If you are looking to start a new amateur blog at WordPress.com, there is a good news for you. Now you can host your images, movies up to 3 GB. It is a big improvement from previous 50 MB. As you know, 50 MB means nothing. But for 3 GB of space, you could blog for at least a year or more.

From their official blog, Matt Mullenweg announced

Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year.

He also assured in the comments section that they won’t roll back this update. So if you’re new users or existing WordPress.com blog owners, you can blog without having to worry about webspace.

Our View

Well, as you know hosting on WordPress.com can’t give you any customization. You need to use their themes, plugins and you can’t insert any ads code too. So that if you’re serious about blogging, I would suggest you to get your own hosting. If you’re serious about blogging and still can’t invest money for your own hosting, I’d suggest you try at Blogger.com as Blogger allow you to insert any ads code you want. After you’ve learnt about monetization, get your own hosting.

Well, anyway, if you want to view the feedburner counts of the blogs that don’t display, you might be able to see it if you’re lucky. In fact, lucky here means those blog owners should have got change of mind and should be stupid too.

Here’s how to achieve this.

This is my feed address.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/BridgeToNova

If you want to see my subscriber, you should type in the address bar as follow.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/BridgeToNova

What do you see now?

I’m not lying to you. You can’t see my counts because I know this trick and I’ve already prevented from it by deactivating in my feedburner dashboard. But hey, there are a lot of bloggers out there who don’t know this and you can check their feed counts.

Let’s start the new year with the best tip. I’ve told you guys about how to avoid spammer by using one-time disposable email services. That could really save you from a lot of email spammers. But what about telemarketers? It is quite annoying to receive a call from someone you don’t know and talking about the product you’re not interested at all. Yeah, nowadays, spammers are everywhere.

I’ve found a website called Numbr, which provide disposable US phone numbers. This service is very useful especially if you want to list your phone numbers in MySpace, Facebook or any other social networks.

I’ve no idea about their business model as they provide this service absolutely free. You can forward to any US landline or mobile phone no. After one month, your number will expire, but you can renew for free in your control panel. The best of all, their website states that your number will never be reused.

Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly. XML error message: The processing instruction target matching “[xX][mM][lL]” is not allowed.

This is because Blogger uses more strict and standardized XML. The above error simply mean the Adsense code is not standardized XML. To solve this, we need to replace all the html character such as ‘<’ with ‘>’ ‘”‘ with ‘”‘. Check the example below: This is original code.

This is XML standardized code:

You can use your text editor to replace all the HTML manually. Hey why don’t you check out Blogcrowds HTML parser. It is very easy and convenient. Be warned that changing the ads might violate the TOS of your specific ads company. So be sure to check with them to play safe.

One of my friend told me there are many websites that offer to keep you updated with our favorite website which don’t have RSS. After filtering through googling results, I found these two websites (Feedity and Feed43) suit my need.

By using these websites, you can enjoy the following services:

• Data syndication facility to web-based services and SMB’s globally.
• Web data integration with backend systems, databases, and mashups.
• Create a custom RSS web feed for any ANY webpage!
• Easily track and monitor changes to your favorite web sites.

How their service work is that they converts free-form HTML or XML documents to valid RSS feeds by extracting snippets of text or HTML by means of applying search patterns, and then joining these snippets together using output templates to form user-friendly content of feed’s items. The principle of extracting specific data from source documents is also known as “HTML scraping”.

Yes, I’m combining two of these web sites technique to explain it just like one website because basically these two web sites work the same way.

Why shouldn’t you rely on TinyURL?

Do you know that if you solely rely only on TinyURL.com for URL shortening services, if it faces technical difficulties, then all your links could become broken. If you google for tinyurl.com reported outrage, you can find it happened already.

Shouldn’t you use URL shortening services at all?

Of course not. URL shortening services help us a lot. Making our life a lot easier by not having to post longer url. Also keep our affiliate links save from danger hand. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use URL shortening services, but I’m suggesting that if you use URL shortening services, don’t use tinyurl.com for all your links. Try to make balanace with many alternatives out there.

Where are the alternatives?

Here are my favourites. You can google for many more.

• Decent URL
• Elf URL
• SN URL

I have no reason to be against Tinyurl.com. I am just giving you all to avoid disaster. Better safe than sorry!!

According to Gmail blog announcement of IMAP, they’ve started rolling out this feature since 24-Oct. But I’ve got the news late and when I check it out, it’s already there.

So now you can access Gmail using POP client, or IMAP for free. Now I’m wondering who would pay $19.99 per year for Yahoo! Mail Plus.

But recently, Google increased the speed of the counter and now Gmail has got over 4GB already. Some people even suggest that Gmail will reach 6GB at January 2008. If you’re using Google Apps like me, they’ve adjusted the storage boost for our custom email addresses too. If you’re Premier Edition users, now you will get a mighty 25 GB space instead of 10 GB.

Some of you might say that Yahoo! have already offered unlimited storage for their email. Are you aware that Yahoo! not only they reserve the right to delete MISUSED accounts but also limit their attachment size at 10MB (Gmail now allow 20MB).

We all love Google, don’t we?

After two or three days, when I login to my Google Webmaster account, I have got the following warnings in my sitemap error.

When I click to view the warnings in details, I saw this:

Line: 2 Invalid XML: too many tags – Too many tags describing this tag.
Line: 2 Incorrect namespace – Your Sitemap or Sitemap index file doesn’t properly declare the namespace.

It made me very frustrated. Feedburner isn’t compatible with Google’s Blogger services? After talking with my geek friends and emailing to Google, I have got the following solution.

• 1. I have to delete the old sitemap.
• 2. After that, I add new sitemap with ?redirect=false

That’s it! Since then, I can see my sitemap with errors or warnings free as below.

So, here are my favourite one time email services. They are really helpful if you want to sign up for stranger websites.

Getonemail : This service is very similar to 10minute mail and no one can accidentally get your email as it randomly assign from server.

Mailinator : You can use autogenerated address and record it, use whenever you need again. The cons is that whoever know that email address can access your mailbox too.

OneOffMail : Same as mailinator services.

Enjoy these services and keep your real email address from spammer.