Archive for the ‘Web Sites’ Category

Annoying Del.icio.us Prompt

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

I’ve been migrating my Firefox bookmarks to del.icio.us as of late, but I’ve run into something I don’t like.

Whenever I clear my cache (Ctrl-Shift-Del), which I do often when I work with CSS and JavaScript, I’m logged out of Del.icio.us (which is no big deal, and expected since I’m flushing the cookies). As soon as I clear out Firefox’s cache and cookies, logging me out of Del.icio.us, I get this stupid prompt from the Firefox extension. It looks like this:

How do I get rid of this stupid prompt? I want to leave the few copies of my del.icio.us bookmarks in Firefox, and I don’t want to be bugged about it whenever I log out of del.icio.us.

GMail: The Video

Monday, August 6th, 2007

Google has been editing a YouTube video about GMail. The cool part? Everyone gets to participate. The first half of the video is currently online on the GMail Video Page. Just print-out the GMail “M-Velope” image and film yourself. The idea is to help everyone “imagine how an email message travels around the world.” It’s an interesting idea, take a look. The deadline for your clip submission is August 13th, and all clips must be under 10 seconds.

Cool, but I hope those Google guys are actually working on GMail, not devoting all their time to this!

My First Mac: Help Buying and Getting Started with Your New Mac

Saturday, July 14th, 2007

MyFirstMac.com, a new site that appeared on Digg today, is a great site for those thinking of buying a Macintosh. I’ve already read through most of their content, and I’m impressed.

I’ve wanted to get a Mac for quite awhile, and I can see that this site could be a valuable resource in the future.

“Starting a Great Blog” Tutorial Completed

Friday, June 15th, 2007

Webmaster-Source’s Starting a Great Blog (with Wordpress) tutorial is now complete. The twelve-part series walks you through starting a blog. The sections are as follows:

  • Domains and Hosting
  • Installing Wordpress
  • Configuring Wordpress
  • Themes
  • Posting
  • Spreading the Word
  • Monetization
  • Stat Tracking
  • Wordpress Plugins
  • Social Bookmarking
  • Conclusion

That’s a lot of reading, isn’t it? Take a look if you’re interested in starting a blog. Stand out from the Blogger and Livejournal users. How? Get a domain, hosting, and spend time (and effort) to make it a good blog. A domain and hosting will only cost you $35/year, so what are you waiting for? If you have something to write about, start a blog.

Ask.com

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

It seems that Ask.com has had some upgrades. Firstly, they’ve updated their design, making it looks more 3d and shiny. Besides the design, though, they’ve also been updating their results pages to be more like Google’s new “Universal Search”, where you get pictures, videos, maps, etc mixed in with web results.

No matter what they do, they’ll still be the “Newbies’ Search Engine”, ignored by experienced users in favor of Google.

Google Acquiring Feedburner

Sunday, June 3rd, 2007

Google just bought Feedburner! Is that surprising? It’s not to me (well, not too much anyway). Think of it this way:

  •  Feedburner = RSS “re-hosting”, feed stats, and feed ads
  •  Google = Web site stats, website ads

So, you combine the two.

I believe the feed stats will eventually be integrated with Google Analytics, the ads with Adsense, and the “re-hosting” as-is. I’m guessing feedburner.com will stay as it is now, but the services will be available in other parts of Google as well.

For example, you could access your feed’s stats at either feedburner.com or through Google Analytics.

I wonder how much Google paid for Feedburner. More or less than youTube? Personally, I think Feedburner is worth more than YouTube.

Hotmail Going Web 2.0

Monday, May 7th, 2007

Renamed “Windows Live Hotmail”, Microsoft’s email service has been revamped. Of course, the changes have been in the works for a long time. I remember when the beta came out: Not long after GMail launched. Using AJAX and DHTML, Hotmail is once again a viable email option. I still won’t use it, though. My main email accounts are GMail, NTugo Email, and GMail Domain Email.

So what’s new with Hotmail? Nothing, if you were beta-ing it for the last few years. It acts a little like Outlook Express, and I’ll leave it at that. Oh, and a quarter of your screen space is taken up by ads.

If you create a new Hotmail account, you’ll get the new version. Old users can click a button to switch to the new version.

Microsoft to Acquire Yahoo?

Friday, May 4th, 2007

Yahoo has been trying to conquer the web lately (again). After lying dormant for awhile, the great beast that is Yahoo has resumed it’s evil rampage. They’ve acquired Flickr, Del.icio.us, and seem to be planning to get into the OpenID business. With the launch of Yahoo Brand Universe, they began trying to take on the many fan sites on the web. They’re claims? They claim that there are too many small sites out there run by individuals. I prefer those sites to Yahoo by far. Take The Leaky Cauldron for example. It’s one of the two foremost Harry Potter websites. They have successfully become an authoritative source for Harry Potter news, and everything Harry Potter. I don’t want a Yahoo minisite for everything. It’s to late for them to do anything about Harry Potter though. Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet have large user bases.

Google too has been acquiring other sites, though mainly to make sure they stay around. YouTube is a prime example. Google bought them mainly because the YouTube guys had huge bandwidth bills piling up. YouTube is still going, and it’s run by the same people as it was before, though Google pays the bills. What Google did was they paid $3 billion for a say in what goes on at YouTube. Recently Google bought Doubleclick, a major ad network, for different reasons. Doubleclick was acquired so Microsoft wouldn’t get their hands on it. Plus, I think Google is trying to kill off the pop-up ad.

Microsoft is now wanting to acquire Yahoo for $50 billion. If it happens, it will have been the biggest website event (financially) in a long time. Possibly since Google went public. Why would they want to do that? FYI, Microsoft is just as bad at Yahoo about trying to take over the world. Here’s a quick formula for you: 95% of the world’s computers run Windows + Millions of combined Yahoo and MSN users + More acquisitions = Total cyber domination. This has probably been running through Bill Gates’ head for awhile now…

Well, I don’t want the Microsoft Empire to own the internet. If Microsoft does buy Yahoo, they will continue to buy up innovative new sites, adding them to the ever-growing Microsoft Empire. Hopefully they won’t merge.

CSS Slicing Guide

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007

Hey, I saw a useful thing on Digg today (unbelievable, I know)! CSS Slicing Guide, a website that teaches how to use Photoshop (or other programs) to slice a layout into working CSS code instead of tables.

As you may have noticed, there are tons of sites that still use tables to line up images into a layout. I admit I’ve done it in the past. If you’ve ever used Photoshop/Imageready to slice a layout, you have to admit it’s a lot easier to do it as a table. Hopefully this guide will help improve the state of the web. :) Personally, I don’t mind the table-based layouts…others do though.

I’m going to have to read the guide thoroughly. Why? I want to improve my slicing techniques for CSS layouts. I’ve gotten pretty good at tables, but I’m not anywhere near as good with the CSS output. I can hand-code CSS layouts fine, put dealing with the output from Imageready isn’t much fun. Then again, it’s not much fun editing the output for table-based layouts either…

I wish Imageready had options to output code that can hold content (of varying lengths, of course) instead of a bunch of stuff that just holds images in place. It’s a big pain to go through all of it and change 3/4 of the code just so it will hold content without breaking up funny.