Load2All can upload files to multiple file hosting websites at once. The service currently supports 19 different file hosting services among them Rapidshare, 2Shared or File Factory. Each file host can be selected on the main page individually.

There are two options that make Load2All unique when it comes to file uploading services. It can split large files into multiple files if the size of the uploaded file should exceed the limit of the supported file hosting services. That’s very interesting for users who usually upload large files to these services. Load2All will automatically pack the files as rar files and split them into multiple archives if a file size limit would be exceeded by the upload.

Even better is the fact that it will do that only for the services where the limit would be exceeded. The other option is to make use of a Rapidshare or Megaupload Collector account to earn points from the uploaded files. The Rapidshare login information need to be entered in this case in the web form.

Finally it is also possible to enter an email address which will then be used by the file uploading service to notify the user about the created links at the selected file hosting websites. Load2All offers several interesting options to users who want to upload large files to multiple files hosts.

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All they need to do is to join the new Orkut community at Orkut which will hand out an invitation to the redesigned Orkut interface to the user after the joining. The new Orkut community page can be accessed here. Just log into Orkut first and click on the join link in the left sidebar afterwards to join the Orkut community.

Some Orkut users might be wondering if the redesign is worth out trying right now, here are the main changes in comparison to the old Orkut design:

• * Fewer pages, faster browsing: We’ve concentrated orkut’s principal actions onto your homepage, making it a one-stop-shop for nearly everything that you’d like to do. Now you can chat, watch videos, and browse and search within your full friends and communities lists without ever having to open a new page. See a photo, video, or status message in your activity stream that you’d like to comment on? Just start typing away. After all, fewer pages and a GWT interface mean less time waiting for things to load and more time doing what really matters– hanging out with your friends!
• A clean, simple interface: We’ve reorganized the most important activites on orkut so that they are easy to find and even easier to use. Look out for larger pictures, easier to access notifications, targeted friend suggestions, and key updates closer to the top of your homepage. Now you can even use your friends’ profile pages to keep up with their most recent activities and leave them scraps.
• Greater personalization: Make your orkut profile and homepage truly your own by choosing the color that best fits your style. Have a personality that’s too unique to be captured by words? We’ve also made it possible for you to customize your “about me” section, adding video, OpenSocial applications and much more to your array of options.

The request to join the new community is pending until a moderator of the community approves it. This can take a few hours, sometimes even longer. It is still one of the fastest ways of being able to access the new Orkut design unless you know someone who could send you an invite directly.

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I researched the new web hoster extensively before making my decision to move the website to the new hoster. That is probably the most important step in the process to ensure that the hoster has excellent customer support, servers and connections to the Internet. Wiredtree was all that and more and I learned during the server transfer that their 15 minute reaction time to customer support requests was not just a figure that they picked out of thin air.

I had to deal with customer support in a few occasions especially during server migration to ensure that everything went underway smoothly. Wiredtree was always prompt to response with a solid solution that solved my requests. They also contacted me after three months to find out if everything was as I expected it to be. Support is therefor excellent, cannot be better in my opinion. But what about the server and hardware?

I ordered one server upgrade in that time; A backup server to store backups of all the websites and databases that were on the server regularly. The performance of the server itself is great and capable of running Ghacks and a few minor websites without problems. The load average, cpu, swap file, hard drive and memory utilization of the server were much lower than on the old server. More importantly than that is the fact that the server never crashed under the load so that I did not have to get up late at night after receiving a SMS that the server was down to fix the problem.

The Wiredtree server is not as cheap as it can get but it is still a cheaper priced server especially compared to other web hosting companies who charge double or even more of the amount that I’m paying for a comparable server. The excellent hardware and connections of the dedicated server in combination with top notch customer support make Wiredtree the hosting company that I recommend to all my friends and colleagues. It cannot get much better than that. We (that’s Everton from Connected Internet and I) are for example hosting Windows 7 News on another Wiredtree server and had no complaints (only praise) there with the hardware or customer support there as well.

I will do another review in 4 or 8 months to see if they are keeping their high standard. I currently have no reason to believe they do not.

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One tool I have found to be the least invasive is Twidge. Twidge does not have an application or daemon running in the background. Twidge does not have a panel applet. Twidge doesn’t even remain open in the terminal window. Twidge just allows you to enter commands that take specific action on your Twitter account. It’s simple, it’s fast, and it’s…well…command line fu-tastic! With that said, let’s install, configure, and use Twidge.

