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- Thank You To Our Friends !
- Geeky Fun: Latest Hilarious Picks
- Cool Websites and Tools [October 25]
- Hoot! An In-Depth Look At A Web-based Twitter Client – HootSuite
- How To Set Up A Wordpress Blog On Your PC Using A Local Host
- Facebook Impostors – How To Configure Your Profile To Protect Yourself From Scammers
- Synchronize MP3s To Non-Apple Devices With doubleTwist [Mac]
- Meme – Yahoo’s Improvement on Twitter
| Posted: 25 Oct 2009 05:31 PM PDT It's time to say thanks to our friends who often help us out with different projects and sometimes even offer their services at discount prices. Thank you guys!
TrueKolor – Cheap Custom Logo and Banner Design
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Pair – Reliable Web Hosting
Walyou – Cool Gadgets for Geeks
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| Geeky Fun: Latest Hilarious Picks Posted: 25 Oct 2009 05:30 PM PDT
Check out the top picks from MakeUseOf Geeky Fun during the last week.
If you would like to keep up with all latest Geeky Fun additions, please subscribe to the Geeky Fun feed here. You can also subscribe and get the latest additions via email.
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| Cool Websites and Tools [October 25] Posted: 25 Oct 2009 05:00 PM PDT
(1) TraceBullet – A must bookmark website for webmasters. It combines 6 different net testing tools (IP check, ping request, WHOIS check, etc) and provides quick access to all on one page. This is much better then having a bunch of bookmarks with sites scattered around the web. Read more – TraceBullet: Quick Server, WhoIS, IP & Port Testing
(2) BookofOdds – If you have ever wondered what are your chances of having a heart attack, or what's the probability of a black horse winning a race, then Book of Odds is the site you need to check out. It is an interesting site which talks about the real life probabilities presents you with some nice data. Read more: BookofOdds – See Real Life Probabilities for Things to Happen (3) Yubby – New service that makes it easy to organize, combine and share your favorites online videos. It lets you search over 30 video sharing sites (YouTube, MetaCafe, Vimeo, Yahoo video, etc) at once. The videos you like can be quickly organized into channels, and the best thing of all you can share and publish your channel as a single embeddable video player. Read more: Yubby – Share Favorite Online Videos As A Video Channel (4) JacksonPollock.org – Webby Awards winner website (also an iphone app) that lets you create Jackson Pollock style paintings online. To create your own masterpiece, just visit the website and move your mouse around the screen. Click on the mouse to change its colors and press any key to sign your painting. Read more: JacksonPollock.org – Create Jackson Pollock Style Paintings Online (5) WorldSings – Place for new artists to promote their music and build a fan base. Call it an American Idol on the Internet. Anyone can register as an artist and post their song videos. Top 20 voted songs enter the The World's Best Song Competition, which will be held in Las Vegas on March 19, 2010. The winning song gets a $1 million prize. Read more: WorldSings – Discover New Artists & Rate Indie Songs
These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Hoot! An In-Depth Look At A Web-based Twitter Client – HootSuite Posted: 25 Oct 2009 03:00 PM PDT
If you have no idea of what I’m talking about, check these posts out: 9 Ways To Use Twitter – No Website Necessary, 4 Tools for More Productive Twittering, 3 More Cool Twitter Tools To Do Your Tweeting With, 4 Good Alternatives to TweetDeck & Seesmic Desktop (Twitter Desktop Clients). One such web-based tool is HootSuite. Yes, it’s web-based, meaning you can sign in almost anywhere there’s an Internet connection, unlike TweetDeck which is a desktop program. These days, there are many different web-based Twitter clients being made so I want to go through what perhaps sets HootSuite apart from the rest.
There are so many ways you can tweak HootSuite to make it suit your needs such as the ability to have personalized columns. Adding columns is as easy as hitting the “Add Column” plus sign.
And up pops the option box!
