Monochrome photographs are timeless, especially black and white photographs. They enhance emotional substance and have a disposition of making photos look more artistic.

Credit: Jana by LudovicMazet

They can be used on many different scenes as it’s not required to think about all the colors that should look good together and match the amount of light available. And for those who love to play with color, black and white photography doesn’t necessarily need to be boring as there are so many different shades to choose from.

Gray scale is a spectrum of black and white which evolves into shades and different depths of gray. So when we speak of gray scale we speak of how we measure tones of gray. Here are five tips you might need to know when it comes to Black & White Photography.

1. Use RAW

If you have the opportunity to use RAW, do it! It will open up many new possibilities and give you more control of the image’s appearance.

The negative aspect of RAW files is that it needs to be processed later. If you use RAW files, your computer, rather than your camera will process the records and generate a picture file from it. You can for instance use Adobe Photoshop to process the images.

If you don’t have that function on your camera, then don’t worry, carry on reading and you’ll see that there are plenty of other ways to get great black and white photographs.

2. Pattern and Texture

Rich textures and detailed sceneries will help your photograph become comprehensible and exciting.

Patterns are lucky in black and white photographs as colors aren’t taking the attention from them. So if you want to take a shoot where you’d like to emphasize on the patterns, then choose black and white tones instead of color.

3. Contrast

With the help of light you can get great contrast. Contrast will bring the tonal differences in your photography as you can’t use color. With side lighting, for instance, you’ll get longer shadows.

Contrast is important because when there is a distinct contrast, with dark shades and bright light, you’ll be able to see things you didn’t see before.

4. ISO

In photography, an ISO number is an indication of the sensitivity of the image sensor, where a higher number indicates higher sensitivity. The higher the ISO is the more are the possibilities to take pictures in low light, without the usage of flash.

For black and white photography, use the lowest ISO. When you use high ISO the noise will become more obvious. Noise in photography is like the “grain” in film, where the film doesn’t become as smooth as you’d wish. The higher your ISO is, the more unpleasant dots will show in your photo. Therefore shady and dim days are actually great for black and white photographs.

5. Subjects

Black and white photography can basically look good in most occasions and circumstances.

• Monochrome photographs are good at bringing a sensitive experience and story into a shoot, they tend to bring depth and give us the chance to explore an object or person more strictly due to the graphic elements that it conveys (especially thanks to a good contrast). Therefore it’s also well-matched for abstract photos.
• When taking pictures of large spaces, like landscapes or foliages; make sure that the same tone isn’t flowing through all the elements in your photography as this will give it a rather boring and dead look. Most black and white images are supposed to be dramatic and leave a striking impact on the viewer.
  One way of doing this is by finding a movement, like an unsteady wave in a sea or a moving sky. Something that isn’t really all that dramatic in real life can become much more intense when a glimpse of it is caught on camera.
• One single subject is the most popular choice for black and white photography. This goes mostly for portraits, here you can really emphasize on the affect that the gray scale will bring to the person’s expression.

About Author – Juan Shaban runs a design blog dudye.com. Follow Juan on Twitter.

When it comes to web design, creativity of design should not be hold back by the limited choices of supported web fonts we call the web-safe fonts. Designers should be having freedom to use any fonts they preferred on titles and contents.

In 2005, dynamic image replacement was made popular with a technique called Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR). Developed by Shaun Inman, sIFR take advantage of Javascript and Adobe Flash to allow web designers to use any custom fonts they like on the website and still maintain visibility to those who don’t have that font. And as the web continues to evolve, today we have more alternative solutions using various technologies, just in case you are not quite a fan of Flash.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at some of the techniques to achieve Dynamic Image Replacements.

Commonly Used Techniques

Here are some of the most commonly practiced techniques for dynamic image replacements.

Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR)

sIFR is one of the most popular method to embed custom fonts on websites. It uses Javascript and Flash to generate custom typeface for your website and allows converted typeface to be selectable. Aside from that, converted typeface remains as text in source codes so search engine can still crawl them.

sIFR 2 (recommended) is the current stable release, however if you are looking into implementing sIFR, you should also know that siFR 3 beta is also available for download. It might be a little buggy but at least it solves the font-expansion problem of sIFR 2.

Tools for sIFR that might come in handy:

• sIFRvault
  sIFRvault is a repository of sIFR fonts you can download.
  
• sIFR Generator
  Online tool that allows you to create sIFR .swf files with a few clicks of your mouse. Simply upload the TTF font of the font you want to convert, preview and download.
• Convert fonts to sIFR
  Upload a .TTF font and this website will have them converted to sIFR Flash file.

sIFR Lite

The original sIFR is 22k, so Dave decided to rework it using a more object-oriented approach, and the result? 3x smaller at 3.7k.

PHP + CSS Dynamic Text Replacement (P+C DTR)

As the name suggest, this is a text replacement method that uses PHP and CSS that make use of the original method described by Steward Rosenberger. It is also an enhancement from the previous version developed by R. Marie Cox that doesn’t support text wrapping and inner tags. Another cool thing about P+C DTR is, the image text can be customizable with CSS tags.

typeface.js

What makes typeface.js special is that they only use Javascript to embed custom fonts and style can be further customized with HTML and CSS, no Flash is required. It is open source and supports most browsers we are using these days, whether it’s Safari, Firefox, IE (6 and above).

Personally after some experiments with typeface.js, we think there could be some potential room for improvements. Firstly, the fonts tend to render slightly different among different browsers. If you are using typeface.js, we suggest you do a cross-browser check before assuming what you see in Firefox will be what you see in Safari. Text are also not selectable with typeface.js.

Custom fonts in typeface.js are not compiled; meaning users are able to download the fonts. That could lead to copyright problem. It’s advised that you checked thoroughly to make sure the fonts you are using are ok for redistribution.

Cufon

No Flash required, Cufon is a great alternative to sIFR and it’s quite simple to implement. First, you use the Cufon generator to generate and customize the font you want, then you insert the Cufon Javascript in your source code and you tell the script which selectors you want the fonts to be customized.

The biggest problem with Cufon would be the legal issue of using these custom fonts online. Since it’s embedded within Javascript , it can be easily ripped by anyone who view the source code. Cufon custom fonts are not selectable, that’s the other turn off.

Facelift

Also known as Facelift Image Replacement (FLIR), it is another great method to sIFR that do no required Flash. Looks like very other alternative is hitting in sIFR’s Flash issue.

Facelift uses PHP and PHP’s GD Library. They inherit the legacy problem of custom font replacements – unable to select the text. Aside from that, we think it’s great too.

More Methods

The techniques above might be more widely used, but we’ve noticed some other ways too to give convert your text into beautiful custom typefaces.

Type Select

TypeSelect leverages on typeface.js, jQuery, the canvas, toDataURL, CSS background properties and real overlayed text to give a custom typeface on your website. Text selection works on Firefox, Safari and even Chrome but not IE.

Swf Image Replacement (swfIR)

swfIR gives you the ability to apply an assortment of visual effects to any or all images on your website. For example, you can add any images on your website and swfIR will add a rounder border, rotate the positioning or even add shadows to it.

Scalable Jens Image Replacement

Created by Jens Persson and based on sIFR, this method uses javascript to replaces some elements in a (X)HTML document with calls to a image generator written in php. Allowing you to use fonts in your web design that is not available on the users computer.

Nine Techniques for CSS Image Replacement

These are not dynamic text replacements, but Chris Coyier demonstrates as much as nine different CSS techniques to replace text with images; each with a report card listing the condition of – what if images are on/off, CSS is on/off.

Font Burner

Font Burner leverage on Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) to change your titles into custom font. All you need to do is find the font, selects it and insert the code into the head and your title will be changed in no time.

Wordpress + Dynamic Image Replacement

If you are a Wordpress user looking for dynamic image replacement solution for the title or even the content of your blog, chances are there are plugin for them. Here are some text replacement plugins we come to know about.

sIFR Wordpress Plugin – WP sIFR
WP sIFR was created to remove the complications from getting custom fonts on a Wordpress site. With WP sIFR, you only have to upload your SWF font file to the plugin directory and then login, activate it, and configure its styles all in the Settings panel.

Cufon Wordpress Plugin – WP-Cufon
The only thing you have to do is converting your fontfiles and upload them into the plugins directory. You can enable the objects you want to get replaced in the Admin Menu of WordPress.

Facelift Image Replacment (FLIR)Wordpress Plugin
FLIR for WordPress is SEO friendly and only renders the image in the browser if JavaScript is enabled. You HTML/XHTML code remains unchanged leaving your head tags readable by search engines and the page readable by those without JavaScript.

Font Burner Control Panel
The Font Burner Control Panel plugin allows you to easily add any of the 1000+ free fonts available on the Font Burner website to your Wordpress theme.

Web optimization is a vital part of web development and maintenance but also something often overlooked by webmasters. Just think of the money you can save, and how it can potentially help increase your readership and traffic when they are properly done.

If you have not done any optimization to your website (or blog) so far or merely curious how it can help speed up your site, please take a look at this list of optimization tips we’ve put together.

