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8 of the Best Social Media Extensions for Joomla

8 of the Best Social Media Extensions for Joomla

Joomla! is a CMS powerhouse, but the core does not include any social media integration other than RSS feeds. With a free download and easy installation, any Joomla! administrator can quickly integrate with popular social media applications.

In addition to driving traffic to your site, integrating your Joomla! site with social media applications shows your readers you value them and want them to return. It also shows your readers that your content is valuable (or you think it is) and it’s worth sharing. Here are eight of the best social media extensions for Joomla!

1. Joomla! AddThis

add this joomla extension image

This module inserts an AddThis button wherever you want it. You can edit the parameters of the button like your account information. If you are not familiar with the AddThis button, it is a single method of including all the major social media bookmarking and sharing applications such as Stumbleupon , Digg , Twitter, Facebook and Delicious . This is a great option if space is tight, or if you just like the uncluttered look.

2. Ultimate Social Bookmarking Plugin

ultimate social bookmarking joomla plugin

This plugin adds small, uniform links below your article. If you’re looking for a full-featured plugin to incorporate all the major social media bookmarking and sharing applications, this is it. Take your pick of 60 different applications and styles.

3. DiggIt Plugin

diggit joomla extension image

As one of the most popular social bookmarking options, the easily recognized “Digg It” button is a must have. Sometimes the plethora of options isn’t the best if you want to emphasize major services like Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious.

4. Sociable Plugin

If you’re looking for fast, easy, out-of-the-box functionality, the Sociable Plugin is for you. It automatically inserts small social media bookmarking and sharing links at the bottom of the article. All the major social media sites are available and even some obscure ones. You can pick and choose which ones show up and even use your own CSS.

5. Digg Module

digg module joomla image

Sometimes showing off your popularity is a good thing, and may even increase your conversion rate because it shows first time visitors you offer something valuable. This module integrates with Digg, letting you display your stats like “Most Diggs, Newly Dugg and Oldest Dugg.”

6. Twitter Module

tweets module image

This plugin displays tweets from an account you identify in a module. This is great for anyone who wants to headline their own tweets or perhaps a friend’s. A lot of Tweeters are using Twitter as a mechanism for introducing original content that doesn’t appear on their own website, which may encourage Twitter followers.

7. Twitter Plugin

This plugin sends a preformatted tweet to your Twitter account with each new article. This can be handy when you want to keep your followers updated but don’t have a lot of time. One note: it will not send a tweet if you save a post as unpublished, then publish it later.

8. Article Footer Plugin

Create your own social media plugin! Use the “Add Article Footer” plugin to insert any code in the footer of every article. This way you can pick and choose your favorite social media sites, select your own images and build your own links.

You May also like : Tweet Your WordPress Posts Automatically With Publicize

YouTube Reaches One Billion Views Per Day

YouTube Reaches One Billion Views Per Day

When your website first reaches a million visitors, it’s a great milestone. However, one billion views per day can only be attained by the selected few, and YouTube is now one of them.

According to the official blog, YouTube is serving “well over a billion views a day”. That’s at least 11,574 views per second, 694,444 views per minute, and 41,666,667 views per hour. Imagine the web server farm that can withstand that much traffic, and then remember that YouTube is just one of Google’s many properties.

YouTube still may not be making enough money to justify the 1.65 billion dollars Google has paid for it, but it definitely makes it up when it comes to visitors.

To celebrate the occasion, YouTube has a special logo today, accompanied with the text “1 billion views per day”. Yes, they’re bragging, but one has to admit they have a lot to brag about.

Get Free Ubuntu CD Delivered to Your House at No Cost

Get Free Ubuntu CD Delivered to Your House at No Cost

Ubuntu is probably the most popular Linux distro which is a community developed operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers.

Whether you use it at home, at school or at work Ubuntu contains all the applications you’ll ever need, from word processing and email applications, to web server software and programming tools.

How can you get Ubuntu (Linux Distro) Free ?

