This blog is about tips, but I found this worth sharing with all you readers. Windows 7 is the successor of Windows Vista. Windows 7 will be hitting the market somewhere in 2010. By the way, Windows 7 was also called Windows Blackcomb or Windows Vienna. Windows 7 looks more like Vista with some tweaking done with the graphics and the UI. Find the screenshots below,

If you guys have been using Windows Vista you must have noticed the search feature in the Start Menu. This is really helpful if you have hundreds of programs in your Start Menu. Now, with this Vista Start Menu Software, you can add the search capability to your Windows XP. The Software is compatible with Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista. The software is good for advanced users and easy for beginners. The latest version also has multi-monitor support. And the best part is that, this software is free.

[Image Via: ZDNet]

SEO is the best way to promote a website/blog and increase visibility and hits, but that needs some time and expertise. Here are some tips, which will help you in promoting a blog and increasing hits –

When you send mails to friends and co-workers, put your website’s/blog’s URL after the closing salutation. The moment that person will read your mail he will notice the URL and click on it and if your website is really interesting and insightful the person will congratulate you as well as ask others to read your blog. Putting the website’s URL as a customized message, which gets displayed in your Google Talk or Yahoo or company’s internal messenger. Whenever you are online, the blog URL will get displayed and people in your friend’s list will click it out of curiosity and if they find it interesting rest will be history. There are Blog search engines where you can search blogs on the topics, which can be of interest to you. Search such blogs, read articles, if you like the articles comment on them and in that comment also put the URL of your website. Next time the person on whose blog you have commented, will read your comment he or she will definitely visit your website. These tips are not as efficient and accurate as Search Engine Optimization but they work thats for sure. The more your website gets visibility and traffic, automatically it will gain visibility in search engines also. Also, don’t forget to add the Google Meta Tag for indexing from the Google Webmaster tools. Also, you can add your blog to blog directories like Topblogarea, Blogged, Blogflux, Technorati, Fuel My blog etc. Just Google for Blog directories and you will get hundreds of them, shortlist 5 to 6 from them and add your blog to these directories and relax. Last but not the least, after you do all these things, don’t forget that the most important factor that will help you gain visibility is the quality of your posts, so make sure that whatever you posts appeals to your readers.

Reach Run quickly
Here’s a quicker way to reach the Run dialog box, if you don’t want to go through the Start menu. Just hit the Windows key + R.

Looking for a better screen font display?
Enable ClearType, Microsoft’s trademark font display technology, for a drastic improvement in screen font rendering. Right-click anywhere on your desktop. Now select Properties. Under the Appearance tab, click Effects. Check the baox for Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts, and in the drop-down menu, select ClearType. Press OK, and apply the change.

Change your mouse pointer scheme
Bored of the same old arrow? To change your mouse pointer scheme, in the Control Panel, select Mouse and go to the Pointers tab. Scroll through the available schemes, pick one that you like and click Apply.

Check that your Windows Firewall is turned on
To make sure your Windows Firewall hasn’t been accidentally disabled, go to your Control Panel and click Windows Firewall. Make sure the radio button for On (recommended) is selected. Add exceptions to your Firewall by going to the Exceptions tab and adding the programs that you think should have access to the Internet to the list of exceptions.

Instantly activate your screensaver
In XP, you can put a short cut of your favourite screensaver on your desktop to instantly start your screen saver. Here’s how. Go to Start on your desktop and click on Search. In the help box, click on All files and folders. and then type in *.scr. Select your screen saver file and right click. Then select Send To, and then Desktop.

Put your Monitor to sleep
Right click on the desktop and click on Properties. In the dialog box that appears, click on the Screen Saver tab. Click on Power and in the dialog box that appears click on the Turn off Monitor list. Select a time to automatically after which the monitor will be turned off. Click OK twice and you’re set.

Using your Windows Key
Your Windows key can be used to for many short cuts. If you want to open your Windows Explorer quickly just press your Windows key and E. If you want to open the Run dialog box, just press the Windows key and R. If you want to open your search dialog box, press your Windows key and F.

Instantly lock your PC
If you have password protected your Windows, here is a quick way to lock it. Press the Windows key and L together.

Change the look of folder icons
If you don’t like the look of the folder icons on your desktop, you can change them. Right click on the folder, select Properties. Click on the Customize tab, and under the Folder icons area, click on the Change Icons button. Select the icon of your choice and select OK.

