HOW TO share your Email ID in your blog without exposing it to spam bots

Sharing your Contact information on your blog or site is a great way of interacting with readers and convert them to loyal readers of your blog, but spammers use bots which crawl the web to find email Ids shared on web and then send spam messages to that address. It is not possible to connect with readers if you daily receive hundreds of spam mails. So here is a simple tutorial on How to share your Email Id with your site visitors but hiding it from Spam Bots.

What are these Spam bots anyway?

Spam Bots are small programs that crawl the web to find email addresses from web-pages and then send spam messages to the ids. So if you link your email address or just show it as text, bots will catch it, but you can easily overcome this problem by turning your email address into image that you can embed on your blog or site.

Spam Proof Email Address Generator -

This tool let you turn your Email address to image with easy to use process, you can customize the image colors, backgrounds and fonts to match your site theme., you can directly embed the image generated or save it to your Hard-disk and then show it on your site.

HideText -

Similar to Spam Proof Email Generator tool, but this tool provides more stylish ways to show your Email address, other options are almost same. Take a look at email address generated with this tool.

So, these were two simple and effective ways to share your Email id safely on the web, Share your experience with us through comments.

5 Cool Tips for a Cool Twitter Profile

If you are a blogger, designer, programmer or a web addict, then you must be using Twitter. So here we are Sharing These cool tips that will help you to make a unique identity on Twitter and grow your network. If you are new to Twitter, then Also read our old Twitter articles.

1. Choose a Good Profile URL

• This is the most important part , you should think about before Starting, If you are representing a Company/ product or a Website , then you should use your product’s or Website’s name as your Twitter url like Blakut.
• But if you are planning to use it without any Topic restriction then i suggest you to use your Name as your Twitter URL because it is more effective to use Twitter, you will get more followers + you can interact with other people better.

2. Choose a Good Profile Display Picture

This shows how you are using your Account, Using a picture is must, no one follows you back if you are using the default picture. I (@anterpreet) use my Picture as I represent my self as a Person not a brand whereas we use Blakut’s logo @blakut because it is our Blog’s official account, so use a proper Display picture, don’t use cartoon/celebrity images, Most of the Twitter users ignore following this type of users.

3. Use a custom and good Profile theme

If you are Representing your product then match your Twitter theme with your product or website’s style. For example take a look at our Twitter Profile, we are using a black background image with Gray sidebars that matches with our Blog. If you are using it with your name then you can use background or colors of your choice, you can also put your Picture on the background with a bio on it, but ignore Bold colors that hurt eyes, your readers should be able to read your Tweets properly. For Designing custom themes, you can use Photoshop and then change colors to match the background or if you don’t know much about designing then simply go to one of these sites to make a custom Twitter theme,

• TwitterGallery
• MyTweetSpace
• TweetStyle

3. Write a Good Bio

Twitter provides you a little space to Describe yourself or your Brand, When someone visits your Profile, he wants to know about you before following you, write a short and effective bio and tell your interests or about your brand, This gives a reason to users to follow you.

4. Provide Useful Information

Keep your Profile Vibrant with good Tweets , Don’t only Tweet about yourself, or don’t post only from your Blog, Provide useful Tips, links to your Followers, This makes a profile looking good and all click the ‘follow’ button. RT good links, Post useful links related to your niche. This is the most important part of a cool Twitter profile, no one wants to follow a dead Account.

5. Don’t Reply (@) or RT much

Replying or Retweeting is good as long you are not overusing it, People want to hear from you, they want to see what you like or what you think about something, they want to see you posting useful info not chatting with other users, if is important to reply to a user then only reply, otherwise you can chat through ‘Direct messages’. Generally users don’t follows users if most of the Tweets are filled with @replies. So think once before Replying or Retweeting. For RTs, do it a cool way, e.g.”5 Best web sites to search & Download High Quality Fonts for FREE http://bit.ly/TdqVu (via @anterpreet)”, Post the content first and Give credits after that, it looks much better.

So these are the 5 most important Tips to become a Better Twitter user, Share your ideas about Twitter through comments

NEW: Find Images to Reuse with Yahoo’s new Creative commons filter

Yahoo today announced about the new ‘Creative commons’ filter in the image search that allows you to search images that can be Re-used for personal use or commercial use. The addition is great, Searching free images for Re-use on the internet was never been that easy.

 

Now on using Yahoo Search, you can filters images with the rights to Re-use easily and quickly by clicking on the show more option button after entering the search term.  You can select from images allowed for ‘commercial use’ or for editing and then again publishing, so it will help Users to escape the conflicts between uploaders and the persons using that image.

ALERT: TwitterCut, another Twitter Scam

Twitter users sometimes go crazy to increase their followers and most of the time it results in a huge Loss, If you are receiving lot of Tweets offering you to increase your Followers (see the screenshot)

then simply ignore them, it is the latest Twitter Scam, The Service offers you to increase your followers by thousands in a click and needs your Login info, but it sends tweets about itself and affect all your followers as well, if they also login there.

