Web Talk

If you own one of the gorgeous N800 or N810 internet tablet well, it is about to reflash! As a matter of fact the guys at Maemo have just released the new update for the little  Nokia device’s operating system namely OS 2008 (Maemo 4.1). This second update (read more about the first update here) is rich of features, but before speaking about them I want to point out  the fact that future releases will be available over-the-air. This means that you won’t have to reflash the tablet anymore and lose all of your data! That’s a big piece of news indeed!  “Further OS updates will be made available over-the-air, without needing to reflash. Now users will get automatic notifications in the home screen about the availability of OS updates or single applications, including those installed from third parties. This works only over WLAN connections. It is still possible to check for updates manually from the Application manager.”  The most important additions to the operating system this update provides are an open source email application based on Modest and the tinymail framework, simplified account setup and the introduction of Chinese character rendering support in email, browser and RSS feeds. If you want to know more about the innovations introduced by this update, click here and here if you want to download it, click here.

As you know I am always looking for nice widgets to add to my website which don’t require a lot of work to set them up. Yes I know, I am a bit lazy, but that’s the way I like things. Some days ago I started looking for a widget which could tell my visitors the best articles for the current day. After browsing for a while I found an excellent website offering freeware widgets easy to install. The website is called feedjit.com and with a simple copy-and-past procedure lets you add your website a full set of interesting infos. Here is a list of its widgets:

• Life Traffic Feed: this widget shows how many people are visiting your website, where they come from (thanks to a nice flag of the visitor’s country), which website they arrived from, if any, which page they visited on your website and which external link they clicked to leave your site, if any.
• Live Traffic Map: this widget reminds me of another good one which can be seen on this article of mine. It shows you the last 100 people who visited your website on a small map. If you move your mouse’s pointer on any red point on the map, you will be able to see where your visitors come from (country and city).
• Live Raccomending Reading: this widget suggests other pages on your website your readers may be interested in.
• Live Page Popularity: this widget shows you the most popular pages (usually the first 10 pages of the current day) on your website by analysing your recent traffic.

All widgets are fully customisable. In fact you can decide: text color, background color, border color, heading color and widget’s width.

I strongly recommend this website to those people who want and need simple but effective stat widgets but, at the same time, don’t want to spend too much time to tweak them or understand how they work. In fact with Feedjit.com, all you need to do is to copy a code and past it in your website or blog.

If you don’t want to buy Windows Vista because you want to give it a try first, then you may be interested in these couple of tricks which let you temporary activate Vista and extend its grace period for 120 days (4 months with three re-arms to perform after a specific lapse of time has passed by). Remember, these methods don’t violate any of the Vista End User License Agreement (EULA) and can be applied to all of Vista versions. Here are the tricks Continue reading »

There are lots of ways to protect your computer from viruses, malware and malicious people trying to trick and scam you. Antivirus, antispyware, online scanner, specialised websites and a lot of software can protect you in a lot of ways. But how can you extricate yourself from this thick jungle and find out what you really need for you and your beloved computer? Here are the best guides I managed to find while surfing in the Internet. I have read all of them and I have to confess you that I was surprised to learn that there are, apart from expensive software, a lot of free programs that manage to shield you against the most common threads you can meet while surfing. Apart from this we can not underestimate the power of a few, little, important tips reported in some of these articles which can save us from hours of pain or worse! So, let’s read together what these writers and experts have to say and teach in order to be smarter than viruses!

• Techsupportalert.com | A very interesting website full of resources, guides, articles and lists of software to be always shielded against viruses and all kinds of threats. I use this website a lot because it contains a very exhaustive list of software covering every kind of security field as far as computer and Internet are concerned. I highly advice this website because if you can not find what you are looking for here, chances are that it does not exist!
• Webuser.co.uk | This interesting guide starts speaking about spywares and what they are, how you can get them and how to be protected from them. But just when you think to have learnt everything here it comes a list of other guides right at the end of the page concerning: Viruses, Premium Rate Diallers, Keylogging, Phishing and Identity Theft. I advice these guides to those people who are just getting seriously interested in the security subject.
• How to Protect Your Computer from Viruses | A very interesting 3-steps guide talking about the most elementary but effective ways to protect your computer from viruses. This guide focuses on the following free software which are considered by a lot of people the most trusting ones: AVG, AVAST! and COMODO.
• Don’t Be A Computer Virus Victim | A 11-steps guide talking about the most important things to do and not to do in order to make your computer virus-proof. I highly recommend this guide to beginners who want to know how to be safer while surfing.
• 10 things you should do to protect yourself on a public computer | Don’t underestimate the malevolent side of surfing on a public computer! Here is a very interesting guide about what you should do and know before and after you surf on a computer which is used by hundreds of people a day!

