Nowadays blogs platforms are one of the most widely used applications and the bloggers community is growing every minute. It was not a long time ago when blogs have been used for sharing only personal thoughts and experience. Today, blogs are used for almost any kind of websites.

Personally, I have seen commercial websites, newspapers, multi-author communities and many, many other kinds of websites based on a blog platform. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this. If you decide at some point that you can base your website on a blog platform you might find the following article interesting and might help you to increase your site traffic. Very often this is important if you decide to advertise some products or provide advertisement space on your website and earn some extra money.

(more…)

If you liked this post, buy me a beer. ($3 for a beer or $7.5 for a pitcher)

Some days ago a friend of mine asked me what cookies actually are and why they are needed. I have come to the idea that most of the things that people do not actually see during their time in Internet usually stay uncovered forever. Of course, I am not referring to the experienced users.

Thus, I have decided to write this article about the HTTP Cookies or the Internet Cookies in a more non-technical way because there are a lot of technical literature regarding this topic, however, it might be “too technical” for a big part of the people who use Internet.

A short definition of Cookies

This is a collection of information, usually including a username and the current date and time, stored on the local computer of a person using the Internet. It is used by websites to identify users who have previously registered or visited the site.

The actual meaning of the words above

As most of the short definitions this one also is not explaining the whole idea of the HTTP cookies. To put the meaning of the text above in more words we can say that the HTTP cookies, sometimes known as web cookies or just cookies, are parcels of text sent by a server to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. Cookies (as we will call them in this article) are used for authenticating, tracking visitor behavior, and maintaining certain information about users, such as site preferences. The term “cookie” is derived from “magic cookie,” a well-known concept in UNIX computing which inspired both the idea and the name of HTTP cookies.

(more…)

If you liked this post, buy me a beer. ($3 for a beer or $7.5 for a pitcher)