I wish I had known this a couple of years ago when my father’s friend was suspecting that his wife was having an affair behind his back. He wanted to know from me how he could hack into his wife’s e-mail address so that he could find out what was going on between her and her paramour. Of course I had no idea back then. He provided me information, like his wife used Windows 7 and the Google Chrome browser.

Do you know you can access someone’s passwords without having to hack into the main database? In Google Chrome all the passwords are stored locally, especially when you’re the only person using the computer and you have set your browser to remember your login details. And all the passwords means all the passwords. Here is how to do it by simply using the GUI of Google Chrome. All you need is a few minutes of access to the computer or laptop used by the person whose passwords you are trying to find. The “auto-fill” feature of the browser makes things quite easier, but it also leaves you unable to ameteur hacking. Anyway, here is what you need to do.

Click the Settings icon of the Google Chrome browser

In the subsequent drop down menu, click Settings.

At the bottom of the proceeding screen you can see “Show advanced settings”; click it.

Go to the “Passwords and forms” section and click “Manage saved passwords”.

The pop-up that comes up displays all the login links and their respective user names and passwords. I have drawn a gray box over login links and user names just so that people don’t start trying to hack into my accounts. This is how the pop-up appears:

Click to enlarge

All you need to do is, click on the particular link and when it is focused, click “Show”. It actually shows you the password as text.

Image source

Social media is like drug addiction, in fact in many cases, worse. In conventional drug addiction you know there is something terribly wrong and you need to seek help. Social media on the other hand is considered to be a totally normal activity in which everybody from a teenager to an aged housewife indulges in. According to a recent survey an average middle-aged woman spends 81 minutes every day on Facebook (according to this article in Huffington Post). Every device, every smartphone these days not only allows you, but also encourages you, to log onto this or that social networking website. You constantly want to know what is going on with your friends and followers, and you constantly want to post updates about what’s going on in your life.

A desire to share and socialize isn’t unnatural. What’s unnatural is worrying more about your virtual friends and less about your real friends and family members. Since most of the social media and social networking services are totally free of cost (irrespective of the fact that you have to purchase the devices that you use to hook onto these websites and you also have to pay for the Internet connection) it’s just a matter of going to that particular URL. Most browsers and user interfaces these days give you one-click access to all your favorite social networking websites and plug-ins.

Normally what happens is, you just log onto Facebook or Twitter to check just a single message and before you know you have scrolled through scores of messages and have spent more than 30 minutes checking out cute videos and awesome images. What have you gained? Practically nothing. The chances are you ended up feeling depressed after seeing all those great things being done by your relatives and friends. The above article also references a survey in which 70% of the participants check their Facebook updates the moment they turn on their computers in the morning. Constantly checking messages on Facebook takes a big toll on your time, on your emotions and also your sense of privacy. No wonder many organizations have totally banned the use of social networking websites at their workplaces.

But what if you are self-employed or simply trying to be productive without a supervisor or someone to keep an eye on you? Then you have to self-supervise. If you think you are suffering from social media addiction, you can take the following steps to get some respite and consequently, get some work done.

• Block these websites while you are working: There are many add-ons and software applications available that allow you to block websites and URLs for a specific amount of time. Most conventional antivirus software applications these days let you add URLs that should be blocked. You can check out FocalFilter that lets you block URLs across different browsers with just a single interface. Of course these URLs are not permanently blocked. You can remove them from the blocked list whenever you want to.
• Carefully track your time: In the absence of any tracking mechanism it is often difficult to keep track of your time. An application like RescueTime runs in the background and monitors all the websites and applications you spend your time on. This way you will get to know exactly how much time you are spending on wasteful activities such as watching videos and images on Facebook.
• Assign money to your your time: You must have heard people saying “time is money” and this is totally true. If you are supposed to be working when you are browsing Facebook updates you are actually losing money. You could be spending that time working on your business, your skills and your abilities. Not just these, you could have been doing something that improves the overall quality of life of your family members. So you shouldn’t just track your time you should also assign some sort of monetary value to it so that you can actually calculate how much you are losing by not controlling your urge to check Facebook and Twitter messages.
• Shift your computer where everybody can see your screen: A sense of privacy also makes us less accountable. At your workplace it is difficult to access social networking websites because everybody will be able to see you (unless you have your own room or cubicle). If your computer or laptop is placed in such a manner that nobody can accidentally look at your screen, readjust it so that everybody can see it. When you’re conscious of the fact that people will be able to see exactly what you are doing on your screen, you will be less inclined to again and again check your updates.
• Involve another person: Do you know that a person actually hired someone from Craiglist to slap him the moment he started ignoring his work and started browsing social networking websites? Below is the video of the slap.
  