Some other people are also trying the same method with same domains, so be careful. Twitter is trying to reset password of all infected users and to shutdown the service. Till then be careful and inform your Followers about this.

~ Enjoy Tweeting

[News]Digg removes ‘Shouts’ , 4 Other great ways to share Submissions

Digg announced to remove the ‘Shouts’ Feature, the feature will be removed in the next week, there are many reasons behind this.

Some Main reasons why Digg is removing it-

• ‘Shouts’ were introduced to show your interesting stories and connect with other people but spammers misused it badly, People flood each other’s shoutboxes badly and it is not possible to find a good stories from hundreds of shouts and Digg them.
• Also if you are going to Digg them or want to share it through Shouts then it is a slow process, it is not as effective as it was supposed to be.
• With the addition of ‘Upcoming stories’ few months ago, it has become much easier to fid and Digg new content and you get recommendations too on your Homepage.

So all these are the main reasons for removal of this Feature.

How to Share your submissions and Favorite posts now?

There are many easy and effective ways to do this, and all are faster than ''shouts’

• Share on Twitter – You can share your Submissions through Twitter, if you have a Good network ( It is not that tough), The diggbar shortens urls automatically so you can Tweet through The Diggbar without copy-pasting Titles or URLs.
• Share on Facebook – This works same as sharing on Twitter, you can easily ask for Digs to your friends by posting your latest submissions on your Wall.
• Other ways to share – With the removal of this feature, Digg is also going to add new features to share on Facebook/ Twitter/ Emails and other social networks even more easier.

What you think on this new update?? Do Share your thoughts with us.

Top 5 Tools For Digg to Turn you into a Power Digger

Digg is the most popular Site for Bloggers and Web addicts, It helps users to Find latest and popular content on the web and Digg them and comment, Blogger have been most benefited by Digg, it helps them to drive High traffic to their site, So slowly Digg has turned into a powerful social network where people Dugg, Share and comments on the stories, Here we are Listing the most Important tools that can help you to become a power Digger.

 

1. Digg Toolbar

This is the most important and useful Tool for you, By using this Tool for Firefox, you can easily submit stories, share them and find latest Submissions and Digg them from the page you are browsing, no need to navigate to Digg pages. Click here to install the Digg toolbar for Firefox .

2. Digg Bar

This is the latest addition to Digg toolbox, you get this DiggBar when you click on any Headline one the Digg page, it shortens URLs automatically, you can Digg from that page, Share the story by shouting, or post on Twitter, You can easily submit any page to Digg by using this Tool or also you can shorten any url by using the small bookmarklet or just add http://digg.com/ before the page address.

3. Digg Top

This is the small but poweful adobe air app, with it you can Digg from your Desktop easily and faster. It shows a summary of the stories too. Go to the Digg Top homepage to install it.

4. Big Spy

It is the tool of Digg labs which allows you to browse Digg in real time, it requires Adobe Flash player to run and it shows popular as well as latest submissions on the page without the need of refreshing, click on the Links which open in new tab and then Digg them.

5. Stack

Another Tool of Digg labs, similar to Big spy, it shows news in real time and run with Adobe flash player, but it shows stories as Graph, New submissions fall from top and join the Bars, popular stories are long bars, it is a very nice and intersting way for exploring new content on the Web.

So here is the list of 5 tools that are must for a Digger, Have another better Tool? share with us through comments.

5 Best web sites to search & Download Hight Quality Fonts for FREE

Here we are sharing list of Top sites for getting Free and Best fonts available on the internet. All of them are free to download and use. Simply download and Unzip them and paste them in the Font folder under Start Menu > Control Panel [Switched to classic view]

DaFont - Dafont is the biggest Font directory and very popular for getting fonts, you can preview your Fonts before downloading, it has better navigation and search features for getting the exact font you need.

1001FreeFonts - Another very popular site for Getting fonts of all types, Similar to Dafont , it has all features for custom previews, better categorization of Fonts, It is the best place for getting latest and unique fonts for your design work

Fontex – Fontex is the directory of Handpicked popular and best fonts, it makes much easier for users to get best Fonts, unlike other sites, you will get a better font for your need easily here.

Fawnt – Another Great Fonts site, not much fonts as Dafont or 1001FreeFonts but this site has good quality and unique fonts that are difficult to find on other resources.

These are 4 Free and Great sites for Downloading Fonts, All fonts are free but few come under some restriction like only personal use, so Read Terms before using them.

Tool for finding Fonts

What The Font – Got any image or screenshot of the font?? and want to download it?, Don’t worry there is a easy way, you just need to upload the image to this site and it will show you the font Type, then you can find it from the above mentioned sites by using its name.

