Digital Musings

A brand new WordPress Plugin from Yahoo: Yahoo Shortcuts.

If you don’t already know the founder of WordPress Matt Mullenweg recently saw a survey from Google, in which the search giant examined all of the http headers of Web. He found that .8 percent of those pages were powered by WordPress. Considering there are more than 100 million websites on the internet a 0.8 percent would mean an incredible reach for any platform that started just a few years back.

This could be as a good a time as any for any service to capitalize on the reach of WordPress, and Yahoo! has just jumped in. After Yahoo got together with Adobe for PDF Ads, Yahoo has just released a plugin for WordPress users called as Yahoo! Shortcuts, which creates small pop ups containing relevant information linked to the term. It works something like the Snaps from Snapshots.com. However the content that is displayed in these shortcut pop ups is that of Yahoo itself.

As you type the content for your blog post, this plugin looks for Flickr Photos, Maps to any locations that you might mention in the post, any products that are listed or even related news to your blogs post.

If your content regularly mentions some companies regularly, Yahoo shortcuts can bring up latest financial information related to that company.

Relevant search results would also come up for certain terms like in the image shown UNIX Pipes would pop up a Yahoo shortcut with relevant contextual search results. Some bloggers may find some shortcuts annoying and irrelevant to their blogs content, but some might really find it useful. It all depends on what you blog about.

However the best feature I think is the auto detection of relevant images to your blog post. Images can really enlighten the posts and make them more interesting.

Best Yahoo Shortcut feature: Relevant photos for your Blog Post.

Yahoo shortcut comes up with the most relevant images for your post. As mentioned in the image above the images are licensed images and when you insert a related image in the blogs post the credit is provided to the owner automatically. This feature is quite useful and can save you some time hunting around for images on the web. Also attribution issues are taken care of automatically.The Creative Commons license aggresments for these images can be found here.

Another faeture is the various size choices that one has while adding a photo to the post. It has been displayed in the image below.

Images below display the small pop up that comes up when you hover the mouse pointer on a location or address. There is a feature called as “Badges” in this plugin using which you can embed the entire map as an image in the blogs post.The users have complete control over which links should show up and if required they can just remove all the links from the option that comes up in the writing pane of the blog post.

These two images display Yahoo short cut as a pop up and the actual Badge as embedded in a post. As you can see both of them contain information from Yahoo database from yahoo maps.

In a way yahoo has found a use of WordPress while helping bloggers find relevant content for their blg posts.

Use of Yahoo shortcut Images and other contents are under a BSD License. You can read more about BSD license here and here. The terms of use for Yahoo shortcuts is here.

Get a T-Shirt for using this plugin.

Since the plugin is new, yahoo is promoting it by offering T-Shits to bloggers who use this Plug in. You can get a Charcoal gray T-Shirt with “Pimp my Blog” written on the front and “shortcuts.yahoo.com” written on the back.

I would like to have this T-Shirt as I already started using this plugin and find it useful for getting blog images. However, its only for guys who live in USA. Unfortunately for me, since am not in the US I can’t get it.

 

You can see the Irony of the situation. Yahoo has released a plugin for WordPress which requires the version of WordPress to be 2.2 and since Yahoo powered hosting is still using Wordpress2.0.2 the Yahoo shortcuts plugin is not compatible with yahoo hosting itself.
Details of Yahoo hosting are here.

I think this plugin would draw mixed reactions. Flickr users would most probably like it. However bloggers who prefer to look for images themselves and have a source of getting images for their blogs would not use it.

You might wonder why my links are not Yahoo shortcuts enabled,even though I am using th plugin? An update for Yahoo shortcut guys, my blog breaks the Yahoo shortcut images and pop ups, so it looks kind of messy and so I had to remove all the links. I guess that is a part they need to work on and might soon need to send an Update.

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my Full RSS feed. Join the Discussions about Blogging and Social Networking in the Forum.Thanks for visiting!

