Browsing articles in "Tips and Tutorials"
May
17
2013

5 Free Browsers for Android tablets and phones

Nexus 7

The Google Play store has several paid and free browsers for Android phones and tablets. Most phones come inbuilt with a browser. But, you have several options to choose from. I’ve tried out quite a few browsers trying to find the best solution. Here are five browsers for Android that I recommend. Google Chrome Google’s very own browser for Android. Chrome comes installed on the Nexus 7 and several other Android devices. You can sign in to Chrome across your devices to sync your open tabs, bookmarks, and omnibox data from your computer to your phone or tablet. Download Google…

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May
15
2013

Intro to Screen Options in WordPress Admin screens

Screen Options - All Posts

Two days back I took the decision to move from All in One SEO to Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. WordPress SEO automatically adds several new columns to the posts admin screen. Coupled with the columns that Jetpack adds, along with those added by my Top 10 and Where did you go from here plugins, I ended up with the post title column being one character long! To fix this view, I needed to disable the columns from displaying via the Screen Options dropdown available in every admin screen. In this post, I’ll guide you through the screen options in the…

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May
9
2013

How to prevent CSRF vulnerability in WordPress plugins and themes

WordPress

Recently the folks at Secunia contacted me regarding a vulnerability in my plugin Contextual Related Posts. Contextual Related Posts is a powerful plugin for WordPress that allows you to display a list of related posts on your website and in your feed. The plugin comes with a tonne of options and inbuilt caching that can possibly increase user retention. This vulnerability was on the settings page of the plugin and opened up the blog to a potential cross site request forgery (CSRF) The application allows users to perform certain actions via HTTP requests without performing proper validity checks to verify…

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Apr
12
2013

5 Steps to setup your Google Inactive Account Manager

Inactive Account Manager

In today’s day and age where most of our information is online, including banking information and more importantly emails, it is essential to think about what happens to this data in case of an untimely passing. Similar to making a will to bequeath your belongings to your near and dear ones, planning your digital afterlife is essential. Yesterday, Google launched a new feature called Inactive Account Manager that helps you in this regard, at least in the case of all things Google. You can now choose what happens with your data if your account goes inactive after a set period…

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Apr
11
2013

How to delete unused or less used post tags in WordPress

Delete Tags

If you’ve been running a multi-author blog like us, over a period of time, you’ll see your list of tags growing exponentially. When I reviewed the number of tags on Techtites today, I noticed that this was well over 1,100 tags! So, I went into the Tags interface and immediately realised that I’m going to spend an hour just deleting and cleaning up tags. There are a few WordPress plugins available that allow you to manage tags and categories, including Term Management Tools. However, there isn’t a good free plugin to delete and clean up tags. So, with a bit…

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Apr
4
2013

Calculating Payback Period in Excel

Payback Period - Question

Payback period in capital budgeting refers to the period of time required for the return on an investment to “repay” the sum of the original investment. For example, a $1000 investment which returned $500 per year would have a two year payback period. The time value of money is not taken into account. Payback period intuitively measures how long something takes to “pay for itself.” All else being equal, shorter payback periods are preferable to longer payback periods. Payback period is widely used because of its ease of use despite the recognized limitations described below. – via Wikipedia The Question…

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Apr
2
2013

How to protect your privacy on LinkedIn by hiding your Public Profile

LinkedIn - Public profile

I love LinkedIn. At the time of this post, I am nearing 1,000 connections there. Unlike generic social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn has managed to maintain its niche of being a business connections site. And, as a business connections site, many of you might have uploaded your CVs and most probably your detailed information is available to everyone on the internet, including showing up in search results. LinkedIn gives you the power to easily customise which you this information is available for public viewing, while your contacts will be able to view all your details. I’ll show you how…

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Mar
26
2013

How to stop Google from adding your site to certain Google properties

Webmaster Tools - Opt Out

If you’ve wanted to prevent your site from appearing on Google Shopping or Google Advisor, you now have a chance to do so within Webmaster tools. Webmasters can now opt out of having content that Google has crawled from their site displayed on: Google Shopping Google+ Local Google Flights Google Hotels Google Advisor To do so simply visit the Opt-Out page and you will be presented with the following option. Simply click the big red button to exclude your site from showing up in the Google properties. After choosing this option, content crawled and sourced from your site via Googlebot…

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Mar
26
2013

How to speed up your site with CloudFlare

CloudFlare

Many weeks back after much deliberation, I decided to give CloudFlare a shot. As they describe themselves… CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks….

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Mar
21
2013

How to restart your Amazon Kindle

Kindle Paperwhite

Just yesterday my wife told me that for some weird reason her Kindle wasn’t responding. We had it fully charged, but all that we could see was a blank screen… almost blank cause I could make out some light shade of the e-Ink. Experience with just about any computer or electronics device is that reboots usually fix the problem. And I wondered if it worked with the Kindle. The Kindle has a cool method to restart the device if you should ever need to do so. You can press the power button for a little over 20 seconds and the…

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