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Archive for December, 2006
My Favorite Top Five must have Firefox Add-ons
115 years ago
by Benedict Herold
in tools
My Favorite Top Five List of FireFox Add-ons that I use and you must have.
Here is a list of my favorite top five Firefox add-ons that I use very often. I just can’t imagine doing so many things on Internet that I do everyday without their assistance. I also been using couple of others which didn’t make into the list since this is list of only Top Five.
You can read more post on [tag]Firefox[/tag] which I had wrote about Firefox and other addons. If you don’t have Firefox yet; download it today.
FireFTP is my personal top favorite, which lets me manage my site. FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client that provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers. This eliminates a piece of software for those of you who use a separate program for FTP. Along with transferring your files quickly and efficiently, FireFTP also includes more advanced features such as: directory comparison, syncing directories while navigating, SSL encryption, file hashing, and much more! Webmaster should try this.
StumbleUpon allows you to discover and share great Web content matched to your personal preferences. Whether it’s a website, video, picture, game, blog, or wiki, StumbleUpon helps you find interesting pages recommended by like-minded people with a single click of the Stumble! Button. This helps you find interesting Web pages you wouldn’t think to search for. Read my earlier post about StumbleUpon.
ScribeFire (previously Performancing) is a full-featured blog editor that sits right in your Firefox browser and lets you post to your blog easily. You can drag and drop formatted content, including images; from the page you are browsing and take notes as well as post to your blog. ScribeFire is compatible with most of the blog systems.
SearchStatus
SearchStatus a neat little tool that provides you with some handy shortcuts for site information like PageRank, AlexaRank, backlinks, keyword density, link reports, whois, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links and a bunch of other search engine marketing related tools. I use the tool to track the pagerank and alexa rank of site that I’m browsing.
FoxyTunes places remote controls for the media player of your choice within Firefox so you can control your music without leaving your browser. The controls appear on the status bar or one of the toolbars, so no space is wasted. You can pause, forward/reverse, play, adjust the volume, and see what’s playing. There’s also an alarm clock and a sleep timer. This is a must-have extension for users who regularly listen to music while browsing the Web as it is to me 
Thanks to those wonderful add-ons. This is my favorite 5, I do use others too but not that often. If you have some else in top 5 list, your comments are welcomed.
Top 10 Popular Torrent Sites of 2006
525 years ago
by Benedict Herold
in internet
A top 10 popular torrent sites list of 2006
As we’re close to New Year, I decided to put up a comprehensive list of torrent site that were popular in year 2006.
The criteria I used to evaluate these torrent sites were; ease of use and searching, speed of access, information provided about the files, information provided about the current torrent status etc. Moreover traffic ranking was taken into account for the list.
1. Mininova.org
Mininova is simple to use and biggest torrent listing sites. The site started in January 2005 as a successor SuprNova, It is a directory and search engine for all kinds of torrent files. Visitors of mininova can anonymously upload torrents to this site, tracked by any BitTorrent tracker. The word ‘mininova’ ranked 9 on Google’s list of most queried terms in 2006. Mininova is our top picks for this year.
2. TorrentSpy.com
TorrentSpy is a popular BitTorrent indexing Web Site. It hosts torrent and provides a forum to comment on them, as well as a graphical portrayal of how healthy the torrents are. Torrentspy was as popular as Mininova and made it to 2nd place.
3. ThePirateBay.org
The Pirate Bay (often abbreviated TPB) is an Internet site that bills itself as the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, and also serves as an index for torrent files that it tracks. Due to BitTorrent’s ability to handle extremely large files, it is popular for sharing large music sets, movies and software as well as Linux distribution discs.
4. isoHunt.com
isoHunt is a popular BitTorrent index. isoHunt is one of the most popular search engines for BitTorrent links. The website has been sued for copyright infringement recently. Isohunt has a large collection of varied content.
5. Demonoid.com
Demonoid is a popular private BitTorrent tracker for the peer-to-peer distribution of files. The website features a publicly accessible search engine, although membership is required to download more than three torrents per week. Demonoid will allow user registration only on Friday’s. Demonoid is a private BitTorrent tracker, however it also indexes external torrents that make us to place them in 5th place.
6. Torrentz.com
Torrentz is a popular Torrent indexing and Torrent search engine. It does not help to track your torrents. The torrent search engine is more advance as it allows you to search for files within the torrents. If you’re looking for unique stuff you should prefer this site.
7. TorrentPortal.com
Torrent Portal is famous for holding large number of active torrents. The search feature gives powerful options to its users. The torrent portal is ad supported for standard Free members.
8. TorrentBox.com
TorrentBox is your best source for the greatest torrents. TorrentBox also lets users to track their torrents. TorrentBox also features a forum, directory and simple search engine for torrents.
