Category: Tips

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

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 »

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

Showing ads only to people who came from Search Engines

Category: Advertising & Marketing, Blogging, Tips

It’s a fact that people do not like ads and they hate it when they appear inside blog posts ;)

It’s also fact that bounce rate for traffic from search engines is very high. Most of the time it’s above 60% for any blog. That means these people search for something in Search Engines, see your blog in the results, come to your blog searching for whatever they have searched, stay there for 5-20 seconds and then they are gone. Let’s hope that they have found what they were looking for…

So, how about showing ads to these bouncers only and not to your regular readers? Seems like a good idea.

WP Plugins

There are few plugins which can do that. The newest being the DailyBlogTips’ Search Ads plugin. It’s a simple plugin with simple interface. You install it and put a code that you want to show to visitors from Search Engines or from any site for that matter. Actually you can put any code in the HTML field; welcome message, subscribe to RSS message etc. But of course, for monetization purposes you will put Google AdSense ads.

There is also a more advanced plugin from Ozh called Who Sees Ads. With this plugin you can tweak the behavior of your plugin more accurately.

That’s one way to increase RSS subscribers

Category: Advertising & Marketing, Blogging, Tips

I was downloading some great web2.0 icons from WebDesignerDepot.com but was not able to proceed with my download until I had to join their RSS. I thought it was creative, even though I found it a bit forceful.

Here is how they have done. Download links were password protected, and they have placed the “password” in their RSS posts.

wddepot.png

The password could only be seen at the end of every post on RSS feed (see below).

wddepot2.png

Actually, I didn’t mind signing up for their RSS because the blog is excellent. Therefore, I believe this tactic will work well on blogs that have good content and not so much on the blogs that have poor content. Because subscribing to good blogs is not a big deal for many users.

So, that’s one way to increase the RSS subscriber count.

Laws related to Software Development

Category: Tips

Here is some laws to take into consideration when developing a software:

Hofstadter’s law
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.

Brooks’s law
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Lister’s law
People under time pressure don’t think faster.

The ninety-ninety rule
The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.

Worse is better (New Jersey style)
Describes how a seemingly “inferior” product can be better from a user perspective. A limited but easy-to-use software may be more popular among users than a “better”, more comprehensive one.

Wirth’s law
Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

Source: pingdom blog