WebHostingBluebook.com review

Category: Reviews -

The following is a paid review of a web hosting resource site WebHostingBluebook.com. If you are new to web hosting, this site has a very useful learning center that covers topics like:

  • How to choose a web hosting provider
  • How to choose bandwidth and how much is enough
  • Should you chose dedicated or shared servers
  • Should you chose managed or unmanaged hosting plan
  • Should you use Linux or Windows based servers
  • etc.

The site also covers 3 top hosting providers and compares them extensively on all levels of features and services provided. They have also reviewed them in depth in the following criteria:

  • Reliability
  • Control Panel
  • Customer Support
  • Value for Money

All of the above criteria are very important when choosing a hosting service for your website. However, I would suggest that you pay extra attention to the customer service part

Summary
As a resource site, I think it’s a very straight forward and very informative website. My suggestions would be to expand the “Learning Center” to include even more questions and answers.

And also to add more hosting providers to the review list, instead of limiting it to only three. While in-depth reviews of the hosting providers are very useful, I think to make it more credible, they should also allow other users to review and comment under each hosting provider.

URL: www.webhostingbluebook.com

How to Backup All Your Instagram Photos

Category: General, Tips -

In light of the latest brouhaha over the Instagram Terms of Service, this might be a good time for you to back up all your Instagram photos. Just to be safe, you know!

Below I will address two ways to backup your Instagram pictures; 1 – your existing Instagram pictures and
2 – a way to auto-backup all your future Instagram pictures as well.

Backing up all your existing Instagram photos

Instaport is a great way to backup all your existing Instagram photos. It’s very simple to use, all you need to do is to connect using your instagram login and all your Instagram pictures will be zipped and ready for you to download.

Website: http://web2.instaport.me

How to auto backup all your future Instagram Pictures

Using two great tools, IFTTT and Dropbox, you can auto backup all your future Instagram photos to your Dropbox as they are posted by you in your Instagram account. I have previously blogged about ifttt here.

For this to work, please make sure to signup for IFTTT and Dropbox first. After which, just activate this recipe in your IFTTT account and you are done.

Now, all your future Instagram pictures will be auto backed up to your Dropbox account. Safe and sound :)

Recipe URL: https://ifttt.com/recipes/43183

Efficient Way to Consume Content on the Web

Category: Mobile Apps, Usability -

For the past few months this is how I consume the content on the web and mobile, I primarily use this method to read longer blog posts and articles. I also use it to save articles so that I can read them later.

What’s the current problem?

You would ask “what’s the current problem that it requires this kind of solution?”. Well, the current problem is that there are many great blogs and websites on the web that are simply difficult to read. This could be due to many reasons. Here are some of them:

  • using small font sizes for the content
  • using dark backgrounds behind the content
  • using difficult to read font-styles
  • blog layout is not user-friendly
  • too many ads on the blog
  • etc etc.

The Solution

Solution is a product called Readability that works with your web browsers, smartphones and tablets. Here is how it works.

1. You sign up for an account with Readability and drag the browser bookmarklets to your browser’s toolbar. Bookmarklet works with all the major web browsers. (You can also install Google Chrome extensions)

2. And when you are browsing the web and come across a good blog post or an article that you would like to read..

3. You just press the bookmarklet and it will send that particular page to your Readability account. Google Chrome extension gives you few options when you press the button; Read Now, Read Later, and Send to Kindle. full details »

Tweet links to your Delicious.com account

Category: Tips -

Problem

Often times I come across a great resource on the web and I want to bookmark it. I usually use Delicious.com to save and manage all my bookmarks. However, sometimes when I’m browsing the web via mobile, I can’t really save the links to my Delicious account, especially when I’m using a specific app, so normally I will do one of the following:

  1. Send the link to myself via email, so that I can bookmark it later when I check my mail on my notebook.
  2. Send to Readability app, if it’s something I want to read later.
  3. Tweet the link (if it is something that will benefit my twitter followers) so that I can favorite it and it will be thus bookmarked on my Favorites list. Yes, I use Twitter’s Favorites list as my bookmark page :) That’s why I suggested to @twitter to do something about it.

The Solution

Luckily there is a solution from Delicious’ side that they have introduced few months back. Basically what it does is that, it connects to your Twitter account via oAuth, and pulls all the tweets with hashtags #d. You can also select few other options, such as pulling all favorited tweets etc.

To set this up, login to your Delicious account and go to Settings > full details »

Education 3.0 – New Way of Learning [updated]

Category: General -

I really like the latest developments in the online education/learning field. Some of the startups are really creative and changing the traditional boring means to learn with more fun, gamified, self-learning online resources. On these sites, you will not only be able to learn, but also contribute to the community if you are good in certain subject fields. This is a great way to harness the benefits of crowdsourcing.

Below, you will find some of these websites:

Code Academy

Codecademy is an interactive and fun way to learn coding. By asking you to type set of words and answers to questions, it will involve you in a two-way communication. By the time you realize, you will be coding and understanding the concepts of object oriented programming. It also employs social elements to the site, so that you can learn together with your friends.

Website: http://www.codecademy.com

code academy

Khan Academy

Khan Academy has a huge collection of 2700+ free videos. And it’s a work of one man, Salman Khan. What started of as a casual online tutoring sessions for his relative’s kids, turned out to be one of the largest non-profit educational organizations in the world.

He has MBA from Harvard, he has three degrees from MIT: a BS in math and a BS and a master’s in electrical engineering and computer science. His website is mainly popular for his maths videos, which are easy to understand and appealing to school kids. You can read more on Khan’s story at the following sites; Money.CNN, Wired, and SiliconPrairieNews.

Website: http://www.khanacademy.org

khan academy

TreeHouse

Treehouse is a fairly new website that concentrates on providing instructional videos on Web Design, Web Development and iOS Development. As a part of its teaching method, it uses ‘badges’ similar to what FourSquare does, you will get a badge for answering questions correctly. full details »

IFTTT – Automate the obvious

Category: Tips -

Ifttt (if this then that) is one of my favorite online tools. It’s a free automation tool for popular online tools and services. It can do a lot of stuff, below screenshot should give you some ideas on what it can do. These are some of the ready ‘recipes’ that you can use right away.

ifttt if this then that

But you can also do a lot of custom recipes of your own. If you like Google Alerts you will love Ifttt, because it can do a lot more than Google Alerts.

Website: Ifttt.com