Face it, most of us like the idea of having an HTPC (Home Theater PC) hooked up to our TV.  The flexibility we get with an HTPC over just a DVD player or a gaming console is enough alone to justify the cost.  I have built a bunch of these for people and until recently, I have never used pre-built …

If you have opened up your WordPress site up to user registrations, there are inevitably some things that you just don’t want them to see. Unfortunately, by default, there is no way to accomplish this directly from the options within WordPress. Until this day comes, you can remove dashboard items by adding some simple code to your functions.php file.

If you take into consideration that WordPress is the most widely used blogging platform, it is confusing why they are still living in the past.  I am referring to the usage of AIM, Jabber, and Yahoo in the user’s profile.  Currently, within WordPress, there is no way for you to modify these choices.  However, with a few simple lines of …

There are a lot of plugins running around that will let you embed videos and media into a post easily.  The funny part about this is that WordPress has had the functionality to handle this all by itself since version 2.9.  The functionality is powered by oEmbed and getting started is easy as pie.

I recently created a VM for Windows 7 and proceeded to waste hours trying to figure out why the Ethernet controller was missing from the Device Manager.  Installing VMWare Tools didn’t fix the issue, tracking down the correct Ethernet driver didn’t help; other people that created the same Virtual Machine were not having problems (of course), just me.  Fixing the …

For a long time, I was a cooling enthusiast; it was water or nothing.  However, as improvements have been made over the last few years, the idea of air cooling has become an attractive option.  The days of drilling holes in my case for mounting radiators and clumsy water pump configurations have gone out the window.  Although nothing looks as …

There are various ways you can secure your WordPress installation, some of them are true security measures and some of them are just concealers.  One thing I have been looking to do with my WordPress installations was to change the URL for user login and registration.  I feel as though having wp-login.php in the url is not necessary, this should …

In my household, netbooks fly around like curse words.  I have had more Acer’s come through my home office than I would like and for some reason, they either come with Windows XP or Windows 7 Starter; both are worthless in my opinion.  So when my friend asked me help him install Ubuntu on his Aspire One, I obliged.  Remember, …

For many of us, engaging our readers is what we ultimately want to do, and how readers interact with our site is what we want to know.  If you are a user of WordPress and you actively use the WordPress.com Stats plugin, you already have all the tools you need to display your most popular posts (by page views) for …

Facebook has introduced a new feature, called Instant Personalization, that aims to personalize your web experience.  The idea behind this is that Facebook’s affiliate sites will have access to your profile information and use this to target you with things you are interested in.  The question is… how much information do you want people to have, and do you want …