WordPress has done its part to help spread the allure of blogging by making it very easy to start a blog—and to update that blog after it’s up and running. WordPress isn’t the only blogging tool in town. Lots of popular tools are out there, including Movable Type, Tumblr, Habari, and Blogger. Given all these choices, why should you use WordPress?

Download
http://rapidshare.com/files/288488192/9_Building.a.WordPress.Blog.rar

Wei-Meng Lee, “Windows 7: Up and Running: A quick, hands-on introduction”
O’Reilly Media, Inc. | 2009 | ISBN: 0596804040 | 202 pages | PDF | 8,8 MB

This compact book offers the quickest path for Windows users to get started with Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system. You get the essential information you need to upgrade or install the system and configure it to fit your activities, along with a tour of Windows 7’s features and built-in applications.

Microsoft has learned from the mistakes of Windows Vista, and Windows 7 shows it-this new OS is much faster and more stable. With Windows 7: Up and Running, you’ll learn what’s new and what’s changed from XP and Vista, and get advice on ways to use this system for work, entertainment, instant communication, and more. Windows 7 is poised to be a big hit, and with this handy guide, you can be up and running — and productive — with it right away.

Master the user interface, including the taskbar, jump lists, desktop gadgets, Aero Shake, and notification area
Discover the joys of networking with HomeGroup file sharing and improved Wi-Fi
Tour the system’s improved security, including the Action Center, User Account Control, and Credential Manager
Learn how to use Windows Live Essentials for messaging, photo sharing, moviemaking, emailing, and blogging
Get to know built-in applications such as Internet Explorer 8, Windows Media Player 12, Microsoft Paint, and WordPad
Learn about optional Microsoft software to enhance your Windows 7 experience

Click here to DOWNLOAD

Each time one of our clients uses SwiftSend to release an email marketing message, SwiftSend generates a robust report.  I thought it would be interesting to share some of our statistics.

The screenshot above is an actual report generated by SwiftSend showing what Email Programs (Also known as “Email Clients”) our recipients like to use.  While it’s not really much of a surprise considering how much B2B work we do, Microsoft Outlook users take the cake with nearly 55%.   Steve Jobs will be happy to know his Apple Mail has nearly 20%.  Google’s Gmail comes in 3rd spot.  Why is this important?  Well for example, users using Outlook 2007 (15% of our subscribers) are unable to see background images built into newsletters.  The email newsletters we design and build must be adaptable for this reason.

Skipable Geek Explanation: This is a limitation due to the fact that Outlook 2007 uses MS Word to render HTML content.  Crazy I know!  Current plans indicate Microsoft’s “Outlook 2010″ is planning on doing the same.  This has those who offer eMail Marketing Services up in arms.  There are many web-based, and social media movements attempting to stop this from happening.

The “Open Rate” report is the proverbial “Meat & Potatoes” of all the statistics SwiftSend has to offer.  Often we hear the question “What is a good open rate?’

Well, in the above example (Our May Newsletter about Skunk-Fu) had an open rate of about 41%.  Not bad.  Compare that to other traditional marketing efforts and you’d be smiling.

For Open rates, there are a few general trends…

• As list size goes up, the open rate tends to fall; possibly because smaller companies are more likely to have personal relationships with their list subscribers.
• Companies and organizations that are focusing on enthusiasts and supporters, like churches, sport teams and non profits see higher open rates
• More specific niche topics, like some manufacturing areas also typically have higher open rates than emails on broader topics

Originally priced at $197, the software is discounted at $50 for a limited time and is being sold at $147. Although still pretty steep for some software, it apparently comes with a lifetime of updates and support, although how long will the software stick around for updates? I have purchased some pieces of software relating to social networking (mostly Twitter and Facebook related), but Bookmarking Demon is supposed to take care of a hell of a lot more. It doesn’t work with social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook where you’re supposed to meet people, it deals with submitting your links to popular bookmarking services like Delicious and Digg, to get high-quality backlinks to your site and also raise popularity of your site.

Below is the video taken straight from Bookmarking Demon’s website. It describes how Bookmarking Demon can help your site and what the software can actually do for you.

Bookmarking Demon is created by a software company by the name of EdwinSoft. They also have another piece of software called BlogComment Demon. I’m sure you can guess the functionality of this by its name, but BlogComment Demon searches Google for blogs in categories and niches you search for with high PR rankings. Then it will post comments to all of these blog’s newest posts, raising your page’s PR and giving you more backlinks. This is supposed to drive more traffic to your blog, and ultimately convert to making a lot of moolah online.

