Category Archives: Internet

Pssst… Wanna buy a domain?

I’ve owned custard.net.au for many years. It’s named after my (perhaps poorly thought-up) business name. Indeed, net.au and com.au names have to be attached to a registered business name.

It used to be that generic .com.au names weren’t generally available, so custard.net.au couldn’t be bought — though sausage.com.au somehow got through the net. When they opened them up, some bakery grabbed custard.com.au, then completely failed to use it.

I forgot all about this until today, when the good folk at Melbourne IT, Australia’s longest running registrar, gave me a ring to let me know it had lapsed, and asked if I’d like to buy it.

The lady on the phone made one fatal mistake: she tried to sell it as part of a package, with some kind of pre-built placeholder whiz-bang web site attached to it, for the grand total of A$595. It should have been obvious from looking at my existing site that not only do I know how to put a web site up, but also that I’m not exactly doing stellar things with the site I do have, so it’s not exactly compelling for me to own the .com.au. And therefore if I wanted to buy the domain, it would be for as little dosh as possible. She really should have pitched it at the budget level.

I declined. Though of course, depending on how quickly I move, I could buy it anyway, though them or anybody else.

But I don’t think I will. It’s a business name I haven’t been entirely comfortable with recently, and it’s only maintained because I have to have a shelf-company to do contracting work through (well, and because breaking my existing email addresses and web pages hosted on it is against my religion).

IE Gets Tabs

Internet Explorer now has tabs.

You can get them by installing the MSN Toolbar, which should also give you the fantastic (yes, I a truly wonderful Microsoft product, even it it based on Lookout) MSN desktop search.

I’ve only just installed it but it looks okay so far.

Using Atomz free search with WordPress

I’ve set up the Atomz free search to index both my old site toxiccustard.com and my personal blog at danielbowen.com together. Atomz allows you to specify multiple entry points for its crawler, putting all the specified sites into the one index.

Given the free search only allows 750 documents in its index, the catch with WordPress is to avoid it indexing individual blog entries, but doing the monthly pages instead. This is done using the URL Masks feature, so for instance with my blog structure of danielbowen.com/year/month/day/entry-slug I specify

exclude regexp http://www.danielbowen.com/..../../../*

The other ones I’ve excluded are RSS feeds (which it chokes on, and wastes processing time on), comments and category URLs.

exclude http://www.danielbowen.com/category/*
exclude http://www.danielbowen.com/comments/*
exclude regexp http://www.danielbowen.com/*/feed/*

This keeps my current total number of pages (both domains together) down to 519, which is pretty good, and well under the 750 limit for the freebie version.

It’s also handy in that the crawler logs broken links. I’ve got quite a few that have shown up as I move my old blog archives into WordPress, so I can just work through the list and fix them.

RSS adverts go mainstream

Google has moved RSS adverts into a wider beta, and Robert Scoble has been considering the benefits or otherwise of them. And he ranks types of feeds from worst (Headline only, with ads) to best (Full text with no ads).

Deciding whether or not to put adverts in your RSS (and indeed if your feed has all your text or just the partial text) is, I think, a matter of what you’re trying to do with your content. To bring it to total black and white, are you trying to make money, or get your ideas out?

Reality, of course, is shades of grey. For one thing, if you go the total black option (headlines only, ads in the feed, and presumably more ads on the site — since that’s the only reason you’d want to provide only headlines in the feed) then unless your content is pretty damn compelling, you’ll get no readers (at least not from feeds, and this is increasingly the way people consume their web sites), and thus no money, and your content goes nowhere.

Other end of the scale (full text in feeds, no ads anywhere) is okay, as long as you don’t get snowed under by readers, and end up paying so much in bandwidth that you can’t afford it anymore. Not likely these days, but theoretically possible, especially if your content is multimedia.

For most of us, I suspect, the balance is somewhere closer to white than black.

Daniel’s new box – part 3

I asked Tony if he knew anything about a good broadband sharing router to buy. Now I’m a two PC household again, no way was I going back to using Internet Connection Sharing. Okay, so it works, but it’s fiddly, your main PC has to be on to use the second one, and getting the firewall (ZoneAlarm Pro) to work with it was a buncha hassle.

Tony said get a LinkSys WRT54G Wireless-G Broadband Router. So I did. Well okay, I read up on it a bit first to verify it was what I wanted, and then I got it. Widely available in AU for about A$130.

I don’t actually need wireless at the moment, but may at some stage, so I can turn it on then. It was surpisingly easy to do the basic setup… I’m betting there’ll be more hassles though when I try to get the work extranet software and BitTorrent running with its firewall (and the XP SP2 firewall), as well as enabling file and print sharing between the two PCs.

