Funny thing.
I remembered reading this blog by Chris Justus when I first discovered Google Suggest. I meant to read through the code and run the example off my server.
Well, I didn’t. And today when I was doing a search on some remotely related topic, this search result caught my eye.
Ah. Might as well blog about my procrastination and use this as a bookmark so I can read it later.
Ya right. I will, I swear, some day.
I haven’t been placing a closer watch on all my blogs (that’s the problem of having too many of them), and today when I decided to do a bit homework, I found that I was SPAMMED!!
I hate getting spam comments, all for nothing but to link to those companies or whatever websites to increase their ranking in search engines. Luckily there wasn’t a lot, but manually deleting all of them was a pain nevertheless. Once again I appreciate this little blog of mine much better because WordPress has comments moderation feature and keyword match feature to stop spams. I love it..
By clicking on a friend’s blog’s link, I was brought to Globle Voices Online. That actual link from the friend’s page is about Wikipedia being blocked from certain regions/areas of mainland China. But that is not the point here.
What caught my attention first was the green area near the top of all pages, the section that contains links to all regions. I have seen it somewhere!
I cannot remember the name of that type of arrangement. A friend of mine once spent his sleepless nights coming up with a page similar to that for frequencies of words from his AIM chats. Here, the font sizes are proportional to the number of articles related to that keyword. It’s quite neat huh? It’s a visual cue to readers what the popular topics are.
Traditional alternatives to the same result/intention include ranking, marking as bold, highlighting only the top results, etc. However, by displaying information this way, the readers’ experience is un-intruded when they need to go to a particular keyword or for frequent visits.
I have been receiving emails about upcoming new looks on their websites for DiscoverCard, AmericanExpress, and many others. What are they doing or trying to do? Pushing new looks all at the same time to attract customers?
There’s a chinese saying that if you walk at night often enough, you will eventually bump into a ghost.
It simply means if you do something often enough, bad luck will eventually hit upon you some day.
I have too many computers. So now I have met my misfortune. One laptop’s battery died, completely, after it had numerous other nasty fights with me for the past few months. I was fed up with it, so I left it cold at a corner for two weeks. When I finally felt terrible about my irrational ignorance and attempted to make something up to it, it died on me!
I don’t want to repeat my complaint for the laptop. You can look it up from fatwallet. Go ahead, search for tired member. That was me.
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Nowadays there are a lot of toolbars for browsers. The most common ones are Yahoo!, Google,and MSN. They provide somewhat similar features, such as a search bar, block popups, auto fill-ins, links to news, easy access to their emails, etc.
There are alternative toolbars out there, I just found out recently, such as Googlebar for Mozilla based browsers. And here are more:
This is a list from Yahoo Directory
Besides toolbars, there are deskbars and sidebars from Google, Webster, MSN, and other companies.
Which one should you install? Just one note, don’t install too many. You would not want to end up looking like
The problems with having too many toolbars are:
1. they take up a lot of your browser viewable areas. 2. they leave your little foot prints everywhere 3. some of them have similar/redundant search features 4. definitely confuse the heck out of you
My two cents: try to keep them simple and keep your computer clean. =)
I thought Google maps’ new satellite feature would be not well-known. It was quite to my astonishment to find out that not only many people knew about it, they were having quite some fun with it, too.
Here are a few interesting things I have found:
On a side note, Yahoo’s recent acquisition of Flickr is probably the first time making them the leader in the search engine, email, and blog competition with Google and MSN in the past few years.
Some time ago I got “tricked” by Yahoo! (see here)’s usage of Captcha to forward emails. Today I stumbled upon another obscure one.
What is this exactly?
I typed in J9WK and it didn’t like it. Any thoughts?
On April 1st, 2005, I read something from Gallery‘s website that there’s going to be a merger between Gallery and Coppermine Photo Gallery, I was surprised…
I went to the link. How could it be? My two favorite galleries are going to become one? They serve different communities, why merge? Coppermine forum had a thread about this, too (thread missing now). They even had a picture of it posted. The more I read about it, the more it seemed to be unreal. Then it hit me, this is an April Fool’s joke!!
Ahh!! I was not mad that I was tricked by it. But I started to get frustrated because I knew both systems and I had both of them installed on my server. I knew everything they were talking about!! That means… I am really a nerd!!
Crazy Sandy Crazy Kat… I gotta stop this madness.
This sounds familiar somehow, that I am in search and in test drive for an online photo gallery. Yes, I did the same thing to choose blogware, wiki, and forum for my website. And now I am back to the game of searching. This process is time-consuming and exhausting; I like to install and play with every single piece of program I can get my dirty hands on.
I am currently using Coppermine and I simply love it (my gallery). It is powerful, skinable, customizable, and hackable. It has very rich feature sets and a pretty well done admin page. Overall, it is definitely a “A” product.
At the same time I am using Gallery (my test gallery), which has an optional java client that you can install on your desktop for easier upload and image resize. It has a simpler interface, less intuitive admin features. But all in all, it’s more compact than Coppermine and best yet, it does not require a database.
The only complaint I have against Coppermine is how it consumes a lot of bandwidth comparing to the other programs I am evaluating now. At this point, I am playing with Simple PHP Gallery from the author of Relatively Absolute website, Enhanced Simple PHP Gallery, YaPig Image Gallery, phpAutoGallery.
I have a few objectives in mind for this time of searching: 1) simple and clean interface; 2) light and fast; 3) intuitive and easy to navigate; 4) some admin features; 5) skinable. If I have time, I will provide a bit of overview late for each one that I evaluate.
Link: - I found this from Hostcripts.com, which gives me a list of galleries to consider from - Google also gives quite some sources to look at. Google Directory on Image Gallery
