Author Archive for Shypy

Downloading Movies from IMDb.com | Hacking a Greasemonkey Script

Greasemonkey is a Firefox addon that allows you to customize your browsing experience using snippets of JavaScript code.

You can find a huge collection of different types of user-written scripts to install run on Firefox(with Greasemonkey installed) or Opera.

Movie Dude is a UserScipt that cross-links movie sites so you don’t have to search for a movie info on related sites.

e.g Say you’re browsing the imdb page for The Dark Knight. Now if you want to visit the wikipedia entry for the same movie, you’d have to open a new tab and run an independent search.

Now with the Movie Dude script installed, you’ll automatically see small icons for  related movie entries different sites including Wikipedia, RottenTomatoes, Google Video, YouTube, MetaCritic, etc.

You can also edit the script to make it display related link from other sites. Here’s a little hack to add ThePirateBay Movie Search and Mininova Movie Search to the list.

If you’re on Firefox you’ll need to have Greasemonkey installed. Then go ahead and install the Movie Dude script.

Open up the .js file for editing in your favorite text editor and add these lines to the code:


Mininova: {
name: "Mininova",
link: "http://www.mininova.org/search/{search}/4",
icon: "http://www.mininova.org/favicon.ico",
scanURL: "mininova.org",
},
ThePirateBay: {
name: "ThePirateBay",
link: "http://thepiratebay.org/search/{search}/0/99/200",
icon: "http://www.thepiratebay.org/favicon.ico",
scanURL: "thepiratebay.org",
},

Save the file and you’re good to go. Now whenever you’re browsing IMDb and feel the urge to *ahem* have a look at *ahem* the mininova listings, all you need to do is click on the link at the top of the page.

Have Fun!

How To Move a Wordpress blog to a New Host

This is the Wordpress logo. Why are you pointing at it?

I recently changed my webhosting provider. Hence, I had to move all my sites from the old host to the new one. Doing this with static HTML/CSS sites is simple enough. But for a database backed script like wordpress it can turn out to be quite tricky.

I’ve heard this question being asked quite often by friends on Personal Messenger and on webmaster forums. That is why I made a step-by-step tutorial on how it is done.

1. Find out the name of the MySql database you’re using for the wordpress blog. Download this database to your localhost. If your host offers cPanel, then you can use phpMyAdmin to do this.

2. Open phpMyAdmin. Select the name of your database. Click on the “export” tab. Select all. Export them as an SQL file and save it on your PC.

3. Copy all the wordpress files and save them on your localhost. This includes all the files and folders in the directory for your domain. So you should have a bunch of files, and the wp-admin, wp-includes and wp-content directories. The image makes it clear:

4. Now change the DNS settings for your domain and point it to the nameservers of your new web host.

5. Create an addon domain (if required) with the new host and copy all the files and folders from your previous installation. Move the folders as they are. They should include the files and folders showing in the image above.

6. Now it is time to work with databases. Create a new MySql database and assign a user to it. You can do this easily from cPanel.

7. Open up the wp-config.php file from the root directory of your domain/blog. Edit the name of the database, username and password to match the new ones you just created in step 6.

8. Remember the database you downloaded way back in step 1? Time for it to be uploaded to the new server/host. Open up phpMyAdmin. Select the name of the new database you created for wordpress and click on the import tab.

This is the phpMyAdmin import tab

9. Browse to the saved .sql databse and click on Go to upload it.

10. Voila! You have moved your wordpress blog to a new host!

This may take some time, but it is the most fool-proof way to move your wordpress sites/blogs to a new hosting provider/server.

The best file-sharing websites

According to a recent survey, File Sharing and Peer to Peer networks take up more than 90% of the total bandwidth on the internet. This is not surprising given the fact that a web page is hardy more than 1 MegaByte, which you can downlad that much in less than 5 secs!

This is where File Sharing websites come into the picture. What if you want to share a certain document with your friends, but dont want to go about emailing everyone. In that case, you can just upload the file to a remote host. In this post, I intend to highlight some of the better remote hosting websites. Bear in mind that the best file hosting websites have a limit on the amount of data you can downlod per day - you need to purchase a premium account if you want to download more.

The best/fastest file hosting websites (paid)

The fastest file hosting websites allow you to download only a limited amount of data in a specific period of time. Moreover they require captcha verification and the free accounts do not support download accelerators or resume support. Here are the best among them

Free file hosting websites with download accelerator support

These websites are not only free, they also provide download accelerator and resume support! I recommend using them if you’re sharing large files with your friends.

A word of caution. Hosting sensetive/critical files on remote hosts may not the best thing to do. Anyone can freely download from there, and this may compromise your data. You can use rapidshare, which provides a delete-this-file link which allows you do delete the file from their servers after the transfer has been done.

FIFA Football 08 [EA Sports] PC Demo Released!

Like the title says, the Demo version for the eagerly anticipated FIFA Football 2008 PC has been released.

