One of the shortfalls of the iChat application built into OS X is that it doesn’t support MSN messenger (or Windows Live, depending on your era).
Microsoft do have a version of messenger that is suitable for Mac’s, but it’s not that great and doesn’t support a lot of the features that the Windows version does. Read more
In a rather bizarre move, Fox has decided to produce a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) based around the Family Guy universe.
For those who don’t know, Family Guy is an animated comedy series first aired in 1999 and now in it’s 9th season on Fox. Read more
If you spend much time on blogs or forums on the Internet then you’ve probably noticed that most people appear “faceless”. This is because they have no avatar associated with that website, maybe they’re not regular visitors, or maybe the website doesn’t allow you to upload a personal avatar.
In the latter case, the website might use a third party tool to display avatars; Gravatar.
The premise of Gravatar is quite simple; when you leave a comment on a website or a blog you usually have to give an email address. If Gravatar is used on the website then that email address is checked against a database and if it exists the photo associated with that address is shown.
There are a couple of main reasons for doing this:
So, by using Gravatar you can do your part to make sure that an image file will display on websites when you leave a comment, read on to find out how.
First of all, head over to Gravatar’s website:
Click “Get your Gravatar today”, and on the next page enter your Email address:
You’ll then be sent a confirmation email to your account, open this and click on the link within it and you’ll be asked to enter a username and password for your Gravatar account:
Enter an account name, and a password, and then click “Signup”. Providing no one has your username already your account will be created and you will see the following screen:
From here you can upload the image files from your computer that you want to use as your avatar.
You can also add multiple email addresses to one Gravatar account, so if you use more than one email address there’s no need to have more than one Gravatar account.
Once you’ve uploaded your image you should find that it appears next to any comments that you leave on websites that use the Gravatar database. Check out the comments area below this article to see how Gravatars will display on compatible websites.
If you want to be able to share your photos with friends and relatives then what better way to do it than with a video that will play on any Windows PC
It’s a great way to ensure that your audience will be able to enjoy your pictures, without the need to turn flick through a ton of individual photos on their PC’s. Read more
WordPress is a phenomenon. Since it’s inception in May 2003 it has revolutionized the way people generate websites and allowed ordinary folk to create their own personalized websites and blogs using very little effort. Case and point; this website. The whole thing is a product of WordPress’s highly customizable and easy to manage system.
For those unfamiliar, WordPress is an architecture of sorts that allows those with a reasonable grasp of IT to create and publish websites that are as individual as they are. Almost no practical understanding of websites or databases is required, and WordPress provide walkthroughs to help you through the tricky setting up process. It’s so successful that any web hosting company worth it’s salt will have packages specifically designed for WordPress blogs and be able to accommodate a site written using WordPress with ease.
The secret to WordPress’s success is it’s customization; the look and feel of your site can be completely changed using a whole host of download-able themes, or you can even create your own! As well as this there are literally thousands of plugins available which allow you to add new features to your site that aren’t found in WordPress by default. In this article I’ll take you through my top 5 plugins, as tried and tested on Tech Made Easy.
The problem with creating a site, especially one that becomes popular, is that other people will want to take advantage of your success. The easiest way for them to do this is to advertise their own websites on yours, and the easiest way for them to do that is to leave comments on your articles. Akismet checks the Email and IP addresses of your commenter’s and adds any suspect ones to a spam cue, much in the same way as with Email. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to sieve through all the comments left on your site looking for legitimate ones. It’s a pretty good system, in all my time using it it has only classified one legitimate comment as spam, while blocking over 400 spam comments from appearing on my site.
More and more people are accessing the web from their smart phones these days. The problem is that, unless they’re using a WiFi network, they’re doomed to slower speeds than in the home and large websites can take a good long while to load. WPTouch detects when your visitors are using a smart phone such as the iPhone and automatically sends an optimized version of the site to the users device. That way, they still get all the great content but without all the annoying delays while waiting for your site to load. The cut down site is quite customizable in itself, and you can choose which aspects of your site are viewable to mobile viewers as well as modifying the colour scheme to match your normal site.
Whether you’re hosting your website at home or with a web host you’re going to be interested in how much bandwidth your site uses. If it’s big and bloated then uses are likely to get fed up waiting for it to download and go elsewhere for their information, but you don’t want to sacrifice the look and feel of your site in order to get the size down. The solution is Total Cache. This plugin caches your website on your visitors PC’s, meaning that once they’ve visited once they should notice a much improved load time on subsequent visits. Not only that, but Total Cache will also reduce the amount of bandwidth that each user chews through while viewing your site, which is excellent news if you have a bandwidth cap with your hosting company.
I’ve noticed about a 20% reduction in bandwidth-per-user since installing this plugin.
This plugin is a great way to bring older content on your website into the searchlight of your regular readers. Most people will only read the most recent entries on your site, but if they’ve only just found you then they might miss some great content that you published six months ago. This plugin will Tweet at intervals that you determine so that your Twitter friends can pick up on your older articles. You can choose the frequency at which this occurs and set an offset so that it doesn’t occur at the same time everyday. You can also choose to exclude certain categories from the plugin (such as news articles or things that are likely to change with time) so that you don’t confuse your readers with older information.
This is also great news if you need to take a break from your site for a few days or if you can’t churn out content at the same rate as the larger websites. Just bare in mind that it will only regurgitate what you have already written, so if you only have one post on your site it will constantly tweet that post to your faithful followers.
