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Why does VJ Madiha have conflicting beliefs?

Posted on 13 February 2012 by Tea Server

I am fail to understand why VJ Madiha is against Valentines Day and at the same time is pro-Christmas and pro-Birthday celebrations. The above picture is dedicated to her Facebook fans for wishing her happy birthday. Also all of her TV appearances involve tight clothes. She is the confusing. Why does VJ Madiha have conflicting [...]

Why does VJ Madiha have conflicting beliefs? is a post from: PakMediaBlog All Rights Reserved.



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Fake disturbing pictures of babies on facebook to promote profiles and pages–>Shame on those who do it!

Posted on 13 February 2012 by Tea Server

It seems some morons are playing with the sentiments of people on facebook. To promote their pages and profiles they circulate a disturbing picture of a baby and say facebook will donate x amount of dollars for every share and innocent people share it considering it to be a genuine thing. I still appreciate those who do that but for those who initiate those pics I don’t have any good words. If facebook wants to donate something then they are a big corporate giant and they can donate it without circulating disturbing images of any innocent child. Facebook can even use advertisement banners to invite people for direct donations or pages instead of using other profiles/pages.

The better way is to report these pictures to facebook or to send a request/protest messages to those who are doing it by following these profiles (if they are also not the victims of these fake picture thing).

Indeed this is a shameful way of marketing and promoting profiles and pages. Shame on those who do it.

Syndicated from: syedfaisal

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Arroz basmati con pollo

Posted on 11 February 2012 by Tea Server

Arroz basmati con polloicono distintivo de los textos de recetas de cocina Me hice con un wok hace un par de añitos y la verdad es que no le saco mucho partido aparte de un par de recetas facilonas. Esta es una de ellas que, todo hay que decirlo, se prepararía igual en sarten o cacerola, pero como va de rollo oriental parece que así mola más. A ver que os parece.

  • 200 grs. de arroz basmati.
  • Media pechuga de pollo (arprox. 250 grs.)
  • 250 grs. de champiñones.
  • Una cebolla
  • Un pimiento rojo y otro verde
  • Canela en polvo
  • Salsa de soja
  • Sal, pimienta negra molida y aceite de oliva.

Troceamos el pollo en daditos y lo salpimentamos. El arroz se cuece en agua con una pizca de sal, un chorrito de aceite y dos o tres cucharadas colmadas de canela. A los 12 o 13 minutos de empezar a hervir lo escurrimos y lo reservamos. En el wok bien caliente y con un poco de aceite de oliva echamos la cebolla y los pimientos troceados y los champiñones limpios y laminados. Cuando el champiñón pierda el agua echamos el pollo y, cuando esté doradito añadimos el arroz bien escurrido y salsa de soja al gusto. Mezclamos todo bien durante un par de minutos y listo.

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The Islamic university where girls were raped

