Category: Technology

Geocities Will Close; Adios Geocities

Geocities, a free webhosting company owned by Yahoo! closes its doors to new account registrations, and total shutdown coming later this year:

Existing GeoCities accounts have not changed. You can continue to enjoy your web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don’t need to change a thing right now — we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time. [Yahoo!]

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When WordPress is Getting Bloated

It has been discussed in some forums, blogs and in the comments:

There are certainly features in WordPress that I don’t particularly use. And I believe a lot of users are not using them as well. Yet, these features are in the core, and we can’t even avoid them.

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Has Akismet Really Been Smart?

I don’t know about you but at least in the last six months I received comments obviously are spam past through Akismet anti-spam filters. Even the akismet stats, I don’t think they’re telling the truth about how many spam they missed –the ones I manually marked as spam. The numbers are just definitely way off the count that I everyday mark as spam.

The missed spam –these are comments that all have to only say, “they liked my website”, “I have the best website”, “they’ve subscribed to my RSS feeds”, and sometimes asking “they can’t understand how to subscribe to my rss feeds”, without adding any single value whatsoever to what my post was about to which they are commenting. They are usually coupled with strange names and url’s or domain names that looked really bogus (e.g. insurance, some medical drugs, etc.).

I love your website.

So do I, now what? Do you want me to visit yours? No way!

I enjoyed your website.

Really? I hope you enjoy more!

Or maybe, the reason these comments go past the Akismet filters is because other people just simply approve them for their own blogs without second thoughts. And Akismet is left confused, don’t know what to do with the same ip address, name, email address, and website url.

Yeah, I’ve seen some comments like these published in other blogs.

Maybe the blogosphere has become too crowded that rendered anti-spam filters like Akismet ineffective.

Some of the Most Expensive Domain Names

Sammy lists down some of the top domain name sales, excerpt follows:

Sex.com – Sold for: $14 million on January 19th, 2006
Fund.com – $9,999,950 – Sold in 2008
Porn.com – Sold for $9,000,000 sometime in 2007 (Update: OR $9,500,000 — Two different prices shown across many different sites/news reports)
Business.com – Sold for $7,500,000 in 1999 (Remember: This was pretty much a “business” sale with a developed name)
Diamonds.com – Sold for $7,500,000
Beer.com – Sold for $7,000,000
AsSeenOnTV.com – Sold for $5,100,000 in January of 2000
Korea.com – $5,000,000 – Sold in January of 2000
Casino.com – $5,500,000 – Sold to a private company in 2003
YP.com – $3,850,000 – Sold to YellowPages.com
Shop.com – Sold for $3,500,000 in 2001
WorldWideWeb.com – $3,500,000 in 1996
AltaVista.com – $3,250,000 (Saw this one but didn’t list it because I was sure it was because of the business built on it)
Software.com – $3,200,000
Loans.com – $3,000,000
eShow.com – $3,000,000
Vodka.com – $3,000,000 Sold December 2006

Continue reading Some of the Most Expensive Domain Names

Browsing the Net Through Your Email Client

There are instances, in office settings, that employees are allowed to have email but not internet access. In this case, webinmail will be extremely useful to bypass this prohibition in accessing “public” websites. By public, it means web pages that are readily available without requiring an account and login just like friendster and facebook.

To request a web page by email, send an email message to [email protected] and the url in the subject line. By sending a message to the same email address and leaving a word or phrase in the subject line (not the url), webinmail will return a rediff search result for such term/word/phrase. To use google, change the subject line to “google:query” replacing query with your query keyword.

One more good thing about this service is that the web page that’s sent to your inbox, the links in the page are already converted to “mailto:” to facilitate more convenience if you want follow up web page requests.

Click here to try it out.

Synchronize Files from Office and Home Machines using Dropbox

Oftentimes, you find yourself needing to keep, access and update files from workstations at the office as well as from a computer back home. These files can be work related, a password keeper, or maybe media files like photos you want to share with officemates or friends.

One solution is to bring with you a portable device like a usb flash drive to dump the files into for further access and edit. However, bringing a flash drive around can prove to be a hassle with the inconvenience of plugging and safely removing the device from the computer. Unless you hang this thing around your neck all the time (i.e., if you find it a good fashion accessory), you’ll oftentimes find yourself looking around for it and racking your brains trying to remember where you last left it, in your pocket, in your bag, in your cabinet, or maybe the trash can.

Thankfully, now there’s dropbox.
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Gmail Chat Now Have Voice and Video Chat

Say hello to Gmail voice and video chat.

Gtalk, which is a desktop application for chatting and voice chat (as differentiated to Gmail chat, which is a built in chat function within Gmail), already used to offer voice chat.

This time, Gmail chat offers voice chat plus the VIDEO CHAT.

Now, Gmail chat surely is a great (and maybe even better) alternative to YM.

Desktop Application for Remember the Milk

I once posted about the web application, Remember the Milk (RTM), which enables users to organize their tasks better.

I have to admit, I used the application but oftentimes than not, I hit the “Postpone” button.

Anyway, I have been searching and always on the watch out for any desktop application for RTM that would make access and edit of my tasks more speedy and convenient. There are various RTM services that can integrate into various applications and services, such as but not limited to, Gmail, Google Calendar, IM’s, Blackberry, Mobile access, iGoogle, Twitter, etc. There have also been hacks for a desktop application, some using Adobe Air, but most of the time they have compatability issues with XP or Vista and other operating systems, or simply limited in functionality (i.e., the functions you can actually utilize while in actual RTM homepage, just like adding due dates, list, tags, url, etc.). Some applications are just being so slow.

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Internet Explorer is Bull; Switch Browsers Now

Now I’m joining to bandwagon of the haters of Internet Explorer. I’m starting to share the sentiments of those real web designers in their disgust over Microsoft’s web browser called the “Internet Explorer”.

Browse Happy logo

Various problems with internet explorer (IE) occured before, but it reached it peak as I was designing my tumblog here at Deuts.NET. Not to mention the javascript that won’t show up in IE6.

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