11:40 by FoxTwo
Is Microsoft Finally Losing The Browser Wars?
Image via Wikipedia
Why amused? Because for all their dirty underhanded tactics, they are still losing ground. Back in 1995 when they first introduced Internet Explorer on Windows 95, the king of browsers back then was Netscape Navigator. Microsoft tried to de-throne it through forced-bundling of IE with the OS, through strong-arm tactics of resellers and hardware manufacturers. Many class action suits have been filed against them. I don't need to go into details since the history can be found on the Internet.
Microsoft also fought a war on the web itself - making ActiveX pages, hoping to attract users since ActiveX was more "interactive" and "engaging" at the time. In today's world, Flash and Java have already unseated ActiveX. There's hardly any non-Microsoft websites using ActiveX nowadays.
Microsoft tried again with "Silverlight", to go head to head with Java and Flash on the Interactive Content arena. Apparently they still lost, since I have hardly heard of anyone, tech guys included, who are won over by it.
So now, we finally have them making a series of web pages that DENY all other browsers except Internet Explorer 8 to view it, in the form of this contest.
Now, I don't want to go into the morality of this move, but personally, I think that Microsoft has made a bad call - you can't simply deny a group of people access to your content just because they do not use what you want them to use. If you want to practice this kind of restrictions, an INTRANET would be the appropriate place, but not out here on the INTERnet. Then again, that's just my opinion.
Somehow this smacks of the Browser Wars of the 90's, brewing again. Except this time I think perhaps Microsoft might actually lose. Back in the 90's, there weren't many choices for browsers. Users had no idea how and where to go to get one. Microsoft conveniently provided them with one. The only reason IE rose to prominence was the convenience of its availability.
Users then started to use the freely provided IE to download a different browser of their choice (be it FireFox, Opera, Safari etc) and stopped using IE. Microsoft recognised that their strong-arm tactics of forcing IE onto desktops was had in fact, backfired.
Back in the 90s we had a slew of web pages "best viewed in Internet Explorer". Those pages would use many IE-specific code and only IE could view those pages correctly. The intention was to "support" IE, and "encourage" people to use IE. Remember what happened next? There was an outcry, and the pages were made compatible with industry-standard code.
This "contest" is just a different way of doing the same thing as was done back in the 90s. Will it work this time around? It may. I personally don't think so. A person might switch to IE for now, to attempt to get the US$10,000. If he failed, he would probably switch back to whatever he was using.
Personally, I have never used IE on a regular basis. It's sitting there on my desktop but I don't click on it. My browser of choice has always been a competitor - Netscape Navigator in the 90s, and FireFox in 2000s. If so inclined, I might just click on IE, just for the sole purpose of trying my luck for the contest. Whether I win or not, I can guarantee you I'd be back on Firefox once this is all over.
If I were so inclined.
But I'm not :)
The best summary I can think of, is the video below. It shows what users perceive the Internet as, today. It's no longer "Firefox", or "Internet Explorer" or "Safari". The software used by the user today is, I guess, no longer important.
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13:24 by FoxTwo
Is The Old Facebook Layout Coming Back?
Due to habit, I click refresh to see the latest updates from my friends, on the Home Page. Lo and Behold, what do I see?
Yes indeed, it seems that the former Facebook layout is coming back! However, right now it's kind of a hit-and-miss thing. Sometimes when I click refresh, I get the old layout. Other times, the new.
What I can speculate is that perhaps, the Facebook Team is rolling back the changes they made, and they are now synchronising all the servers to update them all. That would explain the randomly alternating between the old and new layouts.
Or perhaps Facebook is experiencing a server or database problem and their engineers are fixing it..
Well I sure hope the old layout is coming back!!
Labels: facebook, internet, self
15:23 by FoxTwo
Facebook, Stop Messing With Layouts!
Image via CrunchBase
Even so, I don't mind it so much when Facebook changed their homepages or layouts to "improve" things. In fact, when other people have been screaming blue murder about the latest changes, all I did was to just "get used to it", and learn how the new layout works.
The one just before the current one is, in my opinion, the best offering they've had so far. I get a running newsfeed of what my friends did, who got tagged in which photos, and so on. In fact I have found a few friends this way - a friend got tagged by another friend, whom I also know. Then I'd send a friend request and we link up.
I also liked how all your invites were in the right sidebar - you can see how many of which types of invites you had.
However, the latest one blows. In fact, I'd say that the latest incarnation of the layout just broke everything. People were just getting used to the "new" layout and then they decided to change it again. Yes, it looks amazingly sparse. Kinda like Twitter in fact. Basically, the majority of what's there on the homepage after you log in is basically just status updates from your friends. That's it. You can't see if they've joined a group, or uploaded a new pic, or commented on a picture. In short, all the stuff that used to be there on this page.
The thing I find most frustrating with the latest layout is that my "Invites Box" went missing (or so I thought). Try as I might, I could not locate my latest slew of useless invites to games I will never play or install. However, that doesn't mean I don't want to see them - there might be an invite to an event or a game I might actually be interested in!
After asking around a bit on Plurk, some friends finally told me where to look for it. I present it in the picture below:
Ok if I didn't show you this picture, would you have noticed that single line I circled in red? You'd be hunting left and right to see where your invite notifications are, wouldn't you? After all, it USED to be on the right sidebar.
There's really too many things dropped in this new layouts. I even tried to fiddle with the newsfeed options, but guess what? I couldn't find it. I remember that it existed before, because I remember the slider bars which I can pic to choose which type of event(s) I wanted to see from which specific friend. I remember sliding them around to "See More Of" and "See Less Of" the various types of events of my friends, to tweak them to my personal preference.
Now, all I see are status updates 90% of the time., which is essentially like Plurk (more than Twitter) because you can comment on the status just like how we chat in Plurk. In fact, if this is what Facebook is trying to emulate, then Plurk is already "there". We're all using it, and Plurk has the advantage of having a scrollable timeline. We just drag the timeline around to see older "status updates". With Facebook we have to click on "older posts" and wait for the page to change.
So, Facebook, stop trying to emulate others. Just be yourself - Facebook. That's why we're here. Otherwise, we might as well be at the website(s) you were trying to emulate.
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Labels: facebook, internet, Rant
12:17 by FoxTwo
Offline Gmail - What Is The Point?
Image via CrunchBase
In the old days, we wanted to do our mails offline because the cost of Internet connection was high - many places charge by either the amount of data downloaded or the amount of time you spent online. The more you use, the more you pay. Hence, it made sense to download all your mails quickly, reply them offline at leisure, connect again and send your replies quickly.
Compare that to today's age of broadband - everyone's "always on", and it makes very little difference how long they spend online get their email. Many people no longer are on the pay-by-amount-of-data plans. Most ISPs offer "unlimited connections" or close to it.
So, when I came across this article - "Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Offline Gmail", I was wondering, has everything come full circle? Do people now want a way to read their mail offline, again?
Now Gmail is offering an "offline" function to assist people with "spotty network connections". To do that, you need to install a small bit of software from Google to allow it to detect the state of network connection on your computer.
I find this redundant because we already have software that can do the same thing for years upon years. Heck, you may even know it, because one of them is called "Outlook". Yes, Outlook (like most other email software) can download your mail to your PC and let you read and reply at your leisure! Amazing isn't it?
Not only can Outlook do it, so can Thunderbird, or Pegasus, or whatever. Just go to any software library site like CNet's Download.com, Softpedia, or Tucows and do a search on them. You will find a whole slew of them!
If you use IMAP on these email software, you are simulating the web-based experience only via a new GUI - your email software's. Everything you do when on an IMAP connection is real-time, just as if you're on the actual web page.
All these email software will download your mail by using a protocol called POP3. That is the traditional method. This is also the method that Google is mimicking to download a copy to your local PC.
Personally I've always used an email software, even if I may be using a web-based mail service. The advantage is, all my email accounts from the various services are contained within ONE software. For example, in Thunderbird, I can configure a mix of POP3 and IMAP services as I please, depending on how I wanted to get my mails. I am sure it will be the same in Outlook or whatever other modern email software that you do decide to use.
The caveat is - if your primary email service is HOTMAIL, you may have no choice but to use the latest versions of Outlook. Only MS Outlook can download emails from your Hotmail account.
Since this entry is talking about Gmail, you can relax. Google has wisely allowed both POP3 and IMAP protocols to be activated on your account, so you can easily configure an email software to access your Gmail emails via either protocols.
So I'm still puzzled - why's everyone going gaga over this "feature"? I've had it for YEARS :)
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Labels: email, Google, internet
13:14 by FoxTwo
A New Video Hosting Site - Wegame
What that taught me was that I should never stick to just 1 site to host my videos. I had to slowly, and painfully, re-upload all my videos to a new site. Upload speed, as you know, is pathetic on Singapore's broadband plans. 256K, 512K, 1MB at best.
Anyway right now I have hosted my non-gameplay videos at Viddler. However, more importantly, I found a game-oriented site to host my gameplay videos - Wegame. My gaming videos can be seen here.
It's a new site, started only in 2007. The thing I like about it, is that the video quality rivals that of Vimeo, perhaps even better! The only drawback is that it doesn't have a High-Definition format. Also, encoding videos on wegame is really quick. My videos were all converted and ready almost as fast as I could upload them!
In fact I watched my own videos in amazement as I uploaded them - they looked almost as good as the original file I uploaded! Even on Vimeo, I could see some "degrading" when they convert my videos into FLV format for use on the web. However on Wegame, I almost couldn't tell the difference if I didn't have the original video with me. As an aside though, Viddler really sucks at converting my videos. They immediately become all chunky and blocky.
On Wegame, we can upload up to 1GB per file. That beats Vimeo's 500MB per week quota. The downside is, they also have a rule that the video shouldn't be more than 20 minutes long. I have no idea why though - if you encode a video file correctly, even 1 hour can be squeezed into about 400MB without much loss of quality.
The reason why I didn't upload non-gameplay videos there was because I didn't want to take the risk of running afoul of thier TOS. Now, the thing is, Vimeo also never had a rule against gameplay videos, but they changed the rules halfway through and never informed their userbase. I hope Wegame takes note of this and inform their userbase should their rules change mid-way.
Anyway guess I found a new home for hosting my gameplay videos!
11:28 by FoxTwo Some months ago, I moved my videos from Youtube to Vimeo. At the time, Vimeo was an up-and-coming startup, and it offered some features which I liked. For example, no 10 minute limit, weekly 500MB uploads, and your videos can be in High Definition!
All these made me choose Vimeo over other sites like Viddler or metacafe or veoh.
However, just today, I got a short and terse email from Vimeo:
"Your account has been removed. Reason: Gameplay videos not allowed"
Um wha~~!? I've been uploading gameplay videos since Jan or Feb 2008 and nobody said anything about it. In fact I don't even remember reading anything about their usage policy saying that we can't upload videogame captures! Besides, I distinctly remember seeing other gameplay videos from other people on Vimeo too!
Now, if the rules changed mid-way, shouldn't a site like Vimeo send an email out to all members to tell them to click on ACCEPT on the new Terms Of Service? Well no such email came. No blinking "we updated our terms of service, please read" words appeared on my dashboard or whatever whenever I logged in to upload videos.
In other words, I didn't know.
Also, I don't only have gameplay videos on Vimeo. I have machinimas too (stated on their new terms of use as being allowed) as well as non-gameplay videos like videos of my friends in funny situations.
They removed my account without warning. NONE. Just a short, terse, "your account has been removed" email.
So how does a user take steps to remedy a situation before account removal happens? No chance to even delete/remove them on my own accord to keep my account.
So if you are looking for a video sharing site, do NOT use Vimeo! No, not even if your videos are non-gameplay videos. The way they do things is not .... reasonable.
I guess I'm switching AGAIN... maybe Veoh, maybe Dailymotion. Who knows?
Labels: internet, Rant, self, video
13:27 by FoxTwo
Are Your Mobile Phone Bills Killing You?
Well as far as I'm concerned, they almost were. Lately my talk times have increased almost 100%. My usual mobile phone plan comes with 300 mins and costs $48.15 a month. However, recently I have been clocking as high as 700 mins a month. For every 60 mins over the "free" bundled minutes, I pay almost $10 (16 cents a min x 60 mins). So, you can roughly guess how much my phone bills were.
Now you might be thinking, 300 mins (which is 5 hours) of talk time should be enough. Not really. If you actually calculate, it means you can only talk for 10 mins a day, for 30 days, before all your minutes are used up. A few months ago, 300 mins was enough for me. Recently though, 300 mins barely lasts me 2 weeks.
Luckily, since I recently got a new mobile phone, the Nokia E51, it is touted as a VOIP-enabled phone. As such I started exploring possibilities that I can leverage VOIP on the phone to cut my costs down.
My current problem is simple - I do not have enough "minutes" in my mobile plan, and I don't want to go up to the next higher plan as that would mean I spend $82 a month instead of $48.15. That's almost $30 more a month, every month.
After hunting around a while, I came upon 2 very potential solutions. One is by Skype, and the other by pfingo (incidentally, pfingo is not a "new startup". It's actually Starhub).
Skype has a subscription mode that seems very suitable to me. I pay US$5.95 (approx S$9) a month, and I get to call a selected country for "free". The word "free" is quoted because the small print says "up to 10,000 mins". They did not give any specifics, so I'm naturally wary. The "selected country" for me of course, is Singapore. Luckily too, that Singapore is in their list of being able to call both MOBILE and LANDLINES for free. This subscription has no "fixed" period. You can subscribe for as little as 1 month, or let Skype continue to charge your credit card every month if you choose to stay with them.
pfingo's offering is slightly different. First off, if you subscribe to pfingo, not only can you call Singapore numbers free (both mobile and landlines), you also get your very own number, free too! In other words, should you use pfingo to call your friend, he/she will see your new pfingo number on his phone instead of "withheld" or "private number". This is of some influence in my decision, as I know some of my friends will refuse outright to pickup any incoming calls that are "withheld" or "private numbers". Why? Because most of the time, these numbers are telemarketers calling to sell you something.