We’ve split things up into 3 separate sections for better readability – respectively server-side optimization, assets optimization (which includes web components like CSS, Javascript, images, etc) and platform, where we’ll focus on Wordpress optimization. At the last section, we throw in a couple of links we figured useful. Full list after jump.

Optimization: Server-side

1. Choose a decent Web Host

   Your web hosting account has no direct relationship with the optimizations you are about to perform but we figured choosing the right web hosting account so important we decided to bring it to your attention first. Hosting account is the foundation of your website/blog where it’s security, accessibility (cPanel, FTP, SSH), server stability, prices and customer supports all play important roles. You need to make sure you are in good hands.

   Recommended reading:
   How to Choose a Web Host by wikiHow is a great article that gives you steps and tips you should know before purchasing any web hosting account.

2. Host Assets Separately

   When we mention assets, we meant web components like images and static scripts that don’t require server-side processing. These includes any web graphics, images, Javascripts, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), etc. Hosting assets separately is not a must, but we’ve seen tremendous result in terms of server stability with this implementation when the blog was having a traffic spike.

   Recommended reading:
   Maximizing Parallel Downloads in the Carpool Lane.

3. Compression with GZip

   In short, contents travel from server side to client side (vicet versa) whenever a HTTP request is make. Compressing the content for sending greatly reduce the time needed to process each request.

   GZip is one of the best ways to do this and it various according to the type of servers you are using. For instance, Apache 1.3 uses mod_zip, Apache 2.x uses mod_deflate and here’s how you do it in Nginx. Here are some really good articles to get you familiar with server side compressions:

   • Speed up a web site by enabling Apache file compression
   • Compress Web Output Using mod_gzip and Apache
   • How To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression
   • Server-side compression for ASP

4. Minimize Redirects

   Webmasters do URL redirect (whether it’s Javascript or META redirects) all the time. Sometimes it’s purpose is to point users from an old page to new, or merely guide users to the correct page. Each redirect create an additional HTTP request and RTT (round-trip-time). The more redirection you have, the slower user will get to the destination page.

   Recommended reading:
   Avoid Redirects by Google Code gives you a good overview on the matter. The article also recommends some practical ways to minimize redirection to increase serving speed.

5. Reduce DNS Lookups

   According to Yahoo! Developer Network Blog, it takes about 20-120 milliseconds for DNS (Domain Name System) to resolve IP address for a given hostname or domain name and the browser cannot do anything until the process is properly completed.

   Author Steve Souders suggested that splitting these components across at least two but no more than four hostnames reduces DNS lookups and allow high degree parallel downloads. Read more on the article.

Optimization: The Assets (CSS, Javascripts, Images)

1. Merge Multiple Javascripts into One

   Folks at rakaz.nl shares how you can combine multiple Javascripts like:

           http://www.creatype.nl/javascript/prototype.js
           http://www.creatype.nl/javascript/builder.js
           http://www.creatype.nl/javascript/effects.js
           http://www.creatype.nl/javascript/dragdrop.js
           http://www.creatype.nl/javascript/slider.js
       

   Into a single file by changing the URL to:

       http://www.creatype.nl/javascript/prototype.js,builder.js,effects.js,dragdrop.js,slider.js
       

   by manipulating the .htaccess and using PHP. Click here to read more.

2. Compress Javascript & CSS

   Minify is a PHP5 app that can combine multiple CSS and Javascript files, compress their contents (i.e. removal of unnecessary whitespace/comments), and serve the results with HTTP encoding (gzip/deflate) and headers that allow optimal client-side caching.

   

   Compress them online!
   
   There are also some web services that allow you to manually compress your Javascripts and CSS files online. Here are few we come to know:
   

   • compressor.ebiene (Javascript, CSS)
   • javascriptcompressor.com (Javascript)
   • jscompress.com (Javascript)
   • CleanCSS (CSS)
   • CSS Optimizer (CSS)

3. Customize Header Expiry/Caching

   
   Credit: httpwatch

   By using a customized Expiry header, your web components like images, static files, CSS, Javascript skipped unnecessary HTTP request when the same user reload the page for the second time. It reduces the bandwidth needed and definetely help in serving the page faster.

   Recommended readings:

   • Yahoo! Developer Network Blog – Add an Expires Header
   • How To Add Good Expires Headers to Images in Apache 1.3
   • HTTP Caching
   • Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters

4. Off-load The Assets

   By off-loading, we mean separating the Javascripts, images, CSS and static files from main server where the website is hosted and place them on another server or rely on other web services. We’ve seen significant improvement here in Hongkiat by off-loading assets to other web services available, leaving the server to mainly do the PHP processing. Here are some suggestions of online services for off-loading:

   • Images: Flickr, Smugmug, Paid hostings*
   • Javascripts: Google Ajax Library, Google App Engine, Paid hostings*
   • Web Forms: WuFoo, FormSpring
   • RSS: Google Feedburner
   • Survey and Polls: SurveyMonkey, PollDaddy

   *Paid hostings – Paid services always have better reliability and stability. If your website is constantly requesting for the assets, you’ll need to make sure they are in good hands. We recommend Amazon S3 and Cloud Front.

5. Handling Web Images

   Images are important part of your website. However if they are not properly optimize, they can become a burden and end up utilizing unpredictably large amount of bandwidths on daily basis. Here are some best practices to optimize your images:

   • Optimize PNG Images
     Folks at Smashing Magazine describes some clever techniques that may help you optimize your PNG-images.
   • Optimizing for Web – Things you need to know (the formats)
     Learn more about Jpeg, GIF, PNG and how you should save your images for web.
   • Don’t Scale Images
     Always practice inserting the width and height for each images. Also don’t scale down an image just because you need a smaller version on the web. For example: Do not force scale a 200×200 px image to 50×50 px for your website by altering the width and height. Get a 50×50 px instead.

   Optimizing with Web Services and Tools. Good news is, you don’t need to be a Photoshop expert to optimize your images. There are plenty of web services and tools to help you do the job.

   • Smush.it
     
     Probably one of the most efficient online tool to optimize images. There’s even a Wordpress plugin for it!
   • JPEG & PNG Stripper
     A Windows tool for stripping/cleaning/removing unnecessary metadata (junk) from JPG/JPEG/JFIF & PNG files.
   • Online Image Optimizer
     Lets you easily optimize your gifs, animated gifs, jpgs, and pngs, so they load as fast as possible on your site, by Dynamic Drive
   • SuperGIF
     Effortlessly make all your GIF images and animations smaller.
   • Here’s more.

6. Handling CSS

   Modern websites uses CSS as the foundation of the style, as well as the look and feel. Not only CSS gives great flexibility to changes, it is also lesser in terms of codes needed. However, if they are badly coded, it could be a backfire. Here are some checklists, or rather guides to you make sure your CSS are properly optimized:

   • Keeping Your Elements’ Kids in Line with Offspring
     How to keep your markup clean with CSS Selectors.
   • Keep CSS short
     When they give the same style, the codes are better the shorter they are. Here’s a CSS Shorthand guide you’ll probably need.
   • Use CSS Sprite
     
     CSS Sprite technique reduce HTTP request each time a page is load by combining several (or all) images together on a single image file and control it’s output with CSS background-position attribute. Here are some useful guides and techniques to create CSS Sprites:
     • Creating easy and useful CSS Sprites
     • Online CSS Sprite Generator
     • Best Online And Offline CSS Sprites Generator
   • Using every declaration just once
     When looking to optimize your CSS files, one of the most powerful measures you can employ is to use every declaration just once.
   • Reduce amount of CSS files
     The reason is simple, the more CSS files you have the more HTTP request it’ll have to make when a webpage is being requested. For example, instead of having multiple CSS files like the following:
     

               <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="main.css" />  
               <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="body.css" />   
               <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="footer.css" /> 

     You can combine them into the one single CSS:
     

               <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="layout.css" />
            

   Recommended readings:

   • Useful Tools To Check, Clean & Optimize Your CSS File
     Some of the useful tools that you can use to optimize your CSS code, even if you have completely no knowledge of CSS coding.
   • 7 Principles Of Clean And Optimized CSS Code
     Optimization isn’t just minimizing file size – it’s also about being organized, clutter-free, and efficient.
   • Best Practices to optimize CSS
     Consider this article more like an academic exercise rather than real-life optimization tips.

Optimization for Wordpress

From time to time, we monitor, benchmark and analyze the performance of our Wordpress blog. If the site is running slow, we need to know why. Here are some basic changes we’ve done and we figured will significantly increase the speed of your Wordpress blog.

1. Cache Your Worpress Blog

   WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster and responsive. We also recommend WP Super Cache which enhances from the previous mentioned plugin and too does a great job.

2. Deactivate and Delete Unused Plugins

   When you notice your blog is loading real slow, see if you have a lot of plugins installed. They might be the culprit.

3. Remove unnecessary PHP Tags

   If you take a look into your theme’s source codes, you will find a lot tags like these:

           <?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>
           

           <?php bloginfo('description'); ?>
           

   They can be pretty much replaced with text content that don’t cause load to the server. Check out Michael Martin’s 13 Tags to delete from your Wordpress Blog

Recommended Readings:

• 3 Easiest Ways to Speed Up WordPress
  John Pozadzides shares how his blog sails smoothly through a Digg traffic spike.
• 13 Great WordPress Speed Tips & Tricks for MAX Performance
  Here are a few things to try if you find that your WordPress site is not performing as well as it could be due to high traffic or hidden issues you don’t know about.
• 40 Wordpress Optimization Tips
  Optimization tips in slides. 40 tips in 40 minutes.

Last but not least…

Here are some useful web services and tools that gives you a broader perspective and better analyzation to help you in web optimization.

• Yahoo! YSlow

  YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. It gives you a good idea what needs to be done in order for the website to load faster.

  (Firebug required)

  

• PageSpeed

  Similar to Yahoo! YSlow, Google Page Speed is an open-source Firebug add-on to evaluate the website performances and how to improve them. (Firebug required)

  

• Pingdom Tools

  Pingdom Tools take a complete load of your website including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes) and shows you general statistics about the loaded page such as the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.

  

Recommended readings:
Here are more tips and tools worth checking out.

• Google Web Optimizer
• 15 Tools to Help You Develop Faster Web Pages
• 15+ Tips to Speed Up Your Website, and Optimize Your Code!

If you surf Facebook on daily basis or occasionally, chances are you’re already familiar with regular stuffs like add/delete friends, update statuses, walls and profile, add and explore pages & applications, etc, but there’s more..

This week we want to cover some interesting things you can do on (or with) Facebook; inclusive of tricks that are not documented or unknown to many, as well as tips to stay connected better with your friends. Without further ado, here’s 20 Facebook Tips/Tricks You Might Not Know. If you have interesting tips/tricks related to Facebook, please feel free to share in the comment box below.

1. How to Place Facebook Chat On Firefox Sidebar

   If you are using Firefox, you can place the Facebook Chat at the sidebar.

   

2. How to Download Facebook Photo Albums

   FacePAD: Facebook Photo Album Downloader allows you to download your friends’ facebook albums, Events albums, and Group Albums, en masse, with the click of a button.

   

3. How to Share Flickr Photos to Facebook

   Flickr2Facebook is an unofficial Flickr to Facebook uploader(bookmarklet) which allows you upload photos to Facebook from Flickr.

   

4. How to Update Facebook without Using Facebook

   hellotxt and Ping.fm both introduced features that let Facebook administrators update Facebook Pages.

   

5. How to Schedule Facebook Messages

   Sendible lets you schedule Facebook messages ahead of time so you can send messages to your friends, customers or colleagues in the future.

   

6. How to "Friend" Someone on Facebook & Hide It From Your Status Updates

   A short tutorial on Makeuseof to guide you how to hide Facebook status updates and keep that fact confined to your closer friends.

   

7. How to Create a Photo Collage Using Pictures of Your Facebook Friends

   Click on Friends tab. Proceed to More tab. From "Choose an option" dropdown, choose any of the dashes "—" . Your Facebook friends collage is right on your computer screen.

   

8. How to Know When Facebook Friends Secretly Delete or Block You

   X-Friends is a unique tool for tracking friends that disappear from Facebook.

   

9. How to Display Selected Pictures Only on your Facebook Profile Page

   A little-known feature in Facebook that lets you decide who shows up in that Friends box. Click that "edit" pencil in your Friends box and type the names of your best friends in the box that says "Always show these friends"

   

10. How to Remove Facebook Advertisements

    This Greasemonkey script – Facebook: Cleaner removes many of the annoying ads and updates that unavoidably appear on your Facebook pages.

    

11. How to Syncs Photos of Facebook Friends with Contacts in Microsoft Outlook

    OutSync is a free Windows application that syncs photos of your Facebook friends with matching contacts in Microsoft Outlook. It allows you to select which contacts are updated. So you can update all contacts at once or just a few at a time.

    

12. How to Display Facebook Statuses on Wordpress Blog

    The following method make use of Facebook status feed and Wordpress RSS widget to display Facebook Statuses on WordPress blog.. It will also work for self-host Wordpress blogs.

    

13. How to Post Your Blog Posts to Your Facebook Wall Automatically

    Wordbook allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall. Your Facebook “Boxes” tab will show your most recent blog posts.

    

14. How to Access Facebook Chat on Desktop

    Gabtastik and digsby let you keep Facebook chat sessions open on your Windows desktop outside of your regular web browser, using minimal screen real estate and system memory.

    

15. How to Create Quiz on Facebook Easily

    LOLapps provides quiz creator that can be employed to conjure up these popular personality quizzes that are so widespread in Facebook.

    

16. How to Hide Your Online Status on Facebook Chat from Select Contacts

    Facebook has integrated friends list with Chat and you can also choose which of these list members get to see you online.

    

17. How to Get Facebook Updates on Email

    NutshellMail consolidates your Facebook accounts through the inbox you use the most.

    

18. How to Update Facebook Status from Firefox

    FireStatus is a status update utility for multiple social networks, including FaceBook.

    

19. How to Get Facebook on Your Desktop

    Seesmic Desktop, Facebooker, Xobni, Facebook Sidebar Gadget, Scrapboy and Facebook AIR application are desktop applications that allows you interact with your stream just as you would on Facebook, but without the browser.

    

20. How to Delete, Cancel and Terminate Facebook Account and Profile

    A simple guide to terminate, delete or cancel Facebook account, together with the Facebook profile easily.

    

We all know that the handy user experience of iPhone is one of the selling point. But not so many people do realize that there are several shortcuts, tips and tricks available on the iPhone which able to make life much easier.

We believe every single iPhone users would like to know all of the tips and tricks for every feature of iPhone. In fact, if you dig and explore a little deeper, you will know that you can actually do a lot more on your iPhone. With these lesser-known goodies, you can easily get the most out of your iPhone.

This week, we’ve collected some really amazing tips from Web and our own experiences to present you 25 most wanted tips for iPhone 3G. Full list after jump!

More: You might also be interested in 25 Most Addictive Free iPhone Games.

1. How to Disable iPhone 3G GPRS or Edge Connection

   Tap "Setting – General – Network – Cellular Data Network". In the “APN, Username and Password" field, simply type in some words so iPhone will not pass the correct values to service providers. Restart your iPhone if necessary.

   

2. How to Set Content Restriction

   You can set restrictions for iPod content for the use of some applications on iPhone. For example, parents can restrict explicit music from being seen on playlists, or turn off YouTube access entirely.

   Just go to “General – Restrictions” then tap Enable Restrictions and enter a four-digit passcode to restrict your content.

   

3. How to Customize iPhone Wallpaper as Google Calendar and Notes

   gCalWall Lite enables users to add their upcoming Google Calendar appointments to their home/unlock screens.

   

4. How to Train your iPhone to Learn New Words

   You can train your phone to “remember” words if you type them repeatedly, but this tutorial will teach you a better way to train your iPhone to learn new words on the fly.

   

5. How to Select Other Domain Name Endings

   When you type a website URL in the address bar, you can now hold down the ".com" button to get a selection of other domain name endings and tap on any of the endings to insert them in the address bar. [via tuaw]

   

6. How to Take Screen Shot

   Hold the "home" button, then hit the "power/sleep" button, the screen will momentarily flash, and the iPhone’s current screen contents will be saved to the Camera Roll.

   

7. How to Hide SMS Preview

   With Show SMS Preview disabled you will only get a generic "New Text Message".

   Go to "General > Passcode Lock" and enter a 4-digit passcode. After that disable "Show SMS Preview".

   

8. How to Increase the Volume of the Ringer

   Your iPhone’s ringer volume issue can be resolved by using a custom ringtone rather than ringtones currently available on the iPhone.

   

9. How to Save Images in Safari and Mail

   Just touch and hold an image in Safari or Mai, an action sheet will be presented to enable you to save the image. The image will get stored in the “Saved Photos” library of the Photos app.

   

10. How to Insert Extra Punctuation Keys

    Touch and hold the punctuation key and you get a set of additional keys to choose from.

    

11. How to Force Quit An App

    Have you ever been using an app and it’s become completely frozen? You can actually apply a force quit on it by pressing the Home button for at least six seconds.

    

12. How to Switch Punctuation Keys to Alphabet Keys Quickly

    Mode changes in between the punctuation keys and alphabet keys are pretty annoying. To solve it, just press the “.?123″ key, but don’t lift your finger as the punctuation layout appears. Slide your finger a half inch onto the period or comma key, and release. The ABC layout returns automatically.

    

13. How to Fast Forward/Rewind Music & Video

    Press and hold the skip forward/back arrows to fast forward or rewind rather than skip tracks. Also, press on the album art to manually FF/rewind.

    

14. How to Access iPod Controls or Phone Favorites Instantly

    Go to "Settings – General – Home Button". You can customize by double-clicking the Home Button goes to Home, Phone Favorites or iPod Controls.

    

15. How to Maximize iPhone Battery Life

    Here’s how to live with the iPhone’s battery life while using it a whole lot.

    

16. How to Erase iPhone Data Thoroughly

    A method that should wipe out almost all remnants of your personal data.

