Internet has many resources, appealing websites, games sites, and finally many interesting social networks. In a single sentence, internet can be a great place to “kill” your time! And one may kill himself by killing his “lifetime”, but internet may not get exhausted of contents, resources.

But then, a blogger has finite time, specific tasks to complete within a time frame. A blogger has to write “pillar” posts at least once a week, research what competitor or related bloggers doing. And finally, they have actual office to attend daily, not to mention time for family and friends ( even though, all may be online in a social network site like facebook).

So, it is a good idea to list how not to “waste” precious online time in unproductive activities. I have listed few which I try to avoid doing while online:-

1. Check AdSense Earning hourly

I avoid checking adSense earning hourly and has decided to check only once in two days. I believe that I must keep watching AdSense earning regularly so as to plan my SEO related activities. But, I have started avoiding checking AdSense earning frequently as I have realised that checking it hourly does not increase the earning!

2. Do not check Alexa Ranking

I have decided that, I will not check Alexa ranking. Instead of Alexa Ranking, I would check Google Analytics for new keywords using which some visitors have landed on my blog! Checking Alexa Ranking again and again is surely waste of online time!

3. No more hitting on MORE button in Twitter

Ok, I follow many people in Twitter and my home page is always flooded with updates! But, I will not hit the button MORE to check if I have missed any important updates from important people! I am sure, I will those important “tweets” “retweeted” to be able to read them when I am online! If they are not retweeted enough, well I will pass them as not so important!

4. Will not read all status messages in Facebook

I will not read all status messages in facebook home page! Friends may put out impressive and interesting messages, but I will not be tempted to “like” them or comment them! I would rather search for articles in facebook related to my keywords. I would rather search FAN pages then reading status messages.

5. Never check SPAM folder

I will not check my Gmail Spam folder. I will trust Google to be accurate in detecting SPAMs. Will only check when I am subscribing to some news letter, blog feed and at that time only. Else I will never check SPAM folder.

With these 5 resolutions, I have saved lot of time from wasting in un-productive online time! How do you avoid un-productive online time ?

The most dreaded error of a webserver is Error 500. Specially because, it does not pinpoint any problem, but the site does not work properly. It can really give nightmare to an experienced webmaster. It simply means that “something” has gone wrong with the website due to which the site can not be opened at that time. It may come back if you refresh once or twice.

Thankfully, it is not a problem of the PC or browser which is browsing the site, but a problem of the webserver which is hosting the website. There are many reasons for occurring this error and the most common reasons are :-
1. Problem in .htaccess file.
2. Problem in permissions of the files and directories.
3. CGI script errors.

There are no easy way to fix this HTTP Error 500 – Internal Server error. The best way is to check error log of the web server. Log in to your webserver using CPanel or Plesk, check error log and study the errors. There might be some message which will help pinpoint the error. As they say, once the problem is identified, 50% of the problem is solved.

Few common error messages you may find when you see HTTP Error 500 are :
1. error: directory is writable by others: (/home/user/public_html/)
2. Premature end of script headers: /home/user/public_html
3. error: file has no execute permission: (/home/user/public_html/)
4. Permission denied: /home/user/public_html unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable

Last two days I had battled against some virus on my laptop and PC and I am feeling really sad and embarrassed to admit that I finally lost the battle. I had to format both my C drive and re-install everything! Well, I may not have lost any data, but it wasted four hours of my time. And I will be suffering for next few days as many small utility software which I had installed over the period of time, will no longer be there and I will have to download and install them when ever I require them, all over again.

I think my virus came from an email attachement and now a days maximum virus infection on laptop of PC is by Email.

So, I thought of listing a simple easy to follow guidelines for avoiding virus on a PC or laptop which run on Windows Operating System from Email:-

1. Avoid opening attachments from unknown sender ID. One should be specially allergic to attachment files with extension : .SCR, .BAT, .VBS, .EXE, .LNK, .PIF, .COM, .HTML, .PHP.

2. Always scan incoming attachement even if the sender ID is known. Your know person may have virus on his laptop or PC.

3. Always back up your important files on separate device drives, like USB Drive, USB HDD. Avoid keeping any data on C Drive. C Drive may need to be formatted many times over!

4. Not all virus can be cleaned or removed. So, prevention is better, always.

5. Keep clearing browser Cache, History, Cookies and offline downloaded data.

6. Don’t ever use CDs, DVDs, USB Token or Disks without first scanning them for virus and spyware. Even if you lend someone your Pen Drives/USB Drives, scan it when returned.

7. Do not download files from warez sites or any suspicious sites.

I hope these trips will help me as well as others.

I had a shared hosting on a webhosting company with unlimited domain, unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited database, unlimited POP3 email, unlimited FTP account! I was very happy with all those “Unlimited” features! But one evening, I suddenly found my websites suspended and I did not remain happy after!

On contacting support, they informed me that one of my website was using a lot of server processor, more than allowed for a shared-hosting, so they had to suspend my account! Hmmm, so unlimited was actually not unlimited, it has limited share of the server processor! After much request, they activated my account again and I have finally learnt my lesson and I decided to write how to decide on your web hosting company.

