Woohoo! I am on a roll right now. I am introducing you guys stuff three days in a row! I must be going down with something because I am normally not that hardworking or even that alert. Okay, it’s time to get serious man. I am here to introduce to you yet another great site. This time it is for you people who like to send big files to each other. Nope, not those P2P kind of site but something better and more legal. It’s PipeBytes!

Well, for this site, you don’t need to install anything. Just upload your file from your browser and your friends can download it from their end. They can support a various of browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera too! And the best thing is that you don’t need to wait till the file is completely uploaded before your friends can start to download it. Good for huge files which take sometime to upload. I mean, don’t you just hate waiting for your file to complete the upload before your friends can download? Oh, it seems that they don’t limit the size of the file you can upload, which is a good thing because nowadays even presentation files can get really big. How about big movie files or that mp3 you have just “created”? Yes, PipeBytes support them all. You don’t have to worry about which file types are not supported.

However, do note that this is a single person file sharing (hmmm…..that doesn’t sound right, does it? Maybe 2 person file sharing?). Which means that only one person can download the file unlike the other file sharing sites. I don’t know whether this is a good thing, but it helps cut down the illegal downloading we see very common in the other sites. And best of all, it ensures that your friend get good speeds as well! No leechers hogging all the bandwidth anymore! In a way, this is better for all of us.

Oops, I forgot to mention, this service is provided free. You don’t need to pay anything as it is all supported by advertisements.

Hey, are you a web designer? If you are, then this cool site is for you. I am sure that if you are a web designer, you will face tons of problems with different browsers. So browsers (like Internet Explorer) don’t follow standards and this will cause headaches and problems for you when you design your website. Or for some browsers some CSS will not look right, or the position will be out or the alignment incorrect. Some just plain ugly on certain browsers! You don’t want your visitors to think that you are a crappy pathetic web designer, don’t you? What we usually do is to install a whole lot of different browsers to test out our designs to ensure that most major browsers look okay. But then you have Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera and Safari to install, that’s a hell lot of browsers and a big waste of time and effort. Worse still, you have different operating systems to deal with and it will be next to impossible for you to get different operating systems and different browsers. Guess what kind of nightmare web designers have to face!

So I will now introduce to you Browsershots. Basically, what it does is take snapshots of the site you are designing viewed from different browsers. This way, you can see how it looks like in those browsers without any additional installation. They have different computers which will do the screenshots for you and you can easily test out your creations. You can choose the screen size (so to test which screen looks best for your site), the colour depth, which versions of java and javascript, flash and so on.  So it’s pretty configurable and flexible. Not bad. And the computers (which provide all the screenshots) are all run by volunteers.

I think this is a great service for web designers. Although I won’t say it’s perfect (for example, when I need to test out my designs, it will be for different pages instead of just one page and it would take too long to wait for the snapshots to be uploaded), it’s great to be able to ensure major browsers work with your web design. I am looking forward to a service which allows you to surf on different “simulated” browsers, that would be just great!

If you have been in the webmaster line of “business”, you should have known about a great site called DNS Stuff. It’s a site where you can get all sort of information on your website and domain. For example, if you would like to check whether your email server is accessible and whether there is any problems with your server, you can make use of their service to do that. The best feature they have is the “DNS Report“, in which a complete detailed report on your domain is complied. I have always used this feature to check for problems with my domain names. Think of it as an all in one thingy. You don’t have to use different tools to test everything. And whenever I changed my domain or get a new domain name, I always test them out with the DNS Report provided by DNS Stuff.

However, now it has become a paid service. Sure, the features they have is vey handy and extremely useful, but all the tools you find is actually freely available. So, it’s up to you whether you would like to pay for convenience sake or just visit various websites to get the same information. Even their premium tools can be found in various websites.

For me, I think it’s shame that DNS Stuff has become a paid only service. It was one of the websites I would always recommend webmasters to go whenever they face problems with their domains or websites. It’s easy to use, convenient and provides the necessary information for you to troubleshoot whatever problems your website has. Although the price for membership isn’t that expensive (US$36/year), I think that a lot of people will be turned off. Anyway, if you have the cash to spare, I think it’s a good idea to subscribe to this service. Hopefully, they will continue to improve on their service and add even more features to their website.

How many of you use Dogpile to do your web searches? Well, I do. And I have been using Dogpile for about a year now. It’s okay, you get good results complied for you by Dogpile from different search engines. The “beef” I have with Dogpile is how they combine advertisements or sponsored listings into the results page. And these are listed differently from the rest of the organic search results. Sure, they label it as “Sponsored by” but you need to look carefully at the listings first before you will know that it is actually an advertisement. Worse, these advertisements can do right at the top on the search result list. I did a search for “grill pans” and on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th results, all are advertisements!

I have no problem with Dogpile making some money from advertisements, but at least they should find a more obvious way to differentiate advertisements from organic results. Or just add them with a different colour scheme! Or add a little box around it and to show that these are not the actual organic search. For me, I am used to Dogpile and I know that a lot of their listings are advertisements. But for the casual user, they won’t be able to differentiate them. Since Dogpile has Google adsense listings, isn’t it against Google Adsense’s TOS to do that or did Dogpile have permission from Google? If so, then why is Dogpile given different treatment than from the rest of us?