The downside to pfingo's offerings is the higher price per-month ($13 compared to approx $9 for Skype), as well as the minimum period to subscribe is 3 months. Thus, if you are not too sure, like I was, you can't just "try them out" for 1 month. However, if you try them via the usual way - buying $10 of credits and calling out first and deciding if they are good enough, then once you subscribe to pfingo for 3, 6 or 12 months, you can literally have the peace of mind that:
- You can call out to Singapore numbers for free for the next 3, 6 or 12 months
- You have a number appearing on the other side so that people can actually see who's calling.
- If your friend didn't answer your call, ie a missed call, he can actually call you back on that number!
Needless to say, both have solutions for mobile phones too, so that you can use either GPRS or Wifi to make VOIP calls.
Currently I am trying out Skype for a month. I did activate a Caller ID with Skype too, but it doesn't seem to work. Opening a support ticket elicited no response. With pfingo's offering so tempting, it is very tempting to switch over to pfingo.
In a sense it's a lot more convenient for me using VOIP phones since I do not have a desk phone, and if I want to make calls out to vendors I would need to use my mobile phone. Now that I have Skype on my laptop, it's like having a phone with me too! Oh yes, my laptop easily connects with my bluetooh earpiece for my mobile phone, so there's no need to have any extra "headsets".
Conclusion:
$48.15 a month for mobile plan
$9 for Skype's subscription
Total = $57 a month for almost unlimited talktime.
Of course if you have a cheaper mobile plan than mine (ie those with 100 mins), then your costs are lowered significantly too.
You should consider VOIP to supplement your mobile plans, if you have a modern enough phone. You should seriously consider VOIP especially when your phone has WLAN capabilities ("wifi").
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13:59 by FoxTwo Back in 2007, a new blog traffic tool appeared on the Internet - Blogrush.
1 year later, I received an email saying that Blogrush is shutting down. That would of course, include the shutdown of Traffic Jam too.
Now, I've written about how mis-named the 2 sites are. Blogrush didn't, it crawled. Traffic Jam wasn't, too. An avalanche of traffic poured in instead. Now, both are shut down.
I wouldn't really say that I miss them though. Blogrush was a nice idea but it didn't work that well. There are a ton of other traffic-exchange sites out there to help you with your blog (and mine). Right now, though, all I am doing is just to remove the Blogrush code from my blog. I'll eventually get around to looking for another traffic-exchange site but not right now.
In any case, I haven't really been updating my blog here anywhere near a "consistent" basis. Lately it's been pretty ad-hoc. In the past I'd update once every couple of days at least. Now, a week can go by before I find time to write something down.
Goodbye Blogrush! It was good having you around!
13:47 by FoxTwo
Image via WikipediaThe recent price increase by Singtel on landlines sparked off a wave of protest around my friends, and many bloggers. On the surface, if you look at it, the increase isn't really that much. Only 0.01 cent more per minute, and a total of $10 more per YEAR.And yet, people protest and grumble.
I think, the problem isn't the amount of the increase. It's that everything has been increasing and yet we see no improvements. As a matter of fact, bus fare, MRT fares, and taxi fare increases have not done a thing to help us - MRTs are still packed like sardines, and we pay to be packed like sardines. Bus fare increases only help to put stupid TVMobile boxes into the buses, which do nothing to "entertain us" while we are in a "standing-room-only" packed bus.
The Singtel price increase is probably the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
Nowadays, almost everyone has some sort of broadband connection at home. It's high time we take note of VOIP technology (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and use it as a telephone. VOIP is not exactly a new technology. It has been around for at least 10 years if not more. Back then, the major application for VOIP technology was games. No seriously, it was used for games! Picture this - you're frantically fighting off a horde of monsters. Is it faster to shout "HELP!" or to click the screen, bring up the chat box, and then type HELP (in the meantime the monsters would still be pummeling you)? Even then, would your friends be looking at the chatbox on the screen, or would they also be busy fending off the monsters?
Over the years, VOIP grew from a game-only application into what it is today - ready for mainstream. As an illustration, Starhub already offers it as a commercial product - their Digital Voice products. Yes, Starhub leverages on the cables which they have already laid into your HDB homes meant for their internet and cable TV services to carry voice as well.
Why VOIP?
Because, it's dirt-cheap. You already have an internet connection. You're already paying for it. If you use VOIP to call someone also using VOIP from the same service provider, it is almost guaranteed that the call will be free. Another illustration - on MSN, call your buddy and TALK to him with a mic. That conversation is free. Yes, you hear voice. Yes you can see video (if you both have webcams). Yet, that session is free.
VOIP comes into its own when it comes to calling your friends and loved ones who are in a different country. If you actually sat down and compared IDD rates with VOIP global calling rates, the VOIP rates would typically be at least 40% to 70% cheaper! Seriously. About a year or so ago, I called a friend up in Hong Kong and had a 1 hour 30 minute conversation with her. The price? S$2.00.
No you didn't read that wrong. It cost me US$1.80 for a 90 minute call (2 cents a minute). US$1.80 is about S$2.00 or so. If you think about it, it was cheaper to call overseas at 2 cents a minute, for 90 minutes, than to call your buddy in Singapore up on the mobile phone (16 cents a minute) and talk to him for 15 minutes!
If you are worried about the "call quality", and whether there will be "drop outs" etc, you can rest easy. My overseas friends whom I have called, keep telling me I sounded so clear, it was just like standing next to them. Well it's actually not that surprising since the microphones you own/have is probably better than those on the phones.
Skype is a popular and well-known VOIP provider. Many people I know also have skype accounts. Even the company I work in now encourages Skype usage if you are not physically in the company network. In the company itself, the entire PABX system is all VOIP. To dial anybody up in the world, all you need is just a 5 digit number - first digit represents country, the other 4 digits for the extension. The "overseas call" is thus, free too. Why? Because we are using the company internal network, which is already laid for the LAN and WAN networks for the computers.
With costs so low and dirt cheap, it is little wonder VOIP isn't very well known outside of the IT industry. Telephone companies such as Singtel will definitely not want to lose their "golden goose". Without the masses paying for their high rates (16 cents a minute for mobile calls, 0.16 cents a min for landline calls), they'd lose a huge chunk of their revenue.
Some VOIP services like Gizmo and pfingo even have mobile clients ("software for your phone") that allows you to use your phone to call overseas using their cheap rates, as long as you have an Internet connection. Modern phones probably come with wifi as one of the connectivity options and thus you can just use your phone and "log in" to your own home wireless network, and call using VOIP.
Alternatively, you can subscribe to mobile broadband plans which are definitely cheaper than mobile phone plans. For about $22 a month you can get mobile broadband services on your phone with 50GB of bundled free transfers. 50GB is definitely more than enough for you to make VOIP calls. As an illustration, a typical user only consumes 20GB to 30GBs a month even if he watches youtube videos regularly
So, effectively, you can downgrade your mobile phone plan to the cheapest one available and get mobile broadband to use cheaper call rates (2 cents a min to call any number in Singapore).
If you use the pfingo service, they even have a callback function! Simply go to the internet on any computer, phone or PDA, key in a callback number for you (home or mobile phone), then the destination number. Your phone will ring, a message will tell you to hold, and soon your friend (overseas or local) will be on the other end. So you don't even have to be "on the internet" to use their VOIP service!
In a similar vein, Skype offers an "unlimited country call". Meaning for about S$8 a month you can call any number in Singapore (or your choice of country) free. Downside of course, is that you have to use the Skype client on the desktop or mobile phone, or own a skype-fone. If you go for the Global option, you pay about S$18.00 a month and call Singapore plus 35 other countries FOR FREE.
Now if this blog post hasn't spurred you on to at least do some research into the VOIP technology and how it may be able to help you save some money, nothing else will :)
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20:23 by FoxTwo A couple of posts ago, I wrote about gothere.sg. In a nutshell, it's replacement to Streetdirectory.com, especially now that the latter has splattered adverts everywhere, including right smack in the middle of the map you're looking at. Irritating as hell.
As a quick update, since Monday, 18 Aug, gothere.sg has introduced a new feature - embeddable maps! Now I think some of you can still remember - in the past, you used Streetdirectory.com to indicate your location and pasted a small portion of the map onto your website so people can find you.
Gothere.sg went a bit further. Full interactivity in its embeddable versions! Think of "youtube" but now, it's with maps. As an example, I'll embed one below:
In the map above, I selected my start point as Compass Point (Sengkang's Interchange) and my destination as Singapore Expo.
You can drag it, view it, put pins on it, and so on. One great use I can think of, is for us bloggers to recommend new-found makan places! Easy, no need to describe until face green green (local hokkien version - bin chi chi). Just find a location, stick a pin on it, and start describing in the embedded map.
For the more mobile among us - gothere.sg has a mobile version. Just point your phone's browser to http://gothere.sg/m and you're all set! Of course, take note that the mobile version is a cut-down version, saving you in transfer bytes and thus, air-time costs.
14:03 by FoxTwo
A True Alternative To Streetdirectory.com
Until recently, I have been manually using Google Maps and cross referencing with SBS and SMRT manually to find out how to get to a location.
After reading dk's post on his thoughts on Streetdirectory.com, I feel I should introduce a website which, thanks to Krisandro, has been brought to my attention.
The website is called GoThere. It sports the same features that used to be available on Streetdirectory.com - the bus guides, the driving instructions etc. In fact, I find it easier to use than Streetdirectory.com. You can easily enter a local name for a place, like "Raffles Hotel", or "Bugis Junction" into the search box, and it'll show you exactly where it is. You don't need to know the road name or even the postal code.
The "Get To Here" and "Get From Here To" box works the same. Just enter a name, part of a name, postal code, or just a local name, and it'll calculate the distance for all 3 modes of travel - driving, bus only, or bus+MRT. In fact it's so spot on, that the colleagues I have introduced this website to, have bookmarked it.
Yes, you can click on the numbers to go directly to SBS IRIS and get more detailed bus information. Yes, you can even query when the next bus is coming too (although IRIS has been known to be inaccurate especially during peak hours).
In the bottom left corner you can also see a searchbox to look for nearby locations. Unlike in Streetdirectory.com, you are not limited to searching only for nearby ATMs or 7-11 stores. You can search for ANYTHING. Even "Boon Tong Kee" chicken rice if you want to.
Which brings me to another point. With Gothere.sg you don't need to search for a specific location. You can search for eating places, shopping, whatever. The site is kind of like "open source", where everyone contributes. If you liked a shop, a stall or whatever, and it's not listed, you can add it in. Other people can come and add comments and rate your selection.
23:41 by FoxTwo
Streetdirectory.com Is Back.... Kinda..
Image via WikipediaI received an email today, pretty late in the day actually. It was from the PR firm of Streetdirectory.com, and it says, in essence, that Streetdirectory.com is up and running with new maps and satellite pictures.So I went over and had a look.
I came away pretty indifferent. Well you can't really blame me. In its current state, Streetdirectory.com is nowhere near its former glory. Bus and MRT guides return error results. Driving directions return a blank page.
Google Maps, at the very least, gave you driving directions (oh you didn't know it could? Yes it does, pretty accurately too). Just look at the pic above.
In fact I believe the site is still pretty buggy. Here's how you test.
- At the main page, search for any road in Singapore. I tried to look for "Orchard Road".
- At the map page for the result, scroll down to the bottom and locate the tiny little combo box under the heading of "directions to:".
- No matter which you choose - Bus & MRT, or Driving Directions, it will always take you to the Driving Directions page.
- Even so, after filling in your start and end destinations, no results are returned. Just a blank page listing your start point and end point.
To test the Bus and MRT directions feature, you have to get creative to work around the bug. I clicked on "to here" link, and went up 1 level. It will bring me to this page. From there, I clicked the "Singapore Bus and MRT Guide" link, to get to the right page.
By doing this, however, you have to fill in both your start and end point information. It's not a problem, since I just wanted to test it. The result that is returned is this:
Sorry, we are terribly sorry, there are technical difficulties when processing this routing page. Our administrators has been notified. Please try again later.
Ah well.
At least the maps are back. Still, I'd be using Google Maps over Streetdirectory.com for now, just because at least the driving directions work, and Google Maps have less ads and clutter, hence load faster. Besides, Streetdirectory.com is currently using the satellite pictures from Google Maps anyway (but the maps aren't from Google, just to clarify). I may as well go direct to the source instead of coming here for my usage. Yes I'm weird. I always load the maps with satellite pictures because I want to get my bearings by looking at nearby buildings for landmarks.
As it stands now, Streetdirectory.com is a pale shadow of its former self during its hey-day. As soon as the driving directions and bus/MRT guides are fixed, people will start to come back. Right now though, I don't forsee anybody jumping for joy.
Update: In a plurk response by Krisandro, he mentioned a site called "GoThere". It does indeed provide directions on which bus to take from your start point to reach your end point.
Labels: internet, street directory
13:48 by FoxTwo Ok I'm really late to do this. Seems like everybody has hopped on the bandwagon and joined a relatively new "blogging network" place called SocialSpark except me. Well I finally got around to doing it and signed an account up on SocialSpark.
At first glance, Social Spark seems like a revamped "Pay Per Post", but that's only the first impression. If you actually browse the "marketplace", which is the new name for the "open opportunities" section, you can see several types of "opportunities".
The first available is "Sponsored Posts". This is the usual type that is normally available. That means, you write about a service or a product, submit it for the sponsor to review, and then the sponsor pays you. Something like an advert.
The second type, which is new, is a "Blog sponsorship". Personally I find this category the most irritating of all, and I never will take part in this. What happens is that a blog/website/company will "sponsor" your blog for a time period. To have the sponsorship, you have to install a small piece of code into your blog, which (to me) is irritating and pops up whenever someone visits your blog. If the code contains animation and sound and video, you can imagine how much it'll slow the loading time down! Plus if it's annoying music or video, the visitor has to hurriedly close/cancel/stop the music or video.
Fortunately, you are free not to utilise this portion of the functions if you don't want to.
The third (and final) type of sponsoships available to you is just called a "Spark". Essentially these don't pay you in monetary terms, but in traffic exchange. It really depends on what is offered. Some might review your blog in return, some might link your blog for a month. You have to read the terms before you accept the offer. Some don't even offer anything in return, but to rally support for a specific cause, or for promotional awareness efforts.
Well since I'm still relatively new to Socialspark, I need to explore it much more before I can give a more complete run-down of it.
