This app is available for iOS 3.2+ users and does exactly what a blog App should do, manage, compose, edit, delete your blog posts with geo-tagging as well as photo uploads. Bloggers with multiple blogs can manage all their blogs from this app.

This App works on iPad but it doesn’t exclusively have an iPad version because of which the App works in compatibility mode.
Even though WordPress and Tumblr have sprung up and taking up many new bloggers, blogger is a vast network and powers millions of blogs on Internet.

via Blogger [iTunes Link]

To stay updated and not miss a single deal check check slickdeals.net their wiki is updated very quickly.

HP announced its intention to discontinue production of webOS devices less than 24hours ago and HP has slashed its wonderful HP Touchpad price to $99 i.e. a $300 discount on 16GB HP Touchpad.

The WebOS powered HP Touchpad is now priced at $99 and $149 for 16GB and 32GB version respectively. Almost all the online retailers have sold out the HP Touchpad but some websites keep updating and fill up some stock.

HP Touchpad is powered with a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core APQ8060 processor with Qualcomm Adreno 220 core graphic processor. For a 9.7 inch screen it has a XGA (1024 x 768) resolution. The device’s hardware is brilliant and this sale is worth not missing.

These are some sites where you can get the special price

HP 16GB Touchpad
HP 32GB Touhcpad
Amazon
BestBuy.com
BestBuy.ca
Microcenter
Meijer
Staples
TigerDirect

We might have missed out a few more websites, add in the comments so we could update the list.

• For Mac – Firefox 4.0.dmg (27 MB)
• For Windows – Firefox Setup 4.0.exe (12 MB)
• For Linux – Firefox-4.0.tar.bz2 (15 MB)

via Labnol

WordPress.org users had always felt the need of all the premium services which are provided on the wordpress.com hosted blogs, so Matt Mullenweg released the JetPack Plugin to give all the amazing .com features to self-hosted blogs.

Matt Said,”If you’re on WordPress you’re part of the family, it shouldn’t matter if we host you or not.”

As of now only eight features are included in the JetPack plugin, Stats, Twitter Widget, Gravatar Hovercard, WP.me Shortlinks, Sharedaddy, LaTeX, After the Deadline and Shortcode Embeds. A few more would be added soon. Which replace about 10-15 plugins which self-hosted blogs use to replicate the wordpress.com features.

Automattic has paired up with many hosting companies which offer ‘One-Click WordPress install’ options to offer JetPack as a pre-installed plugin.

I would suggest, every blogger with a self-hosted blog should install and use the JetPack plugin, it is an essential and very useful plugin. We too have installed it now

Read  here for the exciting announcement.

The only limitation to host a site on Amazon S3 is that you can only host static websites and not dynamic websites like WordPress or any blog.

You need to have a Amazon S3 account.

Step 1: Create a bucket in your Amazon S3 account and give it a name which is the same as your website.

Step 2: Select the new bucket and click the Upload button to upload all the web pages as you would do while uploading on your webhost.

Step 3: Right-click the bucket name and choose Properties. Switch to the Websites tab, enable the websites feature and set your index.html file as the index document. Save the changes.

Step 4 : Now the website is hosted, and we need to map that bucket to our domain.
Login to your domain registrar and create a CNAME Record > Set the value as the Endpoint provided by the Amazon S3 bucket and save the changes.

Check the detailed tutorial on labnol

via Digital Inspiration

This is a simple service, which gives the ability to layer all the content  from around the web into a small pop up box which can be access with just one click. Many a times you want to know about something which you read on this blog, you feel you need to read some stuff about it on Wikipedia and then continue reading, doing that means opening another tab/window and searching for that and then you might return back to read the rest of the post. Well Apture changes everything, you no more have to leave the page/blog  to read any small info you need to know, all can be done here itself.

This post is just to inform you and tell you how to use Apture on our blog or rather any blog which has installed Apture on it.

Single Click on the Hyperlinks
This is very simple, just clicking on the small icon besides any of the hyperlinked content gives you all the info you want right on this page.  This opens in a small rectangular box which has all the apturized content . So its like, the general link is transformed into a super link which has all the apturized content and is displayed in Apture’s dynamic Javascript-based window.

Highlighting any Content

The most useful of all. Many a times it happens that the post lacks loads of info of things which you think should have been included in the blog post. But we bloggers tend of skip the data which is already present on knowledge hubs like Wikipedia. But that doesn’t mean you should be knowing it already. Here is where Apture helps a lot. Just highlighting any content gives you an option to search for it. Apture automatically chooses the releavnt phrase and searches for it and gives you apturized content. The sources of Apturized cotent varies as per the term you are searching, the most relevant things which actually matter and you get in the Apture window are from the best possible sources like Wikipedia, Twitter and even videos from YouTube.

Check these demos

That’s all I could tell you for now, its fun just to keep scrolling in one blog post and highlighting some random text and understanding the most in any blog post.

For more info do visit Apture.
Also do check the interview of Tristan Harris, founder of Apture

Via @scobleizer

Most of the time the confusion is over getting a cheap shared hosting plan over the fair priced VPS or other packages. So we start our hunt trying to finalize the decision based on reviews posted by users or affiliates ( most of them ). One fundamental thing we forget is, to understand what’s the actual difference between them.

