All in one IM+Email+Social Network Manager
I have friends all over the internet.
But they never use the same communication tools, social networks, etc. A lot of my friends began with AOL/AIM instant messenger and won’t give it up because they have had the same screen name for 10 years, kind of like an old phone number. Others friends have yahoo instant messenger, MSN, Google Talk or ICQ. So I have friends all over the place and each have their own reason for their preferences.
To keep up with all my friends I searched and found a program a couple of years ago called Trillian which supports all of the major instant messengers. I also have and still use a similar program for the Mac called Adium. There are a couple of other programs that will do the same thing as Trillian and they are all great but recently I found one that does more than combine the instant messengers and it does a great job with everything it does.
Digsby is a instant messenger client that supports AIM/AOL, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, GoogleTalk, & Jabber. So you have all your friends list from the different clients in one interface, but that’s not what makes this program special. The 1st thing I like is you can manage your Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP, and POP accounts from the program. Yes some other programs can do this but this little app does an excellent job. You can choose to have the program put a icon in the taskbar manager for your email accounts and when they have mail and it will also show the number of emails (see screenshot below). Also when a new email is received a popup will displace the message for a couple of seconds then disappear.
The 2nd thing I like about this program is you can add and manage some of your social networks! The only ones they have at this time is MySpace, Facebook, & Twitter, but on their blog they have a poll going to add additional social networks.
I have to say that I am really happy with this free app! I spend less time checking different emails and social networks in addition to not having multiple applications running for Twitter, IM’s, & email.
Go to their website at www.digsby.com for more detailed information and screenshots. Why not give it a try, it’s FREE!
Find and Recover Deleted Files Free
Recover that Deleted File
Have you ever deleted a file accidentally or emptied the recycle bin and realized you need that file now? Some people use the shift+del method to completely bypass the recycle bin and permanently delete a file.
I have done all of the above at various stages. I’ve been dumpster diving in my recycle bin looking for a file as I’m sure a lot of people have. And if you’re not aware, when you delete a file or empty the recycle bin that file is not gone from your computer! The file will stay on your hard drive until your hard drive needs the room and it is overwritten, I will talk about this and options to make them unrecoverable at a later date. There is help out there to recover your deleted files and it doesn’t cost you a dime.
Pandora Recovery is a free file recovery program that is pretty simple to use. The 1st time you start the program it offers you the use of the wizard, which you can choose to use or not. There is a check box that you can uncheck if you don’t want the wizard to start each time you open the program, but it is usually recommended for those not familiar with software & computers in general. If you do the surface scan of a drive expect this to take some time. It took about 45 mins on my 250 GB hard drive, of course it is 80% full. There is a quicker scan but it might not find the file your looking for.
According to Pandora the likelihood of successful recovery is negatively affected by the time passed since the deletion of files Pandora Recovery users were able to recover files eleven years after deletion and more than five years after re-formatting a hard drive!
Recover Stored Passwords
I forgot my password!
A while back I wrote about how to find your store passwords in Firefox through the tools-options menu and using a javascript hack to find them in Internet Explorer as well as Firefox. Today I want to pass on a couple of little free utilities that reveal stored passwords in different web apps.
IE PassView is a free simple to use utility that works with Internet Explorer 7.0 as well as some older versions. You don’t have to have any great computer knowledge to run the program, it’s as simple as clicking on the IE PassView icon and it will retrieve all the usernames & passwords stored in IE. You also don’t have to have Internet Explorer open & running for this to work. This is a great program if you are like me and store a password but then a month later forget what it was.
MessenPass is another free utility that recovers the password from instant messenger applications including; MSN, Yahoo, GoogleTalk, AIM/AOL, ICQ, Trillian, Miranda, & GAIM. MessenPass only recovers if you have stored the password as with all of these recovery utilities.
Mail PassView is a free utility that recovers stored passwords in multiple email clients including; Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook 2000 (POP3 and SMTP Accounts only), Microsoft Outlook 2002/2003 (POP3, IMAP, HTTP and SMTP Accounts), IncrediMail, Eudora, Netscape 6.x/7.x, Mozilla Thunderbird, Group Mail Free, & Web-based email clients.
All of these programs are simple to run and makes recovering your password a little easier than having to recover through the “Forgot your password” method of emailing you a link to reset or recover it. Give them a try and let me know if you find them useful. Enjoy!
Deals and Free software sections
New Pages!
Just wanted to post an update that I have added 2 pages to the site. One for Deals and one for a list of free software. They have some content but will be a work in progress.
“Deal of the Day” will be deals that I find and post from searching the internet. They will probably not be daily but only when I think its an unbelievable deal.
“Best of Free” will be free software and software alternatives to paid for software. This page will be continuously updated as I add things and discover new free software. Feel free to suggest free software that you use.
More to Come!
Simple Upgrade to WordPress 2.5
Upgrades can be scary!
I was a little nervous about upgrading my wordpress to version 2.5. I read over the instructions for doing it manually but still wasn’t ready to make the attempt. I hear of people losing information or things not working after upgrades so I was a bit apprehensive. I often back up my content, just in case anything happens I won’t lose everything!
Backup, Backup, Backup!
If you haven’t made a back up of your blog or website yet do it and you might think about setting a schedule of doing it.
Upgrade Manually
Back to wordpress 2.5, there are a lot of steps you need to take before during and after the install if you do it manually. These include backing up your blog, deactivating all plugins, deleting certain wordpress files in your current installation, installing the new version, and reactivate all your plugins. It’s a lot more than that I just summarized some of the steps. There is a step by step instruction guide on the wordpress website that you can follow if you want to do it that manually. It will take some time and definitely be a stresser for a n00b. If you are pretty good with stuff like this and want to upgrade manually you can go HERE for the download and installation manuals.
Upgrade Easily
Or you can just use a great simple tool for wordpress called “Instantupgrade“‘ like I did! It is so simple and took all of maybe 1 minute and my blog was upgraded to 2.5. You basically install it just like you would any other plugin in wordpress, activate it and go to it’s setting page. The only thing you should have to tell it is whether you want use FTP or HTTP. After you make that decision just hit upgrade and it’s done within seconds. I can only speak for my self but the upgrade went flawless with this plugin and everything works fine. It took a little getting use to the new layout of the admin panel but it is all good.
Ping your blog!
Pinging is a necessity!
If you don’t ping your blog after writing new content then your missing out on possibly some good traffic. Pinging lets all of the blogging & aggregator services know that you have updated your blog with new content.
If you use word press there is a section in your settings that you can set up to automatically ping your blog as soon as you hit the publish button. You also need to make sure when you are writing your post that you check the box for “allow pinging”. I use this method along with website pinging services.
Website pinging services let you input your blog information, usually your blog address and sometimes the feed address, and check which services you want to ping. The ones that I currently use are PingMyBlog.com, Ping-o-Matic!, & Pingoat. Also if you track your website stats and vistors with a wordpress tool you can see that after you ping the number of spiders crawling you site increases.
I currently use the wordpress plugin for statistics “Statpress“. It gives me tons of information about my visitors. It has a section to let you spy on your visitors and show you what website they came from, what browser they used, operating system, city/state/country (not always), ip address, etc. It also shows what pages the visitor looked at. It’s a great tool to analyze your traffic.
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