Routine Order

Hosterio offers reseller hosting in India at very competitive rates. For example, the smallest package is only just $11.08 per year. You get complete cPanel access and a lot more. The smallest hosting account is good for a blog, since space is limited to 20MB. My blog, for example, uses not more than 4 MB of disk space, so far. Hosterio also offers website design services, which covers the entire spectrum of design services. I don’t know what the rates are, but if the hosting rates are anything to go by, they must be affordable for small businesses and individuals too.

If you have more than one domain - it is not unusual for one person to have more than one blog, each dealing with a separate topic, then you might want to check out Hosterio’s multi domain hosting offers. For $100 a year, you can have up to 7 domains hosted on the same account. for $37.77 more per year, you can get the privilege of hosting unlimited domains/sites on the same account. These are powered by cPanel too, which makes managing the sites a breeze. If most of your visitors are from India, or you expect that to be the case, then a server in India would be much better than a server in Europe or the United States. This will provide you lower latencies and delays. Until recently, however, I had been unable to find a host who offers reasonable rates for hosting in India.

We all know we can buy medicines online, since that is why we get solicitations via mail to buy them online for better sexual/mental/physical performance, but I was kind of late in catching on the fact that you can by pet meds online too! At least the pet meds website is a lot more interesting than the online pharmacies. Check out this list of Pet top 10s - including the top 10 distances covered by cats looking to return home after getting lost. How they get lost at such great distances is a mystery, but the stories are interesting.

With regards to pet health, there’s a list of inherited health disorders for dogs by breed! Amazing stuff. There’s a similar list of inherited health disorders in cats. When it comes to pet medications, the site has a listing of which online pet pharmacy offers the various meds at the lowest rates. Nice site will easily keep you busy for an hour if you have a pet, and like knowing more about your breed.

Domdat is a website that provides powerful tools to search for expiring and expired domains. I just signed up for the service that costs $25 per month to take it on a test ride. It came highly recommended by a friend who finally found a domain name he liked for his flower delivery service. What’s really cool is that the domain he bought had been promoted by the previous owner, and so he will benefit from all those search results that will lead folks to his site, for free.

Expiring domains are much better in many ways. Since the domain hasn’t expired yet, but certainly will, you can bid and buy the domain as it expires and serve your website with that domain name. This will give you the page rank, the search result traffic, and even some traffic from users of the old website.

The expired and expiring domain names search tool at domdat is very powerful - As seen in the pic above, you can search by minimum Pagerank, number of links in the search engines, whether or not the website is listed in the DMOZ and Yahoo directories and so forth. This can save you money since unlike DMOZ, you need to pay Yahoo upto $200 to be included in their directory - so if someone has already done the grunt work with a domain, you save a bunch of money. You can set up alerts (upto 5) that will send you an email as soon as any of the domain name searches that you define return positive results.

Domain name prospecting is hot right now. A lot of folks buy expired domains and just sit around waiting for their value to appreciate. Already, it is impossible to find websites that have three characters in the domain name, and domain names that are common words. Domdat is one of the tools these guys use, and if you want a leg-up in your search for a good domain name, it is a vital tool for you.

Thoughts is a place you can create a free blog. There are lots and lots of free blog providers and this is one of them. I got there by typing in the url, I was just curious to find out what’s at the URL thoughts.com - it sounds like the perfect URL for a blog, or, rather, a journal. Now the difference between a blog and a journal, in my opinion, is that a “weblog” or “blog” is a collection of articles and links to sites, and a few opinions from the writer. A journal, on the other hand, is a more personal thing, written for the benefit of the writer more than anyone else.

Most of the free blogs on thoughts come under the latter category, with most of the posts being introspective and very personal. I wonder if the folks blogging there got there the same way I did, and decided to start writing there that way. There’s also a thoughts forum that seems quite young. Mostly bloggers asking about thoughts, and discussing general stuff. The thoughts.com domain name must be worth a lot, and I hope the thoughts free blog service ramps up to realize the full potential of the domain name.

