Categories
Product release Wordpress

JetPack lets you get wordpress.com features in your self hosted wordpress

Without an iota of doubt, I would like to say that WordPress is the best and most popular blogging platform. This comes in 2 flavors, One is the self hosted version of WordPress, which is released by Automattic under GNU-GPL license. The other one is WordPress.com, which provides a free as well as paid (premium) platform hosted iin cloud to publish your blog. So even if you do not have a domain name or web server you can still create your blog as a subdomain of WordPress.com and publish it.

There are certain extremely good features and benefits that a WordPress.com users enjoys, those until now were officially not available in self hosted version of WordPress. Though some of the features like WordPress.com stats were made available in self-hosted version with the help of specialized plugins. According to the founder of Automattic & man behind WordPress Matt, it was his dream to provide feature parity between WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress. And finally his dream has turned into reality in the form of a plugin called JetPack , which gives you all the features in WordPress.com that we always wanted in our self hosted version of WordPress.

With the launch of the first version of JetPack, following 8 features (cloud goodies) of WordPress.com will be activated in your self-hosted version of WordPress when you activate JetPack plugin. JetPack connects to WordPress.com and enables the awesome features in your self hosted version of WordPress.

1. WordPress.com Stats : It provides a simple and concise statistics for yur website without any additional load on your server.

2. Twitter Widget: If your theme supports widget, it will show latest tweets from a twitter user.

3. Gravatar Hovercards: It is a cool feature & I always wanted to have in my website. This will show a pop-up business card of user’s gravatar profile when you hover the mouse over their name.

4. Wp.me shortlinks: The default URL shortening service from Automattic. All your posts & pages will be able to sue this for better sharing in micro blogging platform like twitter.

5. Sharedaddy: It will make the Sharing of your posts easier over the social networks & social bookmarking sites

6. Latex: is the famous markup language to insert mathematical equations inside your post and pages.

7. After the deadline: This a spelling, grammar and style checker with built-in AI.

8. Shortcode Embeds: Add movies, images, flash etc into your posts & pages with single line of code.

The list does not end here. In the coming version of the plugin, expect to see some more uberly cool features of WordPress.com.

If you are hosted with partner hosts of Automattic like Bluehost, DreamHost, Go Daddy, HostGator, Media Temple, and Network Solutions then the one click installation of WordPress available with them is JetPack enabled.  That means when you install WordPress through one click install, you do not need to install the JetPack plugin separately.

Download, Install & Pre-requisite:

1. Please note that Jetpack will work only with WordPress 3.0.5 and later version, you also need a WordPress.com account (if you do not have one you can create so during the setup process. If you meet these 2 requirements,

2. Visit the JetPack website to download the plugin.

3. Unpack and upload it to the plugins directory.

4. Log in to WordPress admin area and Activate the JetPack plugin. Upon Activation, it will show you a message to connect to WordPress.com. Click on the (see the image below)

Jetpack actvation alert5. It will take you to an authorization page as shown in image below. Put your WordPress.com user name and Password and click on Authorize. If you do not have a WordPress.com account, you can create one here by clicking on need an account.

6. Upon successful authorization, you will be redirected back to your WordPress admin area and jetpack setting page will be shown. This looks like the one in the below image:

JetPack Dashboard

From here, you can customize the required features. JetPack not only connects you to WordPress.com  to provide awesome features, but also provides you the convenience of not installing several plugins.

Categories
Tips & tricks Windows

Make your computer greet you with a message

A few lines of VB script code will let your computer greet you every time you login to it. This will look straight out of a sci-fi movie and this is so easy and cool. Your not-so-tech-savvy friends will not only be amazed at this but they will think you as a genius.  Use the steps provided below to let your computer welcome you with a personalized message.

 

 

1. Open Notepad and type the following lines of code (or copy the code below to a notepad) :

Dim speaks, speech
speaks="Hello Ajay, Welcome to your Computer. Please use me with care and Love."
Set speech=CreateObject("sapi.spvoice")
speech.Speak speaks

2. You can replace the text within quote (” “) in line 2 to any text you wish.

3. Save the file as speech.vbs . To do this, in notepad click on File > Save as,  select All Types for save as type and put file name as speech.vbs . Make sure the file is saved with .vbs extension and not like speech.vbs.txt . If it is correctly saved the file icon will change from a simple notepad icon to a VB script icon.

4. Now the required script file is ready. For the welcome message upon login, we need to load this file at start up. To do this we need to copy the file to start-up folder.

5. To copy to startup folder, click on Start > All programs and right click on Startup, select explore. This will open Startup folder in Windows Explorer. We need to paste the speech.vbs file inside this.

6. To verify that it is working correctly, restart your PC. If you hear your computer welcoming you, the trick has worked perfectly.

This trick has been personally tested by me in Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista and Windows 7 and works perfectly. Please share your experience on using this script.

Categories
Tech News

Protect your notebook from being stolen

When we look at the statistics, it can be noticed that thousands of notebooks are reported as stolen every year. So many time we wish, there should be a way to protect those notebooks from being stolen. I am sure some of the geeky readers might have come across some software based solutions to track the stolen laptop. But all those softwares have some sorts of limitations. However Intel has come up with a hardware based solution to help the laptop owners.

