Dork & Sofa

How To Delete Yourself (And Your Searches) From Google’s Memory Your Google account is a powerful tool. Through tracking and artificial intelligence it helps shapes Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube into the service that you see today. There is however a downside to all of this, and that is that to do all that Google tracks pretty much every action you take within its services. So if you play a YouTube video, search for an image or translate a piece of text Google keeps a record of everything. If this, rather understandably, fills you with dread then don’t panic. The company has released a website called My Activity which shows in detail your activity through Google’s many services. That includes every search you’ve ever made, every YouTube video you’ve ever watched and more. Now if that worries you then don’t panic because My Activity was created to give you control over all of this. You can now login, review and delete these activities individually giving you far more control over your ...

In the hunt to create the ultimate cyborg researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have unveiled a robot which uses human-like muscles to move. The robot has been, rather worryingly, built over a human skeleton and shows a network of microfilament muscle “tissues” which are able to accurately able to mimic human movements. TOKYO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY What makes them really scary is that the researchers have created the muscles as an almost exact replica of our own muscle groups, allowing them to contract and expand just as you would your own limbs. The team even went so far as to try and mimic the muscle groups in the jaw, which they did to worrying effect: TOKYO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Ok so this robot isn’t going to be winning any 100m contests anytime soon, but what it does show is that we both have the technology and understanding to use our own biology to shape the future of robotics, and in particular humanoid robots. At the moment the team’s prototype is still very muc...

Have you ever wondered what people are searching for? Google has released a real-time visualization of everything the Internet is searching for, as it happens. This pretty amazing online tool , based on Google Trends data, gives viewers a snapshot of what’s trending online. As of press time hot searches included iOS 7, the PS4 and lots of things in Russian that we don’t understand. You can choose to see just one topic on screen, or expand it into a five-by-five grid. In truth it’s not exactly the most useful Google tool around - the search giant has a wealth of interesting and engaging Trends tools, but after a few minutes this one is a bit of a snooze. If you are a web developer this could be a powerful tool to ensure that you are providing content that meets the current demand for information.  But as a pure visual treat - or possibly as a screensaver if someone can hack that up for us? - it’s quite fascinating. And yes, as far as we can tell it’s safe for work...

Blogspot is the domain name associated with Google's Blogger service. If you have a blog with a Blogspot URL, you will need to log into your Blogger account to export it. If you've decided to change blog providers from Blogger to WordPress, you'll want to know how you can safely move your blog from one host to the other, without losing posts or comments. WordPress' import feature enables you to do this, however you must have a Google login for Blogger in order to use this. Once you've imported your posts and comments, redirect readers from your old blog URL to your new WordPress blog. Step  1 Purchase a domain and find a host. If you don't already have a domain name, buy one from a Web hosting site, such as godaddy.com or bluehost.com. You can also use these sites to host your WordPress blog. Step  2 Change your WordPress post structure to match your Blogger post structure. Log into your WordPress account, click on "Settings," "Permalinks" th...

How to Allow People to Post on Your Blogspot Google's Blogger platform, which hosts Blogspot blogs at the blogspot.com subdomain, allows "team" blogs where multiple people can post on one blog. As the administrator of a team blog, you can choose up to 100 authors to contribute to the blog. You can also allow or prevent people from posting comments. Control all of these factors inside your blog's control panel, but make sure you have administrator access if you want to change any settings. Setup Step 1. Log in to your Blogger account. Use the administrator account, which is usually the Google account username and password you originally used to sign up to Blogger. Step 2. Choose the "Settings" link in the control panel. Select the "Permissions" option from the menu below. Step 3. Click the "Add Authors" button in the Blog Authors section. This brings up a blank text field. Step 4. Enter the email addresses of the people you want to post to...

Are You Making These Common Website Navigation Mistakes? It’s critical. The design of a website’s navigation has a bigger impact on success or failure than almost any other factor. It affects traffic and search engine rankings. It affects conversions and user-friendliness. Everything important about your website is connected to the navigation, from content to the URLs. Let’s look at some common navigation mistakes and see what we can learn. Mistake #1: Non-Standard Style Visitors expect to find horizontal navigation across the top or vertical navigation down the left side. Putting your navigation in standard places makes your site easier to use. That means a lower bounce rate, more pages per visit and higher conversions. Be expected. Yes, marketing is about differentiation, but your navigation style isn’t the place to do it. Your goal is to help people find your content, not show them a new way to get around a website. Mistake #2: Using Generic Labels Navigation should be descriptive. ...

What Every Blogger Needs to Know About Categories Because of the way they are misused all over the Web, categories have grown to become something that we regard in a purely user-centric light. We think of them as navigational tools and guides for users, but in reality, categories are a powerful tool that bloggers can use to exercise precise control over content in a dynamic environment. Unfortunately, the true power of categorized content has been masked by the one size fits all implementation you see everywhere on the Web—the proverbial long, ugly list of category links now appearing on a blog near you. As luck would have it, that awful category list also turns out to be a very poor strategy of presentation for your site…but why? Why Your Category List Isn’t Doing You Any Favors By giving users a list of categories to browse on your site, you are creating a psychological conundrum that usually leaves them with a severe case ofanalysis paralysis. This is a condition where users, when p...

Lets look at the reasons for splitting your posts up. Paginating a blog post is a contentious subject, believe it or not. Some people hate it; they feel like it disrupts the user experience. They find that users skip the “next page” button and feel like the post ends abruptly. This isn’t helped by the fact that many sites for years have used pagination as a way to squeeze out more ad views, by making thin slideshows with 20 images and single-paragraph “pages” and forcing the pages – and ads – to reload every time. These days when I see a site like that I look for a “view as one page” link and, if I don’t find it, I take a good long look to decide if it’s really worth the hassle of paging through. On the other hand, some people really love pagination. It has some benefits, like theincreased ad revenue if you use it tastefully. It helps you divide up lengthy content into smaller, digestible chunks. You can even organize those pages and make a table of contents, like How Stuff Works does....