Labels: blog, internet, socialspark
17:39 by FoxTwo Sometimes, being indifferent does indeed have its advantages.
For example, I'm in mybloglog and blogcatalog. You do see people there making friends, talking to each other at the shoutboxes of each other, talking to each other at the forums, but I never did any of these. They are both supposed to be "communities", yes, but I never really "got into" them.
In Facebook, for a while, I was actively engaged in buying and selling, having fun and so on, with my friends, pingsters and non-pingsters alike. Slowly but surely, Facebook burnout got to me and I started to log in to Facebook less and less. In fact I hardly log in to Facebook nowadays and my friends have to SMS me to chase me to log in so I can hep them do some stuff or give them money to buy their pets etc.
When I joined Entrecard, I see similar levels of activity there. People there frequent the forums. They drop cards, they make friends. I did almost none of these, except for dropping cards and SELECTIVELY making friends by leaving comments on their blogs (I made some great friends this way, such as Aronil, Jasmine and Jade).
In all cases, the "community" was there, but I didn't really actively take part in it, since they are based so far away - in the USA. The selective people I befriended slowly via the means mentioned above usually are Singaporeans or based in Singapore, or at the furthest, Malaysia (Aronil).
I only decided to become more active in ping.sg, a local organisation, based in Singapore, with Singaporeans, or people living in Singapore, forming the core members. I thought it was be preferable to interact in this kind of environment compared to the others mentioned above.
Alas, recent events have shown that it was the wrong thing to do. Indifference which I have shown above in the other "communities" would have insulated me from the impact of recent events. Seriously, if I had been as indifferent in ping.sg as I was in the others, I'd probably be totally unfazed at what's happening within the "community".
Perhaps it's time I backed away and not invest anymore efforts.
Indifference is key, I guess.
Labels: blog, internet, ping.sg
22:01 by FoxTwo ... everything's quiet on the western front.
Not a mouse peeped.
Not a cat leaped.
And the atmosphere feels strained.
It's kinda like a wake. You know, where everyone knows what everyone else is thinking, but nobody's saying anything. To be polite, to attempt to move on.
I logged into Plurk today, after so many weeks of not logging into it. Why? Well many of the regular people disappeared from the usual place. Exactly what I feared. Exactly what I wrote - the harsh action taken will have an effect, and it may not be the one intended. But, I found them all there on Plurk.
Interestingly though, suddenly one of the Plurks became a mini-shoutbox. Everyone congregated there, and everyone talked.
Talked.
Something which should have happened before The Incident.
I still think it's not too late to Talk.
While I doubt things will return to like what it was "in the good old days", Talking will go a long way to help that process.
For now, the place feels like an empty house. Kids have all left home, and I'm just wandering around the empty halls.
It's a lonely feeling.
Labels: blog, internet, ping.sg
21:48 by FoxTwo
I Am Saddened By Recent Events In Ping.sg
Yes I do know cliques will ALWAYS form in any social environment. Humans are gregarious - we always seek out like-minded people and connect with them. That's how societies develop. That's how villages and towns and cities are built.
Giving a label to a group of people will always happen. The "popular", the "bad", the whatever. In your own email client, or even in hotmail and gmail, you can create your own distribution list. In this list, you normally put the people you connect with regularly on it, so you can share jokes, funny pictures, or anything with your friends, ALL your friends, by just typing a label. It's not a bad thing to get a label. Even among friends, you have "best friend" and just "friend" labels, to denote how close they are to you. Not everybody is your friend, and certainly you should have very little, or just one, "best friend".
I know Daphne meant no harm in her original post about "in-groups". She was just putting a label on something, to better describe a group of people. I mean, it's going to get tedious naming the said individuals time and time again. Was it a mistake? I don't know. I have no opinion on this. I just understand that Daphne was just attempting to describe a group of members.
Then, there is the original ideal of ping.sg - to be a platform for everybody, regardless of your popularity or how "in" you are.
It just appears that some members feel that the original ideal should be upheld - one platform for all, and not to segregate members into various groups. Personally, I think this ideal should be upheld too. Equality for all!
However, the recent debate about the use of the label "in-group" got way out of hand too quickly. I personally have made many friends when I joined ping.sg. For want of better words, I belong to the "lim jiu" group of pingsters (*grin*). Although I seldom join them for their outings and activities, that by no means imply I elevate myself above them or I am an "elite" (or otherwise). I just do not forsee the said activity to be interesting to me, or I could be otherwise engaged during the timing of the said activity. Usually I appear for activities that involve liquor (*grin again*), and one should not be surprised that the same people will turn up for such an activity - not everybody drinks, just as not everybody likes the colour purple.
The sudden ban of dk from ping.sg really will adversely affect the image of ping.sg. To any outsider, a ban of a long-time member of ping.sg without some sort of formal announcements as to the reason why, shakes the confidence of the masses. Right now speculations are rife that the ban was due to the disagreement of ping.sg and dk's opinions. Without some sort of formal clarifications, such rumours and speculations will take on a life of its own, and will, very likely, be counter-productive to ping.sg. As we all know, word-of-mouth rumours spread like wildfire and soemtimes, have a greater impact than any official "advertising" or PR campaign.
For all we know, dk could have been banned for a totally different, and possibly unrelated, reasons. For now, we don't know. From the way it looks now, he got banned for caring. Then in this case, should I start to be more aloof? Should I start not to care, because if I care too much, the same might happen to me.
I love ping.sg. I love the virbancy of the whole thing, the people, the good times (and the bad). I identify with the ideal too - to be a platform for everyone. I really hope to see some form of clarifications, because I truly want to know where I (and everyone else) stand.
Labels: blog, internet, ping.sg
17:28 by FoxTwo
Increase Your Traffic with Scoutle
As an aside - yeah I'm plunging headlog into work. The new place wasn't really what I expected when I went to be interviewed. It was MORE. In other words, better.
Anyway, during my random surfing and stumbling around, I came across yet another Increase-Your-Blog-Traffic website called Scoutle. To describe it, it's similar to Blogrush in that you install a widget and then the traffic is supposed to start coming in.
However, that's where the similarity ends. In Scoutle, you create a robot, a web-crawler called a "scout". You program your scout to start scouring the web and "connect" to sites which you programmed it to. The scout then will trawl the web and hit websites with the widget installed, and "make contact". They call the widget "a stage". The different versions offered at the Scoutle website offers differing levels of traffic when installed, and it's up to you to select the levels of traffic you would want.
I think of this as a sort of "robot social networking" where the bots talk to one another, and then shows the URL and links up in your dashboard on the Scoutle site. What you do is to visit the Scoutle dashboard every couple of days and check up on the new "connections" made, to discover new blogs and interesting websites.
I'm still new in Scoutle, so my connections aren't alot right now. It's been just a couple of days and I can't really tell if Scoutle's worth the hype right now. I will post again a couple of weeks later to see how it goes with Scoutle.
Labels: blog, internet, scoutle
13:23 by FoxTwo
Have You Gotten Your Firefox 3 Today?
Usually, it is with trepidation that I download a new browser on the actual release day itself. The main reason is the add-ons. I have come to rely on certain extensions and add-ons in Firefox in my daily surfing and other internet activities, and without those, the browser seems.... naked.
So yes, I actually bit the bullet and downloaded Firefox 3 today. It is with some relief that my extensions are 99% intact - only 1 was incompatible, and I can certainly live without it, since I hardly use it. However, the majority of my themes have been disabled. When Firefox 3 started, it was the "default" theme, and I must say, it doesn't look bad either. I could actually like the default theme enough not to go looking for other themes!
As for "faster".. well honestly, I don't really feel it. Feels about same to me, but of course, I do not have any benchmarking tools running to see actual figures. In normal usage it just feels... "normal".
The main feature, if you could call it that, is the new URL bar, dubbed "Awesome bar". You can type the letters as usual and it'll show you the previous URLs you have been to. In addition, now the URL bar offers you suggestions from web page TITLES too!
Now, you can even tag your bookmarks (like how you tag blog posts) and the Awesome Bar can pick up those tags too. So in other words, you now also are able to search via tags too! For people like me who has a massive collection of bookmarks over the years (mine stretches back to 1996), it's going to be quite daunting to go back and re-tag all the bookmarks...
There are other features too, but right now I'm just exploring them. Firefox 3 isn't that much different from Firefox 2 aside from the Awesome Bar, cosmetics wise and functionality wise. I will, of course, need to read the changelog to see what's new, but as it is right now, Firefox 3 just seems a more streamlined version of Firefox 2.
Labels: FireFox, Firefox 3, internet
15:29 by FoxTwo
Plurk And Twitter, Which Is Better?
Wow it's been a WEEK since I last wrote an entry here. This is my longest "haitus", so far, on my blog since 2005. Sorry guys, Real Life (tm) happened.
To get right to it - recently Twitter had some problems. People who used Twitter heavily were badly affected (withdrawal symptoms, hiak hiak!). For me it was little more than an annoyance that twitter was down.
Then, when Twitter came up in spurts a little later, uniquefrequency from ping.sg had a tweet - he'd found a good replacement to Twitter called Plurk. Since Twitter was, at the time, not stable, I thought I may as well check it out.
First thing that hits you after you sign up on Plurk - the timeline. It's sideways scrolling so it will definitely take some getting used to. Within a few hours of signing up, I had 18 to 20 friends on Plurk and ALL of them are pingsters.
Secondly, replies in Plurk are threaded, like in forums. A little to structured for my liking. When someone replies to a friend's plurk, you get notified, and you have to go hunting for a plurk that might be a few hours old just to see the reply. That means alot of backtracking (and sideways scrolling if you don't click on the "view responses" link at the bottom of your screen).
In any case, this post isn't a "review" on Plurk. It's more like my opinion on which service is "better", in my own context. The initial push to check out Plurk was that Twitter was down. I was impressed that Plurk supports more than just GoogleTalk as the IM of choice. You can choose between the popular ones on Plurk - MSN, Yahoo, GoogleTalk, Jabber, and AIM. All major protocols are covered. Personally, since I use Digsby, it didn't really matter which I chose. The fact that MSN was unavailable in Plurk at the time didn't really bother me much too, even though I would have really preferred to have an MSN IM bot.
However, a couple of days later, the IM bots disappeared. They were offline all the time. This seems eerily the same problem that Twitter had - IM went down. The bots aren't up yet, even today.
When the IM bots went down, Plurk suddenly had none of the perks (to me) to use it over Twitter. No 3rd party clients, no IM, and Plurk definitely doesn't have SMS support. To be "updated", I had to keep the webpage open again, which I hate. Intensely.
Twitter also has the advantage of being "mainstream", so more people use it over Plurk. This is only natural since it's more established. That also means that integration with some other services like Facebook, Mybloglog et al, is already available. Plurk is just a new kid on the block and it will definitely take time for people to come use it, let alone be integrated. Even so it may never overtake Twitter, just like Jaiku and Pownce hasn't, even though they may have been around for almost as long as Twitter has.
If I were to move to a new platform, let alone just to Plurk, I'd have to persuade my friends to do so too. I don't like doing that, since my friends will have their own personal opinions on what they like and do not like. I can gush and enthuse about how great something is (like Digsby), but it's really up to them to take the plunge.
So what's my take?
I have Twitter up all the time on Digsby anyway, so I guess my answer would be - Twitter for me. Plurk is a nice distraction, and I'll still pop in occasionally, but it won't be my "main", so to speak. Also, Twitter isn't "down" now anyway. It works fine, it's up, so no complaints from me.
Labels: internet, plurk, twitter
16:02 by FoxTwo
If You Want To Make Money Online....
.... you really, REALLY have to look at this link. Without reading that link, you will be wondering why you failed in your attempts, or why your efforts are not bearing fruit. That link will be an eye-opener if you never knew those before. Trust me.
Don't worry it's safe to click on the link. You can examine the link yourself - it's not an affiliate link, no hidden gotchas to make you click so I earn money off your click. :)
I know you've heard it all before. Making money online is fast. If you have a blog you can make money easily. You can live off the income you generate online. The link above will tell you THE TRUTH.
I mean, who wouldn't be persuaded, especially if you keep seeing these being said time and time again? Every Make-Money-Online blog or website you come across will always definitely tell you the same thing - it's easy, you don't need much skills at designing web pages, it's automatic and so on.
Like everyone else, I *have* been tempted before. I even broke out my credit card on a couple of times. However, it's always at the last minute that reason reared its head and I kept my card, and navigated away from those pages.
Nowadays there are some of those sites that vary those motto slightly. They will tell you it's not that easy, and that you need to put some work in. Well they're only toning it down and telling you something a little less untrue.
The bottom line - most of these sites are commonly referred to as "scam sites". As the old adage goes - "If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is".
Incidentally, this goes for those "warning" emails you get from friends too.. you know, about a new fantastic virus that can infect everything. It sounds so fantastic, that it's impossible to be true. But, that's another topic.
Don't say I didn't warn you! :)
Labels: internet, make money online
16:57 by FoxTwo
Death To The Google Sorry Page!
In the early part of the week, I was cut off by Google from accessing 2 of my blogs. I kept getting the damned "Google Sorry Page". At first, like everyone else, we thought it was a temporary problem. Common ways to resolve the "Sorry Page" problem was to use a different browser, clearing cookies, clearing cache, etc. However, it seems that this time Google has it in for us. All these measures did not work. I even made sure to disconnect from Starhub and reconnect with a new IP address. Same thing, no go. Google still showed the "Sorry Page".
Ok before we go further, this is the "Sorry Page" I'm talking about:
Yeah it was driving me nuts since I couldn't access my blog to do maintenance or reply comments. I kept hoping it would be a temporary problem and it would go away. It never did. Even up to today, I still see people twittering about this. A very good example is shown below:
All my blogs were hit except this one. The only difference? This one's self-hosted, ie not stored on Google's free blogspot.com servers.
It was VERY fortunate though, that the 2 blogs that were hit, had already had the default Blogger commenting system replaced with the more powerful Intense Debate and Disqus ones. Thus, I could still reply to their comments via email. In the case of Disqus-powered commenting system, I could even head to the Disqus website and reply to the comments from there if I wanted to.
