How to pay Parking fees in Nairobi County using the New System in Kenya

Nairobi City County eparking  started officially on (1 September 2014). the system is expected to cut revenue losses by 30 per cent, with the county projecting a net earning of Sh5 billion from parking fees this year.

The new mode of payment will reduce the time motorists previously spent in obtaining parking tickets manually. Equally, it will boost revenue collection for the County since it will help seal loopholes that the County experienced through the mode of manual collection.

Here are  steps you need to follow to pay your parking fee in Nairobi county.motorist can either use the following methods of payment

1. USSD dial *217#,
2. on the street Nairobi County Agent or Cooperative Bank,
3. Android mobile application “Nairobi City County” (available on Google play), and
4. Nairobi City County website: http://epayments.nairobi,go.ke   Once a transaction is complete, an SMS confirming the payment will be sent to the customer who can also print the receipt at will.

1.USSD

First time user

1. Dial *217#
2. Signup for an account
3. Top up with Mpesa and Airtel money.

Returning users(already registered)

1. Dial *217# and select parking
2. Enter vehicle registration number
3. Select parking duration> Daily
4. Select parking zone
5. Select vehicle type ( private, Lorry, canter, trailer, minibus,Bus)
6. Confirm parking fees and enter pin
7. You will receive SMS Confirmation

2.Mobile applications

(for those who have android phones)
First time users

1. Install Nairobi city county app from Google play
2. Launch Nairobi city county App and Signup.
3. Top up with visa,MasterCard,ken switch,Mpesa,Airtel money,Orange money and Yucash.

Returning users(already registered)

1. Launch Nairobi city county app and sign in
2. Select daily parking
3. Select parking zone and vehicle type.
4. Enter vehicle registration number
5. Confirm parking fee details.
6. Enter your pin and complete details
7. You will Receive a confirmation SMS.

3.Website (Nairobi City County Online portal)

1. Visit http://epayments.nairobi,go.ke
2. Signup for an account name
3. Top up with Visa,MasterCard,Mpesa,Airtel money,orange money,or Yucash

Returning users:(already registered)

1. Visit: http://epayments.nairobi,go.ke and sign in
2. Select daily parking
3. Select parking zone and vehicle type
4. Enter vehicle registration number
5. Confirm parking fees details
6. Enter your pin and complete payment
7. You will receive confirmation sms. In addition, when you use the online option, you have the option of printing a ticket.

Things to note:*USSD operator charges apply
Safaricom  5/= Airtelmoney  3/=
USSD)Unstructured Supplementary Services Data

you can print this Guide here

3 ways to check your kenya power bill - KPLC

The Kenya power (K.P.L.C) unveiled variety of ways to check  electricity bill called (the E-bill) for its customers to be able to access services more efficiently. This is in its quest to maintain high standards of customer service and to ensure that bill are paid  in good time and through various media.you can now check your  monthly bill in 3 easy ways below

• Check your E-bill via SMS Service:

This service allows you to query your electricity account balance and bill due date    using your mobile phone. in the steps as follow:

1. Open a new SMS message.
2. Type the first part of your account number in the message field. For example, if your account number is 998877-01, just type 998877.
3. Send the message to 95551.
4. In a few seconds you will receive an automatic reply with your account balance details. This service works for Kenyan networks. this service is charged at Kshs. 5/- above the normal SMS rates.

Check your E-bill via e-mail Service:

• This service enables you to check your electricity account balance and bill due date via e-mail    follow the steps

1. Open a new e-mail message.
2. Type the first part of your account number in the subject field. For example, if your account number is 998877-01, just type 998877.
3. Email the blank message to bill@kplc.co.ke Within a few minutes you will receive an automatic reply with your account balance details and payment due date.

• Check your E-bill via website:

• This service enables you to check your electricity account balance and bill due date via the KPLC Website located here just type your kplc account number eg(1234567-01)and click submit.

http://contactcentre.kplc.co.ke/KEIOPEN/index.xhtml

NB:make sure that you key in the correct account number and follow the procedure of sending the message in order to get a positive response. 

Seven Precious Tips To Help You Get Better At Video Editing

These following Video editing tips will make you realise how small things can make big difference when using some of best free video editing software, we have listed before. Video editing is more of an art and perspective of a viewer is always important. Here you will find seven of those precious tips that will help you get better at video editing.


With increasing craze of social networking websites, making of home videos and editing them afterwards has gone so popular that everybody wants to learn the art of video editing. Observing videos from movies of big production companies will also help you understand what needs to be done. So keep you eyes open next time you watch a movie in theatre and see what techniques video editors use lately.

Now just see what we have here for video editors today. Hope you like it.

Seven Life Saving Video Editing Tips

1. Don’t Jump. A jump cut occurs when you have two consecutive shots with the exact same camera set up, but a difference in the subject. It happens most often when editing interviews, and you want to cut out some words or phrases that the subject says. If you leave the remaining shots side-by-side, the audience will be jarred by the slight repositioning of the subject. Instead, cover the cut with some b-roll, or use a fade. via
2. Choose the best camera angles for each moment. As you look at your footage, your goal is to balance speaker intent with the expectations of the web audience. Think about where the audience would want to be looking at different points during the talk if they were in the room — that will help you select the best camera angle to reconstruct each moment. By thinking about that, you are also choosing angles that help the speaker better express his or her story. via
3. Work organized. If you are making a longer movie, prepare a storyboard up first. Name your clips in your video editing software. Use the same names as you use in your storyboard. If you don’t name your clips you will end up with a heap of files and you will lose a lot of time trying to find the footage that you are looking for. via
4. Color Correction & Effects. There was a time not so long ago when video color correction was a luxury that was only accessible to top-of-the-totem pole television and video producers. Everyone else did their best to capture the best color they could in the camera. This meant setting the camera’s exposure properly for the scene, and occasionally shooting through physical lens filters to add color to a sunset or to simulate the darkness of night.These days, color correction is accessible to anyone who has a decent video editing software app like Adobe Premiere, Apple Final Cut Pro or Sony Vegas. As a result, video editors have discovered that almost every clip can benefit from at least a small amount of color correction. Whether you’re crushing the blacks, boosting the mids or honing the highlights, color correction is something that you should do, and something that is best done in your video editing software application. via
5. More powerful Hard disks. Most modern computers are powerful enough to run some sort of video editing application, but not all hard discs are suited to the task.  Try to ensure that your computer has discs which run at 7200 rpm rather than the more common 5400 rpm ones. via
6. Cut tight – The best editing approach is to cut tight scenes without becoming too “cutty”. This means taking out unnecessary pauses between actors’ delivery of dialogue lines. Sometimes it mean tightening the gaps within dialogue sentences through the use of carefully placed cutaways. It may also mean losing redundant lines of dialogue, after the director has reviewed your cut.In general, my approach is to start with a cut that is precise from the beginning as opposed to cutting the first pass sloppy and then whittling down from there. Most basic films don’t support audience attentions for lengths over 90 minutes. If your first cut comes in at about 100 minutes, then you can typically get to 90 through further tightening of the cut. On the other hand, if it clocks in at two hours or longer, then major surgery is going to be needed. via

Top Android Tips Tricks Hacks and Secrets

Android users has crossed iPhone users a way back, plus the app store also has increased significantly. With increase in smartphones everyday, mobile devices has become an essential part of our lives.

Today we are featuring some of best and top Android tips tricks hacks and secrets that we found useful. This is another must visit article for android lovers and users, I am sure you must have known some of these till now, but not all. With new advancement and newer versions of Android we will be updating this list, so bookmark it for future reference.

