There are some great tips on that site. However I also wanted to add a few of my own in addition to what is there.

1. Keep your Wordpress site up to date.
   Of course the most obvious part of this is keeping your install updated since it means new features, bug fixes and additions. An outdated Wordpress install leaves you wide open to be hacked and also means you are missing out on the many improvements that are made to Wordpress during each release.
   However a not so obvious part that many people seem to forget is to update plugins and themes. Like the base install, plugins and themes are also updated regularly by their authors to add new features, improvements, security fixes and bug fixes. Thus, outdated plugins and themes leave your install open to errors, problems and hacking as well.
2. Validate your site with W3C tools.
   Search engines and most web browsers prefer if your site is 100% valid HTML and CSS markup. So once you get a theme and your site up and running, validate it using W3C’s markup validator. That way your users don’t see wonky effects and search engines are slightly happier. Also, keep checking your site with this tool periodically since updates to plugins, themes and Wordpress may cause problems. Also new plugins can also cause invalid markup when activated.
3. Get rid of plugins you rarely use or never use
   The most important reason for this is to improve the performance of your site. Too many unnecessary plugins means more server resources are being used to generate your site, slowing loading times. This may also lead to you getting in trouble with your web host. Also, the larger the number of plugins, the harder it is to maintain and keep compatibility with one another and with Wordpress.

That’s all I have for now. One last thing I can recommend is using Google and the news feed on your Dashboard to keep yourself up-to-date with what is happening in the Wordpress world. Things are always changing and the more knowledge you have, the better equipped you can be to keep that install running smoothly and working great. There are loads of tips articles out there, so read them and try them out. Keep in mind though that like this article will soon become, there are many that are outdated and things change fast in the world of Wordpress.

You can get it at: http://batterycare.bkspot.com/en/index.html

If you laptop is like my machine, and it does not give Windows a means of estimating how much time your laptop has left until your battery is drained of power, then BatteryCare is just for you. It also has many other great features. You can get detailed information about your laptop’s battery health.

It tells you how many discharge cycles your battery has until you have to replace it and how many discharge cycles in total your battery has. It also tells you the current total capacity of the battery, designed total capacity, the percentage of wear your battery has experienced, tension voltage, charge/discharge rate and a few other goodies.

As an added bonus, it will even tell you your CPU temperature. It also has power management features. For example, you can disable certain Windows services such as Aero, SuperFetch, etc to save battery power. It can also switch between power plans automatically when you go from AC power to battery power. Finally, it can notify you when it recommends a full discharge be done to your battery. That way, you can ensure that you always keep it healthy.

Try it out, it is a very small download and also a small memory footprint.

Requirements: All you will need is a web server (outside of Iran) with PHP installed. You will also need about 300 kb of space on that server and the ability to upload files to it. You can always download and run a web server with PHP on your own computer. I recommend you check out XAMPP for this.

Steps

1. Download PHProxy from this site to your computer.
2. Extract what you have downloaded into a folder that you can find easily. I recommend somewhere like your Desktop where it is easy to find.
3. Upload the index.php, index.inc.php and the style.css to your web server.
4. Now go to where you uploaded the above files, and test it out to see if it works.

and you’re DONE!!!

See only took five minutes. Now start sharing the link with other people. I recommend you avoid publishing the link on public areas such as Twitter since the Iranian government may blacklist your server and block it, which would destroy the whole point of you doing this in the first place.

Also, I recommend that you set the following settings in php.ini or in your Apache .htaccess root for PHP. This is totally optional and the proxy will run fine even if you don’t set these things.

register_globals = Off (safer for your script)
magic_quotes_gpc = Off (avoids unnecessary, slow stripslashing in the script)
always_populate_raw_post_data = Off (no need for this extraneous data)
zlib.output_compression = On (to enable output compression, better than doing it inside the script)

This anime film is from Mamoru Hosoda, the same person who directed The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. The film is scheduled for an August 1st release in Japan. It seems pretty interesting from the trailer, and the animation, character development and comedy seem right up there with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. I’m definetely looking forward to seeing this film

Then I did some Googling, and I found jQuery. It is a free Javascript library licensed under GPL and MIT licenses that is lightweight, cross-browser compatible and just plain easy to use with a very powerful set of hooks, event handles and constructors.

It made the development of my Ajax page a lot easier and faster, and it comes with some great functions and event handlers to make your life easier. Best of all, it’s got a large community of developers who are writing tutorials and assisting people, and a large array of plugins that you can do to extend the functionality of the library. Also, it is used on some big name websites such as Twitter.

So head over to jQuery.com to grab the latest release and learn more about how this library can make your Javascript/Ajax development easier.

Check it out, it’s really cool and even if you don’t get a grade, credit or degree from it, it definetely helps to just have some general knowledge of a wide variety of topics.

