Have you guys ever wanted to send a huge file to your friends and found out that big email attachments are usually not allowed? The reason is that email servers are not meant for sending large files because of the huge overheads. Even modern email server software can’t solve this problem. Plus, it takes up a lot of resources and jams up the queue when the server is processing the large file. So, most ISPs and email service providers just block large attachments. Just imagine the load these large ISPs have to handle if everyone start sending huge files through email. And now email servers come with extra work like scanning for viruses and filtering out spam. All these take up precious resources in the server.

The solution to this is to use a File Sharing Website. These are like using FTP, only that it is much easier and they usually don’t need any additional software. Just point your browser to their site, follow the instructions to upload the files and then send the link to your friends. It’s that simple. However, it’s my opinion that the reason why most people would prefer to send attachments through email is because it is so easy and effortless. You create an email, then add th attachment to the email and click on Send. You don’t need to do anything else. Perhaps that’s the biggest flaw of email. It’s just too damn convenient and easy and any Tom, Dick and Harry can use it without much problems. That’s why we get some many spam and chain mails everyday.

Anyways, I am here to introduce to you this great service. It’s called File Dropper. It’s a simple to use website which allows you to upload files and share these files with your friends and colleagues. It’s beyond simple. A few clicks and you can start sharing your file. Plus, it allows up to 5GB file size limit. The files are stored in their servers as long as it is being downloaded. So why not? Keep text to emails and help improve your ISP’s performance.

For all your apache fans, here is an online htaccess editor!

Makes everything so easy doesn’t it? When I first started playing around with .htaccess, I had problems understanding a lot of it’s functions and coding. Took me a while to get use to it and it really took me sometime. And I am still not good at it. But when this online editor, you can do some of the most basic functions without going in-depth. You don’t need to learn a whole bunch of stuff and I believe that understanding .htaccess is not that important since you probably won’t be using it a lot anyways.

What I usually use the .htaccess is to do a 301 redirect of my webpages. It’s a good practice especially if you are doing Search Engine Optimization. To rank well in Search Engines, one of the most important thing is links. If someone links to you, it’s just like a vote. They are in fact voting for you. And if a authority site links to you, the value of the link is very high and thus very much trusted by the Search Engine. However, let’s say one day, you need to change the structure of your website (for example when you change your script) and the old links no longer points to the correct URL, it loses it’s value. What you can do is to do a 301 redirect so that Search Engine bots will be redirected to another URL of your choice. Of course, if the link is relevant, then it will certainly help boost your rankings. A 301 redirect is something like telling users that it is “permanently redirected” to another URL.

Other uses of .htaccess is to create a basic authentication for your users, block access to certain parts of your website, deny access to certain IP ranges and so on. The online .htaccess editor has it all. You just need to type in the information and you are done.

I am again on a roll. I am here to introduce to you yet another very cool and useful software. And this is open source as well. This should be interesting to a lot of you webmaster geeks out there. PhpMyVisites is a web statistics script meant to collect information on your website. It helps you monitor your visitors transparently and provides you all the needed information to configure and optimize your site. All it requires is a little javascript embedded in your web pages and you will immediately get information on your visitors. Remember, knowing all these information will definitely make you a better webmaster.

Although PhpMyVisites is free, you will get a ton of features from it. PhpMyVisites can monitor your visitor frequency, visitor statistics over a period of time, visitor analysis, geographical statistics, technical configuration statistics, search engine users and much more. They even have a clicks heatmap which tells you what your visitors are clicking on a certain page. You can get all the needed information from their very friendly interface, complete with graphs for easy viewing. It also supports multiple websites which I believe is useful if you have a number of websites to monitor. You can access all your web stats from just one interface. And don’t worry about security as PhpMySites is built with security in mind. PhpMyVisites also supports more than 30 languages! That’s more than what most people can count so you should be fine.

