Leaning with Intent

Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

Which browser should I choose? This is the question which many people ask, while others spend hours upon hours in order to prove that their browser is superior. While I also have a browser preference, this is not really what I wanted to talk about this time, as I rather want to point out something else. With so many browsers advertising that they are the best, we often feel like we have to make a specific choice, and that is not really the case. Some people might not know it, but you can actually have multiple browsers installed on your computer. You can use Firefox, IE, and Opera interchangeably, and you do not have to be limited to just one. You may wish to use Firefox when accessing dangerous sites, as Firefox is considered to be the safest browser. On the other hand, you may also want to use Internet Explorer when you want to open some of your bookmarked pages, because most websites are compatible with IE. You can use Opera when you feel like you want to quickly jump from one tab to another, as Opera is a very fast browser. Remember that you do not have to limit yourself to just one browser.

Choosing the right hosting can be difficult, as there are a lot of hosting providers. Some of them are large companies, while others are just resellers who may not have a lot of customers. In any case it is important to have a reliable hosting company, especially if you spend a lot of time working on your site. In some cases hosting downtime can damage your site’s reputation, as visiting might think that the site does not exist. In other cases you may lose money because of it, if your site sells products. When it comes to choosing reliable hosting, I usually look at the price and what people are saying about the site. I could give you some recommendations, but the situation is changing rapidly, and what I would say might no longer be true in a few months. That is why I encourage you to do some searches in your favorite search engine to see what people are writing about hosting providers. Personally, I would avoid unknown hosting providers because you never know if their business will fail very soon. You should try to find established hosting companies which you can trust. After all, you do not want to lose valuable data that you have on your website. You shoulf be especially careful if you do not back up your website very often.

Alexa is a site which monitors the number of daily visitors to websites based on the Alexa toolbar. While there are some problems with this tool, it is believed to be accurate for the top 100 websites. However, it does not work reliably for measuring sites which are about technology. This is because visitors to technology sites tend to have Alexa toolbar installed on their computers, as opposed to non-technology related sites. In any case, I was not surprised to notice that search engines were among the most popular websites in the world. Among them was yahoo.com, google.com, and live.com. I believe that the reason that search engines are so popular is the fact that information is very valuable in our times, and search engines are considered the best way to obtain it. You can easily obtain information about recent events, movies, books, or anything you want. Search engines allow you to search for products which you want to purchase, and they are usually less expensive than those in than brick and mortal stores, as online merchants have lower costs. The best search engines in the world are even capable of correcting spelling mistakes, so that if you make a mistake, you will not have to enter the whole search phrase again. All of the things that I mentioned contribute to the fact that search engines became the most popular websites in the world.

Have you ever been wondering what to write about because it seemed like you run out of ideas? I have seen bloggers writing about various ideas that may help others to choose the subject of their posts. I would like to do the same, and that is why I present a list of ideas that hopefully will prove to be useful:

• Write a post that will include a poll. Participating in polls is interesting to most Internet users as it allows expressing one’s opinion. Having various polls on a website can increase the loyalty of visitors, as they will feel that they contribute to the website.
• Post results from a poll that you run. Writing a post that discusses poll results is also a good idea. This way you can prove that it matters to you how your readers voted. Those who participated in the poll will surely like it.
• Reveal some secret from your niche. It might be tricky, but if you think you possess some valuable knowledge, it could be a good topic to write about.
• Post a picture/graph and comment on it. Picture is like a thousand words, so do not be afraid to use them. You might even decide to use charts as well.
• Based on the data from your visitor traffic software/plug-in comment on the visitor tendencies. There might be some interesting data, including what keywords people used to visit your site. Of course, this only works if you have a traffic statistics software.
• Create an advantages/disadvantages post. It might be about a product, service or anything else you want. Discuss what are the advantages and disadvantages of something.

Make sure you write about something you like to discuss, because if you do so then your post will be higher quality.

A few years ago almost nobody heard about social networks, or at least they were not as popular as they are today. Currently, social networks are among the most popular Internet sites in the world. I think that is because talking with other people is a lot of fun. That is why phone cards are so popular as well. Anyway, millions of people who would otherwise probably not use Internet that often are spending many hours in front of their computers. Social networks allow people to make friends with others who live very far away, possibly even in other counties. Social networks are also used to communicate with those who we know in real life. With so much recent success of these networks, the question is whether they pose any danger. After observing people socializing on the Internet, I have to say that there might be a danger that since people are anonymous, they might say things they would not dare in real life.

The most popular social networks in the world are MySpace, Facebook, Windows Live Spaces, Habbo, and Friendster. Some social networks are popular only in specific parts of the world. For example, Friendster is no longer that much popular in the Western world, but is very popular is Southeast Asia. Hundreds of millions of people are part of various social networks and this number seems to be growing.

The term linkbaiting is not new in the blogosphere. It can be also referred to as link baiting, link bait, or linkbait. In general, this expression describes the actions that webmasters and bloggers undertake in order to increase the number of incoming links to their websites. They do this because they are hoping that it will bring more traffic and increase some important ranks including Google Page Rank. Here are some examples of linkbaiting:

1. Running a contest where one of the requirements is to link back to your site from a post.
2. Commenting on other blogs hoping that the author of this blog will link to you.
3. Providing other webmasters and bloggers with free tools and widgets that they will be able to use. In case of linkbaiting, you should make sure that such tools and widgets include a link to your blog.

It is true that webmasters and bloggers have been doing things mentioned above for many years now, even before the term linkbaiting existed. There is currently a debate going on as to whether linkbaiting is ethically right or wrong. There is no doubt that bloggers have different feelings towards such practices. What some consider as spamming, others might even appreciate. From the three points I mentioned above, I do not consider any of them to be ethically wrong. However, there are more linkbaiting techniques that I did not include in this article that can rise a question whether they are ethically justifiable.

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.

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.

It is important for employers that employees should work efficiently and contribute to the success of the company. I do not think anyone is going to argue with that. One of the things that employees might potentially do is waste their time sending non-relevant email. Of course, this does not contribute to you company’s success, and is considered a time waster. The employer can always say that the computers belong to him, so that he has the right to see what his employees are writing, but recently employers also want access to any mobile text messages being sent. What about the privacy of people? It seems that privacy is not the biggest concern in the 21st century. However, these days people value their privacy a lot. I think that many might not mind their employers having access to their email account, but full access to their mobile phone might be an exaggeration. While sending irrelevant email messages might take workers some time, text messages are usually very short and take only a few seconds to send. Very often you might just want to tell your children to get something for lunch or tell them some other important things. I think that sending very short messages should be allowed, because after all we are human beings with families. Everybody should have the right to have a few minute break at work to talk to a family member, or send a short message if there is something important to say.

Surveillance is becoming more and more popular. While I cannot say that I approve of it, the facts are that it is going to be even more widespread in the future. Surveillance these days collects some much data that it is impossible to process it effectively. Basically, governments collect such data but they are unable to process it. There are thousands of cameras that are constantly recording video, but are they really fulfill their role besides spying on people? Can they be effective enough to apprehend criminals? I think that this question was already answered by the 9/11 attacks, as there was data pointing to an attack, but there was no way to properly analyze it on time. We must accept that we are not yet that technologically advanced to analyze all of the data we collect. While it may seem logical that it would be a good thing if we were able to instantly analyze surveillance data, the truth is more complicated. If computers were able to automatically analyze all data and keep records of it, then we would virtually have no privacy. That is because computers would know our shopping habits and interests. The situation would get even worse if there were more and more cameras everyone.