There are several contact management services available on web. Some are commercial solutions and others are free to use. Every such application offers different features. Generally, we want to sync all our contacts regardless of the service or hardware device we are using. Here comes the role of a service that provides us the facility of syncing all contacts on multiple platforms from a centralized location.
Soocial is one such service that helps you manage your contacts with ease from a single location. You just have to update, edit and delete your contacts in your soocial account and all your connected accounts will be updated with new data automatically. Social supports following platforms and hardware devices.
1. Microsoft Outlook
2. BlackBerry (Coming soon)
3. GMail
4. Highrise
5. Mac Address Book
6. Your Mobile Device
Soocial provides a neat and easy-to-use web interface for complete contact management. It automatically backups your contact database and provides one-click restores. For developers, soocial also provides OAuth based API access for connecting your account with different 3rd party platforms or hardware devices. It's free to use and provides some great features at no cost.
Soocial: Update Your Blackberry, Outlook, GMail and Mac Address Book In One Go
5 Best Permanent File Erasers And Shredders
Normally, a deleted file is only removed from the directory entry of the file system and still can be easily recovered back from a file recovery software. If you want to completely wipe out any trace of a file, a file shredder or permanent file deleter can do the trick. It completely overwrites junk characters on the space occupied by the original file and makes it unrecoverable.
Permanent Eraser - It is one of the best file erasing utilities for Mac OS X. This excellent software not just deleted files from hard drives, but also permanently erases the files from CD/DVD.
File Shredder - It is a powerful file deleting software for Windows platform. It is a freeware and very light on system resources. File shredder fills the file space with random binary junk making completely unrecoverable.
AbsoluteShield File Shredder - Yet another powerful and free file eraser for Windows. It erasing process is lightning fast and is ideal for permanently deleting files in bulk.
Heidi Eraser - This file shredder is available for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 2003 Server and DOS. It is completely free and very light on system resources. This software is published under GNU General Public License and source code can be modified under license terms.
Easy Shred File Shredder - This is one of my favorite file shredding software. It has drag and drop support and shell integration. Simple right-click on a file and delete it forever. It is free and works on all major Windows OS.
WordPress Plugin Development: A Guide For Beginners
If you are using WordPress as your blogging platform, most probably you are already familiar with plugins. These excellent add-ons help you extend the features of Wordpress giving you complete control on blog customization and enhancements. There are thousands of plugins available today supported by countless developers from around the globe who are developing these WordPress plugins for the ever-growing user base of this widely used blogging platform. Recently, Vladimir Prelovac has released his book entitled 'WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide', available from Packt Publishing which provides detailed step-by-step guide to create WordPress Plugins.
What immediately caught my attention about this book is the detailed step-by-step development process of 6 popular WordPress plugins, instead of giving bits and pieces in each chapter. Following are these 6 plugins.
1. Digg This - Adds Digg button to your posts.
2. Live Blogroll - Hovering mouse on blog links pops up recent posts from that blog.
3. WP Wall - No reload required to display the comments in sidebar.
4. Snazzy Archives - Archives presentation in a unique way.
5. Insights - Access your flickr images and articles directly in post editor.
6. Post Types - Pre-define post templates for quick insertion of photos and links.
Since each plugin mentioned above is made from scratch in each chapter, you get extensive code examples to properly understand the plugin-API. Because some of these plugins require dynamic content generation via WordPress database, you also learn the use AJAX and jQuery to achieve the same in a more optimized manner to speed up the execution. You also get to learn accessing third party APIs of Digg, flickr and many more.
Integration of TinyMCE plugin, WordPress hooks, forms submission through AJAX and Creating pop ups with CSS are some of the techniques you will learn during each plugin development process. A seperate section is dedicated for AJAX, so that developers who are not familiar with the technology can get a good hand on it before going ahead with the actual implementation of AJAX in the plugin.