Posted on 11 February 2012 by Tea Server

Today a news article in Dawn revealed the shocking case of female students and staff members forced to offer sexual favours in return for grades and demands of their immediate superiors.
I do not believe that this news is “shocking” because such cases are a rarity. In fact I believe that such cases probably proliferate throughout educational institutions, or indeed in any institution where men are in a position to extract sexual favours. This case is shocking because of the International Islamic University Islamabad’s indifference to these cases and its efforts to cover it up. Further, they have tried to justify their actions by claiming that they hushed up these allegations to protect the parents of female students and the reputation of the institution.
So what exactly has happened?
The report claims that a Professor of Economics traded grades for sexual favours, and threatened female students with failing grades if they did not consent to his demands. Such behaviour is coercive, and as some people on Facebook and Twitter are arguing not consensual sex, instead this is rape by any standard or definition. For a teacher, in his position to exploit his ability to pass or fail students to gain favours is morally and ethically corrupt.
The report further claims that a librarian was forced to resign for allegedly harassing his assistant. The offending Economics professor left IIUI and is now employed at the National Agriculture Research Centre.
The acting President of the IIUI, Sahabzada Sajidur Rehman is quoted as saying,
“We did not approach the police to investigate the allegations as it would have brought bad name to the university and set parents of the 9,500 girls studying here worrying,”
I believe this is a case of criminal negligence on the part of Mr Rehman and the university administration as student welfare, is the primary responsibility of any educational institution.
This also lends itself to another line of argument. Would parents rather have their children’s educational institution hush up such cases so that they need not worry? Who are the administrators to make such assumptions?
Second, there is something very, very wrong in the administrators world view, if they believe that the institutions image would be tarnished if such cases were brought to the police, as compared to the negative effect on their reputation, if they tried to cover it up!
Both individuals, the professor and the librarian have now moved on from IIUI. The teacher has landed a new job at a research council where he potentially may continue with such behaviour. Is IIUI not responsible for informing the competent authorities about the actions of this individual to protect his current co-workers who he may prey upon? Have the IIUI made any effort to insure that no other individuals amongst the staff or administration are suspected of similar behaviour?
From this case, some narratives that are dominant in our society are clearly illustrated. One, the moralizing. While there is no shortage of blogsand videos doing the rounds of LUMS, IBA, BNU etc, female students in “modern and western clothing”, with commentators judging and questioning whether they are good Muslims or not, it seems quite acceptable that a male figure, trading sex for favours, is not only acceptable, but worthy of protection and a cover up.
Second, pressure isn’t placed on the perpetrator, instead its borne by the victim. The victim is pressurised to change her story. Again, in a society that is inclined to frown upon any male and female interaction, somehow its in the “greater good” if the victim states that her actions were consensual and that she was not harassed. Why is that?
I for one hope that this issue does not fade away. Its now the responsibility of the IIUI to not only report these cases to the authorities, but to also make known the actions of these individuals so that they do not repeat these crimes again.
We are often told that our “youth” are vulnerable and immature, and all night texting plans are destroying their futures. An “elder” is required to monitor them, well into their 20s. However, kudos to the University’s Students Welfare Association, who bore pressure on the administration and did not fall silent.
Hopefully, a successful prosecution of the perpetrators will give courage to others who are suffering a similar fate and remain silent because they believe that society judges the victim more harshly than her harasser.
This blog post was originally submitted and published on Tribune Blogs here

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Sindhi nationalists should be vocal on the Social Media (an impromptu advice)

Posted on 11 February 2012 by Tea Server

Our Sindhi nationalists are simply not aware of the world trends. They have not idea how powerful and strong the social media has become in today’s world!

In contrast, the Baloch political activists are now quite alert and actively use it to propagate their message to the world through the use of the social media — blogs, social networks, microblogs, etc.

The proof that the world hears them speak is that BBC has now covered the political activists’efforts on Twitter and blogs. According to the reports, in the backdrop of the biased and selective (under-)reporting of the mainstream Pakistani media, it’s the blogs and micro-blogs (Twitter) which have been the source of information for the world on the brutality of the Pakistani state in Balochistan, that is, their kill-and-dump policy against the Baloch nationalists and freedom fighters.

بلوچستان کی حقیقت کون بتائے گا

امریکہ میں بلوچستان پر بحث، پاکستان کو تشویش

Twitter is quite a powerful tool in online activism right now- (who can forget the Arab Spring?) Thanks to Twitter that it’s now possible to ping United Nations (@UN), Barack Obama (@BarackObama), The White House (@whitehouse), Amnesty International (@amnesty), Human Rights Watch (@hrw) — you name it! They are the ones influencing the world affairs.. and they should be contacted frequently.

Or you can also ping Pentagon Press Secretary at @PentagonPresSec. You can even directly pass your comments to Congressman Brad Sherman (@BradSherman), who recently spoke in favor of the US speaking to the Sindhi and Baloch nations (Watch the video).