You can have columns for almost anything you can think of including DMs, mentions, sent tweets, and even keyword tracking and searches. Keep an eye on your brand! If you ever want to know what people are saying about you, your business or your brand on Twitter, you’d probably head over to search.twitter.com and run a search for your company’s name, your name, or your brand. You’ll then get a list of the latest tweets containing that information. HootSuite makes it a whole lot easier! By setting up a column searching for your name or brand, you can keep an easy eye out for those tweets!
One cool way columns can help you organize all of those twits you want to follow is groups. Adding twits to groups is as easy as clicking on the avatar and dragging it into the desired group!
Want the columns in a specific order? No problem! It’s as easy as dragging them to the desired slot!
Another cool thing you can do with search columns (columns you are running a search for keywords, etc.) is you can embed them into you website or blog! What I see as a downside is that this option seems to only be available for search columns. I’m not sure why. Still cool anyway, right? Just look for the code symbol.
Customize the widget to your liking.
Copy and paste the code into your site.
Viola! You’ll have an updating Twitter search widget for your site or blog!
There is only so much screen real estate that we have to deal with. If you are like me, you’ll end up with many different columns and there’s just not enough room! That’s where tabs come in! Help organize groups of columns with personalized tabs!
How refreshing like a warm spring breeze blowing in the window! Organize groups of columns with tabs, naming them any way you want! You can have a friends tab and have columns such as “hometown”, “college”, and “church”. Then you can have a news tab with columns such as “local”, “regional”, and “national”. Whatever you want. HootSuite also makes working as a team really easy by letting you do things such as assigning others to access and tweet and control several different Twitter accounts, all in one HootSuite account!
You can choose which twitter account you want to tweet a message with, or you can tweet the same message across several, reaching all of your audiences at once!
I only have one Twitter account, but you get the drift! There is so much more that HootSuite allows you do such as, URL shortening using Ow.ly, click statistics to see how many clicks you get on links tweeted, and the infamous Hootlet for your link posting pleasure! It even allows you to set a future time for your tweet to be tweeted! Give HootSuite a whirl! You may actually be able to get a handle on what’s going on in this Twittersphere we keep hearing about! What tools do you use with Twitter and why? What makes it better, worse or different from HootSuite? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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| How To Set Up A Wordpress Blog On Your PC Using A Local Host Posted: 25 Oct 2009 01:00 PM PDT
I've been doing quite a few posts about blogging lately but this one take a step outside the amateur 'how-to's I've done like the one about improving your Blogger blog. This article is inspired by the website I'm building that's due to be launched in a month or so – and it's not for tech newbies, this guide. Many of us have personal blogs or blogs that make us a second income. And we don't want to go upsetting our readers by coding and developing them on the Internet. Imagine if every time you visited MUO there were design changes, buggy issues or features constantly being moved about and deleted! So developing your Wordpress blog offline is the best option because you don't interrupt readership (assuming the blog is online already and you're simply updating), you don't have to upload pictures and media and you can view your blog easily without it being live on the internet for everyone to see you shoddy design work. The easiest way to do this is to learn how to set up a blog offline. This is done by creating a host on your PC which acts like a host on the Internet such as GoDaddy.
Beside Apache and MySQL, select 'Start' so that they are both running like in the screenshot. Now, your local host is up and running and is available to be prepared to accept WordPress. First however, we must make a database for Wordpress to be saved in on the host.
To do this open your browser and enter 'http://localhost/' into the address bar. This will bring you to the screen shown above. From the menu bar on the left, select phpMyAdmin as illustrated.
