Category: web services

  • Tivo-Amazon link is cool but what’s the value?

    Amazon and Tivo unveiled their joint downloadable video service today. The basic concept is you purchase video content on Amazon’s Unbox service and it automatically downloads onto your home Tivo, where it appears on your “Now Playing” list alongside shows you recorded yourself. It’s obviously yet another way to get downloaded content from the Internet…

  • Getting more info with Feedburner

    (Updated 2/19 with widget info) I added a MyBlogLog account the other day to get more info about who’s reading my blog but the hole in that strategy is that MyBlogLog only counts people coming to my web site, not those who read entries via RSS. So I’ve now switched my RSS feed sign ups…

  • Mine wifi eyes doth deceive me

    Hmm…just the other day, it seemed like the installation of Netgear’s 85-megabits-per-second Powerline switches had sped up my home office link to the net. It may have been an optical illusion. Just now, at least according to Speakeasy’s broadband speed test, my wifi download speed in my home office, which used to seem so weak,…

  • Plugins to the rescue on tagging posts

    (Updated 2/22) I was complaining the other day about WordPress categories not helping me tag things appropriately for blog search sites like Technorati. Andrew Watson, who writes the blog Changingways, commented that there are plug-ins for WordPress. So I’ve dropped in Bunny’s Technorati Tags and we’ll see how it goes. (Update) Well, this week I…

  • Waiting on the WordPress 2.1 update

    I always say wait on upgrades to key software and the newest version of WordPress is no exception. Let somebody else work the kinks out while I keep getting work done. I’ll get the same new gee-whiz features a week or two later while avoiding all the disasters and head aches suffered by the early…

  • Shifting to Interarchy for online backup at S3

    Well, Jungledisk has driven me bananas for the last time. As I blogged back in October and December, I have been messing around with using Jungledisk as a front end to Amazon’s insanely cheap online storage services, S3. Want to save 20 gigabytes of photo and music files? It’s just $3 a month, plus a…

  • Tags aren’t categories and vice versa

    Begin rant: One thing that annoys me about the otherwise fabulous WordPress software that runs this blog relates to categories and tags. Categories, which run along the side of most blogs (look to the right), tell you about general topics a blogger has written about that might be of interest. Sort of somewhere between an…

  • About time, Starbucks and iTunes

    Something like 20 years ago, I first encountered Hear Music as a catalog of cool albums selected by some people with taste like mine. They may have pioneered the idea of getting recommendations from favorite artists. It was a great way to learn about old stuff like the blues and jazz, too. But like many…

  • Everbody’s thinking about S3 for backup

    I can see today that I’m hardly the only one messing around with Amazon’s super-cheap S3 online storage system as a possible off-site backup strategy. Jeremy Zawodny, whose has been wanting/predicting solid online backup for a while, says he’s experimenting with S3, but doesn’t give all the details yet (like what software is he using,…

  • Speedy blogs, speedily updated on VoIP

    Once upon a time, I kept stacks of computer magazines on hand just in case I was suddenly in the market for some gadget reviewed months earlier. Now a days, of course, the Internet has completely subsumed that role and it’s usually not the web sites of big magazines that even run the best reviews.…