Check out the celebration post and get some stats here.

Wondering what the big deal was?

Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth for $14.46 – A recently published book about the future of our planet by Carl Stager

Congratulations to the Deals.Woot team on hitting this milestone and congrats to Deals.Woot superuser heymo for posting that very appropriate deal!

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• Woot’s Monkey History (woot.com)

The name speaks for itself so the website doesn’t have to, freeing me up to have a little extra fun. I hope you will enjoy it and I hope you will try to do something unexpectedly nice on Friday well!

http://www.dosomethingunexpectedlyniceforsomeonejustbecauseday.info

March forth on March fourth and do good things!

Image via Wikipedia

Maybe you’re like me and didn’t see the Superbowl this year but still would like to be part of the conversations tomorrow? Well, everyone knows that the post Superbowl conversation breaks down into 3 major categories:

10% – The Game
15% – The half-time show
75% – The commercials

Want to join in on the conversation? You can surf on over to USA today’s site and catch up on all 60 of the Superbowl ads on your smartphone or tablet and see what everyone is talking about. The ads are listed in popularity order by default so you can even be sure that you see the best ads first if you have limited time, use the two finger scroll method to move down the list.

If you ever wonder why Superbowl advertising is so expensive, look no further – I just actively sought out something that i normally go to great pains to avoid. Happy watching!

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Deals.Woot Top Reputation Leaderboard

This was a much needed to boost to traffic and user activity, more than making up for the brutal attack on the site’s most active users a few months ago.   Segregation of the site’s more social area and excessive, at times stalking and shockingly personal, moderation of users caused many of the sites most active users to fade into the shadows or abandon the site altogether.

These changes to the reputation system have been in the works for quite a while, but the deals.woot programming team used the time well and the enhancements have been well received.

Deals.Woot Reputation Dashboard

The new dashboard is the center-piece of the changes, it details how the users rank in all the categories of activities that earn reputation.   It also provides useful hints that inform users what they can do if they want to increase their reputation.

Some activity is bound to drop off after some of the novelty wears off, but this change has made a real difference in getting the users more involved and has given the site a much needed shot of energy.

I suppose that someone knows because I saw one today and it was the first time I’ve really noticed one and thought about it.  So for today’s Wednesday Whim I decided to add one for the Knetwork.  All you need is an animated gif, scaled down to the recommended 16×16 pixel size, uploaded to your existing favicon location.  Then add a html line to your header.  Just copy your current favicon code, paste it below itself, and alter the file name to your animated gif.

FYI – mine is a little knight hacking away at something…. it’s probably dead by now.  I’ll probably replace it or remove it but lemme know what you think!

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This is the first of my Whimsday Wednesday posts.   My latest whim was inspired when the little proxy server I was hosting became overrun.  It turned out I didn’t hide it as well as I thought, and people sucking down 40GB of bandwidth in a few hours can have a negative effect on all your other sites loading.  Once I tracked down the culprit and shut it off, I put up a quick note (see it @ KnightKnetwork.net)  saying that I had not intended it to be a public proxy and I added a google search and a small adsense unit to make it easy for folks to find another proxy and maybe make a couple of bucks.

Well, that worked out well enough that I’ve made enough to pay for a domain name and some cheap proxy hosting so I launched LiteProxySite.info this week!  I still need to do some work on it, but it’s functional.  If you need access to your sites that are blocked by your current network then this can help, but cheap hosting means low bandwidth so I’ve restricted the file size that it can pull down and may have to block some sites myself if it get’s overused.

I hope you find it useful!

Lite Proxy Site

Long story short – for a few days last week I was unwittingly subverting the Chinese Government.  Somehow my private proxy server was discovered and published.  I may get into that story more later, but for now all you need to know is that I decided to ask around a few cheap hosting sites to see if I could run a small ad-supported proxy site.  This particular host shows up when Googling proxy hosting, but a couple of support tickets later it turns out that they don’t actually allow proxy hosting.  I let them know about the Google ad and got this enthusiastic sales pitch:

Hi, David.
Thanks for your notification.
If you like to host your sites, xxxxxxxxxxxx might be one of your choices. Let us know if you need more help. Thanks.

Now, I don’t know about YOU, but as for ME – I really like to host my sites.  It brings me much more happiness than when I was burning them onto a CD and trying to fling them into open car windows as I drove to work.  (readership tanked in winter and return visitors were hard to come by if the CD happened to peg them in the face).

So we’ve established that I like to host my sites, the Tech follows with the time-tested hard sell technique of telling me their product is soooo great it just might make it onto my list of choices.  It might be time to rewrite the script here folks!

Happy New Year Everyone!  Have you had any similar bad sales pitches?

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