Those of you who use Windows Vista may have noticed that the clock in your system tray displays time in the 24 hour format by default. If you prefer 12 hour format and is confused on how to do it, follow these steps:

1. Click the Start button
2. Click the Control Panel and then double-click Regional and Language Options if you are using Control Panel in Classic View OR click Clock, Language, and Region and then click Regional and Language Options
3. Click Customize this format
4. On the Time tab, Change Time format to hh:mm:ss tt

Note: Change Time format to HH:mm:ss to switch back to 24-hour clock format.

This may sound simple, but believe me I never found the option to switch to 12 hour format until I googled and found this page.

A regular reader of this blog, Shivaranjan, asked me earlier today on how to optimize images to speed up his site. I decided to write a post on it as I feel there are many people who do not know on how to reduce their image size and as a result slow down their site.

Images are one of the reasons behind a slow loading site and hence is necessary to optimize them before you place them on your site or blog. Photoshop includes a feature called ‘Save for Web’ which you can use to reduce the image size.

If you do not have Photoshop, you can use other image editing softwares that have a similar feature to the ’save for web’ that Photoshop provides or you can also use an online image optimizer.

Continue reading ‘How To Optimize Images To Speed Up Your Site’

Alexa Rank is measured by the level of traffic your web site receives from the number of people who visit with the Alexa toolbar installed. It is important for you to increase your Alexa rank because advertisers and advertising services like Text Link Ads and ReviewMe use your site’s Alexa rank as a way to determine the worth of a link on your web site.

You can sell links on your site at a high price if you have a high Alexa Rank, so it is important to increase your Alexa Rank.

Continue reading ‘How To Increase Alexa Rank’

I have mentioned earlier on how to download YouTube Videos and save them on your computer inorder to view the videos offline. The videos are saved in a .flv extension that can be played with a FLV player.

What if you want to rip audio from YouTube videos? Or want to covert any FLV file to AVI,MOV,MP4 or MP3 format?

Continue reading ‘How To Extract Audio From YouTube Videos’

You might have noticed that you get most of your comment spam on older posts, this is because spammers target older posts as they are indexed by search engines. So it might be a good idea to automatically disable comments on older posts (posts that are 21 or more days old). This tip will be useful to you currently as Akismet is down.

For WordPress users, there is a plugin called Auto-Close Comments that will automatically disable comments after 21 days.

I just installed the plugin and I haven’t got any spam ever since even though Akismet is down

To install the plugin, go here and simply copy the plugin code provided there and paste it to your favorite text editor and save the file as autoshutoff.php. Now upload the file to your plugins folder and activate the plugin.

Continue reading ‘How To Prevent Comment Spam’

Did you know that you could find the definition of a word using Google? Here’s how you do it - if you would like to find the meaning of a word say ‘blogging’ you could search for define: blogging and Google will show you the definitions of blogging on the Web.

The information is shown from a variety of dictionary related Web sites such as Wikipedia.org, and there’s a link to the full entry for each Web site. Google also provides links to related searches, such as “blogging engine” in this example.

I had learned this trick from a friend but you can find this on About.com.

Update: Other Google Web Search Features can be found here

Ever wanted to download your favorite videos from YouTube but failed to do so? Here’s how you can do it the easy way:

• first find the URL of your favorite YouTube video
• then go to VideoDownloadX.com and paste the video URL into their download box
• now click ‘Download’ and it will open a new page with the download link

Firefox fans can use the Video Downloader extension that allows you to download videos to your computer from YouTube and most video sites.

Also check out the amazing collection of YouTube Tools by QuickOnlineTips.

You may also be interested in:

• How To View Deleted YouTube Videos
• YouTube Downloader
• How To Extract Audio From YouTube Videos
• How To Place YouTube Videos on WordPress Blogs
• How To Load YouTube Videos Faster

I was wondering whether this was possible and a quick Google search cleared my doubt. StumbleUpon allows you to easily import all your Del.icio.us tags into it with just a few steps:

• Visit your del.icio.us XML page and then select File>Save Page As from your browser menu
• Now go to this page and select your xml file
• Now click ‘Click here to Import’ to finish

My del.icio.us page mostly includes my favorite posts of this blog and this tip made it easy for me to link to all those pages in StumbleUpon

By the way, this is My StumbleUpon Page. Please add me as your SU friend

Many Bloggers these days want to get their blog posts to the frontpage of Digg so that they can increase their traffic and popularity of their blogs. Some are ready to go almost any extent to get diggs such as making fake usernames and asking friends to digg for them.

Yesterday, I had a chat with one of the Top 10 Digg users and he shared a few tips with me. If you really want to get on digg frontpage, here is how you do it…

Continue reading ‘Tips from a Top 10 Digg user on how to get to the Frontpage’

Last time I had showed you how to add Related Posts to your Feed. Now, I will help you show the Most Popular posts of your blog in your Feed too.

Note: This hack is for WordPress users only.

The main advantages of this hack is that it increases your blog’s pageviews and gets your RSS subscribers to visit your blog instead of just reading your latest posts from your feed.

Instructions

• Download and activate the Popularity Contest WordPress Plugin
• Download the wp-rss2.php from here
• Unzip the downloaded file
• Upload and replace your wp-rss2.php

Now within sometime you shall get both Most Popular Posts and Related Posts displayed on your Feed!

Note: You should deactivate Feedburner Summary Burner (if you have it activated) for this to work.