Luggage Lowdown

I've been a frequent traveler the past couple of years, and this has got me interested in the topic of luggage. Being the avid internet user that I am, I ventured out into the wild wild web to find information on luggage and luggage reviews. This led me to notice 2 things :

• The information was scattered all over the net on different pages
• Most of the search engine results were sites selling luggage, rather than informational site with good content and luggage reviews

So, I thought, why not start my own luggage site ? I am pretty familiar now with the various nuances of luggage, and have also done lots of research on the topic. It would definitely make sense to share all this information in one place, based on what I had learned.

The end result of this idea is my new blog : Luggage Lowdown.

My aim with this blog is to provide general luggage information and luggage reviews, as well as often asked questions such as airline carry on luggage restrictions, and where to find the best luggage sales, and luggage discounts.

My latest blog entry is on a popular topic - How to find cheap Louis Vuitton luggage.

Please check out the site, and let me know what you think. :)

How NOT to build an online business (for dummies)

You've probably seen a lot of advertising and websites these days that claim you can start your own internet business, and begin earning cash while working from home for just a few hours a day.

These offers might seem very enticing. After all, wouldn't you want to earn easy cash from the comfort of your home working flexible hours ? However, what these alluring sales letters don't tell you is that to make decent money from your website, you need to have good, unique content, generate substantial traffic, and presell your visitors so that they are in a frame of mind where they want to buy the products you are selling. This article will help you avoid the mistakes people commonly make when they start out to build their own online business.

Generating good, unique, useful content on your site is the cornerstone of building a successful web business. With billions of sites on the internet, your site better offer unique and valuable information to your readers. Why would users want to visit your new site if you offer them the same information that is already available on the net ?

One of the keys to creating good web content is to select a unique niche that you are passionate and knowledgeable about. When you know and love a topic, writing about it becomes much more easier, and also ensures that you are creating useful, unique content that delivers value to your readers. But the best content in the world is not going to do you any good if no one reads it. Which brings us to the next reason why so many online businesses fail - lack of traffic.

Traffic is another very important element often overlooked by newbies starting their own websites or blogs. They mistakenly assume that once the content is written, visitors will automatically arrive in droves to read the articles and buy the products on their site. That is sadly not the case.

Most users will find your website by typing what they're searching for into a search engine like Google or Yahoo (at least when your site is new). For your site to rank well with the search engines, your web pages must be optimized with the right keywords. In addition, there are a lot of other factors that contribute to your ranking on the engines. One of them is the number of backlinks to your site - that is, the numbers of links on other sites that link to your site. You're better off doing some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) research before you begin writing your web pages. Traffic is probably THE most important factor to your online success - No traffic = No sales = Failed online business

Preselling your visitors - For many this would be a totally new and unheard of concept, but it is important in the online world nonetheless. When you deliver unique, useful information to your visitors, you build a relationship of trust with them over time. They value your opinion and recommendations. This puts them in a frame of mind where they are willing to buy. Also, another useful tip is to overdeliver as often as possible - Don't just deliver...Overdeliver. Give your customers more than they expect. They will be delighted, and will keep coming back to your site.

Monetizing or making money from your site is the last step. The last step ? Isn't the whole purpose of building an online business to make money as quickly as possible ? Well, you might go about it that way, but then you risk setting yourself up for failure. Your visitors need to be presold before they're in the state of mind where they will spend money on your products. And preselling your visitors practically guarantees that you will make the sale. This is almost always true regardless of what you're selling - hard goods, digital products, or promoting your offline business via the internet.

So, hopefully now you can see who so many online small businesses are unsuccessful. They do NOT :

• Provide unique useful, content to their visitors
• Optimize their site for the search engines - no traffic
• Presell their visitors
• Monetize only when their visitors are pre-sold.

Make sure you avoid these mistakes, and you'll give yourself a more than fair chance of succeeding at your online business.

Grouper

Grouper is a P2P app with a difference. You can create private groups and share files with specific users. For example, you can configure the software such that your friends (and only your friends) can access your music collection. This is different from normal P2P apps, where any user using the same P2P app as you, can download any shared file from you. All data transfer (including chat) is encrypted.

Disadvantages are :

1) The program is still in beta, and it might have a few bugs.
2) The program requires the .NET framework, and is a little slow compared to a native Win32 program.
3) Downloading of MP3 and WMA files is not allowed, to curb piracy and stay in good books with rhe RIAA. Renaming the MP3 or WMA file (or zipping the file) acts a workaround to this, though.

But a useful, and usable program overall.

Check it out here : http://grouper.com

And if anyone wants to share files with me using this software, leave a comment here, and I'll get back to you :)

Indian Broadband forum

This is only for people from India (Editor - Yeah... like your blog is world-renowned)

I recently switched to MTNL's Broadband service (which has been pretty good the first month), and thought I'd share a Broadband forum link that I found very useful.

http://broadbandforum.in/mtnl-broadband

Picked up a lot of useful information related to router configuration, and other useful tips from some of the posts.

If you are using some other Broadband service in India, you might be interested in checking out your service provider's forum at

http://broadbandforum.in/india-broadband

Nirsoft.net

Check out this link: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/index.html

It contains tons of very useful freeware utilities. The best part is that all of the programs on this site are no-installs. Which means that there is no installer for these programs, just unzip the downloaded zip file and extract them into a new folder. In case you want to uninstall the file, just delete the program folder.

The advantage of this is that one can be sure that no garbage is left behind, which typically is the case with installers that leave behind DLLs, registry keys, Start Menu items etc that they installed.

Another advantage of such apps is that they are easily portable. Want to transfer a no-install program from your work laptop to your home PC ? Just copy the program folder over, and you're done. No messing with registry keys, and the like.

