kerry
Kerry is a mother of two and has a loving husband. She enjoys writing and blogging about a variety of topics. Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com
Homepage: http://www.callcatalog.com
Posts by kerry
Cool Password Trick
Apr 28th
More and more applications. More and more websites. They all ask for your password. Password security has become more of an issue now. You read news stories of how hackers broke into XXX website and stole people’s passwords — in fact it happened to me as well. Unfortunately, many people use the same password in all applications which creates a sticky situation. These hackers then tried to use the same username and password to login to other high-profile websites like facebook, hotmail, etc…
How can you create a good, well written, and secure password that you can remember — yet avoids the situation above? Here’s a simple, cool password trick.
1) Find a password you like, for example my dog’s name Barkie
2) Replace one or two letters with a number or character. In this case Barkie becomes B@rk1e <– here’s your primary password. I used the replacement characters @=a and 1=i, but you can do any other combination.
3) Make your custom password. Any time you visit a new website where you need to register and create a password, use the website’s name as a prefix to your password. My preference is the first 5 characters of the website name is its easy to remember, but you can use any number of characters. For example, if I register at AskTheAdmin.com, I would use as a password askth_B@rk1e.
And so you have it, a custom password for every website.
Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics. Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory website. You can also read her blog which discusses personal privacy issues.
Odd Outlook Express Issue Fixed
Apr 16th
A few days ago I started receiving the error message on my computer in a popup window, “To free up disk space Outlook Express can compact messages. This may take a few minutes.” There are 2 options: OK and Cancel.
The interesting thing is that I never installed or use Outlook Express.
How did this happen??
Well, apparently this is caused by Windows XP SP3 and Windows Desktop Search (which I also installed)…ugh. here’s quite a lively forum chat over at Microsoft on this subject also.
(One note of caution. Be very careful when modifying your registry. If you do not feel comfortable doing it, please don’t do it. Any inadvertent changes or mistakes could cause disastrous effects..)
Here’s how to stop it from occurring:
1. Close all programs.
2. Create a Restore Point
3. Find this key in the registry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Identities\{GUID}\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express\5.0
4. Double click the Compact Check Count
5. Select the Base option for Decimal and change the value to 0
6. Close the Registry
Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics. Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory website. You can also read her blog which discusses personal privacy issues.
Simple SEO: Force WWW via 301 Redirect
Mar 30th
Have you ever gone to a website where all of these combination work:
www.youwebsitename.com, websitename.com, and websitename.com/index.html?
Unfortunately, Google views this as duplicate content and frowns upon it. Many of us who run websites are always looking for ways to optimize our websites and truly want to avoid any Google penalties.
Rule of Thumb: When you’re linking to anything in your website always use the same link, whether its www.YourDomain.com, YourDomain.com, or YourDomain.com/index.html . This is key to showing google you really only have one link.
One Simple Change: Another nifty and very simple way of avoiding duplicate content is redirecting all non-www traffic to www via a 301 redirect. To do this, go to your highest folder, likely in the www folder add this text to your .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine On
# force www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^YourDomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YourDomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# END force www
Kerry Fitzgerald
Kerry is a blogger on a variety of topics. Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com
Hate Telemarketers? Use This Nifty Tool to Look Them Up
Mar 24th
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t get a call from a telemarketer at least once a week if not much more. They’ll call and leave no message and annoy the heck out of you.
Unfortunately, some of these calls are actually made by criminals who try to get your personal information.
News articles over the past few days discuss about people trying to scam you out of your money or your private information. Scammers posing as US Department of Revenue employees, local bank employees, even police officers, have all been in the news over the past few days.
There’s a website called CallCatalog.com that uses crowd sourcing to grow their database of telemarketers. Crowd sourcing is basically when you, I, and everyone else go there and upload our experiences; it then shares it with everyone else. Sort of like a social network. When you go to their website, you put the phone number of the caller you want to lookup in the yellow box at the top of the page. It then presents information on what other people have written about these callers.
You can also post your own complaint.
Their blog also provides some additional information about how to deal with telemarketers and unwanted callers. Check them out.
