This morning I sent a request to Hostmonster to have SSH access granted. Their only requirement is that you send a scan of some type of government ID. This I did, scanning my drivers license and chopping out my social security number (I have a really old Utah driver’s license). I sent the email, and less than three minutes later I had a reply that all had been taken care of. Wow! That is Why Hostmonster Support Rocks!
Thanks Hostmonster!
I made a big mistake which has killed my Google Page Rank, and consequently my Google traffic. I recently changed my hosting from bluehost to hostmonster and thought I had successfully migrated my site. However, I now realize that I missed something critical.
About six months ago, I migrated my Blogger-powered Tech Blog (http://jimmyzimmerman.com/tech_blog/) to WordPress, and in the process moved the URL to http://jimmyzimmerman.com/blog/. I just wanted ‘blog’ in the URL because Word Press allows categorizing and I could blog on more than just technology. I successfully redirected all of my ‘tech_blog’ posts to their equivalent ‘blog’ addresses when I made this change. However, when I changed from bluehost to hostmonster, I forgot to migrate the redirects to my new server.
I discovered that the redirects were missing way too late, when my site traffic to a dramatic dive. I quickly checked my Google webmaster tools account, and discovered 404 errors for my old tech_articles. Apparently a lot of my Google juice was generated from incoming links to my tech_blog. Now Google thinks that those are invalid links, and my page rank has taken a dive.
Yesterday, Tag Jungle made the cut to debut in Launch: Silicon Valley! During this past month we’ve received some really “nice” endorsements and feedback from the technology community, and we’ve had exciting breakthroughs with investment companies, but the Launch: Silicon Valley news has topped our excitement meter.
Launch: Silicon Valley is put on by Guy Kawasaki’s Garage Technology Ventures and Microsoft. It is an event geared towards generating buzz and PR for companies that are not already well-funded and well-known. It is not meant to be a pitch for funding event, but I’m sure the buzz it will generate will open up even more opportunities for funding.
If the Tag Jungle Tarzan team seems to disappear for the next two weeks, it’s probably because we’re in Phil’s basement coding like mad while wearing our enhanced vision helmets.
Tag Jungle Beta will be released to the public very soon and we are all very excited about showing off our new blog discovery platform. I have been working on the back-end processing which will be feeding data to the Jungle. Creating the JungleBot has been a really fun puzzle to solve.
The blogosphere is growing at an extremely fast pace, and our goal is to make every blog post appear in the Jungle in as close to real-time as possible. We are coming very close to accomplishing this. As we are putting more and more data into the Tag Jungle database, our results are becoming more and more astounding. Tag Jungle is really going to revolutionize the way people find good, current, and most importantly, relevant blog content.
Sign up to be a part of the private beta release.
I was sitting on a couch the other day at the Wilkinson Center at BYU, and a deaf couple came and sat next to me on the couch. From their facial expressions and bursts of laughter, they were having what appeared to be a very fun conversation.
Later, they both pulled out phones with a querty keypad and started messaging each other. I’ve never seen anyone type so fast with their thumbs. Then it occured to me. Technology is changing the fundamental ways that we communicate with each other. I can only imagine how frustrating it would be to not be able to communicate with the majority of the people around me. Text messaging now breaks down that barrier, and lets these people communicate freely with those that don’t sign. I can only imagine that text messaging will break down more barriers of communication as people will be able to have their messages translated for people who speak other languages.
I created this mashup about 5 or 6 months ago, but could never put it on my website until I had php5. Now that I’ve made a change to Host Monster, running php5, I can make this script live.
Here is the mashup. It basically puts all of the earthqakes above a 5 in magnitude on the map. It gets its updates automatically from the U.S. Government.
The script encorporates AJAX for the data points, RSS feed parsing for pulling the data from the USGS Earthquake Feed. I used php5′s DomDocument for the xml that is consumed by the Google Map.
Writely now proudly wears the colors of baby blue and mint green as it has officially been integrated into the Google office suite. Google Docs & Spreadsheets now houses a new image of Writely. All of the Writely functionality is still there. Your Writely documents will now appear alongside your spreadsheets. The integration is pretty clean, and of course Google added a search feature for your spreadsheets and documents.
Just like other disruptive technologies, Google Docs & Spreadsheets is unable to match all of the features and power of its old-school competitor, Microsoft Office. I highly doubt many business professionals today will be switching to Google’s office tools. However, I think Google is heading into a non-consumer market, just like PCs did in their early day.
PCs entered the non-consumer market of family and home computing, and Google is entering the non-consumer market of third-world countries. Their $100 laptop initiative will be bringing computing power to millions of people who could never afford a computer. Google has been investing in Internet infrastructure in several countries providing WiFi Internet access to impoverished areas of the world. The $100 laptops will not have much storage space, which makes the free online application model a wonderful fit. Bill Gates thinks that the computers need disk storage, but that is only necessary in the old paradigm. In 2004, Steve Ballmer thought a $100 PC would help prevent software piracy. Piracy isn’t an issue when it comes to web apps funded by advertising. You can’t pirate a web application.
Over time, Google’s office will eventually reach a level of productivity where it will threaten Microsoft’s Office. At first, the mini computer wasn’t threatened by the PC, but eventually the PC reached a level of performance where it was able to do everything that the mini computer could, but at a lower cost. Thus it disrupted the market. I see the same thing happening with web applications such as Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets.
Twitter Updates