Home internet nowadays comes with a quota of how much bandwidth you can use in a month. It’s unavoidable and if you happen to exceed that quota, your internet provider might charge you a premium, or slow your speeds down to dial-up levels. If you don’t want this to happen to you, then you should monitor your internet usage.

Here are 5 free programs for your Windows PC to help monitor your Internet usage. This is great for readers who are on a student budget, studying abroad on a limited mobile broadband plan. Those broadband plans normally have a quota that includes both upload and download bandwidths and we’ve tested these 5 programs to see how they fare.

Recommended Reading: The Battle For Bandwidth [Infographic]

1. NetWorx

Once you install NetWorx, it will track all your Internet usage with an icon on the taskbar. You can click and launch the program to view usage graphs of each day. What’s good about NetWorx is the ability to set a daily, weekly or monthly quota to track uploads or downloads or both. You can also set the on/off peak usage that some internet providers have and it’ll warn you if you’re about to reach the limit.

2. BitMeter 2

This program comes with a desktop widget meter graph of your download and upload speeds. Similar to NetWorx, you can add a quota limit — in the case of BitMeter 2, it is named ISP Restrictions. Once set, it’ll tell you how many days and bandwidth you can use before reaching your limit. You can also view your usage stats that can be sorted by hours, days, and months.

3. NetSpeedMonitor

This program permanently sits on your taskbar showing upload and download speeds. To enable this, right click on your taskbar and under Toolbars click on NetSpeedMonitor. Apart from showing connection speeds, it can track your daily usage. You can see track your daily or monthly usage, and also see what programs are connected to the internet. Unlike the other programs though, there is no quota reminder.

4. Cucusoft Net Guard

This program has a very clean user interface that is easy to understand. Upon installing it, you’ll have to provide an email address to register for a free product code. After that, you can begin tracking your internet usage and even see what programs are connected to the internet. It also allows you to set your monthly quota with reminders sent to you as you near the limit.

5. ISP Monitor

ISP Monitor is a lightweight program to easily track your daily or monthly internet usages. You’ll have to set it up first by changing the adapter settings under Settings > Traffic Monitor > Adapter to choose between a wired or Wi-Fi connection. Unlike the previous programs, you cannot set a quota reminder. It has easy-to-read logs where you can instantly see your daily upload and download usage.

Editor’s note: This is a article by Greg Narayan aka The Blogger, a 25-year-old guy from New York who answers about 150 blog questions before breakfast. Go ask him a question now, and find him on Twitter or via email.

As bloggers and content creators we have a lot to share. Your blog is a platform. But do you ever feel like no one is reading? Yet when you look at your Google Analytics account you see plenty of traffic. So, what’s going on?

Sadly, the traditional positions of blog post and sidebars aren’t as effective at delivering a message nowadays. Content consumers are quick to bounce and you must be a bit more creative to get their attention.

Good thing your blog/website contains a valuable spot called the “stage”. What/where is the blog stage? Why is it super-useful? Let’s take a look at how to edit, style, and effectively use one of your blog’s hidden hot spots.

Related:

• Most Wanted WordPress tips/tricks (Part I)
• Most Wanted WordPress tips/tricks (Part II)

The stage is versatile

Have you heard of a "blog stage”? Well, assuming you didn’t go ballistic on your design and rewired it completely, you should have one.

The stage sits right below the page navigation but above the top post. It’s an ideal place for announcements and subscription forms mostly because it’s where your readers’ eyes naturally go when they visit your blog. The stage is where the majority of readers focus their gaze on your homepage. Think about it, it’s front and dead center.

The cool thing is that the items on your blog stage show up only on the homepage.

Ideas for a blog stage:

• Product giveaways – Product giveaways need attention, you usually want to direct folks to social media pages.
• Capturing subscribers – Lots of blogs place neat forms here that allow readers to opt into a list.
• Soliciting feedback – My stage has an announcement asking for feedback on a recent eBook.

Some easy WordPress coding

Editting the stage is easy – this is definitely beginner-level coding. At the same time it’s a trick you won’t see used too often, so it’s pretty effective.

I should be clear, this won’t work if you use WordPress.org and can’t edit the code. If you use Blogger, you can edit the stage simply by putting an HTML/Text gadget above Blog Posts in the layout tab.

If you use WordPress.org and a reasonable premium theme, this will prove to be easy.