In this post I would try to cover the most basic difference we all should know about the web hosting packages which are usually offered. Shared hosting , VPS Hosting and Dedicated Hosting.Shared hosting is usually cheap and easy to manage, as the setup is already done, but the resources are pretty limited. We do not actually have any control over the server, nor do we have a guarantee of the site to be up if we get a sudden spike in traffic. So what do we do?Well the simple answer for that would be getting a dedicated server.
Dedicated servers are powerful and highly customisable as per the website needs, there needs to be some level of technical knowledge required for managing a dedicated server. The hosting company does try to help you out, but its advisable to go for that only if you really have a high traffic website and need the complete server resources to be concentrated on your website(s).

To be honest, dedicated servers are pretty expensive and if you are a good startup you might not have that much of money to fit in a dedicated server in your budget. So the question arises, what do we do if you site is big and a shared hosting plan cannot handle the traffic?

Here comes the need of a VPS hosting.

What is VPS Hosting?
Virtual Private Server hosting is a economical hosting solution with almost all the feature a dedicated hosting package can provide,  its  perfect for a website which can’t be hosted on a shared hosting but isn’t that big enough to move to a dedicated hosting.

Shared vs  VPS
In a shared webhosting , your website  is hosted on a server on which a bunch of other sites are already hosted, all the server resources ( RAM, CPU, Disk space ) are shared by every website hosted on that server. So if you site needs any more resources which isn’t available on the server, you might face slow loading site issues or downtime depending upon the service provider.  Whereas, for VPS,  the name is self explanatory, Virtual Private Server is a flexible solution between a shared hosting and a dedicated hosting. Just like dedicated hosting, VPS has its own disk space, RAM only the CPU is being shared between a few other sites.  Unlike  shared hosting, VPS gives you complete  server side customization as per your needs, you can call it a virtual machine  on which your site is hosted.

One good feature about VPS is, despite having a shared CPU most of the web hosting companies offer you Burstable RAM. Where does this help? Well this stuff helps to handle the ‘Digg-effect’ wherein your site gets an unexpected amount of traffic and the provided amount of resources won’t help counter the traffic. So the reserved burstable memory is called upon to manage the temporary high traffic.

But let me remind you this, most web hosting companies provide all these features on a VPS. Still its better to confirm with them before signing up.

Types of VPS

Not all VPS packages are same, they are broadly sub divided as per server management. The webhosting company manages all the hardware and network of the VPS only difference  being the software and custom needs of every user.

Un-managed – The web hosting company isn’t responsible for the  softwares and performance issues on this package.

Semi-Managed - The basic software is installed by the web host. The user has to handle all the custom software which is to be installed on the VPS, the support won’t help  you much with any sort of software installation or upgradation.

Fully Managed - The web host manages everything, i.e. all the host installs all the requested/required software for the user.

So a VPS is usable only for advanced users who root access to the server which shared hosting can’t provide. If you are looking for server side software customization including PHP, MySQL , Apache and all its better to go for VPS which can provide you all the characteristics of a dedicated server but a little less expensive cost.

Who would need a VPS ?

Well its pretty impressive to have a VPS for your website, but do you really need it?
If you have a shared hosting package right now and you are using all the provided resources its better to go for a upgrade. For static websites, a shared hosting would be perfect. But if you are having a few many websites with a huge database, and large amount of data with dynamic content and the possibility that you would have spiked traffic on quite many occasions,  VPS would be perfect for you.

In, all a VPS is a good for going beyond shared hosting and requires less investment than a dedicated server.

The video named ‘The State of Wikipedia’ not only shows us the history of todays most relied site on web but also shares the secret behind the development of such a informative website from scratch. The whole video is narrated by one of the co-founders himself, Jimmy Wales.

via JESS3 Labs

So here are some ways where you can get free space on your ‘free’ Dropbox account

1. The easiest way is to invite all your friends on dropbox, so whenever they register you and your friend both get 250MB free ( Or just sharing the referral link http://db.tt/6gw84D7 ) https://www.dropbox.com/referrals

2. University Students can get the free space and increase the referral from 250MB to 500MB via https://www.dropbox.com/edu
Just connect your .edu email with your dropbox account and voila! you are done.

Its doesn’t have to be actually .edu email all university emails are accepted. So give it a try.

3. Now we all have our social networking accounts, and sharing is the new way to tell your friends. So get on the wagon, and posting about dropbox via https://www.dropbox.com/free to get your account pumped with another extra 640MB.

4. Get 4.5GB Of Extra Dropbox space by using the new beta feature ‘camera import’. Read about it here

So get your free space now!

*LIMITED TIME*
Dropbox has announced a multi-step scavenger hunt called ‘DropQuest’ started from January 15 2011 and ends on January 29 2011.

Prizes:

• Completion: 1 GB for life

Dropquest will also be timed, and the fastest finishers will be rewarded with even more fantastic prizes.

• Platinum: (1) Dropbox hoodie (Psychobox), LIMITED EDITION Dropbox Hack Week t-shirt (actual design), Dropbox drawing signed by the Dropbox team, 50 GB for life!
• Gold: (10) Dropbox hoodie (Psychobox), Dropbox print signed by the Dropbox team, 10 GB for life!
• Silver: (20) Dropbox t-shirt (Psychobox), 5 GB for life!
• Bronze: (50) 2 GB for life!

Every step you pass you get extra space, in all you have 1GB of total guaranteed extra space to win
Just use your brain and you would get it. If you need any clue, drop in a comment would help you.

START THE DROPQUEST NOW!!!

So run along and solve the dropquest,
P.S. : Try not searching for answers, google would help but then its no fun.

Some features everyone should know.

The coolest new stuff from a user point of view is:

1. Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
2. Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
3. Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
4. Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket.

via WordPress

Check the video