Google Chrome is making huge gains in the web browser space. It has done wonders to catch up to all of the competition and, in some ways, has surpassed the competition. The only problem for Linux users is that Chrome has lagged behind a bit. That doesn’t mean Linux users can not get their Chrome [...]

Twitter is currently that popular that it makes sense for companies to use it to promote some of their products. These promotions are usually linked to giveaways which can be followed easily by performing a Twitter search for terms like giveaway, giveaways or free offers. It does require some manual work by the user which [...]

Many Google services come with an api (application programming interface) that allows web developers to create new web services. Google Maps is probably the most popular example. The Google Maps api is used by many web developers to create new web services that include realtime flight tracking or racing games. All of these web applications [...]

Offering computer translations of documents seems to be a one of the features that Google wants to introduce in many of their services. You might remember that they have added automatic translations of RSS feed items in Google Reader a while ago. A super useful feature for users who follow foreign blogs. A few days [...]

Hundreds, if not thousands of websites exist that let users share files. These file sharing sites differ in several parameters including the allowed upload file size, number of downloads and bandwidth, account requirements, additional limitations like time limits and several others. Most do not offer unlimited bandwidth and those that do usually last not very [...]

Webmasters and business owners who want to create a new web project face a problem during domain name registration. Should they register the additional domain name extensions of the domain that they want to register or should they skip that step? The first option is more expensive but ensures that no one else will benefit [...]

Yahoo announced upgrades to three of their major products and services. Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search and Yahoo Messenger were all updated on the same day. Social integration was the key phrase during development as most improvements to the products fall into that category. Yahoo Mail now comes with a redesigned mobile version that is available [...]

Videosurf is a video search website that can search multiple video portals at once. Support video websites are among others Youtube, Hulu, Google Videos, Dailymotion, CNN Video, Reuters and dozens more. Video search results are mixed from all video portals and displayed on the website. One interesting feature of Videosurf are the categories that are [...]

Youtube Insight is a function of Youtube that displays video statistics to video uploaders on the Youtube website. It is practically a basic traffic analyzer that is displaying views, demographics and community responses to the uploaded videos. It is furthermore possible to access in depth stats of individual videos by clicking on one of the [...]

There are quite a few ways to listen to music online. Users can listen to Internet Radio, specialized websites like Last.fm, video portals or music search engines to do so. Semsix adds another possibility to the possibilities. The service offers music searches for artists, albums or individual song titles in its interface. The first difference [...]

A few years ago when the name WordPress was mentioned, most people would not know what it was. But thanks to the popularity of blogging and “the new media” WordPress has become a well known name in the internet community. Other then the small blogs which use it, WordPress is also used on major sites [...]

We noticed a security vulnerability in WordPress 2.8.3 yesterday (and earlier versions as well) that allowed an attacker to reset passwords of users. While this vulnerability could not be exploited to gain access to the user account (unless access to the email account the password was send to was available as well) it could be [...]

Found another gem at Rarst’s blog today. Is My Blog Working is an online service that can be used by webmasters and interested users to find out if a blog is responding correctly. It works by entering a blog url in the form on the frontpage of the service. The service will then do some [...]

The password of my WordPress admin account was not valid when I tried to login today. I first thought it was a problem with the LastPass password manager and tried to see if I was still logged into the service. When I checked my email inbox I noticed that I have received a new password [...]

The owners of the popular social networking website Facebook have acquired FriendFeed, a web service that allowed users to share information with friends and groups easily. Details on the acquisition are sparse at the moment with the exception that FriendFeed will continue its service for the time being. All FriendFeed engineers will join the Facebook [...]

Many Internet users want to download Youtube videos. Downloading the videos can be beneficial in several ways including the option to play the video at any time without having to access the Youtube website on the Internet. It can also save bandwidth and be used to transfer the Youtube videos to devices like cell phones, [...]

Not a lot of file hosts are offering ftp access as an alternative method of uploading files to their servers. Even less if you remove the file hosts that offer that feature to premium users only. The following two file hosts offer free of charge ftp access to their users. Uploading data to a ftp [...]