1. SET UP A PASSCODE

A passcode is critical to have. Think about it: Your phone stores a treasure trove of personal information that thieves would LOVE to steal from you. You don’t want to make things easy for them.

That’s why you don’t want just any passcode, you want a strong one. Users who create 4-digit passcodes such as 0000 and 1234 might as well turn the security feature off.
To set up a passcode go to Settings>>Lock Screen and tap “Screen lock.” In other versions of Android, it’s under Security>>Location and Security>>Screen Lock.

Here you can choose to set a pin number, password or even a connect-the-dots pattern. On newer versions of Android, you also have the option for “Face” or “Face and voice” unlock.
I’d give those a pass. They’re are cool, but not really all that secure.

You’ll want to make sure in your settings that your phone is set to lock automatically after just a few minutes. Letting it sit for hours before it locks kind of defeats the purpose.

2. Disable App Notifications

Bugged by annoying app notifications that just keep coming? If you don’t know already, these app notifications also drain your phone’s battery. If you want to turn them off, and you are on Jelly Bean 4.1 and above, here’s how:

1. On any of your unwanted notifications in your notification bar, long press on the notification for a message box to appear.
2. Tap on App Info > Untick Show Notifications > OK.

3. Smart lock

You can unlock your device with a bluetooth or NFC enabled device like your car stereo, your smartwatch or even an NFC sticker. If your handset or tablet is near your bluetooth enabled device, it will recognise that it’s a trusted source and unlock automatically. To turn this on, go to Settings > Security > Smart Lock and add your bluetooth device.

4. Use power saving mode

Most Android device manufacturers have added some form of power-saving mode. You can automatically hobble your phone’s features or shut down specific apps when your battery dwindles below a predetermined level.
Stock Android only offers battery stats for now, but Android Lollipop has a battery saver option built in (which means most phones running Android 5 will too in the future). If you can’t find a power saving option, check out an app like Juice Defender.

5. Maintain it like a PC to improve performance.

While Android can do much more than iOS, it requires more horsepower and user finagling to run smoothly. You can’t do much about upgrading your smartphone or tablet’s processor (barring a new purchase), but youcan take the time to optimize what you have. Much like a PC, Android devices need to be tuned up now and again. There are several apps that can assist you in this, like All-In-One Toolbox. Even without that app though, you can do stuff like deleting old, unused apps, removing widgets you don’t use, and ending unnecessary processes on your own. To do that last one (the concept of which is much like ending processes through control + alt + delete on a PC), go to settings, apps, running, and manually end anything taking up too much RAM memory.

6. Make sure you set up Google Now.

Think of Google Now as your personal assistant. Open the Google app, tap Get Google Now, and then fill in your preferences. You can tell Google Now your favorite stocks, sports teams, and more to get personalized notifications. You can also tell Google Now your preferred mode of transportation for Google Maps.

7. Use Adobe Flash “on demand”

You’ve probably heard that Adobe Flash is available for Android devices. Maybe that’s even a big part of the reason you’ve chosen an Android phone — you want the full web experience on your smartphone. While Flash on a mobile device isn’t the big resource-eating monster some make it out to be, it does make web browsing a little bit slower. And let’s face it — a lot of Flash content is punching monkeys to win a prize-style ads, and often we aren’t interested in seeing those.

That’s an easy fix. Open your web browser, and tap the menu key. Look through the menu until you find the settings. In the browser settings you’ll find an entry titled “Enable plug-ins.” Tap it, and choose On demand. This way once a web page is loaded, you’ll be able to tap any Flash content to view it, and ignore any you don’t want to view.

8. Disable Mobile Data

Whenever you don’t need to stay connected, disabling the Mobile Data can help keep your smartphone battery from draining too quickly. Turning off mobile data is as easy as:

1. Going to Settings > Data Usage.
2. Disable Mobile data by toggling the setting from ON to OFF.

9. INSTALL ANTIVIRUS APPS

With just a few clicks here and there, hackers can easily get into your computer and steal your personal information. The same is true of your smartphone. One of the first things you want to do with your new Android is to make sure it is secure.

10. Screen pinning

It’s possible to pin an app to the homescreen which can’t be minimised or removed from the screen. This is particularly handy if you’re prone to accidentally pressing the home or back key. To turn it on, go to Settings > Security and toggle “screen pinning” on. Press the overview softkey (the square icon next to the right of the home key at the bottom of the screen) and select the pin icon on the bottom right of the open applications. To turn it off, hold down the back and overview soft keys.

11. Automate your phone

You don’t need your phone syncing away through the night, so why not introduce a bedtime routine that automatically silences it and kills your data and Wi-Fi connections? With apps like AutomateIt and Tasker you can also automatically turn things on and off based on triggers and rules you define.

12. Take advantage Android’s customization potential.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used someone’s Android phone, only to see that they’ve configured it so that their homescreen is full of app icons, much like an iPhone. That’s great and all, but if you want streamlined and simple, Apple’s products do it better. You might as well go crazy if you have an Android device! This means using your homescreen for cool widgets, search bars, etc. To find all the widgets you have, go to your apps page, then select widgets at the top. You might be surprised by how many interesting options are available to you…

13. If you still run out of juice, get an extra battery.

All phones die eventually, and you may not always be near an outlet to charge it. Since many Android phones come with removeable backs, you can replace the battery with a fresh one when you’re on the go.

14. Set your Wifi sleep policy to never

This one sounds counter-productive, but trust us here. If you have access to Wifi throughout the day, and use it often, this will help save your battery. Use this tip with a Wifi toggle widget (see the homescreen section below) and it’s easy.

On your phone, tap the menu button and choose settings. From the list, choose Wireless & networks, then “Wi-Fi settings”. this is where you can choose what Wifi access point to connect to, but there’s also some options hidden. To see them just tap the menu button again and choose advanced. What we’re interested in is “Wi-Fi sleep policy”. Tap it, and set it to “Never”. What this does is keep your phone from switching to the 3G or 4G radio when the screen shuts off. Those radios need more power than the Wifi radio does, so any time we can keep Wifi alive we’re saving energy. Remember to put a shortcut or widget on your homescreen to quickly turn Wifi on and off for those times when you’re not around an access point. This will keep your phone from scanning for available networks.

15. Set Mobile Data Limit

Want to keep track of how far your usage is from your monthly mobile data limit? If you have ICS and above, there is a feature which lets you keep track of how much of the quota you have left.

1. Head over to Settings > Data Usage.
2. Set your data limit by dragging the orange line to reflect your monthly quota.
3. Set your data usage cycle based on when your “month” starts and ends, and you’re done.

You will be alerted once you hit the limit you have set. Note that the tracked data usage of your phone may vary slightly than your carrier’s tracking.

16. SAVE BATTERY LIFE

Android gadgets aren’t exactly known for their stellar battery life, but there are things you can do to make it last.
First, your screen hogs a lot of juice, but it doesn’t have to.

By default your screen is set to automatically change the brightness depending how long it’s been active and the surrounding lighting level. On some gadgets this works well and on some it doesn’t.
You can manually set the brightness by going to Settings>>Display>>Brightness. Adjust the slider so your screen is visible, but not overly bright.

In the same area, Settings>>Display, you’ll see the “Screen timeout” option. This shuts off your screen after you don’t use your gadget for a certain amount of time. Set it to a minute or two and watch your battery life improve.

You can look at other settings in the Display area as well. For example, “Smart screen” keeps the screen on as long as you’re looking at it. This is cool, but it does use a bit more battery life to detect your face.

Other things aside from the display can drain your battery – such as apps. Android’s built-in battery monitor, which you can find at Settings>>Battery, is OK, but it could be better.
The Battery Saver app has dozens of power-saving tips and tricks, like shutting off power-hogging programs. It will also display the amount of time that your battery has left and tell you which apps take up the most power. This way, you can delete the power-hungry apps you don’t need or use.

