GaryKing's Xanga

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:07:54 GMT

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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Sunday, April 22, 2007

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 20:33:46 GMT

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. ' class='wp-smiley' /> 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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Sunday, April 22, 2007

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 19:31:46 GMT

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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Sunday, April 22, 2007

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 18:56:23 GMT

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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Sunday, April 22, 2007

Sun, 22 Apr 2007 18:50:11 GMT

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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Saturday, April 21, 2007

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 05:40:06 GMT

Is Google working correctly?

This entry was originally published at King Gary

Just a quick update on my ‘Comment Rankings’ WordPress plugin that I released 3 days ago. It looks like my plugin is the #1 hit when searching for ‘comment rankings’ on Google now - but it’s not my site, it’s this site. Props to him for being the #1 search result for that phrase, while my site isn’t even on the first page of results. How’d that happen?

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Saturday, April 21, 2007

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 05:14:23 GMT

Facebook was Twitter before there was Twitter

This entry was originally published at King Gary

As of Facebook’s latest update, it looks like they’re doing something that seems very similar to Twitter, the popular microblogging service that has been picking up steam in recent months. This latest update focuses primarily on Facebook’s Status Updates feature, which allows its users to post short messages describing what they’re doing at that point - similarly to how Twitter is used. One of the primary reasons that helped boost Twitter into the limelight, though, was that many of its users connected to the service via a mobile service, allowing them to update their Twitter messages in real time. Facebook’s implementation of Status Updates was a novelty at best, due to the fact that you could only update your status if you were on facebook.com, in a browser of some sort (could be on your mobile, but that wouldn’t be as convenient), and that you were logged in.

As of a few hours ago, you can now update your Facebook status messages using your mobile, you can subscribe to your friends’ status message updates via SMS, and you can easily send status updates from your phone by sending an SMS to Facebook.

As Facebook puts it:

While we were at it, we decided to make some other improvements. Here’s what’s shiny and new:

Your friends’ three most recent updates on the home page

A brand new page to see all your friends’ updates at once

An RSS feed to put your friends’ updates in your reader of choice

The ability to subscribe to a friend’s updates via SMS

The ability to easily update status from your phone by sending an SMS to Facebook starting with the “@” character

To me, it doesn’t seem like Facebook is gunning for Twitter, since it has no reason to. The status updates feature is just a very minor pleasing addition to Facebook, at best. But, because of its (new) convenience, Facebook’s already-huge popularity, and my theory that people will eventually just want to send a few updates a day instead of dozens (something which I’ve begun to notice already), it appears as though Facebook has just begun to chip away at Twitter (which already chipped away heavily at Dodgeball.) Add to that the fact that Twitter has suffered a lot of server downtime due to its growing aches and pains, and that Facebook has had phenomenal uptime (99.96% on average), then it makes it easier to see how quickly this new Facebook feature has the potential to grow. Twitter’s slow performance, which some attribute to Ruby on Rails’ poor performance, can also be likened to when Friendster had its own fair share of performance issues.

Will Twitter suffer the same fate that Friendster did? There are already discussions regarding Twitter’s downfall, so maybe this new Facebook feature goes down the middle, and will be just what the doctor ordered?

P.S.

One thing I must say, is that I very much prefer Facebook status updates because I don’t have to attempt to convert my friends over to Twitter when they’re already using Facebook! And, all of their updates are neatly placed on a single page, similar to Twitter (except with a noticeable decrease in load time).

Do you agree with what I’ve said? Do you disagree? Can my conclusions be considered ‘crazy talk’? Post your thoughts in a comment!

Update:

Looks like other people have similar thoughts:

Update #2:

Looks like this FINALLY made it to Techmeme. More on this news here. Looks like Mashable finally caught up to this story.