Of course, no-installs are recommended only to advanced users, since most simple folks prefer an installer, as they can just launch the program off their Start Menu once the installation is complete. They are not aware about what havoc a badly written uninstaller may wreak on their computers, when the program is uninstalled :)

Finally, I would like to clarify that far from all installers/uninstallers behave this way, but I've encountered enough, for this to be a problem for me.

Hope you have a fun time exploring the tools on Nirsoft !

AutoHotkey utlities

AutoHotkey has got to be my most favorite freeware program of all time.

Here is a list of tiny, but interesting (not to mention useful!) freeware tools created using AutoHotkey

AutoHotkey tools from Donation Coder

Tabbed File Managers

Most of you have probably already seen and used the the latest killer feature in Web Browsers - Tabs.

This feature can be seen in action in Firefox, Maxthon, Avant Browser, Slim Browser, Green Browser, DeepNet Explorer, and many other freeware web browsers.

Tabs are really cool, because you don't need to open a new window for each web page that you're browsing. Each page opens in a new tab in a single main window. This prevents your taskbar from getting cluttered up, and helps you to navigate between open web pages more easily because you can see the tabs for all open pages at once.

Since tabs make a program that much easier to use, why restrict this feature only to web browsers ? Another category of applications that lends itself well to this feature are File Managers.

Many freeware dual pane file managers already exist, but, IMO, the inclusion of tabs in file managers is a really great addition. With each folder opening up in it's own tab, you can have as many folders as you want open at the same time in a single main window, and quickly navigate back and forth between them to carry out copy / paste, and other common file operations.

Here are links and screenshots of some freeware tabbed file managers:

1) xplorerª



This one is my favorite, and is what I'm currently using. This one does dual pane, as well as tabs, and has tons of other handy features like in-built file preview, mass renaming of files, shredding files, splitting files into chunks, and much more.

2) XYplorer (Formerly TrackerV3)



This is another very popular tabbed file manager. As you can see in the screenshot above, the bottom panel allows you to access a host of powerful features such as previewing files, searching for files and folders, and generating a quick report of all files in a folder, among others.

3) ExplorerXP



This a small, fast, and compact program. This one might not pack in as many features as the other 2 programs above (e.g no file preview is available), but has a useful and innovative set of features nonetheless. One unique feature of this program is Groups, which are collections of folders displayed in a small dockable window (seen at the bottom left in the screenshot above), using which users are able to quickly access folders, or drag & drop files to them.

In addition to these, there a few other useful freeware file managers, dual - pane, but not tabbed, which deserve a mention here :

FreeCommander

A43

Pablo Commander

FileAnt

Hope some of you found this information useful, and if you ever use any of these programs, leave a comment here letting me know how it went !

Useful Freeware

Here's a list of programs (all free) that I find useful, and use on a daily basis :

Process Explorer 9.0 (Process Manager)
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml

QCD Player 4.51a (Audio Player, sounds better than WinAmp)
http://www.quinnware.com/

ATNotes 9.5 (Sticky Notes, Alarms)
http://atnotes.fr.st/

Kerio Personal Firewall 4.1.2 (Firewall)
http://www.kerio.com/kpf_home.html

AutoHotkey 1.0.26.1 ( Automation / Hotkeys / Scripting language. A must have for hotkey / automation aficionados like me ;) )
http://www.autohotkey.com/

CLCL 1.1.1 (Clipboard Manager)
http://www.nakka.com/soft/clcl/index_eng.html

Copy Handler 1.26 (Explorer Shell extension for quick file copy / move operations)
http://copyhandler.com/

DialogMate 1.54 (Minimize to tray, shorcuts in Open / Save dialogs etc)
http://www.weird173.net/apps/dlgmate.html

Maxthon 1.1.120 (Web Browser [Yes, I actually prefer this to FireFox])
http://www.maxthon.com

ThunderBird 1.0 (Email / Newsgroup client)
http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/

NetMeter 0.8.6 (Bandwidth Monitor)
http://readerror.gmxhome.de/

PowerPro 4.01 (Hotkeys, Application launcher, scheduler and lots more)
http://powerpro.webeddie.com/

MJ RegWatcher (Registry Monitor. Prevent spyware / trojans from making harmful registry changes)
http://www.jacobsm.com/#downloads

SlickRun (Application Launcher. Another must-have. Try it, will change the way you work.)
http://www.bayden.com/SlickRun/

SpywareGuard (Real-time spyware hijack protection)
http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareguard.html

TrayWizard (System Tray Manager)
http://www.gratilog.net/systeme1.htm

xplorer Lite (File Manager)
http://www.zabkat.com/x2lite.htm

AVG AntiVirus 7.0.3 (Anti - virus software)
http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_dwnl_free.php

PSPad 4.3.2 (Text editor)
http://www.pspad.com/

HandyFind (Incremental global search in IE, Outlook, Notepad etc.)
http://www.handykeys.com

Locate32 (Indexed Desktop Search)
http://www.uku.fi/~jmhuttun/english/softwares.shtml

Hope you find these links useful.

Note that some of the above are not free for commercial use. So please check the license before use.

Anna Kournikova !

For those into Anna K... presenting her in an Indian avatar :

(Be patient - this may take some time to load)

Free Image Hosting

Some sites that provide free image hosting services:

http://photobucket.com/
http://www.imageshack.us/

You can upload images to their site, and link to those images from a forum, web page, blog etc:

As a test, the following image is linked from a jpg that I uploaded to Image Shack :



Here is a list of many other popular free image hosting services :
Free Image Hosting Services