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Intel, the world’s leading chipmaker has partnered with design firm Ziba to create the World’s thinnest Laptop ever. While this Razr of Laptops sure looks thin, this Laptop is packed with enough features to make it the #1 object of desire for every geek out there.

Some Features of the World’s Thinnest Notebook

1. Laptop Size:

Since we are talking thin, let’s talk about size first. Ziba and Intel managed to make this laptop just o.7″ thick. Think about it.  The width of a Razr is 0.54″ thick. How did Intel manage this? Well for starters they removed the standard hard drive and replaced it with flash memory. Flash memory is way faster than a hard disk drive. I run Windows Vista off my 4GB flash drive and my performance is 33% better than running Vista of a hard drive. Your applications would run faster. Another side benefit of flash memory. Your Laptop consumes less power. Intel is reporting that this new Laptop can run upto 14 hours on a Battery. That is almost equivalent to my iPod battery life ! Oh and the Laptop weights just 2.25 pounds

2. Laptop Features:

a. Laptop Screen: Unlike traditional Laptop screens which are boxed in, which looks encased in, photo frame like, this Laptop’s screen extends to the very edges and looks like a high end plasma TV screen. The screen contains light sensors which adjusts the screen brightness automatically and also has an in-built video camera

b. Keyboard: Normally, a keyboard is nothing to brag about, but this is different. The Laptop is completely smooth except for slight grooves between keys. The keys are marked with a futuristic red font and they glow in the dark

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Popularity: 16% [?]

StumbleUpon is growing to be one the fastest social networks on the Internet. Getting Stumbled would mean that you could get tons and tons of traffic. Moreover, you could add lot of subscribers because people who stumbled to your Blog came there because they specified that they have an interest in a topic similar to your blog.

Adding a “Stumble this!” button on your posts allows your visitors to promote your site on StumbleUpon. The more thumbs up your article/blog receives, the more users will in turn stumble upon your site

How to Add a StumbleUpon Button to your WordPress Blog

Step # 1: Download this image and save it as icon_su.gif or anything else you like

Step # 2: Upload this image to your WordPress blog

Step # 3: Log into your WordPress Account. In your WordPress Admin Dashboard, go to Presentations then click on Theme Editor. Under your Theme editor edit single.php of your WordPress Theme

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Popularity: 26% [?]

YouTube and Google Videos currently lead the online video space and a lot of times there are instances where you might want to share a cool video with visitors to your blog.  For websites coding in php and HTML the option is easier where you can copy the embed HTML from YouTube or Google Video and paste in on posts on your website.

WordPress unfortunately does not understand the <iframe> tag you use when you need to embed this HTML on your blog and breaks the code. While there are ways around it, we are always looking for easier options to embed YouTube and Google Videos on your WordPress Blog. How about a Plugin where adds a YouTube, Google Videos, MetaCafe and some other popular Video sites onto your WordPress Write Post page like this.

Plugin Name: Viper’s Video Quicktags

Plugin Author: Viper007Bond

Plugin Homepage:

http://www.viper007bond.com/wordpress-plugins/vipers-video-quicktags/

Download Viper’s Video Quicktags Plugin

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Popularity: 17% [?]

This unique WordPress plugin allows your Blog readers to donate you money through PayPal. Using this plugin, you can add a “Buy Me a Beer” or a “Buy Me a Coffee” button at the bottom of your posts or in the sidebar of your blog. When your readers click on the Buy Me a Beer or Buy Me a Coffee button, they are taken to the secure PayPal page from which they can donate money to you.

Why add a “Buy Me a Beer” or “Buy Me a Coffee” button instead of a simple “Donate Money” button?

Well, according to BlogClout, by telling your readers specific reason increases the number of contributions by 200%

Plugin Name: Buy Me a Beer

Plugin Homepage:

http://www.blogclout.com/blog/goodies/buy-me-a-beer-paypal-donation-plugin/

Download PayPal Donation Plugin for WordPress

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Popularity: 17% [?]

Alexa.com is owned by Amazon.com and provides various traffic level metrics related to your web site or blog. Their Alexa Rank is measured by the number of visits by visitors to your blog with the Alexa Toolbar installed. In this article, we will examine some sure shot methods that will increase your Alexa Ranking and improve the overall web site ranking of your Blog or website.

What is the Alexa Rank?

Alexa traffic Rank is based on the number of visits each website receives from the people who visit that particular website with the Alexa Toolbar installed.

Alexa defines its Alexa Traffic Rank as

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.

The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users)

Why would you want to Increase your Alexa Rank?

Alexa Rankings are terribly flawed simply because it bases your Alexa Rank only on the visitors to your blog who have the Alexa Toolbar installed. Unfortunately the Alexa Rank is still one of the primary factors in determining the popularity of a website and determining its worth. Even at my VC company, we use Alexa Rankings but we also supplement that with our own metrics and other metrics provided by sites such as compete.com.

Besides showing your website or blog popularity, your Alexa Rank determines how much you can make from Make Money Online programs such as ReviewMe, Text Link Ads etc who determine your ad strength based on your Alexa Rankings. So in simple words, if you want to make more money, you better take steps to improve your Alexa Rank

The list shown here only gives you proven methods and tips that will definitely help increase your Alexa Rank. The tips below are shown in order of importance

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Popularity: 17% [?]

