How to Make a Computer Operating System

Decide what media you want to load your OS on. It can be a floppy disk, CD drive, DVD drive, flash drive, a hard disk, or another PC.

Decide what you want your OS to do. Whether it is a fully capable OS with a graphical user interface (GUI) or something a bit more minimalistic, you'll need to know what direction you are taking it before beginning.

Target what processor platform your operating system will support. If you are not sure, your best bet is to target the X86 (32 bit) processor platform, as most computers use X86 platform processors

Decide if you would rather do it all yourself from the ground up, or if there is an existing kernel you would like to build on top of. Linux from Scratch is a project for those that would like to build their own Linux distro, for example. See Tips for an external link.

Decide if you're going to use your own bootloader or a pre-created one such as Grand Unified Bootloader (GRUB). While coding your own bootloader will give a lot of knowledge of the hardware and the BIOS, it may set you back on the programming of the actual kernel. See Tips.


Decide what a programming language to use. While it is possible to create an operating system in a language such as Pascal or BASIC, you will be better off using C or Assembly. Assembly is absolutely necessary, as some vital parts of an operating system require it. C++, on the other hand, contains keywords that need another fully-built OS to run. In order to compile an operating system from C or C++ code, you will of course be using one compiler or another. You should therefore read the user guide/manuals/documentation for your chosen C/C++ compiler, whether it comes packaged with the software or is available on the distributor's website. You will need to know many intricate things about your compiler and, for C++ development, you should know about the compiler's mangling scheme and its ABI. You are expected to understand the various executable formats (ELF, PE, COFF, plain binary, etc.), and understand that the Windows proprietary format, PE (.exe), has been copyrighted.

Decide on your application programming interface (API). One good API to choose is POSIX, which is well documented. All Unix systems have at least partial support for POSIX, so it would be trivial to port Unix programs to your OS.

Decide on your design. There are monolithic kernels and microkernels. Monolithic kernels implement all the services in the kernel, while microkernels have a small kernel combined with user daemons implementing services. In general, monolithic kernels are faster, but microkernels have better fault isolation and reliability.

Consider developing working in a team. That way, less time is required to solve more problems, producing a better OS.

Do not wipe your hard drive completely. Remember, wiping your drive will clear out all your data and is irreversible! Use GRUB or another boot manager to dual-boot your system with another OS until yours is fully functional.

Start small. Begin with small things such as displaying text and interrupts before moving on to things such as memory management and multitasking.

Keep a backup of the last working source. In case something goes terribly wrong with the current version or your development PC crashes and is unable to boot, it is an excellent idea to have a second copy to work with/troubleshoot.

Consider testing your new operating system with a virtual machine. Rather than rebooting your computer each time you make changes or having to transfer the files from your development computer to your test machine, you use a virtual machine application to run your OS while your current OS is still running. VM applications include VMWare (which also has a freely available server product), the open-source alternative Bochs, Microsoft Virtual PC (not compatible with Linux), and xVM VirtualBox. See Tips for more information.

Release a "release candidate." This will allow users to tell you about potential problems with your operating system.

Tips

• Do not start an operating system project in order to begin learning programming. No. Uh-uh. Do not. If you don't already know C, C++, Pascal, or some other suitable language inside out, including pointer manipulation, low-level bit manipulation, bit shifting, inline assembly language, etc., you are not ready for operating-system development.
• It may be a good choice to make a completely new partition for developing the OS.
• Check for potential deadlocks and other bugs. Bugs, deadlocks and other problems will affect your Operating System project.
• If you want an easy way, donsider Linux distros like Fedora Revisor, Custom Nimble X, Puppy Remaster, PCLinuxOS mklivecd, or SUSE Studio and SUSE KIWI. However, the operating system you create belongs to the company who started the service first (though you have rights to distribute it freely, change it and run it however you like under the GPL).
• After all development is done, decide if you want to release the code as open source, or proprietary.
• Use websites such as OSDev and OSDever to help you develop your own operating system. Please note well that for most purposes, the OSDev.org community would prefer that you stick to using their wiki, and do not join the forum. If you do decide to join the forum, there are prerequisites: You are required to thoroughly know C or C++, and x86 Assembly language. You must also understand general, and complex programming concepts such as Linked Lists, Queues, etc. The OSDev community, in its rules, explicitly states that the community is not around to babysit new programmers. If you are trying to develop an operating system, it goes without saying that you are expected to be a programming "god." You are also required to have read the processor manuals for the processor architecture you have chosen; whether x86 (Intel), ARM, MIPS, PPC, etc. The manuals for a processor architecture may be easily found using a Google search ("Intel Manuals", "ARM manuals" etc). Do not join the OSDev.org forums and start asking obvious questions. It will simply result in "Read the f*** ing Manual" answers. You should try reading Wikipedia, and the manuals for the various tools you wish to use.

Wheels and Rims

Often considered the same, the wheels and rims are a very important esthetic and functional part of your car. In the more strict lexical meaning, the rim is the central part of the wheel that sustains the tire, while the wheel is the entire complex. Most online and offline car parts shops offer a large variety of rims, usually blending the two notions together as wheels and rims. There are two different types of rims out there: the cheap, ordinary ones, which need a wheel cover to improve their aspect and the more expensive, esthetic ones that go by themselves.
The trick about a good rim and a balanced wheel is to match the rim with the tire. If you use a too wide or too narrow rim, the tire will wear out quicker and could even get you in trouble on the road. The most dangerous moments with an unfit rim is when taking a turn, as the car can lose its balance if the wheels are not as steady as they should. Therefore, the most important thing, when choosing a rim, is to match it with your car model. The online shops that offer you car parts and accessories usually provide with a sorting service so that you can pick the exact rim and wheel for your cars’ model and year of manufacturing. However, if you want to explore by yourself, you’re welcomed to do so, just try to stay in the limits of your car’s original wheel proportions.
With respect to the esthetics of your car, the manufacturers have thought of just about everything. The only things you need to do is decide upon the alloy you’re interested in (whether is chrome, steel or something else), the color you’d like for your ride and the model. There are hundreds and hundreds of different models, from the ordinary looking ones to the most exotic you could think of. You can also choose, depending on your budget, if you want to buy used wheels and rims, new, already made ones or maybe you’d fancy some custom made rims with something personal on them.
Any car owner that would like to upgrade the looks of his car is bound to start with the koko kuture custom wheels and rims, since they are the easiest to change and offer a great improvement to the way your car will look in your friends eyes. Give it a polish and some new wheels and you have a brand new ride.

