Today I would like to introduce you to a recently launched website - rssHugger. rssHugger is a website which allows bloggers to gain subscribers and subscribers to find new interesting blogs. rssHugger is the brain child of Collin LaHay. rssHugger will be the first ever quality, spam free, and viral rss directory strictly for bloggers.

When you submit your blog to rssHugger, you will be given a page on the site with your most recent posts. This will provide more exposure to your blog among subscribers. To know more about the advantages of joining rssHugger, visit the About section of rssHugger.

Initially you had to spend $20 or $10 and a review on your site to list your feed for 10 years on rssHugger. But now, you can add your feed for free by writing a review about the site. I advice you to write a review as early as possible, because they may revoke the offer when the number of reviews increases.

A few days back I blogged on how to earn some easy bucks using your blog by participating in blog contests. Now many of the new and established blogs are holding contests to increase their popularity or to celebrate a special occassion to them. But it is not an easy task to find out the best competitions for joining. Now there are a number of blogs that are dedicated to contest that helps blogs conducting the contests to find participants and vice versa. Here are some of the contest blogs that I frequently visit.

• Contest Blogger
  

  This is my favorite contest blog, which I visit very frequently. Contest Blogger specializes in blog contests only. Contest Blogger was the first blog that started participating in contests while blogging about them. What makes Contest Blogger special is the Contest Blogger Oath according to which any prize won by the Contest Blogger will be given away to its readers by holding another contest. Initially Contest Blogger used to post about all blog contests, but now only featured contest will appear on the blog. There is a integrated forum for other contests. If you need some publicity, you can also sponsor a contest.

• The Prize Blog

  This was the first contest site that I visited and which tempted me to join different blog contests. Unlike Contest Blogger, The Prize Blog deals with all contests, not just contests hosted by blogs. If you are hosting a contest on your blog, you can have a basic listing for free or a featured listing for $20.

• My Blog Contest

  My Blog Contest is another blog that allows both free and featured listing for your contests. For free listing, you will have to write up the post. The price for featured listing is not specified on the contact page.

• My Blog Contests

  My Blog Contests is another cool blog on blog contests. Last day a  My Blog Contests toolbar was released which allows you to access all the My Blog Contests resources directly from the toolbar. Listing your contest on My Blog Contests is free.

• Contest Beat

  Contest Beat is a highly updated blog dealing on blog contests. A featured sitewide listing of your contest on Contest Beat costs your $25. You can also have a free listing of your contest for free. If you are looking for sponsors for your contest or want to sponsor a contest, then there is a section for that too.

• RevieWOW

  This is another contest blog that I occassionally visit.

So what are you waiting for? Visit one of the above websites and start participating in cool contests. And don’t forget to leave a comment, if you win any prize. Good Luck

Have you ever thought of the fact that running a Church is not a simple work and the process is such a complicated one that sometimes it is better to hire managers to run this process? Are there any alternative and any thing that helps to automate the process?

The whole organization of Church must be structured and this structure can be fully assigned to Customer Relationship Management Software (Church software) that will be of a tremendous help to those who are in charge of running the organization of church procedures.

There are always a number of administrative tasks that are to be handled in Church, for example, church accounting, financial management, church membership and attendance tracking. To record and track the above mentioned things manually can be a real nightmare and will definitely demand more managers who are to be highly-qualified to handle this job. That is why Church Attendance Software and Church Finance Software integrated into one CRM is a must nowadays.

On the other side, modern CRM software can help make the process easy and well-structured. Church management software can be obtained from different manufacturers and not just from one vendor. It means that you have a choice of different Church CRMs that can boast of rich functionality that will cater for any taste. Customizable automated process, easy time tracking procedures and workflow management are just minimum required features for a good faith-based non-profit organization.

Holding a contest is one of the best way to increase visitors and your feedburner subscriber count. Participating in contests is one of the best way to make money online. The contest blogger is a cool blog that lists all the currently running competitions in the blogosphere.

I occassionally participate in competitions hosted by other blogs and have so far won 4 prizes.

1. A free domain name of my choice from Thomas Sinfield
2. A free ad spot in JonLee.ca
3. $500 from JohnCow.com
4. And Finally, $25 in cash and a free review from Cyber Street Report 

I would like to thank all the above bloggers for their awesome prizes.

BTW, Freezing Hot, an Internet marketing company specializing in small business seo and ppc management, is running a contest and giving away a search engine optimization package worth $400 to the winner. Check out the contest on their internet marketing blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.  And be sure to check out Contest Blogger, the number one source for prizes and free samples.

It has been more than one month since my last post on the series “My List of recommended WordPress Plugins”. Once again I am back with 5 new plugins.

