The Chronicle of Blogging

It is certain that Blogging will have a significant place in history with impression as the foremost informational channel of the 21st century. The earliest evidence for the culture of blogging is the use of pamphlets (is nothing but unbound booklet with info) in the 17the century for the circulation of information in all areas.

Exemplar for Pamphlet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pamphlet_dutch_tulipomania_1637.jpg

In later period, as electronic media emerged, Radio and TV were considered the major informational system of that era. In the late 20th century, there was a change in mass media from unidirectional to participatory (where audience play active role rather than the publisher alone) which is a key factor in the concept of blogging (For instance readers can comment on the blog).

By the book, Blogging started in 1997. The word 'Blog' has been emerged from 'Weblog'. Weblog is nothing but a website that has entries in reverse chronological order i.e new post published over old post. Blogging became familiar in 2001 and the demand for blog websites increased. This resulted in the creation of a desirable number of blog hosting websites. The content writers need not compulsorily be a designer. There arose certain complications. A new technique called Content Management System (CMS) emerged which made easy for a layman in web technologies to add, edit and manage contents.

The entry of multimedia into blogging paved the way to booming market for blogs today. The mixture of different forms of content such as photos, audio, animation and video embedded into blog magnified the trend. With appropriate tools, they can even be downloaded to computers, media players etc.

Siri can countdown for you!

How to set timer with Siri?

Launch Siri and say "Set timer for 1 hour". The timer has been set for you now. Siri starts countdown and alerts you when the timer ends.

 You can also use the below commands at appropriate contexts.

• Show the timer

• Pause the timer

• Resume the timer

• Cancel the timer

  
Real time scenarios where Siri and Timer blend is of use:

• During Workouts

• Indoor games

• As a Kichen Timer

• Doing laundry

• Baking/Grilling

• Study/Break sessions etc. 

Tips while leafing through Safari

I am at the bottom of the webpage in Safari and I want to navigate to the top of the screen right now.....

• Tap somewhere on the Status bar at the top to navigate to the top of the screen.

Note:  This is also applicable in many other Applications like Messages, eMails, Facebook, Photos, DropBox etc.

Do I need to type .net/.edu/.org/.us while typing an address in the address bar?

• No, Hold on the .com key to see the .net/.edu/.org/.us keys from which you can select one.

Art of Exemplification

Mark Zuckerberg - The brilliant Billionaire

Most of us allocate part of our worthy time daily on a trendy website named facebook.com, which is one of the top websites ranked by traffic today. Let us all make an effort to know about the face behind facebook and get inspired by the founder of facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, a harvard student, the creator of Facebook, reformed his skills into a business that costs billions. He is a successful businessperson and earned enormous wealth from his efforts.

His drive to facebook started in his second year of college, when Mark and his three friends created a website named Facemash. Facemash is the ancestor of Facebook. This website invited his classmates to compare their official photos to decide who was 'hot' or 'not'. It seems he hacked the University computers to get those photos. The site only lasted for few days until the university found about the site and closed it. But this incident earned him status among the Harvard students as a skillful programmer. Mark expressed in an article in The Harvard Crimson that he was inspired to make Facebook from the incident of Facemash. 

Ultimately Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.com in February 2004 as an internal system for the students at the harvard university to connect with each other i.e only those people with a verified college e-mail address were allowed to sign up. Then FB spreads to some top universities in USA, by allowing them membership to the website. In June 2004 Facebook moved it's office with headquarters to Palo Alto, California and purchased the domain name facebook.com dropping 'The' from the existing domain name. Then Facebook opens its doors to High school students. The High school students dont have email addresses to verify which high school they are from, So Facebook allowed the students to verify one another. Later Facebook is open to employees of certain companies. At last anyone with any e-mail address is allowed to join Facebook. In October 2007, Microsoft acquired equity stake in facebook. In the mean time FB reached several milestones both in technical and business perspective. Mark Zuckerberg is named Time magazine's Person of the year 2010. Finally in May 2012, facebook went public.

Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg who created an energetic and passionate virtual environment which made billions of people to connect each other, share information, develop social relationship among one another through a painless mode, to be informed of the happenings in the world on top of individuals interest and to bring life style to the next level of innovation and entertainment.

Ask Siri to Wake you up!

How to set an alarm with Siri?

Launch Siri and start talking to her after you hear a beep.

Exemplar:

Say "Wake me up at 6 a.m. tomorrow". Siri has set the alarm now.

Certain alarm related Voice commands:

• Wake me up in half an hour.
• Set an alarm for 5 p.m.
• New alarn 6 a.m. tomorrow.
• Change my 6 a.m. alarm to 7 a.m.
• Cancel my 7 a.m alarm.
• Turn off my 7 a.m. alarm.
• Delete my 7 a.m alarm.

Google FeedBurner - Performance metrics for your feed

Google FeedBurner is a web application which allows you to Analyse, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize and Troubleshootize your feeds. To start with, Burn your feed on Google FeedBurner.

• Stay signed in your google account and launch http://feedburner.google.com in your browser.
  
  
  
   

•  Type your feed address in the given Box with max-results to be minimum and click Next.

Exemplar: http://www.blogger.com/feeds/219616526091656459/posts/default?max-results=3

•   Follow couple of Onscreen steps and your feed will be live to the world and the Analyse tab of your feedburner dashboard provides the feed statistics.

How to  promote your FeedBurner feed on your website?

•   Click on your Feed Title (For instance "Techzio") in the Google feedburner dashboard.
•   Click "Publicize" tab -> "Chicklet Chooser" link.

•    Choose the feed icon of your choice and your blog publishing service (Eg: Blogger) at the bottom of the page and click on Go! link to reach the next page.

•     Click on Add Widget button to add the Subscribe Feed icon link to your blog.

Stumbleupon - Vital key to generate traffic to your blog

Stumbleupon is a social networking tool which we can make use of to generate traffic to our website and create backlinks.

• Create an account with Stumbleupon (https://www.stumbleupon.com/signup).
• Download and install Stumbleupon toolbar. For Firefox the download link is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stumbleupon/

• Stay signed in your Stumbleupon account and launch http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit in your browser.

• Complete the above form with your website details and click Add this page. Now your site is available for others when they stumble.

Note: To discover new websites based on your interests, click Stumble! in the toolbar and you can rank the websites visited by clicking thumbs up/thumbs down button.

Siri - My Personal Assistant reminds me of everything

Siri (Voice activated Personal Assistant) is a wonderful feature in iPhone 4S. You can talk to Siri as if conversing with your friend. Let us see how to make our friend Siri to remind us our stuffs.

How to launch Siri?

• Press and hold the Home button

                                 or

• Take iPhone to your ear and look back into Home Screen

Siri will be launched. Wait for Siri to beep and you can start talking to her.

How to set reminders with Siri?

Exemplar:

Talking to Siri "Set a reminder to take tablets everyday 1 PM"

Say "Yes" to her to confirm

Siri has set reminder successfully and she will never forget to remind us.

Siri reminds using GPS:

•  You can tell Siri to remind something when you leave some place. Say "Remind me to take Umbrella when I leave here".
• You can tell Siri to remind something when you arrive some place. Say "Remind me to talk to John when I go to Office" (Office address should be added in Contact Information).

Certain Reminders:

•   Remember to start cooking at 8 PM.
•   Remind me to buy milk at 5PM tomorrow.
•   Remind me to buy bread every 5 days.
•   Remind me to finish this article by 6 PM. 
•   Remind me to attend meeting every Monday (everyday, every week, every two weeks, once a month, once a year). 

Note:

You can check back your reminders by asking Siri - Reminders for today/Reminders for July 28/Reminders for next month etc.

Google Alerts - Perceive latest info on your desired search to your Inbox

Google alert is a facility to preset your Google search and get the latest information regarding the search to your inbox directly. One should be aware of Creating and Managing Alerts in order to make use of this feature.

