Get My Goo (http://goo.gl/9wd5) has just lanched, making it easy to create goo.gl short links without using the Google Toolbar or Google Reader. Simply enter your URL and a cool goo.gl URL will be instantly created.

The cool bookmarklet allows you to create a short-link for any page you are visiting. Have a look at this screenshot:

Earlier this month, I had been suffering from extremely unstable service from (mt) MediaTemple; this caused quite considerable downtime. In fact, it was so bad that some of my hosted websites became unusable for 2 DAYS! I understand that hosts have problems from time to time, but 2 days!? This is just totally unacceptable, and so I decided to pack my bags and look for a more reliable host.

I had Linode (aff), a Virtual Private Server (VPS) host, in my bookmarks for quite a while; just in case I decided to move host in the future. A ‘Linode 360′ provides 360MB of RAM, 16 GB of storage and 200 GB of data transfer for a mere $19.95 per month. {(mt) MediaTemple offer ‘more’, but you are unlikely to get anywhere near using it without overaging on ‘GPUs’ or database usage; I was eventually forced to buy a MySQL container, and my sites receive very little traffic at all.}

I found the decision of web host a difficult choice to make. I ended up choosing a VPS (it was out of Slicehost and Linode) just to give it a go. And now, I don’t think I’ll ever go back. VPS has its disadvantages (like taking ages to set-up), granted; but the power and flexibility of it is something I couldn’t help but get exited about. With VPS, you don’t get stupid rules like ‘5 cron jobs per account’; in fact, you can pretty much do whatever you like.

Take a look at a Pingdom report for Taxomation. Day four was when it moved over to Linode. 2 hours of downtime that day was due to the (mt) MediaTemple hosting, and the downtime on consecutive days due to problems I inflicted on the Linode account. (Maybe I should have got everything working before I migrated, no? .) With (mt) MediaTemple, page loads were typically taking 0.85s. With Linode, that time has been almost halved to 0.46s.

If you are looking for a new web host and know enough about web server software, why not give Linode a go? I’m sure you will not regret it! You can get there using my wonderful affiliate link (Why not?) or with this non-affiliate link.

Bye, bye MediaTemple!

Please share you web hosting experiences…

I have just received an e-mail from Google, with a Christmas gift:

Hello,

As we near the end of the year, we wanted to take a moment to thank you for the time, energy, commitment, and trust you’ve shared with us in 2009.

With sharing in mind, this year we’ve decided to do something a little different. We hope you’ll find it fits the spirit of the Christmas season.

We’re looking forward to working with you to build lasting success in 2010.

With best wishes for Christmas and the New Year,
Your Google Team

This gift is for someone very special: Everyone.
Because charities are experiencing their toughest year in decades, we have committed $20 million (£12.4 million) to helping those who help us all. Our gift to you is a gift to them. Merry Christmas.

Thanks Google! Merry Christmas!

Facebook are to charge £14.99 per month to access the site, in plans to be implemented July next year. Or so a Facebook group says.

Now, you would expect the ‘average’ person to see that this is a rumour. But over 800,000 members (currently growing strong at 250,000 per day) have signed up to demonstrate their naïvety. What’s more is that many people are already making plans to head back to MySpace. Maybe Facebook should put them out of their misery?

Wow.

A few days ago, I was thinking of ways to drive more traffic to 22Talk. Unlike my other websites, 22Talk’s traffic is more time dependent in that more than 1 user must be online at the same time for it to work at all (and lots more for it to work effectively).

I tried StumbleUpon Ads a few months ago, and that worked well: I managed to get around 50 simultaneous users online (for about 15 minutes, though). Unfortunately, only a small number of users from these campaigns returned to 22Talk, making the site useless again. And at $0.05 per visitor, I was unable to see how I would re-coup my costs.

But then, on Saturday, I had an epiphany: Rather than drive users to 22Talk, why not drive 22Talk to the users? And then, 22Talk on Facebook was born. It is more-or-less identical to how 22Talk worked before, but in the more social environment of Facebook. Because of Facebook’s great API, I have been able to make the site more user-orientated: If you find someone you like, you can now add them as a friend for life! (You can also go completely Anonymous, if you prefer).

The app is brand new (not in the directory yet). At the moment, you could be waiting a while for a stranger to come along — but please do wait. Please tell all of your Facebook friends to try it out, blog about this, and let’s see whether we can get enough users to get 22Talk rolling.

Merry Christmas!

Taxomation.com have just released ‘404 widget‘ — a useful tool for helping your site’s lost users. The widget looks at the URL a visitor tried to load, and extracts keywords from it. It then runs over to Yahoo! and finds related pages from your site — all just in time to be displayed to the visitor, who can choose a page or keep searching.

It is similar to Google’s widget, except that more than one page is displayed and text from the page is also included. The Taxomation widget can be customised for your site (changing colours, etc) and is simple to set-up: you just need to copy a little code, and everything works instantly. Why not grab yours now, and see what you think…

Here’s a live example for the page ‘http://webinfodb.net/api.html‘ rather than ‘http://webinfodb.net/api.php‘:

(If you are looking for another example, mis-type a URL on this site; it has the widget installed).

You may also be interested in reading the following about creating more useful 404 pages:

• Creating User Friendly 404 Pages (Coding Horror)
• Creating useful 404 pages (Google)
• A More Useful 404 (A List Apart)
• Make your 404 Page Useful (Blog for Profit)
• Usability: Create a 404 page that’s useful and relevant (azngamerboi 2.0)

Today, Google announced the release of Google Public DNS — a complete alternative to the Domain Name System (DNS) offered by your ISP, OpenDNS and similar services. Google claims that their DNS service is fast, secure, and — unlike many ISPs and OpenDNS — they promise never to filter, block or redirect DNS responses.

From previous experience, it can be expected that Google Public DNS will only get better — but I believe that its openness and performance are reason enough for it to be adopted now. I have already switched, and you can do the same in a few seconds.

If you know what you are doing, you can straight-away configure your connection to use Google’s DNS servers: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.8.4.

Obviously, there is some anxiety amongst users about Google collecting more and more data all of the time. However, Google have addressed this with a stringent privacy policy, summed up as: ‘Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information.’

Google Chormium OS has been released! If you want to take the new operating system for a test run, you can download the source code or get an image for VMware player (the later is the easy option). For now, engadget.com has some screenshots, but I hope to try Chrome for myself soon. Stay tuned.

Download Now »

(By the looks of it, it is a WebOS more than anything).

Never noticed this before…

Traffic Sources Overview - Google Anal

It seems crazy that the media always seem to have something to say about Twitter. Yet, 99% of us don’t actually care.

Recently, BBC News published an article — ‘Fry ends row with Twitter critic‘. That’s fair enough … but is it really that news-worthy!? What is really annoying is that it is published under ‘Entertainment‘ (it’s not entertaining), and featured on ‘Technology‘ (it’s not really anything to do with technology), and mentioned on the front-page and  ‘UK‘ (where most people don’t care about Twitter [or Stephen Fry, for that matter]). Strangely, in the most suitable place, ‘Also in the News‘, it is not mentioned at all.

I’m not specifically attacking the BBC here (actually, I am): this problem is widespread. We don’t care about Twitter. We don’t care about individual tweets on Twitter. And we don’t care about ‘controversial‘ moves for people leaving Twitter. So, to all media: GET A GRIP!