Kiran Upadhyay

Do you own a small business? How long have you been using social media as a marketing tool and what have you learned? In a little over a months time I will have owned my business for just about three years. When I began using social media some thirty six months ago, I had no real marketing background experience, and I certainly had never written a blog post, interacted in a forum, or sent a Tweet. My social media evolution began with a simple foray into blogging as a way to try and rank well for some keywords related to my business. From there I expanded to niche forums, review sites, FLICKR, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Man! Just trying to keep up can be intimidating and overwhelming. However, my number one goal has always been to create a distributed social media footprint with all of my online marketing activities pointing back towards my small business website. After almost three years of working hard, learning continuously, making lots of mistakes, and monitoring successes

You have decided to work on setting up your very own home wireless network so that your home computers and devices will be able to access the Internet or anything on your network from anywhere in your home. You are making a great decision and once you experience WiFi at home you will never want to go back to being tethered to a Ethernet cable . There are many advantages to having a wireless network over just a wired network. You can still plug machines into your router via an Ethernet cable but you also gain the additional benefits of having a wireless network. There are a lot of things to take into consideration such as security, widest range and best speed. MakeUseOf has done a Networking Guide in the past and it will be a good starting point for you. A normal topology for setting up a home wireless network would look like this: The wireless router gets connected to your Internet modem and servers out your Internet to connected computers. Wireless networking has come a long w

When you’re looking for a job, you don’t have a lot of chances to catch the interest of a potential employer. After the cover letter, the curriculum vitae (CV) or resume is one of the first documents recruiters see. To keep them interested in you, this document should highlight your strengths, be easy to scan, yet look unique and interesting. You may wonder what the difference is between a CV and a resume? The main difference is the length. A resume is a one or two page summary of your education, skills, and experiences. A CV covers more details and is primarily used when applying for jobs in academia, education, science, and research. A great way to quickly compile a resume and not forget about any details are online tools. This article covers the top 3 websites to create a CV or build a free resume online. 1. CeeVee Don’t be misled by the name. As I said, the main difference between a CV and a resume is the length. So simply limit yourself to the essential details and this CV bui

Take a moment and think about all of the sensitive data kept on your computer.  Account passwords, addresses, phone numbers, access to bank accounts and other financial services, and maybe even your social security number.  Almost every aspect of your identity is kept on this little machine.  Now imagine you want a new one.  So, you go out and buy a shiny new laptop.  What do you do with the old one?  Just toss it, right? Wrong!  If you just throw out your old computer, all of that personal information is still available to any tech-savvy thief.  Merely deleting a file in the traditional fashion will not truly “delete” it.  With a few techniques, a file sent to the recycle bin and emptied can be recovered if the deletion was recent enough. So how can you erase a hard drive completely?  Well, there a few techniques that anyone can employ to protect their identity. Disclaimer : Please keep in mind that the following software and techniques will ERASE your hard drive and you will not

Gmail is one of (if not the ) most advanced web email provider out there. With a brilliant UI that requires minimum page refreshes, a fantastic search functionality and large storage space; it has all the necessary ingredients you could ask from an email client. Do you think it can overthrow desktop email clients such as Outlook and Thunderbird and be used as a viable option as a desktop email client? I think yes. In fact, I have been using it like so for some time now. Here are the steps and features I have enabled that take Gmail at par with desktop clients if not better! Create a more desktop-like application First and foremost, create a desktop application for Gmail. This as easy as clicking on "Create Application Shortcuts" for Chrome users. Firefox users can install Prism and create applications henceforth. This would give you start menu entries and nice desktop icons to access Gmail quickly. You will be able to use applications like Launchy to launch Gmail if y

Icons don’t take up much space. The little 16×16 (up to 256×256) graphics though, grab our attention. How many times have you judged a software or web app, just by looking at its icons? Originally meant to make computers easier for newbies to understand, icons now occupy all the spaces where you care to look. As operating systems develop, icon development gallops along with them. From 16 color icons to 32-bit images with alpha transparency, we have come a long way. When you think of customizing your computer, changing and tweaking the icons that originally came with it, are on top of the task list. Where do you go for a spot of icon hunting? Thankfully, there are a huge number of resources. Check out our archives for posts tagged with icons and you will get some more. And in case your still aren’t satisfied, here are 8 of the best free icons search engines to take the search further. After all, if everything else can have a search engine, icons deserve a few of their own… FindI

It’s time once again for our featured Movers and Shakers post. Each week, we take one software category and list the top ten most downloaded apps. This week, we are looking at security applications . These are the apps that can be carried on a USB thumb drive and can be used on pretty much any computer. AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition Weighing in at first place, raking in 2,583,548 downloads this week is AVG’s free anti-virus application. A great free anti virus program that we have seen many times on MakeUseOf.com including our Top 15 Must-Have Windows Applications . It has had 268,048,933 total downloads! It was also our readers choice in our poll here . Avast Free Antivirus This comes in second place with over 1 million downloads this week and over 79 million downloads since its release. Avast is a great AV solution and one I use personally. Avast came in second place to AVG in our poll . Avira AntiVir Personal – Free Antivirus Another anti-virus application that I have used pers

“Wow! How did you do that?”, my friend asked me with amazement, when he looked at how I scroll up and down the webpage using my two fingers. “Can my laptop do that?” he asked. He was a bit disappointed when I explained that as far as I know, the feature is Mac-specific because Apple owns the patent to that multi-touch technology. But my friend’s question made me think. Is it really Mac specific? So I did some searching and found an unexpected answer. It turns out that some of the latest non-Mac laptops have similar features built in, and as for the older ones – as long as they use a Synaptic touchpad, you can easily add two finger scrolling using a little help from a little application called, well, Two-Finger-Scroll . Using the Two Finger Scroll The latest version of this tiny little app – version 1.0.6 – can be downloaded in the blink of an eye because its size is only around 290KB. The Two Finger Scroll app could work out of the box without the need to install it. But before r

For those that aren’t in the know, the browser based “IDE” is an abbreviation of I ntegrated D evelopment E nvironment. Very simply said, it’s an application that can be used to write code, but usually with added compiler/interpreter, debugging and automation features. Finding a decent freeware code writing application (view previous code-editor compilations for Windows or Mac ), never mind an IDE, can prove difficult. Some operating systems have it harder than others, and if you use more than one, or are on the move a lot, coding can be a bastard. Hence it pays to code in the cloud. By elevating your coding platform to an online environment, you not only rid yourself of OS issues but even of hardware independence. No matter where you find yourself, you can always access all your files with the same IDE. Here’s Why You Want An Online IDE If the aforementioned motivation of increased portability and accessibility wasn’t enough, here’s something else to think about. With your codi

Anyone who’s used Wikipedia already knows what a wiki is: a series of user-created pages that link to each other heavily. Wikipedia being among the largest collaborative projects on the face of the planet, it’s not hard to see how wikis can be used to get things done. What you’ve perhaps never considered is how useful a personal wiki can be for everyday life. A wiki can act exactly like a to-do list, but with the ability to branch off any complex task to its own page. A wiki can also contain your contact list, detailed information about ongoing projects and any other piece of information you can think of – and do so in an organized manner. The Zim wiki is an open-source program available for Linux and Windows, and it’s a great way to build a simple desktop wiki. Best of all, it’s named after the single greatest cartoon character in history. Installation Installing the Zim wiki is easy. If you’re a Linux user, the program is most likely in your repositories already, so check out yo