On Father’s day, perhaps it might be a nice idea to check out some sites and forums dedicated to dads. Here are 8 of them.

GreatDad - A popular site for advice for dads. Good lists of resources.

DadDaily - A social networking site for dads.

DadStaysHome - A forum for dads to share their daddyhood experiences.

AtHomeDad - A resource and community for stay-at-home dads.

BrandNewDad - A social networking site for new and expectant dads.

Dadosphere - Another social netowrking sites only for dads.

JustDaddys - Another forum only for dads.

The DadLabs Crib - This is a dad’s community at Ning.

I love this site - Cleepr. It is a clean, elegant, and no-frill search engine for music videos that aggregates content from YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, and Google Video.

So now instead of visiting various video sharing sites individually, all I do to get a link of my favorite new song that I hear on radio is to search on Cleepr and I am rest assure I will get some good results. From the latest Colbie Caillat’s Bubbly to yesteryears’Johnny Cash numbers, they are all there.

There are hundreds of Wordpress plugins out there and you can use as many as you want. However, there are some plugins that are must-used for all. This is  a list of 11 such plugins that you just can’t live without.

In no particular order…

Akismet - This plugin that seemingly seem to do nothing visible has protected my blogs from over thousands of spam comments. Need I say more.

You need your Wordpress.com API key to activate akismet. You can get it by registering at Wordpress.com and by going to your profile page.

Feedburner Feedsmith - Sooner or later, you are going to burn your blog’s feed on Feedburner, and when you do that, this plugin will make sure all the default Wordpress feeds of your blog points to the Feedburner feed. For example, http://advocable.com/feed will always point to the Feedburner feed - http://feeds.advocable.com/newposts

Google Sitemaps - Ah! Who wouldn’t want to use Google Sitemaps. This plugin creates that necessary sitemap for your Wordpress blog effortlessly.

Wordpress Mobile Editon - Today, people are increasingly using mobile phones to browse the net, and you don’t want your site to look garbled on their handsets. This plugin displays the content of your blog in a mobile phone screen friendly format that is easy to browse and read.  this is one of those just-installed-and-forget-it plugins.

Maintenance Mode - When you are fidling with the design and layout of your blog, you don’t want your visitors to see you site all crippled. Right? This plugin will display a simple note to your site visitors saying your blog is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance and so please try back after some time. You, as the admin, can continue to work and see how your site actually looks like on screen.

Subscribe to Comments - When I comment on blog post, I ask questions and give my views on a particular topic and expect the post author or other readers to reply to my comment. Now since I can’t be bookmarking or remembering all the comments that I keep making, I’d love it if the replies are somehow sent to me. This plugin does exactly that by giving me the option of subscribing to the follow-up comments when I am leaving a comment on a blog. For a blogger, this is a good way to keep their readers engaged.

Wordpress.com Stats - Now there are so many stat providers like Google Analytics, Sitemeter, Statcounter, Woopra, and more, but I haven’t seen any that is quite as nice as this one. Though not quite so comprehensive, this plugin provides all the key stats you need to know about your blog on your Wordpress dashboard itself. No need to add any javascript that will slow down your blog’s page loading.

All-in-One SEO Pack - This plugin is no longer supported but is still one of the best out there to ensure that your post titles, descriptions, and keywords are in place, duplicate content are in check, and other on-site SEO optimisation is done.

Similar Posts - You can use this plugin to display a list of 5-10 or more similar posts below your blog posts. This helps in atrracting your readers to other similar content on your blog and perhaps make them stay longer on your site.

Popularity Content - This plugin helps you to display a list of the most popular posts on your blog based on certain criteria you have set. Displaying such list is important as your visitors know what are the best your blog has to offer.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade -  Wordpress keeps updating itself to new versions every now and then, and who would have the time and patience to delete some folders from the server, upload the newer versions, and take care that nothing is wrong in all these deleting and uploading. And plus the reinstallation. You can escape all this by getting this plugin do the upgrading for you automatically.

Friendfeed is the latest craze on the blogosphere and it has already spawned more than two dozen third party tools and scripts to enhance the way we use this new service. This is a collection of 42 (and more, now with updates) Friendfeed tools, scripts, and hacks that you can start with.

