Category Archives: Technology

Are You Backing Up Your PC Properly?

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Are you backing up your PC data adequately?So many of us put off backing up the critical data on our PC’s, and yet what would be the effect of us losing this data?   Are you taking the necessary precautions to backup your data?

In some cases, losing things such as photographs of your wedding, child’s birth, or other special events, would be soul destroying.  I know it would be for me, and I almost lost a set of photos once when my computer got infected with a virus.

I wrote a detailed article about the various backup options that are available, both backup devices as well as programs that you can use to backup data.  CLICK HERE to read the article.  I hope that you find this useful.

Don’t forget that backing up to a device attached to your PC is not necessarily enough.  Should you get a power surge, an external hard drive could also become corrupted.   It’s important to keep off site backups of your data as well as in the same place as your PC, in case of fire, flood, or theft.

Auto Pager – A Cool Firefox Add-On

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Auto Pager in action screen shot. This shows Auto Pager in use when searching for images on Google. You can see the page divider on the snapshot.I am sure that everyone is familiar with the problem where you perform a search on your browser, or visit a site that has page after page of entries, requiring you to keep clicking on the button to take you to the next page, and waiting for that page to load and display.

Auto Pager is one answer to this problem, and having used it for the last six months or more, I can say that it works really well.  Written by Wind Li, Auto Pager detects when you have scrolled to the end of a page, and automatically loads the next page for you at the bottom of the current window, with a separator showing you where one page ends and the next begins.

The first time that you encounter a site with multiple pages that Auto Pager is set to recognize (for example Google, Yahoo, Bing and all the main search engines, plus the New York Times, eBay, Amazon, Digg and many more, and scroll to the end of a page, it will ask you if you want to use Auto Pager with this site.   Having confirmed this, it will then expand the bottom of the screen to include the next page, and will keep going as long as you keep scrolling down.

Auto Pager Options Screen. Auto pager is a cool plugin for firefox that allows you to scroll through multiple=There is an FAQ page for Auto Pager on the author’s site, plus the options screen allows you to change a number of settings and to add new sites to Auto pager, if they are not already configured.  (Click on the Tools option at the top of the Firefox window, Add-Ons, then select the Auto pager add-on and click on Options).

Some of these options may be beyond most users of Auto Pager, but you would really only need to play with these if you are a developer.

There isn’t much more to say really, except if you haven’t tried this plugin for Firefox, give it a whirl.  I am sure you will find that it adds to your productivity when searching through multiple pages.

Fixed Social Buttons – A Great WordPress Plugin

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FIxed Social Buttons is a great plugin for WordPress that adds share buttons to the most popular social networking and bookmarking sites to your wordpress pagesSeveral weeks ago I discovered a great little plugin for WordPress called Fixed Social Buttons.

This plugin automatically places buttons for popular Social Networking and Bookmarking sites at the side of your blog page, it’s very easy to set up, and the buttons stand out much better for sharing than others I have found in the body of a post.

To install the plugin on your WordPress site, go to Plugins in the Admin Panel and select Add New.  Then search for “Fixed Social Buttons.   The nice thing about the latest versions of WordPress I think everyone will agree is that plugins these days can be installed and updated at the touch of a button, and this is no exception.  It’s a lot better than having to download, unzip and FTP up to the correct folder on the server.  But I digress…

Having installed Fixed Social Buttons, a new option should appear in the Admin Panel under Settings.

Fixed Social Buttons is a plugin for WordPress sites that adds buttons for popular social bookmarking sites to your wordpress pages. Buttons may be added either horizontally or vertically and at the top or bottom of the page.The Settings couldn’t be easier to understand.  You can choose the style and size of the buttons to use, which buttons to show – currently 11 (Flickr, Delicious, Digg, Webonews, Linkedin, Myspace, Reddit, Technorati, Facebook, Twitter, and lastly subscribe to RSS feed ), whether they should appear at the Top or Bottom of the page, and whether they should be shown as Vertical or Horizontal.

You can also specify whether the links are to open in a new window or not, whether to make the links Follow or No Follow, and if you are sharing to Flickr or Twitter, add your profile details.

It’s as simple as that – simple and effective.  I hope you find this useful.
See also the Fixed Social Buttons plugin page.

How To Add A Control Button To An Excel Spreadsheet

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This was a problem that I was faced with at work recently, and having figured out how to do this, I thought the best thing to do was to present the solution with step by step instructions.

I wrote an article about this, and hope it proves useful to you.  You can see the full details HERE.

New Year – New Web Site – New Host

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affiliate_link It’s the start of a new year, and the perfect time to make new resolutions, isn’t it.

What does 2010 hold for you?   Do you I wonder have plans for a new web site or blog, or to move an existing one over from a Free service to your own domain?   Maybe you already have your own web site or blog, but are not happy with the service that your hosting company is giving you.   Are they charging you too much?  Are you going over your limits for bandwidth or space?  Or maybe you are looking to create more web sites or blogs, and need a hosting plan that allows you to host them all under one account, instead of paying for each one.

Whichever of the above you are thinking of doing, you can do far worse than choosing POWWEB to provide your web hosting service.

I have hosted my web sites with POWWEB for almost 10 years, and the ability to host multiple domains under one account, combined with their huge bandwidth and disk space, have kept me there.

WANT SOME GOOD NEWS?
Right now you will pay just $4.88/month
NOT $5.77 as on the banner
That’s EVEN BIGGER SAVINGS!

POWWEB have just one hosting package to make things easier, and this provides everything that you need to create and operate your web sites, including:

  • Unlimited Disk Space
  • Unlimited Data Transfer (Bandwidth)
  • Comprehensive Member Control Panel
  • DNS Management
  • Sub-Domains (something.yourdomain.com)
  • 24×7 FTP Access, Unlimited FTP Users (separate directories)
  • Web-Based File Manager
  • Password Protect Directories
  • Custom Error Pages (403,404, and 500)
  • SnapShot Instant Click and Restore Daily Backups
  • Rock Solid Unix Platform

You also have automatic script installs of:

  • WordPress
  • phpBB
  • osCommerce
  • Gallery2
  • and more

Add to this full site statistics, daily Site Backups, up to 75 MySQL databases, eCommerce solutions etc.

For email your account provides unlimited pop email accounts, webmail access, unlimited forwarding addresses, and comprehensive spam filtering.

The POWWEB customer service includes:

  • Toll-Free Technical Support (1-877-4-POWWEB)
  • 24×7 Friendly Email Technical Support
  • Active Community Forum (20,000+ members!)
  • 24×7 Live Chat Help
  • Tutorials and Support Documentations
  • 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee

I have to honestly say that when I have used the POWWEB support line, and that is a few times over the last 10 years, I have always had a prompt response, and not from the far flung corners of the world eather like many companies these days.

Right now I have 15 domains hosted on one single account with POWWEB.  Altogether I only use 5% of the allotted disk space, and less than 10% of the bandwidth too.  I have over 40 pop email addresses, and over 100 forwarding addresses, and all runs pretty smoothly.

So what do you think? Does this sound like it would fit your needs? How about that of a friend?

I would be delighted to answer any questions that you have if you think that POWWEB is the right hosting company for you, or just click on the word POWWEB for more information.