I’ve done reviews of different types of search engines in the past like jQuery plugin search engine, job search engine and icon search engine just to mention a few. So what if you’re looking for mp3s? Well there’s also what you call a mp3 search engine and one such website that allows you to search for mp3 songs is called Mp3-2000.com.

Mp3-2000 has almost all the latest and most popular songs so when I was trying out the website for this review, I tried to do a search for something that’s not globally popular and chose an artist from the Philippines – Gary Valenciano. The search results for Gary Valenciano only displayed four songs, but at least the website had some of his songs.

Listen to Music Online for FREE

Aside from being a mp3 search engine, Mp3-2000 also allows you to listen to music online via an embedded music player. All you need to do is search for the title of the song, album name or name of the artist of the mp3 that you want to listen to. When you’ve found the song that you’ve been looking for, you can go and listen to it or share the song link with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, email or instant message. The page also provides a list of related songs and even the lyrics to the song.

Buy Cheap Mp3s

Having an option to listen to music online for free is great but for those who might want to have a copy of the song, there’s an option to purchase the mp3 songs that you found on Mp3-2000. Songs and albums listed on the website can be purchased for cheap (€0.10 per track or €0.80 for a complete album) via mp3sales.ru. These are really cheap rates if you compare it to iTunes, Amazon, eMusic and other online mp3 stores.

A quick background check on the website via McAfee’s SiteAdvisor showed this – “We tested this site and didn’t find any significant problems“. However, since mp3sales.ru is based in Russia make sure that you check if purchasing mp3s from their website doesn’t violate any copyright laws in your location.

If you want to listen to music online for free or buy cheap mp3s, go check out Mp3-2000.

One such search engine is a website called General Files. This website is powered by a unique search engine that allows users to search for specific files – documents, photos, compressed files, videos, etc. and also supports file sharing services and direct links. General Files doesn’t host the individual files on their servers instead, they crawl the Internet for these files, compile them into their database and list it on their website. So basically, they’re doing the hard work by doing the searching for you. All you need to do now is look for it at the General Files website.

The General Files website has a clean, simple and user-friendly interface. Aside from searching and downloading files (download videos for free or download free games), adding other users as friends, users can set up alerts and receive email notification for a specific search keyword. Another benefit of being a registered user is the option to use General Downloader (the native downloading client of General Files and other General World websites) which allows users to bypass many limitations set by file sharing websites.

Screenshots:
Homepage

Search Results

Alerts

For most users, Google Search will always be the first option for finding stuff but in case you still can’t find the files that you’re looking for, you can try out General Files. Since file sharing is supported, it is inevitable to see movies, songs and other copyrighted stuff on General Files. We don’t advocate piracy here on JaypeeOnline so download at your own risk. Be careful with the files you download and don’t forget to scan them with an updated antivirus program to make sure that the file you’re downloading doesn’t contain a virus, trojan or some sort of malware.

Blogging

• How to Write in a More Personal and Engaging Tone
• The Simple 5-Step Formula for Effective Online Content
• Your Blog is Annoying! (And How to Fix It…)
• How to Balance Blogging and Your Day Job (while still growing your blog)

WordPress

• Beginner’s Guide: How to install WordPress Manually
• Redirect Feeds to a Single Format
• WordPress.org Should Scare You
• Questions on Responsive WordPress Theme Design

SEO

• Build Your Social Media Embassies
• Why Small Minded and Small Marketed SEO Doesn’t Work
• SEO Is Not Cookie Cutter
• How a Search Engine Might Visualize and Rerank Web Pages Based Upon Credibility

Social Media

• This Is How And Where You’re Being Scammed on Facebook
• Social Media and Search Synergy in the Purchase Decision Process
• How Social Media Generated $300,000 in Software Sales in a Weekend
• Drive Traffic To Your Blog With LinkedIn

Technology

• HTTPS is More Secure, So Why Isn’t The Web Using It?
• Google Engineer Releases Open Source Bitcoin Client
• Fruit Flies Could Hold Key to Future Internet
• New FBI System IDs People By Voice, Iris, More

Gadgets

• Nintendo 3DS Review
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• Dolby 3D Glasses
• GIGABYTE P2532: Thinnest 2nd Gen Core i7 Notebook Hands On

Pinoy Blogs

• Load Balancing your JBoss App Servers with Apache
• Pixazza Helps You Make Money with your Photos
• ABS-CBN News App for iPhone and iPod Touch : Download NOW!
• Samsung unveils Galaxy Tab 8.9 and Galaxy Tab 10.1

JaypeeOnline Weekly Recap

• CMS Tree Page View For WordPress
• Facebook Questions – To Ask or Not To Ask?
• WPHired – WordPress Job Search Made Simple
• Master Of The Web – IE9 Web Game (Win $100 A Week)
• Photoria Portfolio Theme
• Western Digital 6TB Dual-drive Storage

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or would want to share your article or any interesting story that you found in the Internet and have it featured in the next Weekend Roundup, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message via the contact page.

