Archive for the 'How to?' Category

How to clear your cache ?

Posted by admin on August 28th, 2008

Clearing your cache is important when you are updating your website. Sometimes new elements don’t appear on your live site, even if the new files are physically there.

The reason why is that your web browser (Internet Explorer, Safari..) keep records of your browsing in order to make the next visit to the same site faster, as it doesn’t have to download all the picture all over again.

You can set up your web browsers to clear the cache automatically after a couple of days, but you can also do it manually at anytime.

Below you’ll find how to clear your cache depending of your web browser:

Internet Explorer 7

  1. From the Tools menu, select Internet Options… .
  2. Choose the General tab.
  3. Under Browsing history, click Delete… .
  4. Next to “Temporary Internet Files”, click Delete files… .
  5. Click Close, and then click OK to exit.

—-

Internet Explorer 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x for Windows

  1. From the Tools menu (for version 4.x, the View menu), select Internet Options… .
  2. Choose the General tab.
  3. In the “Temporary Internet Files” section, click Delete Files… .
  4. To confirm the deletion, click OK.
  5. In the Internet Options dialog box, click OK.

—-

Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 for Windows

From the Tools menu, select Clear Private Data, and then choose Cache.

—-

Safari

  1. From the Safari menu, select Empty Cache… .
  2. When prompted, click Empty to confirm that you want to empty the cache.

How to Subscribe to a RSS Feed?

Posted by admin on July 18th, 2008

rss

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” – it’s a format for distributing and gathering content from sources across the Web, including newspapers, magazines, and blogs. With RSS you can quickly and easily get the latest updates from all your favourite websites in one place, rather than having to visiting them one by one. To do this you use an RSS reader that automatically checks for news and updates.

How can you tell if a website has an RSS feed?

Often you will see a small orange feed icon RSS feed icon saying ‘RSS’, ’subscribe’ or ‘feed’ next to it. Usually you just copy and paste the feed link into your RSS reader. Another great thing about RSS feeds: No spam and complete user control; Unsubscribing to RSS feeds are as easy as it can get – delete it, and it’s gone. Period.

Choosing an RSS reader

There are many different ‘feed readers’ (also known as RSS readers, RSS aggregators or simply newsreaders) to choose from, but they can be divided into two main types: web-based and application based. Web-based readers have the benefit that you can check your feeds from any computer, while the stand-alone applications often have more features and greater flexibility. Browsers such as Internet Explorer 7, Firefox and Safari also have built-in RSS readers, although these are not as flexible and versatile as using a separate application.

Web Based RSS Readers

All you have to do is to sign up for an account and you can add as many feeds as you want. Below are a few of the most popular; some sites will  have buttons that allow you to add it to these RSS readers automatically. Otherwise, just copy and paste the RSS feed link into your  reader and you’re up and running.

Locally installed RSS Readers

If you prefer, you can download an RSS reader and install it on your computer, below are links to a few of the most popular. Some of these are freeware/open source, others charge a licence fee:

How to add a Favicon to my site ?

Posted by admin on June 16th, 2008

What is a Favicon

Favicon is short for “Favourites Icon”. The name is derived from the bookmark list for Microsoft Internet Explorer which is called Favourites list. When you add a site to your Favourites list, Internet Explorer (version 5 and above) asks the server if it has a file called favicon.ico. If present, this file will be used to provide an icon that is displayed next to the bookmark text.

Other browsers such as Mozilla have also added support for favicons. Depending on the browser, the favicon can appear in a variety of places, not just in the bookmarks list (in fact, it may not even appear in the bookmark list at all). It may be shown in the address bar or the title of a browser tab, for instance.

How to create a Favicon

To create a favicon.ico simply create a 16×16 .PNG or .GIF file and convert it to an icon resource with Chami. If you want, you can add more images to the same icon resource to provide alternative resolutions. Most browsers only use a 16×16 image but in a different context (e.g. when you drag a URL from the address bar onto your desktop) a larger icon may be shown. If the icon resource only contains a 16×16 image, this will be scaled to the appropriate size, so technically there is never a need to add alternative resolutions. However, doing so can increase the quality of the displayed icon.