Features

The first thing you need to know is if Twidge offers enough features to convince you to use it. Here is the short list:

• Simple to use.
• View activity of friends.
• Add followers.
• Follow users.
• Archiving of your tweets.
• Automatic URL shortening via tinyurl.com.

And much more.

Installation

As you would expect, twidge can be found in your distribution repositories. So all you need to do is open up a terminal and issue a command like:

sudo apt-get install twidge

or

yum install twidge

or

urpmi twidge

The installation will pick up the curl dependency automatically. After Twidge is installed, keep that terminal open because you’ll need it (at least to begin with).

Configuration

In order to use Twidge you have to configure it to authenticate to your account. To do this you have to run a built-in configuration script issued from the command line. Issue the command:

twidge setup

You will be asked two simple questions:

• Your use(r)name.
• Your password.

That’s it. Now you are ready to start using Twidge.

Usage

The basic usage of Twidge is:

twidge update ‘STATUS’

Where STATUS is what you want to post to twitter (between single quotes).

Of course updating is not always enough. Twidge has a number of built-in tools. Let’s take a look at what they are. NOTE: The basic usage of these tools is:

twidge TOOL OPTIONS

Where TOOL is the tool you want to use and OPTIONS are any options you want to pass to the tool (if any options are available).

Display updates.

• lsarchive: List your own posts.
• lsdm: List direct messages sent to you.
• lsdmarchive: List direct messages you have sent.
• lsrecent: Lists recent posts made by you or those you follow.
• lsreplies: Lists all recent replies made to you.
• lsfollowers: Lists those following you.
• lsfollowing: Lists those you are following.

Action commands.

All of these tools are used in the same way the tools above are used, except in certain instances you proceed the tool name with username like so:

twidge TOOL USERNAME

Where TOOL is the specific tool you want to use and USERNAME is the user you want to send the information to.

• dmsend: Send a direct to a user.
• follow: Follow a specific user.
• unfollow: Stop following a user.
• update: Update your status.

So let’s say you want to update your status to say “Hey everyone, I am reading a cool article on Ghacks right now!”. To do this you would enter the command:

twidge update ‘Hey everyone, I am reading a cool article on Ghacks right now!’

and hit enter when you’re done.

Let’s say, however, you wanted to use I’m instead of I am. The use of a single quote in the middle of that tweet would cause an error. To get around that just enter:

twidge update

and then hit enter. You should notice that you do not get your bash prompt back. What you do now is type in your tweet, without using quotes, and then hit enter. This way you can use contractions without having to worry about proper shell quotes.

Using twidge without command line

Although Twidge is a command line only tool, you can get around opening up a terminal by opening up your desktop’s run dialog and then entering your twidge command there. If you’re using GNOME you hit <Alt>F2 and then enter the Twidge command in the run dialog. This keeps you from having to have yet another window open, and it’s much faster.

Final thoughts

I will make no bones about the fact that Twidge is not nearly as simple as the standard GUI-based tool. But Twidge makes up for that with speed, reliability, and flexibility. Because of its command line nature, you could even create a nifty bash script to use something like fortune and then add that bash script to a cron job so you would get an automatically updated status. Script-fu-tastic!

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The first problem is an XSS vulnerability in Press This discovered by Benjamin Flesch. The second problem, discovered by Dawid Golunski, is an issue with sanitizing uploaded file names that can be exploited in certain Apache configurations. Thanks to Benjamin and Dawid for finding and reporting these.

The upgrade is as usual available through various means with the two most popular ones being through an automatic update in the Wordpress admin interface and the second trough a download from the official Wordpress website. The first is faster and more comfortable while the second offers more control to the user especially if something goes wrong.

This Wordpress update does not require an update of the Wordpress database. It is however recommended to perform a backup of both the Wordpress files on the web server and the MySQL database to be prepared if the update should fail for any reason.

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For Linux there are plenty of possible RSS feed readers. One of my favorite readers is Liferea. Liferea is a feed aggregator for Gtk/GNOME that is fast, stable, works with most feeds, and takes up very few precious CPU cycles. And Liferea offers numerous features other, simpler, RSS feed readers do not have. In this article you will be introduced to this outstanding aggregator tool for the Linux desktop.

