The site this blog is hosted on, http://thenewgeek.totalh.com, is only a temporary location while the original blog, http://blog.geekblake.22web.net is down due to server maintenance. It should be back up soon at blog.geekblake.22web.net

WordPress, the most widely used blogging platform on the internet, has tons and tons of cool features to make a blogger’s life easier.  One that I just discovered recently is the ability to have a feed for any tag or category on your blog.  The default feed, for all posts, is yourblogdomain.com/feed (although in many cases sites will put it through FeedBurner to get feeds.feedburner.com/TheirBlog since it provides many more options for publicizing, monetizing, optimizing, and “troubleshootizing” your feed ).

But I bet you didn’t know that for any category or tag address (like blog.geekblake.22web.net/category/computers or blog.geekblake.22web.net/tag/shortcut) you can append /feed to get a feed for just that category or tag (like blog.geekblake.22web.net/category/computers/feed or blog.geekblake.22web.net/tag/shortcut/feed).  And as far as I’ve seen, this works on any blog made with WordPress.

For bloggers: I highly recommend that you give your readers links to feeds for categories and tags, especially if you publish a lot of content (more than 3-5 posts every day) or span a wide variety of subjects that won’t all appeal to all people.  Not everyone will know about this little trick of adding /feed to any category or tag, so this can help people who want only some of your content.  Sure, you won’t get all the cool features that FeedBurner would give you (hey, you can still route some of your more popular categories or tags through FeedBurner if you really want to…), but your readers will appreciate it.  It could be the difference between a satisfied partial subscriber and an overloaded unsubscriber.

Readers, I’m sure you can see the advantage to filtering out content this way.  Of course, you could always mess around in Yahoo! Pipes to achieve the same effect or even a more advanced filterning system (like getting multiple categories or tags, or having the whole feed except for one category).  But for the quick feed filter without having to leave the site, I’d say this is a pretty handy trick to have up your sleeve.

I love Google.  With all the great services they offer, many of which I use, I don’t know what I’d do without them.  But sometimes I wonder if we might be trusting them with a little too much personal information by using all their different products.  I usually stay signed in to my Google accout all day long, using various Google services as I need them.

Here’s a list of the information about me they have access to:  I use Gmail for all my email needs (I highly recommend Gmail as the best web-based email service out there), so all my email is stored with them.  I use Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools for this blog, so they know that I operate this site and they know details about the traffic I get.  They know all the sites I subscribe to via RSS or Atom feeds in Google Reader.  They know who my friends are from Gmail/Google talk.  They have the documents I’ve written or received in Google Docs, and they have my schedule in Google Calendar (although I don’t always use GCal and Google Docs, I sometimes do and they have the stuff I’ve put there).  And while I’m logged in to my Google account for all those services, they also can see what searches I’ve done in Google web search, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Images, Google Blog search, and just about any other things I’ve done through Google.

For right now, it’s very unlikely that people at Google pay any attention to this information.  They may have all my email on their servers (as would any email service), they know who my contacts are, what I search for while I’m signed in, and all that stuff, but right now all they claim to do with it is scan through it to provide relevent advertisements alongside some services.  Other than that, our information is pretty much just sitting on their servers.

But what would happen if Google started going through this information?  Already, they reserve the right to release some information when required by law.  They were recently asked to show server logs for their YouTube video sharing service in the lawsuit with Viacom.  Those logs, according to Google, contain some information that is potentially personally identifiable, which is why they asked (and were allowed) to remove the irrelevant personal information.

Suppose one day, in a future case, the personal information they have is no longer irrelevent?  The information they have could be used to catch criminals who used the Internet as a tool in their crime, but it might be used to do some less justified things as time goes on.  Catching major criminals could evolve into catching minor criminals, which could evolve into just catching liars and sleezy sites.  I could just see the next “innovative” service from Google, Google Lie Detector, where you enter someone’s Google account name and something they said (or might say) to get an estimate of the probability it’s true. Something like that, although Google might not have enough information to do it now, would probably be possible in the future as we trust Google with more information.  Of course, it would not be in compliance with their Privacy Policy to do something like that, but check out the last paragraph of the current policy:

Please note that this Privacy Policy may change from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Policy without your explicit consent, and we expect most such changes will be minor. Regardless, we will post any Policy changes on this page and, if the changes are significant, we will provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain services, email notification of Policy changes). Each version of this Policy will be identified at the top of the page by its effective date, and we will also keep prior versions of this Privacy Policy in an archive for your review.