Keep in mind that for a user with a slow modem a favicon.ico may increase the page loading time by a few seconds if it is too large, so don’t overdo it. Adding a 32×32 alternative should be enough to make sure the image will look good even in contexts with larger icons. Adding even more and larger alternatives is unnecessary bloat. Try to keep the number of colors below 16 and create a 16-color icon using the –colors 16 switch of png2ico (or even create a b/w icon with the –colors 2 switch). This will result in a smaller file that loads faster.

When you create the images to include in your favicon.ico, don’t forget that the icon may be composed against various background colors so you should use transparency rather than a solid background if you want to avoid that your icon appears inside a box. Note, that icon resources only support binary transparency, i.e. a pixel may be visible or invisible but not something like 30% translucent.

Installing your Favicon

To add your new favicon.ico to a web page put it on the server into the same directory as the web page it is for (e.g. www.example.com/foo/favicon.ico for www.example.com/foo/index.html). That is the first place a browser will search. If it doesn’t find an icon there, it checks the top-level directory of the server (www.example.com/favicon.ico for the www.example.com server), so by putting it there you can have a default favicon for all the pages in your domain. Depending on browser and configuration, the favicon.ico is not always rendered, even if it is in one of the above locations, unless the web page explicitly declares its presence. To declare that your web page has an icon, you add the following 2 lines into the <head> section of your page:

<link rel=”icon” href=”favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon”>
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon”>

How to use Mac keyboard shortcuts ?

Posted by admin on June 13th, 2008

Mac computers are quite famous for the intuitive way of using them, here is the list of the most important shortcuts to know:

Menu commands
Keyboard shortcut Description
Shift-Command-Q Apple Menu
     Log out
Shift-Option-Command-Q Apple Menu
     Log out immediately
Shift-Command-Delete Finder Menu
     Empty Trash
Option-Shift-Command-Delete Finder Menu
     Empty Trash without dialog
Command-H Finder Menu
     Hide Finder
Option-Command-H Finder Menu
     Hide Others
Command-N File Menu
     New Finder window
Shift-Command-N File Menu
     New Folder
Command-O File Menu
     Open
Command-S File Menu
     Save
Shift-Command-S File Menu
     Save as
Command-P File Menu
     Print
Command-W File Menu
     Close Window
Option-Command-W File Menu
     Close all Windows
Command-I File Menu
     Get Info
Option-Command-I File Menu
     Show Attributes Inspector
Command-D File Menu
     Duplicate
Command-L File Menu
     Make Alias
Command-R File Menu
     Show original
Command-T File Menu
     Add to Favorites (Mac OS X 10.2.8 or earlier), Add to Sidebar (Mac OS X 10.3 or later—use Shift-Command-T for Add to Favorites)
Command-Delete File Menu
     Move to Trash
Command-E File Menu
     Eject
Command-F File Menu
     Find
Command-Z Edit Menu
     Undo
Command-X Edit Menu
     Cut
Command-C Edit Menu
     Copy
Command-V Edit Menu
     Paste
Command-A Edit Menu
     Select All
Command-1 View Menu
     View as Icons
Command-2 View Menu
     View as List
Command-3 View Menu
     View as Columns
Command-B View Menu
     Hide Toolbar
Command-J View Menu
     Show View Options
Command - [ Go Menu
     Back
Command - ] Go Menu
     Forward
Shift-Command-C Go Menu
     Computer
Shift-Command-H Go Menu
     Home
Shift-Command-I Go Menu
     iDisk
Shift-Command-A Go Menu
     Applications
Shift-Command-F Go Menu
     Favorites
Shift-Command-G Go Menu
     Goto Folder
Command-K Go Menu
     Connect to Server
Command-M Window Menu
     Minimize Window
Option-Command-M Window Menu
     Minimize All Windows
Command-? Help Menu
     Open Mac Help
Command-Space Open Spotlight (Mac OS X 10.4 or later)
Command-esc Front Row
     Activates Front Row for certain Apple computers

 

Find the whole list on their support pages.

How to use Windows shortcuts ?

