When it comes to games on the Iphone, its rare that one comes along thats simple, addictive and really good fun.  Angry birds was the first big hitter but now top of the iTunes downloads charts, Draw something is great fun, simple and brings pictionary online.

Get it, hook up with your friends on facebook and start playing.  You’ll realise most of them cant spell, You’ll realise you cant draw, and you’ll laugh on most rounds when you see whats drawn for you.

Having updated my Iphone 4 to the latest IOS recently i noticed that the service kept dropping and in turn the battery life was seriously diminished.  I set about finding a resolution to the issue and found that below resolved it for me instantly.

First Go to “Settings” and then got to “General” and then to “Reset” and finally to “Reset Network Settings”

After that I will say that “This will delete all network settings ” so now just tap the red “Reset Network Settings” and after that your phone will be rebooted.
After reboot just go to the settings again and turn “on” the “Airplane mode” and then see if it is able to get the network.

Back to normality folks…Full service has been resumed till IOS 5.2

Do you have a problem where the home button doesn’t seem to work every time on your Iphone 4?  Well, your not the only one.  There are many examples of this posted all over the internet forums and it seems that the issue may not be a hardware failure.  There was talk that an upgrade to Ios 4.2 would resolve the issue but no such luck.  Here are some of the suggested methods of “re-calibrating” your home button.

• Do a clean restore
• Do a factory reset
• Re-calibration (Have heard this working on some, but not all occasions)

1.) Open any application
2.) Press and hold the power button until the slide to shutdown swipe bar appears.
3.) Release Power button
4.) Press and hold Home button Lightly
until screen returns to icon screen
5.) Enjoy your functioning home button!!!
This procedure recalibrates the home button after normal wear or heavy use.

• Another re-calibration option (again, works on some occasions only)

Plug in your phone to your computer as soon as u do so hold the home button down and the voice control will apear press cancel and bam it reset my home button and has been working great since.

I hope these tips help….

If you’re anything like me, when I first set up my blog about a year ago, I had NO CLUE where to start.  Should I use Blogger, Blog spot, WordPress, or any of the 100′s of other blog platforms that are out there?

After a lot of research, recommendations, and help from others, I realized that I better go with installing WordPress for my blog.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with WordPress, it’s a blog platform that gives you a pre-built blog site for free and is available on most hosting packages as a installable package.

Here are my Top 5 Reasons to Use WordPress for your blog:

1. Google Loves WordPress – If you’re using a blog for your marketing strategies, you’re probably interested in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – at least a little bit.  If you’re into SEO, then you want and need Google giving your site a good ranking.  Now, I could go on and on and on and on and ON about SEO, but the idea is that you want Google ranking your site higher than your competition for any given keyword.  Well, for whatever reason, Google loves WordPress.

Yes, you can use other blog sites and still get good ranking, but you typically have to work harder to get the same amount of “love” from Google as your competition.  If you already have a different blog and are so far into it that it would hurt you more than help you, just stick with it and MAKE IT WORK.  But AT LEAST have it self-hosted – which leads me into my next point.

2. Self hosted – I have this in my top 5 reasons, well, for a good reason.  You can use the free version of wordpress and have no problems and make that work for you just fine.  But you could run into a few problems, the biggest of which is that your blog could be here one day, and gone the next.  If you have a self hosted WordPress blog, no one can touch it.  It’s yours.  Yes, you’re paying a small monthly hosting fee but it’s WELL worth its value considering the thought that you might lose your blog otherwise.

On top of having your blog self hosted – I would also recommend getting a domain name that is specific to you.  It looks a lot more professional that the generic site URL that WordPress gives your site.  Having your domain forwarded is essential for branding YOU in this industry.

3. WordPress Design Themes – Now , do you want the generic WordPress Theme that comes with WordPress, or a custom designed one that is specific only to you?  The default WordPress theme is perfect if you’re just setting up a blog to have a blog.  BUT, I suggest a designed custom theme. There are tons of people who design custom WordPress Themes that you can easily upload to your domain, to change the appearance and feel of your WordPress website. Some of the WP Themes are paid versions, but most of them are free.

There are more than 1000 themes loaded directly into the WordPress theme website, from which you can choose, although you are not limited to just the themes loaded into the WordPress website.

4. Plug-ins – This is my favorite.  Plugins are what pimps your blog and converts it from a basic site to a site with loads of addins.  The right plug-in can save you time, make you money, and make your job a WHOLE lot easier.

Just like with the WordPress Themes, if there is a specific function you want your blog to perform, there are programmers out there who have created WordPress Plugins that will make your job A LOT easier. There are 1000′s of WordPress Plugins on the WordPress.org website (wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ ), which are free and an ever growing amount that are not in the WordPress database.  You just have to go looking for them.

When you find a Plugin you want, just click “Install” on that specific plugin page, and it will automatically download, unzip, and upload it to the right Plugin directory on your blog. After it finished its upload, simply go to the backoffice area of your blog to “activate” the plugin.

5.  WordPress functionality – Now, I don’t want to lose you here on this one, so I’ll keep it simple.  WordPress is an HTML based blog platform.  Whan you’re creating a post – you have the ability to add videos, pictures, graphics, links, and audio all in HTML format.  The cool thing is, when you create posts, you can create them in a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) design – meaning that what you see on the screen is what your readers will see.  Or you can do HTML formating – all with a click of the mouse and flip-flop back and forth.