All the development tools required to create a WordPress plugin are free. The book has a separate section in the beginning tabulating all the tools required for plugin development, where to get it and what is their use. The author of this book is an expert WordPress developer and has stressed on optimization and security of each WordPress plugin. You will also get to know the security issues and optimization techniques that are must for a successful WordPress plugin.Who should read this book?
Whether you are a hard-core web developer or a hobbyist, if you have working knowledge of PHP, HTML and Wordpress, and if you want to develop your own WordPress plugin, this book is an excellent choice for you. 
Book: WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide
Paperback: 278 pages [191mm x 235mm]
Publisher: Packt Publishing (Released: February, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN: 1847193595
ISBN-13: 978-1-847193-59-9
Also available as an e-book from Packt Publishing
10 Useful Facebook Tools and Add-Ons
Facebook is one of the most popular social networking site with over 2 million members from every corner of the globe. There are countless 3rd party add-ons, widgets and plugins to enhance and enrich your Facebook experience. Here are some useful applications and extensions to spice up your Facebook account.
1. Facebook Toolbar - A very popular Firefox add-on that tightly integrates your Facebook account with your web browser. You can do search, upload and download photos, messages directly from this toolbar.
2. FriendMobilizer - This excellent application provides access to Facebook from wide range of smartphones and PDA's.
3. Facebook Desktop Client - A handy desktop application keeps you connected with Facebook and provides all updates, alerts right on your desktop.
4. LiveUpload - An excellent plugin for Windows that integrates with Windows Live Gallery facilitating direct uploads of photographs from Windows Live Gallery Beta to your Facebook account.
5. OutSync - A unique application that updates and syncs your Microsoft Outlook contacts photographs with that in your Facebook account.
6. Wordpress Fotobook - Want to keep all your Facebook photo albums on a single Wordpress page? Then use this handy Wordpress plugin to seamlessly import all your albums in your Facebook account.
7. Friendbar - A Facebook toolbar for Microsoft Internet Explorer. You can update your status, send scraps, share videos and web pages and can get alerts through this toolbar.
8. Wordbook - This Wordpress plugin integrates your Facebook account with your Wordpress blog and vice-versa.
9. Netvibes Widget - One of the popular widgets that lets you see your Facebook profile and friends from your personalized Netvibes home page.
10. Google Notifications Gadget - Integrates Facebook alerts into your Google Desktop application. Supports fluid resizing sidebar with internationalization support.
10 Best Free And Open Source CMS For Web Developers
Web development has seen many changes in last decade. Some of the technologies has completely revolutionized this process. Prominent among them is use of content management systems (CMS). These systems provides a core-engine on which a site runs giving easy-to-use interface for web administrators. No coding from scratch is required. Just install it and your site is up in few minutes. Here are some of the best content management systems.
SilverStripe: This is one of the most flexible and easy-to-use content management system for editing the web sites. It's free and open source CMS that can be extended easily with plenty of add-ons like Sapphire Framework. SilverStripe is supported by plenty of modules, themes and widgets to give your site the desired look and feel.
Drupal: Yet another excellent free and open source content management system. Drupal is well known for its stability and large support community. You can find tons of themes, widgets and add-ons for this web development framework. Drupal also supports powerful user management system that includes authentication from various services like Jabber, Blogger, Live Journal and many more.
Joomla: Award winning open source and free content management system with easy-to-use interface. Like Drupal, this CMS also has a large support community. Joomla is well known for its extensions that add sophisticated features to an existing core-engine. Some large organizations of the world use Joomla as their CMS.
Frog CMS: This free and open source content management system is one of my favorites. Light weight, clean interface and very flexible. Frog CMS is based on Radiant CMS that worked on Ruby on Rails. This CMS requires PHP5, MySQL or SQLite3 for its working. A must try for every budding web developer.
Plone: A sophisticated multi-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris) content management system with tons of features. Ideal for power users who want to make large dynamic web site. Plone comes with clustering capability and intelligent caching proxy integration. It also supports hardened role-based security model.
