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links for 2009-08-18

  • New this week, I'm going to start publishing a top 10 playlist every Monday. Inspired by the movie Knowing (starring Nicolas Cage) that I rented this last weekend, I decided to focus the list on songs about the end of the world. I hope I'm not giving away something about the ending. Anyhow,… Music about an impending apocalypse is not new, as one entry on this list, Eve of Destruction was originally written in 1965. And there are certainly older themes from every genre. There are psalms and hymnals, classical pieces, even the best recognized ragtime jazz of Louis Armstrong's When the Saints Go Marching In is talking about where Louis wants to be on the day of judgment. It's a much older tune than Mr. Armstrong and some of the lyrics are rather dire. Don't believe me? And when the moon turns red with blood And when the moon turns red with blood Lord, how I want to be in that number When the moon turns red with blood Someone go wake up Ozzy Osbourne an
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    links for 2009-08-17

  • Website security is essential to conducting business online – and it's foremost in the minds of your customers. Whether your site receives personal information, log-in credentials or payment information, SSL Certificates protect data and help you earn your customers' trust.
  • What is .tel? Publish, store, update and manage ALL of your contact information, instantly and in one place. .Tel is a brand new domain name that allows businesses and individuals to manage important contact information directly on the Internet. The convenient page layout lets you control how your information is displayed and who sees it. Plus, your listing is included in the Telpage global directory where customers can search by name or keywords to find you. Get connected to your customers and friends with just one click. Why register a .tel? * Create your permanent online business card * Expand your communication methods and reach your customers * Your customers can find you from any device connected to the Internet in just one click * Compliment your current Website with one complete contact page * Get listed in a new global online directory * Easy site updates that take effect quickly
  • Internet denizens and urban dwellers alike need to recognize that an era of anonymity is ending. The population of the world stands at about 7 billion. So it takes only 10 digits to label each human being on the planet uniquely. This simple arithmetic observation offers powerful insight into the limits of privacy. It dictates something we might call the 10-Digit Rule: just 10 digits or so of distinctive personal information are enough to identify you uniquely. They're enough to strip away your anonymity on the Internet or call out your name as you walk down the street. The 10-Digit Rule means that as our electronic gadgets grow chattier, and databases swell, we must accept that in most walks of life, we'll soon be wearing our names on our foreheads. A study of 1990 U.S. Census data revealed that 87 percent of the people in the United States were uniquely identifiable with just three pieces of information (PDF): five-digit ZIP code, gender, and date of birth.
  • One of the quickest ways to make money with blogging is to join a blog network, like b5media.com. There are other blogging networks that pay bloggers too, and if you’re interested, check out this List of Sources of Blogging Jobs. Of course, different blog networks offer payment in various ways. Some offer flat fees, some offer revenue share, some have a mix of both… Obviously, those that offer some kind of flat fee or “minimum fee guarantee” will ensure that your efforts are paid off more securely and quickly. But, if you want to ‘go at it alone’, then here’s a suggested month-by-month work schedule (of course, you might choose to approach this differently, depending on your working style, availability, resources, personal tastes, etc). This is basically just a guideline to show you what a new blogger can do to get started with making money online through blogging.
  • Are you a web designer who wishes you could do more in one handy spot instead of having multiple programs open? Well, thanks to the enormous Firefox add-on development community, your web browser can do almost everything for you. We already covered Firefox add-ons for developers, but we couldn’t leave out the people that sit there and actually design what the developers have to build. These 19 add-ons will allow you to choose colors, measure dimensions, save screenshots and a whole lot more. Be warned that you should be selective in what add-ons you add to your browser due to the fact that the more you add, the slower it goes, but can you really resist very many of these?
  • Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, which was released 50 years ago today, is a nearly unique thing in music or any other creative realm: a huge hit—the best-selling jazz album of all time—and the spearhead of an artistic revolution. Everyone, even people who say they don't like jazz, likes Kind of Blue. It's cool, romantic, melancholic, and gorgeously melodic. But why do critics regard it as one of the best jazz albums ever made? What is it about Kind of Blue that makes it not just pleasant but important? On March 2, 1959, when its first tracks were laid down at Columbia Records' 30th Street Studio (the album would be released on Aug. 17), Charlie Parker, the exemplar of modern jazz, the greatest alto saxophonist ever, had been dead for four years, almost to the day. The jazz world was still waiting, longing, for "the next Charlie Parker" and wondering where he'd take the music.
  • LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.
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    links for 2009-08-15