So I set about converting my blogs from the nifty Layouts format to Blogger Classic templates, so that I can publish them to my own server, away from Google's reach. I succeeded early on in the week with my fitness blog. I was lucky - I found the same exact template which I used, all ready and waiting to be used as a classic template. That one was fast.
However, there wasn't any classic version of my gaming blog template, so I attempted to manually convert the template by hand into a Blogger Classic template. After 3 failed attempts, I gave up. I have no clue why they failed - the CSS was left mostly intact, yet it looked haywire upon previewing. After having wasted 3 days trying to hand-code the XML template into a HTML one, I gave up and thought seriously about finally moving away from Blogger platform. I was deciding between Drupal and Expression Engine but the theme I used was not available on those platforms. Thus my decision was primarily forced by the need to use the same theme, and to get it working FAST. So Wordpress became de facto platform of choice.
Long story short, it was only today that I completed the migration of my gaming blog to Wordpress. I only used Wordpress due to convenience, not because it's a "all powerful" system. The migration had numerous hiccups, and even their much-vaunted import functions FAILED. Utterly. Wordpress forums were no help. Everyone just said "it SHOULD work!". Yeah it should, but it didn't.
Wordpress was, and still is, very finicky with some themes and javascript not playing nice together, so even though you might like a theme, you can't use it because of some javascripts that you're running. Even worse, some themes look fine on one browser but sucky on another. I know Wordpress die hard supporters will not like me saying this but it's true - Wordpress is almost as good (or "bad") as Blogger.com. The only difference is that Wordpress runs on a server out of Google's reach, which solves my current problem.
I do not have a problem with Blogger platform, just Google blocking me from accessing my blogs. I also do not have have a problem with Wordpress as a blogging platform, just the Wordpress fanbois. I can use either, and I am happy to say that I like (or hate) both equally. None is "superior" to the other in my opinion and usage. No wait, I take it back. Blogger has an edge - I can write 3 blogs from one Dashboard even if the blogs are all self-hosted and externally published. With self-hosted Wordpress, 1 blog per installation please, thank you (without using WPMU and having to muck around with Apache settings and such).
So, now that I've finished addressing my more immediate concerns, ie getting the blogs OUT from blogspot.com servers and onto my own, I can slowly concentrate on perhaps, migrating them completely out from Blogger and onto other platforms. Perhaps I will revisit Drupal, or try out Chyrp. One thing's for sure - the CMS system that I pick to migrate THIS blog to, will need to have this theme readily available and useable.
Now, with Intense Debate or Disqus as my choice of a commenting system, I wouldn't even mind trying out other CMS systems and see if they would be a better, or at least, more interesting choice, than Wordpress. After all, ID or Disqus can be used with any sort of web site, even if commenting systems were not originally available on them!
Labels: Google, internet, Rant
05:02 by FoxTwo
Leveraging Entrecard To Get More Traffic
So anyway, I was a little surprised to see an email coming in via my Entrecard inbox. Well, I've been getting alot of emails from Entrecard because I just put my fitness blog up on Entrecard, so I have been getting advert approval requests. However this is different - this is an email from a real human :)
Well, before I get to the email, let me just say that Entrecard finally added the ability to add multiple blogs to one account! YES FINALLY! Therefore you don't need a separate email for each blog you want to register there now. Seeing this new function, naturally I added my fitness blog. After all I don't need an extra email address now, so it's very convenient. Plus, Entrecard just naturally draws traffic in.
But, to really increase traffic from Entrecard, you need to give it a little "boost". You don't just sit back on your laurels and "watch it happen". To this end, Bogdan Ionescu from Learniacs.com has written a nice little PDF e-book. Click on the picture on the left, or here, to grab the book.
I tried to get it, but apparently the site is now hit by a high load of traffic or something (perhaps trying to grab this free e-book), so it's unavailable to me right now.
However, I'll still be trying to get it. After all, who doesn't need/want more traffic for their blogs? Even if the blog isn't really a money-maker type (like mine).
Update: Ok finally got the book. What I can tell you is, Bogdan writes in a no-nonsense way. Eg - You want this? Do this. No running around in circles telling you stories of when he was a kid and what he did . And did I mention I just added my 3rd blog to Entrecard? Using the tips Bogdan has in his e-book should prove useful and probably will draw traffic in much faster than my original blog did when I first joined Entrecard last year.
We now return you to your regular programming of useless stuff, nonsense and ramblings.
08:06 by FoxTwo
Cool Way To Screenshot A Website Part 2
Back in January, I wrote this entry here, about a web service called Kwout. For those not familiar with it, it's basically a service to screenshot a page and provide ready-made code for you to insert into your blog to show a screenshot.
Now they've come up with a FireFox extension to do the same thing!
You don't have to to go their website to screenshot a website anymore with this extension. Here's how the extension works in Firefox:
You click on the small "k" in your status bar in Firefox. That will pop out the small options box you see in the screenshot.
Then you select the portion you wish to "cut", like as if you're on the actual Kwout website. Once done, you click on "CUT", as usual.
You'll see the final box appear once you've clicked on "CUT". The extra feature here is that you can SAVE the picture to your own computer, or if you click UPLOAD, it'll bring you to the Kwout website for it to be processed and the code generated for you to be put into your blog entry.
Again, in case someone forgets, Kwout is cool because not only does it screenshot a website, the screenshot image contain working links (if you allow)! In other words, if the screenshot has a button labelled "home", and you allowed image mapping, you can click on the "home" button in the screenshot image, and you will be brought to wherever the link points to. Think of it as a "miniwebsite".
Seriously, try it on my previous post. Click on the links in the picture, and you WILL be brought to the bloggers' actual blog entries!
Labels: Extension, FireFox, internet, website
17:58 by FoxTwo
Feedblitz Does More Than Just Email Now
If you don't know what RSS is, in a nutshell it's a consolidation of blog entries in a simplified format, so that you can use a reader to read it instead of visiting every blog you like to read the latest entries. All you need to do is subscribe to the RSS feed and add the RSS URL into your reader, and you can read all your favourite blogs in one place - your reader.
Yeah most blogs have a "subscribe me" button that asks you to enter your email address, and Feedblitz emails the RSS feed to you. Well, at least that was what it USED to do. In the intervening months where I've left Feedblitz alone, I just realised what it can do when I had to reinstall its code on my new blog templates.
Yeah look at the options now - MSN, Yahoo, Twitter. Now you can get the whole RSS thing beeped to you wherever you are!
I just can't imagine how your Twitter will look like if a full blog post comes in via RSS through your Twitter... your followers would probably see a whole bunch of tweets coming from you (assuming you used the public option as shown in the picture).
And if you have subscribed to the feed via your MSN or Yahoo or AIM, Lord help you when you're in the middle of a presentation for your bosses and a new blog post comes in :)
12:17 by FoxTwo
Shareaholic - The One Button To Rule Them All
For example, I discovered the Intense Debate commenting system and implemented it here. Then a day or so later, I came across a competing commenting system, which also garnered rave reviews, and implemented it on my gaming blog. Well yeah I am still "in the process" of implementing the commenting and forum features to my third blog, and even thinking about using it on my website in general too.
Before we go further, I'd just like to jog your memory a little. When you read blogs, do you notice that a vast majority of them have some sort of "share this" button or link at the end of the entry? Yeah, those that you click or mouseover, and a list of services will be shown, like StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter etc?
Well today I'll just touch on something similar, and it's available on the browser. It's a FireFox extension, called Shareaholic. and it's your own personal "share this" button on your own browser.
Remember when you first joined StumbleUpon? Yeah they told you that "it is highly recommended" that you install their toolbar. Then, you joined de.licio.us. They told you the same thing - "install our toolbar". You joined Technorati. Although they don't have a toolbar, you can use the many bookmarklets they have there to "bookmark" your faves.
The list goes on. For every of these "social sites" you have yet another toolbar to install, or more bookmarklet codes to put on your browser bar to "share" your favourites.
This is where Shareaholic comes in. This one single add-on will render all those toolbars and bookmarklets useless! Ok I exaggerate, but this can replace all of them in one fell swoop. Well check out the picture below for a better idea:
As usual, click to enlarge if you can't see it clearly.
As you can see, this one single add-on allows you to share the current page you're on with a multitude of services. I personally only picked those I really use. After all I doubt anybody would have an account on each of those services!
Well, is that it? Not quite.
Shareaholic also works very much like StumbleUpon. Well I think of it as "StumbleUpon without stumbling". What do I mean? Well when you click on the icon in your browser, you will see a selection called "Community links". This is where people using Shareaholic have bookmarked stuff and are sharing it across the various services that Shareaholic supports. The stuff they are sharing all appear here (although not really in real-time). The more impressive thing about this is that, you need not necessarily have an account in whatever services those links are bookmarked to - as long as you have the Shareaholic extension you can see every link passing through the system.
Yes indeed, by using this link, I "stumble" upon new stuff, almost exactly like "stumbling" :)
Labels: Extension, FireFox, internet
21:32 by FoxTwo I saw the first mention of it here, at Lisa C Writes. Then a few weeks later, I saw another mention of it here, at Bloggerfocus.com. What am I talking about?
It's about a new commenting system for the Blogger.com platform. (edit - oops, it is not just for Blogger platform. It is also available for Wordpress, Typepad etc too). Yes I know, stuff like Haloscan has been around for quite a while. However, this new comment system, called Intense Debate, appears to be much better than plain old Haloscan.
So is this going to work on this blog?
I hope so. I have, like a typical kiasu Singaporean, made backups of my original templates before slotting in the new codes for the new commenting system. I have also decided NOT to retro-fit this "upgrade" to all older entries. That means I won't lose all the old, precious comments that are currently stuck in the (old) Blogger.com system.
It would have been better if I could have made a complete switch - that means, importing everything from Blogger.com into IntenseDebate and then do a one-time complete template overhaul. Since it couldn't be done, I have to be VERY mindful about not "republishing entire blog" from now on inside Blogger.com.
Henceforth, until such time that this system shows itself to be unstable, this blog will be on the new, Intense Debate commenting system!
14:02 by FoxTwo
Facebook Is A Stalker's Paradise
Facebook has this "feature" which all other networks do not have. Or, even if they did, not to this level of detail. The feature I'm talking about is the newsfeed. You know, when you log in, you are given a summary of what your other friends did, like "commenting on a photo" or "joined xyz group", or even "kissed, hugged, punched" someone etc in the various apps.
Again, let me relate a story. Again, I am not directly involved, and names have been changed to protect the guilty and innocent. App names have also been generalised - ie I will not make references to any specific app by name.
Stella is a very friendly and outgoing person. She also has a soft heart, she can't say "NO" because "it will hurt his feelings" type of person. Like everyone else, she installed many apps due to her friends inviting her to do so. One of these apps is a flirting/dating type app. How this app works is to show her picture rather anonymously, and show only her first name without her last name. Also, in this app, there's no direct link to her profile. Thus the only way for potential suitors to communicate is via this app itself.
So Stella got to know a guy through this app. Let's call him David. David was browsing profiles in this app and saw Stella. Thinking she looks hot, he initiated contact. Stella, being the friendly sort, always replies. At first things were cordial. They sort of "clicked", and more info about each other were exchanged. She gave him a link to her Facebook profile, and accepted his friend request.
Then he started to hint at something more.
Stella recognised the hints and started to back off, but yet still always replying, and never making any ambiguous remarks. She even came right out and reminded David that she's married (as shown in her profile) and that she's only looking for FRIENDS, nothing more.
David, being a resourceful kind of guy, some how managed to obtain her email address (never shown on Stella's profile). Let's not speculate how he got the info. The fact is he did. So he started to send her lovey-dovey messages to her personal email as well as doing all the "sexy" and "naughty" poke actions to her on Facebook.
Every time Stella sees those, she gets upset. At first she tried to ignore them, but when she did, David very angrily demanded to know why she was specifically "singling him out" yet she responds to her other male friends. He insisted she respond to his "pokes" and email, and says that he could see, via the newsfeeds, that she got his "pokes", why wasn't she responding? David kept harping on one point - if she wasn't interested in him, why did she tell him her profile address and accept his friend?
Stella was in a quandry - she confided in her friends, not knowing what to do as it was stressing her out. She didn't want her husband finding out, or else he would think she had been flirting with guys on Facebook (which she didn't). Her friends advised her to totally block David on Facebook, and to set up a filter in her email to automatically delete anything from David's email address.
Stella, the soft hearted girl, didn't want to do any of those. She didn't want to "hurt his feelings". Yet, she's the one being traumatised. Also, in a way, she was afraid of what David will do.
As of right now, this situation with Stella isn't resolved. She now avoids Facebook like a plague. She is afraid to open her email. In a sense, Stella the friendly and outgoing girl, became withdrawn and afraid. All because of one guy.
Stella isn't alone in this. I know of at least a couple more female friends who are in a similar situation - unwanted attention from guys, who won't take NO for an answer. They also are soft-hearted and "don't want to hurt his feelings".
Guys - when a girl says NO, it's not a "maybe" ok? Being "determined" makes women afraid of you, not admire you. There's a fine line between "determined" and "harrassing".
Girls - don't be soft-hearted. Block the irritating ones immediately. Once you block, no matter what kind of threats he issued, you won't even see it. Also when you block, the "newsfeed" no longer updates on the guys' end. Set up filters in your email to automatically DELETE email from these stalkers. In other words, cut him off totally.
If you don't, the only one suffering is YOU, not the guy. He's not soft-hearted towards you, why should you be nice to him?
Labels: facebook, internet, social networking
11:27 by FoxTwo
A Lot Of Women Read My Blog...
If your blog is on Pay Per Post or you have joined Social Spark, the piece of code they tell you to put into your blog helps them to rank your blog using their own "Realrank". So far, their stats seem ok, no weird flukes like "Nigeria" listed in my stats (for those sensitive to the word "Nigerians" and "Scam", read my post PROPERLY. I have nothing against Nigeria, but I hate the scams. And this post is NOT about Nigerian scams, got it?)
As seen in the picture above, the stats are pretty standard. All counters (except Alexa) say the same thing - majority of my visitors are from Singapore and USA. The percentages vary, but essentially saying the same thing.
The thing about Izea's Realrank code is - I'm curious just how Izea's code manages to differentiate between male and female visitors. Not only am I impressed that they can differentiate between genders, I am even more impressed they can separate them by age!