Desktop Applications

Sobees - You can manage your Friendfeed and Twitter accounts from nice desktop application. You can filter the Friendfeed message stream by the various services, and put the pictures on slideshow.

Twhirl - This is a popular AIR based desktop client for your Friendfeed and Twitter accounts.

AlertThingy - Another popular AIR based desktop client you can use for managing your Friendfeed, Twitter, and Flickr accounts.

Web Applications

Friendfeed Grid - This site shows random Friendfeed users, 20 most subscribed to, and the 10 top commenters.

FriendfeedLinks - This site displays the most popular links of Friendfeed.

Friendfeed Embed - The official Friendfeed widget displaying your updates for your blog’s sidebar. See my widget on this blog’s sidebar as an example.

Mobile Phones

Moblf - Moblf is the short form of Mobile Life, a new tool that you can use on your mobile phone to connect to your Friendfeed account using SMS.

FF to Go - You can read/write on Friendfeed on your mobile phone using FF To Go.  (UPDATED, June 4, 2008)

Wordpress Plugins

Friendfeed Activity Widget - This plugin display a nice widget for your blog’s sidebar that will display your latest updates on Friendfeed.

Friendfeed Comments - Adds a Friendfeed comment section on your blog’s post pages that will diaply the comments you have received on Friendfeed on that post, with a customisable Friendfeed comment box for readers to comment to Friendfed directly from your blog.

Firefox addons

MySocial 24×7 - This is a Firefox addon that you can use to manage your Friendfeed updates and see your friends’ message streams from your browser sidebar.

Shareaholic - This is a Firefox addon that allows you to share a webpage to many services including Friendfeed. It also supports digg, del.icio.us, facebook, foxiewire, google bookmarks, google reader, healthranker, magnolia, mixx, reddit, simpy, stumbleupon, streakr, truemors, tumblr, twitter, and bzzster.

Yahoo Pipes

Most Comments on Your Content - Find people ranked by who have commented on your updates the most number of times.

Friendfeed Minus Twitter - This pipe creates a RSS feed of your Friendfeed friends’ message updates withour the Twitter updates.

Scripts

@reply - This userscript adds the @username when you reply to someone in the comment.

Friendfeed 100 - View 100 items on the Friendfeed homepage.

Friendfeed 50 - View 50 items on the Friendfeed homepage.

Friendfeed Easy Unsubscribe - Creates a unsubscibe link to an user’s profile page.

Friendfeed Evermore Expander - this script sxpand the ‘5 more…’ link on Friendfeed.

Friendfeed Filter Icons - Filter the services on the Friendfeed feed using this script.

Friendfeed Filters - You can filter Friendfeed using this script by creating your own group of friends.

Friendfeed Who Are You - This one adds a ‘Who are you?’ link on Friendfeed user profile pages and when you hover over a name, there is a little popup window displaying the details.

Friendfeed Pagerization Fixer - Fixes the Friendfeed pagerization.

Friendfeed Read Later - This script allows you to mark items to read later.

Friendfeed Reshare Any Link - Reshare any link on Friendfed to others service suing add2any.com

Friendfeed Remove Read Links - You can remove read items on Friendfeed using this script.

Friendfeed Show Domains - This script displays the domain names of shared links.

Friendfeed Show Names - This shows the full name of any user on Friendfeed.

Friendfeed Tabs - You can customise Friendfeed tabs using this script.

Friendfeed TinyURL Resolver - You can preview the tinyurls that shoe up on Friendfeed with this script.

Friendfeed Tweak Refresh Rate - You can change the refresh timings of Friendfeed using this script.

Friendfeed Hiding The Oldies - You can hide entries older than a week on Friendfed using this script so that you can maintain a cleaner and lesser load on your broser.

Friendfeed Put Alert Thingy To Bed - When you update Friendfeed from AlertThingy or Twhirl, you can change the ‘via AlertThingy’ or ‘via Twhirl’ messages to something else that you want.

Friendfeed Sticky Search - Create sticky notes on Friendfeed using this script.

