Gone are those days when we had to wait long to catch up our favorite show or a movie trailer on Television. Today online video is the newest trend in media and increasingly people are getting involved to watch anything they wish. Watching online videos are exploding around us and thanks to Internet for giving us a very amazing way to experience news and entertainment. According to an interesting post shared last year by mediapost, a whopping 158 million U.S. Internet users — or 80% of the nation’s online population — watched online video. And of course the figure is rising each day, in fact the success of sites such as YouTube over few years has helped open the door for those who desire easy access to watch and share videos over the internet. Most people get their hands on YouTube or Google Videos to catch videos, but then there are many other alternatives that can offer great videos too. So with that in mind, honeytechblog has segregated the Top 50 sites to watch free online videos in terms of music, movies, educational, TV and news.

Top 10 Sits To Watch Free Music Videos Online

Music is everywhere, it permeates our world. Everyone knows music has power and is importance in everybody’s life. So if you are looking to watch music videos online then check out the below sites that provide music video fans with a high quality experience to watch favorite videos and discover new artists.

1. MTV

2. AOL Music

3. Yahoo Music

4. Vh1

5. Artistdirect

6. Yallwire

7. In

8. Roxwel

9. Blastro

10. MySpace Music

Top 10 Sites To Watch Free Movies Online

Did you miss your latest movie release at theater? No worries, you can catch it over few interesting sites that offer you to watch full movies online. In fact, watching movies online is the ultimate way to enjoy a movie because it’s instant, you can watch a movie on your giant HD flat screen, or on your laptop while sipping your favorite drink at a local coffee shop – or while travelling. So check back to the following sites when looking to improve your movie watching experience.

1. IMBD

2. Google Video

3. Hulu

4. Veoh

5. Dailymotion

6. Metacafe

7. Onlinewatchmovies

8. Joost

9. Movies-on-demand

10. Babelgum

Top 10 Sites To Watch Free Educational Videos Online

Everybody needs to watch educational videos when they truly want to learn something. Because when you watch something and learn, it comes out better than reading materials. Following are sites that offer you best educational videos across the web. They have everything from tutorials for kids to graphics designer to just about anything.

1. Educationalvideos

2. Archive

3. Brainpop

4. Nationalgeographic

5. Fora

6. Videojug

7. Learner

8. Greenenergyty

9. Neok12

10. PBS Video

Top 10 Sites To Watch Free Online TV

Missing favourite television show due to various reasons is a common thing. But no more as you can catch the repeat telecast of it via various following sites. Online video search engine has created a better way for people to search, discover, and watch their favourite TV show online. So make sure you come back to the following site when desire to watch Television shows online.

1. YouTube

2. Freetvonline

3. Surfthechannel

4. Chooseandwatch

5. History

6. Videosurf

7. Blinkx

8. Tvshack

9. Letmewatchthis

10. Free-tv-vidoe-online

Top 10 Sites To Watch Free News Online

We all wish to get updated about latest news around the world, but we should have reliable source for it. Below given sites are especially dedicated to offer you latest news across the world and which are reliable too. You can watch news videos online in about all categories such as tech, politics and business.

1. Abcnews

2. BbcNews

3. Cnn

4. Cbsnews

5. Foxnews

6. Ndtv

7. Thedailytube

8. Forbes

9. Ctv

10. Thecurrentaffairs

We hope you have a great experience visiting these videos sites and also let us know if we missed some of your favorite online video sharing sites. Meanwhile, you can follow us on Twitter and subscribe for our RSS feed to get update on each post of honeytechblog!

• Top 10 Sites To Watch Free Movies Online
• Top 10 Sites To Watch Free Educational Videos Online
• Top 10 Sites To Watch Free Music Videos Online
• Top 10 Sites To Watch Free News Online
• Top 10 Sites To Watch Free Online TV

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Google Image Search is one of the top technologies today at Googleplex as it serves millions of users around the world that are looking for appropriate images. That displays the importance of images in each one’s life. Especially if you are blogger, web designer or a graphic designer then you highly rely upon new images for day to day work. When you develop a website, the first thing that strikes our mind is to get more views, visitors and incomes. And images help the readers for better understanding of the text content. So generally do Google Image search or may be Yahoo Image search, but at times the result may be disappointing and you might feel like digging the alternative sites too. However, this certainly does not mean that you have shell out dollars to obtain images, there are few excellent royalty-free image sites existing that offer equal quality product at low or no cost. With that in mind, honeytechblog compiles Top 10 websites to get royalty-free images, which can certainly help you getting amazing images.

1. GettyImages

Gettyimages is the leading provider of digital media worldwide, creating and distributing a range of assets – from royalty-free stock photography and editorial images to footage, music and multimedia – that help communicators around the globe tell their stories. Getty Images creates and distributes the world’s best and biggest imagery collections, making them available in the most reachable and usable way – 24 hours a day, every day. From contemporary creative imagery to news, sports, entertainment and archival imagery, their products are found each day in the full range of traditional and digital media worldwide.

2. Corbisimages

The Corbis Royalty-Free Collections covers health, nature, sports, and a full range of current, relevant subject matter. Search unlimited-use images at incomparable value. Corbis imagery is packed with power and emotion and includes areas such as business, technology, people, lifestyle, nature, places and backgrounds. It’s a library of more than 140,000 images and 264 CDs from which to choose from.

3. iStockphoto

iStockphoto is the internet’s original member-generated image and design community. Get easy, affordable inspiration with millions of safe, royalty-free photographs, vector illustrations, video footage, audio tracks and Flash files. The site’s photo library contains over 4.5 million stock photos, vector illustrations, Flash files, video footage and audio from over 75,000 artists.

