I have to say, that while I love web 2.0 applications and shiny new things, I rarely actually adopt them for the long term. I usually find that it needs this one […]
Amazon Subscribe and Save was mentioned in the Cybernet News RSS feed and it sounded that interesting that I decided to take a look at it myself and write a small article about it. The service offers a way to subscribe to household items and select a delivery schedule for those items. Shipping is free of charge and buyers do get a 15% discount on purchased items.
I never thought that highly about the Windows Vista exclusive add-on called Dreamscene which made it possible to display animated backgrounds in Windows. The main reason for my reservation was probably that I did not like the default videos that Microsoft was using to advertise Dreamscene.
Most of my advertisers pay me in Dollar and I have to convert that revenue to Euro which is either done by the advertisement company (Google Adsense for instance) or by cashing in a Dollar check at my local bank (Tribalfusion). When I started blogging I received €850 for $1000 which was not an excellent conversion rate but good enough.
A rule of thumb is that websites or servers go down in an inappropriate moment either when you are sleeping, at work or in another location where you cannot check if your website or server is still up and running. A website that is not available for eight ore more consecutive hours can do serious harm to its reputation and possible revenue that is generated.
How do you cut a Mango, add more Gigabyte to an Ipod Mini, build a Geometric Cut Paper Table Lamp or date a girl who is way out of your league. ? All of those questions and many more are answered on the Instructables websites which is a community driven website showing people how to create and do things. Two type of instructions are available and it depends on the author if the instructions are by video or by screenshots.
I have written about the web service Anothr just a few days ago. This service made it possible to receive RSS Feed updates in Skype, MSN and Google Talk and turned out to be pretty useful to some readers. I discovered another service that is offering RSS Feed updates send directly to Instant Messengers.
Deleted websites is probably not the right catchy phrase that I should use. What I mean is that it happens sometimes that you find a search result in Google or follow a link from another website only to find out that nothing is found. Sometimes the information that has been could be essential. Fortunately for us there is a way to display the contents for most "The Page cannot be displayed" websites.
Inezha is a new startup that offers a innovative way of receiving feed updates from your favorite websites. The feeds that you add to the service are delivered right to your Instant Messenger, Skype or Mail box which offers some practical uses. I have Skype enabled all the time usually which means it is more convenient to receive feed updates in Skype instead of opening Netvibes or Google Reader.
As a proud Opera user, you probably let your browser identify itself as Opera browser by default. Although most websites do work and display more or less properly in Opera, there are still many of them which don't comply with the standards and contain many non-standardized code segments (usually working in IE only) thus confusing the standards-based browsers which leads to improper appearance of the site in the end.
A reader was asking me how I managed to keep track of all those software releases and if I had a a special method that I would use. I do use several methods but one that is working very well and gives me an overview almost instantly is by RSS Feeds. Not all sites offer RSS feeds though but there is a way to create custom RSS feeds for those websites as well.
The developers of the now defunct Allofmp3 website announced a new website called ZML - The Movie Library - that offers movies in three different versions for prices that will cause the concern of the MPAA. The lowest price for a full movie begins at $1.99 which is the version for iPods with a width of 320 pixels.
Using vector images has many advantages over using raster images. While raster images are based on pixels vector images are based on geometric figures which means that they can be scaled without making the image blurry or pixelated.
Google Maps on its own is a wonderful application but mashups really make it one of a kind. Mashups are third party applications that use Google Maps and its API plus their own coding to create something new. I thought it would be nice to create a list of six great Google Maps mashups so that everyone who has not taken a closer look will have a good starting point and those who already know Google Maps and mashups might still find something they did not know about.
I wish there were websites like Algebasics when I was in school, they would have been really helpful and supportive. Algebasics explains all things Algebra in a clean and understandable way. The sixteen main sections like The Basics, Linear Equations and Polynomials are all divided into several sheets that explain various concepts within the chapters.
The build in Windows search is slow, really slow compared to a software like Locate that indexes all of your files on all hard drives and offers almost instantaneous results. But let us start at the beginning. Locate32 is a small software for Windows that works like updatedb and locate on Unix machines.
Most Instant Messengers offer a function to hide your real status from your contacts and buddies by showing a faked offline status. People use it mainly to be able to work uninterrupted.
There is however a way to find out if your Yahoo contact or buddy is really offline or only faking that he is offline. It basically lets you detect if they use the invisible mode in Yahoo Messenger.
If you do use Opera you might have noticed that Opera seems to always bring up the save to dialog and you have to browse to the download location even if you downloaded a file of the same type just a minute ago. The line "Remember choice and do not show dialog again" is grayed out and can't be checked as well.
You might have encountered foto mosaics before which show one picture that was build using many smaller pictures. I think that they look really nice if done correctly and with enough distinctive smaller pictures. One software that lets you create Foto Mosaics is called Foto Mosaik.
I was specifically asked by a reader if it was possible to search Mediafire for files like videos, music and applications and you know I can't say no if one of my reader requests something. Mediafire is a file hosting site like Rapidshare and Megaupload with apparently no storage limitation and a file size limit of 100 Megabyte.
