Basically, a user can click on an image to either have the image – or a video – magnified in a Lightbox window. It is usually accompanied by the use of a dark background, usually a dimming of the page over which the image or video has been overlaid, which helps highlight the image or video being displayed.

For example, click on the image below, and see what happens.

And you can see it in action, on a real, live web site, at the home page of http://DigitalAccessPass.com

This Lightbox script is available for free. It is actually open-source, and released under the MIT license – which means you can also use it in commercial projects.

I use Amazon S3 to host my business videos.

S3 offers incredible performance, unlimited storage, and is extremely affordable. Another Purple Cow from Amazon.

Plus it looks a lot more professional than hosting your business videos on a crowded social video site with user generated videos and ads surrounding it.

• Amazon S3 for video hosting.
• Camtasia / Jing (both from the same folks) for screen capture.
• S3 Fox Free FireFox plugin to upload videos to your Amazon S3 account.
• FlowPlayer free flv player (flowplayer.org) to play the videos.

And I’m done!

Check out some videos I have hosted on S3.

You probably know about my book, “No Business Like E-Business”, that sells on Amazon.

I have also developed this really powerful Membership Software, whose primary “Claim to Fame” is that it can “drip” content little by little on a list, much like an email autoresponder drips emails.

So, I had this rather brilliant idea and thought to myself, why not just break-down the book into blog posts and just give them all away for free – and at the same time, give you a small taste of how powerful my membership software really is, as you see how it drips content on you “post by post”.

So each time you visit the blog, you’ll see more content available to you (which is why I call it the “disappearing blog”

Two balloons with one shot (yeah, being a parent makes you move away from violence, throwing stones and hurting birds. Balloons are still ok though

So hurry up and get my favorite book for free before I change my mind…

Until last night, I thought I was quite tech-savvy and very up-to-date with the latest and greatest in the web world. But I guess I was wrong

I started on a (brief) quest last month to add live-chat to some of my sites. After looking around, I couldn’t find a decent free solution. Of course, I always pay money gladly if I can’t find a free solution or find that a paid solution will solve my problem. And my search ended concluding LivePerson as the best option.

But then of course, my primary project took precedence, and I forgot all about it (eADD anyone?).

Recently, I picked up the thread again, and stumbled upon Yahoo Pingbox. It seemed very cool – simply add a piece of code (the gadget) to your web site, sign in to Yahoo Messenger as usual, and your visitors to the page with the gadget can chat with you, and you’ll get the messages in your YIM client. And the best part is, Yahoo notifies you every time someone arrives at the web page, even if they don’t initiate chat.

So, I tried it, but the gadget on my site always showed me as “Offline” even though I was online.

After a lot of searching, forum-posting and soul-seeking(!), I finally gave up on Yahoo’s Pingbox. But it was this search that led me to Google’s own Chatback solution.

It is rather surprising that Google and Yahoo would offer such services and do absolutely no marketing whatsoever.

And the irony is that even if you Googled for “google chat gadget” or something similar, you would probably still not find the link I’m about to share with you, as Google seems to have hidden their own service quite successfully from site owners like you and me – who can really use something like this!

Here’s a live example (you’ll see a live ‘clickable’ link if I’m ‘available’)…

When you add a Google Chatback Gadget to your site…

1. Visitors can chat with you anonymously, but you get all the instant messages in GoogleTalk or within the browser if you’re just chatting from within Gmail.

2. Your visitors won’t know what is your gmail id – so you don’t have to worry about spam.

3. Whatever status you set in Google chat, that’s the status your web site visitors will see too.

4. You can add the same widget to any number of web sites/pages.

Here’s how you add the Google Chatback Gadget to your site:

A. Go to http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New .
B. Log in to your Google account
C. Customize the Gadget style
D. Copy the code to your web sites/pages.
E. Sit back and wait for your visitors to start messaging you! Done!

So, spent 3 days and couldn’t get Yahoo Pingbox to work. Spent 10 seconds and got Google Chatback to work.