Posted in Blogging, Blogging Tools, WordPress, Yahoo | 12 Comments »

A Guide to BackUp Your WordPress Blog

Recently I had to face the nightmarish experience of a Server crash, which eventually resulted in the database corruption of the entire Blog and whenever I tried to open it in a browser, all I saw was an option to Reinstall WordPress?? RE-INSTALL WP?? What happened to all my posts, my theme,the plugins and all the comments? When I tried to reinstall it, I got a list of over a 100 database errors. It was a horrible experience. Many weeks of work vanished in a matter of seconds! I used to believe one has to experience something to understand its gravity, but I pray to God, none of you guys ever face a server crash.

I read a lot of Blogs and subscribe to quite a few, but I have seen this topic does not get the attention it deserves. Many bloggers are beginners and don’t have experience in maintaining their self hosted blogs. One is not always aware how shared hosting can be deceptive and you can lose your entire site in a server crash, so its of utmost importance that one backs up his work as often as possible, at least once a week. It is almost the only insurance one has.In this post I have covered the process of backing up your blog along with various resources, tools and services that can be useful in this process.

Any WordPress blog, consists of two important parts that need to be backed up separately. One is your actual blog, and other is the database. Its important to understand the difference between these two as both have a different method of backing up and they are incomplete without the each other.Some people just backup the database and think they don’t need to worry about anything, but thats not enough.

Your Blog + Your Blogs Database = Your Complete Site.

Your WordPress Blog consists of the following:

• Your WordPress Core Installation.
• Your WordPress Theme.
• Your Plugins.
• The images and files on your Blog.
• Various Scripts (Java scripts, php scripts etc) and static webpages.

Your WordPress Database consists of the following:

• Your Blog Posts.
• Your Blog Comments.
• Various data that is generated by different plugins. (like Akismet and WP Stats)

These two components together constitute your Blog. If you back up your blog and not the database then you would only get a blank theme and no content. And if you backup the database and not the theme, you would all your content but, the Theme would need to be rebuilt from scratch. Now I would elaborate on the methods of backing up the Blog first and then the database with the most commonly used tools.

Backing up your WordPress Blog: There are three ways to backup your blog(files).

1. Back Up software provided by your Webhost: Almost all Webhosts provide some software to back up your Blog. You should consult with your respective Webhost and find out what options do you have to back up your Blog. You should also check with them how often do they back up your blog and if they back up just the database or the entire site.
2. Copying your entire blog to your computer using a FTP software: Using a FTP software like FileZilla or CuteFTP you can connect to your server and download the entire site in one of the folders on your computer. If your blog is quite large with lot of images and other graphics you can use a Zip software to Zip it and save space, which will let you have multiple back ups without wasting space. A comprehensive guide by WordPress.org about FTP clients and how they work is given here.
3. Synchronizing your Blog with the backup of your computer: There are certain softwares that can automatically sync your Blog contents and the changes that you make on your blog,with the files that you have previously backed up on your computer. Its a a automated process and saves time. Once you get a hang of it, backing the Blog will become quite easy. SyncBackSE and WinSCP are two products that allow you to sync your blog. You can download them and get more information about them by clicking on the names.

Backing up your WordPress Database: There are three ways to back up your WordPress Blog Database.

1. Using a web-based MySQL database Administrative tool: Almost all webhosts provide a utility like phpMyAdmin which is a program to perform administrative operations on your database.Its graphical user interface makes it more intuitive to use. An excellent guide to backup the database using phpMAdmin can be found here. Another excellent guide can be found here. Please bookmark these links for future as backing up of the database is of prime importance. However phpMyAdmin can’t handle large databases. For large databases straight MySQL code would help. Instructions can be found here.
2. Using the WordPress database backup Plugins: There are quite a few plugins that would help us backup our WordPress database. The ones I have used or currently using and recommend are, WordPress Database Backup. Another effective plugin for database backup is BackUp WordPress, its in beta phase but it works quite fine.
3. Using an Online Blog Backup Service: This is also a good option. You can use this as a back up of the back up. One of the great features of a Online Blog back up service is that once you set it up, its completely automated and each post is backed up after its published. The one week of data that I had not manually backed up was recovered from one such service. I would recommend you register for one as well. The one I use is Blog Back Up Online. Limitations are 50 Mb space and its in Beta stage. It supports all major blogging platforms.

After backing up your blog, in case something goes wrong and you need to restore the back up, and excellent guide to restore your database can be found here.

