I am so busy this week that I didn’t have a chance to read manga for 2 weeks straight. I just visited onemanga today and found out that they already have an RSS feed button. That is good news indeed for us manga readers. I was looking for this subscription link before but back then they did not have this.

What are RSS feeds? Click here for a brief and simple explanation of how it works and how we can use it.

Now, you don’t have to go to onemanga to check for updates. You can easily subscribe to their RSS feeds and you will be able to get updates from their website directly to your RSS reader directly.

Below you will see a picture where you can find the RSS subscribe button of onemanga.

If you like palahubog.com and would want to know our latest post, you can read them from your RSS feeds reader. You have to subscribe to our RSS feed to get our latest feeds. You will find our subscribe button as shown in the picture below.

What is an RSS feed reader?

What are RSS feeds?

RSS feeds are the updates of the website that you subscribe to. For example you subscribed to onemanga.com, you won’t have to go to onemanga every time just to check for updates. You can just go to your RSS feed to read all of the updates that came from the sites that you subscribed to. And if you did subscribe to onemanga’s RSS feed, you will receive their RSS feed right away as soon as they have updates on the site or a new manga posted. This saves you time  and resources.

What is a RSS feed reader?

It is a tool that allows you to read the feeds that are delivered to you from the websites that you subscribed to. This tool allows you to read various updates from selected websites of your choice. It works like google mail or yahoo mail where you read emails, but in the RSS feed reader, you read RSS feeds.

Why are RSS feed very useful?

It saves you lots of time of having to go to a website just to check for updates. If you subscribe to an RSS feed of a website, everytime that website updates, you will be notified through your RSS feed reader. Not only will you be notified, you will be able to read the updates(which are in the form of feeds).

Below is a video from google with a very simple explanation of how RSS feeds and RSS feed reader work. This is about their RSS reader, the google reader, which is what I am using right now as my RSS feed reader.

RSS feeds makes bookmarking websites look oldschool. Back in the days, when if we like a website and want to visit it some other time to check for updates we bookmark it.

Today, most websites offer RSS feeds. Especially blogs like palahubog.com offer RSS feeds. This makes it easier for readers to read and get updates from the sites that they like.

Several websites design their RSS feeds to look attractive. RSS feeds today come in many designs and forms. Below are pictures of how they may look like.

If you like to track or get the latest feeds/updates from a specific website, you can just look for buttons that may look like any of these buttons. Just click them and subscribe to the feeds.

If you like palahubog.com and would want to know our latest post, you can read them from your RSS feeds reader. You have to subscribe to our RSS feed to get  our latest feeds. You will find our subscribe button as shown in the picture below.

Twitter was founded on 2006. With headquarters in San Francisco, California and USA, twitter is one of the biggest and fastest growing companies is the US. Not many of us here in Cebu, Philippines would appreciate twitter because we don’t understand how useful it is. We tend to appreciate more on social networking websites like friendster and facebook because we want to connect with friends, share our pictures, update our status and let people know of what we are doing.

Twitter works in a similar way but most of us did not know it. Our first impression of twitter was “Oh, just another social networking website. Major functionof this new site is we can share our status(facebook/friendster terms we got used to). Nah, this is nothing new, we can do also do this in friendster and facebook. We can only have 1 picture, and the picture does not show as big as our primary/profile picture in facebook/friendster, this website sucks!”. So, Why join tweeter? Why do you need a twitter account?

You were wrong. Twitter may seem limited to us when we first saw it, and nobody seem to appreciate it when it was new. Now and ever since it was launched, twitter has more users and everyday more and more have learned to appreciate it.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets.  Tweets are 140 characters long, text based post. These post are broad casted to your followers(friends and fans) as soon as you update/post it.

In friendster/facebook we add people to become their friends and our friends. In tweeter, if you add someone who did not accept you yet, you are following that person. You are the follower/fan of that person you are trying to add/follow. If he/she follows you back, then you are called friends.