Car Spoilers

If you're looking for a way to enhance your car's appearance and boost its performance, you will find that attaching a spoiler in its rear or at the front very useful and charming. Spoilers are great addition and help you create a unique impression for your car. They improve the overall appearance of your vehicle and somehow make them sleeker and unique. Of course, attaching spoiler does not only satisfy people's need for beautiful upgrades. In fact, the main reason that a car owner attaches spoilers to their auto is to boost their car’s performance since spoilers actually “spoil” the wind movement that has no help in keeping the car in steady motion. They also produce down force by reducing the resistance of the wind during high speed or highway driving.
Car spoilers can be found at the rear and sometimes at the front of the car. The front spoiler is often called the air dam while the rear is usually called the wing spoiler. In the case of sports car a wing spoiler acts as a force that push the tires steady on the road thus reducing the instability and drags of the car. This also ensures a more forceful and easy turning, using of brakes and maneuvering.
Car spoilers come in several shapes, styles and weight and can be custom built in order to fit perfectly in any car models, make, and year. They are actually not difficult to install because they are often packed with mounting bolts and necessary gaskets for sealing. They are usually made from lightweight materials like polyutherane, fiberglass or light steel, which are durable and high resistant against bumps, sags and cracks. In addition, since they are of varying styles and makes attaching a spoiler could give your car an overall change in its external appearance.
There are people that use spoilers for appearance and decorative purposes only, while spoilers actually enhance the aerodynamics of the vehicles some install them for the sole purpose of enhancement and aesthetics with little consideration for its function. Some even create their own modification based on their preferences and style that they want to achieve regardless whether the spoiler helps them on the road or not.
If your car has no factory-built spoiler and you want to put one you will realize that finding a preferable spoiler to custom-fit your car is not difficult, nowadays there are many aftermarket manufacturers and sellers and they are actually willing to give you the best price options. For one, there are OEM Spoilers, these are the imitation of the original factory built ones and are tested to fit perfectly in your car. You can also opt for custom-made spoilers; these are built according to the model and make of your car but are not replica versions. There are also sellers that offer universally made spoilers and high-rise or specialty spoilers for your vehicle but you need to be careful with your vehicle measurement to be able to obtain the perfect fit

Bentley Gt Performance Accessories

If we speak of performance cars, it is no longer new that every car enthusiast is obsessed with their luxury or sports cars. If this is so, those car owners love their auto to be the finest of all when being compared from others. It is a guy thing, as everybody knows of this trait, when it comes to cars, they want something that they can boost it out. Because of the desires of those car lovers that theirs will be astounding, this ascends the emerged of customized and modifications of cars. Moreover, since the potential of this investment, market is feasible, more and more auto companies dive in with the car trends and began to invent gears for this purpose. Hence, if you are looking for performance parts of your Bentley Gt, they are available even online and you can certainly find anything you wish for without hassle.
With the endless popularity of this trend, even the purpose of having a car has changed. At first, it was of necessity, but today’s era, it is now part of a hobby. Car companies of any car makes and models of course have thought of it that’s why they had came up with customizations that can absolutely keep with uniqueness, versatility or simply ensembles the car owner’s personality and style.
People who may not be aware of this Bentley Gt trend will point their fingers as the culprit of this modification madness. But, do they really know how this trend started? Car owners of Bentley Gt joined hands together yearly and discuss on how this car makes and models perform well. They meet up not just to discuss the modifications on the appearance of the car, but likewise deal with the modifications they can make on the mechanical operation. Those Bentley Gt owners absolutely want theirs to appear exceptional and fastest ever imagined.
Bentley Gt performance accessories never failed its car enthusiasts to supply only the best. It only wants a level-up performance to its car models. More so, it wanted its car owners to get satisfied and impressed with superb engine system performance. They keep the over-all parts to be performing well without fail. The reason for keeping each Bentley Gt is superior in every part is due to the fact that when one part fails, the entire mechanical functionality also fails. Therefore, Gt and other models performance accessories are certainly designed to enhance and upgrade the driving dynamics as well the car’s looks and style. For example, Bentley body kits are for purposes to put style on the car’s body. Such body kits include ground effects, wings or spoilers, body panel accessories and skirts, and fender flares.
In addition, Bentley Gt performance parts is spoiler or wings, such are designed for purposes of style and function of the car. More so, it upgrades the speed of the car and thus best for sports and racing cars.

Bentley Performance Accessories

Automobiles industry is one of the largest sectors in this whole world since everyone nowadays owns a vehicle. Moreover, any sector that is big obviously includes a lot of competition. Therefore, to keep up with the competition, creativity becomes very important. Bentley cars have its own status in the automobiles industry and are mostly popular for their wide range of racing cars. Undoubtedly, it is very famous and known brand in the Automobiles industry nowadays, mostly because of its awesome performance, which is a result of Bentley performance accessories.
Bentley does not stop right after launching their new models, but they also do provide various additional performance parts for the Bentley owners. So upgrading your car with these performance parts can add up to extra performance rating than previously.
There is a huge amount of additional performance parts for Bentley cars that are available in the market, but below mentioned are the most important and basic parts mentioned.
1. Bentley Exhaust system: Custom Exhaust is pretty big in size and it works perfectly in keeping the engine clean from toxics and helps boosting the torque along with the horsepower.
2. Bentley Air intakes: are much better than the normal intakes and they work far better as they are specially made for mustang cars. The air filters and the latest technology used in those intakes never lets the engine heat up and are even takes care of the engine on rainy days.
3. Bentley Pulley: adds the extra punch that you need for your ride and increases the horsepower. It is generally made of aluminium and adds that exact extra boost that your Bentley might need.
4. Bentley Headers: Headers might not seem that important but it does give your car a decent amount of power boost, more fuel efficiency and better performance of the exhaust system and obviously, Bentley Headers being specially built for its cars serves all these actions better than the normal ones.
These four parts are the main ones that are needed to be upgraded in your car, it’s not like they are needed to be done at once but they all add their own benefit to the car’s overall performance. Therefore, it would be wise to upgrade them all.

Lamborghini Performance Accessories

Automobiles industry is one of the largest sectors in this whole world since everyone nowadays owns a vehicle. Moreover, any sector that is big obviously includes a lot of competition. Therefore, to keep up with the competition, creativity becomes very important. Lamborghini cars have its own status in the automobiles industry and are mostly popular for their wide range of racing cars. Undoubtedly, it is very famous and known brand in the Automobiles industry nowadays, mostly because of its awesome performance, which is a result of Lamborghini performance accessories.
Lamborghini does not stop right after launching their new models, but they also do provide various additional performance parts for the Lamborghini owners. So upgrading your car with these performance parts can add up to extra performance rating than previously.
There is a huge amount of additional performance parts for Lamborghini cars that are available in the market, but below mentioned are the most important and basic parts mentioned.
1. Lamborghini Exhaust system: Custom Exhaust is pretty big in size and it works perfectly in keeping the engine clean from toxics and helps boosting the torque along with the horsepower.
2. Lamborghini Air intakes: are much better than the normal intakes and they work far better as they are specially made for mustang cars. The air filters and the latest technology used in those intakes never lets the engine heat up and are even takes care of the engine on rainy days.
3. Lamborghini Pulley: adds the extra punch that you need for your ride and increases the horsepower. It is generally made of aluminium and adds that exact extra boost that your Lamborghini might need.
4. Lamborghini Headers: Headers might not seem that important but it does give your car a decent amount of power boost, more fuel efficiency and better performance of the exhaust system and obviously, Lamborghini Headers being specially built for its cars serves all these actions better than the normal ones.
These four parts are the main ones that are needed to be upgraded in your car, it’s not like they are needed to be done at once but they all add their own benefit to the car’s overall performance. Therefore, it would be wise to upgrade them all.