I hope you find the above information useful and make the best use of it. I would ask you to backup your blog every week at the least. I would be more than happy to answer and assist you with any stage of backing up your blog as I have gone through the entire process, using all the above methods to get the peace of mind that my blog is perfectly safe.

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Posted in Blogging, Online Services, Popular, WordPress | 20 Comments »

A Collection of Top 50 YouTube Tools and Resources on the Web!

YouTube.com is the most popular video sharing website on the internet. You can upload your own videos, share and comment on others. Listed below is the collection of various tools and resources that can enhance your Youtube experience and help you in Video integration on your Blog or website. Also listed are some of the websites where you can fine the most sought after YouTube videos.

Tools to integrate YouTube in your Blog/Website:

• TubePress: It’s a WordPress plugin that displays YouTube video galleries in your blog. It’s highly configurable, easy to use, and 100% free. The link given is for the Demo page to show how it would look on your webpage. The download link is on top right corner of that page.
• Viper’s Video Quicktags : WP plugin creates a bunch of new quicktags / WYSIWYG buttons via the great PHP class, ButtonSnap. When you click on the quicktags / buttons, it prompts you for the video’s URL and then inserts XHTML valid code into your post or page. Quick and Easy!
• WordPress Related Videos Plugin : Uses tags to look for related videos on YouTube, displays the three most recent related videos on your WordPress blog post.The best part is the related videos automatically.
• WP-FLV : WordPress plugin simplifies the process of inserting flash video files (FLV) inside a WordPress post or page.
• Wordpress Favourite YouTube Videos : Wordpress plugin / widget to display, in a very configurable manner, your latest favorite videos from Youtube.
• Anarchy Media player : Auto embeds href links to mp3, flv, mov, mp4, m4v, m4a, m4b, 3gp, wmv, avi and asf media. Adds buttons to the rich text editor to embed Flash swf, Director dcr, YouTube, Google Video, iFilm, DailyMotion, Metacafe, MySpace and GoEar players.
• YouTube badge maker : This tool will show your viewers images of your 6 most recently uploaded videos.
• WPvideo : This plugin allow you to insert flash videos (YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe…) in your own post or pages in an easy way, can display more info about video (Title, author, description, etc…) and let users download the video.
• YouTube Wordpress Plugin : Display YouTube videos on your Wordpress blog according to Tags.
• YouTube Video Gallery Wordpress Plugin : Displays a gallery of videos from Youtube.com. The styling of the Gallery is done through a simple CSS format provided on the Plugin page.
• YouTube Brackets : This plugin allows you to send YouTube video’s to your standalone Wordpress blog directly from YouTube.com.
• WP-Noembeder :Will insert “noemded” sections into any embed tags for readers that cannot display embedded content (eg. RSS readers). The message it displays is customizable and it will also display a thumbnail image for Youtube videos (using the Youtube API). Great Plugin for Video Blogs!
• Revver Video Wordpress Plugin: Whether you’re new to videoblogging or a seasoned content producer, the Revver Wordpress Video Plugin gives you all the tools you need to create your own personalized video sharing solution. Publish, manage, and track your video content all without ever leaving your own website, and even allow your subscribers to submit their own video responses to your posts! It’s your own interactive video portal, made simple with Revver and Wordpress.

Third Party Scripts and Tools to Enhance your YouTube Experience:

• YouTube Widget : This widget allows you to search, browse, and play videos from YouTube. Simply type in what you’re looking for, and click on the video to view it within the widget. The video opens in a new widget window, which is resizeable.
  Your default screen can be set in the preferences to show several different categories. From Just Added to Most Discussed, you can see the headlining videos right on your dashboard.
• YouTube Podcaster : This tool makes a Podcast feed from your submitted keyword or url. The feed is made up from embedded Youtube video IDs and all videos are converted to the MP4 file format. (This service is down at times, Check Later if its down.)
• fTube : It’s a YouTube player that downloads (using YouTube’s REST API) the list of 25 most recent videos featured on the YouTube front page. The user can select a video from the list and hit the play button to play it in-Flash.
• Youtube Video Slideshow : Its a fast version of YouTube search. It even lets you save the results via Drag and Drop interface.
• Overstream : This tool lets you add subtitles to online videos, specially useful if the Video is multi Lingual targeted at English language users or vice versa. And if its a silent video you can always make it comic by adding your own subtitles according to the actions performed.
• YouTube Userscripts : A collection of 39 scripts created to perform several functions with YouTube. It can add a different look and functions to the way you use YouTube Videos.
• TubeCH : Its in Japanese language, all you need to do is to type the YouTube Video URL, and it displays YouTube video in Flash Player.
• MemoriesOnWeb : MemoriesOnWeb is a powerful yet simple to use slideshow freeware . It’s designed for folks who want to create photo/video slideshows easily and upload to free video hosts like YouTube to share it with friends and family.
• YoutubeCrazyVideos : Its a free Youtube videos desktop player.
• YouTube API Extraction Tool : PHP script that taps into the YouTube API to deliver videos by tag, by YouTube Username or what’s a current favorite.
• TvTube : For Mac users. Allows you to browse YouTube, Google Video and Yahoo Videos, for movie clips that people upload, choose your favorite clips and add them to your shared library.
• Search The Tube : A quick way to find videos for your website, blog or profile. Just type in the searh Term and related videos would pop up.
• IndexTube : This is a categorized and browsable index of the publicly available Youtube videos. It provides clean, well categorized and easily browsable index of the publicly available videos.
• vConvert : vConvert enables anyone to save Youtube videos and simultaneously converting them to formats compatible with mobile phones, iPhone, iPod, PSP, and more. Simply enter the YouTube URL and select which format to convert to. Users can also strip the audio from Youtube videos and convert it to an MP3 file..

Various Tools to Download and save Youtube Videos:

• YouRipper : YouRipper is a small, easy to use utility which enables the end-user to download videos from the major video sharing websites such as YouTube. YouRipper also enables Webmasters, Bloggers and MySpace Hosts to Embed videos from YouTube etc into their own pages, using a generic, fully customizable video player.
• GooTube FLV Retriever : You just enter the video page URL on the Webpage and download the youtube video. Thats easy huh!
• YouTube Downloader : Another similar service, just enter url and download YouTube videos. (Under Maintenance when I checked, but I have used it before)
• Youtube-dl : It is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com. It requires the Python interpreter, version 2.4 or later.
• VideoDL : It is a quick AJAX application that allows you to download online video into your computer. At present it supports top 3 video sites - YouTube, Google Video, and Break.com.
• YouTubeX : This one allows you to save and download YouTube videos easily with the help of or directly from your browser, either Firefox or Internet Explorer.
• Delutube : Deleted Youtube video viewer.
• Save YouTube Videos : Again similar to before just paste the Youtube video url and download the video.
• Capture Youtube and Google videos : Save the YouTube videos as AVI files encoded in the MPEG4 format. All it requires is a single command.A bit technical for few people including me.
• Youtube Grabber : Youtube Grabber is a free tool that downloads FLV files from youtube. Simply copy and paste the URL of a video from youtube into the program, press grab OR enter, and the file will be downloaded into the same directory as the program.
• KeepVid : Download videos direct from most video sites like YouTube.
• Download YouTube via bookmarklets : A collection of Greasemonkey scripts and bookmarklets to do the job.
• TubeSock : TubeSock grabs the YouTube videos from the web and copies them to your video iPod, Mac, or PlayStation Portable.
• Video Downloader : Its a firefox extension that allows you to download videos to your computer from YouTube and almost every other famous Video website.
• Down This Video : This Website allows anyone to download video directly from the web, just by pasting the URL of the video in the box, and clicking Download.

Sites/Blogs with The Best of YouTube Videos Collection:

• Best of YouTube : A blog that selects and displays the best Youtube videos.
• Vidspedia -: It is a collection of the best Google and YouTube videos, submitted and rated by users.
• Viral Video Chart :This site tracks the world’s most blogged about videos including GooTube and MySpace.
• Youtube top-rated - A website featuring 1,001 top rated videos from YouTube updated every week.
• PureVideo : This one’s very specific, it collects Top videos around the web, like YouTube, ESPN, HollyWood UpClose, Stupidvideos etc.
• Top YouTube Videos : This website has a daily updated section of the most popular videos from YouTube.
• The World Internet TV charts : This one tracks the most popular video clips from four leading Internet TV sites.
• Webmunism: Categorizes Youtube videos with related flickr photos.

