In tough economic times, it's common to see references to Darwin. Revenue-weak companies must adapt or go extinct. With the web so ad-centric, expect to see more advertising embrace evolution to stay afloat. The New York Times has a story of two companies creating ads that attract more clicks. They aren't approaching the problem as you might expect, with confusing ads that look like buttons or offers for gadgets if you can punch the monkey. Instead, they're combining demographics, context, and a concept called A/B testing. The concept isn't new, though it hasn't been widely used in display ads. An...
WordPress is well known for its plugins and themes, but not enough people know and love what you can do in your themes functions.php. Chris Pearson showed his love for them back in May, and he did a great job of explaining how you can bring your own functions.php file to each and every theme you use, so I'm not going to repeat that, just go read it. Then Matt Varone started releasing a whole array of useful functions in three consecutive posts over the last couple of months: Taking Advantage of Functions.php in Wordpress Themes Useful custom functions for...
WordPress' core update nag is quite the useful thing, I'll usually know before it shows that there's an update, but a lot of people won't. If you don't know what I mean with core update nag, it's this thing: The issue is that this thing doesn't only show to you, it shows to all users of your blog. Now there's a plugin that will disable this for you, but it will disable it for everyone, yourself included. A better thing to do, in my humble opinion, is either edit that plugin to have the following code, or add this code...
As we march down this technological road with increasing haste there are two definite areas of our society where incredible change must happen. It is no longer a matter of letting nature takes its own course or for businesses in these two areas to be left to their own devices. There is too much at risk and our timetable to make the needed societal changes is growing shorter. These two seemingly disparate areas are transportation and power and rather than being the separate and distinct entities we think they are they in fact are interdependent on each other. This interdependency is only going to increase as we move...
It’s true, Facebook makes it pretty easy to connect with friends online. But what happens after you’ve mutually agreed to be friends with someone? The Facebook news feed does a good amount to inform you as to what’s going on with those in your friends list. But beyond the Birthday reminders, there’s not a whole lot that Facebook does to help you manage your online relationships. If you feel like your friends are falling through the cracks and you just can’t keep up with all the things you need to do for relationship maintenance, Socialfly is here to help. A...
Hindsight is 20/20. Today's featured commenter, madox, has it in spades, on Twitter's lack of a business model: Owen, I'll take a different approach to the "premium service" concept: People that use Twitter now, or have heard of Twitter, expect it to be free. As soon as Twitter starts to charge business customers for their service, they'll simply stop using Twitter because the current mindset is that it should be, and obviously can be, free. Twitter, from its onset, should have created a tiered pricing model for various account types; this would have eliminated the current user expectations that it...
“This is a guest post by Aseem Kishore, the lead blogger for HelpDeskGeek.com, which focuses on providing Help Desk tips to IT Professionals.” One of the things that bothers me the most is when I open the Windows Registry to edit a key and it loads up showing me the last key I had viewed. I normally go into the Registry to make one change and that’s it. I never go back and edit the same key. Wouldn’t it be great if you could open the registry and all the hives would load up collapsed like you opened it for...
The Windows shutdown process may be as slow as the start up unfortunately. But, due to Windows amazing ability of user managed settings, you can change that! (There have been previous articles - in the WinHack column - on Speeding Up Windows twice, here and here.) WARNING : BEFORE making any changes to the Windows registry, it is highly recommended to make a backup in case anything goes wrong. To backup your Windows registry, tap your Windows key on the keyboard and “R”. When the Run box comes up, type regedit. When the Registry box comes up, go to ‘File’...
Not many software programs can benchmark the Registry. A tool that can do it is might be interesting to use after cleaning and compacting the Registry. Two software applications that can compact the Registry are NTRegOpt and Comodo Registry Cleaner. The tools defragment the Registry which reduces the size of it which decreases loading time of the Registry at system startup and should increase overall performance as well. RegBench which has been released in an alpha version can benchmark the various Registry hives. It is an excellent tool to run before and after optimizing the Registry to provide the user...