Performance Accessories

Basically, performance accessories are made and designed to improve the performance of your ride and the driving experience, thus it is not a simple task. In order to improve the overall performance of a car, it needs a combination of few parts. The general idea is to upgrade the engine to start with. However, there are various other parts, which need to be upgraded too. These various other parts can be classified into four classes.
Firstly, the brakes can be categorized as the most important part of a car as they serve as a safety factor that controls the speed of the vehicle. Upgrading the brakes has its own importance as it can affect the acceleration and deceleration of the car’s speed and can save both the vehicle and the passengers from any kind of mishaps. Therefore, it is indeed important to choose the right one while buying them as below standard ones could lead to unfavorable conditions, which we would all want to avoid.
Secondly, the car suspension as we know is referred as something that links the vehicle to the wheels and the better they are the better the car is handled. So, installing upgraded springs or shock absorbers become greatly imperative as it also holds the vehicle when brakes are applied or if there is any heavy cargo in the car, which serves as a safety measure.
Thirdly, the engine, being the most important part of any car, it is of high significance and should be focused on the most. There are various options while enhancing the engine like horsepower enhancer, upgrading the air intakes and the exhaust system. The horsepower enhancer will obviously improve your car’s horsepower. Thus, the upgraded air intakes enhance the whole air passing procedure and keep the engine’s function smoothly. The quality exhaust system on the other hand keep away all the toxic smokes that your car’s engine produces, which will result in a decent increase in torque and horsepower. Furthermore, the muffler can also be upgraded, as it will result in an increase in fuel efficiency. Combining all those parts will help greatly in making the car perform at its best.
Fourthly, the wheels and tires. It is very important to choose the right tires according to your environment or location because your normal tires might just end up being useless when the road is slippery or in a snowy weather or might just not work in rough roads. There are tires specially built for every type of environment. However, it might not be the best idea to switch tires every time, so finding a tire, which suits every environment, becomes important. So, this is where upgrading your normal tire needs to be done.
All these upgrading features will lead to a few favorable things like your car’s speed limit gets high, more firm and controllable drifts, your car will be able to take faster turns etc. However, choosing the right performance parts for your car is best thing that you will have to do for yourself as it greatly depends on what you decide to use in your car and it also depends how good your car is going to act.

Hyundai Body Kits

Automobiles industry is one of the largest sectors in this whole world since everyone nowadays owns a vehicle. Moreover, any sector that is big obviously includes a lot of competition. Therefore, to keep up with the competition, creativity becomes very important. Hyundai cars have its own status in the automobiles industry and are mostly popular for their wide range of racing cars. Undoubtedly, it is very famous and known brand in the Automobiles industry nowadays, mostly because of its awesome performance, which is a result of Hyundai performance accessories.
Hyundai does not stop right after launching their new models, but they also do provide various additional performance parts for the Hyundai owners. So upgrading your car with these performance parts can add up to extra performance rating than previously.
There is a huge amount of additional performance parts for Hyundai cars that are available in the market, but below mentioned are the most important and basic parts mentioned.
1. Hyundai Exhaust system: Custom Exhaust is pretty big in size and it works perfectly in keeping the engine clean from toxics and helps boosting the torque along with the horsepower.
2. Hyundai Air intakes: are much better than the normal intakes and they work far better as they are specially made for mustang cars. The air filters and the latest technology used in those intakes never lets the engine heat up and are even takes care of the engine on rainy days.
3. Hyundai Pulley: adds the extra punch that you need for your ride and increases the horsepower. It is generally made of aluminium and adds that exact extra boost that your Hyundai might need.
4. Hyundai Headers: Headers might not seem that important but it does give your car a decent amount of power boost, more fuel efficiency and better performance of the exhaust system and obviously, Hyundai Headers being specially built for its cars serves all these actions better than the normal ones.
These four parts are the main ones that are needed to be upgraded in your car, it’s not like they are needed to be done at once but they all add their own benefit to the car’s overall performance. Therefore, it would be wise to upgrade them all.

Body Kits

There are two main functions served by auto body kits: for function and aesthetic enhancements. Thus, it is one of the most basic tools needed by every car owner to ensure that their vehicle delivers optimum performance. You can find these kits in automotive shops and is essential for the maintenance of your vehicle. For any car enthusiast, it is therefore important that you know about basic components included in the kit so you can utilize them to the fullest. Your ability to utilize fully the kit components is also vital in ensuring that you can provide maximum performance and function.
The most basic component involves maintaining the exterior parts of the vehicle. You can get separate parts or get the complete bundle so you can produce an entirely new look for your vehicle. This is very true with racers because the exterior parts of the body will also enhance the car's performance.
Slight enhancements to the exterior and interior components of your vehicle will incrementally boost the performance of the vehicle. You can use the kit to modify various parts of the vehicle, such as the bumpers, grills, roofs, headlights, and spoilers, to name a few. Hence, you can utilize it to achieve optimum automobile performance that will increase the value of your vehicle. Your ability to invest in a good quality auto body kits will therefore make a difference in the kind of enhancement you can enjoy.
It is important to note that there is specialized auto body kits sold in the market whether online or offline that are designed for specific car models. Hence, it is best to go for shops that have a wide selection of kits to choose from, regardless of the type of vehicle you are driving. If possible, take the time to look into the basic car components included in the kit so you can assess the quality of the materials. In an online automotive shop, you can determine the quality of the kit by looking at the reputation of the shop itself and the manufacturer.
It is also important to do a bit of research on car body kits - what are the various components and how to utilize it to the fullest. Thus, you will know how to take advantage of these tools for your own benefit, regardless of what aspect of your vehicle you need improvement on. You may also consult various experts at the shop to get more insight into how to make the most of the body kits for your own benefit. In the end, it will be worth the investment you make.

How to Free-up Disk Space on your Windows PC

The cost of digital storage is going down and most newer computers ship with 500 GB to 1 TB of hard disks that are big enough to store all your files. However, if you are using Windows on an old computer with limited disk space, here is a list of things you should do to instantly recover some free space.