First thing first, you should first decide what kind of hosting you are looking, shared-hosting or dedicated hosting. You might find hosting packages like, private hosting, virtual dedicated hosting or alike, I would suggest do not go for those, you either choose shared hosting or a dedicated hosting. and accordingly decide your web hosting service provider. My logic is, a successful, famous shared hosting provider may not be a good dedicated hosting provider and vice-versa. Once you decide your type of hosting, you should start hunting for web hosting provider. Now you may want to know, how do you decide go for shared or dedicated server, my thumb rule would be, if you would host only blogs or normal HTML websites and expect less than million visitors a month, go for shared hosting and if you intend to run any chat script, social networking site, then please go for dedicated hosting!

Now that you have decided your type of hosting, let me share my idea of choosing web hosting company:-

1. Try to think from where you expect maximum visitors to your website. If it is own country, try to choose web hosting company in your own country.
2. Decide who gives you unlimited bandwidth, and space and database. Now a days, you find almost everyone provides unlimited package.
3. Decide a linux based server. Most probably, you script will be on PHP as you will try to use a free script, other wise decide the hosting environment as per your website script.
4. Price! Try to get the lowest as per above 3 points! If possible lowest with monthly payment options! Else try to negotiate for one time payment for 5 years and you will get a good deal for sure.

I think that is all! I will update if I get some more idea!

I had been looking to store a web page content in a string variable using PHP for long time. I Googled, Yahooed a lot but was not successful! Finally I got an a clue!

You can use the PHP inbuilt function
ile_get_contents($url);
where $url contains the address of the web page you want to store! for example : $url = “http://www.bloggeradda.com/”;

But many web hosts may not allow file access method for their URLs! But you need not loose heart, there is a work around using CURL!

Here is the function for that:

function get_url_contents($url){
$crl = curl_init();
$timeout = 5;
curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($crl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$ret = curl_exec($crl);
curl_close($crl);
return $ret;
}

Note : It will only display web page output, not scripts.

While trying to make money by blogging, have your laptop crashed and you lost all your articles saved on your hard disk drive ? Or have you forgotten to back up your vital data ? Your laptop may crash for many reasons like latest virus, spyware, malware, trojan, adwares, phishing etc.

But, you need not be depressed after knowing above reasons for crash of your laptop! Here are ways to keep your laptop from crashing:

1. Use Mozila or opera to browse websites. Avoid using Internet Explorer.

2. Avoid visiting adult websites. In case you need to visit those sites, I recommend use different PC or go to cyber cafe!

3. Avoid piracy, file sharing websites, warez websites.

4. Do not open suspicious emails.

5. Use a licensed antivirus and update it at least once a weak, if not daily.

6. Avoid using LimeWire, Kazaa, BearShare. Normally they bring in many spywares!

7. Always back up your important data in a pen drive or an external disk drive.

8. Use kespersky, latest version.

9. In Mozila, go to tools, and select Clear Private data. You should keep doing that regularly.

10. Normally, do not allow other people to use your laptop!

Many people need to upgrade their computer, laptop. Or many a times, computers, laptops just crash due to virus attack or any reason. So it is a good idea to keep backup of address book and mails of your MS Outlook Express as a CSV ( Comma Separated Values) file and upload in your Gmail or Yahoo Mail. It is often found that, when ever a person formats his machine and re-install everything, he or she forgets to back up his MS Outlook Express mails and address book.

How to back up:
1. Go to File, then to export.


2. Then choose either Address Book or Messages..

3. Choose Address Book, you will see above image.

4. After that click browse, store the file in a known location, give a good name of the back up ( easy to remember) and than click save! And you are done in saving Address Book!

— More to Come!

Here is a simple step by step instruction to download your Gmail mails on your laptop/computer using MS Outlook Express. There are few advantages of having your Gmail mails downloaded on your laptop!

1. You do not need to download the attachments and store on a folder, it will remain in your Outlook Express, safely, to be retrieved along with the mail, OFF LINE.

2. To check your old mails, you need to go ONLINE.

3. You already know MS Outlook can keep downloading emails in a given interval and you need not keep visiting Gmail page to check your emails.

The setting of GMail is very easy. You can simply CLICK here to read setting it up from Google itself, or you can continue reading.

1. Click on the settings circled red as in the picture. on your Gmail Inbox after you login in www.gmail.com, located top right.

2. Click on the circled Forwarding and POP/IMAP in red as in the picture.

3. Now Choose Enable as in the above picture circled red. And you are done with GMail Settings. Now proceed to Outlook Express.

Here are the details of Gmail Pop 3 access details

1. username : Full Gmail Email ID
2. Password : password of your gmail email id.
3. pop3 Server : pop.gmail.com
4. SMTP Server : smtp.gmail.com
5. POP3 Port : 465
6. SMTP Port : 995
And, both the servers need SSL certificate.

That’s all! Quite easy ? Still if you face any problem, you can leave a comment and I will configure Outlook Express, completely free, either on phone, using Remote access ( Team Viewer ).