Share and Follow is an excellent way to integrate your website with the majority of social networks. Using this plugin you can add links for pretty much any social network to pretty much any aspect of your website. I use it give readers access to some of Tech Made Easy’s social networking pages using a widget in the sidebar (look to the right of the page). But you can add this information to pretty much any part of the site, and it doesn’t just stop with the four aspects that I utilize, there are a total of 52 different networks that you can integrate with, all you have to do is provide your account information for each of the ones that you use. Icon size and descriptive text is also changeable so you can tailor it to your particular site.
Well, that’s my top five. There are a lot more out there for you to play around with, let me know what your favorites are in the comments field below.
The UK consumer market is being absolutely flooded at the moment with as many different models of tablet PC as you can shake a stick at.
It seems that every major high street retailer is fixated on flogging you a device that they guarantee will change your life for the better.
The truth is that a tablet PC is far from a necessity, people got by for thousands of years without them, and not owning one isn’t suddenly going to leave you in the dark ages. That being said, they’re fun to use and can help you in any number of ways whether it’s work, rest or play that you’re interested in. Here are my top tips for buying a tablet PC:
The apple iPad has a 10″ screen, which is great for consuming media and browsing the web. But it does make the device a bit large and heavy to carry around everywhere. Most Android tablets come in 7″ versions, which are surprisingly smaller and lighter than the iPad, while still managing to offer much the same in terms of functionality. There are even some devices that are even smaller, around 5 inches, but I wouldn’t really call those devices tablets.
Have a think about what it is that you want the device for, then make a decision on which size would be best for you.
People have polarising views when it comes to Apple, many people will buy a device purely on the strength of it being made by the company, others find the idea of owning an Apple product ridiculous and will buy anything before they visited an Apple store. The truth is that both platforms work well. Apple’s iPad is largely tied down to media formats that Apple supports, meaning that you can’t simply drop your video files onto it and expect them to play, but if you already have an established media collection in Apple formats (say for an iPhone) then this isn’t too much of a problem. Both platforms also have an immense catalogue of applications, and though some need to be purchased, there are a lot that will increase the functionality of your device for free.
In the end, there is no right or wrong answer, some will prefer the openness of Android, while others will enjoy the fluidic and well presented allure of iOS. What’s important is to try both platforms before you buy, so head to your nearest shopping center and try both versions before you buy.
Depending on what you want the device for, you may need more or less space than some of the tablets on sale currently offer. The iPad has a fixed amount of storage; either 16GB, 32GB or 64GB, and it cannot be upgraded, so making sure you know your needs is imperative. As an iPad owner I never thought I would need more than 16GB at a time but, after buying a few games and watching a few TV shows, I’m now constantly swapping apps and media files on the device as it’s full. With other tablets this may not be too much of a problem, many will support external storage, either on Micro-SD memory cards or via USB memory sticks. That’s not to say that storage space isn’t important on these devices; you don’t want to rely on multiple memory cards if you can help it.
There are two main types of touchscreen technology available on tablet PC’s. The older type, resistive, are a lot less sensitive and usually require a stylus to function properly. The advantage of this is that’s it’s a lot easier to be accurate about which part of the screen you’re pressing. The disadvantage is that it can be a nightmare for casual use and requires that you carry a stylus around everywhere (which you’ll inevitably lose).
The more recent type of touchscreen, capacitive, is a lot better suited to devices such as tablet PC’s as their responsiveness is a lot better, meaning that you can simply use your fingertips to control and interact with the device.
Capacitive screens are more expensive to produce however, so expect devices with these screens to be more expensive.
When it comes to Android tablets there’s a variety of different processor speeds on the market. The faster the processor then the quicker and more responsive the device will be. There a lot of devices entering the market at the lower end which have surprisingly slow processors and these are best avoided, after all; what’s the point in a device designed to make your life easier that has you sitting around waiting to open any applications? The higher end Android tablets have processor speeds of around 1GHz, but there are some out there with speeds as low as 300MHz, and these are just best avoided.
One big drawback of the iPad is the absence of a camera. Many people see a tablet device as a way to communicate with friends and family, and what better way to do that than with a video call? A lot of other manufacturers have learnt from Apple’s mistake and an increasing number of devices are hitting the shops with built in web cameras. It’s rumoured that the iPad 2 will be announced sometime in January and will feature a camera, so if you’re interested in video calling it may be worth waiting a few weeks before splashing out on yourself.
A few tablet devices are available with 3G connectivity as well as WiFi, and subsequently a lot of mobile networks are offering cut price devices on the agreement that you take out a two year contract with them. The problem with this is the same as with mobile phone contracts; yes, the device is cheap, but you’re going to pay for it over the next two years. It’s often not as good a deal as it seems, but if you don’t have the cash up front and can afford the monthly usage charges then it may be one option for you. Personally, I would avoid this though and instead purchase the device up front in favour of a lower monthly charge.
Hopefully these insights will give you a steer towards the tablet PC that’s right for you. There are no right or wrong answers, there will be those looking for the best and brightest and those who are on a very tight budget. The good news is that there is a tablet PC for every price point along the way.
More importantly, you need to ask yourself whether or not you really need a device such as this. In a world of laptops, netbooks and smartphones, can you personally justify another platform?
Facebook has overtaken Yahoo to become the worlds third most popular website, research from analysis firm ComScore shows.
The social networking giant welcomed 648 million unique visitors in November, compared to Yahoo’s 630 million.
Facebook is now only behind Microsoft and Google in terms of number of unique visitors.
Google themselves estimate that Facebook receives around 600 million unique visitors per month (not far off), who view around 750 BILLION pages between them.
No matter which way you look at it, that’s an extra-ordinary amount of internet traffic.
Tech Made Easy currently receives around 3000 unique visitors per month.
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