To Double check and see what your content will look like, you can “Preview” it and see it in real time on your designed blog to double check and make sure it looks the way you want it to.

If you have a website, you should have the ability to see some metrics about who is accessing your site, from where and for how long.  Businesses and organizations who use a website as part of their marketing strategies are starting to realize the importance and power of the use of metrics in understanding the behavior of the visitor and the buyer.

So what are the advantages of using Google Analytics and why should business owners use web metrics?

Well, for a start, it’s Free!  All you need to do is setup an account with Google Analytics and make a small change to your website to allow it be accessed by google for tracking.  Most CMS systems have google analytics modules which make it easy to setup and get going.
As you login to the reporting section of your analytics you are faced with an instant array of information in a compressed format to give you an instant performance appraisal. The great news is this dashboard is editable so you can add or remove reports up to a maximum of 12 reports. Sections of the dashboard can be moved by dragging and dropping the report to the position you want them placed.

Other features of google analytics include a range of more indept reports such as where users are linking to your site from, and also where they are going from your site afterwards.  Incidents and errors on your site are also reported which allows you to track what needs to be fixed or improved.  If you’re using e-commerce or an online store, Google analytics will give you good information on the popular products within your store.

A must for every website!

Gone are the days of flash drives. Dropbox is a free online service which gives users 2GB of storage to store any type of file you want online and later retrieve anywhere else in the world. If that is too small you can opt to purchase more space.

Dropbox can be installed on your PC or Mac. When installed you get a Dropbox folder and anything placed inside gets automatically uploaded to the central cloud server. Then you can log onto your personal Dropbox account through your favorite web browser, your iPhone, or even your iPad and open any of these uploaded files. The service runs flawlessly and comes in handy if you forget to bring an important document with you and need to print a copy.

You can use Dropbox to share your files with others.  This saves you having to send large files by email, instead sending them a link to your dropbox account.  Very handy for collaborating on projects too.  All in all, I highly recommend this to anyone that works with lots of documents and files.

Following on from our previous post, introducing Joomla, we decided to list what we believe are the top 5 reasons to use it.

1. It is Free: As Joomla! is open source it is completely free to use.  You can add customer modifications from the huge extensions database too which are developed by programmers all over the world.

2. You are Easy to Find: Joomla! has a Search Engine Friendly setting which provides dynamic URL tags, excellent for SEO.  There are also multiple Joomla! addon extensions which can be implemented to increase your SEO.

3. Program Masters: Joomla! has a reach around the entire world. None of the code that is found on Joomla is proprietary. This means that anyone can work on a project that can be found on the site. This means with a great number of developers working on different projects, eventually code will be finished that you can add to your site if you so choose.

4. Strength of Code: The core code of Joomla! is quite robust. This means that it has a lot of room for flexibility as well as allowing for extended usage. The code will change over time as the World Wide Web changes its coding processes. With the previously mentioned developers working around the world on Joomla code there will always be an adaptability with Joomla that will keep it current. This also allows for a great deal of functionality in the processes that you can utilize with Joomla. Examples are polls, link management, RSS syndication and news management as well as media management.

5. Joomla.org: Joomla.org provides you, with a multitude of different topics on an extremely active user forum. There is an extensive Joomla Extension Directory with over 3,000 plug ins and add ons that are ever changing and evolving. There is Joomla Resource Directory where you can find specific developers for your site and you can find their work on the Joomla Development Website.

Time to give you some details on what we believe is one of the best open source products on the market today.  Joomla! is software that lets you make and update web pages easily.

If you dont know much about websites and want to create your first site yourself, there isn’t a better package to try!.  If you buy hosting which includes fantastico Delux you will be able to create a joomla based website in a couple of minutes, with all of the backend work handled by the package created by the hosting account and live for you to start creating and editing pages straight away.

You can think of a Joomla! website as bringing together three elements.

• Your content, which is mainly stored in a database.
• Your template, which controls the design and presentation of your content (such as fonts, colors and layout).
• Joomla! which is the software that bring the content and the template together to produce webpages

We in Intentico can provide all three as part of our hosting packages and then hand over your site to you to manage yourself, creating as many pages as you like and updating menus and images yourself, perfect for any budding web master who hasnt the necessary skills to create it from scratch.

In the last few weeks I’ve found a new addiction…  Strategery is probably the most addictive game on both Iphone and Ipad since Angry birds first hit the App Store.  As usual I took the optional “Lite” app but it wasn’t long before i could see this was a game i was going to like and i had no doubt the €1.49 was well worth it.  It’s very similar to Risk and has lots of options in terms of how the games are setup to keep you coming back for more.

So how does it work?

There are 5 teams (countries) and the object of the game is to take over the world.  It’s a turn based game where you choose which of your land areas to use and attack an adjacent land to take it over.  Using dice roles the game calculates the winning land and based on your largest joined force of lands you gain additional troops at the end of each turn.  There are 4 different difficulty levels and as you progress through them you have to use more and more tactical prowess to beat the AI led countries.  With hundreds of maps to choose from and the “Wins and Losses” stats page to show you how you’ve done, this is most definitely a must have App for both Iphone and Ipad.

The Ipad version obviously offers a bigger screen and therefore makes the game a little easier to play.

Highly recommended!

Check out the game website here: Strategery Game Website