(Here’s one page about BitTorrent and firewalls, and ooh lookie, a shiny new page that uses the same model router as I just got as its example!)

Next step is to load up the new PC with all its software, and move my files over. I doubt I’ll write about it here unless something spectacularly bad or amusing happens though.

Is Windows getting too net-centric?

Searching Microsoft Office onlineIs Windows (and Office) getting too net-centric?

Case 1: Printer drivers

I hooked up my Lexmark E322 printer to my new computer. Windows XP recognised it, then wanted to go out onto the Internet to get the driver. But the computer’s not online yet. The XP CD apparently doesn’t have the driver. I suppose I could use a separate (online) computer to go to Lexmark’s web site and find a driver, but isn’t that over-complicating things? If XP knows what the printer is, why doesn’t it have the driver on the disc?

(Hey, here’s the web page for Lexmark’s E322 drivers. Someone please tell me it’s some kind of sick joke having three URLs embedded in one like that.)

Case 2: Office 2003 help

To take a theoretical example, search in Word Help for mail merge. It searches Office Online, then presents me with some options. The most useful one turns out to be on their web site.

Obviously having a lot of this content online is beneficial in reducing what is installed on local machines, and even the size of install packages on CDs. It also lets the vendors easily keep software and content up to date.

But… What if my network’s down for the day? What if I’m in a corporate environment and haven’t been granted Net access through the firewall? What if I’m setting up a PC for my mother to use just for word processing, with strictly no Net access?

Today I can re-install and use old versions of Windows, including printer drivers and application help, without network connectivity. Will the same be said for Windows XP in ten years? What if Microsoft drops support for it, including their online driver library? Will Office 2003 still have help available at the end of this decade?

Of course it’s not possible to keep users’ CDs or computers updated with the latest drivers and help files, but shouldn’t at least a basic version of these essential materials be available without network connectivity?

PS. Even after I did get the PC connected to the Innanet, when it tried to go get the driver by itself, it couldn’t find it. So I’ll be downloading it from Lexmark after all.

Firefox critical vulnerability

Firefox - Safer, faster, betterWith Firefox trumpeting itself as “Safer, faster, better” it’s fashionable to think of the product as being inherently safer than its opposition (primarily IE). It’s not. Mozilla has acknowledged a major vulnerability in Firefox, and with no fix available, is saying that the workaround is to switch off Javascript, and disable software installation.

Switching off Javascript renders a large chunk of the web unusable. Yeah, you can manually turn it back on for sites you trust… but who has the time to do that? And among the general non-geek populace, who has the knowledge to do it?

Of course, the likelihood of actually falling victim to this problem is pretty small. But if you’re tempted to switch back to IE, make sure it’s securely set up. One option is to use a security lockdown registry hack.

Meanwhile the neato Tiger Dashboard widgets facility that Andy’s been talking about appears to have its weaknesses too. Whoops.

Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t be so critical, especially since the stuff I code isn’t necessarily miraculously vulnerability-free. But then, I’m not coding browsers installed on millions of desktops.

Google tests RSS adverts

Google is testing ads in RSS.

I was reluctant at first to switch geekrant.org to providing full RSS feeds (entire posts, not just extracts), as it would reduce the already-paltry revenue from Adsense. But really, any revenue from Adsense is a bonus in this game, it’s not the end game unless you’re racking up a gazillion hits a day. The main point is to get your blogs read.

This however has the potential of re-gaining some of that advert revenue, even if readers are getting to you via an RSS aggregator. Question is, would people find it too annoying to find adverts mid-feed? If I personally found it too annoying, could I bring myself to include ads in my feeds?

Here we get about 4 times as many hits on the RSS feed as on the home page. But of course we have no idea how many people read that RSS feed, since it goes to places like Newsgator which might get it seen by hundreds of people.

It’ll be something to watch, anyway.

PS. Friday 8am. Dave Winer on RSS ads: “If we wanted to, as an industry, reject the idea, we could, by asking the people who create the software to add a feature that strips out all ads.”

What next? MyGoogle?

Google has announced search history, and unlike your browser’s field history, it’s attached to your Google account, so it’ll follow you around between computers.

So, let’s see, we’ve got email via Gmail, news headlines from Google News (including personalised news alerts), discussions in Google Groups and now your own search history. How long before a fully-fledged portal brings them all together onto one page? They could call it MyGoogle. (Whoops, they’ve already registered it…)