Tech blogs that I miss dearly
Things can change in a heartbeat on the Internet. In the nearly nine years that I have published articles here on Ghacks I have seen sites come and go.
Back when I started out, I looked up to the guys from the Download Squad, Cybernetnews, or the old Lifehacker that published so many great articles, reviews, tips and links that it was sometimes difficult to decide what to write about.
The tech blogging landscape has changed a lot in the past two years. Great blogs have been shut down completely or were abandoned by their authors, while new sites were only launched sporadically and with little lasting success.
What you find now on the Internet are large corporate sites or at least sites with strong financial backing that write about tech topics among other things.
The issue here is that those articles are rarely good. Don't get me wrong, they are well written but they are too generic to be of much use most of the time. Still, those sites tend to rank better in the search engines than "smaller" sites.
Note that I'm not referring to hardware or "gadget" sites, but sites like mine that concentrate on software, tutorials and Internet services mostly.
Here is a short list of tech sites that I miss dearly. The list is far from complete, so feel free to leave a comment below to add sites that you miss to the list.
- Download Squad - This site was on the forefront of tech news for many years. Most of what I cover here on Ghacks was also covered on Download Squad. I was able to find new programs, web services or tips on the site on a near daily basis. It went downhill when AOL acquired the Huffington Post, decided to merge the site with Switched, to then shut it down completely. The Download Squad archive is still accessible on the Internet, but no new posts have been published since April 2011 on it. No link, as the main page links to the Huffington Post now.
- Cybernetnews - Well, the site has not been shut down, but it has not been updated since December 2012. Created by Ryan Wagner in 2005 (a good year for tech sites), it quickly became one of my favorite tech blogs to follow. A strong focus of the site were tutorials that Ryan posted on it, software reviews, as well as reviews of web services.
- Freeware Genius - One of the greatest freeware review sites of all times. Samer's site was hit hard -- and in my opinion unfairly -- by Google's Panda update. While I cannot say for sure that this is the reason that the blog is updated rarely these days, I can wholeheartedly say that I hope that this site recovers from it so that Samer starts to publish articles more frequently on it.
- Shell Extension City - Not a tech blog but a site that posted a handful of tech related links each day, usually to interesting software programs or web services. It is still online and attempts were made to revive it multiple times, but the posting frequency has been really low in recent years.
- Raymond.cc -Raymond's blog is also still around, but posts are made infrequently on it. The site offered great software tutorials and reviews, and was one of my go-to sites for these things.
- Rarst.net - Another site that has not seen an update in years. Rarst did not post much when he was active on his site, but when he posted something, it was always interesting to read. He had a strong focus on web technologies and programming, but did cover other programs and services of interest as well.
- Lifehacker - Well, the site is still active and maybe even more popular than it ever was. But, the contents have changed dramatically over the years. Tech is not the main focus of the site anymore, and while you find articles about tech on it fairly regularly, they most of the time link to other sites where those contents were published on. Used to visit this site daily, now I only look at it once a week maybe, if at all.
That's my short list of sites that I liked a lot. Have anything to add to that?
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.