Whether you’re searching for a topic to write about due to writer’s block or simply want to discover relevant posts written by other WordPress bloggers then you should check out PressTags.

PressTags is a special search engine created by Trevor Fitzgerald, a long time WordPress fan & developer. This search engine is specially designed to gather and index all posts and topics from WordPress-powered sites, which are then compiled and organized for easy browsing.

Here’s a demo video of PressTags

To use PressTags, simply go to the website and type in a specific topic or keyword and click Search. It will display a list of recently published posts tagged with the keyword that you’re looking for.

Aside from the list of recently published posts, the search results also displays the recent activity or popularity of that specific topic and suggests a list of related topics.

Right now, PressTags is in private beta so if you want your site to be added to the network you’ll have to request for an invite. The only requirements are content must be original, good quality content and of course your website should be powered by WordPress.

Aside from the search engine, PressTags also has a WordPress plugin that displays trending topics from the PressTags database right on your WordPress dashboard so you don’t have to go searching for topics or posts to write about.

The PressTags plugin is customized to display only posts that are the same or related to the topics you blog about most on your website and also allows users to easily reblog posts so they can quickly come up with fresh new content.

Kudos to Trevor for creating PressTags, coming up with the idea of a search engine for WordPress powered posts and for the PressTags plugin which I’m sure will help a lot of writers and bloggers get rid of writer’s block.

Download the PressTags WordPress plugin.

Anyone tried or are using the PressTags search engine or PressTags plugin? What are other options or features that you think PressTags should have? Please share your thoughts.

One of the common trends in the Internet is that anytime something becomes big and popular, it won’t be long before spammers and other malicious users would come in and use the popularity of that website/product/service to take advantage and victimize users. The same trend has happened to WordPress and its users as the blogging platform has become more and more popular the last few years.

I’ve blogged about WordPress theme malware in the past. The first time I learned about malware being inserted into free WordPress themes was back in August of 2007 when Templates Browser dot com was found out to be distributing WordPress and Joomla themes ridden with spam and malware links. A few months after that incident, another website was reported to be distributing free WordPress themes containing spam and malware links.

The reason why I’m blogging again about this topic is to create awareness and to remind WordPress users to be very careful in choosing where they download free WordPress themes from. One of the common practice amongst WordPress users is using Google or any search engine to look for free WordPress themes. Using Google or any search engine engine by itself is not the problem and not all websites offer “dirty” themes. The problem is that these spammers and malicious users are very smart and use a lot of resources like SEO (search engine optimization) to make sure that their websites and “dirty” products get to the the top of the list or the front page of search engine results for keywords like – free wordpress themes, free wp themes, wordpress themes free download, free wordpress themes download, etc.

If these advice or warnings are not enough to convince you or you want to learn more about why you should avoid using Google or any search engine to look for free WordPress themes, I recommend that you read this article that I came across the other day. It’s an article written by Siobhan Ambrose on WPMU.org entitled Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else. The article shows how the author used the keywords “free wordpress themes” on Google and her trying and testing out the themes offered by the top 10 results. The result of her test? Out of the 10 websites offering free WordPress themes, 8 offered themes encrypted with base64 codes and only 1 was safe – WordPress.org.

There are a lot of nice and clean free WordPress themes out there, you just have to be careful and know where to find them. Some good examples are ThemeShaper, Theme Lab and Smashing Magazine. Some premium WordPress theme providers also offer free themes once in a while so you should check them out.

If you can’t find a theme that you like from the WordPress.org Theme Repository or the sites I mentioned above, make sure you use a tool like the Theme Authenticity Checker which checks theme files for any encrypted codes if you decide to download a theme from an unknown source.

Better safe than sorry folks! Never or as much as possible avoid looking for free WordPress themes from search engines.