Welcome to w3techie!

We are a community of geeks sharing our knowledge with the world. We teach visitors about a wide range of topics, from optimizing servers to securing WiFi networks to installing screen protectors, and much in between. Last month alone (January, 2012) we served over 40,000 people, who viewed over 55,000 pages.

We invite you to browse around and see what we have to offer; if you see something you like, feel free to share it with your friends, and if you notice that we're missing an article on an interesting topic, please let us know and we'll write one up!

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Increasing Android Battery Life

I’m relatively new to the world of smartphones.  Prior to purchasing one, I was the type of person that carried around a prepaid phone, sent the occasional text, but never really understood the phenomenon with cellular devices that kept people glued to them.  And now that I finally own one of these devices… I get the addictive part of it.  I always knew that you could do things like easily check and reply to emails on the go, or check on Facebook whenever you wanted, but it seemed that I didn’t really get it until I did.  At this point, I became addicted to Android as well, which led me to discover its one fatal flaw- the battery life.  Being someone who uses their phone pretty much all day now, yet still works awkward hours until late at night, and isn’t at home to charge it for long in between, I searched and searched on ways to keep my battery going through the day on a single charge.  At last however, I have assembled a few tips that I do in order to keep on chugging.  It’s not going to let you last a week without plugging your phone in, but it should work for you if you have a weird hours situation like mine.

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Maximizing SEO Opportunities with Extended Keyword Targeting

Take a look at your site’s image ALT tags and answer this question honestly: How closely do they resemble their respective page’s title? The answer most webmasters would give this question is what inspired this post.

I noticed that some webmasters use the exact same text for their ALT tags as they have in their title. These people are targeting a single, highly specific keyword that they want to rank highly for. What’s the problem here? It’s not so much that this keyword stuffing can have negative effects on their sites – the real issue is that these authors are going into the SEO world with the wrong mindset.

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How Safe Are You?

In this day and age, our computers are our lives. They are our keepsakes, they hold our memories, they run our businesses, and they direct our social lives. Therefore, one of the absolute worst things that can happen to you in today’s society involve somebody either hacking your computer, or having it loaded up with malware. And we Windows users, being the most widely used operating system, have it the worst. So before you click on that advertisement link, before you open that questionable e-mail, and especially before you try out that mysterious software, make sure that you know how to keep your computer safe.

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Prey Security Review

There’s an open-source project called Prey that promises to help you recover your computer or mobile phone in case it ever gets stolen. I went through a thorough test on both their Windows and Android clients, on both the free and pro plans, and I concluded my experiment with mixed feelings about the project.

The concept that Prey works on is simple. Your computer constantly pings Prey’s servers to check the status of your computer. If the computer is detected or reported stolen, the machine will be notified at its next ping to Prey’s servers. Your computer will then begin to collect information, such as it’s location (using the same WiFi triangulation that’s used in iPods and Android phones), IP address, screenshots, and even a camera shot. That collected information is constantly uploaded to Prey’s servers, where you can see the reports.

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Full Guide to Breadcrumbs for SEO

Breadcrumbs are navigation trails which show where a person is on a website with regard to the site’s hierarchical structure. For example, the breadcrumbs which on our forum topic about the necessity of data plans show as:

w3techie Forum  → Mobile  → Networks

This tells us that the topic is located within the “Mobile” section of the forum, and within the “Networks” sub-section.

Who cares? Why does that matter at all?

From a usability perspective, it’s sometimes convenient to know how a specific page is categorized to be able to go up the chain to find related pages.

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