Adding an image in a post not only makes it more attractive but users tend to read posts with images as well. To me image is as important as a good title because both can lead to visitors reading the rest of the blog. Problem with Images is that they can reduce the load time of your blog making it less appealing to people with slow connections and people browsing through mobile devices. With new technologies introduced everyday more and more people are browsing the web through mobile devices so its always a good idea to keep your blogs load time at an acceptable level.

How to Maximize ?

• Try to save your images in a low file size format , for example saving as JPG is much better than saving as a bmp.
• Use online tools to optimize the image , This free tool might come in handy.
• You can also insert the image as a thumbnail, but this should be done according to the situation and always add a note saying click to enlarge with it , not all your visitors are internet savvy people.

Things to avoid

• When saving the image in another format be mindful about the quality of the image , your fast loading image is worthless if readers cant view it properly.
• Adding irrelevant images for the sake of adding images

Conclusion

Adding images can improve the quality and the attractiveness of your post , but you should be mindful of the load time of your blog because researches have shown that 1/3 of visitors leave a blog if it takes around 6-8 seconds to load. If you know of any other method or internet tool that can optimize your images feel free to share them in the comments.

Here’s 22 such sites that I have been using (PR in brackets):

UPDATED 6th April 2008

1. Backflip
2. Bibsonomy
3. LinkaGoGo
4. Mister-Wong
5. Spurl
6. Buddy Marks (5)
7. MyLinkVault (5)
8. SpotBack (5)
9. A1 Webmarks (4)
10. ClipClip (4)
11. Connectedy (4)
12. OYAX (4)
13. MyVmarks (4)
14. TeDigo (4)
15. Complore (3)
16. ez4u (3)
17. Info4It (3)
18. MyPIP (3)
19. Space-Ed (3)
20. SyncOne (3)
21. Yattle (2)
22. Upchuckr (0)

Why Use Social Bookmarking?

Every time you add a bookmark to one of your pages in one of these sites you create a backlink. If you bookmark every piece of content you create in all of these sites you can build a lot backlinks over time. I talked about social bookmarking in an earlier post and discussed how it differs to news submission, which I do not do for my niche sites.

For the purposes of backlinks, you want to make sure that the bookmarking sites provide a real, do-follow link. This rules out the biggest of the bunch - Delicious as it is no-follow. I found lots of big no-follow sites and I also found several that don’t provide real backlinks - they use their own form of dynamic link which does not count as a backlink.

One other thing to be aware of is that even though these are your personal bookmarks, you need to ensure that they are public - that way other people (Google really) can find them. But be careful, some bookmarking sites such as Connotea have a specific niche and probably wont appreciate your toenail clipping bookmarks.
Some Notable Additions

There are some bookmarking sites that are either nofollow or they use a dynamic link structure. However, even a nofollow link can be valuable to some extent because Google is not the only search engine and there is also the issue of human readers. In the case of particularly big sites such as Delicious, those bookmarks often get copied to many other places so one nofollow link in delicious could actually result in about a dozen links elsewhere though this tends to happen only with popular links.

In the next section of this post I point you towards several services that allow you to bookmark at many sites all in one go. Under these circumstances adding your links to a few extra sites can take just a few seconds more so for that reason I have also listed below a few extra bookmarking sites that don’t offer real dofollow backlinks but are very high profile and worth using under those circumstances:

1. Delicious (8)
2. Furl (8)
3. Blinklist (7)
4. Folkd (7)
5. NetVous
6. Simpy

Source : www.caroline-middlebrook.com

Errr… If you don’t have any Wordpress blog installed on your host and you want to start blogging, you should get it now. Most of hosting companies nowaday provides a fantastic "Fantastico Installer" that will guide you through installation process without even touching the source code and that damn-complicated-for-beginner mySQL database.

One more assumption is that the wordpress you have is at least version 2.5.1 because there’s some difference in the administration menu with the old version. Currently I am using the 2.6 version (the latest one when I’m writing this post). Try to always upgrade your WP installation, because there will be always nifty changes and feature in it.

1. Logging in to your account

Of course it’s the most crucial things to do. How can you manage the blog without logging in?

Click the "Log in" or similiar link in your blog homepage (usually under the ‘meta’ sidebar) or just type at address bar http://yourblog.com/wp-admin, it will redirect you to WP dashboard if you haven’t logged in.

2. Changing your password

Now, you have a wordpress installed and you have logged in. Now the first thing to do is changing your password. This step is essential only if you installed WP by yourself (upload and install it I mean). Because the first password you get is merely random characters and almost impossible to remember. If you lost that password, you must reinstall the database. Isn’t it hurts?

Navigate to "User" tab in the dashboard and try to make some change if needed. You may also create the new user with administrator rights to replace that ugly "admin" username.

