I don’t think I can wait for Twitter to become more reliable.  I think it’s a great service, but it’s time to look at alternatives.  I wanted to try testing other things because Twitter was really starting to slow my sites down.  I guess anytime it has to lookup data on another site, it will cause a slowdown, but when a site is down it makes it pretty frustrating to even use the site.

I had already signed up for Ping.fm which is a good service for posted to a whole bunch of other services.  So I figured I would look for a wordpress plugin that would send the posts to Ping.fm and then off to my other services.  This is sort of a test post to make sure that all works.

I’ve also been using Pownce which I am using right now to show status updates and the what am I doing section of this blog.

I’m going to see how it goes for a while then see if it’s worth deploying to my other sites.

I recently switched my sites to Media Temple and I think for the most part it’s been a pretty successful experience.  All four of my main sites (brandonquintana.com, brandonquintanaconsulting.com, lightenment.com, and webdevtwopointzero.com) have all been transfered and after some tweaking and fine tuning I think they are running pretty well.

Media Temple offers a great hosting package which allows you to host up to 100 sites on one account.  My sites are relatively small so I think the allocated bandwidth of 1TB a month will be more than enough for me.  On top of the typical PHP/MySQL setup, other nice features include SFTP connectivity and the ability to run Subversion.  Their hosting control panel is laid out well and easy to use.  Tech support issues are resolved in a timely manner.  As of right now, I’m a happy customer.

If you are looking for a hosting provider, Media Temple is worth a shot and if you are interested in having me host your site, I would be more than happy to work some arrangements with you.

Howto forge has another tutorial on setting up LAMP on the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu is definitely my Linux flavor of choice probably because it’s the easiest for me to setup and somewhat resembles my favorite platform of choice Mac OS X. The LAMP stack runs well on Ubuntu and for the most part has gotten a lot easier to install. I no longer have weird issues where I ask myself why is it doing that, and have no explanation. Read the rest of this entry »

According to CNET News.com, Google will be adding a feature to advertiser accounts to show the number of clicks occurring on their ads through click fraud. It will not only show the number of clicks but percentage of clicks as well. It is estimated that 14-20% of clicks are fraudulent on pay per click advertisements. Google had recently been hit with quite a few lawsuits regarding the issue and this seems to be one step toward combatting the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

Companies are quickly starting to adopt Google Checkout as a form of payment on their sites according to DailyTech. Ebay is one of the large shopping sites saying that it would not adopt Google Checkout. Even though Google says the method of checkout is not designed to compete with PayPal, it seems kind of obvious that it is doing just that. With such a niche market its hard to say that it’s not a competitor since its basic principle is making and receiving payments. Read the rest of this entry »

ZDNet had a blog post regarding browser usage recently. The numbers are clear that Firefox is continuing to gain market share over Internet Explorer. Worldwide 13% is a pretty good amount considering the age of the browser and showing more usage in the US at 16% is promising. Read the rest of this entry »

Seattle PI has an interview on their Software Notebook with 21-year-old Blake Ross, the founder of Firefox. He makes some really good points throughout the interview a few of which I will discuss and give my opinion on in this post. For those of you that don’t know, Ross launched the Mozilla Firefox project in 2002 with fellow software developer Dave Hyatt. While I’m only 23 myself its good to see how people close to my age are making an impact in the industry. Of course Ross’s resume is much better than mine, but I can still relate to a lot of the points he makes in the interview. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times had a great article on Google over the break. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google had built their computers and developed software that was more efficient than anything in the market at that time. They had done this to save money. Read the rest of this entry »

Google has released its own internet payment system called Google Checkout. It should compete head to head with PayPal and allow you to keep multiple credit cards in your Google account as well as a single place to track your orders. Read the rest of this entry »

Apple Matters had an article about Google and is competitors and its forthcoming competitors. Google is the leading search engine by far, but that never means that another engine can’t come out and out perform the engine. As stated in the article, Google isn’t perfect and it will never be perfect. In fact, no service for that matter will ever be perfect. Read the rest of this entry »