That was our collection. If you know about any other source for getting Quality Free Fonts, then do share with us through your comments....

HOW TO: Mass un-follow Twitter users if your [following:follower] ratio is high

Many Twitter users follow so many people, by just randomly browsing here and there or using some mass follow tools, that it results in a big gap between their following list and followers. Where as in order to stop this "Mass Follow Spam" twitter will block your account, if your following:follower ratio is too high. So if you are one of those "Mass follower" then this post can help you not getting yourself banned from twitter.

As said before here is a Free and effective tool ‘Mutuality’ for mass un-following Twitter users who don’t follow you back. There are hundreds of tools like this but many of them are not safe or are not free, Mutuality is a fully safe, your password is fully secure and while un-following users, it performs in natural way so that your account is safe from being blocked by Twitter.

How to Use Mutuality for mass unfollow -

• Go to the Mutuality Page here.
• Enter your username and password in the boxes
• You might be following many celebrities, brands on Twitter, that are unlikely to follow other users back and you don’t want to unfollow them, so Mutuality gives you this chance too. You can exclude some of these users.
• For Finding who is not following you back or who is following you, use this tool Friend or Follow.
• From there , you can select the users to be excluded and add them to Mutuality.
• After adding all required information, click on ‘Go’ button and wait till it completes your work.

That's it! Follow the above 6 steps and you are free from all twitter folks not following you. Also if you have some better tool then do suggest via your comments. And do remember that mass following is NOT AT ALL a good way of making a good twitter. Soon we will publish some tips and tricks which will help you getting more out of twitter in a legitimate way.

[APP] Dhingana launches Orkut App -high quality Indian and Bollywood music from your Orkut account. FREE!

Dhingana.com has launched its Orkut App , currently there are only 2270 users using this app. We have tested the app, it works well. The features it offers are:

• Send your friends musical scraps
• Dedicate songs to your friends
• Create, Save and Share SmartLists
• See what your friends are listening to
• Listen to Top 10 songs right from orkut
• Discover new music with friends everyday

If you are a music lover then this app is for you. You can add it to your profile.

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[Update] Orkut removes email display from its ‘Friends’ page

As one more of its security measures, Orkut has removed email addresses display from its Friends Page.

Before we were able to see primary email ids of friends on that page under their names, but you can get their email addresses from the contacts tab.

You can see your all contacts on this tab and you can identify your Orkut Friends by the icon ( ) next to their names. This is a minor update there is no real utility value to this improvement except that the friends page is looking a little cleaner. Such minor updates often go unnoticed

Scoopler Search Engine - Indexes web results in real time

Scoopler is an inter-social bookmarking real time search result indexing website which shows latest results from the selected quality websites to deliver quality and relevant results. See @HOT Hardware

What are the Strengths of Scoopler ?

• Scoopler indexes pages from the social networking sites like Twitter, Digg, Delicious etc.
• Search results are more relevant and social bookmarking headlines. For example searching for ‘Photoshop Tutorials’ shows different Resources for Tutorials in the Google Search Results which helps us, but Scoopler shows Tweets/Diggs for these entries, which are not much useful.

Click on the images for Larger

What is the weakness?

• You may also get repeated results most of the time because of lesser number of indexed pages. It may also be because it is a fairly new website.

What are the opportunities?

• There are venues for growth for focused site specific searches because many websites index their own pages and thats the gap which has been filled by Scoopler.

What are the threats?

• It is very difficult for Scoopler to earn its brand name in the search engine market. As many search engines are moving towards real time search results as well.
• Twitter is improving their search soon.
• Google still still acting like a monopoly until recently when twitter arrived.

Conclusion

With a small focused market, Scoopler seems to have limited its capability and design . Its destiny seems somewhat similar to Cuil, unless it works towards adding better features and utility driven user friendly design interface .

Does Twitter need labels?

Twitter is UNORGANISED. What Twitter really needs now are lables. Imagine, Twitter includes a feature similar to the Gmail Labels, which help you categorise your tweets into multiple categories. Users visit your page and browse through those multiple categories. Makes all the tweets you are posting more worthwhile right.

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2 new Twitter Update: Better Search to include URL & Informative Follower Email

Previously we talked about twitter is losing its popularity, now it is adding more features to attract more users. So far we have seen two useful update on twitter this week stated below... 1. Twitter search to Index URL giving real time Search result: Very much demanded feature! Soon twitter will not only search the text of twitter posts but also will crawl the URL [Links] included in the Tweets, so as indexing them to give more efficient and prominent result on what is going around the Twitter world! There was a clean signal about this improvement from the Vice President of Twitter

Twitter search, will become a lot more useful soon.

Also Santosh Jayaram - Recent Manager of Google search quality operation, said that Twitter

Search will also get a "reputation" ranking system soon. When you do a search on a "trending" topic--a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar--Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.