Friendfeed By Service - This script adds list of icons of sites like Twitter, Flickr, Picassa, Delicious, etc. on top of your Friendfeed page. when you click on any of these icons, the messages are filtered accordingly to that specific service where they come from.

Friendfeed Show Likes - This displays the list of ‘Likes’ for any entry.

Friend feed Easy Unsubscribe - This cript adds an unsubscribe link to user pages on Friendfeed.

Friendfeed Twitter Client - This script adds a ‘reply on Twitter’ and an interface for sending Tweetsto your page.

Hacks

RSS Feeds from Friendfeed Search Results - Search for anything on Friendfeed and get an RSS feed on that search query.

RSS Feeds for User Comments and Likes - As the name suggests, use this hack to get the RSS feed of any user’s comments or likes on Friendfeed.

Export OPML file of Subscribe To Users - You can use this hack to export the opml file of the users you are subscribed to on Friendfeed.

Friendfeed on Gtalk - You can update to Friendfeed from Google Talk using this hack.

Google Blogoscope Hacks - A collection of hacks including how to zoom in the small the profile picture sof the Friendfeed users you are subscribed to on your subscription page, Friendfeed Search for iGoogle,  and how to change Friendfeed colors.

Next time you head to Wikipedia to search for anything, stop and redirect yourself to Qwika. This new search engine indexes 1158 wikis in 12 languages and has 21,964,380 articles in its index. Most of the search results you will find are from Wikipedia’s various language editions and Wikia pages, but it is definitely a time saver, if you are the wiki researcher types.

There is also a IE and Firefox toolbar that allows topic search, keyword search, and even unlikely features like pop-up blocker, search highlight, and site ranking displays.

So now we have Qwika for search on search on wikis, Twing for search on internet forums, Truveo and Blinkx for video and audio search, and Pipl for people search, besides the omnipresent Google. Good for researchers.

Also check out Top Online Research Resources for PR and marketing Professionals

Google Adsense is without doubt the most popular online advertising network and used by many small and big site owners alike. And we would love to hear how we can earn more from the system. Here are 10 useful tools to help you boost your usage of the service, understand it better, and perhaps help earn more.

Adsblacklist

Adsblacklist is a site that lists the Made for Adsense (MFA) sites and Low Cost Per Click (LCPC) ads that Google Adsense users can add to their Google Adsense Competitive Ad filter tool.  To use the Adblacklist tool, you need to register yourself and your site. Once that is done, click on the Generate Filter List link on the left hand sidebar of the Adsblacklist site. This tool can generate upto 200 MFA sites or LCPC ad sites if you have a free account, or generate all that it has in its database if you are a premier account holder. You can also contribute to Adsblacklist by reporting MFA sites or LCPC sites that you have discovered.

Adsense Earnings RSS feed

Adsense Earnings RSS feed is a script that you can use to generate a RSS feed of your Adsense earnings, clicks, or other reports. So if you are the RSS buff who wants every information on the RSS reader, this is the tool for you. To use this, simply download the script, customize it a little by adding your Adsense login information and the range of days you want to aggregate data of. Then you can upload the script on your own server or some secret place on the web.

Ads Preview and Comparison Tool

Ads Preview and Comparison Tool is an online tool that allows you to preview the ads that will appear on your site from Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher, and Chitika.  You can preview Google Adsense text ads, adlinks, and image ads in various sizes or compare them with corresponding ads from Yahoo or Chitika. This is quite an interesting tool and you might be surprised with some of the ads that may come up on the preview.

Adsense Charts and Graphs

Adsense Charts and Graphs offers eight charts for your Adsense data based on impressions, impressions (Cumulative), clicks, clicks (Cumulative), clickthrough percentage, earnings, earnings (Cumulative), and earnings per click. If you are the type who likes to study your Adsense data thoroughly with charts and graphs, then this is the tool for you. To generate your charts, you have to download the AdSense CSV file from your account and upload it on this online tool.

The charts can come out with some useful information like when did your earnings peak, when did it subside, which are the best performing channels, etc.

AlternateURL

AlternateURL replaces the Public Service Ads from Google Adsense on your site with paying ads. You can register at the site for free and generate the AlternateURL code to use on your site instead of the Adsense code. Simple as that. AlternateURL works on a 50:50 revenue sharing model with its publishers. They pay through Paypal monthly. You can also track your click reports from your AlternateURL account page.

