Xeeber is one more service that allows you to detect invisible yahoo messenger users. I have not used Xeeber myself yet. Have you used Xeeber? Please leave a comment stating your experience with the service.
Archive for the ‘Tools’ category
Google’s latest double standard
Google trend for websites is a tool from google that allows you to get traffic statistics for any website. It gives out details like countries of origin of the users to a particular site, other sites visited by the users of the particular site and most importantly the popular search terms that brings traffic to the website. You can see the traffic trend for techcrunch here.
You can know similar data for youtube with google trends, right?? Wrong. When it comes to google’s own sites like youtube.com or google.com, almighty google will not give you anything. You need not take my word for it. Check google trends for website for google.com or youtube.com to see for yourself.
P.S: If you are able to see the trends for google.com or youtube.com then do let me know. I shall take down this offending post 
send free sms in india
SMS prices might have dropped. However who does not like an option to send free sms messages? Here we profile some websites that allow you to send free sms in india. Bookmark this page now. You will need more than 1 of these sites as they have a restriction on number of free sms you can send daily.
way2sms.com: This is one of the earliest players amongst the free sms service providers. The best part is it allows you to send messages upto 110 characters long. Really hassle free registration.
160by2.com: This is one of the newest players amongst the free sms service providers. However it allows you to send messages upto 80 characters long. However they are getting a lot of traction among new users.
www.jaxtr.com Jaxtr provides many more solutions apart from free sms. It is functional in countries outside india as well. However it works quite well in India. It even gives 50 free credits to make free calls.
www.spicesms.com: They support a imited number of service providers. As a matter of fact they do not support any of the 3 mowas using to check out the free sms services in india.
Invisible Scanner: Find yahoo users who are invisible
Yahoo messenger allows people to stay in invisible mode. Do you want to find your freinds who may be in invisible mode. Invisible Scanner is a really good service that allows you to find out users who are online but in invisible mode. Invisible scanner allows you to scan 50 users in a span of 12 hours. The best part is you do not need to download any software. Check the site at http://www.invisible-scanner.com/
Free online youtube converter
I have been researching about websites that allow you to download youtube videos. I was extremely impressed with vixy.net as it allowed me to convert the video into several formats includig avi,divx,mp3,mpeg4 and 3gp.
However I just got to know that it is not the only one. There are number of online resources that allow you to do so. So here is a list of some free youtube converters.
youtube proxy sites
I had created a list of gmail proxy sites and gmail proxies. The response to those 2 posts has been phenomenal with the first post getting more than 2300 views. So here is aother list of proxy sites for youtube
Most of these are geeral purpose proxy sites that work for other sites as well. However you can use all of them as youtube proxy sites
youtube proxy
http://rcx1.com
http://polysolve.com: My favorite youtube proxy site.
http://www.greatproxiesonline.info
http://www.browseprox.com
www.facebookfirewall.com: This works as a proxy for youtube
http://btunnel.com
http://defusefilters.com
http://www.oneinoneout.com
http://www.filtersneak.com
http://browseschool.com
www.proxysite007.info
http://www.secretlysurf.com
www.jacoto.com
http://magictunnel.info
Please let me know any good proxy sites you know. The idea is to create a comprehensive list.
Convert pdf to excel
We need to convert pdf to excel frequently to avoid data entry.3 pdf to excel coversion tools that I am evaluatig right now. I shall be posting my views on this post after using the tools for some more time. Please share your views if you have used any of these or other free pdf to excel product that you know.
http://www.freepdfconvert.com/convert_pdf_to_source.asp
http://www.zamzar.com/
http://www.investintech.com/prod_a2e.htm
screen capture with SnagIt
Why do I need a screen capture software while I have Print Screen key?I can always paste the resulting image somewhere, edit it and use it. Efficiency. I was skeptical before I started using it myself. The fact is Screen capture softwares allow you to do all these faster and enable you to do a lot more.
SnagIt is one of the best screen capture softwares available. TechSmith first published SnagIt in 1990 and over the years they built up various features while keepig the interface simple and intuitive. You can either purchase it or You can Download SnagIt Trial Version
You can use SnagIt to
You can Download SnagIt Guide to start using SnagIt.
download FLV Player at http://applian.com/flvplayer/
FLV Player is required to play downloaded youtube videos. You can download FLV Player at http://applian.com/flvplayer/
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
Download youtube videos with http://www.tubeleecher.com/
You may want to download youtube videos as it may be a pain to watch youtube videos as they load too slowly. Or you may want to keep the videos for future viewing. You can now download youtube videos to your pc through http://www.tubeleecher.com/
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.
A tool to test your website/blog on different browsers and screen resolution
The greatest concern of any good webmaster, while changing the themse/css of the site, is if the new UI will work properly on different browsers and on different screen resolutions. Browsershots proves really helpful in such a situation. Choose the different browsers and screen resolutions for which you want to test your site and submit the page url. You will get the screen shot after 3-4 minutes. You can opt for a paid mode to get faster service.
You can see the output for one of the pages of binaryday here
Google Maps WordPress Plugin
Your blog can look really cool with some interactive google maps. Embedding google maps into wordpress blog has become really easy with Google Maps WordPress Plugin. However you need wordpress version 2.5.1 and php5 for this plugin to work properly.
