For the longest time I refused to see the value in Twitter. Over the last six months I have changed my tune on that. Now I use Twitter primarily as a PR tool for my articles. And since my renewed belief in micro-blogging, I have found plenty of tools with which to enact with Twitter. [...]

The WordPress developers have just released a security update for their blogging platform WordPress which raises the version of the software to 2.8.6. It is always recommended to update to a new version of WordPress as soon as possible and especially so for a security release. This release fixes two vulnerabilities that are only relevant [...]

RSS has become such a common source of information for us information junkies. Whether you are following Ghacks via RSS, your favorite news site, or your favorite blog, it’s nice to be able to get all of those feeds centralized on your desktop. For Linux there are plenty of possible RSS feed readers. One of [...]

Just a little heads up for you guys. Safari’s new update has been released. Mac OS 10.5.x and 10.6.x can update right now. Check your software update if you have not been notified yet. Screenshot on the other side. It improves on three major points and one of them is better stability for third-party plug-ins. [...]

Bing Maps has been updated today with several new features and a new look and feel. Most notably in this regard are a new button bar with each button loading a specific feature of Bing Maps. Microsoft has also added some new colors to Bing Maps but those are only the obvious changes to the [...]

That is true folks. Twitter finally has a retweet feature. So retweet away to glory I say! 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.

Ever asked yourself if you should take the car, train or plane on your next holiday or business trip? Maybe you have even tried to calculate the traveling time and expenses for the various traveling options. Doing that manually can take quite some time. That’s where the new web service routeRank steps in. RouteRank queries [...]

Services that make use of the vast video and audio archive that is Youtube are springing out of the ground more recently in this year. YouScrobble is the latest service that is combining Youtubes video archive with the information provided by the music service Last.fm. This combination alone proves to be very effective. Users who [...]

Do you use Google for your collaboration tools? Gmail? Google Documents? Contacts? Although the Google suite is a very nice suite of tools that has grown exponentially in popularity, there is something to be said about keeping your collaboration tools in-house. There are plenty of tools that will allow you to set up such a [...]

Offering a popular website or web service is not always a blessing. This especially becomes apparent when you have to deal with security related issues like phishing attacks. Facebook is without doubt one of the most popular sites on the Internet these days and it therefor comes unsurprisingly that the service is regularly attacked. Trend [...]

How many times have you installed a LAMP server only to find Apache doesn’t seem to want to run right? Or you install a new module only to see Apache try to download pages as file, instead of displaying them on screen? There are a hundred and one thousand things that can go wrong with [...]

Several web services exist that allow visitor to make their own business cards. Some of these services are free while the majority of them is not. Paid and free services differ highly in regards to customizability and ease of use. Make Business Cards is a free service that offers enough customization to make it interesting [...]

MSN.com is one of the most popular websites on the Internet with roughly 100 million unique visitors per month that come to the website. The design of the Internet portal has not changed a lot in the last ten years. Users who are visiting the old MSN page notice a lot of links and elements [...]

Twitter recently introduced a new feature called Twitter Lists. Before Twitter Lists Twitter users could only look at the messages that one Twitter user send and received. This could include messages from friends, colleagues but also from mums and dads. If you for instance wanted to find the most influential Twitter users in politics or [...]

The Web Trend Map is a service that computes web trends from trustworthy sources from the stream of information on today’s Internet. It does so by filtering links posted from that stream several times to come up with those trends in the end. These filters begin by the links that are posted on the Internet. [...]

Chance is you have a Facebook account. Hundreds of millions of users have one and at least some of them are looking for ways to change the standard appearance and functionality of the social networking website. One unobtrusive way of doing that is to use so called userscripts which can be loaded into web browsers [...]

The Geocities era ends today with the termination of the once popular free web hosting service. Some great programs and free websites where hosted over the years at Geocities which will no longer be available after today. This has several implications not only for users who hosted their contents at Geocities but also webmasters and [...]

