Compatibility Pack for Office 2007 File Formats

Most of you probably knows, but this article is for those who haven’t heard about Compability Pack yet. Together with Office 2007 new Office formats has been added to the Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. Default file format has been changed from doc to docx, xls to xlsx and ppt to pptx.

Unfortunately you cant open these files with earlier versions of office. For those who doesn’t use office 2007 but deals with docx (or xlsx, pptx) files, Microsoft has developed a Compability Pack.

Compability Pack can be downloaded from Microsoft download center. Right after installation you will need to restart your pc. Then you can open, edit, and save Office Word 2007 documents in previous versions of Microsoft Office.

Before installing Compatibility Pack, make sure that you have all updates installed for your Office version.

Advanced WordPress Help Sheet

Do you need a Wordpress cheat sheet to browse the various Wordpress functions to tweak your Wordpress theme? A great resource for newbies (and for experts as well) is prepared by WPCandy. Documentation contains many useful tips and codes snippets for Wordpress and it is available to be downloaded in PDF format.

In the first version of help sheet, Wpcandy has been focused on, basic template files, Php snippets for header and templates and some other extra stuff for Wordpress. But now they have released and Advanced WordPress Help Sheet.

New help sheet contains;

Styling Different Categories
Unique Images For Different Categories
Styling Individual Posts
Dynamic Page Titles
Query Posts
and more…

Even if you are an advanced Wordpress developer, it is still worth to check this document.

Is your hardware Windows Vista capable?

Since Windows Vista requires a decent hardware, you need to find out whether your hardware is compatible or not before upgrade. There are several ways to check compatibility of your computer.

As a quick solution you can check Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) website (Unfortunately you need to use Internet Explorer to open this link). This website contains a huge amount of computers and devices that have been tested to work with Windows Vista. The list contains bunch of categories and devices that you can search.

If you are an XP user, you can use Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor to check if your computer’s hardware is compatible with Vista or not. Once you downloaded this tool there will be few more step to run out. You should make sure that all USB devices (printer, scanner, webcam, etc…) are connected to your pc, so advisor can check theirs compatitibility as well. Right after being sure that everything is ok you can install software.

A shortcut will be placed on desktop. Launch the application and click ‘Start Scan’. When the Scanning is completed click on see details to see compatibility test result.

The tool is also going to recommend you particular flavour of Vista that would suit and run on your computer.

Around the blogsphere: 4 Jan 2008

Moving From a Single Blog to a Blog Network
Netscape : Strong Brand with No Identity
Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks
4 Characteristics of User-Friendly Websites
TVShows automatically downloads your favourite shows
7 SEO Techniques That Google Smashed in 2007
The Google Ranking #6 Penalty / Filter

Wordpress plugins: 4 Jan 2008

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is the result of some tinkering with John Bowyer’s version of Alexander Malov & Mike Lu’s Related Entries plugin. Modifications made include:

Wordpress Google Reader Widget
Google reader is an online RSS feed reader by Google Inc. It allows you to share combined feeds of shared, starred or tagged feeds. This widget takes that data and shows it on your wordpress blog’s sidebar.

Weasel’s TagIt!
This is a plugin that displays a link to your latest article that does not contain tags, and provides you with an editing link for it as well. This will help you update all your older articles that don’t have tags on them.

Raw HTML
This plugin lets you use raw HTML or any other code in your posts. Wrap a part of your post in special tags (below) to prevent WordPress from converting newlines to HTML paragraphs, escaping apostrophes and so on. Very useful if you need to add a CSS block or JavaScript to your post.

Repair windows problems

Are you having problems with windows update or signing/verification issues? Dial-a-fix is something what you have been looking for. Dial-a-fix is written for Microsoft Windows (32 bit) by DjLizard in Borland Delphi 7 and it helps you to repair various Windows problems;

1. Windows Update errors and problems with Automatic Updates
2. SSL, HTTPS, and Cryptography service (signing/verification) issues
3. COM/ActiveX object errors and missing registry entries

You dont need any technical guidance to start to use Dial a fix since it is quite safe even if you are on beginner level. Collection of fixes has been gleaned from Microsoft Knowledgebase articles adn the important support forums. All you need to do is just to check the fix from the check box list and click GO. And the rest will be done by software (Yes, you heard correct. It is that easy)
DAF works on all pertinent 32-bit versions of Windows: 98, 98SE, Me, 2000, XP, and Server 2003. Dial-a-fix dynamically disables functions that are not applicable to your version of Windows. The version of Windows with the most support and functionality is currently Windows XP.
Dial-a-fix is 100% freeware to use and redistribute as long as the file is unmodified and as long as no money is being charged for access to the file.

Download page

Discover server neighbors or hosting company of any website

Have you ever wanted to learn webserver neighbors or hosting company of any website?

If you are using shared hosting, myIPneighbors is a great tool for you to find out who your neighbors are and to see how many other websites are hosted in the same server with your website. Is your website packed into a crowded host with hundreds of other sites? Or is there questionable content being hosted side by side with your site? If so, it may be time to look for a better host.

Who Is Hosting This is a tool that enables you to find out who is hosting any web site. Simply type in any domain name, and you’ll get a link to the company that’s hosting this particular domain. It’s that simple!

Around the blogsphere: 28 Dec 2007

What Determines Search Engine’s Crawl Rate?
5 Sites with Free SEO Tools
Blogging in the Middle of the Night
Top 12 Most Useful Meta Search Engines
What Determines Search Engine’s Crawl Rate?
Google Responds To Rep. Joe Barton’s 24 Privacy Questions
7 Evil Tactics to Conquer the World with SEO 2.0

Wordpress plugins: 28 Dec 2007

Adsense Under Image : This plugin places adsense under the first image in a post.

LastPostsImage: This WordPress plugin provides a customizable image always showing the last posts of your blog. It can be used as signature in communities.

Local Analytics: Local Analytics is a Wordpress plugin for integrating Google Analytics, the free web analysis service by Google, into your blog.

Last Viewed Posts: This plugin displays the posts (and pages) that have been recently viewed by the visitor (single view).

SyntaxHighlighter Plus: SyntaxHighlighter Plus is a Wordpress plugin for code syntax highlighting.

Persistent sticky notes for Firefox

Another great extension for Firefox. Visit a page, leave a note and next time when you visit the same site, you will find the note you left.

The Internote extension for Firefox allows you to create notes on a web page which still will be standing there on your next visit. Notes are very customizable, and come with useful features. You can see all saved notes, edit, save, delete or print them. Since it’s an extension of Firefox, you wont be able to use it on across computers. But it is still worth to try.

All features

Internotes persist on the page they were created on
Internote Manager allows for access to all notes across all pages
The ‘flipside’ of a note can be used to change its background and text colors
Notes come in six appealing text colors and six appealing background colors
Notes can have either a modern, glassy look, or a classical, flat look
Optional animations are available for notes
One of five default locations can be selected for the creation of new Internotes
Note text is now optionally hilightable
A scrollbar is now optional for notes which are too small to display all of their content
Internote is translated into Simplified Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Spanish
Internote can now be made to work with special sites, such as GMail

Page 13 of 14« First...«1011121314»