However, it is not yet clear how twitter is going to put its searching algorithm and engineers are still working on this! What ever the algorithm may be, this will surely boost up twitter search. Other Evidences~ Twitter switched its default URL shortener from TinyURL to bit.ly: Related to this update we can also predict that the reason behind switching twitter's default URL shortener from TinyURL to bit.ly was perhaps better crawling and indexibility of bit.ly URL and Allowing Twitter to monitize itself! According to Jason Lee Miller @ webpronews.com

The most persuasive answer (there are others, and we’ll get to them) is metrics. Unlike TinyURL, Bit.ly is also a trend management and metrics platform, one that is very useful not only for tracking shortened links, but also for gleaning information about current trends and memes. In short, forgive the pun, Bit.ly enables better real-time search and meme tracking, two things valuable to both users and marketers.

So in short twitter is ready to boost up its tweets giving real time searches and may also finally monetize itself!

Source: cnet news

2. Follower Update Email now include info about the follower: Already implemented update. Now the Email you will get notifying you about the new followers will also contain some basic information about the new follower namely

• Total follower
• Total update
• Total following

Obviously unlike before we can now confirm whether the new follower is a spammer or not and can follow them back or block them accordingly! This is a good update from twitter. Personally we think that currently twitter is giving its best to hold on its position. I am eagerly waiting for the search update! Dont forget to share your views through comments

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[List][Tuts] Great GrandMother of all the Photoshop Resources

We have been collecting links of all the photoshop tutorials and collections and finally decided to post the links. You are welcome to share your own resources and feel free to leave your feedback in the comments section.

This list is composed from the contribution from all the DFS Community Members without them this comprehensive list would not have been possible. Keep up the good work.

TUTORIALS:

SixRevisions: 35 Basic Tutorials to Get You Started with Photoshop

Vandelay Design: 20+ Tutorials for Working with Photoshop’s Tools

Smashing Magazine: Best of Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials

Grace Smith: 115 Insanely Useful Photoshop tips & tutorials

Smashing Magazine: 70 Beauty-Retouching Photoshop Tutorials

Design Reviver: 20 Excellent Photoshop Tutorials for Web Designers

dzineblog: 27 Best Photoshop Web Layout Design Tutorials to Design Decent Web Layouts

HONGKIAT: 41 Nicest Photoshop Photo Effects

Best Sites List: Best Photoshop Tutorials and Tips Sites

PSD TUTS+: 20 Insane Comic-book Style Photoshop Effects

Elite by Design: How To Master Photoshop In Just One Week

Plasticmind Blog: 10 Tips For Creating Website Mockups In Photoshop

HONGKIAT: 50+ Great Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials

Emma Alvarez Site: 50 Free Photoshop Gradient Sets

Abduzeedo: 14 Great Abstract Photoshop Brushes for Light Effects

DesignM.ag : 500+ Photoshop Brushes for Creating Textures

DesignM.ag : 600+ Nature Brushes for Photoshop

Brusheezy : Website

Smashing Magazine: 40 Photoshop Tutorials On Rain Showers and Water Drops

TUAW: How to use Photoshop's Lens Blur tool with masking

Smashing Magazine: Photoshop Tutorials To Improve Your Modeling and Design Skills

Photoshop Roadmap: 30 Awesome Photoshop Text Effects Tutorials

WebDesign Ledger: 28 Powerful Photoshop Lighting Effects

PSD Fan: 20+ Super Professional Photoshop Light Effects Tutorials

WebResources Depot: Free Photoshop Plug-ins Collection

DesignM.ag : 60 Photoshop Actions for Photo Touch-Ups and Enhancements

1st WebDesigner: 45 Sites, Free Icons And PSD Resources For Web-Design

Smashing Magazine: The beauty of Urban Decay

HONGKIAT: 50 Free Photoshop Brush Sets You Should Bookmark

Minervity: The Ultimate Collection of The Best Ornament Photoshop Brushes

Naldz Graphics: 40+ Most Amazing Wallpaper Tutorials in Photoshop and Resources

PSD TUTS+ :

• 40 Cool Beauty Amplifying Photoshop Effects
• 30 Super-Juicy Photoshop Illustration Tutorials
• How to Create a Delicious Green Apple Illustration
• 50 Dirty, Filthy Grunge Photoshop Effects
• 50 Insanely Weird but Awesome Photoshop Brushes
• 40 Logo Design Tutorials

Links you MUST Bookmark/Subscribe:

• Adobe Video Workshop
• Video Tutes
• dZineblog: 45 Sites to Download Photoshop Brushes
• DesignM.ag : Photoshop Toolbox
• MakeUseOf: 10 Websites To Make You A Photoshop Ninja
• Smashing Apps: 40+ Must-See Resources And Inspirational Collections For Designers To Discover The Best Of The Web In March

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