FLV Player is required to play downloaded youtube videos. You can download FLV Player at http://applian.com/flvplayer/
Archive for the ‘Resources’ category
7 online resources to download youtube videos
Here is a list of olie resources that you may use to download youtube videos
http://www.youtubecatcher.com/
http://www.downloadyoutubevideos.com/
http://www.techcrunch.com/get-youtube-movie/
http://keepvid.com/
http://www.savevideodownload.com/download.php
http://www.vidgrab.com/
http://vixy.net/
I like http://vixy.net/ the most as it allows download in other formats as well
7 power tips to get lots of useful backlinks and traffic
Submit your pages to sites like Digg, Reddit, Sphinn. For content relevant to Indian readers only submit them to Indianpad.com, newscola.com, humsurfer.com.
Bookmark your site on social bookmarkig sites. Some of the most popular ones are here ). These sites are great for getting direct traffic to your blog. However may of them use no-follow tags. Hece they do not help you in improving your pagerank. Here is a great list of Social Bookmarking Sites that provide do follow links
Advertise your site on classified sites like Craigslist, kijiji, click.in.
Submit your site to DMOZ.Submit to other relevant directories as well. A list can be found here.
Sign up to StumbleUpon and get your friends to Stumble your site. Here are some tips to use StumbleUpon more efficiently.
Find quality and relevant blogs and leave a comment. Importantly it alows you to start the networking with other bloggers as well.
Participate on related forums. Add a link to your site in the signature of any forums you post on. Here is a list of large number of forums.
Know when your site / blog is down with www.pingdom.com
A site or blog downtime is every webmaster’s / blogger’s biggest nightmare. Now we do not need to keep checking your site to know if it is working. Set up an alert on www.pingdom.com. It will let you know if your site goes down. I am already in love with this site. Try it out for yourself.
15 most useful gmail proxy sites
Why gmail proxy sites?
Companies are increasingly blocking the access to popular sites like gmail. Following is a list of gmail proxy sites that you can use to access gmail at workplace, incase gmail is banned at your office. Make sure to check out my latest posts about dual core vs core 2 duo, most viewed video on youtube and free rapidshare premium account.
Gmail Proxies that I have been using for long
http://www.criclover.com
http://polysolve.com/
http://www.yoyahoo.com
http://www.myglite.com
Some more Proxy sites for gmail that I found out through research
http://www.browseprox.com I like this proxy for gmail a lot as this does not have many pop-up advertisements. However it has lots of contextual advertisements.
http://www.browser9.com
http://btunnel.com I am a little skeptic about using this proxy as the advertisements on the site look like those on malware proxies.
http://bypassgenie.com/ Looks like a good proxy website for accessing gmail. However the site was not working while I was trying to access it.
http://www.filtersneak.com I find this a little more trust worthy as it warns you about not supporting https protocol.
keep a track of some famous startup and venture capital blogs with alltop
My friend Yathindran came across these links which keep a track of latest postings on some of the famous blogs related to startups and venture capital.
For startup news checkout
http://startups.alltop.com/
and for venture capital news checkout
http://venturecapital.alltop.com/
Even if you are not interested in this stuff, do give it a shot. You will sure find something of interest.
Get Angel Investment for your startup (Mumbai Angels,India
The toughest part in a startup is building the prototype of your idea to prove that it works. You will need angel investment to keep the startup going at this phase. If you have a great idea, and you will like to get some early stage funding, then you should try your luck with mumbai angels
By their own admission, they are focused on seed stage and early stage companies with strong teams, defensible technologies or services and well defined product to market plans.
Mumbai angels has many members with prior Silicon Valley experience. So you can expect some really useful advice and handholding as well. More importantly they invest in indivdual capacity and not as a fund.
Show your pagerank on your page
Pagerank of a blog or site is an important input for text advertisers and people interested in exchanging link with you. You can attract potential advertisers by displaying your pagerank on your webpage. You can see a demo just below the feedburner box on the sidebar of this page.