Okay, so the privacy page will change sometimes, and if they consider it “significant”, then Google will provide a more prominent notification.  But that could also change, right?  If you look at previous versions of their privacy policy, you’ll notice that it has changed quite a bit. And check this out from the Gmail privacy policy:

You may organize or delete your messages through your Gmail account or terminate your account through the Google Account section of Gmail settings. Such deletions or terminations will take immediate effect in your account view. Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems.

So basically, anything you delete from Gmail, while disappearing from your email list and freeing up that storage space in your account, may not be deleted from their servers immediately and may never be permanently deleted from their backups.  Similar policies apply to Google Calendar, Google Docs, and other Google services.

Google really is gaining a lot of information and power, and fast!  Even though right now they don’t do much with our information, keep in mind that they do have a lot of it, and there really is a lot they could do with it in the future.  Google might even become a government agency or a sort of quasi government/government sponsored enterprise like Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, possible helping the CIA or FBI with intelligence and investigations.  But with Google having some of the best products out there, and mostly for free, I don’t plan on switching any time soon just to make sure no one company has too much information about me.  But I am going to keep it in the back of my head the next time I do a search or add a feed to Google Reader or send an email or IM in Gmail, “How would I feel if somebody was behind me, watching me perform that action?”.  Because with all the power they have, and the fact that I’m signed in to my Google account most of the time, it wouldn’t be that hard for Google to trace my actions back to me.

These days, both computers and environmental considerations are of great importance, and will become more important as time goes on.  They’ve mostly been considered separate entities, but there is really a big overlap between the two areas.  Below are a few ways that you can hug trees without leaving your desk.

• Use your computer instead of paper. There are plenty of things which previously required paper, but now can be done on the computer to save some trees. And, most of the electronic replacements cost less than their paper methods (in many cases, the electronic method is absolutely free!).
  • Cancel newspaper/magazine subscriptions and subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds.  This will save paper from the printing, fuel from the delivery vehicle, and save you money from the subscription fees you won’t have to pay.  Most major news sources provide feeds for stories on their website.  Some sites have a lot of sections (and even sub-sections) and have a whole page with their different feeds, like The New York times or the Wall Street Journal.  With all the capabilities feed readers have, it’s easy to find what you want to read.  Look at how to use Google Reader, a popular online feed reader, as an advanced knowledge management tool.  Google Reader has a powerful folder and tagging system to easily organize your feeds so you can easily pick what you want to read and find your way back to it later, and lets you search through everything you’ve read.  Since Google Reader is web based, it works from any device that can access the internet which means you can use it from home, work, and on your phone, and keep it all in sync—similar to Google’s Gmail (and if you install the Google Gears browser extension, it can download everything for offline access too).
    There are also some feeds online that you can’t get elsewhere, like this site, Lifehacker and Digg, which are easier to keep up with via RSS than by visiting the site each time.
  • Avoid sharing documents on paper. With email and online document hosting/editing services like Google Docs, most information that we share does not require a single scrap of paper. Despite this, many people still print a lot of their documents for whatever reason. If you have to give or receive a document and it is at all possible to leave it electronic, do so.  Also, a lot of companies let you pay bills and view statements online, so you can eliminate the paper you’d normally get in the mail.  Some of those companies even give a small discount when you do this as it saves them money on printing, postage and administration.
• Delay the purchase of a new computer or hardware upgrade as much as possible. Besides costing a significant amount of money, buying/building a new box or modding your current one to make it more powerful will likely result in it sucking more power out of the wall.  In an effort to be green, don’t treat yourself to that new monster you’ve had your eye on; instead, optimize your computer by deleting unused files, unistalling unused programs, cleaning up the cluttered registry and temporary files, doing a virus scan, defragmenting your hard drive, disabling visual effects you don’t need, and switching to the faster Linux operating system if you use Windows.
• Put your computer into a power-saving state when you are going to be away for a while.  Depending on how long you plan on being away from your computer, you may want to hibernate (when you’ll be away for more than an hour or two—this completely powers off your machine but saves everything loaded into memory on your hard drive, and restores all programs/workspaces to their previous state), sleep—may be called suspend or stand-by depending on what OS you use (when you’ll be away for 15 minutes to a couple hours—this puts your computer into a low power state that retains data in memory but doesn’t do any calculations or processing), or just turn off the monitor if you’re only going to be away for 15 minutes or less.
  Note that stand-by and hibernate both do similar things (retain everything you were working on when you resume), but hibernate uses no power and suspend/sleep/stand-by uses a small amount of power. The reason you would use stand-by sometimes, even though it uses a little bit of power, is that you can resume quicker because you haven’t actually powered down. This also can save a little energy because turning off and on again uses more power than entering stand-by and then resuming. For optimal power usage, don’t power down into hibernate unless you’ll be gone for more than a couple hours; otherwise, it would be more efficient to use suspend/stand-by.
• Connect the computer and all peripherals to a surge protector and turn off the power strip when you’re going to leave the computer off (or in hibernate) for a while.  Sometimes, electronic devices can use power even when turned off if they’re plugged in, but this method will stop that from happening.