17. Ambient display

Google has ported Motorola’s popular ambient display feature from the Moto range to Android Lollipop, although it won’t work on every device running 5.0. Ambient display means that when you pick up your device it will partially wake and show your notifications. To turn this on, head to Settings > Display  and toggle “Ambient display” on.

18. Uninstall or disable apps

Delve into Settings > Apps and flick over to the ‘All’ tab to find a complete list of your apps. Anything there that you don’t use is a candidate for the uninstall pile. In their infinite wisdom, carriers and manufacturers sometimes block you from uninstalling their apps, but you usually have the option to disable them instead and it’s worth doing.

19. Ensure your device gets back to you if you lose it.

There’s no surefire way to guarantee you’ll ever see your phone or tablet again if you leave it out in public by accident. That being said, you can improve the chances of it being returned to you by editing your security settings. Go to settings, then security, then owner info. There you’ll see a little box where you can type in contact information that will show up on your lockscreen. This will make it easier for a good Samaritan to return a lost device to its rightful owner.

20. Make sure you’re signed in to your Google account in Chrome.

If you sign in to your Google account in the Chrome browser on your phone, your bookmarks and preferences will automatically carry over.

21. Set up your Homescreens

You’ve got several of them, and with Android you can really put them to good use.  Besides choosing a picture or a live wallpaper app for your background, there’s all sorts of ways to put information and tools right at your fingertips with widgets, shortcuts, and folders.

Widgets are a favorite of many, including yours truly.  You can find one for just about anything, ranging from instant weather information to rolling dice.  While many are important tools, a lot of them are just plain fun, too.  A good number of them will come on your phone, and the Android Market is full of many, many more.

Some apps will add items to the Shortcuts menu, and give you a one-click way to perform the associated tasks.  Same goes for folders; included with your phone are a few live folders for contacts and files, but apps like Facebook can give you new ones.  Of course, you can also create a regular folder to store app shortcuts in.

To have a look at what’s included with your phone as well as anything you’ve downloaded, just long press on a blank area of your home screen.  Choose the option from the list, and drop it somewhere it fits.  If you change your mind, Just press and hold on the widget, shortcut, or folder and in a second or two you’ll be able to drag it down to the trash can.  This doesn’t delete the app from your phone, it just removes the content from your home screen.

22. Add Multiple Google Accounts

You need a Google account to use an Android phone but did you know you can choose to run more than one Google account on your Android device. This is convenient if you use more than one account for several of your Google services. To add multiple Google accounts:

1. Go to Settings > Add account.
2. Select Google and setup your New or Existing Google account.
3. Once added, choose what you want to sync with the account.

Repeat all the steps above if you want to add more accounts.

23. TAKE A SCREENSHOT

It’s one of the simplest things to do on a computer: Just tap the Print Screen button to take a screenshot. It’s just that easy on your smartphone, too! But you’d be surprised how many people don’t know how to do this simple trick. It’s as easy as pressing the power button and volume down button at the same time.

Try it! The screenshot will appear in your photo album.

24. Turn on 5.1 surround sound

Up your cinematic experience by turning on the built-in 5.1 surround sound in Lollipop. To turn the feature on, head to the Google Play Movies app > Settings and select surround sound. There’s even a surround sound demo option if you want to test it out.

25. Hibernate or freeze apps

You may also consider installing Greenify to get a good look at what is running and automatically hibernate apps that you aren’t using, so they aren’t eating system resources unless you start them up.
You’ll need to root your device to really take full advantage, which is simple enough but will take a little time to manage if you’re new to the process. If you do decide to root then you may also consider Titanium Backup Pro for freezing unwanted apps.

26. Make your phone harder to break into than Fort Knox.

Reader warning: don’t do this one unless you’re really afraid of your phone’s information being stolen. To permanently encrypt your Android device, go to settings, security, encryption, and tap “Encrypt phone.” You’ll then be required to create a pin, which you’ll enter every time you turn your phone on (in order to decrypt it). This is like the unlock code on an iPhone, except way more drastic. Usually it will take about an hour for your device to encrypt itself, and it can only be undone through a factory reset. Only do this if you have sensitive information, or want your phone to be as secure as humanly possible. Be aware that encrypting your information will slow down how fast you can access it.

27. Organize apps into folders to keep your home screens neat.

You can create folders to divide your apps into different categories. This reduces clutter, and also makes it easier to find what you need fast. To create a folder, press and hold down on an app and drag it up to the “Create Folder” option on the upper-left-hand side. On some phones you can also drag and drop an app on top of another to create a folder, just like you can in iOS.

28. Move apps to your SD card

Since version Android 2.2 (Froyo), Android has included the ability to move apps from your device’s internal application storage to the microSD card you’ve placed in your phone.  Not all apps can be moved — the developer has to code them properly and things like widgets, live wallpapers and anything else that needs to run as soon as the phone boots up shouldn’t be moved to the SD card at all.  But things like games and other big apps will usually move right over, leaving only a small bit of information behind.

Moving them is easy as pie.  From your homescreen, press the menu button, then choose settings.  From the settings menu, choose applications, then Manage applications.  Find the app you want to move in the list, and tap it’s list entry.  If it can be moved, you’ll see a button that says “Move to USB storage”.  Press it, and go!

29. Disable Automatic App Updates

Prefer to read through app permissions and manually pick which app updates to adopt? You can, but first you need to disable your automatic app updates. Here are the steps:

1. Open Play Store and head over to Settings.
2. Tap on Auto-update apps.
3. Choose Do not auto-update apps.

If you want to enable the auto updates, follow the same path and choose Auto-update appsat any time or via Wi-Fi (available for certain Android devices only).

30. MONITOR YOUR DATA

With most cellular providers, data plans are mandatory with the purchase of any smartphone. Unfortunately, data plans cost quite a bit and don’t get you much data.
That makes it easy to accidentally go over, which means huge overage fees. Android helps you track your data use and set limits before you go over.
Go to Settings>>Data Usage. You can set your billing cycle, data limits and when you get alerts. You can also see how much data you typically use and which apps use the most. That can help you track down data hogs to remove.
If you hit the Settings button in Data Usage you can turn on the “Restrict Background Services” option. This forces the gadget to do updates over Wi-Fi instead of cellular.

31. Screencasting

Screencasting transmits your device’s screen to your TV via your Chromecast. It’s a bit annoying that you need a Chromecast for it to work when other manufacturers offer direct-to-TV transmission, but if you do have the dongle, it’s quite useful. To beam your homescreen over to your TV, simply swipe down the notifications bar and select “Cast screen”.

32. Underclocking the CPU

If you’re willing to root then you can sweep away bloatware and get an optimized custom ROM, you can even download an app like SetCPU for Root Users and tell your processor to run at a slower speed in order to use less power. It’s an extreme step, but it definitely has an impact.

33. Test out different launchers.

If you have an Android phone, you can use these things called “launchers,” which are essentially apps that allow you to make drastic edits to your device’s homescreen. The most popular one is probably Nova Launcher, which will allow you to change just about everything you can think of. There are several other launchers out there too, and you can play around with them until you find one you like. Often, they can make your phone perform faster than they would with the clunky interfaces that companies like Samsung and HTC give them.

34. Use a third-party keyboard app.

Sometimes it’s easier to swipe than it is to type. You aren’t restricted to Google’s keyboard in Android — there are plenty of keyboard apps to choose from in the Google Play store. Swype, for instance, lets you type by swiping to each letter rather than typing.

