Web Talk

A few weeks ago I spoke about how to have a neat system tray without all of its icons. The solution I wrote was to permanently disable the system tray itself by using a little hack. But what if you need some icons because, for example, you have to keep an eye on some applications or you want to access certain programs’ options quickly? The solution here is to select the icons to hide from those to keep. Here is a step-by-step trick to follow.

1. Right-click on an empty space on the System Tray.
2. Click Properties.
3. Under Icons check the box Hide inactive icons.
4. Now click the Customize button.
5. A list of all the active icons in the system tray should appear.
6. On the right side of each icon you should see the behaviour you want for that particular icon. Click on it and a dropdown list with different options will appear.
7. At this point you can choose to: Hide when inactive, Hide, Show.
8. Select Hide to permanently hide the icon you wish to remove from the system tray.

By default, Windows Vista uses large icons in the Start Menu. They are very nice and all, but they look un-professional and bulky, without grace! If you want to use small icons in order to show more of them and, at the same time, have a neater Start Menu, here is a little trick to follow.

• Right-click on the Start Menu.
• Click Properties.
• In the Start Menu tab, click on Customize… button.
• Scroll the list of option down, to the bottom and uncheck the box Use Large Icons.

If you are a webmaster, there are a lot of ways to optimize a website or a blog to be placed high in the SERP (search engine results page). One of this is, without any doubt, eliminate duplicate content from your web pages, articles and posts. As a matter of fact web engine spiders (such as Google Bot, Yahoo Bot, MSN Bot etc.) while crawling a website tend to look for suspicious content which may look too alike to something they already “saw” while surfing other sites. For a spider, the more a website has got unique content, the better. This, to make sure that what a web author produces is original and has not been forged or copied from somewhere else. That’s why, if your website has got a lot of similar content, Google and other web engines will place it low in the search result for a particular keyword or a whole set of them, with the side-effect that less people will read what you have written. But, what is a duplicate content exactly? Duplicate content is everything which looks similar to something else. Two articles speaking about the same topic will inevitably have something alike, but if the similarities are too many and whole sentences are exactly the same, because they are the result of a copy-and-past action, well, this is duplicate content. But web spiders go beyond all this. As a matter of fact, if two posts have the same, or too similar addresses, for the these spiders this is another good example of duplicate content.

We don’t know when, why or because, but sometimes it seems like that when Google spiders a website, it might end up getting wrong URL link locations by arbitrarily adding an extra or a triple slash (//). For example, Google might crawl the article www.mywebsite.com/testpage.php correctly, but at the same time it could even crawl something like www.mywebsite.com//testpage.php, which in your website doesn’t exist at all, of course, but for Google is another real page belonging to it. At this point Google bots will mark them as duplicate content, and when next time a person will look for the keyword testpage, your article could be placed in the 344 position, lessening in this way the chance to be read. Luckily for us there is a little trick to avoid all this. All you have to do is write this little piece of code in your .htaccess file which usually is located in the plublic_html folder, in the root directory of your site.

1. Open your FTP client and reach your website.
2. Open public_html folder.
3. Right click on the .htaccess file and click edit. If the .htaccess doesn’t exist, just create a htaccess.txt file with Windows notepad, put it in the public_html folder and rename it .htaccess
4. Copy and past the following code in the .htaccess:

# Remove multiple slashes anywhere in URL

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)//(.*)$
RewriteRule . %1/%2 [R=301,L]

5. If you want something more efficient copy and past the following code in the .htaccess:

# Remove multiple slashes after domain

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsitename.com/$1 [R=301,L]

6. These codes will just remove douple or trible slashes anywhere in your website addresses.

If you don’t have any issue related to Windows Vista SP1, then you may consider to make the SP1 installation permanent. But what are the benefits of doing this? By default, Vista SP1 has got a lot of files which are needed in case you want to uninstall it. If you decide to make SP1 permanent you are going to gain a lot of free space by deleting the aforementioned files. Here is the trick.

1. To make SP1 permanent you need a small file called vsp1cln.exe (Vista SP1 Cleaner). You don’t need to download such a tool anywhere since it is already installed in your system. As a matter of fact it is located in Windows/System32 folder.
2. Let’s get vsp1cln.exe (Vista SP1 Cleaner):
3. Click Start.
4. Type CMD in the Search Bar and hit Enter.
5. In the Command Prompt type: vsp1cln.exe
6. At this point the system should ask you the following question: Would you like to continue (Y/N)?
7. Hit Y as Yes and wait for clean-up

So, the new Firefox 3 is out with all its nice and wonderful features and improvements, but not all of us appreciate its sytle and novelties. For example the back button. OK, it is is quite handy, easy to spot and well, it is really impossible to miss it, right? But what if we want it to be just a little smaller? Here is the free trick to adjust its size.

1. Right-click on Firefox’s toolbar.
2. Click on Customize.
3. In the Customize Toolbar window, tick Use small icons.
4. Done!

If you have administrative privileges on the computer you are using (it also means that you are an administrator), you might want to prevent other users, your family members, friends etc. from accessing certain files and folders in Windows Vista because they contain sensitive information and you don’t want anybody to modify  and read them. Whatever the reason, you can turn whatever you wish to private files and restrict the access of certain areas of your computer’s hard disk to whoever you want or even nobody. Here is the easy trick to follow.

1. Right click on the file or folder you want to make private.
2. Select Properties.
3. Click the Security tab and click the Edit button.
4. Now click on the Add button to open the “Select Users or Group” window.
5. In the text box, enter the username of the account you wish to restrict the access of.
6. You should see the username in the Security Permissions window, click on it.
7. Tick all of the Deny check boxes for the user.
8. A message should appear telling you that Deny entries always override the allow permissions.
9. Click OK.

Don’t get confused by the title. As a matter of fact I am not talking about the Windows MUI (Multilingual User Interface) and I am not referring about the possibility to change your operating system language into something else of your choice (this option is available in Windows Vista Ultimate only). Here, I am talking about the opportunity to enable your keyboard for other languages in order to write in whatever language you want. Here is the trick to follow:

1. Click Start.
2. In the Search Bar, type Regional and hit Enter.
3. Select the Keyboard and Languages tab and click on the Change Keyboard button.
4. On the General tab, click the Add button and select, by ticking the checkboxes, all the languages you wish to add.
5. Click OK.
6. Now select the General tab.
7. Still on the General Tab, under Default Input language, set your default keyboard.
8. Now, let’s configure the Language bar. Select the Language bar tab.
9. Under Language bar, select Floating on Desktop.
10. Tick  the box beside Show additional Language bar icons in the taskbar.
11. Now select the Advanced Key Setting tab.
12. Under To Turn Off caps Lock, check press the SHIFT Key.
13. Under Hot keys for input language, highlight between input Languages. In this way you will be able to switch between keyboards and languages by press the key combination you chose.

A new feature introduced by Wordpress 2.6 is the image caption which automatically adds under every picture in your blog a brief description of your choice. If you read well what I just wrote you should notice the term automatically. This mean that, by default, the aforementioned feature is always on and you don’t have any option to disable it. The code    [ caption ] and [ /caption ] which encloses the IMG, OBJECT or EMBED HTML elements will translate into <div> and </div> CSS attributes to position caption, accordingly. Continue reading »