Minimize a Window to your taskbar
If you’re tired of using the mouse over and over again to minimize a window, here’s a handy tip. To minimize a window using just the keyboard, press Alt, Spacebar and N together.

Display album art in your music folder thumbnails
If your music files are in WMA format, XP automatically picks up the album art and displays it, both in the folder thumbnail as well as in the Windows Media Player display. If your files are in MP3 format, you can download the album art from the Internet and then customize each folder to display it. But this takes a lot of time. A faster way around is to save each image as ‘folder.jpg’ and put it in the correct folder. Once you do this, XP will pick up that image and use it as the thumbnail for the folder, and also use the image to display in Windows Media Player while playing songs from the album.

How to stop Windows Media Player from accessing your information
You may be uncomfortable with the idea of Windows Media Player collecting your information and sending it to various websites. You can stop this. Go to the Tools menu of Windows Media Player. Select Options and then go to the Player tab. Look for the check box that says “Allow Internet sites to uniquely identify your player?” and make sure it is not selected.

Opening folders with a single click
If you’d rather not have to double-click everything to open it, here’s the way out. Go to My Computer, and select Options in the Tools menu. Choose Folder options. In the dialog box that opens, select the check box that says ‘Single-click to open an item (point to select)’, and click OK.

Making web pages available offline
You may occasionally need to refer to a website, and you may not be able to connect to the Internet at the time. An easy way out of the situation is to go to the Favourites tab in Internet Explorer, and click Add to Favourites. In the dialog box that is displayed, select the Make available offline check box, and press OK.

The Blogger utility of scheduled postings has been finalized and is online. First it was available in the Blogger Draft version, but now it is available for full Blogger. If you set a post’s date into the future, Blogger will wait to publish until that time comes. This utility will help you in announcing something, which is important on a scheduled date and time. You want to post regurlarly but you are going on vacation, then you can time your posts for specific publication date with this utility.

Via Blogger - Scheduling a post is easy to do: on the post editor page, click the “Post Options” toggle to show the “Post date and time” fields. Then, type a post date and time that’s in the future. When you click the “Publish” button, your post will become “scheduled.” When the date and time of the post arrive, it will be automatically published to your blog.

Hey guys sorry for writing so late was kinda busy with work. So now back with new tip for you all who want to backup their Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla Bookmarks and other stuff related to Mozilla, this utility is called the MozBackup utility and can be easily and quickly integrated with your Mozilla browser. Also, this is not just a back up utility but it also acts like a restore utility. IF all things related to Mozilla crash down then you can use the restore feature in this utility and you are back to square one..ain’t it cool????

MozBackup is compatible with:

* Firefox 1.0 - 3.0 Alpha 6
* Thunderbird 1.0 - 2.0
* SeaMonkey 1.0a - 1.1
* Mozilla Suite 1.7 - 1.7.x
* Netscape 7.x.

There are lot of search engines, which search blogs for you. Just like a normal search engine that searches webpages, these search engines search blogs. Technorati, Google Blog Search are some of the blog search engines but the main catch here is these are not spam free and they also index spam blogs and make your life hell. So here comes Twingly a spam free blog search engine that is in its Beta version. Its a closed Beta and you need an invitation code to sign-up for this spam free blog search engine.They are spam free because they add only trustworthy blog sites and the first thing I did was to add my blog site to Twingly. So till now it must have been indexed by Twingly…we are trustworthy you see. Once you ping to your blog, everytime you write a blog post Twingly gets updated about that.

Apparently Google has launched a new Wakeup Kit. Since it has been told to me by an inside source has become very evident at times when it resulted in lacklustre attendance at team meetings. To help solve the problem they’ve created an innovative solution called the Google Wake Up Kit.

"I could never wake up on time to get to our team meetings. But thanks to the new Google Wake Up Kit, I’m always on time now!"
Pedro C. (the person who tried the beta version)

In combination with the kit, you can receive a new type of notification from Google Calendar, called the "wake up" notification. This notification is relentless in ensuring your timely awakening from restful slumber.

The "wake up" notification uses several progressively more annoying alerts to wake you up. First it will send an SMS message to your phone. If that fails, more coercive means will be used. The kit includes an industrial-sized bucket and is designed to be connected to your water main for automatic filling. In addition, a bed-flipping device is included for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters.

Follow the link here: Google wake up

Read The Words is a new utility that helps you in reading documents, word files, web pages. This utility converts your data into MP3 and then reads them. You can also choose a reader from a host of 15 readers that can read your data in three languages English, Spanish and French. You can post these converted reading to you blog, website, music player, personal media player etc. The company uses latest technologies and programs that help users in converting their files that sound great and are synthesized using state of art technologies.