Features

Liferea offers the following features:

• Easy subscription addition/management.
• Bookmark using sites like Zurpy.
• Fast.
• Easy to use email-like thread pane.
• Import/Export of feeds.
• Script manager.
• Subscribe to your Google mail feed.
• and much more!

Installation

Liferea is very simple to install on any modern Linux distribution. In Ubuntu 9.10 you can open up the Software Center, do a search for “liferea” (no quotes), and install. The same steps can be followed with Synaptic. If you are using a Fedora-like distribution you can open up a terminal and issue the command (as the root user):

yum install liferea

Once installed you will find the Liferea menu entry in your Internet sub-menu of the Applications menu.

Using Liferea

Figure 1

When you first fire up Liferea (see Figure 1) you will notice a number of already configured feeds for your enjoyment. Reading an entry from one of the pre-configured feeds is simple:

1. Click on the feed from the right pane.
2. Click on a story in the upper right pane.
3. Read the story in the lower right pane.

If, within the story, there is a link or comments you want to read you only need click on the Comments link or the url link within the article. The nice thing about Liferea is that you can read the entire story from within the application, so no other application is necessary. You are not just given a snippet of the article to preview.

Adding a new feed source

Of course you will most likely want add your own feed sources. Liferea has made this simple as well. Follow these steps:

Figure 2

1. Click the “New Subscriptions” button.
2. Enter the address of the source in the resulting new window (see Figure 2).
3. Click OK

That’s it. Now you will have noticed the Advanced button in the New Subscription window. You will want to go to the advanced configuration options if you need to:

• Change the source type from URL to either Command or Local file.
• Use a proxy.
• Use a conversion filter.

Other than that, just entering the source address is all you need.

Google

As I mentioned earlier, you can also subscribe to your Google mail. To do this follow these steps:

1. Click the New Subscription button.
2. Enter https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom as the source.
3. Click OK.

When prompted enter your Google username/password. Once authenticated Liferea will download your Gmail as a feed.

If you want to add your Google Reader feeds you can do this as well. Follow these steps:

1. Right click an empty spot in the left pane and select New.
2. From the resulting menu select “New Source”.
3. From the Source Selection window choose Google Reader.
4. Click OK.
5. When prompted enter your Google account username and password.
6. Click OK.

The Google feed will automatically update for you, but might take a bit of time to update depending upon how many feeds you are subscribed to with Google Reader.

Final thoughts

Liferea is one of the best RSS solutions available for the Linux desktop. Not only is it easy to use, it’s flexible enough to satisfy even the more critical users.

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It improves on three major points and one of them is better stability for third-party plug-ins. Good to see Apple doing that.

Tags: 4.0.4, apple, safari, software update

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The performance of Bing Maps was improved in several ways. Microsoft is now serving maps from seven different locations in the world making it faster for the user to access the information requested. The default Bing Maps homepage has seen a size reduction as well from nearly 700 Kilobytes to less than 500 Kilobytes which should be noticeably by and beneficial to low bandwidth connections.

The full list of changes includes:

• Draggable Routes – Yes! This is a great (and much requested) feature added to Bing Maps allowing you to generate a route, then in the case that you need to change the route, you can simply grab any part of it and drag it to where you want the route to actually go. To use draggable routes, click the directions link in the welcome pane or the car icon near the bottom of the welcome pane. Enter a start and end, generate a route, then grab anywhere on the route to move the route line. The route will regenerate for you.
• Zoom Bar – No longer just a zoom in and zoom out button, the zoom bar allows you to jump to specific zoom levels within predefined settings.
• Command Parsing – Want driving directions? Enter “Bellevue, WA to Space Needle” in the Bing Maps search box. Want traffic info? Enter “Seattle Traffic” in the Bing Maps search box.
• Embed a Map – You can now take a map view right from Bing Maps and embed it into your site. To do this, you’ll want to click the Share button once your map is where you want it to be. You can copy the embed code from there; or, you can click the Customize View link which will take you to the embeddable map customizer (EMC). The EMC allows you to set a map to the map height and width (small, medium, large or custom); the map type (static or draggable); the map styles (road, aerial, aerial w/ labels); and, add links to Bing Maps for Viewing a Larger Map or Getting Directions. Once you’ve set everything the way you want it, click Generate Code and boom! there’s your code. You copy it, then paste it into your web page and you’ll have the map you wanted.
• Dynamic Compute – We’ve moved the processing power closer to the user. Using Microsoft’s ECN, we now have Bing Maps running in data centers in 7 locations around the world. This means wherever you are around the world, you will access Bing Maps from the closest geographic node to where you are physically located.
• New Navigation – We also added a subset of features to a button bar along the bottom of the welcome pane. Each button loads features on Bing Maps. Welcome loads the welcome pane; the car loads the route planner; the star loads My Places, formerly called Collections; the envelop loads the ability to share the map with someone via email, copying a URI or embedding the map into a web page (more on that below); the printer icon is for printing; and, stoplight will load a traffic overlay with flow and incident information.
• World Wrap – no longer will your Bing Maps experience stop at the international date line. Keep going around, and around, and around…
• Diet Bing Maps – The default Bing Maps home page dropped from 678kb to 484kb. It zips through the pipes much faster now.

