates.
Click Ok. and relax again. It will take some 20 to 30 min to install the updates.
Phone will be switched off and switched on. You need not interfear until its completely installed.
Once the installation is complete: Again goto settings -> About Phone -> Software update. and click on “Update”.
It will search for updates and in my case it installed some more new updates once again. So check it.

Technotip proudly introduces a tech forum and to the glory of it’s launch, we have written Updating android OS: Sony Ericsson Xperia post on the forum.

Feel free to participate and share your expertise on the forum.

How Do I Preview My Site Before Updating DNS?

Keith,

Q: How Do I access my files on the new server ?
I’ve recently purchased hosting from HostGator and have transferred all my files to new servers. I want to preview it and make changes before letting it live to my audience. Is it possible? If yes, how can I do that ?

Yes, it’s absolutely possible to preview and make changes to it before making it live to general public.

Here are the simple steps:
Usually computers look at the IP in the local host file before looking into the actual DNS( Domain Name System ).
So make changes to this simple file on your computer and trick the computer!

If you are using Windows XP or Windows 7 Operating System, then goto this location, to locate the ‘host’ file: c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
(Ofcourse if you have installed your OS on a different drive, then the path differs accordingly.)

Open the host file in a simple text editor.

The content looks something like this:

# Copyright (c) 1993-2009 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a ‘#’ symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
# ::1 localhost

Now get the new Dedicated IP Address of your server/host from your new hosting provider.
Usually it will be present inside the cpanel.

Assume that new dedicated IP is 165.100.98.10 for www.yourdomain.com

Now: add this line of code to your host file.

165.100.98.10 yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com

Now your host file looks something like this:

now restart the browser. If it doesn’t work, then it’s due to the cache.

To clear the cache use these dos commands:
Goto your command prompt.
type “ipconfig /flushdns” (without quote).

Now restart your browser and visit your site.

Finally:
Once you make changes and change your original DSN to point it to your new server, then make sure to delete the line of code you added to your local ‘host‘ file.

bbpress(plugin) Theme Compatibility

There are many threads on bbpress forum where people are almost frustrated with the problem of making their theme work with the new bbpress plugin version.

Particularly, they have this problem with making a theme, child-theme and applying it to the forum.

Ex: Your blog has sidebar and you don’t want to have sidebar in your forum.

I had the same problem, and solved it after trying it for a long time. Now I feel like, why the hell did I spend so much time on this simple thing 🙂

Without much delay: In this example I’ll illustrate by keeping the official “bbPress (Twenty Ten)” theme in mind, which is present in /wp-content/plugins/bbpress/bbp-themes/bbp-twentyten folder by default when you install the bbpress plugin.

1. Move twentyten theme from /wp-content/plugins/bbpress/bbp-themes/ to /wp-content/themes/.
Note: You can rename the folder with any name you like.

2. Now get into twentyten theme and edit style.css file. Add Template: yourWordpressThemeFolderName (yes add the folder name of your present wordpress theme) to your style.css files comment section, as shown below.

If your WordPress theme name is MyTheme. You have to add Template: MyTheme to style.css file of twentyten bbpress theme.

/**
* Theme Name: bbPress (Twenty Ten)
* Theme URI: http://bbpress.org
* Description: Adds bbPress forums to the Twenty Ten theme
* Author: WordPress and bbPress teams
* Version: 1.2
* Tags: bbpress, black, blue, white, two-columns, fixed-width, custom-header, custom-background, threaded-comments, sticky-post, translation-ready, microformats, rtl-language-support, editor-style
* Template: MyTheme
*
**
*
* This file intentionally left blank. Styles are enqueued in functions.php
*
* 1 – ./css/bbpress.css
*
**/

3. Now you have made the twentyten theme a child theme of your present WordPress theme.
4. Now log into your WordPress dashboard. Goto Appearance, and activate the child-theme.

To remove the sidebar:
Goto the child theme, inside that bbpress folder and comment these line of code /* < ?php get_sidebar(); ?> */ in page-front-forums.php and page-front-topics.php files.

