Computer Tricks and Secrets

The computer keyboard creates “dumb” punctuation marks that may not be acceptable in printed work but are common on web pages. It outputs straight quotation marks (") while your writing may require curly quotes. You can only type hyphens using the keyboard while an em or en dash may have made your text look more elegant and professional. HTML Entities for Punctuation HTML Codes for Punctuation Your keyboard lacks the keys for inserting the correct punctuation marks but there are simple HTML character codes, on entities, that you can use to mimic the typography of printed books on the web. Here’s a quick guide to using HTML codes for inserting typographically-correct punctuation marks in web writing. Hyphens (-) Hyphens, or half-dashes, are most commonly used to join together two or more words. You can type a hyphen directly without using any HTML codes. The next-generation iPhone is expected to become available in mid-September. The word email contains no hyphen but there’s on...

e Royal Family of UK has selected Google as the web hosting provider for Prince William’s official wedding website. The site, available at officialroyalwedding2011.org, contains news updates, photo galleries and videos and everything is hosted on Google App Engine. What’s new here? Web developers have long used Google App Engine to host web apps in the cloud – see Sleeping Time and Tall Tweets for example – but this is probably the first time that Google’s infrastructure is being used to host a ‘static website’ of an event that will get plenty of press attention and web traffic in the coming days. Host your own website on Google App Engine There are quite a few advantages with hosting websites on Google App Engine. First, it should be more reliable since your site will get served through Google’s own data centers. Second, if you have a low traffic website, it is highly likely that you won’t have to spend a penny for web hosting. You get 1 GB of free storage space for hosting your im...

This week I have been testing the various online backup services, both paid and free, and here’s a summary of how these service compare against each other. Why use an online backup service? While it is easy to create a  local backup  of your computer, the physical media where you are storing the backups, like the DVDs or external disk, may not be very reliable in the long term. The other disadvantage is that local backups don’t always happen in real-time. It is therefore recommended that you switch to an online backup service – these are inexpensive and will automatically copy your computer’s data over the Internet to a more secure off-site location (aka the data center) in near real-time without your involvement . Which Online Backup Service Should You Use? If you only have a limited amount of data (< 2 GB) on your computer that you want to store in the cloud, any of the following backup services should solve your problem without you having to shell out a penny. All the above onlin...