4. Photoxpress

PhotoXpress.com is the world’s largest free premier-quality image bank, providing creative professionals a vast and legal image library for both personal and professional use – including Web site design, brochure illustrations, advertisements and editorial illustrations. You get free, high quality, high resolution images and that is up to 10 downloads a day.

5. Freedigitalphotos

At freedigitalphotos you get thousands of royalty free photos and illustrations for websites, newspapers, magazines, video and TV productions, iPhone applications, PowerPoint presentations, forums, blogs and school work. All photos available there are free for corporate and personal use. Every image is free, with an option to buy high resolution versions for use in print or graphic design. If you are a photographer then you can create a free account to share and sell your photos.

6. Morguefile

Morguefile offers outstanding collection of photos for download. The morguefile contains photographs freely contributed by many artists to be used in creative projects by visitors to the site. Don’t forget to check out their top free photo collection, which is indeed worth looking at. The best part of morguefile is that you can download images from the site without even creating an account.

7. Imageafter

Imageafter is a large online free photo collection. You can download and use any image or texture from our site and use it in your own work, either personal or commercial. In the directory you can expect free high resolution images of objects, places, animals, mechanics, insects, signs, circuits and plants etc. All stock photos can be freely downloaded and used in you commercial or personal works. The size of the images range from 1600×1200 to 2560×1920.

8. Photovaco

Photovaco offers free stock photos with high resolution for both personal and commercial projects. You can use these free photos in websites, video, TV production, forum, blogs, school projects and print medias including newspapers, magazine, books, CD covers. That means you can download, edit and use all photos anywhere and anyhow you like except for abuse.

9. Jupiterimages

Jupiter Images is one of the leading suppliers of stock photography in the world – with a comprehensive photo library covering royalty free images and stock illustration. You’ll find top collections including Ablestock, Comstock and PhotoObjects. Between them, they offer imagery for almost any project, with a wide range of conceptual and lifestyle photography, including everything from holiday photos and sports stock to industrial shots.

10. Picturesindia

Picturesindia is an Indian site that wishes to provide an enticing and enchanting journey for its viewers by presenting them a collection of royalty free images, encompassing sections of never explored India. This unique collection has all possible intricate details that will surely be a visual treat for its viewers. From images of hotels, monuments and tourist attractions of India to photos of ancient Indian civilization everything is just a click away at Pictures India. Browse through the vast collection of images of India and download these images free of cost for various purposes like advertising, publishing and web designing.

So which is your favorite site to get royalty-free images? Do share those excellent sites with us via comment.

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• Top 10 Reliable Free Batch Image Resizer and Processor
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• ImageShack

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The most practical and fast solution is what we look for in anything we do today. Because we have less time and resources, so we need make the best of what is available. But at times we tend to lose quality in urge of getting done things faster and land up in something we may not really like. Hence if you get reliability, steadiness and quicker way of performing act, it would be great. Same applies to any kind of softwares available, you use them to save time and at the same time it should produce satisfied results, without compromising on quality.

Especially if you happen to be a web designer or developer, then dealing with converting images to various sizes could be of headache. Converting them to different sizes is a necessary and the result should be best at the end. So doing it hand by hand is of course not feasible for hundreds of thousands of images. Here using batch image processor can help doing hours of work in few clicks and in almost no time. With most of the batch image resizer and processor you resize, rotate, and convert pictures easily. They offer compatibly with most formats such as JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF and more others.

On the other hand, such software also helps in our day to day life when it comes to sharing photos over social networks or others. High resolution pics could consume lot of your time to send it over emails. So, here at honeytechblog we have listed Top 10 reliable batch image resizer and processor that can resize and process image files, along with supported formats, and dramatically reduce internet transfer times, enabling you to quickly and easily prepare your image collections to be published on the web.

1. ImageBatch

ImageBatch is a free lightweight batch converter for images, based on LibGD graphic library. Currently supported image formats are JPEG, PNG and GIF. With ImageBatch you can resize, crop, rotate, flip your images and draw watermarks on them. Watermarks could be based on user text or user image. ImageBatch is expected to work under any Windows platform, starting from Windows 95. Installation is not required and supports Windows for now. It is really easy to use – you just choose working directory, filetypes, setup operation setttings and press “Start” then. After that, execution process could be stopped at any time, using “Stop” button of progress dialog.

2. Fotosizer

Fotosizer is a freeware batch image resizer tool. It resizes your photos in just 3 easy steps – 1. Photo selection, 2. select resize settings, then 3. Start the resize! With Fotosizer, you can shrink JPEG image files, along with other supported formats, and considerably reduce internet transfer times, enabling you to quickly and easily prepare your image collections to be published on the web. It also helps you unlock the photos from your digital camera. Use Fotosizer to batch resize your photos making it easier and faster to email to friends, upload to photo sharing websites or upload to websites that offer photo printing services. Resize quickly and easily using a preset list of sizes including iPod, iPhone.

3. Phatch

Phatch is open source and works on Linux, Mac Os X and Windows. Phatch is a user friendly, cross-platform Photo Batch Processor and Exif Renamer with a nice graphical user interface. Phatch handles all popular image formats and can duplicate (sub)folder hierarchies. Phatch can batch resize, rotate, apply shadows, perspective, rounded corners, and 35 further actions in minutes instead of hours or days if you do it manually. The website carry a extensive documentation and also allows users to install specific extensions, so that any users beginner to advanced will find the software easy to use and extend.

