I always considered the ads in Gmail inbox to be quite annoying. Like most of the webmasters, I am never going to click on a Adsense ad. I don’t mind whether it is on my site or not, I am not going to do that. Hence I searched the internet and found two GreaseMonkey scripts that allows you to remove the ads from Gmail andYahoo! Mail. I have tested the script with Opera User Scriptand it works with Opera too. If you are still an IE user, then you have no other option but switch over to Opera/Firefox or hope that the next version of IE will include support for userscript.

• The first script is Gmail Beautifier by Cipher. The addon hides/shows ads in Gmail, widens email body, removes beta from Gmail logo & gives buttons a better look. Removal of beta from Gmail logo is disabled by default, you will have to enable it by uncommenting a few lines. Personally, I don’t mind the beta part in the logo.
• The Yahoo Mail Beta Ad Remover hides the ads at the right side of the page in Yahoo! Mail beta. Yahoo! Mail already allows you to hide the right ad pane their by increasing the width of the reading pane. But on clicking the next message, the ad pane automatically pops out.

Inorder to install the script for Firefox, you must download and install the GreaseMonkey extension from the Firefox Addon Repository. After installing the extension and restarting Firefox, clicking on the “Install this script” link at the right of the script homepage at UserScripts.org will install will popup an installation window. Click install and reload Gmail /Yahoo! Mail and you are done.

For installing the script in Opera, save the script somewhere on your HardDisk, say C:\\Program Files\\Opera\\Profile\\UserJs\\, or anywhere you like. After that go Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Content > Javascript Options in your Opera browser and click the choose button at the bottom of the window and select the directory where you saved the userscripts. Reload your webmail window and enjoy Ad free version of your favorite webmail service.

Before I finish this post, I want to warn all of you that removing/hiding ads from Gmail/Yahoo! Mail is unethical and illegal. It is against Gmail/Yahoo! Mail terms. Due to these reasons and the fact that I always use my mail client for sending and receiving mails, I am not using these scripts. Hence, if you sue these scripts, do it at your own risk. Well, we all know that there is no risk, but still I have warned you :).

This is the second post on the series, “My List of recommended WordPress Plugins”. The previous post got a good amount of visits. I got busy with many things after that, hence this post got delayed.

• Today, I begin the list with a plugin that allows you to monetize your website efficiently. The Shylock Adsense Plugin  allows you to insert ads on your blog without modifying the template. The main advantage of the plugin is that it allows us to specify when and where the ads will appear, directly from the Admin Control Panel. You can configure the plugin to show more ads in your older posts and no or little ads in the posts created in the last X days. Also there is facility to add ads to homepage, archives and category pages. In pages having multiple posts, it allows you to decide under which post the ads should appear. The name of the plugin is a misnomer, because you can show any ads (contextual / banner), not just Adsense. The plugin was created by Alex of Shylock Blogging for his personal use, but he was good enough to distribute it for free. He is testing a new version of the plugin, watch out for it.
• Another plugin I recommend is the DoFollow plugin. If you have a high activity blog, then you may run into trouble with it. But for small blogs with less comments, it will help increase user activity (though I haven’t seen much difference except in the post announcing it  ). It allows you to remunerate your loyal readers who participate in the discussion on your blog. Once you start using the plugin, you are surely going to get a sudden surge in visitors. If you decide to use the plugin, then I recommend you to checkout the Bumpzee community “No Nofollow“. Andy Beard has posted a list of Do Follow plugins.
• Another important plugin that I would like to introduce is the “Global Translator” from Nothing2Hide. I think most of the bloggers are not aware of the power of this plugin. I have been getting a good number of visits from other language search engines, especially the Italian, German and French versions of Google. I highly recommend this plugin.
• Though loyal readers are the life-blood of a blog, search engines cannot be completely avoided. A good blog is surely going to get a good number of visitors from search engines, who may become your subscribers. There are many plugins that allows you to search engine optimize your blog. “All in One SEO Pack” is a plugin that includes the features of all the major SEO plugins. The plugin allows you to specify alternate title (other than the post title), meta keyword and meta description for your page. It allows you to insert ‘noindex’ attribute to category and archive pages, removing duplicate contents from your blog. This plugin is also highly recommended.
• Wordpress provides RSS feed of comments on a post, which readers can subscribe. But some people(including me) prefer to subscribe to a topic by email rather than by rss feed. “Subscribe to comments” is a Word press plugin that provides your readers to subscribe to comments on a post by email. Users can subscribe to the comments by selecting a checkbox while submitting a comment or by submitting their email address in a separate form without commenting.

This is not the full list. There is still more plugins that I use and I’ll continue with it later. And again, I hope you will try these excellent plugins. Also checkout the previous post in this series

• My list of recommended Wordpress Plugins - Part I

NB: Before you try any of these, please backup your WordPress database. If you are not sure how to do that, then it is better not to try these. Do it at your own risk.

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that it is has increased the webmail box storage size to 5GB for free users and 10GB for premium users. But still, it is behind Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! mail and Rediff mail still leads with both providing unlimited mail storage space. Presently Gmail, the webmail service provided by Google, lags in the race with less than 3 GB space, though it was the first webmail service to provide a GB sized mailbox for free. It was the entry of Google into the Webmail service that revolutionized the free webmail services. Before the entry of Gmail, Hotmail was providing just 2MB space while Yahoo! Mail provided 6MB. Gmail still continues to add great features to its webmail service. Gmail has integrated Chat, Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheet support and so on.