1. The Obvious Methods to Free Disk Space

a. Use CCleaner to quickly clear your Windows recycle bin, temporary Internet files, log files, memory dumps and other stubborn files that don’t show up in Windows Explorer. CClean also provides an option to clean your unused Windows Registry keys and your browser cookies but that won’t save any disk space.
b. Use Revo Uninstaller (the free version) to remove software programs, game demos and other stuff that you no longer use. Revo has a useful “hunter mode” to help you uninstall programs that are not listed in the “Add/Remove Programs” section of the Control Panel.
c. Use either WinDirStat or Space Sniffer to locate files that are taking the maximum amount of space on your hard disk and either erase the unnecessary ones or move them to another partition. You may also use Windows Desktop Search to easily find the largest files on your system from Windows Explorer.
d. Use Duplicate Cleaner to find duplicate files on your hard disk. These may include videos, documents, MP3s, zip archives, images and all other types of files. Duplicate Cleaner compares the MD5 hash of files – not just the file names or their byte size – and is thus pretty accurate at identifying duplicates. Another good alternative for removing duplicates is Duplicate File Finder – this is more suitable for novice users.
e. Check your downloads folder and get rid of all the program installers, driver packages, ISO files, IPSW files, virtual machines, and other bulky files that you may have downloaded from the Internet.
f. If you enjoy watching video podcasts, it may be a good idea to delete old episodes from the disk. iTunes, Zune and most other podcasting software offer easy options to automatically delete podcast episodes that either too old or have been watched.
g. iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users should consider deleting device backups from the computer to reclaim space. Open iTunes –> Preferences –> Devices and delete all backups of your iOS devices but for the most recent one.
h. If you have been an Outlook user all your life and only recently migrated to Gmail, you can backup Outlook’s bulky PST files to Gmail and then move them to another drive for safekeeping. All your old emails can be easily access from Gmail itself.

2. The Not-So-Obvious Ways to Recover Free Space

a. Get Rid of the Shadow Copies

When you install new software program, update device drivers or apply patches and hot-fixes on your computer, Windows will automatically store a snapshot of your system before making the changes. This helps because if something stops working after the installation, you can easily restore your system to the last working state.
Other than system files, Windows also stores backup copies of data files (like documents, pictures, etc.) on your computer which may come really handy if you accidentally modify or delete the original files. Technically, these are known as shadow copies and the feature is available in all editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7.
If you have been using your computer for some time, the disk space consumed by these restore points and shadow copies may easily run in gigabytes. You can either remove all the restore points from your system or, if you would like to play extra safe, you can keep the new restore points and just get rid of the old ones.
Click the Windows Start button and type cmd in the search box (not the Run dialog). Now press Ctrl + Shift + Enter to open the command prompt with Administrator privileges. Click Yes if you are shown the User Access Control Window.
Now type the following command to remove only the old shadow copies:

c:\>vssadmin delete shadows /for=c: /oldest

Or, if your system is working normally, use this command to remove all the shadow copies.

c:\>vssadmin delete shadows /for=c: /all

Command Line is quicker but if you prefer the visual option, launch Disk Cleanup from the Start Menu and choose Clean up System Files. Switch to the “More Options” tab and choose “Clean up” under System Restore and Shadow Copies to delete all but the most recent restore point on the hard disk.

b. Make the Service Pack Permanent

When you installed Service Pack 1 (SP1) on a Windows 7 machine, it saves the installer packages in c:\WINDOWS\WinSxS folder. These would be required in case you want to uninstall SP1 later but if that is unlikely to happen, you can remove the SP1 backup files and reclaim some lost space.
Launch Disk Cleanup, choose Clean up System Files, select “Service Pack Backup Files” and delete. Alternatively, you may run the following command as an admin:

c:\>dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

You may have to reboot the machine after the dism command. If you are on Windows Vista, you may also use the Vista Cleaner utility to clean the Service Pack installer files.

c. Reserve Less Space for Restore Points

Windows will continue to save new restore points until all the disk space reserved for saving restore points is filled up. That means if you have less reserved space, the old ones will get deleted more quickly to make room for new restore points.
Go to Windows Start –> Run and type sysdm.cpl to open the System Properties dialog. Click the “System Protection” tab, choose your current drive (C:) and click Configure. Set the Max Usage anywhere between 3% and 5% of the total disk size. Apply the changes.
Now that you have recovered some important space, go back to the “System Protection” tab and click Create to to capture of snapshot of your system in its current working state – just to be on the safe side of things.

How to Completely Test Your Website

You may have developed your website using an expensive “what you see is what you get” editor but there’s no guarantee that site visitors “will get the website as you see it“.
You will need to extensively test the website to ensure that visitors have a comfortable stay and don’t leave your site in a jiffy.  And here are some useful tools to help you completely check your website:
Browsershots is an online service that automatically captures full page screenshot images of your website in various browsers across all different OS platforms. You also have the option to preview the website design in browsers with or without Flash, Java and JavaScript.
Browsershots is extremely popular and you may therefore have to wait a few minutes for this service to render screenshots of your website.
IE NetRenderer is another service that’s much faster than Browsershots but it can check the rendering only for different versions of Internet Explorer. Mac oriented websites can try BrowsrCamp which is like Browsershots but for the Mac OS browsers only.
To see how your website appears on the small screens of mobile phones like the BlackBerry or Windows Mobile, check out BrowserCam. Another good option is the Opera Simulator that lets you experience a mobile version of Opera from the desktop.
Related: Use Opera Simulator to Unblock Restricted Websites
Some people are still using slow dial-up connections and their population in not insignificant especially in the developing world. You therefore need to make sure that the average loading time of your HTML web pages, along with all the Javascript Ads, Images, CSS, Flash animations, etc., is within reasonable limits.

Pingdom is a free online service that mimics the way a page is loaded in the web browser. It shows statistics (size, loading time) for every object on the web page so you know about the culprits who may slow down the website.

Alternatively, you could use Firebug in Firefox to detect elements on your web page that are increasing the load time of your web pages (press F12, Goto All -> Net).
For website and blogs that syndicate content via RSS feeds, load the website in IE or Firefox and look for that orange XML icon near the browser address bar. This ensures that other online services can successfully auto-discover RSS feeds give your site address.

If you have added email forms to your website – try some combinations in the form address field. For instance, is the email message delivered successfully if visitors add a semicolon instead of a comma to separate two or more email addresses.
You may also want to print some of your web pages to the local printer or save them as PDF to ensure that the Print CSS of your site is stripping the non-essential stuff like the sidebars and the ads.

For accessibility, load the website inside html2txt to ensure that screen readers can interpret your website. This is an online Lynx simulator (text-only browser) and will also help you understand how your website appears to Google spiders and other search engine bots.
And finally, validate your web pages against online HTML validation and clean-up service like the W3C HTML Validator and HTML Tidy. The former service help you check the website for conformance to W3C HTML standards while the latter is for cleaning up HTML source files that contain lot of nested tags.

How to Check the Health of your Hard Drive

Hard disk failure is possibly the worst thing that can happen to your computer and it often occurs without giving any warning signs.

