Good reasons to Sell Your Car

This guy appears to have very good reason to sell his car. You might need to have a few shots of bourbon to completely understand what he’s saying but when you do – you’ll definately feel his pain.

Hosting Madness

Purchasing website/file hosting is sometimes like gambling. You win some, you lose some. (And in fact, some lose the lot) .

A few months ago I took a gamble and signed up to DreamHost, one of the most popular and widely used web hosting companies on the internet. I didn’t really know why they were so widely used and popular – they had a bad webpage and it all looked to good to be true.

I ended up signing up with a promo code and paying something incredibly low like $50 for a whole year of hosting with a free domain name thrown in. That price included 20gig of space and 1000gb of bandwidth! Insane. Not to mention every single week it goes up in gigabytes of space & bandwidth! Even crazier!

Now you wont believe what they did last week. Try: “Hey lets double everyones bandwidth” and “Hey lets give every 10 times more space.” No Kidding. I now have 200gig of space and 2000gig of bandwidth each month. Storage grows by 1gb a week and Bandwidth grows by 16gb a week. What’s going on here! These guys must be mad but it has happened. Some customers are even using this service as an offline backup hosting solution and just tranferring everything to their DreamHost account.

What now? Well I reccomend DreamHost if you truly want to host anything and everything you want on the web without having to worry about limits (this service is practically no limits with the amount they give you) & if you want a reliable large web/file host. They are even releasing new products such as files forever which enables you to store you files forever with a price that is practically for free! It’s just too good to be true – sign up before they raise their prices.

For those who are interested I have a promo code you can use to get yourself $50 off instantly. It just makes it even cheaper. Just enter the code: BLAZE50 when prompted on the signup screen and they will honour the discount for you.

Also if you can refer people in the future, you end up with cash in your back pocket or completely free hosting. So it helps to spread the word.

NetVibes Rocks

I have just switched from Google Home to Netvibes and let me tell you, it's really really good. I like having a custom homepage with all of my favourite feeds and Google Home worked for me quite ok up until now. I had actually tried Netvibes when I made the choice to Google back in the day and it wasnt quite polished enough for my liking. The interface was clunky and hardly worked. Now they really have got it together and the service works great.

I currently have my homepage split up into:

• General (24)
• Blogs / Tech (49)
• Blogs / Business (19)
• Blogs / Music (73)
• Blog / Design (21)

It's working a treat . These guys really know how to put together an easy to use homepage and you have just won some business from a previous google user. Well done.

A new Google PageRank update?

It seems today (April 6) that Google has done another PageRank update across the board. Naturally I went over to Matt Cutt's blog to see if there was a post about anything but left with an April Fools joke that he is moving to Yahoo. The next stop for me is naturally SitePoint and it seems it's true. Google has updated their pagerank.

The changes

This site has only been up a few months and I have gone from PR0 to a PR6, which is fantastic. This also seems to be the case with a few other SitePoint users. What seems strange though, is Google seems to be giving blogs and real content based and organically linked websites higher priority now more than ever. I mean a PR6 is quite a high PR especially for a new site so I don't see why it would be any other way. Previously, to get such a PageRank you would have to be linked by multiple PR7's (I think I have one PR6 link and a lot of lower ones).

What will the "Internet Marketing" industry do?

This really is going to be quite a shock for a lot of "internet marketers" who have built their websites up with link farms and link exchanges because it just goes to show these really aren't going to make a dent in the future for rankings. They've been saying this for a long time now but I think with this last Google update it's really proved itself.

On the other hand…

Some are saying it's either a hoax or pagerank is bouncing around. This blog doesn't have a load of traffic at all which leads me to consider these points.

Nonetheless, I am happy

UPDATE: A few others are actually posting their experiences on the latest post on Matt's blog. One even said his rank went from 0 to 8 unexpectedly with 6 backlinks. Strange.

Attention & Sex

I am signed up to a Scott Berkun’s newsletter which is rarely too exilherating. It focuses mainly on project management and other not so exciting things. His latest essay however is something I think we can all understand and relate back to our lives (I know I have).

This article explains about how we divide our attention and what we focus it on. It makes you stop and think how you really should be spending your minutes of the day.

“Whenever someone is lost in waves of e-mail and information, they’re often oblivious to the deepest tragedy of their time. It’s not the stress of dealing with so many requests and obligations (as real and challenging as that stress might be). It’s that somewhere in the wash of interactions and split attentions is the missed possibility they’re looking for: Meaning. Depth of experience. Connection. To quote Pirsig, “The truth knocks on the door and we say, “Go away. I’m looking for the truthâ€?. In the race to clean out inboxes and scratch items off the to-do list, we miss chances to find the thing we’ve created the inbox and to-do list for. Like an American tourist in Europe racing from site to site with barely a moment to take a picture or talk to someone not on their tour bus, we’re trapped in a quantity mentality, despite our quality based desires.”

Read Attention and Sex

The New Flash

I was just reading up on Alexoid’s blog, courtesy of one of his posts on UXmag (great read) and came across news that the new Flash will be called Blaze. Naturally I found this interesting as my first name is actually Blaze and I am a web designer and I do a lot of flash (increasingly so recently).

Nonetheless it’s always intersting to see what they will bring out with the new Flash. I think theyre just building up still and by version 10 we really will have a complete web platform. It currently is a platform but I just think it will be a lot easier.

We can’t comment on the timeframe for the release of BLAZE but it will be a full cycle so don’t expect anything to be coming any time soon. That said, you’ve probably already heard about the upcoming release of Flash Player 8.5 with an alpha available in a few weeks and a ship date next spring. Flash Player 8.5 will add a new virtual machine, AVM2, and a new programming language, ActionScript 3.0. This player release will coincide with the release of FlexBuilder 2, the new Eclipse-based developer tool for creating rich Flash-based applications.

New Digg Commenting System

Would you believe how complicated the new digg commenting system is. I have never been a fan of digg, but it seems this is just going to complicate things even further. I can’t even work out what is going on or what conversation is happening within the comments.

Maybe they did this to appease the tech users (which admittedly, would be most of their userbase) but this doesnt get me any more excited to sign up at all.

I think, at the end of the day, It all comes back to K.I.S.S.

MacBook Pro, In Black

I just found a post on another worpress.com site in what seems to be italian about a video of the new MacBook Pro in Black which looks really interesting. I’m not sure if this is real but it would be great to see the new MacBooks in a colour other than silver/titanium. I like the whole shiny look and feel of this video but I’m not even sure if it’s real.

On a side note, i found this post browsing the new global tags facility here under the apple tag. This addition is fantastic and will only continue to expand this great blogging service.

Gadget Watch: FM to PC Transmitter

I was listening to Pandora today and was reading through their FAQ about listening to the stream on your stereo. It turns out there is this nifty little USB device that transmits to any FM radio. This looks invaluable – i just can’t stop thinking about how many different situations this would become useful.

From the RocketFM Website:

RocketFM uses any available FM frequency to transmit audio through your home, car or office stereo system. Applications such as iTunes, GarageBand, video soundtracks and even streaming internet radio can be conveniently broadcast with RocketFM.

Laptop users will find the RocketFM invaluable for travel. Use any available radio in your hotel room or temporary office space as wireless speakers. The RocketFM is small and light, and requires no additional power source.

Read more about it here