Ubuntu is and always will be free of charge. You do not pay any licensing fees. You can download, use and share Ubuntu with your friends, family, school or business for absolutely nothing.

There are 2 ways for you to get Ubuntu. Just choose the delivery option that works best for you:

  • Download now – Download the Ubuntu CD installer to your computer now.Please note: the CD Installer is nearly 700MB. If you don’t have a fast internet connection you may want to consider requesting a CD.
  • Request a free CD – Request a free Ubuntu, Edubuntu or Kubuntu CD from Canonical.
    • Delivery typically takes 6-10 weeks
    • Use each CD as many times as you like – you are free to use it on as many computers as you wish and to pass on to others
    • Learn more by visiting the Shipit Questions page.

Ubuntu CD Delivered Free to your House [India]

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Top 5 Blogging Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Top 5 Blogging Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Business blogging can be exceptionally rewarding. When done correctly, a successful blog can bring attention to your business, can attract new customers, and can turn your current customer base into the type of fans that companies like Apple, Netflix, and Ben and Jerry’s have: people who will not only buy your product or service, but evangelize it to their peers. Of course, like anything, there is a right way to go about starting a business blog and a wrong way.

Creating a blog for your small business isn’t easy; it requires hard work and the ability to think creatively about your work. But if you avoid the five big mistakes laid out in this post, your chances of building a successful business blog will be much better.

Mistake #1: Treating Your Blog Like a Press Center

The number one mistake that business bloggers make is to treat their blog as an extension of their current press center. Repeat after me: Your blog is not the place for press releases. Blogging is a conversation and it offers a way for your customers to connect with your business on a completely new level. Press releases, on the other hand, are the exact opposite. They’re impersonal, they’re self promotional, and most readers don’t trust them. If you use your blog to republish press releases your customers will have no reason to keep reading and they’ll also likely not trust your content.

How to Avoid: First, don’t ever put out a press release on your blog. You can use your blog to make product or other business announcements, but do so with original writing and in a more casual voice. Second, do use your blog to write about things other than your core business. Share your thoughts on your industry, share insights into the day-to-day work life and processes at your company, and provide tips and tricks you have learned during your time in business.

Mistake #2: Not Blogging Regularly

Think about the blogs you read on a regular basis — how many of them publish only sporadically? Most successful blogs put out new content at least a couple of times per week and try to stick to a regular schedule. Consistently putting out quality content will keep readers returning and over time it will help you build a community and turn your customers into fans.

How to Avoid: Blogging regularly isn’t easy, so to avoid burning out, brainstorm editorial ideas ahead of time. If you plan to put out new posts every Tuesday and Friday, for example, try not to start writing Tuesday’s post on Tuesday morning. Get other people at your company involved so that one person isn’t shouldering the entire blogging load, and even consider sourcing content from your customers. Remember that anything can provide fodder for a good blog post, so pay attention to the things you read or see on other blogs, newspapers, magazines, or television.

Mistake #3: Not Enabling Conversation

As I already said, blogging is a conversation, and not allowing it to occur on your blog is a mistake. It’s true that blog comments can open you up to criticism, but blogging is an unparalleled opportunity to connect with your customers. You’ll get a lot more out of blogging if you enable — and even encourage — your customers to respond to what you write.

How to Avoid: Obviously the first thing you need to do is enable commenting on your business blog. But beyond that, you need to remember that the conversation is two-way. Get in there and respond to the comments readers leave on your blog and you’ll be more likely to develop a community around your writing that can help turn your customers into fans who will evangelize your products and services and provide you with quality feedback. You should also participate in the conversation on other blogs in your industry by leaving comments on posts elsewhere around the blogosphere. That will help you to establish your “blogging brand” and bring new readers your way.

Mistake #4: Making New Content Hard to Discover

Your blog won’t be very helpful to readers if they aren’t able to easily find new content. You need to make your blog discoverable and you need to make sure that when you add new content, your regular readers will be able to find it.

How to Avoid: There are a few ways to make sure your blog content is more easily discovered.

