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”

Last year I tried out a number of different start pages - Pageflakes, Google IG, Protopage, Fold (now defunct), etc. and found some issues that irked me with most of them - Google IG’s modules were too big, pageflakes had organizational problems, and I don’t even remember my beef with protopage (I think it was loading time). After all the testing, I settled with Netvibes and have been using it as my start page/feed-reader ever since.

I haven’t tried Google Reader (nor do I plan to) just because I’m making a conscious effort to stop feeding the Google borg. The big G has way too much info already. Let’s just hope Netvibes doesn’t get acquired by Google.

» Continue reading “Netvibes Updates, Plans to Launch Open Source Widget API”

In 2006 I became a huge fan of open source projects. It’s online karma. The more you give away to the world - the more the world brings back to you. Wordpress is probably my favorite example. There are a lot of plugins and themes available for the platform, most of which have been “donated” to the community at large by people who have created them.

» Continue reading “The Creative Commons Effect: Set Your Photos Free”

I’m a pretty big fan of Mybloglog and I really like using it, but I see some significant problems that may end up spelling its demise if the MBL/Yahoo crew don’t make the necessary changes soon enough.

1. Security issues - Shoemoney has covered two of them and I’m sure more exist. One is a flaw that lets anyone hijack your “top 5 links” to enter in their own spammy keyword-laced links. Another is a way that uses a MyBlogLog cookie exploit to make people seem like they author websites (when they in reality do not). To me, the entire cookie-based system has some worrying implications beyond this, but I won’t get into that here.

» Continue reading “Big Problems Facing MyBlogLog”