Archive

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

This is a neat program from Cooliris, PicLens allows you to view your favorites photos in 3D, it lets you zoom in and zoom out, or scroll the bar to see all the pictures in a wall.

It support all the major browsers, such as Firefox and Internet Explorer, it is compatible with Windows and Mac.

In Firefox, it's an Add-on program, to install it, visit http://piclens.com, however, in Internet Explorer it's an ActiveX control, it might take a couple of minutes longer to have it installed.

Once it's installed, login to your Facebook account, open an album, then click on the blue button on the very top right corner of your browser, in this case, Firefox - PicLens is launched.

You can search for images using Google, Flickr, Yahoo, Facebook and even Amazon. If you have a website with lots of pictures, you can enable it so your visitors can browse it using PicLens.

Want to see the Beijing Olympics in pictures? Open PicLens!

I am not a big follower of the Olympics, i rather watch the highlights of the day after work or whenever i can, but today i decided wait and watch the opening of the event live and online at http://itsgametime.tv/OlympicsLive.html

For those who follow it closely, I've found some links that you can check out to see the event, either live or just the highlights of the day.

• CBC News: http://www.cbc.ca/olympics
• NBC: http://www.nbcolympics.com
• BBC Sports: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympics/default.stm
• Yahoo7: http://au.sports.yahoo.com/olympics/video/ Australia's official Olympics online site.
• User generated content: http://watch-olympics-online.co.cc/watch-live.php

Happy Olympics!

Update: this link did not work for me: http://itsgametime.tv/OlympicsLive.html

Don't have financing for your start up?
Have you ever wanted to be like Google or Facebook or maybe twitter at least?
Launchebox is a company that could finance your idea. They could give you a $25,000 to $40, 000 US and give you around 12 weeks time get you a working alpha or beta site.

Based in Washington, D.C., LaunchBox is the newest company to offer 'Build it cheap and Fast' approach to startup wannabes or starters. The $25, 000 - $40, 000 is given to 2 to 4 people, enough to get a functioning demo site up and running. If successful, Launchbox takes a six to eight percent stake in each startup.

Make your dream come true, apply now, you never know where you will be in the next couple of years: http://www.launchboxdigital.com

If you are into networking, it is actually a good place to meet people, sounds strange but true. There are tons of people around you, walking with you, bumping into you. Bring some business card if you have, or before you leave, write down your page on a sticky note.

You never know who you will meet, make some friends, exchange information, the person might not be interested about blogging but he or she might know someone that would be interested about it. If you give out 100 business cards, i can guarantee you that someone will follow you - meaning, will check your web site often.

Stick with your plan, remember, you are networking here, your goal is to have people visit your web site and read your blog, not picking up woman.