In the centre of the screen is the section where you create a new data base. Name your server and select collation from the dropdown menu if it's not already selected. In the second dropdown menu select 'uft8_unicode_ci'. I cannot emphasise how crucial it is that you do not overlook this. It is not selected as default so ensure you have it selected. It's the last one in the list. Without it, the host won't communicate with Wordpress and you're in a world of problems my friends – if you can't tell I'm talking from experience. I spend an hour yesterday trying to figure out what the problem was! Once your server is created you're ready to embark on the world-famous 'Wordpress five minute install' and finally set up your blog. Download Wordpress from here. When you have the .zip file, extract its contents to this location:
Your final folder structure should look like this:
If it doesn't, open the XAMPP program file and drag the extracted Wordpress file into it manually. It must be in there in order for your newly created database to detect it. Then, edit this file using Notepad:
Scroll down to the part where it asks for database name, username, password etc.. Fill in the details below:
Then, save the file as wp-config.php instead of the original wp-config-sample.php. Now, open your browser and enter in the following URL:
This will take you into the Wordpress installation just like you were online. Remember, when you're returning to your PC to do more coding ensure you have Apache and MySQL turned on – otherwise http://localhost/ won't exist! Oh and now a health warning: Coding and toying with Wordpress is addictive. Prolonged exposure may cause excessive caffeine consumption, personal hygiene and grooming to go out the window, social commitments to follow and a truly awesome Wordpress site ready to go live. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Facebook Impostors – How To Configure Your Profile To Protect Yourself From Scammers Posted: 25 Oct 2009 11:00 AM PDT
Social sites like Facebook are built around communities. In the real world, a community is a safe haven, but it's not so in the digital world because of its faceless nature and facebook impostors. Social hacking is a term that was born from this very phenomenon. Just to give you an example… You get a link on your profile from a friend (or a username which sounds like a friend). It's just a casual click on that link which lures you to a web page asking for some personal details. A person who is not aware of terms like phishing or malware falls prey to this cleverly disguised scam attack from Facebook impostors. Malware links can even infiltrate your accounts and leech away profile info like passwords and addresses. Or even more seriously, bank account numbers. That itself can set of a domino effect as the others in your contact book start getting attack mails from your account. Social networking sites like Facebook have a huge user base. Facebook alone has more than 300 million users. Even if a small percentage of infiltration attempts succeed (and they do), you can do the math. Protecting your Facebook profile from scammers and spammers requires serious ammo. The first fortifications are of course the security firewalls and countermeasures employed by Facebook itself. But just like any other war, the foot soldier is the most important piece around which the battle can turn. The foot soldier is you and what you do to protect your account. Facebook gives you some privacy controls to help you thwart spammer snoops. Here's the checklist on how to configure your profile to protect yourself from scammers – Stop Facebook Impostors – Configure the Privacy SettingsThis is the first port of call. After you log-in, on the top right corner of the blue bar you will see the Settings link. Hover over it to get the dropdown and the Privacy Settings.
The Privacy page is all about allowing or disallowing others from looking at all the information on your Facebook page. Information can be broadcasted from your profile, a Facebook search result with your name, what gets written on Wall Posts, news feeds of your recent activities, and from the applications you authorize to pull information from your page.
The great thing about Facebook is that it allows us to configure each small part of our profile (see screenshot above). This is what we should be aware of. Be aware of your friends
Be invisible – remove yourself from searchesGiven Facebook's high search listing, anybody (say, scammers) searching for you or some area of related interest would find it easy. When you sign up, the default setting allows everyone to search for you. Later, one way to discourage that is by removing yourself from public search listing and also controlling your visibility from within Facebook.
Caution with applicationsThird party applications have given Facebook a good name and sometimes have left it red faced too. Third party applications with doubtful roots could be spyware by another name. Applications which you authorize need your profile info to work and sometimes that of your friends in the network (that also goes for apps installed by your friends). To cite another example, quizzes and puzzles are fun but they can influence you to reveal some personal information. So, tread on the side of caution.
