If you are a plugin developer, you can join this contest. The contest is to create a plugin, widget, mash up, hack, or other variety of web application that helps people find and share opportunities to take action. You can find more information about the contest here.

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Apple’s App store has some strict guidelines to get the application approved to be sold in the App store. Once you Jailbreak your iPhone, you can use Cydia and install applications which are not sold at the App store. I have jailbroken my iPhone and have application wide copy paste feature, different SMS application which is set to default which can forward SMS, email an SMS and everything that you need. As you see on the image, I get my calendar appointments on my lock screen.

Cydia Store is being set up by Jay Freeman, a 27-year-old computer science doctoral student in Santa Barbara, after he invented an application called Cycorder that allows the iPhone to be used as a camcorder. Apple decided that the application was not suitable and banned it from the App Store.

Rogue iPhone applications stores coming online – vnunet.com

This theme has a very unusual look. I really liked the nested comments and the header.

I found a great post here about creating the Facebook Profile photo. Facebook is very popular these days. Hope this post will be interesting to you all.

5 Creative Ways to Hack Your Facebook Profile Photo

Wordpress is the most popular blogging CMS used among the bloggers. By default Wordpress comes will more that what you need, but you have the option to customize your blog according to your requirement. There are tons of extensions which are available at the Wordpress extension directory which can cater your need. You should make sure that you have your Wordpress Installation Updated to the latest version. Recently search engines have introduced a new tag called canonical tag which is used to tell the search engines about the URL of the post to avoid content duplication. You can use this tag using a plugin without any pain

1. SEO – Search Engine Optimization

   Search engine optimization is something very important as you should be aware that  search engines are the best traffic and free source of traffic for any blog or website. You need to make sure that your blog complies with the Webmasters Guidelines. Google is the most powerful and widely used search engine. There are a number of tips that should help you in optimizing your Wordpress blog for search engines. Pagerank is important for a blog or website, so you need to look into the SEO factor seriously. There are some good plugins like All in One SEO which takes care of most of the SEO requirements of your blog

2. Subscription

   RSS feed subscription is something which you should concentrate on. You should have some option for your readers or visitors to subscribe to your posts using the RSS feeds. There are many ways to increase the number of your RSS feed readers. There are two options for subscriptions, one E-Mail subscription and other is through the RSS feed reader like the Google reader and many others are available.

3. Newsletters

   Other than subscribing using the RSS feeds, you can run newsletters where you send something special to your subscribed readers. I would recommend Aweber which is one of the most popular newsletter system. Newsletters can help you in boosting your traffic and even help in selling offers.

4. Theme

   Having a professional theme is something very important. I use a theme from Brian Gardner called Revolution Church which I feel is having a professional look and I have made some customization looking into my needs and taste. A good theme is very important to impress your visitors. There are also lots of free Wordpress themes available which can be used when you start your blog and later you can change it to a professional one when you feel that you can afford to pay for your blog theme.

5. Advertisements

   Blogging is done as a hobby by some, as a way to make money and some do it for both. To monetize your blog, you need to get advertisers. Google Adsense is the best for the starters and if your blog has some decent traffic, you can go for private sales of Ads slots. I have been using Oiopublishers for some time now which takes care of the entire process from telling the visitors that I have ad slots for sale or rent, they can check the prices, buy it, make the payment, create their ads and view the reports. Make your advertising system automated, that will really help you. You can display your affiliate banners till you sell your ad slots and make money from your affiliate sales too using this plugin.

6. Fighting Spams

   Protecting your blog from spam is very important. If you are using Wordpress, then you do not need to worry much because Matt has developed an excellent plugin called akismet.  You will find this plugin available by default, all you need to have an API key with Wordpress and you have to update it into the settings of this plugin.

7. Guest Post from Users

   Getting your visitors to register and do guest posting will help you in getting good content for your blog. I have some paid content writers for my blog who help me in adding good content to my blog. You can encourage your visitors to register and submit content and offer Guest posting  option. This works well for popular blogs as this would help the authors to advertize themselves as well and market their blogs. I would suggest to use the register plus plugin which has some security features and some additions features than the default user registration in Wordpress. To motivate your visitors to write for your blog, you can offer some rewards which is done by some bloggers, but some offer to add a link to the authors blog which is also very much useful for the authors.

8. Translations

   Offering translation of your blog or website is one of the best way to get readers from non-English speaking countries. I have written a  translation plugin which I was using, but now I do not use because I find Google translation banning the site temporally very often. I need to work on this plugin and find a solution for this.

