Windows XP Support Ends April 8th 2014: Are You Prepared?

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What is Windows XP End of Support?

Microsoft has provided support for Windows XP for the past 12 years. But as of April 8, 2014, support for Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system will end.

As a result, after April 8, 2014, technical assistance for Windows XP will no longer be available, including automatic updates that help protect your PC. Microsoft will also stop providing Microsoft Security Essentials for download on Windows XP on this date. (If you already have Microsoft Security Essentials installed, you will continue to receive anti-malware signature updates for a limited time, but this does not mean that your PC will be secure because Microsoft will no longer be providing security updates to help protect your PC.)

If you continue to use Windows XP after support ends, your computer will still work but it might become more vulnerable to security risks and viruses. Also, as more software and hardware manufacturers continue to optimize for more recent versions of Windows, you can expect to encounter greater numbers of apps and devices that do not work with Windows XP.

How Do I Stay Protected?

To stay protected, there are really only two options:

Upgrade Your Current PC

Very few older computers will be able to run Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, which is the latest version of Windows. You can download and run the Windows Upgrade Assistant to check if your PC meets the system requirements for Windows 8.1 and then follow the steps in the How to Upgrade from XP Tutorial to upgrade if your PC meets the requirements.

Get A New Computer

The good news is that there are good deals on computers and you can get a new computer for very little money. You can also spend thousands. The key is to identify your use – buy for what you will do rather than what you might do.

WordPress Keyboard Shortcuts for WordPress Users

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WordPress keyboard shortcuts let you access frequently used features with a keystroke, and with your fingers never leaving the keyboard to use the mouse on your computer, saving time and increasing productivity. On a Windows computer:

  • Ctrl + A = Highlight All
  • Ctrl + C = Copy
  • Ctrl + V = Paste
  • Ctrl + P = Print
  • Alt + Tab = Cycle through open Windows
  • Ctrl + Tab = Cycle through open browser tabs

The same types of wordpress keyboard shortcuts are available within the WordPress Editor:

Mac PC
SHIFT + OPTION + B ALT + SHIFT + B Bold
SHIFT + OPTION + I ALT + SHIFT + I Italic
SHIFT + OPTION + L ALT + SHIFT + L Align left
SHIFT + OPTION + C ALT + SHIFT + C Align center
SHIFT + OPTION + R ALT + SHIFT + R Align right
SHIFT + OPTION + A ALT + SHIFT + A Insert link
SHIFT + OPTION + S ALT + SHIFT + S Remove link
SHIFT + OPTION + M ALT + SHIFT + M Insert image
SHIFT + OPTION + T ALT + SHIFT + T Insert “more” tag
SHIFT + OPTION + P ALT + SHIFT + P Insert “page break” tag
SHIFT + OPTION + J ALT + SHIFT + J Justify text
SHIFT + OPTION + O ALT + SHIFT + O Numbered list
SHIFT + OPTION + U ALT + SHIFT + U Bulleted list
SHIFT + OPTION + Q ALT + SHIFT + Q Blockquote
COMMAND + C CTRL + C Copy
COMMAND + V CTRL + V Paste
COMMAND + A CTRL + A Select all
COMMAND + X CTRL + X Cut
COMMAND + Z CTRL + Z Undo
COMMAND + Y CTRL + Y Redo

Tools To Protect Your Smartphone

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Your smartphone is simultaneously your best friend and your worst enemy. It can help you find the nearest coffee or bagel joint, reach out to family in a crisis, or get the score or highlights from the Olympics. If it falls into the wrong hands, however, a smartphone can expose your contacts, location history, banking data, and more. As the reality of the extent and invasiveness of the NSA’s surveillance programs hits home, the pro-privacy movement has been cranking up its own ideas to counter spy-technology with pro-privacy technology. This post provides tactics and tools to protect your smartphone.

The most recent example of this is Blackphone – a smartphone that is designed to enable secure, encrypted communications, private browsing and secure file-sharing. The project is a joint venture between an encrypted email service provider (Silent Circle) and a Spanish smartphone startup (Geeksphone). Available for pre-orders within the week, the Blackphone has been built from scratch with security in mind. Few details are available as to what the phone might cost, and while Blackphone is an intriguing concept, there are already some viable tools for protecting your smartphone.

