March 2008

I’ve got an invitation for the EverNote Beta available for the first ten lucky readers to contact me.

If you’ve never heard of EverNote, head over to their web site to get the low down. To summarise, it allows you to grab “clips” from just about anywhere and pop them into notes using either your browser, or a Mac or Windows client application. You can search across all the notes (including text in images!), tag them and stick them into Notebooks.

Additionally, everything’s synchronised, so if you add a clip at work using your browser, when you get home and fire up the client application, it’ll be there waiting for you.

I find it dead handy for numerous tasks, including:

• Saving collections of code snippets
• Saving standard templates for things like emails
• Saving stories that I stumble across during the day for inclusion in blog posts

I’m sure everyone will have their own way of using it, and that’s the beauty of it. You can use it pretty much how you want to.

In order to request an invitation, simply drop me a line using my Contact form. The first ten I get will each receive an invitation.

Update: All invitations have now been given out. I’ll post again should I get some more.

A battle seems to be hotting up between MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog for the superest mega-widget of all time.

I mentioned the BlogCatalog offering earlier, which you can see in my sidebar, which tells you what I’ve been up to across various networks. Now, MyBlogLog are offering what I’d describe as a giant version of the same, designed to be embedded in a page. You can see mine in my About page. Underneath the static blurb, you’ll notice a dynamic offering letting you know what I’ve been doing recently (on the Net, that is!).

Which one’s best? They serve different purposes, really, even though they offer similar information. The BlogCatalog widget sits nicely in a sidebar, and the MyBlogLog version sits very well in a page. The MyBlogLog version is almost an embeddable version of FriendFeed for your own site, which is pretty neat.

I like them both. Trouble is, the number of widgets is now creeping back up on my blog!

I logged in today and have just noticed a little “head and shoulders” icon for each message that I’m pretty sure wasn’t there yesterday:

Clicking on it usefully shows other recent messages from the sender of that particular email. Pretty neat. Anyone noticed any other new features?

A while ago I created a site where people could announce newly launched web sites. When I was looking for such a place after creating a new site myself, I couldn’t really find anything suitable, other than the usual Digg, Mixx etc.

So, if you’ve got a brand new site and you want to let the world know about it, head over to One’s Hits (yes, I know, it was a joke at the time, and it just stuck - thanks Geoff!) and add your site. It’s got Digg style voting, so if anyone ever ends up using the site, it could be quite useful.

You don’t often get something for nothing these days, so head over there now, add your site and spread the word!

I’ve been having problems with Dreamhost for a while now. They seem okay as a host until people actually start visiting your site.

One of my blogs gets around 1,500 - 2,000 uniques a day. Not exactly Google, is it? But it’s enough to blow Dreamhost apparently. I did have a translator plug-in that was apparently blowing up their servers every 5 minutes, but despite removing it (and it cost me cold hard cash to purchase), the downtime simply isn’t acceptable.

This weekend I’ve suffered one outage of 8 hours and it’s just gone down again. I opened a Media Temple Grid account a while back and have been gradually moving my sites there. I’ve been keeping an eye on them for a few weeks and watching up-time and so far it’s been excellent. I was going to move the remainder over after Easter anyway, but the latest outage is enough for me to get things moving quickly. As soon as it’s back up, the remainder of my sites are moving to MT.