Friday, December 22, 2006

Create a shortcut to shut down your PC

Did you know that you can log off, shut down or restart your pc with a single click? Here is the way: Right click on the desktop and select create, new shorcut. Write (or browse the path) C:\Windows\System32\Shutdown.exe (where C is the letter of the drive on which Windows are installed to) and click next. Name your shortcut as you want and click finish. Then single click the shortcut you created and select properties. In target field add to the command line -1 if you want log off function for your shortcut, -s if you want shut down or -r if you want restart function. After adding this, you can add also -t x (where x is seconds) if you want a countdown until your system shuts down or restarts. Also you can add -c "text" (where text write anything you want) if you want a text message to appear when you click your shorcut.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

10 tips for a successfull blog!

Here are ten tips that in my opinion are the element for a successfull blog:
  1. Write quality content. Quality content means to write on topics that other would like to read and content that you know well because to attract readers you have to write something that is not mentioned by everyone.
  2. Categorize your blog when you create it. Blogs that covers a lot of irrelevant subjects at the same time are not successfull most of the times.
  3. Write for readers and not for Google and other search engines. First of all you have to think about what would attract more readers to your blog and then how to make search engines index it.
  4. Start promoting your blog to blog catalogs after you have written some posts, so readers can read many posts. A blog with a single post does not attract anybody. This will help you also with the search engines.
  5. Put a foto on your profile to blog catalogs like technorati. People remember photos and are attracted by them.
  6. Read other blogs and try to come to contact with other bloggers by posting comments on their blog or by sending them an email. This will help you build relationship with other bloggers and make them come to your blog.
  7. Try to gain inbound links. The best way to achieve it is by writing quality contect, so others would like to link to your posts or to your blog. Links from pages with better pagerank than yours is a plus for your blog's indexing by google.
  8. Have quality outbound links. Outbound links will help you a little with search engines and when you link to a blog or post you liked, you will probably get an inbound link by the blogger to whose post or blog you linked.
  9. Have an easy-to-read blog, which means add labels and tags if you are able to, write with fonts that can be read easily and avoid black backgrounds. It is better if you include some pictures relevant to your posts, because posts with text only are not so attractive. Be carefull if you use photos from the web to your blog, as some of them are copyrighted.
  10. Do not advertise your blog (spam) to other blogs by leaving comments that include your url. Anyone that would like to read your posts can find your blog's url in your profile.
Bonus tips: Be patient as indexing by search engines and increasing the traffic of your blog can take time. Update your blog regularly so you can keep your readers, as a blog that is not updated for a long time seems as abandoned to others. If you will not post for a while (for example when you are on vacation) write a post to inform your readers about it.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Web 2.0 Logo made with Photoshop!

I designed a web 2.0 logo using Adobe Photoshop! Thanks a lot to Alleba for his great video guide! Visit this link and create your own web logo. It is much more easier than you can imagine! Below you can see Alleba's video guide.

Saturday, December 02, 2006

How to speed up your computer's boot

As you may have noticed, when Windows boot, a lot of programs start running in the background (you can see these programs alongside with windows's processes in the task manager -processes tab- by pressing ctr+alt+del. Most of them put also an icon in system tray). These programs of course take time to load, which means that Windows take more time to boot! Most of the times, programs that run in the background are not needed, so you can eliminate your system's boot time by disabling them. Lets start:
  • Press start and then select run
  • Type msconfig and press enter
  • In the window that appears choose the Startup tab
  • Here is the list of programs that load when you boot your system and continue running in the background. Disable any program that you want, click "apply" and then "ok". Restart your system when you are promt to and enjoy how faster your pc boots!
Notice that it is safe to disable all these applications! They have nothing to do with the services that run also in background. You can leave in the startup list any program you want to load when you boot up your system (for example msn messenger or skype).