Leaning with Intent

Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

AutoComplete is a quite useful tool in Firefox that allows your browser to remember what you enter in forms. For example, you may want Firefox to remember your personal details such as name, address and email, so that you do not have to type it each time. This can save you a lot of time, especially if you fill out various forms on a daily basis. This feature is great and I use it a lot, but there are also some potential problems. One of them is when you misspell some important information such as email. Next time when you will try to enter your email, Firefox will suggest this misspelled email. That is why when you make such a mistake it is important to erase the saved form data. You can do that by going to Tools -> Options -> Privacy and clicking Clear Now. Just make sure you indicate what you want to clear. Of course, if you had any other information stored, it will also be deleted. That is why you should only use this feature when you are absolutely certain you want to do it. You should be especially careful if you have been using Firefox for many months, and possibly have a lot of personal details stored. Once you press Clear Now, all of them will be lost. Anyway, I believe that AutoComplete is a very useful feature, and I recommend that you take advantage out of it.

Handling dangerous files is definitely risky. You might receive such dangerous files through email from someone you do not trust. However, there are things that you can do to greatly limit the risk. The thing that you should be worried about is whether the file contains a virus, spyware, or malware. You can make a scan with your own antivirus software, but most people do not have a good antivirus program, and scanning with only one antivirus might not detect a potential threat anyway. If you would be completely sure that a particular file does not contain any malware you would need to scan it with at least two or three antiviruses. Since buying multiple antivirus programs would be very expensive, you might be wondering at this point what I am going to suggest. My recommendation is to visit a site like virustotal.com, and upload the file so that it will be automatically scanned by 33 best antivirus programs available. You do not have to pay anything, and you get the best protection. What else could you ask for? The only disadvantage is that each time you want to scan a file you will need to upload it, but that is not a problem if you are uploading small files.

Most bloggers want to post new articles on their blog on a regular basis. Did a few days already pass since your last post, and you feel obliged to write something new? Do not worry, as there are a lot of things to write about, and all you have to do is stay focused. Here is some advice that may help you:

Duplicate content is something that every serious webmaster is trying to avoid. Basically, duplicate content means that some specific content, like an article, exists in a few locations on the Internet. Search engines often penalize websites for having duplicate content, as usually duplicate content provides a smaller value for Internet users. On the other hand, original content is something considered to be very valuable.

However, it seems that detecting duplicate content not always works as well as it should. From time to time, bloggers report that articles on their site has been marked as duplicate content, because scraper websites have copied those articles to their own domains. If the duplicate content filter was working correctly, then the scraper sites would be marked as sites with duplicate content, not the opposite. Generally speaking, scrapper sites are automated websites that pull content from other websites using web scraping. Most of those sites are made solely for Google AdSense. It is important to understand that many of them violate copyright law, as they do not even give credit to the original author. The webmasters of such sites do not put any work into writing articles, yet they might be listed quite high in search engine results.

Some speculate that many search engines fail to realize on which site the content was posted in the first place. The websites that copy/paste content from other sites, which are indexed earlier, might be actually treated as legit sites. While it is alarming, let us hope that the major search engines will work on those content filters, as we do not want our content copied/pasted to other websites. I hope that this article reminded all of us that original content is something we should strive for, and that copying copy/pasting content from other websites should be avoided at all cost.

Benefiting from various technological advancements can give a lot of satisfaction. However, what we need to remember is that being obsessed with some aspects of technology is not always good. I am talking about excessive email checking. It is quite possible that in the future there will be meetings of people called “email checkers anonymous”. Let us discuss our this topic for a while. First of all, there are people who are addicted to checking email so often that it ruins their personal life and well-being. Very often the problem is that instead of spending quality time with their family, people often work too much. However, in case of excessively checking emails, you are not even going to get paid by anybody. One might say that it does not take that much time to read emails. However, you have to remember, that checking email is often associated with not only reading the message, but also responding or taking other actions. There is also no point checking email if you know that it might contain a message about some potentials problems at work, which you cannot solve until next Monday anyway. If you are tempted to check your email too often, talk to somebody about it. Ask this person to help you in some way.

Do you want to know how to obtain a free hard drive? I might not be able to tell you how to obtain a regular one, but you can get an Internet virtual drive by utilizing Gmail. You will need to have a Gmail address, but these days it should be quite easy to obtain. Secondly, you will need to download the Gmail Drive shell extension and install it. You can do it by visiting this link: softpedia.com/get/Internet/E-mail/Mail-Utilities/GMail-Drive-shell-extension.shtml. Once installed, this software is going to create a virtual file system around your Google Gmail account. What this means for you, is that you will be able to save and retrieve file directly through Internet Explorer. Of course, the transfer rate of files is going to be a lot slower compared to copying files between your regular hard drives. On the other hand, since it is completely free, it is useful anyway. I must admit that I really appreciate the ability to back up my files this way. There are many users who use this Gmail drive on a regular basis. I would like to encourage more people to benefit from this free hard drive, as I am aware of the fact that not many Internet users know about it yet.

Internet Explorer enables you to add search providers and even switch them easily. This feature is especially useful, if you want to search for a specific item, for example a book, through your favorite search engine. The good thing is that you do not have to be limited to one search engine, as it is natural to have at least few search engines, which you might want to use. It is also a good idea to set one of your search engines as a starting page. This way, every time you open your browser, your favorite search engine will appear and you are ready to use it. To get started you should locate the Instant Search Box at the top right. It should have the name of the selected search engine written inside the box. Next, click on the arrow to the right of the magnifying glass and choose “Find More Providers”. Now you can add search providers and select the one you had in mind. From now on, you can change the search provider whenever you wish without any problems. Google is probably a good choice when it comes to search engines, but there are also other overlooked search engines.

Would you like to hear some email tips? You have probably seen BCC before many times, and were wondering what this abbreviation stands for. By using BCC, you can send your email to many people without them knowing who the other recipients are. Whereas CC stands for Carbon Copy, BCC is a abbreviation for Blind Carbon Copy. As using CC enables other people to see who else received a message, there are many advantages of using BCC over CC:

Overall, Blind Carbon Copy ensures privacy of your recipients, so in many situations this will be the biggest advantage of using it.

All of us value our privacy, but the Internet made it rather difficult to hide confidential information. Did you know that based on your browser history it is possible to estimate your gender? That is because each website you visit has a specific male-female ratio, thus knowing that ratio and the browsing history, you can say with high probability what gender an Internet surfer is. You can check if the script will guess what your gender you are by visiting this link:
http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-history-estimate-gender/
This is a very fun script, but keep in mind that the results will be the most accurate if you do not share your computer with anyone. I also recommend accessing the script with Firefox, unless you are really patient.

We often like to read news in order to stay informed about the most important events. Generally, we simply want to know what is going on in the world. Where are many ways we can have access to news, such as through a newspaper, magazine, TV, or even the Internet. Actually, reading news on the Internet is very popular these days. Not only you can read news online, but you can personalize it, so that you will stay informed about the things you really care about. To get started visit news.google.com and click “Personalize this page”. You can delete sections, increase or decrease the number of stories shown in each section, or even add different categories. This is a great way to read news, as you will feel that the news site is really optimized for you to have the best experience.