    

17. How to Backup Your iPhone Contacts

    A neat application dubbed IDrive Lite that allows you to backup, share and restore all your iPhone contacts completely free of charge if you’ve updated your iPhone software to 2.0.

    

18. How to Design iPhone Themes

    If you’re bored with your default iPhone theme and plan to get more funky on it, you can visit iPhone Theme Generator and grab your own customized theme. It also provides a very good guide on how to install the theme into your iPhone.

    

19. How to Access the Scientific Calculator

    To access the scientific calculator, just rotate your iphone sideways into landscape orientation while using the calculator.

    

20. How to Share Your iPhone Apps with Others

    Melvin Rivera has a great step by step set up, so if you are a multiple iPhone family then you may want to head on over and check it out.

    

21. How to Use iPhone as External Disk

    DiskAid is a tool (freeware) for PC and Mac which enables to use your iPhone or iPod Touch as external Disk. With DiskAid you can transfer files and folders via USB between your device and your Computer.

    

22. How to Create Free iPhone Ringtones Using iTunes in Windows

    A few steps you can actually convert a DRM-free song into a ringtone using only iTunes in Windows.



23. How to Convert Videos for Your iPhone

    An useful resource for converting videos online as well as off. This tutorial also teaches you on how to copy videos to your iTunes and iPhone.

    

24. How to Sync An iPhone with Multiple Computers

    This tutorial allows you to add music/videos/podcasts from multiple machines.

    

25. How to Migrate Cell Phone Data to iPhone 3G

    Fone2Phone can help you migrate contacts, events, tasks, notes, bookmarks, photos, music and movies to the iPhone 3G.

    

In the old days, we depend a lot of on developers and programmers to help update the website, even when it’s just a minor one. Thanks to the CSS and it’s flexibility, styles can be extract independently away from the codes. Now, with some basic understanding of CSS, even a novice can easily change the style of a website.

Whether you are interested in picking up CSS to create your own website, or merely to tweak your blog’s look and feel a little – it’s always good to start with the fundamentals to gain a stronger foundation. Let’s take a look at some CSS Tips we thought might be useful for beginners. Full list after jump.

1. Use reset.css

   When it comes to rendering CSS styles, browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer have different ways of handling them. reset.css resets all fundamental styles, so you starts with a real blank new stylesheets.

   Here are few commonly used reset.css frameworks – Yahoo Reset CSS, Eric Meyer’s CSS Reset, Tripoli

2. Use Shorthand CSS

   Shorthand CSS gives you a shorter way of writing your CSS codes, and most important of all – it makes the code clearner and easier to understand.

   Instead of creating CSS like this

   .header {
         background-color: #fff;
         background-image: url(image.gif);
         background-repeat: no-repeat;
         background-position: top left; 
       }

   It can be short-handed into the following:

   .header {
         background: #fff url(image.gif) no-repeat top left
       }

   More – Introduction to CSS Shorthand, Useful CSS shorthand properties

3. Understanding Class and ID

   These two selectors often confuse beginners. In CSS, class is represented by a dot "." while id is a hash ‘#". In a nutshell id is used on style that is unique and don’t repeat itself, class on the other side, can be re-use.

   More – Class vs. ID | When to use Class, ID | Applying Class and ID together

4. Power of <li>

   <li> a.k.a link list, is very useful when they are use correctly with <ol> or <ul>, particulary to style a navigation menu.

   More – Taming Lists, Amazing LI

5. Forget <table>, try <div>

   One of the greatest advantage of CSS is the use of <div> to achieve total flexibility in terms of styling. <div> are unlike <table>, where contents are ‘locked’ within a <td>’s cell. It’s safe to say most <table> layouts are achievable with the use of <div> and proper styling, well maybe except massive tabular contents.

   More – Tables are dead, Tables Vs. CSS, CSS vs tables

6. CSS Debugging Tools

   It’s always good to get instant preview of the layout while tweaking the CSS, it helps understanding and debugging CSS styles better. Here are some free CSS debugging tools you can install on your browser: FireFox Web Developer, DOM Inspector, Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar, and Firebug.

   

7. Avoid Superfluous Selectors

   Sometimes your CSS declaration can be simpler, meaning if you find yourself coding the following:

   • ul li { ... }

   • ol li { ... }

   • table tr td { ... }

   They can be shorten down to just

   • li { ... }

   • td { ... }

   Explanation: <li> will only exist within <ul> or <ol> and <td> will only be inside <tr> and <table> so there’s really not necessary to re-insert them.

8. Knowing !important

   Any style marked with !important will be taken into use regardlessly if there’s a overwriting rule below it.

   .page {	background-color:blue !important;	background-color:red;}

   In the example above, background-color:blue will be adapted because it’s marked with !important, even when there’s a background-color:red; below it. !important is used in situation where you want to force a style without something overwriting it, however it may not work in Internet Explorer.

9. Replace Text with Image

   This is commonly practice to replace <h1>title</h1> from a text based title to an image. Here’s how you do it.

   h1 {
   text-indent:-9999px;
   background:url("title.jpg") no-repeat;
   width:100px;
   height:50px;
   }

   Explanation: text-indent:-9999px; throws your text title off screen, replaced by an image declared by background: {...} with a fixed width and height.

10. Understand CSS Positioning

    The following article gives you a clear understanding in using CSS positioning – position: {...}

    More – Learn CSS Positioning in Ten Steps

11. CSS @import vs <link>

    There are 2 ways to call an external CSS file – respectively using @import and <link>. If you are uncertain which method to use, here’s few articles to help you decide.

    More – Difference Between @import and link

12. Designing Forms in CSS

    Web forms can be easily design and customize with CSS. These following articles show you how:

    More – Table-less form, Form Garden, Styling even more form controls

    

13. Get Inspired

    If you are looking around for nicely designed CSS-based website for inspiration, or just simply browsing to find some good UI, here are some CSS showcase site we recommend:

    • CSS Remix
    • CSS Reboot
    • CSS Beauty
    • CSS Elite
    • CSS Mania
    • CSS Leak

    

    Need more? Here’s a round up of 74 CSS Galleries.

14. Rounded Corners in CSS

    This following article gives you an idea how to create cross-browser compatible rounded borders with CSS.

    

15. Keep CSS Codes Clean

    If your CSS codes are messy, you are going to end up coding in confusion and having a hard time refereing the previous code. For starters, you can create proper indentation, comment them properly.

    More – 12 Principles For Keeping Your Code Clean, Format CSS Codes Online

16. Typography Measurement: px vs em

    Having problem choosing when to use measurement unit px or em? These following articles might give you a better understanding on the typography units.

    More – Units of Measurement in CSS, CSS Font size explained, Using Points, Pixels, Ems, or Percentages for CSS Fonts

17. CSS Browsers Compatibility Table

    We all know each browser has different ways of rendering CSS styles. It’s good to have a reference, a chart or a list that shows the entire CSS compatibility for each browser.

    CSS support table: #1, #2, #3, #4.

    

18. Design Multicolumns in CSS

    Having problem getting the left, middle and right column to align properly? Here are some articles that might help:

    • In Search of the Holy Grail
    • Faux Columns
    • Top reasons your CSS columns are messed up
    • Litte Boxes (examples)
    • Multi-Column Layouts Climb Out of the Box
    • Absolute Columns

    

19. Get a Free CSS Editors

    Dedicated editors are always better than a notepad. Here are some we recommend:

    More – Simple CSS, Notepad ++, A Style CSS Editor

    

20. Understanding Media Types

    There are few media types when you declare CSS with <link>. print, projection and screen are few of the commonly used types. Understanding and using them in proper ways allow better user accessibility. The following article explains how to deal with CSS Media types.

    More – CSS and Media Types, W3 Media Types, CSS Media Types, CSS2 Media Types

We previously showed how you can display Feedburner feed count in raw text. However, if you’ve recently migrated your feed from Feedburner to Google Feed, you’ll noticed those codes will no longer work. Here’s the workarounds, for those who wanted to display Google Feed subscriber count in text for better styling.

Previous Code For Feedburner…

This code will only work if you intend to display Feedburner feed count in text, but for those who are already on Google Feed, some changes are required.

//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl="http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburner-id";

//Initialize the Curl session
$ch = curl_init();

//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);

//Execute the fetch
$data = curl_exec($ch);

//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
//end get cool feedburner count

The Solution

Replace line:2 from:

//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl="http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburner-id";

to the following:

//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl="https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburner-id";

The Complete Code

Here’s the complete set of code to display Google Feed subscriber count in text. Remember to replace feedburner-id (line:2) with your real feed ID.

//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl="https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburner-id";

//Initialize the Curl session
$ch = curl_init();

//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);

//Execute the fetch
$data = curl_exec($ch);

//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
//end get cool feedburner count

Troubleshoots

Here are some of the possibilities if the above code don’t work for you:

• Double check if you’ve correctly replaced http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburner-id with https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburner-id
• Did you replaced feedburner-id with your actual Feed ID?
• SimpleXMLElements requires PHP5. If nothing shows up, chances are your web host is still on PHP4. You should contact them about the upgrade.

