All you need is a USB flashdrive. I use a 1gig LG flash drive, but something as small as 128mb will do. First of all, go to Portable Apps and download the Portable App installer. Install the program onto your flashdrive (it’ll take a while to do this, so go do something else for a while). Once that’s done, you’ll want to start up the portable version of Firefox. This is where a majority of your survival kit will be going.

If you don’t already have one, head over to google and sign up for an account. With this account you’ll have access to Google mail (gmail), Calendar, docs, and many others. With this account, you get 6GB of online storage.

The best way to use that storage is a little Firefox plugin called GSpace. With GSpace, you can upload/download any file you want via Firefox. That means that if you’re finishing up a class and you’ve got some homework you need to finish up, you can upload the word doc, the images, the audio files, or whatever you need to Google and head home, download/complete the assignment and reupload for download at school.

Now you might be saying that you can easily do this with a flash drive. This is true. But if you’re a graphic or web design major (I’m web major), you’ll have MASSIVE files that will very quickly fill up your flashdrive. But with Google + GSpace, you can fill up your 6GB with endless amounts of stuff.

This next one is setting your homepage to http://igoogle.com. Here you can find little widgets and dock them on the page.

Personally, I’ve got Calendar, Gmail, and a few others docked so I can easily view my schedule, email, etc. Also remember to trick out your Firefox.

Even though its portable, this version of Firefox can use plugins and themes just like the full version. The only difference is that Firefox auto-clears the browsing history when you remove the flashdrive (this reduces the amount of space needed to store Firefox).

Lastly, make use of the programs on Portable Apps. There are a ton of smaller versions of popular programs that you can use. There’s graphics editors, text editors, IM clients, and more.

Also, you can easily add your own programs that will show up on the Portable Apps menu on the computer. I’ve got some GBA/SNES emulators on mine, alone with a few smaller games (Conquest, Crayon Physics, etc.).

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Unlike Windows, your get two panels on your desktop: top and bottom. The majority of the bottom panel is given over to the window selector for your running applications. For most users, this leaves the top relatively empty, apart from the Ubuntu system menus on the left and the date and time on the right. So let’s make use of that space.

Applets

If you right-click on the top panel and select ‘Add to panel’, you’ll be presented with a list of cool panel applets. There’s quite a few to play with, but here’s my pick of applets to add.

System Monitor
This displays helpful information such as CPU, dick or network usage. When it appears it’s just a single black rectangle and a tad short for what it displays, so do the following:

1. Right-click on it and select Preferences
2. Tick the Network and ‘Hard disk’ boxes
3. Set ‘System Monitor Width’ to 60.

Now you should find three nicely spaced graphs for CPU, network and disk usage.

Weather Report
To set this up for Australia (wherever your location may be), right-click on it, select Preferences and under Location, drill down to your state and city. Under General, make sure the temperate unit is set to Celsius. Then click Close, right-click it again and select Update. Left-clicking on the applet will give you a detailed report.

Deskbar
This is one of those cleve utilities you can’t do without. Based on the same principles as Apple’s Spotlight, when clicked on, it will provide an input box — whatever you type will be matched against a command, email contacts, local documentation, dictionary search, internet search and more. You can use it to both find information and open or launch the references it finds. Right-click and select Preferences to expand the list of sources used for searching.

Eyes
This is just a bit of fun and actually a very old application from way back when Unix was something you would only find in server rooms. What does it do? Watch the eyes as they follow your mouse around!

Launchers
You’ll note Ubuntu already provides launchers for Firefox, Evolution and the help system; but you can add your own. To add something from the Ubuntu menus, simply scroll through the menus to your application, then left-click and drag it to the panel. If you want to add a program not in the menu system, first right-click on the desktop, select ‘Create Launcher’, fill our the details and then drag it from the desktop to the panel. You can move and arrange them by either left-clicking or middle button-clicking and dragging them. You can prevent certain launchers from being moved by toggling ‘Lock to panel’ when right-clicking.