4. FixPicture

FixPicture is amazing online image editing application, which is one of the fastest ways to resize, crop, rotate, and convert your images and pictures. You also manipulate your pictures by giving grayscale, blur, sharpen, emboss, normalize and other effects. The tool has two versions Flash and HTML and there is no registration required as well. You can upload your image directly from the URL or a hard drive. This one supports over 400 file format: pictures (jpeg, tiff, png, gif, bmp, tga, and more RAW files (crw, nef, raf, cr2, dng, and more.

5. Irfanview

IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative tool designed converting and batch processing images that goes well with Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, 2008, Vista, Windows 7. This is extremely simple tool for beginners and also for powerful experts. Some of the exciting features would include, supports almost all file format, file search, toolbar skin option, Cut/crop, IPTC editing, Lossless JPG rotation, loads of plugins, Capturing, hotkeys and much more worth giving a look.

6. Resize2mail

Resize 2 mail is an online resize website utility developed for digital camera owners, webmasters, people travelling or anybody who quickly wants to resize a digital image for email or publishing on a web site. To resize your image is now as simple as one, two three, and no need to open an image editor for this! Select the image you would like to resize with Browse option, select the size you would like your new image to be, and finally click on okay and wait for the next page to show up. Save the resized image on your PC and email it to friend, family, colleague or office.

7. ImageConverter .EXE

Image converter.exe is a free image converter works on Windows. This is a fast and flexible image conversion program, which allows support for converting to over 15 formats. It features over 20 effects which can be applied in any conversion process, and even in batch mode. It makes the application out of box as it offer Image Conversion Wizard, which helps with a step-by-step dialog that allows you to select files, set conversion properties (JPG to BMP), apply effects, and set how the converted files will be named. To make the process simpler, Image Converter .EXE includes the MediaView Extension from SoftTech InterCorp, form which converting between image types and apply effects can be done by simply right-clicking them. Convert and Rotate 120 selected files right from Windows Explorer.

8. Dosize

Dosize is an online utility that is very helpful for users who upload photos to the Internet or email. Many sites and email programs do have file size necessity that your photos might not meet. So on Dosize, you can resize, shrink and email all your pics under one roof. The application allows image resize up to 10 pictures at a stretch. It is simple to work with, select picture, select preferred resizing option and click ok. Then it will ask for email id where you pics need to be sent. It supports only JPG format and there is no registration required. It one of the best free online utility to resize, shrink and email your photo images.

9. FastStone

FastStone Photo Resizer is an image converter and renaming tool that intends to enable users to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy batch mode. Drag and Drop mouse operation is well supported. Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats including BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA. You can also check our review on FastStone.

10. PIXresizer

The reduced files are saved in a different folder, so your original images are not altered at all. PIXresizer offers several different resizing methods to choose from and can automatically recognize image sizes to calculate the best fit. In addition, it can convert between image formats (JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNG and TIFF), rotate images, convert to grayscale and resize multiple images in batch mode. A great companion for webmasters and digital photographers.

These are some of the best photo resizing and processing software available on the web and I’m sure there are lot more. So, if you have any of your favorite reliable free batch image resizer and processor, then do share it with us via comment. Meanwhile, you can follow us on twitter and key in your email on our RSS feeds to get every post update on our site!

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Everybody needs to watch educational videos when they truly want to learn something. Because when you watch something and learn, it comes out better than reading materials. Following are sites that offer you best educational videos across the web. They have everything from tutorials for kids to graphics designer to just about anything.

1. Educationalvideos

2. Archive

3. Brainpop

4. Nationalgeographic

5. Fora

6. Videojug

7. Learner

8. Greenenergyty

9. Neok12

10. PBS Video

• Top 50 Sites To Watch Free Online Videos
• Top 10 Sites To Watch Free Movies Online
• Top 10 Sites To Watch Free Music Videos Online
• Top 10 Sites To Watch Free Online TV
• Top 10 Sites To Watch Free News Online

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In case you are looking start of your web based or a CMS project, then WordPress is strongly recommended. There are many reasons why we love WordPress and believe that it is the best blogging/CMS platform on web today. Some of the reasons why honeytechblog is powered by WordPress are:

• Its Simplicity
• Trackback Feature
• Auto Ping Functionality
• Easy to Customise
• Variety of Design Themes Available
• Outstanding Plugin Functionality
• User-friendly and So on

With increasing popularity of this, many are choosing wordpress as the base platform for their project. In fact, toady you will find many .gov and .org sites are based on wordpress. Here, I have collected Top 10 Government Sites Powered By WordPress.

1. America.gov

America.gov is produced by U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP), which engages international audiences on issues of foreign policy, society and values to help create an environment receptive to U.S. national interests. IIP communicates with foreign opinion makers and other publics through a wide range of print and electronic outreach materials published in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Persian, Russian, and Spanish. IIP also provides information outreach support to U.S. embassies and consulates in more than 140 countries worldwide.

2. Congressional Budget Office

Congressional Budget Office blog is maintained by the director Douglas W. Elmendorf. He oversees the agency’s work in providing objective, insightful, timely, and clearly presented information about budgetary and economic issues. The Director also supervises the numerous analytical papers and cost estimates produced by the agency, and he testifies frequently before Congressional committees. In managing the agency, the Director is responsible for a staff of about 235 people and an annual budget of roughly $40 million.

3. Broadband.gov

Blogband is the official blog of the United States National Broadband Plan. A great way to create a connected America is to involve all Americans in the development of a National Broadband Plan. The FCC welcomes civic participation, and also look forward to more interaction through this website as they new features and functions. Through this blog, broadband tries to help spread the word about the available and imminent plans and promote what FCC is doing to educate people about it. Blogband is also one of the FCC’s major ventures into blogging and social media.