- Make your blog easy to find by linking to it prominently from your company’s web site and including your blog’s URL in your email signature, on your business cards, and in sales and marketing collateral.

- Use a full RSS feed (because the goal with most business blogs should be to get read, not boost page views) and make it easy for your readers to find and subscribe to.

- Embrace social media technologies like Twitter and Facebook as a way to notify your fans and followers of new blog content, and make it easy for your readers to share content with each other through social media channels and via email.

- Optimize for search engines by putting relevant keywords in post titles and URL slugs and write about the things that your customers are most likely to be searching for — but avoid sounding artificial simply so you can stuff some more keywords into a post.

Mistake #5: Expecting Too Much, Too Soon

Blogging isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. Your blog won’t be an overnight success, and for the first few months it might feel like you’re writing for no one. It can take time to build up your readership and have a regular community of people who participate on your blog. Don’t expect immediate returns from your blog and do expect to put in a lot of hard work.

How to Avoid: Set attainable goals and realize that you’re in it for the long haul. Don’t cancel your blogging efforts after three months — give it at least a year of regularly putting out quality, original content. And make sure that your blog is easy to find, and that your readers are able to easily comment and share posts with others.

You can Read this also : Top 10 wordpress Plugin to promote you Social Media profiles

9 Best legal ways to download free software

9 Best legal ways to download free software

Freeware popularly known as Free software. There are plenty of software which does almost the same thing and differ in few features. Like we have Open Office.org for Microsoft office alternative, we have GIMP as an alternative for Photoshop.

Talking about multimedia software, we have Video Lan player, Windows media player, Real player and so on, selecting the best out of them depend on user’s personal choice. Though a review of software help up to understand the software and give more insight about it.

There are plenty of websites on the Internet, from where we can download software. Some legal ways and some illegal.

The downside of illegal websites are , most of time they come bundled up with viruses and Trojans, which tends to infect your Computer. You might saved 2$ by not paying for the license of the software but you ended up paying 200$ for data backup because of this.

The best solution here is look for expert review and download free alternative software, which is freeware and you can read the review and expert remark before downloading them.

1. Download.com

Download.com is widely used website for software review and software download. Its domain name has a key advantage here. The download.com shows the review along with user opinion and other stats like number of time software is downloaded. Their software archive is very huge and easy to navigate.

2. Majorgeeks.com

The websites consist of freeware and shareware software’s. If a software is a shareware it will also show the price for the licensing. A detail description of software along with rating and screenshot are also there.

3. Sourceforge.net

The largest open source application and software directory on the Internet.  The directory contains the wide list of open source softwares.

4. Filehippo.com

One of the most popular website to keep track of latest updated software. Filehippo has also a software popularly known as update checker which helps to check if latest version of software’s are installed or not. You can grab their RSS feeds to keep track of all software updates.

5. Oldversion.com

As name suggest and their tagline “Because new is always not better”. This is website from where you can download old version of most of the software. Their archive contains almost all the older version of popular software. Bookmark this website, because it can become very handy at times.

6. Softpedia

Another huge software directory for your Windows, Macintosh and Linux system. Contains wide range of freeware. The website can be very handy to track latest software updates and new freeware.

7. SnapFiles

Another good website to track latest software trend and updates. Their homepage features “new and popular” “Weekly top 20” and “Users choice” to easily track down popular and upcoming software in all categories.

8. Gizmo’s freeware

Gizmo’s freeware along with the forum and lots of freeware reviews. Wide categories of freeware software are covered here. You can also subscribe to Gizmo’s feeds to keep track of latest trendy and upcoming software.

9. Zdnet downloads

Another popular website to track the latest software and find the review. The website navigation is very friendly.

Don’t forget to check 10 best ways to check your Internet speed.

Surf's up Wednesday: Google Wave update

Surf's up Wednesday: Google Wave update

About Google Wave

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation
and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Starting Wednesday, September 30 we’ll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

We’ll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.

