1. Once you’ve got the idea conceived, get yourslef a killer domain name and a suitable hoster (with PHP/MySQL).
2. Select the hosting plan after estimating the expected user-base.
3. Grab a copy of Pligg and install it on your server. Installation is easy, but configuration takes a bit more time as there are many functions and features to be configured/tweaked.
4. Then you can ADD CATEGORIES, modify the site structure and much more in the administration panel.
5. Search for a suitable template/theme. There are many available free of cost. These are good resources:
   • Pligg2U
   • FreePliggThemes (less number of templates)
6. That’s it. The Technical Part is over.
7. Invite your friends and have sometime, testing every part of it, making sure it’s secured.
8. Release it to public (or even in BETA) and promote as much as you can. Introduce your new digg clone to bloggers and they might review it (as I’ve done for Migg).

There are many digg clones in the web, mostly powered by Pligg. Some are language-based ones like Migg, some region-based, gender-based, category-based and some even college-based !!!

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Twitter has been a revolution. If you still haven’t started tweeting/twittering you might feel missed out. This simple idea and its effective implementation has made it a ground-breaking service.

Here, I share with you, all the twitter resources (includes mashups,apps etc) I’ve came across during my one great month of tweeting. (You can follow me @aravindjose)

Twitter Basics & Guides

• Newbie’s guide to Twitter

• A Twitter Guide

• Another Twitter Guide

• Twitter Terminology & Descriptions

• Twitter Etiquette

Twitter Apps and Twitter Mashups are almost synonymous, eventhough there is a small difference.
Apps - refers to stuff that will assist you in tweeting.
Mashups - refers to stuff that will make tweeting more fun & enjoyable

Seeing the search results, I realised that I couldn’t treat Apps & Mashups as two categories. So, I combined those under the title:

Twitter Tools & Resources

• Apps listing at Twitter Wiki

• Mashup listing at Twitter Wiki

• All(!) Twitter tools and mashups in one place
• UPDATE: How not to be a Twitter nit-wit

Twitter tools and resources for (not only)

• Journalists

• Bloggers & Coders

TwitterFeed.com - Attach your blog’s RSS to your account)

TweetBurner.com - A new service that offers click statistics for the links you create through their homepage. It’s basically a URL shortner with advanced capabilities.

Twitter Scripts - Scripts for various platforms & languages

Here are some newly discovered stuff, that are not covered above.

• TwitStat.com

A service that shows interesting stats about Twitter usage. To see your stats, follow twitstat.

• Xefer.com’s Twitter Statistics

Wonderful mashup that displays your twitter activity as stunning graphs. You get to see the “hour in which you tweeted the most”, “day of the week with most tweets” etc. It’s one of my personal favorites.

• Twitter Karma

Takes your Twitter Friends List to another level. Worth a try !!

Interesting Ideas & Reports

• Ideas at Twitter Wiki

• Twitter as a Command Line Tool

• 5 Terrific Twitter Uses

• Analysis of Indian Twitosphere

Which twitter tools do you use? Have you got any other twitter tool to be shared? Show your love for twitter! Use the comments area.
You can follow me @aravindjose

Poll

[poll=4]

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Introduction

Ever since I got my broadband connection, the greater portion of my life was online. I learned many new things, which i might never come across, if i was not a netizen. Here, I share with you - my dear readers - How to be a COOL netizen.

The Bare Basics

Broadband connectivity, a powerful customizable secure browser (Firefox being my favorite), and a desire to explore the never ending web!!

Now that you are ready for the ride, we’ll look for stuff that will make the journey more dashing.

1. E-Mail & IM (needs description??!!)

You’ll need that everywhere. So have one for yourself. It is advised to have a private as well as another publid ID. You may choose any of the webmail giants (GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL) to get you one. Almost all of them provides unlimited storage & similar features, so, it’s completely upto you to decide.

SignUp for atleast one Instant Messaging service. (All the above mail providers provide IM service)

2. Socialize and Interact

2.1 Social Networking Sites

Since you want to be a netizen, you need to have contacts in the web just as you have in the physical world. Think no further and signup for a social networking service. There are many and while choosing one consider the following:

· Register for a service which is popular in your region/country (India=Orkut!!)