Screen your messagesA scam behind a Facebook impostor’s message is the oldest trick in the scammer's book. Beware of messages which ask for personal information or cash/donations. Even if you receive a message from a pal asking for sensitive information or monetary help, verify the request with a phone call. You can also do an authenticity check by asking questions which can be back-checked. Be wary of direct linksDon't click on direct links that you get in messages or wall postings especially from unknown sources. They could be a ruse to malware sites or fake login sites. Look at each link carefully before being trigger happy with your mouse. A genuine link can be made out by looking up the domain name with a Google search. Though with a shortened URL, it could be a problem. Many links direct the user to a fake Facebook login page which can compromise your password. Facebook usually never asks you to log-in again to view another page. Community rip-offsJoining a community may get you a bunch of contacts in one go. But it can also be a scam trap if the community is a sham. Fake communities could serve as marketing gimmicks, often with the intent of building mass mailing lists. Select your community and look around the member profiles before jumping in. These are just some of the ways we can guard against scam attacks. The best way of course, is to click logout and pick up the telephone. But that's like picking up paranoia and ditching the fun of social networking. Simple precautions like choosing a secure password, familiarity with all the security options and safe browsing habits can keep us protected. For more Facebook security tips, check out Mahendra’s post – 10 Solid Tips to Safeguard Your Facebook Privacy. What other tips do you think can help to keep our guard up? And leave the scammers dry… Image Credit: Jesse Gardner Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Synchronize MP3s To Non-Apple Devices With doubleTwist [Mac] Posted: 25 Oct 2009 07:00 AM PDT
For digital-age music lovers, the biggest advantage that iTunes has is the ability to play well with large-scale music collections. Add-sort-search and other library management tasks could be done easily and flawlessly. But to some people, two of those great features become iTunes major limitations. First, iTunes only manages and synchronizes to Apple music players i.e. iPods. And second, the only store accessible from iTunes is (obviously) Apple’s iTunes Store. A DoubleTwist Mac Review – Considering the alternative
There are several alternatives that available for Windows, but the option is more limited for Mac users. So I did some searching and one of the few tools that I managed to find is doubleTwist. We’ve covered it once before. This app is available for Mac and Windows and promises to give users the ability to synchronize their collection to other multimedia-capable devices. It also provide alternatives to iTunes Store to purchase and download music: Amazon MP3 Store. The first impressionThe first time you open doubleTwist, a log-in window will appear. If you already have an account, just fill in your email address and password and click “Log In”.  Or else, click “Create Account” to open the registration window, fill in the needed information and click “Sign Up”.  The first thing that I wanted to check after the main window open is how much of my system memory used by doubleTwist. Users from Windows version reported that this app is not memory-friendly. Sadly, the same thing goes for Mac version that I’ve tried. It consumes a major portion of the memory, even when it’s idle. I tried to compare it with the idle iTunes and the result is a bit shocking.  But memory-hog aside, let’s see how useful this app really is. Connecting the devicesI have to admit that I’ve prepared myself to do some copying from my collections into doubleTwist library. At the very least, there should be some folder synchronization process that I must go through. But I was wrong. You’ll notice that doubleTwist automatically uses the Music folder plus the existing iTunes Music Library and playlists as its own “Music” Library. This really is a nice time saver because no effort is necessary from user’s side.  The same thing goes for doubleTwist’s “Photos” library – it uses your Mac’s Photos folder and iPhoto library;  and “Movies” library that uses your Mac’s Movies folder and iTunes Movie Library.  The developer claims that this app is compatible with hundreds of devices – Blackberries, Androids and Palm Pre are among them – and there is the complete list on their website. My Windows Mobile phone hasn’t been supported by doubleTwist Mac version yet, but I tried it anyway because many users reported successful media synchronization to unsupported device. But no such luck. Then I plugged in my MP3 players one by one, and they all appeared on the device list and I could drag and drop my music to them easily. Unfortunately, doubleTwist doesn’t support folders so all the items from every folder are there in one list. One easy way to manage the transferring process is by creating one playlist for each device that you have, and put your selected songs there. This way, you’ll only need to select the playlist and move the songs to your device in one go.  Wish list and wrap upThis app still has a lot of things to fix and is too far behind in terms of features to be in the same level as iTunes. One feature that I really love to see is the ability to automatically synchronizes a playlist to a specific device. I also hope that the memory hog could be trimmed down to minimum. So to wrap everything up, I have to say that despite all the negatives, I still think this app would be useful for Mac users who want to make their music collection available to non-Apple devices. Have you tried doubleTwist? Do you know other alternatives to synchronize your multimedia collection to non-Apple devices? Share using the comment below. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Meme – Yahoo’s Improvement on Twitter Posted: 25 Oct 2009 05:00 AM PDT
It’s proven its usefulness in incredibly diverging scenarios, ranging from loud egocentrics to real-time news aggregation during disasters. For a more extensive read on Twitter, check out the MakeUseOf PDF Guidebook to Twitter. Nevertheless, it’s always refreshing to see a Twitter alternative hit the market and challenge the active powers. After all, competition lies at the very foundation of progress. Yahoo! MemeMeme, Yahoo’s new microblogging platform is a Twitter-challenger that should be taken seriously. Even though it’s been running a short while in Portugal, it’s just recently been launched for the English-speaking public. I was lucky enough to receive an early invite. The opinions on Meme deviate – it’s been called a serious Twitter-killer by some, a superfluous clone by others. In this article we’ll try to compare the features of both platforms – not to blatantly conclude which is better, but to look which prevails in what area. Where Meme Beats TwitterThere are a few areas where Meme makes Twitter bite dust – a few features that aren’t included in the latter contestant, or not as actively. Media-rich and extended post functionalityContrary to Twitter, which is mostly text-based, this Twitter alternative not only supports, but focuses on media-rich posts.
