Google Mail (or GMail) is a free email from Google. It has 2 modes, Standard View with heavy loaded AJAX, and Basic HTML View without AJAX for browser without Javascript capabilities (maybe determined from Browser’s User Agent). GMail also has another address : gmail.com.

Features are :

• POP, SMTP, IMAP.
• Retrieve Email from other email accounts using POP.
• Multi labels for each incoming email.
• Filters for incoming emails.
• Use only 1 GMail account to send and receive from/to many email accounts.
• Relevant RSS Feed, you can customize it.
• Relevant text ads while reading emails.
• Give “Star” for important emails.
• etc…

But unfortunately, all those features sometimes make GMail very heavy. So I have tested using 3 famous browsers.

With Condition :

And the results :

Conclusion

If you want to use AJAX based GMail (Standard View), you need to have a good processor. If your processor is old (like mine), you better use Basic HTML View.

What about the choice of browsers ? I’m using flock because it’s the best browser to manage all my blogs and social networking sites. But using flock to open GMail is not a good idea for me. I only open GMail with flock only when I don’t want to surf other websites.

Opera ? It only requires small CPU and Memory Usage. But its speed is very terrible (and annoying). So usually I open GMail using Firefox, better than Flock on CPU and Memory Usage, but a little bit slower than Flock.

If you find out anything else, please tell me via comments.

Thank You.

• No Resume Download.
• No Mirrors available.
• No Simultaneous Download.

These tricks can solve all those problems. Just continue reading…

Get the correct Download Manager.

A good download manager must have these features :

1. Support multiple download.
2. You can limit your bandwidth.
3. Support downloading from mirrors.
4. Can Resume Download (Pause and Start again).
5. Simultaneous download, and you must be able to set maximum connections per server and per download.
6. You can set the lowest speed when download must be restarted.
7. Can find mirrors automatically.

For those features, I suggest you to use Free Download Manager. Not only those features, it has more features :

• Scheduler.
• Shutdown when done.
• Auto Hang up for dial up connection.
• Exit program when done.
• Flash video download for websites like youtube, and convert them into other formats (mpg, avi, etc).
• Bittorrent download !
• Site Explorer. Browse FTP or a website and show the files just like usual file explorer.
• Site Manager. You can manage username and password per server if needed. And you can customize individual settings for every server.
• HTML Spider. Need to download a whole website ? You can set the file types and download depth.
• IT IS FREE !

Simultaneous download and Download Mirrors.

Even after using download manager above, sometimes you can’t do simultaneous download because it can not find mirrors and the origin server doesn’t support resuming.

FDM uses 1 of 2 mirror search websites available : FindFiles.com and FileSearching.com. If FDM is using FindFiles, make sure to check FileSearching.com manually and put the results (if available) on “Mirror” tab from “Download Properties”.

And it’s also good to put the faster mirrors on top or use the fastest as main download source.

Create your secret mirror.

But if you can not find mirrors, you have to create mirrors manually. The idea is very simple. If you have a hosting account with PHP and URL fopen capabilities, then you already have a mirror. You only need this html and php script :

Save as index.html
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" width="100%" height="100%">
<tr>
 <td width="100%" height="10%">
  <form action="get.php" method="post">
  <input type="text" name="url"/>
  <input type="submit" value="Download this URL"/>
  </form>
 </td>
</tr>
<tr>
 <td width="100%" height="90%">
  <iframe src="../download/" width="100%" height="100%" style="border: none; padding: none; margin: none"/>
 </td>
</tr>
</table>

Save as get.php
<?php
if (!empty($_REQUEST["url"])) {
 $fcnt = file_get_contents($_REQUEST["url"]);
 $fname = “download/” . basename($_REQUEST["url"]);
 if (!empty($fcnt)) {
  $fh = fopen($fname, “w”);
  fwrite($fh, $fcnt);
  fclose($fh);
 }
}
header(”location: index.html”);
?>

Put those two files in a directory, for example : secretmirror, and create download directory inside. CHMOD 777 or 666 download directory.

The structure will look like this :
<secretmirror>
-- <download>
-- index.html
-- get.php

Go to http://yoursite.com/secretmirror/ :

Put the URL of the file you want to download on the input box. Click Download this URL button and wait. After finished, you can use http://yoursite.com/secretmirror/download/file-name.exe as mirror.