So what do you think? Has anybody actually tried Bookmarking Demon and can give a real, honest review of the quality and price? How should you use this software properly, and is it worth purchasing? I have searched Google for reviews on the software, but there have been many blogs saying it’s good and many saying it’s a poorly designed program. So any comments or tips from Bookmarking Demon is greatly appreciated!

As the name suggests, Windows 7 Tips & Tricks covers many interesting Windows 7 tips that improve your productivity by familiarizing yourself with some of the enhancements that are new in Windows 7.

A total of 14 tips are waiting for you in this guide:
Change the scenery,
Crunch the numbers,
Smart printing,
Shake it up,
Clean your desktop and order it too with keyboard shortcut,
New right-click features,
Unveil your hidden drives,
Pin folders to start menu,
Double-up your Windows,
Clean,
Crisp display,
Order and reason for your taskbar,
Taskbar traversing,
Bitlocker to go protection, and
Windows troubleshooting platform.

Free Download Link

Secure FTP (SFTP), designed with automation in mind, so you do not have to spend time interactively transferring files. For Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and other Unix platforms.

Features:

Simple User Interface helps you transfer files interactively; but the Goal is to let you create advanced automated SFTP and FTP tasks. The tasks can be scheduled to run automatically, or can be run manually.

Automate Secure FTP to/from an intranet or internet server. Schedule FTP of files between your PC and the server, and automatically rename the files based on current month, day or time, if needed. Secure FTP supports wildcards (*). Transfer multiple files at once. Supports subdirectory transfers.

Scheduler software is easy to use, yet has very powerful scheduling, tasking and automation capabilities.

FTP Command task can run RFC FTP commands in sequence.

Email notification of task failure based on task exit code.

Remote FTP directory monitor can detect directory change and trigger the tasks, such as: FTP , zip, copy, delete. It can detect file size, total number of files, file modification dates and trigger other tasks, if required.

Local directory monitor works similar to the Remote FTP directory monitor.

Zip files and directories using wildcards on a schedule. Can append date/time to filename, for archive purposes.

Copy files and directories using wildcards on a schedule. Can append date/time to filename for archive purposes.

Delete files on a schedule based on wildcards.

Technical Information:
Support for both SSH protocols, SSH1 and SSH2
SFTP transfer protocols supported
Password, Public key authentication
3DES, DES & Blowfish ciphers
Optional Twofish, AES & CAST ciphers
Stateful decryption counter (SDCTR) mode cipher for AES
SHA1, MD5 Message Authentication Codes (MACS)
RSA, DSA public/private key file generation, in SSHTools, OpenSSH and SSH1 formats
Supports reading of PuTTY and SSH.com public/private keys
Public key subsystem
ZLIB compression
SSH2 custom channels
HTTP, SOCKS 4 and SOCKS 5 proxy support
diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1 Key Exchange

Download Link

1. Adobe Photoshop

When it comes to web design, graphic design, photo manipulation and many other things – Adobe Photoshop is the best tool.

2. Adobe Illustrator

From time to time, when I have to make some icons I use Adobe Illustrator. It has some great features and with the latest releases I can set the interface to look like Photoshop – which is very helpful.

3. Google Picasa

Although I’m not a Google fan, for graphic files management Google Picasa is the best free choice.

4. Microsoft Visio

For wireframing and flowcharts Microsoft Visio is the right tool. Of course that you can do it with a pen and a paper but this is an alternative.

5. Notepad++

I know that there are many users of Adobe Dreamweaver, but I’m not one of them. I prefer Notepad++. This open source application is the best code editor from my point of view. It has many features and additional plugins.

6. Intype

An alternative to Notepad++ is Intype. This editor is free and it has the best snippets bundled with the application. Great for productivity.

7. EasyPHP

EasyPHP is a complete package that includes an Apache server, a MySQL database, PHPMyAdmin as well as easy development tools for web sites and applications.

8. Firefox

This is my browser of choice, not only because it is fast and reliable, but because it has the best plugins.

9. Firebug

The first plugin for Firefox installed on my PC is Firebug. It is a powerful debugging tool for websites.

10. Web Developer Toolbar

Like Firebug, this is another debugging plugin for Firefox. It has additional features to Firebug and that is why I have both installed.

