IP’s maybe static or dynamic, this depends on your ISP and connection type, if it’s dynamic, you would get a new IP each time your connection is reset, if you use a dynamic IP the above reasons stated as to why you might need your IP would be pretty much rendered useless and unpractical as each time your connection is reset you would have to forward your IP again and add the new IP to the filter on your stats program. A static IP however cannot be changed and is permanently assigned to your connection by your ISP.

There are different ways to find out your IP. The easiest and most accurate way is to visit one of these websites:

• whatismyip.com
• whatismyipaddress.com
• whatismyip.org
• ip-adress.com

Alternatively, you could use the following method (for Windows OS) however if you are on a LAN this would not show your IP but the IP of your LAN so if you are on a Local Area Network, it’s best you stick to the above websites:

• Go to Start > Run > “CMD”

• Type “ipconfig”

The IP address as you can see in the screenshot above is then shown.

If you use a MAC or Linux OS, you can check these resources on how to find your IP:

• MAC
• Linux

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Twitter revolves around two way communication where followings are usually reciprocated among twitterers and the best way of keeping track of who follows you is via the native feature of their email notifications whenever someone follows you, and sometimes you might find your inbox filled with these notifications.

While this might turn out to be difficult to manage it is required all the same to be aware of who is following you so below I have outlined the easiest way to manage these notifications.

This feature is available by most email clients and is none other than the ‘filter’ feature. Below I have outlined how you can do this with Gmail.

• Sign into your Gmail account, on the top you should find ‘Create a filter’.

• You’ll then be given criteria to set to filter your emails. Now, you are looking to filter all the Twitter notifications into a separate folder, so in the ‘From’ field type ‘Twitter’.

• On the next page, you will be provided with a list of options of what to do when an email matches the filter criteria, check the ‘skip the inbox’ field and apply the label ‘Twitter’ to it. You might also want to apply the filter to the existing mails matching the filter criteria, if so tick the box at the bottom.

• Once you create the filter all your notifications will now be sent to the ‘Twitter’ label in a separate folder separate from your inbox where you can sift through them at your own pace.

You can setup simlar filters for other email providers as well, below I’ve linked to guides on popular email clients:

• Yahoo
• Windows Live Mail

And as always, if you run into any trouble, leave a comment below.

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• Open Start > My Computer > Properties > Advanced

• Select Startup and Recovery Settings

• From the System Startup Properties pick the OS you use on startup

• Uncheck the two option in the System startup properties and save the settings

Restart the computer and test. If you run into any issues leave a comment below.

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Setting this preference requires you to modify the registry. Make sure you read this post on how to backup and use the registry if you are not familiar with it.

I’ll explain how to make the change in a series of steps:

• Open the registry – Open Start > Run > Type ‘regedit’.

• Locate the location in the registry to place the data – In the left Tree-view window navigate to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer” if any of the keys (directories) are missing create it. If they are all there skip to step 4.

• How to create a key – if for example “Policies” is missing, right click “current version” and select new key.

• Right-click “Explorer” and select new DWORD value.

• Rename the value to “norecentdocshistory”.

• Double click the value and type 1 for the value data.

• Close the registry and restart your computer.

• Check if the modification worked by navigating to Start>My Recent Documents.

• To reverse this modification edit the key to a value of ’0′ or delete the key.

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First I’ll show you how you can do this with an application as software always simplify the process. The utility you can use is Disk Heal which is a simple utility I developed. You can download it from here. Once you download the application open it and go to the ‘Tweak’ window. Click on ‘Appearance Tweaks’ and at the bottom you can change your icon. All you have to do is type the letter of the drive (portable or internal) and select your preferred icon by clicking ‘browse’, once you’ve got a suitable icon click ‘ok’ and then restart the computer if the drive is an internal one or re-insert the device if the drive is a portable one and voila, you are done!

Bear in mind you can’t change the icon again without restoring defaults which you can find next to the ‘OK’ button or else you will get an ‘invalid path’ error. (A little thing I need to fix)

Apart from that, the application performs plenty of other tiny, useful tweaks as well so be sure to check the application out even if you prefer changing your icon manually (below).

Well, it doesn’t get easier to do this than explained above using the application but if you like a bit of a challenge (it’s no big deal really) you can do it manually.

First, select your desired icon. Copy the icon to the parent directory of the drive you want to configure (eg: C:/icon.ico). Next go to My Computer > Tools > Folder Options > View and make sure ‘hide extensions for known file types’ is unchecked. Now create a new text file in the parent directory of the same drive and rename it to ‘autorun.inf’. Open the file and paste the following:

[Autorun]
icon=[file name of icon].ico

Save the file, now re-insert the drive if it’s a portable file or restart the computer if it’s an internal drive and you are done!

Don’t forget to go back to My Computer > Tools > Folder Options > View and check ‘hide extensions for known file types’ again.

You might also want to go to the file properties of ‘Autorun.inf’ and your icon and give them the ‘hidden’ attribute to keep your drive’s parent drectory clean.

Having trouble? Leave a comment.

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1. Open the registry – Open Start > Run > Type ‘regedit’.

2. Locate the location in the registry to place the data – In the left Tree-view window navigate to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\NonEnum” if any of the keys (directories) are missing create it. If they are all there skip to step 4

3. Create a key – if for example “Policies” is missing, right click “current version” and select new key.

4. Right-click “NonEnum” and select new DWORD value.

5. Rename the value to “{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}”.

6. Double click the value and type 1 for the value data.

7. Close the registry, now test it.(you might have to restart the computer first)

8. Open Start and check if ‘My Computer’ still exists on the top right of the Start Menu., if the ‘My Computer” item has been removed the tweak was successful.

