Use Proxy For Anonymous Browsing

You have probably already come to the situation where you wanted to visit some website but not from your computer. There are many reasons why you want to browse the internet anonymously. The main reason is to hide your IP address. When you visit some website you provide a lot of information about you and your computer to that website. From the IP address it is possible to determine not just your country but also more precise location. Although it is not easy to connect the IP address with particular person, sometimes it is simply not desired to expose your location or properties of your browser.

There is a very simple way to avoid exposing your details to the destination page. You can use a proxy service to bypass your direct connection with any website. This is a service that acts as an intermediate computer which accepts your web addresses and returns requested web pages. So the target website sees the proxy computer and not your computer or your browser. This way you are not accessing the websites directly and your IP address and other data is not exposed to the world but only to one computer. The only disadvantage of browsing this way is that the communication is a little bit slower because of the additional "element" between your computer and web server. This additional element is a computer which downloads pages and sends them to your browser. But this is the only price you will have to pay for anonymity.

There are many free proxy services. Just Google for "free proxy" and you will find many websites offering this service for free. Browsing is still pretty simple. Instead of entering the wanted web address into the address bar of the browser you enter it into address field of the proxy page and press enter or click the "go" button. This website will download web page and send it to your browser. You will get exactly the same content as you would get by browsing directly. This is not true if the server returns data according to the visitor's country. In such case you will probably get some local content. When you browse through proxy you access the target website with the IP address of the proxy website which may be hosted in a different country.

Proxy servers or websites offer some additional functions for even better protection. One of them enables you to prevent storing cookies. Cookies are some data that is stored on your computer when you visit certain pages. The second protection function is to remove JavaScript code. This code runs in your browser when the page loads. You can enable or disable these options on the same page where you enter the target address.

In most cases you can browse directly because there is no need to hide yourself. But in some cases it is better to browse anonymously and not reveal your true identity. You can also use proxy websites to access your website from other countries in order to check if right ads for that country are displayed. It is up to you to decide when to browse this way. Anyway, proxies enable us to effectively hide out location and computer data.

Web Hosting Facts

Web hosting is more than just putting some files on the web server. It is also a relationship between website owner and web hosting provider. The purpose of websites is to continuously offer access to web pages. Serving web pages without interruption or failures all around the clock. Of course, 100% up-time is not our goal and it would cost us a lot of money. A reasonable expectation is about 99.9% up-time. This means that on average 8 hours per year the system could be down. This is acceptable and doesn't cause much trouble to either website owner or visitors.

The things change when there are frequent malfunctions and the website is inaccessible for hours or even days. This is where we can start distinguishing good hosting from a not so good one. If the hosting provider doesn't have good support then the website owner quickly becomes frustrated and if the problems are not solved within few hours the web hosting service looses that customer. Loosing many customers means also loosing reputation. Bad reputation is the last thing a web hosting service provider wants.

The next important fact about hosting providers is the service they offer and/or advertise. To attract customers many web hosting providers promise unlimited "everything". Is this possible? Well, yes and no. Theoretically they don't limit disk size, bandwidth, number of domains, etc. The truth is that the web server is a physical machine, a computer with limited hard disk, limited processor capabilities, limited amount of memory, i.e. the computer is a limited resource. In addition to this, our web server is not hosting only our website (unless we have such hosting plan). Usually it hosts hundreds of websites. All the server resources are limited and shared between all websites hosted on this server. So you should understand properly the word "unlimited".

Another important fact about web hosting is connectivity with the internet. The connection between hosting provider and ISP should not be some bottleneck which limits how fast our pages load. The hosting provider should have a fast and reliable connection with the internet backbone. Pages that load slowly and even more slowly when the server is loaded are not visited frequently. We might loose visitors only because of poor internet connection of our web hosting provider.

Before we decide for web hosting company it is a good idea to check all key factors that contribute to fast and reliable hosting. We can contribute a lot to speed up our pages if we limit the resources that are needed to load the page. Pages without all the bells and whistles can also be useful to the visitors.

Web Content Management Systems

In general, a Content Management System (CMS) is a system that manages work flow, usually in a collaborative environment. This system is a collection of procedures that simplify some complex or repetitive tasks. These procedures can be manual or computer-based. Website management is one of the tasks that needs some system to create, edit and manage content. Web pages are a typical example of content. You need some editor to create pages, some database to store them and some system to generate and retrieve pages when they are needed.

Web Content Management System (CMS) is a web application designed for creating and managing HTML content--web pages. Web CMS is used to manage a large collection of web resources (text, HTML code, images, PHP scripts, etc). Web CMS functions usually include: content creation, content control, content editing, maintenance functions, and functions special to each CMS. In general, web content management software applications provide authoring tools designed to allow users with little or no knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease. Therefore you don't have to know anything about HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, AJAX or other fancy codes.

Web content management systems use a database to store content, metadata, or additional data that might be needed by the system. A web CMS usually contains a presentation layer which displays the content to web-site visitors based on a set of templates. A template is a basic page layout that contains content place holders, page styles and other page data that does not change.