Most photos that are uploaded to Flickr are available in various sizes at the photo hosting service ranging from the original photo resolution down to medium, small and thumbnail copies of that photo. Users who upload photos can make the decision to share all available sizes of the photo with other Flickr users or only [...]

The Raindrop project was introduced the other day at the Mozilla Labs website by the Mozilla Messaging team which also develops the email client Thunderbird. Raindrop aims to be the only software program a user needs to manage all messaging needs. It does so by allowing the user to add different data sources like Gmail [...]

Back in the days when I began using Stumbleupon I always thought that the website itself was a bit messy. Plus there was not really a good search to find websites related to topics that you were looking for. This has changed with the recent redesign of the Stumbleupon website. An account is still required [...]

The WordPress developers have released version 2.8.5 of their popular blogging software. The version is considered a security upgrade and therefor mandatory for all WordPress blog owners who run their own WordPress blog (but not those running a blog at WordPress.com). The developers are calling this released a hardening release as it tightens WordPress security [...]

In this day and age, very few people have not heard of Myspace. Myspace is a social networking website. MySpace users create their own webpages and then in turn, invite “friends” who can create their own MySpace pages. This creates a huge network of people linked together by Myspace pages. MySpace is also used by [...]

I’m sure by now everyone here knows about Hulu. If not, Hulu is a rather huge collection of television programs that can be viewed on line, for free, with few commercial interruptions. It’s brilliant. You can watch old reruns of What’s Happenin? or Mork and Mindy or Alf! Yes, Alf! But many of you may [...]

Facebook users who want to check their Facebook account for new messages, pokes, friend requests or invites usually have to go to the Facebook website and login there to see the Facebook status updates. This does mean that they sometimes visit Facebook to find out that nothing has been updated. A Facebook status update notifier [...]

Printing out articles or other information on a website has usually the effect that a lot of elements are included in the print out that are not necessarily needed. This waste of printer ink can be reduced by removing the unnecessary elements from the page layout before printing the relevant information. The Printliminator bookmarklet offers [...]

Facebook is currently probably the most popular social networking website on the Internet. With a user base growth of 50 million in the last three months it is without doubt now ranking at the top with its 300 million users. Facebook login problems are as common as those on other websites. This does not only [...]

MySpace is without doubt one of the most popular social networking websites on the Internet even though some say it has been in decline ever since Facebook took off. MySpace login problems are as common a problem as on other websites with this amount of users. Like every big website they are a common target [...]

The Google Docs development team has finally added one of the most requested features to the document management service. The ability to share folders – and with those the documents contained in those folders – was not given until the new release yesterday. This new feature makes it more comfortable to work with several users [...]

You might have already read about it in the news elsewhere: The Twitter account of security researcher Mikko H. Hyppönen of F-Secure got suspended without warning two days ago. Mikko tried to contact Twitter support and tried everything in his power to understand why his Twitter account was suspended in first place. He received a [...]

Orkut is Google’s social networking attempt. The basic idea was created by one of Google’s engineers who quickly adopted the idea and created the social network Orkut from it. Orkut is one of the most popular websites on the Internet even though it does not receive all the media coverage that networks like Facebook or [...]

We reviewed Yahoo Meme a while ago here at Ghacks and gave out several invites to Yahoo’s Twitter-like service. The service was in private beta back then which meant that only users with invites were allowed to use it. Yahoo Meme expands on the basic options that Twitter is offering to its users. It gets [...]

Twitter can be an excellent source for spotting the latest trends. Twitter itself displays several popular topics on its frontpage which are sorted by minute, day and week. It does become more difficulty to spot trends if they are not displayed on the Twitter homepage. The two problems that arise are finding those trends if [...]

Most computer users know that regular data backups are important to be prepared when data on a computer system becomes corrupted. This can be due to hardware failures, human error or computer virus infections. Backups ensure that data can be recovered at anytime. Online services on the other hand are not usually integrated in backup [...]

