Keep your email address private

Would you place your home phone number in a place where millions of people can see it? Well, you maybe exposing your private email address to millions of people every time you send an email, every time you download a file from a FTP site, every time you subscribe to a mailing list or a web page notification, every time you submit forms, every time ... (and the list goes on) :)

So what's the downside? One day you might come home and your email box may have more junk mail than your regular mail box. While it's difficult to completely stop your private email address being exposed to strangers, you can certainly try.

One way to handle this problem is to get a secondary email box and use it to send mail to "public" places, while using your primary email address to communicate with your friends and family. If your secondary mailbox starts to receive too many junk mail, you can simply close it or change it's name.

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Blog monetizing starter tips

One important principle to observe when you are blogging for money the first time is to keep everything simple. There is nothing gained with haste, but waste.

2 Ways You Can Blog for Money:

1. Blog for Yourself. If you are fascinated how your neighborhood have realized their income goals just by setting camp at home and working long hours in front of their PCs, blogging as a business is the easiest way to venture into online commerce.
2. Blog for Others. Online businesses thrive through the written word. You can blog for businesses for a fee, as specified in a contract that can run for a minimum of three months. Search via google and send out your proposal. Many people have started making lots of money this way.

There are many ways you can monetize your blog. Most people recommend Google AdSense as the topmost choice. Ads by Adsense should run on your blog, same with Text Ads while you should enroll as an Affiliate with the Affiliate Marketing of your choice, before you can promote a product of the Affiliate Company and earn from it.

Either you blog for others or for your personal website, you can blog your way to riches if you apply the necessary strategies that could work well with your type of blog or website. To determine what works, it is best to apply one strategy at a time and observe how it affects your blogging efforts. If it does not seem to work, you may replace it with another.

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Blog Maintenance

There are many things that all blogger must do on a regular basis to ensure that their blog remain useful and functional. Some of the tasks you should be performing are listed below.

1. People expect your blog homepage changing. If your blog is static and unchanging there is no reason for someone to come back again - after all, they've already seen it so why return? One major way to get them to come back is to change the content constantly and to be sure that your visitors know it is changing.

2. Occasionally review your blog. When you look over a page, check your grammar, spelling and accuracy.

3. Subscribe to a service which monitor your blog on a regular basis. This is important, as if your blog is constantly "bouncing" you will find it being removed from search engines and your visitor levels will drop.

4. Learn as much as you can about internet security, and ensure that, to the best of your abilities and knowledge, that your blog is secure. This ensures that your visitors information remains confidential and safe. It also protects you and your blog host from harm.

5. Promote your blog constantly. Every single day you should do something, anything, which attempts to get people to your blog. This is extraordinarily critical in order to ensure that people continue to visit your blog day after day. You can leave a comment on another blog or use any advertising programs like adsense, adbrite, etc, to increase your blog visitors.

6. Another task that must be performed on a regular basis is checking for a "broken link". It is most common with external links (sites move, are abandoned or are modified all of the time) but can occur occasionally with internal links.

7. You need to stay up-to-date on new technologies which can use to improve your blog. In addition, getting certified, joining community is essential to staying current and active.

8. A task you should be performing on a regular basis is to review your statistics. At a minimum, you should check your page counts to be sure that your blog is being viewed. At best, you need to know where people are coming from, which browsers they are using and what they visited while they were at your blog.

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Monetize your blog

As long as your blog have a visitors, you can easily get the benefits from monetizing your blog. Adding the advertising scripts from ad companies like Google AdSense, Adbrite, Bidvertiser, etc, can help you generate money from what you like best, typing into your blog. Why not? Many people are using blogs to make money.

You don’t need to have a blog that’s talk about making money, SEO, or computers. There are many people making money from their favourite topics. Sit back and imagine how many people in common with you.

With the many choices for advertising on your blog, along with the infinite possibilities for keywords, you can make money from what you may consider ramblings. The only downfall is that your blog cannot be about sex, drugs, guns as most advertising companies will not allow their ads to be shown on these types of sites.

Keep up blogging, and with a little added ad script, you can get the benefit from your blog like so many other people already have. While the other read your shared information, you will receive money from clicks or impressions.

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Silly mistakes that you can make with text

Even in today's world of Flash animation, animated GIFs, sound files, and other special effects, the basic reason why people surf the internet is to read. Yes, the pictures and the animations are wonderful, but what people really care about is what you've got to say. That being said, it's so very important that you don't destroy your message by presenting your text in ways that discourage people from reading.

