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 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.

Home Web Hosting - Access Your Home Server From the Internet

If you are a webmaster developing or maintaining websites then you probably have a home web server for development or testing purposes. An old computer can easily be transformed into a Linux server. If you install also Apache, MySQL and PHP applications you will be able to host websites at your home. Of course, this is not the same hosting as offered by commercial providers, it is only a place where you can install, develop and test web applications. With some additional settings you can access your home computers from any place that has internet access. This is very convenient for getting files you forgot at home.

Assuming that you already have a local area network (LAN) including the router, which is a bridge between your computers and the internet, you need no additional equipment. In order to enable web access from the internet, you have to configure your router to forward outside web requests to the your server. The default port for web is 80, but you can choose any other port number to increase security.

The first prerequisite for remote access is a domain. This is the name of your home server on the internet. There are many services that offer free domains and free updating of IP addresses. This is especially important if you don't have a static IP address. Most internet providers dynamically assign IP addresses which change once a day or with every connection. Since knowing your external IP address is crucial to access your computers from the internet, you need a way to update the domain DNS records.

Many routers support popular dynamic DNS services like DynDns. If your router has no such function you can still install simple software utility on your computer which will update address every time it will be changed. You should create an account, select preferred domain name and choose your name which you will use as a sub-domain. This account data you should enter into the router settings or external software for IP address update.

Now you have access to your router. Each time you will enter your name followed by the chosen domain, you will reach you router. If you have enabled access to its user interface from the external port, you will be able to configure it as you do it from your home computer. To reach your server you need to configure port redirection. If you would like to use the standard port 80 for web access, then simply create a rule to forward external (public) port 80 to the local port 80 at IP address of your web server. This is everything that is needed to access your web server from anywhere.

For hosting of real websites especially if they are commercial in nature you need a reliable hosting like Hostgator. Simply because the website needs to be available 24 hours a day and downtime in the case of hardware failure should be as short as possible. Commercial hosting companies usually provide professional service for few dollars per month. This includes unlimited number of domains, unlimited disk space and many other goodies.

Having a possibility to access home computers from any location is very useful when you need some files or data from home. Even if you have a dynamic IP address you can access your development websites and show them to your friends or clients.