  Of course extreme situations call for extreme measures, but if you wouldn’t like to go that far, you can involve your partner, or anybody close to you and seek help. Ask to be monitored unexpectedly so there is always a danger of getting caught while wasting your time. You can also decide on a punishment every time you ignore your work and waste time on Facebook or Twitter.
• Delete your social media accounts: If nothing else works, what stops you from deleting your social media and social networking accounts? Also it may seem like abandoning your phone when all the communication happens via telephones and mobile phones, social networking websites don’t solve any solid purpose. If you want to keep in touch, there are many other ways you can do that. You can call people up, you can visit them if they live in the same city, you can e-mail them, you can have a Google hangout, a you can use something like WhatsApp that allows you to exchange messages and images/videos without crowding your timeline.

Social media and social networking is not as evil as it may seem after reading the above text, but overdose of everything is bad. Take for instance television; whether you realize it or not, it has totally altered social dynamics. Just imagine, before television, people used to have ample amount of time and they could socialize, read books, organize outings and parties and spend lots of quality time with each other. On the other hand, television keeps us informed and we get lots of useful information from it.

Similarly social media empowers us. It only becomes problem when we don’t know when to put a stop to it and focus on our priorities.

A slow loading website is not just bad for your search engine rankings, it also turns away your visitors, or worse, your customers and clients. Search engines will abandon indexing your website if it does not load on time. They assume that your website does not exist and hence it is dropped from the search engine index. Google openly says that the loading speed of your website affects your search engine rankings.

Similarly an average visitor is quite impatient. Scores of other things are happening around him or her and in between them if he or she has to wait for more than a minute to load a single page he or she will certainly lose track or move onto another website. On an average a smart phone user won’t visit your website if the website doesn’t load within 3 seconds.

So how do you make your website load faster?

Tone down on images

Are you needlessly using images? Why are you using 10 images when 1 or 2 would be sufficient? Are you optimizing your images? Do you know that you can reduce the size of an image by almost 50% without reducing its quality? This is also called image compression. Do that with every image you upload.

You can also use CSS Sprites (here is a good explanation of these) so that the browser doesn’t have to make multiple HTTP requests in order to download multiple images.

Get your website hand coded

When you use GUI HTML tools to design your website they insert lots of junk code. This can considerably slow down your website. If possible, hand code your website or ask your web designer to do so.

Keep your stylesheet light

As you play around with your stylesheet, lots of extra code can creep in. Layout specifications that can be written in a single line don’t need to go on and on for 10 lines. There are many tools available online that can help you optimize your stylesheet in order to reduce its size.

Make JavaScript calls at the end of the document

In most of the cases you use JavaScript to create a friendlier user interface. But your content must be visible as soon as possible. So by the time your various JavaScript routines load people should be able to access your website. This can be achieved by making JavaScript calls (calling external JavaScript libraries like jQuery) in the end of the document rather than in the beginning (for instance, call the file in your footer area rather than header area).

Combine your CSS and JavaScript files

The more requests your browser needs to make to the server, the slower loads the website. If there are multiple CSS and JavaScript files a particular webpage is loading, it is better to combine multiple files into one file rather than loading individual files. Don’t worry about the size. More than the size, what matters is the number of download requests the server receives. So fetching a file containing 500 lines is much efficient compared to fetching 5 files containing 100 lines of code each.

Use caching

Caching means when a person visits your website for the first time all the necessary components like images, CSS and JavaScript are saved locally in the person’s computer’s cache memory. Afterwards, whenever your website is accessed from the same computer, the files that are cached are used from the computer rather than from the server unless they have been changed. This significantly improves your loading time. You can make changes to your .htaccess file to enable caching. If you use WordPress to manage your website or blog, there is a plug-in that enables you to activate the caching feature.

In the beginning days of blogging comments used to be a big thing. People used to spend as much time commenting on other blogs as writing for their own blogs. The comments section of popular blogs used to be great hubs of interactions and ideas. Sometimes the comments appearing on the blog used to get more popular than the blog post itself.