Not long ago, my system popped out a dialog saying "Error" in the title and offering two ways to go in form of two buttons below it - Yes and No. I was trying hard for a while to find out about the right answer but I never really did find it because I did not know what the error was all about. I suppose I've saved the world by choosing the right answer, the world didn't blow up after all... And now seriously :)
The blogosphere was going crazy last week with rumors about the sudden Pagerank drops of several authority sites like Problogger or The Washington Post. Soon enough lots of theories made the round which ranged from being punished because of selling links to being in a blog network that would list all of its sites in the sidebar.
There are two types of clones of successful website concepts on the web. The first copies the concept and publishes a similar website under a different name, the second copies part of the name and the concept over to another area. Giftube is trying the latter by being the 'Youtube' for Gifs, that is small animated graphics.
Even if you do use Yahoo search regularly you might have missed the Yahoo Search Assist feature. To be honest, i had no desire to use Yahoo as a search engine until the recent actions of Google made me change my mind. Ankit, who recently commented on my blog wrote an interesting article about Yahoo Search Assist and I decided to give it a go.
Feedburner displayed a redirection link to my article instead of the direct link to the article on my blog. In case you are wondering: Feedburner is a service that blog owners can use to distribute their feed, get statistics and ensure maximum compatibility with most feedreaders out there.
The so called Flickr Related Tag Browser offers an interesting and comfortable way to search Flickr using tags. The user enters a tag of his choice and the website compiles the relevant information and pictures from Flickr. 25 of the pictures are shown as tiny thumbnails which increase in size if the user moves the mouse over any of them.
The build in Opera popup blocker notifies the user every time that it blocked a popup successfully resulting in a small notification overlay in the top right corner of the screen. While this might be useful under certain circumstances it becomes quickly annoying especially for web savvy users who know their way around the web.
Some countries on earth are trying their best to keep their citizens from accessing the Internet freely out of fear that ideas of freedom and liberty would spread like wildfire throughout the country. China, notorious for blocking websites has started to realize that its citizens were able to read all those forbidden writings by simply accessing the feeds of those websites.
Microsoft must be desperate. That was my first thought when I read that Microsoft made the decision to remove the Windows Genuine Advantage validation check from the download and installation of Internet Explorer 7. I was not able to come up with any other explanation why they decided to turn around 180 degrees and head for the other direction.
Textmemos is a service that lets the user type in text messages that he wants to have delivered at a certain date and time. All that needs to be done is to enter the cell phone number, the cell phone provider, the date, time and of course the message. As of now 38 different cell phone providers are supported by Textmemos most operating in the United States and Canada with only a handful European ones.
Most online language courses that I have tested so far do not utilize the advantages of the web at all. Those courses simply copy language courses from books. Mango is the first language course that I'm aware of that uses interactive elements to support the language course.
I'm writing this article rather excited because of what I have just seen. Panoramic photos recently started to be very popular when the first algorithms and applications for creating such images appeared and digital cameras were given support for this specific kind of shooting. Publishing such shots on Flickr or any other similar site sure is fine but I've just hit a service that serves panoramic photos in a breath-taking way.
I wish I had a site like Notesake back then when I was at school and University, it would have saved me and my friends lots of time. Notesake is basically a group note taking online service where group of users can take and edit notes together. This is great for several reasons.
I saw the funny picture series over at Operawatch and thought that you would like to join the laughter. It is a rather visual comparison of how Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer would look like if they would be transportation vessels.
How many bookmarking sites are out there on the web ? A few hundred for sure. They are a great way to increase backlinks to your blog and drive some traffic to it as well. Submitting your articles to those bookmarking sites however is a painfully slow process. Visiting those sites one by one, logging in, filling out the submission form takes some time and it pretty boring and repetitive.
Companies, Universities, Schools and pretty much everyone else are blocking or banning contents on the web that they deem inappropriate, questionable or distracting. The banning spree however goes sometimes to far and websites that should not be blocked are blocked as well.
Last.fm does not offer an obvious option to play music streams in an external music player. It is however possible to obtain the stream url for several radio streams from last.fm and use them in your favorite music player. This is also an excellent opportunity to record those songs using that player. I do recommend XMPlay for this.
Airset is a basically an online organizer with sync functionality. It lets you create groups like work, family and gym online each with their own group members, calendar, blog, file sharing possibilities and more. Groups are color coded and can be viewed using a tabbed interface at the top of the Airset website.
That is at least the definition by us common folks who are happy to get an unlimited plan - be it Internet or mobile phone - only to find out that the fine prints are detailing lots of exclusions that turn the advertised unlimited plan into a limited one. I'm not a marketing expert nor a lawyer but this does look fishy to me.
Media Defender, the company that is spreading fake releases to p2p networks such as edonkey or bittorrent in order to spread chaos amongst file sharers, has been hit by another devastating blow. First thousands of internal emails leaked on the Internet detailing information about fake releases, ways of spreading those releases and several other internal Media Defender internals.
