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.
| Topics: Plugin, Tools |  Email This
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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.
| Topics: Plugin, Tools, Uncategorized | Email This
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Companies are increasingly blocking the access to popular sites like gmail. Following is a list of proxies that you can use to access gmail at workplace, incase gmail is banned at your office.
Update: I have created a new list of 900 proxy sites
Proxies that I have been using for long
http://polysolve.com/
http://www.yoyahoo.com
http://www.myglite.com
Proxies 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.
Read my tips on buying second hand mobile and buying unbranded phones in the grey market
| Topics: Resources, Tips and Tricks, Tools | Email This
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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.
| Topics: Entrepreneurship, Internet, Make Money, SEO, Tips and Tricks, Tools | Email This
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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.
| Topics: Internet, Plugin, Softwares, Tools, Uncategorized | Email This
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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]”
| Topics: Blogs, Resources, SEO, Tools | Email This
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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.
| Topics: Open Source, Resources, Softwares, Tools, Uncategorized | Email This
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You don’t have to log into Gmail every time you want to see if you’ve got mail. Google’s gmail notifier is an application that can alert you if you have new messages. It shows an icon in the system tray to let you know if you have unread Gmail messages, and shows their subjects, senders and snippets, all without your having to open a web browser.
You can Download it here
Alternatively if you use firefox then you may use gmail notifier to read the mails.
| Topics: Tips and Tricks, Tools | Email This
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Here is a list of wordpress plugins that we are currently using on binaryday.
Spam Control from akismet. Without this plugin, there was no way we could have allowed our users to comment on the blog. Works like a magic in controlling spam. This was the first plugin you must install, once your blog is up and running.
Google sitemap generator helps you create a xml sitemap for your wordpress blog. Helps google find more pages on your blog. Make sure to submit the sitemap to google webmaster central. This is the only SEO I have used till date and I have a pagerank of 4.
Related Posts. At the bottom of this post you will find a list of posts relateds to this one. A really cool plugin to increase user experience and pageviews.
Email the post, pagenavigation and post views This page has some of the most useful wordpress plugins, including email this post, page views and the advanced navigation bar at the bottom of the blog.
Make sure to install the email this plugin for sure. You will be surprised how the small numbers add up over the time.
| Topics: Tools | Email This
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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.
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Ever wanted to download a clip from youtube? vexy.net is one of the best websites that I have used till date. It first converts the youtube videos to more usable format like .avi and then lets you download the same. Check it out.
You can also download youtube players at abhisays
| Topics: Tips and Tricks, Tools | Email This
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GDB (Acronym for GNU debugger) is considered to be one of the best debuggers among the geek community. i generally prefer debugging my programs without any debugging tools , i.e by mental inspection and printf()s. I feel this is the best approach for a student…It makes you learn a lot. But when you have to debug a more than 1000 lines code and you have deadlines to meet you practically can’t do without a debugger.
GDB is a command line based tool but really powerful and helpful.
I found a great comprehensive tutorial on GDB here ( http://www.dirac.org/linux/gdb/ )
PS: don’t leave chapter 2 of this tutorial. Even if you don’t want to learn about gdb, still read chapter 2 of this tutorial …. Read it to know why.
Hail GNU !!!
| Topics: Coding, Open Source, Tools | Email This
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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.
| Topics: Internet, Resources, Tips and Tricks, Tools | Email This
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