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"Internet"
For those of you unaware of the January 18th blackout, reddit is leading the charge against SOPA/PIPA by completely blacking out the site from 8AM through 8PM on January 18th, 2012. Although Chai Life has no where near the clout and some tiny insignificant fraction of the traffic that reddit gets, I will be blacking out this site in protest during that time as well. When you visit Chai Life on this coming Wednesday, you can expect a blank page with no content and a simple link explaining why.
Note: The latest news on this front is that SOPA has been indefinitely shelved in the Congress, but PIPA still lives on in the Senate. This fight is not over and this does not affect my plans for a blackout.
For those of you unaware that the future of the Internet is at stake, following infographic will fill you in.
For as long as I can remember, I have been registering my domain names with GoDaddy. My reasoning wasn’t that they were necessarily the best registrar, but more so that they were cheap. Whenever it’s time to refresh my domains, I just look up a GoDaddy coupon code and tack on another year or two. Anyone who has been their customer before probably knows that doing any kind of transaction with them involves a shitstorm of upsells throughout every step of the process. It really isn’t hard to ignore them (and occasionally uncheck some “default” upsells), but it is annoying. Still, I never really felt motivated to switch to another registrar.
Lately, however, our ever-productive Congress has been pushing through bills that would allow the government to set up “The Great Firewall” of the United States, under the guise of stopping online piracy. These bills, known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, have caused outrage throughout the Internet. They’ve even summoned opposition from some impressively large websites, including Google, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and many more. It was Reddit, however, that has so far made the biggest news in the fight against SOPA/PIPA, by targeting it’s supporters. As it turns out, GoDaddy is not only a large supporter of the bill, but they have had at least a small part in drafting it. There is even an exemption included in the bill for registrars such as GoDaddy. Reddit organized and promoted a mass migration away from GoDaddy in to the arms of another registrar that is anti-SOPA/PIPA. Likely the largest single benefactor of this mass exodus has been a company called Namecheap. Not only are they against the bills, but they openly publicize it on the top of their site and offer a nice coupon code (STOPsopa) to give you a discount on the transfer of new domains. (Note: Since this all started, GoDaddy has first dismissed the boycott, then backpedaled a bit on their support, and most recently they claim to oppose the bill entirely. I know bullshit when I see it.)
Based on how open they are with their opposition and how good their pricing is, Namecheap is who I chose as the new registrar for Chai Life and all of my other domains. I quickly created an account and started the ball rolling. Although I’ve only been a customer of theirs for a day now, I have already noticed two major differences between Namecheap and GoDaddy. First and foremost, the upsells were extremely mild, at worst. Do they offer features above and beyond what I was looking for? Of course they do and I would expect them to at least let me know that they are available. GoDaddy’s strategy, however, is akin to throwing shit at a fan. At times, GoDaddy even attempts to trick you in to paying for more than what you want/need by having added “features” checked by default or making them appear essential. Secondly, Namecheap’s interface is so clean and organized. Everything I’ve needed to do has been easy to find and simple to understand. GoDaddy’s domain manager is the exact opposite and their website in general is a cluserfuck of horrible design choices.
Although my tiny account will not be the straw that breaks GoDaddy’s back, I am proud to have done my part. Now it’s your turn.
Confused? Know your meme.
Source: Unknown.
For a very long time, pretty much as long as I’ve used Twitter, I’ve gone by a policy of following back whoever follows me. This has gotten me a lot of followers, but I also ended up following about 1200 accounts, many of which were nothing but non-stop spam. It eventually got to the point where I not only didn’t care about my feed, but I couldn’t even look at it because there were dozens of new posts a minute, about 97% of which were spam.
After going back and forth on how to handle this for a week or two now, I made my decision today. I unfollowed about 1000 people, keeping only those that I was actually at least somewhat interested in following. The result? My twitter feed is no longer a clusterfuck of spam, retweets, and #hashtags. I feel as though for the first time since I started using twitter, I actually have a desire to check my feed and see what’s going on in my now greatly reduced twitterverse.
Although there are plenty of ways to manage a large number of followers, such as setting up lists, I’m happy with the way I handled it and will no longer worry about some sort of imaginary etiquette that demands I follow anyone who follows me.
So, if you’re interested in following me, please feel free, but unless you seem like someone who’s tweets I would enjoy, don’t necessarily expect a follow back.
As with pretty much anything that’s new, there’s always a learning curve. Google+ is no different and there are some fun and interesting features along with new and different ways to do things. With that in mind, I’ve thrown together a cheat sheet for anyone who’s interested in learning some of the basic ins and outs of G+.
| Post Formatting | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| *Text* | → | Text | You can mix and match any of the text formats to the left. | Mention other people in your posts by prefixing their name with either the + or @ symbols. |
| _Text_ | → | Text | ||
| -Text- | → |
Sharing |
||
|---|---|---|
| You can add links, photos, or videos in your post by dragging and dropping them in to the share box. | Private messages aren’t an obvious feature, but you can do it by sharing with only one person and disabling reshare. | Clicking on the timestamp for any post will take you to a permalink for that post’s page. |
| To prevent someone from sharing your post, click on the arrow at the top-right of the post and select “Disable Reshare”. | ||
 Blue: Only people in the selected circle will see the post.
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||
 Green: People outside of your circles will see the post.