If I really get 48% female visitors, then dangit I need to change my content slightly to cater for the female population! Perhaps more pink? Talk about lacey lingerie? Latest makeup and fashion maybe? Or how about boy-girl relationships?
If I continue to prattle on about techy geeky stuff like HTML and codes and what-nots, I'm gonna bore them all to tears... So, come on, tell me what you wanna see! :)
09:04 by FoxTwo
Join Facebook, Make Friends! Enemies Thrown In As Bonus!
Why do you join a social network, such as Facebook? Well I could have used other social networks like Friendster, Orkut etc but right now, Facebook's the "in-thing", and almost everyone has an account.
So back to the subject at hand. Why do YOU join a social network? I bet it's more likely peer pressure. "Everyone has joined, I should too!". Although none of your friends actively "pressured" you, the mere act of them sending an invite to you is already "pressuring".
We all like friends, definitely. But, did you know you can now use Facebook to find new enemies? Yes you can!
Facebook takes the cake in that it's the first social network thing I know of, where you can make enemies really quick. I'm not kidding.
Previous incarnations of social networking sites, like Friendster, only let you add friends. You can't do much except to send each other private and public messages (Facebook calls the public messages "Wall Messages"). If you uploaded pics of yourself, people can write comments on them. That's basically the extent of the "interaction".
So now Facebook comes along, ups the bar by allowing 3rd party applications. All fine and good. Then people who write "apps" need the apps to be competitive. After all, competition is what keeps nature alive, and ever changing. We compete for food, mates, etc. It's natural. So we have apps that buy and sell friends.
This is the fun part. First, let's set a hypothetical background:
On Facebook, Ah Kow has a friend, Ah Mei. He installed this "Buy Your Friend" app and bought Ah Mei because she is his friend. Ah Mei has another male "friend", Ah Gu. Ah Gu doesn't know Ah Kow, but he knows Ah Mei. So he installs the same app, and buys Ah Mei.
So, this is the part where people get too serious and personal.
Ah Kow is not happy that a stranger buys "his" Ah Mei. So Ah Kow buys Ah Mei back from Ah Gu. Ah Gu, however, is a businessman. He finds that Ah Kow is a good candidate for "quick sales". So he buys Ah Mei again, driving her price up. He knows Ah Kow will buy her back and he'll make more money.
But, Ah Kow is totally pissed off that this weirdo Ah Gu keeps buying "his" Ah Mei. Pissed off, he goes to Ah Gu's wall and writes some threatening notes.
Tada! Ah Gu just got a free enemy from a social networking site!
You just gotta love Facebook... enemies are provided too!
Yes, the story I related is actually happening inside Facebook. This post serves to explain my sudden disappearance from all buy/sell apps, because I no longer wish to be asked to decide whose side I'm going to be on, because EVERYBODY TAKES THESE APPS TOO DAMN SERIOUSLY!
Labels: facebook, internet, Rant
16:30 by FoxTwo
Showing Pictures In A Pop Up Web Page Window
WARNING! Geeky Post Ahead!
Today, for some weird reason, I thought I'd inject some pizazz into my blog. I remembered how some websites had this funky function that is able to pop a picture up in a window INSIDE the web page.
No, it's not the usual javascript prompt or messagebox window. Some people refer to it as a "web 2.0 popup box". What it actually is, is a piece of Javascript code (or several pieces). So, Google being my friend, I went searching for one. Yeah I could probably write one myself but I'm lazy. Besides, why re-invent the wheel when someone else already has done it?
So, Google, my good friend, threw up several links, and I found a website offering the code for FREE, right here.
As a demo, here's a picture of my hamster, Dufus. Click on it to see the javascript in action.
Nice eh?
If, like me, you just want to pop a picture up in a box, the code is very simple. Just add a class='thickbox' into your <a href="...."> part of your link. So the code will look like this:
<a href="http://yoururl.com/images/picture.jpg" class="thickbox"></a>
Well, if you've followed the instructions on the website correctly, you can easily install this script into your own blog/website too. Also, this script is so flexible you can show just about ANYTHING inside a box, not just pictures. Look at the website for demos of how to show websites, text, video or anything that you can hyperlink, inside a box.
Labels: internet, JavaScript
10:31 by FoxTwo Remember when I wrote about Digsby the multi-protocol IM wonder?
Well the devs have outdone themselves this time. Just about a week after Facebook launched its "chat" feature, Digsby is now able to chat with your friends that are on Facebook! This feature is available with the latest version, just released yesterday even, on 1 May.
So that means you don't have to put up with the sucky Facebook interface anymore! No longer do you have to keep popping your chatbox out after every page visit in Facebook. No more asking your friend "What did you just say?" when it loses the last line before the new page in Facebook loads up.
So how does it look? Check it out:
It looks exactly like the rest of the protocols. A big F on a blue background shows that it's a Facebook contact, and on the right, your friend's profile picture in Facebook. In fact your friend wouldn't even know the difference. He/she will think that you're inside Facebook. I just tested it out myself. Works fine on Digsby's end. My friend didn't know the difference and she didn't even think it would be possible to chat to people who aren't "physically" on Facebook.
I really love this new feature - that means I don't have to keep the Facebook page loaded up on my browser all day long if I wanted to chat with my Facebook friends. Let's face it - some "friends" you meet on Facebook, you really don't want them even knowing your MSN or your Yahoo ID. For women, this is a great "excuse". Get Digsby, and then tell all your unwanted suitors to use Facebook to "chat" with you :)
As a quick recap, yes Digsby can do MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, GoogleTalk and other protocols too, so you don't lose anything by switching to Digsby. Well, since women love the cute custom emoticons that MSN has, they will miss it if they switch to Digsby. Yeah, you can't see those funky animated pictures when your friend uses them on you. You'll just see the raw text that forms the picture.
Labels: Digsby, facebook, internet
10:02 by FoxTwo
Painless Website And Blog Migration
Some time back last year, I wrote about how to do "Disaster Recovery" on your website.
Today, I did exactly just that!
Well, don't worry, you probably didn't even notice it, because both sites were mirrored before I did the DNS change. For those people whose ISP have slower DNSes, they will still hold the old IP address to my old site. For those people who have already updated, will get the new site. In any case, the only difference is that the old site won't have this blog entry; the new one, ie this one, will.
Why did I change host?
Very recently, like a few days ago, I noticed that it took a very long time to access my website. Various tests showed that it wasn't my webhost, but more likely to be a Starhub problem. However, since I do get comments on my blog posts, I really hated to wait and wait for my site to load before I can reply their comments.
So, I went hunting for a new FREE host. Yes, I found a FREE host, within 30 seconds of Googling for one - 10GBFreehost.com. It offers 10GB space and 20GB monthly bandwidth. My current one offered only 5GB space, but 300GB monthly bandwidth. Since I doubt I will ever hit anywhere near even 5GB of bandwidth per month, the drastic reduction of "free bandwidth" isn't a problem.
Plus, this new host offers FREE MySQL databases, 5 of them in fact! Not only that, each database can be as large as 200MB. Now, 5 databases WOULD come in useful, should I ever decide to switch blogging platforms to one that require MySQL.
So, in the wee hours of this morning, I loaded up my trusty FTP program Filezilla, and started to mirror my existing site over to a new host. Migrating a Blogger platform blog is easy as pie actually. All I needed to do was to make sure every file that exists on my current server is transferred over to the new server in the same exact place. That means keeping all the files in the same directories, and recreating them on the new server the same way.
I didn't even need to touch any settings in Blogger.com itself, since I have already pointed it to "foxtwo.org" which is controlled by the DNS.
After the files were successfully transferred, the only thing left to do is to change the DNS to point to the new server. Sit back, relax, and wait for 72 hours for all DNS servers wolrdwide to update themselves with my new IP address. In the meantime, the old site still contains everything, so people that aren't updated will still get my old site and old contents.
If you're reading this entry, that means the DNS that you're using is already updated with my new webhost. See? It's transparent to you!
Labels: disaster recovery, internet, webhost, website
20:25 by FoxTwo
Zemanta - The Ultimate Blogging Tool
Image by Tom Raftery via FlickrOk so I just discovered this. Actually it was a confluence of factors that allowed me to be able to discover this in the first place. By some sheer concidence and twist of fate(s), I saw this being twittered from one of my followers, which, amazingly, isn't a personal friend. He followed me, I saw who he was, decided, why the hell not, and followed him/her back.Then I saw his/her tweet last night, about Zemanta.
And that's how I found out about it, installed it, and love it.
Ok what is Zemanta?
Very simply, Zemanta is a small Firefox (only!) extension that goes out onto the Internet and looks for pictures and related links for the blog post you are currently editing or creating. That's only the simple and quick explanation for it. It also recognizes keywords in your post(s) and offers hyperlink suggestions for you. For example, in this post I mentioned the name Zemanta, and it offered to hyperlink to the Zemanta homepage by itself. In addition to hyperlinks, it also suggests tags for you in your blog posts.
Also, if you look towards the bottom of this page, you can see a list of "Related articles"? Well it's not the same as the Wordpress version. This Zemanta version means related articles found on the internet, ie other blog posts, or other websites, or even the homepages of various products or services you're writing about. All these, it does in REAL-TIME. Meaning as you write your post, delete, add stuff, etc, the suggestions CHANGE, according to what you have written or removed.
As of this writing, it supports Blogger, Wordpress and Typad blog platforms. For people who hosts their own Wordpress blogs, no sweat, it works there too.
Yes, it is only available so far for FireFox. If you head on to their site, you can see that the reason other browsers aren't supported is due to lack of resources more than anything else.
It's sad, for me personally. Now that I've just gotten used to using Windows Live Writer to write blog posts offline, the discovery of Zemanta makes me want to come back to writing blog entries online again, via the web interface. *sigh*
Labels: internet, twitter, Zemanta
20:41 by FoxTwo
A couple of weeks ago, Entrecard rolled out their new pricing structure. Prices were crazy back then.
Now, they've stabilised, and thus far, the most expensive I've seen right now across all categories, is just 8192 creds. Not too bad, like the crazy prices of 2 weeks ago, but still, it'll take 2 weeks for anybody to drop enough cards to make 8000 credits just to advertise on the blog.
Pricing aside, Entrecard is one of the better traffic-generation systems available actually. The moment you put a blog onto Entrecard, you get a surge of incoming traffic. I've only been in Entrecard for 4 months, since about December 2007, but in that time I have seen Entrecard steadily providing traffic. So much so, that it overtook my Singapore statistics and made USA visitors become the predominant incoming traffic to my site instead (not much, about 2% more, but still, more).
Lately, since I'm jobless, I've also been (finally!) looking around for a new template for my other blogs. Just the other day, I found a pretty cool-looking one via yet another Entrecard blog, GosuBlogger. Looked nice enough for me to spend 1 whole day yesterday just re-doing my gaming site, Shades Of Twilight, up.
Now that I've gotten the gaming site up and running on the new blogskin, I thought I might as well put it up on Entrecard too, and see how well it fares there.
It's only a matter of time before I get a new template for my 3rd blog, I'm Such A Loser, and get it up on Entrecard too! :)
Labels: advertise, Entrecard, internet
18:28 by FoxTwo
New Alexa Ranks Don't Inspire Much Confidence Anymore
The new Alexa rankings caught me by surprise, in more ways than one.
Remember I was saying that my blog is just "so-so" and that I don't really have a lot of traffic? At best 150 or so daily is the norm (I know, it's pathetic compared to you guys but I'm happy with the figure ok?). My rankings have always been around 300,000 or so, and it yo-yos up and down around that figure.
Yesterday I was surprised to see my current ranking - it jumped almost 100,000 places to 222,000. I got excited for awhile, till I checked out their website. They announced that they've changed the way they rank websites.
So now my website is sporting a brand spanking new rank.
But, the next surprise was in store for me. Check out the pic.
Alexa stats
Suddenly, my visitors from USA dropped from 50% to 29.7% ?? What happened to my Singapore statistics? Who the hell in Nigeria is reading my blog?! And hell no, my blog isn't a 419 spammer blog ok?
Google Analytics stats
Statcounter Stats
I checked my other stat counters, like Google Analytics, and sure enough, zero visitors from Nigeria. Over at Google, at least, it still shows the usual - roughly 48% USA, 46% Singaporeans, and 2% other places (ok Statcounter says otherwise). Well, in any case, other counters still say Singapore and USA are my main traffic sources.
Now, this anomaly doesn't inspire much confidence in Alexa ranks anymore. I don't see "Nigeria" listed anywhere else in my other 2 statistics counters. Not just "a few" Nigerians. According to this statistic, almost HALF of my 150 daily visitors come from Nigeria! I'd really, really like to see just exactly how Alexa determined that Nigerians are reading my blog whereas the other 2 counters don't even register anything from there.
The biggest question is - what happened to the stats for Singapore?!
16:20 by FoxTwo
Streetdirectory.com Is Back, But Mapless
Yes I know, old news.
For those that are clueless, catch up here.
Today I received an email from a company claiming to be Virtual Map's PR firm. The funny thing is, I wonder how they got my email address. I never published this particular email address anywhere. Or at least, not anywhere public. Just as a precaution, in case it was spam or fraud, I did a series of WHOIS and Traceroutes. Seemed legit.
This is an excerpt of the mail:
This is Melvin from 20twenty. We're Virtual Map's PR agency and we've been reading your posts regarding streetdirectory.com.
On behalf of the guys at VM, thanks for your interest in the website and how it's fairing(1).
We've been receiving a lot of comments about how the loss of the site has inconvenienced people, so we've decided to come back online with most of our features like the popular bus/mrt guides. Unfortunately, the maps will have to wait, but hopefully this will relief(2) your inconvenience somewhat.
Besides, Streetdirectory was "back" last week. I just didn't think it noteworthy enough to mention it in a blog entry, since it wasn't (and still isn't) functioning 100% yet. Notice the part I underlined in the excerpt above. They aren't ready for maps yet and they know it.
Seriously though, if maps aren't ready, then what is the whole point? It's like saying "Congratulations you just won a car! Sorry, no keys though. You have to wait for those".