Test Your Hard Drive for Impending Problems

You may however run certain tests on your computer beforehand to get an idea about the current condition of your hard disk. This should in turn help you decide whether a replacement drive is necessary or not.

Step 1: Check your hard disk for errors

All recent versions of Windows include a utility called Chkdsk.exe that can check your hard disk for any bad sectors.
You may either run Chkdsk from the command line (see details) or launch Windows Explorer, right click the drive that you wish to examine and choose Properties. Switch to the Tools tab and click the “Check Now” button under Error checking. Select “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” to perform a thorough disk check.

Step 2: Understand the sounds of your disk

Do you sometimes hear strange sounds coming out of the CPU box? Well, if the hard drive is making those sounds, it could be an alarming situation and your best bet would be that you turn off the computer before any further damage is done to the disk.
But how do you distinguish between sounds coming from a hard disk with noise that’s made by the fans or the power supply? Here’s a useful page where you can listen to recorded sounds of various hard drives that have lead to a crash. If your disk is making a similar sound, get a replacement quickly.

Step 3: Catch errors before they happen

Disk Checkup is a free hard disk monitoring utility that displays tons of diagnostic data about your disk. While the level of detail it provides may easily confuse even tech-savvy users, just ignore the numbers and keep the utility running in the background.

It monitors your disk’s temperature, read and write error rate, etc. and will alert you when the values of any of these parameters approach dangerous levels. These may be signs of an impending disk failure. Disk Checkup is free for personal use.

Step 4: Thoroughly test your Hard Disk

SeaTools is free diagnostic tool that can completely test your hard drive regardless of the OS installed on it. The tool is provided by Seagate but it works with non-Seagate  disk drives as well.
To get started, you need to download the ISO image of SeaTools for DOS and create a bootable CD. Now boot the computer with the CD in the drive, accept the license agreement and run a long test (the full scan). If any defects are found, a list will be offered at the end or after aborting the disk scan.
Other computer vendors /disk manufactures including Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba (Fujitsu), Western Digital, Lenovo, Dell, etc.  too offer diagnostic tools that work only with their own brand of hard drives. If you are having frequent computer problems (like system hangs or fails to boot up), you may run these tools to confirm if the problems are hard drive related.
Important: While these tools can help you diagnose your hard drive’s health, they are still no good substitute for regular backups.

Do Everything on Office Computer That You Thought was Impossible

Life inside an office firewall can be very restrictive for some employees.
You are not allowed to check your personal email accounts, tons of websites are banned (loss of worker productivity), you cannot store music on your Office computer (because people think all MP3s are illegal), there are no permissions to install new software, YouTube videos are prohibited and almost all Instant Messaging software are blocked.
There are two options here – either you stick to the official rule book (and stay safe) or if you are adventurous and willing to take risks, read the following guide that shows how to do everything inside Office that you otherwise thought was impossible.

Watch YouTube videos at Work: Your friend has sent you a link to some funny YouTube video clip but you cannot watch it inside office since YouTube is banned. The easy workaround is vixy.net – just copy-paste the YouTube URL and you can save the video locally as an AVI file. Vixy will also allow you save YouTube videos as MP3 files. A similar service that you may also bookmark is zamzar.com/url.
Instant Messaging inside Office: IM software, like Yahoo! Messenger or Google Talk, are probably the worst nightmare of any IT department and therefore they are blocked in most workplaces.
If you are finding it extremely tough to stay out-of-touch with your IM buddies during Office hours, try meebo.com – it requires no installation and runs inside your web browser. Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger also provide web based version of their IM software. [Meebo review]

Read Your Favorite Blogs: If you are working in a BPO or financial services company that has imposed a blanket ban on all websites citing security reasons, you can still keep in touch with your favorite blogs through email. Services like SendMeRSS (of NBC Universal) or FeedBlitz will send you RSS feeds straight in your email Inbox – the moment there’s a new blog post, you can read it just like any other email message.

When a Web page is Inaccessible: This is another common problem – the email message contains a link to some article on a website (say Forbes.com) but you cannot read the full story as access to that website is restricted at work. No worries as you can still read that article through email:
Just send an email addressed to www@web2mail.com with the URL of the web page in the Subject field (e.g. www.cnn.com) and you’ll soon find a copy of that web page in your Inbox. A similar service is provided by www4mail@wm.ictp.trieste.it – it will also fetch websites for you through email though in this case, the site address should go in the body of the email message. [Useful email addresses]
Related: Access Blocked Websites at Work
While Surfing the Web, Pretend That You Are Working: It can be a bit embarrassing when you are surfing some non-work related websites at work and the boss walks-in. You try to minimize the browser or hide it behind Microsoft Outlook but the sudden panic makes everything clearer.
What you really need here is WorkFriendly – it’s actually a wrapper website that make your web browser look like Microsoft Word.
The web pages inside Work Friendly look as if you are reading a Word document. And there’s a wonderful Boss Key that replaces the web page with a proper Word document in a click – handy when you hear the footsteps of your boss.
Related: Check Email When Gmail is Blocked
Listen to Music Stored on Home Computer: You have an excellent music collection on the home computer that you would love to listen at work – the simple option is to burn your home MP3 on a DVD or if that sounds lot of effort, try Leaf at leafnetworks.net – it’s a free no-geeky solution to help you access files on the home computer from any other computer.
The only requirement for Leaf Networks is that the source machine (your home computer) should be up and connected to the internet. An alternate solution is SimplifyMedia that works with iTunes and will also maintain the music playlists across computers.
Related: Play MP3 Stored on your Home Computer at Work
Important: While all the above tricks and workarounds will bring more joy to your life inside the Office firewalls, make sure you know how to deal with the associated risks and fallouts.

Online Tool Crops your Images “Intelligently”

The interesting parts of an image are preserved in the cropped version

Cropp is new online tool that will intelligently crop and/or resize your images in the browser without requiring any software. You can use the tool to crop a single picture or upload multiple images (max 5) and it will crop /resize them all to the desired sizes in a batch.

This is obviously a crowded field – search for “crop resize images” in Google and you’ll find dozens of similar web apps that do cropping and much more –  but there are few unique features in Cropp that you’ll probably like.

Many-to-Many Cropping

One, Cropp is probably the only online app that does many-to-many cropping – you can upload multiple pictures, select multiple outputs sizes and it will provide you all the cropped versions in a downloadable zip file.
The other advantage is that Cropp algorithms will automatically try to preserve the most interesting parts of a picture in the cropped version (handy when you are trying to create small thumbnails). And if you aren’t happy with the final output, you can always adjust the crop marquee manually to get the desired result.

Desktop Wallpaper Website Syncs with Dropbox

Bored of your desktop wallpaper? Check out Desktoppr, an online gallery of high quality backgrounds for your widescreen desktop. The site has an extensive collection of wallpapers and registered users can even upload their own images to the public gallery.