11. Opera

When you want to see the flaws your site has, Opera is the best tool. From my point Opera renders the site the right way.

12. Safari

Being one of the most popular browser Safari must be a first priority tool. You will want to test your site on Safari since it has around 8% or the browser market share.

13. Xenocode Browsers Sandbox

This tool is for testing purposes: it enables you to test your site on most important browsers without installing them.

14. W3C Validators

The HTML and CSS validators are very important because from time to time I check for my code compatibility with the standards.

15. CleanCSS

This is a site that optimizes and helps you compress your CSS code based on several options that you can select.

16. A List apart

Please tell me that you know this site. This is the foundation site for web designers.

1. Offending Comments

2. Internet Explorer 6
I’ve had my share of pain because of IE6 so I really hate it right now. And based on the latest reactions across the web, I’m sure I’m not the only one.

3. CSS Inconsistency
Even after 10 years – CSS 2 is not rendered the same way in browsers. This says something about the different directions that the major browsers had along the years.

4. Opera Marketing Team
Opera is a great browser but the marketing team assigned to assist Opera is far from creative, competitive or productive.

5. Same Template on Multiple Sites
A template is a starting point for a web site. It helps you get rid of the hard part. Today, templates are a final “starting point” which is why many pages look the same.

6. Lists Articles
I hate the articles that have no original content – just a description from Wikipedia, a link and an image. At least create the description yourself.

7. Plagiarism
Whenever a site gets famous, there are 20 designers ready to clone it. No further comment.

8. SPAM
According to spammers, web designers have a small penis, erection problems and the list can continue. We really have some problems.

9. Google Adsense
Although it is an important source of income for many blogs, those text ads are annoying as hell and they break the user experience on a web site.

Conclusion

In the end every domain has its drawbacks and advantages, but that doesn’t make me love Opera Marketing Team. Cheers!

1.  Google Code Search Lab

2. Black Duck Koders

3. Codase: Searching million lines of code

4. Code Fetch

5. Source Code Online

6. The Code Project

7. Byte My Code

8. Snipplr: public source code repository

9. Open Source: ankerl.com

10. OpenSolaris Project: OpenGrok

11. Delphi Search Engine

12. Java Examples in Open Source

13. Java Developer Kits: Searches the API documentation of the JDK

14. Krugle.com

15. Mero Base: Component Finder

16. gonzui: a source code search engine

17. DZone Snippets

1. Quantcast

Quantcast is one of the 3 major websites dedicated to website traffic and audience. Quantcast provides publishers, marketers and agencies unmatched capabilities to measure, organize, discover and transact based on directly-measured traffic and inferred audience data.

2. Compete

Compete is a site similar to Quantcast. Compete’s ranking is based on the stats of +2.000.000 US citizens – this means that Compete is not so accurate outside of US. Anyway – check out Compete for your ranking and compare your results with your competitors’.

3. Alexa

Alexa is one of the first ranking websites with advanced data regarding target population, country rank and others. The problem with these statistics is that they are provided based on Alexa Toolbar. Again, this fact makes Alexa’s data inaccurate.

4. BuiltWith

This tools is quite complex – it shows you various information about your site or any particular site (technologies used, seo) and it helps you optimize your site. Very useful when you don’t know much about SEO. It has a paid version as well that has a lot more tips and info.

5. Dataopedia

Dataopedia.com is a web service that provides comprehensive information (50 different sources) about websites available on the Internet.

6. BizShark

BizShark is a direct competitor to Dataopedia. Both sites share the same concept and have similar information. You will have to decide which one suits you.

7. Quarkbase

Quarkbase is another site that gathers its info from multiple sources, but here is their definition: Quarkbase is the best way to find website information contributed by website owner, lover and the Internet Community.

8. Website Grader

From my point, this is one of the most useful analysis site. It has a great composition of information: social, seo, general info. It even gives you hints and a grade – to compare and further optimize your site.

9. Popuri.us

This tools is a lightweight tool that gives you the most common ranks available on the web: Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, Compete Rank, Technorati Rank etc.

10. Feedcompare

This website is useful when you want to compare your number of feed subscribers with the number of subscribers. For this you must have a FeedBurner account.

11. XinuReturns

XinuReturns is a tool that shows you pretty much everything – Google Page Rank, Yahoo Links, FeedBurner subscribers,Technorati, DMOZ etc. It is perfect for a fast small popularity analysis.

There are other sites as well with interesting results, but I think these ones are the most important.