/dev/random

It looks like all of my sites will be down Friday night until early Saturday morning. DreamHost sez:

Due to continued space and power constraints in our primary data center, we will be moving all central DreamHost functions as well as the “spunky� cluster to one of our newer data centers. This move will begin Friday, [...]

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I just checked my Akismet moderation queue and found that no less than 5 splogs republished an item I posted less than two hours ago. I bet this item will also be scraped and republished. If you’re reading this anyplace other than mcdevzone.com, this post was illegally republished.

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I don’t pay much attention to Windows shareware & freeware, so I haven’t heard of G-Archiver until I read this item at Coding Horror.

I was looking for a way to back up my gmail account to a local drive. I’ve accumulated a mass of important information that I would rather not lose. During my search [...]

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I’ve joined FriendFeed. You can read or subscribe to my feed here.

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I’ve changed the tagline for MacMegasite to “Mac Community News”, which reflects the focus as a community driven site better than the old one, “News for mac geeks”.

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Guy Kawasaki writes: Most people believe the top of the page is the best place for ads. This article, called “Demystifying ‘Above the Fold’” is important to read for its contrarian approach to this belief. It states that people are often so intent on reading content may not notice any ads above the fold. Better [...]

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I’m now in the process of moving this site back to Dreamhost. I’ve already moved the database, so the same content will be mirrored on both servers.
I found that HostGator doesn’t seem to offer any advantages over Dreamhost and their control panel (CPanel) is nowhere near as nice as Dreamhost’s control panel, plus I have [...]

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This has been a weekend from hell for my web sites.
It started when Dreamhost moved one of their server clusters, which affected all of my sites. It was only supposed to take 8 hours, but it turned into almost 24 hours. Unfortunately that seems to be their usual pattern. Every planned change they make always [...]

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The DNS entry for Macmegasite is screwed up right now, so it’s inaccessible. I had temporarily switched it to Bluehost and a little while later switched it back to Dreamhost. The first DNS change is in effect now, so it’s pointing to a non-existent site at Bluehost. It *should* be back to normal by the [...]

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This site is back online, now hosted at Host Gator. The rest of my sites are still at Dreamhost for now.
I had tried Bluehost first, but I cancelled almost immediately when I found out that they can’t host multiple independent domains on a single account- multiple domains are treated as subdomains.
There are still some [...]

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As you’ve probably noticed this site has been down for most of the day. Dreamhost had a major meltdown when they moved a server cluster, which affected all of my sites. I tried two alternative hosts and I’m now moving this site to Hostgator.com. Everything else will remain at Dreamhost for now.

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Steve Ballmer lays it on thick in a letter sent to Jerry Yang of Yahoo before going public with the offer:
“Together we can unleash new levels of innovation, delivering enhanced user experiences, breakthroughs in search, and new advertising platform capabilities. We hope that you and your board share our enthusiasm.�
This was no love letter. [...]

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I’m sure everyone has heard about Microsoft offering to buy Yahoo.
Yahoo owns two sites I use regularly, Flickr and del.icio.us. It isn’t clear how they’d be affected if Microsoft does buy Yahoo.
When we trust our data to a site like Flickr, we trust that it will always be there. I’m not predicting that they’ll [...]

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Instapaper is a new site that does one simple thing: it lets you save a URL to read later.
I still love del.icio.us for permanent bookmarks, but Instapaper is much simpler. No tags or description — simply use the Read Later bookmarklet to save the page. You can then go back to your Instapaper page [...]

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I switched to a new theme & logo at MacMegasite, and I also de-cluttered the sidebars. I’m still looking at more themes and working on the logo, so I may still change it if I find something I like better.
The last few days I’ve looked at a lot of WordPress & Drupal themes. Almost none [...]

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Nick Bradbury compares the advantages of using a desktop RSS reader (such as NetNewsWire) vs. a web-based reader.
I have been using NetNewsWire for several years, but I recently tried using Google Reader for a few weeks, so I could use the sharing features. I found that I prefer using NetNewsWire and I was glad [...]

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I noticed today that MacMegasite now has 34526 subscribers to the newsfeed, a sudden jump from the usual 18000-19000.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
FeedBurner’s statistics page confirms the sudden jump.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!
This happened just after NewsGator announced that NetNewsWire is now free, and MacMegasite happens to be one of the default feeds. Thanks Brent! I owe [...]

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I’ve used NetNewsWire for a long time, but I recently started using Google Reader instead for the sharing & suggestion features. Unfortunately the two don’t sync, so switching between them is a bother.
In light of today’s announcement, and because I always found NetNewsWire faster & more convenient than reading news online, I switched back to [...]

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I’ve added a Macworld tag to MacMegasite, which will list all articles tagged with that category. I will use it to post all Macworld related items.

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For a long time I was unable to view ustream.tv on my MacBook Pro, even though I have the latest version of Flash player and other sites work OK.
I noticed that I had local storage disabled in the Flash Player settings. Enabling it fixed the problem.
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

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