Posted by admin on June 13th, 2008

A lot of us already know basic keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+C (copy) and Ctrl+V (paste), but did you know that there are more than 70 of them ? Here is the list of the most important one:

Windows system key combinations

F1: Help
CTRL+ESC: Open Start menu
ALT+TAB: Switch between open programs
ALT+F4: Quit program
SHIFT+DELETE: Delete item permanently

Windows program key combinations

CTRL+C: Copy
CTRL+X: Cut
CTRL+V: Paste
CTRL+Z: Undo
CTRL+B: Bold
CTRL+U: Underline
CTRL+I: Italic

Mouse click/keyboard modifier combinations for shell objects

SHIFT+right click: Displays a shortcut menu containing alternative commands
SHIFT+double click: Runs the alternate default command (the second item on the menu)
ALT+double click: Displays properties
SHIFT+DELETE: Deletes an item immediately without placing it in the Recycle Bin

General keyboard-only commands

F1: Starts Windows Help
F10: Activates menu bar options
SHIFT+F10 Opens a shortcut menu for the selected item (this is the same as right-clicking an object
CTRL+ESC: Opens the Start menu (use the ARROW keys to select an item)
CTRL+ESC or ESC: Selects the Start button (press TAB to select the taskbar, or press SHIFT+F10 for a context menu)
ALT+DOWN ARROW: Opens a drop-down list box
ALT+TAB: Switch to another running program (hold down the ALT key and then press the TAB key to view the task-switching window)
SHIFT: Press and hold down the SHIFT key while you insert a CD-ROM to bypass the automatic-run feature
ALT+SPACE: Displays the main window’s System menu (from the System menu, you can restore, move, resize, minimize, maximize, or close the window)
ALT+- (ALT+hyphen): Displays the Multiple Document Interface (MDI) child window’s System menu (from the MDI child window’s System menu, you can restore, move, resize, minimize, maximize, or close the child window)
CTRL+TAB: Switch to the next child window of a Multiple Document Interface (MDI) program
ALT+underlined letter in menu: Opens the menu
ALT+F4: Closes the current window
CTRL+F4: Closes the current Multiple Document Interface (MDI) window
ALT+F6: Switch between multiple windows in the same program (for example, when the Notepad Find dialog box is displayed, ALT+F6 switches between the Find dialog box and the main Notepad window)

Shell objects and general folder/Windows Explorer shortcuts

For a selected object:

F2: Rename object
F3: Find all files
CTRL+X: Cut
CTRL+C: Copy
CTRL+V: Paste
SHIFT+DELETE: Delete selection immediately, without moving the item to the Recycle Bin
ALT+ENTER: Open the properties for the selected object

To copy a file

Press and hold down the CTRL key while you drag the file to another folder.

To create a shortcut

Press and hold down CTRL+SHIFT while you drag a file to the desktop or a folder.

Find all the shortcuts on Microsoft support pages.

How to start your business Online, in 4 steps

Posted by admin on June 6th, 2008

If you seriously thinking of setting up or growing your business, you need to think about your internet presence today to ensure you keep one step ahead of the competition.

 

Here are 4 steps to help you get Online:

-          Step1 - Protect your domain names: This is the address people will use to access your web site (yourcompany.com / yourproduct.co.uk..).  Register your online presence as soon as you can.  Many a business has found the right idea and developed a good business plan, but failed to secure their online brand in time.

 

-          Step2 - Design of your website: Creating a website is a good first step, but the most important thing is to keep it updated, which is why, ideally you should manage your own website if you don’t want to end with expensive bills with design agencies.

 

-          Step3 – Hosting and Email: Each website needs to be hosted on a server, permanently online, in order to be reached by the web community. You should use personalised email accounts like sales@mycompany.com  - this is much more professional than a Yahoo or Hotmail address.

 

-          Step4 – Marketing your Website: Your website address should be everywhere (leaflets, business cards, print ads etc..). The more people who visit your site, the more visibility it will achieve in the  search engines.

 

As a major player in the UK internet market, Easily.co.uk offers a wide range of web services - including our Website Creator package, which can help you to build and update your website yourself, using your own professional domain name, including 2 business email addresses - for only £50 a year.

How to translate Easily ?

Posted by admin on June 5th, 2008

Get ready for the Euro 2008, and impress your friends with your new linguistic skills!

English: easily
Czech: snadno nabyl or snadno pozbyl
Croatian: lakši
Dutch: gemakkelijk
Greek: εύκολα
French: facilement
German: leicht
Italian: facilmente
Polish: łatwo
Portuguese: fàcilmente
Romanian: uşor or lesne or uşurinţă: cu uşurinţă or liber or calm.
Russian: легко
Spanish: fácilmente
Swedish: lätt
Turkish: kolayca or kolaylıkla or rahat rahat or kuşkusuz or şüphesiz or kesinlikle