Infrared Light and Ultraviolet Light, are, as most people know, invisible to the human eye. Meaning, you can’t view IR or UV rays without special equipment as you see normal light. However, here is a simple way to view Infrared Rays with equipment available in most homes. This method is quick and no setup is needed as well.

Equipment Needed:

• Infrared Emitting Device: This includes any Remote Control of a TV, a stereo system or any other electronic equipment. The only necessity is that the IR emitting device like the LED should be visible. This includes most remote controls, so you needn’t worry.
• A Camera With A LCD Screen: You can use a video camera, digital camera, camcorder, webcam or any camera that has a LCD Screen.

How To See The Infrared Rays

This is too simple. Now that you have the above equipments, here is what you do.

• Ensure that the camera is in capture mode. i.e. The LCD Screen should show you the surroundings.
• Now point the Remote so that the LED in it is within the range of the camera. Or simply point the camera at the LED in the remote.
• After this, simply press any button on the remote to emit the IR Light.
• When you look through the LCD Screen, you can see the IR Rays as a blue glow at the LED on the Remote Control! [as shown above]

As long as you keep the button pressed, you can see the IR Light. Also, in a dark room it would be more distinct to notice. If you cannot see it in your camera, try using another camera. There was no problem with the Canon Powershot A550 I have and it worked instantly!

And you need not worry, this process won’t damage your camera or its lens. Also, you can only see the IR through the LCD Screen and not through the optical viewfinder, so it works only on Digital Cameras. Do try it and let me know if it works for you as well!

If you find this useful, do consider sharing it.. Thanks for reading!

After being acquired by Google, Feedburner announced that they were offering Feedburner Pro Features for free to all its users. One of the interesting features was MyBrand, a way to implement the feeds for your site to be accessible from a sub-domain of your own site instead of redirecting to Feedburner. And finally, I took the time to go ahead and implement MyBrand here!

Why MyBrand?

When you look at a particular feed’s address, you can tell me which looks better.

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/yoursite
• http://feeds.yoursite.com

Obviously the second option makes your site look a bit more professional indicating to visitors that you are managing your feeds, even if you aren’t actually doing so. And anyway, the process to implement MyBrand was quite simple and straightforward, so I didn’t mind wasting a few minutes doing it!

How to Implement MyBrand?

To implement MyBrand, you need to do the following:

At Feedburner

• Login to Feedburner
• Go to My Account area
• Go to MyBrand
• In the 3rd step, simply enter the subdomain on your site where you will your feeds to be present. If you want to host it at feeds.yoursite.com, then enter that without the http://

At Your WebHost

Most domain registrars do not offer the CName service unless you point your domain to their nameservers. So, you need to ask this service from your web host to whose site you are pointing the nameservers of your domain name. Most hosts do not allow CName changes to be done by yourself. So, you should send them a support ticket asking them to do the same.

The CName entry for your site should be set to feeds CNAME feeds.feedburner.com. The final dot may be essential as well. The first word should be feeds only if you are want the feed address to be at feeds.yoursite.com. If you want it to be elsewhere, simply use that sub-domain name here. e.g For it to be at myfeeds.yoursite.com, use myfeeds CNAME feeds.feedburner.com as the CName entry and save it. Do not forget to create a sub-domain called feeds using Cpanel.

The CName entry may take upto 24 hours to propagate, however the process lasted only a few minutes in my case. After this you’d be able to access your feeds at feeds.yoursite.com/yourfeed. As in my case, the feeds are at feeds.siteguide.us/siteguide.

How it Works?

CName is nothing but an alias for a domain name or sub-domain. Basically when you set the CName of a subdomain to another domain name, the subdomain would point to the other domain name. Here, the subdomain feeds.siteguide.us points to feeds.feedburner.com.

Remember, my feeds are actually located at feeds.feedburner.com/siteguide. After applying the CName, the sub-domain name feeds.siteguide.us will behave like feeds.feedburner.com. So, any feed at feeds.feedburner.com can be accessed via your site as well.

