WordPress Visual Cheat Sheet

WordPress Visual Cheat Sheet is the new document, of the Visual Cheat Sheet family, that contains a practical reference guide to WordPress 2.8. [Via: WLTC]

WPWorldMap.net

WPWorldMap is a brand new service powered by Google Maps. WPWorldMap allows you to plot your location in the map. You can plot your location and add your details. Click the image above to visit my profile out there.

How to Display Any RSS Feed on Your WordPress Blog

If you are running multiple blogs, an easy way to spread the word about them is by displaying posts from one of your blogs onto your other blogs. You can quickly do this by displaying the recent posts via an RSS feed.

How to Disable RSS Feeds in WordPress

WordPress offers you a complete range of RSS feeds. You may not need all of these, so why not disable them? With a little code added to your themes.php file, you can quickly and easily disable the feeds.

Tools required to Develop a Wordpress Plugin

If you are into WordPress plugin development, or planning to take a step into it, you'll need to get yourself setup with some tools. WordPress Arena gives you a big list of tools that you can use to develop WordPress plugins.

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Alright, the fact of the matter is that, if we are going to be talking about ripping, we might as well be straight with one another. The days of ripping DVDs are over. We have landed, with a big splash, into the era of Blu-Ray ripping and it would appear that this is not only the media of the hour, but is here to stay.

What is the purpose of ripping any media? Simply put, a DVD or Blu-Ray DVD is ripped so that the information contained on it, be it video or audio, can be enjoyed by all, including those with hardware that is not as well-suited to read such exotic and cutting-edge a format.

Whereas traditional DVDs could host as much as 3 to, perhaps, 8 giga-bytes of information, an already sizable amount, Blu-Ray DVDs can; in fact, host between 25 and 50 giga-bytes, placing them among the most proliferate of the hosting media available on the consumer market today. Clearly, this media is something that should be available to all and not just a select few who are able to attain the rigorous hardware acquirements necessary for its use.

Clearly, a novice user must be made aware of the advantages, should there be any, of using such a modern, and perhaps soon-to-be outdated media. After all, Blu-Ray would not be the first to succumb to a newer, and more proliferate, competitor should one come forth, however, such an occurrence seems quite unlikely.

Among other noteworthy attractions, modern Blu-Ray DVD Rippers have the following features to offer the average user:

As a new media in a highly competitive market, Blu-Ray rippers are updated with astounding frequency.

The conversion factor is said to be 100%, or in other words, equal to the quality of the original product. This, in and of itself, is something that practically no product of its kind can claim.

The programs are, almost always, point-and-click. You would be hard-pressed to find a reasonably educated, majority user who could not master this type of application within a few short minutes of use.

Most importantly, the software works with almost any target software a user could possibly imagine. This simple feature, in and of itself, guarantees that any user will be able to reap real benefits from the use of this kind of software, enjoying the fruits of the information, be it video, audio, or what have you, therein.

If you are looking for certain material, and can’t find it in any of the media that your system is readily able to support, then a Blu-Ray DVD Ripper program might very well be the avenue that you had best pursue. The fact is that Blu-Ray is here to stay and those of us that are looking to enjoy all of the benefits of our own systems and the information that is available to us out there, should be able to do just that without the added requirement of a superfluous and completely unnecessary hardware purchase. Seek the information without conforming to the imposed price. You can get the Blu-Ray disc ripper by downloading the free trial-version from http://www.yepbd.com

Author’s resource box:
Bob is a freelance writer and software developer at http://www.folderlock.org.

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Spywares and malwares are considered to be a greater threat than computer viruses. This is because the detection of a spyware or a malware in the computer is very tough and you cannot be sure that a spyware or a malware is present in the PC, until the time you notice the loss of data or the popping up of unwanted advertisements. This is the reason why it becomes highly imperative as a computer user to know how to detect as well as cure a spyware or malware attack. Although spywares and malwares do not possess the ability to self replicate (as computer viruses can do), they are as much a threat to the computer as well as the computer user, as are computer viruses.

