GoogleSharing: Remain Anonymous from Google

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Who knows more about the citizens in their own country, Kim Jong-Il or Google?

Google tracks everything, your searches, web movement which arises from your search, what places you went last summer (or are planning to go, thanks to Google maps). Google not only knows about you but also understands you much better than your own girlfriend. If that freaks you out, I’d say you are in your right mind. But now you can avoid it to a certain extent by using GoogleSharing.

GoogleSharing is an extension for Firefox, which will anonymize your requests to Google products which do not require you to log in but where your activities can be tracked by Google. Google keep tracks of you through cookies. If you attempt to strip off your cookies from your HTTP request, Google might tag you as spam bot and will force you to type in a CAPTCHA for your every request.
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WordPress: WP ShareThisPost

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Although the third party bookmarking and sharing tools are quite useful to analyze the sharing trends on your blog, they do slow down the whole process of sharing. Also, as mentioned in my Sharing and Bookmarking Tools post, I was not comfortable with the small icons available with Bookmarkify and Socialable. WP ShareThisPost is a small custom wordpress plugin which provides large icons along with the flexibility to add your favorite sharing and bookmarking sites (if not included by default).

WP ShareThisPost includes the following sharing and bookmarking sites, by default:

  • del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • Google Bookmarks
  • StumbleUpon
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Technorati

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WordPress: Security check for your Blog

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Most of the bloggers ignore various security loop-holes in their WordPress installation, thinking that the chances of Crackers intruding their small and unpopular websites are slim. Never even think of this. No one is going to check your page rank or Alexa rank before hacking your site, so better secure it now than to regret later. There are a lot of wordpress plugins that will do the job for most users. But if you are a freak like me, keep reading to know how to secure your blog without installing any wordpress plugin.

Here is a list of methods that will enhance the security of your blog:
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PHP: Select HTML elements with more than one css class using XPath

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Recently, while working on my project FeedAPI ImageGrabber I came across the issue where I had to select HTML elements by a given css class. The HTML element can have a single CSS class:

<div class="foo"></div>

or multiple CSS classes associated with it.

<div class="foo exp tar"></div>

Now if you want to select the HTML elements with class “foo”, this div element would be one of them.
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Tutorial for FeedAPI Image Grabber

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Updates:

I get a lot of requests for this, so here is a tutorial explaining the 3 W’s (What, Why and How) of FeedAPI ImageGrabber.

Motivation

a feed item from google reader

a feed item from google reader

This is a screenshot of a news item from my Google Reader. Anyone who has a moderate knowledge about the feeds would know that the image on the left in the above news-item is actually not published with the feed.

In other words, If you refresh any feed on your Drupal website using FeedAPI, you won’t get the image in the posts, unless they are published along with the feed which is quite rare.

The purpose of FeedAPI Imagegrabber is to make the feed more informative as well as interesting for the user. As, we all know that “comics are much better than novels”, this module appends the feed-item with an appropriate image from its content URL. The goal of the FeedAPI ImageGrabber is to mimic the thumbnail display of Google Reader for the feeds on your Drupal website.

As soon as you refresh the feed, ImageGrabber automatically attaches an appropriate image from the original article to the feed-item node on your website. You don’t even have to press an extra button!!

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Withdraw PayPal Money Directly to A Bank Account in India

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PayPal is used by a lot of online merchants to accept payments for the products they sell online. PayPal can also be used to accept donations for your technical open source projects or charity organization.

Recently, I opened an account with PayPal to accept payments from my clients who reside outside India. Before I started, I searched for reviews on PayPal which seemed quite horrible. You can read a lot of them here. But then I needed the payments and had no other option (without spending a huge transaction amount), so gave it a try and I am happy that my experience with them till now is excellent.

So, here is a step by step procedure to Withdraw funds to your bank account in India. Continue reading →