Bing Maps is a service over at Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

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It is still in beta and I haven’t gotten around to using it much yet (just noticed it a while ago!) But is this cool or what? Will retweet a few tweets and test it out.

Update, okay, did it. screen shot below. Nice eh?

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The service will display all results based on the cheapest possible price with the option to change the sorting factor to either time, means of travel or CO2 emission. It will display the departure and arrival date and the number of legs for each transportation means.

The information offered by routeRank make it very comfortable to find suitable means of travel. It is even possible to customize the car that might be used for the travel (including petrol type, fuel consumption and petrol price) as well as the departure and arrival transfer means which will be included in the calculation.

A quick sample route from Berlin, Germany to London, UK revealed the following: The most environmentally friendly way of traveling is by train with a CO2 emission of 57 kg, a traveling time of 10:15 hours, a price of 169,50 Euro and three legs. The fastest way is by plane which would cut the traveling time almost by half to 5:40 hours. The price would be 54,30 and the CO2 emission at 212 kg. Traveling by car would be the most expensive, longest and environmentally unfriendly way of traveling between the two locations.

One interesting aspect here is that the service is considering the transfer to and from some of the locations. If you use one of the cheap airlines you usually do not arrive at the main airport of the destination but another airport that is sometimes badly connected to the city. RouteRank takes this into account.

RouteRank is an interesting service for users who want to quickly see the best means of traveling between two locations based on important parameters such as traveling costs and time.

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YouScrobble brings the best of these two worlds together. Users who visit the music service can perform a search for an artist to be presented with the complete discography of that artist. The mashup now brings Youtube into the picture by allowing playback and downloads of the music found on Youtube.

The service makes use of three different user roles: Guests can search for and listen to music on the website. They are also allowed to download five songs every 24 hours. Registered users (still free) get ten additional downloads per day, a better download priority, playlist support and scrobble functionality to let Last.fm know about the music. Paid users finally get unlimited downloads and the highest priority in the download queue.

YouScrobble offers means to discover music in a different way. Users can also take a look at the categories or popular artists instead of searching for artists, albums, bands or songs.

Is the service legal? That’s a question that is better left to the lawyers in this case. The pay for downloads model that YouScrobble uses is certainly the most controversial aspect of the service. As Martin Bryant over at Read Write Web points out it is one thing to embed videos on a website that playback music and another to offer that music for download. But that’s something that the developer’s have to dell with eventually, not the users who are using the service.

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And then there’s OpenGoo. OpenGoo is an open source collaboration tool that is fully web-based, easy to use, simple to install, and free to use. But is OpenGoo for you and your company? This tutorial will show you how to get an OpenGoo installation up and running so you can kick the tires and find out if it is exactly what you need.

Features

OpenGoo offers all of the standard features of a business-level collaboration suite:

• Text documents
• Spreadsheets (coming soon)
• Presentations
• Task Lists
• E-mails
• Calendars
• Web Links
• Contacts

All you need to install an OpenGoo server is:

• Apache >= 2.0
• MySQL >= 5.0 (5.2 recommended)
• MySQL >= 4.1 with InnoDB support

Now, let’s get on with that installation.

Install

This installation will be done on a Ubuntu 9.10 setup. I have installed this on both desktop and server installation, but regardless of which you have installed, you will need a LAMP server running.

The first thing you need to do is to download the zip file from the OpenGoo download page. I downloaded and installed the 1.6 beta version which works nicely.