Spywares are the programs which are really harmful as they possess the ability to capture as well as transport important information stored on the computer of a user. These programs come bundled up with other software applications downloaded from the internet, and are often also disguised as software which prevent spywares. These spywares can be of various forms, and range from screen capturing applications to keyboard loggers. There are various different ways in which the presence of these spywares can be detected. The following are just a few symptoms.

1. The appearance of never seen before toolbars as well as buttons on your computer screens. There may also be abruptly popping out advertisements as well as windows on your screen, which you have never been seen before.
2. Crashing off of the internet browser of your computer without any prior intimation or reason.
3. Gradual as well as mysterious slowing down of the computer during the execution of various programs and applications booting up.
4. The home page on the browser of your computer gets changed without your prior knowledge.
5. There appears to have been occurred some kind of a security breach on your system.
6. The appearance of bandwidth usage, even when no internet usage or data transfer is underway from the computer.
Once you are sure about the existence of spywares or malware in your computer, you should not be neglecting the curing of the problem, as it can cost you quite dearly. The very first step is to do away with the possibility of a virus threat to the computer. In order to do so, you can run an active virus scan throughout the system. After that, a suitable anti spyware software can also be executed in the system. Many anti spyware as well as anti malware software are available over the internet, for free of cost download as well as installation. You can install the software on the hard disk and can execute it from there. Some of the most commonly found free of cost anti spyware and anti – malware software are Windows Defender (Beta 2), Spybot – Search and Destroy, Ad-Aware SE Personal from Lavasoft in Google Pack, Ewido anti-spyware and anti-malware and many more.

Author’s resource box:
Bob is a freelance writer and software developer for at http://www.folderlock.org

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Having your blog/site tracked can become a money demanding matter, but not if you use Clicky.

What is Clicky? Clicky is a traffic monitoring tool for you blog and websites. What is Clicky’s best feature? It gives you Real-Time web stats; which means when you log into Clicky you can see your blog’s/site’s traffic status right up to that very minute!

To use Clicky, you first need to register for an account and add the websites or blogs you want monitored. Once you do that Clicky does the rest, and you just check your stats.

To test out Clicky I made up an account on it and added a recently created blog which I’m planning to launch. Here’s how Clicky showed up the related stats to the blog:

To the top-left you can see a link which enables you to add more websites to monitor. To the right, you see a graph which shows the traffic your site has attracted on that day, by default. Since the monitoring just began, there were no net today’s results and the view opened up was of the past 30 days. Other time periods are also available:

Clicky also lets its users see exactly how much of each type of traffic is being attracted to their site. For example check out the following image from Clicky’s website:

You can see what percentage of your traffic was via bookmarks, was by advertising, searches, social media, and more. This can immensely help you analyze what is directing traffic to your site the most.

Clicky can also lets you see what percentage of the visitors on your site are from specific areas:

This feature can play an important role especially in understanding the audience your site is attracting.

With all these free features and many more, Clicky becomes an awesome tool which every website owner or professional blogger should have in his arsenal.

A good alternative in this case is to record the music from the radio station. AudialsOne is one powerful software that allows you to record music from radio stations as a basic option and a lot more as an advanced option.

The software is so feature rich, that one post cannot do justice on it. I'll try to do some justice to the software in this review by covering some of the main features.

AudialsOne is actually three software rolled into one, viz. Radiotracker 6, Tunebite and Mediaraptor.

• Radiotracker 6 is the can record from every radio station on the planet and then convert those files into every format for every playback device.
• Tunebite is an universal converter which is able to handle over 100 audio and video file formats, with or without DRM copy protection. Tunebite also lets your record movies and videos online from free movie sites, web portals and online movie stores in HD and lets you save them in the file format you need.
• Mediaraptor is the modern solution to legally get all the free music from social radio stations your hard drive can handle. Mediaraptor is also an universal web recorder, because every video and film from websites you’ve visited are recorded automatically and converted into every desired file format.