Whenever you noticed a contact in your Gtalk/Google Talk has not been online for some time, have it ever crossed your mind you’ve been blocked? If you are curious in finding out who actually blocked you in Gtalk, here’s a workaround you can try.

This following method we attempt to show make use of a chat client call Pidgin.

1. Download, Install Pidgin

Click here to download Pidgin chat client. If you already have Pidgin installed, you may skip this step.

2. Configure Pidgin for Gtalk

You’ll probably start with the below screen. Click the Add button. "Accounts -> Manage Account" will also bring you to the same screen. Let’s add Gtalk to Pidgin.

Clicking Add will allow you to add new Gtalk account. The following two screenshots show what you need to fill up for Basic and Advance tab, pay attention to those highlighted.

With all the settings properly entered, you should be able to connect to Gtalk and load your contacts successfully. Now let’s go find out who blocked you.

3. Who’s Blocking You?

When someone blocked you in Gtalk (and other IMs), they appear offline just like your other contacts who are really offline. Right click, click on Get Info, and we’ll see how to differentiate them.

The following image is a comparison of 2 different contacts: Actual offline (left) and Blocked offline (right). If you are blocked, nothing will be display under Buddy Information.

If you are generating revenue off your website or blog, chances are you serve banner ads and they are either updated manually by adding the images and URLs into the source codes or with the help of external ad-serving scripts like OpenX or OIO Publishers.

Google has a similar web service, call the Google Ad Manager. In a nutshell, it is a simple (and free) web service that helps you manage banner ads. It also comes with a pretty complete inventory report module. Ad Manager integrates with AdSense, therefore webmasters have the ability to serve AdSense ads if there’s no banner for any particular slot. Here’s a quick look into advantages of Google Ad Manager:

• Ad Targeting ability. You control who get to see the ads. Let it be geographical, browser or language specific.
• Efficient ad serving. No script installation is required. Everything (including the creatives) are hosted with Google. Not only it saves you space and bandwidths, you can also be rest-assured that banners will be delivered quickly.
• Multi-user supported. You can assign multiple salespersons to handle the sales part, and have everything documented/recorded nicely inside Google Ad Manager.
• Simple User Interface. And like any other Google web services, Ad Manager has simple and easy to understand interface.
• more..

If you are convinced that Google Ad Manager is potentially helpful in managing advertisements for your website or blog, we want to show you how to get it setup right from the scratch. Full guide after jump.

1. Create Ad Slots

Ad Slots are the reserved space on your site for ad placements. If you want to insert 4 125×125 banners on your sidebr, you are looking at creating 4 ad slots. Here hongkiat.com, we have eight 125×125 image banners. That means we’ll need to repeately create 8 different ad slots. Let’s go about doing it.

1. Under Inventory -> Ad Slots, click on New Ad Slots.
2. Compulsory fields: Give your slot an unique Ad slot name. Select the banner size drop drop down, or create one if you like. Choose if the banner should open a new window (_blank) or open on current window (_top) upon click.
3. Optional fields: Checked the AdSense checkbox is you want to maximize revenue on the slot with AdSense, but we’ll recommend not to, for now. Fill in a meaningful description for the Ad Slot, or you can perhaps skip this if your Ad slot name is self-descriptive enough.
4. Save it.

Repeat step 1, 2 and 3 to create all the ad slots you’ll need. For our case, we will be creating 8 ad slots with different name. Here’s how one of them look like.

And once you are done with creating all your ad slots, here’s how your Inventory page will look like. Next, we will be creating ad placements.

2. Create Ad Placements

Ad Placements are what hold/group your ad slots together. For hongkiat.com, since we have 8 ad slots of 125×125 banners on the sidebar, we’ll need one ad placement to hold them together. Ad placement also make sure each ad gets a fair shot of being on the top position if you set them on rotational. Here’s how you create ad placement.

1. Under Inventory -> Placements, click on New Placement.
2. Compulsory fields: Give your ad placement a meaningful name. For example, we name ours "HKC-125-RightTop-Zone" because it’s going to store all 125×125 banners, positioned at the top right corner of the blog.
3. Optional fields: If you allow AdSense to bid for ad slots in this placement, check for Targeting, else uncheck. The Internal Description is personal use only, something to let you understand your ad placements better.
4. Add all ad slots that belongs to this new ad placement you’ve created, in our case we added all.
5. Save it.

Here’s a sample of how our Ad Placement settings look like.

Once saved your ad placement, you’ll be returned to Inventory -> Placements main page and it looks something like this.

Here’s a quick summary – You’ve created the necessary Ad Slots, and group them under a Ad Placement. The next thing we need to do is to add "real" banners into each of these ad slots.

3. Create Orders

Orders

Think of Orders as banner order requests. It stores information about who the advertisers are, the start and end date of the ad campaigns, and more. If an advertise place an order of banner ad on your website, you create a new Order. If you have 8 Ad Slots, expect to create up to 8 different Orders. Make sense? Let’s create some Orders.

1. Under Orders, click on New Order.
2. Compulsory fields: Give each other an Order name and External ID you can easily regconized. Let the system know when the banner will start and when it’ll end by choosing the Start date and End date. Choose unlimited if it’s likely to be permanent.
3. Optional fields: You might also want to fill up the Advertiser, Agency, Contacts, User Assignments and Notes to help you understand the Order better.
4. Save it.

We’ll now create a Line item for this order.

Line Items

Line Items associate with Orders. Every time an Order is entered, you’ll need to create a Line Item for it. Line item allows you to determine the nature of the ad, whether it’s serving as CPC, CPM or CPD.You also set the cost/price for the ad here.

Everytime you hit the Save button after creating an Order, you’ll be directed to create a Line item.

1. Click New line items.
2. Give it a Name.
3. Determine the Delivery Priority. If your order is a direct ad, change to Exclusive from the drop down box so you can use CPD (Cost per Day).
4. Again, you need to make sure you’ve correctly entered the Start date and End date.
5. Under Placement section, associate Line Item with it’s respective placement.
6. Targetting section allows you to control who should see the ad. In another words, under what condition the ad will appear on your website. This setting is optional, by default ad will be visible to all.
7. Delivery Options section detemine the appearance of the ad. Set Delivery rate and Creative rotation to Even will ensure all your orders get equal impressions.
8. Save it.

Here’s how your line item will look like.

A quick recap before we continue. We’ve created an Order, with advertiser information, campaign start date and end date. Then we created Line Item for the Order where it stores information like cost type (CPC, CPM, CPD), cost, targetting behavours, etc. The next thing we need to do is to add creative for the ad.

Creatives

Creatives are images of the ads. Every time a Line Item is added, you’ll need to add (and approve) at least one creative for it.

1. After saving a Line item, click on need creatives to add an image for the ad.
2. Fill up the Name, Ad slot size (banner size), Creative type, Manual Weight (if you need to control the priority of banner rotations)
3. Save it.

Creative type determines how you serve the banner image. Google Ad Manager is capable of hosting your banners internally (regardlessly of jpg, flash, gif or png) or you can host them elsewhere and insert the image URL. Use rich media if you need manual HTML codes insertion.

Here’s a sample of how creative upload page should be filled.

Remember to Approve and activate the creative.

Repeat all steps in Orders, Line Items and Creatives for every individual banners. In our case, we will repeat this 8 times to fill up all our ad slots.

4. Display Banners

Here’s our final step before ads start showing on our website – generate the codes and paste them inside our source codes.

1. Go to Inventory -> Ad Slots, click on Generate Sample HTML.
2. Add all slots needed to Selected Items section
3. Click Generate Sample HTML

Scroll to the bottom to find your generated codes. It should look something like this:

  <html>
  <head>
  <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN THE head SECTION -->
  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://partner.googleadservices.com/gampad/google_service.js
  </script>
  <script type="text/javascript">
  GS_googleAddAdSenseService("ca-pub-8918970543424762");
  GS_googleEnableAllServices();
  </script>
  <script type="text/javascript">
  GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A1");
  GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A2");
  GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A3");
  GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A4");
  GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A5");
  GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A6");
  GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A7");
  GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub-8918970543424762", "HKC-125A8");
  </script>
  <script type="text/javascript">
  GA_googleFetchAds();
  </script>
  <!-- END OF TAG FOR head SECTION -->
  </head>
  <body>
  <p>Sample Text before slot HKC-125A1
  </p>
  <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A1
  -->
  <script type="text/javascript">
  GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A1");
  </script>
  <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A1
  -->
  <p>Sample Text before slot HKC-125A2
  </p>
  <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A2
  -->
  <script type="text/javascript">
  GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A2");
  </script>
  <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A2
  -->
  <p>Sample Text before slot HKC-125A3
  </p>
  <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A3
  -->
  <script type="text/javascript">
  GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A3");
  </script>
  <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A3
  -->
  <p>Sample Text before slot HKC-125A4
  </p>
  <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A4
  -->
  <script type="text/javascript">
  GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A4");
  </script>
  <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A4
  -->
  <p>Sample Text before slot HKC-125A5
  </p>
  <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A5
  -->
  <script type="text/javascript">
  GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A5");
  </script>
  <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A5
  -->
  <p>Sample Text before slot HKC-125A6
  </p>
  <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A6
  -->
  <script type="text/javascript">
  GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A6");
  </script>
  <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A6
  -->
  <p>Sample Text before slot HKC-125A7
  </p>
  <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A7
  -->
  <script type="text/javascript">
  GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A7");
  </script>
  <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A7
  -->
  <p>Sample Text before slot HKC-125A8
  </p>
  <!-- PUT THIS TAG IN DESIRED LOCATION OF SLOT HKC-125A8
  -->
  <script type="text/javascript">
  GA_googleFillSlot("HKC-125A8");
  </script>
  <!-- END OF TAG FOR SLOT HKC-125A8
  -->
  </body>
  </html>

Follow the instructions stated in comments to insert the codes into their respective <head> and <body> sections.