One of the most classic mistakes is to make your text very small. After all, you've got a lot to say and you want it to fit on one screen, right? So why not make it as small as you can?

There are times when you want to make a small text. A link at the bottom of your page to your privacy policy is a good example. If someone wants to see this they will find it. Otherwise, it's just something that you have to put there.

On the other hand, a very common problem is to make your text a similar color to your background. If I run into a page with everything like this I hit the back button fast.

Another mistake is to type all word in upper case. People soon learn that all caps does not mean "give me your attention" on the web - it means shout in your face. It's also a good way to get people to hit the back key on their browser.

Sometimes I see a sites which use non-standard fonts. I know that the special font which you paid a hundred dollars for is awesome, but believe me I'm not going to pay a hundred dollars just to see your web site display correctly. You can use downloadable fonts, but be aware that browser support and standards are spotty at best. Even if you do include downloadable fonts, be sure and specify alternates in your tags just in case the browser did not processing it.

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Plan Your Blog Navigation

Good navigation is the good way to keep your visitors coming back or staying very long on their first visit. You must provide a way for your visitors to find out what you've got. It's no use if no one can see it.

You want to make it difficult for your blog to succeed? Then make your navigational system difficult to understand and use. Bury your hyperlinks in a complex image map that's not obvious to the user. That's a great way to stop people from looking around your blog.

Some other things you can do to prevent users from enjoying your site:
* Put your menus only at the bottom of every page
* Scatter your links all over the page haphazardly
* Make the hyperlinks the same color as the rest of the text
* Make the menu actually move around the screen
* Make the text very, very small or in a strange font

Another huge mistake that many webmasters forgot to linking every page back to their home page. It's important to remember that search engines typically spider your entire site. This means that visitors can land literally anywhere in your site. If you are smart you will accept this fact and place a link back to the home page. And remember, this is a good way to increase your home page pagerank.

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How to avoid Adsense PSA?

How to avoid Google Adsense Public Service Ads?

Ensure that META tags like ‘title’ & ‘description’ and the headings tags like h1, h2 etc. have content which matches the rest of your site. They are main ways google judges your pages content.

Add specific keywords in your text which will help the google bot to determine and understand the content of your website. Repeat related keywords which will better help to understand site content. Do not fill your page with similar keywords, it might work against your favour.

Develop sufficient good content with keywords on your webpage related to the topic of interest. Google is a great fan of good content websites.

Try to keep the entire website focussed on a particular theme, so that even if the content on a particular page is lesser, the ads wil show.

Do not place multiple ad units if there are not sufficient ads to display on all of them. Also Google TOS do not allow placing more than 3 ad units on a page.

Use section targeting - you can target an ad unit to a specific section of your blog, as well as block out irrelevant sections like navigational links. Useful to get more targeted ads.

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Why your blog showing Public Service Ads?

Why your blog showing Public Service Ads?

Recheck your Adsense code was inserted properly on your webpage. Do no attempt to modify the code in any way, as it is against their terms of service. Adsense gives enough options to costumize ad colours and sizes to suit your site. USe only the official code available from their site.

There may not be any ads configured to show in your region. Lets say that these ads may be working in United States, but maybe showing PSA is Zambia. This is because Google Adwords payers can select regions where to display their ads, where they believe their target surfers are. After all why should an eye surgeon in US want to promote his service in Zambia? Try using the Google Adsense Preview Tool which helps to determine probable ads in different regions.

Your site maybe using a robots.txt file, which will may not be properly set up and prevent the AdSense crawler from crawling your web pages. Add the following two lines to the top of your robots.txt file:User-agent: Mediapartners-Google* Disallow:

Your page may contain objectionable content. This may be against Google Adsense policies. If you feel your page has no such content, then look for any objectionable keywords or phrases which may be present accidentaly. Removing such content can cause PSA’s to dissapear.

Frames may occasionaly cause difficult in indexing your page. Always remember to tick the Framed page checkbox from the Ad layout code page when generating your ad code. Similarly IFRAME’s also prevent effective indexing and cause PSA’s

Reduce your filter blocked urls. This feature is in place to allow you to block competitors ads from showing on your pages. If you block too many such urls, there may not be any advertisers left to display ads.

Remove session ID’s from urls - they changes every time a different user views a page, and the URL will not be in the indexed everytime.

Google may take time to crawl your site. Although most of the times the ads show immediately, at times it takes upto 48-72 hours for google to assess the content of newly created webpage. This usually occurs if your site has not been indexed before by Google. The time is reduced on newer pages of a site already running adsense. Google claims the ads will get better and more focussed to your pages with time.