I am fully aware that there are a lot of guides in the Internet speaking about this topic and how to make and increase money with Google Adsense, so I am more than sure that I will not add anything new in this article. Anyway one thing I can do is to order all the tricks I found while surfing and list them tidily, making attention to write just those ones which really worked for me and this blog. This post doesn’t promise to enrich you overnight, but assures you not to make any of those common mistakes people usually do when they decide to put Google Adsense in their websites. Just follow these tricks strictly, and you will start making some money for sure. At least this is what happened to me! Ready? Here is the list. Continue reading »

The whole story started about five days ago when, all of a sudden, Web Talk started experiencing a great drop in its visits. Basically, from almost one thousand visitors a day, at the present time Web Talk just manages to gather a little more than two hundreds people. I have lost around 80% of visitors, and considering that all of Web Talk’s readers come from Google search, well, this has obviously to do with Google itself. This tendency is still on because, while I am writing, my visits are still dropping dramatically by the hour. If it continues, I fear there will be just a dozen of people here at Web Talk. I have to tell you that this thing worries me a lot. That’s why, a few days ago I started Googling to find out if I could get a solution or a reply to this big issue. To my big surprise I learnt that this is not a lone case but a spread tendency, courtesy of Google and its Sandbox. But what is Google’s Sandbox? First of all let me tell you that Google denies any Sandbox algorithm in its policy and, as a consequence, there are lots of theories about it, all of them getting to the conclusion that, despite what Google says, there is a kind of Sandbox behaviour on Google’s side. But let’s start from the beginning. Let’s start from what means being in a sandbox and why it was created. Google’s Sandbox was put in place in March 2004 to prevent fake and spam sites from being placed and ranked highly in the Google Search. Basically, if a website manages to get a lot of visitors, or a high rank or perform well in the Google Search in a short laps of time, Google gets “funny” about the website and, because of this reason, tends to think that something weird, bogus and not-legal was made in order to trick its algorithms. That’s why it puts the website in a sandbox to play…just with itself. As a result the website will stop performing well in Google Search, and while the whole website is still indexed, its keywords will perform badly and its pages will be shown very low in the search result. Solutions? No solution are available at the present time. The only thing to do is waiting. Usually Google puts a website in the Sandbox for a period of time which varies from one month to one year at most. I don’t want to discuss about Google’s policy because a lot has already being said in the Internet. That’s Web Talk situation right now. I can not do anything but continuing writing my posts as usual. For the few of you guys who were able to find this blog, stay tuned because more news and guides are coming up. If you wish to know more about Google’s Sandbox here is a list of the most interesting articles I manged to find while surfing. Continue reading »

The beginning of this story started some weeks ago when I decided to hire a web designer in order to have my Wordpress theme restyled. Oh boy! It has never been so difficult for me to spend some of my money. As a matter of fact every time I asked for a quotation or I looked interesting in a web designer, I just got uninterested replies from the other side. Maybe, the turn off side was my limited budget which made my offert very unappealing. I am just a guy running a personal blog. I am not part of a big company which has bunch of money to spend without a second thought, so I can not afford to spend thousands of dollars. In the end it was just a matter of money, nothing more nothing less. Anyway, every time I got a quotation I was very crestfallen. If you think to have your Wordpress theme re-made, it is right for you to know that designers may ask you a lot of money, in the order of thousands of dollars. Usually prices start from 1.200 - 1.500 USD. You won’t get anything less. This is not a general rule. In fact I also got cheap quotations, but the web companies involved had a very low profile meaning that, if you looked at their portfolio, they didn’t perform very impressive artworks. At a certain point I was really in despair. I contacted more than 20 Wordpress designers, but the results were really frustrating. They asked too much money, they were not very good at what they did or they were not interested in my small budget. Luckily for me, just when I thought that I could not have any chance to have my theme reinvigorate, I got into communication with Rachel, web designer and owner of Cre8d-design.com. First of all, I have to say that before knowing her I got impressed by its company portfolio. If you want to know what I am talking about visit this page to have an idea. Rachel was very patience, calm and listening and understood my needs and what I was looking for, tailoring an offer just made for my blog and my limited budget. In the end I hired her. The first thing she did was to put me into communication with her excellent coworker Stephen Merriman who promptly fixed some incompatibility issues with my theme and the new Wordpress 2.5.1. After that, she started pouring some good ideas in my head and, after mixing everything up, she made me understood what kind of design I was looking for. The process was rather simple. Every time she modified my theme she sent me a snapshot of it. At that point I indicated what changes I wanted, she made them throughly and a new snapshot was sent. The whole process was performed in a special environment called Basecamp, an account where I could log in whenever I wanted to see the progress of the work and communicate with the team. It took just a couple of days to have my brand new Wordpress theme re-designed! The coding part instead was reserved to Stephen Merriman who, I have to say, did a very good job! A special thank to Rachel Cunliffe and Stephen Merriman who help me make this blog more gorgeous than ever! If you want to hire them, click here!

But, in which way this team of gorgeous geeks can help you? Here is a comprehensive list of what they can do. Continue reading »

Just a quick note. Web Talk has changed its skin. I hope you like the new theme. I wanted something simple, elegant and with soft colors. This Wordpress theme should let you concentrate on the posts a little more and should make the browsing of the blog easier. So, Welcome to the new Web Talk. In a couple of days I will give you more infos as far as the company who modified the theme is concerned. As usual, stay tuned!