To start, navigate to the dashboard and go to Appearance > Editor. Then go to index.php, and find this code:

  <div class="content-loop">  

Your stage exists immediately below this code and we’ll put the announcement there.

valuable stage items

What are you eagerly awaiting to tell or show readers? Creating a simple message for your stage is crucial but here are three examples of features I’d put there:

I – The Facebook like box

Built a ‘Like’ Box yet? With Facebook’s developer API, it’s easy. Just choose your settings then hit Get Code, select the ‘iFrame’ option, and insert into your blog stage as indicated above.

‘Like’ boxes look pretty, and even more so when there are thousands of faces of fans who have ‘Liked’ your Facebook page, but if you’re just starting out, that box may not get many inline clicks.

Let’s check out other options you can try.

II – The simple announcement

My first announcement was all about a giveaway contest I ran for Adobe CS. By commenting and ‘Liking’ a blog post, they could win a copy of CS Master Collection at my blog. An awesome offer, but not if nobody knew about it.

As a general rule, this part of your blog is super effective for attracting more blog comments on a certain post.

III – Subscription forms

I talk a lot about Aweber in my writing. They let you design beautiful subscription forms where users can enter their email, name and any other information to join your email list.

These forms are ideal if you want readers to subscribe by email and can be placed in your stage with one line of javascript Aweber generates for you. Alternatively, you can also try MailChimp.

Sure, you could put anything in your stage space. You could put your favorite song via mp3 download or one of those school bus photo displays of you for each year of schooling you did. It’s totally up to you, so be creative.

Watch The Video Tutorial

If it this is all too hard to swallow, here’s the video tutorial for this page.

Homework

Try putting something on your stage now and tweak those messages until you get a winning formula. Remember, keep it simple, simplicity is best. If you have questions, do let me know in the comments.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this WordPress how-to, and stay tuned for more tricks!

Do you have important WhatsApp chats that you want to save or read without having to press ‘load more’ every, single, time? Or is your WhatsApp starting to slow down because of your bloated (and still growing) chat history and you want to free up some space without losing all those memories inside?

With the help of iPhone Backup Extractor and WhatsApp Xtract you can save your WhatsApp chat history in your computer. With a little bit of help from Phyton you can display the chat history in browser view and read it whenever you want.

Recommended Reading: How to Backup iPhone SMS to Your Computer

1. Backup and Extract WhatsApp Data

Connect your iPhone to your computer and open up iTunes. Back up your iPhone.

Note: Make sure that you create an unencrypted backup file as the extractor in the second part of this guide cannot handle encrypted backup files.

To extract WhatsApp data from your iPhone backed-up files, download iPhone Backup Extractor and install it. Run the program.

This program will auto-locate the location of your backup files. If your folder is not in the located folder, click the drop-down and ‘Select another backup folder’ and locate your iPhone backup folder.

After locating the backup files, click on Expert Mode.

Then, click on ‘Application’ to expand it. Find ‘net.WhatsApp.WhatsApp’ and tick on the box next to it. Then click on Extract selected.

The extracted files will be placed in a folder named ‘Application’. The ‘Application’ folder can be located at the directory you chose after clicking ‘Extract selected’ earlier.

Before we go further, search for ‘ChatStorage.sqlite’ in the same folder. You will need this in the next step.

2. Extract & Read WhatsApp Chat History

So far, we have extracted WhatsApp data from our iPhone files. To read the chat history on the computer, we must first extract it from our WhatsApp data.

To extract, first download WhatsApp Xtract. Extract WhatsApp Xtract to a folder which is convenient for you.

You will see a ‘ChatStorage.sqlite’ in the WhatsApp Xtract folder. Replace it with your own ‘ChatStorage.sqlite’ that has been extracted from your backed up file.

To Read on Browser View

Download and install Phyton. Download the 32bit/x86 version even if you’re running on a 64bit/x64 Windows. If you choose to download the 64bit version, you’ll end up with an error when you try to use it later on.

After installing Phyton, go back to the WhatsApp Xtract folder and search for ‘!install pyCrypto.bat’. Run it (or right click and ‘run as administrator’).

Then, run ‘WhatsApp_xtract_iphone.bat’.

Once it is done, it will open in your browser and all your WhatsApp chat history will be displayed.

Clicking on the ‘Contact Name’ will direct you to the chat history with that contact.

The HTML file will be stored in the WhatsApp Xtract folder, so you can refer back to that for future use.