Related articles: How to avoid Adsense PSA

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Common Mistakes that Violate Google Adsense TOS

Common Mistakes that Violate Google Adsense TOS:

1. Never change the Adsense code. There are enough means of adsense optimization & customizations available to change the colour, background or border to suit your needs. Do whatever you want to do outside the code, never fiddle within the ad or the search code. They know it when you do. The search code has more limitations to colour and placement, but you should adhere to the rules. The code may stop working and violates the TOS.

2. Never click your own adsense ads or get them clicked for whatever reason. You know this one very well. This is a surefire way to close you Adsense account. Never tell your office associates or friends to click on them. Keep a check if your family or children are busy increasing your income by clicking your ads and indirectly trying to stop your income. Dont even think of offering incentives for clicks, using automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software. Adsense is very smart to detect fraudulent clicks. Check the ads which appear on your pages by the Google Preview tool if required.

3. Do not place more than 3 ad units and 3 ad links or 2 adsense search boxes on any web page. Anyway, ads will not appear in those units even if you place more ad units. But this is the limit they set, so it is better to stick to it.

4. Do not disclose confidential information about your account like the CTR, CPM and income derived via individual ad units or any other confidential information they may reveal to you. However, you may reveal the total money you make as per recent updates to the TOS.

5. Label headings as “sponsored links” or “advertisements” only. Other labels are not allowed. I have seen many sites label ads with other titles. Dont make your site a target in a few seconds gaze.

6. One Account suffices for Multiple websites. You do not need to create 5 accounts for 5 different websites. One account will do. If you live in the fear that if one account is closed down for violation of TOS, believe me they will close all accounts when they find out. You can keep track of clicks by using channels with real time statistics. They will automatically detect the new site and display relevant ads.

7. Never launch a New Page for clicked ads by default. Adsense ads should open on the same page. You may be using a base target tag to open all links in a new window or frame by default. Correct it now as they do not want new pages opening from clicked ads.

8. Do not mask ad elements. Alteration of colours and border is a facility to blend or contrast ads as per your site requirements. I have seen many sites where the url part is of the same colour as the background. While blending the ad with your site is a good idea, hiding relevant components of the ads is not allowed. Also do not block the visibility of ads by overlapping images, pop ups, tables etc.

9. Do not send your ads by email. Html formatted emails look good and allow placement of these javascript ads. But it is not allowed as per TOS. You do not want impressions registering on their logs from any email even once. They are watching!

10. Keep track of your content. So Adsense is not allowed on several non content pages. But it is also not allowed on several content pages too. Do not add it on web pages with MP3, News Groups, and Image Results. Also exclude any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content.

11. Avoid excessive advertising and keyword stuffing - Although the definition of ‘excessive’ is a gray area and is subject to discretion, yet Google adsense with correct placement, focused content and high traffic will get you much more income than other programs, so excessive advertising is not required. Keyword stuffing does target better focused ads, but overdoing it is not required.

12. Do not alter the results after ad clicks or searches - Ensure you are not in any way altering the site which the user reaches to after clicking the ads. Do not frame, minimize, remove, redirect or otherwise inhibit the full and complete display of any Advertiser Page or Search Results Page after the user clicks on any Ad or Search results.

13. Ensure you Language is Supported - Adsense supports “Chinese (simplified), Japanese, Danish, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, English, Polish, Finnish, Portuguese, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian and Turkish”. In addition, AdSense for search is available in Czech, Slovak, and Traditional Chinese. If your web pages language is not supported, do not use the code on such pages.

14. Do not confuse with adjacent images - It was a common policy to increase CTR by placing same number of images as the number of text ads, which falsely gave the impression that the text ads represented an explanation to these images. Inserting a small space or a line between the images and ads is not allowed. Make sure that the ads and images are not arranged in a way that could easily mislead or confuse your visitors.

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How to Increase Adsense CTR

Here are some tips to increase Adsense CTR:
Make sure the ads that are appearing on your site are closely related with your content. This is the first thing you have to do because if your ads are not relevant, there's small possibility that people will click on them. Then, what should you do to tackle this problem? Here are the tips:
Create a keyword rich content. I suggest you creating one topic a page.
Check your keyword rich content and then mark some of your keywords as bold or italic. But don't do it too much, just do it 1 or 2 times per page. Otherwise, Google assumes you are doing spamming.

