Ravi’s Rants

1. Create a file called phpinfo.php




2. Enter these few lines of code in it: (you can copy-paste from below):
   
   <?php
phpinfo();
?>




3. Upload this to your root folder (where your home page (index.htm or index.html etc) lives.




4. Access this script via the browser like this:
   
   http://www.YourSite.com/phpinfo.php




5. You should see a nice page come up, with the PHP logo and headers, that shows all of your PHP configuration and settings. If you see it, then: Hurrah, you can run PHP on your site!




6. If you see some kind of errors, first try changing the file’s permissions (chmod) to 755. (CHMOD Tutorial)




7. If that still doesn’t work, then you’re probably SOL (S#!t Outta Luck). Confirm it with your web host.




8. If your web host doesn’t support PHP, don’t waste your time - or your web site - with your current host. Just switch to where I host my own sites.




9. WARNING: Don’t forget to delete the phpinfo.php file from your web site. Hackers can figure out a lot of stuff from this page!

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

“Bacn” - pronounced as “Bacon” - is spam (kind of), but not really the lewd, disgusting, “killing my inbox” type.

From Jargon Watch at Wired.com:

It’s not really spam. You want to read it (and probably would), you just don’t have the time. Thanks to the folks at PodCamp Pittsburgh, there’s a new web-term you can now use specifically for these types of e-mail notifications. Things like bill-payment receipts, Twitter requests, newsletters, project notifications—all are bacn.

Here’s more if you want more.

Camtasia is giving away a slightly older version of their famous screen-capture software, Snag-it, that lets you go beyond the “Prnt Scrn” button.

Here’s where you can download it.

A Print-Screen Tip
If you press the “Alt” + “Prt Scrn” buttons together, you will capture only the front-most (active) window - which means you no longer have to capture your entire screen along with pieces of your desktop and other windows open, just to get a screenshot of your browser window.

Also, it helps to reduce the size of the browser (or whatever window you’re trying to get a screen-shot of) first, and re-size it to a much smaller size before hitting “Alt” + “Prnt Scrn”. That way you won’t get a gigantic image when you’re just trying to capture just a small portion of the window.

This has been around for a while now, but its coming out of beta (a.k.a Google Labs) means that Google is serious enough to support this going forward.

Here’s how it works:

• Dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (800-4664-411)
• Say where you’re calling from - City, State or Zip
• Say what you’re looking for (Pizza delivery, from the video below)
• GOOG-411 connects you with the one you pick from the spoken list (or you can get it text msg’ed to your phone)

GOOG 411 - Totally free 411

In my book “No Business Like E-Business“, I write about the Google Supplemental Index (GSI - Ravi’s acronym). Basically, this is like the “alternate” Google database, where sites that are “on the way in” or “on the way out” show up.

If yours is a new site, it may show up in the GSI before it shows up in Google’s main index (google.com). Similarly, if your site has suddenly disappeared from the main index, you may find it here (before it disappears from everywhere on Google - which means your site probably violated their webmaster guidelines, and has gotten banned by the Almight G!).

Here’s more information from Google Webmaster Central about the Supplemental Index.

And don’t forget to subscribe to the feed while you’re there.

The whole idea of podcasting is not to be just able to publish your audio files online, but to make your audio posts “subscribable” - i.e., your listeners should be able to set up their podcasting software (like iTunes) to subscribe to your feed, in which case the software (in this example, iTunes) will automatically download your newest posts to their hard disk, as soon (or soon after) you make your posts live.

Which means, when they next sync up their mp3 player (say, iPod), your newest audio posts will automatically be synced from your subscriber’s hard disk to their iPod.

That’s the real “subscription” model of podcasting.

So how to make your WordPress feed refer to your podcast? Simple:

1. Create your audio file (mp3, mp4, etc)
2. Upload it to your server (into a folder in your main directory, say “podcasts”)
3. Your post can have your usual text content, but make sure your post has a link to the actual audio file. Note: It has to be the full path.

   Wrong: <a href=”yourfile.mp3“>My podcast</a>
Right: <a href=”http://Example.com/podcasts/aug2007-vol1.mp3“>My podcast

4. WordPress automatically links your feed to your audio file, such that if someone were to view your blog posts in a feed reader, and clicked on the link for your audio post, then they won’t be led to your blog, but the audio file will start playing instead.
5. Once your listeners “subscribe” to your feed, their podcasting software automatically downloads new files (posts with your audio file in it) to their hard disk automatically.