The first time you open the software you may get a little overwhelmed. But, while you settle in, you'll notice six tabs which allow you to access all the features of the software.

The Radio Tab

The power of AudialsOne begins with the Radio tab, which is one of the two features that you will use the most.

The radio tab is easy to use. You can perform a quick search for a radio station, or manually go through the list by hitting the stations button.

You'll be presented by a genre-sorted list of radio stations. Once you double-click on a radio station, it will be added to your Favorites list and from there you can start listening to the radio station, or choose to record it.

You have the option of recording the music one song at a time or you can record the entire station. Beware however, everything you record requires space on this hard disk and unless you have a few terabyte hard disks lying around, you may soon run out of space.

The Search Tab

This tab allows you to search for music by entering the article or the title. You can select the song you want and it will record the song. You can also get hold of the more powerful Search & Record Plugin to improve the search results.

The other tabs

The wish list

AudialsOne now allows you to add some songs to your wishlist. Once the songs have been added to the wishlist, the software will search through tens of thousands of songs to find those that match your wishlist. You can either create your own wishlist, or you can download one from the Wishlist community.

The web tab

This is one that I found is still being populated. You can check in the Audio / Video forum for links to websites from where you can capture audio and video. Sample sites are hulu.com, www.tv.com, freemoviescinema.com and joost.com.

Podcasts

This is one feature I haven't used much and don't think I will be either because of the limits of my internet connection. A podcast is not much different from a radio station. You'll be able to add a whole set of podcasts and then listen to them whenever something new is posted on it.

Converter

This tab allows you to browse for audio/videos on your computer and convert this from one format to another. The supported file-formats are in the screenshot below:

It can also help you remove the protection from DRM protected audio files. You can also convert audiobooks and even record your entire screen. Maybe, I'll try to churn out a few video-posts.

Techtites readers get a 20% discount

AudialsOne freeware has one limitation from the complete software. You’ll receive 40 songs for free to test out the program. However, you can listen to the radio stations for free and convert your music without restriction.

However, if you're keen to try out the Platinum version of the software, it retails for only $79.90. But, you can get it for a 20% discount by entering the coupon code: AudialsOne4.

- Download AudialsOne freeware
- Buy AudialsOne Platinum at a 20% discount

5 Free ways to bulletproof your WordPress site

Make your site usable, accessible and secure. Essential pointers to ensure that you're blog is ready.

Plugin compatibility on the WordPress Repository

In a bid to get people to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, the plugin repository now has a brand new feature.

You can now choose the version of your WordPress and the plugin and choose if it works or not. The first few weeks are going to be in data collecting phase. You'll need an account to vote

How to fudge page excerpts

This is a very simple tutorial that will teach you how to remove img tags from a custom excerpt. You won't be using this too often, but whenever you try to display the excerpt for a post.

Custom fields for HTML in post title

One drawback of WordPress is that it doesn't take care of HTML in your post title. It will display nicely on your website, but will get messed up in your feed. This article will teach you how you can overcome this limitation with a simple bit of code.

Multiple Featured Content Galleries

scriptygoddess teaches you how to hack the Featured Content Galleries plugin to display more than one Featured Content Gallery.

Know of any good article on WordPress, or have you written one? Tell me about it.

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Keeping that in mind, CoolKeys was created. CoolKeys is a freeware that lets us, the users, assign hotkeys to almost any task.

With CoolKeys, we can use hotkeys to launch programs, open documents and links/websites, perform numerous system operations (such as opening the control panel, adjusting the volume, minimizing open windows).

The download file is merely ~1.5 MB and when installed, here’s how CoolKeys looks like:

By default there are no hotkey functions added to CoolKeys. But you can easily make new ones by clicking on Coolkey in the main menu and choosing New. You are presented with a screen from which you can choose your desired hotkey and its corresponding action:

You can either assign the hotkey to perform a system function (by accessing Actions) or you can have it open a file and also specify what program will be used to open that file.