Microsoft has also promised to improve the performance of Hotmail by identifying and fixing the slowest parts. The slow reponse was the primary reason I moved from Hotmail to Yahoo! Mail and finally to Gmail. Of the three main webmail providers, I like the look and feel of Hotmail the most. It is really cool. The new Yahoo! Mail is more or less like my email client. I like the new interface very much. Unfortunately, it doesn’t load in my browser (Opera). Also, the time taken for it to load is also large. Had they provided some ActiveX components, that made the loading fast, then I would have considered going back to Yahoo! Mail. Gmail is my favorite webmail provider. There are many reasons for that. First and foremost, its integrated chat feature. Recently, Yahoo! also started providing a similar service. The second reason for me loving Gmail is the ability to send emails from multiple email addresses from a single email address. I have configured my different Google Apps accounts and Gmails accounts to forward received mails to my primary Gmail account. When replying to a received mail, google automatically sends the mail from the original email address. This is a great help to me, as I have to manage a number of email addresses. Another feature I like in Gmail is its filter system. It helps me to organize my mails better. The filter system along with labels is much more powerful than the folders provided by Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. BTW, I forgot to mention the best feature of Gmail. Its ability to group together messages of a conversation and notification of updates to conversation while we are composing a message.

Don’t you think it will be cool, if you can chat with your Google Talk, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger contacts with a single email address? Now you can do that if you have a Gmail account. Gmail has built in support for GTalk. For using your Gmail ID with MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger, signup for a Windows Live ID with your Gmail address. Now login to your MSN Messenger and GTalk. You can’t have GTalk to MSN / Yahoo chatting. But now your contacts doesn’t have to remember your different messenger IDs.

I had posted here a few days back that I had tried a large number of WordPress plugins, after moving my site to my own domain. I had also promised to post about the plugins I liked the most. Today, I am going to blog about them.

• The first plugin that I want to discuss here is the Admin Drop Down Menu by Ozh. If you are using the default admin theme, then this plugin is a must use for you. The default theme WordPress admin theme allows you to visit a sub menu link only after visiting the corresponding top page. This plugin allows you to see and visit sub menus under a main menu item from anywhere in the admin section. By pointing the cursor over a menu item, the corresponding sub menu is shown below it horizontally. I had a little problem with the menu in Opera. I didn’t try it in other browsers. But this is not the plugin I am using right now. I will reveal the plugin I’m using later.
• Another plugin I can’t live without is Pluginstaller by Henning Shaefer. The continuous installation and removal of plugins almost made me go crazy. That was when I found this excellent plugin. Pluginstaller makes plugin management really easy by replacing the default plugin manager of WordPress. Pluginstaller displays active and inactive plugins separately. It also hides the extra details about a plugin under a collapsible box, thus reducing the need for using the scrollbar. But, the biggest attraction I found in Pluginstaller was the ability to check and install updates to installed plugins and the facility to install plugins directly from the web or from your computer without using any FTP client. If you are a person like me, who loves to test different plugins, then this is a must use plugin for you.
• I believe every website needs a contact form. Because, it is much better than directly displaying your email id. A blog is also a website and needs a contact form. I tried two contact form plugins. The first one was cforms, which did not work for me due to some reason. Hence, I searched for another one and found the Enhanced WP-ContactForm by Joost de Valk. It provides a basic contact form with built-in spam protection. It was more than enough for my purpose.
• Another plugin used in this blog is No Self Pings by Michael D. Adams. This plugin prevents WordPress from sending pings to your own site. It thus helps reduce the time required for saving / publishing a post.
• Now I am going to reveal the two WordPress addons that I like the most. The first one is an admin theme called SpotMilk by Sunghwa Park. From the very first day I started using WordPress, I didn’t like the default admin theme. But I didn’t know that it could be changed like the user end. The first theme I used was WP Tiger Administration by Steve Smith. It was much better than the default theme, but I removed it since it had some problem with the Admin Drop Down Menu. It was then I discovered the SpotMilk theme, inspired by the SpotLight of Mac OS X and Milk theme by Max Rudberg. I am using the black version of the theme included within the same archive, which can be activated by uncommenting a single line in the theme file. I also wanted an admin drop down menu that blended and worked with the new theme. After reading through the hundreds of comments in the themes page, I found out SpotMilk Admin Drop Menus by Andy Staines.
  You can find more admin themes at WordPress.

There are many more plugins that I use. I will post about them later. In the mean time, I hope you will try these excellent plugins and themes. Other posts in this series are

• My list of recommended Wordpress Plugins - Part II 

NB: Before you try any of these, please backup your wordpress database. If you are not sure how to do that, then it is better not to try these. Do it at your own risk.

I have decided to remove the nofollow attribute from the comment author’s url. Since the blog is very young, I have so far recieved only a hand full of spam comments. Hence I decided to use the wordpress plugin DoFollow. I hope this will encourage visitors to start commenting on the posts.

I hope this decision will not be misused and abused. If that occurs, then I will rethink whether or not to continue with this.

Today I am very happy. The month I started using Adsense, which was almost eight months back, my net earning was just $60. From then on, my monthly earning showed a gradual increase. But I always had to wait for two months to break the $100 threshold. I have been waiting for this moment from the first day I started using Adsense. And finally last month, July 2007, I earned $101.04. During the first few days of last month, I doubted whether it was going to attain even the $50 mark. Fortunately, there was a substantial increase in my pageviews and clicks during the last two weeks which helped me to overcome the slow start.

I never expected it was going to cross the threshold this month. But by the beginning of last week of the month, I became hopeful and started waiting for the moment. The final update of a days net earning usually occurs after a few minutes past 12 PM IST. When I checked my balance at 11:45 AM, it was $99.98. The next fifteen minutes had been extremely thrilling. And when I next refreshed my account, I almost jumped with joy. And finally, the most happiest moment of my life as a webmaster arrived.