FIFA 08You can download it directly from the EA website here. Currently, their servers are heavily overloaded and you wont get too good a download speed, but we can expect the situation to get better in a couple of hours.

Here’s a link to the FIFA 08 official website for more information.

 

I’m really excited about this release, and I’m sure their AI and graphics will get a whole lot better from FIFA 07.

The FIFA 08 demo will probably be available from 10:00 am GMT or about 12:00 pm CET (Denmark, Germany, France and such).

The game itself is slated for a September 28 release.

Also, the demo for Xbox360 and Playstation 3 might be released sooner than expected. According to EA Sports it won’t take more than take 2-3 weeks - I’ll keep you updated on this one.

As the download is more than 490 MBs, I suggest you use a download manager, so that you can continue the download later if the current download speeds arent too good.

Ronaldinho playing FIFA 08

The easiest way to optimize your websites for search engines - Wordpress plugin

You’ve probably read(and experienced) a lot on how Google penalizes websites/blogs for duplicate content.

Whats that? You say your content is 100% unique and home-made? Well, thats not the utter and complete truth, because google indexes your content from http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com, effectively crawling your blog/website twice. This also dilutes the effectiveness or incoming links as some may point to the www version and others to the non-www version of your website.

Now you might think that the Googlebot isnt so dumb, and it isnt, but all the same its best to fix the problem.

Thats where the enforce www plugin comes in. From the page:


This plugin will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference (http://example.com/ vs. http://www.example.com/) and will strip off index.php from the ends of URLs.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, set up your preference for your domain from Options->General tab on your Wordpress admin menu, and thats all there is.

Wordpress Options

I use the non-www preference for Shypy.com, so even though you type in www.shypy.com in your browser, it always takes you to http://shypy.com (no WWW!) ;)
No WWW!

Edit: The same effect can be achieved by doing a .htaccess rewrite - more info can be found here

An easy way to use images in your blog posts - ImageShack WordPress Plugin

Using Images spruces up you blog posts. Period.

This has been said again and again, so I’m going to show you a little trick(read plugin) which I use to use images with my blog posts and save hosting disk space at the same time.

If you dont already know, it is more convenient to use an Image Host for uploading images, rather than upload it to your own server.

ImageShack and TinyPic are the most reliable ones, and the ones I use. But the problem is that everytime you want to upload an image, you need to go to their webiste, upload it, and use the link in your blog post.

Thats where the ImageShack Uploader plugin by Arne Brachhold can make things a lot more convenient.

You can download it by clicking here.

After downloading it, upload it to your wp-content/plugins directory and activate it.

After activating it, an ImageShack tab will appear next to the Upload tag at the bottom of

WP post editor. You can now upload files from your editor itself without opening a new browser tab/window.

ImageShack

You’ll get several optios after uploading the image:

ImageShack plugin

You can upload multiple images and use them as and how you want to.

PS: You can also use the edit image toolbar button in WP to change the alt tag, adjust alignment, etc.

Learning CSS

I’ve been polishing my coding skills, mainly CSS and PHP for the past week. I’m still not experienced enough to say, code an entire WP theme by myself, but I’m getting better all the time :D
I’d started reading this book a couple of months ago, and almost finished it, except for the last 250 pages or so :p

Yesterday, I felt like brushing up my skills, so I got the Lynda.com video tutorial CD from a friend and got started. It took me only 3 hours to complete the entire course and make a demo page - entirely done in CSS.

If you’re new to CSS and want to learn too,  I’d highly recommend Lynda.com’s video tutorials to get you started(athough it can be a bit(or a lot) expensive).

If you know me personally, or are willing to pay the shipping charges, feel free to contact me. I’d be more than willing to share . ;)

I R Wiener

Yup.

Although 50$ is not that big a deal, its not bad for 30 mins work. :p

So thats about 7 new domains for me, and I’m already thinking about starting a video blog and a news-aggregator website.

And while we are on the subject of competitions, I’d like to add that JohnCow.com a parody blog of JohnChow.com are haveing a competition where you have the change to win a Playstation3,or an Xbox360, a Nintendo Wii, or an iPhone. The competition has been sponspored by their web hosting provider(I think I’m gonna try and convince my host to sponsor a competition too :p)

They already have something like a zillion entries, but it’d never hurt to try ;)
Edit:

They’re closing their blog, but probably the competition is still on.


Shypy dot com Hacked!… not

Yes, I was hacked if you consider editing someone’s 777 access file in the wp-content/uploads folder to be hacking.

ImageShack

This is the website where I saw shypy.com listed among a list of hacked sites:

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

This is the guy who apparently did the damage.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

Now that was scary…(not).

Anyways, I’ve still left the page up, so little Dexter can show is momma how he can hack.

Edit: Sorry about the images running out of the borders…

The Singhsons - Indian Parody of The Simpsons

Found this while wasting away on YouTube. :D
Really funny stuff :)