For more information: http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa/

For more information: http://americancensorship.org/

• H.R.3261 – Stop Online Piracy Act
• S.968 – PROTECT IP Act of 2011

Do you ever access facebook from a public Wi-Fi location? You should probably treat Facebook and other social networking sites like you do a bank website, ie. don’t browse insecurely. Public Wi-Fi networks aren’t very safe.

To enable secure connections in Facebook, just hit “Account” in the upper-right hand corner of any Facebook window and go to “Account Settings“.

How standards compliant is the browser you use? I was interested in finding the acid test: http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/

And as a web developer, I love their mission statement: “Founded in 1998, The Web Standards Project (WaSP) fights for standards that reduce the cost and complexity of development while increasing the accessibility and long-term viability of any site published on the Web. We work with browser companies,authoring tool makers, and our peers to deliver the true power of standards to this medium.”

As making websites cross browser compliant is very much a time consuming endeavor!

To see how they all compared, I took the following tests with Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, and Google Chrome. http://acid3.acidtests.org/

6%: Internet Explorer Version8.0.6001.18975 (Compatibility Mode)

20%: Internet Explorer Version 8.0.6001.18975

94%: FireFox Version 3.6.6

100%: Google Chrome Version 7.0.517.44

As the document states “Social networking will always be a tradeoff between safeguarding your privacy and enjoying the benefits of socializing online”… so why not make safeguarding your privacy as secure as the the US Military recommends for it’s service members?

There are now 500,000,000 (a half billion) Facebook users on the internet, so why not add a little professionalism to your profile?

CIO magazine lists four applications that help you do just that, such as this one:

Follow this blog

Is your personal information suddenly flapping in the breeze? Very interesting article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36877160/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/from/ET?GT1=43001

Broadband access in the United States is even worse than you think.

My DSL is only 610K download speed (610k based on test below, basically a 512K connection) on what should be a 5MB (5120K) connection. It is unfortunate, but there is nothing that I can really do about it. Except switch to dial-up; but that would leave me with a connection speed of 56K. I have had three different internet providers since moving into my house, and all of them use the same telephone lines, so same coverage. Each one I call tells me that my house is located at the end of the line which is why I have such sluggish service. Most of these services advertise themselves as up to 5MB (nearly 10 times faster than what I have).

You can check out your own DSL speed online. Check it against what you are supposedly paying for: http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

Hopefully investments like Google’s fiber-optic plan to add 1GB (10240K) connections to 50,000-500,000 households (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-gig-our-experimental.html) help meet the National Broadband Plan goals:

“NATIONAL BROADBAND GOALS (http://www.broadband.gov/)

• Goal 1: At least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second.
• Goal 2: The United States should lead the world in mobile innovation, with the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation.
• Goal 3: Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service, and the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose.
• Goal 4: Every community should have affordable access to at least 1 Gbps broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals and government buildings.
• Goal 5: To ensure the safety of Americans, every first responder should have access to a nationwide public safety wireless network.
• Goal 6: To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption.”

Facebook has recently introduced a new feature called social plugins: http://developers.facebook.com/plugins. These plugins are designed to integrate into websites and increase Facebook interaction with the internet.

Including things like the Recent Activity display (which is highly unlikely to display anything for this site):

But the real gem is being able to quickly add a “Like” button to all of your website’s pages.

For a quick add simply use the following HTML IFRAME text:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=www.mysite.com&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:200px; height:25px"></iframe>

And change www.mysite.com to the URL of the page the like button is on.

Or if adding it to a PHP page:

<?php
function curPageURL() {
$pageURL = 'http';
if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == "on") {$pageURL .= "s";}
$pageURL .= "://";
if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80") {
$pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].":".$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
} else {
$pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
}
return $pageURL;
}

echo '<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href='.curPageURL().'&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:200px; height:25px"></iframe>';

?>

Note: curPageURL function code from : http://www.webcheatsheet.com/php/get_current_page_url.php

If you are like me and occasionally add PHP to blog posts in WordPress I used to use a plugin called Exec-PHP (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exec-php). It was great because I could add PHP right into my posts, adding dynamic user interfaces, HTML forms, etc.

The biggest use I have for it is being able to output things into posts that would normally be filtered, such as IFRAMEs, by using the php function, html_entity_decode:

<?php
echo html_entity_decode("&lt;iframe src='www.google.com'&gt;&lt;/iframe&lt;");
?>

However, a near fatal flaw with that plugin, is that if you switched to the Visual tab in WordPress, the PHP code vanished! The plugin states that fact at the top of all blog posts as a warning:

This has frustrated me several times, because if I had the Visual tab open on a previous post, and went to one with PHP… gone! Then while setting up a new WordPress site, I was adding plugins and did a search for “php exec”. This came up with a few plugins, one of which was called Inline-PHP (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/inline-php/). Just curious, I installed it and could not have been happier! I can put all of my php code in [ exec ] tags which does not get filtered if I go to the visual tab, and as an added bonus, even displays in the Visual tab.

I highly recommend Inline-PHP plugin for any WordPress blogger who integrates PHP code right into their blog posts: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/inline-php/.

When I was working with a site hosted with WordPress-MU, using the html_entities_decode method was almost absolutely required, as it seems that WordPress-MU filters a little heavier than the standard version.