Recent Finds – NinjaFollow, The Fish Puzzle, Ajax Effects + More
Sunday, December 7th, 2008 | Hack, Open Source, Tools, Twitter, Utilities, Yahoo, photo-manipulation | No Comments
NinjaFollow
Need to unfollow or follow Twitter users in bulk? This website is for you. Quick and easy tool that utilizes Twitter’s API to mass-follow/unfollow
Coudal – The Fish Puzzle
Have some time to waste? Good, you’ll need it!
20 Ajax Effects You Need To Learn
Tutorials and source code, just how I like it.
Smush.it Image Optimizer
Quick and easy website that will optimize your images for viewing on the web. It’s an open-source project run by one of the members of Yahoo!’s “Exceptional Performance Team” – The same group that put out their YSlow Firefox application!
Enjoy!
Rep. Charles Rangel and The Pair Of $40,000 Websites
Friday, December 5th, 2008 | Funny, News, Random, Unusual | No Comments
The Politico has just reported that New York Democratic Representative Charles Rangel has paid his son nearly $80,000 for two horrible looking campaign websites. While it is technically not illegal, if I was paying taxes in the state of New York I probably wouldn’t have appreciated paying for that.
Here’s the only one that they listed, www.nationalleadershippac.com , but judging from the design & execution, I can’t imagine the other being any better.
This is so bad that I think it might resemble those old MS Frontpage templates. Not only that but images are blurry, improperly cropped and there are spelling/grammatical errors throughout the site!
And to think that this is what a $40,000 website looks like! My favorite part is in the left sidebar, I’ve taken the liberty of taking a screen shot of it for you. What kind of professional would ever go live with the following still on the site:
$40,000 and he couldn’t even out-source it for $200 to any number of the cheap freelance sites that are available? Thats amazing!
According to The Politico,
“Steven Rangel’s firm was paid roughly $2,500 on a monthly basis—less than the firm that had previously managed Congressman Rangel’s Web and on-line operation (Network Politics)—and the firm’s fees included money for Web advertising designed to promote traffic to the Web site.”
Ouch!
eBay Holiday Giveaway Thwarted By Automated Script
Thursday, December 4th, 2008 | Business, Hack, News, Promotion, eBay | No Comments
Apparently eBay’s in trouble for their recent $1 Holiday Doorbusters Giveaway, where they ‘randomly’ give out 100 gifts ranging from GPS devices, jewelry and even a new Chevrolet Corvette for only $1 (with a new item given away each day). The catch? eBay isn’t going to tell you what item is being given away each day or even what category it’ll be in….a plan that apparently was full of holes.
The contest was brought down to a screeching halt on Tuesday when hundreds of users began using automated scripts that would continuously bid on items for $1 in an attempt to secure the winning bid even before the actual auction page goes public. This then resulted in a large crowd of the more ‘honest’ users becoming furious at eBay for letting these rogue ‘script kiddies’ get away with cheating the system….evidence of which can be found throughout the eBay public forums.
The script in question is right now all over the internet. You can find it for sale on RentACoder for $20 or even for free in various forums.
Poor eBay.
.Tel Domain Names Now On Sale
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 | Business, New Beginnings, News | No Comments
Starting today you can purchase your very own .tel domain name. Regulated through Telnic, you’re forced to submit your contact information through their forms in order to submit a request to purchase a desired domain. The opening up of this TLD will be held in three phases.
The current ‘Sunrise’ phase only allows for trademark holders to register their .tel domain name (and they have to pay a pretty penny to secure it – ), the rest of us will have to wait until the ‘Landrush’ phase which begins on February 3, 2009. It will then be opened up to the public on March 24, 2009.
This TLD brings a whole new slew of potential vanity domain names to mind so it should be interesting to see what comes out of it. I can only imagine how valuable names like ‘cantyou.tel’ will go for on the auction block come March.
The downside to this new offering is the limited usage that is permitted by Telnic. Right now you can’t even upload your own company logo to be used on the domain purchased and according to their website, its primary purpose is to act as some sort of global address/phone-book. Also, the pricing for the general public release looks like it’ll be close to $20 for a one-year contract – far more expensive than your typical .com or .net domain.
Add SEO Friendly Social Media Links To WordPress
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 | Blogging, Hack, Open Source, Promotion, SEM, Tools, Twitter | No Comments
Jeff from over at Perishable Press has just posted a handy guide to adding code to your WordPress theme that will enable you to offer SEO-Friendly, fully validating social media links for each of your pages or posts. If you want the easy way of adding social media links to your blog, there are countless WordPress plugins that will do just that, this method is for those of you who want to use as few plugins as possible (a real lean mean blogging machine!)
He gives the code for Delicious, Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Blinklist, Furl, Reddit and AddThis (with more sites provided in the comments).
Here’s an example for Digg.com:
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Submit this post to Digg">Digg this!</a>
In order to add the code to each post, edit the single.php and paste in the appropriate code before the comments PHP tag. So you’d paste it before:
< ?php comments_template(); ?>
To add the code to your pages, edit page.php and paste the appropriate code after the PHP tag for your page content. So depending on your theme you’d paste it after:
< ?php the_content(); ?>
To have the links appear on the homepage after the end of each post, edit index.php and paste the appropriate code after the content PHP tag, though it might differ depending on your theme. So you’d paste the code this time after:
< ?php the_content(__('Read more'));?>
Go check out the full post for more examples.
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