Having a bus/mrt guide without seeing where to get on, get off, walk, is almost useless. Google's maps have always been ready. Even their "driving instructions" work. We're just missing the bus/mrt info that Streetdirectory.com used to provide, but we can make-do with Google Maps (and other alternatives) for now. Google Maps even has MRT stations printed on their maps, so one can actually see the nearest station and make a guess how to get to their location.
If you were to actually go to the website now, and tried to search for a location, you'd get a blank green box. That's all. Only when you switch over to "Satellite" view, will you get - surprise surprise! - Google's satellite images. Google. Think about it.
As an aside, I also get irritated by incorrect/bad English used in official correspondence. This time it probably isn't even the author's fault - it's just the human reliance on automated spell-checkers.
(1) It's FARING not FAIRING.
(2) RELIEVE instead of RELIEF
See? That is why I don't use a spellchecker at all in any of my documents. The words above were spelled correctly, just used incorrectly. People nowadays just rely too much on spell checks, that they don't really check grammar and punctuation on their own anymore. Seriously, it's the same for myself regarding Chinese. I find that I can type almost anything in Chinese as long as I know the hanyu pinyin for it. Thus I don't bother to remember how to write it by hand anymore. Is this a good or bad thing? Hmm that makes for an interesting blog entry...
Anyway, it's interesting to think that they've actually bothered to engage a PR firm to do "damage control", and they actually wrote email to people like me. Personally I'm not very well known, and my blog is, according to the statistics, visited by more Americans than Singaporeans. Well slightly more Americans, anyway. It's like 50% USA visitors, 49% Singaporean, 1% rest of the world (like Greenland and Iran for example).
I should applaud Virtual Maps for this initiative though. It's a fresh approach, unlike other companies who either try to spin the media into saying "it's not our fault".
Labels: internet, Singapore, street directory
13:20 by FoxTwo
Digsby The Multi-Protocol Wonder
I'm sure you, like many people, have friends on IM platforms, be it MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ or whatever. And, I'm sure not all of them are (conveniently) on the same platform. You'd have some on MSN, some on AIM etc.
It wasn't till very recently that the 2 largest IM networks, MSN and Yahoo, decided to finally "work together" and allow their users to cross-talk to each other, using the latest versions of their client. Even so, there are some lazy or blissfully ignorant users out there who don't know they need to upgrade to the latest version of their respective choice of clients before they can talk to their friends on the other network. Or maybe they know but they don't want to upgrade.
What we could do to accommodate these type of users is to get a multi-protocol IM client, ie a piece of software that will log you onto the various networks that you may be on, all at the same time. This way, you can talk to all your friends from all the different networks. 2 examples of the more well-known multi-protocol clients would be Trillian and Miranda.
Now, gaze upon a relatively new entrant to this arena - Digsby, The Wonder Client! In my opinion, Digsby is THE client to have. It sports support for MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, AIM, Jabber and Googletalk protocols, for starters.
One pretty neat feature of Digsby as opposed to other multi-protocol clients out there is the ability to merge "duplicate" entries into one. You will definitely have friends who are like you - have an account in each of the networks. So, if you drag your friend's Yahoo account over to his MSN account, Digsby will merge these 2 into 1 entry on your buddy list! Don't worry, when your friend logs in on either network, you'll be notified like always. It doesn't stop at just 2, too. You can keep dragging his account from any of the supported networks, and it'll merge them all into just 1 entry.
The other usual features are skin support, avatars ("Display Picture" in MSN-speak), fonts etc. But, what takes cake, is support for SOCIAL NETWORKING! Yes, it checks Facebook, Myspace and Twitter! Now, I don't have Myspace, but it's ok. Digsby checks my Facebook and Twitter at regular intervals of about 10 mins. Unfortunately you can't control the interval right now. What is cool is that you can update your Twitter from inside Digsby itself!
Yes, I have been thinking of either getting a twitter client or installing a plug-in for MSN that allows Twitter. Now along comes Digsby and I am thinking I'm going to use this one long-term from now on.
Also, a nice bonus is that Winamp support apparently is built-in. As soon as you play a song on it, your "status" on Digsby changes to reflect the Artist-Title, just like on MSN or Yahoo.
Yes Digsby really works! It even allows you to chat with me via the "Chat With Me!" selection on the sidebar of this page. If you see a green man icon beside it now, it means I'm online in MSN Network.
Labels: facebook, internet, messaging, MSN, social networking, twitter
13:51 by FoxTwo
Goodbye Streetdirectory.com, Hello Google Maps
Yes, by now most Singaporeans would have known about Streetdirectory.com shutting down due to their lawsuit with SLA (Singapore Land Authority).
Many Singaporeans actually depend on this free service, truth to tell. When someone organises a ping.sg gathering at some far-flung corners of Singapore, we'd all head to streetdirectory.com to see how we can get there in one piece. When you get a job in a remote corner in Singapore, you'd head there to see how to get there before your boss screams at you for being late at the customer's location.
However, some of the basic functions can be found in an alternative - Google Maps! The basic stuff like searching for a road name like "Bedok North" will zoom you onto Singapore, since "bedok" is definitely indigenous to Singapore. However, if you're going to search for, say, "Smith Street", it's advisable to include ", Singapore" in your search query to get the right location.
Google Maps also has a mobile version, which I've already downloaded to my phone months ago. In fact I wrote about it here, back in October 2007. Since then I've been using Google Maps when I'm on the move and needed to find a location. In fact I have never loaded up Streetdirectory.com at all when on the move. To me, it feels like Google Maps work faster for mobiles, so I've stuck with it.
So, until Streetdirectory.com comes back up again with new, non-infringing maps, turn to Google as a filler. :)
edit:
Alternative 2 - Can.com.sg (thanks to Wishbone)
Alternative 3 - e-route planner (thanks to joshua)
Labels: Google, Google Maps, internet, street directory
10:21 by FoxTwo
The Cousin Of Ping.Sg - Ping.My?
As usual, I'm doing my usual blog-surfing thing at work. At one of my regular stops, at KongTechnology, I came across this article.
Hmm so it appears that Advertlets have registered the domain ping.my. Update: ok I must be cock-eyed, but it's not Advertlets, my mistake. It says "from the FORMER CREATOR of Advertlets."
If it ever launches, I guess I'll register there and ping this blog there too. I'm sure they wouldn't mind a few Singaporean blogs there too. After all, ping.sg has a few Malaysian blogs being pinged here anyway.
edit (13:30 hrs) - whoever that registered ping.my, I hope he knows it won't be making money. Uzyn always complained that ping.sg makes him spend money anyway hee!
I was just thinking, if I had my way, I'd make my blog on the site called http://ping.my/blog ... "ping my blog", geddit? yes yes? No? ok nevermind sigh.
Labels: advertlets, internet
10:02 by FoxTwo
Pioneer Video Sharing Site Stage6 To Shut Down
Remember, back then, broadband speeds were just like about 512Kbps to 1Mps at most. DivX was released, and for the first time, videos can be compressed with it like songs can be compressed into MP3s. Finally, videos can be shared among friends because the files no longer need to be 500MBs or more. To give you an example - a raw capture video file of about 2 minutes might take up 2GBs of harddisk space. DivX can easily compress it down to about 20MBs without much loss of quality. In other words, the 20MB version will look very close to the original 2GB version.
That was indeed a breakthrough.
Video sharing sites started to sprout up. Youtube was among the first, and is now the most popular of all. However, to "stream" videos, the files needed to be even smaller (remember, broadband speeds were slow back then), so Youtube compressed it further, and resized it downwards. While videos might look blocky and blurry on Youtube, users are impressed because we can now watch live, streaming videos.
Stage6 was a brainchild of DivX actually. They wanted to prove a point back then - that it was possible to stream videos in high-quality, using their own DivX codec. Slowly but surely, it started to gain popularity, because yes, it was indeed possible to stream high-quality videos over the Internet.
The second thing that made it popular was that you can DOWNLOAD the videos off the site onto your harddisk, and play it back with your standard Windows Media Player if you choose to.
The third thing is, Stage6 is the place for me to go if I wanted to watch a TV series that isn't shown in Singapore - like Andromeda, Stargate Atlantis, Farscape etc (yes I know, it's all sci-fi series listed here). You can find contemporary shows there too like Lost, Prison Break, West Wing etc too.
All in "high-definition".
Before even "high-def" TVs were even heard of by most Singaporeans.
And, unlike Youtube (yes, don't be surprised. These shows are available via Youtube too), they aren't blocky, or pixellated, and NOT broken down into 10 minute parts (unlike Youtube's weird policy), ie, no need to watch "1 of 4" then search for the same episode part 2 of 4 etc to continue the show.
Fast forward 5 or 6 years to present day. This morning I just got an email from Stage6, where they announced they are going to shut down the service effective 28 Feb 2008 (yes you read it right, 28 Feb 2008, not 29 Feb). To me, it's an end of an era.
Here's an excerpt from the email:
As Stage6 grew quickly and dramatically (accompanied by an explosion of other sites delivering high-quality video), it became clear that operating the service as a part of the larger DivX business no longer made sense. We couldn't continue to run Stage6 and focus on our broader strategy to make it possible for anyone to enjoy high-quality video on any device. So, in July of last year we announced that we were kicking off an effort to explore strategic alternatives for Stage6, which is a fancy way of saying we decided we would either have to sell it, spin it out into a private company or shut it down.
Yes, Stage6 is free. It doesn't have advertising. It's only a matter of time before the service shuts down. I am only amazed it lasted this long without external sources of funding. In the meantime, I have been enjoying TV series like Lexx on Stage6 in "high-definition" in the past few years.
Thank you Stage6, for all the good times.
Now, I guess I have Vimeo, which can also stream in high-quality. It's not as popular as Youtube, but then again, this post isn't about Youtube or Vimeo.
10:13 by FoxTwo
To Facebook Apps Developers....
When you FORCE them to send invites to 5 or 10 or 15 etc friends before you allow the "results" to be shown. Yes, many will spam their friends just to see the "results", but if your app is useless, it only gets spammed ONCE. Then people remove it and block it.
For once, go take a look at successful apps. Apps like Friends For Sale for example. You don't need to tell us to spam invites... we'll invite on our own because, we get $ when we do, and we can't buy people who don't have the apps installed unless they're on our friends list. You BET we'll invite, even without the need to force us to!
Not only that, people will continue to use/play with your apps if it's FUN and ENGAGING. Make 'em fun and the app will become popular. Force us to spam invites, it stays in our profiles only until we find time to remove it. And remove we WILL.
Forcing people to spam invites makes your app a "virus". That's how viruses spread - by forcing themselves onto others. Chances are, you know that if you don't force people to do it, nobody will come back to your app a second time eh? What a low tactic.
Giving incentives to invite people is another thing - more money, more points, whatever. As long as it's our concious decision to say "hey this app is fun, I want to invite my friends to come play it", it's fine.
Labels: facebook, internet, Rant
09:45 by FoxTwo
Blogrush and TrafficJam Need To Be Renamed
After seeing just 1 day of statistics, I have come to a conclusion.
Blogrush should have been named "TrafficJam", and TrafficJam should be renamed as "Blogrush". Honestly, the results these sites deliver are in total opposite of what their names imply. When I first joined Blogrush, I was expecting a flood of incoming traffic. That never happened. In fact, a couple of blogger friends of mine even thought about removing the Blogrush widget.
Then, seeing the statistics from just yesterday alone, Traffic Jam sent close to 400 hits to my LOWEST-TRAFFIC blog (I'm Such A Loser - my fitness blog). Normally that blog gets between 10 to 20 hits a day at most.
The only other service that even comes close to sending this much traffic is Entrecard, but unfortunately that blog isn't on Entrecard because I haven't figured out if I can add additional blogs to Entrecard.
The only downside I can see to the TrafficJam service is this - your blog entries must get listed in their "top 10". If it's not visible, you won't get any traffic. My fitness blog had an entry listed at number 5 across the whole network, and all hits to my fitness blog was headed for that #5 ranked entry.
I am forseeing that what happened on the old ping.sg will happen on Traffic Jam, ie a lot of people will be trying to come up with catchy, racy, raunchy etc titles to get people to click on it. Blogrush works like how the old ping.sg worked - as soon as someone clicked on your link, it's counted. Get enough clicks, your entry shows up in the top 10 list of Traffic Jam. When it shows up in the top 10 list, you get even more clicks.
16:22 by FoxTwo
Traffic Jam On The Blogosphere
It's weird, if you think about it. First, they tell you that your blogs will "rush" around. Now they tell you that your blogs will get caught in a "jam". Kinda extreme.
It's similar to Technorati or ping.sg, but this time the website is pulling data from across the Blogrush network. That means that if you want your blog to be featured, you need to join Blogrush first.
Here's a screenshot of the new website.
What actually surprised me was that I actually saw one of my blog entries listed in their Top 20 blog entries. I'm flattered that it's ranked #5 in the entire Blogrush network!
That entry is taken from my other blog, a very LOW-TRAFFIC one at that. Man, I never knew the people on Blogrush were reading my fitness blog....
Again, as a reminder, if you want to get in on the action, you need to join Blogrush.
17:18 by FoxTwo
Win US$500.00 In A Blog Contest!
The blog Business+Directory, is organising this contest. They are doing this as part of their launch and promotion efforts.
The rules to join are very simple:
- Link to this contest page so that others will know how to join.
- Link to Business+Directory telling your readers about the February promotion.
- Original post must come from your blog so that we know who to send the money to. Post should be at least 250 words using your own unique writing style, please don’t cut and paste from this post.
Think about it. 500 smackeroos in US currency is about S$710, going by current exchange rates. Since they said the money will be paid via Paypal, you need to have an account there too. If you want to hold the amount there until the exchange rates are better to cash out, by all means. Me, I don't know what I'll do yet. Maybe cash out, maybe leave it in Paypal.
Er, that is, assuming I win.
Yeah, you can bet that there's going to be alot of blogs joining this contest. They're going to use a randomizer software to pick the winning blog. If Missloi were here, she'll use Probabilities Theory to tell you just how much of a chance you got :)
Incidentally, as of this writing, there's about 70 blogs in the contest, so, 1 in 70 chance of winning :) Much better odds than Toto or 4D, wouldn't you say? Well, unless Missloi smacks me and tell me I suck at math (which I do actually) and my numbers are all wrong...