35. Copying ringtones to the right place, so they appear in the ringtone menu

Customizing your Android phone with your favorite sounds is easy!  Download a few in either .mp3 or .ogg format and save them on your computer.  Connect your phone to your computer and look for a folder named media.  If you don’t have one, that’s not a problem — just create it.  Inside the media folder, you can place your sounds in one of three places; notifications, ringtones, or alarms.  Again, if those aren’t there just create them.  Decide what your sound would be best suited as, and place it in the correct folder.  That’s all there is to it.  Unplug your phone following the direction in the link above, and you’ll find your custom sounds bundled in the menu with the built-in sounds, ready to use.

36. How To Check For Android System Updates

For Android users that are using stock ROM, you may want to look for new updates to your system. To check for updates:

1. Go to Settings > About phone/tablet.
2. Tap on System updates.
3. Tap Check now to look for system updates.

37. Guest mode

It’s now possible to add multiple accounts to Lollipop, including guest accounts for temporary use. This new security feature means that you can avoid someone viewing your personal emails or texts, and you won’t have to worry about your configurations being messed about it with either.
There are three types of accounts that you can set up on Lollipop. First the user account, which has full access to settings and apps. Second there’s the guest account, which happen in sessions and anything done in this time isn’t recorded or saved. Finally, there’s the profile account, which lets the main user restrict how the device is used – disabling certain apps for example. You can quickly add new accounts by touching the profile icon in the top right-hand corner of the lock-screen, or by going into the main settings menu. If you want to add restrictions and manage each account, go to the main settings menu and select ‘Users’.

38. Automatically send certain contacts straight to your voicemail.

There are certain people you just don’t feel like dealing with over the phone. Luckily, you can send them straight to your voicemail with little to no effort. Tap that person’s name in your contact list, tap the three boxes in the upper-right-hand side of the screen, and press “Add to reject list.”

39. Tap to wake

No longer will you have to press the power button to wake your device. Now, all you need to do is simply double tap the home screen and the lock-screen will appear.

40. Access the hidden developer options.

To really get a sense of how customizable Android is, activate the “secret” developer mode. Go to settings, about phone, and click on “build number” seven times. Your device should tell you something like “you’re now a developer!” It’s all very Easter Egg-esque. Once that’s done, return to system settings, and with luck you’ll now see something entitled “developer options.” One of the cool things you can do here is reduce the time it takes for animations to execute, thereby making your phone feel snappier. Do this by going to the “animation scale” options and turning them off (you can make them take longer too, but I don’t see why you would want that). There are plenty of other sweet customizations you can do on this page, but don’t go too crazy unless you know what you’re doing.
So, how did you find these top android tips, tricks, hacks and secrets. Would you like to add anything more, if yes please leave your comments below and we will surely add if found suitable.

Sources – hongkiat, komando, forbes, techradar, lifehack, businessinsider, androidcentral.

Download your WhatsApp Contacts

You can now use the WhatsApp messenger on your Mac or Windows PC provided you have the WhatsApp app running on a mobile phone that is not an iPhone. Go to web.whatsapp.com on your desktop, scan the QR code on the screen with WhatsApp on your phone and you can instantly send or receive messages to any of your WhatsApp contacts from the computer.

WhatsApp supports desktop notifications in Google Chrome so you can read your messages even if the WhatsApp web app is open in some background tab. The other benefit is that you can send pictures from your desktop or the DSLR SD card without having to transfer the bulky file to your mobile. There’s no support for sending audio or video files though. The other limitation is that your mobile phone should be connected to the Internet for you to use WhatsApp on the web.



If you right-click on the profile picture of any WhatsApp contact, you’ll get a link that looks something like this;
https://web.whatsapp.com/pp?t=s&u=919760008596

Here the blue string represents the phone number of your contact with the country code while the red string (t=s) represents the size of the picture thumbnail. If you replace t=s in the URL with t=l, you’ll get the bigger version profile picture of that contact.

Save your WhatsApp Address Book Locally

The WhatsApp app on your mobile phone does not offer an option to download the profile images nor is there an option to export your WhatsApp Contacts for uploading into other address books like Google Contacts or LinkedIn. However, the contacts data can be easily extracted, or rather scraped, from the WhatsApp website in less than a minute with the help of a bookmarklet.

WhatsApp Contacts

To get started, drag the WhatsApp bookmarklet to the toolbar of your Google Chrome. Next open web.whatsapp.com on your computer, wait for the website to load and then click the bookmarklet in the toolbar. You can either choose to have a CSV list of your WhatsApp contacts or create a print-ready addressbook of your WhatsApp network. This will have the high-res profiles pictures, the names and the telephone numbers of all your contacts.

The WhatsApp image URLs are session-based and thus cannot be shared. You can however press Ctrl+S or Cmd+S on Mac to download the entire web page created by the bookmarklet and it will permanently download the profile pictures to your computer as well.


The WhatsApps app UI itself is written in React, a JS library from Facebook. If you are curious to know how the bookmarklet works, see the annotated version.

Find How Many “Eggs” Follow you on Twitter

When you join Twitter, it sets your profile picture as a colored egg but for people to take you seriously, you replace that egg with your face. This is the first rule of the Twitter book but some users aren’t paying attention. Maybe they are too lazy to change the avatar, maybe they want to stay anonymous or maybe they are bots and fake users created by spammers who “sell” Twitter followers.

This week, I set out to count the number of eggs that follow me on Twitter and results were surprising. It turned that out of the 53k users who follow me, around 15% of the followers have eggs as their avatars. Most of these “egg” profiles have never tweeted, their Twitter bio is empty and they have followers in single digit. All big hints that these profile are boosting your “follower” count but not actually reading your tweets.

You can click here to see the full Twitter eggs report.

Find & Remove your Egg Followers from Twitter

If you are curious to know how many eggs follow you on Twitter, here’s a Google Script that will help. It will read your Twitter followers and if any of them have eggs as a profile picture, it will log an entry into a Google Spreadsheet. Here’s how you can get started:

1.  If you are getting an error that “there are currently too many people viewing this file” error, try this mirror.
2. Replace technewsyetu@blogspot.com with your own email address (the report will be sent here) and technewsyetu with your own Twitter handle.
3. Go to the Run menu and choose Step 1 – Authorize. The script will ask for certain permissions and you need to choose Accept  at the authorization prompt.
4. Open the Run menu again and choose Step 2 – Run to initialize the script. That’s it.

You can now close the Google Script window. The script runs in the background and it will send you an email once it has extracted all the eggs from your Twitter account. This is an open-source Google script that uses the Twitter API to get your followers.


Thou shalt not have an egg image as your default avatar in Twitter.

Wondering how the script finds the egg profiles? No, it doesn’t do any magic image matching, it merely looks at the URL of the Twitter avatar – it there’s the word “default” in the URL, it means the underlying image is that of an egg. Simple.

There’s a Game Hidden inside your Google Chrome, It works on Android too!

Google Chrome users are probably familiar with the T-Rex dinosaur that shows up when your computer is not connected to the Internet. The T-rex had short arms and therefore lot of things were out of its reach. Chrome, like that dinosaur, too is having trouble reaching the Internet.

What’s even more interesting is that the offline dinosaur in Chrome is also a game. Press the space bar to activate and your Chrome tab will quickly turn into a moderately addictive game. The T-Rex will run and your mission is to prevent it from bumping into the saguaros.

The game is written in JavaScript and you can find the complete source code in the Chromium repository. Thanks Codepo8 for the discovery.


And it’s not just about Chrome for desktop, the dinosaur game is available in Chrome for Android as well. Switch to airplane mode and give it a shot. The only difference is that instead of the space bar, you need to tap on the screen to jump / fly the dinosaur.

