Archive for October, 2005
· October 31, 2005 at 4:44 pm · Odds & Ends
Hey, here is a great way to start the day. I was finally mentioned on the Blogebrity Web site.
Furthermore, Blogebrity’s purpose, unlike that of Memeorandum or Blogniscient, is expressly to focus on the top bloggers and treat them as celebrities. It’s fair to criticize topical news systems for systemic bias. To accuse Blogebrity of this is to accuse Entertainment Weekly of “only covering the big stars.” It’s silly and needlessly dismissive.
I’ll take back my statements as far as the blog part of Blogebrity goes. There is a lot of good original content there. The thing that I have had a problem with though is the list. It needs more than just your casual tip, it needs a more dynamic background so that regular folks can give input in real time.
Personally I’m just tired of seeing the same names and faces mentioned, no mater what RSS feed I subscribe to. That is the real reason why I think we need a blogging renaissance.
· October 31, 2005 at 6:11 am · Odds & Ends
It’s that time of the week you get curled up with the Web Hosting Show. Why? You need to know what is going on in the world of Web hosting. Web hosting is the backbone of the internet as we know it today. Without Web hosting you wouldn’t have your Googles or your Yahoos. You wouldn’t even have your Lockergnomes of the world either. This week we had a lot of Halloween fun, but also we did discuss some of the wars going on in the Web hosting world.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said that it had reached an agreement to settle a longstanding legal fight with VeriSign, operator of the .com and .net registries. These folks have been going at it for a long time. Here is what the WHIR had to say about it:
The settlement covers all legal disputes between the two parties. Foremost among these was the controversial Site Finder service VeriSign introduced in late 2003. With Site Finder, Internet users typing in addresses that did not exist were served Web pages suggesting where they could go rather than given error pages.
Critics argued the service was an abuse of power by VeriSign, since it received money from those who benefited from the traffic. VeriSign gave in to the pressure and suspended the service. It then counter-sued ICANN, alleging the organization was impeding its efforts to offer new services and generate revenue.
The second war this week that came to an end was between Level 3 and Cogent. Level 3 and Cogent Communications said that they had agreed to a new peering arrangement, ending a nearly month-long dispute. Hopefully now we don’t have to worry about them playing with turning the Internet on and off in some regions anymore. I said a few weeks ago the behavior of both companies seemed childish at best, and yeah… I still stick by those thoughts.
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· October 31, 2005 at 6:10 am · Odds & Ends
The TabBrowser Preferences extension gives Firefox the options and customization for tabs that it should have been born with. There are even a few perks to having this extension that I probably wouldn’t have thought of before using it as well. So what does it do? It gives you full and total control of your tabbed browsing experience.
Here are only some of the features included: open URLs in the URL bar and searches from the search bar in new tabs, open the homepage in every newly created tab, select tabs by moving the mouse onto them, instead of clicking on them, moving the tab bar to the bottom of the browser window, opening URLs from the Extension/Theme Manager and the Help window in new tabs, opening the throbber in a new tab, control the focusing/unfocusing of various tab-creating functions, such as the File, New Tab command, per-tab locking, to force left-clicked links to open in new tabs, compatibility with Tab Clicking Options, and ability to drag and drop URLs on the new tab button on the tab bar.
TabBrowser Preferences makes using Firefox a better experience. For those folks out there who are picky about having only one browser window open, it gives them the options to control that type of surfing better than before.
So try something new when it comes to tabbed browsing and put this extension inside your version of Firefox. I bet after you do, you will not know what you ever did without it.
· October 30, 2005 at 7:08 pm · Odds & Ends
I am getting tired of services like Blogniscient.com, Tech Memeorandum, Blogebrity and others that do the same thing. What is the topic point this time around? It goes back to the argument of giving the circular pat on the back to all the “top bloggers” out there today. These services and others pretty much do the same thing, each one just has a different twist on things. Lets just take talking points and posts from the most famous of the blogging world and give everybody else and their grandmother the finger.
Which one is more exciting though? Reading the same old content from the same old folks, or finding something new and original to enjoy. Don’t get me wrong, what some of these bloggers do is good, some is even great. The point of the matter is that in the “A-List” blogging world, there is no room for growth. It is nothing more than a boys’ club. With podcasting and other “Web 2.0″ ideas that are out there, the main focus seems to be finding new content. It is about reinventing the wheel so that folks have more choices and flavors out there to choose from.
So who is going to do the Star Search or American Idol for the blogging world? I think that might be the only way some of us can get out from under the thumb of not being “popular” enough with the in crowd. I feel like I’m in high school all over again.
· October 28, 2005 at 10:00 am · Odds & Ends
A lot of folks might say that Firefox is good. Many more folks would say that Firefox is great. One thing that we can not ignore though is that not every Web page looks good inside of Firefox. Due to some companies only supporting some browsers, Firefox has been left out in the rain on more than one occasion. There is hope though. You can make it easier to switch from Firefox to Internet Explorer and back again.
This tip came to me via a Lockergnome reader. Chuck told me that he often uses these two extensions to switch back and forth between Firefox and Internet Explorer. The first extension is IE View. IE View adds an option inside of Firefox so that you can “View in IE”.
From within the IE View extension, you can also set that certain pages always open in IE. So if you know a Web page is never going to work in Firefox, put it in that box and every time you launch it, it will launch in Internet Explorer.
What if you want to go back to Firefox from Internet Explorer? Well that is where the second extension comes into play. Firefox View is to Internet Explorer what IE View is to Firefox. Once you install Firefox View, then you will have an option from within Internet Explorer to view a Web page inside of the Firefox browser.
By installing both of these, you are able to switch between the two browsers. You might not be solving world hunger, but you will be letting two browsers who don’t usually work well together both exist side by side on your machine. Many thanks to Chuck for the tip, and if you have one you’d like to share just get ahold of me.
· October 27, 2005 at 12:26 pm · Odds & Ends
When is the right time to work with a data center and when is the right time to just go through a Web host instead? There are a lot of questions surrounding collocation in the Web hosting industry, and hopefully I can get more than a few of them answered for you today. I got an E-mail from a Web Hosting Show listener the other day. Shane wanted to know what I thought about Web server collocation. When you should do it, when you shouldn’t do it and so on. So here we go.
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