In December I posted about Blockbuster rolling out their Total Access in-store & online video rental service. At the end of the post I said I’d subscribe to and compare both Netflix and Blockbuster and see which one is better…

I signed up for both Netflix and Blockbuster Total Access on a Friday in January at the same time. I got 3 DVD’s from each service on the following Wednesday. The turnaround on both services was 2 days - if I dropped the movie in my mailbox on Monday, I’d have a new one by Wednesday. Essentially Both Netflix and Blockbuster Total Access had the same turnaround times for my area. (Your mileage will vary).

After having both services for a few months I can say that both of them are very similar. So what are the differences?
» Continue reading “Netflix vs Blockbuster Total Access”

Yesterday I lost a domain name auction at SnapNames (I refuse to link to them).

For those who don’t know, Snap Names is the exclusive domain name expiration dropper for Network Solutions. If you’re monitoring a domain name that’s due to expire and see that it was registered at Network Solutions, you have to use Snap to try to acquire it.

» Continue reading “How to Lose a Snap Names Domain Auction”

Over the past few months we played around with a number of online collaboration suites. We were searching for a way to organize everything and have a central dashboard to keep track of projects, tasks, and timelines for multiple users.

Some of the tools we tried were Jotspot, PBwiki, Zoho, and Basecamp.

» Continue reading “Online Collaboration Suites and Why I Don’t Get Zoho”

Firefox bookmarklets are some of my favorite tools. Not only are they good for bookmarks, but they also allow you to embed custom javascript to give you one click access to your favorite tools. The one I probably use most often is my “Google It” bookmark which lets me run a keyword search via Google on any website that I’m surfing at the time.

Test it our for yourself. Drag this button/link into your Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar Folder:

Google It

» Continue reading “Google Site Search Any Website in One Click”

Several months back I covered a new hosting service called Grid Server by Media Temple that I learned about via TechCrunch. I signed up for an account and played around with it for a few of our sites.

Today we cancelled the account. For our purposes it just wasn’t worth it. We’re going to continue using Dreamhost for all our hosting.

The Grid Server service is just not fully baked yet in my opinion. There were a few planned outages, the speed was not any better in our testing, and the back-end (while slick-looking) was just too confusing.

» Continue reading “Media Temple Grid-Server Verdict: Mostly Hype”