This script requires just PHP and a MySQL database to store all it’s information. This is pretty standard and most webhosts should already supports this requirement. If your webhost does not support these simple requirements, you should ditch it and change to another better webhost. You just need to edit the file to tell the script where the database is, chmod some files and then it is done! Of course, you still need to add the javascript code into your actual site code.

Link: here

Isn’t this so very cool? These are 5 email addresses which will help you convert files to other formats just by sending them the file! You can very easily convert Microsoft Office files to PDF or vice versa. You can even convert WAV files to MP3 files! Although I think that there will be problems when you convert WAV files because of the large size needed.

To use the service provided, all you need to do is to send an email (with or without any subject) with the attachment(s) to the following email addresses:

a) mp3@kooolwire.com - This converts WAV to MP3 files. Problem will most likely be your source WAV file will be too big for the service to handle. This has a 10MB size limit.

b) iphone@pdfonline.com - This converts Visio and Word files to PDF for you. It even works for the latest Word format (docx). Nice for people who can’t view the latest docx extension, especially for those using non-Windows Operating Systems. For anyone using Windows, you should just download the update for your Microsoft Office software.

c) doc@koolwire.com - This converts PDF to Word files. Just sometimes conversion is not always successful and you will not get complete functionality in word.

d) pdf@koolwire.com - This converts your Microsoft Office files like Excel, Word & Powerpoint to PDF. It does not support more than 10MB file attachments.

e) wav@koolwire.com - This is the reverse of mp3@koolwire.com. It converts MP3 files to WAV. Remember to make sure your email service provider accepts large attachment when you use this service.

So that’s it. You send email with attachment(s) to these email addresses to do your conversion and you just wait for the return email. It’s that simple. However, I should tell you that it is much easier and convenient if you use dedicated software to convert for you. Not to mention, you have more control over your files. How about the security risks of sending your important documents to “someone” who you have no idea will do with your data. This service is meant for users who can’t use such software (like in perhaps some Mobile Devices) or just lack the technical knowledge to convert the files themselves.

Let me suggest to you one very interesting site which requires you to do something. It’s this site. And just what’s so interesting about this site? Well, it’s some sort of physics simulation program whereby it simulates the effects of a cloth being blown by a fan. It’s made up of polygons and you can drag the cloth anywhere and see how it will react. Kind of like a science experiment you do at school but it is much cooler since you don’t have to actually setup the experiment yourself. All you have to do is to to choose what size the cloth you want and the fan speed. After that, you just drag the cloth anywhere on the screen and see how it reacts. Hey, you can even rotate the cube and see the cloth in all it’s 3-D glory! Cool!

No, it doesn’t really tells you anything useful. It’s not that kind of site where the meaning of life is being explained to you. And if you don’t have anything to do, why not play with the cloth. Just drag it anywhere you want and see how beautifully it is being simulated by the program. If you have played with that cloth for over 15 minutes, you should get an award for the most bored person on the Internet. I mean, really, go get a life. Or join me and together we will go get a life. Oh, just think of the programming skill of the one who coded this? Must be pretty complicated stuff to code such things. Amazing isn’t it? Only people who great skill and great understanding of physics will be able to write a program like this!

What’s that?!!! Some new religion formed by people who loves text? Or some cult you see so very often sprouting on the Internet? Or someone sent by god to clean up our mess. Na, I will never introduce to you crap now, would I? Textism is just a little website designed for anyone using Microsoft Word as their primary HTML editor/webpage creator. What it does is to help you clean up Word’s HTML page. If you had done your webpage (in HTML format) using Word, then you will realize that Word somehow adds a lot of unnecessary tags in your HTML file. This makes it very difficult for you to troubleshoot any coding problems which may occur. And worst, it makes your file size bigger, hence you are wasting expensive bandwidth to serve your files. You will be surprised to see that all these useless tags can take up more than half the file size! It’s just amazing that Microsoft simple loves to add crap into their files instead of optimizing it. A few years back when I was still using Word to create my webpages, I opened the files with my text editor and got a shock of my life. It was so messy that I gave up on manually editing it!