If you do everything detailed above, trees and other parts of the environment will thank you (so will those little guys on your money).  If you really want to make a difference, show this post to more people so they can do these things too.  If you’re already doing all the things I mentioned above, great job; you can always do a bit more by getting other people to do these things too.

What did you think of these methods?  Do you agree or have some other recommendation?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment!

Anybody with a website (especially a fairly new one) probably wants to know how their site ranks in a Google search. Google Webmaster Tools can help you see Google’s crawls statistics and errors it found when crawling your site, but all it provides in terms of search ranking is your position for the queries that land the most people on your site and your position for the top queries in which your site appears. What it doesn’t give you, is a way of easily checking your search position for any search terms you want.

That’s where the Google Position Checker comes in: just enter your website, the search term you want to check, the region if your site is geared toward a particular country (or choose World if country doesn’t really matter), and how many of the top results you want to check (you can go up to the top 1000 results, but for a faster check you can go as low as the top 100 results). This way, you can easily see your ranking for any search term, without having to do the search yourself and look through the results for your own site.

Firefox extension iMacros will save you some time by recording a group of tasks in Firefox and letting you repeat them whenever you want, letting you move on to bigger and better things.  You can call your mini-program from a library which goes in the sidebar on the left side of the screen.  Or, for an experience more closely integrated with the Firefox UI that you’re already accustomed to, you can bookmark your macro.  It behaves just like any other bookmark in your list (it can be organized and tagged, put in the bookmarks toolbar, etc.) but calls your macro instead of a web page.

And, there is absolutely no programming required!  Just go to the Rec tab, hit the record button, do some things in Firefox, click stop, and you’re good to go.  Of course, once you’ve made a macro in the visual interface, you can go to the Edit tab in the iMacros side bar, select your macro from the list and click the Edit Macro button to view and edit the code it generated.  It’s easy to pick up the basics of the scripting language iMacros uses just by recording a macro and viewing its code, but there’s a more detailed reference of all the commands and how to use them here.  If you decide to code some macros from scratch, write code in the text editor of your choice, save it as a plain text file (iMacros by default saves macros with the .iim extension, but it seems that you can use any extension you want, as long as the encoding is a plain text file), then go to the Rec tab in the iMacros side bar, choose Load, and find the file with your code in it.

You can see a screenshot tour of iMacros here.  This extension, like the previously mentioned Linux command line shortcuts, is one of those tools that can do wonderful things, and what it can do is only limited by your imagination.

iMacros Firefox Extension [via Web Worker Daily]

I hate ever having to ever use Windows, it’s so slow and bloated and… Even though I would rather use Linux all the time, sometimes I find it necessary to boot Windows: Ext2 IFS makes it very easy to switch between operating systems and file systems, and still be able to work with all the files I need.

For anybody who dual-boots Windows and Linux on a regular basis, this is a must-have freeware program that lets you read and write to Linux Ext2 file systems.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve downloaded or saved something to my desktop in Linux, and then next time I’m in Windows forget it’s on my Linux drive, and wish I had moved it over to a FAT or NTFS partition.  Yeah I could always reboot and transfer it over for use in Windows, but that takes too much time.

Meet Ext2 IFS.  With this program, not only can you read and write files on your Linux (Ext2) partitions, but it integrates perfectly with Windows Explorer (or any other Windows based file manager you use), allowing you to assign drive letters to your Linux partitions just like with any other file system type natively supported by Windows (like FAT or NTFS).

Below is a screenshot of me setting up the drive-letter mounting for my Linux partition:

…and browsing my newly mounted drive in Windows Explorer:

Hope you like it!

Here are a few ways to give your computer a small speed boost if things are getting sluggish:

• Clean up your machine by getting rid of all the junk.  This means deleting unused files and organizing the remaining ones, uninstalling unused or unneeded programs, etc.  If you are using Windows, the Revo Uninstaller can help you remove programs and all files/registry entries they may leave behind (the provided Windows uninstaller doesn’t always remove everything, and sometimes leaves things in the Application Data and other folders).  Another good Windows tool is nCleaner or CCleaner to clean the registry, cookies, and other unneeded files.
• Run a malware scan from Safe Mode if in Windows.  Viruses sometimes (a lot of the time) start processes right when you start up (sometimes these processes even hide themselves, making it harder to find them with a virus scanner), but Safe Mode starts only core Windows processes so you’ll be in a clean environment when you run the scan(s).  See here for more on that.
• If in Windows, defragment the hard drive using Ultimate Defrag.
• If the above haven’t made your computer fast enough, and you’re still thinking about that hardware upgrade, try disabling the visual effects that you can live without.  In Windows (especially Vista), this means going into Control Panel > System Properties, Advanced tab, performance section, settings button, and uncheck some of the options that you could live without.
• If you’re using Vista with the Aero visual effects like glass windows and Flip-3D, you can disable those too. more settings are hid in the “Personalization” options.  Right click on a blank area of your desktop, choose personalize, then click Window Color and Appearance.  Select Windows Vista Basic, then click OK.
  
