Volunteers will receive a purpose-built broadband measurement unit which can be plugged into the existing modem/router. This is called the SamKnows Whitebox.

If you are interested in helping by hosting a SamKnows Whitebox, and playing a part in changing the face of the European broadband industry, then please sign up on this page! It’s worth taking the time to read through the requirements before proceeding.

The new interface looks better, but there’s a lot of white space that could be used to show more information about the files. The details view is no longer available from the interface, but you can enable it in the old UI and the setting is preserved.

If you like having your messages list available even when viewing, this is a great feature to have. To enable it, just open Gmail, go to Labs, and turn on the Preview Pane option.

The Preview Pane lab works like a charm with all your beloved Gmail shortcuts (if you’re not familiar with them, hit the question mark ['?'] in Gmail to bring them up). To turn it on in your Gmail account, head to your Gmail Labs page, Ctrl/Cmd+F for “Preview Pane”, select enable, and click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page. If you don’t fancy the default layout, you can adjust the size of the panes with a little drag and drop.

Via Lifehacker

• lacking any controls: unrestricted
• boundless, infinite
• not bounded by exceptions

Apparently to many hosting providers, the word unlimited actually means:

• a whole lot less than you think
• as much as it can until it becomes a problem for them
• Sharing the resources of a three year old server between a thousand sites; incapable of handling serious load.

For most bloggers on the Internet today, these two different ways to interpret what unlimited is won’t ever become a problem. However, if you vaguely aspire of gradually building a successful blog with thousands of readers, there is when this could become a problem.

Success can take you by surprise! What if someday one of your posts ‘goes viral’?

While I would love to hang up the 9 to 5 job in favour of becoming a professional wordsmith, that’s just not in the cards right now. ‘Cheap and cheerful’ is the order of the day for everything that goes into my blog, including hosting plans, platform, domain registration, using only public domain images, and even using free software to produce the content.
Most folks would agree that you get what you pay for, but when everywhere you look talks about cheap hosting and free this, and unlimited that, it is fairly easy to convince yourself to go with a low cost provider. Most of these companies do a great job of providing affordable hosting, and they do a good enough job for most blogs, right up until the first post really hits it big.

I’m talking about making it to the front page of Slashdot, or being dug on Digg, hitting a trending topic on Twitter, or getting some national mention on the evening news. The next thing you know, your site visit counter looks like a spinning odometer, your blog’s response time starts to get erratic, then slow, then suddenly stops completely. A moment later and refreshing your browser reveals one of the following…a 500 error, or worse, an account suspended page. In both cases, what you have discovered is that your low cost provider has low costs for a reason, and you just exceeded your thresholds. Now you know why they were so cheap.

One of the blogs I work on recently had an article make it to the front page of Slashdot. While the initial surge in traffic was exciting and extremely gratifying, it quickly degenerated into a disaster. The provider, Bluehost, suspended our account. Apparently they don’t have a copy of Webster’s dictionary.

This not only impacted the blog in question, but others operating under the same shared plan. Apparently the bandwidth consumption was so high that the hosting provider could not handle the load, the surge was affecting other customers, and they opted to disable the account to ride out the storm. When contacted about the suspension, they allegedly refused to reinstate the account until the viral post fell off the front page of Slashdot, which of course killed the buzz and caused several other blogs to be down.

Don’t let this happen to you. There are several things you should consider when setting up a blog that will help you to avoid this situation, and ride out the wave of a viral hit with ease.

1. Read the Terms of Service
Unlimited means something different in marketish than it does in English. See what your plan actually offers, and what happens when your site exceeds the limits of your plan. Some hosting providers have built-in allowances for occasional surges in traffic, while others may let you roll over your account to the next billing cycle.

2. Read the SLA
Should something go awry, what is the provider’s SLA and how do they address issues? Disabling your site until it falls off the front page of Slashdot is an arbitrary reaction more in line with a child’s tantrum than a professional hosting company.