3. Configuring basic settings of your blog

Navigate to "Settings" tab in the dashboard and change some options in the sub-tabs.

I will only explain the important settings to change here.

General > Blog Title : The title of your blog, this one will appear in the browser title bar and blog header. However, the title bar texts can be overwritten by some plugin like All in One SEO Pack.

General > Tagline : It’s the tagline of your blog. Put some description of your blog here. On most themes tagline will be placed under the blog title in the header.

Writing > Size of post box : If you have 1024×768 or larger monitor resolution try to change the value to 15 or more. It will help you when typing in the post box because the default is just too small and maybe optimized to 800×600 res.

Formatting > Convert Emoticon : It’s must be turned on. You must know why

Discussion > Email me whenever : Change to decide wether you get notfication email from the blog or not.

Discussion > Before a comment appears : Change the moderation rule for your blog commenting system.

Privacy > Blog visibility : Changes only if you think it’s right

Permalinks > Common settings : "Month and name" is the best permalink format. It’s both reader and SEO friendly.

Miscellaneous > Organize my uploads into month and year based folders : I prefer to turn this option off. Except your blog contains some photo journal.

4. Changing your theme

The default Kubric theme is nice, but it’s not unique! I wan’t to get my blog as unique as possible. Start it by changing your themes now. There are so many free WP themes in the net. If you want even more unique themes, you can hire someone to make you one or buy a premium themes (of course it’s not free). The easiset place to get the free one is from the official WP themes collection.

The default installation of WP only provide you with 2 default themes, unless your hosting company gives you some additional themes. But, most of them are not free.

You must upload your theme files to http://yourblog.com/wp-content/themes either by FTP or your cpanel file manager. The other method is with a theme uploader plugin. I will explain you how to use FTP client in another post.

Changes your desired theme in "Design > Themes" subtab.

5. Managing your sidebar widget

Unless your theme is not "widget-ready", you may want to change your sidebar.

The number of sidebar is different for each themes. e.g. 3-columns themes may have two sidebar, but 2-columns only have one. You can arrange your widget via drag and drop system, click the add button to add it to the widget list.

Recent Post & Recent Comments : Self explanatory. Very important to include.

Search : Unless your theme is not including the search bar in the header, add it. The best position is on the top.

Categories : Show the categories of your posts. I recommend you check the "show hierarchy" checkbox to keep it organized.

Meta : Put it to your sidebar for easier access to the dashboard.

RSS : You use it to put a link to another blog via RSS here. I will show the latest posts of selected feed.

6. Managing plugins

Plugins is something to give your blog more functionality by installing it. You can upload the plugin files to http://yourblog.com/wp-content/plugins. Still, the easisest place to find one is at official WP plugins site.

Activate or deactivate your plugins via "plugins" tab. From the 2.6 version, WP has a feature to mass (de)activate your plugins.

You can read my another post about plugin recommendations to install on your wp. Tune up the settings after you activate certain plugins. Some of them need further configurations to work correctly. Refer to the plugins documentation to get more information on how to make it work.

7. Managing categories

Before starting to make a post, plan your categories well. Click on Manage > Categories subtab to manage them.

A nice way to organize categories is to make them structured. Use the parent category option to make it.

8. Starting to post

You have made well preparation. At least you have done the top to-do-list. Now, it’s time to make a new post. I will tell you how to get posting idea later in the next post.

Regards,

Strife Leonhart

Okay, let’s go straight to the first step.

1. Prepare your image file with jpg extention and have your files packed in a rar files.
2. I’ll assume you have “image.jpg” and “secret.rar” in same folder named “c:\strife”
3. Open up your command prompt. If you wonder how to open it just click Start > Run, type “cmd” and press enter
4. Change to the folder where the files placed. Type “cd c:\strife” and press enter
5. Now, it’s the crucial step. Type “copy /b image.jpg + secret.rar result.jpg”
6. You will get the file result.jpg in the same folder. Remember not to miss the “/b” because without it you won’t get it right.
7. Finish!

Do you recognize that the result image has bigger filesize than the original image? Yes, you have embedded the rar archive to that image. Open it with your image viewer and you get the image exactly same as before, other than the size is a lot bigger.

But, how to open the secret hidden files? It’s a little tricky. Right-click your “result image” and select “open with…” then try to use WinRAR to open that file. Hey, I don’t need to explain you how. Right?

Now, you can mail or transfer the file more securely with the files hidden in rar files camouflaged in image files. Don’t forget to tell the recipient how to open it. Yeah, you can give password to the rar to make it more secure.

Regards,
Strife Leonhart

Here we go…

A nice little tweak for XP. Microsoft reserve 20% of your available bandwidth for their own purposes (maybe for updates and interrogating your machine etc..)