· Join only those services, which clearly ensures your safety online

(Get the full list here)

You may join Twitter, (a service to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you doing?”). Know More about twitter here. Once you’re familiar with these and have some contacts online, you may join services like FriendFeed.

2.2 Forums

Forums are web hangouts were, netizens interact each other based on interests. There are millions of forums out there, just for any category (Even, there is no Wikipedia entry listing forums!). So, the best way to decide on one is to ask those who use them.

3. Blogs

The best way to stay updated is to regularly read blogs. There are hundreds of thousands out there. There are both Corporate Blogs & Individual Bloggers (like me, Shankar, Nirmal, Sumesh). Doing a search for your interests on GoogleBlogSearch, Technorati etc. will take you to blogs which deal about the content you need. Once you’ve found one that suits your interest, it’s easy to find more of that type. It’s better to be a reader at many blogs, so that you get many flavours. (For info on staying updated with many blogs, see the RSS section below)

4. Get The Content Delivered To You (RSS)

RSS - Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) - is a “family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts.”

Let’s put it simple. Every blog and many sites have a feature called “feeds”. You subscribe to the feed using any RSS Reader and any new articles/posts made in the blog/site will be delivered to the RSS Reader by the website/blog. So, if you subscribe to (say 5) blogs, all the new content from those 5 blogs will be there in the RSS Reader for you to read. Thus, you need not visit individual blogs/sites. This is a simple, extremely useful service, but not everyone uses it. I wonder why!! (You can subscribe to my blog here).

4.1 RSS Readers

There are both Online & Desktop clients available (Get the full list here). I personally use Google Reader and you can have a quick, neat tutorial here.

5. Social Bookmarking

This was a Web 2.0 phenomenon and was an immediate success. There started many Social Bookmarking services, which allowed you to share interesting websites and articles you come across on the web. These portray the “hot topics” of the moment, so that we get to know what the world is talking about. The giants in this business are Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Reddit etc. You can have a long list here. (Take a practical lesson by bookmarking this post/blog if you liked this!!).

I prefer StumbleUpon, because it is much more than just a social bookmarking service. With just a toolbar, StumbleUpon learns our likes/dislikes and shows us cool websites based on our interests. You can also submit “your discoveries” to it.

5.1 Automatic single-page aggregators

I would like to speak about popurls.com which “is the dashboard for the latest web-buzz, a single page that encapsulates up-to-the-minute headlines from the most popular sites on the internet.” This is an incredible service. There is another one similar to popurls.com: theweblist.net

6. Content Publishing (Speak Out!)

If you want the world to know your thoughts, or if you want to share your knowledge with others, or if you just want to vent your emotions, you CAN. There are many free personal publishing platforms which help you to setup a blog for yourselves in minutes. The leaders are WordPress (This blog is WordPress-ed!), Blogger & LiveJournal. You need not be a techie or a programmer to have your blog up and running. You can start with any one of those mentioned, or you can host your own domain and power it up with any one of the platforms.

7. Content Sharing (File/Photo/Video)

7.1 Share Your Stuff

The whole web is based on the spirit of sharing and you too can share anything you want. You can share files (eg: Rapidshare), images (eg: Flickr) and Videos (eg: YouTube). You can also make money from your content through programmes like, MetaCafe’s Producer Rewards Programme etc.

7.2 Take the Shared Stuff

Downloads are the sweet part of the net-life. You get music, movies, apps, pictures, videos, just anything you want. It is necessary to have a download manager ready for you, so that you may batch-download, pause/resume downloading etc. List of Download Managers.

And there is p2p (peer-to-peer), the king of file sharing. More than 75% of world’s bandwidth is used for p2p. It needs a category of its own, and you may learn more about p2p here & here.

Conclusion

You can get more Web Apps and services here & here.

There’s still more to say. These are only the basics to guide you; even sky is not a limit here.

Note To Wanna’-be Netizens: Are you ready? Any Questions? Put it in the comments.
Remember, Never drop the desire to explore more.

Note To Netizens: Have I missed something important? Use the comment section to let me know.

[[ N.B. You can download this guide in PDF format here. ]]

This Article by aravindjose.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 India License.