Lost your Phone? You Can Still Retrieve its IMEI Number

Your mobile phone has a globally unique number associated with it, called the IMEI number, that uniquely identifies your device within the mobile network. If your phone gets lost or is stolen, you would need to provide this IMEI number to the law enforcement agencies and the telecom operator for them to blacklist your device and prevent anyone else from using your phone on their wireless network.

As you probably know, it is relatively easy to find the IMEI number of your mobile phone. While there are apps that will help you retrieve this number with a tap, you don’t really need one. Just open the phone dialer, call *#06# and the IMEI number will be displayed on the phone’s screen. Alternatively, you can open device Settings – About Phone – Status and long-press the IMEI number to copy it to the clipboard.

If you have however lost your phone but did not record the IMEI number beforehand, you can still retrieve the number from your Google Account.

Just go to google.com/settings, sign-in with your Google account and expand the Android tab. Here you will see of all Android devices that are connected to your Google Account and it will list the IMEI number of your phone as well.


In the case of iPhone, the IMEI number is printed on the box itself. And if nothing works, trace the phone’s receipt – the vendor may have written the IMEI number o the phone on it at the time of sale.

How to Migrate your Blog from Blogger to WordPress

Your blog (abc.blogspot.com) is hosted on Blogger and you would now like to move the blog from Blogger to WordPress (self-hosted) with a personal domain name like abc.com. What is the easiest way to switch from Blogger to WordPress without losing Google search traffic, page rank and your existing feed subscribers?

WordPress provides an easy one-click option for importing blog posts and reader comments from Blogger into a new WordPress blog but there’s more to migration than just transferring content. For instance:

• Some of your articles on the old blogspot blog could be ranking very high in search engines for certain keywords but once you move these articles to a new WordPress blog, you will lose the organic search traffic since the permalinks (or URLs) of your blog posts will change.
• People come to your blog through search engines, browser bookmarks and referrals from other web sites that have linked to your blog pages. If you migrate to WordPress, Blogger will not automatically redirect these visitors to your new website.
• When you switch from Blogger to WordPress, existing readers who are subscribed to your Blogger RSS Feed may be lost forever if they don’t manually subscribe to your new WordPress feed address (and most won’t).

The Importer tool available inside WordPress will only transfer content from Blogger to WordPress but if would also like to take care of the various issues listed above, follow this step-by-step tutorial. It takes less than 5 minutes to complete and you’ll also be able to transfer all the Google Juice from the old blogspot.com address to your new WordPress blog.

How to Move your Blog from Blogger to WordPress

Before you start the migration, it may be a good idea to backup your Blogger blog including the XML template, blog posts and comments just to be on the safe side.
If you need assistance with the Blogger to WordPress migration, please get in touch with me using the contact form at ctrlq.org. This is a paid option.

1. Register a new web domain, buy web hosting and install WordPress on your new domain.
2. Open your WordPress Admin Dashboard and under Tools -> Import, select the Blogger option. Authorize WordPress to access your Blogger Account, select your blogspot.com blog and within minutes, all your Blogger blog posts and comments will be available on the new WordPress site.
3. Open the WordPress themes editor under Appearance -> Editor and open the functions.php file for editing. Most WordPress themes include a functions.php file or you can upload it manually into your WordPress themes folder through cPanel or FTP. Copy-paste the following snippet of code inside your functions.php file (at the beginning of the file) and click the “Update File” button to save your changes.

<?php
 
function labnol_blogger_query_vars_filter( $vars ) {
  $vars[] = "blogger";
  return $vars;
}
 
add_filter('query_vars', 'labnol_blogger_query_vars_filter');
 
function labnol_blogger_template_redirect() {
  global $wp_query;
  $blogger = $wp_query->query_vars['blogger'];
  if ( isset ( $blogger ) ) {
    wp_redirect( labnol_get_wordpress_url ( $blogger ) , 301 );
    exit;
  }
}
 
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'labnol_blogger_template_redirect' );
 
function labnol_get_wordpress_url($blogger) {
  if ( preg_match('@^(?:https?://)?([^/]+)(.*)@i', $blogger, $url_parts) ) {
    $query = new WP_Query ( 
      array ( "meta_key" => "blogger_permalink", "meta_value" => $url_parts[2] ) );
    if ($query->have_posts()) { 
      $query->the_post();
      $url = get_permalink(); 
    } 
    wp_reset_postdata(); 
  } 
  return $url ? $url : home_url();
}
 
?>

4. Open your Blogger Dashboard and choose Templates. Scroll down the templates page and choose the “Revert to Classic Templates” option to switch from the XML-based Blogger templates to the classic Tag based templates.
5. Copy-paste the following snippet into your Blogger template editor but before you do that, replace all occurrences of labnol.org with your new WordPress site URL. For instance, if your WordPress site is located at example.com, replace labnol.org with example.com and paste the modified snippet in the Blogger template editor. Save the changes.

<html>
 <head>
  <title><$BlogPageTitle$></title>
  <script>
    <MainOrArchivePage>
      window.location.href="http://labnol.org/"
    </MainOrArchivePage>
    <Blogger><ItemPage>
      window.location.href="http://labnol.org/?blogger=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>"
    </ItemPage></Blogger>
  </script>
   <MainPage>
    <link rel="canonical" href="http://labnol.org/" />
   </MainPage>
   <Blogger>
    <ItemPage>
     <link rel="canonical" href="http://labnol.org/?blogger=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" />
    </ItemPage>
   </Blogger>
 </head>
 <body>
  <MainOrArchivePage>
    <h1><a href="http://labnol.org/"><$BlogTitle$></a></h1>
  </MainOrArchivePage>
  <Blogger>
   <ItemPage>
    <h1><a href="http://labnol.org/?blogger=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>"><$BlogItemTitle$></a></h1>
    <$BlogItemBody$>
   </ItemPage>
  </Blogger>
 </body>
</html>

We are almost done. Open any page on your old Blogger blog and it should redirect you to the corresponding WordPress page. We are using a permanent 301 redirect on the WordPress side and therefore all the Google Juice and PageRank should pass to your new WordPress pages.

The above method works for regular blogspot.com URLs and also country-specific Blogger domains like blogspot.co.uk, blogspot.com.au or blogspot.in.

The Blogger Import tool moves only posts and comments from Blogger to WordPress but not images. And that should be fine because the image URLs in your imported WordPress posts are still pointing to blogspot.com (where the images were originally hosted) and therefore nothing would break.

Switch RSS Feed from Blogger to WordPress

When you move from Blogger to WordPress, the URL of your RSS feed will change as well. Go to Blogger -> Settings -> Other and choose Post Feed Redirect URL under Site Feed. Here you can type the web address of your new WordPress RSS feed here and the existing RSS subscriber will automatically move to your new feed.
If you are using FeedBurner, just replace the source from Blogger RSS feed to your new WordPress feed.

Migration to WordPress Complete – What Next?

Now that your new WordPress site is up and running with all the old Blogger posts, here are a few important things you should do:

1. Add your new WordPress site to Google Webmaster, verify the site ownership and and also submit a XML Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site.
2. Follow these WordPress optimization tips, install some of the essential plug-ins and pay special attention to improving the security of your WordPress site.
3. Follow these blogging tips and take your blog to the next level. 

How to Return Apps Purchased from the Mac App Store

If you have accidentally purchased an app from the Mac App Store, or if the app isn’t functioning as expected, or if you are experiencing technical issues with an app, you can request a refund from Apple. Not every app downloaded from the Mac App store may be eligible for refunds but for others, if you have a good case, you can return the app and your credit card charges will be reversed.