Although there are some Sindhi nationalists’accounts on Twitter (Like @jssfjsmm, @jssfmediacell@JssfJsqm, Raja Dahir, Sindhi Xafar but their presence is not quite frequent; whereas, Twitter means continuous pinging the world about your and your issues.

Our Baloch activists have continuously been asking the Sindhi nationalists to be awake and alert on Twitter like them. And I receive tweets like the following frequently:

However, this blog is not about teaching you how to use Twitter.. rather, it’s more for forcing you to start using it for your sociopolitical activism. It’s just to motivate the Sindhi nationalists to start using the power of the social media as an effective tool for lobbying in this age and time.

Keep tweeting — the world is listening!

[You can follow me on Twitter at @AamirRaz.]

Tagged: Arab Spring, Facebook, Nationalism, Social Activism, Twitter

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Use Email to Convert Files into Different Formats

Posted on 10 February 2012 by Tea Server

There exist quite a few online services that let you convert files from one format to another. You upload the source file, specify the output format and within seconds, the converted file in the desired format becomes available for download. That’s easy but there are somes limitations with this approach:

  1. When you want to convert a file, you have to upload it to the file conversion service. This is not an issue when you are converting files from the desktop but how do you upload files from iPhone, Android or any other mobile browser.
  2. Sometimes clients will send you files in obscure formats as email attachments. In order to convert those files in a format that your apps can understand, you will download the attachments to your desktop and then upload them to the file conversion service. That’s work.

Zamzar, a popular tool for converting files online, has added a new option that lets you convert files by email itself. You can forward your email attachments directly to Zamzar, without downloading them to the desktop, and they’ll be converted in no time.

convert files by email

Convert Email attachment into Different File Formats

To get started, you need to forward the input (source) files to a specific email address like format@zamzar.com where format represents the file type of the desired output format.

For instance, if you have a Word document that you want to convert to PDF, you can send the file as an email attachment to pdf@zamzar.com. If you have a PDF file that you want to convert into an ebook, the corresponding conversion address would be epub@zamzar.com or mobi@zamzar.com depending on your ebook reader.

Here’s a complete list of input-output file formats that are currently supported by Zamzar. You can convert documents, presentations, ebooks, videos, audio files, archives and more.

In my test, the converted files were delivered quickly and the quality of the converted files was impressive. There’s no need to create any account at Zamzar and you can convert files up to 1 MB in a single batch. You may go for a pro account to convert bigger files that starts from $7 per month.

One more thing. You can only upload files by email and initiate the conversion process but you’ll still have to visit the Zamzar website to download the converted file. It stays on Zamzar servers for about a day and their download page is actually very confusing when accessed on a mobile phone.

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, Use Email to Convert Files into Different Formats, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/02/2012 under Convert, Email, Internet.

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Create Collages with your Facebook Photos

Posted on 10 February 2012 by Tea Server

facebook photo collage

The team behind Shape Collage, a popular photo collage software, have launched Loupe, an online tool that will help you create collages using Facebook photos.

You can either use your own photo albums and turn them into collages or the app can also pull photos from the albums of your Facebook friends that are visible to you.

It takes just a few steps to build your first collage. Authorize the app to access your Facebook account, then select any of your photo albums (or that of your friends), choose a shape and your collage is ready. Hit the Share button to save that collage to your Facebook account or grab the permalink to share it by email.

The collages look impressive and if you don’t like the default layout, you can always move or delete any of the pictures on the pile. Here’s a quick video that shows how you can turn Facebook albums into collages.

The drawback though is the resolution. Loupe generates a relatively small image of your collage that will probably look good only on a mobile screen. Shape Collage says that will be introducing higher resolution images in the future.

Photo Collages and Facebook Privacy

Any photo collage that you create with Loupe is public and currently there’s no option to change the visibility to private. Thus, if you have any private photos on Facebook that you don’t want the world to see, it may not be a good idea to turn them into collages because others may then find them through search engines.

Also see: Create Picture Collage in Picasa

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, Create Collages with your Facebook Photos, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/02/2012 under Facebook, Internet, Photo Sharing.