Save Wallpapers Directly to Dropbox

While you may confuse Desktoppr as just another online repository of wallpapers, it does offer one unique feature – the site is Dropbox ready.
You can link the wallpaper site to your Dropbox account and you will then be able to send any of the wallpapers from the site to your Dropbox with a click. The synchronization is quick and saved wallpapers will appear in your local Dropbox folder almost instantly.

And it’s a two-way sync. If you add any of your own images to the app-specific wallpaper folder inside Dropbox, the images show up on the Desktoppr website for public consumption (make sure you have the necessary rights).
Also see: The Best Dropbox Apps
You will have to set your Dropbox wallpaper folder as the default “Picture Location” (under Control Panel –> Appearance –> Personalization) for Windows to pick up these new backgrounds (see the next screenshot).

The idea is simple but clever and I wish more web apps – especially the ones around documents and photo sharing – could offer this sort of one-click integration with Dropbox.

How a Typical Facebook Scam Works?

If you have been on Facebook for a decent amount of time, you may have definitely come across videos posts on your news wall that have an enticing title and an innocent thumbnail but upon clicking, the link takes you a scam website.
How do such scams happen on Facebook and why do they go viral so quickly? If a trusted friend is sharing such links with your, does that mean her Facebook account is hacked or does she have a virus on her computer that is quietly posting these dangerous links on her behalf? Not really.
Matt Jones, who works with the Data & Security team at Facebook, has recorded an informative screencast video where he walks you through the various type of scams that happen on Facebook.com and why do they happen. Most scams require Facebook users to copy-paste some JavaScript code into the browser’s address bar and as soon as they do that, the rogue post is automatically published to the walls of all their Facebook friends.Interestingly, according to Matt, Google Chrome and Safari are the only browsers that are susceptible to this kind of cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability while IE and Firefox are relatively safe. And since the malicious JavaScript code is often hidden inside Flash videos, Facebook isn’t able to detect it. Maybe the solution is that they allow video embeds from trusted websites.

Google SMS Channels: Send SMS Text Messages to your Group for Free

Google India has just introduced a free SMS service called Google SMS Channels that lets you subscribe to news alerts, blog updates and other kinds of information like horoscopes, jokes, stocks or even cricket scores via SMS text messages.
If you are based in India and like to subscribe to this site on your mobile phone via SMS, please join the Digital Inspiration SMS channel on Google. You don’t pay anything to send or receive SMS messages using Google SMS Channels.
Google SMS Channels, which seems to have lot in common with SMS Gupshup, is free both for content publishers as well as mobile phone users who subscribe to text updates via SMS.
Families or friends can create private SMS groups on Google SMS channels and stay in touch via SMS without paying any fees to their mobile carrier.

Other than receiving blog RSS feeds via SMS, you may also use the Google SMS service to get news alerts and weather information on your phone.
Another interesting part – you don’t really need a mobile phone to send an SMS to your group as there’s an option in Google SMS channels that lets you can compose and send SMS messages via the web itself. It supports English, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada.
Google SMS channels currently works only with with phone numbers of India but they are “working towards making this service available to international numbers.” Thanks Amit Somani.
To search for an SMS channel from the mobile phone, just SMS ‘SEARCH ‘ to 9870807070.
To unsubscribe to an SMS channel from the phone, SMS ‘OFF ‘, to 9870807070 where is the name of the channel.

Search Google on your Mobile Phone via SMS Text Messages

This is something for mobile phone users in India who don’t have a web-enabled phone – you can now search for information on Google using SMS. The service has been around for a while but Google is no longer charging a premium fee for sending you the SMS message.
The Google SMS search service may be used for finding movie timings, weather, nearest pizza restaurant, currency conversion, train schedules, cricket scores and a host of other things.

One of the very useful features in SMS search is language translation. For instance, I could SMS "say hello in French" to 9-77-33-00000 to get the right French word.

Google SMS Search could be real bad news for the business of services like Indiatimes that charge a premium fee for delivering news or astrology updates on the mobile phone using short codes.
For details go to the Google Mobile website or check their help center for more details.
The Google blog says that you only need to pay the standard SMS text charges for sending the SMS query to Google – there’s no fee for the incoming messages from Google. The service is available for all popular cellular networks including Airtel, BSNL, Idea, Reliance, Spice, Tata Indicom and Vodafone.

Access Facebook on any Mobile Without the Internet

Do you have an old mobile phone, like the Nokia 1100, that has no browser and can do little more than make phone calls? Or are you stuck in some remote place where there’s no Internet or no other form of data (EGDE/GPRS/3G) connectivity is available?
Not a problem. You can still use your Facebook account in India by dialing *325# (or *fbk#) from your mobile phone – this service requires no data plan or Internet and it will even work on phones of the Stone Age. Here’s a quick tour:
        

Use Facebook without the Data Plan

Facebook India has partnered with Fonetwish to bring Facebook on every mobile phone without requiring any apps or even the Internet.
You dial the *325# number, then enter your Facebook username and password and you are in. You can then send number based commands to access various features of Facebook, chat with friends who are online, add new people to your friends list, and more.
I played with the service for some time and it was a nice experience overall. If there were a Unix-like shell interface for Facebook, it would be much similar. Fonetwish says that this service is currently available for Airtel, Aircel, Idea and Tata Docomo users in India.
It may be too much work to read your Facebook news feed stories one by one but this is a good option to quickly update your Facebook status or for chatting with friends who are online. The price is reasonable too – you just have pay a subscription fee of 1.00 per day for unlimited usage.
Related: If you have an old mobile phone, you can search Google by SMS without requiring a data plan.

Add a Facebook Like Box without the Branding

The Facebook Like box placed on your website /blog is probably the easiest way to attract new fans to your Facebook page.
And the same rectangular box can even help convert casual visitors to your site into regular ones. That’s because the photo pile inside the box will show visitors pictures of their friends who are already fans and when they seen a known face, it could increase their relative interest in your site.

Customize the Facebook Like Box with CSS

Facebook offers a simple Like Box plugin that you can easily integrate into your website using either JavaScript or IFRAME. You can customize the border color, the height and the width of the Like Box but, officially, nothing more.
That said, if you would like to add a background color to the Like Box to better match your site’s color theme or if you would like to completely remove the Facebook logo and other branding from the box to make it less crowded (see demo), you can easily do that with the help of CSS.
To get started, copy the code below and paste it anywhere inside your website template. Change the URL in Line19 to point to your own Facebook page and you’re done.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

<style type="text/css">  .facebookOuter {     background-color:#F4F4F4;     width:250px;     padding:10px 0 10px 10px;     height:250px;     border:1px solid #CCCCCC;   }  .facebookInner {     height:250px;     overflow:hidden;   } </style>   <div class="facebookOuter">  <div class="facebookInner">   <div class="fb-like-box"       data-width="245" data-height="290"       data-href="http://www.facebook.com/digital.inspiration"       data-border-color="#F4F4F4" data-show-faces="true"       data-stream="false" data-header="false">   </div>  </div> </div>   <div id="fb-root"></div>   <script>(function(d, s, id) {   var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];   if (d.getElementById(id)) return;   js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;   js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1";   fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); </script>

Now the boring technical stuff.
The default background color of our Facebook Like box is #F4F4F4 but you can use any other web color (change values in Line 03 and Line 20). Similarly, if you want to have a more wider or taller Like box for your website, you can need to change the width and height values defined in lines 4, 6, 10 and 18.
The above example uses the JavaScript version of the Facebook Like box though the same can be applied to the IFRAME version as well. In that case, you need to replace Line # 17-21 with the IFRAME tag.