Here’s how to get it back:

1. Click Start > Run…

2. Type gpedit.msc

3. Point to this location :

Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Network > QOS Packet Scheduler > Limit Reservable Bandwidth

4. Double click on Limit Reservable bandwidth. It will say it is not configured, but the truth is under the ‘Explain’ tab

5. "By default, the Packet Scheduler limits the system to 20 percent of the bandwidth of a connection, but you can use this setting to override the default."

6. So the trick is to ENABLE reservable bandwidth, then set it to ZERO.

7. This will allow the system to reserve nothing, rather than the default 20%.

8. Tested on XP Pro and 2000

Network Connectivity

The internet, in the most simplest of terms, is a group of millions of computers connected by networks. These connections within the internet can be large or small depending upon the cabling and equipment that is used at a particular internet location. It is the size of each network connection that determines how much bandwidth is available. For example, if you use a DSL connection to connect to the internet, you have 1.54 Mega bits (Mb) of bandwidth. Bandwidth therefore is measured in bits (a single 0 or 1). Bits are grouped in bytes which form words, text, and other information that is transferred between your computer and the internet.

If you have a DSL connection to the internet, you have dedicated bandwidth between your computer and your internet provider. But your internet provider may have thousands of DSL connections to their location. All of these connection aggregate at your internet provider who then has their own dedicated connection to the internet (or multiple connections) which is much larger than your single connection. They must have enough bandwidth to serve your computing needs as well as all of their other customers. So while you have a 1.54Mb connection to your internet provider, your internet provider may have a 255Mb connection to the internet so it can accommodate your needs and up to 166 other users (255/1.54).

Traffic

A very simple analogy to use to understand bandwidth and traffic is to think of highways and cars. Bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway and traffic is the number of cars on the highway. If you are the only car on a highway, you can travel very quickly. If you are stuck in the middle of rush hour, you may travel very slowly since all of the lanes are being used up.

Traffic is simply the number of bits that are transferred on network connections. It is easiest to understand traffic using examples. One Gigabyte is 2 to the 30th power (1,073,741,824) bytes. One gigabyte is equal to 1,024 megabytes. To put this in perspective, it takes one byte to store one character. Imagine 100 file cabinets in a building, each of these cabinets holds 1000 folders. Each folder has 100 papers. Each paper contains 100 characters - A GB is all the characters in the building. An MP3 song is about 4MB, the same song in wav format is about 40MB, a full length movie can be 800MB to 1000MB (1000MB = 1GB).

If you were to transfer this MP3 song from a web site to your computer, you would create 4MB of traffic between the web site you are downloading from and your computer. Depending upon the network connection between the web site and the internet, the transfer may occur very quickly, or it could take time if other people are also downloading files at the same time. If, for example, the web site you download from has a 10MB connection to the internet, and you are the only person accessing that web site to download your MP3, your 4MB file will be the only traffic on that web site. However, if three people are all downloading that same MP at the same time, 12MB (3 x 4MB) of traffic has been created. Because in this example, the host only has 10MB of bandwidth, someone will have to wait. The network equipment at the hosting company will cycle through each person downloading the file and transfer a small portion at a time so each person’s file transfer can take place, but the transfer for everyone downloading the file will be slower. If 100 people all came to the site and downloaded the MP3 at the same time, the transfers would be extremely slow. If the host wanted to decrease the time it took to download files simultaneously, it could increase the bandwidth of their internet connection (at a cost due to upgrading equipment).

Hosting Bandwidth

In the example above, we discussed traffic in terms of downloading an MP3 file. However, each time you visit a web site, you are creating traffic, because in order to view that web page on your computer, the web page is first downloaded to your computer (between the web site and you) which is then displayed using your browser software (Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.) . The page itself is simply a file that creates traffic just like the MP3 file in the example above (however, a web page is usually much smaller than a music file).

A web page may be very small or large depending upon the amount of text and the number and quality of images integrated within the web page. For example, the home page for CNN.com is about 200KB (200 Kilobytes = 200,000 bytes = 1,600,000 bits). This is typically large for a web page. In comparison, Yahoo’s home page is about 70KB.

How Much Bandwidth Is Enough?

It depends (don’t you hate that answer). But in truth, it does. Since bandwidth is a significant determinant of hosting plan prices, you should take time to determine just how much is right for you. Almost all hosting plans have bandwidth requirements measured in months, so you need to estimate the amount of bandwidth that will be required by your site on a monthly basis

If you do not intend to provide file download capability from your site, the formula for calculating bandwidth is fairly straightforward:

Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x 31 x Fudge Factor

If you intend to allow people to download files from your site, your bandwidth calculation should be:

[(Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size) +
(Average Daily File Downloads x Average File Size)] x 31 x Fudge Factor

Let us examine each item in the formula:

Average Daily Visitors - The number of people you expect to visit your site, on average, each day. Depending upon how you market your site, this number could be from 1 to 1,000,000.

