There are plenty of tools available both freeware and commercial when it comes to file recovery. Handy Recovery stands out from most the rest just for ease of use. Earlier, file recovery can be done only by a computer expert. This has been proven wrong again by Handy Recovery, allowing any novice user to restore their files safely.

Key Features

• Support most of the Windows file system
• Very extensive scanning for deleted files
• Ability to create disk image for recovery
• Search option for deleted files
• Explorer style interface for ease navigation
• Preview for recoverable items
• Supports recovery from memory cards

Handy Recovery works great for most of the file recovery. Handy Recovery also provides you the probability of recovering data. In addition to cool features, Handy Recovery has also got Windows VISTA certified logo for its reliability.

Setbacks

Here are few drawbacks which I have observed so far with Handy Recovery.

• No support for Linux partitions
• Not a free ware

Bottom line, Handy Recovery would have been more attractive if it was provided as freeware. Handy Recovery is priced in the higher side and it costs 39$. But if you’re the one looking for an easy way to recover your deleted files go for Handy Recovery.

If you like to try Handy Recovery, you can download the trial version from their download page. The trial has limitation of one recovery per day; sometimes good things doesn’t comes for free 

Have anyone tried anything similar to Handy Recovery for file recovery? Share your views.

This is a sponsored post.

I have been using Gallery2 till now, since I wanted to brand my photos under my banner. But when you have bunch of photos trust me managing it with a self-hosted solution is a pain. That why I decided to move to hosted photo-sharing solution. Flickr sounded like the solution for me with plenty of flickr tools.

Here is the bunch of flickr tools that I discovered recently. If you are looking methods to brand your Flickr photos under your banner this list would be great help.

Flogr ( Demo | Download )

Flogr is a photoblog application that works great with Flickr. Flogr written on PHP over MySQL database and off course uses Flickr API. Flogr allows you to customize your template. It uses Slimbox implementation for slideshow. Flogr grabs EXIF data and comments from Flickr for each image. Moreover Flogr is easy to install and configure!

Satellite ( Demo | Download)

Satellite is a photo gallery application that allows you to use Flicks for hosting. The installation is simple; all you need is Flickr account, Flickr API key and a PHP supported host. Satellite uses MooTools framework and Slimbox implementation.

Chasr ( Demo | Download )

Chasr is another similar mini application that allows to display Flickr images in own website. Chasr is very simple implementation that allows you to customize it to you own theme. Chasr allows you to view / add comments to the images.

FlickrViewer ( Demo | Download )

FlickrViewer is a simple script written over SimpleViewer, which allows viewing Flickr photoset. SimpleViewer is a popular Flash app that allows to views self hosted photos. FlickrViewer needs Flickr API Key to read the images from you blog. This is simple flash gallery application.

Also if you like to integrate Flickr into your WordPress blog there are several plugins for it.

BTW, I have recently purchased Panasonic Lumix FZ50 camera and now I’m thinking of creating new photoblog. If you guys have better suggestion for photoblog, please suggest me.

Are you running photoblog using Flickr? If not do you plan to do so?

Update:- Moses over WPThemesPlugin.com has listed all flickr related plugins used with WordPress.

Update (08/30) :- Ram over TeknoBites did a favour for me listing all the photoblog themes available for WordPress. Thank you gentleman.

Log file analysis approach is normally in-house and they reside within the web server itself. The analysis is based on the web server log file.

Here I’m going to brief down the advantage of log file analysis method

Advantages of log file analysis

Fast. You don’t have a burden of executing extra JavaScript code on your site; web server logs every possible transaction related to the site.

Reliable. You don’t have to rely upon user’s browser to collect their data. JavaScript may not work in some browsers or it can be disabled.

Error Information. Web server log files captures every error message and failed requests which tagging method fails and technically impossible to achieve with page tagging. Also you would be able to track hot linking information.

Spider Details. Log files also captures the spider information. It would give you the idea about how many pages were indexed and how much bandwidth it consumed etc. This might give you an idea of spider that eats your bandwidth and you can block them using robots.txt if you want.

Privacy. The log file details are kept within your server and not shared to 3-rd party.

Ease. You don’t have burden of installing a script in each and every page / blog.

Limitation

Less Analysis. It doesn’t give you more detailed analysis; you have mostly do analysis manually.

Here is the list of web log file analysis software.