• Use your keyword in your page title.
• Use HTML Tag H1 as your content title, and put your keyword in it. Don't forget to place this tag at the beginning of your content.
• If all those tips still do not work, there is just one possibility: there are no ads that matched with your keyword! Change your keyword!
• Use wide ads (336x280, 300x250 or 250x250). Because these are the best performing ads.
• Blend your ads with your website themes. For example, if your background color is white, change your ads border and background color to white as well. If your background color is dark (black), use bright color such as yellow as link color. This will decrease user ad-blindness.
• I don't recommend you placing three ad units in a single page. From my experience, the number of ad unit you place in a single page doesn't affect your CTR. In fact, I even found that placing three text ads in a single page make my ads "unblended". For example, I put 160x600, 468x60 and 336x280 ads on a single page. You know what? My 468x60 ads only showed 3 ads in it, whereas my 336x280 ads only showed 2 ads in it! My suggestion is: use 1 or 2 ad unit and a single link unit on your page
• Always use Link Unit! Many people never realize that Link Unit is the most profitable format if put in the right place. Try to place it near your navigation menu. People will misidentify it as a navigation menu and automatically read it. If your ads are closely relevant to your content, there's big possibility they will click it. I move the top navigation in one of my websites to the bottom section and replace it with 728x15 Link Unit Ads. You know what? My Google Adsense CTR increased by 200%!

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How to improve your adsense earnings

Here are some 5 proven ways on how best to improve your Adsense earnings.

1. Concentrating on one format of Adsense ad. The one format that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280). This same format have the tendency to result in higher CTR, or the click-through rates. Why choose this format out of the many you can use? Basically because the ads will look like normal web links, and people, being used to clicking on them, click these types of links. They may or may not know they are clicking on your Adsense but as long as there are clicks, then it will all be for your advantage.

2. Create a custom palette for your ads. Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a white background, try to use white as the color of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the Adsense look like it is part of the web pages. Again, This will result to more clicks from people visiting your site.

3. Remove the Adsense from the bottom pages of your site and put them at the top. Do not try to hide your Adsense. Put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between Adsense locations can make when you see your earnings.

4. Maintain links to relevant websites. If you think some sites are better off than the others, put your ads there and try to maintaining and managing them. If there is already lots of Adsense put into that certain site, put yours on top of all of them. That way visitor will see your ads first upon browsing into that site.

5. Try to automate the insertion of your Adsense code into the webpages using SSI (or server side included). Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your Adsense code in a text file, save it as adsense text, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then using SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.

These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites. It is important to know though that ads are displayed because it fits the interest of the people viewing them. So focusing on a specific topic should be your primary purpose because the displays will be especially targeted on a topic that persons will be viewing already.

Note also that there are many other Adsense sharing the same topic as you. It is best to think of making a good ad that will be somewhat different and unique than the ones already done. Every clickthrough that visitors make is a point for you so make every click count by making your Adsense something that people will definitely click on.

Tips given by those who have boosted their earnings are just guidelines they want to share with others. If they have somehow worked wonders to some, maybe it can work wonders for you too. Try them out into your ads and see the result it will bring.

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10 Firefox Add-Ons for Bloggers

ScribeFire Blog Editor
There are a number of offline blog editors that work with the major blogging platforms, but if you’re looking for a blog editor to use from inside Firefox, give ScribeFire a try.
“ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, upload images, and post to multiple blogs.”

TimeTracker
Running a successful blog requires efficient use of your time. The TimeTracker add-on will make it easy to see how much time your spending in your browser.
“Do you spend too much time on Firefox? Do you open tabs faster than you can close them? Cannot get things done? Keep track of how much you browse with TimeTracker.”

Sage
While there are plenty of choices when deciding on an RSS reader, Sage will function from within Firefox and integrates with its bookmark system.
“Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed reader extension for Mozilla Firefox. It’s got a lot of what you need and not much of what you don’t.”

LinkChecker
Many bloggers use a lot of links withing their posts, but testing the validity of those links can be tedious and time consumer. With the LinkChecker add-on you can quickly and easily find dead links in your posts.
“Check the validity of links on any webpage.”

Rank Checker
Rank Checker is one of my favorite add-ons because of its potential and its ease of use. Aaron Wall created rank checker and he even provides a brief video that will show you everything you need to know about using it.
“Want to know where your website ranks in the search results? Our Firefox Rank Checker extension allows you to easily check your website rankings in Google (US and international), Yahoo, and Microsoft Live search.”