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How to Permanently Delete your Mac Files

Posted on 10 February 2012 by Tea Server

When you delete a file on your Mac, it goes to the trash. You empty the trash thinking that all traces of your private files are now completely erased from the Mac’s hard disk but that may not be the case.

Files deleted from the trash in this manner can still be recovered unless the sectors are overwritten by other files. There’s an easy way though. If you would like to permanently remove your deleted files, just remember to use the “secure” option while emptying the trash.

Here’s how. Click and hold the trash icon on your Mac desktop and it will display the “Empty Trash” option. Now press the Command button and the Empty Trash option will change to Secure Empty Trash. Select it and the trashed files will be gone forever.

The concept is similar in Windows though there’s no built-in option in Windows to permanently delete “deleted” files. You can however make use of the free SDelete utility to ensure that deleted files cannot be recovered again.

Emptying the trash, or the recycle bin in Windows, is not enough.

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, How to Permanently Delete your Mac Files, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/02/2012 under Mac, Software.

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The Syrian Spiral

Posted on 10 February 2012 by Tea Server

As I write these words, demonstrations are unfolding in the public squares of Syrian cities and towns, as they have done every Friday for the last eleven months, since the people of Dir’a first took to the streets to manifest their discontent at the indignities imposed upon them by the Asad regime.

Grainy scenes of crowds heaving, swaying, chanting slogans, singing revolutionary songs flash across the screens of Arab satellite channels, scenes of jubilant defiance and anger.

And, as I write, the violent repression of these protests continues. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and al-Jazeera (in Arabic) report that 25 individuals have been killed already in the besieged city of Homs and the countryside of Damascus. Another 83 died yesterday across Syria, according to the Observatory, while the Local Coordination Councils put the figure higher still, at 126 – 107 of them in Homs alone.

Overnight, army tanks entered the Insha’at neighbourhood of Homs, prompting fears of a broader ground assault, to follow the week-long artillery campaign on the city, which activists estimate has led to the loss of more than 400 lives.

Reports emerging from the city testify to the use of long-range shells and mortar to pound the residential neighbourhoods of Bab ‘Amru, al-Khalidiyya, al-Insha’at, and Bayyada, and to a worsening humanitarian situation. Human Rights Watch reports that hospitals are unable to cope with the number of casualties, while Al-Jazeera’s Beirut correspondent Rula al-Amin reports that medical supplies and food are running dangerously low (see links above).

There is no doubt that armed contingents of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) are present in several neighbourhoods of Homs. However, these deserters number no more than a few hundred or thousand men – a stark reminder of the deep asymmetries of power between these dissident forces and the Syrian regime, which has insistently claimed that it is faced an uprising by ‘armed bands’ (‘isabat), while using to the fullest its military superiority.

In other places, including the coastal cities of Banias and Latakia, in the ‘Alawi heartlands, and the Damascus suburbs of Duma and Daraya, troops have deployed to prevent demonstrators from congregating after Friday prayers.

Meanwhile, several car explosions went off in the northern city of Aleppo, killing 25 and injuring more than 175 according to Syrian state television, which has blamed the attacks on “armed terrorist gangs”.

The General Council for the Syrian Revolution, for its part, has accused the regime of plotting the attacks to foment unrest. This claim was echoed by an activist in the city itself who, citing ‘suspicious activity by security personnel’ in the moments before the explosion, told the BBC that “we hold the Syrian regime entirely responsible for this action”.

Further confusion has arisen from the conflicting claims of different contingents within the FSA. While one officer reportedly told Al-Jazeera’s Beirut correspondent Rula al-Amin that the FSA was responsible for the attacks, the Syrian National Council has issued a statement from the FSA in which it categorically denies any role in the attacks.

This latest blast will only increase the virulent controversy in the blogosphere between supporters of the regime, who see in them confirmation of government claims that the protests of the past year are born of a ‘terrorist’ ‘conspiracy’, and its opponents, who believe that they are one more cynical act of official violence, designed to keep the populations of first Damascus, and now Aleppo, quiescent.

