Fight malware I – Defend your turf
The following guide is part of a series that is primarily addressed to students, but can be utilized by anyone. My hope is that it will serve to help you in your fight against malicious software. Many times friends have come to me complaining about their slow computers and ever-annoying computing problems. It is amazing how much internet crud accumulates to lead to these symptoms. To a student, the computer is one of the most important tools while at university and, the last thing that needs to happen is for you to use the excuse that the computer ate your paper!
Paragon Software – Free hard disk tools and limited-time GIVEAWAY!
A while back, I posted an article on some free tools that you can use to create hard disk images. Well, although that article only generated a couple comments in feedback, I was most surprised when a representative from Paragon Software Group sent an e-mail to inform me of the solutions their company offers. To be honest, I have only come across Paragon through software recommendations in tech support forums, but was perhaps a bit absent-minded to not include their applications in the list. From what I have heard, their products come highly recommended. As a matter of fact, in addition to having commercial products, they also give away a couple of free tools.
Paragon Backup and Recovery Free Edition is a feature-rich application that comes at no cost to you! You can perform scheduled complete or differential backups, save to bootable external media for later recovery and a whole lot more. If you are paranoid about losing your data or just prefer to be proactive when it comes to preserving your important files, then you should definitely give Paragon Backup and Recovery Free Edition a try. While browsing their website, it is worth checking out the other free tools that are available such as Partition Manager Free Edition, Rescue Kit Express and CDROM Emulator. ExtBrowser looks interesting if you want to access Ext2/3-formatted Linux partitions from Windows, but note that Ext4 does not seem to be supported.
Limited-time Giveaway
Well, it looks like there might be another piece of free software that will show up on the list. Unfortunately, however, this software will only be freely available for a limited time. From Friday, January 29th until Sunday, January 31st, 2010, Paragon will be giving away their Backup and Recovery Compact Edition for free! This program, which normally sells for US$39.95, offers a number of professional recovery tools and is a good alternative to the Backup and Recovery Suite if you only require the basic features. Ensure that you revisit Paragon’s freeware page during the giveaway in order to grab your copy of Backup and Recovery Compact Edition and start securing your valuable data.
HostMonster adds DNS Zone Editor to cPanel accounts
I was pleasantly surprised today when I logged into my HostMonster account’s cPanel and noticed that there was a new tool under the Domains section. The new tool is called the DNS Zone Editor and comes in two flavours: a Simple and an Advanced version. With this tool, HostMonster customers can now edit their own DNS information as far as A-records and CNAME records are concerned. Prior to this, customers wanting to add these records would have to place a support request via e-mail or ticket. Now, we have the ability to do all of this by ourselves. Thanks for adding the new feature, HostMonster! I am sure that a lot of customers appreciate it.
Combine and minify Javascript, reduce number of HTTP requests
Do you remember when I posted about combining stylesheets in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests? Well, a similar thing is possible with external Javascript files, which can improve website loading speed for your visitors. Here, I will relate my experience in achieving this. As you might expect, I have utilized this technique within WordPress, but you can apply it elsewhere.
If you are concerned about website loading speed, you have probably come across Y!Slow, Firebug and many of the other web developer tools out there that assist users in diagnosing which components of their web pages are cause for slowdowns. The very first recommendation at the top of Yahoo!’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website is to reduce the number of HTTP requests for your visitors. It does not matter how good the content might be on a page; if it takes too long to load you are going to lose visitors who have already struck the ‘BACK’ button after waiting 10 seconds!
LastPass – My new and favourite Firefox addon!
Mozilla Firefox is my favourite web browser. Not only is it free and fast, but there are countless addons that you can install to unlock new features and functionality. I have been using the free LastPass plugin for Firefox for over 4 months now and it has become one of my favourites, perhaps even more than the other addons I use!
LastPass is a password manager that allows you to store all of your login details in a central database which is itself password-protected. All you have to memorize is a single access password and logging in to your favourite websites can be performed by the simple click of a mouse. Furthermore, because your passwords are always synchronized, you can utilize LastPass on different computers without having to migrate any databases! There is also a built-in password generator which you can call up at any time when a strong password is required.
LastPass is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS. There is support for integration with popular web browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome. Give it a try today!
More on compressing your website content for speed [PART I]
In one of my previous posts I explained how you could force GZip compression on your server, by specifically focusing on websites hosted within the HostMonster environment. The post has generated a lot of discussion, especially from those using the HostMonster as their web host. Recently, I did some additional research and experimentation that have revealed a few new things, which I will share with you in this article series. I should warn you that this is quite a long article. It is written to be instructive for those who may not possess advanced knowledge in this area because I too do not possess such advanced knowledge. I am by no means a professional at this, so please keep this in mind if you choose to implement the following techniques. This article is simply meant to share what I have discovered and hopefully get constructive feedback from those more knowledgeable in the area, so that we all can benefit.
Configure avast! Antivirus to update behind a proxy
One of the problems I ran into when I moved to another university was the awkward way in which internet access was provided for the students. Instead of having routers in each dorm room that connected onto a high-speed fiber connection as I was accustomed to, I had to be satisfied with inconsistent WiFi. Anyway, this post is not meant to complain about unreliable internet access. On rare occasions you may find that your internet provider requires that you connect through their proxy server with a username and password in order to surf freely. This presents no problem for your web browser once the settings are configured, but what about all those other applications such as your antivirus software that require a constantly active connection in order to download and install definition updates?