One of the latest search engine trends seems to be search controls for refining searches. Google added some advanced search controls not long ago to Google Search and Google Image Search. Now the photo hosting site Flickr redesigns the search results page to provide users with additional information and controls. The Flickr Search results now [...]

Wikimedia recently conducted a study into how to make their projects, like Wikipedia, more usable and user friendly. The study highlighted a number of interesting points, like that many users had never been to Wikipedia’s homepage, instead finding articles through search engines. These points have helped steer development. One of the first things to come [...]

The WordPress developers have released version 2.8.3 of the popular blogging script. The update is a security update and it is therefor recommended to update the WordPress installation immediately to protect the data and web server. Upgrades are as usually available directly from within the WordPress admin interface or by downloading the new version of [...]

For more and more people these days, our identities are centered online. Whether you have a company, a blog, or just a Facebook page, most of us have some sort of online presence. The problem arises, however, when we’ve got more than one space online where we’re present. And that’s true for a huge, and [...]

If you are a webmaster you will eventually stumble upon users in the access logs that tried to access pages on the website that do not exist. These visitors are presented with a 404 error page that can be customized by scripts but also simple html. It could for example point the visitors to the [...]

If you have ever had a need for an on-line shopping cart, and have ever tried to install a shopping cart, you know that making a choice can be a challenge, and getting the shop up and running can be a challenge. Not so much with Zen Cart. Zen Cart is an open source e-commerce [...]

Broken links on websites and blogs can have several negative side effects. This includes visitor frustration as broken links waste their time and can change the perception of the website the link was posted on but also the perception of search engines, other web services and reviewers that crawl and visit the website. Google for [...]

About three weeks ago, I finally got an invite for Google Voice, the new phone-managing service from Google that I’d been itching to try out since before it was even called Google Voice (back then, it was called GrandCentral, and I still wanted it really, really badly). Google Voice has a ton of great features, [...]

You are usually using Twitter day in day out if you are a Twitter fan(atic). And when you thought you reached the limit with what you can do a new service pops up that allows you to save and send reminders using the messaging service. Remind Me About is basically an Open Source php script [...]

Ghacks has been running on the same server for more than a year now. The server it is running on is provided by German company Hetzner who offer a fantastic deal for the money (€49 for a 4 Gigabyte server with everything that is needed to run websites that have a lot of traffic). A [...]

A new version of the popular blogging platform WordPress was released just a few minutes ago. It is an unexpected upgrade considering that the last WordPress update was less than two weeks ago. The new update fixes a security vulnerability that affects all but the latest version of WordPress. The XSS vulnerability could be used [...]

A few years ago, Martin covered OpenID, an open authentication system. Since then, it has become increasingly popular and a wide range of sites, from AOL to LiveJournal provide OpenIDs, and OpenID login is also quite common. OpenID is particularly popular for blog comments, with Blogger now integrating support for it. An OpenID is an [...]

Recently I wrote an article to help you secure your Linux Apache Installation (see “Five ways to help secure Apache on Linux”). In that article I mentioned using Apache’s mod_security, but didn’t have the room for a tutorial on its installation. Well, here’s the how to on installing this outstanding helper for Apache security. What [...]

The German web censorship law passed the German Bundestag earlier today. This could mean that German Internet providers with more than 10.000 customers have to create filters based on a secret list that is provided by the German Federal Criminal Office. Users who access Internet sites that are included in the list will be presented [...]

It is inevitable that IPv6 addresses are going to eventually take over. When that happens you will need to know just how to assign an IPv6 address in your Linux operating system. Of course this will only be necessary on a system that uses a static IP address, but when you’re using Linux that can [...]

ATutor is an open source Content Managment System (CMS) focused on education and the class room.  If you think about it, a CMS is the perfect springboard for the creation of a tool designed to manage a class. With a CMS you get: Communication, Content management, file storage, feedback, FAQ, forums, news and announcements, and [...]

