Quick Online Tips » Miscellaneous

View YouTube Videos in WideScreen Format

QuickOnlineTips — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:06:47 +0000

Youtube videos just got bigger and better with a new widescreen format. Now watching movies and videos in widescreen monitors with full screen options just got better.

Youtube rolled out its new, wider player today with a widescreen aspect ratio 16:9 to provide a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience. They also changed the web design to extended the site width to 960px to accomodate the� new player. However they assure viewers that 4:3 aspect ratio videos will play just fine in this new player.

So does that mean that all embedded youtube videos will get wider? I checked that the default embed codes are still the same size as before with a width of 425 px and height of 344 px. Although the videos themselves have not embed code displaying right now, but that should be fixed soon.

But you can change the video size easily by editing the width and height tags of the embed code. This is the standard embed format with 4:3 aspect ratio.

Here is the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio at 468px by 263px settings

And it looks much better.

Must Read Related Articles

Batcache: New WordPress Caching Plugin

QuickOnlineTips — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:13:00 +0000

Batcache is a fresh caching wordpress plugin on the scene that will keep your shared hosting server up when Digg hits your site. After the WP-Supercache built on the success of WP-cache, the new caching wordpress plugin Batcache promises to be different.

But when I am super satisfied that WP-Supercache is working great on our site and recommend it as one of the most essential wordpress plugins, why should I use Batcache?

Why use Batcache?

Andy Skelton, creator of Batcache explains that WP-Super-Cache is good for anyone with a single web server with a writable wp-content/cache directory, but in enterprises with multiple servers that don�t share disk space, Batcache comes in useful where you can�t or won�t use file-based caching.

By default it looks for URLs that receive more than two hits from unrecognized users in two minutes. When a URL�s traffic crosses that threshold, Batcache caches the document for five minutes. You can configure these numbers any way you like, or turn off traffic metering and send documents right to the cache.

Once a document has been cached, it is served to eligible visitors until it expires. This is one place where Batcache is different. Most other caches delete cached documents as soon as the underlying data changes. Batcache doesn�t care if it�s serving old data because �old� is relative (and configurable).

Some people may see older pages when they have not interacted with your web site before. However, once they have logged in or left a comment they will always get fresh pages.

So does it work out of the box like other plugins? No. You need to have Memcached working first. Memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load, initially developed by Danga Interactive to enhance the speed of LiveJournal.com.

There are lot of updates and to-do lists lined up to improve batcache, and the author says it�s so experimental that it doesn�t even have a version number!

Must Read Related Articles

Track Firefox 3 Downloads with Live Counters

QuickOnlineTips — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:20:07 +0000

Do you want to see the Firefox download counter ticking away to set a Guinness World Record. Visit the Firefox 3 Download Counter page and track downloads live in real time for most popular language versions.

I see over 7.7 million FireFox downloads and can you believe that around 7000 downloads are occurring every minute. Mozilla informs us that due to overwhelming demand they have passed through 14,000 downloads a minute! And considering each download is about 7MB, that�s around 13 Gigabits/s of just download traffic! And Mozilla.com web traffic is pushing well over 2 Gigabits a second of just pure HTTP traffic. Amazing.

Just in February Firefox crossed 500 million downloads and went about distributing free rice. Now Firefox has been downloaded a total of 579 million times since its launch. There are lot of ways to add a Firefox download counter to your site.

Must Read Related Articles

Bloglines is Most Popular Web RSS Feed Reader!

QuickOnlineTips — Thu, 22 May 2008 07:29:37 +0000

Which is the most popular RSS news aggregator? Everyone is buzzing about Google Reader, but the old time favorite Bloglines is still leading the charts. A Hitwise study reveals that Bloglines is still the most popular web-based feed reader based on share of US visits, though Google Reader is growing in popularity and closing the gap to Bloglines.

Some interesting observations reveal that

Google Reader sent 61% more visits to News and Media websites than Bloglines.
Google Reader users are more inclined toward mainstream media – using the reader as a front page of a newspaper – while Bloglines seems to be used more for following blogs.
Bloglines users are also more inclined toward Photography websites, while Google Reader users are more inclined to visit Television websites.
Bloglines users are 24% more likely to continue on to a retail (Shopping & Classifieds) website.

When we analyzed our 15000 feed readers, the stats revealed that 47% used Google reader, while only 10% used Bloglines to read this blog. Remember Feedburner Google stats are actually Google Feedfetcher data that combines subscriber counts from Google Reader and iGoogle (their personalized single page aggregator). Also note that the Hitwise data tracks US visits only, and it would be great to have an analysis of international traffic and subscriber behavior.

Which Feed reader do I use? I personally use Google Reader and recommend it. But Bloglines is also great. This means that if there are only 2 RSS subscribe buttons you need to display – they should be Google and Bloglines.

Must Read Related Articles

Who is the Next Mahalo VLOGIdol?

QuickOnlineTips — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 13:40:54 +0000

Mahalo VLOGIdol is a competition to find the new host for Mahalo Daily, an incredible show hosted by Veronica Belmont who moving to Revision3 as the new co-host of Tekzilla with Patrick Norton. Mahalo is busy finding the next Daily Mahalo hostess and the finalists for the Mahalo VLOGIdol are out.