I have written a small tool to do so for any webpage. You can show a similar image by adding a single line to your blog. Add the following within php to display your pagerank
include “http://www.binaryday.com/pagerank.php?url=[your site url]”
How to increase your feedburner subsciber numbers?
Feedburner subscriber base is the most assured way to increase number of repeat users. feedburner stat also acts as a good proxy for knowing how many readers find the blog really cool. That is the reason I keep checking my feedburner stat and keep thinking about ways to increase that number.
Below are 2 methods that I find are the most useful to increase the feedburner subscriber number.
Ask them to subscribe You will be surprised how effective is that “if you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed” link. If you think about it, the reader is most likely to subscribe to your feed after going through a really good article.
Convert the Unverified Subscribers This is one data that really surprised me. If you have a feed subscription service for quite sometime, you will be really surprised by how many people who subscribed to your feed never confirmed the subscription. It is normally as high as 40% of your total active subscriber base. These are people who liked your blog (why else they will subscribe at the first place?).
So go ahead and remind them to just verify the subscription. In my experience the best way is to subscribe their email ids once more. They will get a confirmation mail. At least in my case 80% of the people confirm the subscription.
If you found this post useful, you know what to do. 
A good gmail proxy
if your favorite proxy for gmail has been blocked by administrator then try this detailed list of 15 gmail proxy sites
GParted — ultimate HDD partitioning utility
Do you want to resize your hard disk partitions without removing your current installed operating system? Do you want to create new partitions again without destroying your current operating system?
Do you want to install a second operating system? Or you computer refuses to boot and gives messages like “NTLDR missing” or “no bootable media found” (not exactly same messages…I don’t remember the exact ones 
)…
Well there’s a nice solution to all these...GParted (GNOME partition editor) .
It has three versions… installable, liveCD and liveUSB. I found the liveCD really good because using it you boot your system from the CD and not from the HDD so even if your OS gets corrupted you can use it . Also it has a very simple to use and intuitive GUI.
You can read more about GParted, Download it, check its screenshots here at its home-page.
Tips & Tricks 1 : I am unable to install software online
I had played (literally) a lot with my system in past 3 years … Had lots of experiences (some really mind blowing) of destroying and repairing my system. Thought of sharing some good ones with you all.
I discovered the cause (one of the probable causes) to this problem (of being unable to install online software) when a few days ago my friend was unable to install adobe reader from adobe’s site on his Windows XP (yes windows, not even Linux !). His system met all the hardware and software pre-requirements. I asked him to check his system’s date. It showed a date of 2005 (This incident happened in Dec 2007). THAT WAS THE PROBLEM.
He adjusted his system’s date and installation was a cake walk. When you try to install a software online the server checks your system’s date and does not install if you have a wrong date…Someone please try installing with a future date…I haven’t tried it… The error shown nowhere tells you about the date problem.
One more thing , your Gtalk will also not work if you have wrong date settings.
If you have to reset your computer’s time every time you boot into it … Please get your BIOS battery changed immediately.
But sometimes disturbing your system’s date and time settings is useful if you want to do some Software piracy… I will stop here on the issue of piracy.
Wait for more tips and tricks posts … Hope this one was useful.
Some cool recursive acronyms !
Just came across these acronyms … mostly names of open source softwares…but there’s something special in them … they are recursive !!! some famous recursive acronyms are
1. GNU – GNU is Not Unix. (Software collection)
2. Cygnus – Cygnus Your GNU Support. ( A Software company)
3. EINE – EINE Is Not EMACS. (A text editor)
4. ZWEI – ZWEI Was EINE Initially. (Another text editor)
5. LIAR – LIAR Imitates Apply Recursively. (A scheme compiler)
6. WINE – WINE Is Not Emulator. (A windows emulator(like) for Linux)
7. EMACS – EMACS Makes A Computer Slow. (A famous text editor written by RMS).
8. XINU – XINU is not Unix.
9. PHP – PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. ( Server side web scripting language)
10. LAME – LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder.
One famous real world, non-technical example (We have all heard it but most of us don’t know it’s an acronym) is VISA.
