Archive for June, 2009
BlogBackupr it’s a simple and nice web app that automatically backups all your posts in your blog. It represents a very easy way for you to not worry so much about vulnerabilities in the platform, loosing data, accidental deletion, etc.
It works with all blogs that have RSS-feed, that is the minimum requirement. Among the features that you can find in this web app:
- Completely free.
- No installation required.
- Once you register, the backups are performed regularly without requiring your intervention.
- You can export and import all those backups whenever you want.
- Automatic restore supported for WordPress.org, WordPress.com and Blogger.com
- WordPress users include these backups: full posts, comments, pages, categories and media.
- You can have backups without giving your WordPress credentials. Will just use the public feed.
- CSS file and images from the blog template are also saved.
This is your administration site where you can execute all necessary tasks with the added blogs:
Go ahead, give it a try.
Upon the Death of Michael Jackson on Thursday just after midday, there wasn’t much media attention for over two hours. At first, media stories circulated while everyone tried to make sense of it all. When Jackson’s brother made a statement at 2.26 pm LA time, the news papers and TV broadcasters went into a frenzy thinking up headlines for the evening papers and the 6 o’ clock news – all the while the web was left to its own disorganised devices.
Wikipedia and Twitter came under attack with slanderous comments and hoax stories of what really happened. Numerous posts were made to Jackson’s Wikipedia page while many blogged about the singer’s life, and at that time ‘apparent’ death.
The first confirmed reports surfaced after 4pm just when the American nation were settling in from work. However, the Europeans were already tucked up in bed none the wiser.
Here I am in Ireland waking up on Friday morning with a text message from a friend in America. It was a joke about the singer’s death. I couldn’t make head or tails of it but when I powered up my laptop Yahoo! Headlines carried the story in full. I was shocked by the story while America was already fully informed.
Astonishingly, many ticket sales sites carried on selling tickets to fans unaware of the singer’s death until midday Friday. Other sites carried news stories of Jackson’s death while displaying advertisements for his upcoming concerts dubbed ‘The Final Curtain’.
In my mind, and the mind of many others, serious questions have been raised about the internet. I had always assumed that news stories travelled the world in hours, even minutes. With YouTube, Twitter, MySpace and even good old e-mail, everyone thought that if something happened in the States we’d all know about it in a few minutes – I guess we were wrong. The internet still has some serious cracks that need patching up.
Mandriva Linux, one of the most known distributions, it’s preparing the new version and already has an alpha (previous stage for a beta): Mandriva Linux 2010 Alpha 1.
Mandriva was originally called Mandrake Linux (started in 1998), but after a litigation about the name (related, of course, with Mandrake the Magician) was forced to change it; and at the same time MandrakeSoft acquired Conectiva Linux (my first Linux installation ever), so the combination of those two did all the rest, and Madriva was created.
Related to Mandriva 2010, here are some of the improvements related with previous versions:
- Boot time improved.
- Clean and complete grub and install menu (failsafe, init3 entry, recovery entry, check tool for istallation media)
- Use of Plymouth and fallback on Splashy for non supported chipsets
- Switch to Tomoyo as security framework, provide GUI for common setup, integrated also in msec tool
- Guest account created on the fly when needed
- Packaging of Moblin, use it as default environment if stable enough when light hardware configuration is detected
- Manage end of life distribution through mdkonline applet
- Autodetection of local urpmi repositories
- Improved hybrid isos use
I know what you are thinking, Why I would even consider to install an Alpha Linux distribution? Well, there’s no direct and simple answer to that one. As I mentioned before in 40 years of Unix post, the history of Linux has a long way and it is responsible for several other projects like Mac OS X, BSD and Sun operating system. The spirit is what did all the work.
And that’s the idea, go ahead, download it, test it, give your feedback, contribute and improve the work; that’s the spirit.
Final version for Mandriva 2010 will be available in October 21st.
As we’ve announced earlier WordPress is releasing the 2.8 version of the platform, and the development team is working on constantly improving this release. That’s why the WordPress 2.8.1 Beta is now available to the public.
The main differences are related in bugs fixing about the previous version. Here are some of them:
- Translation of role names fixed
- wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
- Upload error messages are now correctly reported
- Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
- Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
- SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
- Switched back to curl as the default transport
- Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload
To see all tickets that were fixed from Beta 1, check this link. I really enjoy watching this kind of transparency in projects, where you can give your feedback, insert about a bug and see the evolution about it: owner, priority, state.
Download WordPress 2.8.1 Beta 2.
Well yes, the name says it all AutoTweeter is the application that tweets automatically, what did you expect?
Uses a “tweetfile” (like a clean text file) where each line is considered a tweet; so you can set your tweets in this file and schedule the time where each tweet will be published. It is intended to have the usability for “quote of the day”, “joke of the day”, “did you know”; for that you can have different tweetfiles to use at different times of the day.
The configuration and usability is quite simple and intuitive:
Even though this type of application it is not related to the “twitter spirit”, to instantly share your status or information, still will help users that are trying to increase their number of followers and get more publicity by having a tweets constantly published.
Download AutoTweeter.
As we announced earlier, WordPress released their new version: 2.8, that has big performance improvements. Even though this feature isn’t brand new, it is a nice option that you can give it a try: WordPress Antivirus Plug-In.
The plug-in has a new version, 0.4, that appeared a few days back and it already includes compatibility with the latest WordPress version.
