As you may have noticed, i have not updated or posted any content in the past couple of weeks. I am taking a long break and due to some changes at work, my time has been very limited, i intend/commit to update my web site, add more frequent content at the beginning of the next year.

Marry Christmas and a very very happy new year!

Hector M.

This service appears to be available in the US only, it is a new service which offers buyers cashback for a successful purchase from one of their publishers.

Rundown:

1 - A user searches for a product at http://search.live.com/cashback
2 - Using the result, the visitor compares prices from other publishers.
3 - The person makes the purchase, within 60 days, you get a cashback.

Rather than going to the store in person, Microsoft is encouraging buyers to purchase the items online from the participating stores.

Online merchants are supporting this idea and Microsoft is reporting a 12% increase of online transactions across the web, according to Comscrore.

No date when it will be available in Canada.

If you are like me, although a bit of a late comer to Facebook, that gets sometimes annoyed by just one person spamming the main page of your profile, i decided to write about how to limit the entries from one particular person to the Posted Items tab.

If you see several entries from one person in one day, like sharing videos, photos, links, music, an other content, thus filling most of your home page, move your cursor over their name, on the left side, an Options link appears, click on it and a small box pops up, make a choice, such us, 'Fewer posts, Fewer photos, Fewer videos'. The next time the person posts something, it is filtered and goes to the 'Posted Items tab' - You decide when to see all the posts.

Now you have a cleaner home page - which is the Feeds section.

Did you know that Facebook is one of the most used sites in Vancouver? Well, according to Google trends, it is.

Why? I had to stay up late working on for the upgrade of Tecito.com. For those who are not familiar with the name, it is a well known site in the Latin community in Canada, especially in Vancouver.

The site uses Drupal, a powerful CMS system. Without going too much into details, i decided to upgrade the site to the newest version of Drupal, 6.5. Tecito was using version 5.X before. I took advantage of the long weekend.

I had some minor issues with the upgrade, found problems with the modules in use, a few of them are not fully compatible with Drupal 6.x. The database was backed up frequently, install and uninstall modules often, a the end, the upgrade was successful.

The site was launched today, check it out. http://tecito.com

It seems that a lot of people do not think much when registering a domain, a domain should be unique, short, easy to remember, even easy to type. It usually is the name of your business, organization or your name.

If the domain you really want is taken, use the city or country where you live with another word, play with words. But do not be repetitive, a good example is shown in the picture above. The domain above could have easily been registered as westernunioncanada.com.

Here is another one: universitycanadawest.ca, we know that .CA is for Canada, so why include the word Canada? This is better universitycanadawest.com, people remember a .COM much easier. If you must use a .CA, then, do not use the word Canada in the domain, here is a good one, iam.ca.

I finally upgraded Firefox to the newest version, Firefox 3 - it was worth it. Initially, i thought it would not display my favorite pages properly, especially my blog, or it would not support my favorite Add-ons.

After browsing the Net for some time, i notice the speed and quickness of the tabs. Pages load faster. I am comparing it to the previous version of Firefox. The old one would sometime freeze or when i try to open a tab, it would take about 5 seconds to open it - the hourly glass won't let me do anything.

My favorite Add-ons appear compatible with the newest version of Firefox: Firebug, Addblock Plus, Flash block, ColoZilla and a few others. These Adds-ons are for a safer browsing and some of them for debugging web pages.

In summary, i encourage everyone to upgrade to the newest version - if you have not done so. There are lots of improvements and fixes: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ If you are using any Add-on, make sure they are compatible: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

It's catchy, pink background, bright colors. You look at the woman, you scan her quickly from top to bottom, you think it's an ad for staying fit or for a new gym opening, you turn to the next page, you walk away, or you just throw it in the garbage.

However, if you are still looking at it, you then read the text 'Koodo Mobile', it gives you a summary of what it is - an affordable phone plan, but does it really want to make you sign up for a plan?

Personally, no. To start, the pink background, the outfit, the thing near her shoes(don't know what it is) and the name 'Koodo Mobile', the name just doesn't work. I don't fine it serious. Is this ad targeted for teenagers only? I wonder. But we all want some cheap phone plan!

They should just change the ad format and the name, get more serious with their business, and they could be a competitor.

A quote from the creators page:
Mollom is a web service that analyzes the quality of content posted to websites. This includes comments, contact-form messages, blogs, forum posts, etc. Mollom specifically tries to determine whether this content is unwanted - i.e. "spam" - or desirable - i.e. "ham."

This module does a wonderful job in blocking spammers from my site. When someone posts a comment, for example, Mollom sends the data to http://mollom.com, it goes through an analysis, it then returns the content back and classifies it as 'Spam' or 'Ham, now if it is unsure as of what to do with the information, it tags it as 'Unsure', it then presents it to the visitor with a CAPTCHA challenge.

You don't need to know all the details about how it works, just know that it guards your web site against spammers, so you can focus your time on generating content for your blog.

Mollom is a module that was initially written for http://drupal.org, but has now been ported to other CMS platforms. Here is a version for WordPress http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-mollom/ and for Joomla http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,v...

If you have a Drupal site and you would like to install it, visit http://drupal.org/project/mollom, the main page is at http://mollom.com