Note: To prevent errors and avoid messing up the live site, it’s good that you copy the generated codes, paste it on a blank HTML to test the output. If the ads do not show up, chances are your current time is not yet the start date set in Orders and Line Items.

It’s done! You are now managing your website banners with Google Ad Manager. Login again few days later to check on the performance.

For any other questions, drop a comment, I’ll try my best to help.

Assuming you run a high trafficked website or blog and you ran in to these following problems:

• Slow content serving – Contents (htmls, images, download files) are serving at extremely slow speed, especially during traffic spikes
• Paid, and unused – You are paying you web host more than what you are actually utilizing. That means, you are probably paying for a web hosting package with 50Gb of web space and 1Tb of bandwidth, but you are barely using half of them.
• Messy files/folders – The web account is in a mess. Images folders, download-able item folders are not properly organized.

All these can be easily solved with Amazon CloudFront. CloudFront is a new service launched by Amazon, powered by cloud computing technology. Using Amazon S3 as storage, CloudFront serves on top of the buckets and deliver contents at a much higher speed with lower latency. Click here to read more.

If you are already using Amazon S3 to serve files for websites, CloudFront is really something you should check out. We’ll now guide you through setting up CloudFront to serve web files.

1. First and Formost

   Get an Amazon S3 account (read here), then sign-up for an Amazon CloudFront service. Check your email to make sure the service is activated for you.

   

2. Create Distribution

   Applications you use to manage Amazon S3 buckets might varies, but we’ll try to stick to a free tool – S3 Firefox, a S3 file manager with CloudFront supported. Get connected to your account with S3 Firefox, right click on the bucket name (assuming files and folders inside here are/will be web accessible) and choose Manage Distributions.

   

   Distribution is an unique URL of sort that you can use to reference a file. You’ll get a better picture once it’s created. Click on Create Distribution to create your first distribution for the bucket.

   

   Once you’ve created, you’ll noticed a new Domain Name: XXXXX.cloudfront.net is being created for you. Status will turn from InProgress to Deployed when it’s done. You can also click on the Refresh button to update the status.

   If you previous has this following asset:

   • http://hongkiat.s3.amazonaws.com/folder1/imageA.jpg, it now can be accessed with the URL
   • http://XXXXX.cloudfront.net/folder1/imageA.jpg

   You still can serve files with the first URL but the latter one is CloudFront powered, and it’s way faster.

3. Create CNAME

   Distribution URL starts with http://XXXXX.cloudfront.net/ and we don’t think there’s any way to decide what goes before .cloudfront.net. However, to make the URL simplier, nice and easier to remember, we can use CNAME to map this URL to whatever we want. This requires access to web hosting control panels. In this example, we’ll show you how to map:

   • http://XXXXX.cloudfront.net/ to
   • http://hongkiat.s3.amazonaws.com/

   If you are unfamiliar with CNAMEs, we suggest that you ask your web host to do it for you. You’ll entere something similar to this, with your own distribution URL of course.

   

   This might take 24 hours to propagate, but in the mean time, filled up the CNAME in S3 Firefox.

   

   Once it’s properly propagated (you can test with pinging the URL), you can serving files using http://hongkiat.s3.amazonaws.com/*.

4. Performance Comparison

   We all know how fast and efficient Amazon S3 serve files, but we thought you should see a comparison after CloudFront is being implemented on top of the serving so you’ll know each and every penny spend is worthwhile. To do a fair compare of the loading speed differences, we took a blog content, load it twice; once with images hosted under hongkiat.s3.amazonaws.com, another time with images under static.hongkiat.com (CloudFront) and monitor it with Pingdom Tools. Click on images for larger view.

   hongkiat.s3.amazonaws.com – 41 images loaded at 6.5 sec.

   

   static.hongkiat.com (CloudFront)- 41 images loaded at 3.5 sec.

   

Written by: Lizzy Vasilyeva

Computers are like pets – they need care. We all want our computer to be fast, efficient, and responsive, but when it starts slowing down, most people just get mad at it. Well, don’t. Just give it some good care. The maintenance tips in this article will help you make your XP computer faster, safer, and more stable.

1. Reduce recycle bin size

   Nowadays hard disks are pretty large, so the default 10% for the Recycle Bin is way too much. Most users would be OK with 5–10Gb, which will usually be from 2 to 5% of the hard drive space.

   To reduce the size of your Recycle Bin do the following:

   1. Go to Desktop
   2. Right–click on the Recycle Bin icon
   3. Select Properties
   4. Use the slider to choose the required percentage
   5. Click Apply, then click OK

2. Turn off Remote Desktop and Remote Assistance

   Windows XP has services that make it possible for other people to access your computer remotely. They are handy if a computer is part of a network, but there is always a danger that hackers may use them to access your computer. So, if your PC is not part of a network, it’s best to turn them off. Here’s how:

   1. Go to Start – Settings – Control Panel
   2. Double-click the System icon
   3. Select the Remote tab
   4. Uncheck Allow Remote Assistance invitations to be sent from this computer
   5. In the same tab click Advanced
   6. Uncheck Allow users to connect remotely to this computer
   7. Click Apply, then click OK

   Don’t worry – you will be able to access MSN, Skype and other similar programs. Turning off Remote Assistance and Remote Desktop doesn’t affect them in any way.

3. Run Windows XP chkdsk (Check Disk) from time to time

   Windows XP chkdsk is a tool that should be run from time to time. It will scan the disk for errors, fix logical errors, detect and mark bad sectors, so that Windows will no longer try to use them. This way it can prevent your computer from becoming unstable.

   There is a slight disadvantage, though – Check Disk may require a lot of time to perform its task. It depends on many things, like overall PC speed, number of files and folders on the disk, amount of RAM, and disk size. So it’s best to run Check Disk only if you don’t need to use the computer for some time.

   Also Windows XP chkdsk wants exclusive access to the computer. In most cases it will ask for a reboot and will run right after the reboot, so you won’t have access to your PC. Of course, you can always interrupt the process, but it’s not a good idea.

   To run Check Disk do this:

   1. Find the My Computer icon on your desktop and double-click it
   2. Find the disk you want to check, right-click it and go to Properties
   3. In the Properties dialog box go to Tools
   4. Click Check now
   5. A new dialog box will appear, check both options and click Start
   6. Most likely you will get a message that Check Disk wants exclusive access to the disk and wants to start right after your reboot. Click OK
   7. Restart your computer

4. Defrag regularly

   Badly fragmented disks can cause a lot of problems, like general system slowdowns, slower startup and shutdowns, and even computer crashes. Basically, your hard drive is the slowest part of your computer and file fragmentation makes it even slower.

   Windows has a built in Disk Defragmenter. To use it go to Start – Programs – Accessories – System Tools – Disk Defragmenter. Like any other defrag utility it gathers file fragments that are scattered all over your disk and writes them into adjacent clusters.

   But to be honest, I never use Windows Disk Defrag – it takes quite some time to do its job and skips too many files.

   The good news are that there are good free defrag utilities available for download. The ones I like are Auslogics DiskDefrag and Piriform Defraggler. Both are from trusted developers and do their job great. Personally, I like the Auslogics one better, because it doesn’t need time to analyze the disk, so it’s very fast.

About The Author

Name: Liz Vasilyeva Website: http://www.ladyminstrel.ucoz.com Profile: I’m a final year Journalism student and a free-lance writer. I write about technology, traveling, music, cultural events. Also I dedicate a fair bit of my time to writing poetry.

Few days ago, I was still struggling with solution to further scale this blog so it will serve contents faster and at the same time, not pressuring the server too hard. Hongkiat.com serves about 50,000 pageviews daily and that consumed about 60-80Gb of bandwidths on a daily basis. Something have to be done here so the requesting of images and files will not affect the stability of the entire server. After some readings, considerations and research, I settle for Amazon S3.

You might have heard of it, or perhaps using it already. But for those who have problems scaling your site, looking for solutions or looking for a stable online file hosting, here I’ve written a fairly complete article (I hoped) that give you a basic understanding on Amazon S3, together with guides on getting and account to using it. For the ease of reading, contents are spitted up in the following sections.