For some reason, the procedure for returning apps to the Mac App Store isn’t straight forward so here’s an illustrated guide that will walk you through the entire process step-by-step. It will only apply to app purchases made in the last 90 days.

How to Request Refunds for Mac Apps

Step 1: Click this special link – phobos.apple.com/purchasehistory – and it open your app purchase history directly inside iTunes. Alternately, open iTunes on your Mac and choose Store -> View Account. Next click See All under the Purchase History section to see all your recent app purchases.

This is confusing but you have to open iTunes to see a list of your past purchases. The App Store will also show your purchase history but you won’t be able to return apps through the App Store.
Step 2: Click the Report a Problem link available against all your recent app purchases. If the Mac app is not listed in your recent purchased list, click the little grey arrow to expand the order that contains your app and click the Report a Problem link against that app that you are looking to refund.

Step 3: When you do that, it will redirect you the reportaproblem.apple.com website and here you have to specify the reason for requesting a refund for the app. You are more likely to choose “I didn’t authorize the purchase” or “Item functions but doesn’t work as expected” and describe the exact issue you are experiencing with the app.


If the app is eligible for an immediate refund, you’ll see a “Request Refund” button right away and the refund will be processed in 5 to 7 days. In case not,  someone from the Apple support team will contact you within 48 hours via the email address associated with this Apple ID to resolve your request.

How to Run a Poll on Twitter with Google Forms

Twitter, unlike Google Plus, does not offer a native polling solution so you have to rely on an external service to run a quick poll or even a quiz with your Twitter followers. You’ll create a poll on a service like Polldaddy or WuFoo and tweet the link, your followers can click the link and take the poll.

That’s how most polls are conducted on Twitter but the person has to leave the Twitter website in order to answer your poll. Wouldn’t it be better if there were a way to embed a live poll in the tweet itself that people can answer inline, much like subscribing to newsletters, without leaving the Twitter ecosystem?

Embed Polls in your Tweet

Well, that is possible, sort of, with Google Forms. When you tweet a link to a Google Form, Twitter embeds the actual form when the tweet is expanded. People can interact with the form and submit while staying on Twitter.

See this live example of a tweet that embeds a poll hosted on Google Forms – you can answer it within the tweet itself.

There’s no trick here except that you should keep the poll really short. That’s because Twitter will only display a question or two in the expanded tweet and most people will thus not be able to figure out how to navigate to the other hidden questions. (hint: Use the TAB key)

Also, while designing the Google Form, choose a theme with smaller fonts and set the description text as blank so that the actual questions are clearly visible in the expanded tweet. You can instead put the description in your tweet.

How to Turn Google Sheets into an Amazon Price Tracker

The prices of products listed on online shopping sites like Amazon vary every single day and Google Docs can help you keep track of these price fluctuations via email. Just put the items that you wish to buy from Amazon in a Google Spreadsheet and it will do the rest. If the price of product drops on Amazon, you get an email alert and will thus never miss that deal again.

Get daily price updates for your favorite products via email

Track Amazon Prices with Google Docs

The Amazon price tracker is easy to configure. All you have to do is add the URLs of product pages that you wish to track inside a Google Spreadsheet. For instance, here’s the product page for iPad and here’s the search page for iPad – you need to put the URL of the product page in the spreadsheet.
The tool can track prices of all products listed on Amazon.com and the various country-specific websites including amazon.fr, amazon.de, amazon.es, amazon.ca, amazon.it, amazon.in, amazon.co.jp and amazon.co.uk.

Here’s how you can set up the price tracker inside Google Docs:

1. Open the Amazon Price Tracker Google Sheet and enter one or more URLs of product pages from Amazon in column B. The sheet has some sample product URLs to get you started.
2. Replace hello@labnol.org in the yellow cell with your own email address. This is where the email alerts will be sent.
3. From the Price Tracker menu, choose the Initialize option and say “Accept” when asked for authorization. The script is open-source and no one else will have access to any of your data.
4. Go to the Price Tracker menu again and this time choose the Start Tracking option. Price tracking is now active, it will run in the background and you may close the Google Sheet.

Add products to this Google Sheet to begin tracking their prices

You’ll get an email within a minute or two listing the current prices of the products that you have added in the Google Sheet. The sheet will then send you a daily email digest (see sample email) of the product whose prices have changed since the last update.

Also, you can add new Amazon URLs, or delete existing products, from the Google sheet and the script will automatically pick the changes in the next run. And if you ever wish to stop receiving those email alerts, just choose the Stop Tracking option from the Price Tracker menu in the same Google sheet.

Update:

Internally, the Google Script uses Amazon’s Product Advertising API to fetch the latest prices of Amazon products. The tool cannot however track prices of Kindle ebooks since Amazon’s API doesn’t offer pricing information for Kindle titles via their API.

The Best Screen Recorder for Android 5

With Android L, you can easily record high resolution videos of your phone or tablet’s screen without having to root the device. Android Kitkat too allowed screen recording but with Lollipop, the process has become almost as easy as recording screencasts on your desktop – you launch an app (there are several alternatives to choose from), hit the record button and everything that’s on your screen, including touches, will be captured as a MPEG-4 video.

The Perfect Screen Recorder for Android

A quick search on the Google Play store returns a dozen Android apps that support screen recording for Android v5 or later.

Some apps are free while others are paid but they mostly offer a similar set of features. You can record the screen as well the on-screen touches so the viewer has a better idea about how you are interacting with the apps. They can record the external microphone audio but none of the apps I tried allowed recording of internal system audio. Maybe that is a limitation of the Android platform.

The most popular option is Mirror that will not only record your Android screen but it can also mirror your phone on to your desktop using AllCast Receiver, a free app for Chrome. There are no complicated settings to choose from, the recording is smooth but the big downside is that the app adds a fairly big watermark and you do not have option to disable it.

Shou.TV is another app than can record and also live cast your phone screen to the desktop without the watermark. It is the only app that can save the video in multiple formats including MKV, AVI and MOV. There’s however a definite lag when casting the screen on the desktop that makes it less usable.

iLos and the screen recorders from Rivulus, Hecorat and Misty let you record the Android screen in multiple resolution including 1280×720 and 1920×1080 pixels at 30 frames per second. The recorded screencast can display touches, there are no ads and you can record videos of unlimited length. These apps do however add their icons in the notification window while the recording is in progress.

Another app in the category is SCR that offers a unique feature – it can add the picture-in-picture effect to your screencasts. That means it can use the front camera of your phone and overlay a live video of yourself on the screencast. The app is freemium and you need to upgrade to remove the watermark or to increase your screencast length which is limited to 3 minutes.

I also enjoyed using Rec. that has a very clean interface and allows you save your settings as separate presets. You can turn off the screen and it will stop the current recording session. You do however need to upgrade to show the screen touches and for recording the microphone audio.

This screencast video was recorded on a mobile phone running Android 5.0.1 and rendered as an animated GIF

To conclude, as you may have noticed, most of the screen capture programs for Android are very similar and it is thus difficult to pick an absolute winner. Still, if I were to choose one, my vote would go to the Hecorat Recorder for creating screencast movies (no time limits, no ads, no watermarks) and Mirror for mirroring the Android screen on to the desktop.

The Best Websites to Learn Coding Online

The Learn to Code movement has picked up momentum worldwide and that is actually a good thing as even basic programming skills can have a major impact. If you can teach yourself how to write code, you gain a competitive edge over your peers, you can think more algorithmically and thus can tackle problems more efficiently.

Don’t just download the latest app, help redesign it. Don’t just play on your phone, program it. — Obama.