Top Tip

Size it up
You don’t have to stick with the default panel sizes Ubuntu provides. On larger monitors the text and icons can be smaller, so enlarging them can help. Simply right-click on a panel and select Properties and then adjust size in pixels. It will happily expand to 120 pixels in height, but you’ll probably find a setting of 30-40 to be more amiable. The top and bottom panel can be sized independently, so you can keep the bottom task window smaller while making your program launchers and applets on the top bar larger.

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Simply Place a DVD in your drive, Start Handbrake, Click the “source” icon and select the VIDEO_TS folder and click OK. It Scans the files and then allows you to select a destination folder. You can further configure your preferred options. Click the “Start” button and walk away.

After an hour of so come back to your computer and the file has been converted to an .mp4 file. Add this file to the Movies Playlist of your iTunes Library. Select the movie and right click. Choose “Convert for iPod/iPhone” from the menu.

This process takes the longest. I let it go over night. When you wake up in the morning, sync up your movies and there it is. I have done this with several movies and they are extremely high quality. There you go. Great quality movies just like from the iTunes store.

Disclaimer: I only recommend doing this for personal use. Only convert movies that you have purchased. Do not distribute converted files. This is illegal.

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Maybe you like to grab and customize free HTML templates, maybe it’s the fact that you need your content easily to be probably indexed by search engines or maybe you just don’t like flash because it has become tantamount to an inferno of noise and crappy animations.

As a fact there could be various reasons which could make you abstain from designing sites completely in flash. It’s not my intention to convert you to a group of flash lovers.

I’m here to tell you how to combine the best of both worlds. Stick to your HTML layout and then apply the finishing touch by replacing the header with a flash animation.

Well, it could be anything but I think the header as a natural choice so that’s what we are going to focus on for now.

What do we need to get started?

PREPARING OUR HTML TEMPLATE:

1. Grab a free template. For this tutorial lets use this one designed by Rambling Soul. Unpack the files.
2. Open index.html and style.css in your favorite text editor. Notepad is suitable for the basic operations we are going to perform.
3. You need a piece of JavaScript now. Get it from here and unpack it to the same folder the html files and the .css file are stored.
4. In index.html add this line in the header right before:[CODE1]
5. Delete everything inside [CODE2], that would be this: [CODE3]
6. Now let’s add the code that calls our flash animation. Copy the following code and paste it to the very same location from which we just deleted a couple of lines:
   [CODE4]
7. In style.css find this line: #wrap #header { background:url(images/header.jpg) no-repeat; height:229px; margin-top:10px;}
   Delete background:url(images/header.jpg) no-repeat;
8. Now we have removed the original image from the header. The script that we linked to in step 4 and made use of in step 6 will embed the flash movie as seamless as possible in all major browsers. You can just as well get used this way of embedding your flash files as it’s better than any other way.

THE FLASH HEADER, REUSING THE CONCEPT €“ PART 1

1. We have prepared our template for our flash header now. Let’s create the flash header. Open header.jpg located in the images folder. You can perform the following steps in almost any image editor, for this tutorial I’ll use Photoshop.
2. Because Ramblingsoul has created such a beautiful frame, let’s reuse it. Select “Rectangular Marquee Tool” (Hotkey is “M”) and select the whole blue area (the actual image inside the frame. Select it all including the cute strawberry-guy. Don’t select the bright frame).
3. When this area is selected go to “Select” >> “Inverse” (Hotkey is CTRL + SHIFT + i). Press CTRL + C to copy the selected area.
4. Go to “File” >> “New”. Say “OK” and press CTRL + V to paste our frame.
5. Go to “File” >> “Save as” (hotkey is CTRL + SHIFT + S). Name it “frame” Choose GIF as format and save it to the images folder. (The template you downloaded contained this folder)

