First came Wikipedia, containing a wide range of information on every topic possible. Since then, Wikis have attained cult popularity because of their usefulness in displaying information to everyone. Added to that, the fact that anyone can edit a wiki ensures that the content on the wiki stays updated all the time. It is also true that anyone can create a wiki on just about any topic at any time. Check out the Wikimedia users guide for more details on running a wiki.

However, creating a wiki using any of the available scripts is time consuming and you would also need to find space for hosting the site and so on. To tide over this problem, Wetpaint provides you with a service to create and run wikis instantly. Creating a wiki on Wetpaint takes as little as 3 steps. Here’s how it works:

Creating A Wiki

Clicking on the Go button on the homepage takes you to the registration page. Here, you need to enter details about the Wiki including the name, description and permissions as to who can view it and edit it. You also get a free subdomain @wetpaint dot com for your wiki. I created a simple one at http://siteguide.wetpaint.com.

Styles

Once this is done, you can select a style for your wiki. There are quite an extensive number of templates available for this and you can choose one of them to design your wiki with depending on your site’s theme! You are also able to upload a logo or image instead of the name of the wiki. This image is displayed instead of the name on all pages of the wiki.

Restricting Access

A wiki is usually a collaborative effort and for this purpose, you can invite friends to help you out in creating the wiki. In the next step, you can invite a bunch of your friends for this. As mentioned in the first step, you can make your wiki a private one, accessible only to the people you invited. You can also restrict editing privileges in the wiki to the invitees only or can open it to the public. This can be done for closed group wikis.

Running A Wiki

Once you go to your wiki page, you are given options to choose a text template depending on the type of wiki you have like a fan site, a book club, a group, a wedding or so on. This automatically creates a wiki with a main page and sub pages. The content of the pages can be edited using the AJAX based editor on the site. So, you can save and preview changes instantly as well.

The page structure is easy to be read by search engines, so SEO is not a problem for most. You are also given the option to subscribe to the RSS feed of the wiki, so that your users can keep themselves updated.

The instant wiki maker seems an interesting tool and I may use it sometime. Have you ever created a wiki or do you run one? Do let me know of your opinions about this site as well! Thanks for reading

The title best describes Akismet and its work here at Siteguide. This site has been online since last April and till date Akismet has caught around 10,000 spam – 10321 to be precise. For those who don’t know about Akismet, here is a short intro.

Akismet or Automattic Kismet is an automated spam fighting tool that helps you keep your blog safe from spam everyday. It is evident that most bloggers would be knowing about Akismet. But of late, the question is if Akismet is enough for your blog in fighting spam?

Some bloggers have either switched to other spam fighting plugins namely Spam Karma or Bad Behavior citing reasons that

• Akismet doesn’t catch all spam on a blog
• It marks legit comments as spam and so on

With regards to my blog, I must say that Akismet has been highly efficient in stopping spam over the last 10 months. The only problem that I would say is that legit comments or trackbacks get stopped by Akismet. Also, comment moderation is by default switched off on my blog to enable more comments.

Overall however, I feel Akismet has more than a good job on my blog. I certainly wouldn’t consider switching to another spam catcher for some more time atleast.

What about you people? Do you simply run on Akismet? Do let me know your anti – spam techniques as well.. Thanks for reading!

Many a time I’ve lost data from my PC due to mistaken deletions on my part or simply due to a OS crash. Some of the data were valuable and deleting them meant that I needed to do the work all over again. Understandably, it is frustrating to do something all over again. However, the fact is that deleted data are not entirely deleted from your system, they are recoverable provided you have the right tools for data recovery. This includes files that are emptied from the Recycle Bin or those deleted by Shift+Del as well.

Handy Recovery is a software that helps you recover lost or deleted data from your PC. The download and install is quite small, but it works very well. I did try the utility by creating a sample file and deleting it completely before installing the software. I also filled the sample file with content to check the amount of recovery. Here’s how it worked:

The application takes a few minutes to analyze the drive from which the file was deleted. It lists a number of files that were deleted. You are then able to search for the lost file from this using the search feature. On finding the file, you are provided with the probability of recovery possible for the file. The higher the probability, the better the chance of getting the file back intact. I was able to recover most of the data from the file, except a few characters which had gone corrupt. All in all, I must say that the application worked well.

