Bridge to Nova

Well, we are very curious with our competitions. Sometimes, we really want to know how much of the subscribers do they have too? For me, I haven't publicly shown my feed subscriber counts yet even though I am having a quite impressive number for me.

Well, anyway, if you want to view the feedburner counts of the blogs that don't display, you might be able to see it if you're lucky. In fact, lucky here means those blog owners should have got change of mind and should be stupid too.

Here's how to achieve this.

This is my feed address.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/BridgeToNova

If you want to see my subscriber, you should type in the address bar as follow.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/BridgeToNova

What do you see now?



I'm not lying to you. You can't see my counts because I know this trick and I've already prevented from it by deactivating in my feedburner dashboard. But hey, there are a lot of bloggers out there who don't know this and you can check their feed counts.

Let's start the new year with the best tip. I've told you guys about how to avoid spammer by using one-time disposable email services. That could really save you from a lot of email spammers. But what about telemarketers? It is quite annoying to receive a call from someone you don't know and talking about the product you're not interested at all. Yeah, nowadays, spammers are everywhere.

I've found a website called Numbr, which provide disposable US phone numbers. This service is very useful especially if you want to list your phone numbers in MySpace, Facebook or any other social networks.

I've no idea about their business model as they provide this service absolutely free. You can forward to any US landline or mobile phone no. After one month, your number will expire, but you can renew for free in your control panel. The best of all, their website states that your number will never be reused.

If you've ever tried to insert the Google Adsense code directly into your Blogger XML Template as you want ads between post (not in the widget sidebar or anywhere else), you'll be stunned like me when you get the following error message.

Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly. XML error message: The processing instruction target matching "[xX][mM][lL]" is not allowed.

This is because Blogger uses more strict and standardized XML. The above error simply mean the Adsense code is not standardized XML. To solve this, we need to replace all the html character such as '<' with '>' '"' with '"'. Check the example below: This is original code.

This is XML standardized code:

You can use your text editor to replace all the HTML manually. Hey why don't you check out Blogcrowds HTML parser. It is very easy and convenient. Be warned that changing the ads might violate the TOS of your specific ads company. So be sure to check with them to play safe.

RSS feed is a very convenient way to keep in touch with our favorite website. But what annoy me most is some of my favorite website don't have RSS feeds at all. So that I have to manual check regularly whether they have updated their content or not.

One of my friend told me there are many websites that offer to keep you updated with our favorite website which don't have RSS. After filtering through googling results, I found these two websites (Feedity and Feed43) suit my need.



By using these websites, you can enjoy the following services:

• Data syndication facility to web-based services and SMB's globally.
• Web data integration with backend systems, databases, and mashups.
• Create a custom RSS web feed for any ANY webpage!
• Easily track and monitor changes to your favorite web sites.

How their service work is that they converts free-form HTML or XML documents to valid RSS feeds by extracting snippets of text or HTML by means of applying search patterns, and then joining these snippets together using output templates to form user-friendly content of feed's items. The principle of extracting specific data from source documents is also known as “HTML scraping”.

Yes, I'm combining two of these web sites technique to explain it just like one website because basically these two web sites work the same way.

I've noticed that many webmasters become very obsessed with Tinyurl.com services. Of course, I can't deny that tinyurl indeed provide very useful service for all of us. But there are many alternatives available too.

Why shouldn't you rely on TinyURL?

Do you know that if you solely rely only on TinyURL.com for URL shortening services, if it faces technical difficulties, then all your links could become broken. If you google for tinyurl.com reported outrage, you can find it happened already.

Shouldn't you use URL shortening services at all?

Of course not. URL shortening services help us a lot. Making our life a lot easier by not having to post longer url. Also keep our affiliate links save from danger hand. I'm not saying you shouldn't use URL shortening services, but I'm suggesting that if you use URL shortening services, don't use tinyurl.com for all your links. Try to make balanace with many alternatives out there.

Where are the alternatives?

Here are my favourites. You can google for many more.

• Decent URL
• Elf URL
• SN URL

I have no reason to be against Tinyurl.com. I am just giving you all to avoid disaster. Better safe than sorry!!