But then soon spammers took over, realizing the link building potential of the activity. Although popular blogging platforms like WordPress developed anti-comment-spam plug-ins and almost every serious blogger used them, commenting began to lose its charm because of excessive noise and the shady tactics people used to garner back links.

Nonetheless, commenting on other blogs can be highly rewarding especially when you do it for the sake of engagement and interaction. Of course as a business owner you wouldn’t spend your time meaninglessly engaging in conversations on other blogs when you could be spending that valuable time building your business or at least generating content for your own blog or website. So yes, commenting on other blogs can get you traffic too, and even improve your search engine rankings, although not directly.

Why should you leave comments on other blogs

If commenting no longer has search engine benefits (most bloggers these days use the “rel=NoFollow” tag to discourage spammers) why should you spend your time leaving comments on other blogs. If you are interested in leaving comments just for the sake of improving your search engine rankings, then forget about it, this is an activity you shouldn’t waste your time on. You would like to leave comments on other blogs to

• Interact with other members of your professional community
• Become known among a wider audience
• Share valuable input and hence increase your brand value
• Network with blog publishers so that someday they will eagerly publish a guest post from you
• Encourage other people to visit your blog

For many online entrepreneurs these are very important reasons to leave comments on other blogs.

The art of leaving comments

• Leave a comment only when you have something valuable to say. Avoid commenting if your comment is going to seem hollow and forced. Remember that a meaningless comment can be more harmful than not leaving a comment.
• Express the difference of opinion politely. If you’re going to express something contrary to what the blogger has written, be mindful of the fact that the blogger has spent a considerable amount of time trying to explain his or her point of view. So certainly some degree of emotion is involved. Instead of straightaway contradicting the blogger, politely present an alternative point of view. The same goes for other commenters. The blog publisher would not like it if his or her visitors feel insulted on his or her blog.
• Keep it short. There is no reason to go on and on (after all it is a comment and not a complete blog post) if you can make a point within a couple of sentences.
• Be mindful of spelling and grammar. Just because you’re writing in the comments section doesn’t mean you don’t care about spellings and grammar. Remember that your comment is a representation of you or your business. People will immediately relate you to the way you express yourself. Also if you use proper language it means you respect the blogger and other people there.
• Use your links in the right context. It’s okay to sometimes use your links but don’t do that unnecessarily, out of context. Use your own links only when they add further value to your comment or if you have written on the same topic (or on something another commenter is talking about) on your own blog.

If you haven’t heard yet, Google Glass is an augmented reality hardware. If this sounds too techie, it is a gadget that you can wear just like normal glasses and it would be controlled by your voice as well as some hand gestures.

According to a video just released Google demonstrates how you can just say “OK GLASS” followed by one of the preset commands to make the device perform functions like record a video, send a message, take a picture and get directions. So if you want Google Glass to record a video, you just have to say “OK Glass record a video” and the glass starts recording the video (it records whatever is there in front of your eye). Here is a video of the Google Glass experience:

Twitter bought Posterous just last March (2012) and now it has decided to pull the plug. Founded in 2008 Posterous mostly catered to bloggers who weren’t exactly crazy about creating long blog posts. Wanted to share a link or a video or a few photographs? Posterous Spaces was just the right place to do that.

Nobody knows exactly why Twitter bought Posterous but at the time of the deal it was said that the service would go on just like that. After April 30, 2013 your Posterous blog posts will no longer be available. If you don’t care about what happens to your blog posts over there you don’t need to bother. But if you want to save your Posterous blog posts and then continue blogging afterwards, and if you are OK with using WordPress you can easily import all your Posterous blog posts into WordPress.

In order to achieve this first of all you will need to go to http://posterous.com/#backup (if you aren’t already logged in then first you will need to log in).

Next to your “Space Name” you will need to click “Request Backup”.

Once your backup is prepared you will receive an email with the link to your backup. It will be a zip file. This file will also contain your videos and images.

If you are using WordPress.com just login, go to Tools on the left hand sidebar and then click Import. The Posterous import plugin is already there. The simple GUI tells you how to import your Posterous blog posts into WordPress.com.

If you are using WordPress.org, then you are using a self-hosted blog. After logging in follow the same procedure, but you may first have to install a plugin that imports Posterous blog posts into WordPress.