Also, you will most certainly not lose any of your earlier subscribers who have subscribed through feed readers or by email. They’ll still continue to get the same feed since this address acts as a redirect to the original feed which will still be located at feedburner. So, you can go ahead and use this without any worries. Thanks to Keith for mentioning this!

The reason you can’t place your feed at feeds.yoursite.com itself is because you may have more than one feed for the same domain. For e.g there may be feeds for the categories, individual posts, comments and so on.

If you have any queries regarding the article, do feel free to ask me. How many of you have already implemented MyBrand on your site? Do let me know in the comments!

Assuming you are writing about a site or reviewing a product, a nice screenshot of the website would a wonderful addition to the post. And it is an accepted fact that images increase the chance of people scanning through the post. But including screenshots of webpages is difficult if you need to manually do a print screen, copy-paste, crop and then upload the image.

WebSnapr 2.0

To simplify this process, WebSnapr 2.0 provides you with free screenshots of any website that you want. On the WebSnapr homepage, you are able to view sample screenshots by selecting a size and entering the website address. The amazing thing about WebSnapr, unlike Browsershots, is that the screenshots are obtained almost immediately. I had to wait a maximum of 3 seconds for the screenshot to be queued, taken and received.

There are 4 default screenshot sizes which you can use. However, these 4 sizes represent the majority of screenshot sizes used around the web, so you won’t have any problems with them. The larger the screenshot size, the more time it takes to get the screenshot.

Using Screenshots On Your Site

The most important use would of course be to, implement this on your site. For this you need to do the following steps. (more…)

How active a blog is, is primarily decided by the number of comments or responses that each post on the blog gets. The more the comments, the more the buzz surrounding the blog. High traffic does not necessarily mean more comments.

It is the quality of the posts and the content in them that determine the number of comments. Comments on a blog indicate the level of interaction a blog has with its readers and are very important in determining the loyalty of visitors and readers. Here are a few tips that can definitely help in increasing comments on a blog.

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Spam Problems

Almost every single blog out there will be have at least a ton of spam comments on it. Spam has become very difficult to restrict in any type of website or blog. Using a spam blocker like Akismet or Bad Behavior can help you to manage automated spam. However, of late, spammers visit your website and advertise their products or sites which have no value whatsoever.

Also, spam directed toward your blog or site may be originating from specific countries. You can find this by keeping track of the IPs that leave spam comments or messages on your site. If you want to block an IP, you can do it easily. However, spammers may simply use another IP address to send their spam. Sometimes, it becomes essential to block an entire country or range of IPs in order to block the spam.

Blocking with .htaccess

The .htaccess or hypertext access file is one that can be used for changing access permissions to any folder or subdomain on your site. If the .htaccess file is present on your hosting account by default, then all you need to do is edit it. If not you need to create and upload one.

Creating a .htaccess file

• Create a text file on your PC and name it htaccess.txt (or anything else)
• Upload it to the root of your hosting account. In most cases, put it in the folder which has the folders by the name of public_html, private_html etc. If you do not know the root folder, simply ask your host.
• Then using a FTP client or the File Manager of your host, rename the file to .htaccess. Ensure that the file name is dot htaccess (don’t forget the dot)
• You cannot create the file with the name .htaccess in Windows and hence you need to follow this procedure

Banning Countrywide Visitors

• Visit Block a Country
• Select the Country that you want to ban
• Get the .htaccess details for that country
• Copy it and paste it in your .htaccess file
• Now, all visitors from the country will not be allowed to enter the site

Disadvantages of Blocking

The main demerit would be missing out of visitors from that country. However, these countries would probably not fetch you much traffic anyway. The site basically generates a list of IPs specific to that particular country. Also, spammers may use proxies from another country to over ride your protection. But, you can atleast discourage most spammers from your site.

This needs to be done only in extreme cases of spam problems. In case, you have a couple of spam from a country and you ban the country, then you seriously will be having problems in getting visitors to your site.

Do tell me if you’ve ever had the need to do so for your site or blog. Consider sharing this if you find it useful and thanks for reading!