Average Page Views - On average, the number of web pages you expect a person to view. If you have 50 web pages in your web site, an average person may only view 5 of those pages each time they visit.

Average Page Size - The average size of your web pages, in Kilobytes (KB). If you have already designed your site, you can calculate this directly.

Average Daily File Downloads - The number of downloads you expect to occur on your site. This is a function of the numbers of visitors and how many times a visitor downloads a file, on average, each day.

Average File Size - Average file size of files that are downloadable from your site. Similar to your web pages, if you already know which files can be downloaded, you can calculate this directly.

Fudge Factor - A number greater than 1. Using 1.5 would be safe, which assumes that your estimate is off by 50%. However, if you were very unsure, you could use 2 or 3 to ensure that your bandwidth requirements are more than met.

Usually, hosting plans offer bandwidth in terms of Gigabytes (GB) per month. This is why our formula takes daily averages and multiplies them by 31.

Summary

Most personal or small business sites will not need more than 1GB of bandwidth per month. If you have a web site that is composed of static web pages and you expect little traffic to your site on a daily basis, go with a low bandwidth plan. If you go over the amount of bandwidth allocated in your plan, your hosting company could charge you over usage fees, so if you think the traffic to your site will be significant, you may want to go through the calculations above to estimate the amount of bandwidth required in a hosting plan.

Source : I get it in my harddisk, I wonder where I got it

Here I would like to talk about different types of blogs and the purposes of those blogs. Basically, there are three main types of blogs, and I will describe them below.

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1. Self blog

A blog was originally created to be like an online diary for people, who wanted to share their everyday life with others. However, nowadays blogs are used for many other purposes, such as making money online or product promotions.

Despite that, there are still some bloggers who use a blog as a place, where they can post what happened to them yesterday or what they’ve done today, etc. Instead of keeping hand-written notes on a paper, they do it online. It’s faster, easier and more organized, plus it’s free.

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2. Niche blog

Niche means market, specific area of anything, in which people are interested. If you have a niche blog, it can be literally about anything you want starting from movies and games till online business and ecommerce.

Also a niche blog doesn’t have to be very broad. For example, there are some general blogs about games, and there are some niche specific blogs, such as action games or racing games. Do you get the idea?
Good, that’s what a niche blog is.

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3. Money-making blog

As I previously mentioned in my article, blogs can also be used to make money online. Automated blogs are those, which are meant to make money for it’s owners and there are many ways how to do it, including advertising (Adsense), affiliate programs or selling web space on a blog, if it has got high traffic.

Blogging is actually quite popular way of making money online and the best thing about that is it’s free and doesn’t require any specific knowledge of IT or online marketing. It’s so simple, but effective, that’s why many people want to know how they can make money blogging.

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Source : EzineArticles.com

In the “edit post” page put the cursor to the point where you want to get your post cutted. And click the “Split with readmore tag” button on rich text editor toolbar. For HTML view, click the “more” button. And save or publish your post.

Alternatively, you can manually type <!–more–> in the HTML view. That three technique will give the same result.

But, the question is how to make different ‘Read More’ text link for each post? e.g. in the first post it says “Click here to continue” but in the second post it says “Read the rest of this entry”. Seems cool?

It’s not so complicated and very very simple. Look at the HTML view mode, and now add something to your code to make like this: <!–moreClick here to continue reading…–> or <!–moreRead the rest of this entry–>

Got it? Yep, it’s easy, isn’t it? You mustn’t have any difficulties to apply this trick now.

…

Regards,

Strife Leonhart

Friendster Features :

Friendship  Social Networking

Profile commenting

Photo upload (up to 1 MB each)

Photo commenting

Private message

Bulletin board

Classified ads

Blogging

I found the classified ads feature recently when fooling around. OMG, Why didn’t I realize it from the start? If so, I can use it for promoting my blog for free. Yes this classified ads is FREE for FS user.

At first there are so many people spamming on the BulBo (i called it so). Now, FS admin give limited amount of Bulbo someone can post in one day. Fortunately, it helps me from messing up my Bulbo inbox.

The blogging feature is not so optimal yet. Anyone who want to give comment must have logged in. And for the SEO and blog promotion, it’s BAD !

Online status disappear about one year since I joined FS. OMG, it was so helpful and must have feature for online social networking. So, why the h**l they removed it?!?

Choosing a domain name… hmm, is it sounds easy? I spent some days to think for a domain name for this blog, it delayed me in hosting purchase :). Not so SEO friendly anyway, but i love this domain name

Something important is  wherever you host your blog at, try to use dot com TLD (Top Level Domain) at all cost. Because a dot com TLD give you more benefit than any other. First, it’s a typical and most popular top level domain name in the world. Second, it gives impression that you do blogging seriously. Third, think it yourself

Register a domain name is easy, but choosing a good name is painful !

Apapun hostingnya, DOT COM domain-nya!!!