Once that file is downloaded, move that file to /var/www. Now, change to the /var/www/ directory and then unzip it with the command:

sudo unzip opengoo_1.6.beta-2.zip

NOTE: If you downloaded a different release, edit that command to reflect the release number.

Once that files is unzipped rename the directory with the command:

sudo mv opengoo_1.6.beta-2.zip opengoo

Now change into the /var/www/opengoo directory and issue the following commands:

sudo chmod -R ugo+w /var/www/opengoo/config

sudo chmod -R ugo+w /var/www/opengoo/cache

sudo chmod -R ugo+w /var/www/opengoo/upload

sudo chmod -R ugo+w /var/www/opengoo/tmp

With all the right permissions in play, it is time to create the database. I like to use PhpMyAdmin to make database creation simple. For more information about installing this tool check out my article “Install PhpMyAdmin for easy MySQL administration“. Use this tool to create a database called “opengoo” (No quotes).

Time to begin the web-based installation.

Fire up your browser and point it to:

http://IP_TO_SERVER/opengoo

Where IP_TO_SERVER is the actual IP Address of your OpenGoo server. You will be greeted with usual welcome screen that will tell you exactly what is going to happen during the installation. Click the Next button to continue on.

The second screen will run the environment checks. If everything gets and OK (and it should be if your LAMP server is up and running and you’ve taken care of all the permissions) click the Next button to continue on.

Figure 1

The third page of the installation (see Figure 1) is the first step that should require you to input any data.

The information should be fairly self explanatory. There is one point of note: If you plan on allowing access to your local LAN you will need to change the Absolute script URL to reflect the proper IP address (or domain).

Once you have all of this information in place, click the Next button which will take you to the congratulations screen where you only need click the Finish button to assume you’ve completed the installation.

Figure 2

Ah, but there is one more step. Figure 2 shows the final step for the installation. Here you need to create an administrator for your installation.

Setup your administrative user and click Submit. You can now log in to your OpenGoo server with your administrative user.

The basic interface

You will log into your OpenGoo server by entering the same address you did for the installation. When you log in you will be at the OpenGoo Getting Started Page (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

The OpenGoo installation will offer a very simple information page that will help you get started on your decision. But as you can see, the interface is laid out quite well. The tools are accessible and very user-friendly.

After using OpenGoo for a while I can assure you if you like Google’s suite of tools, you will like OpenGoo.

Final thoughts

If you are looking for a very cost effect collaboration solution look no further than the open source OpenGoo suite of tools. Not only is it easy to use, it’s simple to install, and free of charge.

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Trend Micro are reporting about yet another Facebook phishing attack that is currently in the wild. The attack begins – like most phishing attacks – by mass mailing potential Facebook users informing them that they need to update their Facebook login credentials. A link is offered in that email and if they follow that link they land on a website that looks like Facebook. What’s interesting here is that the email address field of the Facebook login form is already filled out so that the Facebook user only needs to enter the Facebook password to complete the process.

A click on the login button will open a new page that contains a link to an update tool which installs a trojan on the user’s system.

It attempts to access a Web site to download a file which contains information where the Trojan can download an updated copy of itself, and where to send its stolen data. This configuration file also contains a list of targeted bank-related Web sites from which it steals information. Note that the contents of the file, hence the list of Web sites to monitor, may change any time.

It attempts to steal sensitive online banking information, such as user names and passwords. This routine risks the exposure of the user’s account information, which may then lead to the unauthorized use of the stolen data.

The blog post contains security tips on how to distinguish legit from phishing emails. Users who are interested in those can visit the blog post but the most important lesson once again is to avoid clicking on links that are send via email.

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There are a hundred and one thousand things that can go wrong with any web server installation. From a fresh installation to an installation that has been running for a long time, you never know when something is going to cause your web server to go astray. When it does happen, it’s always nice to know that, usually, Occam’s Razor applies.

In this tutorial you will find some advice that will help you through some of the more common issues that can pop up with an Apache web server.

Is your server actually running?

Believe it or not, this has happened to plenty of administrators. You take the server down, do some maintenance, and when you go to check out the server you’re getting errors. The first thing you do, naturally, is check out that /etc/apache2/apache.conf file to make sure your syntax is correct. But it’s perfect! What’s up? The first thing you might want to check is to make sure the server is running. But you don’t want to just issue the command to start the server or reload the server. Instead, issue the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 status

Which should return something like:

* apache is running (pid 9751).