Hotkeys works with a minimal memory footprint and stays active as an icon in your system tray.

Hotkeys offers amazing functionality and increased efficiency for its users. It’s definitely a must-have.

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Google is now adding a wonderful feature to its Search to better help you find the music you like. To do so, Google has teamed up with popular online music providing services. Let’s see how this feature will work.

The feature will be incorporated into the Google’s web search and will work in the simplest way possible.

Suppose you search for Green Day’s album ‘21st Century Breakdown,’ you simply type in [21st century breakdown] in the text field, and click on the Search button:

The links provided will include audio previews from most popular music websites. You’re also provided with the links to purchase the music you search for.

Now let’s assume you’ve got a song stuck in your head but can’t recall the artist/band, the title, or the album’s title. All you can remember is that the song lyrics contained ‘static silhouette somehow’ somewhere in them. Simply search for [static silhouette somehow] and here’s what you’ll get:

The search will instantly present Phoenix’s song Rome which has those lyrics in it. And just like before, you’re presented with multiple audio links.

This wonderful music search feature is being worked on by Google to even show you the music you would like but haven’t heard yet. For this purpose Google has partnered with Pandora, Imeem and Rhapsody and the partnership will reach fruition in the near future.

Google plans to spread this music search feature across gradually across the United States. Once the search is perfected, it could then be provided to users worldwide. Let’s just hope that day comes here really soon.

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Essentials for the first blog

So, you're new to WordPress and starting off on your first blog. This article guides you through a few essential items that you would help you enhance your blog.

Easy Embeds for WordPress 2.9

WordPress 2.9 will have better support for embedding videos on your blog. It uses the oEmbed API. Viper, the original man behind the code, explains how you can go about easily embedding your videos in the upcoming WordPress 2.9.

How to Use Wordpress Conditional Statements

WordPress gives you a lot of power on choosing what you want to display where. One method of controlling what displays what displays on which page / post is by using conditional statements. Addicott gives you the lowdown on what Conditional Comments, complete with examples.

Conditional Thickbox loading

Simple piece of code that can help you speed up the loading of your site, if you are using Thickbox or Lightbox. The problem with most scripts that are used generically on a blog is that they load on every page which can significantly increase load time. By loading these only when needed, you can cut down the load time of the scripts.

Is your sidebar doing it's job?

While content is king, the portion of the page around it also contributes a lot to increase visitor engagement on your blog. One such element is the sidebar. Is it contributing towards increasing the time your visitors spend on your blog? Or, is it just another element that increasing the clutter and scares your visitor away?

This article gives you some tips on improving your sidebar.

Deactivate all WordPress plugins via Database

So you found that amazing plugin that is supposed to should revamp your blog with the most amazing set of features. You download it and activate and … you stare at an error that clearly indicates that your blog has crashed. What makes matters worse is that you can't even get into the admin area to fix this. Your first step should be to delete the plugin files and WordPress should normally fix the error.

What could make this difficult, is if you are not exactly sure which plugin caused the error. The best approach is to deactivate all your plugins in one shot and then start activating them one by one.

And to close this post, here are two official posts from the dev blog. The first one is an invitation from the dev team to participate in the 2.9 release which should be here at the end of the month. And, to make this easy, you can get hold of the new WordPress Beta Tester, that allows you to upgrade to the beta versions from within your Admin panel.

Highly recommended that you don't run this on a production site. I've got it installed on my Demoblog that I use to test my plugins and theme. And, if you are pondering whether to begin testing, Dougal gives you a download on all the features in WordPress 2.9.

And more importantly, if you haven't already done so already, remember to upgrade to WordPress 2.8.5 since it fixes tonnes of security issues.

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Having gone through a considerable number of free services offering to produce wireframes, we feel Mockflow is one setting itself apart from the crowd.

In order to start creating wireframes, you first need to register for a free account and then activate that account via the email you receive in your inbox. Having done that, you can start building wireframes by logging in.

