When using social websites like Facebook, Twitter, etc, usually we try not to divulge too much information. After all there are unscrupulous shenanigans out to phish information that you publicly display. Identity theft is pretty dangerous for you. You may try to protect yourself by limiting the number of information available, but now researchers have come out a way to infer about information that you have left out by using an algorithm to search your friends profile and infer information that you have left out.

So you thought that by leaving information out would afford you some privacy and perhaps only let people know about 20% about you, but with this technique they can infer information up to 80% accuracy about your other attributes. (more…)

The Star Two Rage section is more for the youth, twenty-something who likes to blog. Some of their featured Malaysian bloggers including the super blogger like Kenny Sia and several others. Ok, intriguing. So where do I stand as far as all this bloggers go?

Blogging may be all the rage these days especially in the Malaysian scene. Granted when I pop into blogging a few years back, blogging was still in its infancy (a few years is like millennia, considering the fast pace of online app development!). Back then I started a website about travel, it was a niche topic, doing pretty darn well I should say. But I have more things to say than just happy travelling. So I got myself a blog and started to write about technological stuffs which I like (ok, apart from travel which I also liked, and there are many more things which I like too.) (more…)

I noticed that some of my RSS feeds from Feedburner have the feedproxy.google.com domain and a long squiggly URL. I would like to remove and get rid of the feedproxy in my feedburner feeds and would much prefer to have the URL with my own domain and the webpage URL link. I also noticed that not all my RSS from my various blogs has this issue. So very likely there was some sort of setting at fault. (more…)

When choosing a webhosting solution like Exabytes, IPserveron, Bluehost or Bravenet, when you build your website, the control panel of the webhost that you choose will determine the usability. Of course the simpler your website that you make, there will be less impact if the control panel is buggy. However if you need to do something more you might find yourself struggling and perhaps hobbled by what buggy control panel that your domain is hosted in. (more…)

Earlier this year, one of my friends Wordpress website and Drupal website was hacked. Both of them were running a travel website and their site was stuff full of web spam with links to dubious website selling dubious products. Appears this was no isolated incident and I have come across forums where some person websites was hack here and there. Security is an issue if ever you are maintaining a website using any of the software for making website. (more…)

I have been curious, whether a HTML extension (or HTM extension for that matter) would do as well in a search engine as compared with extension that ended up in PHP, ASP, SHTML, PHTML, etc, etc. Of course each extension has its own usefulness.

HTML was started pretty long ago for use with web browsing. HTML meaning Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML in short as a standard means of encoding a file to display text and graphic on your browser. It has since come a long way with many changes to its standards, though those old web pages should still work in the new modern browsers despite having HTML code that may be deprecated.

There was also forum thread discussing whether HTML will have a better standing than HTM extension. And there was more too discussing whether HTML extension would be superior in search engine than web pages that uses extension like PHP, ASP, SHTML, PHTML, JSP, CGI, etc, etc. (more…)

Recently I wanted to update my database driven software like this Wordpress which was managed by Simple Script. Sure, using Simple Script to manage my software installations in Bluehost was really convenient, but I didn’t expect to see hiccups in their updating of software. Try as I might, the installations wouldn’t update to the latest version.

In the end I had to contact Bluehost support to find out what’s the matter. A flurry of exchanges later, still no solution could be found. Apparently another user also reported a similar problem – inability to update the software using Simple Script. (more…)

This is really strange. Perhaps I’ve not been blogging for awhile, but to find the website traffic dropped suddenly is certainly disconcerting. Sure this website is mostly a blogging website in nature. It’s always nice to see lots of traffic despite the high bounce rate. Never expected the traffic to suddenly tank!

Sudden Drop in Website traffic!

Do you make your own web site or make a blogging web site? What is the purpose of blogging anyway? There is a difference between blogging and building a web site. Blogging is linear, it has no structure while a web site has a pyramid form where people can navigate to find relevant information. In terms of usefulness for people visiting a web site, a proper structured web site would be superior to a blog.

If you plan to make money from blogging, it would require a massive effort. You get some good pages with good incoming links and traffic, but mostly you get lots of bounce pages and for those visitors who linger, most would just read that post that was relevant to what they were searching and off they go. You won’t see them again.

Blogging has very high bounce rate. It is quite common to see 80-90% or more bounce because most of the posts do not fit in to what people are searching for. Once a visitor drop in, and find the whole web site is not quite relevant to what they are searching generally, they would just pop right out again. (more…)

A friend commented, “Wah! You got so many web sites! Heard that can make money from blogging. Wanna try too.”

Well, it is not as simple as that. If it were so, I would have been a rich man by now. Sure it is no harm trying. Especially if you can build a web site for free using free service from Google, Bravenet, Yola, Geocities, etc. But in the end after making some post for some months, not seeing any results, with very paltry returns, the-would-be-webmaster call it quits and that’s the end of that. (more…)