How to Get the Classic Photo Viewer in Facebook

Facebook has rolled out a Google+ style photo viewer that displays user comments and ads next to the picture in an overlay window. Thus, you don’t have to scroll the page to read the comments and the photo viewer adjusts itself as you re-size the browser window.

Switch to the Old Layout of Facebook Photos

If you are viewing any photo in Facebook and would like to use the classic layout – where photos are displayed on a separate page and not inside a pop-up – you can do that in a couple of ways:

• While the photo viewer is active, press F5 on your keyboard (or hit the “reload” button in the browser) to refresh the Facebook photo page. This should open the photo without the overlay.
• Or go to address bar of your browser, remove the string “&theater” from the photo URL and hit Enter.
• Or the easiest option is that you hold the CTRL key while clicking the thumbnail of any photo on Facebook and this should open the corresponding photo in a new tab but without the lightbox effect.

Create Collages with your Facebook Photos

The team behind Shape Collage, a popular photo collage software, have launched Loupe, an online tool that will help you create collages using Facebook photos.
You can either use your own photo albums and turn them into collages or the app can also pull photos from the albums of your Facebook friends that are visible to you.
It takes just a few steps to build your first collage. Authorize the app to access your Facebook account, then select any of your photo albums (or that of your friends), choose a shape and your collage is ready. Hit the Share button to save that collage to your Facebook account or grab the permalink to share it by email.
The collages look impressive and if you don’t like the default layout, you can always move or delete any of the pictures on the pile. Here’s a quick video that shows how you can turn Facebook albums into collages.

The drawback though is the resolution. Loupe generates a relatively small image of your collage that will probably look good only on a mobile screen. Shape Collage says that will be introducing higher resolution images in the future.

Photo Collages and Facebook Privacy

Any photo collage that you create with Loupe is public and currently there’s no option to change the visibility to private. Thus, if you have any private photos on Facebook that you don’t want the world to see, it may not be a good idea to turn them into collages because others may then find them through search engines.

Indian Police Finds Suspect on Facebook

The Times of India reports that Facebook helped Indore police crack a theft case where two students had picked up a motor-bike from a shopping mall in the city.
The news report says that the CCTV cameras installed in the parking area captured the image of thieves. The duo had done some shopping inside the mall and “guessing them as students, police tried to find out the accused on Facebook and traced them to Bhopal. “

The report doesn’t exactly say how Facebook helped the police catch the suspects. Did they use “face recognition” software to match the CCTV footage with the 900 million Facebook profiles? A Facebook employee told me that law enforcement agencies sometimes do approach the company for “image matching” requests – like those of missing persons – but such requests are politely declined.
The local Hindi edition of Dainik Bhaskar newspaper paints a much clear picture though.
It turns out that the duo had used credit cards to pay their shopping bills and that’s how the local police discovered their real names and addresses. The police then searched Facebook to find profiles with similar names and the profile picture of one of these Facebook profiles matched that of the person in the CCTV image.
Facebook did help the police confirm their initial suspicion but I think it’s the credit card payment that actually helped the cops nab the suspects.

How to Bypass the Social Reader Apps in Facebook

Some stories appearing in your Facebook newsfeed, like the one shown in the screenshot above, require you to add a “social reader” application to your Facebook profile before you can access the underlying story.
This social-reading “feature” is enabled for quite a few popular sites including Yahoo, The Washington Post, Guardian, Huffington Post, Daily Motion, and many more.
The problem is that once you add the social reader application, Facebook may broadcast your activity on these sites to the newsfeed of your Facebook friends. Do you really want your friends to know what stories your have been reading or watching on the Internet? Facebook calls this "frictionless sharing" but it can be embarrassing sometimes.
Option 1: Look for the Cancel button in the window that prompts you to the add the Social Reader app. When you hit Cancel, Facebook won’t install the app to your profile and you’ll be immediately redirected to the underlying article or video page.

Option 2: Some social reading apps in Facebook – Yahoo for example – do not offer the Cancel option and you have to add the app to read the article. In that case, you can just change the privacy settings of that app from “Friends” to “Only Me” and then hit “Okay, Read Article.” Now you activity won’t be visible to any of your Facebook friends.
Option 3: As someone suggested in the comments, simply copy the story title from the Facebook ticker to the clipboard, paste it into the Google Search box and hit the I’m Feeling Lucky Button. This is how you can also read premium news content on the web.
Also see: How to Create Custom Facebook Pages [Video]

How to Block Facebook Social Reading Apps

If you have added any of the Social Readers Apps to your Facebook Profile and would like to get rid of them permanently (so that they don’t broadcast stuff without your knowledge), follow these steps.
Go to Facebook Account Settings and open the Apps Settings page (direct link). This will show all the authorized Facebook apps that are associated with your profile. Search for “Social Reader” and hit [x] to remove that app from your profile. Alternatively, click the Edit button next to the app and set the visibility of “Posts on my behalf” to “Only Me.”
A recent Hacker News thread discussed a couple of Chrome extensions that help you read articles on Facebook without adding the Social Reading apps but the downside is that extensions aren’t available for all browsers – especially when you are accessing Facebook on your iPad – and second, they may not support every site that’s enabled for social reading.

Your Facebook Account has Three Passwords

This is interesting. You can log into your Facebook account using three passwords – one is the main password that you created and the other passwords can be constructed by toggling the case of characters that form your original password.

For example, if your Facebook password is operati@nGeronimo!, you can convert the uppercase characters to lowercase (and vice-versa) and the toggled password string – OPERATI@NgERONIMO! – will also get you into Facebook.
There’s another variation as well. If the first character of your Facebook password is in small case, just change that character to upper case – like Operati@nGeronimo! - and Facebook will gladly let you in.
You may try these variations with your own password on the Facebook login screen available at facebook.com/login.php.

Multiple Facebook Logins

You don’t just have multiple passwords on Facebook, you can log into Facebook using multiple usernames as well.