If not, start the server with either:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start

or

sudo apache2ctl start

NOTE: If you are using a distribution like Fedora, SuSE, or Mandriva you will need to first su to the root user and issue the above commands WITHOUT using sudo.

It’s not running and it won’t start

Did you just make changes to your Apache configuration file? Are the changes correct? If you’re not sure, you can use the apache2ctl command to check the syntax of your configuration file. This is done with the command:

sudo apache2ctl configtext

The above command should report:

Syntax OK

If you don’t get an OK, you will get information that points to the errors in your configuration file.

Apache wants to download .php files!

This is another common issue. When you add a new tool on your web server (such as Drupal), if your configuration file is set up properly, any .php file might not be displayed. Instead any attempt to view a .php file will instead have your browser trying to download the file. Why is this? Apache must be informed that certain extensions are to be displayed, not downloaded. This is done from within the Apache configuration file. Open up that file (in the Ubuntu server it will be /etc/apache2/apache2.conf) and first look for the following line:

DirectoryIndex index.html

If that file doesn’t include index.php nearly all sites that use php will be rendered useless.

The second line to look for is:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php

If you find this line, and it is commented out, make sure you uncomment it by removing the “#” character. If it is not there add it to the bottom of the configuration file.

And, as always, when you make a change to the configuration file, restart Apache.

Know where to look for problems

Finally, it is crucial that you know where to first turn when the above doesn’t help you out. Any time I have an issue with Apache where Occam’s Razor does not apply, the first place I turn is the log files.

If you look in /var/log/apache2 you will find, at least, the following files:

• access.log: This keeps track of any connection made to your server.
• error.log: This keeps track of any errors that occur with Apache.
• other_vhosts_access.log: This is where virtual hosts will log when the virtual host has not been prescribed its own log file.

Of course, as your site evolves so will your available log files. Regardless of what you find in /var/log/apache2, that is where you should always first turn when you have problems. Even before you google.

Final thoughts

Now you should be able to handle some of the more common issues with the Apache server. And if your problem isn’t common, you also know where to turn to find clues that will lead you down the right path to correction.

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The process of creating a business card consists of three basic steps. A graphic is added in step one. This is done by pasting an url in the web form at the top of the generator. The developer of the script suggests using a clipart repository if no custom image is available. This place is usually filled by a company logo.

The user then selects a font from the three available ones (Helvetica, Times, Courier) which will be used for the text of the business card. Up to ten lines of text can then be added and aligned on the business card. Font weight and size can be customized individually for each line of text.

A click on the Make Business Cards button at the bottom of the screen will generate a pdf document containing one sheet with twelve of the custom business cards on it. This pdf document can then be printed to create the business cards. Users interested in making their own business cards can visit the website to create their own in less than five minutes.

Do you know other resources to make your own business cards? If so let us know in the comments.

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The best way to see the changes on the page is to display the old and the new MSN homepage as images:

The new page looks much cleaner and more interactive. Microsoft claims that they cut the number of links by almost 50% and while that may be true for the links that are displayed visually it is another story if you analyse all the links on the page. The new MSN page sports 219 external links currently compared to 186 on the old page. These figures are subject to change but it currently means an increase by almost 30 links on the MSN homepage.

The number of objects on the page on the other hand was reduced from 46 on the old page to 29. The total size increased on the other hand to 192568 bytes from 135594 bytes which can be largely attributed to the larger photos that are displayed on the page.

The new page should on the other hand load faster for Internet connections faster than 128 Kilobytes per second thanks to the reduced number of objects that need to be loaded. Here is what Microsoft has to say about the new MSN homepage:

The clean, new MSN is designed to be the best home page on the Web, with powerful Bing search, the top news and hottest entertainment, and convenient access to some of the most popular social networks — all in a fresh new look. Based on customer input, the new design has 50 percent fewer links than the previous home page and a simplified navigation across news, entertainment, sports, finance and lifestyle. In addition, sophisticated technology powers the home page to deliver personally relevant information and improved performance satisfies people’s need for speed.

The new homepage will be gradually enabled for visitors from the United States with the option to access the preview MSN homepage at anytime and from anywhere. What’s your opinion on the new homepage?

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Twitter Lists introduces a new feature that third party websites have been offering for a while. A comprehensive option to build a list of Twitter users on any subject. This can be a list of all students in business 101, a list of local politicians who use Twitter or a list of the world’s most popular thinkers.