Some call Google Wave the next big thing on the Internet while others think that it does not add anything new or exciting to the web. Whatever it is, most users have not had a chance to test Google Wave as Google has closed registration for the service. The Google blog announced yesterday that they [...]

One cannot really deny the fact that Google is constantly working on new features for their popular online services like Gmail or Google Docs. The latest feature is currently available as a demonstration only and not yet integrated into Google Docs. The Google Docs OCR demonstration can OCR the three image formats jpg, png and [...]

F-Secure Health Check is a web application that can perform a health check of a local Microsoft Windows operating system. A health check is basically divided into three areas of interest that are checked and an assessment in the end that lists possible solutions to the problems encountered. Area one will check for installed security [...]

PBTweet is a bookmarklet and userscript that enhances several aspects of Twitter by changing or adding new functions to the popular social network. Before we start looking at the features a word about compatibility. The bookmarklet works with most Webkit based web browsers including Safari and Google Chrome. The userscripts are compatible with Greasemonkey for [...]

Google and Microsoft are constantly working on new services and features of their search engines. Microsoft introduced a visual search option in Bing yesterday which allowed search engine visitors to access and sort information of specific niches visually. Google introduced a new Google Labs feature called Google Fast Flip which is offering a new reading [...]

Many companies and organizations limit their services on the Internet to users of a specific country. This is especially true for streaming based services that stream media like music or videos over the Internet. It usually comes down to usage rights as the main reason for the limitation. Others say the limits are there to [...]

Giganews has been my Usenet provider for the last couple of years. Before that I switched from service to service only to be disappointed eventually by poor performance or connection problems. Yes, these services were cheaper than Giganews but you did get what you paid for, at least back then. The Usenet provider landscape has [...]

Professional webmasters, and also many other website owners, need a way to keep track of keyword rankings of their website. Keyword ranking simple means the position in selected search engines of a website for a specific keyword. Ghacks is for example ranking on the first spot in Google, and probably in every other search engine [...]

Big companies are not only currently competing with each other in the search engine niche but also when it comes to webmail. It’s actually the same three companies – that is Yahoo, Microsoft and Google – that provide both search engine and web mail services. One of the latest areas of interest for web mail [...]

Facebook has activated a lite version of their popular website for users in selected countries. Facebook Lite was initially designed to offer users with slow Internet connections a faster way of accessing the most relevant sections in Facebook. The concept still seems to be valid although only users from selected countries can currently open the [...]

It is not often that Google changes something on the front-end of Google Search. The only element that the Google developers change regularly is the logo that adds a little bit of change to the search engine every other day or so. Changes to the rest of the front-end on the other hand are rare [...]

Believe it or not, there is sometimes a need to have Internet Explorer available. Some web designers like to be able to to test their sites with all possible browsers. Some websites are poorly designed and will only function properly in Internet Explorer. So many designers (and users) need to have this browser available. If [...]

Looking up information like the local time, local date or local weather can be helpful in certain circumstances. Maybe you are planning a trip to another location and want to make sure to be prepared, maybe you do not want to miss the important video conference with that other company from China (or another country) [...]

Chance is you find a lot of quick reference guide posters if you visit IT departments throughout the country. Techposters server two purposes. First they do provide the viewer (sometimes) with references that might be needed from time to time and then they are great for showing off. The second reason might not be obvious [...]

A computer worm is currently in the wild that is attacking unpatched WordPress blogs. Unpatched meaning blogs that have not been updated by their administrators to the latest version of the popular blogging software. The worm exploits a security vulnerability in older versions of WordPress to create a user account, make some changes to the [...]

Rollgator offers an interesting service that could be very appealing to businesses and organizations. The online service creates full screen RSS feed tickers of up to four RSS feeds. These full screen ticker has been optimized for large displays that include computer monitors, flat screen televisions and even walls or projectors. Rollgator could be an [...]

With the rise of file hosting websites came the desire to upload files to multiple file hosting services to have alternatives if an upload gets deleted by one file host. This had to be done manually back in the days but in the last months several services have appeared on the Internet that would distribute [...]