articles

With the advent of the Internet, plagiarism has become a disease that teachers, web administrators, and editors alike have been trying to eradicate. Latest in the fight against plagiarism is a case regarding Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an online ... encyclopedia that is written and edited entirely by its users. Recently, a critic of the site has accused Wikipedia of containing several biographical articles that seem to have word-for-word passages stolen from other websites. The critic, Daniel Brandt, found the suspected plagiarism examples by using a program that he created to run a few sentences ... (view more)

Since November 2005, infopackets has opened its doors to volunteer authors to share their thoughts and ideas with our audience. The transition to a multi-authored web site has been both enlightening and challenging. On one side: infopackets now ... offers a variety of fresh and interesting discussions almost daily to its audience; on the other hand, acquiring and maintaining material on a regular basis has proven to be particularly difficult. Let me explain. Since our volunteer bloggers are not paid to submit articles, submissions have been (for the most part) sporadic. Further to that, my work ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader John B. writes: " Dear Infopackets Team, I have been a subscriber for over three years now and am always excited to see infopackets in my mailbox. I have purchased a number of software programs to support infopackets and have been ... very satisfied with my choices. I am writing today to request the whereabouts of Dennis? I miss his 'questions and answers' style articles and also the software reviews. If you could please pass this message onto Dennis, I would very much appreciate it. " My response: It's nice to be missed ;-) Actually, I've been busy "behind the ... (view more)

For the last few weeks, I've been working around the clock ironing out bugs, as well as addressing new issues which have arisen as infopackets moves into the next stage of multi-authored publishing . As an editor, one of the most challenging tasks I ... am regularly confronted with is to find new and interesting ways to express technology-based questions and answers using simple-to-read English so that anyone (and everyone!) visiting infopackets.com can learn from our articles. I would like very much to offer our Readers fresh and exciting material as infopackets continues to grow; however, I ... (view more)

Today's issue of the Gazette is a series of very important announcements. Let me begin by telling you what's been happening in my life. I don't normally write about personal stuff, but this circumstance is different because it directly affects ... infopackets.com. At any rate, here goes: As of November 2nd, 2005, I finalized the deal on my new home. Prior to the 2nd (and beginning October 20th), I was running around like mad trying to get everything settled -- such as: meeting with the builder regularly, the bank, the lawyers, and making tons of phone calls to service providers. All of this ... (view more)

Since 2001, the Infopackets Windows Newsletter has become one of the premier tech resources on the 'net, chock-full of highly informative and well-sourced computing tips. In all, our library of in-depth tech tips stretches to over 875 articles to ... date. So what makes Infopackets.com so successful? Every once in a while, someone new comes along and asks me what the secret is to having a successful web site. And every time I'm asked this question, I always chuckle, because I think back to almost 5 years ago when I asked that very same question. Of course, the answer to having a wildly successful ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Phil C. write s: " Dear Dennis, I have been a long time subscriber to your online magazine (since early 2002) and have found your articles to be both informative and especially easy to read. And, although, I admit I don't have ... time to read all of your articles, there always seems to be an issue you've covered (more often than not) that deals with similar computing problems that I face on a day-to-day basis. For that, I am deeply gratified. I'm writing you today with regard to some of the changes you've made to the site. I like the new layout (especially the links to ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader James S. writes: " Dear Dennis, For the last two email editions of your newsletter, I have noticed a 'special announcement' near the top of the page, concerning 'RSS implementation' to your web site. At the bottom of the ... announcement, you have linked to a review of FeedDemon to better explain the RSS technololgy. I'm a bit stumped, however; the more I read about RSS, the more I don't understand it! There almost seems to be too many explanations. In fact, RSS sounds so complicated that I sincerely feel like throwing away my computer and going back to 'the good old days ... (view more)

I have been *extremely* busy as of late and am having a hard time keeping up with my regular schedule (and subsequently, the regular newsletter schedule). Just before the holiday break, I mentioned that the newsletter layout would be changing. Well ... -- no surprise -- it looks like I jumped the gun again. As I was adding the finishing touches to the new article format, I decided that it would be extremely beneficial to include links to related articles [previously posted in our newsletter], immediately following the feature article. So, for an example: if I wrote a new article on XP Service ... (view more)

I'm stoked. For the last 3 months, I've been nibbling away at a special web script (project) that reformats all the previous Infopackets newsletters into a simple, clean layout. Why all the excitement? There are a lot of great things to come now ... that this daunting task is nearing completion. With article layout standardized, I can now move forward with: a) splitting articles into separate pages: it is important to split the articles so that potential web visitors can locate our web site through search engines (such as Google). As it stands now, 95% of all traffic to our web site is from our ... (view more)