Some of you have asked what we mean by preview. This just means that Google Wave isn’t quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we’ve focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky.

There are also still key features of Google Wave that we have yet to fully implement. For example, you can’t yet remove a participant from a wave or define groups of users, draft mode is still missing and you can’t configure the permissions of users on a wave. We’ll be rolling out these and other features as soon as they are ready — over the next few months.

Despite all this, we believe you will find that Google Wave has the potential for making you more productive when communicating and collaborating. Even when you’re just having fun! We use it ourselves everyday for everything from planning pub crawls to sharing photos, managing release processes and debating features to writing design documents. In fact, we collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.

Speaking of ways you could potentially use Google Wave, we’re intrigued by the many detailed ones people have taken the time to describe. To mention just a few: journalist Andy Ihnatko on producing his Chicago Sun-Times column, filmmaker Jonathan Poritsky on streamlining the movie-making process, scientist Cameron Neylon on academic papers and lab work, Alexander Dreiling and his SAP research team on collaborative business process modelling, and ZDNet’s Dion Hincliffe on a host of enterprise use cases.

The Wave team’s most fun day since May? We invited a group of students to come spend a day with us at Google’s Sydney office. Among other things, we asked them to collaboratively write stories in Google Wave about an imaginary trip around the world. They had a ball! As did we…

Finally, a big shoutout to the thousands of developers who have patiently taken part in our ongoing developer preview. It has been great fun to see the cool extensions already built or being planned and incredibly instructive to get their help planning the future of our APIs. To get a taste for what some of these creative developers have been working on, and to learn more about the ways we hope to make it even easier for developers to build new extensions, check out this post on our developer blog.

Happy waving! :-)

Help Google Bot to run your website effectively

Help Google Bot to run your website effectively

Everyone loves to get their web pages indexed by Google as soon as they write them. If you can guide the GoogleBot to crawl your site easily it will index your pages much faster than your expectations.

Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. When the Googlebot visits your website it detects links on each page and adds them to the list of pages to crawl. If your site has got a very authority your pages will get indexed by Google within few minutes. Below are some useful tips to get your pages indexed by Google effectively.

1. Create and submitting a Sitemap to Google. Even if your site is already indexed in Google submitting a sitemap will give Google a better way to understand about your site. If you are using Wordpress use any of the plugins that can create a sitemap for you.

2. Register for Google Webmasters Tools and check the crawl error page frequently. The crawl errors page provides details about the URLs in your site that Google couldn’t access. So you can fix the errors once you know the problem area.

3. Make sure that the required URL’s are not blocked by robots.txt file or meta tags. If you are not sure about robots.txt file use the Webmasters Tools to create a robots.txt for your website/blog.

4. Search engines cannot understand images and videos. So if your website has good number of images or videos try to provide relevant information about them.

These are just some of the tips which will help you to get your site crawled by Google effectively. If you have any other tips then do share them with us.

Choosing a Good Domain Name

Choosing a Good Domain Name

1>>Choosing A Good Domain Name
Choosing a domain name for your site is one of the most important steps towards creating the perfect internet presence. If you run an on-line business, picking a name that will be marketable and achieve success in search engine placement is paramount. Many factors must be considered when choosing a good domain name. This article summarizes all the different things to consider before making that final registration step!

2>>Short and Sweet
Domain names can be really long or really short (1 – 67 characters). In general, it is far better to choose a domain name that is short in length. The shorter your domain name, the easier it will be for people remember. Remembering a domain name is very important from a marketability perspective. As visitors reach your site and enjoy using it, they will likely tell people about it. And those people may tell others, etc. As with any business, word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool to drive traffic to your site (and it’s free too!). If your site is long and difficult to pronounce, people will not remember the name of the site and unless they bookmark the link, they may never return.