• You may call this shameless self promotion. But I am starting this list with my own plugin - Local Analytics  :-) . Local Analytics is a plugin for integrating Google Analytics into your WordPress powered blog. The main advantage of the plugin is its ability to locally cache urchin.js file, to speed up your page loading. You are also able to track downloads and external clicks with this highly configurable plugin.
• The second plugin I am dealing with today is Defensio. You maybe already familiar with Defensio, as the recent public launch of the plugin created a lot of interest in the Blogosphere. I am happy to say that I was one of the beta testers of Defensio Anti spam plugin for WordPress. I liked the interface of the plugin much more than Akismet. As far as the spam detection is concerned, I think Defensio is a little too strict compared with Akismet. Fortunately, Defensio is said to have the ability to adapt to the site on which it is installed.
• After posting a comment, many times I wanted to add some more information to the comment. Usually I post a second post below the first with the additional information. Fortunately, I found a plugin that allows commentators to edit their comment for a specified period of time, after it was posted. Administrators are able to edit comments directly from the post page. This cool plugin is called WP AJAX Edit Comments. Unfortunately, the plugin is showing some errors on my blog. I checked the plugin homepage and found out that it is caused by the threaded comments plugin.
• In my Local Analytics plugin’s page, several users asked about the possibilty of integrating Google Analytics reports within the Word Press Admin Panel. WP-Reports is an awesome plugin by Joe Tan, that allows you to integrate your Google Analytics Reports and FeedBurner subscriber stats within your Administration Panel.
• Last but not the least, I would like to recommend the Related Posts plugin from FairyFish. The plugin will display a list of related posts under all your posts. Unlike other similar plugins, this plugin can display a list of random or popular posts, if not related posts were found.

Please checkout these cool plugins and let me know your comments about the list. You may also be interested in the previous posts in the series

• My list of recommended Wordpress Plugins Part I
• My list of recommended Wordpress Plugins Part II
• My list of recommended Wordpress Plugins Part III 

Today I am releasing the latest version of TorPlus. For those who still don’t know about TorPlus, it is a software bundle containing TOR (The Onion Router), Opera(browser) and Privoxy (web proxy software). The bundle is preconfigured to work through proxy servers with the help of Tor. You can move from the proxy mode to normal mode with one click. Opera is also preconfigured to include several modifications. You can enable / disable Cookies, Javascript, plugins, java and flash with a single click. Also you can switch your browser’s user agent also easily from the status bar. An adblocker is also included with the Opera.

I haven’t updated TorKestrel, yet. I will be updating it to the latest beta version soon.

You can download the latest version of TorPlus from the downloads section.

Update :  TorKestrel+ v1.0.3 has also been released

ChangeLog 

• Updated Opera to latest version (v 9.24)
• Updated Kestrel to latest beta version
• Updated Tor to latest version (v 0.1.2.18)

Today, many companies rely on outsourcing, freelancers, or contract workers in order to complete projects on time and in order to make a business grow. Small and medium-sized businesses, especially, often rely on contractors or freelancers in order to create better profits.

There are many advantages to hiring freelancers. They require less money and generate more real work for the effort. In most cases, you pay freelancers only for the amount of work completed. This means that you do not pay for vacation time, coffee breaks, and so forth. This can save you a great deal of money over the average employee. Additionally, freelancers usually do not require insurance, benefits, and other additional expenses that traditional employees make use of. Many companies are also finding that outsourcing some of their work to freelancers allows them to hire people for occasional work. For example, if your company requires design services only once in a while, outsourcing to a freelancer can be less expensive than going to a company for your needs or hiring a design team permanently.

Keeping in touch with your virtual team with Relenta CRM

One challenge with outsourcing is that in many cases employers have less control over the work performed and must develop a failsafe communications system with their new employee. Relenta CRM software makes this very simple. A contractor or freelancer can be entered into the Relenta CRM system as a contact. That way, you can keep track of all the e-mail correspondence, information, and files exchanged between the company and the freelancer. Plus, Relenta CRM provides the ideal virtual workspace for both you and your contract employee. Simply assign the contract employee a department of their own, or give them access to the department that they are involved in. The employee can upload files, manage contacts, add assigned tasks in the shared online calendar, and interact with the department that he or she needs to interact with. At the same time, you can keep your financial department, and then any other department with sensitive information secure. Relenta CRM has gained immense popularity with many Chicago web development and Toronto SEO companies for it’s easy-to-use modules and intuitive interface.

Today I am going to write about an excellent application, which I discovered yesterday. The main reason why I hated checking out my Google Analytics reports was that I hated logging in to my Analytics account. My personal Google account is different from the one I use for website related uses, including Adsense, Sitemaps and Analytics. Whenever I try to check my personal mails and Analytics account together, I get logged out from the former. That was when I discovered Google Analytics Reporting Suite based on Adobe Integrated Runtime (Previosly Apollo), developed by Nico.

Google Analytics Reporting suite is a desktop application based on AIR, which allows you to access your Google Analytics Reports directly from your desktop. GARS provides a much better interface compared to the original web application. It also implements almost all the features provided by the web application.

