The popular blogging platform WordPress has been updated to version 3.0. WordPress 3.0 contains more than 1200 bug fixes and enhancements including a new default theme and a redesigned admin area with lighter colors. One of the major changes in WordPress 3.0 is the merging with WordPress MU, the multi-user version, that was offered only [...]

Many web developers run local web servers to test website changes without affecting the live websites on the Internet. They can also be used for numerous other purposes from offering access to files or information in a local network to creating the next Facebook or Google. Whatever it is they allow the developer or user [...]

Google Books offers a vast library of books and magazines. Some books and magazines are provided as full digital copies that can be read online while others are only available as previews or summaries. Download options are not provided on Google Books which leaves users with no other choice than to read the books and [...]

For any open source advocate, one of the biggest needs is an Exchange-like server. There are plenty of them available, some of them offer less-than enough features to really be viable. Some of them offer plenty of features but are insanely difficult to install. And then there’s Zarafa. Zarafa is an open source collaborative software [...]

Most web users are accustomed to filling out login forms to access a web account. These login forms usually ask for the username and password of a account. The information entered by the user is then compared to the information in the site’s database and access is only granted if the username and password combination [...]

The football Word Cup in South Africa kicked off last Friday. We have already seen a few surprises when favorites like England or France could not beat their opponents in their opening games. TV stations in most countries of the world show the games live but there might be some countries where not all games [...]

The prime choice for most users who wanted to manage documents online was up until recently Google Docs with its advanced set of features. Microsoft yesterday launched the Office Web Apps on SkyDrive service which might put a serious dent into Google’s domination. Office Web Apps on SkyDrive has been made available for users in [...]

Google is just rolling out a feature to U.S. users that allows them to change the background image of the Google Search homepage. The feature should be available to all U.S. users in the coming days and international availability is also expected in the coming days. Please note that this feature is only available to [...]

The domain name system is a naming system for computers and other devices connected to private computer networks or the Internet. One of its most important tasks is to translate domain names (e.g. ghacks.net) into IP addresses that computer use for communication purposes. Most Internet users use their Internet Service Provider as the DNS provider, [...]

Tudou.com is the first entry in our new site review series that takes a look at very popular sites that you may have never heard about before. Tudou is the most popular online video hosting site in China with more than 100 million video views and 40,000 new videos per day. While that does not [...]

File hosting download programs fight a constant battle with file hosting sites. The file hosting sites often change the way downloads are handled to prevent automatic downloads of files from their servers. Megaupload is one of the most popular file hosting sites on the Internet making it a prime target for automatic downloaders. File host [...]

Google yesterday officially announced the release of the Open Source, royalty free video format WebM making it a third contender for the HTML5 video crown after H.264 and Theora. WebM video might however be exactly the compromise that most companies where looking for. You might remember that the major browser developers could not agree on [...]

Newzbin was one of the first – if not the first- Usenet indexing services. That was a long time ago and IIRC it was free back then but turned to a paysite eventually. The main achievement of the site operators was however the nzb format which made it a lot easier to download multiple files [...]

WordPress, like any other popular script or online service, is heavily targeted by malicious users who try to get access to it to use the high-jacked blogs or services to execute malicious activities. This includes spamming ads to the blog’s visitors or placing links to their sites on the blog’s pages. WordPress administrators can improve [...]

Dropbox is a popular file synchronization service that allows its users to synchronize files and folders between multiple computer systems. Additional features allow them to share files and folders easily or access them on the Dropbox website. There was not an easy way until now to synchronize folders that are not placed inside the Dropbox. [...]

It’s widely believed that Amazon S3 offers the best storage on the internet amongst all cloud platforms. It’s a great web service which works like a charm with high volumes of data and allows developers to develop highly scalable solutions. As with any web service, when the volume of data increases, the complexity increases as [...]

What’s behind that link? This is a question that most Internet uses probably have asked themselves when they encountered a link that they could not figure out immediately. We reviewed the Firefox add-on Interclue back in 2007 which is part of this review. Interclue basically provides access to an overlay window that displays the contents [...]

