Archive for August, 2005
· August 31, 2005 at 9:00 am · Odds & Ends
The folks over at Pingoat have created a very nice Google Sitemap Creator. Some folks have been really confused as to how to submit a sitemap to Google’s new service. This tool over at Pingoat takes all the confusion out of it.
You can enter your Web site URL, how frequently your Web site is changed, the last modification date, and the priority for indexing. Pingoat will even Gzip compress it and upload it to your FTP server if you want them to.
My only question is, why isn’t Google providing this type of service? They have a “sitemap generator” but you nearly need to know a different language to learn how to use it. I’m not even sure if I understand half of it.
The tool over at Pingoat really makes it to where anybody can understand and submit their sitemap information over to Google.
· August 30, 2005 at 10:00 am · Odds & Ends
I used to love using ping-o-matic to ping all the different blog directories and services out there. The last few months it never does seem to work for me though. Could it be that it has become too popular? Could it be that thanks to blog spam they have had to start blocking IP addresses? I don’t really know the cause of the problem, but I do have a solution.
I started looking around for alternatives to ping-o-matic today, and I have to say I am surprised that I found three of them. I’m going to try each one of these out and see which one works the best for me.
Pingoat
Feed Shark
King Ping
Do you have any other ping-o-matic alternatives? Leave me a comment and let me know!
· August 29, 2005 at 11:25 am · Odds & Ends
Another Web week is done and another Web Hosting Show is ready for download. In this week’s podcast we cover everything from wi-fi hosting relations to AIT’s CEO giving out his phone number and E-mail address. Two of the hottest topics we discussed on this week’s show though were the world’s smallest server and GoDaddy’s free E-mail accounts.
Download The Web Hosting Show!
Running Time: 21 minutes | File Size: 4.92 MB
One amazing thing I saw this week was a Web server, you know one of those large metal boxes you see in a data center, the size of a head of a match. It is called the IPic and it really does have to be seen to be believed.
IPic - A Match Head Sized Web-Server
Here is what they have to say about it on the Web site:
The single chip computer in the above picture runs the IPic web-server, the world’s tiniest implementation of a TCP/IP stack and a HTTP web-server. The chip above is a complete micro-computer, and it includes all components of a complete computer on a single tiny micro-chip (this includes the CPU (central processing unit), memory, serial port interface circuitry, and clock oscillator).
So is this a sign from the future? Instead of having massive data centers that have rows and rows of servers, will we be able to store a server under our desk? I’d love to hear your thoughts good or bad on the matter. Send them in to mitch@mitchkeeler.com and if I get enough of them, I might read the best ones on next week’s edition of the Web Hosting Show.
Domain registrar and Web hosting provider Go Daddy announced on Tuesday that it would give away a free Economy Email account for free with any domain name purchased, transferred or renewed.
This is called taking the rug out from under your competition and beating them over the head with it. Yet another extra service you can get when getting your domain name at GoDaddy.
· August 28, 2005 at 3:08 pm · Odds & Ends
See I knew I was smart to wait on this. Eric Lunt, the CTO of FeedBurner commented on my last entry on this and pointed me to this page from FeedBurner’s Burning Questions blog:
Since we launched the Feed Awareness API, many publishers have taken advantage of this capbility in order to allow third party applications to promote popular feeds, feeds whose subscriber numbers are growing, and other interesting analytical trends.
Now that the API has been available for a while, it’s worth clarifying a couple of items, both for ourselves and our publishers. First of all, if you enable the Awareness API for your feed, then the number of subscribers to your feed becomes a number that is accessible to third parties for inclusion in popular feed lists and other awareness and attention tracking directories. In the “Publicize” section of FeedBurner, you can toggle the Awareness capability on and off. Activating the awareness API makes your feed subscription numbers publicly available, as we put no restrictions on what services are allowed to leverage the API. It’s an open API.
Secondly, although feeds with the Awareness API enabled are making their subscriber data publicly available, going forward we will not comment on any individual feed metrics, whether or not those metrics are already available on other websites, unless the publisher has requested that we mention the numbers in some context. Recently, in a couple of interviews, we have discussed publicly available Feed Awareness metrics, and it is clear that in some cases, misunderstandings about the public nature of the API has led to publisher and subscriber concern about our comments vis a vis a particular feed’s popularity. The easy solution to this is to simply eliminate all public commentary about individual feed metrics, regardless of whether or not that data is already accessible.
We have always been very clear that we are here to serve publishers. We will make very clear on the “Publicize” page that activating the Awareness API makes your feed data available to third parties.
I fee a little better about this situation now. Leo Laporte has also posted an update on his side of the situation now as well over at the TWIT Web site. The fact that the people at FeedBurner would go out of their way to make this clear and known to me is proof enough that I should stay with them. So no more worries about changing feeds.
· August 28, 2005 at 3:51 am · Odds & Ends
It seems like Leo Laporte is pretty angry about the fact that Feedburner let it be known how many subscribers the TWIT podcast was getting… well, kind of.
Yesterday Information Week published an article about podcasting quoting Feedburner’s VP Business Development, Rick Klau. Klau quoted a figure of 41,000 for our subscribers. This is in direct violation of Feedburners stated privacy policy, and I consider it a real breach of trust. This information is proprietary and they don’t have my permission to disclose it to any third party. It also damages us materially since he severely understated our subscriber base. We have 100,000 downloads per show from AOL alone.
Even though Feedburner didn’t get the numbers right, I can’t say that I am at all happy about what Feedburner has done here. Breaking your privacy policy isn’t the way to win many folks over. Then again, I depend on Feedburner a lot for the Web Hosting Show’s RSS feed. The reason I do is because I host the audio files for the Web Hosting Show on a different server than the content for the Web Hosting Show.
So what is a podcaster to do? I’m going to wait this out for now to see what happens next. I have a feeling it might not get any prettier, but I would like to hear some answers from Feedburner’s side.
· August 27, 2005 at 5:04 pm · Odds & Ends
As mentioned in my Plugged by Pirillo post (try to say that ten times fast) I have been doing some Firefox articles for Lockergnome’s Web Developers section. Do you have any tips, hints or tricks on or about Firefox you’d like to share? Feel free to leave me a comment here or drop me an E-mail at mitch@mitchkeeler.com. Also let me know of any and all of your favorite Firefox resource Web sites as well.
Here are some of the Firefox articles I’ve written over the past two weeks:
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