Desktop Renamer is a lightweight software that can rename or reset the names of the Windows Recycle Bin, My Computer, My Documents and My Network Places. The software provides a graphical user interface for renaming those four system icons in Windows. There is however a direct way to rename those icons - and many more - by using the Windows Registry instead with the added advantage that you do not have to run another software on the system. To rename the system icons start the Windows Registry editor with [Windows R], typing regedit and hitting enter. The Registry path in...
These 11 tricks will help make your Windows Vista system more useful than before and save time doing routine tasks on Vista machine. This list also covers some of the annoyances of Windows Vista and how to remove them using simple tricks. 1. Disable Balloon Notifications If you are annoyed by balloon notifications given by applications in system tray, then here’s how to disable them. Open up Registry Editor and move to key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced and right click in right pane and create a new 32-bit DWORD value named EnableBalloonTips and set its value to 0. You’ll need to log in...
As Facebook continues to expand internationally (see data on Facebook’s 2008 international growth by country), here’s a quick check of Facebook’s current (user-reported) age and gender demographics for marketers interested in reaching US users. There 33 million Facebook users in the United States 55% of US Facebook users are female, and female users outnumber male users in every age bracket 52% are between the ages of 18-25, but the younger and older groups are growing For more stats on international age distribution, check out Ben Lorica’s post from yesterday....
Post from: Royal HeHe2-ness! A blog that advocates Linux and Open Source. Run Windows Apps 100% Seamlessly on Ubuntu! I know that most of us Linux user usually cringe whenever we need to *god forbid* use a Microsoft WIndows machine. So we created applications like Wine in an effort minimize the contact with that horrid machine. With Wine a big percentage of Windows only apps could run on Linux, which more or less takes Windows out of the equation and lets us interact directly with our favorite App. Another solution of course would be installing Windows on a virtual machine....
Just in time for JIRA 3.13 release (release notes), JIRA Issues Bucket plugin version 2.0 of this plugin is released as well (release notes). This is a major productivity improvement. Some of the annoyances are taken care of now: Filter out updated issues where the author of the last update is current user In a typical way, when going through the bucket, I would open the issue in a new browser tab, so I would still have my bucket open and did not need to navigate back to it. That means that once the issue was actioned, I would go...
With the Facebook redesign going live this week and other recent changes to the Facebook Platform, many developers find themselves asking, “What is the best way to communicate with my users”? Several channels exist which developers can utilize to effectively communicate with their current user base, as well as with potential users. While most of these methods are covered in the Facebook Developer’s Wiki, their intended purposes and best uses are often left to the developer’s interpretation. Notifications Two methods exist when sending notifications to users. An application can either send an app_to_user notification, or a user_to_user variant. Both types...
Black Coffee is probably the number one drink of system administrators throughout the world except maybe in the UK where they drink tee and in France where they drink wine (just joking guys). Black Coffee is a lightweight tool for system administrators to tweak settings in Windows. It was specifically designed to aid system administrators in modifying user and local administrator windows settings. The software program can be run by system administrators and users of the system. The users can only look at the settings though but do not have possibilities to change them. The program is divided into the...
…It should start charging $1 per month for Gmail service. Twitter users probably represent one zillionth of the Gmail user base (yes, that is an exaggeration) and here is the Twitter reaction when Gmail went down for less than 30 minutes today: Twitter reaction Bravo Google, the world needs Gmail. I would venture a guess that at only $1 per month Google would likely retain well over 50% of its current user base. That’s a whole lot of dollars…...
Gizmo5 a VoIP service that competes with Skype has just added what they are terming ‘Universal IM’ which we understand to mean IM on any platform anywhere in the world and it inter-communicates with all the major IMs and even a couple small ones with only one exception - SKYPE. Sadly there is no connectivity with them. Gizmo5 the little Train to Skypes Juggernaut continues to innovate. Have you heard of Gizmo5? No. Well then you should check them out because they are the ultimate messaging tool and their VoIP rates to Landlines and Mobiles tend to be cheaper that...