3. Determine how many sites are on a host
This site shares it’s server with 78 other domains, according to http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/. I have seen as many as 2000 sites on a single host before. Any one of those could go viral, and impact your site the same way your viral success could impact theirs.
4. Consider your images
Downloading images can consume the majority of bandwidth associated with a post. Use the smallest image size possible, saving files to the required resolution rather than simply resizing them in the HTML. Consider hosting your images with a dedicated media hosting company like ImageShack or PhotoBucket to reduce the traffic consumed by your blog.

5. Three words…caching, caching, caching
If you use WordPress, implement one of the great caching plugins like WP-cache or WP Super Cache to reduce the CPU load on your host and increase the load speed for your pages.

6. Watch your ‘extra stuff’
Plugins, analytics, and ads can all impact your site’s load time. Even if your site is wicked fast, a slow ad server or plugin that pulls content from another host could make your page painfully slow to load during peak times. In the event of a post ‘going viral’ be prepared to disable plugins and widgets to slim down your page and improve load times.

7. Mirror, mirror, on the wall
If you happen to catch a slashdotting or digg-effect happening in the early stages, consider setting up a quick mirror. NetworkMirror.com and DuggBack.com both exist to ease the effects of instant popularity on smaller sites, and may have already mirrored your post. Replacing your post with a quick redirect may be enough to stay ‘up’ without exceeding your hosts’ caps.

Basically at this point, you need to make sure you have Success Proof Hosting!

Once one of your posts has ‘gone viral’ the likelihood of another doing this increases dramatically. There are several things you may want to look into in addition to what is above.

1. Dedicated hosting
Whether that means a dedicated server per blog, or per account, one reason many hosting providers will throttle your success is because it can impact all of the other one thousand sites on the server hosting your blog. Dedicated hosting is much more expensive, but ensures that your success won’t cause issues for others.

2. Virtual Private Server hosting
VPS is a nice compromise between a dedicated host, and a free for all. With a guaranteed percentage of system resources, and with the possibility to upgrade quickly, you know you will get a share of the pie and not be left with only the crumbs.

3. Burstable bandwidth
Look for providers that offer a steady bandwidth minimum with burstable peaks. You won’t be paying a premium every month, but your blog can weather the storm of another viral post with ease.

4. Multiple hosts
While this will greatly increase your admin overhead, using several inexpensive hosts across different providers, and using DNS round robin can be cheaper, and more resilient, than one large-scale hosting plan. It also reduces the likelihood that a hosting provider issue could take your site down.

Surviving a slashdotting or digg-effect is a badge of honour on the Internet. Not surviving is a close second, since both mean you had a post ‘hit it big.’ The difference between winning the gold, and taking home the silver, can be as easy as choosing the right host, making some prudent decisions with your setup, and reacting quickly when the storm begins.

“We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed,” the company wrote on its home page. “No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.”

The tr.im service was one of many services (like su.pr, bit.ly, is.gd ow.ly and lots of others) that will convert a conventional long URL into a shorter alphanumeric string. This is extremely valuable expecially for extremely long URL’s and for people posting URL’s on twitter who face a 140 character limit in the messages they send.

Twitter is partly to blame on the closing down of tr.im. “There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but anointed bit.ly the market winner,” the company wrote.

Tr.im is no longer accepting new URLs although said it would continue to redirect links until at least the end of this year.

Update : URL shortening service Trim is reopening its doors, restoring service to both existing Trim links and the core of the site that lets users make new ones. A company blog post that details the change of plans says that the company will continue to run Trim “indefinitely” while a trustworthy buyer is sought out.

Twitter 2.0 – my vision for a better twitter.

I’ve taken some time to write this post and write my ideas on how twitter can be improved and did my best to create a cheat proof system that would allow twitter users to have a better experience. I’ve taken my points and joined Twitter, digg and eBay to finally create the system below.