This is where Textism’s Word HTML Cleaner comes in handy. What this website does is to clean up any word HTML file. It gets rid of most of the stupid Microsoft tags in your file and this will help reduce your file size. However, not all the Word’s propriety tags are supported which means that some of the tags will not be touched while others may be affected by the stripping.

And all these are pretty easy. All YOU have to do is to upload the Word HTML file and the software will do it’s work and return back to you a streamlined and clean HTML file. That’s it. You won’t need to open up your HTML file and start manually removing any redundant tags yourself. It’s done automatically! Or I could suggest you another method. Use a proper text editor to do your HTML coding. Those WYSIWYG software are meant for the beginners and after a while, you will find them useless. And for god’s sake, why use Microsoft Word?

It’s introduction time! This time, I will focus my attention to yet another site instead. This doesn’t require any software or downloads or installation. And what does this website do? It’s a website tool and it does all sort of conversions for you. That’s why it calls itself a free online file conversion site. It supposed supports a huge number of file formats, divided into different categories - documents, image, music, video and compressed formats. Examples of the format it supports are csv, pdf, doc, ppt, bm, gif, jpg, aac, mp3, ra, avi, flv, mov, rmvb, vob, cab, zip, rar and so on. You can take a look at all the formats the site supports here and what they can be converted to. It’s just amazing and mind boggling to see what they can do.

And all you have to do is to go to the Zamzar website, choose what type of files you want to convert and then upload the files to their servers. After Zamzar has finished converting the file (up to 100MB) for you, an email with a link will be sent to you. However, remember that the file will be active for only 24 hours and will be removed from their server. You need to re-upload the file to their servers again if you need the converted file. You can convert up to 5 files per session, making things much faster if you plan to do batch conversion. However, I would recommend you to sign up for their paid plans. You will get a storage space to store your converted files and you can easily manage your files through their interface. For just US$7 per month, you get a 5GB storage as well as file size increase to 200MB. Of course, if you pay more, you get additional features.

The weird thing for me is that when I do the conversion, it was pretty fast. But after finishing the conversion, I waited and waited for the email but didn’t receive any. It took more than 15 minutes for the email link to arrive! Hmmm…..weird right? Fast conversion, slow email? Even their download speeds were impressive. Maybe their email server was overloaded? Or perhaps they are trying to “convince” us to buy their plans? It’s still a business overall. Anyway, whatever their reasons, it’s still a good service and I think everyone should support them. They can really save you a lot of time trying to figure out which software will convert which format. I know it took me a long time to search for these softwares to do the work of Zamzar.

This blog is certainly getting a much need boost in the traffic department these few days. Wuhahahaha! All thanks to Stumbleupon. Stumbleupon is a social networking site, a bit like Digg, but you will need to install their toolbar (for Internet Explorer and Firefox) first. What you do is find a site or a webpage which you like and then you stumble it. Basically it means you bookmark and allow others to “discover” which sites you have stumbled and they can visit as well. Of course you can rate the site, write a review on the site and so on. However, the best part of Stumbleupon is that you can “channel surf“, something which I am very guilty of doing. Nothing beats a boring day than to click on the Stumble! icon and see what site it brings to you. I have “stumbled” to a lot of great sites, some of which is pretty pretty interesting. You should give it a try. Just download their toolbar (it’s very small in size, free and comes with no spyware or virus!) and sign up for an account. After which you are on your way to discovering great new sites, many of which you normally won’t find without any help.

The best part of Stumbleupon is if you are stumbled, your traffic doesn’t come in huge waves! Usually if this happens, like in Digg, it could simply crash your webserver or use up all your bandwidth, thus down goes your little website and everything on it. One example is to go to Digg and try browsing some of the top sites they have there. You will surely find that several sites could not be reached. But Stumbleupon, unlike Digg, the traffic comes consistently but you won’t be overwhelmed by the huge traffic. I got a very good review for one of my articles and I get consistently good traffic from Stumbleupon. Pretty cool huh? And please keep the traffic coming, we can take it.