There are four different kinds of posts; text, picture, video and audio. The latter three allow you to post media from your hard drive or an internet location – as well as supply it with a caption. Video and audio players are embedded in post overviews so you can play everything on spot.
Obviously, Meme also supports text posts. The main difference to Twitter, however, is that you can type up to 2000 characters – the equivalent of roughly fourteen tweets.
Meme also supports basic HTML mark-up, allowing you to type in bold, italic and create links. Reposting and commentingAnother defining feature of Meme is the reposting functionality. Sure, retweeting is possible as well, but it’s far more limited. Next to each post you’ll see a repost button, as well as the number of times it’s been spread around already. By clicking the button, you instantly repost the item to your stream. As you can in the screenshot below, you can attach a personal comment to the repost – this will be visible to the source, as well as your followers, but will not be carried in any subsequent reposts.
Each repost also includes two names at the bottom – the one who you reposted it from, and the original source. This ensures that the spiritual ‘legacy’ of a post is always carried on, no matter how many reposts have passed. Of course, reposting isn’t the only way to comment on someone else’s activity. Every post in Meme also gets its own page. On there, multiple people can comment in a threaded view. Where Meme Fails TwitterEvery coin has two sides, and Meme is still far from perfect. There are a number of areas where the Twitter alternative still fails Twitter, due to missing features or functionality. ContentI hate saying it, but Meme is still far inferior to Twitter in terms of content. A large majority of people on Meme just post ‘funny and cool’ pictures all day long – which is entertaining at the start, but quickly gets tiresome. At the time being, there’s a huge shortage of people who have something meaningful to add. Looking solely at content, Meme might be heading the same way as Tumblr.
Of course, this is not a permanent conclusion. Twitter started out the same way, and quality of content is bound to improve over time. Nevertheless, it can’t be ignored. SearchabilityThe searchability of Meme is very limited at the moment – not to say ‘nonexistent’. It’s not possible yet to search posts, or search ‘topics’ like in Twitter. Twitter’s real-time search is one of its great strengths, and because of its complete absence in Meme, this is an obvious failure. Third-Party BackingLast but not least, third-party applications also aren’t available. Where Twitter is supported by an abundance of online and offline client applications, as well as hundreds of cool ‘bots’, Meme is completely stand-alone. The biggest (and only) link to the outside-WWW is RSS functionality. Conclusion?There are a few wins, a few fails. Whom you regard as the winner is completely subjective. You’ll have to carefully consider which features you value most in a microblogging platform. Personally, I’m a Memer – what are you, and why? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts
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Oh readers, if only you could see me now. You'd be looking at a guy with three day stubble on his face, a pile of junk food in his stomach and a half-finished 
Where you go, we follow. That's the motto of the scammer brigade; those invisible citizens of the web underworld. They populate our inboxes, our blog comments, our forums and not surprisingly, our social networks. What's their loot? It's our information.
Most people would agree that 
Not everybody have iPods and/or iPhones. And for those who own one, it’s very likely that they also have other gadgets. To be able to synchronize our music collection to these non-Apple gadgets, we need help from other sources.
Extremely popular, and every day more so – 
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