• In a Nutshell
• Gettting an Amazon S3 Account
• Using Amazon S3
• Amazon S3 as Image Hosting
• Amazon S3 Applications and Other Resources

Full guide after jump.

In a Nutshell

Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as Amazon S3 is an online storage facility. It is cheap, fast and easy to setup. And since it’s a service provided by e-commerce giant Amazon, you can be rest-assured whatever you stored at S3 is secured. Read more about Amazon S3.

Who needs Amazon S3?

In S3, there’s no initial charges, zero setup cost. You only pay for what you utilize. It is utmost suitable for webmasters and bloggers, especially those who have the following issues:

• Running out of bandwidths

  If you are on shared hosting account, any Stumble Upon or Digg effect can easily eat up the entire bandwidth limit for the month. Most of the time, the web host will suspend the account until you have settle the payment for the extra bandwidths consumed. Amazon S3 provides unlimited bandwidth and you’ll be served with any amount of bandwidth your site needs. Charges will be made to credit card and payment can be made at the end of the month.

• Better scalability

  Amazon S3 using cloud hosting and image serving is relatively fast. Separating them away from normal HTTP request will definitely ease the server load and thus, guarantees better stability.

• Paying for more that you actually used

  Whether you are on shared hosting, VPS or dedicated server, you pay a lump sum each month (or year) and the amount includes hard disk storage and bandwidth you might not fully make use of. Why pay for more when you can pay only for what you are used.

• Store files online

  Instead of backing up your files in CD/DVDs to save more hard disk space, here’s another option. Store them online, and you have the option to keep them private or make them public accessible. It’s entire up to you.

• Easier files retrieval and sharing

  If you store your file online, you can access them anywhere as long as there’s Internet connection. Amazon S3 also allows me to communicate files better with friends, clients, and blog readers.

Unlimited storage and bandwidths, pay as you use, full control on file privacy are what excites me towards migrating images on hongkiat.com to Amazon S3. You can probably think of more that suites your need. Read more on Why you should use Amazon S3.

Next, I’m going to explain on how you can sign up for an Amazon S3 account.

Gettting an Amazon S3 Account

Before we go into signing up an account, I think you should at least know how Amazon S3 charges. Check them out over here, or estimate with a AWS Simple Monthly Calculator. Now if you’re all set, let’s get an Amazon S3 account.

1. Sign-up/Login to Amazon

   If you have an Amazon account, login, else sign-up for one.

   

2. Get Amazon AWS Account

   Go to aws.amazon.com and sign-up a Amazon Web Services Account.

   

3. Look for – Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

   Once you are done signing up, you’ll be greeted with a page that says your account has been created and information has been sent to your email. Look for Amazon Simple Storage Service under the list, click it.

   

4. Sign up – Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

   Once again, you’ll be brought to Amazon S3 introduction page. Read it again if you need, or just skip to signing up an account by clicking on the Sign up For This Web Service. Put in your credit card details and follow the instruction to setup your account.

   

5. Know Your Username/Password

   Once you’ve successfully sign-up, Amazon will prompt you on your AWS Access Identifiers, which includes your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key. Note that Access Key ID and Secret Access Key are as good as your username and password so you should keep them safe.

   

   If you have missed theAccess Key ID and Secret Access Key notification, click on Your Web Service Account, choose AWS Access Identifiers to retrieve them.

   

Under Your Web Services Account is also where you check the account activities, how much you are going to pay at the end of the month, changing your profile etc. Getting familiar with these pages is necessary.

Now your Amazon S3 account is created and ready to go. Let’s do some uploading.

Using Amazon S3

Your Amazon S3 account starts with a clean root account. On the root is where you create buckets. Bucket is Amazon S3’s terminology for root folder. You can create multiple buckets, and inside buckets is where you place your folders and images.

Amazon S3 releases a set of API and developers around the world releases application that allows your Amazon S3 account to talk to your local computer so you can do all the file uploading, synchronization, back-up , etc. For starters, we’ll be looking at how you can take advantage of S3Fox extension from RJonna (Firefox extension) to connect to your Amazon S3 account and later, we’ll give you a list of alternatives of free and paid applications to connect to Amazon S3.

Using Amazon S3 with Firefox S3Fox

S3Fox is a Firefox plugin, so if you don’t have a Firefox browser installed in your machine, you’ll need to get one. Install S3Fox plugin, have your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key ready, let’s get started.

1. Launch S3 Organizer

   In Firefox, go to Tools, select S3 Organizer.

   

2. Set up account

   Set up your Amazon S3 account with S3 Organizer. Enter
   a self explanatory Account Name, your Access Key and Secret Key. Click Add.

   

3. Get connected, create first bucket

   Once you’ve entered the correct information, you’ll be brought to your account (which is blank, by default). On the left side of S3 Organizer will be your local machine folders, and Amazon S3 on the right.

   Right-click, Create Directory. Anything created on root level will be your buckets. All files and folders will be stored/organized under buckets.

   

4. Create folders, upload images

   Double click into your bucket, create a folder. Inside the folder, upload an image. By default, anything uploaded to your Amazon S3 account will not be accessible by public.

Amazon S3 as Image Hosting

By default, images uploaded to Amazon S3 with S3 Organizers will not be made public. If you intend to share uploaded files with your friends and peers, or if you want to use Amazon S3 to host your website’s images, additional steps will be needed.

1. Edit image permission

   Right-click on one of the image uploaded, select Edit ACL.

   

2. Make public accessible

   To make your image public accessible, make sure
   Everyone, Authenticated Users and me(Owner) has read access.
   Follow the settings in the image below. Click on the icon to swap between ticks and crosses.

   

3. Get image URL

   Right-click on any particular image, select Copy URL to Clipboard. Your URL will look something like this:
   http://hongkiat.s3.amazonaws.com/10yearsago/amazon_10ya.png

   

   Image URL comes in the following fixed format:
   http://bucket_name.s3.amazonaws.com/foldername/filename.jpg

Amazon S3 Applications and Other Resources

We’ve been using S3Fox throughout the entire explanation because it’s free and it resides on Firefox browser. But I thought you should also be aware of other applications and various ways out there that provide similar facilities.

Amazon S3-Supported Applications

• JungleDisk – Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3.

  

• Transmit – FTP/SFTP application for Mac.

  

• S3Sync – Consist of S3syncs and S3cmds. Ruby program that allows control of Amazon S3 account with shell commands.
• Bucket Explorer – User Interfaces for Amazon S3.
• Backup Manager – Command-line tool for Linux.
• S3 Backup – Windows desktop application that makes it trivial for everyone to use Amazon’s impressive infrastructure for remote backups and secure online file storage.
• jets3t – Toolkit for Amazon’s S3 online storage service.
• Sync2S3 – Synchronizes your files with the Amazon (S3), providing you with a secure and affordable backup solution.
• SME Storage – Access files from anywhere.

More Online References

Here’s more online references to help you understand Amazon S3 and its connectivity better.

• Amazon Simple Storage Service – Browse through the solutions that Amazon Web Services developers have built using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
• Amazon S3 Forum – S3 Forum with plenty of useful information.
• Amazon S3 API – Understand Amazon S3’s API.
• Amazon S3 in Wiki
• Using Amazon S3 as an Image Hosting Service
• How I Use Amazon S3- Read Paul’s method to use Amazon S3 with rsync and JungleDisk.
• Bulletproof Server Backups with Amazon S3 – Control S3 with Ruby and S3Sync.
• How to Use JungleDisk, Amazon S3, and rsync to Backup Your OS X Home Directory
• Cheap Server Backup with Amazon S3
• Amazon s3 backup for web server files and SQL using bash
• Using Amazon S3 from Perl
• Using Amazon S3 with Django

Did I leave out any good resources?

Providing printscreens or screen captures is probably one of the easiest way to discuss, understand and deliver any information over the Internet. Major operating systems like Windows and MacOSX comes with default keyboard shortcuts to perform screen capturing, but are you using them to the fullest?

Looking for more keyboard shortcuts? Here’s some you might be interested:

• Keyboard shortcut for Photoshop CS2 Toolsbox
• 100 Windows Keyboard shortcuts
• 80 Keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Outlook

Full content after jump.

Windows Printscreen Shortcuts

By default, there isnt too much option in doing screen capture but enough to get the basic job done. Here are the keyboard shortcuts to do screen capture (printscreen) in Windows.

• PrtScn – The Print Screen button will save the entire screen in clipboard. You will then need to further edit it in some image editing programs or Microsoft Words.
• Alt + PrnScn – By holding Alt key while pressing PrtScn button, it captures only the active window. That means the window screen currently in view.

Windows Vista

Together with Windows Vista, an utility call Snipping Tool was introduced. It gives much more flexibility for screen capturing. Learn how to use Sniping Tool.

Mac Printscreen Shortcuts

Mac OSX covers more different ways to do screen capturing. It allows you to print screen active/non-active windows, full screen and selective area.