The program allows you to manage multiple profiles from different Google Accounts directly from the program. The login credetials will be saved on your computer so that you don’t have to re-login every time you check your reports.

Here is a screencast of the previous version

Highlighted features of GARS (from AboutNico.be)

• Easy profile selection and account management »
• Use multiple profiles from different Analytics accounts »
• All visitors, traffic and content reports available »
• Tabbed interface to easily switch between reports »
• Data drilldown, goal values, data segmentation »
• Animated, interactive graphs »
• Advanced data grids with filtering and paging »
• Switch between interactive reports or PDF reports »
• Site overlay view »
• Exports to PDF, Excel and XML »

The program is still in its beta stage with beta 2 released on October 5th. I recommend everyone  to tryout the program and provide feedback to Nico, so that it can be improved further. Version 1.0 of the reporting suite is expected to be released by early 2008. A sneak peak of Google Analytics AIR 1.0 was provided and the new version is much prettier.

Google does not provide an official API to access Google Analytics data by external programs. Fortunately, programmers have developed unofficial APIs[1, 2] for doing the same, even though Google is remaining silent on the legality of using it. Google Analytics Reporting Suite is also based on an unofficial API developed by Nico, by studying the working of the web application for months. Fortunately, both Google and Adobe extended support to Nico for further developing the application. GARS is included in Adobe’s Showcase program and Google has offered assistance in making the program more secure.

Now that I have Google Analytics Reporting Suite installed, I now check my Google Analytics reports 4 - 5 times a day. Thank you Nico. 

Downloads 

• Google Analytics Reporting Suite
• Adobe Integrated Runtime

First of all, let me thank everyone, especially Joe, Kevin and David,  for their active participation and support in reporting the errors in Local Analytics. According to my Google Analytics stats, the plugin was downloaded over 200 times so far. A few errors were reported and fixed. Now the only unfixed problem is the corrupted zip file. I think it is caused by the some problem with my system, because it is showing some other troubles too. I will format my system and recreate the files in a few days.

I request you to report any difficulty or error you are having with the plugin. If no errors are reported during the next two days, then I will declare the current version stable and start working on the next version.

I also request you to suggest any improvements and changes you wish to include in the next version. Alex and David have made a very good suggestion, which I will try to incorporate in the new version. Though I don’t promise this, if I have time I will try to integrate the Analytics Reports also within the Administration Panel, as Jared and ekowanz asked.

Yesterday, while fixing some browser compatibility issues of my new theme, I was surprised to know that my homepage was over 400 KB in size and took more than 30 seconds to completely load with my DSL connection. More than 80 files, including images, javascript and css, were embedded within the page.

I decided to optimize the page and found that the following actions can be taken to decrease the load time.

• Reduce the number of requests
  First of all, I opened up my theme’s stylesheet and found several unused classes with image backgrounds and bullets. I removed those classes and removed all references to non-existant files.
• Reduce the total download size
  I tried removing unwanted markup and html comments left by my theme and plugins. But that did not create much difference in size. Next I converted some of the images from PNG to JPEG format. This reduced the total size by over 30 KB. But most of the page size was due to the embedded Javascript and CSS files. For example, the prototype javascript library is over 90 KB in size, which on compression get reduced to 22KB. Hence I used Apache Module mod_deflate to compress my files dynamically for gzip enabled browsers. I used the following code in my .htaccess file to compress files of the following mime types  - text/css,  text/html,  text/plain,  text/xml and application/x-javascript. For this to work on your server, you should have mod_deflate enabled. Most webhosts have this enabled. If not, you may also try  PHP mod_gzip or ZLib compression.

  # Insert filter
  SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
  
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css text/html text/plain text/xml application/x-javascript
  
  # Netscape 4.x has some problems...
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
  
  # Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
  
  # MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
  # BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
  
  # NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48
  # the above regex won't work. You can use the following
  # workaround to get the desired effect:
  BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
  
  # Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
  Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

• Cache files client side
  Almost all browsers have the ability to cache files on your computer for faster loading. If we set the expiry time of the file, the browser will check for updated content only after the specified time. We can use the Apache module mod_expires for this purpose. The following code will request the browser to cache all files for three hours. This can make the browser download the file only once during a session, but will update the content on next visit. You may also use the ExpiresByType directive to set different time for images, javascript and css files.

  # Cache all files for the next 3 hours
  ExpiresActive On
  ExpiresDefault "access plus 3 hours"

Results

The final result was great. The homepage size got reduced to 159 KB, which was less than half of the original size. The page load time also reduced to 19.3 seconds from about 32 seconds.

The load time and page size were calculated using the Web Page Speed Report tool from www.websiteoptimization.com.

Make sure you backup your current .htaccess file before trying the above code. So that you can revert back if something goes wrong.