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This needs attention. Imageshack.us, the leader in image hosting, today added a great new feature to their ‘already-nice’ feature-set: “Online Torrenting”.

What Is It?

It’s a cutting-edge technology by which you can download the contents of a torrent file to imageshack.us’s clustered servers and download it to your computer through direct links.

That means, you literally need no torrent clients or p2p clients running in the background, hogging your resources. Just add the torrent file at imageshack and let them do the torrenting for you. And, once it’s finished you can download the files as direct links. Sounds great, isn’t it !!!

Specs

You get 15GB Storage Space & 15GB Bandwidth

How To?

1. The service is still in the early BETA and requires you to register for an account at imageshack.us
2. After Registering, LogIn and Go to Imageshack Torrents’ Home.
3. You can either upload a .torrent file from your computer or else provide the URL to the .torrent file. Click GO
4. That’s it. Now, Imageshack starts torrenting for you and you may shut the computer and have a good night’s sleep.
   Nothing is downloaded to your computer, NOW.
5. When you check back, it might be finished or else you can see the status of the given torrent download.
6. In the torrents’ homepage, you get to control torrenting, like, Start, Stop, Download, Delete etc. (screenshot below)
7. Clicking on “Download” will take you to a file listing page. (screenshot below)
8. If you are downloading a torrent with many sub-files, you can download the individual files in the order of finishing. That means, if your torrent contains 50 files and only 25 of them are finished at the time you check, you can download those 25 files individually while the torrenting proceeds in the background.

You might’ve used BitLet, which allow you to download the torrent files to your computer without a torrent client. But, Imageshack has gone one more step ahead, and downloads it to their servers to provide you with DIRECT LINKS.

Screenshots

Showing Status of torrents

(This one facilitates HTTP downloading of Torrents!!)
What do you think about this cool, new service?

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Here we use, Adobe’s Audio Mastering Software, Audition. This trick uses a channel mixer preset that is available with the default installation of Adobe Audition. I Have Explained all the steps with screenshots so that it would be easier to understand.

1. FireUp Adobe Audition

2. Open the original version of the song

3. Select Waveform View (if not selected already)

4. Click & Drag the mouse through the waveform to get the whole of waveform selected

5. Go to Effects >> Stereo Imagery >> Channel Mixer

6. In the Next Dialogue that appears, Select ‘Vocal Cut’ from the ‘Effect Preset’ drop-down.

7. Click Apply/OK and wait for the process to finish. Save it and let the music begin…. The Karaoke or Instrumental Version of the song you selected is ready.Have Fun!!

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I needed some songs, which i did not had in my HDD. I then thought about the legal “all-music-playing-sites” like listen77.com raaga.com dishant.com smashits.com etc. These sites are HUGE (yeah, i mean it) databases of almost all songs.

But, i needed those songs as a mp3 or wav so that i may edit, cut and mix it with other tracks..But, those sites dont allow DOWNLOADING

I decided to take a way around and was successful with the following way.                                                                              (Please Note that this can be achieved through many other softwares too. But almost all of them are paid software; i am illustrating the tutorial using an efficient freeware.)

==>

Get yourself the free, open source AUDACITY.

Download: http://is.gd/18L

and U MAY need Lame mp3 encoder to export as mp3 from Audacity; get it here:
DOWNLOAD: http://is.gd/18M

Logic 
Simple. We are about to record the sound that is playing through our speakers.

Now, the method.
••Install Audacity and Launch It.

••The main Audacity window will open

••At The top you’ll see two volume sliders (if you dont, go to View menu and select it)

••This is the important part. Next to those sliders, you’ll see a drop-down box to
select the recording input. Click on it and select “Wave Out Mix”.

••After selecting the “Wave Out Mix” the input volume slider will go to ‘0.1′. Dont increase it, KEEP IT LIKE THAT else get ur ears blown…Itz the appropriate level for our job.

First part is over, Second Part>>

••(example)go to www.raaga.com >> Enter a channel (select a language) >> Search for your favourite song(the search bar is there at the top) >> From the search result, click on the song title (of the song u want to record) and now, another browser window will open that is the song player

••At first, you’ll hav to wait a seconds (for buffering) and after that you might probably hear an ad or your slected song will start to play.