If this method does not work, then create a file called sidebar.php and drop it inside your main theme folder. sidebar.php must be blank.

Now Reload your forum :p

‘YOU’ Are A Big Deal

If you’re working on your own i.e., if you are your own boss, then you will have the risk of getting distracted or interrupted easily.

This new year, my resolution would be to focus on myself. i.e., You should start focusing on yourselves.

YOU
You are the highest leverage thing in your business/life.

If you are happy, healthy, strong and in good mood, you can perform better and you will have a better result; and at the end of the day you would feel satisfied and thus feel more happy, healthy and strong. Yes, it’s a recursive process. If things don’t work properly, you would feel sad, unhealthy and weak; and there is more chances of getting bad results inturn.

In order to balance our life, we need to take care of 2 things: Profession and Personal Life.

Measure Your Work:
If you are not digging ditches or manufacturing tires or any physical goods for that matter, you will be able to measure the exact amount of work you accomplished at the end of the day.
For example: If you are into information business or if you are into some work which is directly related to information and there is no physical product involved; Like a software: it’s not a physical product.

Tip: Fix the amount of work that you want to accomplish for the day.

Solution:
Fixing a goal and working daily in chunks of fixed blocks of time to achieve the goal. Ex: If you decide to do Yoga, to help yourself with maintaining your health, then do it daily on a fixed time, for a fixed block of time.

Kill Multitasking
All these days I was efficient with multitasking..now also I’m! But if I focus on one specific task alone, I will get better results and finish tasks soon, one at a time.

Do not keep sms’ing, emailing, Facebooking, Tweeting all day or whenever you get distracted by it’s thought. Fix time for most of these things. Yes being in touch with friends is as important, but it’s not the only thing on earth. You dint start your business to end it this way, right ?

Solution
Kill unwanted distractions. I’m going to kill most of it. I’ll sms, email, Facebook, Tweet only once in a day, and not more than 20min for all these things.

And I would make sure, I WILL NOT INTERRUPT OTHERS.

Stop Unhealthy Habit
I’ll not drink caffeine, beer, wine etc. Will stick to healthy diet.

Good Emotional Habits
Yoga, Meditation brings good health to body and mind. It would surly help in the long run to maintain health and good state of mind. With good health and good state of mind, we have more chances of succeeding at whatever that we are doing.
Imagine, if you have some illness and your mental status is out of focus and you are attending a meeting to decide about the future of your company :p How worst the situation can be?

Do’s and Dont:
From now on, we have to do things which brings us closer to our goal. We need to eliminate the useless things which we regularly do, which neither creates value to us nor to others.

Enjoy Life
Regularly Take Break’s. Yes I get satisfied while working. I enjoy my work. But there is a life outside it. We have people who love us. and there are people whom we love.
We need to spend as much time as possible with them. These are the only things that will remain in our heart till the end.
Spend time with your parents, children, wife, girlfriend, friends etc. Remember the last time you had spent time with them, how happy you were.

We need to take time and regularly spend time with loved ones and never ignore them for the sake of business and money.

Reading Books:
If you fall asleep while trying to read books, then, try doing it at the end of the day.
Try to finish reading one book, … two books, .. three books. Take interesting books; things you like to know about.

Slowly you’ll fall in love with books. I’ll end my day reading atleast one chapter from my favorite authors.

Summary:
1. Wake up early in the morning.
2. Start the day with Yoga, Meditation.
3. Eliminate doing things which do not bring any progress in what you want to achieve.
4. Focus on things you want to do: one at a time.
5. Kill multitasking.
6. Take care of yourself. You are the most important thing in your business/life, nothing else. If you stay fit/healthy, you could achieve anything.
7. Your priorities matter. Don’t prioritize wrong things; and don’t ignore the right things.
8. Life has it’s up and down: Know this in advance and continue focusing on your values and do not get distracted.
“Don’t swell when you are happy, don’t dwell when you are sad”

I wish you all the success. Happy New Year. Remember, for all the reasons quoted about and more, ‘YOU’ Are A Big Deal.