Blaze

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.

A new night rider movie coming out in 2008 with a Koenigsegg CCX as KIT?! Is this serious? Is this going to happen? If so, they couldnt have chosen a cooler car

Update: David Hasselhoff is confirmed and I found the following info on wikipedia:

Knight Rider: The Movie is the possible title for a feature film adaptation of the hit 1980s NBC television program, Knight Rider. On May 9, 2006, two leading film websites, Comingsoon.net and IGN’s Filmforce reported that The Weinstein Company had acquired the rights to the franchise from creator Glen A. Larson and will be producing a Knight Rider feature film.

Rumored to be in development since at least 2002, this new film was almost nixed at least twice due to David Hasselhoff’s insistence that the script be faithful to the show. One of his demands was that KITT should be similar to his predecessor. Negotiations stalled when studios to whom the concept was pitched refused to allow it, but resumed again in 2005 when they finally conceded and allowed a new script to be written, this time with the new KITT retaining his predecessor’s characteristics.

IMDB seems to have a page about it but I’m not quite convinced. Maybe someone could shed a bit of light onto the subject?

Just playing around with testing to record a mix with my new DJ gear. This was done into the mic input of my laptop so im not sure if the sound quality is amazing. Its quite a compressed mp3 too which I didnt realise.

Keep in mind the mixing sorta sucks too. I did the whole thing in my headphones.

Enjoy:

Blaze Mix 9th October 2006 (Right click, Save Target/Link As)

NOTE: I HAVE RECORDED MANY MORE MIXES SINCE THIS POST THAT ARE MUCH BETTER QUALITY & WITH FULL TRACKLISTS ETC. HEAD OVER TO MY LAST.FM JOURNAL FOR ALLTHE LATEST MIXES WITH MP3 LINKS

Tracks Include songs by Quesh, Les Rythmes Digitales, Chromeo, MSTRKRFT & more….

Update: I recorded this mix with my mic input on my laptop and well I have now worked out that the mic really isnt the best option for recording an audio except for… you guessed it… your voice. Honestly though, I thought laptop makers would made an easy way to get a line-in input going. Ah well you can still enjoy the mix, just next time I’ll have to drag my desktop pc into the dj room

Also posted on Last.FM

…and the power of unexpected advertising.

Google makes so much money from “contextual advertising.” This basically means they serve (somewhat) relevant advertisements to users based on what they are searching for or looking at on other websites. This was a good idea at the time of conception and it’s proved to be extremely successful & profitable for Google and a lot of their advertisers.

But, Is “Related Content” enough?

Many have speculated over Google’s ability to make money in the future & if contextual advertising is enough to sustain the company. I often though these concerns weren’t very valid with Google being an 800 pound gorilla who is completely dominating online search & online advertising. I mean lets face it, it’s their cashcow and they don’t have a another similar sized income stream to fall back on.

Enough about Big G though, what about YOU!

I don’t know about you but I quite like stumbling upon things I don’t know existed and various things I would not normally find out about. I mean cmon, that’s what advertising is all about isn’t it?

So lets explore different methods of getting to people. Like setting up a fake youtube user called lonelygirl15 and making random videos and decieving the viewers that it is a real girl out there somewhere… yeah.. right. Interesting example though. It’s a slippery slope when you start tricking your users though.

Flash isn’t dead. In fact, Flash could well be growing in more of a niche than we realised. A lot of people may already know this but STOP PRESS: 1. SEO is great, but it’s strategies & implementation tend to spoil a website (gasp, ooh ahhh!). 2. Flash is great, for multimedia style presentations with fantastic creative displays of information & visual elements - when you don’t need to index a million pages & be number one for everything and top 10 google and ppc and adsense and paid links and ctrs and arrrrrrrgh! . . . . . Brain Explode!

My point here is simple: talk to more REAL people (not search engines). The best way to do this is to draw them in with creativity & good flash.

Don’t get me wrong, SEO is important.

…But there are so many people on the bandwagon. It’s gone to the extent of a large number of people using SEO practices as the basis for building websites.

Why not engage & use real life principles.

Be Creative

Be Spontaneous

& most of all

Be Intersting

Also I have found a good site with some good visual flash FX (effects) for those interested after the jump.
Read more »

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted an entry. This is due to a few reasons…

• I sort of got annoyed with having to blog and post.
• I got annoyed with the whole “tech” scene and the “tech blogging” scene.
• I got REAL busy.
• … then (as if on cue) my laptop hard drive died and I lost 80gb worth of work, emails, files, financial files, music production files, music & more.
  (ps: do not try to tell me how to prevent this in the future, believe it or not - it doesn’t help)

Things are back on track now though and I have also been doign work with an Advertising Agency and it’s really interesting stuff. There’s something fulfilling about harnessing creativity and getting paid for it.