The main benefit of this approach is that someone can access the public messages of all the Twitter users in that list from the Twitter Lists page. It is possible to subscribe to a Twitter list to receive the usual updates when someone on the list posts a new message.

To sum it up: Twitter Lists makes it easier to combine the messages of various Twitter users under one roof without having to filter through additional noise that is created by messages that they receive in their standard Twitter Account.

There is still one question to be answered: How can someone find the best lists without having to manually look at the pages of Twitter users? The answer, at least for lists of prominent Twitter users, is Listorious. The service maintains a list of (currently) 140 Twitter lists sorted in categories like media, news, marketing, health or finance.

This is a good starting point to find lists of prominent Twitter users like all verified NFL players who use Twitter, journalists who cover finance and business or thought leaders of this world. On the other hand; You won’t find your high-school’s teachers there.

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Here is a visual representation of the process:

And here how it looks like on the homepage:

The service is currently in private beta with a few invites still available on the site for a price. Apparently only users who buy the Web Trend Poster for $49 can apply for a private beta invitation on the website. It is likely that this is going to change in the future. Users with an account can create their own maps. Everyone else is currently left with the information that are posted on the homepage of the service.

A click on any icon on the homepage will display trends posted by that specific user or website. Each link includes a small preview and the option to open the website to retrieve additional information about the topic. Interested users can visit the Web Trend Map website by following this link. (thanks Jojo for sending in that tip)

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The userscripts change, remove or add elements to a website on load if they are activated. They can for example remove ads, display download links, embed additional content or provide other benefits to the Internet user. Check out our Facebook Login and Facebook Login Page help articles if you have troubles logging into Facebook.

FacebookDeletes

If you want to delete friends on Facebook you need to do that one by one on the Friend’s page there. That’s a problem if you do not want to remove one but maybe dozens or even hundreds of friends. That’s where the Facebook Deletes userscript comes in handy. It allows Facebook users to batch delete friends in Facebook. [link]

Facebook | Add Status

You can change your status by writing something into the What’s on your mind box. Some users like to see their previous status there before they start changing it. This is what the Add Status userscript does. It displays the current status next to the What’s on your mind box, [link]

Remove All Facebook Ads

If you are not using an ad blocker in your web browser you might want to consider running this userscript. It will remove all Facebook ads to remove these distractions from the Facebook website. [link]

Secure Connections

If you visit Facebook you usually enter through the http address. Facebook is also offering to open Facebook using a secure https connection. This script automates the process by automatically loading the https website for Facebook and several others that are configured in the script. [link]

Facebook Fixer

One of the larger Facebook scripts. The developer is currently working on a new version as Facebook recently has made some design changes to their website. There is a lot that this userscript does including

• Big Profile Pictures and Photos recently improved
• Big Album Pictures
• Video Download Links
• Load Full Albums
• Homepage Customization recently improved
• Age and Sign recently improved
• Calendar Integration
• Keyboard Shortcuts recently improved
• Re-Title
• Error Page Reloading

This is a large script that changes many aspects of Facebook to the better. [link]

Facebook Purity

Don’t like all those quiz and application messages on your Facebook homepage? Now you can get rid of them by installing the Facebook Purity userscript which automatically removes them from the homepage. [link]

Facebook Friends Checker

Want to know if any of your friends have removed you from being their friend? Now you can find out with the Facebook Friends Checker userscript. [link]

Facebook Chatbar+

Gives you a collection of emoticons that you can click for a simpler way to experience emoticons in chat. [link]

Facebook Highlight Birthdays

Highlights the birthdays of today on the Facebook homepage. [link]

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Geocities users can still use the day to backup their files from the web hosting service before these get deleted. Yahoo is suggesting to move to Yahoo web hosting but there are other free options available which might appeal more to Geocities users.

If you search for Geocities in major search engines you still find millions of websites and files that are hosted at the free web hosting service. It will be interesting to see how the search engines cope with the sudden termination of those pages and files.

Here at Ghacks we had ten pages with links to Geocities. Some to great software programs such as Iso Puzzle which will from today on only be available on third party download portals.

What’s your opinion on the termination of the Geocities service? Good move by Yahoo to get rid of another slow and ad infected free web hosting service or bad move as some treasures of the past decade will be lost in the process?

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