9. TorrentReactor.to
TorrentReactor has the comprehensive listing of torrents. The site claims it has the most active torrents. TorrentReactor was much popular in the beginning of year, but still managed a position in the top list.
10. TorrentScan.com
TorrentScan is gaining popularity these days. TorrentScan scans across all the popular bit torrent search engines. It has comprehensive collection of torrent search engines, which make the user to get their required torrent with ease.
Special mention goes to Seedler.org was one of the popular torrent search site and my favorite during the start of year. It has lost completely the popularity now because of reliability issues.
Warning: BenH.org is not accountable and responsible for the content of any site that has been listed above.
Lightbox JS v2.0 Integration with Blogger Template
535 years ago
by Benedict Herold
in tweaks
Create a simple Photolog using Blogger.com and Lightbox JS. A step by step guide for photo bloggers; to Integrate Lightbox with their existing Blogger publishing system.
Blogger is a popular weblog publishing system, which supports custom designs and templates. Meanwhile Blogger is not much popular as other blog publishing system like WordPress, etc for its support to Plug-ins. In other hand Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It is lightweight and works with most of the browsers with Javascripts enabled.
Yesterday, I was trying to publish my own Photolog. I was looking for a good web serice so that it would ease my task. I am with Blogger for a quite time and still I have not moved my blog to WordPress, even I wish so. So I decided to go with Blogger again with the FTP publishing enabled. But blogger didn’t have any ready made plug-in for Lightbox so I had to hack the code little bit. Blogger with Ligthbox would give any blog a realistic Photolog look.
Step by Step Guide:-
- Download the Lightbox JS script from Here and copy the scripts to your web server most likely where your blog is been published.
- Login into Blogger system and go to Template –> Edit HTML
- Add the below line into the Meta section of HTML tag
<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/lightbox.css" type="text/css" media="screen">
- Add the following scripts tag in the header section of the HTML template
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/prototype.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/lightbox.js"></script>
- Check the CSS and make sure the referenced prev.gif and next.gif files are in the right location. Also, make sure the loading.gif and close.gif files as referenced near the top of the lightbox.js file are in the right location.
- Once you’re done Save the Template.
- With Blogger, we will not able to tweak their system directly, since it is not open source software. So we need to have little manual effort every time before you publish a photo log entry.
- After creating a blog entry in Blogger system, do the following steps before publishing.
- Go to Edit HTML option in the Post window as show in the figure
- Once you have uploaded the image you will see an entry similar shown in the figure below.
- Replace the selected code above with
rel=”lightbox”as shown below
- You can also add title tag in tag to enable Caption in the LightBox displayed
- Now you’re all set and you can publish your Photolog.
If you like to have image sets for each post entry then you need to add rel="lightbox[group_name]" for all the images that you which to show in that particular group image set. It should be similar to the below image.
Now you have a wonderful Photolog to start with as I do; Visit my PhotoLog at The PhotoLog
Pandora.com, My favorite internet music station
55 years ago
by Benedict Herold
in web 2.0
Pandora is an automated music recommendation service based on previous users selection and free Internet music radio service created by The Music Genome Project.
Pandora is Music discovery service uses an open-source development platform to connect users to the songs they love. Listening to music in Pandora is much easier; trust me. It will just ask you to enter the name of artist or song title. Pandora service will instantly creates a radio station that plays songs that share musical characteristics associated with the artist or song provided. You can tell them your taste using their Feedback system on each played songs. You can also skip from hearing the particular song if you dislike.
The site stats says,
“A user can make up to 100 unique stations that play all kinds of music — pop, rock, jazz, electronica, hip-hop, old and new — from a library of more than 300,000 songs from over 10,000 artists.”
This is amazing! Isn’t? Do you like to Explore Pandora, read a good O’Reilly article; Inside Pandora: Web Radio That Listens to You.
The coolest part is Pandora is completely web-based and you need not install any software to start listening to music. Conrad says, “Lots of other people have already done that. We wanted to build something that was really, really simple — sort of a one-click radio [station].” Conrad is Chief Technical Officer at Pandora.
Out of curiosity about this uncommon name Pandora, I just researched on the same. In ancient Greek mythology, Pandora, whose name means “all gifted,” received many gifts from the gods, including the gift of music from Apollo. She was also very curious. Unlike those gods of old, who were displeased with Pandora’s curiosity, the developers of Pandora.com say they celebrate that trait and have made it their mission to reward the musically curious with a never-ending experience of musical discovery. If you like to know more about the Greek Pandora read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora. This Wiki page turned out interesting in finding more other stuff with name Pandora.
Bottom line, Pandora.com is a free and ease to use internet radio service that can play my favorite music.
Next time if you’re looking to play music online, go to Pandora.com
Update : Pandora is not available outside the US
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