i m sure none of you like to lose all your post that just wrote because of a power failure or computer crash.

Previously, Windows Live Writer had this auto-save feature enabled by default which would automatically save changes made to our articles after every 3 minutes. But they have left this option unchecked (disabled) in the latest Live Writer release.

This can be enabled by following the steps given below, because you never know when it might come in handy.

How To Auto Save in Windows Live Writer

1. Go to Tools from the top menu and select Options.

2. From the left side, select Editing.

3. The first option you will see at right side will be of auto-save feature.

4. Check “Automatically save drafts every” and enter the number of minutes below after which it is suppose to auto save. I kept it to 2 minutes.

5. Click OK to close the Options window.

Now Windows Live writer will automatically your post after every 2 minutes (or whatever minutes you entered).

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Get Free Domain and 1GB Web Space for Blogging

e all know having a top level domain improves branding and helps you get better exposure. And it’s way better if you get free hosting with a self-hosted WordPress installation.

HyperWebEnable is known to be providing such services from quite some time now, and offer a free domain (www.yoursite.com) with a CMS installed (e.g WordPress, Joomla etc.).

Unlike Blogger, where you get limited templates, HyperWebEnable offers many themes for all CMS, and if your favourite one isn’t there, you can always request for it. I gave them a try few months back, and signed up for freewebhostoffers.com, which is now inactive because I never got time to work on it. The registration process went smooth, ignoring the part where they took 4 weeks to register and accept my domain.

You get full control over your blog and can also make money by monetizing it. HyperWebEnable has their own affiliate program which pays you a dollar for every new friend who registers with your reference.

In my view, they are doing an amazing job by providing these free services for bloggers with a free domain and 1GB web space. The site is still in beta, so you might experience some hiccups in the service, overall, they are good.

HyperWebEnable – Get Free Domain and Web Hosting

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Zoundry Raven – Portable Blogging Client

If you are searching for a portable blogging solution to let you update your blog on the move, so here is the most advanced app I have found for you.

Though you might have tried ScribeFire and w.blogger for the same purpose. I bet you won’t be disappointed with Zoundry Raven.

Zoundry Raven is a free open source app which let you blog in ease. It is a feature-rich client with the power of WYSIWYG editing.

You will also get benefit of FTP as well as Picasa/Image Shack integration and more. For advanced users it also supports custom fields.

Features

When I say feature-rich, I really meant it. ZR is designed for bloggers only specially for pro-bloggers.

• Tabbed true WYSIWYG Editing – fully XHTML editing, what you see is what you get type of post writing, with the power of drop images, text and video. Which can later be viewed in template of your own blog.
• Improved content management – built in indexer which let you view you see all your posts according to added blogs, tags, links. It also has tag cloud to let your feel the original dashboard browse environment.
• Manage multiple media storage services – Here you can setup many storage media services like custom FTP, Picasa, Image Shack etc
• Manage multiple blogs offline – simple click to publish same post for all blogs.
• Portable Application support – is also available to let you blog on the move for all the extended aand home like features.
• WordPress 2.2+ Page & Tag support – create pages with WYSIWYG power even tag support is available to let you add, modify and import tags.

Note: The only requirement you need to set is to enable Remote Blogging to start blogging with ZR.

Interestingly supported blogging platforms includes all of them like Blogger, Movable Type & TypePad, Windows Live Spaces, WordPress, and more

Download Zoundry Raven

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Old WordPress Vulnerable to Attacks: Upgrade Now

WordPress is the largest and the most popular blogging platform available which is available for free and is being used by millions of bloggers, including governments, huge corporations etc. around the world.

Recently, many WordPress websites have been getting hacked and now it has been confirmed by a WordPress developer himself that older versions of WordPress are under attack.

The number of sites being hit by this attack is growing every hour and the only and the best way to save your blog from this attack is to update it to the latest version. All versions prior to WordPress 2.8.4 have been found vulnerable to this attack.

What the attack actually does is that it adds strange keywords in your permalink structure and also creates a back door administrator account on your blog which is inaccessible by you.

For more information on this attack and how to protect new and already hacked blogs, can be found at Lorelle’s blog. A must check out for every WordPress using a version older than 2.8.4.

Upgrade now to the latest WordPress!