There’s no reason why shouldn’t know the basics of coding. You can automate tasks, you can program your Excel sheets, improve workflows, you can extract data from websites and accomplish so much more with code. You may not be in the business of writing software programs but knowing the basics of coding will help you communicate more effectively with developers.
Gone are the days when you had to enroll in expensive computer training classes as now exist a plethora of web-based courses that will help you learn programming at your own pace in the comfort of your web browser.

The Best Sites to Learn Programming

If you are ready to take the plunge, here are some of the best websites that offer courses in a variety of programming languages for free. I have also added a list of companion ebooks that will give you a more in-depth understanding of the language and they don’t cost anything either.

	Online Courses & Screencasts	Programming Books (Free)
JavaScript	Code Academy, Learn Street, Khan Academy, Code Combat, Code Avengers	Eloquent JavaScript, JavaScript Guide, Speaking JS, JS The Right Way, Oh My JS, Canvassing
HTML & CSS	Code Academy, Don’t Fear The Internet, Tutsplus, Learn Layout, A to Z CSS, Dash, Web Accessibility, The Hello World	Mozilla, Dive into HTML5, 20 Things I Learned, HTML Dog, HTML & CSS, HTML5 for Designers, DOM Enlightenment, HTML Canvas
jQuery	Code Academy, Tutsplus, Code School	jQuery Fundamentals, Learn jQuery
Python	Code Academy, Google, Learn Street, Python Tutor, IHeartPY	Python for You and Me,  Dive into Python, Learn Python the Hard Way, Think Python, Python for Fun, Tango with Django, Django
Ruby & Ruby on Rails	Code Academy, TryRubyCode Learn, Railscasts, Rubymonk, Learn Street	Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, Learn Ruby the Hard Way, Learn to Program, Learn Rails by Example
PHP	Code Academy	PHP Programming, Practical PHP
Google Apps Script	Getting Started, Office Hours, Google Scripts Examples, Learning Apps Script
WordPress	Treehouse, WordPress TV
Linux & Shell Scripting	Stanford.edu, Explain Shell	Conquer the Command Line
Node.js	Nodetuts, Node School	The Node Beginner Book, Mixu’s Node book, Node Up and Running, Mastering Node.js
Angular JS	Code School, Egg Head, Learn Angular	Angular JS Tutorial, Thinking Angular, Angular Tutorial, Getting Started (Adobe)
Git (version control)	Code School, Git Immersion, GitHub Training	Pro Git, Learn Git
Objective-C (iOS & Mac)	Code School, Stanford, iTunesU
Chrome Dev Tools	Code School, Dev Tools Secret, Chrome Dev Tools Tutorial, Udacity, Building Browser Apps
Go Language	Golang.org, GopherCasts	Programming in Go, Go by Example, Learning Go
Java	Learn Java, Coding Bat, Java Udemy, Learneroo	Programming in Java, Thinking in Java, O’Reilly Learning Java, Think Java, Java & CS, Java for Python Devs
Android App Development	Udacity (Google Developers), Coursera, The New Boston, Google University, App Development Essentials, Code Learn, App Inventor (Visual)
D3 (data visualization)	Data Visualization for the Web, Dashing D3, D3 Tips & Tricks
SQL (Databases)	SQL Zoo, SQL @Stanford, Essentail SQL, SQL for Nerds
Everything Else	Udacity, edX.org, Coursera, Udemy$, Lynda$, Pluralsight$, Treehouse$, Open Consortium, One Month Rails$

Teach Kids to Code

If there are kids in the family, you should download either Tynker (Android/iOS) or the Hopscotch app for iPad and they can learn the basics of programming through games and puzzles.
There’s also Scratch, an MIT project that allows kids to program their own stories and games visually. Scratch is available as a web app or you can download it on your Mac/Windows/Linux computer for offline use. Blockly and Alice are some other desktop apps that will introduce the concepts of computer progamming to your children.
On a related note, the following chart from Google Trends shows the relatively search popularity of various programming languages over the last 5 years. JavaScript clearly has maintained the lead.

Things You Should Do After Installing WordPress

It takes two easy steps to install WordPress but you should tweak some of the default settings to further optimize the performance and also improve the security of your WordPress website.

Optimize your WordPress Installation

These suggestions are only applicable to self-hosted WordPress.org sites and not WordPress.com blogs. Also, I assume that you are running WordPress on Apache under Linux. Let’s get started:

1. Move out the media upload folder

WordPress store all your uploaded images and files in the wp-content/uploads folder. You should however move this folder outside the main WordPress folder, preferably on a sub-domain. Thus your WordPress backups will be more manageable (the uploaded files and themes can be backed up separately) and, most important, serving images from a different domain will allow parallel downloads in the browser improving the page loading time.
Open your wp-config.php file and add the following lines to change the location of the wp-content folder. You may also deselect the option – “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders.”

define( 'WP_CONTENT_URL', 'http://files.domain.com/media' );
define( 'WP_CONTENT_DIR', $_SERVER['HOME'] . '/files.domain.com/media' );

2. Remove unnecessary meta tags from WordPress header

If you look at the HTML source code of your WordPress site, you will find a couple of meta tags in the header that aren’t really required. For instance, the version of WordPress software running on your server can be easily retrieved by looking at your source header.

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 4.1" />

This information is a good hint to WordPress hackers who are looking to target blogs that are using the older and less secure versions of WordPress software. To completely remove the version number and other non-essential meta-data from your WordPress header, add this snippet to the functions.php file found in your WordPress themes folder.

  remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_generator' ) ;
  remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link' ) ;
  remove_action( 'wp_head', 'rsd_link' ) ;

3. Prevent people from browsing your folders

Since you would not like anyone to browse your WordPress files and folders using the explorer view in web browsers, add the following line to your .htaccess file that exists in your WordPress installation directory.

Options All -Indexes

Also make sure that there’s a blank index.php in the wp-content/themes and wp-content/plugins folder of your WordPress directory.

4. Disable HTML in WordPress comments

The comment box in WordPress allows commenters to use HTML tags and they can even add hyperlinks in their comment. The comments have rel=nofollow but if you would like to completely disallow HTML in WordPress comments, add this snippet to your functions.php file.

add_filter( 'pre_comment_content', 'wp_specialchars' );

5. Turn off Post Revisions in WordPress

WordPress includes a helpful document revisions feature to help you track changes to post edits and you can also revert to any previous version of your blog posts. Post revisions do however increase the size of your WordPress wp_posts table as each revision means an additional row.
To disable post revisions in WordPress, open the wp-config.php file in your WordPress directory and add the following line:

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

Alternatively, if you would like to retain the Post Revisions functionality, you may just limit the number of posts revisions that WordPress stores in the MySQL database. Add this line to the wp-config file to only store the recent 3 edits.

