Routine Order

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.

There’s no comparison of the rates for gas cards in the UK, but otherwise, UK Financial Options is an excellent resource to compare credit card rates. Surely, they must have Gas cards in the UK. Or are they “petrol” cards? I could find neither at UK Financial options, but I did find a good table comparing credit cards. The credit card comparison page lists the top 5 cards for the various categories, such as the best cards for balance transfer, the best cards for those with bad credit, etc.

The site also has a list of pages, each dealing with a particular kind of credit card. Here’s the page comparing the football credit cards, for example. Football as in the game played almost entirely using one’s feet, as opposed to the game where the foot-long ball is thrown around.

At one point, I was checking GasBuddy religiously for the cheapest gas in my area. Turns out, there are more ways than one to get information about cheap gas.

If desktop widgets are your preferred way of getting info, then there is Gas for Mac users, and GasWatch for Windows users. If you’d like SMS messages, you can text the word “gas” followed by your 5-digit zip code to the number 415-676-8397.

Or you can send an SMS to sms@mobgas.com, gas@gasbuddy.com or gas@fuelgo.com. If you have a smartphone like the iPhone or the SideKick, try GasBuddy ToGo or MobGas Mobile. Finally if you can plunk the dough, get a GPS system for your car, which offers this info in your car, like the Garmin services does.

I am kind of toying with the idea of driving visitors to Clickbank using affiliate links. Fear not, it is not on this website, but on another one. Clickbank is probably the largest internet retailer of digital products - mostly ebooks, guides, scripts, tools and even some merchandise. The most difficult part of becoming a clickbank affiliate is finding the right products that talk to your visitors and setting up the links to those product pages. In clickbank terminology, these links are called “hoplinks”. That’s what put me off so far - the process of creating those links on your website and updating them periodically is tenuous, but even that is nothing compared to the process of finding new products on clickbank that are worth promoting.

So why am I thinking of doing this now? What has changed, you might ask? Well, I just found the killer tool to make life easier for me as a clickbank affiliate - hoprss. HopRSS provides an easy to use Clickbank RSS Feed that allows you to display the latest and greatest products on Clickbank forever - with just the initial setup.

What’s great about hoprss is that it does not rely on javascript. So the RSS feed gives you a list of products related to specified keywords or niches and once you set it up, the HTML source of your website that displays the item links is updated automatically. What this means is that in addition to being a valuable monetization tool, hoprss also adds new, relevant content to your website regularly. This can only be good for your website as seen by search engines. Try the Clickbank affiliate feed for your site, if it is oriented towards some commercial niche. And no, the links in this post are not affiliate links, I gain no kickbacks from these links whatsoever. The service is 100% free too - the author of the script probably hopes to earn enough from the ads on the hoprss homepage.

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.

I am in love with Todoist, the simple todo list manager.

Todoist is a new kind of todo list, that’s useful and easy to use.

So what is it that makes Todoist better than the other to-do list managers out there?
Off the top of my head, the following features impress me the most:

1. A dead simple, but dropdead gorgeous design.
2. Create an infinite number of “projects”
3. Create nested to-do lists. Ctrl+Right moves a to-do list item to the right, and that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to using keyboard shortcuts
4. Easy to use formatting
5. Easy to enter dates/times and to create recurring items: Write “every day at 1 PM” to schedule an item to recur every day at 13:00 hrs!
6. Create items with or without checkboxes
7. Prioritize items
8. Get a list of items due today, this week etc, even create custom queries for different lookups of items on your to-do list. You don’t have to search for the links to do these - there are a minimal number of links and all of them are placed in just the perfect place.

All of it reminds me of the Vim Outliner. This is like a Web 2.0 incarnation of the Vim Outliner, just a lot trimmed down.

I would love to have a Vim outliner style task/project completion estimate, based on the number of checkboxes (and their “depth”) that have been completed.

Also the the todoist homepage could make do with a list of features. Heck, even this article of mine does a better job of “selling” todoist than the homepage!

Todoist is brought to the world by the talented Amir Salihefendic, who also brought us the simple and beautiful Skeletonz, which is a Python powered CMS.

Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP: Virtual Desktop Manager: Manage up to four desktops from the Windows taskbar with this PowerToy. This is so cool - not!

There are so many other clones out there, little apps, some freeware, some not that provide the same feature - that of having more than one “desktop” in Windows.

Linux operating systems have had this feature for ages, and were it not for my multiple desktops, I would have lost sanity a long time ago. The windows “power toy” only shows you a list of four buttons on your taskbar - click the number to go to the desktop with that number, in Linux, you see small screencaps of the four virtual desktops, and in some window managers, you can drag and drop items from one virtual desktop to another using icons in the pager. You also can specify default virtual desktops for different applications and have all your startup programs to start in particular locations on the different virtual desktops.

Windows, apparently, has a little catching up to do in some areas, before it measures up to, say, Ubuntu.

FrozenWarrior’s Amazon Price Watch tool just made me some money over the holidays. Much as I would like to keep saving more money, I thought I’d share this with my readers since your saving money does not, in this case, preclude my saving money — in other words the cake is infinite

So what does the service do? Simple, it watches the prices of items on Amazon.com and informs you if the price drops below a certain amount. So far so good. It gets better when you realize that amazon.com has a price drop guarantee, where, if the price of an item you purchase drops within 30 days of your purchase, they will refund you the difference!

This website is designed to check Amazon.com prices daily. If the price of your items drop, then you will receive a single message detailing the new price. If the price drops within 30 days of purchasing an item, you can request a refund for the difference. The e-mail you will receive when the price drops, has a link to the support pagewhere you can request your refund. This service is also very helpful if you wish to purchase an item, and you are willing to wait for a much better price.

So that’s the tip of the day for better living through saving, then!

Mirek’s Free MWSnap Windows Software is a small yet powerful Windows program for snapping (capturing) images from selected parts of the screen.

The current version is capable of capturing the whole desktop, a highlighted window, an active menu, a control, or a fixed or free rectangular part of the screen. I find it very handy for creating presentations, tutorials etc. You can configure keyboard shortcuts for the different kinds of screenshots you take, and it will save the picture files in a directory with serial order numbers!

MWSnap also contains several graphical tools: a zoom, a ruler, a color picker and a window spy, and a fast picture viewer or converter. Installation is real simple, and it works beautifully - did I mention you can even minimize it to the system tray, so it’s running in the background - ready to take screencaps when you bid it to? MWSnap is freeware, so no bugging “register now” or “buy now” messages, ever!

Google Patent Search

Google Patent Search covers the entire collection of patents made available by the USPTO—from patents issued in the 1790s through those issued in the middle of 2006. We don’t currently include patent applications, international patents, or U.S. patents issued over the last few months

The new search tool makes a joke trivial - have you ever tried to check if your idea is original? Try it now, and be amazed at how many people out there get patents, and for what silly “inventions”.

I am in love with LaTeX, the intelligent text formatter. Someday I will write a book with LaTeX. For that day, then, I save the following resource:

Getting to Grips with Latex - Latex Tutorials by Andrew Roberts @ School of Computing, University of Leeds

I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, but I’m learning all the time. I recall finding it quite taxing when I start to learn Latex, which is why I have started these tutorials. However, I hope that my experiences plays to your advantage, since I hope I can let you into the sort of questions and problems I had when I first learning Latex.

The guide seems quite comprehensive, and should be useful for graduate students who use LaTeX a lot, or better still, want a better alternative to the braindead-ness of MS Word.