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Archive for the 'my ideas' Category

Donation for October

Published
by
Ken
on 28 November, 2006
in my ideas and online
. 0 Comments

This month’s donation comes a little late. I was thinking which other software that I use regularly that I should send in a donation. In the end I decided to send to an online service instead.

EveryDNS is a project that provide free DNS service to the internet community. The founder David Ulevitch, has since moved on to start OpenDNS, another free DNS service that I had been using as well.

Managing DNS is not as easy as it looks, especially when it comes to the smaller details. And often it is the smaller details that gets you.

For example, providing 2 or more DNS server, making sure the 2 DNS are at two different routing (and/or physical) location, syncing the DNS records between them, etc.

EveryDNS solves these, provide an easy interface and take away the server maintenance. I’m happy to make a little contribution to keep it going.

[Tag]dns, donation[/Tag]

Work starts on Host Thyself

Published
by
Ken
on 6 November, 2006
in my ideas and online
. 0 Comments

Since I am doing more and more system admin work behind the scene to support my websites, I had compiled a collection of useful notes.

Some of the notes are result of countless trial-and-error as well as searches, so I hope it will prove useful to other users.

Rather than have the notes sitting on my harddisk, I decided to turn the notes into a wiki and have it available online.

The site is setup using MediaWiki (which is the reason I upgraded to PHP5) and is now online at Host Thyself. The organisation is still under work as I gradually move more information online.

Mediawiki speeding up move to PHP5

Published
by
Ken
on 27 October, 2006
in my ideas and online
. 2 Comments

I’m a laggard in terms of adoption and in this case PHP5. Upgrade to PHP5 was held back since most applications work fine on PHP4 and some even has issues with PHP5. But all these is about to change because of Mediawiki.

I wanted to use Mediawiki for a few wiki that I like to start. Mediawiki however, had stopped development on PHP4 platform and support only PHP5. My choice is either to use the legacy version or move on to PHP5. I bit the bullet and chose the latter.

Upgrade went pretty painless. Much, much more simple than I imagine. Just a configuration change, a package update and a apache restart. Thanks to this piece of information.

Everything seems to be working fine, at least this blog looks ok.

Well done. I took my first step into PHP5.

Donation from September Revenue

Published
by
Ken
on 18 October, 2006
in my ideas
. 0 Comments

Another pay check! Time for another donation. This month I’m picking 2 useful Firefox extension for donation.

GTDGMailThe first is GTDGMail, a Firefox plugin to implement GTD (Get Things Done) using GMail.

Since I reported using it less than a month ago, I had pretty good result with GTD.

GTDGMail is a Donationware, you can read more about the plugin and the background behind it on their blog.

The second is Gmail Manager, another Firefox plugin. Gmail Manager allows you to manage multiple GMail accounts.

If you have a few GMail accounts which you need to sign in and out frequently to switch between them, you will find GMail Manager very useful.

To the developers I say, “Thanks for creating these useful plugins, my little contribution is on the way.”

GTDGMail after 2 weeks

Published
by
Ken
on 9 October, 2006
in google, my ideas and online
. 0 Comments

This is how my GMail inbox look like since started using GTDGMail 2 weeks ago.

inbox after GTDMail

I didn’t take a screenshot of the inbox before but it was close to 100 times that figure.

Did GTD Work?

Well, the idea of GTD is simple and attractive. Although GTDGMail is a nice Firefox plugin to implement the concept of GTD in Gmail, I haven’t quite gotten the most out of it for 3 reasons.

  1. If you have thousands of thing in your head, jotted on post-it or stacked across the desk, can you imagine getting all that into GTDGMail?
    I haven’t gotten around to tag things outside of my GMail inbox. There got to be a better way instead of sending myself a thousand emails.
  2. I get quite alot of email, the end result is that I spend alot of time following the two minutes rule to clear each email without skipping any.
  3. The tagging and reviewing work flow is still very clumbersome for me.

All of these are not really a problem with GTD or GTDGMail per se but more of getting the workflow right.

I believe GTD fit into what I’m doing online, especially with more than a handful of ideas going on. More update as I go along.

Update on AdAdvantage

Published
by
Ken
on 19 September, 2006
in 59ideas, adadvantage, my ideas and wordpress
. 0 Comments

I did not mention it but AdAdvantage, my K2 3 column scheme (the one that you are looking at right now), had been updated a while back and is sitting on the scheme page.

Thanks to all those kind soul that send me message to ask, yes I’m still updating it. I’m using it on a number of my blogs and my plan is to sync up with the K2 development as much as I can.

During the last sync I noticed that K2 is doing some integration with the sidebar widgets themselves and interfere with the Automattic’s Widgets. K2’s version is also not complete and cannot support 2 sidebars (as of my last sync).

I’m planning an integration as soon as I find some time and when K2’s version become stable. Thanks for all your feedback and comments.

No one interested in free hosting?

Published
by
Ken
on 25 August, 2006
in my ideas and online
. 0 Comments

It looks like no one is interested in my idea of a free hosting.

Maybe I didn’t promote it enough. Any suggestion?

Free Hosting giveaway promotion

Published
by
Ken
on 7 August, 2006
in my ideas and online
. 10 Comments

This my giveaway idea for August.

Free hosting for life

Someone suggested in my last free domain giveaway that free hosting would be something he would be excited about. So here I give it to you - Free Hosting for Life! (Yes life! My life that is).

What you have to do

  1. Mention and link to my site (http://59ideas.com) from anywhere it is permissible for you to do so.
    Hint: You can mention this giveaway. Spread the word.
    For example, your blog, a forum you participate in, comment in another blog, … be creative
  2. Do not submit to link directories or link exchanges.
  3. Leave a comment here telling me where you put that link.
    (Remember to leave your email so that I can contact you if you win.)
  4. Wait for the good news!

How Winners are determined

  1. Statistic will be based on Google Analytics’s referral data.
  2. All submitted links will be ordered in decending order for the number of referrals from the link.
  3. Links that provides that top 20% of all referred traffic will be the winner.
    For example,
    Total 100 referrals from all links
    Link A: 10 referrals
    Link B: 6 referrals
    Link C: 5 referrals
    Link D: 3 referrals
    all other links with 1 referral
    A, B, C are winners

Terms & Conditions

Some terms and condition to guard my ass.

  1. The giveaway is given in good faith and mutual trust. If you do not respect that or feel that I will any way cheat you, please do not participate.
  2. Participants should not spam or do anything in bad faith in order to participate.
  3. Hosting is for a reasonable website.
    Since bandwidth and storage requirement varies, I cannot host a site beyond my means.
    As a simple guage, if your site can be comfortably hosted on a few dollars a month shared hosting, I can afford you.
  4. If for whatever reason I cannot host you anymore, I will have a chat with you.
  5. Any ambiguity in interpretations or the lack thereof will be resolved by me and the decision will be final.