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3);

6. Change the Post Auto-Save Interval

When you are editing a blog post inside the WordPress editor, it will auto-save your drafts as-you-type and this will help in recovering your work in case the browser crashes. The drafts are saved every minute but you can change the default duration to say 120 seconds (or 2 minutes) by adding a line to your wp-config.php file.

define( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 120 );

7. Hide the non-essential WordPress RSS Feeds

Your WordPress installation generates multiple RSS Feeds – the blog feed, article feeds, comments feed, category feeds, archive feeds, etc. – and these are auto-discoverable as they are included in the HTML header of your blog pages using the <link> meta tag. If you just want to publicize your main RSS feed and remove the other feeds from the , add a line to your functions.php file:

remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 );
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3 );

8. Maintain a Single RSS Feed, Redirect Others

In the previous step, we simply removed the RSS feeds from printing inside the site header but the RSS feeds still exist. If you would like to have only one RSS feed served through FeedBurner and disable all the other feeds, add this to your .htaccess file. Do remember to replace the feed URL with your own.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine on
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(FeedBurner|FeedValidator) [NC]
 RewriteRule ^feed/?.*$ http://feeds.labnol.org/labnol [L,NC,R=301]
</IfModule>

9. Disable WordPress Login Hints

When you type a non-existent username or an incorrect password while logging into WordPress, it will provide a very detailed error message telling you exactly whether your username is wrong or the password doesn’t match. That could offer an hint to people who are trying to break into your WordPress blog but, fortunately, we can disable the login warnings.

function no_wordpress_errors(){
  return 'GET OFF MY LAWN !! RIGHT NOW !!';
}
add_filter( 'login_errors', 'no_wordpress_errors' );

10. Enable 2-factor Authentication

This is highly recommended. If someone gets hold of your WordPress credentials, they will still need your mobile phone to get into your WordPress dashboard.
Unlike Dropbox or Google, 2-step authentication isn’t part of WordPress but you can always use the Authy plugin to enable 2-factor authentication.

11. Change the Permalink Structure

Do not use the default Permalink structure of WordPress since it is bad for SEO. Go to Options -> Permalinks inside your WordPress dashboard and change your WordPress Permalink structure to something like:

Option 1. /%post_id%/%postname%
Option 2. /%category%/%postname%/%post_id%/

12. Add Favicon and Touch Icons

Your WordPress theme may not even include references to the favicon (favicon.ico) or the Apple touch icons but web browsers and feed readers may still request them from your server. It’s always better to serve a file than returning a 404.
First, create a 16×16 favicon.ico and a 144×144 apple-touch.png file and upload them to the home directory of your blog. Then add this line to your .htaccess to redirect all apple touch icon requests to that particular file.

RedirectMatch 301 /apple-touch-icon(.*)?.png http://example.com/apple-touch.png

13. Disallow Indexing of WordPress scripts

You want Google and other search engines to crawl and index your blog pages but not the various PHP files of your WordPress installation. Open the robots.txt file in your WordPress home directory and add these lines to block the bots from indexing the backend stuff of WordPress.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: */feed/

14. Make the Admin a Subscriber

If your WordPress username is “admin,” create a new user and grant them administrator privileges. Now logout out of WordPress, log in as the new user and change the privilege of the user “admin” from Administrator to Subscriber.
You may even consider deleting the user “admin” and transfer any existing posts /pages to the new user. This is important for security reasons because you don’t want anyone to guess the username that has administrator privileges to your WordPress installation.

15. Hide XML Sitemaps from Search Engines

XML Sitemaps will help search engines better crawl your site but you don’t want search engines to actually show your sitemap in search results pages. Add this to your .htaccess to prevent indexing of XML sitemaps.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 <Files sitemap.xml>
  Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
 </Files>
</IfModule>

16. Do Not Use WordPress search

Make sure your site search is powered by Google Custom Search and do not use the built-in search feature of WordPress. WordPress search returns less relevant results and the other advantage is that it will reduce strain on your WordPress server /database since the search queries will be handled through Google.
Alternatively, if you plan to continue with WordPress built-in search, use the Nice Search plugin. It creates better permalinks for your WordPress search pages (/search/tutorials vs /?s=tutorials).

17. Password Protect the wp-admin Directory

You can easily add another layer of security to your WordPress installation by password protecting the wp-admin directory. You’ll however have to remember two sets of credentials for logging into WordPress – your WordPress password and the password that is protecting the wp-admin directory.

18. Log 404 Errors in Google Analytics

404 errors are a missed opportunity. You can use events in Google Analytics to log your 404 errors including details about the referring site that is pointing to that 404 page of your site. Add this snippet in your 404.php file.

<? if (is_404()) { ?>
 _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', '404',
              document.location.pathname + document.location.search,
              document.referrer, 0, true]);
<? } ?>

19. Delete Unused Themes & WordPress plugins

The unused plugins and themes won’t affect the performance of your WordPress website but the aim should be to have as little executable code as possible on our server. Thus deactivate and delete the stuff that you no longer need.

20. Stop WordPress from Guessing URLs

WordPress has a strange habit of guessing URLs and it does make mistakes in most cases. Let me explain. If a user request labnol.org/hello URL but if that page doesn’t exist, WordPress may redirect that user to labnol.org/hello-world just because the URLs have some common words.
If you would like WordPress to stop guessing URLs and instead issue a 404 Not Found error for missing pages, put this snippet in the functions.php file:

add_filter('redirect_canonical', 'stop_guessing');
function stop_guessing($url) {
 if (is_404()) {
   return false;
 }
 return $url;
}

21. Set Expiry Headers for Static Content

The static files hosted on your WordPress website – like images, CSS and JavaScript- won’t change often and thus you may set Expire Headers for them so that the files get cached on the user’s browser. Thus, on subsequent visits, your site will load relatively faster as the JS and CSS files would be fetched from the local cache.
Refer to the HTML5 Boilerplate for details on setting up expiry and compression headers for performance. If you are using a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache, the cache control is managed by the plugin itself.

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 30 days"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 30 days"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 30 days"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 week"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 week"

23. Improve WordPress Security

I have discussed WordPress security in detail earlier. The gist is that you should add secret keys to your wp_config.php file, install a file monitoring plugin (like Sucuri or WordFence), change the WordPress table prefix and also limit login attempts to prevent brute force attacks.

24. Disable File Editing inside WordPress

When you are logged into your WordPress dashboard as an admin, you can easily edit any of the PHP files associated with your WordPress plugins and themes. If you would like to remove the file editing functionality (one missing semicolon can take down your WordPress site), add this line to your wp-config.php file:

define( 'DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true );

25. Remove extra Query Parameters from URLs

If the web address of your WordPress site is abc.com, people can still reach your site if they add a few query parameters to the URL. For instance, abc.com/?utm=ga or abc.com/?ref=feedly are, technically speaking, completely different URLs but will work just fine.
This is bad because it dilutes your link equity (SEO) and, in an ideal situation, you would like all URLs to point to the canonical version. Add this little snippet to your .htaccess file and it will strip the unnecessary query parameters from all incoming requests.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !=""
 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^p=.*
 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^s=.*
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wp-admin.*
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1? [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

26. Remove the Admin Bar

This is an annoying feature of WordPress – it adds an admin bar on top of all pages and that is visible to all users who are logged into their WordPress.com accounts. This can however be removed by adding a line to your functions.php file.

add_filter('show_admin_bar', '__return_false');

27. Deal with Ad Blockers

Some of your blog readers may be using ad-blocking software to block ad serving from your site. You can serve alternate content like a list of your popular WordPress posts or embed a YouTube video instead.

28. Add Branding to your RSS Feed

You can easily add your brand logo to all articles in the RSS feed. And since these are served from your server, you can serve a different image for sites that are plagairising your content by republishing your feed. Add this to your functions.php file.

function add_rss_logo($content) {
  if(is_feed()) {
    $content .= "<hr><a href='blog_url'><img src='logo_url'/></a>";
  }
  return $content;
}
add_filter('the_content', 'add_rss_logo');
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'add_rss_logo');

29. Install the Essential Plugins

Here’s a comprehensive list of WordPress plugins that I use and recommend.

30. Stay logged in for a longer period

If you check the “Remember Me” option, WordPress will keep you logged in for 2 week. If you are only logging into WordPress from a personal computer, you can easily extend the expiry date of the authorization login cookie by adding this to your functions.php file.

add_filter( 'auth_cookie_expiration', 'stay_logged_in_for_1_year' );
function stay_logged_in_for_1_year( $expire ) {
  return 31556926; // 1 year in seconds
}