Syria, it is clear, has entered a vicious spiral of violence. The spectre of instability, which the Baathist regimes of Hafiz and Bashar al-Asad have long boasted of holding at bay while neighbouring Lebanon and Iraq were consumed by internecine strife, is now at the door.

Many within the country, of course, had already resigned themselves to protracted unrest before the failure of the UN Security Council to reach agreement on a Draft Resolution supporting the Arab League’s efforts to secure a negotiated transition of power in Syria on the Yemeni model.

However, it does seem that the decision of Russia and China to veto this Draft Resolution has galvanized both the regime and the opposition to ramp up their activities.

While the regime has seen this veto as a license to continue in its repression, the continuing division of the international community on the vexed question of Syria has only added to the intransigence of many activists; despairing at their enforced isolation, they have become more obdurate still in their desire not to give in.

Thus, in a video message circulated on social networks on 6 February, the Humsi activist Khalid Abu Salah allied a call for assistance with a message of resilience. After appealing to ‘every noble human being to save us here in Baba ‘Amr, to save the children and the women in Baba ‘Amr’, he turns away from the camera for a brief moment, as gunfire resounds outside, and the clip seems to draw to an end.

Then, turning back, he addresses words of defiance to the Syrian president: ‘Ya Bashar, don’t think we’re going to surrender, if you killed all of us we wouldn’t surrender … if you killed all of us we wouldn’t surrender’.

Khalid Abu Salah’s “Appeal to the Free World”

There is no doubt whom Syrian opposition activists blame for the lack of support they receive. While the Local Coordination Committees have in the past berated the general inaction of the international community, naming one of their Friday demonstrations, in a sharp rejoinder to the international community, ‘Your silence is killing us’, they have chosen to call this Friday ‘Russia is killing our children’.

Russia has responded in kind to this deliberately emotive message. In a statement issued earlier today, its Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov, accused the West of being “accomplices in the process of inflaming the crisis”, and insisted that the opposition’s refusal to enter into talks with the regime of Bashar al-Asad meant that it “bears full responsibility for improving the situation”.

It is clear that Russia feels stung by what it regards as a deliberate manipulation of the Security Council to prosecute regime change in Libya, and many critics of intervention have echoed its claims that any international action in Syria would be ruinous.

In a particularly caustic piece, the Columbia professor Joseph Massad has claimed that intervention of one kind or another would only serve what he calls ‘American imperialism in the Middle East’, berating the ‘exile opposition’ for having ‘hijacked the popular uprising against the Asad dynasty’.

But such claims overlook two crucial factors.

The first is that there exists no stark divide between opponents of the regime within the country and those in the Syrian mahjar, or diaspora. Opposition activists certainly disagree on key issues – not least that of international intervention – but the schism does not run along geographical lines.

The Syrian National Council itself, despite repeated assertions to the contrary, is not simply an exilic organization with few ties to those within Syria. While its figurehead, Barhun Ghaliun, has long been settled in France, other members of its executive committee, like Samir Nachar, have only very recently left Syria.

In a note posted on its Facebook page a few weeks before the official announcement of its formation on 1 October 2011, the SNC itself claimed that while 60% of its members were abroad, another 40% remained within Syria itself.

Moreover, it is clear that the SNC, far from the pipe-dream of ambitious émigré schemers, developed from reformist trends within Syria in the early to mid-2000s, such as the Damascus Declaration of 2005.

The second is that Russia and China, by blocking the proposed resolution, have themselves intervened in this internal conflict. Though some have justified their claims by pointing to the need to respect the sovereignty of the Syrian state, the notion that the West is, alone, contemplating intervention is harder to countenance.

