There are lot of applications to choose from like games,photo animations,book shelves,emoticons, horoscopes and a lot more

Here are a few which i liked

TypeRacer:

I haven’t explored it completely but it seems to be interesting and addictive.

Guess the missing letters of the alphabet to fill in the blanks and get the right answer.





iRead is a social book discovery application. With iRead you can organize your favorite books in bookshelves, rate and review them. You can browse what other iReaders and friends are reading. iRead learns from your book reading tastes and recommends books you will like and also users who read like you. Add application and join the social book discovery revolution!

This is my favorite,Attack photos of your friends with cool animations! Slap them silly, send them a kiss, splash them with color balloons. No matter what your emotions are we have an animation that can help you to express yourself. Let the game begin. Attack Now !!

Add music and videos to your profile, list your favorite artists, and test your skill in the Music Challenge! Join 23 million iLike users to share and discover music.

Are the stars aligning for you? Find out with a RockYou horoscope and get regular updates for your sign.

A Plugin to publish the posts in wordpress blog as an e-Book

Personal Profile

Full name: Satish Gandham
Email: g.satish@iitg.ernet.in
Gtalk ID: satish.iitg@gmail.com

Project idea information

Project Title: Develop a plugin for wordpress which enables the blogger to publish his blog posts in the form of an e-Book.

Project Description
The main functions of the plugin are as follows

• User should be able to upload an image to have his custom first page.
• The PDF should have an index page and an easy navigation.
• User should have an option to select the posts which he want to publish in the e-Book
• In case if there are multiple authors on a blog, user should have an option to publish the posts of each author separately.
• Each author should be able to choose if his posts can be published as PDF or not.
• A link to save the post as pdf and number of times the post had been downloaded will be given after each post.
• Option to publish posts from each category as a PDF.
• The plugin should be able to support the html tags.
• Track the number of downloads.
• Add a sidebar widget showing link to the PDF and download stats.

Why would someone want to publish an e-Book?

• This would help the readers of a blog to read the posts offline, this method is better than downloading the entire site for offline browsing.
• There are lots of people who don’t blog for money, so this plugin would help them get close to their readers.
• Even for those who blog for money, they can monetize the e-Book with yahoo ads for PDF, and I’m sure that Google will also come up with something to monetize PDF’S.

Road Map

• I will start by downloading the wordpress source code.
• Understand how the database is designed.
• Study the built in functions in wordpress that would be helpful for this plugin.
• Study the functions available in PHP to create a PDF.
• Discuss with the mentor thoroughly about how to implement this plugin, prepare a solid blueprint of the plugin. (I will keep discussing about this right from the start of the project, but I would like to have a solid blueprint by 5th June)
• The coding of the core parts of the plugin will be completed by June 25th.
• After finishing the coding of core parts, I will work on designing the interface.
• The plugin will be very user friendly, usage of the plugin will be as simple as wordpress installation. The interface design will be finished by July 10th.
• Finally I will make a thorough check of the plugin to fix any bugs present.
• Review the documentation of the plugin and release the plugin on 20th July

Availability

I can devote complete 3 months to this project. I can work 6 to 10 hours/day (42 to 70 hours/week) depending on the work load. I do not have any other obligations this summer.

Open Source Development Experience

I haven’t really worked on any open source project till now. I wrote a small tutorial on adding Google Adsense ads to wordpress theme on my blog, here is the link of it
http://geniushackers.com/blog/category/adsense/

Work/Internship Experience

I have been using wordpress for more than a year now; I have good Understanding of the wordpress themes. I developed a shout box, a small ip tracking site using PHP and SQL. I also worked on developing an Online Stock Market game for our college tech fest; though this project was not completed in time it gave me a good exposure to PHP and SQL.
Ip-Tracking Site: http://www.iptracking.geniushackers.com/

Academic Experience

I am a third year undergraduate student from Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, One of the best institutes for science and technology in the country and world. I was among the top 1% of the students who appeared for the entrance test to this institute. I did a C-Programming course and Numerical Methods and Computational Physics course where solutions to problems are obtained using approximations and C-Programming.
Apart from these I learned PHP, SQL and HTML form the internet and e books.

Why WordPress

Wordpress is my favorite software, I strongly believe that the quote “Code is poetry“ Is very apt for them. I want to contribute something to the open source and my favorite software.

Why Me

I’m fascinated by the way the World Wide Web works; I have deep passion for building my own websites and web applications. Though I’m not from computer science department my strong passion for coding and developing web applications motivated me to learn PHP, SQL and html myself. I got the idea of this plugin when I happened to read an article on how an e-Book can be used to promote a domain and develop it as a brand name. I cannot do it as an academic project because no one would be ready to waste their time with me as I’m not from Computer science background. So I decided to do it on my own. I knew it’s a tough task for a student like me, but I’m very obsessed with the idea of this plugin.
I was very excited when I saw wordpress in list organizations participating in GSoC, I’m now having a chance to code my plugin under the guidance of a mentor and I get to learn from people with lot of experience. This summer will be the best summer for me. I will enjoy PHP coding.

Thanks wordpress, Thanks Google

Download the above application as a PDF

PART I - FINDING A SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY THEME

Optimizing wordpress should, in my view, start with finding a Search Engine Friendly theme. What am I talking about? Does a theme determine my Search Rankings ( SERP’s)? Not completely, but yes, it does to an extent. Here’s how :

• A SEO friendly theme ensures that SPIDERS dont have difficulties while crawling your content.

• The first 50-60 words the SPIDER sees should mainly consist of your content and not other HTML/Javascript code.

• The theme you are using should be completely valid. Use this to check it out.

• Your theme should not have any flash/ajax or if it is that necessary, keep it to the minimum you can.

• The themes should be coded in such a way that the h1 tags are used only one time and also in the single posts page, the post title should come first and anything should come afterwards.

Much more can be said, but I am limiting it to here. I think that by now, you all must have realized the importance of Search Engine friendly themes.Now lets move on :

ON-SITE OPTIMIZATION

On-site optimization is another very important part of wordpress SEO. Here we go :

• Title tags - As far as Search engine bots are concerned, they give the most weightage to your title tag. So the text you put between <title> and </title> is going to do it or spoil the party. To optimize the title tags, you may go to your DashBoard > Options > Permalinks and change it to <category><post-title> format. However, you can change it to any format you wish. Another option for doing the thing is this :

a) Go to your DASHBOARD > PRESENTATION > THEME EDITOR and then click on header in the right hand column.

b) Search out for the text between <title> and </title>

c) Replace it with this : <title><?php if (is_home()) { bloginfo('description'); } else { wp_title('',true); } ?> | <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>

d) Click on update the file and then go to your blog and see the wonderful results.

Anyways, I hope that you are enjoying your journey. If you had missed any steps above, stop on and read them again. Otherwise, move on

• Interlinking your blog posts : Interlinking blog posts is a very good option to make sure that none of your pages get engraved and that everything stays alive. After all you’d never want to lose the worthy posts that you spend your time writing.

Now adding the real JOSH to your blog

As people say, write and hear, Wordpress is SEO friendly by default. I agree. But if we do some work and add some “Power capsules” (better known as plugins) to the Wordpress, won’t it come first in the race? It will. Here we go :

• Akismet - This plugin comes inside the Wordpress Package. All you have to do is to go to Plugins and then activate Akismet.You know that the “virtual world” (internet) is full of scammers and people whom you wont like to see around your blog.This is the filter you need.

• All in one SEO - Simply one of the best plugins for Wordpress. If you take my opinion, it should have been there in the Wordpress package as Akismet. It provides you with the option of adding keywords, description and much more flexibility that will help you in getting better Search Engine Rankings.

• Google XML Sitemaps - Google loves Sitemaps because it helps the SPIDER to crawl easy. This is the plugin to make GOOGLE happy .

• RB Internal Links - Interlinking your posts is a good way to get better rankings, though it is not often followed. It is a very time consuming job to link all your posts, remember their URL’s etc etc. This is the plugin that solves 80% of the work.

• BookMarkify - Social Bookmarking sites like DIGG, SU, Mixx , Slashdot etc are becoming a tool for getting huge and instant traffic. This is one of those plugins which will put the small bookmarking buttons below your posts which allows your visitors to bookmark the post in their favourite site.

Well, the above said plugins will add something to your wordpress and really, I can bet for that, you will enjoy blogging more than you ever did!

Do I need to have any software for designing my website ??

You will need a simple text editor like notepad to write your code and a web browser like Internet Explorer, Mozilla firefox, Safari, Opera to check the pages you created. You don’t need any additional software to design your website. You may use dreamweaver or any other html editor to make the coding simple.

Your first and best resource to learn web designing is w3schools.com, they have every information you need to develop your own website.

HTML, XHTML , PHP , CSS , AJAX , Java Script ,ASP, .NET, SQL, XML

Hey satish that’s a long list, where should I start from, should I have to learn all these stuff to build my website???

You don’t really have to learn all these stuff to start your website, HTML and CSS will do for a static website and you need Server Scripting languages like PHP, ASP, Python, Perl and SQL for managing the database to build a dynamic website.

First start with HTML, HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. There are about 25 pages in w3 schools HTML tutorial, they explained it very clearly, it wouldn’t take much time to finish these 25 pages.

HTML Tutorial

After you learn HTML, go for the CSS ( Cascading Style Sheets) tutorial .

CSS Tutorial

After you finish these two tutorials download some templates from here and try to study the code and modify it. With a little practice you will be able to create your own designs

More resources for open source web templates

• http://www.oswd.org/
• http://www.openwebdesign.org/
• http://www.opendesigns.org/

Please post your comments if this post was helpful for you.

Real mistakes in this world are the mistakes from which you learn nothing

These are the main topics that I’m going to discuss here
• How to start your website
• which software you should use for your website
• Different ways to promote your website
• Search engine optimization
• Blogging tips
• Ways to monetize your site

1) First , make an account at DIGG .

2) Then login to your account and submit a webpage to DIGG.

3) Things such as title and description are required which should be attractive enough to get some visitors.I am explaining them below

HEADING : What do people see first?Heading or title. If it is attractive ,then people would go on to read the whole description and all other things.So you should make Heading as attractive and specific as possible.

DESCRIPTION :If you have a good heading, people will move their eyes to the description which should contain the important howabouts of your webpage.Be specific and targeted.

CONTENT :When people come to your website,they would bookmark it and come again and again if you have a good content and provide them some useful information.

4) Add the DIGG this button to your website as a must.It would increase the no. of diggs you get.

5) Ask your friends to digg for you and get as many diggs as possible.

6) Go to other forums and exchange DIGGs .

Wait for some time and see the result.I am sure I would have helped you.
If you were helped by my post,please do give a comment below.

• Participate in various forums of your niche and  post your website’s URL in your signature or if they have an advertising section,put it there.
• Go to other blogs and promote your website( care for the no-follow tag)
• Build links with other websites of your niche who are already indexed in Google
• Submit your websites to social bookmarking sites such as Digg,stumbleupon and others and ask other people to stumble it or digg it.

If these steps are properly followed,I dont think it would take much more than 2-3 days to get indexed by Google because I myself have experienced that .The only problem is that luck gets here ;p but that doesnt mean anything.You can always try and thats what I believe in!

a) Write w3 compliant code wherever possible.  Click here to check if your website is w3 compiant.

b) By using interactive elements such as javascript , you can allow your visitors to control their experience and view your page in the way they want.

c) Try to lessen up the use of images because they make your website load slow.

d) Dont use text as images.

e) Have a clear,consistent and good navigation.

f) Try to keep file sizes small . Optimize your webpages for that but dont compromise with the graphics.

g) Some small things like having a search option in your site(You can take that from google) can help your visitors have a good experience.

h) Make sure the links are visible and the visitors dont have to search for important links.

g) At last provide some useful content to the visitors so that they come again and again .After all this is also a  good experience

First of all,choosing and registering a domain name is important.What is a domain name? Well domain name is just a web address,an address like you have for your home.You have to get a domain name for your website . For example : http://theseopark.com.It can be registered through various domain registrars.Prefer for those who are ICANN accredited. If you want to know some places where you can get a free domain name,read this article.

Now that we have discussed about domain names,lets move up to Hosting.Well really speaking,paid hosts are better than free ones.But since we are going to set up a site for free,we wont be discussing them.Anyways,there are lots of post to host forum which will give you quality hosting in exchange of posts.The one I recommend is GeekPoint

So,you have both hosting and domain,Now what to do?Well,now there are two ways,either hire a Web Development Company for your website or Do it Yourself .But hiring a company would be a paid task so we are going to do it ourselves.For this,we need one of the two things - A WYSIWYG editor or Knowledge of XHTML basically and if advanced is needed then CSS,Javascript(Not java),PHP,MySql and there are many others.For learning XHTML or those things,I would recommend you to learn from w3 schools

That will make your base strong and then you can learn many other things from other tutorial websites like HTMLDog,PHP freak and etc etc.

Swastik

In my view there is an answer to this question.Ask yourself if you are going to create a site that is expected to serve long term goals or Is it going to be a short term matter?If you think that it is going to serve a long term purpose,go for a short,memorable and brandable domain name.If it is a short term thing , go for keywords in your domain name.This will help you in the short term.

Swastik