Google bot is the general term for Google’s automated web crawling service that is linked to the Google search engine. Google sends out requests to webpages that use a Google Bot user agent. This specific user agent is used for several purposes including identification and restrictions. Webmasters can for instance filter out Google Bot from [...]

Megavideo is one of the most popular websites on the Internet. It currently ranks on 89 according to Alexa despite the fact that it makes use of an irritating 72 minute time limit after which the user is given the option to wait for 50+ minutes or purchase a premium account to continue watching the [...]

Have you ever wondered what the trends of tomorrow will be? What people will be talking about? You can now get a headstart with Zoofs, a brand new service that scans Twitter for video links and aggregates them into a most popular listing on their website. According to information posted on the service’s website more [...]

Many video content creators want to make sure that they videos reach the largest audience possible. To achieve this they upload their videos to multiple video hosting services such as Youtube, Dailymotion, Facebook or MSN Video. Doing that manually can take quite some time. It would involve accessing the service’s website, logging in, selecting the [...]

Batchgeo is a free online service that maps spreadsheet locations to Google Maps. This can be useful for several purposes including creating a store locator, creating a map, calculating distances, house or apartment buying, finding the best route to visit several locations and more. All that needs to be done to map the locations is [...]

Wikipedia users have access to so called gadgets which are Javascript snippets that extend the functionality of the popular online encyclopedia. They provide a similar functionality as userscripts with the difference that they are not installed on the user’s computer. Wikipedia gadgets can be accessed by clicking on the my preferences link in the top [...]

Geocities was a popular service back then that allowed its users to create basic websites. Many Geocities pages dated back to the beginning days of the Internet where webmasters liked to use animated gifs, sounds and other distracting elements on their pages. The Geocities-izer brings back those fond memories by offering to turn any modern [...]

The Web in 2010 seems to be all about personalization. First we got search engine personalization and now we got Facebook’s Instant Personalization feature introduced a few days ago at the F8 conference. Instant Personalization has caused some unrest amongst tech savvy Internet users. But what does it do? It basically allows partner sites (currently [...]

Panic! Facebook is not loading. I just encountered something that Facebook users probably experience as well from time to time. Tried to open the Facebook website directly in the Firefox web browser only to be greeted with a blank page. No content was displayed at all. Tried reloading the page with Ctrl-F5 but the blank [...]

I’m not a very active Facebook user. Got my account just like anyone else on this planet but do not log in more than once a week or so as I mainly use it to validate news about Facebook. I have however used some of the features of the social networking site in the past. [...]

Countries all over the world, especially those that claim to be democratic (when in fact we all know that they are not), plan to introduce various control mechanisms to increase their control over the content that is published and shared on the Internet. Cleanternet is satirical website that tries to educate Europeans (and users from [...]

Many Internet users who want to view and edit documents online use Google Docs to do so. There are other services besides Google Docs but none that can compete with Google’s service on an eye to eye level. This however could change in the near future with the public release of Docs.com, an online document [...]

The internet weather has been turning somewhat cloudy in recent years and by saying that I now don’t mean to start another discussion about (important) Net neutrality here but rather to bring up the smooth transition to a trend of moving data to indefinite “shadowy” remote storage sometimes referred to as “The Cloud”, the shape [...]

Facebook some time ago offered their users an alternative version of the social networking site dubbed Facebook Lite which was a stripped down version of Facebook designed for users with slow Internet connections to speed up page loading times. Facebook Lite on the other hand was not designed for mobile users who can access Facebook [...]

Did you know that you can create books from Wikipedia articles? Chance is you did not as the feature is currently available in the beta interface which can only be activated by registered users. Every Wikipedia user who creates an account and switches from the standard interface to the beta interface can create books from [...]

FreeApp is an online service that offers a simple concept. Pick all your favorite applications from the list of offered apps to create a custom installer that will install all those applications on the target system once executed. The idea is not new as there are other services like Ninite which offer a similar functionality. [...]

