Apologies & Volunteers....

Hey guys,

For starters I have to apologies for being away, but I'm back on track and ready to get started!  Expect to start seeing regular updates.

As you may or may not know myself and Amy own/develop/maintain TWCollection and have just recently started up Ghost (My own little proxy service).  Obviously these little projects couple with sixth form notably bring up questions of time keeping.  I am managing to keep both school and personal going but it would be nice to be able to not be worrying about one or the other.

This is why I'm asking anyone, it doesn't matter if you are a skilled programmers/web designers, I'm looking for any really, preferably with some knowledge of HTML and/or CSS.  Even if you just want somewhere to expand your web experience and help in a project, e-mail me - I'm sure I'll find something for you to do.  Also don't worry, I won't leave you to do everything, I'm very hands on so I wont be dumping all of my workload onto you.

For more information or to volunteer yourself send me an e-mail at: nexus5.01@gmail.com

Please enter "Volunteering" or "Questions" as your subject.

I look forward to hearing from any of you!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Make Flock (and Firefox) run faster!

Hey these are all of the "hacks" I use to make my Flock faster (they will also work Firefox), and believe me they do improve speed, noticeably!

about:config alterations
As you should know to apply these alterations you should open a new tab and in the address bar type "about:config" after agreeing not to break anything, I can guarantee you are going to be overwhelmed if your new to this. These are all of the settings you can change for Firefox, don't go changing anything unless you know what you are doing or unless they are listed below. If any of these particular values don’t exists, you can add them yourself by right-clicking anywhere in the config page and choosing “new”
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To alter any of the existing settings just double click on them and change the existing value to the one shown here.

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Find network.http.pipelining. Set this value to True.

Next, go to network.http.pipelining.firstrequest and set that to True, as well.

Go to network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and change that to 8.

Now we’ll get to network.http.proxy.pipelining and again set it to True.

Find nglayout.initialpaint.delay and change it to a 0.

Go to content.notify.interval and set this to 0.

Locate content.switch.threshold and change this to True.

And finally, change content.interrupt.parsing to True as well.

DNS Service
"OpenDNS is the world's largest, fastest-growing DNS service provider. Millions of people worldwide (and growing) trust us to handle their DNS and Web-content filtering needs. Why? Because we take a fresh approach to the Domain Name System and make it smarter and more powerful than it's ever been." - OpenDNS about us.

I swear by this service, it's fast, it's safe, reliable and free. I've been using it for around 2 years now and I have never had a problem. The people I have recommended it to have been very impressed, the only think I can recommend here is for you to try it for yourself. :-)

Here's the link: http://www.opendns.com/

Thank for reading guys!

"hacks" were obtained from Chris Pirillo.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Are you using Knol?

Incase you haven't heard Knol (released by by Google July 23, 2008) has kicked up quite a big of dust in the land of "Wiki" styled pages. Knol vary's from Wikipedia in many ways, but they are both built around the same concept.

"Knol is a Google project which aims to include user-written articles".

As soon as you start publishing on Knol and getting used to the UI (which doesn't take long at all) you will notice it has the "Google feel", by this I mean the UI is clean, easy to use and you just, know where everything is. Writing/Editing any Knol (what Google uses to refer to the articles) is very easy, formatting, links, images, videos, etc can be added using the toolbar


As I hope you can see from the image the toolbar contains everything you need and I bet you can tell me what all the buttons in the toolbar do without going and checking can't you? ;)

Users are also able to set permissions of their articles, there are three permission settings anyone can use for their article:

1. Open collaboration model - All signed in users may edit the Knol.


2. Moderated collaboration model - All signed in users can suggest edits in the Knol, but these need approval from an author before being published.


3. Closed collaboration model - Only owners and authors may edit the Knol.

Some other neat features of Knol include the choice of license you publish your "Knol's" under (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License and All Rights Reserved).

The future of Knol looks bright, with it's clean interface and constantly expanding user base and not too mention to boat loads of money Google can throw at Knol it's going to improve, it's going to get more users and it's already got Wiki worried.

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Think my blog could be improved?
Let me know: nexus5.01@gmail.com
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Why should you choose Firefox 3?

Firefox first entered the scene of web-browsers sometime during 2004.  This was bad news for IE (Internet Explorer) who owned, well pretty much the web browsing scene.  With many people experiencing problems with the web-rendering compatibilities of the infamous IE people started seeking a better, faster and more secure web-browser.

This is where Firefox came in, with Firefox's clean interface and blazing fast Gecko rendering engine Firefox was the wow factor.  Firefox has since then "stolen" around 18% of IE's market share, this is shared also with other browsers such as Apples Safari, Opera and other smaller browsers.  Firefox after being spread among literally millions of people, mainly due to the record breaking download day. 

Firefox has not only set the standards for many of today's modern browsers, but has also gone beyond just being a web browser, you can now apply "add-ons" these add-ons enable users to enhance their browsing experience for example the add-on Foxmarks will synchronize your favourites between multiple computers automatically upon closing the browser. 

Firefox is an Open source browser, the really means that you are free to see every piece of code that went into making the browser.  A great example of the possibilities you can do with an open source browser has been mentioned previously in my blog, Flock is a web browser that has been built on Firefox, Flock and Firefox are in essence the same browser the only differences being the fact that Flock has features that rely on new technologies that enable software to communicate with various API's, this adds features such as being able to interact with the social networking site Facebook without actually going to their site eg.  You can  send a shout to friends, Nude friends, leave a comment on their wall etc.

Firefox has changed web browsers in many different ways, it has innovated and explored places that IE probably hadn't considered prior to Firefox.  This has attracted millions of people and has replaced IE on many people computers.

Whether you use Firefox or not, I would like to hear your views on the browser.  If you like Firefox, why? If you don't, why?