To intervene, one need not put troops on the ground, send fighter planes or frigates – though, of course, Russia has already done so, having despatched a naval flotilla led by the aircraft carrier Kuznetsov to its own naval base in Tartus in November 2011, in a show of support for the regime of Bashar al-Asad…

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The New Amazon Kindle Ad Targets the iPad

Posted on 10 February 2012 by Tea Server

Amazon has released a new video commercial for the $79 Kindle that targets the one flaw (or limitation) of the iPad – it is nearly impossible to read books on your iPad while you are out in the sun because of the reflective glass screen.

The other point that Amazon is trying to highlight in the video is that Kindle is more value for money – you can get a bundle of two Kindle Fire units and one Kindle 5 unit for less than the price of an iPad.

Here’s the original Kindle ad that Amazon released about an year ago. It uses the same setting – a girl sunbathing near the pool and reading on her Kindle – and they have even hired the same actress – Anna Zielinski – to do the sequel.

On a related note, I have an iPad 2 and the new Kindle 5 (see setup) and I almost always prefer reading long form content on the Kindle. The iPad is good for flipping through PDFs or for watching multimedia content but Kindle is much better for reading text whether you are indoors or outside in direct sunlight.

The Kindle “Pool” Ad [Original]

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, The New Amazon Kindle Ad Targets the iPad, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/02/2012 under Amazon Kindle, IPad, Internet.

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Facebook copies Google+ yet again!

Posted on 10 February 2012 by Tea Server

It’s strange why Facebook has to copy Google+ every now and then despite being the global market leader and it’s also not strange how we complain about the changes and later accept them. However, Facebook’s recent picture outlook with comments at the right (as can be seen above) is like giving a Google+ experience which [...]

Facebook copies Google+ yet again! is a post from: PakMediaBlog All Rights Reserved.



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This Valentine, Send your Loved One a Google Search Query

Posted on 10 February 2012 by Tea Server

Google Love Equation

This Valentine’s day, try sending your geeky loved one a Google search query instead of an e-greeting and they may like the little surprise that’s in store for them.

The Heart Equation for Google

When you put any Math equation in Google, it will try to plot of a graph of that equation just like your scientific calculation. And one such equation, listed below, renders a heart curve that you can pass on to your Valentine.

To give it a try, just copy-paste the following query in Google. Thanks Suhel.

sqrt(cos(x))*cos(300x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01,
  sqrt(6-x^2), -sqrt(6-x^2) from -4.5 to 4.5

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, This Valentine, Send your Loved One a Google Search Query, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 10/02/2012 under Google, Internet.

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Is Video Blogging Right for Your Blog?

Posted on 08 February 2012 by Tea Server

Let’s be honest, a big block of text simply isn’t as interesting as a cool video. As someone in her mid-twenties, I know that my generation is YouTube crazy and video game insane, but this fascination with video is only going to get more intense as the years continue. As a former High School English teacher, I think I know this better than anyone. Do you think my students read the books I gave them? Or do you think they watched the movie? Their test scores would say the latter.

People are getting tired of the traditional article, so many blog editors are doing everything they can to keep the way they relay information exciting. Many have decided that video blogging is the way to go, and although the idea is somewhat new, all the evidence supports its success. For those who are unfamiliar, video blogging is a blog that uses videos as its primary mode of content delivery. The content is generally similar to the content you would find in an article on a blog, but it’s shown through a video.

Video Blogging Is Video Blogging Right for Your Blog?

Videos work great for a few reasons:

