I hate online advertising, but sometimes it is a necessary evil (We have to pay the bills SOMEHOW!). However, being bombarded with ads while I search really drives me up the wall. As a Safari user, there are no hacks to remove Google Adwords so I’m kinda stuck. Not anymore!
If you use http://www.google.com/search?output=googleabout to do all your searches, the results will have no advertising, or other annoying Google garbage attached to it.
Monitor your website uptime using Twitter with a free service known as MoniTwitter. With MoniTwitter and your standard Twitter account, you can have server issues or unavailability errors reported directly to a public or private Twitter account. Once your website is associated with a specific Twitter account, you can subscribe to that Twitter account and receive updates via SMS, web, or email.
Earlier today I was introduced to a new Woot-like bargain store catered towards the purchasing needs of outdoor enthusiasts. The online bargain store Steep and Cheap brings killer gear at killer prices (until all available units are accounted for). Steep and Cheap brings you great deals on outdoor gear and makes sure you don’t miss out. Thanks to the various instant notifications of new items options, you’re sure to know exactly when something enticing is available for sale.
In yet another story on how to toss away your money, the Darth Vader Phone features three sound effect buttons (that double as ringers), producing realistic recreations of the saber swing, the Imperial March and of course, Darth’s famous heavy breathing. Now if you could mix in the heavy breathing WHILE you are on the phone and we might have a winner! Available for £19.96.
We’ve all seen ‘em. Websites with fonts set at a ridiculous default size making it irritating to spend any time reading through content without manually increasing the font size with a browser. Fortunately, for anyone who frequents a website with small text, there is a convenient Firefox extension known as NoSquint which will remember what sites required manual resizing.
Are you always changing the text zoom level when you open a new browser window? Do you find some sites you visit have impossibly small fonts and you are constantly changing your text zoom back and forth as you visit different sites?
NoSquint is a Firefox extension that allows you to adjust the default text zoom level, which is very useful if you have a small display or run at a very high resolution. NoSquint also remembers the zoom level per site (though you can disable that).
You can grab the NoSquint extension for yourself - make sure that Firefox is installed otherwise you’ll scratch your head wondering why you’re not getting the results you expect.
Ok, Palm addicts time to get your fix. Sprint and Palm today jointly announced the Treo 755p. We’ve created a walkthrough video that brushes over the smartphones hardware changes (Look Ma, No Antenna!), as well as two of the devices key bundled apps – Voice Control and IM.
Built into the ROM are the usual suspects, Documents to Go for native Word, Excel, PowerPoint editing, and full PDF support. PocketTunes for media playback (including protected WMA files). VersaMail with built in Exchange push support (still puzzled why they didn’t ditch VersaMail and use their most recent acquisition ChatterMail). Also of note included in the ROM is Google Maps, and Sprint TV.
This Treo will also sport two colors, deep royal blue and burgundy in a rubberized finish similar to the Treo 750.
All in all it is a solid model (but why oh why did they ditch the metal stylus?!)l, and perfect replacement for those hold outs still using the 650. But 700 users may want to wait until third party extended batteries are available since I found myself scrambling for a charger a few times when I was reviewing the product.
After the jump, enjoy some screenshots of the UI.
WordPress users who rely on Akismet for preventing or reducing the amount of spam on their website can surely identify with the tedious task of filtering through the spam queue. Prior to today, I had reduced my spam filtering work flow by simply mass deleting any comments that were caught by Akismet. Not the best idea but something that had to be done to reduce the headaches. Akismet does a fantastic job of catching spam, but it also does a so-so job at catching safe comments.
Manually browsing through the moderation list is the last thing any blogger wants to do on a Sunday afternoon. Fortunately, there is a handy plugin which can be used in conjunction with your existing spam filtering plugin [like Akismet]. The supplemental plugin is called the Simple Spam Filter – a filter for your spam filter. The Simple Spam Filter presents an alternative view which allows you to quickly scan through spam mass deleting comments which share common keywords recognized as spam.
Last week we spoke about how to prevent Spam blogs for ripping your content and killing your bandwidth bill. This week how to prevent image ripping.
Normally if you run a website that doesn’t have a news feed it is really easy to block people from stealing your images by using tweaking your .htaccess file with a referrer requirement. BUT if your site has a news feed that tick won’t work.
The Hotlink Protection Plugin for WordPress Referrer checks every request for an image that is made to your site. If the referrer empty or not from your your blog the request is redirected to an information image or the image is blocked.
To ensure that feed readers see images the image urls in the feed are replaced by an alternate ‘secret’ URL. This secret URL is not protected by a referrer check so online feedreaders get the image, and since you implemented my tip from last week you don’t have to worry about spam blogs getting the secret link.