SEO Link Analysis
For doing some research and analysis on your own website/blog or on a competitor, SEO Link Analysis will provide you with plenty of information quickly.
“Link data in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft’s Webmaster Portal is pretty static, they give you the pages a site has links on, and let you do all the analysis with other tools. That sucks if you want to do a quick analysis of a site, or want to get a quick overview of inbound anchor texts for a site. This Firefox extension gives you a bit more information when opening such pages, it gathers the PageRank for the linking page, the anchor text used on the link, and checks whether the link is nofollowed or not.”

Link Diagnosis
Another excellent add-on for link analysis, Link Diagnosis will give you some of the same information as SEO Link Analysis. Try them out and see which one works best for your purposes.
“This tool can show you all the important information about your competitor’s links. The report includes pagerank, anchor texts, no-follow information and more.
* see Google Pagerank of every backlink* see Anchor text of every backlink* see if links are no-follow* see most popular anchor texts* see charts with breakdown of pagerank and link types* CSV exports* Firefox 3 support”

Zemanta
Depending on the type of blogging you do and the content that you produce, Zemanta may be a fun and efficient tool for improving your process.
“Zemanta expands the author’s regular blogging dashboard, populating it on the fly with content suggestions relevant to the current text. It presents images, links, articles, tags in a simple interface. It encourages re-use and linking to other content with as little effort as possible – a single click.”

Clipmarks
Clipmarks is part bookmarking, part social sharing. If you do a lot of surfing, like most bloggers do, this could be a handy resource to keep track of things that you find and to share the best with your friends.
“Instead of copying and pasting links, Clipmarks is like adding a pair of scissors to your browser, letting you capture exactly what you want others to see (text, images or video). Your clips are saved on clipmarks.com and can easily be syndicated to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook or other sites. You can also post anything you clip directly to your blog (supports Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and more) or send it directly to friends or co-workers via email. Clipmarks also gives you a way to help the environment by printing only the parts of a page that you need. By printing just what you need, you’ll save ink, paper and trees, thus making a contribution to a cleaner environment.”

Copy as HTML Link
If your use a lot of links in your posts, Copy as HTML Link could give you a nice boost in efficiency.
“Creates an HTML link to the current page using the selected text and copies it (into the clipboard) for pasting into other applications.”

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Turn off/on system restore

System Restore, a Windows XP feature, is similar to the "Last Known Good Configuration" in Windows NT and Windows 2000. You can use System Restore to restore the computer to a previous state, using the backups that it makes of selected system files and program files. However, "Last Known Good Configuration" restores the computer back to the last state that Windows determines might work, whereas System Restore gives you a choice of previous states to restore the computer back to. That is, System Restore maintains multiple restore points instead of one last restore point.

While this is a desirable feature, in some cases it should be temporarily turned off. For example, If the computer is infected with a virus, it is possible that the virus could be backed up by System Restore. So, if you spend the time to remove the infection from your system, system restore could actually restore the virus to your system the next time it is used.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

You must be logged in as an Administrator to do this. If you are not logged in as an Administrator, the System Restore tab will not be displayed. If you do not know how to log in as Administrator, contact your system administrator (if you are on a network), the computer manufacturer, or installer.
Turning off System Restore will clear out all previous restore points.

To turn off Windows XP System Restore:

NOTE: These instructions assume that you are using the default Windows XP Start Menu and have not changed to the Classic Start menu. To re-enable the default menu, right-click Start, click Properties, click Start menu (not Classic) and then click OK.

1. Click Start.
2. Right-click the My Computer icon, and then click Properties.
3. Click the System Restore tab.
4. Check "Turn off System Restore" or "Turn off System Restore on all drives"
5. Click Apply.
6. As noted in the message, this will delete all existing restore points. Click Yes to do this.
7. Click OK.
8. Proceed with what you need to do; for example, virus removal. When you have finished, restart the computer and follow the instructions in the next section to turn on System Restore.

To turn on Windows XP System Restore:

1. Click Start.
2. Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.
3. Click the System Restore tab.
4. Uncheck "Turn off System Restore" or "Turn off System Restore on all drives."
5. Click Apply, and then click OK.

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Speed up XP Start Menu

Windows XP default speed of the Start Menu is very slow. You can fix that by editing a Registry Key.

Here's how:

1. Go to Start> Run, then type in: regedit Press [Enter] on your keyboard.
2. Navigate to the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Control Panel \ Desktop \ MenuShowDelay
3. By default, the value is 400. Change this to a smaller value (like 0) to speed it up.