AWStats

AWStats is one of the well-known open source web analytics-reporting tools. AWStats parses and analyzes the server log files and produces tables and bar graph output. The web reporting is done through a CGI script. AWStats would with most of the web server log format.

Webalizer

Webalizer is a fast and free web server log file analysis program. It produces HTML reports using tables. It has more detailed reporting.

Analog

Analog is pretty old web log analysis software among others. The data reports are made mostly using text formats.

W3Perl

W3Perl is more advanced free log file analyzer that allows you to gather HTTP, FTP and Email log files. It is written in Perl language and would work in any server with Perl support.

Visitors

Visitors is a very fast web log analyzer for Linux, Windows, and other Unix-like operating systems. It takes as input a web server log file, and outputs statistics in form of different reports

Special Addition

FeedStater

FeedStater is an only available feed statistics tool for self hosted feeds. FeedStater is written in CGI and it will read the log file to report the feed statistics.

Also you should be aware of the fact Urchin is one the popular log file analyzer software and latter it was acquired by Google for its analytics.

Bottom line, I would say log file analyzer would be the best methodology but it should be used along with more advanced page tagging method to gain more insight on Web Analytics.

Have you ever used any log file analyzer before? Share your thoughts.

Another main feature I love with VLC player is the ability to play any broken media file (say partially downloaded file). I use this feature to preview the media before downloading the entire content and save my effort

Few Interesting Facts about VLC Media Player

Here are few interesting facts I found about VLC Media Player.

• VLC (VideoLAN Client) was initially client for Video LAN project; Later they combined both server and client into VLC media player.
• Google’s Video search uses browser plugin based on VLC player.
• Democracy Player, an Internet player uses VLC media player as a back-end on Windows
• The code name of VLC Media player is based on character name from the movie golden eye
• There are bunch of project that uses VLC; see complete list here.
• VideoLAN enhancement projects are featured in Google Code.

Key Features

• Play Anything – As said this is the main feature of this player you can play whatever you want. Be it any format or any codec no bar; they got to play in VLC. They have ability to read disk images (iso) and play directly.
• Simple – It can be used by any novice without any hitch.
• Network Streaming – It can stream internet video over HTTP, UTP protocol more over it support IPv6.
• Steaming Server – you can broadcast video using unicast or mutlicast in high bandwidth network.
• Equalizer -VLC has an equalizer for both audio and image.
• Filters -VLC comes in with dozens of audio and video filter that you can apply to alter the output.
• Skins – This is not much attractive, but yes you can change the default skins.
• Portability – This works with all operating system, which include Windows, MAC, Linux, BEOS, Win CE. etc. The latest version is compatible with Windows VISTA as well.

Possible Improvements

I have couple of suggestions probably here for VLC Player. VLC also doesn’t have support for real format, which they can add in feature version.

1. Interface
Sadly, this needs some serious attention. They have easy to use interface though their interface and not that attractive. They have skin support but it is not effective too.

2. Playlist
VLC provides you the ability to manage your play list. I think that can be improved a bit to allow option to effectively manage and have some tagging and rating features. Also the play list is not integrated well with the main area.

3. Real Format support
Unfortunately, VLC player doesn’t have support to Real format till now. It would be great if they add support to them as well. Thanks to CyBer$|x for pointing this out.

Other than this I really don’t see much on improvement track. VLC almost rocks already!

Bottom line, VLC Media Player might not be my favorite media player but I use it really extensively.

Have you tried VLC? Share your experience with VLC.

Update : Haris has compiled a list of best skins for VLC player. Deepak has his own list of beautiful skins.

Why Replacement?

Notepad has some disadvantages, which is known to everyone who uses it frequently. Here is a quick list of them.

• Doesn’t have support for multiple document interface
• Doesn’t display line number (this is harder part for programmer / debugger)
• Doesn’t support syntax highlighting
• Doesn’t support larger files
• It is after all Microsoft product

To overcome these and other disadvantages many programmers looked into developing better tools that will be as simple to use as Notepad, yet offer additional features and enhancements that were left out of the original Notepad.

Couple of weeks back I wrote about my favorite notepad alternative and I asked my readers about their favorite too. Thanks to the readers who have given their views about their notepad alternative.

Top 5 Notepad Replacement

Here is the top 5 list of notepad replacement. I bet you will love at least one

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free source code editor and an effective Notepad replacement. Notepad++ supports several programming languages. The features include syntax highlighting, code folding, auto-completion, multi-document, drag and drop, full regular search support etc., It also has include advanced macro recording and playback feature. Moreover Notepad++ has most of my readers vote and it is the well-know replacement for Notepad.