If you like this collection you may want to share it on StumbleUpon

Or Vote for me on the on Bloggers Choice Awards. Or for future reference you could Bookmark it on Del.icio.us

If you know anymore resources that I might have missed please suggest them in the comments!

Posted in Online Services, Popular, WordPress | 13 Comments »

Rating Widget/Plugin for WordPress, Blogger and Typepad Blogs

Lately I have been looking around the web for plug-ins that would allow me to get feedback from the visitors. Comments are a good way to get feedback or get into a discussions, but for new bloggers like me, comments are hard to come by. So getting a Plug-in or a widget to that allows visitors to give instant feedback was my best bet.

Among the ones I read about I found the Outbrain Rating Widget to be the best. Its simple compact look and quick response while rating makes it a must have for any blogger who wants to understand if the visitors like what they are reading. Visitors just need to hover the mouse on the five starts that are displayed and rate the post they are currently reading immediately.

The OutBrain Rating widget lets everyone know how many people have rated the current post and If one reads the post that he has already rated, it shows how had the person rated the post previously. The widget is available for all major Blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger and Typepad.

A few points about the Outbrain Rating Widget:

• No registration required
• Installation is super-easy… we adjust the widget’s design to your blog’s look& feel automatically
• It’s absolutely FREE

You can get the Ratings Widget here. And the Developer Blog is here.

And yes, Dont forget to Rate this Article!

Update: I temporarily needed to remove the Out Brain plugin, as it may be conflicting with a new plugin I have installed. After running a few tests, if the new plugin  works well , I would put the rating widget back on.

Posted in Blogging Tools, Innovation, WordPress | 4 Comments »

How to add additional Text Widgets in WordPress 2.3

We Bloggers as a group are quite creative in our own niche,we read a lot, write good informative posts(not always though) but, that does not mean we are technically sound as well. If this were a requirement of blogging I.d have never gotten far, but it is an advantage to have the ability to learn and work on a technical level. As a blogger you need to work on a computer with web based software and at times you.ll need to .tweak. your blog. Knowing how to do it yourself can be very handy. If you.re not this type of person, you might want to make friends with someone who is.

All WordPress users know that the Text Widgets in the Theme editor are the easiest way to post new components in the sidebar or the footer. However every WordPress theme has a limit of 9 text widget, but when I needed more I just found a way to get as many text widgets as required. The process is simple and if you have hosted your own WordPress blog, it would be easy for you to see this through.

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Posted in Blogging, Tips and Tricks, WordPress | 3 Comments »

Trackback for Dummies : A Concise Tutorial.

When a new Blogger enters the Blogging arena he has to learn many terms quickly and effectively so that he can make the best of the varing but excellent features existent in the Blogsphere. It can help to spread the word and get the required audience and traffic every Blog requires. However not all the terms and functions are easy to understand. One such term which is often used and often not understood easily is a TRACKBACK.

Now this information is mostly aimed towards a new blogger and blog readers who don’t really know much about it and wonder, what is this Blog jargon I see all over the web?? In this post, I would try to make this as reader-friendly as possible. I would request any reader who know more about this to comment on the article and share the information, or Trackback to it!

To start with; trackback is one of three types of Linkbacks,which are methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their posts.

The three types of Linkbacks:
1)Tackback
2)Pingback
3)Refback(rarely used)

So what is a Trackback?
Its a way to tell a particular blog/website that you have published something that references it.

So How does a Trackback help?
Well a trackback or a pingback can be an excellent way to build links and traffic for your blog and in the process build good relationships with bloggers.

Which is more popular Trackback or a Pingback?
Well Trackback is associated with Typepad/Movable-type and WordPress has taken Trackback to a new level by introducing Pingback which is an integrated feature of WordPress.Now we need to understand,how to locate and then send a trackback.

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Posted in Blogging, Popular, Tips and Tricks, WordPress | 4 Comments »