Tag Archives: Services

AOL Commits Suicide with Ad’s in E-Mail



Imagine your paying $14.95 per month for your AOL account that you are using largely for e-mail to only start getting advertisements jammed into e-mail. This has to be the most stupid move I have heard about. AOL is nothing more than a over priced ISP, for them to do this is beyond comprehension.

When you have a free account place somewhere you expect ads, this will add another nail in AOL’s coffin. [InfoWorld]


Google Calendar is Live



Well I am logged into calendar.google.com pretty basic but free. You will be able to create multiple calendars of which you can make them private or share it. The one thing is obvious Google wants you to stay logged in. If you do then when appointments are near it will put up a pop up on your screen. Nice start. [calendar.google.com]

RSS feeds available I found the RSS feed, you have to dig around to find it, go to the left hand side click the down arrow by your name, and you will see calendar settings click that and you will be presented with a private feed URL if your application supports ical you can link in with that as well.


Nettica DNS Services



Since we have been adding servers here at Geek News Central, I have been wanting to make sure that we have some things in place in case we blow a hard-drive or have a hacker incident etc. First thing was to move DNS services off all of our servers and onto a professional DNS Service.

I was introduced to Nettica by Tim who has done, server and design work for me. What impressed me was the price, 100 domains, $50.00 a year and a smoking web based interface. They are not a fly bu night company they have their servers in multi-tiered hosting facilities and spread out as near as I can tell in 5 different places in the country.

They also have a service call FailSafe which will watch our groups of servers and if one of them goes down will route the traffic to a backup. Thus we are now in the process of mirroring all of the critical domains so that if we do go down for a hardware failure we will be able to come back online within a 15 minute window.

It will be a couple of weeks before we are done doing all of the migrating and have the mirrors in place and it is a significant investment but at this point we cannot afford to go down. We have even went so far as to have a server pre-configured to step in and become a new mirror if needed.

We will be testing the failure and recovery pieces here in the coming weeks but will let you know in advance when it is going to happen. Check out Nettica yourself.


Windows Live Updated in Big Way



A re-worked Microsoft Search engine is being preliminarily released as I type this. This is the start of Microsoft attempting to make the long climb to compete with Google.

First look and this is indeed a impressive upgrade, and I have been playing with it for about 20 minutes and man it’s fast, and although the search results are quite different than what I see at Google you can see Microsoft has rolled the dice and put some serious Web 2.0 components on this page. The Site works out of the chute with Firefox as well [www.live.com]

live.JPG

More news Sources [Seattlepi.com]


BlogEverywhere.com I don’t get it!



First of all I have not sent a e-mail to anyone on Hotmail in a very long time. I am sure there are a lot of people that use it, but e-mail was always going missing and I personally find the interface horrible. Seems the Inventor of Hotmail did not like his interface very much either, as he has invested 5 million of his own dollars to build a toolbar that simply downloads the e-mail from Hotmail when the machine is idle.

I am not sure about you, but I receive and respond to e-mail today almost as fast as come in, sometime e-mail can be like a instant message conversations. From the point of view functionality I think the tool bar is pretty stupid. The second function piece adds some blogging tools, or actually it’s more a site annotation tool. What looks like has happened here is that the developer figured out part way into development is that he had a looser and had to add some functions to it in order for people to get excited about it.

What blows me away is he has had 50 programmers working on this thing. I tell you what give me 50 programmers 90 days and 5 million dollars and I will create a family of services that will cause people to sit up and notice.