  • In 1998 I worked behind a counter at a popular restaurant where take out was busy in the evenings. Now in those days the process was: Fax machine * Call the restaurant and ask for a menu to be faxed to you * I would run to the back of the restaurant and fax the menu * The customer studies the menu and calls us back with the order. and then the fax machine broke. I wish I could say all hell broke loose, but small businesses have an exceptional way of coping with challenges and moving quickly, so we just called our sister restaurant and faxed our menu to them and had them fax the customers. Of course this was a temporary fix. At this time I was also getting more and more interested in the online stuff. I used AOL, I had just bought my first PC and was figuring out html. We brainstormed and bought a domain name from Network Soutions of course and then with the help of a geek friend put up a website. (Now preserved in the Internet Archive.) Now as people called for directi
  • screen.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)
  • International Space Station comes together
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    links for 2009-08-13

  • WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. – Les Paul, who pioneered the solid-body electric guitar later wielded by a legion of rock 'n' roll greats, died Thursday of complications from pneumonia. He was 94. According to Gibson Guitar, Paul died at White Plains Hospital. His family and friends were by his side. As an inventor, Paul also helped bring about the rise of rock 'n' roll with multitrack recording, which enables artists to record different instruments at different times, sing harmony with themselves, and then carefully balance the tracks in the finished recording. The use of electric-amplified guitars gained popularity in the mid-to-late 1940s, and then exploded with the advent of rock in the mid-'50s. "Suddenly, it was recognized that power was a very important part of music," Paul once said. "To have the dynamics, to have the way of expressing yourself beyond the normal limits of an unamplified instrument, was incredible.
  • At Community Pet Supply, we understand that your pets are an important part of your family. We are a family-owned business dedicated to providing name-brand pet toys, supplies and accessories for your animals. Whether you have dogs, cats, fish, hamsters or other critters, we have what you need to make them happy and healthy. Dog lovers will be happy with our selection of merchandise for Chihuahuas, Great Danes and everything in between. Our dog carriers for cars make traveling comfortable for your pets and convenient for you. Our large dog toys are fun, durable and suitable for your biggest canine companions. We also carry products for all the other animals in your life. Keep your cats bug-free with our cat flea and tick control shampoos, sprays, collars and more. Build your fish an underwater palace. Browse our selection of fish aquarium supplies for tanks, multicolored gravel, filtration devices and lights. We even have treats for your wild animal friends.
  • Find domain names, web hosting and online marketing for your website — all in one place. Network Solutions helps businesses get online and grow online with domain name registration, web hosting and innovative online marketing services.
  • * Not so long ago, having advanced computer skills was considered the ultimate in job security. How times have changed. Now, tech jobs are among the most heavily outsourced. Research firm Computer Economics recently estimated that more than half of all software application development work was contracted out last year, often to workers in other countries, along with 44 percent of application maintenance tasks and 40 percent of website and e-commerce work. So which well-paid careers won't be shipped overseas? Our experts — career coaches Susan Bernstein, founder of Work from Within, LLC in San Francisco, and feature writer and instructor Paym Bergson in Toronto — offer this list of hard-to-outsource jobs that highlights a variety of industry sectors. The jobs share a key factor, Bernstein says. "Think about things where you literally have to touch or see people," she says. "Managing anything related to personal services or health care — that can't be outsourced."
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    links for 2009-08-11