Silent Circle offers subscription services for Android and iOS. The $10/month option encrypts voice, video, texting and file communications sent to anyone who is also using Silent Circle Mobile. The more expensive plan encrypts your end of a phone call to a mobile or landline, even if the person on the other end isn’t a subscriber.

Tools to Protect Your Smartphone

Security Tools for Texting and Instant Messaging

Whisper Systems encrypts text messages between users, as long both users have installed the app and you use it for texting instead of your regular app. The texts are encrypted as they are sent back and forth and stay encrypted when they are stored on your phone.

TextSecure does the same thing but is currently only available for Android users.

ChatSecure offers encrypted messaging for Android and iOS users. This free app doesn’t replace texting; instead, it lets you send encrypted messages over a number of existing chat services like Facebook Chat, Google Talk, Google Hangout, and some others. Obviously this only works if both the sender and receiver have the ChatSecure app on their phone.

Security Tools for Phone Calls

When it comes to making phone calls, the options are simpler because there currently aren’t many.

One option is the Silent Circle service mentioned earlier.

The other option is Red Phone and currently only available on Android phones. Red Phone provides end-to-end encryption for calls, securing conversations so that nobody can listen in.

Security Tools for Browsing the Internet on Your Phone

Another common mobile phone security failure is browsing. Your search data, location and personal information can all be gathered, either by your carrier, government spies or hackers. Consider a secure browser or browsing app for your phone.

On Android, the Guardian Project’s free Orweb browser and companion Orbot apps offer private browsing that frees you from cookies, stops network providers from viewing your web travels and disables security threats. It also doesn’t keep a browsing history.

A good alternative for iOS users is the $1 Onion Browser, which, like Orbot, routes your surfing through the Tor network.

It’s worth noting that none of these options are 100% secure, but using any one of them is better than nothing.

What is Nest and What Can it Do and Why Did Google Just Buy it for $3.2 Billion

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Google completed its acquisition of Nest on February 7th. The $3.2 billion deal was one of Google’s most high profile and unexpected purchases in recent memory, obtaining the hardware company’s portfolio of home automation devices and staff.

What is Nest?

Led by Tony Fadell, former Senior VP of the iPod division at Apple, Nest is a company built around home automation and reinventing forsaken hardware devices in your home – thermostats and carbon monoxide/smoke detectors.

What Can Nest Do

Nest’s reinvented thermostat is smart – kind of like the Roomba of thermostats, it will learn your home heating and cooling preferences over the course of a few weeks and then automatically adjust the temperature. You can control the thermostat with your smartphone and make adjustments remotely. It costs $249 but Nest thinks you’ll make up that expense within a year. Read More about the Nest Thermostat

Nest digital thermostat and smoke alarmThere’s also a smoke/carbon monoxide detector. If you burned the toast, Nest Protect won’t start yelling at you. Instead it turns yellow and speaks with a human voice and gives you an early warning. To silence an alarm, all you have to do is wave your hand 2 to 8 feet beneath it. If the batteries are running low, you’ll get an alert on your phone. All the smoke detectors in the house are connected even if wifi is down. If one alarm goes off, a human voice will tell you where the problem is in the house. If the carbon monoxide alarm goes off, Nest Protect will automatically turn off your gas furnace – a possible source of carbon monoxide leaks. Next time you stumble out of bed at night, Nest Protect can light your way down the hallway automatically. Each Nest Protect unit costs $129. Read More about Nest Protect

Why Did Google Buy Nest for $3.2 Billion?

Google has big plans for the team behind the connected device company. Google will keep the Nest group intact inside the company. The new division will still work on hardware devices, but not necessarily thermostats or smoke detectors. In fact, Google would like Fadell to work on gadgets that make more sense for the company. Will it be a phone or a tablet? It’s unclear for now.

While Nest first became popular with its thermostats, Google didn’t buy the company for these devices. First and foremost, the company wanted to snatch the great product team.

