Users like me who have a Bandwidth Restriction need to find some way to save bandwidth. Until recently I used to do this by blocking Images and Flash on Firefox. And used to check for updates on blogs through feeds. But I was tired of browsing the Web imageless, so I had to find another way.

Now thanks to a Firefox extension called ImgLikeOpera, I can now load only the cached images in my Firefox browser. This helps me to save Bandwidth as well as see some of the images. This extension is also very useful for non broadband users to increase page load time of sites by loading only cached images.

Some of the features of ImgLikeOpera are

• placeholders for blocked images
• (re)load image from context menu or Ctrl+rightMouseClick
• forced expiration time (5 minutes - 3 months)
• policies for tabs
• filters

You can set one of these policies for each tab:

• don’t load images
• load cached images only
• load images for the originating Web site only
• load all images

ImgLikeOpera also allows you to block images with filters. This is one of the features that was missing in Firefox and available in Opera. Now Firefox fans too can enjoy it

Download ImgLikeOpera Firefox Extension

Around last week, Yahoo launched a new crawler called Yahoo! Slurp. They claim that Slurp is faster and more efficient and will have to visit your site less and will use less bandwidth when it does.

Now that a new crawler has been launched, you may see some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index and some changes in ranking as well.

So have you noticed any changes in the traffic coming to your blogs from Yahoo? If you have not, here’s a tip on how to increase your blogs traffic from Yahoo.

Also,

• Sign up for My MSN, and add your blog to your own “My MSN” account. This will get your blog included in MSN very quickly
• Sign up for Google Pages, and add some content (non spam) and link to your blog. This will get your blog included in Google very quickly

Technorati, the most popular blog search engine, has had a redesign on it’s 3rd Birthday. The new design uses 3 columns and has made major speed and accuracy improvements in core search.

Many new features has been added and I find that even Link counting is a lot more accurate now. Technorati had not updated the blog links to my site for many weeks and now it seems to have been updated after the redesign.

Some big changes has been made to the blog profiles, allowing you to get stats about any blog that Technorati tracks, including the tags used, posting frequency, traffic, and Technorati ranking. Today I was able to check out who all had added my blog to their favorites. Earlier only the the number of people were shown.

From the Technorati’s blog-

This is just a start - there’s more to come in the coming weeks and months, including better charts, more real-time spam detection and elimination, more real-time media indexing, microformats integration, and additional localization and language support.

My Thoughts

I liked the older design. This new design looks confusing, maybe I will get used to it. I think Technorati should Ajaxify their site like Yahoo has done.

Did you like the new design or prefer the old one?

You can now start sharing instant messages with your Windows Live (MSN) Messenger contacts on Yahoo! Messenger 8 Beta.

To do so sign out of Yahoo! Messenger and sign back in. Then just click the Add a Contact button on your main Yahoo! Messenger window to start inviting your Windows Live Messenger friends to join the fun.

Get Yahoo! Messenger 8 from here

Will you use services such as Trillian again?

It’s time to upgrade your Flash Player as the latest version 9 has been released today. Download the latest version from here

All of us have our own reasons for the need of a secure Online Storage. It may be due to the lack of hard disk space or because you want to share a large file with your friends or for just backing up your important files.

Some of the best Online Storage services are provided by Box.net and Gmail. Yes, Gmail with the help of a simple extension to Windows explorer called Gmail Drive Shell extension can be used for backing up your files with ease.

Continue reading ‘The best Online Storage Service’

The best BitTorrent client, µTorrent, just released it’s latest version. It has now much improved disk caching and other optimizations for faster download speed.

I immediately experienced it’s increased speed on a torrent that was being downloaded at a maximum speed of 15kB/s. Now with the same torrent and the latest version of µTorrent I get maximum speeds of 40kB/s

To increase your download speeds even more, check my µTorrent tutorial

All the Easter Eggs of version 1.5 still works in the latest release.

The screen resolution 800 x 600 pixels has signficantly decreased since July 2005. More and more internet users choose for screen resolution 1024 x 768 or higher. The finding has important implications for web site designers because most web sites are designed for a screen resolution of 800 x 600 pixels. 1280×1024 is #2 in the world.

According to my Google Analytics stats, most of the visitors here are also on 1024×768. Actually, I think it’s good news because I don’t think my current 3 column theme would display well on resolutions of 800×600 or below.

via OneStat

Maxpower has a nice listing of free icons for your website or application. Get them from here.

Here’s a screenshot

Will Langford has written a good article comparing the features of Opera 9 and Firefox 1.5.

My goal in this is to go into the features that Opera is showcasing and to see how well Firefox holds up

I still prefer Firefox, what about you?