Creating wireframes through Mockflow is a completely online process i.e. the entire wireframing process takes places within your internet browser.

As you can see from my wireframe above, the layout of Mockflow is quite simple. The plane on the right contains all the tools/boxes you can drag and enter in the plain workspace on the left. These tools contain over 70 components and over 200 icons, so you have all imaginable tools at your service. Once you are forming your wireframe, just click on the ‘Save’ button located at the top of the page. You can even save your wireframe as a PDF file including any comments.

But those features are available in almost all wireframing programs/services. So what sets Mockflow apart from the crowd?

The forte of Mockflow, however, is that it enables the user to work on the same wireframe with a group of people. That is right: you can get other people to work on your wireframe with you. By sharing in private/public mode, you can not only have your partners collaborate, but you get instant feedback from your clients as well.

Considering all those features and the fact that everything happens online without requiring any installation, Mockflow is another valuable addition to the wireframing tools available on the internet.

One great solution would be to look for websites similar to the ones you already like. Today we discuss something that does exactly that – let you find websites similar to the ones you know/like.

This something is iWeavr.

iWeavr works in the most simple way possible: from your internet browser’s favorites bar. Once you are on the iWeavr homepage, you will see what is contained in the screenshot pasted above. Now focus the region encircled (the circle is not on the original website, I added it).

Right click on the blue ‘iWeavr’ button and add it to your favorites. Remember to add it to your favorites bar so it easily accessible while browsing. Now let us see how iWeavr works.

A website I really like is FunnyOrDie. I visited it in my browser, and clicked on the iWeavr bookmarklet I had placed on my favorites bar. Here is what happened:

A white section appeared on the webpage and I could see all the websites similar to FunnyOrDie. I use FunnyOrDie as a source of instant amusement and entertainment. With iWeavr’s help I can now expand my favorites and discover the new websites out there with their new funny material.

The iWeavr tool, apart from finding websites you did not know about, can also be used while finding related articles or news to something particular you are reading. If you click on a link which leads to a page shortly stating ‘President Obama won the Noble Prize’ and you want to know more, just click on the iWeavr button to see all the related news articles.

iWeavr serves an important purpose and was a much needed tool for internet users.

With that comes the risk of losing this information if the service shuts down or even worse, if your account is hacked.

Founded about a year back as Lifestreambackup, Backupify currently supports the backup of your Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, Zoho, Google Docs, Photobucket, WordPress, Basecamp, Gmail, Facebook, Friendfeed and Blogger accounts.

Backupify offers all users a completely free Twitter backup. However to backup any other account, you'll need to get hold of one of the paid accounts.

So, for the purpose of this post, I will explain how you can go ahead with backing up your Twitter account. Of course, you will need to signup for Backupify.

On logging in you will be taken to the Settings screen.

If you hit on the Manage next to Twitter, then the grey box on the right will appear. Hit Twitter Authentication link and you'll be directed to Twitter, where you will be asked to allow Backupify to access your Twitter information.

Backupify using OAUTH to access your twitter data, so that you don't need to worry about giving your password. This isn't true in the case of all services, since many do not support OAUTH.

On granting access, you will be redirected back to Backupify. I added two of my twitter accounts, viz. ajaydsouza and Techtites. I hope you are following both!

That's all that is required to ensure that the backups take place.

Backupify even allows you to download all your updates so that you can keep them safe. You can do this from the archives section.

And, now that we have come to end of our little tutorial on backing up your Twitter account, I've got some good news. For a limited time period, readers of Techtites can get a basic account with Backupify worth $29/year completely for free for a year!

All you need to do is click on this link and signup for your account. Remember to give me your feedback. And if you blog about it, you have the chance of winning a Amazon gift certificate worth $250. And all users who blog and give feedback will be given a free Premium account.

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MashSpots is an amazing free web service to locate the places around you.

Say you are living in Seattle and you need to find nearby restaurants.