THE FLASH HEADER, NOW IT’S GETTING FLASHY €“ PART 2

1. Now open Flash CS3 (or any previous version you might have).
2. Create a new document. (“File” >> “New”) Select ActionScript 3.0 or 2.0, it doesn’t really matter.
3. Press CTRL + J to open “Document Properties”. Dimensions should be 882px * 229px. Framerate 35 FPS. Press “OK”.
4. On the very left of the timeline double click “Layer 1″ and rename it to “pic1″. Create a new layer (see image) a double click it to rename it “pic2″. Create a third layer a rename it “pic3″. Create a fourth and last layer and rename it “frame”.
5. Download these three slightly modified royality free pictures from here. Put them in the images folder. Import them by clicking “File” >> “Import” >> “Import to library”. Select them all or import them one at a time. Also import our self-created frame namely “frame.gif”.
6. You screen should look something like this.
7. Select layer “frame”. Drag our “frame” image from Library to the scene. If not align-box is visible press CTRL + K. Press the icon below the text “To stage:” so that it’s active. Now select the image “frame” we just dragged to the stage and press “Align horizontal center” and “Align vertical center”. Now our “frame” is in place. Lock the layer by pressing the dot below the lock once. Also lock the layers “pic2″ and “pic3″.
8. Select the layer “pic1″ and drag it to the stage. Align it like we just did with our “frame” image. Because our frame image hasn’t got quite even sides you have to move the image to pixels to the left by pressing the left key twice.
9. Convert our “pic1″ to a movie-clip symbol by selecting it once and pressing F8. Name it mc_pic1
10. Insert new key frames (still on the “pic1″ layer) by clicking on the 15 frame (don’t confuse this frame with our image “frame”) and pressing F6. Click the 85 frame and press F6. Click the 100 frame and press F6.
11. While still on the 100th frame click the image once and properties select color >> tint >> 100%.
12. Right-click somewhere between the 85th and the 100th frame and select “Create Motion Tween”. Now go to the first frame and click the image once again. From properties select color >> color >> advanced >> settings >> Replace the first three “0″ values with “255″. Don’t increase the value next to Alpha. Press “ok”.
13. Right-click somewhere between the first and the 15th frame and select “Create Motion Tween”. Now lock this layer, hide it by clicking the dot below the eye and unlock layer “pic2″.
14. Select the unlocked layer “pic2″ and repeat step 8 to 13.
15. When you have repeated those steps lock the layer “pic2″ and hide it.
16. For the third image and the layer “pic3″ redo the steps. When you’re done lock layer “pic3″ and hide it.
17. Unlock layer “pic2″ and unhide it. Select all of its 100 frames. Drag all the frames so that it starts in frame 100 instead of frame 1.
18. Lock the layer “pic2″ and hide it.
19. Unlock layer “pic3″ and unhide it. Select all of its 100 frames. Drag all the frames so that it starts in frame 199 instead of frame 1.
20. Unlock our layer “frame” and go to the 283th frame and press F5 to insert frame.
21. Unlock and unhide all layers. We are done! Now press CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + S and navigate to our images folder we have been using so far. Name the file header and save it.
22. It’s nice to have the source file so also save that by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + S.

UPLOADING

1. 1. What do we need to upload? Everything in the original template folder besides the old header imager, namely header.jpg. Be sure that it’s the edited index.html and style.css you are uploading.
2. Also be sure to upload our JavaScript namely swfobject.js.
3. Be sure to upload our header.swf, it should be in the images folder.
4. You don’t have to upload pic1.jpg, pic2.jpg, pic3.jpg or frame.gif. They are all contained in our .swf file.

You can download and review the final result here. I have included the images used as well as the .fla

I’ll create a Video tutorial of this later, so if your lost don’t worry too much. Until then feel free to mail me your questions here. I can’t guarantee a reply but I’ll try hard

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As a longtime jQuery user I was excited to take some time to read and review two new jQuery books.

Packt Publishing provided me free copies of Learning jQuery and the jQuery Reference Guide.

I spent most of October reading through them and making the most of my first book review experience.

In short, these are both excellent books and getting them together will benefit a developer of any skill level. This review will focus on the books, but is equally a review of the jQuery javascript framework.

As a Visual Foxpro developer using the West Wind Web Connection server framework, I was in need of a client side framework to both reduce my work load and make my applications more browser agnostic.

One of the most important aspects of this was that the client side framework has to be backend agnostic. I tried plain ole’ javascript (POJ), Mootools, prototype, and a few of the ajax only frameworks on Sourceforge at the time. None of them made any sense to me as a windows developer.

I was in need of a tab control one day for a project and it was jQuery and its wealth of plugins to the rescue.

