Category Archives: Useful websites

This category contains all posts that refer to useful websites.

Test your typing skills for free – www.typeracer.com

I only recently discovered this, but it’s a really addictive game. Well, it’s not really a game – but it is really good fun.

Basically, you create your profile for free. Once you’ve done that, you can start by practising typing on your own. When you’ve typed out a given text, it will tell you your average words per minute (wpm). After you’ve had a little play-around on your own, you can start playing worldwide where other people from around the world compete with you to see who can type the quickest.

It’s actually really addictive. Plus, it’s also quite practical as it can teach you out of bad spelling habbits. All in a bit of fun.

The “game” is totally free and great fun – even quite addictive. Try it for free now – www.typeracer.com.

Which is the best free antivirus/firewall around?

Today, you don’t need to fork out money to get a good antivirus. There are plenty of free alternatives available that’ll do exactly the same job for you, without you having to burn a whole in your pocket.

And there aren’t just one or two free options anymore, there’s actually quite a lot to choose from. Some are better than others, but it’s still worth doing your research and doing a bit of testing to see what’s what. So that’s exactly what I did.

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3 (Three/Hutchison 3G) UK Mobile Pay as you Go – Full and thorough review!

I’ve been with 3 (Three) for just under 6 months, so I feel it’s about time I do a full review. There’s much argument on the internet as to whether 3 is really a good company or whether it isn’t to be used. I have summed up most of the features available on 3 and how well they compare to other mobile operators in the UK.

Bare in mind, this review is based on pay as you go usage, but some categories (such as Coverage) apply to both PAYG and Pay Monthly.

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Can you run a normal website using WordPress?

Since, over the last few months, I have become a massive fan of the well-known blogging platform WordPress, it begs the question could you run a normal website using WordPress?

Well, I am quite confident in saying yes. I am now designing and setting up websites for a small range of people, and with all of them I’ve set them up using WordPress.

WordPress was originally designed as a platform for blogging. It is used by millions at wordpress.com, and you can also run it on your own site by installing the package at wordpress.org.

I love using WordPress with GEEK!. I have used it even since it was launched back in September 2008. It’s a great platform that not only blogs well, but has really neat features and great expansion capabilities.

And I believe that WordPress can be used for websites and not just blogs. Frankly, it beats many web design software packages available, both free and paid. The community that has accumulated with WordPress is also unbelievable. People are now producing fantastic plugins and themes that can be used for free on any site. Even the theme that I use on GEEK! is used with thanks to the people at jide.fr who produced the fantastic ‘Freshy 2’ theme.

So, if you are thinking of building a website any time soon, take a look at WordPress. It is quite obviously designed for blogs, but if you’ve got the time to play around with it a bit, you can get a perfectly good website going in a few hours. In my opinion, it’s better than any freeware or commercial product around.

A Small Orange webhosting – initial thoughts….

Well, I’ve been with my new host, A Small Orange, for just over a week now so I thought I’d do a quick “first thoughts” kind of review.

So, what do I think? Well, for the mere $10 a month that I pay (in the UK, that’s just under £7.50), it is really good value. I chose the Medium package which gives me 400MB of space and 25GB of bandwidth per month. I also get cPanel and Fantastico with a huge range of unlimited features such as unlimited FTP accounts, email, mailing lists and even MySQL databases (which is very unusual for hosts).

The uptime is generally good. I’ve had a couple of outages but the customer support is very good and I can change to any one of their 60 or so servers at any time. They are often available for instant online chat support but if not you can just submit a ticket and they respond very quickly (usually within a couple of hours).

They also have customer forums but these aren’t recommended for support as the ASO staff don’t check this very regularly. However, the ASO staff often post details about downtimes here, so it is recommended users view this forum if their site goes down before contacting staff.

So, in general, I really like this host and hope I can stay with them for years to come. The prices are generally really good value, and they also offer VPS for customers who don’t like shared hosting.

Take a look and see what you think. They offer 30 day money back guarantee and there is no contract so you can cancel at any time.