As blogging is catching fire from last two years, there are lot of ancillary tool that have come up that help you in making your blog related experience delightful. On such tool is Zemanta, the blog content suggestion engine. It is a European company, which has developed this tool for WordPress blogs. When you are blogging this tool will suggest you contextually relevant links, pictures, related content and tags using an internally developed semantic analysis engine. This utility is unfortunately not free and you have to pay to get it working for you. Anyways, you can give it a try by downloading the Zemanta Demo. This works with which works with Firefox, TypePad, WordPress and Blogger.

Reach Run quickly
Here’s a quicker way to reach the Run dialog box, if you don’t want to go through the Start menu. Just hit the Windows key + R.

Looking for a better screen font display?
Enable ClearType, Microsoft’s trademark font display technology, for a drastic improvement in screen font rendering. Right-click anywhere on your desktop. Now select Properties. Under the Appearance tab, click Effects. Check the box for Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts, and in the drop-down menu, select ClearType. Press OK, and apply the change.

Change your mouse pointer scheme
Bored of the same old arrow? To change your mouse pointer scheme, in the Control Panel, select Mouse and go to the Pointers tab. Scroll through the available schemes, pick one that you like and click Apply.

Check that your Windows Firewall is turned on
To make sure your Windows Firewall hasn’t been accidentally disabled, go to your Control Panel and click Windows Firewall. Make sure the radio button for On (recommended) is selected. Add exceptions to your Firewall by going to the Exceptions tab and adding the programs that you think should have access to the Internet to the list of exceptions.

Instantly activate your screensaver
In XP, you can put a short cut of your favourite screensaver on your desktop to instantly start your screen saver. Here’s how. Go to Start on your desktop and click on Search. In the help box, click on All files and folders. and then type in *.scr. Select your screen saver file and right click. Then select Send To, and then Desktop.

Put your Monitor to sleep
Right click on the desktop and click on Properties. In the dialog box that appears, click on the Screen Saver tab. Click on Power and in the dialog box that appears click on the Turn off Monitor list. Select a time to automatically after which the monitor will be turned off. Click OK twice and you’re set.

Using your Windows Key
Your Windows key can be used to for many short cuts. If you want to open your Windows Explorer quickly just press your Windows key and E. If you want to open the Run dialog box, just press the Windows key and R. If you want to open your search dialog box, press your Windows key and F.

Instantly lock your PC
If you have password protected your Windows, here is a quick way to lock it. Press the Windows key and L together.

Change the look of folder icons
If you don’t like the look of the folder icons on your desktop, you can change them. Right click on the folder, select Properties. Click on the Customize tab, and under the Folder icons area, click on the Change Icons button. Select the icon of your choice and select OK.

Minimize a Window to your taskbar
If you’re tired of using the mouse over and over again to minimize a window, here’s a handy tip. To minimize a window using just the keyboard, press Alt, Spacebar and N together.

Display album art in your music folder thumbnails
If your music files are in WMA format, XP automatically picks up the album art and displays it, both in the folder thumbnail as well as in the Windows Media Player display. If your files are in MP3 format, you can download the album art from the Internet and then customize each folder to display it. But this takes a lot of time. A faster way around is to save each image as ‘folder.jpg’ and put it in the correct folder. Once you do this, XP will pick up that image and use it as the thumbnail for the folder, and also use the image to display in Windows Media Player while playing songs from the album.

How to stop Windows Media Player from accessing your information
You may be uncomfortable with the idea of Windows Media Player collecting your information and sending it to various websites. You can stop this. Go to the Tools menu of Windows Media Player. Select Options and then go to the Player tab. Look for the check box that says “Allow Internet sites to uniquely identify your player?” and make sure it is not selected.

Opening folders with a single click
If you’d rather not have to double-click everything to open it, here’s the way out. Go to My Computer, and select Options in the Tools menu. Choose Folder options. In the dialog box that opens, select the check box that says ‘Single-click to open an item (point to select)’, and click OK.

Making web pages available offline
You may occasionally need to refer to a website, and you may not be able to connect to the Internet at the time. An easy way out of the situation is to go to the Favourites tab in Internet Explorer, and click Add to Favourites. In the dialog box that is displayed, select the Make available offline check box, and press OK.