• If your computer still isn’t working better, try re-installing the operating system, and if that doesn’t help, switch to Linux (see how and why), which will almost certainly be faster.

Hope this helps rejuvinate your computer!  You may also want to see here for more things you can do along these same lines.

You may have heard about the release of Firefox 3.0.1 today and the security vulnerabilities it fixes, among other issues.  But there’s a catch: some extensions won’t work.

The only one I currently have installed that the updater says won’t work is Google Gears 0.3.24.0, and I hope that Google releases an update for it soon because I like being able to use Gears.  But, it seems that Gears 0.3.24.3 has been released for Firefox 3.0.1 support.  Download it at http://gears.google.com/ (if it says you already have Gears installed, just click reinstall and follow the instructions).  I tried installing it, but it doesn’t seem to work for me—maybe it will work for you.  Oh well, I guess I can go a bit longer without the 3.0.1 update.  I’ll live!

Web design and development tips, tutorials and reference site WebReference.com shows a very simple method of giving access to your web site’s server-side source code. By making a few small tweaks to your Apache server config file (httpd.conf) you can give readers access to your site’s code, be it PHP, SQL, Perl, or any other script, by simply going to the same page in the “source” directory (eg. your homepage is at example.com/index.php, source code can be viewed at example.com/source/index.php).

From the article:

It’s widely accepted by many that open-source software has many advantages over closed-source software. Whichever side of the fence you’re on, one can’t deny that it’s an excellent way to learn the practical side of programming. In this article you’ll learn how you can configure Apache to allow your visitors to learn from (or offer advice on) your source code through browsing it, in a manner similar to browsing ordinary Web pages.

(…)

During the setup process of installing Apache on my home PC, I got the idea to make the source (that comprises a page) to be readily available via http requests to Apache. One could configure anonymous FTP access for downloading only on certain files and no access at all for others, or making copies of files to make available and placing them in special directories that have their files processed differently.

Instead of messing around with an FTP server or making lots of duplicate files, I opted for making a few small tweaks to Apache. With this method people can view server-side PHP code (and quite a few other server side languages) simply by making a small alteration to the current URL instead of having to fire up an FTP client, download the file and then open it in an editor. It allows a visitor to browse server-side code similar to the way they would look at client-side CSS and Javascript.

Opening The Source On Your Host [via HTMLGoodies]

Most Linux users at some point have used the command line, as there are some things that still can’t be done (or are harder to do) in a desktop environment.  For those of us who are frequently using Bash, command aliases can help shorten some of that typing (or make a command that’s easier to remember than its long counterpart).

Here’s how to make an alias in the Linux bash: open the file ~/.bashrc (for new Linux users, ~ is a shortcut character for your home directory, usually /home/yourusername/.  When a Linux program sees you enter ~, it knows to replace that with your home directory, which can be a pain to type out each time).  In the .bashrc file, enter the following on a new line, replacing “nickname” with what you want to name the shortcut, and “command” with what command you want it to do:

alias nickname='command'

Here are some ways that this could be used:

1. Open a commonly used file or directory:

   #  Use cd (change directory) command
   #  to move to a directory.
   alias directory_name='cd /path/to/folder/'
   
   #  Use nano text editor to open a file.
   #  Alternatively, replace nano with gedit
   #  (only for GNOME based distributions
   #  like Ubuntu) for a graphical editor.
   alias file='nano /very/long/path/to/file.txt'
   

2. Use apt-get to easily install a program. Normally, you can use sudo apt-get install package_name to install a package from your system’s repository (only for Ubuntu, Debian, or other apt-based distributions). You can shorten this command to inst package_name with the following in ~/.bashrc :

   alias inst='sudo apt-get install'
   

3. Make an alias for the gcc command to compile a source code file you frequently work on, and ./ to run the program:

   alias build='gcc ~/source.cpp -o myapp.exe'
   alias run='./myapp.exe'
   

You can read about more bash aliases here.Of course,there are infinite ways to use these, so use them in whatever way suits you (or don’t use them at all).