Stockezy is India's first social investing community designed to connect Indian Stock Market investors. Stockezy provides an effective platform for like-minded investors to exchange ideas, share business insights and grow to make educated financial decisions. Stockezy is your free web-based social utility to build new connections, collaborate and work together for mutual benefit. The following are some of the key features of the site:
Stock Picks:
It’s a section where you can add BUY-SELL stock recommendations, prove your investing talent & become a community guru. The site automatically tracks the performance of your picks and also informs you whether your picks have met the target or not.
Questions & Answers:
If you have a question about finance or investing & don't know where to turn? Then this site can be pretty handy where you can get help from the community of like-minded investors.
Opinions:
It’s a place where you can blog about your investment ideas & market insights. Discuss stocks to get direct & actionable financial information on variety of topics.
Market Snapshot:
From Sensex ups & downs, to Nifty winners & losers; Get the latest market round up and all BSE/NSE stock quotes at this section.
Portfolio Tracker:
This is the place where you can understand the performance of your portfolio, manage your investments better & diversify away your risk. This section is all about tracking your net worth, P&L, asset-allocations etc.
Turn off your computer when not using it, especially if you have an ‘always on’ internet connection.
Get a firewall if you have a DSL or cable modem. Remember to keep the firewall always.
Use a good Anti-virus program. Remember to use only one such software, as different programs use the same system resources & may conflict. Besides anti-virus program it is advisable to use a good anti-spyware and anti-malware program. Keep both your anti-virus and anti-spyware program up-to-date by regularly downloading latest updates.
Turn off file and print sharing.
Hackers count on the public being uninformed and use their ignorance to gain access to your system. Therefore, visit sites by your OS manufacturer to stay updated on security.
Specific Measures
Don’t visit chat rooms unless they are closed & you know the room administrator.
Never open an e-mail attachment that ends in .DLL or .EXE, even if the e-mail is from your best friend. The only time you can open such an attachment is if you know exactly what’s in it.
To outwit script-based viruses, ask an expert how you can open scripts in Notepad or wordpad. Then get someone who knows about Visual Basic (VB) to look at it before running it.
Keep data private through encryption.
If you’re not surfing & you see your modem lights flashing, a hacker could be testing for vulnerabilities.
Using a Strong Password
A good password is one which is easily remembered but not easily guessable. It should be a secret, never written down, never saved in a file.
When a website asks if it should be saved, say no. It is much safer not to save the username and password in the browser by disabling the auto-fill option.
A password should have at least eight or more characters with an intelligent combination of letters, numbers and special characters. The letters should be a combination of uppercase and lowercase.
Never use a password which is a word found in a dictionary. It should not have four or more letters found consecutively in the dictionary.
Instructables.com is a storehouse of do-it-yourself (DIY) articles on a variety of subjects, such as art, science, music, literature, pets, technology, games, homes, kids, sports, craft, food etc. It includes instructional write-ups for activities ranging from making a chocolate frappucino mocha latte to building a removable laptop water cooler. From how-to- write poem or novel to how-to- do various scientific experiments and many more. Most of the how-to’s are accompanied with images, while some also come with videos. This is a great resource and must bookmark site for future use.
If you have a website, blog or other social media account, then you can link your Twitter account to it. It can be one of the best ways to find new followers for your Twitter account. Doing it with an eye catching button, widget or counter can be even more effective. Of course there are various sites which provide Twitter Buttons and badges and also there are some Official Twitter Badges available. But I found the two below-mentioned sites very useful because even if you don’t know HTML codes there’s no need to worry. You have to just copy-paste the codes into your blog widgets or Web page. The site are:
This site has some very interesting Twittter Buttons. Simply enter your Twitter ID in the given text-box and click GO! Then copy the code of any button you like and paste it on your blog or website. They have even got personalized Twitter Buttons, where you can display your follower count in real time!