The following screen capture shortcuts print and output images on desktop in the format of .PNG (Portable Network Graphics)

• Command + Shift + 3 – Prints the entire screen, everything inside your monitor screen.
• Command + Shift + 4 – Prints the screen according to user selection. By using the following shortcut, your cursor will turned into a cross-hair and allows you to select the area you want to capture.
• Command + Shift + 4 then Space – By holding down Command + Shift + 4, your cursor will turn to cross-hair. Then hit the space bar once it will turned to a camera icon. This allows you to capture any opened windows, regardless of active or hiding behind.

If you want your screen capture to be kept in clipboard so you can paste them in image editing tools (eg. Photoshop) instead of output as .PNG, just include Control while using the shortcut.

• Control + Command + Shift + 3 – Captures entire screen, hold image in clipboard.
• Control + Command + Shift + 4 – Captures screen according to user selection, hold image in clipboard.

Changing the output format

By default, Mac outputs screen captures in .PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format if you did not include ‘Control’. If you prefer JPG, GIF, TIFF over the default .PNG, here’ how you can it manually. Launch Mac’s Terminal and insert these 2 commands.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type jpg
killall SystemUIServer

The above commands change your output to .JPG. Simply change that to any format you want. Remember to include the second command ‘killall SystemUIServer‘ that basically does the restarting to make sure your changes will work.

[Windows only] Do you frequently perform the same set of actions/commands again and again in your daily job? If you agree with us that this is frustrating and it’s killing your motivation and efficiency, meet WinMacro.

In short, WinMacro is a FREE Macro recorder/player that monitors your mouse and keyboard events, then play them for you. It could be very useful to automate everyday tasks that you need to perform repetitively, so all you need to do, is pretty much clicking a button. Think of it as ‘Actions’ in Photoshop.

How To Use WinMacro

1. Download and execute WinMacro.
2. Type a filename to record. A file will be saved at the same directory with WinMacro program.
3. Click “Record” button to start recording.
   
4. To stop recording, press the Pause/Break key. You may also use Ctrl+Esc or Ctrl+Alt+Del.
5. To playback a recorded action, browse to select an existing file.
6. Click “Playback” to playback from the file and WinMacro will minimize itself to the taskbar and starts playing back events from the file.
7. After playback is over, WinMacro pops a message box indicating “Playback Over”.
8. To interrupt playback midway, press Ctrl+Esc or Ctrl+Alt+Del

How to use WinMacro may varies from individual to individual, depending on personal preferences and styles but the bottom line is – it speed things up.

Assuming that you have plenty of accounts for emails, social networks, ftp accounts, banking services, Instant Messaging and etc. Technically you might be able to register a same ID for all of these accounts but we bet you are not using only 1 password to access all of them.

You determine the most appropriate passwords for particular accounts but the problem is – “how do you remember all of them?” For this, you can try KeePass.

Before we’re diving in, you might be interested in our previous privacy security related articles:

• How to Hide Folders More Efficiently in Windows
• How to Delete / Erase Sensitive Files Permanently
• How to Encrypt Data or Files
• How to Clear All Traces of Your Internet Activity
• How to Hide Confidential Hard Disk Drive In Windows
• How to Encrypt USB Flash Drive
• Generate Unique and Pronounceable Password – Xyzzy

What is KeePass

KeePass is a free/open-source password manager or safe which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. It allows you to put all your password is a lockable encrypted database. To unlock the encrypted database, you only need one master key or a key file.

Besides being FREE, it is very simple to use without bells and whistles. Alternatively you can use key files. Key files provide better security than master passwords in most cases. You only have to carry the key file with you, for example on a USB stick, or you can burn it onto a CD.

Other bonus features like strong security, portable, easy database transfer, multi-language support and support of password groups are provided too.

Download KeePass Password Safe (1.3Mb)

And by smarter way, we mean giving the webmaster more control on the .htaccess in terms of:

• what sites to block
• what sites to allow
• allow/deny blank referrers
• display custom images detecting image hotlinking
• files to protect

Step 1 – Create .htaccess

If you’re currently not using any .htaccess in your web account you should be creating one. Open up notepad, save it as .htaccess without any extension behind. For those who already have an existing .htaccess file, download it to your local computer as we’ll be doing some editing in Step 2.

Step 2 – .htaccess hotlinking code

Paste this following code into your .htaccess.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain2.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ http://hpmouse.googlepages.com/hotlink.gif [NC,R,L]

Explanation

Line 2 – Allow blank referrers (recommended).

 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$

Some users surf under firewall and thus they are not providing any referrers information. Disallowing blank referrers will means blocking them from accessing these images. However if you want to block blank referrers, just delete line 2.

Line 3, Line 4 – Sites allowed to link your images.

 
 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain2.com [NC]
 

By default all sites are blocked from hotlinking. Only those specified by you are allowed to do so.

Line 5 – File format to block, custom blocking images.

 
 
 
 
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ http://hpmouse.googlepages.com/hotlink.gif [NC,R,L]

In between the () are images you intended to block from hotlinking. To add more seperate them with”|”

Change ‘http://hpmouse.googlepages.com/hotlink.gif‘ to a image you’ve set, and whenever image hotlinking is detected, this image will show up. Just make sure where this image is not hotlink protected or your server can go into an endless loop.

For the maximum security of files on your computer, it is essential to have a powerful encryption tool. A powerful encryption tool means it must at least provides several encryption algorithms and smart handling.

For this, Blowfish Advanced CS does a good job is cryptographic implementations. In short, Blowfish Advanced CS is a file-encryption solution which offers multiple algorithms, efficient data compression, and safe key handling for content protection.

Blowfish Advanced CS is an advance encryption tool but still very handy and user friendly. It actually encrypts megabytes of data per second and allows data compression at the same time.

So if you’re looking for a free encryption tool with powerful features, try Blowfish Advanced CS.

Download Blowfish Advanced CS

[Windows only] Duplicate images are redundancy and they causes extra hard disk storage space. Find and delete them manually is tedious and requires absolute patient. Imagine all the searching, compare and delete. Dup Detector in a Windows software developed by William L. Hunt that can detect and delete duplicate images intelligently.

But how does Dup Detector manage to find the duplicates? Here’s the recipe:

Dup Detector creates a data file by opening and reading image pixel data for each image in your collection. It then finds duplicates by % match and displays matching pairs from a log file.

Dup Detector supports checking on these following image file formats – jpg, bmp, png, tif, pcx, tga, wmf, emf, psp. It’s free, so you don’t have to pay a penny to clear some extra space for your hard disk.

Download Dup Detector.

One of the biggest obstacles for web designers/developers (or at least for me) is to cater our interface for those who are still using Internet Explorer 6 and below. Whether we like it or not, there’s still a big crowd out there hanging on IE6 or worst, IE 5.5 and IE 5.

To develop and test on these outdated browsers, it’s tedious. Here’s how you can install different versions of Internet Explorer (let it be IE3, IE4, IE5, IE5.5, E6 or IE7) on Windows, Mac and Windows.

IE3, IE4, IE5, IE5.5, IE6 on Windows – MultipleIEs

MultipleIEs allows you to install all different version of IEs, except IE7 on Windows. Everything works with a little bit of drawbacks:

• Developer tool bar from Microsoft WILL NOT work in IE6.
• Sometimes IE5, IE5.5 and IE6 crash unexpectedly.
• Multiple IE doesn’t work on Windows Vista.

Download MultipleIEs

IE7 (Standalone version) on Windows

MultipleIEs did not come with IE7, to add IE7, download Internet Explorer standalone Installer.

IE5, IE5.5, IE6 on Mac – ies4osx

The better alternative to install Internet Explorer on Mac is to use Parallel, VMWare, or any other application that allows you to install Windows on Mac. However if you are not ready to pay just to get IE running on your Mac, try ies4osx. It’s supports running IE5, IE5.5, IE6 on Mac. Read more about ies40sx.

IE5, IE5.5, IE6 on Linux

Folks at simplehelp has a step to step guide on installing different version of IE on Ubuntu Linux using IEs4Linux. Click here to read more.

[Windows only] Everyday we perform hundreds of activities on Internet and each activity actually has been recorded down in a form of cookies, logs or temporary internet files. Some of these files are useful, but some actually do harm. It would be safe to clean out unwanted traces of your online journeys and keep you Internet privacy after accessing some security website, for example, online banking website.

IE Privacy Keeper takes the burden of sweeping up the crumbs by making sure no one will know the web sites you’ve visited, or the search queries you’ve made.

Regardless you are using Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, IE Privacy Keeper automatically cleans up the browser history once you are done surfing the net. The program will correctly clean up all index.dat files without the need for a Windows restart.

You can specify custom files and registry keys to delete. IE Privacy Keeper has secure deletion feature to prevent data recovery and conceal the cleanup.

You can keep selective items in the browsing history and hide the program form the list of running applications. Secure deletion will make any attempts to recover deleted items fail.

Here are some key features of “IE Privacy Keeper”:

• Cleans up Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox history
• Cleans up index.dat files without the need for a Windows restart
• Keep selected items
• Cleans up your offline activity traces
• Cleans up custom folders and registry keys
• Automatically cleans up when IE or Firefox exits
• Various notification methods
• Secure deletion

Did I say that IE Privacy Keeper is absolutely free?

Download IE Privacy Keeper (1Mb)