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Saturday, April 21, 2007

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 04:31:25 GMT

Blackberry reveals the cause of downtime

This entry was originally published at King Gary

It turns out that Research in Motion, the company that makes the popular Blackberry handheld device, gives the cause of downtime that plagued its users this past Tuesday and Wednesday to be because of an “insufficiently tested software upgrade”. They give a list of ~~excuses~~ reasons of why this problem occurred, including:

the failure was trigged by “the introduction of a new, non-critical system routine” designed to increase the system’s e-mail holding space.

“the pre-testing of the system routine proved to be insufficient”.

the service in the event of a failure “did not fully perform to its expectations”

There’s a good chance that the problem was caused due to oversight by someone from the school that I currently attend, the University of Waterloo, since RIM employs most of its employees from there due to it being headquartered just a few hundred feet from the university’s campus. So on behalf of my university and fellow students: Sorry!

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Friday, April 20, 2007

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 10:03:02 GMT

Why MySpace sucks, Facebook rocks, and the power of specifying relationships

This entry was originally published at King Gary

vs.

I’m not sure about you, but I’ve definitely been witnessing many people fleeing from MySpace and finding joy over at Facebook, instead, in recent months. It’s also been reported that Facebook is the #1 site for teenagers, and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 22-year-old founder, is profiled in this month’s edition of Fast Company. What I believe are some of the reasons that people are rapidly moving from MySpace to Facebook include:

The MySpace layout is really cluttered, whereas Facebook’s is really clean. On MySpace, at first, it seems like a lot is going on so it’s exciting. Once you hit a server error for the umpteenth time, though, then it’s quits for MySpace.
There is a LOT more privacy on Facebook than on MySpace (there are no less than 7 privacy sections found on Facebook, where each has dozens of settings which control things ranging from your profile, to search results that include you.)

I especially think that the ability to set how you know someone whom you’ve added as a Friend on Facebook is a Godsend. This gives much more value to people who are considered ‘Friends’ in your profile, because then you can specify how well and from where you know someone, and you can then filter people using these settings. Want to see who you went to High School with? Then filter your friends using ‘High School Friends’. Want to filter out everyone you know who lives in the same dormitories as you on your university campus? Then use the ‘Housemates’ filter. It’s that easy!

On MySpace, the opposite holds true. Each and every friend that you add decreases every Friend’s value, especially when you’re like a lot of MySpace members who click the ‘Add to Friends’ button as if they had ADHD. It’s a popularity contest on MySpace, plain and simple, especially because the number of ‘Friends’ that you have is more clearly stressed and displayed on MySpace than it is on Facebook. Also, there’s a ‘Top Friends’ list on MySpace, which tends to make being your friend more of a competition than anything else. (On MySpace, the total number of Friends that you have is displayed. On Facebook, it shows the number of Friends that you have within your primary ‘Network’, be it geographical, a university, etc.)

For myself on Facebook, I’ve begun to remove people that I don’t really know too well. Some people added me as a friend a while ago because they were from my university. I didn’t know who they were, so I simply assumed that I knew them from a friend of a friend. Chances are that these people just found me because we attend the same university, though, so they’ll be removed from my Friends list. (Facebook makes it easy to find out who you’ve got as a Friend and that goes to your university!)

MySpace is beginning to fail as a social network, while Facebook is rapidly gaining ground. Maybe its new MySpace News offering, with its Digg-like features, will boost it back into the limelight once again? Well, probably not.

Which do you prefer to use - MySpace or Facebook? Post your thoughts in the comments and vote on the poll below (if you’re reading this in a feed reader, you’ll have to visit this post in your browser to see the poll)!

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Thursday, April 19, 2007

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 19:36:45 GMT

Happy birthday to me!

This entry was originally published at King Gary

It’s my birthday today! Ah, how time flies by. I hope to mark this birthday as a special occasion - I’ll hopefully NOW be making regular blog posts, and I’ll try to give my special insight and thought into each and every post that I make ;).

Anyways, that’s all for now. Keep your eyes peeled for some more stuff! Also, thanks to everyone who acknowledged my birthday!

This post has 67 words.

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