Programmer’s Notepad

Programmer’s Notepad is free, open source, text editor with special enhancements for Programmers. Programmer’s Notepad is a project featured in Source Forge, which comes in as one of the best notepad replacement for programmers. The main features include book marking, code highlighting / folding, no limit to file size, tabbed document support, project management feature and much more. Programmer’s notepad is my favorite choice for Notepad replacement.

PSPad

PSPad is freeware code editor and wonderful notepad replacement. PSPad offers main features like rich text formatting, mighty code editing features, project management, syntax highlighting, auto-correction, HEX editor, text difference, spell checker, macro recorder and many more. PSPad also has inbuilt FTP functionality which is a plus for Web developers and Bloggers. PSPad is more advanced of all editors mentioned here. If you are looking for full functional and feature rich editor then PSPad should be your choice.

Notepad2

Notepad2 is a lightweight, free and open source text editor. Notepad2 is a full functional Notepad like editor with syntax highlighting. It is also based on Scintilla source code editing component similar to Notepad++. The features also include drag and drop feature, regular expression search, syntax highlighting for most of the languages. Notepad2 is best suited for persons who need simplicity like Notepad and Code highlighting feature for fun programming.

MetaPad

MetaPad is a small, fast and completely free text editor. It was designed to completely replace Notepad since it includes all of Notepad’s features and few extra features. The features include tool bar functionality, WYSIWYG printing, auto indenting etc., It is also been said it consumes less amount of memory than Notepad. So even if you like to stick with the simplicity of Notepad; you can very well try MetaPad.

I have complied the list with the help of my readers feedback and my thanks everyone.

Are you able to spot your Notepad replacement?

Consider a case where you’re trying to fix an error in multi-nested loop. Notepad does fail here and it would consume few extra time than the time intended if we use good productivity tool. One among such tool is Programmer’s Notepad. It would increase your productivity by reducing the time taken.

PNotepad’s Code Folding feature comes in handy here. Code Folding is a feature that allows user to selectively display and hide section of currently edited file. The section can be either a fragment of code or function etc. This feature is available in most powerful text editor and IDE’s

See the screen shot below with code folding done for function second_page(). Also have a look at Text Clips in notepad area.

Programmer’s Notepad offers syntax highlighting for wide range of programming and markup language. Also it has Text-clips option to insert the predefined code-snippets for various languages. Programmer’s Notepad also has a simple project management interface to manage the files related to the projects.

Key Features -

• Code Folding
• Code / Syntax Highlighting
• Project Management / Grouping
• Regular expression search
• Code Snippets
• Tabbed multi-file support
• Bookmarking
• Export feature
• Addon Support
• and lot more…

Programmer’s Notepad is an open source project that is featured in SourceForce Programmer’s Notepad is a free to distribute under GPL license. Thanks to Simon Steele for Programmer’s Notepad

Bottom line, Programmer’s Notepad can’t be a replacement in high-end IDE’s but it can be a good replacement for Windows Notepad.

What is your choice?

I was really amazed by Joost, the quality of the video was superb. Joost works on seamless Peer to Peer (P2P) networking. Joost provides selectable programs on over 150 channels, ranging from cartoons, movies, music, sports and documentary using peer-to-peer TV (P2PTV) technology. The original content is stored on main server owned by Joost and then distributed by users to other users watching the same program.

Joost is signing up deals with major video content providers which would help them to gain more programs and viewer ship. Latest in the list was CNN and Sony; Viacom was already in the list. Joost is also building up a social network around their viewer. Joost has channel chats, where users watching the same programs can interact. This is just a base for their social networking model.

Joost Screenshot

This service remains free since it is been paid by advertising which are shown intermittently. The Joost interface is fairly simple and easy to use. The viewing experience is also great as it suffers not much of streaming problems. To add to the value, Joost is the venture of founders of Skype and Kaaza which were most successful. You need to aware of this; since Joost runs on P2PTV technology it will consume lot of your bandwidth for both uploading and downloading.

If you are looking for a Joost invite and didn’t have one till now; drop me a comment. I have Joost invites left out; you must try this service for sure.