Don’t get me wrong, I think Dogpile provides a valuable service. Their interface is simple, easy to use and if you feel comfortable with Google, you will feel right at home with Dogpile. But I think combining advertisement with searches and placing them on the top results is just not right. It “tricks” the user into believing that these are actual organic results. A more ethical way is to set them apart visually.

This piece of software, I have been using for over a year now. I used it mainly because I do a lot of web coding and a little web programming myself. Yes, I used it to replace Microsoft’s ridiculously useless and featureless notepad. But I guess Microsoft’s Notepad does what it is suppose to do, do simple editing of text files. Well, if you do web coding, I am sure that you will need something more powerful than that. You definitely need proper formatting because web coding can be very messy and confusing at times. You need highlighted syntax for easily identify mistakes or errors in your coding because you need to save time when doing troubleshooting.

And for the web coding, there is even more! PsPad comes with Colour Selector and Colour Translator for you to choose your site’s colour scheme. And it comes with an eye dropper so that you can get the correct colours for your site. For all you CSS freaks, it comes with a solid CSS editor. Time to perfect that very cool web2.0 site you have and make it even more web2.0.5 or whatever.

PsPad supports opening multiple files in one window. Works pretty well if you have a wide screen monitor. It’s actually kind of cool to be editing two files at the same time, kind of like those hackers you see in the movies. And you can always impress your boss with that trick. Two slave workers for the price of one. And it supports synchronization between the files.

PsPad is free for all but I don’t think it is open source. Anyway, for most of us, it doesn’t really matter right? If it is free, it is free. We just use it. Of course, don’t forget to support the project either by telling your friends and relatves about it or you can give a little donation. I am sure the authour of the software will be glad.

If you are using an older version of PsPad, I would recommend you to upgrade to the latest version. The older version seem to have a bug which prevents PsPad from opening when you open a file directly. It gives an error. Upgrading solves it.

Yes, the latest version of Spybot Search & Destroy is out and this seemed to be the final version for this series. Perhaps in the near future, we will see the beta version of Spybot Search & Destroy v2? Hey, if you don’t know what Spybot does, you are in deep trouble. You should have this software already installed on your PC if you are connected to the Internet. This little freeware helps to keep away those pesky spywares and adwares (irritating advertisements that pop out of nowhere) from your PC. And it comes with non-intrusive real-time protection, something which a lot of other freeware of it’s class doesn’t offer. I have seen the power of this software personally. You know my workplace? It’s a hellhole with tons of spywares and adwares in their PCs. And with this software, I have managed to kill off 90% of the spyware infection that happened in my company. I often used this with spywareblaster and Hijackthis for maximum protection. Oh, all these software are free as well, so it should go down pretty well with your cheapskate boss.

This release deals mainly with the Vista compatibility problem with the later versions. So if you are using Windows Vista and faced a lot of problems with other versions, you are recommended to update your software to v.1.5.1.15. I had just updated mine.

I was surprised that a lot of people don’t use Spybot orhave any sort of spyware protection. Luckily for those on Vista, Vista comes with Windows Defender, which should be up to the task. But still, it’s best to have additional protection against these kind of threats. I am sure everyone hates to see crappy advertisements for adult porn or health supplements on their desktops. And I am sure that everyone hates to see their browser have their homepage hijacked and redirected to some stupid website selling cheap software. Spywares can even slow down your PC significantly and render some other programs unusable. Worse, some of these spywares are actually trojan programs stealing your passwords and information.

Sometimes if Spybot can’t detect or remove some spyware, Hijackthis is very useful to help troubleshoot those spyware problems and you can even ask the experts in their forums for help. I think a combination of different software can offer better protection, especially nowadays with some many spyware whacking havoc on the Internet.

Yes, this is yet another site coming along to help you post your stories or webpage to social bookmarking/networking sites you see on the Internet. Nowadays getting listed in these social networking sites is seen to be the most popular thing to do. I guess youngsters like to feel very community and lovey dovey when they see others doing the same thing as them, which is good actually. The Internet is no longer a place for loners like me, now it has become a web of like minded people converging to their favorite sites. Think of it like honey attracting bees.

And it seems that Search Engines like Social Bookmarking sites very much. Which means that Search Engines, especially Google, takes links on Social Bookmarking Sites like Digg, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon more seriously and give them more weight. How much? I am not sure, I doubt anyone knows for sure either. Thus when people start to realize that, all the SEOers start to submit their client’s webpages to these social networking sites. It became a easy way to get good quality links and unlike directories, your submission usually won’t get rejected. You can also submit deeplinks to these sites without any problems. Actually, they like deeplinks since they are more article/story based. Best of all, it’s free and easy to use.