In order to improve connection times for users from all over the world, Ghacks enabled a content delivery network (CDN) yesterday. A CDN basically stores files and information on mirror servers all around the world in order to serve data to users from locations closest to them. This speeds up the connection process noticeably. In [...]

The video hosting website Youtube hosts all kinds of videos from movie trailers to music videos, from educational videos to personal ones. We all know that it is possible to download videos from Youtube so that they can be watched locally without additional bandwidth costs. Furthermore, it is possible to copy the videos to devices [...]

The music streaming service Last.fm announced earlier today in a blog post that they would retire their on-demand track streaming for customers in the UK, US and Germany. On-Demand playback on Last.fm was restricted to some countries and basically allowed users from those countries to listen to full-length previews of those songs. Last.fm radio streams [...]

The Internet has made it easier to discover new music. This is actually not limited to music as it is also possible to find new book authors and books, video games or movies that you have never heard before. We are concentrating the discovery in this report on music, more specifically music from artists that [...]

Reports about a WordPress hack affecting self-hosted WordPress blogs have appeared on the Internet in March. The hack seems to affect WordPress 2.9.2, the latest version of the blogging platform. To make matters worse there seem to be two – possibly unrelated – issues that webmasters experience. One is a malware attack that is spreading [...]

Many webmasters and Internet users host images on so called image hosting websites that allow them to store the images. This process is helpful for users who do not have their personal storage space on the Internet and webmasters who want to save bandwidth by hosting the images remotely. Image hosting sites have received a [...]

Wikipedia; Almost every Internet user has heard that name before and chance is they have been – intentionally or not – on the website of the popular online encyclopedia at least once. Wikipedia is a good starting point to find information about a topic on the Internet. Most users access the site through web searches [...]

The Google Webmaster Central Blog today announced that Google has added a site speed factor to their web search ranking algorithm which effectively another ranking factor that webmasters have to look out for. The information are – as always – rare at this point. According to the blog post the feature was enabled a few [...]

Jojo just mailed me an interesting article about a blog that discovered that its trackbacks, the links pointing to their articles from other blogs, increased practically overnight to three or four times the standard amount. We to have seen an increase in trackbacks coming from totally unrelated Internet sites which is one of the main [...]

My Usenet provider of choice Giganews has reached a binary retention level of 600 days with no end in sight (That’s a huge leap considering that they were the first to reach 100 days in 2007). Binary retention refers to the time the binary data, that is the files that are uploaded to the Usenet, [...]

It took Chinese officials less than two hours to react on Google’s announcement to stop censoring their services in China. Google, two hours before the response, started to redirect their China mainland traffic to their Hong Kong domain serving unfiltered information and services to Chinese users. The official in charge of the Internet bureau under [...]

Giganews VyprVPN is a virtual private network that is run by the same company that is providing one of the most reliable Usenet services on the Internet. I have been with Giganews for a very long time and never looked back. Since the announcement of the new vpn service Giganews Diamond account owners were able [...]

How do you decide what to read and what not to read? The decision might be influenced by past books that have been read (e.g. from the same author or same topic), friend, colleague or magazine recommendations, advertisements, related books that are shown on shopping sites or by simply stumbling upon interesting books online or [...]

Google Calendar is a calendar application that is integrated into several other Google services like Gmail. A labs section is provided by for Google Calendar users that provides access to experimental features. The Google Calendar features can easily be activated in the labs section and Google just announced the addition of three new Calendar Labs [...]

Twitter has been targeted by users with malicious intents ever since it started to become increasingly popular. One of the biggest problems up to yesterday were direct messages which one Twitter user could send to another. Links posted in those direct messages were not scanned by Twitter before they were send out, only after they [...]

FTP Sync is a free command line application to synchronize files between two ftp sites or local directories. Its main purpose is to automate the synchronization of files between two ftp servers or between a ftp server and a local directory. This can be helpful for instance for webmasters or coders who design their websites [...]

If you think radio you either think of the good old fashioned radio or Internet radio, both with little to no interaction and user contributions. Jelli tries to change that by offering Internet radio stations that are run by its users. It basically works by allowing users to vote for songs with the most voted [...]