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How to Get XnView to Open an Unknown File Format

Ok, XnView cannot open unknown file formats, but it can open many more formats than it enables during a normal install. See the full list of file formats it is able to open here. XnView is an excellent image viewing program that handles many graphics formats and allows numerous batch operations like: resizing, compressing, image […]

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Jetpack Site Stats can be Misleading

I have the Jetpack plugin installed and use the Stats module in it to monitor activity on this site. It gives the following notice: Keep in mind we don’t count your own visits. Unfortunately, this is not completely true – if you are not logged in, it will count your visits to your site. To […]

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Why You Don't Need to Defragment Your Hard Drive

Defragmenting your hard drive is often presented as a way of speeding up your computer – mostly, it is a good way to quickly wear out your hard drive, waste a lot of time and risk data loss. In general, you do not need to defragment your hard drive. Even if files are fragmented, it […]

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An Easy Way to Fragment Your Hard Drive

Following on yesterdays blog post on A Faster Way To Defragment Your Hard Drive, I decided to blog on an easy way to fragment your hard drive – although, this is usually not what we intend to do. After a while, our hard drives tend to fill up with (mostly junk), and we get a […]

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A Faster Way to Defragment Your Hard Drive

File fragmentation is, pretty much, a fact of life. You can run utilities like Windows Disk Defragmenter or Piriform‘s Defraggler (which lets you defrag just a single file instead of the whole disk), but they are slow – even if left running overnight, they often don’t finish on heavily fragmented drives (at least on my […]

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Estimating Your Web Host's Limits

Many low cost web hosts advertise “unlimited bandwidth”, “unlimited storage”, etc … Of course, it is not unlimited. If you read the terms of service, you will find some definitions or rules setting out “reasonable” use. For the typical website the average user or small business is going to set up – these are more […]

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Getting w.bloggar to use your site's theme

I finally figured out how to get w.bloggar to use my site’s style settings to give me a more accurate preview. Turns out the options for controlling the preview rendering are located under Tools → Blog Properties (or F2 using the keyboard shortcut): Under the Preview tab, there are 6 edit areas to help you […]

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Day 2 with w.bloggar

So far, I am pleased with my decision to change over to w.bloggar. Sure, it is not fancy, there is no WYSIWYG editing (but there is a basic ‘preview’ function), no incorporating your site’s theme, no “live” spelling grammar checking (you can invoke a spellchecker), and it hasn’t been updated in over 3 years. On […]

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Why I Switched From Windows Live Writer to w.bloggar

I’d been using Windows Live Writer (WLW) for about two years. There is no question that it is probably the best desktop client for writing articles for your website. Yesterday, I discovered it has a serious problem – as do most blogging clients. All comments about Windows Live Writer refer to Build 14.0.8117.416 en. This […]

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Why I switched from Joomla! to WordPress

This website previously used Joomla! (version 1.5.x) as the backend CMS, but I switched over to using WordPress (version 3.x). The two main reasons were: Comments Ability assign an article to multiple categories Comments Comments are built into the WordPress core, but you need to install a third party plugin to allow visitors to leave comments […]