Rory Hansen

Brad Feld mentioned WSFinder (looks like the website is down at the moment), a wiki for web services and open APIs, on his blog, Feld Thoughts, today. WSFinder currently has information about over 100 publically accessible web services and APIs, covering a wide spectrum of industries and technologies.

I think it’s a great resource to have bookmarked, so I did. And I mention it here on my blog too, so that perhaps you’ll bookmark it, too.

Cruise on over to the WSFinder blog and learn more about this handy wiki.

Even though I followed this tutorial to get AWStats running on TextDrive, it still took about an hour to complete. It’s such a long process!

By the way, to save you some time, skip the third part of the tutorial on user authorization. Instead, just password protect the AWStats folder using the “Protected Web Directories” option from the Webmin main menu.

By chance, I opened Firefox and visited my site, just to see how it looked. And I guess it’s a good thing I did, since I noticed a number of interesting anomalies.

• The text within my <code> block was quite small, so I’ve modified the CSS a little bit so that it should now be readable.
• Because all of my posts are created using WordPress, whenever I make double carriage returns in their text editor, the program automatically adds new <p> tags. This seems to totally screw with the <code> blocks, ending them prematurely. To bypass this problem, I’ll have to consciously avoid using two successive carriage returns and, instead, manually add a <br /> whenever I want a blank line.

I also noticed that I may have prevented people from commenting on my posts. So, if you had previously wanted to comment on something, but couldn’t, feel free to do so now!

Anyway, I’ll have to remember to view each of my posts with both Internet Explorer and Firefox from now on, just in case more of these anomalies appear.

There’s this article on Wired News called Wanted: Free iPod. Will Pay which discusses how people are willing to pay cash in order to obtain freebies, such as iPods and laptops. The article was a real eye-opener for me; I never knew there was an active community of bargain hunters who would actually pay other people to become their “referrals” for things like this, but I guess it does make some sense. If you’re able to get an iPod for $150 rather than $300, then perhaps the savings are worth seeking out and paying complete strangers to sign up for the required services for you.

We’ve all seen ads for places like Free iPods.com while browsing the Web, and while I’ll admit, I’ve thought about signing up to get a free iPod through them, I’d never actually do it. Who’s to say that I’d ever con convince my friends into helping me out to get one. Or, say I did manage to “refer” 5 people, who’s to say that the company would even send me my iPod.

Anyway, in the article, it mentions how people often lose money by paying strangers who never end up keeping their side of the bargain. Business idea: Set up a website where freebie hunters can find other freebie hunters and exchange referrals. It could be set up so that users auction off their time and services eBay-style and the little money involved could be stored away in escrow (ie., the business’ Paypal account) until both sides fulfill their promises. The website proprietors, no doubt, would take a small middleman “tax” for themselves. Of course, I have no idea how legal this idea is, or how financially feasible it is. It’s just an idea. : )

This is the first time that I’ve had the chance to use WordPress, and so far, I’ve been very impressed.

Not only was it easy to install (perhaps because I did it through the CPanel plug-in called Fantastico) but its easy to use, as well. Installing this theme was really straight forward and adding and modifying posts is easy, too.

In the past I’ve played with b2evolution and MovableType, but I was not completely happy with either. Modifying b2evolution to match the look-and-feel of a current site was somewhat difficult and even after I was done, I wasn’t happy with what I had done. With MovableType, I was disappointed with the actual process of posting new content. Perhaps if I had read a tutorial or two, I would have understood the process, but I hadn’t so I didn’t. In any case, I like WordPress a lot more than I did those other two.