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WordPress 2 for iPhone now Available

WordPress 2 for iPhone is now available for download in the App Store. You can now grab it from the App Store and experience blogging in WordPress with lots of new features in WordPress 2.

This app is a completely new app and the previous WordPress for iPhone won’t upgrade to WordPress 2.

When you launch the new app, you’ll immediately see “Version 2.0? at the bottom of the screen. When you’re no longer using it, you can safely remove the previous version from your device.

WordPress 2 for iPhone New Features

• A new, more efficient user interface that makes it faster to switch between comments, posts, and pages.
• Various user interface refinements and bug fixes
• New Comments interface, with Gravatars and the author URL shown in the comment list
• Passwords are now stored in the keychain
• Posts are now automatically saved and restored if network connection is lost during publishing
• Added persistence, so the app re-opens in the blog you last used
• Added an interface for manually entering the XMLRPC endpoint for non-standard setups
• Fixed rotation-related visual glitches
• Fixed errors where malformed XML prevented access to XMLRPC endpoint
• Fixed edge case where local drafts were sometimes not saved
• Fixed the order of photos so that they’re displayed in the order they’re uploaded

WordPress 2 for iPhone Screenshots

Download WordPress 2 for iPhone

You can download WordPress 2 for iPhone from here: Download WordPress 2 for iPhone

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WordPress for Android

WordPress for Android just released in the Android Market. We knew WordPress was working on an Android version of their mobile blogging app after the iPhone and BlackBerry version.

Android version of WordPress was finally released today and is now available in the Android Market.

WordPress for Android Features

Features include the ability to:

• Configure and manage multiple blogs
• Comment moderation including the ability to reply to comments
• Create and Edit Posts including categories, tags and photos
• Create and Edit Pages
• Get notified of new comments in the Android notification bar

The current release v1.0 offers you enough features so you manage your blog and write posts while on the go. This release is pretty stable. I couldn’t get the screenshots up because of my Nexus One drivers are not working on Windows 7.

Download WordPress for Android

You can download this Android app by pointing your mobile browser here: Download WordPress for Android

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Wordpress 3.0 Beta 1 Released: Twenty Ten Theme Added

The last major version of Wordpress was released back in December 2009, which was WordPress 2.9, introducing many new features. And now they have done it again.

WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 has been released by WordPress which is available for early beta testing.

The new version features a new theme “Twenty Ten” and many new features and enhancements that are not present in the current version. However, the version is still incomplete and might differ from the final release. So, they are looking for beta testers who can test it especially the following features:

1. Play with the new default theme, Twenty Ten, including the custom background and header options.

2. Custom Post Type functionality has been beefed up. It’s really easy to add new types, so do that and see how it looks!

3. WordPress MU users should test the multiple sites functionality to make sure nothing broke during the merge.

And email them if they find any bugs so they can be fixed as soon as possible.

Download WordPress 3.0 Beta 1

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Woopra: Live Web Tracking and Analytics Tool

Google Analytics is no doubt the best free analytics tool available for webmasters and bloggers. It is an essential service to track visitor and blog/website statistics.

Several complaints have been heard from people about Google Analytics saying that it updates only once in 24-48 hours and does not include any sort of live visitor tracking tool. There are many other tools that offer live tracking, but they don’t even come near to Google Analytics when website analytics is concerned.

Woopra is a new live web tracking and analytics tool that lets you analyze your websites/blogs in real time. It is targeted towards small and medium websites (particularly bloggers) with up to tens of thousands of daily page views.

It is still in private beta but if you signup, there are 90% chances that yuo will be accepted soon. Current restrictions also include the number of websites you can have tracked for the beta. It has a very intuitive interface and offers advance features that include many graphical visualizations such as, charts, maps and panels.