In any case, I think this is a much better chance than trying to get a Payperpost ad. Most of the time, Asia, let alone Singapore, is usually disqualified from the "opportunities". Most times I go in, all the currently available opportunities are all RED, ie unavailable. As I said, most of the time it's because they wanted only US or Europe territories to write.
Anyway, here's wishing myself luck!
Labels: blog, contest, internet
14:20 by FoxTwo Thanks to Uzyn's superhuman efforts, the NEW Ping.Sg is finally live about 2pm today!
Here's a screenshot:
Notice the top 10?
Yes, nice and clean now. The most often asked feature - the ability to flag posts as inappropriate by the community, has been implemented! We have ping.sg back and not pr0n.sg anymore! Yay!
There are other neat features like "un-ponging" and "poofing", but I'll let the ping.sg blog explain it to you (when Uzyn gets around to blogging about it, that is).
Oh yes, now we can see who ponged which post ok? So now we know who are all you humsup lou's! *big grin*
23:59 by FoxTwo
I Discovered Windows Live Writer
Ok, not really "discovered", but more like "finally got around to it". Yeah, I knew about it even when it was in beta. Then, when it came out of beta, I still didn't get around to installing it. I finally "found time" to install it after my recent reformat.
As proof, I'm actually writing this post via Windows Live Writer. See the screenshot below:
That's the latest version that is available from Microsoft's Live.com. If you get it, you actually just download a "stub" installer file. From there you pick what you want and just wait for it to get the rest from the Internet, which I actually hate. I would really prefer to get the whole thing in one shot, be it a 20MB or even a 100MB file. Why? Simply because if I ever reformat and have to re-install stuff, I'd have to go through the whole "download it all from the Internet" process again, which wastes time.
I did a couple of test posts first, and this is what Windows Live Writer looks like:
It is actually quite impressive that a FREE blog editor supports so many platforms. I don't even have to configure my blogs - it automatically detected all the required settings from just the URL which I typed into the wizards. Naturally you can fine-tune it further if you go into the options panel.
There's built-in support for Blogger's "tags" system, which is picked up by blog services such as Technorati, MyBloglog and Blogcatalog, to name a few. You can see it in the screenshot above, right at the bottom, the line that says "Set Catergories". If your blog is not recognised by Windows Live Writer at setup, you can actually click "Insert Tags" from the right-hand sidebar and select the kind of tags you want. Services like Technorati, Flickr, IceRocket etc are supported.
WLW opens by default into the WYSIWYG interface, or "Web Layout" mode as it's now more commonly known. You can go into the HTML view if you choose, too. As a coder myself, I can tell you that Microsoft never fails to insert bloat-code into their stuff. Frontpage did it, now WLW does it too. Useless <p> tags everywhere, useless non-HTML whitespaces, etc.... sigh!
It takes some getting used to, though. I am actually more comfortable writing my posts from the web interface at Blogger instead of through a blog editor.
If you're hunting for a blog editor, give Windows Live Writer a try. It's pretty neat, and if you're not picky about "clean codes", it'll fill your bill quite nicely.
11:38 by FoxTwo
Cool Way To Screenshot A Website
What's so special about it?
In simple terms, it captures a screenshot of a webpage. The great thing about it is, not only can you screenshot a FULL page, you can select portions of it and kwout will cut it out and magnify that portion for you!
Here's a screenshot of just a portion of ping.sg:
Nice eh? Makes it really convenient to just point and click, and do an image link in addition to a standard link to a website of interest...
Labels: cool, internet, website
10:03 by FoxTwo I was just making my usual rounds of pingsters' blogs this morning (hey, people surf news sites, I surf blogs ok?), and guess what? Chillycraps' Department of Crappy Engineering is blocked!
Yeah, for some reason the company has decided to block his blog! Makes you wonder how a humour blog can garner a "Malicious Web Reputation" eh? And, it's not just that post either. Going to the actual URL is also blocked.
No, blogspot.com isn't blocked :) I can go to themuxicbox's blog fine.
I should really go find out who in my company reads his blog and hates it eh? LOL!
Labels: blog, firewall, internet
15:23 by FoxTwo
Advertlets Took Me Down, So I Took Them Out
Thank you for giving me a wake-up call. It's not enough that I should take care of my own servers, but I should be mindful of which widgets and advertisements I put on my blog. Your recent "partial outage" completely redirected all my blogs to some parking page, and new visitors to my sites will instantly have the impression that I'm a spammer instead of a blogger.
You took me down, and now I'm taking you out.
Your ads will no longer run on my blogs. Maybe after you get your act together, I might reconsider. Might.
Labels: advertise, advertlets, internet
02:07 by FoxTwo I was just surfing the net these couple of days, especially over at Youtube. I discovered a couple of gems, and thought this particular one might be the best among them all.
NTT - you might have some problems with the video since you probably understand what they're saying, but the subtitles will throw you off hahaha!
Labels: Humour, internet, youtube
17:35 by FoxTwo Ok so I'm a lazy guy, I admit it. But hey, I'm ON VACATION! I'm allowed to be lazy!
Anyway, Daphne was bugging me to go open my letterbox and see if I got the T-shirt, and I kept putting it off till today when I finally decided, what the heck, may as well clear the letterbox. Lo and Behold! Yes the T-shirt was indeed in there!
So, here are the pics of it.
Good thing I chose size M instead of L. Fitted just nice, but if I ever grew FAT (hey I'm already fat), it'll become a tiny bit too "snug" :)
Thanks Daphne!
20:31 by FoxTwo
"Facebook" Is Now An Official Word In Dictionary
And, today, I found out my Facebook profile died. Well, I dunno, I can't see my own profile from any of my PCs here, and using both FireFox and IE6/IE7, my profile "can't be found". My friends however, say they see my profile fine.
Conversely, I see theirs fine. I just can't see mine. Bleh!
At the very least I can go to the "Facebook Homepage" and start Superpoking my friends.
Incidentally - yeah I haven't been updating my blog as often as I normally do, due to the fact that I'm now "on vacation" and thus, very lazy. I sleep till noon, I eat junk for lunch and then I play online games with Americans and British players till wee hours of the morning (which is just about afternoon time for them).
Ok I'm kidding about the junk food part. I'm STILL on my "diet" and I'm still working out. Oh yeah I also ordered the Bodylastics Home Gym, the Max Tension set, but that's a topic for my other blog :)
Labels: facebook, internet, social networking
10:37 by FoxTwo
Entrecard Gets More Traffic For Your Blog
First of all, let me just say this blog isn't really popular. My page rank is 0 (ie a pr0n site *grin*), my Alexa rank is over 1 million etc. This blog was originally meant as my ranting outlet. For me, something as insignificant (to you maybe) as having 3.2 pageviews per unique visitor is alot for me.
It's now just about 30 hours since I joined Entrecard. A quick check of my website statistics show that for yesterday, Entrecard sent 38% of my total traffic, while ping.sg provided about 15% which is pretty typical for ping.sg (unless my blog title has a sex-related word in it like NAKED or NUDE, in which case ping.sg will send like 80% of my traffic for the day).
It's also worth noting that yesterday was the official launch party, so there's actually less people from ping.sg surfing the net, all were busy at the event.
Looking at the preliminary figures, I'm actually quite excited about Entrecard. Blogrush really needs to rename itself to BlogTrickle.
Labels: advertise, Entrecard, internet
02:55 by FoxTwo
Entrecard - What Blogrush Should Have Been
I joined Blogrush too, and although I do get a few clicks and and there from Blogrush, it's not exactly a "rush" of traffic.
If you look on my left sidebar, right under the "Crazyhamster.net" graphic, you'll notice a new "adspace". Technically it's an ad, but it's also a "business card" for blogs. The best thing about it, is that it works 1000 times better than Blogrush. It's called Entrecard.
Here's an example. I saw this on Merdurian's blog, approximately 1.50am Singapore time. By the time I signed up and created a widget, and put it on my site, it was about 2am. By 2.30am I've gotten 6 "business cards" from other blogs/websites wanting to post their graphic up on my blog here. That's an average of 1 request every 5 mins!
And, keep in mind, these figures are just for when people actually click to drop their "cards"! There is also traffic where they do not drop their cards (hey I can't blame 'em... can't please everybody all the time).
How does it work? Well you sign up, FREE. You make a widget (and you can put in your own graphic too), and then you post it up on your blog. When people come by your blog and like it enough to want to "advertise" on your blog, they "drop their card" by clicking on the yellow bar at the bottom. It gets routed to your inbox at Entrecard where you can approve or reject their ad request.
Or, you can click the big graphic and visit the advertiser's site.
Simple eh?
In the time that it took me to write this post, I've gotten FOUR more ad requests, and I took only like 15 mins to do this post up! Maybe in a few more days I'll put up some screenshots of website visits to see how well Entrecard worked.
So, talk about "rush". Blogrush should have worked like this.
Labels: advertise, Entrecard, internet
11:37 by FoxTwo
Firewalls - Time For A Rethink
Today, I'm gonna ramble about firewalls.
History
The history stretches back to ancient times. In medieval times, when armies fought, sometimes the commanders will erect flaming walls of fire to retard the advances of the enemy forces. Horses will be frightened of the wall of fire, and hence the defending forces bought some time, or is able to use the wall of fire to "funnel" the enemy forces into a kill zone.
This became known as a "fire wall".
Fast-forward to modern times. Internet was invented back in the 1960's and started to really grow exponentially around 1990. As with everything else, when something becomes popular, it gets abused. Worms, viruses and trojans started to appear and infect unprotected computers across the Internet.
Computers that are in an organization such as a company or educational institute are safer, because the network engineers have implemented a protection software called a "fire wall". It is aptly named because it does the same job as what a real wall of fire does - prevent and retard the advancing enemy forces (unauthorised entries into the network).
For a long time, up to the latter half of the 1990's, most home computers connected to the Internet were unprotected. When the Internet started to become more commercialised, marketers started to "push" unwanted software into your computers, to force the user to always log in to their marketing site(s), or to show you adverts. Alot of these malicious software also started to collect "demographic" data, and soon came to be known as "Spyware".
Up until this time, we were still connecting to the Internet at pathetically slow speeds of analogue modems - 56Kbps was the fastest speed possible. Having a personal firewall software was almost unheard of. Firewalls cost thousands of dollars, and no one at home could possibly afford that!
Modern Era
Now, in 2007, the majority of us connects to the Internet via "broadband", which became popular around 2000. At the time, personal firewall software started to become available, cheaply, and in some cases, FREE.
Thus, more and more people started installing firewalls, and newer PCs and Laptops now come pre-installed with some sort of firewalls too.
When Microsoft finally upgraded their Windows to XP, finally we get a "free" firewall built right into the OS. But, all is not well. General perception is that Microsoft's "XP firewall sucks".
People have gotten used to the 3rd party firewalls out there that do MORE than what a typical firewall does. For 3rd parties to sell their products to the masses, they need to be more than just a firewall. They need to offer features like adblocking, cookie cleaning etc, and so people got used to thinking that firewalls need to have those to be a "firewall".
In actual fact, the function of a firewall is simple- "Prevent Unauthorised Entry". That's all. It does not prevent OUTGOING data. It just blocks INCOMING. Microsoft's built-in firewall inside XP does exactly just that. Thus, people label it "sucks".
As a personal test, I configured a PC without any sort of 3rd party firewalls and placed it on the Internet using only Microsoft's XP firewall back in March 2007. It's now December 2007 and the PC is still fine, no trojans, no spyware. XP's firewall WORKS. However, read on below because sometime in August 2007 I turned off the XP Firewall on this PC.
Routers/Wireless Routers
Also, since many people are also now using routers at home, the routers also come with a hardware firewall built-in. By default, the hardware firewall inside the router is enabled. Thus, you would already have the protection of a firewall the moment you turn the router on. Also, the firewall in the router is pretty much "fire and forget", ie at most you need to configure it once and it'll work. Usually, you don't even need to configure it.
The hardware firewall in the router works similarly to XP firewall too - it only blocks INCOMING, and freely allows outgoing data. I emphasize again, that this behaviour is what a firewall is supposed to do.
Again, as a test, I turned off the XP firewall in the same test PC mentioned above, around August 2007. Thus I totally relied on the hardware firewall in the router for protection.
As mentioned earlier, the PC is still fine today, without a software firewall. There hasn't been a breach of my home network - the hardware firewall worked flawlessly. Because I'm such a geek, I actually bothered to look through the logfiles on the router, and I actually see it dropping packets from those people who were scanning and probing.
My reason for doing these tests? Because every bit of software you can turn off from the PC, releases more resources for other things. If the router came with a virus shield and automatically updates itself, I'd turn off the one in the PC too :)
A good test for your firewall(s) -> http://grc.com and select "SHIELDS UP". I don't want to do a direct link because it'll automatically start probing your system and might trigger off many alerts for you, and you might think this is a malicious post trying to get you infected :) If you click yourself, you KNOW you are gonna get probed, because the pages warn you about it first.
Labels: firewall, geek, internet, software, tech
12:02 by FoxTwo
What Do You Do When Your Website Goes Down?
Business Continuity - Yet another common term heard in companies and businesses.
Businesses can not afford downtime to their IT systems. Neither can you, if you're blogging for money (I hate the term "ProBlogger". Makes it seem like the opposite of this is "Anti-Blogger").
Last night as I was finishing up the previous entry, my webhost went down due to some Denial Of Service Attacks, or commonly known as DDoS attacks. Although my site wasn't the target, the server that it was hosted on, had hosted other websites, and probably one of them was the intended target.
It wasn't technically a "disaster", but it irritated the heck out of me. So, I did what I could - I set up a mirror site on another host, and pointed my domain to the alternate site until my original webhost recovered.
I was just chatting with themuxicbox on MSN and happened to mention what happened, and she said if it had happened to her she would not know what to do and would fret. So I thought I'd write this post and perhaps give the rest of you some idea of what to do.
First, you need to hunt for a backup webhost. Since my webhosts are all those "free webhosts", it's easy to sign up with them. Google is your friend, and you can find a lot of free webhosts. Your backup webhost might not necessarily need everything your main webhost does, but it'll be good if both of them offer almost the same things. Then, the backup webhost becomes a "mirror" of your original.