WordPress is not perfect - not just yet. But there really isn’t any software out there that can do all it does: well written, open-source, extensible, has lots of plugins, and has a great community around it - like WordPress.

So, just make peace with the “comparison war” (which is better: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc), simply download WordPress (or sign up for a free blog online), and get going with your content.

Content is what makes money - not your blog software.

You know what is Blog-And-Ping. Blog-And-Bookmark is quite similar.

You first blog about something (hopefully) interesting, then once your blog’s ping service has done its work on the back-end pinging all of the various web sites and your post is live, then you go to work as follows.

Use a one-to-many social bookmarking tool like AddMe.com or Socializer. I use AddMe on my blog itself, but use Socializer when I am actively bookmarking my own posts. Also check out the one-form-many-bookmarks site OnlyWire.com.

Add a bookmark to your post at all leading sites starting with StumbleUpon.com, Digg.com, Reddit.com and Netscape.com. You should do it manually for these sites, and use OnlyWire.com for automated submission to the rest of the sites.

I highlight StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and Netscape here, because those are the ones that send about 95% of the social bookmarking traffic that my blog gets. The rest of them add up to only about 5%, but pursuing them is still worth it due to the number of back-links (incoming links) you will get.

See the Feedburner statistics (screenshot) below for RavisRants.com.

Note the spike in traffic every time I do blog-and-bookmark myself. It not only brings in a fresh supply of visitors, but also increases my number of average subscribers (Feedburner only reports that number for one given day, as the number can vary from day to day). This is not only a great way to get first time visitors, but also to get some new feed subscribers.

So, don’t forget to blog-and-ping, tag-and-ping, and blog-and-bookmark every single time you post.

I save about 1/2 hour every week on grocery shopping thanks to this list. That’s 26 hours a year. Assuming I would have done this for at least 40 years of my life by the time I’m dead, that means 1040 hours saved (26 * 40).

1040 Hours = 43.33 Days

Yes, I get (at least) an extra 43 days of my life back because I used a simple, grocery list.

Can you imagine how much more you and I could save if we got just a little bit more organized in stuff we do every day (or week)?

Click here to download and customize the original excel spreadsheet that I use.

Take a copy of it and stick in on your refrigerator. Every time you run out of something, or if you are expecting guests and need more of something, just quickly jot it down. Yes, it is more productive than just writing down a plain list on a erasable board.

- Ravi Jayagopal

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

Everytime I come across a cool Firefox plug-in, I want to install it and use it right away.

This is even more true when I want to perform a task (like, say, grab the color code of a cool looking color from a web site), then search if a Firefox plugin exists to do that, find one, and then install it.

I almost always have at least 10 different browser windows open, with many of them having more than one active tab. So, unless I close all open browser windows (and tabs), and re-open Firefox again, I can’t get to use my newly installed plug-in.

So, here’s a cool trick that I came up with, that you can use to install a plug-in, and still get back to where you were, without losing track of the sites that you had open.

• Do just one of the following to get to the Task Manager:
  

  Press “Ctrl + Shift + Esc” to get the “Task Manager”
  - OR -
  Do a right-click on your task bar, and select “Task Manager”
  - OR -
  Press “Ctrl + Alt + Delete” and then select “Task Manager”

• From the “Process” tab, select “Firefox” (just click on any item first, and then keep pressing the “F” key till you get to “Firefox”
• Click on “End Process”, which will immediately and forcefully close all open Firefox tabs and windows, but worry not.
• Launch Firefox now and you will be asked if you want to restore the “crashed” session (see image below)
  
• Click on the “Restore Session” button
• Gwala - all previously open Firefox tabs and windows will re-open one by one (you may have to log back into some sites that don’t use sessions to remember your login)

So, you can now use your newly installed Firefox plug-in, and you also didn’t lose any open windows.

Enjoy.

- Ravi Jayagopal / LinkOverLoad.com

GrimThing has this interesting post that makes a practical comparison of Gimp and Photoshop.

Summary:
For businesses: Photoshop rules!

For home use: Don’t pirate Photoshop, and use Gimp instead, which can do all the basic stuff you need to do anyway.

Personally, I’ve used both Gimp and Photoshop, but primarily use Fireworks just because I’ve been using it for many years and am very familiar with the interface.

After Adobe bought Macromedia, they now own two of the most popular commercial image editors, Photoshop and Fireworks. Would be interesting to see what is the roadmap for these two quite-similar products. With Photoshop probably being the bigger brand, I suspect they just might fold ol’ Fireworks into Photoshop.

Go on to Gimp vs. Photoshop

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