Actually, this site is similar to the one mentioned above – the only difference being the URL and that that it has also got some really cool Twitter Buttons. This site has got more variety of Twitter Buttons and Badges than the ‘Twitter Button’. The functioning of both the sites is quite similar. All you have to do is simply enter your Twitter ID in the text-box and Press GO, then you can copy the code (click "Copy Code") of any button you like and past it on your Blog, Web Page or any where and let others follow you. That's it.
If you own a blog using blogger template, then you will find the site ‘DeluxeTemplates’ very useful and informative. DeluxeTemplates is a cool site or a blog which provides free professional blogger templates. This site has a good number of blogger templates which can be downloaded for free as per your choice or liking from two-column or three-column template. You can choose from ‘Latest Templates’, ‘My Favorites’ etc. You can even request a blogger template of your choice.
Most importantly, the ‘Useful Tips and Tricks’ section is absolutely resourceful. This section provides useful information on how to add various kind of widgets to your blog, how to change blogger template without deleting widgets, how to add comment form in your blog and much more. Moreover, the author of the site provides nice and useful guidance on various queries relating to templates through comments. All in all, it’s a must bookmark site for blog owners using blogger templates.
Liven up your profile pictures by having them retouched byPictreat. The Website automatically applies red eye correction, removes skin flaws like blemishes and spots, auto-correct colours and contrast to make sure you look perfect on all the social networking sites. Users can log in with their Facebook or Myspace ID, and also import albums from Facebook, Flickr or other URL’s. Moreover, you can download the retouched picture/photo on your computer or upload it to your social networking site’s profile. Registered user can also create their separate album and save it on the website itself. I have used this website and found the results quite impressive. The only downside is that the high resolution pictures when edited/retouched are converted to smaller size if you don’t have any free credit on the site.
QuizBox.com has a very good collection of love tests, personality tests, compatibility tests, riddles, puzzles, horoscopes, jokes and fun quizzes for your personal enjoyment and intellectual stimulation. There are a whole lot of personality tests like ‘Get to know yourself better’, ‘What’s on your mind?’, ‘What is your working style?’ and many more. Here you can also get to know the hidden meaning in Names, Birth & your personality, sun sign & your personality etc. Moreover, here you can build your own quiz for your blog or website in just three steps with no programming skills required. It’s very easy and absolutely free!
Gazup!is the leading website for social file mirroring online. By using this service you'll be able to upload files to multiple file hosts in one go thus saving you time and bandwidth. Simply upload a file and this site will rapidly mirror your file to 8 hosts, including RapidShare, MegaUpload, FileFactory, zShare and many more. They have unique features for both video and normal file formats, for example if you upload a video to our service they will automatically generate screenshots of the videos frames and display a presentation next to the download links. Their system is quite advanced as they have link checking, allow uploaders to "cure" dead mirrors and allow uploaders to customize mirror pages and much more.
Gazup!
Gazup! also pays you to upload. That's right, upload files and you'll get rewarded pure cash each month. You could easily make hundreds of dollars of side income each month. They have an awesome member service which is 100% free. Keep track of existing uploads (edit, reup, delete, etc). Get alerts when a mirror goes down, if someone comments on your file or when a mirror has finished uploading. View your rewards history and see how much cash you have made and much more.
AddThis is a very popular bookmarking and sharing tool on the Internet. It helps website publishers and bloggers spread their content across the web, by making it easy for visitors to bookmark and share content to their favorite social destinations. AddThis buttons can be found on hundreds of thousands of websites, and are currently viewed over 20 billion times a month by users all over the world, in over 20 languages.
You must have seen the following Addthis button on various websites and blogs:
What can you share with AddThis?
AddThis can be used to share just about anything, including:
Websites
Blogs (Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Tumblr)
Email newsletters
MySpace profiles
Microsoft Office Live workspaces
Embedded content, such as videos
AddThis offers several different ways to share your content and lots of ways to customize, so you can get the sharing tool that's right for you.
While browsing the net I came across a very informative blog post. I thought it would be a handy resource for the bloggers. The following is the excerpt from the blog post written by Amanda fazani from Blogger Buster:
When you publish a blog with Blogger, the default favicon which appears in your browser navigation bar is Blogger’sfavicon (the unmistakable orange and white logo).