Best WordPress Plugins – Miscellaneous

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WordPress is an incredibly flexible, easy-to-set-up and manage web publishing platform that has been downloaded more than 60 million times since its launch in 2003. As of August 2013, WordPress is used by nearly 19 percent of the top 10 million websites. The content management system’s popularity has spawned thousands – nearly 30,000 in fact – of plugins that expand the basic functionality of WordPress. At Connect4, we routinely use 45 WordPress plugins. We use some plugins, for security, admin, and SEO, for example, on nearly every site we create.

The problem with WordPress plugins is that many of them present as much trouble as they do opportunity on a website. Not all plugins play friendly in the same sandbox. And not all plugin developers continue to provide updates for their plugins. Plugins that haven’t been updated in a year make for a security risk. So make sure you consult with your webmaster or web developer prior to installing any of these plugins. It’s always a good idea to make sure you have a backup before trying out a new plugin.

Today we are going to talk about essential wordpress plugins that fall into the miscellaneous category.

Miscellaneous

  1. WP Greet box
  2. Co-Authors Plus
  3. Print Friendly and PDF Button
  4. nRelate Related Content
  5. Edit Flow
  6. WordPress Editorial Calendar
  7. Custom Post Donations
  8. TablePress

WP Greet Box

This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url. For example, when a visitor clicks through from Twitter, they will see a message suggesting them to tweet the post and follow you on Twitter. You can also set a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed. Having these targeted suggestions will help your blog increase exposure, loyal readership, and reader interaction. Best of all, this plugin is compatible with WPMU and various WordPress cache plugins (so you do not have to sacrifice speed).

 

Download WP Greet Box

Co-Authors Plus

Assign multiple bylines to posts, pages, and custom post types via a search-as-you-type input box. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s archive page and in their feed. Co-authors may edit the posts they are associated with, and co-authors who are contributors may only edit posts if they have not been published (as is core behavior).

 

Download Co-Authors Plus

Print Friendly and PDF Button

This plugin by Joost de Valk (developer of the wildly successful WordPress SEO by Yoast) automatically creates printer friendly and PDF versions of your pages without the hassle of having to create a print CSS file. No coding, hacking or programming required. Simply install the Print Friendly & PDF plugin, activate, and choose settings for full customization. It also gives your user the ability to remove images and paragraphs of text, so they really only have to print exactly what they want.

Download Print Friendly and PDF Button

nRelate Related Content

This is the best way to display related content from your site, and/or your blogroll. Nrelate is not just another related posts plugin. What’s particularly cool is that the plugin continuously analyzes your website content and displays other related posts from your website. This ultimately leads to higher site page-views, and a better user experience.

 

Download nrelate Related Content

Edit Flow

Edit Flow empowers you to collaborate with your editorial team inside WordPress. Edit Flow is modular so you can customize it to your needs:

  • Calendar – A convenient month-by-month look at your content.
  • Custom Statuses – Define the key stages to your workflow.
  • Editorial Comments – Threaded commenting in the admin for private discussion between writers and editors.
  • Editorial Metadata – Keep track of the important details.
  • Notifications – Receive timely updates on the content you’re following.
  • Story Budget – View your upcoming content budget.
  • User Groups – Keep your users organized by department or function

 

Download Edit Flow

WordPress Editorial Calendar

Did you remember to write a post for next Tuesday? What about the Tuesday after that? WordPress doesn’t make it easy to see when your posts are scheduled. The editorial calendar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog.

 

 

Download WordPress Editorial Calendar 

Custom Post Donations

This WordPress plugin will allow you to create unique customized PayPal donation widgets to insert into your WordPress posts or pages and accept donations. WP Plugin for creating custom PayPal donation widgets. PayPal for WordPress. WordPress ecommerce.

