Category: internet

I just got myself a Gmail account! I spent the last hour or so changing my e-mail address at various web sites so that all the newsletters that used to go to my yahoo account will now go to Gmail. I really like the interface, and the absence of obnoxious, blinking Flash ads. The gigabyte of space is nice too. It’ll be interesting to see how the spam filtering works out. I’m getting about 50 spams a day to my Yahoo account. It files most of the them correctly, but I have to fish 2 or 3 good e-mails a week out of the spam folder, and I usually get 3 or 4 spam e-mails a day that wind up in my inbox instead of the spam folder.

Brian Livingston’s newsletter today had some interesting stuff on the decline of Google. Recommended alternatives:

• Teoma
• AllTheWeb
• Dogpile

I stumbled across the Knight Rider Online bulletin boards just now. Good to see my old friend Mike Pajaro is still a big Knight Rider fan.

1and1 is working out fine so far. I haven’t had a chance to play with any PHP stuff or anything like that, but I did set up a new guestbook and a counter. I may start playing around with Movable Type soon, if I can find the time.

My site is now hosted on 1and1.com, and it seems to be working out all right. They have a limited-time deal right now where you can get free hosting for 3 years, including shell access, a bunch of e-mail accounts, PHP, and some other fun stuff. Definitely better than Yahoo/GeoCities. I’m not sure if they’ll really honor the whole 3 years, or if they’ll go out of business or something, but I figure it’s worth a shot. Now I need to learn some PHP so I can do some fancy stuff on the site…

I’m looking to change my web host over to 1and1.com, so access to this site through andrewhuey.org may be spotty while I transfer stuff over. I’m sure you can all live with that. 🙂

How not to run an online store:

– First, put in a JavaScript age-checking routine that works under IE, but not under Mozilla, so that everyone using that browser is identified as being under 13, and hence not allowed to buy stuff from you. Hey, why worry about it? Proper cross-browser date handling is well-documented, but who uses Mozilla anyway?

– Next, rely on pop-up windows for some key functions, so that people with pop-up blockers enabled can’t register on your site. Again, why worry? Only communists use pop-up blockers!

Thank you, swatch.com!

(Of course, the sad thing is that I bought a watch from them anyway. after switching browsers and disabling pop-ups.)

Annoying new scam:

How Low Can You Go? New Community Web Site Is Doing You No Favors

I just got one of these e-mails, and MAN was I creeped out. If you get any e-mail from the “Word-of-Mouth.Org Report Awareness System”, I’d recommend just ignoring it. Creepy.

Spam is getting to be a big problem at work, so I’ve been spending some spare time looking into various spam-filtering solutions. The stuff I’m looking at for work is, of course, server-oriented software. For home use, though, I’ve been looking at a few things that get between your e-mail client and POP server. I just downloaded K9 and installed it for use with Eudora. I won’t know how good it works until I’ve been using it for a week or two, but hey, it’s free, so it’s gotta be worth a try.