Jan14
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
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Dec31
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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Sep3
Toluu’s tags, totally tremendous! Today’s timesink: tagging Toluu totality! Ok, enough of that, this really is great news.
Caleb Elston, Toluu’s founder, tells us that tagging was the most requested feature for Toluu. I’m very impressed with the implementation as tagging really permeates the site now, it’s feels like a true integration, not a hacked together add on. When adding tags, the auto-complete will cut down on typos. Along with tagging you’ll see better sorting options on many pages.
A word of warning, if you reimport your OPML you will lose your exsisting tags so you’re gonna want to sync everything before you get started and then use the bookmarklet (or single add) to add new feeds to your Toluu account.
Let’s take a look at some screen shots:
Top Used Tags for a user now on their Profile
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You can click Top Tags to see all of a user's tags. Notice the new sort options.
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Click a tag to see all feeds that user has tagged with it
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Quickly add tags from My Feeds, hover to get add button, click for tag dialog
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Click a tag and see all the feeds with that tag
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Click a feed and go to it's tab menu for all sorts of tagging goodness, including similar feeds to check out
I’m sure I missed some things but that’s a good rundown of some of the most important additions. This is a big upgrade in usability for Toluu but it relies on Toluu users taking the time to tag their feeds, something that provides only a small amount of additional functionality for themselves. As people use the tagging system you’ll see Toluu making changes to get the most bang out of it. I’ll go ahead and predict that grouping of tags that are similar except for extraneous characters and plurals will be added. Enough of me, go play with it yourself and get tagging – I need to find some new podcasts!
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Aug20
*Please note the important update at the end of this post
One way that a new blogger can get story ideas and make a name for themselves is to report on new and interesting startups, the problem has been how do you find out about a startup early enough to get the scoop? The main service that I was aware of was KillerStartups.com, they saw the need, the niche, and acted with great success. The problem that appeared was the sheer amount of new startups interested in the publicity made it impossible for detailed coverage of any of them. The cookiecutter information that became the standard fare on KillerStartups, while still useful, left open a door for competition that could do a better job providing coverage.
TechCrunch’s Crunchbase has been steadily gaining users in this arena and with the recent addition of an API and KillerStartups’ decline, has taken the lead according to Google Trends (it’s recent integration into Zemanta means you’ll see more of it from me):
Google Trends Data for Startup Info
Still, it’s hard to scoop TechCrunch with their own database, so other startups have entered the field, two that I’ve used and think are notable are TradeVibes and YouNoodle. If you check out the Alexa data you can see that YouNoodle is enjoying a spike in traffic among Alexa users. And while Alexa data is generally considered less than ideal, in this case it might be a better indicator of where web-savy users are getting their information:
Page Views by Alexa Users
The Alexa data also seems to show some hope for KillerStartups, but the Google Trends data is showing a clear flatline. So, we get back to the title of this post, does the way KillerStartups delivers information still have a place? Can they bounce back or has KillerStartups been killed?
*Update! – Please be sure to take a look at the comments and note that the Quantcast directly measured results back up what the Alexa results show, a significant bounce back up in traffic and a hefty lead in readership over Crunchbase.
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Jul16
Toluu has a added a small new feature to your Activity Page that turns out to be a big usability enhancement, here’s what Caleb, Toluu’s founder had to say about it:
I found that many times I had no idea what a feed was about but, I didn’t want to click on it and then have to click back if I wasn’t interested I wanted a really quick way to get some more info so that is how the tooltip came to be it shows the 5 most recent post titles from the feed and you can click a title and go directly to the source
With this new enhancement the Activity page has just gotten much more useful, and it’s good news for bloggers as well. Those of us who are total marketing geniuses and not only put 2 silent Ks in their blog name, but also give no context clues about the content, can now rest easier. All you would have to do is hover over ‘The Knight Knetwork’ and you’d see my 5 latest posts, giving you a chance to visit a post with an interesting title and see what you really think about my writing and subject matter. Here’s an idea of what you’ll see:
Kudos again to Toluu for adding enhancements that really increase the usabillity of the site, and don’t forget to Toluu ‘The Knight Knetwork’, those silent Ks actually speak volumes.
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