SEO Optimization is making a copy of the book SEO Made Easy (where, of course, SEO stands for search engine optimization) available as a prize to the win SEO Made Easy eBook contest. Writing about it makes me an entrant to the competition

I am just learning the ropes with respect to how to optimize this blog for search engines. This is not trivial, since more than 50% of my new readers arrive via some search result. I’ve been reading up about the keywords, meta tags and SEO tips for wordpress and the lot. The SEO tutorials category at SEO Optimization has more good stuff. Check it out. I hope I win this contest, an eBook should be much easier to read than a bunch of webpages all over the place. I’ve heard good things about Cutline, the theme I use on this blog - it seems to be optimized a lot better than other themes, but I guess one could always try and improve

Web sites that don’t provide an RSS feed with updates annoy the hell out of me. I mean, do they think we are still living in the 90’s or what? I have been searching for a solution that tracks changes to web pages and automatically notifies me of the change through email. I finally found a great solution: changedetect - webpage monitoring services. They offer a one-click webpage monitoring system:

No logins are required to setup web page monitoring with ChangeDetect…
In fact, you do not even have to visit the ChangeDetect website at all…
Just surf the web as you normally do and, with one-click, monitor your favorite web pages and save as you go.

It is totally free, and has some really cool change monitoring features - my favorites are auto-login and support for https websites too. So you can monitor protected pages which require a login. The benefits of changedetect include improved privacy and a highly adaptable feature set. This is a LOT more than what I was looking for, and amazingly enough, it is free! They also have an extensive list of frequently asked questions for all of your questions.

I really love it when someone takes a tool beyond being cheap hack to a well-document, feature-rich utility like changedetect.com. I wonder why I never heard of it before or read about it. Hope this article comes in handy for others who are looking for a similar tool.

The InternetFrog.com Speed Test Tool is by far the best I have used. No clicking, no nothing, just visit the site and get your connection speed displayed graphically. Here’s my speed:


Isn’t that cool?

There are some really cheap broadband offers in the UK - when compared to what I pay to Time Warner/Road Runner here in the US, the offers across the pond seem so much better. However, one thing I don’t get is if whether these deals are for DSL or for cable internet. I am somehow a little suspicious of DSL, and also, if I do get DSL then I will have to get a phone line on top of the DSL connection.

Another strange thing about the UK boradband market is that AOL seems to be a major player. If you were to compare broadband offers in the UK, you’ll see AOL offers competitive rates, and yet they are not the cheapest - this must mean that they have no trouble finding subscribers and that they can afford to quote higher prices. On the other hand, in the US, you will be hard pressed to find AOL DSL customers. Indeed, if you search on google for “AOL broadband“, the UK site shows up first, you will have to scan further down the page to even find the AOL US broadband link. Looks like AOL has lost and conceded the battle for broadband in the USA.

Now there’s free internet voting for everyone except the governments. Yes, you can hold an Internet election, for free.

Selectricity is an MIT media lab project that is in the incubator program. Right now it allows you to create quick polls which are fun and easy. Later, then intend to enable cryptographically secure, verifiable voting based election using different methods. This will enable organizations, individuals, families, and other groups of people to securely and confidently vote on the Internet and make decisions democratically.

What a cool idea! Any why it took so long for someone to think of this and implement it is a mystery.

Visit Selectricity, and give the quick vote a spin.

Wilfing is the new term that describes aimless browsing on the Internet. I am told WILF stands for “What Was I Looking For?”

Nice! Someone had to invent a name for this phenomenon that is everywhere, and affecting just about everyone.

“However, our study shows that although people log on with a purpose, they are now being offered so much choice and online distraction that many forget what they are there for, and spend hours aimlessly wilfing instead.”

Read Britons waste online time wilfing: study - Yahoo News for more details.

Ever wondered what a page would look like without that image/block of text/header? When designing pages, and when in doubt regarding whether or not to have something on your blog/webpage, it might be useful to be able to check what your page would look like without the item in question.

Javascript comes to the rescue. To edit any displayed page in the browser, by selecting and deleting, or adding text/images/stuff, you can visit the page and put the following in the URL Location bar:
javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Now you will find that you can edit the page, as if it were a word document or something! Go on, try it right now.
(via Free Software Blog)

Go to Yahoo.co.uk and search for “Buy Viagra”.

So Yahoo! UK thinks Google sells viagra. Another possible explanation is that Google is the secret hand behind all the Viagra spam we get everyday - all part of a secret conspiracy to set up a new operation where Google provides you with the drugs, regardless of geographical location, for a low, low price

Look at the fifth result. Wonder what the heck broke, and how.

This was so good, I had to save the result.

First seen at the digital point forum.

Estonia is all set to be the first country in the world to allow voters to vote over the Internet in a public general election! The system was tested recently where people could “vote” to choose the king of the forest from among 10 animals. They did not disclose the results, so we don’t know who the King is.

Interestingly, this small Nordic nation seems to be secure in its faith in technology:

The security angle of voting via the Internet has not raised many worries. “E-voting is not so difficult to think about here. We are used to using the Internet for business and for almost 10 years we have been using the Internet for banking,” he said.

Compare this to the US, where the diebold voting machines have caused enough problems and doubts repeatedly. I guess it is just a matter of trusting the provider - but then again, how much can you trust a company or organization that provides the internet-voting service? Just as much as you can trust the election officials in an “offline” election, I suppose. The distinguishing difference is that, offline, more people are involved in the voting and counting processes, so it is more difficult to game the system.

Estonia set for world’s first Internet election - Yahoo! News

This blog is anonymous. You might want to know why, and more importantly, how.

I did have another blog which is way more popular, and older, and respected. I still blog there, but increasingly this is my “preferred blog”.


Photo Credit: Anonymous Blogger by zivpu

Fear of getting fired is not the only reason why someone would want to blog anonymously.
I wanted an anonymous blog because:

1. Anonymity sets me free to write about whatever I want
2. I don’t have to stop a thought in its tracks because of fear of blowing good relationships with other people - bloggers and people I know in real life. I can write however I want.
3. My dad and a lot of relatives read my other blog
4. My boss once brought up something I wrote on my other blog, and wanted me to delete it. So what you write on your blog affects work and I don’t like that
5. I don’t want stuff I wrote in the past to turn up in google searches for my name - thus affecting future relationships and deals.

Now that we have the “why” out of the way, lets get into the details of how to blog anonymously, on the cheap. We ignore fee blog hosts like blogger and wordpress.com since you lose a little bit of your independence when you sign up for a hosted blog, and that is not acceptable to us

There is a guide by the electronic frontier foundation about how to blog anonymously. In fact, that was the first guide I referred to when I was thinking of starting this new blog. It provides a list of tips on how to remain anonymous. It is worth a read. However, I was really disappointed in one thing - the link for registering a domain name anonymously does not work! The link points to https://www.onlinepolicy.org/forms/opg-domain-create.shtml which returns a “404: Not found” page. So much for an easy to follow guide. Earlier today, the subject of anonymous blogging came up again in conversation, and I decided to document how I made this blog anonymous.

After the EFF article, I searched and ended up at ask.metafilter.com. There were a couple of posts there, but none of the suggestions were cheap. So I did some more research and ended up with my perfect solution. Read on for details…

Keep reading →

‘Madame Wikipedia’ runs web giant from village HQ - Yahoo! News
“It’s quite simple, I spend all my time running around.”

A peek into the life of Florence Devouard - the chairman of the board of directors of the foundation that runs Wikipedia.

She lives in a village in France and was elevated to the top position mostly as a result of her continued dedication and volunteer work.

Thank you, Florence!

This trick amazes me when I think about it - oh why did it not occur to me sooner!

You can translate a page from one language to the same language using Google. For example you can translate this website from English to English! - Here are the results.

The URL, if you notice it is:
http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=routineorder.com

The “en|en” specifies that the site has to be translated from “English” to “English”. Of course, now you must think I am crazy - how will this help you cut across that corporate firewall, or your dad’s firewall, or the Great Internet Wall of ?

Easy, the translated page is a cached(sort-of) version. So bingo, just ask Google to translate the page from whatever language to the same language and you’re all set!

If you forget the URL, you can always go to http://www.google.com/translate_t and use the tool there to translate the webpage from one language to another. If necessary, change the URL in the browser to make the languages the same.