CushyCMS: No installation is required to use this innovative content management system. You just have to create an account for integrating your existing web site with CushyCMS system. Once the integration is done, you can directly edit the site code from within its user friendly interface. The integration process just takes a minute by supplying your FTP details for site connectivity. You can assign different roles (designer, content editor) to your web development team for restrictive access to your CushyCMS account.
Mambo: A flexible, free and open source CMS with large support community. Mambo is available for multiple platforms (Linux, Windows IIS, Mac OS X, FreeBSD). You can find tons of plugins and add-ons for this excellent content management system. Mambo is known for its stability and powers millions of sites. You can download additional language packs to add support for multiple languages.
Typo3: An ideal content management system for large scale distributed systems involving intranets. Offers tons of add-ons from its rich Typo3 extension repository. If you are working on a multi-location dynamic web portal with a large development team, this CMS is your best bet. Typo3 has a strong support community that provides quick answers to new users. 
dotCMS: A light weight and extremely flexible content management system. dotCMS supports content versioning and rollback in case something goes wrong. This powerful CMS also supports AJAX Photo Galleries,RSS Feeds, Streaming MP3 Player, Social Networking, Video Player / Galleries, Google Maps Integration, Online Form Creator / Handler and much more.
modx: This CMS is also one of my favorites because of its excellent interface that makes even a newbie developer feel at home. modx CMS has full support of Web 2.0 Ajax technology. modx has perhaps the best rich text editors for easy and fast web site coding. You can also switch to strict XHTML 1.0 coding format to meet the quality standards required by your project.
There are dozens of free content management systems available on Internet. The list presented here is picked randomly and in no way represent the popularity of any content management system.
AdSweep: Ad Blocking Plugin For Opera And Google Chrome
Firefox users use AdBlock Plus to filter out advertisements from web pages. What about Opera and Chrome users? An excellent ad-blocker plugin/add-on has been developed that works smoothly both on Opera and Google Chrome.
AdSweep is an equivalent of AdBlock Plus for Opera and Chrome users. Although, it has been developed for Opera, you can easily use it for Google Chrome too.
Installation On Opera
1. Extract the javascript file from Zip archive after download and save it in a directory.
2. Go to 'Tools -> Preferences...'.
3. Select 'Advanced' tab and select 'Content' menu item.
4. Click 'Javascript Options button and select the Adsweep .js file through file browsing dialogue box. Click 'OK'.
Installation On Google Chrome
1. Extract the AdSweep.js from Zip archive and rename it to AdSweep.user.js.
2. Place this file in Chrome's user script directory.
3. Right click Chrome's shortcut and select 'Properties' option.
4. Select 'Shortcut' tab and append --enable-user-scripts to the string in 'Target' field.
5. Make sure there is space between the old string and your appended string. Click 'OK' and save.
5 Best Linux Live CDs
If you are new to Linux and are hesitant to make your system dual boot before getting a good taste of this popular open source OS, here is a collection of best Linux live CD's that will boot up an entire operating system without the need to install it on your hard disk.
1. KNOPPIX - One of most popular Live CD distribution and my favorite. This highly compressed distribution contains over 2GB of useful software giving you almost every tool found on a typical desktop system.
2. Ubuntu - In recent years, Ubuntu has raised itself as a leader in desktop version of Linux. This famous distribution also provides Live CD's for every new released distribution.
3. Gentoo - Light weight and very fast booting. Gentoo provides Live CD's for x686 and AMD (64-bit) platforms. Good Live distro for low configuration systems.
4. openSUSE - Novell offers two variants of Live CD (KDE Version & GNOME Version). Ideal for normal home/SOHO users.
5. FreeBSD LiveCD - A power-packed Linux Live CD for power users. A robust distro with advanced tools to convert your machine into a desktop, server, web server, router, bridge or a firewall. Recommended for experts.