So what exactly a blog antivirus can do? You may ask. Well, this plug-in can help you out on monitoring possible platform vulnerabilities, virus injections, malicious links inserted, etc. Includes also features like email notifications and whitelisting.
The installation process it’s the same as every WordPress plug-in:
1.Download AntiVirus plugin
2.Unzip the archive
3.Upload the folder antivirus into ./wp-content/plugins/
4.Go to tab Plugins
5.Activate AntiVirus
6.Edit settings
7.Ready
WordPress users and webmasters always find the need to keep a good eye on the deployed platform in case any vulnerability appears and, if that happens, just pray for a quick hotfix. It’s nice to have a quick option that can help you be more proactive about the health of your deployments.
It’s a recession out there, but it’s also summer. Holidays, shortbreaks and long weekends litter the calendar. What to do? Trazzle of course!
Many websites are catching the twitter bug and beefing up their websites with tweets . If there was ever a time to jump on the pigs back it was now. Trazzler was no exception. It’s a travel website offering reviews, news and profiles of places and attractions from the four corner of the globe. Now, they have introduced Trazzler Buzz.
Trazzler Buzz allows people to tweet cool deals they seen for hotels, flight, B&Bs and anything else remotely related to travel. I think this is actually a good place to start your travel planning as you get unbiased deals from real people.
For example, a couple of the good deals I spotted when I logged in this morning were:
- New York City 4.0 Star Hotel, $169.0/nt Times Square – Theatre District: Wed Jul 22 2009 – Thu Jul 23 2009 http://rubyurl.com/MDvt
- Frankfurt 5.0 Star Hotel, $64.0/nt Frankfurt: Sat Jul 18 2009 – Sun Jul 19 2009 http://rubyurl.com/CexF
There are some links which are quite obviously spam or just the hotels themselves trying balance the books but they are few and far between. For the most part you’re getting great offers shot at you left right and centre. And let me tell you, I don’t mind having money saving deals thrown my way. From previous experience of running around travel agents and browsing never ending travel websites, Trazzler is a breath of fresh air. In addition, because it’s updated in real time using the twitter system your getting a constant stream of ‘great offers’, ‘discounts’ and ‘low air fares’. Trazzler is useful and innovative – just the kind of thinking we need in an economic depression.
Google keeps up with his strategy to amaze ourselves constantly. Google Voice is a very interesting project that will allow you to receive all of your calls and messages in one number, and apply special rules whenever you receive these phone calls or messages.
Not convinced yet? There is more:
- Integration with Gmail contacts and phones.
- Recording conversations.
- Manage and listen your voice mails. Including forwarding voice mails to other users.
- Forward calls or messages to other six phones.
- Text and phone calls within the US completely free.
- Conference calls up to four members per conference.
- You can set up rules to route each call to a specific number. For example, customers call -> automatically routed to my business phone; daughters call -> rings every phone; wife calling -> blocked
- Google Voice can even transcript voice mail via e-mail. Yeap, that is right, you dont have time to listen your voice mails? Google Voice can send it that message as an e-mail with 90% accuracy in the transcript.
- Service cost? Completely Free.
- Availability? Currently available only for GrandCentral customers. But it is expected an official Google statement about general availability of this service.
Here are some videos about the Google Voice usability and features.
Even though we dont have any confirmation about the release of this new feature, get ready because I am sure it is going to change the way you communicate.
There once was a time when if you wanted to surf the web, check you e-mails and text a buddy on the move you bought a Blackberry. They took care of everything for you and became so popular the brand name was a synonym for ‘Smartphone’. However, the competition has been heating up in the Smartphone market ever since the iPhone was introduced last year. Samsung are meeting it head on with their i900 and the Nokia N97 will give it a run for its money. With all these new releases, each one promising more than the other you’d expect Blackberry, the old giant of the Smartphone world to come out with a good model. You’d be wrong.
Instead, they throw the Tour 9630 out there. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good phone. Good shapes like the Blackberry Curve, nice and wide, QWERTY keyboard and a 480×360 screen. It also has 3G, GPS mapping, good browsing speed and a 3.2 megapixel camera. However, I ask you – does any of this surprise you. When the iPhone came out everyone gasped when GPS mapping was so well incorporated, when the touch screen was so easy to operate and when the internet was just that – the internet. But the upcoming Blackberry Tour 9630 just doesn’t offer anything new.
In fact, it has taken away a few features including one very important one – WiFi. This will deter the typical consumer who doesn’t particularly want to pay 3G charges and use their home WiFi instead. For this reason, the 9630 is only really a good phone for the business person, not for the average consumer. I think that Blackberry has cut out a large chunk of the market by leaving out WiFi. Are Blackberry floundering under the pressure of a new Smartphone market or are they ramping things up for a big release? Let’s hope for the latter because it would be a shame to see a once strong giant disappear so quickly with barely a whimper from phones like the 9630
How many of you have thumb drives lying around with little use for them? Perhaps you’ve got several external drives that you have to keep plugging in and unplugging when you are not using them. This frustrating experience cycles because there’s never been a suitable solution for all this.
If you’ve not checked out PogoPlug, then this little device could be a life saver for all of you. PogoPlug is a device that allows you to plug all of your USB devices to it and via a portal, you have access to all of your data from any computer/laptop in the world.
Before you throw them away, take a look at PogoPlug and keep all your data accessible. The PogoPlug comes in at a reasonable $99 offering easy setup, easy sharing, and the kicker…iPhone access for those needed to access their PogoPlug on the go.