Top 5 Benefits to Video Blogging

  1. Increase Traffic – Videos are typically more appealing to readers, so more people will want to continually visit your site. You will be able to gain credibility with readers much easier than if you had a piece of text looking identical to every other piece of text on the web. Videos will also improve your marketing efforts because search engines will often features videos at the top of a results page. Although as video blogging becomes more and more popular this may change, it’s currently a great way to increase traffic.
  2. Opportunities – You have more opportunities to get your point across to readers if you’re using video. First, videos can help you explain a dry or complicated topic without losing the readers’ attention. Second, videos can show someone how to do something much easier than if they were reading it in an article. This solves the “it’s hard to explain” problem for bloggers.
  3. Easy to Create – Many bloggers get nervous about video blogging because they think it is difficult to create. However, creating a video blog is actually quite simple. All you need is a digital video camera or a webcam to start recording. Although the most professional video blogs use software and video editing, most use a basic camera to start. Visit For Bloggers By Bloggers to learn how to upload your video onto your blog.
  4. Websites – You can video blog through social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and of course YouTube, so you are not bound to a specific website. This same ideas works for sharing your content. Social networks generally only allow you to link back to your piece of content, but a video can be uploaded virtually anywhere—a Facebook fan page, YouTube, StumbleUpon, etc.
  5. Saves Time – Video blogging saves everyone time. You can almost always fit more information into a video than you can into an article, so it’s faster for the reader and the writer. This also goes back to the idea that videos are more appealing to readers. After all, why wouldn’t someone want to save time?

Video blogging would certainly be a big change for most of the blogs on the web, so I advise you to start slow. Create one or two videos per week and see what your readers think before going to an all-video blog. Most blog editors end up creating an entirely new video blog that is separate from their traditional blog. Although it’s a little bit of extra work, I think you will find that it will pay off in the end.

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to small business loans. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including 401k limits to small businesses and entrepreneurs for a b2b lead generation company, Resource Nation.

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WordPress Plugins that Power Digital Inspiration

Posted on 08 February 2012 by Tea Server

WordPress PluginsAs some of you may know, this tech blog and my personal blog are both powered by WordPress software. What follows is a complete list of WordPress plugins that work behind the scenes to add new functionality to these sites that’s otherwise not available in the vanilla version of WordPress.org.

These are all free and open-source plugins and you can find them in the WordPress plugin repository.

The Best WordPress Plugins for your Website

1. Search Regex – This adds extremely powerful search and replace capabilities to your blog. You can find and replace almost any kind of data stored on your WordPress site including post titles, excerpts, comments, and meta data. It even supports regular expressions.

2. Redirection – If the URL of an existing post has changed or if an external site is linking to a non-existent page on my site, I can create redirection rules and automatically forward all the incoming traffic to the right pages.

3. Bing 404 – If someone lands on a 404 page for which redirection is not yet enabled, this plug-in will display links to relevant article on the error page. For example, a 404 page like labnol.org/googledocs will have links to my Google Docs articles.

4. WordPress SEO – This is probably the only SEO plugin you need for your WordPress blog. It helps you create better titles, you can block duplicate pages (like archive pages) from search bots, and it also adds the necessary meta tags required for more search-friendly Google snippets.

5. Hyper Cache – This is a caching plug-in for WordPress that will help reduce the load on your web server by saving pages as static HTML files. WP Total Cache is another popular caching plugin though I prefer Hyper Cache for its simplicity.

6. FB Open Graph – This plugin will insert the necessary Open Graph meta tags to your blog’s header so that you blog posts look good and have the right snippets when they are shared on Facebook or Google Plus.

7. 404 Email Notifier – This sends you an email notification as soon as a visitor lands on a 404 page on your WordPress website. The email messages have details about the visitor’s IP address, what browser they are using and the referral URL that led him to that broken link.

8. SlideShare – This helps you easily embed SlideShare presentations in blog posts with the help of short codes – see samples.

9. Smart YouTube – This lets you embed YouTube videos in blog posts using standing video URLs and the embedded player can be customized. It adds a thumbnail of the embedded video in the RSS feed and the same plug-in can also be used to embed videos from Facebook and Vimeo.

10. YARRP – The related posts plug-in adds links to old stories that may be contextually related to the content of the current story. It also helps expose your archived content to search bots.

11. WP Optimize – Use the WP Optimize plugin to clean-up your WordPress database tables. It can remove post revisions, trash spam comments and also optimize your MySQL tables so that it works more efficiently and also consumes less space.

