Zoho, the leading provider of cloud-based services and online business applications has recently announced the launch of ‘Zoho Sites‘ – an easy-to-use website builder to Build Professional-Looking and Mobile-Ready websites. Zoho offers a wide suite of online applications and now the addition of website building and hosting service makes them more powerful in the market! Zoho Sites Website Builder lets anyone create a polished and professional site in minutes without writing any code. The websites carry a responsive design, means they’re automatically optimized for smartphones, tablets, etc. Available in both free and paid editions.

Zoho Sites offers a drag-and-drop user interface and integration with third-party apps like Google Analytics, YouTube. It is integrated with Zoho’s suite of apps, thus allowing users to manage their data using Zoho’s business apps. For instance, one can host email in Zoho Mail, customer data in Zoho CRM, financial data in Zoho Books, etc.

Get started with Zoho Sites is real easy – Simply login into your Zoho account (sign up if new), define a name for your site, choose a theme from the gallery, drag and drop desired elements such as text, images, videos, etc., and then publish the site with the push of a button. You can also add forms, widgets and other various stuff to your site. Making changes is just as easy and fast.

Highlights: 

• Mobile website – Websites are automatically optimized for access on mobile devices, eliminating the need to create a separate mobile website. Visitors are automatically redirected to the mobile-optimized website when accessing on mobile devices.

• Dynamic content – Zoho Sites simplifies frequent content updates by storing all content in the Zoho Creator database. Whenever content in the database is modified, the corresponding webpage is automatically updated.

• Powerful form builder – Powered by Zoho Creator, the form builder lets users create website forms for various purposes like managing contacts, support requests and much more — without writing any code. Forms can also trigger automated email notifications and other custom workflow.

• Third-party integrations – Pre-integrated YouTube, Google AdWords, Google Maps, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Picasa elements can be embedded on websites easily using the drag-and-drop interface. Other third-party elements can also be embedded.

• Zoho Sites for Google Apps – Zoho Sites is integrated with Google Apps and is available in the Google Apps Marketplace. Google Apps customers can now create and publish websites under their domain.

• Collaborative website creation – Users can invite other users to serve as authors or moderators of select pages or the entire website.

• Themes gallery – An array of ready-made business themes and page layouts can also be customized with the built-in HTML editor.

• Domain registration and hosting – Users can register a domain on Zoho Sites and host their website on that domain. All Zoho Sites websites come with free, reliable hosting.

Pricing 

The Zoho Sites Free Edition includes two websites, with each website containing two forms, one blog and unlimited pages. The Professional Edition is priced at $39 per year and includes six websites, each website containing 10 forms, a blog and unlimited pages. The Professional Edition also supports Google AdSense and complete rebranding.

Video Tour -

Start creating your new site at Zoho -  http://zoho.com/sites

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If you’re webmaster or blogger then you must be aware how crucial it is to take regular backups of your site as they act as a lifesaver in case something unfortunate happens with your site server or it gets hacked. There are several ways to backup a self-hosted WP blog, you can do it manually via phpMyAdmin or simply use one of those Database backup plugins out there to export the backup file to your computer or email.

However, above tricks are meant only to perform a backup of your WordPress site database which includes your posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, plugins data, and some other info. But the database doesn’t includes your blog images, plugins, themes, scripts and any other files uploaded to your FTP server. Certainly, it’s advisable to take a complete backup of your site to be on safe side in case some disaster occurs. We’re here to share an easy and efficient way that automates the task of backing up your Full WordPress blog (or just database) to one of the best and most popular cloud storage service ‘Dropbox’. Until now, I had been uploading images and other important stuff manually to Dropbox but not anymore. Here comes the easiest possible way!

WordPress Backup to Dropbox is a free plugin for WordPress that automatically uploads a backup of your entire website, including all files and its database, to Dropbox. With a minimalist and simple interface, it makes it easier for you to setup a recurring backup in a few clicks. It lets you initiate a backup process manually and also offers the functionality to schedule backup as desired so as to perform backups on regular basis. You can choose the date, time and frequency for the backup to dropbox. One can also choose what files and folders are to be included in the full backup. There’s a nifty option to select the files and directories that you wish to exclude from your backup.

In simple words, it can backup the root directory of your site (public_html) to a set location on your Dropbox account. You shouldn’t be concerned about the security as the plugin uses OAuth to keep your Dropbox account details safe. No credentials are stored for the plugin to gain access.

How to Backup WordPress Blog to Dropbox –

1. You must have a Dropbox account. It is Free and provides 2GB of free storage.

2. Open your WordPress dashboard, install the plugin ‘WordPress Backup to Dropbox’.

3. After activating the plugin, open its Settings from the Backup option in menu.

4. You now need to Authorize the plugin to connect it with your Dropbox account. Then grant access by clicking the ‘Allow’ button.

5. Now move back to WordPress Dash, go to plugin settings and specify the backup schedule. Tick mark any files or folders that you don’t want to be included.