According to TechCrunch, Google is all set to buyout the leading RSS management company Feedburner for around $100 Million all cash deal. Feedburner was founded in 2003 and this buyout represents the increased usage of RSS to read blogs by most of us. Feedburner currently boasts of 422,717 publishers who in turn burned about 721,074 feeds

While some people prefer the community feeling via the comments and the interaction provided by Blogs by visiting the site, some others prefer the comforts of keeping themselves updated through their RSS readers.

Most Bloggers depend on Ads for revenue and RSS effectively eliminates any ads from being shown. Google recognizes this and this deal represents their desire to move in monetizing the RSS feeds via their AdSense or recently acquired DoubleClick.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

The pre-release versions of Microsoft Windows Vista, Vista Beta 1, Vista Beta 2, Windows Vista RC1 and Windows Vista RC2 are set to expire on May 31, 2007. If you are running one of the above mentioned pre-release versions of Windows Vista ( Beta 1, Beta 2, RC1 or RC2), you might have seen notifications like the image below reminding you about the upcoming expiratation since May 18, 2007 reminding you to “Backup Important data from Windows Now and then install any edition of Windows Vista”

After the expiry date of May 31, 2007, you can still use your pre-release version of Windows Vista and log in for a max of 2 hour sessions to retrieve data. After this 2 hours of usage, your PC will automatically reboot without giving you any opportunity to save your data. Microsoft tells us that these 2 hour sessions would be available for a limited time only, how long they don’t tell us.

If you liked Windows Vista and want to install the final version of Windows Vista from any of the pre-release version of Windows Vista, Micrsoft is providing you with some good upgrade options but if you are thinking of putting of upgrading to Windows Vista to a later date, you might as well take out your Windows XP CD and start backing up your existing data before May 31.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

So, how does one Increase Search Engine rankings, bring in increased Search Engine Traffic and also prevent duplicate content on your blog or website using a single robots.txt file?

What is a robots.txt file?

robots.txt protocol also called the Robots Exclusion standard is used by web spiders and other web robots such as Search engine robots, blog robots, splog robots, adsense robot etc and prevents them from accessing all or part of a blog or a website which is otherwise, publicly viewable.

By placing a robots.txt file on your blog or website you are telling the specified robots to ignore and prevent their indexing of the specified files or directories.

Why is the robots.txt important for my blog?

Search Engines penalize duplicate content by placing that particular post or in some instances an entire blog or website in their supplemental index. Also known as Search Engine Hell, if your post goes into the supplemental index of a search engine, it might take almost 6-8 months for it to come out into the regular index and that too after you removed the duplicate content from that particular post.

Okay, so a Robots.txt file might prevent duplicate content. How does it increase my search engine rankings?

Simple, having a clean blog makes search engines think that you do not host spammy content and if you write good content, the robots will keep coming and index your site everyday instead of once every week. Also by preventing duplicate content, you prevent articles from going into the supplemental index which in turn means that people can find that post when they search on Google or any other search engine, which in turn means you get more traffic! Prominent blogger Neil Patel wrote on his Link Building blog that by using a robots.txt file, his web site traffic went up by 11.3%.

What content does one need to prevent the search engine robots on a website from accessing using a robots.txt file?

a. We need to deny the search engine bots and robots from accessing our WordPress folders or if you have a Movable type blog, your movable type folder. For example, in the picture below, you can see that Google is trying to access a file within my WordPress blog folder and throwing out a 403 (not found) error. This is bad

b. Remove comment feeds from the search results. You should never block the robots from accessing comments on your posts, but block the search engines from accessing your comment feeds as this would result in duplicate content.

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Popularity: 15% [?]

Could this be the next generation of CAPTCHAs being introduced by a social networking site? I definitely think so with similar techniques being used in the world of Computer Security 

Reddit is one of the hottest sources for what’s new and popular on the web. Reddit gives editorial control to people who use the site and not to those who run it. The users get to decide which stories are popular and vote them to the front page.

A CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Computers are unable to solve CAPTCHAs so anyone entering the correct solution is presumed to be human. The most common type of CAPTCHA including that used by Reddit requires a user to type the letters of a distorted image. Sometimes this CAPTCHA is enhanced with the addition of a sequence of numbers also distorted.

Technology now exists to read some types of CAPTCHAs. So the latest generation of CAPTCHAs add more distortions such as highlights, shadows or random line segments with a gradient background etc. Below is an example of a CAPTCHA you would see if you submit any stories or articles to Reddit

However, last night while surfing on the Internet Super highway, I found a really interesting article, which I wanted to submit to the social networking sites including Reddit. So, when I try to submit this story, image to my surprise where instead of seeing the regular CAPTCHA, I see a new form of CAPTCHA which Reddit is trying to introduce.

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Popularity: 13% [?]

When you started out blogging, you thought about all the core genres you are going to write about or rant about whatever the case maybe, but something that interests you. Over time, those ideas change or get refined. Maybe you branched out. You may have established categories in your blog, some of which you might not be blogging about any more or maybe created a broader area category. How about something that can Condense your wordpress categories, Rename categories , Add categories and also Delete moved categories

Now, you have two options if you wish to convert categories of your WordPress Posts

1. Go to each and every one of the posts you wish to change categories and then modify their categories. This is however very time consuming.  

2. Use a plugin that does the migration of categories for your your WordPress Blog. Say you have around 30 categories .. how about condesing them into around 10 categories.

Plugin Name: Category Converter

Plugin Page: http://armenianeagle.com/2007/01/30/wordpress-plugin-category-converter/

Set up the Category Converter to migrate and convert your WordPress Blog Categories

Step # 1: Download the Category Converter Plugin

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Popularity: 14% [?]