3>>Consider Alternatives
Unless a visitor reaches your site through a bookmark or a link from another site, they have typed in your domain name. Most people on the internet are terrible typists and misspell words constantly. If your domain name is easy to misspell, you should think about alternate domain names to purchase. For example, if your site will be called “MikesTools.com”, you should also consider buying “MikeTools.com” and “MikeTool.com”. You should also secure the different top level domain names besides the one you will use for marketing purposes (“MikesTools.net”, “MikesTools.org”, etc.) You should also check to see if there are existing sites based on the misspelled version of the domain name you are considering. “MikesTools.com” may be available, but “MikesTool.com” may be home to a graphic pornography site. You would hate for a visitor to walk away thinking you were hosting something they did not expect.
Also consider domain names that may not include the name of your company, but rather what your company provides. For example, if the name of your company is Mike’s Tools, you may want to consider domain names that target what you sell. For example: “buyhammers.com” or “hammer-and-nail.com”. Even though these example alternative domain names do not include the name of your company, it provides an avenue for visitors from your target markets. Remember that you can own multiple domain names, all of which can point to a single domain. For example, you could register “buyhammers.com”, “hammer-and-nail.com”, and “mikestools.com” and have “buyhammers.com” and “hammer-and-nail.com” point to “mikestools.com”.

4>>Hyphens: Your Friend and Enemy
Domain name availability has become more and more scant over the years. Many single word domain names have been scooped up which it makes it more and more difficult to find a domain name that you like and is available. When selecting a domain name, you have the option of including hyphens as part of the name. Hyphens help because it allows you to clearly separate multiple words in a domain name, making it less likely that a person will accidentally misspell the name. For example, people are more likely to misspell “domainnamecenter.com” than they are “domain-name-center.com”. Having words crunched together makes it hard on the eyes, increasing the likelihood of a misspelling. On the other hand, hyphens make your domain name longer. The longer the domain name, the easier it is for people to forget it altogether. Also, if someone recommends a site to someone else, they may forget to mention that each word in the domain name is separated by a hyphen. If do you choose to leverage hyphens, limit the number of words between the hyphens to three. Another advantage to using hyphens is that search engines are able to pick up each unique word in the domain name as key words, thus helping to make your site more visible in search engine results.

5>>Dot What?
There are many top level domain names available today including .com, .net, .org, and .biz. In most cases, the more unusual the top level domain, the more available domain names are available. However, the .com top level domain is far and away the most commonly used domain on the internet, driven by the fact that it was the first domain extension put to use commercially and has received incredible media attention. If you cannot lay your hands on a .com domain name, look for a .net domain name, which is the second most commercially popular domain name extension.

6>>Long Arm of the Law
Be very careful not to register domain names that include trademarked names. Although internet domain name law disputes are tricky and have few cases in existence, the risk of a legal battle is not a risk worth taking. Even if you believe your domain name is untouchable by a business that has trademarked a name, do not take the chance: the cost of litigation is extremely high and unless you have deep pockets you will not likely have the resources to defend yourself in a court of law. Even stay away from domain names in which part of the name is trademarked: the risks are the same.

7>>Search Engines and Directories
All search engines and directories are different. Each has a unique process for being part of the results or directory listing and each has a different way of sorting and listing domain names. Search engines and directories are the most important on-line marketing channel, so consider how your domain name choice affects site placement before you register the domain. Most directories simply list links to home pages in alphabetical order. If possible, choose a domain name with a letter of the alphabet near the beginning (“a” or “b”). For example, “aardvark-pest-control.com” will come way above “joes-pest-control.com”. However, check the directories before you choose a domain name. You may find that the directories you would like be in are already cluttered with domain names beginning with the letter “a”. Search engines scan websites and sort results based on key words. Key words are words that a person visiting a search engine actually search on. Having key words as part of your domain name can help you get better results.

JPG, PNG or GIF: Tips to Choose an Image Format for Screenshots

JPG, PNG or GIF: Tips to Choose an Image Format for Screenshots

The quality of screenshot images and illustrations used on your website can make a difference.

You may use the good-old Print Screen key or any of the professional screen capture tools to grab your desktop but the basic requirement remains same – the output image should be sharp and that the file size be well within a reasonable limit.