9. To enable the My Computer again, open the registry and delete the value or replace the value data with “0”.

This tweak is particularly useful if you wish to limit user rights (by restricting usage of My Computer)

Alternatively you can use Disk Heal and perform this same tweak by just ticking off a single check box.

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WordPress has a widget by default to display the most recent posts in your blog’s sidebar. Blogger doesn’t do things for you that easily but thanks to this post displaying recent posts in your Blogger blog is just as easy.

First of all you’ll need to be managing your feeds via Feedburner. If you are not using Feedburner yet visit www.feedburner.com and burn your feed. It’s a simple ‘wizard like’ process and doesn’t get any easier. Once you’ve setup your account and burned your feed visit your feed stats dashboard and go to ‘Publicize’. On the left sidebar you’ll see ‘BuzzBoost’, click it.

BuzzBoost lets you display your blog’s recent posts just by configuring a few settings and pasting a little bit of HTML in your blog.

Once you visit the ‘BuzzBoost’ page you can configure various settings, like number of items to display, title of the list of posts and so on, and it also has some added features like allowing you to display the first few characters of the post below each recent post title.

Once you’ve configured the settings the way you like it click ‘Activate’. You’ll then be provided with a snippet of HTML along with a preview of how the recent posts would look on your blog so that you can make any changes in case you find something you don’t like. Once you are satisfied all you have to do is copy the HTML go to your Blogger dashboard go to the ‘Page Elements’ section of your dashboard and add the HTML into the ‘HTML/Javascript’ page element. You can then rearrange the page element and place the list of recent posts wherever you like and then you are done!

This is a screenshot of how I displayed my recent posts when I was on Blogger:

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Your own visits to your sites can mess stats up, specially if your site is an average one which doesn’t get thousands of visitors, so by following the steps below you can exclude your visits to your site or blog from your Analytics stats.

You could do this by blocking specific IP’s from your Analytics account. So first of all you need to figure out how you connect to the Internet. You may be using a static IP or dynamic one. If you are using a static IP you are in luck as the procedure is a lot easier, the best way to find out would be to call up your ISP.

If you are connecting to the internet via a static IP you can visit here or here or here and get your IP address. Note it down or just ‘Ctrl + C’ it.

Now visit your Analytics dashboard, click Analytics Settings and go to ‘Filter Manager’. Click ‘Add Filter’. For Filter Name type something like ‘My IP’, for filter type select ‘Exclude all traffic from an IP address’. Your IP would be in the form of [Number].[Number].[Number].[Number], you’ll have to change it to [Number]\.[Number]\.[Number]\.[Number]\. Click Finish.

If you are using a dynamic IP however you will need to use a cookie to ignore your visits, this is because if you connect to the Internet via a dynamic IP connection, the IP changes each time your connection is reset. The Google Analytics help section provides a comprehensive article on how this can be done:

To exclude traffic from dynamic IP addresses, you can use a JavaScript function to set a cookie on your internal computers. You’ll then be able to filter all visitors with this cookies from appearing on your Analytics reports.

How to exclude traffic by cookie:

1. Create a new page on your domain, containing the following code:

<body onLoad=”javascript:pageTracker._setVar(‘test_value’);”>

(Please note that this code is in addition to the Google Analytics tracking code that you have on every page of your website.)

2. In order to set the cookie, visit your newly created page from all computers that you would like to exclude from your reports.

3. Create an Exclude filter to remove data from visitors with this cookie. Follow these instructions http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55494
to create a filter with the following settings:

Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: test_value
Case Sensitive: No

Note that using a cookie as explained above is browser specific.

Your visits will now be excluded from your web stats. You can now feel free to visit your site without worrying about your own visits contaminating your traffic stats.

If you are having trouble with excluding your traffic stats please leave a comment.

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If you setup a free Blogger Blog apart from the yourname.BLOGSPOT.com ‘advertisement’, the default Favicon is the Blogger logo (find out how to change your Blogger Favicon) and the other bar right at the top of the blog with its icon and the Blogger logo.

This blog used to be on Blogger and the NavBar was not among the reasons why I moved to WordPress, because I never had it on my Blogger blog on the first place, removing it is a walk in the park!

Well, here I will show you how to remove the annoying NavBar, don’t worry about breaking their TOS because it does not state anywhere in the terms that it is a violation.

All you have to do is open the template code (Dashboard > Layout > Edit HTML and paste the following code on the template:

#navbar-iframe {
height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none;
}

Save the settings and reload your web page and your Navigation Bar should have vanished!

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I will describe how to perform this tweak in a few steps.

1. Open the registry – Open Start > Run > Type ‘regedit’.
2. Locate the location in the registry to place the data – In the left Tree-view windows navigate to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer” if any of the keys (directories) are missing create it. If they are all there skip to step 4
3. Create a key – if for example “Policies” is missing, right click “current version” and select new key.
4. Right-click “Explorer” and select new DWORD value.
5. Rename the value to “noclose”.
6. Double click the value and type 1 for the value data.
7. Close the registry, now test it.(you might have to restart the computer first)
8. Open Start and check if ‘Shutdown’ still exists on the bottom of the Start Menu., if the ‘Turn off computer” button has been removed the tweak was successful.
9. To enable ‘shutdown’ again, open the registry and delete the value or replace the value data with “0”.

This tweak is particularly useful if you wish to limit user rights (by restricting shutting down of the PC).

Alternatively you can use Disk Heal and perform this same tweak by just ticking off a single check box.

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