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

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 »

When HTNet was first conceived, I had a sidebar list full of links to blogs I find dear to my heart. It stayed on HTNet’s pages for more than a year. It also grew in size as I found more and more blogs that I visited frequently.

Then came a phase in my life where stupid things like Google PageRank and SEO brought out the linking “artist” in me. I came to the conclusion that linking liberally might be bad for HTNet’s own ranking.

About two weeks ago, I reached enlightenment and decided, “To hell with Google and other search engines! This is my blog and I can pretty much damn well link whoever I thought deserve it!”

Read the rest of Got Rid Of My Stalkees Page »

Photo Credit: Leia

For the past 11 days, I’ve been bombarded by accusations that my company’s server is slow. As much as I explained that the server performance is on par with service standards of developed countries (in fact, we’re doing much better than most), the truth of the matter is, regardless of where your server is located; you will always be subjected to your ISP’s failures and incompetencies.

For any problem (especially Internet connectivity related ones), one must find the source of the bottleneck. In our case, it has been Streamyx’s “service interruption” that has been going on since 20 December 2008.

Nevermind that the server has been performing admirably since that period for the rest of the world. The painful truth is that my customer base is almost entirely located in Malaysia. Even more painful is the fact that almost all of them are Streamyx customers; that monolithic, incompetent, self-absorbed, competophobic, poor excuse of an ISP.

Read the rest of Poor Internet Sevice Is Destroying Malaysia’s Image As A Tech Hub »

Psst… have you heard that WordPress 2.6.1 is available now?

For the list of all bugs fixed, please refer to this page. Once you’re clear about what you’re getting yourself into, download the relevant archive here.

Upgrade (or install) and enjoy the show