The backup would be automatically performed at the specific time interval to Dropbox. Voila! All your site’s media and database will now be accessible from anywhere.

Plugin site – WordPress Backup to Dropbox

via  [TechBU]

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Tumblr is a very popular micro-blogging platform that allows everyone to simply share multimedia stuff such as photos, videos, textual content, etc. It offers a great and smart way to share your thoughts, creativity and interact with other people online. Perhaps, if you’ve a blog on Tumblr (tumblelog) or are obsessed with some of the amazing tumblelogs out there, then here’s a nifty and handy tool that you must check.

TumblRipper is a free small tool for Windows that offers the ability to quickly download photos of Tumblr blogs with great ease. Using it, you can create a backup of all your tumblr pictures to your computer or any of the tumblr photoblog you adore. The app is indeed very useful as it can automatically download entire pictures from any tumblr site. One just need to specify the source and the destination for saving the photos.

It downloads the photos in their largest size available and keeps the original upload dates intact. The indexing and downloading progress of files is also shown. One good feature is that the tool doesn’t downloads the entire photos as a standalone package but as individual files, thus allowing you to access the downloaded photos in real-time. The application has a mere size of 11KB and doesn’t requires an installation.

- Requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0

Download TumblRipper    via [Ahmed Zizo]

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Certainly, it’s not possible to stop scraper sites as the web is a huge place but if you’re a webmaster or blogger then you must be aware of sites who copy-paste aka scraps your hard written content. Spam blogs are usually a scrapper site which automatically pulls the entire post via sites RSS feed and publishes it on their site without the consent of original author. This can be generally referred as stealing of content.

Unfortunately, the recent Google Search algorithm (PANDA update) seems to give more importance to these splogs rather than the original site. I’ve seen many instances where our site was being outranked by the content scrappers in Google search, this makes me sad and is pretty bothersome. A small example of this can be seen below:

As you can see in above screenshot, the scrapper site is ranking at 1st position whereas the original site is at 3rd position. This definitely drops down our organic traffic and the sploggers who just steal our work enjoy the benefit of it.

To combat against this, Google seems to have finally started working to improve their search algorithm and they need data points for testing. Matt Cutts (head of the Google webspam team) just tweeted a link, using which site owners can report about blog scrapers to Google. This is a specialised webpage to Report scraper pages, it says:

Google is testing algorithmic changes for scraper sites (especially blog scrapers). We are asking for examples, and may use data you submit to test and improve our algorithms.

From now onwards, if you ever find any spam site or blog who is lifting your articles and is ranking above your site in Google, then do report about them and help Google in improving their algorithm. For me, Panda is a sort of nightmare that has turned into reality, resulting in 50% drop in both traffic and revenue since last few months.

To Report a Scraper site, just visit here. Input the search query, then URL of original site page and the scrapper site page. You can share some details too. Click Submit!

Note: This form does not perform a spam report or notice of copyright infringement.Related Posts:

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Hot-linking occurs when someone directly uses a link to an image that is stored on your site server, instead of saving and uploading the image to his own website server. This is referred to as bandwidth theft because the person is utilizing the bandwidth for which you’re paying and causes extra load on your server which can degrade its performance.

This is usually the case with Spam Blogs who blindly copy your content and link directly to your site images. Let’s say you published an informative article, then there is a good chance that it might get scrapped by numerous content scrappers as was happened in my case. To prevent this, you must Enable Hotlink Protection for your blog or website and stop everyone else from hotlinking your site images and videos.

How to Stop Hotlinking using cPanel -

We’re sharing the easiest method to do this task, provided your site has cPanel and you have access to it. Follow the steps below:

1. Login to cPanel.

2. Select “HotLink Protection” from Security window in cPanel.

3. Click on the ‘Enable’ button to enable hotlink protection.

4. Now enter the desired URLs/website to whom you want to allow access. Make sure to enter your site domain here as well as the list of feed readers like Feedburner, Google Reader, Bloglines, etc. so they don’t display the redirect image on your site and feeds.

ADD all the domains listed in image below (replace webtrickz.com with your domain).

5. Specify the file extensions you wish to block. (Default are jpg, jpeg, gif, png, bmp)

6. Input the URL of any image (should NOT be hosted on your site) which you like to serve as the Redirect image on sites who have hotlinked your images. Below is an example of our redirect image hosted on Imageshack.

Then click ‘Submit’ and you’re done. Now visit any site who is directly linking to your site images. They must show the redirect image. In my case above image is shown, visit (goo.gl/2SmKN , goo.gl/j6cSK) to see the live demo

“Do check your website and feeds properly after making this change to make sure everything is working the right way.”

Thanks +Dhawal Damania and +Amit Banerjee for the hat tip!