So all hail Stumbleupon! My favourite social networking site! It’s just too bad that it requires a toolbar installed on your browser. A lot of people are now afraid of installing toolbars, due to the fact that a lot of toolbars contains spywares. But I am pretty sure that Stumbleupon toolbar doesn’t have any spyware (that sends personal information). I am a bit surprised that a lot of people (probably die-hard fans) spend a few hours everyday stumbling, it has become a hobby for a lot of them. Anyway I hope you guys will join me soon.

Kiasu? Hell yes! But what is a poor guy like me to do? Anyway, one of my friends got infected with a virus the other day and it seems that his current antivirus software (which is completely updated with the latest virus definitions) cannot detect one part of the virus, which is actually a spyware component. Although the antivirus software detected and stopped the virus from installing, it allowed the spyware to run and it affected his entire system. Apparently, the spyware is not a popular one. It’s those you get from visiting the Chinese warez sites and it creates all sort of problems with the system. So, nowadays viruses and spywares come together in a nice package! Ain’t it cool? It took me over an hour to clear the damn virus off. Big big headache and a time waster.

So, this got me worried. If a update antivirus software can allow spyware or virus to be easily installed, then it could be dangerous and a security risk. The best thing to do is to get another antivirus software (free of course) and let it run concurrently with my current antivirus software. So I downloaded AVG free and installed it. Hope that it will add another level of protection against virus. I have Avira Antivirus Free Edition running as well. For spyware protection, I am using Spybot Search & Destroy as well as Spywareblaster. And they don’t seem to have any conflicts. Luckily, all these protection ain’t resource hungry and my system runs reasonably fast. Well, as fast as expected since my system is a bit slow. Hey, it’s just a old Pentium 4.

For over 4 years now, I have been virus free. Thank the gods, but it’s no time to be complacent, especially now. Nowadays, the spread of virus is even faster than before as more and more people go online. People without much experience with computers are probably the risk group here. They are the worse culprits. I have seen PCs which are completely infected with a sort of viruses and spyware known to man and the person owning it thought that his PC was just old (it was like 6 months old)! He never even bother to update his antivirus software (which had expired anyway) and kept on using it, probably infecting others as well. So beware of getting thumbdrives/memory cards/emails/documents from them. Always scan for virus first.

 

Have you heard before FileSwap? You may think that it is like those Peer-to-Peer service in which you swap files among your friends or among others, well……hmmm….it is like that! But the thing is unlike other services, you get a random file instead. So if you upload a file let’s say an mp3 file of your own, you may get back a jpeg picture of a dog sleeping on the couch. There is no telling what kind of files you will receive. Yes, that’s right, it’s just a weird little service. So you can swap text files, music files, pictures and pdf files. Not executable files like those programs. I am sure this is to prevent viruses and spyware/adware from being shared through this service, which is a good thing. I really hate those stuff.

It is like the Russian Roulette. You will never know what you will get. I think it is meant to be interesting. And I must say, it is quite interesting to get a file and not know what it is beforehand. Kind of like a Christmas gift exchange thing we had back at the office. Everyone is so excited trying to figure out what and who bought gifts for them. But this time you do it with complete strangers on the Internet. Oh, isn’t this just so damn fun? Of course, if you have the time and if you have a lot of files, you can spend the entire day doing file swaps with strangers.

It is just too bad that they have a size limit of 500kb. That’s very small, considering that nowadays those “standalone” files can get up to 2-3MB in size. And they have limited support for file types. So a lot of files cannot be swapped like powerpoint presentation files, flash files, movie files and so on. Hopefully they can improve on this and maybe in the future we will be able to swap even more files with strangers, like that nice guy from Afghanistan who gave me a dirty bomb recipe. Thanks!