Yes, this blog, and my homepage, is hosted on a FREE webhost called 110mb.com. It has everything I need, and Blogger.com platform doesn't need MySQL so it doesn't bother me. If I ever switch to Wordpress, I would probably not need to move it from here since I could easily sign up with one of the free database sites out there and point my Wordpress blog to it.
Second, once you've found your backup webhosts, you need to upload your site (or blog) to it, keeping all the directory structures intact and in the same exact place, so that all your webpages and blog entries won't "cock up" and barf if a picture is not found, or have broken links etc.
Yes, once I completed this step I had to go back to Blogger.com and reconfigure my blog for the new webhost, ie change FTP servers, and then did a "Republish Entire Blog" from there. Took about 8 mins for Blogger to completely upload my entire history of postings from 2001 to present :)
Third, and last step - point your DNS to your backup webhost. Change your A records to the IP address of your backup webhost, so that visitors land on the new webhost instead of your original (which is currently down, remember?).
Caveat
The problem with my method of "disaster recovery" is that, Wordpress blogs might not be able to execute this successfully. Why?
Because the majority of Wordpress blogs have their database on the SAME SERVER. If it's already down, the blog posts are down too, and having a backup site with an empty database is pointless. This only works if your database is OFFSITE or is on a platform where it does NOT require a database (like Blogger.com).
Another problem is that if you do NOT have your own domain, you can't execute step 3 above. You have no DNS entries to configure, so this wouldn't work for you too. Same problem occurs too even for Blogger.com blogs, if you are hosting your blog on Blogger's servers but only using a domain name for it. If xxxx.blogspot.com is down, it's down. Your domain entry is only pointing back to blogspot.com (like my http://loser.foxtwo.org blog). You need to have Blogger.com publishing to an external site via FTP for this to work.
Also, I doubt most people would do this since it's too "hardcore" as themuxicbox said :) But, for those of you who are geeky enough, this post is for you!
Labels: disaster recovery, internet, webhost, website
00:59 by FoxTwo
Looking For A Free Website Statistics Tracker?
For example, in this blog alone there's at least 5 statistics trackers - Statcounter, Feedburner, Mybloglog, Blogrush and Google Analytics. All of them are free, but 2 of the 5 give "limited" information and wants you to pay to "upgrade" and get the full package.
Honestly, I never intended to put so many tracking systems into my blog. My original was Statcounter. The rest are just "accidents", ie when I signed up for those services, they included the tracking system for free.
It was only recently that I realised that Google Analytics provided the most comprehensive view of your statistics and visitors in one package, and for FREE at that! The only thing missing is your feed statistics, but that is easily covered by Feedburner. I'm now running Google Analytics in parallel with Statcounter and I'm going to compare the results for a couple of weeks. If Google Analytics work better, I might just forgo Statcounter completely and rely solely on Google.
The only drawback about Google Analytics is just that it's not "real-time". All site statistics are lagging by 24 hours, as they only update daily.
In the picture above, I'd like to point out the 2nd line - "Absolute Unique Visitors". This might be important for people who are thinking about joining up with Nuffnang. For me, this just shows the "real" number of visitors to my site, and not just pageloads. Yes, Statcounter has "Unique Visitors" option too, and I configured it to count only uniques, but I still haven't compared Statcounter's reports with Google Analytics'. To err on the side of caution I'll take the lower figure of the 2.
In this picture above, I'd just like to show you how cool Google Analytics is - it provides a world map of where your visitors come from (the green shaded areas). The darker the green, the more visitors you have from that area. Again, for me this information is purely for entertainment. For a business website, demographics and geographical statistics might very well mean the success or failure of your business.
In addition to these 2 cool features, there's a whole host of detailed reports you can have. You can tell how many of your visitors have Flash installed, and even which version of Flash they have. You can tell which version of Java they have installed. You can even tell if they're coming in via dialup, or broadband, and which ISP too.
If your website is a business one, Google Analytics is geared very much for Adwords analysis. Check out the picture below:
Notice the section on Adwords, Campaign and Ad versions? If you're using Adwords from Google too, it's an all-in-one solution! In addition to this, Google also has statistics on "conversion pages", ie specific pages where you "funnel" the visitor into ordering your product or services. Imagine a checkout cart system, where you have step 1, step 2 etc. Google Analytics allow you to track the percentage of visitors that actually complete the checkout process or quit halfway out of the ordering process. Again, this will come in very handy for business sites, where they might be able to identify the offending pages which cause lost sales.
Personally though, since my site is a hobby site and also just a blog site, Adwords isn't important to me. Knowing it's available for FREE will be useful for me in the future, if I ever decide to run an online business. I'll definitely choose to rely on Google Analytics then.
Labels: counter, internet, statistics, website
13:27 by FoxTwo While stumbling across websites randomly today, I came across this article. In it, it describes how you can actually post the video you uploaded to your blog!
I am glad I found this. In my gaming blog I tend to post videos up, and I'd really hate to have to do all the embed codes manually. Normally it takes a good 20 mins or more to upload the video to Youtube. Then I have to wait for Youtube to "process" it. Only after it has done so, can I finally see the embed code I need to copy over to my blog.
Now, with this article, I can easily just wait for it to finish processing, click on SHARE, and select my blog. It's almost like blogging from Flickr or Picasa, although this time it's with videos and not just pictures.
Caveat - works only for Blogger.Com blogs, not Wordpress. Yeah, it'll work even if you're using your own domain, if you know how the Blogger platform works.
Labels: internet, video, youtube
21:52 by FoxTwo I must be really free today, it being a Sunday and all. I should be saving London from the demon hordes, yet here I am surfing all over the Internet and just lazily clicking stuff, until....
.... I came across this post on this blog here. In it, the writer talked about how he was getting rid of his shoutbox and replacing it with this new code - a web-based, one to one Windows Live Messenger window, directly to him.
After seeing how he did it, I did a quick mod of the HTML code as presented on the Microsoft website, and made it into a popup chat window. After all, I think my blog sidebars are already pretty dang full, and I don't want to add anything huge right now.
So, I made a new link and put it into my left sidebar, right under the "Email Me" link. Notice the cute little icon of a man? The cool thing is that the tiny little picture of the man you see there actually shows my status - green for online, and grey for offline. The only problem with web-based IM apps is that, well, you can't send me messages when I'm not online.
Go on, give it a click... cool eh? Well, I guess this is the next best thing to having a shoutbox like ping.sg...
Ok I guess you guys wanna see it in action huh? Ok, for one day only, limited time offer, here it is in this blog post - see below:
So, what do you think? Yeah well it's too big to fit into my sidebar anyway, being 300 pixels wide... I guess you could alter the code to make it slimmer, but I was too lazy. Besides, I have already written the javascript code for a popup window, and I'm definitely too lazy to go back and change it all again to make it fit into my sidebar.
Looking at ping.sg's history, people would prefer a popup window anyway :) That's why the "standalone shoutbox" was an almost instant hit among all the regular visitors to the website.
Labels: internet, messaging, MSN, shoutbox
13:42 by FoxTwo
Free Database(s) For Your Website
I think my recent stumblings through "techie" websites might help you. I found a new one today which may help all of you. Yeah, the company can block "social" and "useless" sites, but making tech sites available to people like me, tech staff, is like opening a goldmine. If they didn't block those social and useless sites I may never have been forced to surf tech sites, cuz I'd be too busy throwing sheep at people on Facebook hahah!
This website, called Database4Free, provides you with a free database! Yes!! Sign up with them, create your database, and then go back to your current webhost and point your Wordpress (or whatever application that needs the database) to this new account! It'll work like it did before, except with some slight slowdowns. Afterall, that's to be expected - the database isn't running on the same server anymore, it has to do URL lookups and queries and these requests take time.
FYI, the database they use is MySQL (what other database is "free" on the Internet?). If you're a tech guru (*ahem*), you can even download MySQL off the MySQL website and install it to your webhost if you know how. Incidentally, Facebook is powered by MySQL too :)
Generally though, you shouldn't be able to "feel" the difference. The "lag-time" is in terms of seconds, so if it takes 1 or 2 seconds longer to load your webpage I doubt your visitors would notice. They'd probably attribute it to their sucky "stuckhub" or "sin-tel" connections :)
Labels: database, internet, MySQL
00:23 by FoxTwo Ahhh the wonders of what a restrictive company firewall can do to its staff....
Well I spent the whole day surfing whatever sites I could, and they're usually technology-related sites (and yeah the network guys didn't block my domain so I could still do stuff on it). Yup, I came across this website which is new to me, and which I think should have been discovered by me much sooner, like maybe 5 years sooner.. :)
The website? It's called Contactify.
What does it do?
Nowadays it's damn dangerous to even put your email address up on the web in the clear, unless you really like attracting spam-bots. One of the ways to beat these spam bots is to convert your email address into a graphic to foil the spam-bots, the other is to use Contactify. It's sorta like what Haloscan does for comments and trackbacks in a blog. It's a free service which presents a form where users on your website can email you, but you don't even have to reveal your email address at all.
The basic service just gives you a URL link which is uniquely yours. You just slot this link just like any other link onto your site, and when the visitor clicks on it, it brings them to contactify's website to fill in a form to send an email to you.
Better yet, it also offers a widget which you can use to integrate it into your own website, and even use the CSS stylesheets on your website, so that it has the same look-and-feel as the rest of your website. When you choose this option, the visitor doesn't get whisked off to contactify's website - they can fill in the form right there on your own website, with a form that is css-styled to suit the rest of your website theme.
Want a real live working demo? Sure, click here to email me :)
Cool huh?
As I said, this service should have been around years ago, before blogs became prominent. Back then, spam was a big problem (still is, now). People used to have "homepages" and left their email addresses as valid mailto: links, and spam-bots quickly picked these up and spammed them. If Contactify had been around back then, this problem would have been quickly nipped in the bud.
Now, I guess you don't really need this service much. Most people now have "blogs" instead of "homepages" (I'm one of the few dinosaurs who still have a homepage, and you're on the "blog" part of it). I just happen to have both, and integrated my blog as part of my "homepage". Yeah my website's kinda retro heh!
00:06 by FoxTwo
100 Free Email Accounts For Your Domain!
Well, I just found something really useful today and thought I'd share it with everyone.
First of all, I am sure that for many of us who have registered their own domain, we usually get ONE measely "free" email address that is named for the domain we purchased. In some cases, may be 5, or 20. Or, in worst case scenarios, none.
Well when I registered mine, I only got one free one. It was a no-brainer to create the email address. However, most "professional" sites have email addresses like "support@domain.com" and "sales@domain.com" etc for different purposes. Assuming you registered your domain for a business goal, having just one "free" email probably wouldn't suit your business, and you would probably already have paid a small fee to "upgrade" your plan so that you can get more email addresses to run your business.
Today, I ran across Google Apps. Ok, with a name like that, it's nothing to shout about. Google Apps is a web-based office productivity suite, kinda like Microsoft Office On The Web. Yes you get the usual Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Pages and all that jazz. However, what drew me to it was the fact that the "standard" edition, ie FREE edition, already allows you to create up to 100 free email accounts, and they can be named for your domain! Not only that, each of these email account is a Gmail clone - ie you get 4GB (and counting) storage for your email PER ACCOUNT. FREE! If you went ahead and created 100 accounts, you'd have 400GBs of storage for your email.. wow! For a small business, I doubt anyone would need more than 50. Oh did I mention they are POP and IMAP capable too? Would probably fit right in to most organisations.
In any case, I wasted no time in signing up, and configuring Google Apps for a few more email addresses to my domain. Instructions provided by Google Apps are easy for guiding you to create DNS entries or to point them to Google so that your brand-spanking-new email addresses are ready to accept email.
No I'm not making any money off this, and there's no "referral link". Just something really cool that I'd like to share with you guys.
Labels: domain, email, Google, internet
16:23 by FoxTwo Circumstances coerced me into signing up for one of those "mobile broadband" plans. Back in the old days, they were known simply as "Data plans", ie for your phones to be able to dial up to a number and connect to the Internet, and be able to check mails and surf the net.
Nowadays, with the advent of WAP and GPRS (and all those new-fangled jargons), the old, slow-poke way of connecting to the Internet are replaced with this new term - "Mobile Broadband".
A few guys in my office had signed up for the M1 "mobile broadband" plan. Having "WiFi" spots in Singapore isn't enough for them it seems. They NEED it on the train, on the bus, everywhere they go (tsk tsk).
Then, things happened, and made me seriously consider doing the same too - ie go to M1 and sign up for the mobile broadband thing. However, I decided to do a little more research first. So, I started looking at Singtel ("Broadband on Mobile") and Starhub ("MaxMobile") for more information. All I needed to do, was to get the notebook connected to the Internet. It doesn't matter how - via WiFi, Bluetooth, whatever.
In general, all offerings from the 3 major telecomm providers are similar - they use the GPRS protocol to connect you to the Internet. Almost everyone knows, using GPRS without a Data Plan will burn a reeeeeaaallllyyyyy deep hole in your pocket.
After reading all the price plans, it seems that since I'm a Singtel subscriber, I may as well sign up with Singtel. Yes, no doubt I won't get a nice plain white featureless USB box to plug into my notebook, but my phone effectively becomes the "white featureless USB box", except now I can connect the notebook to the phone wirelessly via WiFi or Bluetooth if I didn't want wires (incidentally I opted to have wires cos the USB port would charge the phone as I'm using the GPRS to go out to the Internet). Plus, now if I'm out and about and I suddenly need to go to, say, www.streetdirectory.com to pull up a map on the phone, I can! Without worrying about "how much will this cost me" too!
As I said, I opted for Singtel only because their data plans are pretty comparable to M1, and the bundled "free" data is 10GBs compared to M1's 5GB.... I don't think I can ever exceed 10GB a month (nor even 5GB!) doing mobile Internet. I exceed 100GB monthly at home though, on my Starhub cable :)
Now, with this mobile broadband thing on my phone, I don't even need to look for "McDonalds" or "Starbucks" anymore. I can be sitting right smack in the middle of Botanic Gardens, or Mosquito Circle, and it doesn't make a difference - I can still connect to the web.
And, my MSN will still be on.... :)
Labels: internet, m1, mobile, phone, singtel, starhub