All you do is change the default option from ‘Groceries’ to ‘Restaurant’ like so:

Some of the most common categories are predefined and can be selected from a drop down menu. However, custom queries turn up equally successful results. For example, typing in ‘Laundry’ or ‘Laundromat’ will give you the nearby Laundromats.

For now, we shall consider the ‘Restaurant’ option.

On the map, notice the little guy with the green shirt and blue pants. That is you. You can drag yourself to any location on the map and the surrounding red circles will be positions of nearby restaurants. The names of shops on the left of the screen correspond to the circles around you and give you the names of those restaurants:

If you want more locations (in this case, restaurants) around you to be displayed, you can change the number of circles from four to eight.

Yes, I know what is going through your mind: it would be really quite handy to have MashSpots with you, on the go. For that purpose, MashSpots also has an iPhone application, which you can get here.

MashSpots makes it easier for the user to know how far or near a place is; suppose you are hungry but you have to get to your friend’s place. You decide to order the pizza from his apartment. But before heading out, you can run MashSpots and find that the pizza place is actually quite far from your friend’s place and the delay between ordering and delivering will not be worth the wait. So instead, you grab a bite before you head out.

That example is only a minor way in which MashSpots can save us time daily. I am sure the users MashSpot can find major ones as well.

Try out MashSpots here and if you any suggestions, do not feel shy to give them your feedback.

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If you are a graphics designer, or in any field that requires interactions with colors, Colors Pallete Generator  can prove to be an amazingly simple, and immensely useful tool.

The main function of  this application is to extract all colors from a given picture, and then present all the colors which are included in the picture.

Let us use this picture:

The trained eye can see that in this picture exists an entire array of various colors which cannot be extracted easily.

Now, we proceed to upload this image to CSS Drive. You can upload an image even if it is not store on your own PC; in that case, you need to provide the URL of the image, and CSS Drive will upload it.

Within a second, CSS Drive extracts all the beautiful colors from the image, no matter how complex it is, and displays the color palette, classifying them as light, medium, and dark. At the bottom, you can see the complete color palette. Colors can be selected and the 8 selected colors are shown in a horizontal list to the right, which is visible in the screenshot above.

As your mouse pointer hover over a color, its hexadecimal color code is shown by CSS Drive, so you choose the same color in some other application you are running.

At the bottom of the webpage a user can see the following two options:

Therefore, the option of saving the colors in CSS or ACO formats is also available.

CSS Drive is a powerful, yet small and free utility which make life easier for a lot of graphic designers.

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Yoast guides you through a quick way of styling WordPress' internal functions next_posts_link and previous_posts_link.

Five Ways to Change Your WordPress Password

Maybe you're regularly forgetting your WordPress Admin password, or maybe this is your first time and you're totally clueless as to how to proceed? Then, this article is for you!

Jeff tells you five different methods to go about changing your WordPress password. As for me. Well, I haven't forgotten my password ever. I just change my password from my user page.

Reply to Comments, Gravatars, French, Italian, and More !

If you've got a Blackberry and are happily using the WordPress application for Blackberry, then you have some good news. You can now reply to comments from within the application. You can also open the author's link directly in your Blackberry browser. I just prefer my laptop for composing posts. Am not much of the travel and blog person, especially when there is Twitter.

Create a Free Email Newsletter Service using WordPress

WordPress is so much more than a blog software it used to be a few years back. It's progressed into a CMS and with the power of plugins you can do just about anything, short of cleaning your house and cooking your food!

In this article, wpbeginner teaches you how to harness the power of Feedburner to create a weekly newsletter that your visitors can subscribe to.

Publicize: Twitter

If you're still using WordPress.com to blog and you also Twitter, then promoting your posts has just been made easier by the new Publicize feature.

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Blogging is a serious job, especially if your blog depends on loyal readership and not search engines for traffic. Like in the real world, the authority of the blogger is as much dependent on how the blogger carry themselves as it is on the content. That being the case, it becomes very important for bloggers to make their online activities look as professional as possible.