Introversion is normally thought of as a negative behavioral attribute. It is a general perception that introvert people find it very hard to strike up conversations, express themselves, and move ahead in life. But just as any disadvantage can be used to your advantage, you can also use your introversion as a strength, according to this Lifehacker blog post.

What is introversion

You first of all need to understand what introversion is and how it is different from lack of confidence. Introvert people are more inward focused rather than outward focused. They like to keep it to themselves. In order to feel good or important they don’t need to express themselves or interact with other individuals. If you are an introvert person

• You are very sensitive about your space
• You are very thoughtful
• You are interested in self knowledge and self understanding
• You are not very emotionally expressive, outwardly
• You are more comfortable around people you know well
• You are very observant
• You are very sensitive about the other’s needs

Contrary to popular misconceptions, introverts are not antisocial. They just don’t like to talk unless they have something really substantial to say.

How to use introversion as an advantage

• Accept introversion as a normal personality trait: You are not weird if you are an introvert. Just like there are people who like to talk and would like to socialize, there are people who don’t like to talk and don’t want to socialize unless it is important to them. Again, don’t mix up being introvert with lacking in confidence. These two are different things. When you lack confidence, you need to handle your situation from a different angle.
• Think in terms of giving rather than taking: We are always uncomfortable if you need to approach somebody for the sake of taking. On the other hand, when we gave, we feel more sure of ourselves. As a professional, as well as as an introvert person, whenever you’re preparing your pitch, have the confidence of over-delivering. Make it into a win-win situation. This way it becomes easier to convince people. Also, you know that if that person doesn’t show much interest, he or she is the one to lose.
• Develop a growth oriented mindset: Due to your introvert nature unless something really stimulates you, you don’t seem very enthusiastic and driven, especially when it involves interacting with other people. Instead of worrying about your “inability” to approach people and talk straightaway, focus on the growth path that you want to follow.

The key here is to consider your introvert attitude just as a behavioral attribute rather than a deficiency. Just treat it as you would treat any other characteristic of your behavior.

In order to stop more and more people from leaving Facebook the company is constantly adding new features. Normally when people have to do a search, they head to Google.com or some other search engine of their choice. Searching the Internet is one of the most indulged-in activities and Facebook would like people not to leave its website to do searching. Hence it has launched Graph Search. Now it doesn’t mean that there will be lots of graphs when you carry out search using this feature. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has properly explained in this blog post in what different ways you can use the Facebook Graph Search.

What implications does it have for your business? People using Facebook for their daily dose of search certainly means that now they would like to find your business on the social networking website rather than a search engine. This also means that you must have a presence that can be easily noticed and found. How do you do that?

Facebook is all about connections. Just as Google ranks your website according to the various people linking to it, Facebook is going to highlight your business page according to the number of people “Liking” it. For instance, if you’re looking for a content writer for your business and there are some of your friends who have already liked a content writer’s Facebook page there is a very big chance that this particular content writer will show up in your search.

And that’s not only it. You can search if there is a restaurant in a particular area that your friends like. You can search if there is a barber your friends like. Of course there is a fat chance that your neighborhood barber has a Facebook business page, but you get the idea.

Anyway, if you want your Facebook business page to rank higher, you need to make as many people “Like” it as possible. How do you do that? Of course the basic tenets of communication, quality, engagement and networking, on a sustained level, apply here too.

Use the right name for your business

Ideally, the name of your Facebook page should represent your business. Make it as apparent as possible. People shouldn’t have to think even for a couple of seconds to figure out what your Facebook business page represents.

Describe your business

Although your rankings primarily depend on how many people are liking your page, the words that you use to describe your page will also play an important role.

Post quality content under your business page

In order to make your people like your page, you need to offer them quality content. This can be in the form of important and useful information that you share with them. It can be the updates about all the exciting things happening at your business. You can post images and videos that people would like to like. The basic point is, people should instinctively click the Like link when they see your content.

Engage people constantly

Nothing beats engagement. Interact with people. Let your business become familiar to them. Visit their profiles randomly and post updates on their timelines (make sure you don’t spam and simply share important updates). Whenever they leave a comment on your business page that warrants a reply, do reply within a realistic timeframe.