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From past 2 days, WebTrickz was experiencing major technical issues and several long downtimes occurred in short intervals. Though, our site is running perfectly now as we moved from Hostgator’s Shared hosting to their VPS. We got to learn some new things while getting our issue sorted. A simple tip is shared below which may come in handy to bloggers and webmasters using WordPress.

Certainly, our Comments section is bloated with lot of Spam comments listed under Spam section and similarly there are Pending comments. If you want to get rid of all the Spam or Pending comments, then you can easily remove all of them at once in just a few clicks without the need to use the uneasy phpMyAdmin method.

Just install the WP-Optimize plugin directly from your WordPress Dashboard and activate it. To access it, just open the Dashboard drop-down menu and click on the “WP-Optimize” option. Now tick mark the desired option ‘Clean marked Spam comments’ or ‘Clean Unapproved comments’ (Pending comments). Click on the Process button.

Voila! All the Spam or Pending/Unapproved comments will get deleted instantly. You can deactivate this plugin later if you don’t want to use it frequently.

Update – I just noticed that we can easily bulk delete all the Spam comments in WordPress without using any plugin. To do so, go to Comments > Spam and click on the “Empty Spam” button. All the spam comments will get deleted.

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New Year 2011 is finally here and apparently this post is the first post to kick start 2011. Firstly, I’d like to wish all our lovable readers, friends and subscribers a very Happy New Year. Wish 2011 brings joy, health, prosperity and you achieve all your goals in life!

This post is just to share a little insight of WebTrickz’s journey in 2010. I started this blog in May, 2008 as just a hobby but after stepping in 2010, I conceived to opt this as a profession. 2010 was truly a good and lucky year for me since beginning in which WebTrickz made prominent and steady growth every month. This always pleased and motivated me to work more harder and smarter.

Below are WebTrickz Traffic Stats for Year 2010 (Jan 2010 – Dec 2010) which will give you a view as how we progressed with time. Includes both Total Visits and Pageviews:

A Total of 800 Posts were made in 2010 on webtrickz, mostly all were written by me.

As far as Revenue is considered, it is pretty good and has made similar growth like our traffic. Below is the Annual Income Report 2010 (AdSense) for WebTrickz but without the actual earnings figure. You can see the growth though

Thanks a lot to all our readers, friends, fellow bloggers, and my family for their love & support. This all couldn’t have been possible without you. I’m looking forward for more perfection, growth, and sharing great articles in 2011. Keep supporting us in future too!

Don’t forget to follow @web_trickz (Official twitter profile of Webtrickz.com)

Again, Happy New Year 2011.

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If you’re a blog administrator who frequently organises giveaway and contest, then you’ll find this article really helpful. Making a comment by participants is necessary in most of the giveaways and it becomes really difficult for site admin to randomly draw the winners, if the comments are in large number.

An exclusive way is discovered by us which will allow you to extract the email addresses, IP address and Name of all commentators from a specific post in WordPress.org.

Follow the step by step tutorial below carefully to extract Email address:

1. Login to cPanel (of your blog host).

2. Go to phpMyAdmin under Databases section.

3. Select your blog database from the left panel which may be marked as _wrdp1

4. Click on wp_comments from table in left hand side.

5. Now click on “Search” tab.

6. Open Options (in blue), Select comment_author, comment_author_email and comment_author_ip in the fields box. Tick mark ‘DISTINCT’ to remove the exactly similar entries (those with same name, email and IP address).

7. Input comment_post_id = xxxx under "Add search conditions (body of the "where" clause):" Replace xxxx with the post ID.

To find Post ID of a post, just login to your blog’s WordPress dashboard. Open ‘Posts’ and point your mouse over the preferred post. You’ll then see a link in the status bar of browser. Just note the no. next to post=xxx (For eg: Here it is 7260) as shown below:

8. Set Number of rows per page to 1000

9. Display order Ascending

10. Click ‘GO’ button. All queries will be sorted now.

11. Click Export button, select ‘CSV for MS Excel’ and tick mark ‘Save as file’. Click GO.

A MS Excel file will now be produced containing all the commentators name, IP and email address from a certain post. You can then find duplicate email and IP addresses and sort the invalid ones using Excel. Then you can copy all the email addresses and use Random.org to draw the giveaway winners.

This guide looks difficult in starting but you’ll find it really easy, once you get used to it. This post is specially for bloggers who conduct big giveaways on their blog.

Do share this tutorial if you find it useful.

Update – Sandip of BlogsDNA has provided us a source code which eliminates 6 steps and makes it real easy to do this task. Check below how to do it:

Go to phpMyAdmin and select your blog database. Now click on “SQL” tab. Input the below SQL query there and click the ‘Go’ button. You’ll now come straight to Step 11.

SELECT DISTINCT comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_IP
FROM (
SELECT DISTINCT comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_IP
FROM wp_comments
WHERE `comment_post_ID` = ‘xxxx’
) AS WEBTRICKZ

Remember to Replace xxxx with your Post ID.

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