9. Social Networking

   You need to build your presence in different social networking sites like twitter, stumbleupon, facebook, digg, etc to advertize your blog and make it popular. Many use social networking to gain traffic and sales. Traffic is very important for your blog and social networking sites are something which can help you in branding your blog and get loyal readers.

10. Auto Blogging

    I have come across an excellent plugin which will fetch and update your Wordpress Blog with posts from different RSS feeds. You can run a blog without spending time in doing posts.

11. Hacks

    There are many hacks that I use on my Wordpress blog like displaying the upcoming posts and adding the meta custom fields for thumbnails for themes which use thumbnails like the Revolution Themes, showing a welcome message to your visitors coming from search engines

I have written written this post for Wordpress CMS because I have been using this for my blog and I find Wordpress is the most widely used open source tool for blogging. I would suggest to make customization for your blog using plugins rather than making any changes in the core files. Reason being, when you upgrade your Wordpress installation will overwrite all you customization.

Ministry of Housing, Transport and Environment is hacked by Jadecrew. I was surprised to see that many Maldivian Websites were targeted, which includes, Mifco, Villa Foundation, Sonee Hardware, Maldivian Air Taxi and MDP.

The hacker has used sql injection to get the login details.

Apple’s iPhone beats out a desktop computer in some important areas for me. I’ve even gotten into the habit of grabbing my iPhone instead of jumping onto my computer for various tasks. Here are 10 things I’d rather do on an iPhone than my desktop.

Where iPhone beats computer – Computerworld Blogs

In you Wordpress blog, you may want to hide unwanted pages in the menu. To do this, you can use the include parameter in the Wp_query.

Suppose you want to show only the  pages with ID 4, 5, 842,2412, then you can use the include parameter. You can even exclude the pages using the exclude parameter. If you use the include parameter then only the pages that you have asked for will be displayed, but in the case of exclude all the pages other than the pages in the exclude parameter will be shown.

<div id="navbarleft">

        <ul id="nav">

            <li><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>">Home</a></li>

            <?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=2&include=4,5,842,173,2412&sort_column=menu_order'); ?>

            <li><?php wp_loginout(); ?></li>

        </ul>

</div>

Youtube has the facility to play HD quality videos, but how do you embed it to your blog and display the high quality video on your blog or website.

And now in HD Quality

Do you see any difference in the quality in these two video’s. the diffence is that I have added &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 to the second video which should play HD quality video.

I use videos on my blog very often and have tried different video hosting services and players. I was using Blip.TV for long time now as I get some revenue out of it. Earlier I was using Revver, Vimeo which also pays for the ads displayed. Recently I installed a useful plugin called wordtube which manages the JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER 4.2 and makes it easy for you to put music, videos or flash movies onto your WordPress posts and pages. The player used is the JW Player for playing the videos. You can use different skins available to suit your blog taste. You need to download the mediaplayer.swf file from longtailvideo website and place it inside the plugin folder before you start using this plugin.

Hosting your Video Files

As far as my experience is concerned, I would recommend to use video hosting sites like blip.tv or YouTube to host your videos rather than saving it to your server. If in case you need to move your hosting, you will have tough time downloading all the bulky video files. Other reason is that your hosting charges may go up or you may even need to change your hosting package as for video viewing the bandwidth usage is high. You also will not have to take the pain of converting your AVI files to FLV and compress it if  you are using video hosting services.

About the WordTube Plugin

This is an excellent plugin which can be used to customize your Video Player, add your logo, set default sizes or custom sized video’s etc. You need to first need to add the video like you add media files. You can select custom thumbnail for your videos also. You can even use the videos from YouTube or Blip.TV by entering the URL of the video. In case of YouTube, its simple, just enter the URL of the YouTube Video, but in case of Blip.TV, you need to enter the Flash file download link which you can find towards the bottom of each video page. Once you add a new video, that video is assigned with a unique media ID which you need to tag inside your post like [ media id = 1 width = 585 height = 320 ]. You can assign every video to a playlist or create new playlists also. You can add information likes the title, description, tags etc for each video. This plugin also has a widget which can be used to display the latest video or some playlist.

Video adds flavor to your blog, you can talk to your visitors much better when you use Videos or pictures. If you use Video’s on your blog, I would suggest to use this plugin and discover your own ideas and spread the message to the world.