Control who sees your adsense advertisement
Every blog has two types of visitors : returning readers and first time visitors. Returning readers already know what to expect on your blog and come to your site for its content and for what you write. First time visitors, (mostly search engine visitors), come because they are looking for something particular, look at the page, and leave.
The returning visitors should be treated as premium members because they spread word about your blog and link to you. Anyways they are least likely to click on your advertisements. So no point in showing a lot of adsense advertisements to them and put them off. I shall rather show them CPA advertisements to them as they trust my blog.
Whereas one time visitors are most likely to click on the adsense advertisement as they are looking for something. If I have to monetize my blog with adsense then I shall show the adsense advertisements to these one time visitors. However the compexity of the code required to determine if the visitor is a regular user or onetime user deterred me from using this strategy.
However now you can control the display of the advertisements using who sees ad plugin for wordpress
While inserting the adsense code you just mention what type of user can see the ad. The plugin takes care of everything else.
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.
Strategies that we use to get more traffic
It has been more than 3 years since we started mywalkin. With more than 24,000 feedburner subscribers and more than 1,00,000 unique visitors a month, it has been a reasonable success. I had never bothered to understand how we managed to get those users. However recently I did some analysis as I want to use the learnings from mywalkin, to get more traffic for binaryday.
If you are starting a new website or blog, then you have basically 3 different options to get traffic. Direct advertisement, Search engine Optimization and creating a word-of-mouth buzz.
Direct advertisement has the advantage of providing immediate results. If you spend X amount of money then you will get Y number of traffic. If the concept needs some initial userbase to start working like some digg like concept or forum or social network, then this is a must. However direct advertisement makes your website grow in an arithmatic progression. i.e if your advertisement budget allows you to get 200 users per month, then the growth of your site will look like 200,400,600, 800 and so on. CPC and CPM advertisement methods shall fall under this category.
Search engine Optimization looks like the most talked about method. If you are not in a highly competitive domain then it is not very difficult to rank high for target terms. It does need some initial investment both time and money. However once the work is over, much less investment is required for maintaining the position. On the downside, you will be completely at the mercy of all mighty google. It takes some time to take effect. While getting to the top 10 may be possible, moving up from there becomes a really big challenge. So with search engine optimization the traffic graph will look something like 0,0,0,50,70,100,170,300,300,300.
Word of Mouth This is perhaps one of the most important and most difficult strategy to use. And this is what differentates between a good site and a great site. For this strategy to work, you shall need to make your customers to talk about you. You can do that through quality and innovative features. However if you manage to achieve this, then this is effectivly a zero cost method of getting traffic. The importance of this method is that it makes your traffic increase in a geometric progression. assuming you manage to convince 10% of your visitors to talk about your product, your traffic numbers will look like 100,110,121,133,146,161,177,195,214 i.e the traffic will double in 8 months.
DotGyan – There’s more to selected text than cut/copy & paste
I have been working on this idea of “There’s more to selected text than cut/copy & paste” for past few weekends.
What do we do when you come across a word whose meaning you don’t know or a term you want to know more about while reading a Charles Dicken’s or Shakespeare’s work or may be just a newspaper?
Most of us simply ignore it or think “I’ll lookup in a dictionary when I get up” and we never do that. There are a very chosen few of us who purposely keep a dictionary with us while reading.
Consider this scenario while reading on the web. It’s lot easier, right? just select the term, right click, copy, open a new window, open google, paste and then wait for result. Fast enough but also irritating enough to break your concentration.
I came up with a widget to try to solve this problem. As of now I call it “DotGyan”. It allows you to search a word/term there and then with least interference in your reading pleasure.
It works like this…
1. You see a word like lagniappe whose meaning you don’t know. The word can be there any where on the blog or webpage.
2. Select the word as you would do for cut/copy & paste.
3. You see a dot at the end of your selection.
4. Click this dot.
5. You get the options (on what I call a “GyanBox”) to search the term in Google, Wikipedia or Wiktionary.
6. Click on one of the three options.
7. Rest you will get it yourself.
TRY THIS OUT, RIGHT HERE ON BINARYDAY !
What if I don’t want to search the selected term? Simple, just ignore the dot. It will go away in 3 seconds.
What if I want to edit the selected text before searching? Well, just edit it in the text box you see on the GyanBox.
Some may argue that we already have such softwares. True but almost all of them are available as browser plugins and how many of us actually know about such plugins and even if we know how many of us install them? Also plugins are browser dependent. DotGyan is browser independent and it shifts the installation trouble from user to web-master.
I have installed DotGyan on BinaryDay. Go ahead, Try it out Please! (Just select any word or phrase and click the dot)
DotGyan is right now in a very initial phase. Please give your valuable comments and suggestions as comments to this post or mail me at vineet7kumar@gmail.com.
Your comments and suggestions can pertain to anything from looks & colors to any new feature you would like to have. Also suggest some good names for the widget.
Team BinaryDay will be more than happy to hear from you
PS: If you are a blogger or a webmaster and would like to install DotGyan on your blog or page please drop me a mail at vineet7kumar@gmail.com … I will love to have DotGyan on your Blog or page.
PS: Currently safari browser and Internet explorer less that IE7 are not supported.
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]”
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.