Many Blogger users choose to display their own favicon instead of Bloggers, in order to “brand” their blog with memorable icons in keeping with their blog’s design. It is actually quite easy to add our own favicon to our Bloggerblogs, and instantly adds a sense of professionality to your overall design.
In this post, I’ll explain how easy it is to add a favicon to your Bloggerblog, along with resources for designing your own favicon and where you can host this for free.
What is a favicon?
The word “favicon” is short for “favourites icon”, and is a 16×16px square icon which is associated with a website (or blog). Browsers which support favicons will usually display a website’s favicon in the address bar (to the left of the URL), and next to the page’s name in a list of bookmarks. Browsers which support tabbed navigation (such as Firefox and IE8) will also display the favicon next to the page title on each tab.
Favicons are usually found on the root of a domain, and use the .ico extension. For example, the favicon for Blogging Tips can be found here: http://www.bloggingtips.com/favicon.ico
Blogger users do not have access to the root of their blog hosting. This means that unless an alternate favicon is specified, Blogger’sfavicon will display in browsers accessing Blogger powered sites.
In order to add a custom favicon to be displayed in the browser of sites accessing a Blogger powered blog, we need to:
Create our own favicon
Upload this to an image host
Edit the Blogger template to reference this alternative favicon.
Let’s go through these steps in order.
How to create your own favicon for Blogger
A favicon is a small image, measuring 16×16 pixels. Favicons are usually made with the .ico extension, though it’s also possible to use .GIF and .PNG files to reference a favicon.
If you are a budding ‘Photoshopper’, you can create your own favicon from scratch. Don’t forget to use a canvas measuring 16 pixels square (or create a square image which can be reduced to this size) and save as a .GIF or .PNG image.
Those who already use a recognised icon for their site/blog logo can easily generate a favicon using one of these free services:
HTML-Kit favicon generator (download as favicon package) – Enables you to create a static or animated favicon; you can even create a favicon quickly using your Twitter username!
Alternatively you can download a “ready made” favicon from these sites:
Iconlet.com (use the 16 px square version of your favourite icon)
Upload your favicon to the web
While Blogger does not offer hosting for files we use in our blogs (eg: JavaScript, documents and HTML files), we can upload images for use in our blog posts which are hosted by Picasa.
After uploading an image to our blog post (even if this post is not published) we can extract the URL of the image and reference this in our Blogger template code. Surprisingly, we can upload .ico files to our blog posts with Blogger (as well as any .PNG or .GIF favicons you may have created too).
To upload your favicon to Picasa through your blog, simply create a new blog post and choose to insert an image in your post. Choose the favicon you have created/generated/downloaded and upload this to your post.
Then either preview your post or view in the rich text editor so your favicon image can be seen on the screen. Right click this favicon and choose to copy the location of the image. Save this to your clipboard or paste into a text file for easy reference.
If you prefer to use a different host for your favicon, here are a few free hosts which support .ico files:
Then save your template. Now when you view your blog in your browser, you should see your favicon appear beside the web address and in the bookmarks folder (if you have bookmarked your site).
Note: it is very important that you paste the favicon tags just before the closing tag, not earlier in the template code. This is because Blogger generates favicon tags when your blog pages are generated which would otherwise override your custom favicon references.
Important information when using custom favicons for Bloggerblogs
If you use Internet Explorer 6 or older, the favicon will not appear unless you have bookmarked your blog and refreshed your browser.
Also, any services which automatically extract the favicon for a site (such as Blogger’s “Feed” and “Blog List” gadgets) will still reference the Bloggerfavicon rather than our own custom favicons. This is because such auto-discovery scripts reference the favicon hosted on the same server as the website, rather than the favicon which is referenced in the HTML code of the page. As yet, there is no way to present our custom favicons to services which automatically discover the favicon for a site.
Using signatures is a simple and effective way to make e-mail messages, blogs and websites more stylish, underline their individuality and get the author's energy across. So, what can you say about animated signatures that give the real impression that the author is signing right in front the reader's eyes?
MyLiveSignature offers you everything necessary to create both static and animated signatures and add them to your email messages, to blogs, to your posts on forums and on websites.
There are three ways to get your signature on the site.
1. Imitate your signature yourself using step-by-step signature creation wizard.
2. Imitate your signature yourself using the on screen signature draw widget.
3. Write your signature with a pencil, pen or a felt-tip pen on a sheet of paper, scan the sheet and let the designers create the signature by sending the scanned image via a special form.
The outbrain widget is a simple yet powerful ratings & recommendations tool that blends seamlessly into any blog design, inheriting your own look and feel. The widget includes an interactive 5-star rater, and personalized recommended links from your blog as well as others.
User ratings are one of the best ways to get instant feedback from your readers. A simple click of the mouse and Voila! - their opinion is counted. The widget also displays the average rating and number of users who rated the post.
The widget works with a personalization algorithm, which tries to compute a unique Personalized Relevancy Score for each reader, and for every item that is viewed. If the widget has enough data, the reader will see a message indicating how relevant this post may be. The algorithm is mostly based on a reader's rating history so... the more ratings that are cast, the more content can be personalized for each reader.
Installation takes minimal effort and does not require any registration. A few clicks and you are done. The widget supports TypePad, Blogger, Wordpress (installed), Drupal, and custom Javascript for your site.
Widget features -
Blends into your blog design - It's your blog, and your content ratings, and there is no reason for it to look any different. All outbrainblog widgets inherit the hosting site's styling properties. Here are two examples:
No marketing crap - You won't see an outbrain logo or marketing language such as "Powered by outbrain" on the widget itself.
Adgitize is an advertising platform for bloggers. It is quite similar to Entrecard. You earn points by doing a variety of things relating to your blog and those points are then converted to cash. The more points you earn, the more money you’ll receive. You can also use Adgitize to advertise your blog on hundreds of other blogs for just $14 for a one month ad.
There are many of ways of earning points with Adgitize. You can earn 100 points for each day you publish a new post on your blog. You can only do this a maximum once per day but if you do it everyday; it’ll really accumulate many points.
You can also earn points for page views and ad views on your blog. The difference is that the ad views count can be higher if you have more than one Adgitize ad on your blog. So if I’ve received 40 page views today, but my ad views count is 80 because I have two Adgitize ads. The max amount of ads you can show is 10. If you have the max 10 ads on your blog, you’d be earning points for every page view, but x10 for ad views. That’s a lot of points!
Another way to earn points is by clicking on the ads of other blogs. If you see an Adgitize widget on someone’s blog - you’ll earn points for clicking on it. For this, you have to be logged in and a member of Adgitize. If you click on all of the available ads, you’ll receive 100 points for that day. It works similar to dropping an Entrecard on someone’s blog.
Entrecard is a useful site and advertising tool for bloggers. Entrecard uses a currency called Entrecredits (ECs) and with ECs you can buy advertising on other sites, get cool stuff from the Entrecard shop, or even sell it for money or cashout by converting your ECs into cash! Earning Entrecard credits is easy and there are plenty of ways to gain Entrecard credits.
The easiest way is to sell advertising on your blog. This method can give you a steady stream of ECs each day. Entrecard takes 50% of what you earn from ads, and the minimum cost for an ad is two ECs. So, you can at least earn 1 EC a day by doing nothing. But, the more people drop on your Entrecard, the more the spot is worth.
Another way is dropping. You earn 1 EC every time someone drops on your Entrecard, and 1 EC every time you drop your card on someone else’s. Although this is a bit time consuming method but it will surely increase the number of your loyal droppers.
Moreover you can earn ECs by organizing contests and using Entrecard credits as prizes. Entrecard has their own Entrecard shop where you can buy and sell items and services in exchange for ECs. You can sell almost anything. A wise thing to sell would be a service, like designing Entrecards.