The search for a smart, fun, young, charismatic, female host for Mahalo Daily has to led to 12 Finalists who will fight out to become the famous Mahalo Daily host. Here are the Mahalo VLOGIdol Finalists photos, some audition videos and some teasers below.

Mahalo bids farewell to Veronica Belmont

Jason Calacanis says Veronica has left the building and Mahalo Daily is lost and adrift, and starting Monday, they will air the search for the new host of Mahalo Daily. Keep tracking the search for the Next Mahalo VLOGIdol?

Must Read Related Articles

Movable Type 3.34 Fixes XSS Security, Supports FastCGI

QuickOnlineTips — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 17:02:26 +0000

Six Apart has released version 3.34 of the Movable Type Publishing Platform. Movable Type 3.34 is a free and recommended update for all Movable Type users.

Movable Type 3.34 fixes important potential XSS vulnerabilities and enables simple use of FastCGI which yields a 15x performance increase.

FastCGI support has been fully integrated into the core application and now Movable Type is capable of detecting when it is running under FastCGI automatically and take advantage of its unique performance benefits. Running Movable Type under FastCGI is still optional, but they recommend that users run Movable Type under it.

“FastCGI has shown to increase application performance by almost 15 times. The speed increase is so dramatic because the application is persisted in memory, allowing information to be cached between page requests reducing page load time and database load.”

That should make MovableType Bloggers happy…

Must Read Related Articles

Wordpress Plugins are Updating to Support Wordpress 2.1

QuickOnlineTips — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 14:10:32 +0000

There is a race amongst Wordpress plugin developers to update their plugin versions to support the newly released Wordpress 2.1. Previously Plugin developers were notified that they needed to update to support the MySQL changes in Wordpress 2.1. Some of the popular Wordpress plugins I use are being updated.

Akismet 2.0 is already coming bundled up in Wordpress 2.1 – with some new features
* page through everything caught by Akismet.
* search the Akismet caught queue.
* Longer timeout and counters now update properly
* A recheck moderation queue page
* A new counter widget
* Akismet can discard spam that comes in on entries older than a month.

Google (XML) Sitemaps 3.0b6 – a new version is out. This generator will create a sitemaps.org compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported By Google, MSN Search and Yahoo. Its a beta but a necessary upgrade.

WordPress Database Backup v2.0 – Originally developed by Skippy, the plugin management has changed owners. This plugin has been bundled with WordPress installations for about a year, but no longer. WordPress 2.1 includes a new cron feature that provides makes it easy to schedule regular database backups.

Here is a list of plugins compatible with WordPress version 2.1.

Must Read Related Articles

Update Manager Wordpress Plugin : Check Plugins Versions

QuickOnlineTips — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 15:43:29 +0000

A new wordpress plugin promises to make updating plugins on your wordpress blog easier. It helps to ensure you always have all the latest bug fixes, security patches and gadgets. I wonder why no one thought about it before.

The Update Manager is a new Wordpress admin plugin that helps you keep your plugins up to date. They say that since this plugin only displays information and does not modify your wordpress installation in any way, you can easily give it a try.

Presently when I need to check for Wordpress plugin updates (an essential activity once a fortnight), I visit my Plugins page on Wordpress Admin panel and click on the Wordpress author pages (Wordpress plugins I use) to look for any updates after matching the plugin versions. This plugin should make that task automated.

The comments on the plugin page show that the plugin is a little buggy at the moment, but I suggest you keep a close watch on its development. I am sure the Wordpress guys will get in this functionality in future versions.

Recently I spotted that Weblog Tools Collection has started posting daily WordPress Plugin Releases which helps me stay updated.

Must Read Related Articles

Ibibo Great Indian Blogger Hunt

QuickOnlineTips — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 12:45:27 +0000

Ibibo is running the Great Indian Blogger Hunt. Rs. 1.5 crore is up for grabs. Top 100 Bloggers will get paid every month based on their ibQ Score.

The blogger’s ibQ Score which determines the top 100 bloggers is calculated using three components:
* The Quality Score (QS) is a reflection of how readers rated a blogger’s blog.
* The Popularity Score (PS) is a reflection of how popular a blogger is based on a combination of page views, comments and number of fans that a blog has.
* The Activity Score (AS) is a reflection of the blogger’s consistency in posting new posts on the blog.

It is open to Indian citizens and residents of India who are above 18 years of age. See how the payout will be done. Their ad is figuring on Google Adsense units on several of my pages, so they seem determined to spread the word.

I just checked the rules that reveal that “the winners will be required to maintain and regularly update blogs on ibibo.com for a period of one year and the actual payment will depend on their performance metrics that would be told to them at the end of the contest.” Read the fine print carefully.

Must Read Related Articles

AOL Top Searches of 2006 : All About Weather

QuickOnlineTips — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 14:31:02 +0000

It seems all top search engines are creating a public preview for their top searches of the year. AOL Search presents the year in review 2006 which highlights the top searches of 2006.

The top Overall searches:
1) Weather
2) Dictionary
3) Dogs
4) American Idol
5) Maps
6) Cars
7) Games
8 ) Tattoo
9) Horoscope
10) Lyrics

Ipod tops the Video Searches and Paris Hilton is most searched person. You can also navigate by most searched terms every month too. Compare that with Myspace tops Ask, Britney Spears tops Yahoo and Bebo tops Google.