There is a similar service to this from Adsense through which you can color mask your ad block, use an image, or make your ad unit collapse whenever there are no paying ads to display.

ClickAider

ClickAider is an online tool that will track clicks to Google Adsesnse ads and ads from other ad networks that are displayed on your site. This can be an useful tool that will provide you information like which advertisements are the most preferred by your readers. ClickAider also tracks where your site visitors come from and which outbound links they follow from your site.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Google Adwords Keyword Tool is essentially an online tool for Google Adwords users but Adsense users can take advantage of it as well. You can use the tool to generate a list of top keywords on any descriptive word, phrase, or website address. The generated list of keywords are also rated based on the amount of advertisers bidding on them, search volume in a particular month, and the average search volume. This gives you a sense of high paying keywords that you can used on your site to attract high paying Adsense ads.

FilterTool

FilterTool is a cool online tool that you can use to find a list of sites whose Adsense ads are likely to come up on your site. You can pick the bad sites from this list and add them to your Adsense filter list. You can also sort out the good sites and keep them separately so that the next time you run this tool, those sites are exempted from showing up. FilterTool is available for a free trail of 14 days.

Pubmatic

Pubmatic is a tool that you can use to optimize the ads you get from your various ad networks including Adsense. Once you register at Pubmatic, you can add your Adsense account details and generate the html codes that ypu can use on your site in place of the Adsense code. That’s all. PubMatic will get the best ads in terms of size, color, text/banner/video format, etc. suitable to your site.

SysSense

SysSense is a light tool that will sit on your system tray and monitor your Adsense account. The first time you run SysSense, you will be ask to set up your Adsense account. You can provide your Google adsense login ID and password and you are done. There are lot more features here than you will find on the Firefox addon tools providing similar services. For instance, there is the currency convertor, and the auto update that you can set from anywhere between 1 minute to 5 hours. You can set what information you want SysSense to show including page impressions, clicks, clickthrough rates, effective CPM rates, or earnings.

Once upon a time not so long ago, DivShare used to be my best file sharing service, beating Box.net and all the others in terms of features, usability, interface, or space. DivShare doesn’t limit your file uploads to 10 MB like Box.net does on its free account. It provides you with a big 5GB space. Its features such as the AJAX search and fast multiple file upload tool are wonderful. The service was even nominated for Webware 100.

Not anymore. Why am I saying that? Read on.

Apparently the company is running sort of funds or whatever and are doing all it can to get ad revenues and get the free users to turn premium. I understand every business needs funds and DivShare is no different. But whatever they are doing now, they are becoming a little too much for my liking at least and not what I would like my (trustworthy and solid) file storage site to be like.

For instance, now when you log in to DivShare, their premium account rates and super discount charts greet you instead of your dashboard. When you do a ‘No Thanks’ and continue to your account, everything seems fine and looks the same as before. But wait until you send a file to your friends and this is what they will see when they open the file link.

This is a page full of ads and looks no better than a spam site. Just imagine you are sending that link to a client or a business partner and this is what they see, along with two pop-up ads. Not only that, when you click on the download link, you are taken to a new page , again full of ads, and asked to be waited for 15 seconds before getting redirected to the final download page.

What also made me lose complete faith in DivShare is that they have recently made their services unavailable in 12 Asian countries. Reason: “the online advertising market in China and Southeast Asia is much weaker than in other parts of the world”. This is bad news not only for the DivShare users there but also means that you cannot send files to people in those countries. Thankfully Indian companies still advertise in the site and the service is still active here. But I don’t know for how long.

I don’t mind paying for their premium account but when there are so many services providing the same services free of cost, it’d be a bit silly to find a service provider who asks you to pay up.

By the way, I don’t work for any other file sharing service providing company. This is genuine consumer dissatisfaction.

There have been many Greasemonkey scripts and Firefox addons that do the job of adding pictures and links on Gmail signatures. As you know Gmail, on its own, doesn’t support the use of html and pictures in its email signatures in order to prevent misuses. So these scripts and addons have been the favorite lot of many who wanted to spice up their emails a bit. However since the new version of Gmail debuted, many of them have ceased to work.