So now, this is where Tagenie comes in. We know that there are like hundreds of such social networking sites, some of which are pure crap. So Tagenie will list down a list of good quality social networking sites and help you create your URL, Title and description for all of them. You can then submit individually to each social networking site. Hey, what’s the difference from submitting manually you might ask. Well, Tagenie will help you remember which site you have already submitted your story to and once you have submitted, the particular social bookmarking site will be crossed off. No need to take down which sites you have submitted anymore! A life saver for SEOers doing tons and tons of submission. I really like it, though I seldom do mass submissions of my articles or stories to bookmarking sites anymore. I prefer someone else doing it for me.

Oh yes, they have a spelling mistake in their title. Bad boys.

My friend’s Search Engine Site - WebWobot is becoming more and more recognized on the Internet and there have been several people blogging about the website. And I am sure, with that, there will be a massive increase in traffic to WebWobot. I am glad for Scolls (the webmaster of WebWobot) and we all wish him the best and continued success. He build his site from a wee little Search Engine to what is it now, a powerful and well respected Internet Portal. Hey, I am very active in WebWobot’s Search Engine Forum as well, so if you see me there, give me a call as well. I go by the name of Solidghost, because you can put your hands through me. And when the time comes for Scolls to go knocking on Google’s gates, I hope that he will allow me to hold his cloak. It’s my honour!

Why do I often frequent WebWobot forum? Well, the thing that attracts me to the forum is the core group of members (5 to 6 of them) who are pretty easy going. This makes the forum rather relax and visiting the forum enjoyable to say the least. This kind of atmosphere I like very much. And they are very helpful. Unlike other forums where you will get assholes and morons or some big shot moderator trolling the forum, you would not find such members here. You won’t be kicked down hard if you are a newbie in something. You won’t get your face smashed if you disagree with some of the main members. And you definitely won’t get screwed when you make a little joke here and there. This forum just isn’t like that. I guess that is what makes WebWobot forum so damn great to be part of.

The thing is I am afraid that as WebWobot continues to grow and more and more people start to join, we will become like those big forums you see on the web. Oh I am sure Scolls will work hard to prevent that from happening, but we all know how big forums are like and it’s very difficult to control what goes on in a huge forum. Oh well, only time will tell. And we all wish Scolls the best of luck in making his Search Engine one of the best on the Internet.

If you are interested in reading about far away places and destinations, you should take a look at World of Peter. It’s a blog done very nicely by Peter le Roux, brother of the now famous Paul le Roux of Webwobot. I believed I have introduced this little blog before to you guys before, but it deserves another introduction for those who have missed the first one. You can read about exotic travels and places which you have only dreamed about traveling to. I know, it’s not the same as being there, but this is the next best thing.

And oh, check out this little post on South Africa. The ironic thing is that it is posted under the category Short Stories. I wonder how long will the post be if is posted under the some other category? 1 million words?? Anyways I have always enjoyed reading stuff like these. You know, stuff like brand new places, it’s history, it’s beauty, interesting events and the people and accomplishments they done there. And Peter writes it so well, makes me all both weepy and fuzzy inside. I didn’t know that South Africa has so many natural beauty and landmarks. It makes my head spin! After reading Peter’s blog, I feel the urge to drop everything and row my little leaky raft from Singapore to South Africa. If I only knew which way is West and if you can stand me saying “Are we there yet?” every few minutes. I mean, comparing Singapore to South Africa is like comparing this blog to Matt Cutt’s. There is no real fight. In Singapore, we have just the hot sun and ugly concrete buildings. The women here are not even pretty.

Let’s drink a toast to our South African friends with extremely strong alcoholic drinks!

PS: My keyboard is a bit flaky these days. The spacebar seemed not to work at will, so if you find the some words are stuck together, blame the keyboard, not me. Or just blame the years of accumulation of bits and pieces of food stuck beneath the keys. Have any of you wonder what lies beneath the keys in your keyboard? I don’t want to even think about it. Yucks.

Bet you guys never heard of this site before, right? It’s not that well-known and it’s now only at Beta. Well, RobotReplay is actually a web analytics script just like Google Analytics. They take information from your visitors and compile them into a user friendly interface for you to see how well your site is performing. It also tells you where your visitors are from and which pages of your site is the most popular. What makes RobotReplay different and unique is that it records and plays back your site visitors actions. Sort of like a video recording of your site with different visitors moving their cursor and clicking on your links. Very nice huh?

The advantage is that you can use this information to see which links or area of your site attracts most of your visitors. And where your visitors eye tend to look at. So if a particular area is where most visitors would look at (by checking which area their mouse pointer is pointing at), perhaps that is a good place to have your important links or even your advertisements where they would be more likely to be clicked. You also can use this script to see where your visitors get bored and leave your site so that you can improve on the usability of your site. Furthermore, they have this form replay function where you can see whether your forms is too tedious for your visitors or not. Good for testing out what kind of detailed information your visitors would be willing to provide to you as well.

The possiblity of this script is endless. You can use this replay to do many things to improve your website. Although it is not meant for Search Engine Optimization, but a website is all about the human visitors, not about Search Engine. Improving user experience will attract even more visitors to your site.

And furthermore, this script is free. All you need to do is to sign up and install a little script on their site and the watch their recordings! It is no hassle either.