Some of the basic Woopra features are:

• Live Visitor Tracking
  Live tracking enables webmasters to analyze visitor statistics in real time and can track over 40 different statistical events and analytics.
• Rich User Interface
  Woopra’s rich graphical user interface has n delays in the response time as comes with web-based programs. And it is designed to be flexible, with plans for future development of various color schemes and themes.
• Manage Multiple Blogs and Websites
  You can track multiple blogs and websites at the same time and the quick site tabs at the top of the Woopra panel lets you acess them with one-click.
• Deep Analytic and Search Capabilities
  The huge data can be easily searched for more deep analysis as specific user names, IP addresses, geographic locations, user browsing data, visitor history, visitor paths, arrival and departure points.
• Chat With Visitors
  Woopra allows you to initiate chat sessions with visitors without any installation. This sounds quite creepy, and I myself scared a few of my friends by saying: Your PC has been hacked! Thanks for visiting Sizzled Core.
• Visitor and Member Tagging
  You can tag regular site visitors with names to monitor their activities easily.
• Easy Installation and Update Notification
  It is very easy to install and set up. WordPress and vBulletin users can use the official Woopra plugin instead of manually adding the code. The desktop application can be installed on any recent version of Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Currently, Woopra is offering tons of features for free to all the private beta users and will later also add premium services.

I would recommend all bloggers to signup for Woopra because of its ease of use and the depth of statistics it provides!

Woopra: Live Web Tracking and Analytics Tool

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Upgrade Wordpress to 2.6.3 Quickly

WordPress 2.6.3, which was released yesterday, is a patch release that fixes two security vulnerabilities involving Snoopy, a library that WordPress uses internally.

All WordPress users should upgrade to the latest WordPress version to avoid being a victim of this particular vulnerability. There are many obvious and less obvious ways to upgrade WordPress, a few possible ways, in decreasing order of required time, are:

• Download the latest WordPress source, unzipde it on your harddisk, connect to your server via ftp and transfer the files. Then follow the upgrade instructions on the WordPress website. This is the method Windows users are most likely to use ;-)
• Do the above, but transfer files via scp
• Log on to your server via ssh / putty, do a wget http://wordpress.org/download/ to download the latest installer zip file. Unzip using unzip latest.zip. mv the required files to your WordPress folder and run the installer using the instructions from the WordPress website.
• Download and install the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin on your WordPress blog. Go to the plugin page and follow the simple instructions each time there is a new upgrade available. This is suitable if you are running a single blog.
• If you want to upgrade from 2.6.2 to version 2.6.3 , you simply need two files [file1] and [file2]. Just download and overwrite these files in your wp-includes folder, afte changing their permissions, using any one of the methods listed above. Doing it via ssh/wget/cp should take less than a minute.

Whichever method you choose to use, do keep your WordPress installation up-to-date to avoid potential problems and hacking attempts.

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Moderate WordPress Comments from Desktop

It’s been a while since I last shared an Adobe AIR tool. The last one I posted about was about GMDesk which lets you run Google services from your desktop.

Many blogs have comment moderation enabled to prevent from spam. Even this blog uses comment moderation, and I daily have to moderate a big pile of comments. This has just been made easy, thanks to Daniel.

Moderator is an AIR-based app that lets you moderate comments on your WordPress-powered blogs right from your dekstop in rela-time and you don’t have to login to your Dashboard just to approve/unapprove comments. Some features included in this early release are:

• Viewing unmoderated comments.
• Dock and system tray notifications of the number of unmoderated comments.
• Accept, delete, and spam comments from within the desktop client.
• Close application window, or minimize it to the system tray while running.
• Shows the Gravatar icons for the user who posted the comment.

Moderate also supports the upcoming WordPress 2.7. Since this is an early release, expect it to be buggy. The only two requirements this app needs is WordPress 2.6+ and Adobe AIR 1.1.

Download Moderator

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WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 Released

We have already been teased enough by the screenshots and features of the upcoming WordPress 2.7. And again a lot of buzz has been created before the actual release of WP 2.7.

Finally the first beta of WordPress 2.7 is now available for download. The WP Team has been working hard on the pretty visuals you will see. At the moment, there are many glitches in WP 2.7 for IE and Opera, but it works fine in Firefox and Safari.

For all those who are eagerly waiting for the full version of WordPress 2.7, there’s a small bad news. It won’t be releasing on November 10th, 2008 as planned before since the WP Team is two weeks behind schedule. What you get on Nov 10, is a Release Candidate release of WP 2.7.

Nothing has been said about the final release date, but they won’t take long since the Release Candidate version will be released next week. For now, enjoy the first beta!

Download WordPress 2.7 Beta 1

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Google SEO Book

We all know that Webmasters Tools by Google are here to help webmasters in every inch of their website career, but did you know there is a Google SEO book available?

