I was researching improvements in Firefox 3 and came accross the following “Easter Eggs”.

Type these into the address bar (no preceeding http://):

about:robots

about:mozilla

Funny!

You may have heard that Firefox 3 has just been released. In case you didn’t know it is more secure, more flaxible and faster than IE. That said, there is room for improvement. Because it is an open source product it is easy to customise it and speed it up.

Follow these steps and you should notice a speed improvement:

1: In the address bar, type about:config (it will warn you, are you sure… yes, you are!)

2: Scroll down and alter the following settings:

Set network.http.pipelining to true

Set network.http.proxy.pipelining to true

Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to some number like 25. This effectively mean Firefox will do 25 things at once, cool eh?

3: Right click anywhere on the screen, select New and then Integer. Give a name of nglayout.initialpaint.delay and when it asks for a value, enter 0 (zero). This means the browser does not wait before it starts to draw the page.

There you go. You should notice that pages load faster. The speed increase will largely depend on the internet conection you have, the faster it is the more you will notice.

There are legitimate reasons these are not set as default. 25 connections at the same time to a server does put strain on the server. You doing it will make minimal difference, but the several Million users of Firefox on the Internet all using this setting would have an impact. For those reasons the browser designers have to conform to certain standards.

Enjoy!

A number of people have contacted us with similar issues, sites taking a long time to respond and then loading quite fast. It turns out these people are almost always ADSL users and quite often on a handful of providers (bulldog, O2, be internet etc).

The problem seems to be with the DNS servers. Quite why they are performing so poorly I don’t know, but there is an easy solution.

The solution is to use OpenDNS, free to use DNS servers that perform very well and very fast.

How to I use OpenDNS?

There are 2 ways. Firstly you can configure your computer to use them. Secondly you can configure your router to use OpenDNS.

You need to login to your router (see your router instructions for how to do this).

Once you have logged in you should see settings for Primary and Secondary DNS. You need to change these to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 respectively (make note of your current settings before you do this).

Once you have done this, press “Apply”.

Your router should then reboot and the settings should take effect.

This should solve your problem. If it does not then put your settings back and call your ISP. You can now tell them you have tried using OpenDNS servers and it didn’t help, thus ruling out a DNS issue.

Have you ever noticed that if you search for pages from your site in Google you see the words “Blog archive” splitting your title from your page description?

After looking through all the menus in the wp-admin screen I found that in actual fact you need to edit the header.php file to do this. The solution is simple, as follows:

1. Edit the header.php file (either in a text editor or in the presentation area of the admin menus)

Look for the following code:

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

2. Remove the red section.

3. Upload the file, or click “update” if you did it in the wp-admin menu.

That gets rid of the “Blog Archive” text and Google should now show more of your title as there is more room!

Ever wondered how to tell when a page was last modified? Maybe you found a piece of information and you have no way of knowing if it was writted in 2002 or 2008.

Here’s a little trick for you. Paster the following line into your Address bar and press enter :

javascript:alert(document.lastModified)

Easy as that!

Whether you are an Internet veteran or a fresh faced “newbie” you will undoubtedly experienced spam in your inbox at one time or another. Little blue pills, replica watches and not forgetting that bloke in Nigeria with the 3.2 billion dollar fortune he wants to share with you all club together to clutter your inbox and keep you from seeing the genuine valuable mail you have waiting for you.

There are several ways to tackle this issue. Allow me to explain.

Privacy

Firstly you should if at all possible keep your email address off your web page. If it is essential it is on there then you should “obfuscate” (encrypt) it. There are ways of doing this which I will get to later.

Never use a catch-all email address

This is worth repeating… NEVER use a catch-all email address.  Spammers often guess at your email address and blanket send to all names under the sun. If you just have 1 or 2 email addresses live then you will drastically reduce the chance of spam on your account.

Spam Assassin

This checks for tell take signs of spam and gives the mail a rating based on what it finds. You set the level at which am email is classed as spam. Spam Assassin can then either mark the header as such or delete the mail altogether.

Domainkeys and SPF records

These are a little more complicated but basically give the email address authenticity so the destination server knows the email genuinely came from where it should have. This enables the server to handle the spam issue with a little more intelligence and has proven very effective on cutting down our spam levels. Please contact us to have this enabled on your account if you are getting spam.