Ravi’s Rants

I was recently in the market for an “e” fax solution. I looked at quite a few services. My basic requirements were these:

• Reliable
• Low cost (not necessarily free - because I wanted the service to be reliable and accountable)
• Didn’t need a local area code - anywhere was fine, as I don’t receive too many faxes
• Offer a free trial - so that I can experience it first-hand
• Offer a decent number of incoming pages in the package
• Offer a low-cost pay-as-you-go model for additional use

• After hunting around the web, looking up various forums and wasting time on made-for-adsense spam and junk-review sites, I stumbled across MaxEmail.com.

  You can get your incoming faxes sent to your email address as a PDF attachment.

  I went through their 1-month free trial, was highly satisfied with the quality of their service, and just now signed up for a whole year at $24/year (their “lite” plan).

  If you are looking for something similar, go check out MaxEmail.com

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.

I’ve thought about selling my RSS Feed Publishing Script for a long time.

And then one day, I just decided to give it away.

All I want is for you to try out my free newsletter. You can leave any time. No questions asked. And you will never hear from me again.

Your permission to send you really good stuff (I think - You decide) is not asking for too much, is it?

My FeedMonster script will allow you to publish any RSS or XML feed from any web site - even my own blog feed from RavisRants.com - on any page of your web site. It takes under 2 minutes to install and set up. Publish either one feed on a page, or multiple blog feeds from multiple sources on a page.

Go here to subscribe and download the FeedMonster and 14+ other PHP scripts.

Once you download and install my scripts, don’t hesitate to send me your feedback.

If you’ve used a computer long enough, you probably have tens of little icons in your system tray (next to your system clock), that are an indication of all the apps that are currently running. Many of them may be programs that automatically add themselves to the startup process, or may simply be applications that you no longer actively use and may not need them to launch during startup any more.

It used to be easy to delete these apps simply by deleting their shortcuts from the “Startup” folder, but not all apps create a shortcut there, and many directly modify your Windows registry and add themselves to it.

So, if you want to remove programs that launch during startup (when you re-start your computer), here’s a handly little app called “StartupRun” that I use myself.

- Ravi Jayagopal / LinkOverLoad.com

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