This new technology developed by Intel is called Intel Anti-Theft technology and it is a hardware based solution with software configuration. Notebooks having this technology pre-built to them can disable themselves if they got lost or stolen.

Technology Overview:

– It is hardware-based anti-theft technology with software configuration using LoJack by Absolute software or any other compatible service provider.

– Requires Intel chipset support (not a software-only solution)

– Hardware-level theft detection and data encryption.

– Can disable laptop completely if owner reports as stolen.

– The system periodically checks with LoJack server and verify report status.

How it Works:

System will regularly check with LoJack server and verify the report status.

– If it finds any stolen report it will disable the laptop.

– The disabling of notebook occurs if system detects suspicious behavior like excessive login attempts or counter expiry or stolen report in LoJack server.

– Once system is disabled the data access from hard drive is also restricted even if hard drive is removed and connected to a different system.

– The timer expiry might occur in case of OS re-installation or BIOS flashing, HDD wiped or removed or laptop being disconnected from Internet. In order to prevent this there is an option to disable lockout timer using the LoJack software.

– Once laptop is recovered, it can be unlocked using a pass code or  a security token obtained from the software vendor.

– By default the Anti-Theft technology will be disabled in the notebook when you purchase it. So first thing you need to do before you start using it is to enable it.

How to check if Anti-theft technology is supported:

In order to verify the support of Anti-theft technology in your notebook, you need to go to your BIOS configuration page. (Refer to notebook manual for the correct key to use to go to BIOS). Look for Intel AT under Security. If supported and enabled it will be set to ON, if supported but disabled it will be set to OFF.

If you have purchased the laptop long back, then theer is high chance that it does not support Ant-theft.

The hardware based Anti-theft technology is more secure and provide better result. Being a hardware based technology it comes pre-installed with a new notebook purchase.

Categories
General

Evolution of Techie Zone

Hello World…Welcome to the re-incarnated version of Techie Zone. Now this erstwhile popular blog has not only a completely revamped design but also it is sitting on a new location. The original version of Techie Zone is still living in the Internet at it’s old location. Many of you must be thinking why I kept the old name Techie Zone where I could have simply switched to a new name and started everything fresh. I could have done that, in fact at some point in time, I had decided to sell my erstwhile popular website the original Techie Zone. But I did not do that instead wished to keep the name and do a complete revamp.

To answer Why I did that, let me start from the beginning. I got the taste of blogging and started working on Internet in the year 2006. Initially in my learning phase I started with blogger platform like majority of newbie bloggers do. I posted my first post on 27th July 2006. After sticking with blogger for sometime, I learned about WordPress.com and started exploring that. By this time I was getting a good grip on both blogger and WordPress.com and started exploring money making option from Internet. I came across a website called MyLot and made my first earning from Internet in the year 2006. As I had money with me earned through MyLot, I decided to buy a domain and bought TechieZone on 9th Sep 2006. But I did not know how to create a website the easiest way on my own domain. That is when I learned about the self hosted version of WordPress. I could not have dreamt of any better option than that. The flexibility it offered and support of millions of users/theme and plugin developers made me fall in LOVE with WordPress. Finally in the year 2007, I switched over completely to self hosted version of WordPress and my first self developed website Techie Zone was borned. Switching to a self hosted version of WordPress was never an easy task and I had to learned a lot of things and I am still learning. During it’s journey from 2007 till date Techie Zone has seen lots of ups and downs. The visitor count of Techie Zone increased from 20-30 in a day to 1000s and it was being featured in first page of google for many Windows related search term followed by the movement of Page Rank from PR 0 to PR 4. But destiny had something else for Techie Zone. I did the mistake of moving it from the subdomain blog.techiezone.in to techiezone.in and that is when the downfall started. I followed all the SEO specialists recommendations, tried many tactics but nothing worked. PR went down to N/A..the earning from adsense started declining, direct advertisers withdrew themselves. In the mean time I was so much engaged in my day-to-day job that I hardly found time to update any new posts. Frankly I started loosing interest because of all the negative growth Techie Zone saw. Later on I was able to manage my time and tried fixing things to regain the status of Techie Zone, nothing worked. I was hurt and decided to sell the site and start a new tech related website. But when I thought of my journey to this blogging world and how Techie Zone played a pivotal role in it, I could not sell it nor did I dare to abandon the name. And as Techie Zone is my brain child, it will be there with me for ever.

Future Plans:

Going forward, this address will be the permanent location of Techie Zone. The original Techie Zone will still be there but I am not going to update it any more. I still get 150+ visitors a day to this blog, which is decent looking at the fact that I am not doing anything to it for couple of months.

I will be a professional blogger. Having said that I am going to dedicate more time to blogging here and some of my other online ventures.

This blog will cover topics ranging from Desktop computing, Internet, Hosting, SEO, Blogging etc..

Friends, please do not forget to share your blogging journey in comments.