Sometimes, when you are chatting with friends or colleagues you will highlight the fact that you saw an awesome film on DVD the other day or heard a really cool album that you downloaded via iTunes, only for them to reply: “Yeah, well I heard/saw that ages ago, I downloaded it the day it came out”. The conversation then turns to how they did this and how can you do the same but your request is met with a reply that simply implies it’s too difficult for you to fathom and might include the suggestion to look into something called Bittorrent.
Bittorrent, put simply is a way of downloading large collections of files without the need for complicated software packages, it uses one protocol that can be accessed many different ways. Many people are used to peer-to-peer programs such as Limewire, Gnutella and Napster and associate this with the downloading of Bittorrent files.
So, completely forget about firing up a software program and searching away for the file of your choice. Bittorrent is much a much simpler but altogether different way of downloading files but today we want to explain the basics so you can harness the power of Bittorrent without any of the confusing jargon and related technical rubbish.
Let’s get one thing straight, it is illegal to download copyrighted works via the internet, WillINeedIt doesn’t condone any sharing of this nature. Bittorrent can be used to serve legal data also, with this article serving as a guide to using the protocol so users can decide what they wish to download, from wherever they wish.
This article is for the people who run their own Windows servers and are frustrated by the amount of time they have to wait for the POP3 Connector to connect and download any new emails on their server. If you run an Exchange on Small Business Server, you may have already noticed that the graphical interface only allows you to set the time between connections to a minimum of every fifteen minutes.
If, like me, you are looking for more of an instant mailbox, there is a simple way to reduce the polling time of the POP3 Connector. All it requires is a small registry editing and two minutes of your time.
On 11.06.09, In How To, by Matt Brian
Downloading television episodes via the internet is something that continues to grow and grow. TV networks had found their audiences are preferring to record their favourite programmes on their DVR’s and watch them back at more suitable times, this has seen some of the more internet savvy users take to harnessing the power of Bittorrent to grab the new episodes as soon as they become available.
When you want to download a TV episode, it’s as easy as visiting your favourite Bittorrent website, performing a search and then clicking download. This brings with it a little sense of repetition and it can be tiresome if you follow quite a few different television series and have to perform numerous searches to download each episode.
One way to automate the download process is to take advantage of RSS, many Bittorrent websites provide RSS feeds to allow syndication of their listings to different Bittorrent applications that support it. This article will show you how to add RSS feeds to uTorrent and configure it to download each television episode as soon as it’s available.
Website owners are starting to realise the impact that social media has on their traffic and site interaction but for some it can be a thankless task. Webmasters need to identify the best social networks to submit their content to but they also need to supply the tools so that their website visitors can submit also.
In one of our recent articles we mentioned how Facebook was making inroads into traditional social media sharing sites, standing out as a large traffic referrer on it’s own. Whilst, there are quite a few tools that enable you to share your content with friends on Facebook, one really simple and easy to setup button stands out for me, so much so it now sits pretty on this very site. This article details how to install a Tweetmeme-like Facebook share button onto your website or blog, giving your website visitors the opportunity to distribute your articles amongst their friends.
Facebook is a behemoth, harbouring over 300 million users, housing 40 million status updates a day and hosting 14 million new videos a month, it’s easy to see how the service has started to make inroads into the other media sharing services like YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr.
One of the most popular types of media shared on the website are photos, mainly down to the simple usability of the site and the fact you can add and tag photos of friends. This allows users to view lots of different user submitted photos, possibly from the save event from many different perspectives. With 2 billion photos uploaded a month, the proof is in the statistics.
There is one drawback of having being tagged in a set of photos from the same event you attended, you don’t physically have a copy of them. Sure you could sit there and download them, one by one, but that would take all day and night if it was a particularly big album. Luckily for those people who use the Mozilla Firefox browser, there is a clever little addon that allows you to download entire Facebook albums with the click of a button.
A few days ago, I was lucky enough to have one of my articles features on one of the best Tech blogs out there; The 2.0 Life run by a friend of mine, David Pierce. This article focused on how to install extensions inside your Google Chrome browser and also which ones would be the best to install.
One thing that I hadn’t thought about until recently was how would I uninstall these extensions once I had tested them and even if it was possible to do so. Luckily, after a little bit of research, there is a very easy way to do this.
Google Chrome, one of the newest players in the browser market, has seen a progressive rise in it’s usage throughout the year, really since it’s release. Many coders who had previously embraced open platforms and created extensions for browsers like Mozilla Firefox have started to flex their programming skills for a different browser with the addition of a extension platform within Google Chrome.
That said, some of the better extensions available for the Firefox browser have yet to be ported over to it’s newest competitor. Chrome users are crying out for extensions such as the Web Developer Addon, Adblock (although there is a prototype available in the form of Adsweep) and also the Stumbleupon Toolbar. The Stumbleupon Toolbar is a massive tool for online marketers and social news submitters, some will simply not use Chrome until a toolbar is developed for it.
We recognise that there isn’t a toolbar just yet but it is still very easy to get your Stumbleupon fix. You can still browse, submit and share Stumbles without the addon and we will show you how.
In today’s mobile connected world, a lot of people have moved from their traditional diaries with pen and paper and have moved to a more cloud hosted environment to keep on top of their appointments and engagements. One of the leading calendar providers is of course Google, with their Google Calendar product.
In a recent move, Google have enabled it’s users to add personal information to their calendars, aswell as being able to add sports fixtures/important dates. It’s pretty simple to add these to your calendar, ultimately allowing you to access these dates not only from your browser but also your mobile connected device.
Some people have a love affair with Facebook, they use it to organise their lives and keep in touch with their hundreds, possibly thousands of friends. Others have an account to simply say they have one, they hate the idea of updating statuses and sharing their lives with people they don’t know.
There comes a time in every Facebook users life when they want to give Facebook the chop and delete their account. Most of these people think they have deleted their account but all they have simply done is deactivate it. This article shows you how to completely delete your account and everything associated with it.
If you have been reading WillINeedIt for a while now, you will have noticed that we display a TweetMeme counter displaying the number of “ReTweets” a certain post gets via Twitter. This is a way of gauging how many people are sharing our posts and allows us to be able to connect with them again in the future.
Today, we have moved over to a new ReTweet button, one created by a certain John Resig. This ReTweet button plugs into the URL shortener we use on this blog; Bit.ly and will display the amount of people that have used the link to visit a page on this blog. If you are interested in learning how to place this inside your own blog, follow the instructions after the jump.
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