Archive | 2007

Drop the Mike, Pick up a new Subscription!

Dec/14 in Web Development Tutorials

Mike Muise, one of the tech geek, pretty good writer and business development mastermind has started up his own blog over at DroptheMike.com. I’m always excited to highlight interesting people in the hosting and domains universe and Mike does fit the bill there.

In the hope to drum up some interest in the new project, he is also giving away a Ipod Nano (to one lucky winner) for those who spread the word about him. Heck I would have done it for free too. Shameless promotion aside, reading some of his posts he has up thus far I am highly impressed and can’t wait to read more. Might have to try to get him on the podcast too.

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Hosting Debate Over 10 Terabyte Deal

Dec/14 in Web Hosting

It has been fun the past few days watching the debate on the Web Hosting Show about fxts.net and a segment I did talking about their “promise” to give their clients 10 terabyes of disk space. Well, I give Daniel – the guy in charge over there a lot of credit because he has defended himself and his action.

Alex (from Sliqua Enterprise Hosting) had held the fire to his feet though without going over the line. Here are just a few examples of the discussion that has been had. Continue Reading →

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Poking Holes in Start Pages with Pageflakes’ CEO

Dec/13 in Interviews, Popular Posts

PageflakesYour start page says a lot about you. Do you like tons of information flying your way – or do you like to keep it short and simple? I recently got the chance to have a quick chat with one of the leaders in the start page arena Dan Cohen, CEO of Pageflakes. From taking the start page idea of out Pageflakes to what his favorite pagecasts are – I tried to cover it all with minimal fluff.

How important is user feedback and experiences (good and bad) when it comes to the Pageflakes product?

Dan: It’s extremely important and we have ongoing dialogues with our users through the blog and support forum. We monitor this full time and read & respond to every email. Our product plans include user requested information by way of reviews and feedback. We always have a representative from customer services support team involved in our product sessions.

This is to not only know how our site is produced & written, understanding sessions etc but also to represent the user base and their comments/suggestions into our future plans. They aggregate the most popular requests and common denominator feedback so we acknowledge this as paramount in our product plans. Ongoing dialogue internally and with our users are taken extremely seriously into our product design development strategies.

Start pages have a history of being something that people spend five minutes on, get caught up on whatever they want to watch – clocks or kitten saying funny things. Why should somebody invest the time to spend more time with Pageflakes?

Dan: A great number of users spend more time on Pageflakes than email and social networking sites. The old generation of personalize pages i.e. my Yahoo would result in people clicking for a moment and then visiting another site. But the old RSS information was sports, news and stocks related so if the user wanted to read more, they’d click through or venture to other websites.

With Pageflakes, users can check bank balances, email, network, visit social networking flakes so the interactive elements on Pageflakes is richer and includes flakes that users couldn’t do before. We are revolutionizing what people are doing on the Web. Technology has changed and Pageflakes is more of an engaging experience by definition to keep users on the page longer. They are learning and digging deeper into topics individually and interacting with other like minded individuals.

Continue Reading →

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Vista Media Center – Edit Out the Ads

Dec/10 in Desktop Apps

Last night I recorded the replay of Tin Man on the SciFi Channel (really good show, if you haven’t seen it yet). This was also my first real test of recording something using Vista’s Media Center.

I have to say it went pretty smoothly going through the manual controls but I had only one issue come up. After words – I decided I wanted to cutout the commercials. After doing a little searching I found Lifextender.

Here is how the creator explains how it works:

Lifextender is pretty simple. It scans the directory that Media Center records TV to every X minutes for new TV shows. All new TV shows are queued up to be analyzed and scanned for annoying commercials. After a show has been analyzed, a new file is created from the original with commercials cut out, around 3/4 the original size. The original show is then replaced by the new, commercial-free show. Rinse and repeat.

Does it work? Well I plan on starting it up tonight and letting it work through the night. From some of the other reviews I have seen I have high hopes, but I’ll let you know if I run into any issues – of course.

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Hosting Video Tutorials

Dec/10 in Web Hosting

Since the holidays has everybody (including me) all mixed up with to-do lists and haven’t don’t yet choirs I thought I would try something a little different this week for the Web Hosting Show instead of rolling out the usual podcast.

Whipped this tutorial up in under 30 minutes or so, since I have had some people ask for the “videos” section of the Web Hosting Show to comeback. What do you think – worth the time and effort to look into?

What hosting-based tutorials would you like to see?

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Why Are You Reading This?

Dec/07 in Personal

This web site has been around for a while – but as you haven’t noticed I have always kept things very basic here. What does that mean?

No about page. Contrary to the name, I didn’t want this blog to be totally about me. So for those who are new – or for those of you who have always wondered this is why you are reading this.

Mitch, Mitch who? I don’t know you!

Mitchelaneous started being hosted over at Lockergnome’s now defunked blogging service through Blogware. I mainly wanted to try my hand at running a blog – and being a writer for Lockergnome helped me in more ways than one. It was a good way to get some more traffic to me and to get some people talking about me. I was one of those guys who was lucky do get 5 people a day – now I was dealing with hundreds. Continue Reading →

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WordPress – “Your Internet Protocol address is listed on a blacklist”

Dec/06 in Web Development Tutorials

I have seen a few people with this problem in WordPress this morning. Seems they are being blocked from logging into their WordPress powered blog. Instead of being let in they are getting this message:

We’re sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for /wp-login.php on this server. Your Internet Protocol address is listed on a blacklist of addresses involved in malicious or illegal activity. See the listing below formore details on specific blacklists and removal procedures.

Looks like the trouble maker is the Bad Behavior plugin. I would suggest updating it or getting rid of it all together to get this issue taken care of. Personally I have been using a mix of Askimet and Comment Timeout and it is working great for me.

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Vista Highlights: Actual Good Things About It!

Dec/04 in Hot Web Topics, Personal

When I last left you – I gave you a few of the things I could think of when it comes to naming the things that Windows Vista – Microsoft’s latest OS. Today I’m ready to bring you back up again with a few positives, and all around good details about the Vista experience.

The start menu is kinda like shoving everything in a junk drawer and leaving the most important stuff on top. I don’t say that as a bad thing, personally I like my junk drawers. I’ve used search on Vista in the past week more than I probably ever used it in Windows XP ever.

The Favorite Links in the folder view is probably my next favorite feature. I like keeping more than a few folders handy at all times and this does beat the left side menus that the previous version of the OS had.

While we are in my profile folder, the saved searches is nice too. As I said before, this is the first OS I’ve actually bothered to use search with all that much and I like it. Continue Reading →

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Things that Bug Me About Vista

Dec/03 in Desktop Apps, Personal

I think the world has seen enough over the top Vista bashing. I did want to share some of my bad experiences for others though. I have to say I am amazed by reading the press that I didn’t have more problems than I did. If you believe what a number of reviewers and tech minds would have to believe you would think that Vista was about as useful to you as a newspaper is to a homeless man in the rain.

User Account Control in Vista is annoying, but not driving me crazy yet.

The only device I had trouble with getting to work with Vista was my old Logitech keyboard. Other than that though, all my other gadgets seem to have worked the first time around.

Had to finally upgrade my old version of NoteTab Pro to the newest version (actually ended up buying NoteTab Std cause it got the job done for me. Continue Reading →

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