12. WP-DBManager – This plugin will help you backup your WordPress database manually or you can set up a scheduled job for automatic backup and the database files will be sent to your email address at set intervals. Advanced users can use WP-DBManager to run SQL queries against their WordPress database without the phpMyAdmin tool. There are other plugins that can save backups to Amazon S3 and Dropbox.

13. Debug Queries – Is your blog slow? Use the Debug Queries plugin plugin to determine which MySQL queries are taking more time to execute and thus slowing down the blog. Debug Bar is another related plugin org that shows PHP warnings, queries and other helpful debugging information in the WordPress admin bar.

14. Auto Post Thumbnail – WordPress added support for Post Thumbnail Images in WordPress 2.9 but if you have been using WordPress for long, thumbnails may not be associated with your old posts. Use the Auto Post thumbnail plugin to automatically generate thumbnails for such posts using the first image found in the post content.

15. Regenerate Thumbnails – When you change the default size (height and width) of post thumbnails (or featured images) on your blog, you can use this plugin to regenerate thumbnails with the new dimensions.

16. Google XML Sitemaps – Since you want Google and other search engines to know about each and every page of your WordPress website, you need an XML sitemap and this plug-in lets you generate one in a click.

17. XML Video Sitemap – The plugin generates an XML Sitemap for your WordPress blog with all the YouTube videos that are embedded in your blog posts. I am also using XML Sitemap for Images and XML Sitemap for Mobile.

18. Date in a Nice Tone – This plugin offers an alternate way to display dates in your blog posts. It displays the amount of time – like “a few days ago,” or “in the last month,” or “over a year ago” – that has passed since a post or page was published.

19. SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – If you regularly embed code snippets in your WordPress blog posts, this plugin will help you highlight the syntax of the source code in different colors for more comfortable reading. Supports all popular programming languages.

20. Pubsubhubbub – This will help you beat content scrapers using Fat Pings. When you publish a blog post, it will instantly ping Google and that is a strong signal to the search engine that you are the original author.

21. WP-Associatizer – This plug-in will automatically rewrite any Amazon URLs in your posts to use your Amazon Associates ID.

22. Template Tag SC – WordPress offers numerous template tags – like wp_list_pages() or wp_tag_cloud() – that you can use in your theme files. The plugin will help you insert the sam template tags directly in your blog posts or pages using Short Codes.

23. Login Logger – This plugin logs the IP address and the exact date & time when a user logs into your WordPress dashboard. It also keeps track of any unsuccessful login attempts. Use this plugin in combination with Limit Login Attempts to automatically lock out users after they have made ‘n’ unsuccessful login attempts.

24. CF Shortcode – This helps you insert custom fields inside your WordPress posts using the visual editor. This comes extremely handy when you want to add custom JavaScript inside your WordPress posts.

25. Advanced Excerpt – The post excerpts in WordPress are fixed at 55 words and often displayed with [...] ellipsis at the end. This plugin lets you to specify a custom length of excerpts, you can get rid of the ellipsis and the excerpts can be configured to have full sentences so that there are no weird cuts.

WordPress Plugins – Retired but Useful

The first version of this list was published in 2010 and since then, I have removed or deactivated a few WordPress plugins. Here’s why:

1. WordPress.com Stats – I am using Google Analytics to track site stats and therefore it doesn’t make sense to have another tracking program for the same goal.

2. Akismet – The comments on this site are powered by Disqus and they seem to offer decent spam protection on their own.

3. WordPress PDA – This plugin helped serve the mobile version of this site based on their browser’s user agent. Digital Inspiration now uses a responsive design and thus the same site is served to both desktop and mobile users.

4. WP-Paginate – The paginate plugin provide better navigation and also helps search engines find and crawl deep content on your site. The new design of this site has pagination built-in and therefore this plugin is no longer necessary.

Also see: Essential Linux Commands for WordPress Users

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Digital Inspiration @labnolThis story, WordPress Plugins that Power Digital Inspiration, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 08/02/2012 under WordPress, Software.

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