Image source

Right now this service is only available in the United States. If you use the iPhone you can use the Facebook messenger app to make free phone calls from within United States to your friends and family members. It is just like Skype, with the only difference that Skype can be used worldwide in order to make free calls (Skype to Skype users, to call landlines and mobile phones, you need to buy calling time).

In order to make the free phone call, the following prerequisites are needed:

• Facebook messenger that you need to download and install from the App Store, if you haven’t already done so
• A Wi-Fi connection (or any data service that allows you to connect to the Internet)
• The contacts in your Facebook account (it means people should already be friends with you in order to be able to receive your calls)
• The other person must also have the iPhone

Making the free call

Tap on the name of the Facebook contact that you already have on your messenger. Once the profile of the contact is open, on the top right-hand side there is an Info button. Tap that button, and as you can see in the below image there is a “Free Call” button. Tap this button and you can talk to that person.

Image source

Again, it goes without saying, the person you are calling must also be connected to the Wi-Fi and using the Facebook messenger.

Whenever a new version of WordPress is launched, it also comes with a set of default themes. So previously you might have used the TwentyTen and TwentyEleven themes for WordPress. The latest version is TwentyTwelve, which is basically a framework for building more child themes using it.

If you use the default theme in the twentytwelve folder you get a very minimalistic layout. It’s perhaps the first theme from WordPress that uses not even a single image (on this link you can see an image, but actually when you download the entire theme folder and activate it, it doesn’t show any image).

Although for those who are were looking for a minimalistic layout just to publish lots of text, it might be a perfect theme, but there are many people out there who would like to make certain changes to the way the fonts appear, their sizes and colors, their types, and even other changes here and there.

Altering the core Twenty Twelve files might be a bit difficult for most people, and besides, it is not advisable to change them because then your entire framework may collapse. But there is a solution. Since this thing pretty much acts as a framework, you can build a complete child theme based on it.

Creating a child theme for Twenty Twelve

Building a child theme for Twenty Twelve might be as simple as creating a single style.css file or as complex as creating an entire new file structure. Anyway, once it’s clear how to create a child theme you can go all the way to creating an entirely new theme and the new layout.

In order to create a child theme you will need to create a separate folder inside the themes folder (you can use your preferred FTP program to create the new folder)

/blogroot/wp-content/themes/twentytwelve

As you can see, the child folder is also in the same folder where twentytwelve lives (mind you, not inside it). You can name it anything you want. Inside this folder you have to create the style.css file and it should begin like this:

/*
Theme Name: Twenty Twelve Child
Theme URI: http://example.com/
Description: Child theme for the Twenty Twelve theme
Author: Your name here
Author URI: http://example.com/about/
Template: twentytwelve
Version: 0.1.0
*/

The CSS definitions may seem like commented out, but they actually provide useful information to the CSS file. Here are some quick descriptions of the variables used inside the file (you don’t have to use all)

• Theme Name: This is required, but as already mentioned above, you can name it anything
• Theme URI: This is optional and this should ideally be the link to your blog
• Description: This is optional
• Author: If multiple people create multiple CSS files at your workplace it would be nice to assign your name to the stylesheet, otherwise it is optional.
• Author URI: Optional
• Template: Required. It should be the exact name of the folder that contains the parent theme files, in this case it is normally twentytwelve
• Version: This is optional. You can create various versions of your child theme.

In case you switched to the child theme before making any changes, you may have to switch to another theme and then switch back to this child theme in order to let the “Template” variable make a difference. If you don’t do this switching, your child theme won’t work.

Since this is a child theme, you will have to import the styles of the parent theme. The following CSS command helps you achieve that

@import url(“../twentytwelve/style.

After this is the usual CSS stuff. Suppose you want to change the font of your blog title, you can easily add this line to your child theme CSS file:

#site-title{
        font-family: Droid, Serif;
        font-size: 50px;<

In the same manner, if you want to change the font of the blog post title you can use the following definition:

h1.entry-title{
        font-family: Droid, Serif;
        font-weight: none;<

Wondering where you get the names of these div IDs and classes? Just open your website, preferably a single blog post (so that you don’t have to load a bigger page), right-click on it (preferably somewhere there is just text) and open the source code. In the source code you will be able to view the divs, the IDs and the classes.

So far we have just discussed the stylesheet file. You can also make structural changes with the help of your child theme. For example, you can add your own functions.php, single.php, page.php and other files just the usual way.