• Stay signed in your Google account and launch http://www.google.com/alerts in your browser.
• In the Search query field, enter your desired search term. Preview of your search is shown at the right side of the Google alerts home page. By having a look at the Preview, you can make sure if the search term chosen is appropriate.

• Select the Result Type (Everything/News/Blogs/Video/Discussions/Books), How often - frequency of alerts (As-it-happens/Once a day/Once a week), How many (Only the best results/All results), Deliver to (Your email id) and Click on Create Alert button. You are taken to the Google Alerts page with the alert set up.

•  Click the Edit button to change the Search term, Volume and How often and Save after editing. 
•  To delete an alert, tick the Check Box ahead of the alert and Click the Delete button.

Search on Mac smartly by configuring Spotlight

Spotlight is a tool to search the contents on Mac. The search is efficient with Spotlight as it focuses on Metadata. By configuring the spotlight on Mac you can go for a more effective search.

• Go to System Preferences and Open Spotlight Panel.

• You can check the check Boxes of items to be included in the Spotlight searches. (Eg Applications, System Preferences etc)
• You can choose your preferable "Spotlight menu keyboard shortcut" (to launch spotlight) as any function key. The default choice is command + space. 
•  You can choose your preferable "Spotlight window keyboard shortcut" (to launch spotlight search result window) as any function key. The default choice is option + command + space.

How to prevent spotlight from searching certain locations?

At times, you don't want the spotlight to search certain sensitive locations on your MAC. To do that,

• Click Privacy tab on Spotlight Panel
• Click the Add button (+) and browse the folder you like to prevent from spotlight search and click Choose.

• You can also drag and drop the sensitive folder into the list under the Privacy tab.

Generate traffic to your blog via Pinging

Pinging is a technique to drive the contents of a blog to the leading blog search engines and directories. Whenever you update the blog, you can send a Ping to the search engines by means of various free pinging services available on the web. A Ping is a brief message containing the basic information about your new post on the blog. Pings are good traffic generator. Here are some of the fascinating pinging services.

1. http://pingomatic.com/
2. http://blo.gs/ping.php 
3. http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=ping
4. http://ping.in/
5. http://pingoat.net/
6. http://pingler.com/
7. http://freewebsubmission.com/#fws_submit_form

 Exemplar:

• Go to http://pingomatic.com/
• Enter the Blog Name, Blog Home Page,RSS URL (optional) on the pingomatic home page. Check all the services that needs to be pinged.

• Now Click the Send Pings button at the bottom of the page and You will be redirected to the Pinging Complete! page. Hence Pinging can generate traffic to your blog with ease.

Google Reader for your favorite blogs

Everyone of us have our own favorite blogs, where they add regular content. But the site won't be notifying us when they post any new article. Its tedious for us to go and check the site often to know about the latest updates. We are going to make use of a cloud based application called The Google Reader to read all our favorite blog updates aggregated at a single place.

Feature behind the Google Reader

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the feature of the websites which allows us to subscribe to the feed sent by the website.

Feed is nothing but a date file sent by the website, to display the latest updates on the site.

In order to subscribe to and display the Feed, we need a Feed Reader (like Google Reader) so that we can read the contents.

How to use Google Reader?

• Go to this link http://www.google.com/reader/view/ to launch the Google Reader. Currently the reader is empty without any feeds.

• Click on the Subscribe button on the left navigation pane of the Google Reader and enter the address of your favorite blog (I have entered techzio.blogspot.com).

•  Now click the Add Button. You have subscribed to "TECHZIO". Similarly you can subscribe to all your favorite websites.

 

• The list of the sites subscribed will be at the bottom pane under the Subscription list. You can click on the specific blog to read or click on All items at the top of the navigation pane to read all the blogs subscribed. The Google Reader displays the contents at the right side of the page. By default the contents  are shown in Expanded view. you can also jump to Quick view by clicking the list view icon at the right side top corner.

 

Enjoy reading all your favorite blogs at one place.