4. National Center for Preservation Technology & Training

NCPTT protects America’s historic legacy by equipping preservation professionals with progressive technology-based research and training. NCPTT advances the application of science and technology to historic preservation. Working in the fields of archeology, architecture, landscape architecture and materials conservation, the Center accomplishes its mission through training, education, research, technology transfer and partnerships. NCPTT serves the community that fostered its creation and, in turn, serves the nation and the world.

5. Speaker Nancy Pelosi

This blog belongs to Nancy Pelosi who is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, having made history in 2007 when she was elected first woman to serve as Speaker of the House.  Speaker Pelosi has proved to be a strong, pragmatic leader, unifying her House Democratic caucus more than any other leader in the last 50 years to pass critical legislation moving America in a New Direction after eight years of Republican rule. With Speaker Pelosi at the helm, the 110th Congress has built an impressive record that has focused on the priorities of the American people and brought needed change to Washington and across the country.

6. Official Site of U.K’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown

This is the official site of the U.K Prime Minister’s (Gordon Brown) office. It is the complete source of information on Prime Minister’s performance and activity. The news feature will continue to be central to the site, allowing you to keep up to date with Prime Minister’s work. The Number10 TV channel also provide a wealth of video material, photos updated quickly to the Number 10 Flickr channel, and he will also be posting frequent messages through Twitter to keep you in touch with his day to day activities. With this site he discover what are the current issues faced by the country and locates solution to it.

7. Brazilian Culture Ministry

It is the official web site of the Brazilian Culture Ministry. Apart from daily updates, the sites shares huge information on Project support, Bids and Awards, meetings and forums and videos.

8. Library of Congress

The Library of Congress (LOC) is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library’s mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations. The Office of the Librarian is tasked to set policy and to direct and support programs and activities to accomplish the Library’s mission.

9. Directgov | innovate

Directgov is an Directgov | innovate developer site to provide an innovative, collaborative, open source environment for Government and developers to interact, share new ideas and showcase work. The success of this space is dependent on open participation and the ability to have conversations around best use of government data, development of applications and use of new and innovative technologies.

10. Power of Information Taskforce Report

This site offers report on Power of Information Taskforce. The Taskforce brought together a group from government, industry and the third sector who all share a passion for using ICT to enable better public service delivery. All members have contributed in a personal capacity rather than on behalf of their respective organizations and this independence of approach is reflected in our conclusions. The group has itself worked largely through web 2.0 tools – communicating as a web group, publishing our progress via a blog and RSS feed, and producing this draft report on a wiki.

All these sites are powered by WordPress and doing a great job out there. Do share other wordpress based websites (only .gov) if you come across. Meanwhile, if you are a blogger then let’s join hand together via Blogger on Twitter.

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With so many websites offering many different information on a specific topic, the typical Internet user is now more impatient when it comes to looking something up. Just by skimming through the page from which an Internet user entered, they already have an idea if it’s worth the time to scour through the other pages. This is why many websites and blogs end up with a high bounce rate. This is especially common for blogs that have recycled material from other websites that have a stronger authority over the subject. Here are 10 tips that will help blog owners reduce their bounce rate and enable them to gain a higher earning power.

1.Adopt a stimulating web layout and attractive web design

First impression is the last impression so if your web layout or landing pages are cursed with design flaws then user don’t really bother to stay. The design of your web page should mature enough to drag the user attention. The users will read the content of your website and then starts checking the layout only if it stimulate there senses. The impressed users will sure come back again on your website and hence total time spend by them on your site will also increased. So you should remember to follow

• A Good layout structure.
• A watch over on best trends of creative designs.

2.Don’t over complicate your navigation menu. It should be placed where normal users would expect it to be placed.

Testing and creations are the part of innovations but we should remember the basic facts and human perceptions. If you plans to play “hide & seek” with the navigation’s then you may loose the visitors. Even though you have a nice content on the webpages and blogs but if users are unable to trace them then this is the big cause for your Bounce Rates. Always keep in mind that top area are most visible portion of your webpage and users generally expect the navigation menu over there. So you should remember to follow

• Some basic information’s of the site should always be indicated on navigation. It should be top, top-right or top-left (depend on your layout).
• If you are using  jQuery or javascripts on navigation then make sure to check the cross browser compatibility.

3.Keep it simple. Try to minimize the number of pages you have on your website

Whenever a post is extended into pagination then user distract after seeing 1-2 pages. Make your website simple so that it takes less time of users and they can see your other posts.

Note: Don’t confused with the pagination of single post and the pagination of webpage.

4.Have very well written and interesting content. Publish all original works and never duplicate anything from other websites.

If you think that you copied a content and you should not refer to original work then you are on the wrong direction. By giving the credits to the original sources you can gain your own credibility. Always remember that “When you copy a content from single source then it is a duplicacy but when you coped the contents from different resources then it is termed as research”

5.Don’t forget to optimize your content with keywords, but don’t make the mistake of stuffing them too much into the articles.

Keywords are the things which are used by the users to search on the search engines like google, bing and others. So if you wants to prepare an elaborate and optimized post then you should use the keywords within your articles. For example, I have a post titled “Top 250 list of Twitter clones sites” then i’ll used the keywords like “twitter clones“, “twitter clones from china” , “twitter clones from Spain” and so on. The resultant will increase the value of keyword “twitter clones” on the search engines.

Note: Please make sure to maintain the naturalistic post so that users can spare handsome amount of time on your page without smelling anything suspicious.