May be I'm pretty late to blog about this. But you know what? I've got IMAP access in my Gmail. See the picture below:



According to Gmail blog announcement of IMAP, they've started rolling out this feature since 24-Oct. But I've got the news late and when I check it out, it's already there.

So now you can access Gmail using POP client, or IMAP for free. Now I'm wondering who would pay $19.99 per year for Yahoo! Mail Plus.

Long long ago, based on the counter speed of Gmail page, I wrote an article that Gmail will reach 3 GB in 2008.

But recently, Google increased the speed of the counter and now Gmail has got over 4GB already. Some people even suggest that Gmail will reach 6GB at January 2008. If you're using Google Apps like me, they've adjusted the storage boost for our custom email addresses too. If you're Premier Edition users, now you will get a mighty 25 GB space instead of 10 GB.

Some of you might say that Yahoo! have already offered unlimited storage for their email. Are you aware that Yahoo! not only they reserve the right to delete MISUSED accounts but also limit their attachment size at 10MB (Gmail now allow 20MB).

We all love Google, don't we?

After I have used feedburner for my feeds, I have setup feed redirect in the Settings -->> Site feed as follow.


After two or three days, when I login to my Google Webmaster account, I have got the following warnings in my sitemap error.


When I click to view the warnings in details, I saw this:

Line: 2 Invalid XML: too many tags - Too many tags describing this tag.
Line: 2 Incorrect namespace - Your Sitemap or Sitemap index file doesn't properly declare the namespace.

It made me very frustrated. Feedburner isn't compatible with Google's Blogger services? After talking with my geek friends and emailing to Google, I have got the following solution.

• 1. I have to delete the old sitemap.
• 2. After that, I add new sitemap with ?redirect=false

That's it! Since then, I can see my sitemap with errors or warnings free as below.

Last month I posted about how to avoid spammer by using 10minute mail. Even though 10minute mail service is great, some websites already start blocking their addresses.

So, here are my favourite one time email services. They are really helpful if you want to sign up for stranger websites.

Getonemail : This service is very similar to 10minute mail and no one can accidentally get your email as it randomly assign from server.

Mailinator : You can use autogenerated address and record it, use whenever you need again. The cons is that whoever know that email address can access your mailbox too.

OneOffMail : Same as mailinator services.

Enjoy these services and keep your real email address from spammer.

If you have sensitive data and want to backup or you don't want to carry your external hard drive with you all the time, I would like to recommend iBackup online storage services.

What is iBackup?

IBackup enables consumers and organizations to get enterprise-class protection with superior performance for their critical data at a fraction of cost.

You can use iBackup with Windows, Mac, Linux and even for Exchange Server Backup too. You can use as webfolders for easy drag and drop too.

There are many subscription plans to choose from. Starting from $9.95/mo for 5GB to $299.95/mo for 300 GB in Economy Plans. Depending on the features, there are other plans such as Enhanced Backup Plans and Workgroup Subscription Plans available too. As there are many options available, I'm sure you will find the best option that suits your need.

Don't think too much. You can try a fully functional 15-day trial account first (link) and then decide yourself.

Have you ever dream about sending an email to yourself or your friend at a future date like on 14th February 2008? You don't need to dream anymore as your dreams come true! There are several email services make it possible.


Here is a list of emailing services that I liked.

Mail to the Future - allows you to send mail to yourself or others at a specified date and time in the future. But requires registration and they wrote In order to use Mail to the Future, your browser must send us a cookie that contains an encoded password. Luckily, if you have an email account somewhere, it's very easy to get such a cookie. Discontinued


FutureMe - No registration needed made this my favourite service. Specify the email address, subject, message and the date to be sent in the future. The drop menu shows the last year as 2036 ( Will they last that long? ). You can also keep the email private or as an anonymous public one. They have a sense of humor as they wrote this in their copyright statement : if you steal anything, we will sic a pack of cute angry girl lawyers on you. for real.


FutureMail - Use FutureMail to send yourself reminders, notes, or any information you want to have in the future. You can even share your future items in a public RSS feed or your own FutureMail Blog. You can specify your time zone and select an hour along with your message date! This makes FutureMail much more useful for daily reminders!

I am sure there are many other services out there or will come out later. From three of these services, I recommend you to use futureme. That is simple, easy and the best of all : NO REGISTRATION.