[Via: Email]

If you have a blog or website it is imperative to have a RSS feed working on it. When you create a account with FeedBurner they will give you small Chiclets or the RSS feed icons that you can use on your website. You must have always felt that you should create your own RSS icon, with size specified by you and colors that would match your blog or website. Now this is possible by using the RSS Feed Button maker. This utility is easy to use and in single click provides you with a RSS Feed button as per your choice.

You can add extra effects like shadow and shine and also change inside color as well as background color of you Feed Button. Just click the “create” button and you are ready to flaunt your new creation on your blog or website.

You must have seen many blogs/websites that have an option where you can rate their posts, it feels good and you must have though some heavy duty coding has gone behind that. But now, with the help of Outbrain, you can add ratings to your blog posts and feeds in less than a minute. The Outbrain widget is simple and easy to install. The Outbrain widget offers a simple yet powerful ratings & recommendations widget that blends seamlessly into any blog design. The widget includes a 5-star rater, and personalized recommended links from your blog as well as others.
This is how the widget looks within a blog post:
The widget is available in a growing number of languages (24 at the last count) and dialects, thanks to bloggers who contributed translations.Why not give your ratings capabilities to your RSS feed readers? The rating widget is also available for Feedburner’s FeedFlare. And last but not the least, it’s your blog, and your content ratings, and there is no reason for it to look any different. All outbrain blog widgets inherit the hosting site’s styling properties.

Sometimes when you are browsing the Internet you come across an interesting webpage and you need to take the snapshot of that page. What do you do, in normal scenario you hit the print screen button and paste the picture in any image editor and save it any desired format.Now you don’t need to do all this, just use the Freezepage tool, in this tool you just need to input the URL of the webpage and then click the freeze page button, in an instant the webpage snapshot is saved to your desired location and you also get an online link to that image, which is unique, ain’t this tool cool!!! This tool saves the entire webpage but when it comes to saving dynamic elements on the webpage, it fails…but its ok..given the ease of use of this tool.

Accessing blocked websites and bypassing firewalls is always dream of people like you and me. We are not some kind of hi-fi hackers, so we just dream about it. But now accessing and bypassing can become a dream come true by these tools, which have been collated by Sizlopedia. Thanks DJ Flush.

1. UltraSurf

UltraSurf is the flagship software product from UltraReach for Internet anti-censorship. It enables users inside countries with heavy Internet censorship to visit any public web sites in the world safely and freely. It enables users to browse any website freely just the same as using the regular browser while it automatically searches the highest speed proxy servers in the background.

2. GPass

Hide your IP address during web surfing. Support streaming audio/video, email, instant messaging, download managers, etc. Break through Internet blocking. Easy-to-use graphical user interface.

3. FreeGate

FreeGate is an anti-censorship client software for a secure and faster internet. Users access web sites overseas as fast as their local ones. It requires no installation or change in system setting. FreeGate works together with DynaWeb, a P2P-like proxy network system.

4. Garden GTunnel

GTunnel is a Windows application that works as a local HTTP or SOCKS proxy server. After setting proxy to GTunnel in web browser or other Internet applications, the traffic will go through GTunnel and our server farm before it reaches its original destination.

5. JAP

JAP makes it possible to surf the internet anonymously and unobservably. Instead of connecting directly to a webserver, users take a detour, connecting with encryption through several intermediaries, so-called Mixes. JAP uses a predetermined sequence for the mixes. Such a sequence of linked mixes is called a Mix Cascade. Users can choose between different mix cascades.

6. Your Freedom

Your Freedom services makes accessible what is unaccessible to you, and it hides your network address from those who don’t need to know. It turns your own PC into an uncensored, anonymous web proxy and an uncensored, anonymous SOCKS proxy that your applications can use, and it can even get you connected to the Internet just as if you were using an unrestricted DSL or cable connection.

7. Hopster

Hopster is all about open, safe and uncensored internet access. At home, schools, universities and offices worldwide, even in countries where Freedom of Speech is a political challenge. Hide your real IP address and protect yourself from nosy people and wannabe-hackers.

8. Freenet

Freenet is free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. To achieve this freedom, the network is entirely decentralized and publishers and consumers of information are anonymous. Without anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech, and without decentralization the network will be vulnerable to attack.

9. Tor

Tor is a software project that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

10. HotSpot Shield

HotSpot Shield creates a secure virtual private network (VPN) over your connection allowing you to bypass any ISP firewalls and lets you visit even those websites which are blocked by your ISP. It can also be used to visit those websites which are specifically meant for US users e.g. Pandora, Hulu etc.