Some great books on digital photography
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New features on Google Analytics
Image via Wikipedia
If you go to the Google Analytics home page you will see an Application gallery where you can add various features to your analysis of your web site.
However, what I have noticed in my reports is a beta feature which you get to by clicking on Contents and then In Page Analysis. Here you will find that your site shows where visitors are clicking on your page, what percentage that is and what percentage click under the fold. Hover over the percentage bubbles and you will see how many visits that is.
Very useful! To see more than just your home page, leave the google analytics page open and click through other pages.
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Fireshot – a fabulous Firefox add-on
If you want to take screenshots of webpages and save them in multiple sizes and maybe also add text on them then you can do this all right inside Firefox with FireShot extension for Firefox.
Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers.
I’ve just installed this add-on and it really excites me for some reason. I took a screen shot of this blog. It’s useful for me because it takes the whole site in, not just what the Print screen key can take, which is whatever you
can see, but not further.
I have made the image smaller so it fits on this blog.
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How to embed your facebook and twitter icons into a blog
I’ve added a Follow me widget to my wordpress blog. First I saved an image of an F and a T. I then used this code to put into a text widget.
<a href=”http://facebook.com/profile.php?id=781704128″><img src=”images/facebook.png” border=”0″></a>
<a href=”http://twitter.com/#!/ozwebhub”><img src=”images/twitter.png” width=”60″ height=”60″ border=”0″></a>
You can see that I have not used WP media to add the image but this URL instead www.ozwebhub.com/images
You will obviously have to change the code to suit you.
You can try uploading the image to your WP but I found that more difficult to do. You may be able to upload to the images folder of your themes images, but I haven’t tried that.
Fell free to Save the images I have on the right for your blog.
Next I’m going to try to add a Like button for Facebook for under the posts. Some of the related posts below may assist you in this too.
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Phone scam
You are probably aware already that there is a phone scam going around in Australia and don’t know what other countries. I have heard it on the radio and several have been taken in by it.
What happens is that someone rings and says they are a technical support person who is a representative on Microsoft or Windows and they say you have a problem on your computer which is ‘pinging’ back to them. They ask you to go into Command on your computer and give you a command to run and up pops various reds and blues. Or they ask you to go to your Event Viewer. The event viewer is accessed by going to your Control Panel > Administrative Tools and then Event Viewer. Then they offer to fix this (non-existent) problem for a price. These calls appear to be coming from India but if people ask for a phone number they get an Australian phone with an Australian name.
If you accept you will lose money for nothing AND have more malicious code put onto your computer.
Microsoft will never ring you. Nor will any other software technical support. If you ask them to give you your computer’s IP address (those numbers you often see), they don’t seem to know them.
DO NOT give these scammers your credit card details or access to your computer remotely.
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Contact forms on blogs or web sites
I noticed that my Contact plugin was looking a bit odd on the ‘new’ blog so I decided to look at the page source. I found some malicious code there!!!! Usually it is an iframe like this <iframe…..www.somethingnasty.com……..iframe>
So I deactivated that contact form plugin and got another one. That code went away. If you see it on a web page, delete from web page, but in this blog it wasn’t with the theme but with the wordpress upload. I found it too difficult to find the malicious code.
The latest contact forms with Catcha and so on seemed to require too much configuration for my liking, so I have one which wordpress recommends. Much better.
I finally managed to create navigation across the top of the page, so I’m now happy.
I am going to use a photo here to check out this feature.
O………I have found a bug in this theme. The title is picking up my first category name, rather than my extra tagline.
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Modern word press themes
You know, if you are prepared to pay a little money, word press layouts and themes are now so good they can be the platform for a web site. Content management systems like WP are so easy these days and global changes are easy too.
I’ve been searching for quite a while for a new template because I attempted to add my Twitter and Facebook logos so you could find me there. Well you seem to have to pay for these. There are really excellent themes out there but I recommend this one from Woo.
They come with the ability to change text and graphics, without having to go into the PHP pages to change them. That reminds me. There is a spot for Google analytics which I’ve forgotten to fill in yet.
These new and modern word press themes also come with SEO embedded and the ability to emded videos.
I haven’t finished this blog layout by any means but I thought I’d give you a little look. I got this one for free, but there is no support for it. So I’m having to work out how it works, because one has to add one’s own information in different places with this one. I cannot add menus to the top just yet, but I have added my flickr photos and altered the heading graphic which came with this theme.
See your external links
I have come across a free external link manager. It is called e-referrer
What you do is sign up and they will collect referrers for you which appear on your blog or web site. I first thought that these kind of back links were alien to Google, that Google didn’t like them, but I tried it out anyway.
Gradually, as people come to this site the referrers are appearing. You can see the list down the bottom right. I have found it surpringly useful, even though I have only had it for less than 24 hours. It alerts me to which Google seaches are coming to my site and I was surprised. On the google page one of my posts was on the front page and it had my picture, my blog and other posts of mine.
So give it a go. It’s in beta form at the moment and your user name appears on their site. Already my user name has disappeared, so it must be popular.
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The nightmare of the new hard disc drive
- Image via Wikipedia
Okay, so I found that I couldn’t reformat my old hard drive because it was corrupted.
I backed everything up on an external drive. Backing up emails is easy, but restoring them is less so.
I bought a new 1 TB Sata hard drive over the internet. Sata HDDs are much more common now that IDE drives and much easier to connect. As I installed it, I took photos of the old one within the case so I would remember how the wires went. I can’t find them this minute, because these photos are untitled.
I inserted everything correctly finding where the cables went. I started installing Windows XP and pressed F2 to see Set up or BIOS. I saw that the new Hard drive was there. I changed the boot up sequence so that the computer would boot up from the Windows disc.
At a certain point the Windows disk would stop and it would say “no hard disc detected”. Installation has failed. I tried every combination of BIOs settings and boot sequences. No luck.
Finally, I rang a tech company and when the guy came out, all was well, except that my version of Windows did not contain the drives necessary for the motherboard and new HDD. So off it went to the factory and 3 days later at came back all fixed.
I’m restoring everything now. Thank God for the password reminders on web sites, because of all the folders in my outlook email account guess which one didn’t restore. My passwords!!
It’s very nice to see updated software from the web though.
So, if your motherboard is old and that only means a few years, then your search on the internet for how to change a HDD (which is easy) won’t bear fruit. If it is newer, it is a synch really.
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My site was hacked
- Image via CrunchBase
I received an email from Google to notify me that I had malware on my site. When I went to the offending pages I saw, “Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer” No-one could see the information.
What to do?
The email had a link to Webmaster tools (You must have a Google account).
Click on your site
Click on Diagnostics > malware
You will see down the bottom : Problematic URLs
Click on details
It shows suspected injected code. Mine was an iframe linking to an ad.
Now you might be able to find this and delete it, but I just deleted the subdirectory (it was on a second blog of mine)
I changed my password for my FTP program and my control panel where I host my site. I scanned my site: nothing. So someone had accessed my control panel on my server or my FTP program.
I have lost the posts for this blog because I hadn’t backed it up, but luckily I wasn’t using it much. I’m not sure if the bad code could have been easily removed.
So, keep your virus program up to date, change passwords on your FTP and control panel regularly and back up your blog. Web sites are easier to fix.
Get a good firewall.
Good luck!
Oh, once you have fixed the problem you need to get your site reviewed by Google. Webmaster tools tells you how.
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