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

I’ve been receiving unexpected surprises for the past few days. I’m not someone who likes surprises but for these, I make an exception.

The first surprise is that I noticed my short URL generator has been receiving a lot of traffic for the past few weeks… and that’s only part of the surprise. shlnk.com has also been receiving daily AdSense clicks for almost a whole week! For almost an entire year before that, it only had two or three clicks total. So this is a welcome improvement.

I’ve also noticed that it has attained a PageRank of 3; this is of no importance for a URL chopper but it’s appreciated nonetheless; thanks to shlnk.com’s users, linkers and Google

Read the rest of Why You Should Turn That Great Idea Into A Product NOW! »

These days, you can’t browse the web without finding a link to Twitter. It seems everyone has a Twitter account… yes, I do to. The only reason I registered for Twitter account is to find out what the fuss is about.

For those of you who last got on the net in 2005, let’s just recap what Twitter is.

Twitter’s official definition of itself is as follows:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Wikipedia calls Twitter:

…a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets”.

Personally, I find Twitter to be a highly overrated product with minimal if not zero innovation value. In it’s very essence, Twitter is nothing more than a global short message broadcasting system sandwiched between the social networking loaves of being followed and following others.

After Googling more about Twitter; I’ve been converted from a skeptic to a die hard believer. I’m absolutely certain that Twitter is the best thing that happened to mankind since rubber tires. Read on to find out why.

Read the rest of What’s The Big Fuss With Twitter? »

Whenever I feel that my Internet connection is acting up again, the next web page I load up will be TM’s news releases page.

I suspected that the increasingly unreliable SMW submarine cables snapped again; was glad to find out that it’s not. Nevertheless, it’s still an equally disruptive circuit fault.

Yet again, TM has demonstrated how poor it is in selecting (or investing in) critical submarine Internet connectivity infrastructure.

I hope that this incident can be rectified much sooner than the ridiculous two weeks they took to fix the previous SMW4 cable issue.

Of course all this won’t spare me from the inquiries I’m bound to receive from my friends and customers hosted on my US-based servers.

Flickr is in my opinion the ultimate photo sharing web site available online. I’ve been using it for years and highly recommend it for photographers to safely store their photos (check out my Flickr photostream).

As awesome as Flickr is, there are areas where it can be improved. One obvious area is the process of sharing photos on blog and forum posts.

Previously I’ve been doing this manually by clicking on the picture, selecting the appropriate size and copying the HTML code to be pasted. Straightforward? I guess so. Fast? OK if I’m not copying HTML for the large image; it can get time consuming to wait for larger photos to load though.

That’s why I’m very pleased to come across AllSizes+; a Greasemonkey script that makes Flickr photo sharing a few notches easier!

Read the rest of AllSizes+: Wonderful Greasemonkey Script For Flickr Users »

Having fast loading websites are important to professional webmasters and hobbyist bloggers alike. If your web pages fail to load quickly you’ll lose a significant portion of your visitors.

Almost everyone wants instant gratification. Even with the best SEO and content optimizations your website is competing with hundreds of millions of other web pages available online. Therefore having fast page load speeds will stop you losing visits to the next item in a search engine results page.

A basic web page load test involves using your own computer to view your web pages and time them manually. However, this is not the best method because there are too many variables that will skew your benchmark.

One of my favourite web page load speed testing resource is Pingdom Tools. The rest of this post will explain why.

Read the rest of Visually Analyze Your Website Loading Time »