Note: If your still experiencing a slow speed of the Start Menu, even after using the above tip, then you might try the following:
4. Navigate to Display Properties> Appearance> Advanced
5. Turn off the option titled Show menu shadow . You will get much better overall performance.

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Add Toolbars on the Windows XP Desktop

For an easy way to create a toolbar for your favorite Windows XP folders such as "My Documents" or "My Pictures", all you have to do it drag the XP folder to the right, left or top of the desktop. The toolbar will then snap into place. Right click an open part of the toolbar to see the customizing options.

You can even add additional toolbars in the existing toolbar by right clicking an empty part and select "Toolbars". Then simply select a new toolbar or browse for a new toolbar to add.

To delete the new toolbar, right click it and select "Close Toolbar".

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Making text transparent on desktop icons

Four criteria must be met to have transparent text on your desktop icon.

1. Go to Start>> Right Click My Computer>> Properties>> Advanced tab>> Performance Settings>> Visual Effects tab.
The entry "use drop shadows for icon labels..." must be checked

2. Right click any blank area of your desktop>> Arrange Icons by...>> The entry "Lock Web Items on Desktop" entry must be unchecked.

3. Having any web content on your desktop will not allow transparency to work.

Here's how to check for web content:

Right click a blank area of your desktop>> Properties>> Desktop tab>> Customize Desktop button>> Web tab>> make sure all checkboxes are unchecked.

4. Wallpaper must be an image file, not HTML.

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Block any website just from Windows

A website can be easily blocked without using any software. Just follow these steps
a). Browse C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc

b). Find and open the file named “hosts” in notepad

c). There you will see a line “127.0.0.1 localhost”

d). Just under this line add “127.0.0.2 www.sitenameuwanttoblock.com” , without quotes.
Save the changes and the mentioned site will no longer be accessible.

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Create invisible titles for your XP desktop icons

In this first step, you will need to make sure that Windows XP is configured to use drop-shadow icon titles. Here's how:

1. Right-click My Computer and choose Properties.
2. Click the Advanced tab in the resulting window.
3. Click the Settings button inside the Performance pane
4. Click the Visual Effects tab.
5. Scroll down until you see the entry "Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop". If it's not checked, go ahead and check it now.
6. Click OK.

Now Windows will not include a rectangular background around the icon text.

In this next step, we will create our invisible title. Since Windows will not accept a space as a file name, we will need to use a character that is invisible. The ANSI character "0160" is a non-breaking space and is visually indistinguishable from a space. We will need to insert this ANSI character into the icon title box, here's how:

1. Right click an icon and select Rename (or single click the icon and press F2)
2. Hold down the Alt key and type 0160 on your numeric keypad, then release the Alt key.
3. Press Enter.

Note: You will now see a highlighted rectangle that represents the invisible title but a single click on a blank area of your desktop will make this disappear.

To make a second icon have an invisible title, just insert the special ANSI character twice into the icon title box. (eg: ALT + 01600160) This is necessary because Windows will not allow duplicate file names.

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Displaying Windows XP Quick Launch Bar

If you are a frequent multi-tasker, you may want to consider using the Quick Launch bar. The Quick Launch bar resides in your taskbar next to your Start button. It makes it very easy for you to launch frequently used programs with a single click. Another convenient feature of the Quick Launch bar is the "Show Desktop" icon. When you click this icon, it will minimize all active windows and show only your desktop. Click it again and everything will return as it was.

To display the Quick Launch bar:

1. Right click an empty area of your taskbar
2. Select Properties from the resulting menu
3. Place a checkmark in the box titled: "Show Quick Launch" under the "Taskbar appearance" section of the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties window
4. Click Apply and then click OK to exit the window

To add a program to your Quick Launch bar, simply drag the program from either the desktop or the All Programs menu to the Quick Launch bar. To delete a program from the Quick Launch bar, right click the program and select Delete.

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Change Windows XP Title Bar Colors

The Title Bar is designed to quickly inform you of which program, document or web site you have open windows for. The Active Title Bar will inform you of which window you are currently viewing.

The default colors for the title bars are basic blue with white writing. If you would like to change this to your own color of choice, here's how:

1. Right-click on an empty area of your desktop.
2. Choose Properties.
3. Click the Appearance Tab.
4. Click the Advanced button.
5. Choose Active Title Bar or Inactive Title Bar from the 'Item' drop-down menu.
6. Change Color 1 and Color 2 to your color of choice.
7. Press Apply when you're finished.

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