Frederick's Timelog

A sad week for web hosts

It’s a sad week (well, two weeks) for web hosts. First, the company with which I have been a customer for over 2 years encountered issues after migrating to a new datacenter; these problems broke a number of my sites and caused me unending headaches. Then DreamHost, which hosts this blog and a number of other sites, had to perform network hardware maintenance, which was followed by sporadic periods of network failures. Finally, today I received an e-mail saying that the first company was shutting down in January and that I’d need to find a new place to host those sites.

What happened? Why do I feel like the Internet is collapsing? Aiya!

I’m really disappointed. More »

4 online document hosting services

Over a year ago, I compared two online services designed specifically for PowerPoint slideshows. Today, I want to review 4 free online document hosting services that take your document files and convert them to a format that can be embedded and shared on the Internet.

I’ll be giving scores based on these factors:

• Web site design / usability
• Compatibility
• Converted appearance
• Embeds

In case you’re wondering, these 4 document publishing services are Docstoc, edocr, Issuu and Scribd. Of these, Scribd and Docstoc are likely the best known and the best established.

I should give a warning for those on low bandwidth connections: this is a screenshot/media-heavy post.

More »

Won a contest

I just found out this afternoon that I was the 1st place winner of a giveaway contest at OMNINOGGIN, so I get to have a free custom banner design from buytemplates.net.

(As a side note, I think the links or ads on the high traffic and high ranking site are generally more valuable to me than the custom banner design. But then again, those are only for 30 days… so I’ll stick with this valuable prize.)

Now I have to decide: what do I want to promote with the banners that will be designed? Should it be one of my sites (for instance, this blog?), an affiliate product or service, or… perhaps… a social/political cause?

Help me choose.

Blog scraping

As a blogger, I’ve encountered the issue of trackback/pingback spam coming from splogs that scrape content. It is sometimes frustrating when a new post is immediately reproduced on spammy sites that do nothing but scrape content from other sites.

It used to be that these splogs would just quote the content word-for-word and add a link to the original source. As time went on, search engines and other tools became aware of them, and these sites were short-lived, as many of them made it onto blacklists.

Yesterday I posted about the Mercedes GLK, a sponsored blog post that was quickly and automatically copied by a splog.

I noticed something new. Instead of simply copying the original text, this splog uses computer intelligence to replace words with synonyms, evading duplicate content detection and content theft tools.

The first screenshot is my original post from yesterday. The lower screenshot is from the splog.

Original content from my blog

Splog's stolen content

Now what? What will we see next from Webmasters who attempt to profit from scraping content?

Easier Web Designing

A lot of people (including myself) design Web sites with a clear process:

1. Think of ideas.
2. Make a mockup in Photoshop.
3. Convert to XHTML/CSS
4. Tweak design.
5. Add functionality.

Normally, the step that takes the most work is the third one: converting the Photoshop mockup to XHTML and CSS.

Fortunately, there are services out there to take care of this step. Many people already know PSD2HTML, an established name in this field, but there’s an interesting new competitor called HTML Markup.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t use these services because of their (typically) high prices. However, if I needed it done extremely quickly, these services are probably the best choices.

HTML Markup offers affordable Photoshop to HTML conversion at lower prices. They convert to HTML or XHTML/CSS, and advertise their services as cross-platform compatible on IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari; PSD2HTML, on the other hand, charges $9 for Safari compatibility and $9 for Opera compatibility. HTML Markup will also make sure that the output is optimized for the Web.

More »

Customizing 404 error pages (on WordPress blogs)

If you’ve ever seen a 404 error (“not found”), you’ll relate to the frustration that users experience when all they get is a “Sorry, can’t help you” type of message.

That’s why I’ve customized the 404 errors on Frederick’s Timelog to be a bit more user-friendly.

If you go to any random non-existent page (for instance, http://www.frederickding.com/posts/234u0af) you will come up against a 404 page with an evident error. The red background immediately indicates a problem, while the blue section indicates possible remedies.

On a random URL, the possible remedies are limited to a site search. However, if you go to a misspelling (for instance, http://www.frederickding.com/podcasts as opposed to http://www.frederickding.com/podcast), there’s a neat feature that says “Go to [the correct URL]“.

How was this accomplished? (Code samples follow after the jump.)

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Follow me on Twitter

I’ve been using Twitter for about a month now, and the characteristic signs of Twitter addiction are beginning to show. That’s why I’d like for you to follow me on Twitter.

All you have to do is create a Twitter account and click the follow button under my name. You’ll be alerted of all of my future tweets (only about one message a day or less) and you can post your own 140-character messages as well.

Go on, see what I’ve been posting on Twitter.

Two online PowerPoint hosting services

In this post, I’m going to compare two online PowerPoint hosting services (like YouTube, but for your slideshows) — SlideBoom and SlideShare — by looking at details regarding:

• Web site design
• Compatibility
• Slideshow appearance
• Embeddable player

More »