I never did, until my friend tweeted about it. Well, there is nothing new in this book but simply the basics covering every aspect of the Search Engine Optimization. This e-book has been named as “SEO for Beginners”.

In this book you can find out about all the terminologies, and important things taking part and organizing the whole SEO setup, but from Google’s aspect.

In this book some basic questions are also well answered, like:

• Can Google index your site?
• What are Robots and what Robot.txt means?
• What is really controlling Google indexes ?
• Robots.txt vs. Meta tags 9
• How to controlling caching and snippets?

Or if you are searching the ways to Increasing visibility of your content, some best practices are also mentioned by Google itself.

Download Making the Most of Your Content – A Publisher’s Guide to the Web – PDF file

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Google Optimisation Essentials Video Series

The main key to earn maximum revenue from Google AdSense is to optimize your ads well for your blog.

Google Adsense has now started giving recommendations for the best optimization of the Google Ads for your blog or website. So far they have made two posts on such tips. Below is a brief overview of what AdSense said about optimizing your ads.

I – For AdSense Ad Units

Last Week they released their first video enforcing towards an important logic while putting AdSense adverts and making more out of them. This logic was Bigger is Better. Yes, they recommend that bigger add size will give you the maximum opportunities for your AdSense revenue.

These three ad unit were their recommendation regarding choosing the best size of your ads.

• 300×250 medium rectangle
• 728×90 leaderboard
• 160×600 skyscraper

Video:

II – Design to Impressing Your Audience

This is the second and latest from the AdSense Team in their Optimization Essentials for publishers. In this they have showed the importance of design, and what colors you should use for ad units. In most cases, publisher ads with contrast suit best and webmasters stick to them for years. But at some places, like this blog, you will find ads with blending colours.

They suggested the following tips:

• Using colors that either blend or complement with site’s colors. Make the ads a part of your site.
• Using lighter colors for borders, or no border at all.
• Using the rotation colors strategy.
• Occasionally switching the location of your ads on the page.
• Implementing saved sets of frequently-used colors as a palette.

Video:

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Oxite: Blog Engine by Microsoft

We hardly know of anything that Microsoft has contributed to the open-source community, and almost a week ago, Microsoft launched its very own blogging platform which is surprisingly open-source, which means free!

Oxite is the blogging engine powered by Microsoft technologies which can be used for small personal blogs to large corporate websites as a CMS (content-management system).

This has been launched in competition with WordPress, which is by far the most popular open-source blogging publishing platform. But it is more ASP.NET driven and only corporate web developers would like to use it.

WordPress has one of the biggest user and developer community, and provides the power and flexibility that no other CMS can provide. In my opinion, Oxite is no match for WordPress in any way!

If you are curious to see any blog powered by Oxite, check out MIX Online.

Download Oxite and more info here.

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Embed RSS Headlines Using Google AJAX Feed API

Now with Google’s code generating tool, it’s very easy to embed RSS headlines into personal sites or at other places where JavaScript is allowed. All you have to do is choose a style, feed expression and generate the code! Can it get anymore easier? The code can be easily customized to suit your web-design, contains no ads and is a great tool for web beginners.

Choosing a style is very easy. You get to choose from three styles vertical, vertical stacked and horizontal. You can see an example of the horizontal style in the image above. In feed expression, you just add the name of the blog, and Google will find the feed for that blog itself and show you its direct feed URL. If you think that’s all what you need, press Preview button to see how it looks. Finally, when you are done with adding blogs, press the Generate Code button. You can copy/paste the code on any page where JavaScript is allowed.

This is a very useful tool for bloggers who write on multiple blogs and would like to display a headline rotator on each showing the latest headlines from all his blogs. FeedBurner also provides this feature as Headline Animator, but it displays headlines only from one feed URL.

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Download WordPress 2.6 Beta 1

Finally, the first beta of WordPress 2.6 has been released, with many new features in it and is now available for download. WordPress is one of the world’s favourite blogging platform. This release won’t be as big as WordPress 2.5, but will be worth upgrading to, because of the number of interesting new features it has. WordPress 2.6 is slated for a mid-July release which will have many usability improvements including the features mentioned below.

Features

Here’s a brief list of new features that are included in this beta, and will be included in the final WordPress 2.6 as well.