  • The recent data breach at Internet domain administrator and host Network Solutions compromised more than 573,000 credit and debit cardholders and begs the question: What more can be done to secure such systems? The incident also raises new questions about the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI). At the time of the breach, discovered in June, Network Solutions says it was PCI compliant. The breach was the result of hackers planting rogue code on the company's web servers, intercepting financial transactions between the sites and their customers, which are mostly small online stores. So, if Network Solutions was PCI compliant, how could it be breached? Paul Kocher, chief research scientist at Cryptography Research Institute, says the fundamental limitation with PCI is that it attempts to distill security down into a static set of requirements, while adversaries aren't restricted to a rigidly-defined set of methods. "As a result, clever attackers will always
  • In this first look at forms and accessibility we’ll cover the very basics you should consider if you are to help as many users as possible to interact with you and your web site just as you would like them to. Forms are often the most tricky aspect of web development for beginners to get their head around, largely because it means stepping out of the comfort zone of one-way information – no longer are you simply presenting information at the person viewing your site, now you are asking for input, for feedback that you have to process in some way. And just as it may be difficult for HTML beginners to understand just how they handle form data, so is it difficult to understand some of the issues relating to accessibility. Static content presented to the person visiting your site may be perfectly well understood by someone using a screen reader, or perhaps a Braille computer, assuming you’ve used semantic, structural markup (such as h1 – h6 for headings). However, for someone visiting yo
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    links for 2009-08-10

  • I’ve had a half dozen or so longer posts about Apple brewing in my head the past couple of weeks. There is no shortage of controversy surrounding the company right now thanks largely to the hugely popular and hugely unpopular aspects of the iPhone. But Jason Calacanis’ post yesterday entitled “The Case Against Apple-in Five Parts” serves as a great springboard for bringing up a lot of it. The Backstory While my story with computers doesn’t go back quite as far as Calacanis’, our stories are pretty similar. He said that 6 years ago he made the switch to Apple products after a 20-year affair with Microsoft. I made the same switch 5 years ago after a roughly 15-year affair with Microsoft. Regular readers may have heard this already, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but in the 1990s I loved Microsoft products and hated Apple stuff. I grew up on DOS, installed Windows For Workgroups because I thought it was cooler than regular Windows 3.1, bought Windows Bob,
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    links for 2009-08-06

  • Nothing makes a blog post more eye-catching than a great header image, but not all publishers have artistic talent. And even accomplished digital creatives often crave some found material to start from or work with in a project. Luckily for all of the above, sources abound for finding a compelling photo to grab your readers’ eyes and draw them in, or to locate fresh multimedia to remix.
  • On Friday July 24th Network Solutions, a web hosting provider to over 4,000 US-based websites, found malicious code on servers supporting some of its e-commerce clients' websites. The code may have captured transaction data from approximately 573,928 cardholders – a similar method was used by cyber criminals to steal millions of credit card transition details from Heartland Payment Systems in 2008. In spite of the massive data breach, which put over half a million consumers at risk of identity fraud, Network Solutions should be congratulated, even awarded, for the way it handled the incident and the measures it put in place immediately after.
  • Good Widgets provide sophisticated flash photo widgets for myspace pages, websites, and blogs.
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    links for 2009-08-05

  • Why? Enough is enough. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 was released in late 2001. For its time, it was a decent browser, but in 2009, it is still in use by a significant portion of the web population, and its time is now up. As any web developer will tell you, working with IE 6 is one of the most difficult and frustrating things they have to deal with on a daily basis, taking up a disproportionate amount of their time. Beyond that, IE 6's support for modern web standards is very lacking, restricting what developers can create and holding the web back. What? This website is run by a group of people who want to see IE 6 disappear as soon as possible. To help make that happen, we're encouraging the IE 6 users of our websites to upgrade to a more modern browser, so they can have a better experience using our sites and browsing the web.
  • Short for shenanigans, meaning "bullshit". particularly popular on certain internet forums.
  • We're sorry, but themes are available for Google Chrome 3.0 and above only.
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    links for 2009-08-04