As I started writing my own jQuery code, it just made sense. I couldn’t write in POJ anymore. Not that I’m stubborn, I just can’t remember how, jQuery just makes it so easy.

As time progressed and my love affair with jQuery grew, I was (and continue to be) in need of some more formal education. Both of these books accomplish this in different ways.

jQuery Reference Guide

Sharing a similar first chapter to the “Learning jQuery” about obtaining jQuery, the reference guide the jumps into a “what were going to tell you” mode that is concise and to the point. My military expereince taught me to appreciate their…

• What we are going to tell you
• What we came to tell you
• What we told you

…format throughout the book. The next ten chapters cover the wide range of tasks in jQuery starting with selectors and covering HTML form manipulation. I keep a one page cheat sheet close to my development machine at all times, but this reference guide is going to be just as close to me from now on.

None of this guide would have made any sense were it not for its companion, Learning jQuery.

Learning jQuery

This ten chapter and three appendices book can nearly stand as a reference guide on its own. The authors stick with the same HTML through most of the book to illustrate the progessive enhancement that is so important to the jQuery methodology.

Personally I appreciated this as you could watch a simple css/html page become an enchanced interface with real world implications.

After the excellent examples a chapter is devoted to jQuerys biggest strength, plugins, some of which I’ve listed below.

Appendices “A” and “B” cover the online resources available to a jQuery user and appendix “C” goes into some of the higher level things to do with jQuery and how to avoid memory leaks.

My point is that there is something in this book for every level of javascript developer, from beginner to expert. I highly recommend it!

Wrapping up

jQuery was a big hit at the recent Web Connection conference I attended. I took the books with me, but didn’t get to spend much time with them as they were being borrowed, discussed, and shared among the attendees.

If you are looking to start with jQuery or expand your knowledge base, these two books will suit you well.

$(books).purchase(function(){
$(.JavascriptSkills).increase();
});

Publisher Resources / Purchase

• Learning jQuery (Amazon)
• jQuery Reference Guide (Amazon)
• Book example code

Other Reviews

• Slashdot
• Ben Nadel
• Brian Dillard

Personal (short) List of jQuery Resources

• jQuery Homepage
• Excellent plugins by Mike Alsup
• Cookie Plugin
• RikRikRik plugins
• Live query plugin
• Discussion Group (4,000+ members)

Originally posted on SKFox.com. Used with permission.

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While there are thousands of tutorials on web development, most of them assume the reader already knows a bit, or already has a website. Very few address the total novice. Contrary to what a lot of people believe, it is not expensive to maintain a site. For instance, it costs me less than $50 a year to maintain my own site and blog, and the site related to my books.

So, where do you start? I have put together a few basic steps that should hopefully get anyone started, even if your web design skills are zero. Once you have that web presence, you can do more about making it work better. And you don’t have to be development guru to achieve it.

Step 1: Register your domain name

This is the “whatever.com” the user types to get to your site. Remember that the usual .com, .org and .net are not the only extentions you can have. You could go for .tv, .info, .biz, .name, and of course, the country-specific extensions. For example: .in (India), .cn (China), de (Germany), .eu (Europe), .us (USA), etc. It all depends on what your site is about.

A domain usually costs less than $10 a year, depending on what sort of extension you choose. It is advisable to choose a reliable company to register your domain with. If you’re unsure, go with one of the big names, like GoDaddy, Network Solutions or Yahoo! Domains.

Step 2: Figure out what sort of site you want

It doesn’t matter whether you knit sweaters for charity, have a multi-million dollar business, or just want to share your Doctor Who fanfiction—in this day and age you have every right to need or want a website of your very own. However, it will make your job far easier if you know what your site will be like. Take a look at other similar web sites for ideas, though this could possibly prove counter-productive, as the millions of ideas out there might be more confusing than helpful!

To make this easier, open a blank document (or take a piece of paper) and list out your site’s contents. What pages will you have? Will there be a photo gallery? Will there be a contact form? From this you should get a pretty good idea of your layout.