IrfanView is written by Irfan Skiljan, a graduate student of Vienna University of Technology. This compact software is completely free for non-commercial use. The development is supported by donation; feel free to donate towards this. IrfanView is especially useful when working with digital photos and their retouching. My top use of IrfanView is to watermark and resize my entire digital collection; so it is ready for Web.

Features Glimpse

• Many supported file formats ( almost every image format)
• Multi-language support
• Thumbnail / Preview option
• Slideshow (Save as EXE / SCR)
• Fast directory browsing
• Batch conversion / editing
• Multipage editing
• File search
• Email Option
• Multimedia Playe (plays popular video)
• Change color depth
• Scan Support
• Cut/Crop
• IPTC editing
• Capturing
• Lossless JPG operations
• Effects (sharpen, blur, Adobe Photoshop filters)
• Extracts icons from EXE/DLL
• Lot of shortcut keys for ease of use
• Command line options for experts
• Customized plugins

Edward de Leau lists the 10 ways of using IrfanView. He writes clearly about how IrfanView can help in day to day image processing needs. Here is the quick summary on how IrfanView can be used,

1. To take Screenshots
2. To preview, sort, rotate albums
3. To resize image
4. To create thumbnails for online photo album
5. To scan image
6. To watermark my photographs
7. To preform batch processing
8. To apply effects / filters
9. To set Windows wallpaper
10. To do lot more with the image

Update:- Pallab has written a Ten Things you can do with Irfanview with more explanation.

IrfanView has been around for many years and keeps getting better. It might still require lot of improvement towards the UI. Hope it gets better too.

IrfanView is my favorite when it comes to basic image editing / viewing. If you never tried it before give a try today. Visit their homepage.

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

Site24x7 also has the option of emailing you out weekly / daily report. You will be also check out the archived stats online in their site.

Folks, If you are owning a website then I would highly recommend you to check this out.

Thanks Site24x7

Update: Site24x7.com is no more completely FREE. Now they have a option for buying SMS credit.

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

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

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

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

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.

PageAddict can be downloaded from here. It is just a 10k download. Once you install the Firefox extension you need to visit www.pageaddict.com to know your addition. There you’ll get the time you spent at each site, percentages of overall time and the option to apply tags. You can even categorize different sites and restrict how much time you spend in each category per day.

Now find your addiction level and try to do something productive

Windows Live Writer has a lot of bells and whistles – preview in WYSIWYG or HTML mode, support for most blogging platforms (Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress and others), easy insertion of photos and things like Live.com Maps, and tagging. What’s nice about Windows Live Writer is that it reads your current blog’s template and it lets you preview your content while creating it. It’s like seeing your blog post growing.

The rich-text editor is not impressing, as it contains the usual elements and doesn’t produce clean code (you’ll notice many unneeded tags). When you insert pictures, you’ve got more options: you can resize the picture, add a nice shadow, adjust brightness and even use some simple effects like sepia. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn’t allow you to publish images for the hosted blogs

Windows Live Writer is available only for windows and more over it’s still beta. The simple interface and the innovative additions make this tool a good replacement for the standard blogging interfaces and it’s a good alternative to Performancing for Firefox, Qumana, but it’s still far from a commercial application like ecto.

Windows Live Writer needs lot of improvements with features like categories, tags, etc., should show up. Moreover the formatting code should be clean.

For more information about the tool read the writer team blog at http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

I tried few basic troubleshooting steps; but nothing seemed to work. So I started searching for a good solution for recover my logical partition. Finally this tool Partition Table Doctor stopped me. Partition Table Doctor sounded promising to me and I decided to give a try.

Thanks to Partition Table Doctor, it saved lot of my efforts that I had to spend on the recovery process. They had automatic recovery option that was a great feature. I was able to fix up most of the partitions using automatic recovery expect one. I had to fix it using manual recovery process, which was lot easier too. The tool was so handy and came in right time for me. If you’re one stuck up in similar problem don’t get panic just rebuild the partition table. It would work is most of the cases.

But I would recommend you to backup you partition tables, master boot records (MBR) into other media. Partition Table Doctor also has option for backing up this information or you can use any other tool.

Quick Feature List:

• Recover deleted or lost partition
• Fix boot sectors errors
• Backup / Restore MBR, partition table and boot sectors
• Easy to manage Partitions
• Surface Test
• and other advanced features…

Partition Table Doctor is really a great product when it comes to managing partitions.
Bottom line, Prevention is better than cure so backup your sensitive data in regular interval.

Update: I have reposted this on 06/22/07 with more information on PTD