6.Make sure that your keywords are specifically targeted for the content on your website.

The bounce rates are often due to lack of relevant content on the site but many times it dude to wrongly optimized keywords. For example you optimize your post title “30 Free Google Android Applications” to a wrong keywords like “Free Google Wave” or “Google applications” then users hitting on the post may not be interested on it.

7.Don’t forget to optimize your most effective keywords by starting a PPC campaign

Pay-per-click ad campaigns are most responsive and quick way to drag traffic from search engines on particular keywords. Bounce rates are often due to non-targeted users, if you are any services or product company then you should try the PPC campaign for most relevant users. For example if you are a technical university then you should start the PPC campaigns on keywords like “B.Tech admissions” , “M.Tech admissions” and others.

8.Take the time to develop a well thought out linking system. Develop partnerships with other website owners so that you can have exposure through linkages.

9.Minimize the exposure of distracting elements such as pop ups.

Pop ups , new windows and surveys are often irritating for users so please try to avoid them on your website.

10.Check if your website can easily be loaded with all the important elements intact regardless of the operating system platform being used.

Website loading time is also a crucial factor for the bounce rates. Its quite obvious that sites having heavy loading time are responsible for higher percentage of bounce rates. You should know that how to optimize website loading time and performance.

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Robots.txt is used to define the Robots Exclusion Protocols for the websites. It handles the behaviors of all the robots, bots and web-crawler programs. In a simple words any web-crawler program or bots visiting any website checks for the root file /robots.txt, which defined Exclusion Protocols for that bots. One of the common example of the robots.txt file is defined below
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Where User-agent: defines the type of bots and Disallow defined the exclusion for particulars or type of url locations.
User-agent: * means all types of bots
Disallow: / means exclusion for all the files and pages located at websites.

How to decide the robots.txt for Wordpress blogs

A common example of robots.txt file used at honeytechblog is listed as below
Sitemap: http://www.honeytechblog.com/sitemap.xml

User-Agent: *
Disallow: */?mobi*
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: */forums/bb-login.php?*
Allow: twitter.honeytechblog.com

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
disallow:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
disallow:

Explanations of the common exclusions and agent used in the robots.txt files

1.Sitemap: http://www.honeytechblog.com/sitemap.xml

Used to define the sitemap location for the bots, these will create ease for search bots to detect your new pages.

2.User-Agent: *

Already described above

3.Disallow: */?mobi*

Used to exclude the pages containing “/?mobi”. I used this feature to avoid the content duplicacy issues generated for mobile users.( It is not necessary for you )

4.Disallow: /wp-admin/

Used to exclude the wordpress admin pages from the search engine. It is necessary to avoid the listing of any hack prone page or errors.

5.Disallow: /wp-includes/

Used to exclude the Wordpress includes folder which also necessary to avoid from the searching bots. It is necessary because some times when your Wordpress faces any plugins or update issues, it floats a serious errors which can be easily indexed by the search bots or hackers.

6.Disallow: /wp-content/

Again it is not necessary to index all the files in the wp-contents.

7.Disallow: /wp-

For security purpose its better hide all the core files and pages.

8.Disallow: /*.css$

For exclusion of all the style-sheets. (If you want to further protect your css files)
Note: Disallow: /*.”fileextension”$ can be used to exclude the “file extension” from the reach of bots. Where “file extension” can be any extensions you want like *.txt$,*.php$ ,*.jsp$, or *.jpg$

9.Disallow: /*?

Used to disallow all the urls having “?” in it. (Used to avoid content duplicacy issues, tracking urls and custom features from the reach of bots)

10.Disallow: /name/

Used to disallow any directory ,folders or categories. for example you want to disallow “admin” folder then you can simple use “Disallow: /admin/” , if you want to disallow a category named “download” then you can simply use “Disallow:/category/download*” and for uncategorized category use can use “Disallow: /category/uncategorized*”

Extra:

To allow all the images bots (like google image bot) to search and index all images of the website / blog

disallow:
Allow: /*.png$
Allow: /*.jpg$
Allow: /*.gif$
Allow: /*.jpeg$
Allow: /*.jpg$
Allow: /*.ico$
Allow: /images/

To allow all the adsense bot to crawler with ease on entire site

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
disallow:

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In case you ever fight with Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) then you may know that it is full of compatibility issues. All the Developers and Designers cry when clients talks about browser compatibility. IE6 have several issues with web Security ,Flash objects ,JavaScript’s ,Jquery ,CSS and PNG Transparency. Recently Ben Parr of mashable described that why IE6 must die . Moreover david walsh also listed 6 Reasons why IE6 must die due to lack of various compatibility supports.

In all the above issues IE6 PNG Transparency is the most unpleasant and irritating. On general websites we can fix these issues with the the help of script that adds near-native PNG support with alpha opacity to IE 5.5 and 6. Now the question moves into WordPress, though you can manually fix that but its quit tricky. HITS- IE6 PNGFix is a WordPress plugin for the persons who doesn’t have any knowledge of scripts and css and wants to fix the PNG Transparency issues in few clicks. This plugin will automatically adds the codes to fix the PNG Transparency in IE6.

• You can easily add and install the HITS- IE6 PNGFix from the Plugins>Add New options in the dashboard

• You can configure the plugin from the Settings>HITS- IE6 PNGFix

• You can choose the PNG Fix Method from the drop down options of Twin Helix v1.0 ,Twin Helix v2.0 and Unit PNG fix

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Most of the confused souls on choosing efficient webhosting company are the new guys who desired to shift their blogs from wordpress.com or blogspot.com. These guys don’t have enough knowledge and often seeks for the consultations of the experts. Few fortunate enough gets the consultations from friends and social networks like twitter. From the last 3 years I deals with more than 10-20 hosting companies and also help few to established their sub hosting unit as a reseller accounts.