But luckily here is one script called Gmail HTML Signatures that still works. It not only adds pictures and links on your signatures but also enable float. In other words, when you are replying to an email, your signature will be visible just below your message and not after the copy of the original email embedded in your reply. See screenshot of a signature below.

For newbies, please note that you first need to install the Greasemonkey addon on your Firefox browser and  then this script. After you have installed the script, when you open your compose editor, you will see that just after the ‘From:’ section, you will see a link called ‘Create Signature’ . When you open that link, you will see a window where you need to add the html code of whatever signature you have created.

If you don’t know how to create a html and want a quick solution, you can use a free online WYSIWYG editor like this one at Real Graphics. Create your signature, format it well, add the font colors and the picture. When you are through, click the toggle (< >) button and copy the html code from there.

Remember if you using pictures, be sure to fill the  description of the picture in the ‘Alternate Text’ in the upload window. Whatever you fill there will come out in the alt=”…” section of the html code. For example: alt=”StumbleUpon”.

This will ensure that the image description is shown whenever your email recipient can’t receive html emails. Just like in the screenshot above.

Do you know Linkedin is the smartest website in the world, followed by Facebook and Simple Spark? This is the ranking calculated from the cumulative IQ scores of their users. MySpace ranks 5th, Twitter is on 8th, and Google is on 9th.

Might be fun to calculate the IQ of your site as well. Head to IQ League where you can calculate your and your website’s IQ. You can take a simple 60 second test to determine your IQ level.

For you website, it is a little elaborate as your website readers are the real IQ of your site. You need place a link on your site and ask your readers to take their IQ tests. For each visitor, IQ League will remember were he/she came from and automatically add that visitor into your site’s data. Once you have 5 people taking the test from your site, IQ League will calculate IQ of your website. You can view the stats at http://www.iqleague.com/group/mysite-com

Is it a surprise that India is the smartest country in the world, followed by Netherlands and Serbia.

Web18 seems set to become the destination for your social bookmarking needs, video and music sharing, online travel portal, start up page, feed aggregation, and emails. Their latest venture, In.com, so apparently, is a huge effort in this direction. If the name, targeting all those who yearn for small email addresses, doesn’t strike you, then check out the features. These guys must have figuring out hard all this while on what kind of online sites tick well with the masses. And when they did, they assembled all of them together in one. So now you have your Digg, YouTube, Gmail, MakeMyTrip, Netscape, Zapak, and JukeboxAlive under one domain. That’s the story.

Do I like it? Definitely. In fact, I dare say this is finally a web 2.0 site from India after a long time that I honestly like. The design and look are neat. The music and video streaming is fast even on my dialup. The email service is with a whopping 10 GB space and I particularly find it quite thoughtful that they have introduced folders, made compose editor or for that matter every mail that you read open in a new tab. The inbox page is clean and they don’t insert any ad on the footers of emails that I send to my acquatntances, like our so big Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail do. Plus, In.com is a 2-letter good name (it has supposedly costed Web18 2 crores) to have an email with and being new, you can have all the mayank, sita, teena, and what not @in.com, instead of going for the tenna20008 type usernames.

In.com doesn’t have to worry about the news. They aggregate it from other sites. Maybe many people would prefer that instead of having one publication house to read the news from.

What the site lacks is the functionality in some areas. Site navigation can still be a pain. if you venture somewhere as when you are adding your feed or reading a feed, you cant find the go-back buttons so easily. You cannot move back to any part of the site from your inbox.

Would I prefer In.com over gmail? Unlikely , but it can definitely become my second best and I can close down my Rediffmail, Yahoomail, AOL, and Hotmail.

I hope they keep the site clean and don’t insert ads like there’s no tomorrow, something so characteristic of web18 sites.

Final words: This site is here to stay and so watch out, Indiatimes and Rediff. I cannot yet start comparing it feature by feature with the biggies like Gmail and YouTube, that won’t be fair, but I think web18 has got it right.

For users like us, all I can say is grab your ID before anybody else does (provide your mobile phone number not email for instant invite code on the site) and the ad campaign starts.