What makes twitter very useful is the sharing of tweets. Its like news, real-time news. If you did not know this, information you find in google is not really uptodate/real-time. Websites have to be submitted to google, then indexed for them to show up on google’s results. This whole indexing process can take upto 7days to 1 month at most. Why does it take this long? websites have lots and lots of information, not very specific and probably broad topics. Are you seeing my point now?

My point is, twitter has more uptodate information. Brief and straight to the point information. Its short and light, that means searching for information is much faster on twitter. Data/results are more uptodate, more to say “real-time”.

Google and other search engines appreciated this idea, and they have made their move in integrating twitter to their search engine systems. Google and Bing currently the largest search engines have now been working with twitter to generate more accurate/real-time search results. This project had already started months ago and you will soon be seeing real-time results in these search engines in the next few weeks.

Another thing about twitter is that more and more tools/websites that are compatible with it. See the few examples that I have below.

Twitpic is a website that allows users to easily post pictures to the Twitter microblogging and social media service.

TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR desktop Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace application. Like other Twitter applications it interfaces with the Twitter API to allow users to send and receive tweets and view profiles.

Tweetie is a client for Twitter, the social networking website. Its mobile version runs on iPhone and iPod Touch, while its desktop version runs on Mac OS X.

Twittermail allows you to tweet using an emails.

Twitter Counter is a counter to show your twitter followers.

 Twitter Vision shows a visual map of Twitter posts.

Above are just a few of the twitter tools you can find in the internet. There are a thousands more that are currently active, and there are thousands more tools still being developed. You can imagine twitter’s future, 2 search engine titans google and bing are trying to get a hold of them and their technology.

If you think you are in because you have a facebook account, you might as well setup a twitter account. Create a twitter account now and make sure to follow us. 

AVG antivirus system

AVG Anti-Virus Free 9.0 works with Windows 7 to provide your PC with the best protection against web threats. Get your free download now at free.avg.com.

The explosive growth of dynamic content makes the web a fertile attack vector for infiltrating PCs. Forums, social networking sites, and content delivered by advertising networks are prime targets for the delivery of malicious code. According to IDC, up to 30% of companies with over 500 employees have been infected through web surfing.

That’s why over 2.4 million people download AVG Anti-Virus Free 9.0 every week. In fact, it’s the CNET Top Weekly Download for free anti-virus software.

And this free download is not a light version of the software, or a limited time trial offer. AVG Anti-Virus Free 9.0 is a full-featured solution that’s free forever. So your PC will always have the best protection against web threats.

But then that’s what you’d expect from a global security leader like AVG. Led by Chief Research Officer Roger Thompson, AVG continues to deliver true protection against viruses, spam, cyber-scams and hackers on the Internet.

But remember – not all free anti-virus software is created equal. Only Anti-Virus Free 9.0 gives you superior protection against web threats.

So whether you’re running Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7, AVG Anti-Virus Free 9.0 provides an extra layer of security that’s so critical to your PC. Get your free download now at free.avg.com.

Many websites today offer video streaming. You can enjoy watching the videos, but you can’t download them. These are very common on many well known websites. Why would they limit us from doing this? I really don’t know why but I think its because streaming these videos are already consuming much bandwidth from their connections, much more if you add downloading to it. Another very easy explanation would be they simply want you to come back to their website to watch the video again, rather than download and play it locally without having to add traffic to their site. There could be many other reasons but it does not matter, there are many tools you can use to download these videos.

Download Helper is a freeware add on for Firefox browsers. This add on allows you to download videos and images while you surf the internet. DownloadHelper also allows you to download files one by one, so that you keep bandwidth usage low for browsing other sites.

Just surf the Web as you are used to, when DownloadHelper detects it can do something for you, the icon gets animated and a menu allows you to download files by simply clicking an item.

You can download the DownloadHelper add on here.

