Technology & Internet

This is a very aggravating post to write. It’s a wonder I am sitting here and not in a mental hospital right now. Let me offer some background. For the past few weeks, Laura’s computer has been showing the signs of hard drive failure. The computer is about 6 years old and has a 30Gb […]

Last night around 8PM, I heard the surge protectors/battery backups that we have for the computers beep. It’s the first time I heard that since we have been here. I am pretty used to it because they are rather sensitive. Any power fluctuation causes them to beep. It is comforting. I didn’t think anything of […]

Back in the old house, we had DSL for about 2 1/2 years. It worked well with only a few minor issues. Towards the end, I did begin inquiring about more upload and download speed. I called Frontier and they said I was maxed out…that’s all they had. The reason I needed more speed is […]

The more I look around, the more I learn that the domain name business is big business. As I told you yesterday, I am trying to scoop up a bunch of different extensions for the domains I already have. It’s working out pretty well, but I have hit a little bump. I already bought up […]

I have been purchasing quite a few domain names lately. At last glance, I own 78 of them. Over time, I am taking any confusion out of who owns the real domain by scooping up as many different extensions as I can. I have noticed a disturbing trend of domains being bought and sat on…or […]

This is pretty neat. The other day, I was fooling around with my laptop. I noticed that it had a built in webcam, but had no idea how to use it. There didn’t seem to be any program associated with it. I emailed my sister, Stephanie, and asked her to look into this because she […]

As you may already know, for the past few weeks or months, I have been in the process of migrating all my websites over to a new hosting company. All the sites are now over and running smoothly. Among others, I have five websites that are almost identical…only the content and look is different. The […]

So I broke through to support today. After days and says of no response, I actually got through to an American who knew what to do. If you aren’t familiar with what I am talking about, please read about it. I first called Sales. I thought that if anyone would answer the phone at a […]

If there is one thing I have learned from doing this business thing all these years, it is to work with the best companies out there. The problem is, they are kind of a pain in the tush to find. You are bound to get involved with the wrong companies here and there. I sure […]

I have a domain name and hosting account sitting there just burning to be used. I purchased a script a few days ago that looked like it had lots of promise. After installing it, I learned that it was nothing but full of bugs. Since I didn’t have the time or patience to fix someone […]

My cron jobs have been running as scheduled, but the strange part is I have been getting status emails…with errors in them. I am using the cron jobs (Scheduled Tasks) in Plesk to run my sitemap generators. Every time the generator runs, it deletes the old generated files and creates new ones. I was wondering […]

I have been putting this off for a while. For some time, I have had the need to set up a cron job to run my website sitemap generators. Currently, I do them by hand. Every few days, I log in to each one and run the generator. This gets a little tedious, because I […]

I have been thinking of next year’s projects lately. Some thoughts that have crossed my mind have been an employment site, a real estate listing site and a social networking site. I did quite a bit of research tonight on the last one…the social networking thing. I came across a bunch of them… – phpFox […]

I am absolutely exhausted. I have been working at home for most of the week. A few weeks ago, one of my servers went down. It was down for about 60 hours, which means three of my classifieds websites were down as well. I couldn’t wait for the lousy support (more about that later) to […]

I have been through it before…when Adobe discontinues a certain piece of software. The first one I lost was Adobe ImageStyler. That was back in 1999, when I was in college. The second one was Adobe LiveMotion. By this time, I can pretty much read the writing on the wall. Recently, Adobe purchased Macromedia. I […]

I was showing off last night while trying to print out some nice letterhead that I made. I printed the envelope with no problem, but when I printed out the full 8 1/2″x11″ piece of paper, I got this annoying vertical black line on the right side of the paper. It seems to be a […]

I look at my website performance pretty closely. I think last count (which was this weekend) was 34 websites that I own and operate. I used to say that I was diversifying my portfolio. Now, I don’t know what to call it. I still have a few ideas on the back burner, but I would […]

Sometimes people name things and think they are very very cool for doing so. People hear these cool new names and start using them in everyday conversation. I bet you know what I am talking about. Let’s say…”24/7″ for example. I for one, think this is a very stupid little saying, but it seems as […]

If you own and run a website or websites, like I do, you are probably pretty concerned with what’s around the corner. Back in business school, we learned about something call a “SWOT analysis.” I remember, during the time I was copying homework assignments straight from the textbook, I thought to myself that this was […]

I noticed a while ago that whenever I turn on my BRAND NEW HP laptop, the battery indicator say something like, 83%. I say to myself, “What the heck is that about? This laptop is brand new and the battery was charged to 100% when I used it last.” Today, when I turned the laptop […]

I came across this very important discovery this morning. I was attempting to edit the “About DotWiki.US” page of my Wiki when I thought a link would be nice. Wiki syntax, Wikitext language or wiki markup is a bit different than regular HTML. I am not sure why they did it this way…perhaps because the […]

I was working on setting up a new website last night on my home desktop when things on the computer started acting a little quirky. I decided to restart the computer to clear out any problems it may be having. Well, upon restart, I was greeted by what is known as the blue screen of […]

After I got the MediaWiki software all installed on the DotWiki.US domain and looking semi-like Wikipedia, my first task was to change the logo in the upper left hand corner. I didn’t think this was going to be much of a challenge for a seasoned web developer, such as myself. Well, I must say that […]

Yeah, this took me a little while to figure out. I started last night and noticed that the clock was ticking rather quickly. I had to move away from the computer…MOVE AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER. One of the most important things you can do for any website is to create pretty URLs for your pages, […]

I suppose this is the question of the day. I am currently working on some of my websites’ HTML code…trying to clean it up. The code itself is about three years old and a bit bulky. I am noticing a lot that doesn’t need to be there. The main thing I am coming across has […]

This post may seem a little fragmented towards the beginning, but keep reading. It will all come together…trust me. Have you ever had a conversation with someone about the internet and about half way through, you noticed them mentioning websites and services they just assumed you knew about? I have. It’s a real personality trait […]

This post may ruffle some feathers. I will try to keep it short. I had a conversation with a friend this morning about SEO. I started thinking. Now, you may not know, but one of my favorite pastimes is managing my websites (of which I mentioned in an earlier post). There are many parts to […]