P50 Allied Bloggers » Technology

What Steps Have You Taken To Prevent Identity Theft?

AlliedBloggers — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 19:23:28 +0000

Having our website or blog hacked by some lowlife scum would have to be one of our greatest fears. There are many ways that they could do this including placing malicious code on the blog, linking to sites of disrepute or horror of horrors corrupting the database causing us to lose everything. All that hard work gone to waste!

There is something that is so much worse though and unfortunately the Internet has increased this problem astronomically. Of course I am talking about identity theft and this problem is so huge that an industry has grown around identity theft protection. While I’ve talked so much about this on one of my other blogs those posts can only serve as a warning to others.

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Automatically Backup Data Online Free With Dropbox

AlliedBloggers — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 16:55:32 +0000

Dropbox is a great way to auto-update or backup Gigabytes of data online for free, which you can retrieve from the internet wherever you go. Just install the quick-setup package and you’re ready to auto-sync/backup up to 10GB of data on your account. On signing up with a referral link like http://www.getdropbox.com/ you get an additional 250MB, while the referrer gets an additional 250MB for referring you!

Setting up a FREE Dropbox account is very simple:

1) Follow the link above and sign up for a FREE Dropbox account using your email ID and any password.

2) Once the account has been registered, you can download the Dropbox desktop software program to your Windows or Linux based computer

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Page Speed Test, Webmaster Tools And SEO

AlliedBloggers — Fri, 06 May 2011 18:07:04 +0000

You all probably know by now that page speed is an important ranking factor for determining your position on search engine rankings. While this is true, I am of the opinion that more important than this is to provide your readers with the best possible user experience and having your website load quickly not only achieves that but also avoids from “casual” visitor to quickly abandon your site if it takes too much time to load. When this happens, you loose potential readers (or customers) and that is something you don’t want to happen.

Optimize Page Speed

To optimize your page speed, you first will want to know how long your pages load and detect if any, which components are taking too much to fully render. Having the right SEO tools for this is essential as the results will provide you with some insights of what to tackle. One the most obvious tools available for performing this test is Google’s Webmaster Tools. Although Google Webmaster Tools (under the Labs Tab) does this, it provides you with “average” data and basically directs you to use another tool, which is not the object of this post today.

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WinX DVD Author – Free DVD Authoring Software

AlliedBloggers — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 16:43:53 +0000

WinXDVD

There are a lot of free CD/DVD burning software available on the Internet that will let you rip CDs and DVDs, burn files into CDs or DVDs but when it comes to DVD authoring software (creates a DVD video capable of playing on a DVD player), it’s hard to find a good free version. So today, I’m gonna share with you a reliable and free DVD authoring software that I use for creating DVDs (complete with chapter menu & subtitles) from video files.

Created by Digiarty, WinX DVD Author used to be a commercial DVD authoring software that cost $49.95 until about 2 months ago when the company offered it for FREE. I don’t know the reason behind it but I’m glad they did and I’m sure a lot of people do too as WinX DVD Author does a great job of converting all sorts of video files ( MKV, M2TS, M4V, MP4, FLV, MPEG, MOV, RM, RMVB, H.264, AVI) into DVD format.

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My Top 5 Firefox Add-Ons

AlliedBloggers — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 15:37:44 +0000

The best thing I love about Firefox is how you can customize it to do so many things for you. You can set it up to track stuff for you. You can set it up to connect with social media sites. You can set it up so you can change both the look of the browser and certain websites you visit.

There’s just so much, thousands of things, that I decided to mention my top 5 here. One quick warning, though. Like people tell you with your blog, the more add-ons you activate, the slower your browser might run. If you have enough RAM, or run fewer than 15 add-ons, you’re probably good.

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WordPress 3.0.3 Security Release

AlliedBloggers — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:21:52 +0000

Just a week after they released the WordPress 3.0.2 security update, the WordPress dev team has released another security update early this morning – WordPress 3.0.3. This security update is mandatory for all previous versions of WordPress.

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Gravatar Hovercards

AlliedBloggers — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 18:17:17 +0000

Early this year, Gravatar added full profiles which enables Gravatar users to add contact information (email, instant message & phone numbers), links to social network profiles (Facebook, Twitter, Del.icio.us, LinkedIn, etc.) and blog/website links to their Gravatar profile. If you liked the full profiles and thought they were cool, wait til you’ve seen and tried Gravatar’s latest new feature.

Last week, Gravatar added a new feature called Gravatar Hovercards that extends the usability and functionality of full profiles.

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Why Newbies Should Use Linux

AlliedBloggers — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 18:09:49 +0000

Microsoft has made a huge profit off of people who don’t consider themselves to be technically proficient.

That particular demographic tends to be afraid of downloading and installing new software.

Why do they surf the web with Internet Explorer? Because it’s the web browser that was pre-installed with their OS.

Graphic courtesy of Techaby.com

Case in point- a relative of mine told me about a month ago that my freelance web design site appeared funny to her.

I asked her the first obvious troubleshooting question, “Which browser are you using?”

“Huh? I just click on ‘Internet’! Browser? What’s that?”

Cue my ‘face palm’ moment.

And why is IE the browser that was pre-installed with their OS?

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HowTo: Install Adobe AIR on Ubuntu

AlliedBloggers — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:19:49 +0000

I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala a few days ago. I know its a bit late, but the reason why I didn’t do it earlier was because I didn’t want to mess up my customized Ubuntu “Mac” desktop. What made me decide to do a fresh install was because my old Ubuntu partition was only 5 GB and I was already running out of space. This time, I created a bigger partition – 40 GB. Anyways, the upgrade was quick and it went smoothly. Since it was a fresh install, I had to reconfigure everything and reinstall all the programs and applications that I need. One of it was Adobe AIR which I need to run my Twitter client of choice – TweetDeck.

Installing Adobe AIR on Ubuntu can be quite tricky if you’re not quite familiar with the commands and if you’re new to Linux/Ubuntu. So for the sake of those users, I’m sharing this short step-by-step tutorial on how to install Adobe AIR on Ubuntu.

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Create A Strong And Unique Password

AlliedBloggers — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:44:10 +0000

Making a good online password is today one of the most important aspects that we need to be aware of, specially if we have a strong presence on the Internet, or online if you prefer. Like anyone using the online world today, we have most likely a lot of accounts that need passwords. Bank accounts, social networks, new startups we might consider checking out, email accounts, blogs, forums, access to our company’s server, you name it.

Though we should maintain unique passwords for important services (like company servers, bank accounts and some important email accounts), it still is a pain to determine what password we should create and worst of all, having to remember passwords for every service we are using online. In most cases, it is possible that you find yourself reusing the same passwords, over and over again. Needless to say that, such practice is obviously not recommended. Regardless of how strong your password can be, once it is compromised, it is one big invitation for a hacker to gain access on other services you use.

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