Step 3: Find a suitable template

Since this article assumes you cannot design one yourself, there are two options here. Either pay someone to design one for you or use one of the thousands of great free templates available on the Net. I highly recommend the OpenDesigns site for free templates. Not only are there almost a thousand (including my own! *shameless plug*) available, it has a vibrant and friendly community that will help you out should you get stuck at any stage. If you like a template and want to use it, but are not sure what to do, mail the designer for help. Most people will get back to you. I have helped out a number of people who have downloaded and used my templates for free.

Step 4: Get hosting

Now this is slightly trickier, as for every reasonable and reliable host out there, there exists an equally scary horror story of disappearing acts and clients being left high and dry. Webhostingtalk is a good place to find out about people’s experiences of various hosts. What sort of hosting you will want will depend on what sort of site you have, what you envisage your traffic to be like, and what your budget is. Free hosts are also available too, but remember that they’re likely to have caveats associated with them.

Step 5: Put it all together

And finally, you need to transfer the contents of your site into the template you are using, and then upload everything—images included—to your host’s server. Let’s take it one by one.

If the thought of looking at code makes your heart rate go up, don’t worry, it’s not at all hard! Get a text editor like Notepad++ that highlights code, and it is easy to see where your text will go. If you really feel you cannot handle it, you could use a WYSIWYG editor like NVU.

Once you have everything in place, you will need to transfer the files to the server space you bought from your web host. You will need a program known as an FTP client (for example, FileZilla). Your hosts will have given you a username and password for FTP-ing, and you will need these settings to access your server space. Upload all the files associated with your site—by copying-and-pasting, dragging-and-dropping, etc.—to the public_html folder of your website. Before you upload, do remember to check locally on your computer to see that all links are intact.

If you’ve done this right, typing in your domain name should show up your site. If you’ve messed up somewhere, head over to OpenDesigns and ask for help!

Good luck!

(Originally posted at Writeside.net.)

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Just a quick note before beginning: this guide has been written for Windows XP (my operating system) and therefore the names of certain options or menus might be different.

Almost every single USB flash drive comes formatted with the FAT file system by default, which allows them to be used by virtually any version of Windows that supports USB.

Although Microsoft doesn’t make it either intuitive or straightforward, you can format a flash drive with the NTFS file system. This gives you the added benefit of a robust file system and a smaller allocation unit, which makes smaller files occupy less space on large flash drives (why NTFS is better than FAT).

In addition, you can take advantage of NTFS compression to create additional effective space on the flash drive or enable the Encrypting File System for added security.

Unfortunately, all good things come at a price and this statement is no different for the NTFS file system. The price you will pay for NTFS features is slower copying times (about 1.5x for USB 1.1 and 2x for USB 2.0), even without encryption or compression enabled.

To enable compression for the entire flash drive:

1. Open My Computer, right-click the flash drive and select ‘Properties’.
2. Tick the box that says ‘Compress drive to save disk space’ in the bottom box and click OK
3. In the ‘Confirm Attribute Changes’ dialog box, keep the default ‘Apply changes to [drive letter]:\, subfolder and files’ and click OK.

You can also enable or disable compression for single files and/or folders, which is the only option for encryption.

To start either procedure:

• Right-click the file or folder and select ‘Properties’ and then click the ‘Advanced’ tab
• You can now tick either Compression or Encryption. Make your choice, click OK and see step 3 above.

Although you can’t enable both compression and encryption on the same file or folder, you could compress one set of files or folders and encrypt a different set.

With Windows XP’s default settings, NTFS isn’t included on the Windows format tool’s list of file systems, but you can add the option by changing the default on the ‘Policy’ tab for the flash drive from ‘Optimize for quick removal’ to ‘Optimize for performance’, as illustrated here.

Although you must have ‘Optimize for performance’ ticked to add the ‘NTFS format’ option, if you wish you can change back to the default after formatting. However, either policy gives the same time for copying files to the flash drive because apparently XP only enables the write cache for fixed USB drives.

If you frequently swap files on and off your flash drive(s), you should check out Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager. This freeware program requires the .NET Framework 1.1, but won’t install if you have .NET Framework 2.0 or later (weird, eh?).