Mistakes : If you consider that Space and Bandwidth is the main feature for choosing a webhosting company then you are running under blunder. Space and Bandwidth plays 20% part in choosing the right webhosting. There are many other factors which predict the performance of the hosting. These factors are described as follows:

1. Up Time: Server uptime is most important factors. Unlike local hosting providers, hosting should have 100% up-time. Most of the best data centers like planet claims to provide 99 % up time warranty.
2. CPU Limits: CPU limit is the most crucial factors for high traffic websites. If you plans to shift your host just because of high traffic then you must keep in mind to check for their maximum allowed process limits. Normally due to lack of this you often face the “Interner Server Errors” – 400 pages. I personally faced this issue so telling you on the basis of personal experience.
3. cPanel : Control Panel is the most common feature of the hosting. In case you are on the windows hosting having Plesk Panel then you must checkup for automated applications, traffic manager, database management applications and other basic things. Personally i liked the cpanel.
4. Support: This is the most confident feature of the webhosting providers. Some time you messed up with the dedicated sites then support should quickly respond to your queries. Support should be quick chat support or mail/ticketing system.
5. Money matter the most: Yeah, money matter but set up your few above described bench mark and then decide the hosting providers offering all the things under minimum budgets.
6. Established data center: I consider that you all known with the term data center. Data center are the place where your the web server is located actually. You should clear on the fact that data center is safe and secure with all types of dangers like flood, fire and accidents. Of course it is not supposed to be first floor of your building or in your bed room.
7. Accepted user policy (AUP) and the Terms of service (TOS): About 90% of the internet users don’t give a dam about the certificates , TOS or any policies. Webhosting TOS is unlike the software you are supposed to install in next – next clicks. You should aware of the things like hosting company is responsible of any data loss / data theft . It is recommended that you should read the Accepted user policy(AUP) before buying hosting.

Now you are confused that some friend suggest the DreamHost and some suggest any other. I would recommend that you should consider the above described points before going for any hosting provides.

Suggestions: In case you have a blog then you should go for Hostgator baby plan and if it have quite healthy traffic then you should go for Hostgator Business plan.

Shared hosting have their own limits in case you are earning more than $1000 from your blog and have more than 5millions of monthly page views then i will recommend for the dedicated servers or Virtual private servers (VPS).

Update: How to choose your web hosting according to your requirement

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Internet users are quite restless and never wait if your website is too heavy to load in the normal internet connection. Web site optimization is an important phase that decides the productivity of the websites. So never frustrate your users  with slow loading time and complicated and confusing navigations.

Recently i optimized this blog after so many tricks and tips like logics to load the header files, javascripts compression , hacking wordpress plugins , compressing and optimizing the custom style sheets. Through this post i would like to convey all the important points that i implemented on the honeytechblog which helps in optimizing its loading times. You can use this free website performance tool for web page speed analysis and compare the loading time of your blogs with honeytechblog.

If your blog is not well optimized then the question is how to optimize the websites?

Their are many ways to enhance the performance of the website like these top 10 way to speed up your website, few of the experimented process apart from 20 easy ways for increasing website traffic are described as follows:

1.I checked for the use of heavy files on the home pages and figure out the objects that sucks the loading time. As a results i came to know that featured content gallery is taking too much time to load for the new users. (You can leave this option in case feature contents are important feature for your blog)

2.I checked for the number of HTTP requests from the home page. I have only single page without any iframe so this option looks fine on my homepage.

3.I checked for all the images and try to avoid the use of too many images on the homepage. This can be done by using following methods:

• Use of CSS sprites.
• Using images from different hosts or sub domains. For example media.yoursite.com.
• Initially their were so many images like logos, social icons, profile images, rss buttons and collectively they consume more than 100KB but after the implementation of CSS Sprites it optimized to only 31KB.

Note: I’ll cover up the CSS Sprites optimization in the up coming posts and you can also check few ways to improve your web performance using CSS-Sprites.

4.Try to avoid too many css calls on the homepage. For example wordpress plugins require large resources which calls useless css and javascripts files on the homepage.  Try to avoid <?php wp_head(); ?> on the home page and use alternative methods like i used on honeytechblog. The method is described as follows:

1. Go to wordpress theme directory located at wp-content/themes/yourtheme and open index.php file
2. Find the tag  <?php get_header();?> and replace it with below mention code

<?php
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] != "/")
{
get_header();
}
else
{
include ("header-home.php");
}
?>

Now the above code require a new header file which doesn’t call the <?php wp_head();?> on the home page.

How the use of two header files works:

When users view the home page then it calls the header-home.php and on the other pages it will call the default header files together with your plugins.

Note: After the implementation of this trick my loading time decreased down to more than 300%. (As i used so many plugins and files on the home page but i cut it down to few specific only. I’ll cover up the must have wordpress plugins in the upcoming posts.)