So what does this mean for the future of learning? I think it is the start of a new trend where increasing numbers of people start taking distance education courses and earn their degrees this way. It also means that education is now more accessible and being free, it will definetely benefit those in poorer nations with access to internet connections. Overall, this just might be one of the best ways to raise the average level of education that humans worldwide receive.

The future of education is definetely looking brighter with the launch of Youtube Edu and similar sites like it. However I also do wonder whether this is just going to compound the current social problem of people preferring to hide behind the barrier of communication devices and having less actual person-to-person human contact that is gained from face-to-face lectures, conversations, etc.

Check it out at http://anime.kokul-idk.com/

It’s basically just going to be a hobby site for me. but I’ll try to keep it updated with screenshots of anime I have recently viewed.

Moral of the story: always do weekly database backups.

The Good: Small, fast, secure with a clean, intuitive interface.

The Bad: Not enough customization options available in terms of themes, addons, and extensions.

Google released their web browser not so long ago into a market already dominated by the likes of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. However, coming from a search and web giant, this browser definetely has the power to gain a solid foot hold. Google released this browser with the intent to improve the average user’s everyday web experience, fixing things that their engineers felt that other browsers felt lacking. After all, who else spends more time on the web than Google employees?

When you first boot up the browser, what you instantly notice is the clean browser interface. There is no splash screen, no loading bars, no pop-ups, prompts, etc. It just opens up and shows the initial start page. No hassles, no crying, no confusion. Unlike other web browsers, Chrome has only the most necessary and frequently used buttons in browsing: Back, Forward, Home, Refresh and the Favourites. Everything else has been shuffled into menus that take a page from Windows Live Messenger’s book. Two buttons on the right hand side are used to access menus where everything else like settings and history are stored. While this may seem like a nuisance since one will have to go through menus to access certain things, you find that you only need those menus perhaps once a day or once a session. Everything else you need is in the simplified toolbar. The URL address bar has also been greatly simplified and easier to use. Like Firefox, typing in URL or Web Page names brings up a list of recently visited pages from the history. Also, the URL bar acts as a search box which returns results from the Google search engine.

When you open a new tab or boot up Chrome, you get greeted with its start page. The start page lists your 6 most frequently visited websites, showing thumbnails of them that you can click on that will take you there instantly. Quite handy, since it reduces the amount of typing one has to do, and the number of URLs one has to memorize. The page also lists recent bookmarks, a search box to search your history from, and a link to show your full history.

Security in Chrome is pretty solid. Vulnerabilities are kept to a minimum using updates, with each tab and plugin held in a separate process to prevent one tab or plugin from sniffing credit information and personal information from other tabs or plugins. This type of isolation also prevents the entire browser from crashing if a plugin or tab crashes, preserving your entire web session. As of yet, there are no major reported vulnerabilities, making it pretty safe for banking and other matters that require personal or credit information.

One of the things that Google has kept in mind with this browser is Web standards. One notices that HTML and CSS render smoothly, cleanly, and more importantly unlike its Microsoft counterpart, correctly. Web pages that work in any other browser work in Chrome. This means that new adopters will not have to worry about their favourite sites loading and displaying properly. Of course, new adopters can also bring in bookmarks from other browsers into Chrome.

The one thing you notice when you open up the options page is Google’s commitment to make it a easy to use, simple, works out of the box solution to your web browsing needs. There are not a million dazzling options to scare the average user away. The only options available are ones that need to exist. Like where to place downloads by default, and some other minor tweaks all related to one’s web browsing experience. There is no need to tinker with settings to get it to work with your internet connection, etc.

Of course, with such simplicity comes some grief. Customization is sadly lacking, which I suppose is a small price to pay for usability and simplicity. There is currently no way to change its look and feel with themes or skins, but I suppose they may just interfere with the interface’s simplicity. There are no add-ons or extensions available to change your browsing experience although it may be possible that Google deemed these to reduce the stability of the browser or make it more insecure. Although it is true that extensions may weigh down the browser, making it more sluggish.

Overall though, this browser is certainly a keeper and may find a fairly large market for itself among the everday web surfer. Whether more advanced computer users will pick up on the browser and use it is still yet to be seen. But Google is far from done working on this browser.

Recently, singer and artist Will.i.am launched a site called inmyname.com which encouraged people around the globe to place pressure on their governments to meet the Millenium Development Goals which were established in 2000, which included halving extreme poverty by 2015. With serious support from various celebrities including Queen Rania of Jordan, it is a movement that is making an impact.

Then, just go over to inmyname.com, add your name to the petition and add a pledge to make world leaders aware, including national leaders of your own country, that the pledges made at that 2000 UN Millenium Summit cannot be just ignored. THEY MUST BE MET!!

You have more power than you think. Make a difference. Check out the site for more details on how you can get involved and place presurre on your political leaders to help get these goals achieved. Millions of lives can be saved quite easily, but only if rich nations are willing to work together to help those poor nations.

For more info, just watch this video: