Thoughts from Howard Yermish about technology, music composition, wine, bicycling and being human.
Want to know the IP address? Hosting company? Server platform? Domain registration information? Alexa traffic rank? Company information? Social network popularity? And on and on and on…
Where QuarkBase shines is its presentation. It takes a very simple approach (just type in the domain name) and it serves up all of this information for you in an easily digestible way.
Another gem from Common Craft…
Many people in the business world perform a Google search on themselves to see if anything strange is showing up. Well, you can setup an automated search of new content on Google by creating a free Google Alert for either your name or business name.
All you have to do is enter the search phrase or keywords, set the type of search, set the frequency and enter your email address. Very simple to do and a nice way to monitor your online reputation.
Even though my day to day has more to do with strategizing with clients, I still love to roll up my sleeves, fire up my graphics programs and code editors, and get under the hood for some good old fashioned website development. With that in mind, one of my favorite tools is Iconfactory’s xScope.
Think of xScope as a graphics Swiss army knife. It helps with all of those little jobs where there is no really good way.
If you use a Mac and do anything design related, this is a great tool to have at the ready,
For some reason, lots of people have been mentioning to me that they are going to be near an Apple store over the next few days.
Perhaps they are going to purchase a new iMac or MacBook?
So, for all of those people ready to jump from the PC to the Mac, here are some good resources for you to ease the transition:
And if you still need some convincing, perhaps Ellen Feiss can help.
If you like cars and technology, this is very cool.
Twitter has been suffering major reliability problems. Perhaps the service was never engineered to handle the number of users and “tweets” and third-party clients. While it may have cute error messages, the Twitter crowd has started exploring other options.
Enter Plurk.
I have to say, the experience of Plurk is quite good. I really enjoy using Plurk - it is actually quite fun. And the timeline interface is a great way to browse through the plurks of others. But after the “work” to get over the hump of Twitter, attracting followers and following interestng people, do I want to start over?
Post your comments below.
Use one of your spare clicks to write some stream of consciousness over at WriteSomething.net. Basically, your message is added to this ongoing collaborative stream.
From the about page…
“… I sit here thinking about what it means to be a part of something like this - an endless, senseless, interactive book - and i come to the conclusion that it’s really a very cool thing. To have tons of random people just vomit out what’s on their minds at the moment - kind of connects them all, just for a second, y’know?…”
“… These plots with no endings and interrupted by small snippets of other people’s thoughts and worlds… It’s very much like life, but who said that art could imitate life and still make sense? …”
The unfortunate part is that spammers sometimes put in garbage, but I guess that it is all part of the collaboration.
In an effort to bring goodness and sunshine to the entire world, Google has its own version of the traditional 411 information service. But, in the Google spirit, it is free.
From any phone, simply dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411). It is all voice activated and the couple of samples that I tried worked perfectly.
Here is a little video from the wacky people at Google.
More information about this service is available on Google’s site.
If you are new to Twitter or even for seasoned users, head on over and take a look at the Twitter Cheat Sheet. And if you aren’t following me yet…
