Archive for February, 2007

DivShare–a new free, clean, fast file sharing for everyone

5 years ago

by Benedict Herold in websites

DivShare is yet another free online file hosting service similar to rapidshare.de or yousendit.com

But I would say, interface of DivShare is much better and clean than other similar service. Also this has more unique advantage compared with others.

Here is the few unqiue features I see over other file hosting providers.

1.The files stay online forever even if they are inactive for long period. (RapidShare deletes during the inactivity period)

2.You can upload unlimited number of files but has 200MB file size limit (RapidShare has 100 MB)

3. You can upload mostly any file extension. It has enhanced support for audio and image files. You can also describe your files.

4. You can upload and embed audio file directly to your site. Learn about it here.

5. You can create image galleries and thumbnails.

6. You can keep your files private. This is an easy way to share files between friends and family.

7. No pop-up ads or spam or wait time. I’m not sure how long this will exists true J

Now it has the really cool feature for bloggers, you can directly integrate DivShare with WordPress using the DivShare Uploader plug-in. The plugin was officially released couple of days back. This can be used as replacement for WordPress attachment and will really help you in saving lot of web space and bandwidth.

Most importantly you can get a DivShare account for free. Sign up now.

file hosting sharing

Migrating New Blogger to WordPress 2

5 years ago

by Benedict Herold in tutorial

Import your posts with comments from New Blogger to WordPress 2. New Blogger Import tool is ease and simple to use; no more manual pains.

My love with Blogger is over finally I have been planning for move to WordPress for a long time. I have been stopped since I did’t want to carry the pain in my butt with all the manual stuff involved in it previously.

After the announcement of new blogger import feature in WordPress. I thought to give a try and which now made me to take the final move. Now I’m proudly powered by WordPress and themed by Qwil

The new blogger import plugin is out of beta and is been tested with the current version of WordPress. The final version is available here. From the new release of WordPress this plugin would be present as default.

Features :-

Imports all Blogger Posts
Imports all the Comments
Imports the Post Author and Comment Author information
Imports Categories (i.e. Labels) from Blogger

Other Useful Utils:-

1. While you’re testing the blogger import feature you can try out WordPress Suicide plugin; this plugin will help you clear all the posts in WordPress.

2. By itself it does not support to import the images hosted in blogger, but you can use the blogger image import plugin.

The plugin is compatible only with new blogger so i would suggest to migrate everyone to migrate to new blogger. Since the old blogger import utility will not import post comments along with posts.

Here I will provide you the steps required to Import the post from New Blogger to WordPress.

Limitation:-

The import plugin won’t work with the blogs that are using FTP publishing. So before trying this import feature make sure you switch to Blogspot publishing.

Steps:-

Make sure you got the id of Blogger which your tring to import( say bloggerid.blogspot.com).
Make sure your blogger publish full feeds, if not modify the option to publish full feeds. ( In Settings –> Site Feeds –> Blog Posts Feed –> FULL)
Download the latest plugin from here.
Upload the plugin to the WordPress plugin location and activate the plugin.
Make sure your web-server supports url_fopen or should have curl enabled.
In WordPress, goto Manage –> New Blogger Import to access the plugin.
Provide your blogger id which you’re trying to import.
Select the default category and author, where you want the post to be imported.
Also you have option to create the category and author corresponding to the post.
If you’re blog is too large and you’re facing time out error, reduce the import cycles and unpick the import every posts in single fly option.
If you’re using Haloscan comment in blogger, then enable the option and use the plugin in conjunction with this.
If you want to enable permalink structure same as used by blogger turn this on. I would not suggest it.
Click on import, you will be all set and it ask to import the author information.
Save those changes. Now all the post and comments are imported to WordPress
Now it’s time to say good bye to Blogger forever. See the redirection below.

If you have published the Blogger using FTP previously, you got good luck. Since you will be able to do a Permanent direct 301 using .htaccess using the syntax below.
RedirectMatch permanent ^blog/2006/07/old-post-link.html$ http://www.sitename.org/newblog/2006/07/new-post-link/

The posts redirected with 301 redirect will not loose search engine ranking or penalized.

But if you’re using blogspot publishing, you will left with no other option that using <META> tag redirect. You can make the required changes in the template and republish the blog. So that the blogger will redirect all the request to the newly hosted wordpress domain. See below a sample syntax of blogger template should be to enable the blogger redirect.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>My blog title</title> <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5; url=http://www.sitename.com/newblog" /> </head> <body><p> If your browser supports Refresh, you'll be transported to our <a href="http://www.sitename.com/newblog">New Blog</a> in 5 seconds, otherwise, select the link manually. Thank you </p> </body> </html>

Now you will preserve your traffic as well.

Have fun. Say good-bye to Blogger soon

Happily and Proudly powered by WordPress.

Update (04/26/07) : The above method doesn’t work anymore; since the plugin in broken as there was a change in Blogger’s feed. Better option would be upgrading to WordPress 2.2, which has inbuilt blogger import feature. Good Luck!

blog blogger migration wordpress

Site24x7.com – A free website-monitoring service

5 years ago

by Benedict Herold in tools

Site24x7.com is a FREE beta web monitoring service provided by Zoho, a online collaboration leader.

I should have mentioned about this service long time back but unfortunately I realized the importance of similar service only after my site faced a server downtime. Thanks for Site24x7.com for alerting me on the event. I have being using this service effectively for past couple of months now.

This is another 100% FREE service provided by Zoho.There are several website that provide similar service. I personally prefer Site24x7 among them. Checkout the features page to find out why you should give a try too.

I would consider the SMS alert feature as a very good value add; it wouldn’t allow you to have a good night sleep if something is wrong in your site Website owners will know about the importance of site uptime and I’m not going to write about it here. Site24x7 will alert you by email or sms. You can have multiple email or sms to which alert has to be sent.

A noticeable feature about site24x7 is its simplicity, i would say. It’s every simple to setup a site for monitoring. To setup a website for monitoring provide the website URL and then the polling frequency. You’re all set. This is pretty easy for any novice user.

With advanced configuration option you can specify the events for which you need to receive the alert. You can use the advanced option very effectively. It helps in lot of ways, the keyword options will let you not to loose the rank in search engines. Also you can get alerted for bad response time. In the option page you will be able to add multiple email ids. Also you can choose which form submission method you want to use. If your website is secured site, you would be able to provide the authentication information as well.

Recently, I found a option for monitoring the web application. For this you need to record the sequence of web application UI. I have never tried this till now. But would be worthy for guys who are running e-commerce site.

Sample Status Report