Hosting
By Huw Leslie | April 8, 2007
I’m not happy with Dreamhost at all. There was at least an hour’s downtime (quite possibly more) across all my sites (and all DH’s sites), affecting not only personal sites like this one, but the whole of the Oratos Network, and Klaxis.
My Dreamhost account expires in August, and I’ve decided not to renew it unless there’s literally 99% uptime before then. At the moment I’m looking at getting Media Temple’s GS product, but that’s unfortunately twice the price of DH. On the other hand, there’s no point paying for hosting if you’re site isn’t up a lot of the time.
Any other suggestions?
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Blogger’s block
By Huw Leslie | March 25, 2007
I’ve had ‘bloggers blog’ for the past couple of weeks - a complete lack of posting on Gizbuzz was the consequence. I’ve now got over it - well, sort of.
I’ve lined up about 4 drafts in the Gizbuzz system, which have the first paragraph written. So, over the course of next week, all I need to do is finish them. I have a feeling I will.
So - to get over future blocks, I will half write posts.
(by the way, I’m procrastinating again - I have a coursework essay to write, and it is midnight).
Topics: Blogging, Gizbuzz, Me, Uncategorized | No Comments »
GMail Spam
By Huw Leslie | March 24, 2007
The spam filter in Gmail used to be excellent - I never, ever got spam in my inbox, despite sticking my email address in text all over the internet. In the past few weeks, though, I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting much more. Is anyone else seeing this? In other gmail irritations, today I was trying to move over to an account on Google Apps for your Domain, and wanted to transfer all the email from my @gmail account to the @waah account. Gmail wouldn’t let the @waah account retrieve email from the @gmail account, which really annoyed me. Any way to get around this?
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By Huw Leslie | March 6, 2007
It’s quite likely that every reader of this blog has already got my Twitter address, but in case not, you can get the latest ‘what I had for breakfast’ updates on Twitter at http://twitter.com/huw . It’s really addictive!
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Trillian Astra
By Huw Leslie | March 4, 2007
I’ve just taken up an invitation I got a while ago to try out the alpha version of the next version of Trillian, and I’m typing this blog entry in it now. I don’t like it. I usually use the Gmail GTalk client, and I love the minimalist style of it which just does the job. Trillian (which I haven’t used before) is cluttered, difficult to use and far too flashy. I’m sure some people will love it, but it’s not my cup of tea.
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2020 vision
By Huw Leslie | February 28, 2007
Elements of the Labour Party (led by Alan Milburn, former Health Secretary and staunch Blairite and Charles Clarke, former Home Secretary) have set up a website designed to come up with new ideas for the party’s future called The 2020 Vision. It’s going to be all new media, with blogs and comments included. At the moment there’s not much content on there, but some of the commenters’ names on the page explaining what 2020 Vision is all about cracked me up.
It’s the first time I’ve seen peers of the realm commenting on a blog (and using their titles). I expect its new to them too, and it really is quite bizarre. Other famous commenters, just on the first page, include Hilary Armstrong MP, social exclusion minister, Peter Mandelson, our staunch Blairite EU commissioner for Trade and Ann Clwyd MP (TB’s human rights or Iraq envoy methinks - could be wrong though).
Also weird is the juxtoposition of comments like this:
The Labour Party has never been scared of debate. We are in an unprecedented third term and I welcome the opportunity to ensure we are the party with the ideas, the vision and the values to face the opportunities and challenges ahead.
from Hillary Armstrong to this eloquent, insightful view of the problems facing society:
It is about time you built more prisons and got the scum of our streets, people are scared to walk them at night, shopkeepers abused, spat at, lives made a misery.
If people commit crime they should all get there benefits took off them why should they get free treatment on the NHS, i have been paying my NI since i was 16 years old nearly half of my life and i am sickened by it all.
Who are the Mugs,,,, Us the hard working of the population,,, its ok for ministers you are on a pretty wage.
I for one have lost confidence in the Labour party and it will take more than a few new ideas to help fix that.
Note the exceptional use of grammar.
I guess this is just a result of new media, putting everyone taking part in the conversation in the same boat.
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Posting from Google Talk
By Huw Leslie | February 26, 2007
This is an experimental post using an IM bot called imified.com. I’m writing this in GTalk, and this will apparently be posted to Waah. Whilst such a service is of slightly limited value (I can quite easily login to the Wordpress editor), it is slightly quicker. This might make me do more short, Twitter-style updates for Waah.
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Google will buy FeedBurner
By Huw Leslie | February 16, 2007
I’ve written before that I think Google should buy FeedBurner, and I think (for admittedly very tenuous reasons) that the acquisition might be getting closer:
- The GReader Team just announced that Google Feedfetcher would report subscriber numbers when requesting feeds. This is essential for services like FeedBurner to get accurate numbers (as Google only fetches a feed once on behalf of all subscribers on IG and Reader), and would be a necessary step for Google to take before buying FeedBurner so that it puts FeedBurner in as strong a position as possible.
- The GReader blog just linked to FeedBurner. It’s really really rare (I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it before) for Google to link to a commercial, web 2.0 service from their corporate blogs.
- FeedBurner would give Google access to much, much more RSS feed inventory than it currently has access to. Adsense for Feeds isn’t particularly well used, and if FAN (FeedBurner Advertising Network) became powered by AFF, that would mean more $ for Google.
- Google like analytics tools.
- Who else will by FeedBurner? It’s VC investors deserve a lucrative exit just for being visionary.
Lets see if I’m proved right or wrong?
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BBC web principles, etc
By Huw Leslie | February 13, 2007
Well worth a read for anyone behind a website.
They are the basis of a new strategic review being conducted by the BBC of its web strategy, and I think they make a lot of sense, not just for mammoth organisations, but any organisation which isn’t purely aimed at one very specific audience (as Gizbuzz is at tech early adopters). So not much use for me, but they may well be in the future.
BTW, I’ve been doing a few more posts at Digital-lifestyles.info. If you’re interested, you can check out my author page with only the stuff I’ve written. It’s actually a very new experience for me - even though I’ve been writing about tech for over a year now, its a change for me not to be running the website. I think the DL writing style is slightly different, and I am working on adjusting to that - the paragraphs are much shorter, more like a news publication than a blog, but with more opinion than you would find on a traditional news site.
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Funny, ridiculous, ironic and great
By Huw Leslie | January 28, 2007
This blog just got accepted into the TLA program, after the PR update of this week which saw its PR go up to 4.
Funny, ridiculous and ironic because Gizbuzz hasn’t been able to get into the program previously, despite having far far more traffic than this blog because its PR as published by Google was only 3 until the update this week. Presumably Gizbuzz will be let in, however, on the monthly review now.
Great because it will hopefully be a nice little source of income. Given the average of 5 mins a month I spend tending to this blog, if I even sell one ad slot for, say, $15, that works out at an hourly rate of $180, or about £90! Not bad!
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