The solution/workaround to this problem is to temporarily uninstall the later version of .NET Framework, install version 1.1, install USB Flash Drive manager and then reinstall the later .NET Framework.

And so ends this article on Fine-tuning your flash drive.

If you have any questions, comments or something was unclear, leave a comment or contact me on my site.

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Disclaimer: I do not take responsibility for anything you do to your router. If you brick it or something else goes wrong, it’s not my fault. I’ve documented everything I’ve done in flashing my own routers however your mileage may very. Proceed at your own risk.

It takes only a few minutes to flash the router with a new firmware but you must note these key steps.

Keep in mind that you can only flash a Linksys WRT54G Router version 1-4. Look on the bottom of your router. There should be a label with the version number on it.

You can also tell from the serial number by checking the first 4 letters:

• Version 1.0: CDF0, CDF1
• Version 1.1: CDF2, CDF3
• Version 2.0: CDF5
• Version 2.1: CDF6
• Version 2.2: CDF7
• Version 3.0: CDF8
• Version 3.1: CDF9
• Version 4.0: CDFA

I’m going to assume you’ve already downloaded your choice of DD-WRT firmware. If not, go download it now. I recommend dd-wrt.v23 SP2.

Flashing Your Router:

1. Connect your PC with the .bin file to the router via Ethernet cable. Do not try to flash the firmware through a wireless link, which could be unstable and lead to a brick.

2. Reset your router’s current firmware to factory defaults. You can do this through the current firmware’s configuration pages €“ Administration/Factory Defaults/Yes/Save Settings.

As an alternative, you can physically reset the factory defaults by pressing and holding the reset button on the back of the router for 30 seconds.

3. Now you can flash the new firmware. Connect to the router’s configuration pages with your browser and navigate to Administration/Firmware Upgrade. Open the browse dialog to select your .bin firmware file.

4. Once you start the firmware upgrade €“ do nothing! Have a drink, go for a walk. Just don’t touch your computer or the router. Leave them alone for this intimate moment. Interrupting this process will only produce a new baby brick.

5. After a minute or so you’ll see the upgrade progress bar complete. The router will now reset itself and assuming everything worked, you’ll see a new page with a button marked Continue.

6. Wait at least two more minutes before clicking the Continue button. Sometimes the router presents the continue screen before it has truly cleaned up from its upgrade and you’re better safe than sorry. Have another drink or walk around the block again.

7. Now click Continue. You should be forwarded to the main configuration page for your router. In the case of DD-WRT, it looks much like Linksys’ own page, except with DD-WRT markings and a whole lot more features to explore.

That’s it. You’re done. Congratulations. From here you’ll want to explore the configuration pages and follow any guides or documentation available for the firmware you’ve installed.

Possible Issues:

What if you didn’t make it this far? What if something terrible has happened and the router did not come back to life?

This is a rare but possible event. It is very unlikely if you’ve followed steps one through six. Your router may be bricked, which is somewhat like being dead, except with the possibility of resurrection.

First, try to reset the router to factory defaults by pressing and holding the reset button on its rear for 30 seconds.

When and if it relights, try to connect to it with your browser. You may be lucky and have a chance to start the process over again.

There are various other tricks you can try to revive a bricked router, also known as recovering from a bad flash. In this case, you want to consult the WRT54G Revival Guide.

Originally posted on Planet Sean.

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At the original writing of this article, Google Pack came with Adaware, Firefox, and other great tools. But for whatever reason, Google has removed them from the Google Pack download.

Google Earth

Have you ever wanted to instantly view anywhere in the world? Well with Google Earth you can. Google Earth allows you to view satelite images of the world up close. A better description of it is Google Maps times a million.

The program is for broadband users (do to the endless number of images you’ll be instantly downloading as you view the world), so if you’ve got dial up you might want to think twice about use this program.

The program comes in three versions: Free, Plus, and Pro.

Google Desktop

Using things called “Gadgets” you can add hundreds of features and tools to your desktop using a sidebar.

The sidebar can be set to display above everything, under everything, or a few other positions.

With this sidebar thing comes something Windows XP users have been needing for a while. A fast (just as fast as Google’s search engine most of the time) search for your computer.

