by jos on February 18, 2011
Backing up your data is one of those theoretical things that everyone thinks of as a nice idea and never does and then experiences the shock of a data loss and wishes they`d put the small amount of effort necessary into properly backing up their personal and business information. Many people who haven`t experienced a data failure do not realise how much of their life is stored on their computer with large quantities of personal information and photos, films and so on that may not be replaceable.
For a home user there are two main ways for home users to back up their data, local storage, either a hard disk drive or increasingly solid state storage or, with the rise in Cloud-based services on the internet and broadband connections, storing the data at a remote location, usually a data centre which will have its own data redundancy and site protection making your data as secure as possible. [click to continue…]
by Matthew on February 7, 2011
Last year, I came across a very handy plugin that allowed me to easily, or should I say automatically, compress images uploaded to my blog. Reasons for doing this are as follows:
1. Smaller image sizes can get to the readers browser quicker.
2. Smaller image sizes use less bandwidth
On a busy website, any speed up on a page load, no matter how small, is mostly welcomed by readers. Also, by knocking off up to 40 or 50% on images sizes in some cases, you also eat through a lot less bandwidth.
How to Install WP Smush.it
WP Smush.it is one way to shrink image sizes down on your blog. WP Smush.it is a plugin that can be installed free of charge through the regular Plugins menu in the admin console of WordPress. To do that, you need to follow the instructions below. [click to continue…]
by Matthew on February 7, 2011
In this post, I’m going to tell you how to speed up your wordpress blog. There’s a few reasons you’ll be wanting a fast blog. The first is that it gives a better user experience. If pages load up fast, the visitor will likely browse around a bit more. On the other hand, a slow website can easily make the visitor hit the back button. Also, Google is starting to favor faster blogs. Those that run quicker might be rewarded with a bit more traffic for certain search terms although don’t worry too much here as this only concerns a small percentage of searches.
With that in mind, lets take a look at what can be done.
Install W3 Total Cache
There’s a few steps that you can take to speed up a wordpress blog. One of the main ones is to use a plugin called W3 Total Cache. This plugin has been designed to run on WordPress and lets you cache pages so that on a second and subsequent page loads, the page doesn’t query the database and thus, provides a quicker page load. Also, if your blog suddenly gets a large influx of traffic, the cached page handles all the traffic keeping database queries to next to zero. [click to continue…]
by Matthew on February 4, 2011
When Google announced Android 3.0, a new feature was included called the Fragments API. What this particular API does is allow developers to create code more easily for a range of devices allowing the apps to scale across the different screen sizes that will become available this year.
The API is called Fragments and each Fragment is described as a mini activity on a device. Basically, Fragments become a part of the general UI and look to be pieced together so that when a larger screen is used, the app works just as well. [click to continue…]
by Matthew on February 4, 2011
Since picking up an iPhone last year, I have been a regular user of Evernote. I primarily used it on the desktop and then used the Evernote iPhone app to browse documents whilst out and about while also capturing thoughts ready to process when back at my desk.
Then I picked up an iPad and found Evernote to be even better for the, new at the time, tablet computer. Evernote does the job well on the iPad and allows me to quickly grab things on my desktop and look at them while on the move, or in the case of the iPad, it allows me to keep notes at meetings with relative ease.
Then I stumbled across Simplenote and was stuck with which product to use for note keeping. Evernote offered a clean interface that allowed me to access all of my scanned in documents and text files whilst on the move although Simplenote was just easier and had less clutter. [click to continue…]
by Matthew on January 31, 2011
Internet Explorer 9 will soon be launching. This comes after a few months of beta testing. A launch event is being held on February 10 that will unveil the final browser and provide details of when it will be made available for download.
Internet Explorer has been struggling over the last few years and even more so with the launch of Google Chrome as well as new versions of Firefox. Back in January of 2009, Microsoft Internet Explorer had a 70% share of the browser market. Just two years later, that has dropped down to 57%. IE9 is expected to address that problem and bring the browser back as the standard.
Early reports from beta testers indicate that the new version of the browser is performing well. Microsoft has aimed to make this version the most standards-compliant web browser which includes support for HTML5. [click to continue…]
by Matthew on January 31, 2011
I came across a fantastic extension today for the Google Chrome browser. The extension is called Snooze Your Email and what it does is exactly what you probably think it does… it allows you to set a delay to when you are reminded about an email. Times range from 5 minutes to 4 hours as well as Tomorrow and the remaining 6 days of the 7 day period.
Perhaps you have an email that needs a response, but not till Monday morning. To snooze it, you open the email, click on the Snooze button that gets added right next to the More actions button and then select the duration or day you want to be reminded to answer the email. [click to continue…]
by Matthew on January 29, 2011
TechAsis uses the Thesis Theme on a WordPress install and due to being a member of the forums over there, I received an email from Brian Clark a while back now, who introduced a new service (at the time) to me called Scribe.
Scribe is a WordPress Plugin designed to help your site go the “last mile” as Brian puts it in terms of your SEO strategy. What it does is analyze your content when you write it to see if it conforms to all the basic SEO principles. Once your content it written you load up the Scribe SEO plugin and a report is given giving you a percentage of how good your content is in terms of the number of links you have, the number of words per sentence, optimized titles and meta descriptions along with keyword densities as well as other things. Suggestions are made that provide advice on how to change page titles, as well as recommendations for keywords that you might want to optimize for. [click to continue…]
by Matthew on July 30, 2010
Recently I started using Nozbe, the getting things done software. I use the web interface, the Nozbe iPad app and Nozbe iPhone app to keep all things in sync which provides a quick way of capturing tasks I need to do with what ever device I have with me at the time.
One of the features of the web based version is the ability to connect up to an Evernote account, but this integration wasn’t available on the iPad or the iPhone. Thankfully there’s good news as a new Nozbe update was released a few days ago that brings Evernote integration to the iPad. We also hear that the iPhone update should also be ready any time soon bringing support to the iPhone version.
The integration is simple and works well. We’ll give you a quick run-down after the image below.
[click to continue…]
by Matthew on July 22, 2010
When Apple first announced iOS 4 a few months back, one of the apps demonstrated was Skype that was seen running in the background on iOS 4. Now that iOS 4 has been released we were left waiting a few weeks without the ability to keep Skype running in the background. That has now changed as Skype launched Skype 2.0.1 in to the app store last night that brings multitasking to the mix.
The new version works on the 3GS and iPhone 4 where multitasking is concerned and lets users receive calls while the using the phone for other things. Previously you had to be running the Skype application and have it active to receive calls.
When a call comes in from Skype a popup box appears asking if you want to accept or decline the call making it a very handy application to have on the iPhone.
[click to continue…]