How to create two header files and get them working with your theme

Follow the following process to create two homepage files:

1. Go to your theme directory located at wp-contents/themes/yourtheme and file the file named header.php
2. Copy all the contents of the header.php and paste them into a new file named as header-home.php
3. Now fined the code name <?php wp_head();?> into your header-home.php and delete it.
4. Now your alternate header file is ready to use but this header file is manual and you need to include few important things like meta tags and descriptions generated by “All in one SEO Plugin”. So in next step you need to find the dynamic meta contents.
5. Open your blog in the browser and then view its source. Just search for codes between <!– all in one seo pack 1.5.1 –>  and <!– /all in one seo pack –>. It generally includes the meta tags like <meta name=”description” content=”" /> <meta name=”keywords” content=”" /> <link rel=”canonical” href=”yourdomainname.com” />
6. Now your new header file is ready to test. Now you have options to include this header-home.php file into your theme directory or in root directory of the blog. I choose the option of root directory as its easy to edit it for future uses.
7. As an backup option upload the header-home.php file into root directory i.e yourblog/header-home.php and also into the theme directory ie wp-contents/theme/header-home.php.
8. Now you are completely ready to run the blog. Just don’t forget to change the index.php file described in the above mention process.

Note: You will realized that your loading time is enhanced as now their isn’t any useless calls of the plugins which is not required on the home page. For example script generated by cforms , sociable and other plugins. (if you used them only on single pages) 

5.Try to avoid excess external scripts.

While checking the page source i found useless script like wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js so i removed it using above mention method of two header files.

6.Try to avoid use of multimedia files on the home page. Multimedia files like heavy flash and video require too much bandwidth and loading time. As discussed above i use to have the featured content gallery on the home page but i removed it while going through the optimization process. It requires more than 5 big image as an article image and more than 5 thumbnail images so after the removal it reduced the page from by more than150 Kb.

7.Shift all the media files, css and javascripts into another subdomain. Shifting css files is very simple piece of cake. Follow these steps:

• Create a subdomain where you need to put these CSS files. For example i create media.honeytechblog.com
• Search for style.css used in your wordpress themes i.e yourblog/wp-contents/themes/yourtheme/style.css
• Search for images used in the style.css. Generally these images includes in the same theme folder i.e yourblog/wp-contents/themes/yourtheme/images
• Copy the style.css and the images folder and shift then to desired subdomain. For example a)I shift the css files into media.honeytechblog.com/s1/style.css and images b)I shift the images into media.honeytechblog.com/s1/images folder. Note: I  shift the files into the s1 as a subfolder to differentiate the versions for future use. It is not necessary but things will be neat for future use.

Note: I try to keep this post short and simple but in case you have any issues then feel free to comments and i’ll try to resolve it. In coming days their will be more posts on the wordpress customizations and optimizations so its better if you subscribed to our official RSS.

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What’s a website if no one visits it — additional garbage floating around the Information Highway. Their are millions of website having undefined goals and are neglect by the users. Most of the website owners and bloggers don’t know about what actually they want with their website. FAIL is ultimate results of those confused fellows and via this post i would like to drag your attention towards your baby websites/blogs. For getting fruitful traffic/business, ideally you should target the right audience with the right niche.

So abide by these 10 Tips to help you decide the niche for your website:

1. Focus on one category – If your website is a jack of all trades you dilute your regulars since you’re all around.
2. Come up with information that only you can provide. – If it’s just something you grab from other sites, your credibility decreases. How can you sell anything if you don’t have an edge?
3. Determine if you would put your website’s identity under one category, territory or channel.
4. Get an affiliate website that has already entered and succeed in that particular niche market – This way you can take advantage of the customers that you really need.
5. Get in touch with the market – Surely, Beta-max players are way out of circulation. You’re selling tapes? Good Luck.
6. Create your USP or Unique Selling Proposition – Customers would want to avail of what you offer if you are the best in a certain field so capitalize on it.
7. Streamline your resources.
8. Design a landing page that will divert your customers to your site when you do an email blast.
9. Locate your information equilibrium or your balance. Not too much or not too less.
10. Seek vertical domination. Going wide is definitely not the core of Niche Marketing.

The best way is to feel the market before you dive right into it without testing it first.

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Are My Sites Up? will monitor your websites and let you inform the status of your websites “specially when your site goes down”. On basis of premium service you can get tons of notifications about your site’s status or you can track more then five to hundreds websites. Automatically it will eye on your websites and when it’s down shortly it will notify the webmaster.

Recently, Are My Sites Up brings an iPhone applications for iPhone users and which will eye on all your domains and when you’re away from the computer will SMS and send email notifications. Also, the service may be not charging for SMS — it’s free. This iPhone OS 3.0 will give you real time notifications when any of your websites goes down. So, easily you will get the information in your hand and take any instant initiative to live up the website as soon as possible for your audience.

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Featured contents are the beneficial example of showcasing the best posts of the blogs. This is the another way of getting more traffic from buried posts of the blog. Now a days most of the popular blogs including Digital Inspiration,Time, MSN, and Walmart used featured post to engage more audience into the conversation and content. There are many ways to display featured contents in the websites,few of them are describes as follows:

1. FeaturedContentGallery based on Mootools framework which have an automated and customizable rotating image gallery for the wordpress blogs. You can post the featured contents any where in your blog template by simply calling the php codes.
   <?php include
(ABSPATH . '/wp-content/plugins/featured-content-gallery/gallery.php');
?>
   

   Note:It required Custom Fields for inserting desired images in the pages and posts like “articleimg “ “thumbnailimg”.You can select your craved images and exhibit categories, pages or posts with tradition overlay text and a thumbnail whirligig.

   

   The installation of this plugin is quite easy and for more details check out installation steps.

   Download this plugin

2. Featurific For Wordpress is an effortless wordpress plugin for the featured slideshow of the posts.The basic plugin is free and i also have a pro version.
   