Below is a screenshot on how to use DownloadHelper after installing it.

Using download helper to download videos from youtube

Queuing videos being downloaded

I have downloaded lots of videos using DownloadHelper and I have tested it on facebook, youtube, dailymotion, Google videos and some porn sites as well. This tool is very useful for downloading videos while surfing other websites. You can just  select videos to download and put them on the queue while the initial videos you selected are being downloaded one by one.

Ever had questions about who is the owner/admin behind a website?You may want to check if the site you are reading is give false information. You may want to check the owner of the site and contact him if you are interested with his website. You want to apply for a job using a website, is this a legit website? You may be sending your resume to someone who will take advantage of the information. It is important that you know how to check a domain/website for many different reasons. Many don’t know how to do this and have several questions.

These are very common questions below.

• Ever wonder who owns a specific domain/website name? Like facebook.com, palahubog.com, google.com.
• How do we find out who owns these websites?
• Where to we find relevant information for these websites?
• Like when they were created?
• When do they expire?
• Where are they hosted?
• Who registered these domains?
• Can we buy the website from them?

Many of these questions can be answered by a simple public database called the whois.

WHOIS (pronounced as the phrase who is) is a query/response protocol that is widely used for querying databases in order to determine the registrant or assignee of Internet resources, such as a domain name, an IP address block, or an autonomous system number. WHOIS lookups were traditionally performed with a command line interface application, and network administrators predominantly still use this method, but many simplified web-based tools exist. Below are a few of the web-based tools you can use for free.

http://who.is/

http://www.domaintools.com/

http://www.whois.net/

What will you find in a whois look up? Here are useful information on what you will find in a whois lookup.

Lets do a whois lookup on facebook.com and I will label the important things that you can find out about the domain. Below is the whois result for facebook.com and I have labeled the important information with Rastafari color in the results. Click the image for a larger view.

A sample whois lookup of facebook.com

A domain name registrar is an organization or commercial entity, accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) or by a national country code top-level domain (ccTLD) authority, to manage the reservation of Internet domain names in accordance with the guidelines of the designated domain name registries and offer such services to the public.

A registrant is the person who owns and probably did the registration of the domain. He went to a registrar company to register the domain so that he can use it for a website or an email.

A nameserver is the server or host of the domains. This can be a server pointing to another server where the website is hosted or stored.

Was that easy? This tool is very useful if you really are into websites. If you are buying and selling domains this would really come handy. Even if you are just speculating if this website is having legit programs or information, you can check it from the whois if they are who they say they are.

You want to slack around? Play some games on websites that you can’t go to? Want to go to Facebook and update your account, upload pictures or chat with friends? Yet you can’t do this because typing in Facebook and other websites redirect you to an error page or a page setup by your I.T administrator. Your network or I.T administrator probably blocked some websites in your computer(in your office network usually).

Well, there is one way of getting around this, you can use proxy servers. Yeah, sounds nerdy right? But it is so easy to use. First what is a proxy server and how it works? Here is a graphic stupid way to explain it.

A user using a proxy server can access websites without restrictions.

Basically you cannot access some sites from your office because of security reasons/firewalls setup by the administrator. They may also be doing so you would focus on your work, not on sites that they are blocking. But who cares about their security measures, depriving you of your time to kill time. You should use proxy servers once in a while to enjoy the blocked websites.

How to use proxy websites?

1.) Go to a proxy website. Sample proxy sites are below.

http://cantblock.me/

http://hideu.info/

http://proxy.org/

2.) Type in your desired website in the http or URL field. Below I labeled these fields, this where you type in the desired website’s address. e.g. http://facebook.com

3.) After typing the address of the site you want to go to, just press go, browse or churva. Walah! You are on the prohibited website? Sweet!

I actually don’t enjoy doing this just to waste my time on other sites, I only use this for emergency situations.

WARNING: Do not abuse this. You may lose your job or get kicked out of school