How To Configure Multiple-Inboxes In GMail
One of the latest feature of GMail - 'Multiple Inboxes' has made my life easy. It is very flexible and highly customizable feature. I have noticed some of my followers on twitter are wondering how to effectively use this feature. So let's see how to use this excellent feature to save our time and be more productive.
Although you can use this feature in many different ways, I'll show you how I am using it to save my time. If you receive lots of mails on daily basis and struggle to read/answer all of them in time, here is a good solution for you.
I receive about 150 mails (avg) daily. These mails include social media notifications/alerts, RSS subscriptions, readers mails, mails from peers and other random stuff.
Earlier all these mails were stored in one location (inbox) and I used to process them in reverse order (older-to-newer). This methodology was a big time-waster. Then I found an intuitive solution to this problem. I enabled the Multiple Inboxes feature and created 3 new inboxes. Then I created several filters such that a partucliar type of mail lands in its respective inbox.
For example, any mail coming from Digg will automatically land in Social Media inbox. This helped me in segregating the mails according to their type. Once you configure this feature, its on autopilot. The benefit of this approach is that you can process the high priority mails first, leaving less important mails to be processed later.
Let me give you an example, how to create an inbox and how to create a supporting filter to automate this segregating process.
1. Enable feature - Go to Settings -> Labs and enable the Mutiple Inboxes feature.
2. Create a label for new inbox - Go to Settings -> Labels and create a new label. Choose an appropriate name for the inbox. Let's assume you want to name your new inbox - 'Feed Subscriptions'. Your aim is to filter out all your incomng subscription mails such that they automatically land in this new inbox.
3. Create a new inbox - After creating the label, you will find a new Multiple Inboxes tab in settings. 
Go to this tab and remove all the default pane entries in it. Now write label:Feed Subscriptions in the first pane. Choose 'Below the inbox' from 'Extra panels positioning:' option. This will ensure that the new inbox is placed right below in inbox.
4. Create filter - The last step is to create required filters. Remember, you may have to create many filters but it will be one time process. For example you want all your incoming mails from no-reply@digg.com should land in this new inbox. To achieve this, go to 'Settings -> Filters -> Create a new filter'. Paste the email address in From and click Next Step. Select the Skip the Inbox (Archive it) option. Now check the Apply the label: and choose the 'Feed Subscriptions' label from the drop down box. Click Create Filter and done.
Similarly, you can create more inboxes and required filters to completely automate this process and group your incoming mails according to their type and priority.
iCore: Create Virtual Accounts In Your Windows Machine
There are many virtualization software available on Internet including sandbox software running your system in isolation. However most of these software create an aditional layer on top of host OS adding more overhead on system resources.
On the other hand, iCore goes one step ahead and creates OS-level (Container-based) virtualization for your windows machine. With iCore, you can create virtual windows accounts and can create isolated environment within that account giving you complete security to test new software or to browse internet.
In case a virus spreads in your system while browsing Internet through your iCore virtual account, there is no need to worry. Just delete to iCore account and the rest of the system remains unaffected.
If you want to test any new software, game or any other custom software but are worried of any hidden malicious code within that account, then install and use it in iCore virtual account without the fear of any infection in your Windows machine.
How To Listen Free Web Radio On Google Talk
There are thousands of digital radio channels on Internet that you can listen while browsing the net. Through an excellent VOIP service you can listen to countless radio channels via Google Talk. 
GTalk2VoIP is a popular service offering VOIP and SMS services. Since most of the web radio stations are free you can use this service to listen radio stations via Google Talk.
Start with adding service@gtalk2voip.com to your buddy list in Google Talk. Once this bot appears online, type IM RADIO command to display the number of available radio channels. The available radio channels will be prefixed by a number (id) identifying each station uniquely. To listen a particular radio station, simply send a command RADIO (number/id). For example, RADIO 137. A call connection will be established and you will asked to pick the call. Accept the call and enjoy the radio station.