The default username is the email address that is associated to your Facebook account but you can also login using your Facebook username (that’s in the vanity URL of your Facebook profile page). Similarly, if you have associated your mobile number with Facebook (which you should for security reasons), you can use that mobile number as your username on the Facebook login screen.
A Stack Exchange thread pointed me to this ZDNet story that explains why Facebook allows users to login through multiple passwords. According to Facebook:

We accept three forms of the user’s password to help overcome the most common reasons that authentic logins are rejected. In addition to the original password, we also accept the password if a user inadvertently has caps lock enabled or their mobile device automatically capitalizes the first character of the password.

Thus, if you have accidentally enabled CAPS Lock on the keyboard, the toggled password would still work on Facebook.

A World Map of the Most Visited Websites

This world map represents the most popular websites by country. No big surprises here as Google reigns supreme in most parts of the world followed by Facebook. Yahoo is still the most visited website in Japan and Congo while Baidu is the Google of China in every sense.

The data was arrived from the Alexa rankings of websites per country but there are other ways to estimate traffic ranks and they should paint a similar picture. A larger version of the map is available at The Atlantic.

Responsive Web Design – A Dummies Guide

Google has officially recommended Responsive Web Design as their preferred method for building mobile websites. If you have a website or a blog, it is time that you seriously consider switching to a responsive design instead of maintaining a separate mobile-friendly (or tablet-friendly) website.

One Design, Multiple Screens

If you are new to the concept of Responsive Web Design (RWD), here’s a quick guide that should answer most of the common questions that you may have around this technique. Let’s get started.
Q1 – Why should I switch my website to Responsive Design?
A1 – Your website looks great of the desktop screen but the same may not be true when your site is viewed on a smartphone, a tablet or an e-reader (like the Kindle). Once you make the design responsive, the website will look good (and readable) on all screens and not just the desktop.
Q2 – What are the other advantages of switching to RWD?
A2: With Responsive Design, you can create one design and it will automatically adapt itself based on the screen size of the mobile device. This approach offers plenty of advantages:

• It save time and money as you don’t have to maintain separate websites for desktops and mobile phones.
• Responsive Design is good for your website’s SEO (search rankings) as every page on your site will have a single URL and thus Google juice is preserved. You don’t have to worry about situations where some sites link to your mobile site while other link to your desktop site.
• Your Google Analytics reports will paint a better picture of your site’s usage since the data from mobile and desktop users will be consolidated.
• The same will be true for the social sharing stats (Facebook Likes, Tweets, +1′s) since the mobile and desktop versions of your web pages will no longer have different URLs.
• Responsive Designs are easier to maintain as they do not involve any server-side components. You just have to modify the underlying CSS of a page to change its appearance (or layout) on a particular device.
• The earlier design methods looked at user agent strings to determine the mobile device name and the browser that is making the request. That was less accurate and with the number of devices and mobile browsers expanding every day, that matrix is very difficult to maintain. Responsive Design doesn’t care about user agents.

Q3 – What should I know to get started with Responsive Design?
A3 – Responsive Design is pure HTML and CSS. You create simple rules in CSS that change style based on the screen-size of the user’s device.
For example, you can write a rule that says if a user’s screen-size is less than 320 pixels, don’t show the sidebar or if the screen size is greater than 1920 pixels (widescreen desktop), increase the font size of the body text to 15px. Here are the same rules translated to code:

  @media screen and (max-width:320px) {
    .sidebar { display: none }
  }
  @media screen and (min-width:1920px) {
    body { font-size: 15px }
  }

Q4 – How do I check if particular website is makes use of Responsive Design? 
A4 – That’s easy. Open that website in any desktop browser and resize the browser. If the site’s layout changes as you resize, the design is responsive. You can also use these online tools to compare the different layouts of a page in the same tab.
Q5 – Can you share examples of some good websites that are responsive?
A5 – That are quite a few but my favorites include The Boston Globe (news website), Simple Bits (personal blog), Happy Cog (web design agency), Barack Obama (yes, the President’s website), Shake Shack (restaurant chain), Nicole & Josh (wedding website), Food Sense (cooking & recipes), dConstruct 2012 (design conference) and Good to Know (Google’s site on online safety). You should also check out mediaqueri.es, a curated gallery of websites that use Responsive Design.

Q6 – If I go with the Responsive Design approach, will my website work with older browsers?
A6 – Mostly yes. RWD uses CSS3 media-queries and HTML5 (for better semantics) that are not supported in older versions of IE. However, there are JavaScript based solutions – respond.js and modernizr for example – that bring the power of CSS3 and HTML5  to older browsers including IE6.
Q7 – Does Responsive Design play nicely with advertising networks like Google AdSense?
A7 – If you using ads on your website, you should carefully choose the formats because wide units  (like the 728×60 pixel leaderboard) may not fit on a 320px mobile screen. I prefer using standard rectangular units (like 300×250) on my blog since they easily fit on smartphone screens and widescreen desktops.
The one issue with Responsive Design is that ad slots on your website that are above the fold (ATF) often gets pushed down on the mobile version and clients may not always like that (if they have paid you for a premium ATF slot).
Q8 – There are thousands of mobile devices. What screen resolutions should my responsive website support?
A8. Open your Google Analytics dashboard and choose Audience -> Technology -> Browser & OS. Now switch to the Screen Resolution tab in the report and see the resolution of mobile devices that people are using to browser your site.
I would recommend setting break points for at least the following viewports in your CSS3 Mediaqueries - 320px (iPhone landscape), 480 px (iPhone portrait), 600px (Android Tablets), 768px (iPad + ~Galaxy Tabs) and 1024px (iPad landscape and desktops).
Q9 – How do I get started with Responsive Web Design? Any good tutorials?
A9 – First, read this article by Ethan Marcotte and then buy his book. Ethan coined the term and popularized the technique ever since he wrote that article for A List Apart back in 2010.
Here are more online resources to help you get started:

• Websites - Net Magazine, Smashing Magazine, CSS Tricks and Web Designer Wall [these websites and blogs frequently cover responsive design]
• Video Tutorials – YouTube, Net Tuts [responsive design 101]
• Presentations – PowerPoint Decks [the best online presentations around RWD]
• Books – Code Poet [web design experts discuss techniques for designing WordPress responsively. The book is available in PDF, Kindle and ePUB formats]
• Podcasts – Shop Talk, 5by5 Web Show and The Industry [audio and video podcasts around web design where hosts frequently bring up the topic of responsive web design]
• Twitter – @RWD, @NetMag and @SmashingMag [accounts worth following on Twitter]

Q10 – What are some of the disadvantages of using Responsive Design?
A10 – Responsive Design may add some  extra kilobytes to your web page as they will have to download CSS styles and JavaScript files that were otherwise unnecessary. The other problem is around images. You don’t want to serve higher-resolution images on your mobile site but that is hard to achieve in responsive design (unless you resort to a server-side workaround like Adaptive Images and Sencha.io).
Finally, there is a learning curve involved and it will take effort to add a responsive layer to your existing website. Sometimes it may make more sense to start from scratch rather than making your existing fixed-width website fluid.