I read a lot of news. One of the many ways I read news is via RSS feeds. If you don’t know, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. What an RSS reader does is collect summaries of news feeds from your favorite sites and places them in a simple, easy to read format. Most RSS [...]

I received an email from Matthew a few hours ago who asked if there was a possibility to exclude certain categories from my website from appearing in the RSS feed. I was really busy with a website that I purchased earlier this morning and could not answer immediately. The good news is that it is [...]

Password recovery questions are great to recover a forgotten password in a matter of seconds. All that needs to be done is to answer the password recovery question to receive a new password in the email inbox. This does however make email hacking a profitable business as email accounts are usually connected to online stores [...]

A Google account offers access to numerous popular and often times important services. This includes access to the popular Gmail email service, Google Docs for storing documents but also access to Google Adsense or Adwords for webmasters. Losing an account, either by forgetting the password or email address associated with it or by a successful [...]

I host my website on shared hosting. My connection is too slow and unreliable to justify running my own server and I have no need to hire a dedicated server or a VPS. Consequently, many other websites are hosted on the same box as mine and I have often wondered their nature. In addition to [...]

How many ways can you install Linux? Quite a few. You can install via: CD DVD Flash Drive Network Installation or… InstaLinux Technically InstaLinux is really just another way of doing a network installation. InstaLinux is a web-based service that allows you to choose some of the specifics of what you want on your installation [...]

Two of the most popular sources on the Internet for HD movies trailers are the Yahoo Movies and Apple Movie Trailers websites. They both offer many of the latest movie trailers in various hd formats including 480P, 720P and 1080P. Users can only view the movie trailers on the Internet sites which is bothering many [...]

Web users have quite a few possibilities to access websites that have been deleted or are temporarily unavailable for some time. Possibilities include using Google Cache, the Web Archive or other web caches that mirror websites. Web caches are great for accessing single pages of a website but not comfortable when multiple pages need to [...]

I’m a student. I’m also a writer, a researcher, and a number of other things that all seem to involve a ton of research. Particularly that student thing. An increasing number of us, regardless of what we do, rely on the Web to get information, do research, and get work done. For most of us [...]

Network Troubleshooting can be one of the most frustrating tasks especially for the average computer user. There is always the question where to start the troubleshooting process. The Windows operating system comes with troubleshooting wizards that usually do not help at all except for the most basic of troubles that users can run into. But [...]

Google today announced the public alpha release of their new data management product Google Fusion Tables that focuses on fusing data management and collaboration by offering means to merge multiple data sources and to query, visualize, discuss and publish the data on the Internet. Users with a Google account, for example one from a Gmail [...]

Many users think that nothing gets ever deleted on Wikipedia. There might be some heavy editing going on from time to time but deleting pages? If you visit the website Deletionpedia you will soon realize that Wikipedia pages get regularly deleted. Pages in this case meaning the page including all of its contents. Deletionpedia provides [...]

If you have never set up a website, you probably have plenty of questions about how to do it. One question you might ask yourself is, “Why should I pay for web hosting when there are plenty of sites offering free web hosting?” It’s a perfectly valid question, especially if you don’t have a nice [...]

A new version of the popular blogging script WordPress has been released by the developers yesterday. WordPress 2.8 is the latest stable release of the blogging platform and webmasters are encouraged to upgrade their blogs as soon as possible to benefit from the changes in that version. The update adds a multitude of features and [...]

Are you one of those special geeks that think there is never TMI (too much information)? If that describes you then Nagios is the monitor for you. Once installed, Nagios will keep you busy with more information about your system than you ever thought possible. But it’s not just a matter of running apt-get install [...]

Three researchers of the UC Berkeley School of Information have published results of an Internet privacy study that analyzed web privacy, data collection and information sharing on today’s Internet. Interested users can download the fill Internet privacy report from the project’s website or view the majority of its findings directly on the website. Each of [...]

I do a lot of writing. I also create presentations on occasion. Naturally, being an open source/Linux advocate, I use OpenOffice for all of my needs. One area where OpenOffice might consider a little less than user-friendly is the adding new templates for your use. Once you understand how this is done you will think [...]