Naveen’s Blog

If you are using Wordpress for your blog, you might have already come across the name “Kaushal Sheth” when searching for free Wordpress templates. Have you noticed the recent theme, Tick Tock Green, from him? I like it and looks very nice. You can also hire him if you need a custom theme.

I have com across a recent post by him on web hosting and seen that KS has rated Host Monster, Host Gator, and Yahoo Host as the best hosts. I have never used these web hosts. I have been using Dream Host for the last two-and-a-half years and I am happy with their service. I think one cannot expect 100% uptime from a shared hosting seller and I see 1-10 mins downtime with Dream Host once in a quarter or so. I see that lot of hosting companies guaranteeing 99.5% to 99.9% uptime and never 100%.

If you are using above hosts, just let me know how they are working for you and have you noticed any downtime with them. Already KS has given #1 rating to Host Monster.

written by Naveen

Today, I am going to share my favorite “bookmarked” Wordpress themes that look like CMS/Magazine. I wanted to make a post with all my favorite themes and came with this post.

My favorite theme maker is Justin. He has more number of magazine-style themes to his credit than any other theme maker and I often visit his blog to see if he has released any new. He is so kind and releases premium Wordpress themes for free.

If somebody asks me to select the top one from my list, I would select Mimbo by Darren. He also has a list of good tutorials to customize the Wordpress.

1. Mimbo by Darren Hoyt | Demo | Theme Info & Download

2. Options by Justin Tadlock | Demo | Theme Info & Download

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written by Naveen

Here is a list of bookmarking sites with high pagerank, which I got at DigitalPoint forums. Submitting your site link to these sites can give you boost in your pagerank in next Google’s pagerank update.

http://www.furl.net/ - Another PR 8 bookmarking site also free
http://www.backflip.com/dir_start.ihtml - PR 7 book marking site
http://www.blinklist.com/ - PR 5 book marking and its free
http://www.blogmemes.net/ - PR 5 and it’s free
http://jots.com/- PR 6 a directory like bookmarking service and it’s free
http://www.linkroll.com/ - PR 6
http://www.looklater.com/ - PR 5
http://ma.gnolia.com/ - PR 5
http://www.maple.nu/ - PR 4
http://www.markaboo.com/ - PR 3
http://www.rawsugar.com/search/ - PR 6
http://www.shadows.com/ - PR 7
http://simpy.com/ - PR 4
http://www.spurl.net/ - PR 6
http://wink.com/ - PR 6
http://www.stumbleupon.com/ - A PR 7 bookmarking service with good reputation
http://www.kaboodle.com/ - PR 7 nice bookmarking site
http://www.clipmarks.com/ - PR 4

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written by Naveen

These days, I have been experimenting with making money from Internet and found success with few. So, I will let you know one by one. Already, I have posted one offer - Ziddu.

This post is about making money from your blog. Recently, I have tried Smorty, a new blog advertising service, which pays for reviewing the products/services/websites of advertisers. Smorty paid within a week after I wrote a review.

What are the requirements?
If you have an active three months or older blog and it is indexed in Google and Yahoo, you can sign-up with Smorty. Once you are approved, you can log into your account and accept the offers from a list of offers available. They will also mail you whenever new campaigns are added. Being a PR4 blog with an Alexa Rank of 15L, I have got offers up to $16.

How much I can make?
The minimum pay per review is $6 and if you have a good Smorty score, you can get offers up to $100 per post. Smorty score will be calculated based on numerous factors like Google PR, Alexa rank, number of completed reviews, and approval/decline ratio of completed tasks. Smorty pays only through PayPal at this time, so you will need to have one to get the payment.

Smorty is one of the best services to get paid for blogging. I highly recommend it.

Read the program FAQs and Rules before signing up.

written by Naveen

Ziddu is a new and rapid growing file sharing site, which pays you to share upload and share files. With its decent interface and great features, soon it will become competitor for other file sharing sites. Some of the features that attracted me are:

• No obtrusive ads
• Clean and intuitive user interface
• Parallel downloads with no waiting tickets
• Ability to create photo albums, audio and video libraries
• Decent speed.  You can check it by downloading sample files: Regseeker (0.5 MB) | Wallpaper (1.6 MB)

Ziddu pays $1 for every 1000 downloads. In some forums, I have seen that files are downloaded more than 20k times due to its huge user base. So, they can easily earn $20 per file. Once you reach the minimum payout of $10, you will be paid through Paypal.

It is great to know that Ziddu has been developed by the Hyderabad-based Northgate Technologies.

So, today onwards share files only on Ziddu – Upload, share, and earn.

written by Naveen

This week I have updated my Real Player to the latest Real Player v.11 and I am very impressed with it’s glossy look and amazing features. One of the interesting features is downloading the streaming videos on the web with one click.

In my previous posts, I explained about various tricks to download videos from YouTube, LiveLeak etc using Greasemonkey scripts. You might have also seen that there are lot of sites that help you to download the streaming videos into your system.

Now forget about all these tricks and sites, and install Real Player Version 11, which is available on the Real Player’s website here (Free Version). Get it, install it, and restart your system. Now, whenever you mouse over on a streaming content, you will see a link to download it with Real Player download manager. Without installing any script or software, now you can download videos from MySpace, Metacafe, Blip.tv, YouTube, Google Video, and almost all video streaming websites.

It has inbuilt download manager that shows you the progress of downloading and also lets you pause and resume the downloads.

written by Naveen

Computers have become part of our daily lives and now you can see a computer in almost all households. Not everyone is expert to handle the computer problems on their own and once it starts giving problems, we become mad. Someone calls his IT friend and some one rushes through newspaper classifieds to see if any computer service at home is available.

Here comes BT Home IT Support, expert IT support for common problems like software and hardware installation, transferring data, monitor and printer problems, installing game consoles, and more. They even help you on sharing your photos with your relatives, creating emails, and know about the Internet lingo like what blogs and podcasts are. They also have home visit service where their engineers come to your home for computer repair and setting the things up and working.

Support is available over the phone at a cost of £9.99 a month and if you are ordering a 12-month subscription, it will cost £8.99 a month. Home visits cost starts from £60 per visit. You can find the various services and costs here.

Find more about BT Home IT Support here: http://www.bt.com/homeitsupport. There you can see a list of common issues and also watch the video of their team in action and assess the quality.

written by Naveen

I was recently searching for the codec to play a movie that is in Matroska (.mkv) format. I found one that makes it possible to view the .mkv file. I installed it, but it did not work for me. I might have installed it wrong or it does not support the latest Windows Media Player. Suddenly, VLC Player came into my mind and within few clicks, I landed onto the features list and thank god, VLC plays the .mkv files.

What is VLC?
VLC Player is an open source cross-platform media player, which supports “n” number of audio and video formats. No need to download any codec. Just install it and it starts playing almost all except .rm (Real Media) files. Website states that VLC will support Real Media files in the next version, 0.9.0.

Another good thing about VLC is support for skins. With the use of skins, you can make VLC look like your Media Player 11 or old light blue Media Player just by adding respective skins to the skins’ folder in VLC’s installation folder. Browse the skins repository for a good number of interesting and nice skins.

It is an open source application and you are free to download, use and redistribute. It is currently available for Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora, SUSE, Red Hat, Slackware, and many more.

VLC’s Homepage | VLC Skins | Supported video and audio list

written by Naveen