Luis Alfonso's profile on ComoHacer.eu

How to find content for your blog with Google Alerts.

5 Comments / Internet / By Luis Alfonso / 2 minutes of reading

The Google alerts are a free service that, although offered as Beta for years, is very useful if we want to keep up to date and monitor certain content on the Internet. We can track certain news or products that we comment on our blog, check if they talk about us, or follow the news and developments of the competition.

To configure an alert, the following elements must be defined:

Terms (search terms). These are words (e.g. ministry of housing), proper names (e.g. Barack Obama), brand names (e.g. Twitter, Coca-Cola, etc.) or urls https://www.comohacer.eu/ for which we want to be notified when content with these terms is published on the Internet.
Type. Indicates the source where the terms will be searched:
- News. Terms will be searched for in Google News.
- Websites. The terms will be searched for in Google Web (Google standard).
- Groups. The terms to be searched for are Google Groups.
- Comprehensive. Search for terms in all possible sources.
Frequency. Periodicity with which we wish to receive notifications. It can be when it occurs, once a day o once a week.
Destination notification (send to). We can choose between a Gmail email address or RSS. The RSS option is very practical as we can manage the information received more easily. If we opt for e-mail, then the mailbox will fill up, making it more difficult to extract the information we are interested in.

Service in English, Google Alerts allows for the field Type select two additional options: Blogs y Video.

On the other hand, we can manage our web alerts in a comfortable way.

The most remarkable thing about the service is the enormous simplicity of use, in a single window we configure the parameters of our alert and we click on Create alert.

By Luis Alfonso (from Merkatia).

How to hang a picture on the wall.

2 Comments / Home / By Luis Alfonso / 3 minutes of reading

One of the most common decorative elements in the home are the pictures. Although the process of hanging a picture on the wall The process is simple, it is necessary to pay attention to each of the steps to be taken in the process. We start by assuming that we have a properly framed painting.

We check if the frame has the plinths in place. (screws with an eye at the end), which will always be located at the back of the frame and in the upper area. If they are not in place, we must do the following to calculate their correct location. If it is a small frame, it is sufficient to place a plinth. In this case, the plinth should be placed in the centre of the frame. When using a single eye, if you do not calculate the position correctly, the painting will be crooked. In the case of a medium or large painting, we will use 2 eyes. In this case the brackets should be placed in positions 25% and 75% of the width, i.e. if for example the width of the frame is 50cm, then one bracket will be placed at a distance of 12.5 cm from the end (50cm * 25 / 100) and the other at a distance of 37.5 cm (50cm * 75 / 100).
Calculate the height at which the frame should be positioned. In general, the appropriate height will be that which places the central area of the frame at eye level. Consider a person of average height to approximate the position. The best way to do this is for one person to hold the painting with both hands and position it at different heights. At the same time, a second person will check from a distance whether the height of the frame is correct. Once the position has been found, using a pencil we mark the place where the spikes from which the painting will hang are to be placed, which corresponds to the position of the brackets. If the wall is smooth, we can also press the picture against the wall so that the plinths leave a mark that we will use as a reference. Once this has been done and to make sure that the reference has been correctly positioned, we measure from the ceiling to the mark to check that the distance in the vertical is the same for both points. Additionally, we check that the distance between the marks on the wall and between the eyes of the painting is the same.
We place the lag bolts and the spikes. For a normal frame the lag screws can be 4 or 5 mm. With the help of a drill we make the holes in the wall where the wall plugs will go. We can use a drill bit 1 mm smaller than the size of the dowels, so that if the drill moves a little (which is quite common), the size of the hole will be correct. Insert the lag bolts using a hammer. Then, we screw the spikes until they are quite tight. Another option, for light frames of less than 14 kilos, is to use an easy hanger, which is a plastic hanger with a steel nail in it.
We hang the painting and check the result. If we have made a mistake when taking the measurements, it is possible that the frame is tilted. In this case, if the inclination is small, and the frame has two eyes, we can place a small piece of cardboard on the lower edge to compensate for the difference in height. If the frame has only one eye, we will have to take it out and put it back in the correct position.

By Luis Alfonso (from Merkatia).

How to optimise your blog images to get more visitors.

Leave a Comment / Internet / By Luis Alfonso / 2 minutes of reading

One of the easiest ways to get visitors to your blog is to properly configure the properties of your images so that they can be found and ranked by search engines, mainly by Google Image Search.