VISA stands for VISA International Service Association.
I hope it was interesting.
Some nice tech links
Here’s a small list of some really nice tech related links. Will add more to the list as they come to my mind.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/ -> coding blog
http://www.labnol.org -> general tech
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com -> tech fun
http://www.linuxquestions.org -> best place for any linux related query
http://www.searchenginewatch.com -> news about search engines
http://www.topcoder.com -> online programing
http://www.webmonkey.com -> web development
Create cool flowcharts online at giffy
Sometimes it can be really difficult to create a flowchart without the proper tool. I just discovered this really cool website that allows you to create a nice flowchart online without much effort. I just created this flowchart for finding out if a number is primary or not.
Top Torrent Sites
Torrents are great, they are the best way to share large files with your friends, or even with people you don’t know at all. But surprisingly enough, not many people create or use torrents when they need to share something.
You can search latest movies , Songs , software both legitmate and pirated on this torrent sites and download them with the help of a torrent client like azures , microtorrent etc…
Here is the list of top torrents which are popular among net surfers..
1. Torrentz.com
Torrentz is a popular Torrent indexing and Torrent search engine. It does not help to track your torrents. The torrent search engine is more advance as it allows you to search for files within the torrents. If you’re looking for unique stuff you should prefer this site
2. BitTorrent
BitTorrent’s software client allows you to quickly download high-quality digital content such as video, music, and games.
It leverages on its community of over 70 million users to securely deliver files to your PC faster than anything else out there.
http://www.bittorrent.com/
TorrentSpy.com
TorrentSpy is a popular BitTorrent indexing Web Site. It hosts torrent and provides a forum to comment on them, as well as a graphical portrayal of how healthy the torrents are. Torrentspy was as popular as Mininova and made it to 2nd place.
www.torrentspy.com
Nowadays dowload managers are also coming with torrent supports so that u can download both normal files as well as torrent files.
Best example is Flashgates
Google talk banned in office?..No probs
Thanks to network admin team and security policies , we see lot of websites and IM Clients being banned inside most of the office networks in India.
Though we ourselves don’t want to waste our so called precious time on browsing crap stuffs in our office but i strongly feel accessing gtalk does come under fundamental right of every office goers – no matter where he works.
So here is one work around to bypass the filters and enjoy this fundamental rights..But yes its alwayz at your own risk
Nimbuzz : http://web.nimbuzz.com is a web based application where in we can chat with gmail ids. and yes it is of course free.
Bullets in Excel
I wanted to create a list like
- Point 1
- Point 2
- Point 3
in an excel cell.
Bullets and numbering is a widely used feature in microsoft word. Surprisingly microsoft excel does not have any such feature. So I did a bit of research and found the following work around.
insert the following formula in the cell where you want to put the bulleted list.
=CONCATENATE(CHAR(149),” Point 1″,CHAR(10),CHAR(149),” Point 2″,CHAR(10),CHAR(149),” Point 3″)
Keep the cursor on the cell and press Alt+Enter (“For wrap text”) and you will have your text beautifully wrapped up.
P.S If you do not want to keep the messy formula in your sheet then copy the cell and paste the value using paste special.
LogMeIn
LogMeIn is a service that allows users to remotely access a number of home or work PCs anywhere they may be through an Internet connection. Users can access their computers remotely, even from Linux machines, Macs, and PocketPC devices. LogMeIn is browser-based and I was able to successfully test the program with both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Because the program is browser-based I can access the Target PC while seamlessly interacting with the PC I’m using to remotely connect.
Send / Share Really Large Files
If you have a file that is too large for gmail or if you do not have access to gmail then you should try out http://www.mediafire.com. The website lets you upload files upto 100 Mb in size !!!!
This is a really cool site that lets you upload files even without signing up. I just tried it out with a 3mb file and the file was loaded in less than a minute.
It also gives us various options like sharing files with your freinds and embedding the file to your webpage. I am too impressed with it.