Digital Idea

Pluralsight is among the best places on the web to learn programming through videos. Whether you are a complete beginner or a pro looking to advance your coding skills to the next level, you’ll find a video course at Pluralsight that will meet your needs. They have courses on practically all programming languages from JavaScript to PHP to Java to the trending technologies like AngularJS and React (see  complete list ). It is a subscription based service and you have shell out $30 per month to get access to their entire video training library. Now here’s the interesting part. If you join the Microsoft Visual Studio program, which is also free, you automatically gain free membership to the entire PluralSight library for 6 months. No credit card or coupon codes required. Here’s how you can activate your Pluralsight subscription in a minute: Go to  signup.live.com  and create a new Microsoft Account. Skip this step if you already have one. G...

The first tweet was published almost 8 years ago and Twitter has come a long way since then. There’s a whole ecosystem of apps and services available now that allow us to use Twitter in more ways than ever before. This guide curates the best tools that will help you get the most out of Twitter. 1.  Nuzzel  – This works as an intelligent filter for Twitter and helps you discover the most popular news stories shared across your Twitter network. All signal, no noise. 2.  Flipboard  – Connect your Twitter account to Flipboard and it will create a beautiful magazine for all your Twitter feeds that you can flip through on the web (example), mobile and Windows 10 devices. 3.  LifeOnTwitter  – Get interesting statistics and facts about your Twitter account (example). 4.  TallTweets  – It lets you send tweets of any length by slicing your long tweet into multiple 140-character tweets (sample) and sending them ...

W hat do you do when your mobile phone has limited storage and there’s no option to add an external SD card? How do you carry all your videos and documents where there’s not an iota of space left on the device? Yes, you do have cloud-based services like Dropbox or Google Drive that add virtually unlimited storage to your phone but you’ve to be connected to the Internet to access your files. This week I’ve been testing a wireless USB stick from Sandisk that adds storage to your phones and tablets much like a regular USB drive. To get started, you plug the USB device into your laptop or desktop computer and let it charge for about an hour or two. You can also transfer the files to the stick from the computer through Windows Explorer or Finder on Mac. Once the device is charged, you tap the little power button on the stick to turn it on. Now install the Sandisk Connect app on your mobile phone, go to WiFi settings on your phone and connect to the Wi-Fi hotspot created by the...

Wireless Networking (Wi-Fi) has made it so easy for anyone to use Internet on your computer, mobile phones, tablets and other wireless devices anywhere in the house without the clutter of cables. With traditional wired networks, it is extremely difficult for someone to steal your bandwidth but the big problem with wireless signals is that others can access the Internet using your broadband connection even while they are in a neighboring building or sitting in a car that’s parked outside your apartment. This practice, also known as piggybacking, is bad for three reasons: It will increase your monthly Internet bill especially when you have to pay per byte of data transfer. It will decrease your Internet access speed since you are now sharing the same internet connection with other users. It can create a security hazard* as others may hack your computers and access your personal files through your own wireless network. [*] What do the bad guys use  – There ha...

G oogle AdSense supports Responsive Ads which means that the size of AdSense ads on your website will automatically change based on the visitor’s device. Thus, if they are viewing your pages on a desktop computer, they may be served the bigger 728×90 leaderboard while the same ad unit may serve a smaller 468×60 banner to visitors who are on a tablet. There’s no need to change the code as the AdSense script smartly detects the browser’s width and serves the right size accordingly. Now consider a slightly different scenario where, instead of showing a smaller sized ad, you would like to completely hide the AdSense ad if the screen width is less than ‘n’ pixels. For instance, you may have a 160×600 px Skyscraper unit in your website’s sidebar but it should be displayed only when the site is being viewed on a desktop computer and not on a mobile phone. There are two ways to achieve this. You can either write a CSS media query that will completely hide the sidebar o...

WordPress websites and blogs are prone to Brute Force attacks and a recommended way to prevent your site against such attacks is to protect your wp-admin folder with a password. Let me explain. Your WordPress installation directory has three main folders: the wp-content folder includes all your themes, plugins, images and other uploaded files. the wp-includes folder includes all the PHP functions that actually run WordPress. the wp-admin folder is the front-end for WordPress admin, authors and and other members. Unlike the public HTML pages and images of your WordPresss website, the Admin dashboard area requires a username and password and is thus accessible only to “authorized” users. However, to make your WordPress more secure, you can add an extra layer of security to the wp-admin folder so that even authorized users can’t just get in with their WordPress passwords. Secure wp-admin directory of WordPress with a Password Here’s a step by step guide on how to p...