TinyURL is a web service that offers turning very long URLs into very short ones of the form http://tinyurl.com/4jwg63
So if you have a silly long URL to share with a friend or in a forum, you can simply go to the TinyURL website, enter your long URL and it will be converted into a short one in no time. Easy and convenient.
But what if you’re a heavy user of TinyURL, then you of course don’t want to waste all your time copying and pasting URLs to and from the TinyURL website. So here’s a Firefox add-on to make your life easier whenever you want to shorten a URL.
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BitTorrent is a P2P communication protocol used to widely distribute large amounts of data without the original distributor incurring the entire cost of hosting and bandwidth. Instead, when the data is distributed using the BitTorrent protocol, each recipient supplies pieces of the data to newer recipients to reduce the cost on any individual source.
The use of the BitTorrent protocol requires a special client of course, along with a “.torrent” file for each file you want to download. However, if you offer downloads on your website or blog via torrent file, this may not be convenient to your users as some of them might not be familiar to the BitTorrent protocol.
But what about offering an executable file that is able to download a specific torrent file? That’s much easier for everybody!
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It’s really buggy when you try to open your website and find it inaccessible. Once this happens to you, you will most probably freak out and immediately open a trouble ticket with you host to let them investigate about the problem.
But what if there was nothing wrong with your host and the problem was from your ISP instead? It might happen sometimes that your ISP has problem connecting you to specific websites on the internet. You’ll then of course feel embarrassed of accusing your host of having something wrong.
To avoid such situations, here are a couple of services that can check the status of your website in realtime, and you can rely on their results to prevent confusion.
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We’re pretty sure you have seen these links to tinyurl.com everywhere on the web, especially in forums posts. TinyURL is a service to run long URLs into small ones like http://tinyurl.com/5u58e2
There’s no doubt they’re very useful, but their bad side is that you usually do not know where a TinyURL will lead you when you click it. But lucky for us there’s a way to preview the destination URL before you get redirected to it.
Here how to do it.
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In yesterday’s post, our main concern was how to backup huge files. We continue today on discussing the problems of dealing with such files an we will be focusing on exchanging them over the internet.
The available options to send a large file over the internet nowadays is to either upload it to a free hosting website, such as RapidShare, and abide by their irritating rules, or use instant messaging software such as Yahoo! Messenger or MSN Messenger, but this of course requires the other peer to be using the same IM software.
However, there’s now a much more easy alternative, which is to simply share it via your browser! Want to know how?
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It’s cool to have your own internet radio station and broadcast you favorite music! Actually a lot of people are doing it either to broadcast music over internet or over their home or office LAN, and today we’re going to teach you how to setup your radio station is less then 10 minutes.
Let’s first see how it works. You have a media player (Winamp in our case) to play music, and you use a plugin to send this music to a broadcasting server, which could be your computer itself, and then the server will send the music to listeners. The concept is easy and setting it up is even easier, so let’s see now how to do it.
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BitTorrent is a great way to share large amount of data widely. And what’s good in the BitTorrent protocol is that the distributor does not have to bare all the cost of bandwidth while sharing data, instead recipients will be supplying the parts they have downloaded from the distributor to other new recipients and so on until they reach a total independence from the original distributor.
However, due to the significant amount of bandwidth that the BitTorrent protocol uses, almost all companies and colleges have blocked BitTorrent ports to prevent individuals from abusing the bandwidth.
But, if you are in one of these organizations where BitTorrent is blocked, there’s a good news for you. You can still download .torrent files even if you don’t have any client installed!
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We all know that domain names were made to make it easier on us to remember web addresses, however computer do not need help to remember addresses so they use IP addresses to “talk” to each other.
The translation between the friendly names and the IP addresses is made using what we know as DNS (Domain Name Server) consisting of huge tables mapping internet names to IP addresses.
So typically speaking, when you want access yahoo.com in your browser, your computer will send a request to your DNS asking to resolve the address to an IP, once the IP is obtained your computer will be able to communicate with yahoo’s server.
But, what few people know is that there’s a small local database in their operating system, called the “hosts” file, that they can manage, and it works the same way a DNS does. But where is it located? and how can we make use of it?
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This is how Google looked like today when a friend forwarded a link to me… makes you wonder if they really got hacked! What do you think? 
The number of web hosting companies has increased very much lately, and their offers vary from very basic hosting packages to dedicated servers. And choosing among these companies and their packages can be tricky sometimes (I’ve been there before).
So here are some tips that you may consider when purchasing your package.
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