The calm after the storm

So now things are starting to calm down a bit more I have to finish off a bunch of client work and then I will be venturing into the slightly unknown: creating my own sites, ideas & monetising them. Ideally I would like an easy to maintain supplemental income on the side whoile being able to focus on client work 9-5. I have a whole bunch of new ideas for websites and I will be launching them on this blog soon. So stay tuned. Eventually I want to work towards a project that I will create when I am more relaxed

I’m “semi” glad to see Web 2.0 losting its buzz

Web2.0 served it’s purpose to excite the buzz surrounding the web but now it’s petered off. I’m glad about this because people need to focus on real things, not fuzz & fluff hot air ideas that will get you nowhere (case in point: too many to mention).

But truly this point needs a whole post to elaborate completely on the whole situation.

So why would you want to come back here?
Writing in my style is the idea. I just want to make it short, punchy & do stuff a little more creative around here. Plus in the past I focused on absolute shit boring things. Let’s keep it succinct & interesting. You don’t really have to come back but in the future I hope to be writing stuff that will make you come back!

And also in the news!

• I got my first iPod - 30gb video (very nice)
• I’ve been working on a quad g5 (which has just been superceeded, but even still, it rocks)
• I got a pocket watch!(next on the list: smoking jacket & pipe)
• I got a lava lamp (life almost seems complete now)
• I got a new digi cam (flickr here I come)
• I’m getting CDJ’s. (i think i’ll post mixes up on here? who knows!)
• I got some Dreamhost hosting (cheap, huge, fast, reliable - hell what more could you want. want to sign up? use the promo code blaze50 when signing up and it’ll get you $50 off - sweet!)
• I got my first wireless mouse ($15! - late bloomer)
• I still have the same hot girlfriend! (no she hasn’t left me yet! bonus! :p)

Anyway enough of the personal stuff…

Have a good day & thanks for all the fish.

WordPress has really proven itself to be one of the most functional, best looking, easy to use and now scalable blogging applications out there. Here on wordpress.com they have superceeded 200,000 blogs.

Some interesting stats they have posted:

In the past 10 days, WordPress.com bloggers have….

• Created 14,100 blogs
• Added 30,300 static pages
• Tagged 188,259 tags on posts
• Gotten 267,490 comments
• Written 291,000 posts
• Have 779,325 feed subscribers
• Had 6,832,322 pageviews!

That's simply amazing to think that wordpress.com would recieve over 20million hits a month and still manages to handle 200,000 blogs.

Congratulations to Matt & the team for keeping the whole process here easy & painless.

I would reccomend anyone to get a blog here over blogger or any other service.

Take a look at this picture:

Google has made its millions upon millions upon millions of dollars providing relevant content. Why is it then when you click on "Spam" in GMail, that you get an array of recipies to make spam sandwiches, spam bakes and spam tortilla sandwiches (among other things).

Congrats Google, that is not only incredibly relevant but also amazingly useful!

Note: Disregard the following links and just try and use the links on my profile. WordPress can't seem to sort out the linking issue to last.fm.
Well I seem to have been upgraded to a last.fm subscriber (my profile) for now which is great. I get access to a few more feature which are good. Features that have always been free though are listening to radio. I fancy myself as a bit of a DJ or "good music chooser" might be the better choice for now, so why don't you sign up and then click some of the following links to fire up a 128kbits mp3 stream from last.fm of some good tracks.

• Blaze's Personal Radio plays a lot of the music I do, so check that one for some good tracks. It's quite a good match they have there of the stuff I get into, well done lastfm.
• Here's a radio station I made up combining a bunch of my favourite artists at the moment. Quite a disco house style, some french touch and a bit of electro in there too. This seems to play a lot of semi older tracks (80s and 90s style) but it's fantastic.
• I have a bunch of neighbours that like similar music to them, so why not listen to some of Blaze's Neighbours? They surely have some interesting stuff.

I normally wouldn't make a post about something like this but last.fm suprised me with the kind of tracks they were playing. Admittedly I dont listen to very much commercial music but they seem to be getting a lot of it down well.

If you're not on lastfm yet, sign up now and start saving your music history, you never know what you will find in the future. It is truly an exciting place to be.

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 :D. 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.