Now PNG, JPG and GIF are the three most popular image formats for sharing screen captures on the web. Of course there’s another format called BMP but people rarely use that for obvious reasons.

Text & Clipart – If you are capturing text (like a block of source code or Google search pages or a navigation menu), always use GIF or the PNG format – the screenshots are clear and file size remains pretty low.

Regular Desktop Windows – If you need to screen capture a regular window on your screen, dialog boxes, Windows Explorer, DOS command prompt window, Google Maps or even splash screens – use the PNG format.

The advantage with PNG is that it preserves all the colors and yield a much sharper output when compared with JPG. See this Photoshop splash screen for a comparison between JPEG and PNG quality.

Videos & Photographs – If you doing a still image screenshot of a video (YouTube Flash video player), Google Earth, video games, Flash animations, desktop wallpapers or photographs (like Flickr) – always go with JPG instead of PNG because the image file size would be smaller without much degradation in the quality.

To give you example, this Wall Strip video on YouTube would take around 92kb when saved in PNG format but that would fall to 20kb if we changed the format from PNG to JPG. Surprisingly, there isn’t any remarkable difference in quality.

Interesting Uses of Camera Mobile Phones

Interesting Uses of Camera Mobile Phones

Some creative and productive uses of camera mobile phones (and digital cameras):

Computer Screen Capture – You can use the Mobile Phone cameras for capturing screenshots of error messages that popup while you are reinstalling a copy of Windows or modifying some BIOS settings. In situations like the dreaded Blue Screen, Print-Screen key is useless but any phone-cam will get the job done.

Remember Dates – Some time back, I had gone to a nursery school for submitting the admission form of my son. I don’t remember the exact date now but luckily, I had snapped a picture of the school and so that date is automatically stored with the image.

Cable Connections – Before removing the cables from your home theatre system, gaming console or the computer, it is a good idea to capture the connections with your phone camera. Then you won’t have problems plugging the cables again in the right ports as the pictures will show you “what goes where”.

Use Mobile Phone as a Web Camera – There are some free utilities that will convert your mobile phone camera into a web cam for your computer. You can use the web camera via a USB cable or wirelessly through Bluetooth.

Car Parking – Most shopping malls here have huge underground parking but there aren’t any signboards so it gets tough to locate the car. So when you park the car, just look towards the escalator (or the exit door) and take a picture or record some video. This will save lot of effort (and time) when you return with all those heavy shopping bags.

Scan Printed Documents – Mobile phone camera can work as scanners for capturing clippings of text from newspapers, library books and printed magazines. Just photograph the page and use a service like Qipit or ScanR that extract the text out of pictures taken with a mobile phone. (See “Use Mobile Phone as a Scanner“)

Replace Paper and Pen – Your wife has prepared a long list of items that you are supposed to pick from the grocery story. Why tear down that paper from the diary or put extra pressure on your memory – just click. You can also use the camera phone for capturing information written on whiteboards, subway maps and notice boards.

Google Maps and Directions – You are traveling and need the driving directions from Google Maps onto your mobile phone. If your phone has no Internet or you are not too sure how to transfer data from computer to the phone, just open Google Maps, press F11 for full screen and click with your phone.

Rent A Car – If you are taking a car on rent, capture all the areas with dents and scratches so that you don’t run into a dispute when returning the car to the agent. Thanks CraftyGirl.

Security Weapon – Before you board a taxi in some unknown place, take a picture of the license plate and driver details that are generally written near the passenger seat. Email the picture to your spouse or friend as a security measure.

Shopping Alone – If you are in a store shopping without your spouse, get his/her opinion on the stuff you are about to purchase by emailing pictures though your phone. A word of caution here – some shop owners may consider your action as “digital shoplifting” and this may lead to an embarrassing situation.

As a Mirror – When you are about to reach the party, take a self-picture with your mobile phone to make sure that that makeup and hair style is in perfect condition.