HTNet - A Notepad of Tech, Business, Science and Self Improvement

HTNet now adheres to a new dress code. I’m calling this new theme bubbles. Mostly consisting of CSS and using only three images for the standard design. I know it’s not visually breathtaking, in fact, I prefer it that way. I have always been a minimalist when it comes to my web sites and desktop.

You may notice some kinks here and there. I’m still in the process of sorting out minor bugs and other minor layout issues. I’d appreciate if you can give comments regarding such issues. Heck, you could even post criticisms, suggestions or any other tips you can offer. Just don’t tell me to add more artwork

At the moment, I don’t have plans to make this theme public… but hey, never say never

I’m going showcase some of the interesting links I’ve visited for the past week, and I’m going to start now

First off, I checked out PostSecret. What’s it about? Here’s how the site describes itself:

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

Some of the postcards are really funny, while on the other side of the spectrum, quite a few are somewhat disturbing. All in all, a very worthy web site to visit.

For those of you who are more business minded, check out The CEO Refresher archives. There are tons of useful and interesting articles to read ranging from Education to Strategic Planning.

Remember my posting on Google ranking secrets? I manage to find the paper written by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, describing the PageRank™ algorithm.

While on the topic of search engines, have you ever wondered how one would sound like? Yes? Well, try Speegle, the search engine that not only display your search results, but speak it as well

Finally, I’m off from Malaysia’s No. 1 incompetent web host… and very happy to do so. In a way, those dimwits has dented my “Malaysia Boleh” faith… but whatever, life goes on.

I’ve migrated HTNet and my company’s webby. It’s been a year since I last used a cPanel based hosting package, and after being tortured by the annoyances of Plesk… I treasure the change. Not to mention the availability of ssh, which makes my life much easier by just updating my sites using wget, cvs or svn. Life is such so much easier now!

Anyway, my real beef with Mercumaya is that there was a time when their server was down. Well, shit happens, I can accept that… I was a support engineer myself once. But the unacceptable part was that none of their staff had the common courtesy of informing me, a customer, about this issue. Not by email, not by phone… and we’re in the same country. When I called, the person answering said that the hard disks were busted… and they might take 3-4 hours to “fix” it (which I assumed actually means replacing it and restoring from backup).

Well, that 3-4 hours turned to 3-4 days. On the fourth day, my friend Omar, who’s hosting his site, as well as some customers on Mercumaya too, gave me a call and said that he contacted Mercumaya and they informed him that the server is now up again. However, they totally fscked our data. Yeah, daily backups my ass.

All in all, I just know that they’ll go bust soon anyway. Idiots who treat their customers that way, usually won’t make it far. For me, it’s just a case of good riddance to bad rubbish.

Just upgraded to WordPress 1.5.1 (downloadable here) a few hours ago. Everything works fine so far.

My first WP upgrade went without a hitch, and pretty much a very easy process. And for those of you who missed it, upgrade instructions are available, however it may seem to be a tad bit outdated.

I’ve also added the Random Bloglink section to the sidebar. Basically it’s a randomly generated link to a blog on the BlogShares network.

The feeds from LQ’s Slackware forum and OSNews are up and running now. I found out that it’s not really difficult to set up on WP, if you can find the right plugin. For me, the RSS Link List plugin does the job nicely.

The next phase of my plan for HTNet would be to make it more graphical. I’m looking for ideas on how to spice up my site. Feel free to give suggestions… but for now, I’m gonna catch Newcastle vs. Liverpool on telly.

Go Magpies!