First, for each image it includes the ALT attributewhich corresponds to the text displayed by browsers when an image cannot be loaded. It is recommended that you enter some keywords in this attribute. Do not include too many words, nor take advantage of this attribute to spam keywords, Google will detect it and your image will lose relevance, and you may suffer a penalty. Between 3 and 5 words should be enough to describe the image. You can separate the words with spaces.

On the other hand, the image file name must be related to the content of the ALT attribute. We can name the file with the same keywords as in the ALT attribute, in this case we will separate them with hyphens. The extension of the file is indifferent, whether it is JPG, GIF, etc.

The relevance of the image is completed by the content of the surrounding text. In the lines before the image and in the lines after it, include phrases with the keywords (in bold) you have included in the ALT tag. Also, the use of tags such as H1 or H2 that include these words will increase their relevance. Context is essential for search engines to know what the image is about.

Another image attribute that you can use is TITLE which is used to define the text we want to display when the user places the mouse cursor over the image. Although it does not have much influence on the positioning of the image, it is useful as it improves usability, giving more information to the user.

Finally, it uses images of sufficient size and quality so that users who are looking for images through tools such as Google Image Search will choose your image and not those of other websites. Keep in mind that this tool allows you to filter images by size and generally users are looking for medium or large images.

Remember that the images that first appear in the Google image search engine are those that are most relevant to the search, although sometimes images may be shown that do not fit at all.

By Luis Alfonso (from Merkatia).

How to memorise using images.

1 Comment / Training / By Luis Alfonso / 2 minutes of reading

One of the most basic techniques in the mnemonics to memorise both words and sections of a subject is the method of places or loci. It is a technique devised by the Greeks to remember the points of a speech.

For remember We are going to use familiar places for the elements, for example, the rooms in your house, the rooms in your workplace, the shops in your street, etc. In each of the rooms we are going to associate one or more terms. The method consists of associating a visual image to the element that we want to memorise and include it in one of the rooms by creating a scene. To increase the retention of the concepts, it is advisable to watch the objects The more extravagant the images, the greater our ability to remember them. The more extravagant the images, the better our ability to remember them.

Example: Let's remember the following objects: ball, violin, apple, chair and car.

For example, if I have 5 rooms in my house, in the first room I will remember the ball, in the second room the violin and so on.

- To recall the ballIn the first room, we imagined a huge red ball bouncing and crashing through the walls and making them rumble.

- To memorise the violinIn the second room, we imagine a musician playing the violin with great skill and speed.

- To recall the appleIn the third room, we imagine a tree with a man sitting underneath it (Newton) and an apple falling on his head.

- To memorise the chairIn the fourth room, we imagine a huge chair in which there is a man sitting who looks tiny.

- To memorise the carIn the fifth room, we imagine a car driving around and smoking.

The technical aspects of the sites It increases our ability to memorise and greatly reduces the chances of forgetfulness. The human brain works with images and it is these that stimulate the right hemisphere, which is related to creativity.

By Luis Alfonso (from Merkatia).

How to use GMail securely on WiFi networks.

3 Comments / Internet / By Luis Alfonso / 2 minutes of reading

The use of wi-fi networks wireless internet is now widespread and wireless internet is available in airports, parks, shopping malls, etc. The problem is that wi-fi networks are vulnerable and data surfing over them can be spied on.

By default, GMail is configured to use a HTTP connectioni.e. no encryption is used in communications. However, we can configure GMail to use HTTPS, which is the secure connection protocol.The SSL-encrypted encryption is used on the Internet, mainly in banking, e-commerce, etc.

First, we log in with our GMail account and, once inside, we click on Configuration. Choose the tab General (which is usually checked by default) and go to the bottom of the page where it says Navigator Connection. Here by default it will indicate Do not always use https. We then select Always use https. Then press the button Save changes. From now on, all communications we make to check our email with GMail will be encrypted for greater security.

Returning to the message inbox, another interesting option, if we suspect that our GMail password may have been stolen, is the possibility of consulting the IPs of the last connections that have been made to our email. We move the scroll bar to the bottom and we see a line that indicates:

This account is open in another location with this IP (81.42.xxx.xxx). Last account activity: 5 minutes ago. Detailed information

The first sentence will only appear if you have GMail open in different browser tabs or if you use a widget that connects to your email. The interesting link is Detailed information. If we click on it, a window will open showing us a table with the recent activity of the account. We can see the IP addresses from which the mail has been consulted and the time at which the connection was made. At the top of this window there is a button to close all open GMail sessions except the current one. Once you have clicked on this button, GMail recommends that you change your password if you suspect that you may have been compromised. phising or theft of your password.

By Luis Alfonso (from Merkatia).