Donation Widget Types

  • Standard Donation – One editable donation amount field.(DEMO)
  • Fixed + Additional Donation – One fixed donation amount with an additional editable donation amount field. (DEMO)
  • Per Item + Additional Donation – Fixed donation amount per item with an additional editable donation amount field. (DEMO)
  • Per Item + Additional + Fixed Donation – Same as above, but includes a fixed additional amount. Possibly a shipping charge. (Pro version only)
  • Campaign Donation – Donations plus Fields for Name, Address, Occupation and Employer. Meets Federal Election Commission (FEC) requirements. (Pro version only)

Download Custom Post Donations

TablePress

Even though advances in HTML and CSS have moved web developers far beyond the use of tables for organizing website content, every once in a while you have a need for actually displaying content in a table. The most common scenario is if you need to set up a pricing table. That’s where TablePress becomes a very useful WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) WordPress plugin.

 

 

Download TablePress

 

Best WordPress Plugins – Social Media

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WordPress is an incredibly flexible, easy-to-set-up and manage web publishing platform that has been downloaded more than 60 million times since its launch in 2003. As of August 2013, WordPress is used by nearly 19 percent of the top 10 million websites. The content management system’s popularity has spawned thousands – nearly 30,000 in fact – of plugins that expand the basic functionality of WordPress. At Connect4, we routinely use 45 WordPress plugins. We use some plugins, for security, admin, and SEO, for example, on nearly every site we create.

The problem with WordPress plugins is that many of them present as much trouble as they do opportunity on a website. Not all plugins play friendly in the same sandbox. And not all plugin developers continue to provide updates for their plugins. Plugins that haven’t been updated in a year make for a security risk. So make sure you consult with your webmaster or web developer prior to installing any of these plugins. It’s always a good idea to make sure you have a backup before trying out a new plugin.

Today we are going to focus on social media plugins.

Social Media

  1. Social Author Bio
  2. Social Media Feather

Social Author Bio

Social Author Bio adds a author bio box with the author’s avatar with built-in and custom social icons on pages/posts.

social-author-bio

 

Download Social Author Bio

Social Media Feather

Social Media Feather is a super lightweight and free social media WordPress plugin that allows you to quickly and painlessly add social sharing and following features to all your posts, pages and custom post types.

Now the only social sharing and bookmarking plugin with full support for the Retina and high resolution displays as used in iPad 5 and other devices!

The primary goal behind the plugin is to provide very lightweight WordPress social sharing and following that doesn’t add any unnecessary burden to your site and especially on your users.

What sets WordPress Social Media Feather aside from the plethora of other social sharing and following WordPress plugins is its focus on simplicity, performance and unobtrusive impact.

social-media-feather

 

Download Social Media Feather

Best WordPress Plugins – Search Engine Optimization

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WordPress is an incredibly flexible, easy-to-set-up and manage web publishing platform that has been downloaded more than 60 million times since its launch in 2003. As of August 2013, WordPress is used by nearly 19 percent of the top 10 million websites. The content management system’s popularity has spawned thousands – nearly 30,000 in fact – of plugins that expand the basic functionality of WordPress. At Connect4, we routinely use 45 WordPress plugins. We use some plugins, for security, admin, and SEO, for example, on nearly every site we create.

The problem with WordPress plugins is that many of them present as much trouble as they do opportunity on a website. Not all plugins play friendly in the same sandbox. And not all plugin developers continue to provide updates for their plugins. Plugins that haven’t been updated in a year make for a security risk. So make sure you consult with your webmaster or web developer prior to installing any of these plugins. It’s always a good idea to make sure you have a backup before trying out a new plugin.

Today we are going to focus on search engine optimization (SEO) plugins. It’s a large category with two main plugins – WordPress SEO and All In One SEO. You can’t go wrong with either one but you should definitely use one of the two.

SEO

  1. WordPress SEO
  2. All In One SEO
  3. Google XML Sitemaps for Videos
  4. Broken Link Checker
  5. Redirection
  6. SEO Friendly Images
  7. SEO Smart Links

WordPress SEO

Out of the box WordPress out of the box is already a good platform for Search Engine Optimization. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t improve it further. The WordPress SEO plugin is written from the ground up by Joost de Valk and his team at Yoast to improve your site’s SEO on all needed aspects. While this WordPress SEO plugin goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization, it first and foremost helps you write better content. WordPress SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere.

