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I found out my news feed was not working for my WordPress blog news.smartlabsoftware.com.
The feed is supposed to be directed to feedburner. The feedburner feed worked fine. But…
I typed in the feed path: news.smartlabsoftware.com/feed/ and whoa! A 404 not found.
First I blamed the plug-in. Not that.
After some research, I found out there was no .htaccess file in the blog’s root directory. Nor on my copy on my computer. I copied one from another blog site and the feed started working. I used the generic .htaccess that appears when WordPress is installed. I’m surprised WordPress did not recreate it. I’m on WordPress 2.9.
BTW, a nice feed to subscribe to is the FeedMedic alert. It is at the bottom of your home page for feedburner. It alerts you of any feed problems. Nice.
I tried to get a WordPress blog claimed on Technorati and it failed.
One fix suggestion was to remove the trailing slash from the feed and the blog URL. That did not work.
The next suggestion I tried was making the feeds full text instead of summary. That did not work.
Technorati says in its instructions to add the claim code to an existing post and the crawler will find it. Therein lies the problem.
I added the claim code to an existing article. The article updated but not the feed. I ended up writing a text post with the claim code on a separate line. I made sure I could see the code in the feed, the I claimed it. Successfully, I might add.
BTW, my feed goes to Feedburner which should not make a difference.
Here is the browser market share for Oct 2009:
| Browser | Percent Share |
|---|---|
| Internet Explorer | 63.6% |
| Firefox | 24.7% |
| Safari | 4.4% |
| Chrome | 3.9% |
| Opera | 2.3% |
Opera, around since 1996, has not made any headway. Neither has Chrome.
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Many ISPs put their own branding in the Internet Explorer title bar. Here is how to get rid of it without reinstalling anything.
Microsoft makes it fairly easy for companies or individuals to put their own branding on the IE title bar, but getting rid of it isn’t too hard, either. As always, back up the registry before you make changes. Navigate in your registry editor to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Internet Explorer \ Main
Now look in the right pane and you should see a value named Windows Title. In the Data column, you’ll see the branding text (such as the ISP’s name). You can delete this value to get rid of the branding entirely, or you can double click the value and change it to whatever you like (such as your own name). After you make the desired change, close the registry editor, close IE and then when you open it again, the change should take effect.
August 2009 search engine market share.
| Search Engine | % search share |
|---|---|
| 64.6 | |
| Yahoo | 16.0 |
| Bing | 10.7 |
| AOL | 3.1 |
| Ask | 1.7 |
I never thought removing an activex control could be so obfuscated.
Recently I ran Secunia PSI which checks the versions of programs to see if they are up-to-date and are a security risk. One program that showed up was Trend Micro’s Housecall activex control which was woefully out of date. Not using housecall anymore I though it simple to delete the activex control. Hah!
The control was firmly esconced in the Windows/Downloaded Program Files directory. Even starting Windows explorer as an admin did not help.
I opened Internet Explorer 8.0 > Tools > Manage add-ons.
The activex control was nowhere to be found until I selected All add-ons under the Show: label. I scrolled down to the Housecall activex control, right-clicked on it, and chose More Information. Then click Remove which will delete the control.
I have been waiting since Firefox 3.5 came out for Google to update Gears to be compatible. I had gears 0.5.21.0 installed and tried updating add-ons, which disabled gears, and going to the gear’s website, downloading and installing gears.
What I ended up doing was uninstalling gears, downloading the gears installer and running it. NOW the updated gears (0.5.29.0) installed and is compatible with Firefox 3.5. This was for Windows XP.
I tried this on Vista and gears installed fine through Firefox.
I am a power user of Firefox; it is not uncommon for me to have 30 tabs open. But with convenience comes problems. Memory problems. As the tabs are cycled through, closed, opened anew, the memory Firefox grabs grows (though it seems better in v3.5). One modification you can do is this:
1. In the url bar type in: about:config
2. Accept the warning.
3. Right-click on the resulting page and add New > Boolean
4. As the preference name enter: config.trim_on_minimize
5. Choose True as the value.
6. Restart Firefox.
Now when Firefox is minimized it frees up memory.