Here are some other features of Handy Recovery:

• Supports Multiple File Systems like NTFS, FAT32, HFS etc
• Even recovers files from deleted partitions
• Extensive file scanning is available to get more data on available files as well
• Searching, Filtering and Sorting among results also available
• Disk images can be created for recovery at a future time
• Vista compatible and certified

A 30 day trial version is provided at the site using which you can recover upto 1 file every day. The full version costs $39 for a single license and can go down upto $26 depending on how many you purchase. If your data is valuable, then this is certainly a software that is recommended for you.

Have you used any such software and how have the results been for you? Tell me about it in the comments. Thanks for reading.

If you would like a Comprehensive Featured Review like this on Siteguide, contact me for details.

Consider that you are doing a review of any particular product, software or anything else on your site. It becomes essential to watermark your image to prevent other sites from using the same images without credit. Watermarking an image is simply adding text or a small image within the original image to indicate that you own the copyrights to the image. Watermarking could be done with Photoshop, GIMP etc.

But for those who aren’t experienced in handling such software, here is a simple tool that helps you watermark your images and provides numerous options in doing so as well. PicMarkr is a recently launched service. To start watermarking your images, you start by uploading them to the site.

You can also use images directly from your flickr account as well. A max of 5 images can be uploaded at a time, each having a size less than 5 MB. You are given the option to resize the uploaded pictures as well.

Types of Watermarking

The types of watermarking available at PicMarkr are text, image and tiled. In text watermarking, you enter some text to display on the images, select the style of the text to be displayed and also the position in the image where it should be placed.

For the image watermarking, you can upload a small logo and choose its position on the image.

Tiled watermarking means, you can display some text or a logo throughout the image. This can ensure that people don’t use your image after cutting out or blurring the part of image that has the watermark.

Once you choose your options, click Continue and the watermark is applied in a few seconds and your image gets ready. You can either download the images as a image itself, or in a zip archive. You can also upload all the images directly to your flickr account as well.

This is certainly one of the easy to use services I’ve come across. Plus it’s pretty fast and boasts of quite a handful of useful features as well. I would recommend this to anyone if you want to watermark your images quickly. What do you think about this service? Do leave your comments and thanks for reading!

This is one of the useful tools I’ve come across recently. The Alphabetizer is basically a service that helps you manipulate lists apart from its primary service of arranging a list in alphabetic order. The list you enter can be of different forms and still you can get yourself a meaningful output. Let’s look into how this works

The Alphabetizer

The first service, which is the arranging of list elements in alphabetical order. A list is simply a set of words separated by commas, semicolons or any other separators. These lists can simply be copy pasted into The Alphabetizer and you get the output at once. Usually, the terms are separated by a new line, meaning one term in every line.

However, you can use commas, semicolons, spaces or anything else for that matter. The service reads the list and gives you the output in the same form it received. It also gives the number of items that are sorted as well. It is essential that all the terms are separated by the same separator, if not the service stops arranging once it hits a unusual symbol!

Other Services

There are other smaller but useful services to manipulate your lists as well. Here are a few

Appending Text

You can add some text to the beginning and end of each term in the form of a label of some sort

Strip HTML

You can choose to strip HTML codes from the input and sort only the rest of the required text. Useful if you are copy pasting from a HTML Source!

Make Lowercase

You can change all the text to lowercase while sorting.

Capitalize First Word

Capitalize the first word of each list term.

Remove Duplicates

Remove duplicate terms from a list. Can be useful if same terms are added many times in large lists.

Reverse/Randomize

You can reverse the entire list to be arranged in reverse alphabetical order or simply the reverse order. Also, you can randomize the list. This can be used the give random numbers to participants in a contest and so on.

Numbering Results

You can make the list a true list by using numbers or letters before every term.

Apart from this you can prevent the Alphabetization of the list and at the same time use these other functions as well. It is a simple looking tool, but I’ve found it quite useful recently! What do you think about this? Do let me know! Thanks for reading!