  • Where Smart Buyers & Sellers Connect
  • CSS pseudo-classes are used to add special effects to some selectors.
  • About this talk Too much of the world lacks access to clean drinking water. Engineer Michael Pritchard did something about it — inventing the portable Lifesaver filter, which can make the most revolting water drinkable in seconds. An amazing demo from TEDGlobal 2009. About Michael Pritchard With cutting-edge nanotech, Michael Pritchard's Lifesaver water-purification bottle could revolutionize water-delivery systems in disaster-stricken areas around the globe. Full bio and more links
  • I recently had an opportunity to experience excellent customer service from the opposite side of the coin (as a customer). Since we don’t always take time to reflect on experiences we have in our personal lives and how it might translate into business, I thought it would make a valuable lesson to provide some insight into the client’s perspective. As a bit of a change from my normal posts, here is an outline of my experience and what made the provider so successful in my mind. To give you some background, we recently received news of a serious diagnosis for my soon-to-be-born son. We’ve been facing a tremendous amount of uncertainty, desperation for answers and fear of the unknown while we were undergoing a series of exhaustive tests at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Here is what CHOP did to make them a top contender on my list of organizations providing excellent customer service.
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    links for 2009-08-03

  • Home » Ecommerce
  • YouTube (YouTube) recently redesigned channel pages to make them more dynamic and easier to customize. The beta channels are now a hodgepodge of your uploads, favorites, playlists, and numerous in-channel editing options. Should you upgrade to the new design, you have a greater chance of creating an eye-catching channel that’s likely to keep your viewers engaged for longer. YouTube originally made the redesigned channels available to a select group of elite members and new users. Now however, the video site is letting anyone upgrade their channel, and eventually they’ll be moving all remaining channels over to the new version. As previously reported, the redesign allows for wider videos and better organized pages; the result is a viewer-friendly experience centered around your content. As such, we wanted to highlight some of the best ways to maximize the redesigned channels and show you how to customize them to your liking.
  • YouTube (YouTube) recently redesigned channel pages to make them more dynamic and easier to customize. The beta channels are now a hodgepodge of your uploads, favorites, playlists, and numerous in-channel editing options. Should you upgrade to the new design, you have a greater chance of creating an eye-catching channel that’s likely to keep your viewers engaged for longer. YouTube originally made the redesigned channels available to a select group of elite members and new users. Now however, the video site is letting anyone upgrade their channel, and eventually they’ll be moving all remaining channels over to the new version. As previously reported, the redesign allows for wider videos and better organized pages; the result is a viewer-friendly experience centered around your content. As such, we wanted to highlight some of the best ways to maximize the redesigned channels and show you how to customize them to your liking.
  • YouTube (YouTube) recently redesigned channel pages to make them more dynamic and easier to customize. The beta channels are now a hodgepodge of your uploads, favorites, playlists, and numerous in-channel editing options. Should you upgrade to the new design, you have a greater chance of creating an eye-catching channel that’s likely to keep your viewers engaged for longer. YouTube originally made the redesigned channels available to a select group of elite members and new users. Now however, the video site is letting anyone upgrade their channel, and eventually they’ll be moving all remaining channels over to the new version. As previously reported, the redesign allows for wider videos and better organized pages; the result is a viewer-friendly experience centered around your content. As such, we wanted to highlight some of the best ways to maximize the redesigned channels and show you how to customize them to your liking.
  • Just because some of our fellow bloggers decided to stay with Blogger platform, that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve some nice looking themes. Over the pass few years, no doubt there have been too many nice themes created for the WordPress platform, but the really nice ones are converted to Blogger Templates. Some are so nicely done, you won’t be able to tell if it’s a Blogger or WordPress. If you are not looking forward to migrate to WordPress, but keen to give your Blogger blog a fresh new look, here are some 40 Free Beautiful Blogger Templates you might want to take a look at. Full list and more templates after jump.
  • Network Solutions is investigating a breach on its servers that may have led to the theft of credit card data of 573,928 people who made purchases on Web sites hosted by the company. Networks Solutions notified 4,343 of its nearly 10,000 e-commerce merchant customers on Friday about the breach. It affects 573,928 cardholders whose name, address, and credit card number were exposed between March 12 and June 8, said Susan Wade, a spokeswoman for Network Solutions. (Credit: Network Solutions) Mysterious code was discovered in early June on servers hosting e-commerce customer sites during routine maintenance, she said. The company called in a third-party forensics team to help with the investigation, and the team was able to crack some of the code on July 13, determining that it could be related to credit card data, she added.
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