3. In case you want to display the specific post of the single categories then you may try Featured Category.
   
   Note:Unadulterated for displaying the important categories, recent news, projects, and featured posts in the blog.
4. Best Foot Forward provides an easy way to automatically create a featured post list by utilizing the Wordpress tagging system.
5. Random Featured Post plugin allows you to display a random post from a designated category.

I used the FeaturedContentGallery and its quite easy to make any customizable plugin based on the jquery. The original concept is the MooTools JavaScript framework used by SmoothGallery from JonDesign. Moreover i also implement the SmoothGallery on headers of the mediaredefined website.

Note: Plugins based on Mootools frameworks often creates problems while working with Jquery. You should check how to resolve JQuery, Prototype, and lightbox issues to make them work on same page.

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Who is web designer? Someone who specializes in graphic design?.What tools they all are found of ?

I’m  talking about the windows and mac users who generally use the Adobe products or illegally use the cracked software’s and never look in the free and open source world.If we talked ethically then we should discuss about the open source evangelisms.Might be you are interested to know about the scope of web designing and development in the arena of free and open source.Their are very vast amount of free and open source tools for designers.Here are the 15 best open source and professional tools of the web savvy designer:

1. Agave – Agave is one of the best solution for designers to feel the color scheme, contradicts colors, soft colors & all with a fabulous outlook.
   
2. NVU -  The open source replacement for Dreamweaver.You can Design, develop, and maintain professional websites and applications and yes its absolutely free.
   
   How to beginning A Project in NVU
   
3. Quanta – Quanta Plus is a highly stable and feature rich web development environment.You can access the FAQ for further details.
   
4. Inkscape: The vector graphics application which may spell the end for Adobe Illustrator.
   
5. Blender -Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems.Do you know that Elephants Dream is the world’s first open movie, made solely with open source graphics software such as Blender.
   
6. GIMP: Gimp the open source replacement for Photoshop. (Mac, Linux, and Windows)
   
   Cnet.com also had some good reviews on the Gimp , one of them is as follows

   Pros: Defiently good for beginners and you create some very awesome looking images. Also very easy to use and enough effects tools to keep anyone happy. It’s like a baby version of Photoshop . A billion formats to choose from to save your image.

   Cons: No line/path making feature! Hard to get toolbars to stay in places. If you put the layers toolbar somewhere for instance, when you reopen it’s not there.

   Summary: Absorlutly brilliant. Fun, easy to use, simple (not as simple as ‘Paint’ ) , a brilliant peice of freeware!! Also comes in a portable version for your flashdrive. by tom_hack_i

7. Skencil – Skencil is a vector drawing application for illustrations and diagrams.It an open source artwork application that helps in making something clear or attractive.
   
8. Karbon14 – It is another scalable vector-based drawing application that’s part of the open source KOffice project.
   
9. Krita – Krita is another awesome painting and image-editing open source  software application for KOffice
   
10. Mozilla Composer : Composer is a free WYSIWYG editor provided by the Mozilla Organization.Please note that you need not to have any HTML coding knowledge for creating a website with Composer.
    
    Note:

    The Mozilla Suite is no longer supported by the Mozilla project

11. GraphicsMagick – GraphicsMagick may be used to resize, rotate, sharpen, color reduce, or add special effects to an image and save the result in the same or differing image format. Image processing operations are available from the command line, as well as through C, C++, Perl, Tcl, Ruby, or Windows COM programming interfaces
12. Bluefish: An HTML editor for programmers written using GTK, designed to save the experienced webmaster some keystrokes. (C) (GNU/Linux, Unix)
    
13. Amaya :Its an open source based W3C’s complete web browsing and authoring environment.Its basically  a Web editor, i.e. a tool used to create and update documents directly on the Web
    
14. Cssed: A CSS editor featuring auto completion, syntax highlighting and validation. (C, C++) (Linux)
    
15. Pico -  from wikipedia
    

    Pico is a text editor for Unix and Unix-based computer systems. It is integrated with the Pine e-mail client, which was designed by the Office of Computing and Communications at the University of Washington

Note:Few alternatives to use the windows tools on the linux:

1. You can use VMWare with a virtual machine for Linux.
2. Wine is an open source software for running Windows applications on other operating systems.
3. Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows.Its basically different collection of tools which provide Linux look and feel in windows box.

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Everyday we are bombarded with new internet applications, services, or updates on the most popular ones like Google Adwords, Flickr, Facebook, and the like. We see more and more people becoming blog writers, creators and artists who create themes for MySpace or Plurk, and even online business tycoons who have become successful due to effective use of search engine optimization and continuously getting traffic everyday. These innovations of the World Wide Web have transformed internet usage from mere linear transfer of information to cloverleaf exchange at high speed. To put it simply, we’re dealing with Web 2.0.

This term was coined by the O’ Reilley Media six years ago and it has released a never-ending debate of what web 2.0 really means and what it refers to. Some argue that it is merely a marketing jargon, due to the fact that many marketers and internet savvy businessmen and women are taking advantage of the internet as their marketing platforms. On the other side of the world, others believe it is a term used to indicate the complete overhaul of web 1.0 applications such as Britannica Online, mp3.com, and Ofoto. But one thing’s for sure, web 2.0 is the new World Wide Web or the virtual playground where people can freely share and express there own creativity as well as expand communication with others from all over the globe, build online social networks, and branch out even more the sharing capabilities of people when it comes to old and modern information.

I would like to drag your attention on the presentation  Designing Web Interfaces This is basically a Book (Bill Scott & Theresa Neil) on Principles and Patterns for Rich Interaction.

References:

http://designingwebinterfaces.com

http://looksgoodworkswell.com

http://designgenie.org

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