A lot of it is dependent on your blog content. Glaring typo errors, astonishingly illogical arguments can all take away your authority. While I presume that only the real authorities on a subject take up blogging in that area, here are a few other subtle tips that can add that extra bit of professionalism online.

Your Email Address

Imagine an advertiser receiving a mail from dolly125@freemail.com requesting for advertising partnerships. In all probability, the blogger would simply not see a reply to the mail. This is because the professional touch to the whole conversation was lost simply at the first step when you send an email for a business relationship from an email such as that. The first and foremost step would then be creating a professional email id at your own dotcom. Did I say not to use free blog services for your website? Yes, that goes without saying.

Custom Themes

When you are dependent on loyal readers more than search engine traffic, one of the most important points to remember is to get your own custom design done for your website. Downloaded themes; no matter free or ‘premium’ always bring the professionalism of your website down. While this may not affect your interaction with your readers, it certainly does affect your business when you are trying to sell something. The common perception would then be that a guy who cannot afford to get a professional design for his site could not have actually purchased a product to be posting an honest review.

About Me Section

This section is absolutely important if gaining reputation is part of your goal. A professional ‘About Me’ or ‘About Us’ in some cases need to have at least 3-4 paragraphs detailing about the authors' expertise in the area. In case you do not have too much of an expertise to talk about, you may talk about the qualifications that make you worthy enough to be blogging about the subject. Do not forget to include a picture of yourself and remember to use your full name. Nicknames and avatars are best left for IM chats and a professional ‘About Me’ section can go a long way in establishing the authority of the author who the readers can trust and bank upon.

The bottom-line is to treat your online activity as important as your 'real life' businesses. While it is possible for you to blog in your pajamas, this feeling of being casual while 'at work' should not be actually affecting your authority on the subject.

This application is DiskDigger.

The setup file is roughly 700 KB, so the download only takes an instant. Moreover, no installation is required to run the program. After downloading and extracting the ZIP archive, you can go ahead with using the DiskDigger. Here is how the program looks like:

The loading time of the application is hardly a second. On my machine, DiskDigger’s memory footprint was ~2 MB.

To look for deleted filed, select the appropriate media and click on next. You will be presented with this screen:

You can choose out of two scanning methods. The pros and cons of both are listed right under the options, as visible from the screenshot above. Choosing either method, according to your preferences, and clicking next will thoroughly search your device for any deleted files. Those files will then be listed and you will be given the option to restore them.

The user-friendliness makes this application suitable for professionals and beginners alike. The easy-of-use, minuscule setup size, and the small memory footprint make DiskDigger an ideal data recovery program.

One way hackers compromise our passwords is via phishing scams. These scams involve the use of fake websites to lure users into entering their personal exploitable information such as, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, etc. Familiar with the loopholes in internet security, most users stay clear of suspicious emails and submitting their information on less known websites. However, there is still a large number of internet users who fall victims to phishing scams, clueless about their actions even after they have been taken advantage of.

The potential dangers of phishing scams have now been brought into major attention after analyzing the victims of the recent widespread phishing scam, forty percent of whom used the same password for all their accounts on a number of websites. Neowin, the technology blog, reported an initial list of usernames and passwords from a number of websites, which was circulating the internet. The list was traced to its source Pastebin, which a site which is commonly used by program developers to share their program codes.

Paul Dixon, owner of Pastebin, has pulled the site down for maintenance. According to him, Pastebin was intended to be a fun side project, which due to this incident is something it currently was not turning out to be. He has announced that until he makes further modifications to prevent something like this repeating itself, Pastebin will remain down.

Reviewing the first list, it was thought that only Hotmail (Windows Live) customers were being affected by the scam. However a second list was discovered which included usernames of accounts on almost all major internet networks namely, Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL, amongst others. Soon afterwards, spokesman from numerous affected internet services, such asMicrosoft and Gmail, announced that the information of their customers had been compromised not due to any security glitches in the system, but due to misleading websites gathering people’s personal information under false pretenses.