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| Circles and +1 | |
|---|---|
| Circles function kind of like a combination of groups on Facebook and following someone on Twitter. You are following anyone in your circle, but they do not necessarily have to approve you or have you in one of their circles. | Clicking +1 on Google+ or elsewhere on the web is similar to “Like” on Facebook. Clicking it once will +1 that post, clicking it again will remove it. Clicking it on a post will not show in your stream, clicking +1 elsewhere on the web will. |
| Hotkeys | ||
|---|---|---|
| Space | → | Scroll down Stream |
| Shift-Space | → | Scroll up Stream |
| J | → | Scroll down Single Post | K | → | Scroll up Single Post |
| Q | → | Jump to Chat |
| Return | → | Start a Comment |
| Tab, Return | → | Submit Comment |
If you’re aware of any errors above or anything that you think should be included here or has been added to Google+ since I posted this, please leave a comment and I’ll be sure to add it.
Dear Facebook,
Every time you release an update or tweak to your iPhone client, it becomes an even larger piece of shit while simultaneously not actually adding any worthwhile features from the standard site. From what I hear, you don’t even have a native iPad app yet. I can’t speak to your Android app, but knowing your iOS development cycle, I doubt it is any better. Frankly, this is pathetic. For a company that has it’s finger on the pulse of social networking more than any other, you seem to be neglecting an increasingly apparent future in mobile platforms. If you don’t want to get bitch-slapped by the likes of Google+ and Twitter, both of which embrace mobile usage at their very core, it might be time to pump some much-needed development in to native mobile applications. Your iOS and Android apps should mirror the features of today’s and tomorrow’s Facebook, not the Facebook of 2-3 years ago as it currently does. Until that happens, you’re just about begging something like Google+ to usurp your throne.
Sincerely,
Someone who likes your service, but will jump ship if you keep acting like you’re the only game in town.
Hello, this is the part where I kill you!
If you, like myself, have been a long-time Firefox user, then the following reasons I’m switching to Chrome may interest you.
- Speed
I haven’t bothered looking with any depth in to benchmarks or anything like that, but when I click that Chrome icon on my dock, it is instantly open. Firefox, however, takes several seconds to show up. Any defender of Firefox, my former self included, would brush this off as the fault of various installed plug-ins, but I’ve tracked down and installed all of the same or comparable Chrome extensions (plus one or two new ones that looked neat) and it still opens like lightning. Page loads seem faster as well, but they were still pretty fast in Firefox once it was open, so that one is a close call. - Extensions
Whether you call them plug-ins (Firefox) or extensions (Chrome), they are what makes a modern-day browser awesome. AdBlock is obviously a must-have (although I disable it on my favorite sites and/or sites that aren’t completely obnoxious about ads), but some of the other Firefox plugins that I’ve found Chrome counterparts for that are as good or better than those available for Firefox are Chrome SEO, StumbleUpon, and Ultimate Chrome Flag. A big part of what has held be back from switching to Chrome earlier was the lack or limited ability of a few of those. - Standards
Whether or not you are aware of what web standards are or how they make your web browsing experience better, they are important. Some browsers (I’m looking at you, IE) have long ignored this fact and it has hurt them in the long run. One of the very first things I do when I install a new browser or major update is run the latest Acid test. As seen below, Chrome currently ranks extremely well (Hint: 100/100 is perfect), whereas the latest version of Firefox “only” scores a 97. - PDF Support
If you, like me, view a lot of PDFs from various websites across the net, then you’d expect your web browser to natively be able to just view them inline without thinking twice. This works flawlessly in Chrome without any 3rd party extensions. In Firefox, however, you used to need a third party extension to get it to work and in the latest version that has stopped working and development on an update is all but abandoned because it would require a rewrite. Why Mozilla doesn’t just integrate this in to Firefox is beyond me, but thankfully Google felt it necessary for Chrome.
So there you have it. On both my home and work computers, Google Chrome is now the primary web browser. Between the speed with which they update it, the ever-growing selection of high quality extensions, and the features already built in, it will likely stay the default web browser on any computer I use for some time to come.
See this:
Picture and hear this:
I don’t know exact numbers, but it is probably a safe assumption that the Facebook app for the iPhone is likely one of the all-time most used 3rd party apps. That being the case, why does Facebook continually expand and improve upon its web-based features, while all but completely ignoring its mobile iPhone platform? Sure, they integrated the “Places” feature pretty rapidly after it was introduced, but it has so far been a flop (Does anyone know anyone who actually checks in somewhere other than their own house using Facebook Places?). Aside from that, they’ve largely left the application completely alone except for minor bug fixes here and there. I’m not proposing anything huge here, but I’ve got some ideas for features I’d love to see integrated in to Facebook’s iPhone app.
- Liking Comments
This feature has been integrated in to Facebook for a while now. Would it really be so hard to update the app so I can swipe a comment to like/unlike it? - Properly Attaching Links & Videos
There are three main status updating options: Text, Photos, Links, Videos. Is there some reason that the latter two on that list don’t make the cut for the iPhone? Last I checked, the newer iPhones handle video quite nicely and can easily copy/paste a link from Safari in Facebook. - Tagging Friends/Pages
This is one of the changes they’ve made lately that really made sense to me. Why this handy little feature hasn’t made its way over to the iPhone is beyond me. - Ignoring Applications
Everyone’s got at least one Facebook friend who uses every quiz, game, etc, that spams their Facebook wall every single time they beat a level or take a quiz. PLEASE let me ignore whatever new annoying application they’ve found from my phone, so I don’t have to remember to look back and find it next time I’m using the web interface.
That’s it for now. Maybe whatever monkey they’ve got programming their iPhone app will see this and take note. Anything else you’d like to see that I missed? Please comment and let the world know.
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