Most web CMS applications use server side caching to boost performance. This works best when the web content is not changed often but visits happen on a regular basis. Administration of web CMS is typically done through web-based interfaces, but some systems require the use of a desktop client. A web CMS typically requires an experienced administrator to set up and add features, but is primarily a Web-site maintenance tool for non-technical administrators. It allows non-technical users to easily make changes to a website with little or no training.

There are many open-source web Content Management Systems you can download and use for free. Some well known free CMS systems are Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal to mention only the most popular. Those mentioned are based on PHP scripting language. There are also other CMS applications based on other languages like.NET, ASP.NET, Java, Java Bundle, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, etc.

From only viewing the web page you never know for sure how it was created or generated. Creating web pages with powerful CMS is pretty easy and fun--you can forget about code and HTML tags. You can now focus on content and creativity.

Life With Internet

Internet was born long before we have noticed it. Today we can not imagine life without it. There are many people who believe that internet is world wide web (WWW) and vice versa. Of course, web is only one of the services that are available over the internet. The fact is that our lives depend on the internet services even if we don't have a computer. It it difficult to imagine life without internet as it was difficult to imagine life without electricity thirty years ago. Internet is a worldwide network. And only a network. Services are what helps us to send a message or to do something.

Internet Service Providers
In order to connect to the internet you need a contract with some internet service provider (ISP). Access to the internet can be made available over analog phone line, ISDN, various xDSL technologies, fiber to the home (FTTH), wireless networks, cable network, etc. The speeds vary but it is not uncommon to have 100 Mbit/s or even 1 Gbit/s via FTTH. Regardless of the connection speed, internet access is a must.

Email
Sending electronic messages is one of the very popular internet services. In order to send and receive a message you need at least two mail servers, one for sending and one for receiving the message. Since email address is a prerequisite for any business, not just online, each company has at least one mail server. Fortunately there are many free email service providers. One of the most popular and famous is Gmail, free email from Google. If you don't have a Gmail account you are missing a lot.

World Wide Web
WWW is probably the most widely used internet service. This is probably the reason that www means the same as internet to many people. Having a homepage is a must. Not just for companies but also for communities, clubs, organizations and also individuals. Writing a blog is very popular these days. Because of this popularity there is a huge competition among web hosting providers. The prices are low, setting up a website is pretty simple and just anybody can have his own website.

Spam
Spam is not an internet service but it is a direct consequence of cheap or even free internet services. It is so easy to create an email and send it to any address. And sending the message to millions of worldwide email addresses is no different. Email spam is a big problem. There are many companies that are offering anti-spam products or services. One excellent anti-spam filter is used by Gmail. You will rarely receive a spam email. But there is also spam on the web. There are millions of pages that offer no useful content. When you are searching for something it is very likely that you will land on such page.

Of course, there are also other services on the internet. Sending IP packets is simple and every modern appliance or consumer electronic equipment has an ethernet connector. We can expect a huge expansion of communication over internet.

Advantages of Joomla Content Management System

Most bloggers, internet marketers and individuals use the web to publish content. They usually don't care about HTML, CSS, JavaScript or PHP. Web content management system (CMS) is a complete platform to create a website from scratch. It provides the framework needed to communicate with the database, to store and retrieve data, to dynamically create pages, to deal with authentication and to do other tasks needed for any website. The main advantage of using CMS is that you can focus on content. You install the system, select template and few plugins and you are ready to go. One of the very popular web systems is Joomla.

Joomla is a universal free open-source content management system. Universality means that you can adapt it for almost any purpose. Bloggers usually choose Wordpress for the blogging platform. This is a natural choice, but you can also make blog with Joomla. The basic installation provides the backbone for a working website. The page layout can be set by installing appropriate template. You can choose among thousands of free templates or pay small fee for a professional customizable design. Additional features and functionality can be added with various extensions. Depending on the extension function they are available as components, modules or plugins. Extensions make Joomla extremely universal.

The beauty of extensions is that there is one for every imaginable function or feature. Whenever you need some functionality for the website you can go to the Joomla extensions page and search for the right module. Some extensions are available free of charge, for some you will have to pay. And if for some reason you can not find a suitable extension you can modify an existing one or you can create a new one from scratch according to your needs. For this you will need to know a little about HTML and PHP but this is not a problem since both languages can easily be learned from the existing code examples.

Another nice feature of Joomla is customization of the core system. With code overrides you can change default layout of most page types. If this is not enough you can modify any Joomla file to achieve the desired functionality. For this kind of customization you need to take into account that any upgrade may overwrite modified files. But if you are a skilled web programmer this will not be a problem. Since Joomla is an open-source platform you can modify it any way you like. Most customizations can be done without knowing any of the web languages, but if you know them you will have a very easy and pleasant task.

A simple example of Joomla CMS in practice is the http://fullspectrumbulbs.org/ website. This is a small site about full spectrum bulbs which uses basic Joomla system with a lightweight template. One of the benefits of such simple layout is fast page loading. Of course, there are few extensions installed but they don't provide any crucial functionality for visitors.

Joomla is a fantastic content management system. With few extensions you can make a website for any purpose. But if your goal is a blog you will probably use Wordpress. Not because it is better than Joomla but because it is easier to create a blog with it.