Aqeel Zafar

One of the great thing about Office software is, no matter how much you know about it, you can almost always find a feature you never knew existed. I am using OpenOffice.org for a very long time now (more than couple of years), though as my usage for office applications is quite low, I can be considered an average user for these applications.

Yesterday, while preparing for my exam, I was reading my handouts in OpenOffice Writer, when I noticed an “Edit File” button in toolbar, which I had never noticed before (though according to the screenshots I can see on web, it has been present since always). The button is used to switch between Edit and Read-only mode. If you are only reading a document and don’t want to edit it, switching to Read-only mode makes the experience more pleasent by removing formatting toolbars and improving overall page view.

Read-only Mode

Edit Mode

Edit file button can also be used to open a copy for editing, if you don’t have permissions to edit the file you are currently reading.

It’s not some huge feature, but if you read many documents / ebooks in OpenOffice.org, or want to edit a read-only file, it can be quite useful, and the fact that I (and few other people I know) didn’t know about such a simple feature made me write about it. It’s interesting how many people don’t know about most of the features present in such huge software. If you know any such feature which no one else seems to know, do share it with us!

Aqeel General, Linux openoffice

Yesterday I went to Lahore Bloggers Meetup, organized by Badar Khushnood, Google’s country consultant, IEEE Student branch of LUMS and CIO Pakistan.

Event started (I was 10 mins late, not sure if I missed something) with Badar Khushnood’s introduction to blogging and how to earn money from it. Main points of his presentation were:

• Follow your passion
• Find your audience
• And earn money from it.

It was followed by success stories of 17 year old student Haris from Sizzledcore.com – told by Badar as Haris’ mother didn’t allow him to attend the meetup due to his exam next day – and Saad Hamid from Sizlopedia.com. Then came Maryam Nasim, a housewife earning from freelancing using her site PinkWool. Last hour was dedicated to Question and Answer session, which was pretty interesting as well as informative.

End results were, earning money from blogging takes lots of patience and hard work. Write original content, and follow your passion. If you work hard you will eventually start getting some results, but there is no shortcut. Most importantly, don’t write because you want to earn money, write because you love to.

In the end, I finally got to meet many people I already knew on web, some more thoroughly than others. It was great to finally meet them all.

This meetup is also covered (in more detail) by Sohaib Athar, UzEE, Imran Jafri and TechMynd (the most detailed roundup yet).

Aqeel General, Personal bloggers, google, lbm08, lums, meetup

Wordpress is a great blogging platform, in my opinion, the best. And if there is some feature not present in it, you can always install a plugin to get that functionality. There are few plugins which I believe to be must have for any wordpress user. (though I know some people who may not agree with it )

Subscribe to Comments: Unless you have comments disabled on your blog, this is the most important plugin to have (and the reason why I am even writing this post). Nothing is more frustrating for a commenter than to keep visiting the site to check new comments. Subscribe to Comments, as the name implies, allows commenter to subscribe (or unsubscribe) to the comments on post, every new comment posted after that will be emailed to all subscribed commenter.

Unfortunately, many bloggers don’t add such functionality to their blog, if that’s the case, you should poke them to install the plugin, if they still don’t install it, you can always use some comment tracking service like coComment, which enables you to track your conversations on different blogs on a single page.

All in One SEO: I don’t like to spend my time optimizing sites for search engines, but the sad truth is if you site doesn’t appear (and rank well) in search engines, people won’t be able to find it easily. And no matter how good your content is, if people can’t find it, it’s useless. That is why I like All in One SEO. Even though it is not needed to appear in search engines, it is useful to increase search ranking by removing duplicates, adding meta tags etc. If you like you can use additional SEO plugins too, but if not you should have atleast something basic like this.

Wordpress Database Backup: Those who have never lost their data, usually does not feel the need to backup their data, that is, until they actually lose it. Even if you are sure nothing will go wrong, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Wordpress Database Backup allows you to backup your database without any hassle. Just select any additional table present in your database that you may wanto to backup (additional to core wordpress database) and press the button to back it up on server, download it or email it to yourself. You can also schedule regular backups emailed to you.

Wordpress Related Posts: Okay, this is not a must-have plugin, but I have still included it in this list as it’s one of those nice-to-have one. Wordpress Related Posts simply add links to automatically generated related posts, found using post tags, at the bottom of the post. This makes it easier for the user, who has come to a specific post from searchengine to find more posts according to his interest.

Let me know if there is any other plugin you consider to be must-have.

Aqeel General wordpress