There, I just saved you a few hundred dollars

Quite frequently, I am reminded of how we take certain things for granted, while it could be something completely new/interesting/educating/shocking for someone else.

Using Google Alerts for competitive research is one such “thing”. During a chat with a friend the other day, I casually mentioned how I use Google Alerts to keep an eye on my industry, and it completely blew him away, while I’d actually been doing this for as long as Google Alerts have existed (and before that News.com alerts).

So, for what it’s worth, here goes:

I use Google Alerts to set up specific alerts for specific keywords.

When Google first finds any new or existing content (blog posts, web pages, forum discussions, etc) anywhere on the web that it hasn’t indexed before, that contains these keywords, Google sends me an email with a link to this newly-found content.

And if a publisher has password-protected their content, but still allowed Google to index it (using the “password-protected content” sitemaps feature), then Google emails me a little blurb of that password-protected content!

So, basically I have set up tens of alerts, the first one (vanity “alert” ahead – quite literally! being my own name (“Ravi Jayagopal”). That way, I always know the instant (or within a few days at worst), if anyone is blogging/writing about me or my products.

Here are some of the alerts you could create:
1. Your full name
2. For all your product names
3. All your web site urls
4. Each and every one of your competitors’ names
5. All of your partners’ names
6. Name of any industry expert (or their web site url) whose blog/site you follow (like I have one for “Seth Godin”
7. The name or category of your industry: For eg., right now I’m a month away from launching a very powerful “Access Management” software to manage subscription-based web sites. So, some of my alerts include the keywords “subscription”, “content”, “download”, “security”, etc. Yes, I do get some false positives, but who cares!

The kind of stuff Google finds on a daily basis thanks to these alerts, not only help me keep a tab on myself, my customers, my competitors, and my idols, but it also gives me a lot of new ideas, new features for my products, and great new ways in which I can make my product remarkable!

So go create your alerts today.

[UPDATE: This script was free for a LONG time. Apparently, at some point, they made it not-free. FYI.]

At my MyWebmasterInABox.com site, I used to run a forum powered by phpBB. But phpBB turned out to be one of the most poorly designed, least secure, web-based applications I have ever used.

So, for the longest time, I had no forum software, and no official support system.

But recently, after a number of my customers had issues with sending/receiving emails to/from me, I embarked on a (rather brief) quest to find a good PHP application, and stumbled upon a brilliant, free, ticketing and customer support application called Maian Support.

I’ve installed it on my own site now at http://www.MyWebmasterInABox.com/support/.

Going forward, if you need support for any of my scripts, go here to enter a ticket.

And to download a copy of the application that powers this, go to Maian Support.

If you know what a “blog” is, you probably already know what a “RSS Feed” is.

One of the best (not to forget, cheapest and fastest) ways to get free content for your web site, is to display a third-party RSS Feed. Every time the feed’s content changes, content on your web site automatically changes, thus keeping the content fresh and ever-changing on your site.

This trick can be used for both legit and illegitimate purposes. Sploggers (those who create Splogs – “SPam-filled bLOGS”) often use it to generate thousands of “made for adsense” pages, whose primary intention is to increase PageRank, get ranked higher for highly competitive and high paying keywords, get people to visit their splogs, and manipulating the navigation that they end up leaving by clicking on AdSense (or other PPC) ads.

But if you use it for legitimate purposes, you will find that publishing RSS feeds on your site can be a great way to provide targeted, complementary content for your visitors.

Magpie RSS is a great open-source PHP script that will allow you to easily publish any third-party RSS feed on your site. I have personally tried many RSS scripts, and highly recommend Magpie. I have even used Magpie to create a pretty cool web-based feed-aggregator service, a la Google Reader and Google Personalized home page.

If you want a quick and customizable free script that is based on Magpie, and gives you sample scripts that show you how to publish one, two or more feeds on a page on your web site, go get my Free RSS Feed Publishing script, “FeedMonster”.

- Ravi Jayagopal