Wordpress Plugin to Optimize Database and Cleaning Tasks

Apart from writing Good content for your blog, it is also very important do some housekeeping tasks, specially when you are managing the hosting environment yourself.  As traffic grows it also comes with spam and other unwanted things like fragmentation of database which may slow down the performance. Post revisions may pile up taking valuable resources in the database.

All these housekeeping tasks can be done easily with a single button click. WP-Optimize is a free plugin which can be used to optimize you database without going into technical details of queries and other kind of optimizations.

Based on your selection it can remove post revisions, comments marked as spam, unapproved comments and Drafts. After cleaning it also displays a summary something like below.

And at last optimization done at the tables, showing number of KB space recovered.

For more details visit WP-Optimize plugin page at Wordpress.org

Facebook Timelines - How to enable - Preview

Facebook Timelines – A new content rich dashboard with Facebook is experimenting. If you haven't tried it  yet, just give a try.  If gives you more visibility on the content plus easy accessibility.

Facebook Timelines can be enabled into your account in just 2 steps. Visit http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline, you will be presented a screen something like below one. At the bottom of the screen there is a “Get Timeline” button.

Just click the “Get Timeline” button and you default Facebook dashboard will be switched to timeline view.

Facebook timeline view

Just type in “Let it snow” in Google Search

Just type of Google .. “Let it snow” and see the amazing animation and snowflakes effect.

Your screen will be filled with smoke and you will also be able to see falling snowflakes right into you web browser. Really cool .. isn't’ it?

Thetechhub.com - completed 4 years - got a logo as well

Oh! missed to celebrate it again. Belated Happy Birthday! www.Thetechhub.com has completed 4 years on 1st December 2011.

This all started as a fun, but gradually I realized it could be a nice place to put your day to day experiences.  2011 is nearing to its end and when I see the total postings this year .. really bad stats .. Just 43 .. worst ever. But no worries, this can be corrected by just doing a better time management and planning.

I am very hopeful to take it to a new direction in 2012 with more visitors and bunch of new topics.

One small thing ( techhub logo)  which was pending from a long time, finally I was able to complete it and the same was applied to the blog. May be I’ll do some tweaking's going forward but for the time being it looks ok to me.

Increase you Internet Speed - Find the best DNS servers based your location

Is your Internet connection giving the best performance?  You might have purchased the best available plan but still not satisfied with the speed. Whichever type of internet connection ( DSL, 3G, ADSL, EDGE, Broadband) you are using, there is always a possibility to tweak it.

Domain Name Server (DNS) is a translator that converts the website name to an IP address. When you click on the hyper-link, or enter an address like www.yahoo.com in your browser, the browser sends the name to DNS servers that help route requests to the proper IP address URL. When you configure the ISP's Internet connection is set up to use your ISP's DNS service. However, you are free to use other alternatives. As such, you can use Open DNS or Google Public DNS etc., to replace your ISP's DNS.

Open DNS offers rich content-filtering options for privacy and security of the family. Google Public DNS has been engineered by Google techies for faster performance and better security. However, because of the complex variables involved, there is no single option can be said to be the best for all. So how do you know the DNS is the fastest for you? you can use the NameBench  tool, which is a free tool to help you find the fastest DNS for. NameBench is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and UNIX with GUI as well as command line interface.

NameBench hunts down the fastest DNS servers available for your computer to use. namebench runs a fair and thorough benchmark using your web browser history, tcpdump output, or standardized datasets in order to provide an individualized recommendation. namebench is completely free and does not modify your system in any way.

After scanning is complete NameBench displays a through report with recommended  DNS configuration for you system. Before making DNS changes just note down the settings and apply recommendations given by the this free tool. Apply the new settings and enjoy the Increased Speed.

Download namebench from Google Code

How to Zip / Unzip a directory in Linux or Unix Environment

In Linux world Zip command is not as popular as Gzip probably because of its compression where as in Windows we use it more frequently than Gzip. Recently one of my colleague asked for a command to Zip a folder in Linux environment.  After Googling few websites I got below solution :

zip –r   <Folder1.zip> <Folder1>

Here -r parameter recursively compresses the folder passed as parameter. 

This command will result compressed Folder1 with all its contents recursively in Folder1.zip file. Here one thing I have noticed that Zip command reports error while Zipping Folders with name containing special characters like _ underscore or  hyphens – or . dots. Not sure why it happened, but I don’t have solution for it now.

If you want to reverse the zipped file back to folder you can use below command :

unzip Folder1.zip -d /temp

This command will result Folder1.zip to be extracted under temp path as Folder1 directory.