OpenDNS does something cool - but Firefox already does it

This entry was originally published at King Gary

There’s been a bit of talk about a new service provided by OpenDNS, a ‘free domain name service’, which allows users to create keywords, such as typing in ‘blog’ in your address bar to go to King Gary, or typing in ‘g king gary’ to search Google for ‘king gary‘. It does this by replacing each search term with a URL that you specify on their website. In order to make this all work, you have to modify your ’hosts’ file, which is already a task that some people are either unsure of how to perform, or are simply unwilling to do so just because they don’t want to play around with something that isn’t usually intended for them to play with.

This service is pretty cool - but it’s something that Firefox already provides (as does Opera, and several other browsers), right out of the box. Which is why I don’t see what’s so cool about this particular service, especially when it requires at least a little technical insight, whereas something like Firefox is much more widely used and supported, making it easier to find help when needed.

This service is also similar to YubNub, which is also very similar to Firefox’s built-in features, but it at least also adds a few new twists to it, such as being able to use more than one argument, and being able to keep statistics of searches in order to see which ones are the most popular.

I can say with a fair amount of certainty that keyword searches is not a major thing among most browser users, and even if they knew about it, they wouldn’t really be willing to give it a go. This can be attributed partly to the fact that most people use Google for most things, such as showing you the weather, giving you stock quotes, and calculating whatever you throw at it. Why would you ever want to leave mother Google (and Firefox), anyways?

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King Gary is one of the hottest blog communities on MyBlogLog

This entry was originally published at King Gary

The MyBlogLog craze seems to have died down recently, but there’s still quite a lot of active members that are using the service. Also, once you’ve logged in to the site, you appear on the MyBlogLog widget of all sites that you visit unless you explicitly log out of their service.

It looks like my blog is one of the so-called ‘hottest communities’ on the MyBlogLog right now, with 28 members and counting (minuscule compared to fellow problogger Darren Rowse’ 3,148 and counting), among other blogs such as PayPerPost (yikes) and Girls Chamber (uh, ok?).

Maybe this ‘blogging’ thing really does work. Although, I’m curious to know how many of the people coming from MyBlogLog will become subscribers? I’ll have to check tomorrow’s stats for that, but hopefully it’ll go up!

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October 2006 placeholder

This entry was originally published at King Gary

This is a placeholder for the month of October 2006, because I unfortunately did not make any posts this month.

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Does Netvibes take Saturdays off?

This entry was originally published at King Gary

I check my FeedBurner stats for King Gary every once in a while, and I have begun to notice that my stats take a big dive on weekends. This is nothing really special, because it’s common knowledge that feed circulation routinely drops on weekends. But then I notice that my stats go down on Saturdays - sometimes by 50% - and then it goes back up on Sundays.

I checked my stats, and I see that Netvibes doesn’t report its subscriber counts on Saturdays. Is this something that’s normal? I have a feeling that most people are NOT experiencing this issue.

Screenshots after the jump:

This is how my subscribers stack up last Friday:

And this is how my subscribers look like, yesterday (on Saturday). Notice the lack of Netvibes? Or maybe, Netvibes users don’t use their browsers on Saturdays, since Netvibes is most likely set as their homepage?

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King Gary is looking for a new web host

This entry was originally published at King Gary

I’m looking for a new web host to use for King Gary. My hosting expires in a short while, and so I’d like to get your input on what are some good hosts to use. I value personal experience with a particular host, over anything else and over whatever the host themselves say, because that’s what I really think counts. The host that I’m currently with is okay, but I’d like to go out and try different ones because I’m sure there are better ones out there.

I’m not looking for anything too specific regarding disk space and bandwidth because nowadays, they are provided plentifully by hosts, but the particulars that I’ll require include:

• Ruby on Rails support (preferably they know what they’re doing when it comes to this, and not just another host jumping on the ‘we support Ruby on Rails’ bandwagon)
• able to support multiple domains through separate control panels

That’s about it.

Please post your recommendations in the comments! Thanks!

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