All in all, Entrecard is a very useful tool to promote your blog/site and a handy way to increase traffic on your blog.
If you are looking for e-paper on the net or want to read e-paper from other countries, than www.epapercatalog.com is the site for you. It contains the list of online newspapers & e-papers from across the world. In a sense it is worldwide online newspaper hub. It lists more than 320 eEditions from 51 countries in 35 languages.
Newspapers are neatly categorized by countries arranged broadly as Asia Pacific, Africa, Europe, Middle East and America. You can also find online newspapers based on the language.
www.Qipit.comis a new online mobile service that lets you use your camera phone or digital camera to make a digital copy of any written or printed document to store, share via email or fax, or publish to the web. Qipit allows you to convert all of your written and printed documents into scan-quality digital copies (in black and white or color) for convenient online storage, without the need of a portable scanner, copier, or cell software. It's easy. All you do is take a picture of notes, a whiteboard or a document with your camera phone or digital camera; send it to qipit as a multimedia message (MMS) from your camera phone, via email or your qipit account; and qipit turns your photo into a clear digital copy, in PDF or JPEG format, that you can store or send to an email or fax number from your cell phone as a multimedia message (MMS) or mobile email, or on your PC via email or your qipit account. You can even publish your qipit copy to the web. Qipit is like a portable scanner, mobile copier, and a mobile fax machine, all in one.
What you can do with Qipit?
Turn documents, notes and whiteboards into digital copies (PDFs)
Email or fax qipit digital copies via email, your online Qipit account, or right from your phone
Store all of your paper documents and notes as digital documents for easy archiving and sharing
Tag your qipit documents for easy searching and sorting
If you can’t think of something suitably witty, funny and original for your status on Facebook or Twitter, trywww.generatus.com .
Simply type your name, indicate whether you are a boy or a girl, then click Generate. You will be served up a brand new, sparkly status all ready to be copied and pasted into Facebook, Twitter or whichever social networking site you prefer. I think its best way of getting rid of boring status updates!
www.MiniClip.com is primarily a directory of web games. It is a site where you can play free games.There are a large number of games and they are categorized into sports, action & adventure, puzzle, and shoot em up. Many of these games can also be downloaded for play on your PC. Recently released is a cash prize, Miniclip Tournament section where members can play for money.
Miniclip games most popular titles include Flashman (PacMan variant), Runescape, Bubble Trouble, Miniclip Tetris, and Hamsterball. So if you are looking for some light gaming experience than Miniclip games would suit you. Its quite ideal for small kids.
‘WPClipart’ is a collection of high quality public domain images specifically tailored for use in word processors & optimized for printing on home/small office inkjet printers. There are thousands ofcolor graphic clips as well as illustrations, photographs and black & white line art. www.wpclipart.com provides almost 30,500 clip art images that are free to use. And the best part is that the images can be easily be integrated into any office suite.
It is a very good resource especially for those using free office suites such as Open Office where good built-in clip art is not available.
CatchYouTube enables you to convert YouTube videos into any number of different video and audio formats and then to download these to your computer. It's FREE and very simple to use. You can easily save your favorite videos to your PC. Simply post the video link, select the format of your choice (MPG, MOV, DVD, MP4, 3GP, MP3, WAV, FLV) and click the ‘convert’ button. The free resource will soon let you download the movie clip.
Once on your computer you can view or copy the files to any number of devices including other computers, mobile phones and literally any device that plays video. You can even email the downloaded videos to your friends.
The conversion process is performed directly from our site and on our server, so you don't need to download any software.
This website lets you create your own business card in PDF format. Ii doesn’t matter if you don’t have any graphic knowledge or skill. All you need is to fill in your details – such as name, designation, office, email & Web address in the ten empty fields. Choose the font size and style. Then upload a photo or any graphic picture that you’d like to use as a logo. If you like the preview, download the design in PDF format (an A4 page with the card in a 3x4 matrix) to print at your local card printer. Designing your own business card can’t get as easier than this!