• The old bookmarklet is back in WP 2.6
• Caching of Admin Dashboard files with Google Gears
• Theme previewing like in WordPress.com
• Built-in post word counter
• Ability to relocate your content directory
• Drag-and-drop sortable galleries
• Customizable default avatars
• Bulk delete, activate, and deactivate for plugins
• Plus lots bug fixes and performance improvements

For a complete list of updates in WordPress 2.6 Beta 1, head over here.

I waited for about 3 months before I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.5 after its release, but looks like I will now upgrade to WordPress 2.6 as soon as it gets released because of its new features.

Download

Download WordPress 2.6 Beta 1

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How To Remove Navbar In Blogger Blogs

You see a navigation bar on the top of every blog hosted at Blogger. With this navigation bar, you can search blogs, visit the next blog, sign in or create a new account. You can even flag a blog for posting some objectionable content.

One thing I like about WordPress.com blogs is that they don’t display any navigation bars at the top or at the bottom, but here at Blogger.com they don’t provide any option to remove it. I was hoping to see an option to remove this in the latest Blogger Draft features.

But who needs them when you can manually tweak it not to display the navigation bar.

How To Remove Navbar In Blogger Blogs

1. Open your Blogger dashboard.

2. Go to your blog’s Layout settings > Edit HTML

3. Look for:

/* Variable definitions
====================

4. And above that add:

#navbar-iframe { display: none !important; }

5. Save your settings and open your blog now. The navigation bar will be gone.

Here’s a sample blog that you can see without the navigation bar: http://freehostingoffers.blogspot.com/

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WordPress 2.6 Released – Download Now!

Yesterday, the first release candidate of WP 2.6 (codename Tyner) was released and a day later, the final version of WordPress 2.6 is out and is now available for download.

WordPress again brings in lots of new features and usability improvements with its latest version. They have also done some minor tweaks to improve its security.

What’s hot and new in WordPress 2.6

• One of the major features to be added is the WordPress Turbo, that uses Google Gears to save your WordPress Dashboard files on PC and load pages at lightening speed.
• Then comes Post Revision, with which one can track all the changes made to their posts and restore any old saved data if needed.
• The Press This! bookmarklet is back. This was one feature that many people missed in WordPress 2.5.
• Now blog admins can preview themes on their blog using Theme Preview without making them live for everyone. You can test it for possible errors and fix them before applying it for everyone.
• Other minor features include word count, bulk management of plugins, image captions, revamped image control and reordering of Galleries are just to name a few.
• WordPress 2.6 fixes a total of 194 bugs.

More details on features and bug fixes can be found on the WordPress blog.

Download

You can download the latest WordPress from the link below:

Download WordPress 2.6

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Sunday Highlights – 3

hey readers! Enjoying your Sunday? :) I hope it’s going well for you. It’s almost night time here and I had awesome day today. This week has been great for me. I finally got over with my laziness and upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1 yesterday. :)

May 19, 2008 – May 25, 2008

• Amazing Face Art
• Upload Files To Multiple File Hosts At Once
• Download UXtheme.dll Patch For Windows XP SP3
• Free Webroot Desktop Firewall License Key
• Google Hacks – The Ultimate Google Exploit Tool
• IE7Pro 2.3 Released – Download Now
• 
  
• Free Facebook Themes
• Download Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8 Special Edition
• Ad-Aware 2008 Final Released
• WordPress 2.6 Features
• Rapishare Happy Hours Detector – Firefox Extension
• 50 Rapidshare Search Engines
• Sneak Peak At The New Facebook Profile Design
• How To Try Out New Facebook Design

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Happy Birthday WordPress

My favourite blogging system and the best CMS around turns 5 today, on May 27. I started using WordPress in Feb. 07 on DJ Flush’s (of Sizlopedia) recommendation. I was always a big fan of Joomla, and thought it was the best CMS around. But I just tried WordPress once, and since then there is no looking back!

With all the tons of exciting features, and ease of usability and flexibility of designs, there can be no better CMS than WordPress. I would like to congratulate, Matt and all other WordpPress developers, on its birthday and would like to see it grow more in the coming years.

If you are interested in reading my WordPress related posts, then head over to the WordPress category.

WordPress Teaser From Sizzled Core

Here’s a teaser for what’s going to come in the next few days! I’m not going to further open my mouth about this.

By the way, no, it’s not the WordPress Dashboard! :)

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