Internet
How to choose the right web host
Jan 19th
If you’re starting a new site, it’s very hard to know how to pick the right web host. Which company should you host your site with? How much should you be spending?
There are a number of factors to consider.
Disk Space This is the actual physical space on the server for your files. If you’re just using text, screen resolution photos and a few icons and graphics then you really won’t need much space at all. A few megabytes will do. If you’re going to be working with high resolution photos, audio or video files then you might need more.
Data Transfer More >
How to pick the right domain name
Jun 22nd
How should you go about selecting the right domain name for your business?
Firstly, you need to find the free domain names available on the web. For this, you can take help of your web host. Some web hosting plans include a free domain name with their hosting plan.
So, once you know where to actually register a name, how do you pick the right one?
To help demonstrate some different selection methods I’ll use the ficticious example of P J Morris, a long established bookshop based in Ashford, Kent.*
In an ideal world where all possible domain names are available here are a few different More >
Fighting Spam
Sep 14th
Junk email and blog posts are a constant problem. Here are a few ways to help spoil the spammers’ fun.
Email Spam
There are a lot of anti-spam or spam filter products around these days, many included in mail software but the sad fact is that once you’re getting spam you’re likely to keep getting spam regardless of these filters.
Spammers are able to change the sender’s email address, subject and body of an email so easily that if you block them they can still mail you just using a different mail account.
Anti-spam software like anti-virus software can only deal with what it More >
Twitter explained simply
Jul 3rd
Twitter keeps hitting the headlines at the moment but a lot of people don’t seem to understand what it really is and how it differs from other Social Networks. I’ll try to explain it in terms more people can understand.
Twitter is basically about posting short messages, much like SMS texting on mobiles. Each post is called a “tweet” and is limited to 140 characters. It can’t include other media as such but it can include hyperlinks so anything you wish to share is only a click away.
It doesn’t work like email where you choose the recipients of your messages but more like More >
Hits schmits! What do Web Statistics really mean?
Jun 4th
With web technologies it’s very easy to quote and manipulate the statistics to make things sound better or worse than they actually are. There are some grey areas in the terminology used and it’s very easy to get lost and not understand precisely what you’re being told. Here is a guide to help explain some of the more commonly used terms.
Back in the nineties everyone would talk about hits, how many hits they were getting, hit counts, they’d even have a little hit counter on their home page.
So, what is a hit? A hit means a file that is retrieved More >
My Firefox Add-ons
May 1st
I use Mozilla Firefox as my prefered web browser. Firefox allows you to expand its functionality by adding on mini programs. These are called add-ons. I thought I’d share some of my favourite add-ons.
AdBlock Plus This add-on blocks adverts in web pages. It collapses any content being imported from ad servers. You should see how small the Yahoo! home page becomes without its advertising. There are no more sponsored results on search engine pages, only organic results. It allows you to manually create exceptions, pages where ads are allowed. Where it detects any Flash content it displays a tiny button so that you can More >