••SO, BEFORE CLICKING ON THE SONG TITLE , go to Audacity.

••In the Control Buttons in audacity Click the record button (RED) and it will start to record anything that plays thorugh the speakers..Now click on the song title and let the song play. After the song is completed, Stop RECORDING in audacity.

••Close the browser Window and we’ll do some final touch.

••Remove the extra silence or gap in the beginning of the track by just selecting that much portion and press DELETE on the keyboard. Do that until the waveform looks perfect without any gaps/silence.

••All u hav 2 do now is 2 xport it. Click File >> Export as mp3(or wav) >> Save IT.
(while xportng mp3s for 1st time you may b requird to locate the lame_enc.dll (the file u downloaded earlier)).

And Thatz all….Juz play the song and dance to the tune…

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==>

Burning a full length movie onto a CD

So, letz look how to burn a full single movie onto a CD (700 MB) and also the most awaited, how to burn 2-5Movies on a single DVD (4.7GB)

1. Buring a full movie onto a CD (700 MB)
(not only 1 movie, you can burn many movies onto a VCD, but the quality will be affected)”

We’ll be using Ashampoo Shrink & Burn to do the job.
In this great software, we can define the output size manually and it will automatically compress the movie.
We are also shown the specifications of target file (itz resolution, sample rate, fps etc..)

NOW, FOR BURNING A FULL LENGTH MOVIE TO A CD, Choose “to use with DVDPlayers” adn select “Burn Movies”.
In the next page, select the appropriate encoding (all options are explained there greatly..) and click NEXT.
Here, u have to select and add the files. The program will automatically compress the selected movies so as to fit them onto a VCD.
(The latest version, 3.x now supports burning Video DVDs too…)

==>

Buring MULTIPLE MOVIES onto a DVD

:::This was the much awaited part:::
Burning 2-5 movies onto a DVD (4.7GB)
Even if Ashampoo Shrink & Burn 3.x supports burning movies onto DVD, the software used to do this before Shrink & Burn is ConvertXtoDVD

You may download The Demo Version or try your luck in p2p.

Herez a tutorial in flash format to get you in touch wid the soft.
(Remember, the tutorila is short; there are many more options to be explored.)
http://82.143.202.118/guides/ConvertXtoDVD%20Guide%20by%20bT.swf

The tutorial will guide you in the process. The working is similar to that of the above software.You get to decide on the output size.

Happy Encoding…

(DISCLAIMER: This post/author/blog in no way supports/promotes piracy or any form of copyright infringement. This post doesn’t promotes anything illegal. The only aim of this post is to help people to burn HomeMade videos onto Discs easily. The author of this post cannot be held responsible for any abusive use of this information. If you feel any offence, inform me, and I’ll remove this)

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==>

If you juz want to backup a DVD, u may go for DVD Decrypter.

Itz a freeware and allows you to backup/copy entire/portions of a DVD with/without menus…

Using this program, the DVD is saved as .vob files and menus as .ifo s…
An average DVD ripped using DVDDecrypter will amount to a 3.8-4.3 GB..

So itz juz backin up and needs tons of disk space…
Take it down from here:
http://www.mrbass.org/dvdrip/SetupDVDDecrypter_3.5.4.0.exe

==>

cReatING a 1CD fUll MovIE DVDRip (700MB)

This tutorial uses the freeware, FairUSE to do our work. And of course a lot of time.

First of all, Download FairUSE here:
http://fairuse.free.fr/FU-Setup_LE.exe

The steps can be explained only wid the help of screenshots as each and every option and value is to be sure of..
So, here i’ll give you the tutorial in flash format..
http://bt.dvd-guides.com/FairUse%20Ripping%20Guide%20by%20bT.swf (thanks to the author)

I must warn you that, the Ripping and encoding process is very time consuming.

(DISCLAIMER: This post/author/blog in no way supports/promotes piracy or any form of copyright infringement. This post doesn’t promotes anything illegal. The only aim of this post is to help people on ripping and saving wonderful OpenSource Movies like the Elephants Dream .The author of this post cannot be held responsible for any abusive use of this information. If you feel any offence, inform me, and I’ll remove this)

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