zParacha.com

Twitter provides an excellent platform to bloggers to promote their blogs. Because of its popularity several third-party tools and services were created to help Twitter users. Following is a list of the tools and services that I think make Twitter lot more easier and fun to use. More

 

To me the key to productivity lies in simplicity and avoiding distraction.
I am glad that last month I found out about Dark Room at DoshDosh.com.
Dark Room is a no-frill, minimalistic full-screen text editor. Its main purpose is to let you focus on your writing and kill all distractions that come with other full-featured editors. More

 

Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to see my Alexa rank became145,792. The night before it was some where in 233,00 range. My first thought was something is not right. So I went to Alexa.com and found out that they have changed their ranking system. And that new system is the cause of this new rating. Instead of ranking a website based only on the visits by the visitors who have Alexa toolbar installed, Alexa is now using “other sources” to determine website rank.

Alexa won’t provide any details on those other sources but this new ranking system will certainly helpnon-tech websites and I think the new ranking system will give a more accurate rank. Honestly, the older ranking system was skewed towards tech-heavy websites where most visitors would have the alexa toolbar installed.

So how did this new ranking system affect your Alexa rank? Do you even care about Alexa ranking at all?

 

Regular expressions provide a powerful and flexible way to search for phrases or characters but they are also confusing and many developers find them quite daunting. If you have been reluctant to learn regular expressions because of their apparent complexity, fear no more. More

 

In Java you can find maximum or minimum value in a numeric array by looping through the array. Here is the code to do that.

public static int getMaxValue(int[] numbers){
  int maxValue = numbers[0];
  for(int i=1;i < numbers.length;i++){
    if(numbers[i] > maxValue){
	  maxValue = numbers[i];
	}
  }
  return maxValue;
}

public static int getMinValue(int[] numbers){
  int minValue = numbers[0];
  for(int i=1;i<numbers.length;i++){
    if(numbers[i] < minValue){
	  minValue = numbers[i];
	}
  }
  return minValue;
}

These are very straight forward methods to get maximum or minimum value of an array but there is a more cleaner way to do this. More

 

Reading properties file in Java is much easier than you might have thought. Following example illustrates one simple way of reading properties from a properties file.

Let’s say we need to read from myConfig.properties file.




The properties file has following entries.

Directory = C:/prodFiles/
NumberOfFiles = 25
Extension = java

Here is the java code to read the values of these keys.

import java.util.Properties;
import java.io.*;
public class ReadValues{
   private static final String PROP_FILE="myConfig.properties";
   public void readPropertiesFile(){
       try{
  	     InputStream is = ReadValues.class.getResourceAsStream(PROP_FILE);
	     Properties prop = new Properties();
             prop.load(is);
	     String directory = prop.getProperty("Directory");
             String numberOfFiles = prop.getProperty("NumberOfFiles");
	     String  fileExtension = prop.getProperty("Extension");
             is.close();
	  /* code to use values read from the file*/
       }catch(Exception e){
         System.out.println("Failed to read from " + PROP_FILE + " file.");
       }
   }
  }

The code is quite simple and self explanatory. Let me know if you have any questions.

 

Want to find out how much does your blog worth? Just go to DNScoop.com and get your answer. DNScoop.com estimates the dollar value of an established domain name. Its estimation is based on several factors including

• Links pointing to the domain
• Popularity of the domain
• Age of the domain
• Pagerank of the domain
• Traffic to the domain

Although the estimated value is just that, an estimate, it can give you a good indicator of how much to expect if you sell your domain. This tool can also be used to estimate the price of established domain name you are interested in buying before you make an offer. Think of it as domain name’s blue book (like Kelly’s Blue book).
So go ahead and check your blog or URL’s worth.
Share with us what you think of this tool.