The internet services forced password changes on the accounts they found on these lists and work on restoring the integrity of all accounts is currently under progress.

The combined number of accounts in these lists was around 30,000; while some of these accounts included fakes, the number of real accounts was ominously large. Observing these facts, one may begin to wonder how many phishing scams actually get away with what they do.

The only way to protect ourselves from being defrauded on the internet is to have up to date antivirus software, keep clear of suspicious emails, and never give out private information on websites of which the security we are not confident about.

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Keyloggers are perhaps the most dangerous type of spyware. When undetected by the antivirus software being used, keyloggers usually infiltrate a user’s PC via the internet, and then silently monitor the keys being typed by the user. This information is slowly recorded and sent to the keylogger’s author either in small chunks of information, or one big collective chunk.

The author of the keylogger can than proceed to exploit the illegal information he/she receives. Examples of this illegal behavior are using somebody else’s credit card number for online shopping and passing off somebody else’s research paper as your own. This little piece of spyware can potentially ruin somebody’s life.

While our antivirus software keep most of safe from keyloggers on our PCs, the same guarantee does not accompany the usage of a public computer. A keylogger can quietly collect your Facebook username and password while you access your page in an internet café.

While typing in our private information, we should take all the possible precautions. One reliable precaution against keylogger is SafeKeys.

The program can be used after downloading the *.msi file and installing the SafeKeys application.

The main window, as clear in the screenshot above, is similar to a keyboard. The way to enter information from SafeKeys is clear and simple. The appropriate keys in the SafeKeys’ should be clicked which will present the password in the form of asterisks at the bottom of the program. The asterisks can then all be selected, and dragged-and-dropped into the desired field. This way nothing is stored on the clipboard, so nothing exists for the keylogger to send back.

SafeKeys has a number of advantages over other anti-keylogger programs.

Firstly, no actual keys are being typed, so the keylogger will not be able to record the physical keyboard’s actions.
Secondly, SafeKeys does not translate virtual key presses to actual key presses. Since actual key presses alert the keylogger, this feature works its way around the spyware.

Moreover, the main windows changes its width and height each time, so in case the computer is infected with mouse-loggers (spyware that monitors mouse clicks), no important information could be gathered since the key placement of the SafeKey’s main window keyboards on your desktop will be different each time.

You can use upper and lower case letters, as well as special characters to enter your information; so no matter how complicated your password gets, you will still be able to enter it via keylogger.

Another great feature of SafeKeys is the ability to enable the option of entering mouse keys simply by hovering the mouse pointer over the keys in SafeKeys keyboards. This is to work around those advanced keyloggers which take screenshots every time you click your mouse.

With all these features, it is safe to say that SafeKeys make it very easy to defeat keyloggers of all types. This amazing freeware should not be overlooked.

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Metalock is a free online alarm clock which does not need any registration, any installation, any hassles.

As is clear from the screenshot of Metalock’s homepage pasted above, the settings are very easy to configure. MetaClock gives you the power to easily customize the time setting and choose your desired alarm tone from a list of available tunes. The alarm can be stopped easily by simply hitting any key from the keyboard. All that is needed is to set the time and click the ‘Set Alarm’ .

You can also set some URL’s to open when the alarm goes off. Let’s say you’re a Facebook addict and the first thing you do after waking up is not wash your face, but check you Wall. By adding Facebook into the URL’s on Metalock, you can wake up to your Wall every time.

You can also choose from a list of songs to play when the alarm goes off.

Although not a lot of options are available for the tune that wakes you up, one can’t ask much for a free service which doesn’t even require installation.

Key features include

• Free of charge
• No registration or sign ups required
• Easily Set Prefrences
• Open websites and show some notes when the alarms turns on

Metalock does exactly what it claims and never fails. This is a service deserving two thumbs up.

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