• Voting buttons – (digg style) – the voting buttons on the side of the picture would allow the people who receive the tweet to vote on it’s value. A person that finds the value useful can vote for it. The second button is to add to favourites, and the bottom button is to rate the post as spam.
• Score Bar – The score bar calculates the percentage of good value posts together with the posts considered as spam, and creates a user score. – this however should be calculated only based on the user tweets, and not in any way relative to other users. It can also be calculated according to a certain time period (Say 30 days). I got the idea from the eBay seller rating.
• User States – Active, Silent or Disabled – Any users that are within set target user score would be the normal active users, silent users are those who get below a set user score threshold and are therefore punished by switching them to silent mode, where they can only receive tweets, or maybe limit the URL posting capabilities. any users who end up in silent mode for an x amount of times will be disabled – and probably considered as spammy accounts.
• User grouping – this is an additional feature that I think would enhance Twitter’s usability a lot. There should be an easy way to categorise the people you follow into groups. Like for example – twitter users who talk about technology, some might be bloggers, some might be companies and organisations etc…

In my opinion, these are all great ideas that could be incredibly useful for all users and to have a better experience while using twitter. Let me know what you think on the above points in the comment area. I do have a lot more ideas on how twitter can be improved… but ill write those up in another post later on. I’m looking forward to hear your thoughts!

There are 29 themes available in Google’s directory, and they some of them are pretty good. I assume Google will allow third party developers or designers to create their own themes for Chrome eventually.

My favorite theme right now is probably the greyscale one, since it fits perfectly with my Windows XP ZUNE skin. (Yeah, how boring I am!) What’s your favourite?

There is now a new unofficial application offered by a third party that allows you to read your Google Reader feeds from your Desktop. You can download the Desktop Google Reader from here. This software is still under beta testing, so you may come across to some little bugs, however the most basic functions work pretty well, and a the full version is expected to have most of the features available in the online version.

Let us know what you think of this software in the comment area below!

It surprises me how many website owners don’t realise this, but the web is REALLY world wide. Once you put something online, everyone who is connected to the Internet can see this information.

This fact occurred to me some days ago while browsing around some online shopping sites. I was trying to find a particular product, and I was lucky enough to find a ton of sites that offered this particular item. However, when I was going through the usually painful purchasing options, the sites would not offer shipping outside of their own region/country.

This really surprises me since this information would be best shown to the user well in advance, not right at the end of the purchasing process (that most of the times require a long user account registration form and e-mail address verification!!).

Current technologies allow the sites to understand where the visitor is coming from, and therefore, it would be relatively simple to notify the visitor that the website accessed does not offer any shipping to his current location. If this is not possible due to any imaginable excuse… it would be extremely simple to just add a small banner/image saying that “We only ship to X, Y and Z” No big deal right?

A good example of a website ordering system done right is at www.overstock.com. Once you visit the website, it shows you right near the search bar that shipping to your country is possible. Well done to Overstock for such functionality! On the opposite side, a shopping system done wrong would be Amazon.com. They allow you to browse their entire catalog, and by the time you are almost finished to order, you are taken to a page that informs you that “Sorry, this item cannot be shipped to this address!”. I understand that companies would have some restrictions where they might want to sell their products, however, please do let us know in advance!

This lack of “international” thinking is also often present when certain companies organise events, webinars, web conferences etc… they usually just point out times and dates in their own local format and time zone, whilst completely ignoring other country time zones.

Luckily, now you can use the Internet to help you in those emergency situations (where you absolutely cant do otherwise!

http://www.viewdocsonline.com/ is a cool site that lets you view some of the most common types of files that are handled in offices on a daily basis. Currently, the online service supports the following formats for viewing online: PDF, XLS, XLSX, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, PPS, PS, TXT, RTF, ODT, ODP, SXW, SXI, and more.

You can upload the document to the web site, and it will convert it for easy reading (but not perfect). Alternatively, if the file is hosted on a server somewhere, you can also paste in the URL that directly points to a file, which saves you from having to download the file to your computer.

too bad this site was not created earlier (like 5 years ago!) it would have saved me so much time and useless trips between offices and clients.