If you have more than one hosting accounts, they will really help. There are many free hosting account on the internet with php and URL fopen capabilities.

Usually hosting companies have very fast internet connection. So it’s good to use them as mirrors.

About Sourceforge.net

SourceForge.net is the place for open source projects. If you want to download from one of the project, you should also try their mirrors from around the world, not only the one nearest from you :

Asia
jaist : Ishikawa, Japan
nchc : Tainan, Taiwan

Australia
optusnet : Sydney, Australia

Europe
switch : Lausanne, Switzerland
puzzle : Bern, Switzerland
mesh : Duesseldorf, Germany
dfn : Berlin, Germany
heanet : Dublin, Ireland
garr : Bologna, Italy
surfnet : Amsterdam, The Netherlands
kent : Kent, UK

North America
superb-west : Seattle, Washington
superb-east : McLean, Virginia
internap : San Jose, CA

South America
ufpr : Curitiba, Brazil

To use this simply replace http://surfnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/projectname/file.tar.gz with the mirrors above. Input each one of them as mirrors on your download manager.

Limitation

These tricks work with most common downloads. For token-based download such as rapidshare, they won’t work.

Akismet

Usually it’s already installed on new wordpress installation. You just need to get a Wordpress.com API keyand activate it. This plugin will learn about spam coming to your blog.

All in One SEO Pack

This is a must-have plugin. It will help you to tweak titles, descriptions and keywords. You can do it on per post / page basis.

Bookmarkify

The Social Media Marketing Plugin that lets you put social bookmarking links in your posts and other pages. Help your readers promote your blog on 50 social bookmarking services including “Email This” link. But maybe 50 is too much for you, luckily, you can customize it (I only show 10 of them). And it also provide CSS classes so you can modify the style.

CommentLuv

Once a comment is submitted, this plugin will check RSS feed from commenter’s blog and show his/her last post.

Exec-PHP

When static HTML code is not enough, you may insert PHP codes for more dynamic contents. Be careful when using this plugin, especially when you insert :

<?php die(); ?>

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will make your blog more search-engine-friendly. Combined with robots.txt, it will help you to create plain xml sitemap and compressed xml sitemap, and to notify search engines.

But I recommend you not to activate auto notify / ping because wordpress will automatically ping search engines using http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ everytime you publish a post. So the next rapid pings can be considered as spam by search engines.

If you really want to ping them, you can use external ping services like iPings.

One Click Installer

This is the FIRST PLUGIN you have to install ! After that you can install other plugins and themes easily without having to upload (and extract) them manually via ftp or your hosting file manager.

Just make sure you have set a correct permission on your wp-content/themes and wp-content/plugins directory.

It also has firefox / flock extension so you can easily customize your wordpress blog from your browser !

Wordpress.com Stats

You don’t need to install your own statistic script on your server. Use this plugin and your blog’s statistics will be automatically recorded and you can view the report through admin dashboard.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows you to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions. You only need to provide your ftp login.

WP Security Scan

It will measure your wordpress blog’s security, including directories and files permission.

This is my third personal blog. My previous blogs are using mixed languages. So I want to have a pure english blog. I know it would be hard, but I think it’s good for me since english is an international language and this blog will make me easier to learn english. And I hope I will get international visitors too !

This domain name and hosting have their own history. I won a local live blogging competition by creating an article and I was the second winner. Rumahweb Hosting Company was one of the sponsors and they gave me free domain and hosting for 1 year as the prize.

Not only domain and hosting, I also got a 120GB Western Digital External USB 2.0 HD, some money, a t-shirt and a mug.

I’m using wordpress, but honestly I want to try out a Mephisto as blogging platform. Unfortunately the server doesn’t support it because I will have to run direct command from the shell and install something from there. It is impossible since this is only shared hosting. But I won’t give up, I will try to install it on my slackware. Maybe someday I can rent a dedicated server (but it seems too much for a blog :-)) and play anything I want.

That’s about the hello-world, I hope you are comfortable reading my blog. If you want to say something, just drop me a comment. And I’m sorry if there are some ads on this blog.

Enjoy !