Pathik Shah

Connect.me is some new social networking play which has gone completely viral on Twitter and Facebook over the last few hours. It’s currently in stealth mode.

Here’s what they say they are

“connect.me is your social connections in context.

We’re not YASN (yet another social network) — we’re a better way for you to manage your connections and a better way for online communities to discover and connect to each other.

We believe privacy, control, and portability are requirements, not features.

And we believe there is a better way to connect you to businesses without spying on your data.

We’re part of a much bigger story of what’s coming in the semantic and social web.

We’d love to share more, but we’re in ninja stealth mode and would regrettably have to kill you.”

What’s interesting is how they have managed to get so many people, including yours truly, to sign up for something they know absolutely nothing about, and also grant it complete access to their Facebook, Twitter and Linked In accounts.

There is a mad rush to reserve user names on connect.me, just in case it turns out to be the next Facebook. And of course, to get an early invite, you need to refer your friends to the service as well.

Very ingenious, huh?

BTW, here’s a link to the service – connect.me with my referral details, if you are interested.

How to Find Website Load Time

In this tutorial, I will show you how you can test, find or measure the loading time of any website. The bigger a webpage, the more time it takes to completely load in a browser.

Why should you care about load times?

Having a bulky webpage can lead to excessive usage of your hosting bandwidth once you start getting good traffic, leading to higher hosting bills.

Google also considers load times when ranking your website pages, so high load times can lead to a lower SERP rank on Google.

Having a high page loading time also leads to a bad experience for your website visitors. Nothing is more frustrating than waiting for a webpage to load.

How to test your website’s load time?

To test the load times of any website, including your own, just use Pingdom’s tool – Full Page Test.

It allows you to test the load time of your website and also gives a complete visual breakdown of the various components in your webpage, and the time taken to load each of them.

How to reduce your website’s loading times?

There are many ways to reduce your website’s load times. You could remove comments and redundant code from your HTML and CSS pages as well as JS scripts to reduce the size of the file.

Also, ensure that you don’t add too many social plugins or widgets like Facebook, Twitter to your pages, as they can add up to your page size.

How to Monitor Your Website’s Uptime/Downtime For Free

If you have a website or blog which you host on your own server/VPS/shared hosting accounts, here’s a small tip for you.

Even the best servers go down sometimes and most shared hosting accounts have a lot of downtime, despite what they may claim.

If your site goes down, you not only lose out on website traffic but also ad revenue. Now, you can’t manually keep checking your site all the time to check for downtime, so here are a few services you may use to monitor your site uptime/downtime/availability for free.

Pingdom

You can use Pingdom to monitor your site for free. In case there is any downtime, the site can alert you by email or SMS. You can set the service to check your site at specific intervals. It’s free for a single site but you will have to pay if you want to monitor multiple sites on a single account. It also offers uptime reports and multiple check locations.

Host Tracker

This website monitoring service allows you to monitor 2 websites for free but again, it has a 30 minute check interval. It also offers uptime reports and some detailed statistics.

Site Uptime

This is another good service for checking your site’s uptime/downtime. It’s free for a single site and offers site statistics, uptime reports but checks your site only once in 30 minutes for free accounts.

Update: Wave invites sent to the first 30 requests.

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With Google announcing 1,00,000 free invites for Google Wave, a lot of “Free Google Wave Invites” sites / blog posts have gone up in the past 2 days. Most of them are fakes, and you have just as much chance of getting a Wave invite from them as actually winning a Nigerian lottery. Anyways, as always, I have come to your rescue.

Leave a comment here with your email ID and I’ll try to send you a Google Wave invite as / when I get some extra invites. Also note that with each Google Wave account, you get 8 invites using which you can further spread the Wave love.

Anyways, try registering on these links to get it directly from Google.

Google Wave Invite Request

Google Wave Developer Sandbox Account Request

You can also try your luck here if you want –  Google Wave Invites

Update: Wave invites sent to the first 30 requests.

Google normally approves them in a week. Leave a comment if I missed anyone. 20 more invites in the next week.

This tutorial will explain how to password protect your directories using .HTACCESS and .HTPASSWD
You may want to protect your web directories from listing content publicly if they contain your private content. This is the easiest way to protect your directory using password authentication.

First of all, create a new text file and rename it to .HTPASSWD and enter this text

user:password

Next, create another text file and rename it to .HTACCESS and enter this text

AuthUserFile /home/user/domain/path/folder/.htpasswd
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Login Details”
Require valid-user

Upload both the .HTACCESS and .HTPASSWD files to the directory you want to password protect. Now if you try to access that directory, it will prompt you for a username and password.

You can add more users to the .HTPASSWD file if you want to. If you want to use the same .HTPASSWD file for protecting another directory, you can just reference it again in your .HTACCESS.