The search is restricted to documents (word, text, images, html files, etc.), but its still a very helpful thing to have. More information on GDS can be found here.

This is comparable to Vista’s Sidebar. In fact, when I bought my Vista computer, it came with Google Desktop loaded instead of Sidebar and for a few hours I couldn’t tell the difference.

Picasa

If you’re a photographer, or just a person with a gazillion (or something like that) images, Picasa is for you.

In just a few moments after being started, Picasa hunts down and finds all of the images on your computer. But that’s not all it does.

Picasa organizes your images by year, allows you to further organize your images without leaving Picasa, lets you password project photo collections, and much more.

Google Toolbar

Using Google Toolbar, you can easily search using Google no matter what web site you’re on.

It is available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. There’s really not much to say about this, since its pretty self explanatory. It works well with Firefox, because a lot of Firefox theme developers make it so the search bar blends in with their theme.

Photo Screensaver

If you’ve got yourself a bunch of awesome pictures and you’ve always wanted to make your own screensaver, then this is the program for you! Using Photo Screensaver, you can take pictures from your computer (or the internet) and turn them into a working screenaver.

Adobe Reader

Adobe reader is a free reader for Adobe’s PDF format. It’s like Adobe Acrobat without the editing/creating functions.

This is definitely a must have for those in the business world, as well as those that like to read the 500mbs worth of Star Wars books you downloaded (and by “those” I mean me).

Norton Security Scan/Spyware Doctor Starter Edition

Norton is a virus remover and Spyware Doctor SE takes care of trojans, adware, spyware, etc. These two don’t really require much explanation.

Personally, I would exclude these two from your download and pick up Adaware instead.

Google Talk

Google Talk is a simple and easy to use IMing software that lets you chat with GMail users around the world. GMail comes with this program built into their inboxes, but you can also download it and run it like you would AIM, MSN, etc. Google Talk also lets you do voice conversations.

Skype

Skype is basically the same thing as Google Talk, but without the GMail aspect. Its interface is no where near as simple or easy to use as Google Talk’s, but its still a great IMing program that I use everyday.

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This is something that a few people must be encountering, and while there are detailed instructions at the WP Codex on how to backup a database, install WordPress, and reinstate your posts, it can be a little scary for a first timer. (I don’t consider myself a WP newbie, but I did do some very silly things in a process that can be achieved with minimal pain.)

So here’s my quick guide to moving your Word Press site to a different location, incorporating all that I learnt from the experience in one place!

Step 1: Back up your database, theme, plugins

Backing up your database is not as scary as it sounds, especially if you have the WP Backup plugin. If so, you’re probably being a good girl/boy and backing up your tables regularly.

But even if not, a backup can be easily done through PHPMyAdmin, accessed via the control panel at your hosting account. Select the Word Press tables in your database and go to the “Export” tab. Select the “save as file” box and download the backup to your computer. You should be having a .sql file. If you selected to compress, you’ll have a zipped/gzipped version of it.

Right. Now your posts, comments, etc. are safe.

You also need to backup your theme files, and any plugins you use.

Step 2: Recreate the WP database at the new location

Using your control panel, create a new MySQL database at your new host’s, adding a user and password. Go to PHPMyAdmin, select the database, and then click on the SQL tab. Copy and paste the data from your .sql backup file in the box provided. (Alternatively, use the “Show location of textfile” option: click on browse and point it to the .sql backup file). Now go get some coffee while the query executes. Sometimes it can take a while.

Step 3: Install Word Press at the new location

Upload all the files to your new location. Remember to rename config-sample.php to config.php, and put in your new database settings (database name, username, and password). Also upload your theme files (to the wp-content/themes folder) and plugins (to wp-content/plugins folder).

Step 4: Type in the URL of your site and press Enter/Return

Yes, you’re mostly done. At this point you may notice that clicking on your posts or archives is returning an error. This is the case if you had a custom permalinks structure. You need to update your .htaccess. Log in to the dashboard. Go to Options –> Permalinks. Update the permalinks. If Word Press cannot rewrite to your .htaccess, it will tell you exactly what to put in there. Use this data to update your .htaccess manually.

And now you are done!

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