 

Download WordPress SEO by Yoast

All In One SEO

All In One SEO is like the little kid next door to WordPress SEO. If you want to improve upon the basic SEO settings of a clean WordPress site but don’t have time to optimize each page of content, All in One SEO Pack will automatically optimize it for you.

 

Download All In One SEO

Google XML Sitemaps for Videos

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google, Bing and other search engines about web pages, images and video content on your site that they may otherwise not discover.

The Video Sitemap plugin will generate an XML Sitemap for your WordPress blog using all YouTube videos that you may have embedded in your blog posts.

Download Google XML Sitemaps for Videos

Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker monitors your website for broken links and lets you know if any are found.

Features

  • Monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
  • Detects links that don’t work, missing images and redirects.
  • Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email.
  • Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
  • Prevents search engines from following broken links (optional).
  • You can search and filter links by URL, anchor text and so on.
  • Links can be edited directly from the plugin’s page, without manually updating each post.
  • Highly configurable.

Download Broken Link Checker

Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin that manages 301 redirections, keeps track of 404 errors, and generally cleans up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

New features include:

  • 404 error monitoring – captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
  • Custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
  • Full logs for all redirected URLs
  • All URLs can be redirected, not just ones that don’t exist
  • Redirection methods – redirect based upon login status, redirect to random pages, redirect based upon the referrer!

Existing features include:

  • Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes
  • Manually add 301, 302, and 307 redirections for a WordPress post, or for any other file
  • Full regular expression support
  • Apache .htaccess is not required – works entirely inside WordPress
  • Redirect index.php, index.html, and index.htm access
  • Redirection statistics telling you how many times a redirection has occurred, when it last happened, who tried to do it, and where they found your URL
  • Fully localized

Download Redirection

SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress SEO plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes for SEO purposes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according to the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

The ALT attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your images to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match.

The TITLE attribute plays a lesser role but is still important for visitors as this text will automatically appear in the tooltip when mouse is over the image.

 

Download SEO Friendly Images

SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.

Download SEO Smart Links

Best WordPress Plugins – Comments, Contact Forms & Forums

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WordPress is an incredibly flexible, easy-to-set-up and manage web publishing platform that has been downloaded more than 60 million times since its launch in 2003. As of August 2013, WordPress is used by nearly 19 percent of the top 10 million websites. The content management system’s popularity has spawned thousands – nearly 30,000 in fact – of plugins that expand the basic functionality of WordPress. At Connect4, we routinely use 45 WordPress plugins. We use some plugins, for security, admin, and SEO, for example, on nearly every site we create.

The problem with WordPress plugins is that many of them present as much trouble as they do opportunity on a website. Not all plugins play friendly in the same sandbox. And not all plugin developers continue to provide updates for their plugins. Plugins that haven’t been updated in a year make for a security risk. So make sure you consult with your webmaster or web developer prior to installing any of these plugins. It’s always a good idea to make sure you have a backup before trying out a new plugin.

Today we are going to talk about plugins that control comments, contact forms, and forums for WordPress.

Comments, Contact Forms & Forums

  1. Contact Form 7
  2. Thank Me Later
  3. Discuss Comment System

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is the most widely used wordpress contact form because it is easy to use, extremely flexible, and free. Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

contactform7

Download Contact Form 7

Thank Me Later

Have you ever posted a comment on a blog, or provided your email to a site and then received an email a few seconds after doing so?  You automatically think, “Well either that’s the most obsessive blog admin on the web, or this is an auto-generated email.”  Well, with Thank Me Later, you can make your ‘Thank you,’ emails far more personal through the ability to customize certain fields, and the best part… you can tell it to send hours after you the signup.  The beauty of this is the fact that it provides a much more personal touch to the emails that are programmed to be sent to new commenters and visitors. Thank Me Later sends ‘thank you’ emails to your commenters. Simply write a message saying thanks and it will be emailed after a time of your choice — 5 minutes, a day, a month, whenever!

thank me later

Download Thank Me Later

 

Disqus Comment System

Disqus, pronounced “discuss”, is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.

Download Disqus Comment System