Dan’s Web Spot

I never thought the day would come when I would consider replacing my Mozilla Firefox browser shortcuts with those of a different web browser, but it finally has. One of the best features of Mozilla Firefox (to me) is and has been its extensibility via add-ons that extend the browser capabilities, like capturing part of a web page to an image and being able to annotate and save it, or bookmarks synchronization, or printing only certain parts of a web page in order to save paper and ink.

Google Chrome

About a year ago, I surveyed the Google Chrome web browser. At the time, I had made a small investment in Firefox and a group of add-ons and extensions that I regularly use and like. I couldn't find similar ones for Google Chrome, but was impressed with how fast it opened and loaded web pages. It may have even been in beta, but I didn't feel that it was ready for migration to a main web browser at the time.

Extensions provide additional functionality in the web browser. One of the best extensions I have found is Adblock. This will automatically block ads on web pages as your surf, and results in a faster web browsing experience because you don't have to download these items while surfing. I didn't realize how many junk ads are out there until my wife and I were on the same web sites while sitting next to each other. She was using IE and I was using Firefox with the Adblock extension. What a huge difference! I'll take the no-ad version any day. I pay for my Internet access and I don't need to see advertisements as a condition of web browsing. Now, some ads are unavoidable, but you will definitely see 90-95% less ads if you use Adblock Plus... » More...

"Smart" phones are cool. Phones like the iPhone or BlackBerry let you install both free and paid applications on them that provide some cool or useful (hopefully both) functionality. Let me point out one of the most popular phrases of 2009 (according to a University of Princeton survey): "There's an app for that" -Apple, referring to their iPhone. And cool it is...

Over the past decade, there have been many technological changes, from the prevalence of PDAs to laptops to Netbooks to Smart Phones. Look out, because I don't think things are done evolving quite yet. There are plans for a multi-touch tablet computer revolution. Could we see an end of the computer "mouse" as we know it?

tether for PC

The topic of this post is about a little slice of technology called cell phone "modem tethering". You may have heard of this but for those that haven't. this is where you use the Internet connection provided by your wireless phone to connect to your PC or laptop. Instead of a WiFi or Ethernet connection to a router, DSL, or even dial-up connection, the cell modem principle allows you to venture off to places where you would not normally have an Internet connection available for e-mail or web browsing. » More...

Experts-Exchange

Wow, my first Experts-Exchange accepted solution. Experts-Exchange is a website where people who are anywhere from user-level to guru-level can ask questions and post solutions.

The site used to be free, but I think they are now taking advantage of the increasing popularity it has enjoyed. Here's a link to the question that my solution was accepted for:

Layout issue with IE6
(sorry, link is broken on Experts Exchange) » More...

There are several blogs and web sites discussing issues with WordPress sites not getting indexed by Google. I was hoping that the reason my site was not getting indexed would be revealed in this thread: Major Problem solved with WordPress & Google. Unfortunately, it wasn't.

WordPress Privacy Settings

I searched a lot more and finally realized that there was a WordPress setting that handled this. I had set my site to be publicly available in an older version, but somehow, somewhere along the way, it got changed.

My Settings>Privacy settings were set to "I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors". Once I changed the Privacy settings to "I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technochrati) and archivers", and clicked the "Save Changes" button, my site tools indicated that Google had pretty much instantly started indexing the site. Then a simple Google search of my site revealed several posts and content. I wish I could identify when this setting was changed, because I clearly would have remembered changing it, which I did not. » More...

Introduction:

In my last post, I outlined the XAMPP program and what it can do. Unfortunately, I hit a bit of a bump in the road, and wanted to share with others how I got around it.

Once I installed XAMPP, set up a new local database for testing, extracted a fresh copy of WordPress in the new c:/xampp/htdocs/wordpress folder I created, I opened wp-config-example.php to add my database and account info, and then saved it as wp-config.php.

All good so far, right? Well, not exactly. To begin the WordPress installation, I pointed my browser to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php
I entered my user name and email address and clicked on the next button.

At this point is where the snag came in: normally a randomly-generated initial blog password is displayed and/or sent to the email address you provided at initial setup for you to use when logging in for the first time. After you log in, you can change your password to whatever you like. However, when running your blog on your hard drive as localhost, you may not ever get that initial email, and worse yet, you can't access your blog's admin panel to change anything. If your email service is not set up, or if your firewall is blocking such communication, there is still a way to get in. Note that this applies to a locally-running XAMPP-powered test blog as well as a live, web host-powered blog. » More...