I’m pretty impressed actually. They’ve made 30 themes and some of them are just amazing. My fav one has to be the one called Ninja. Well you’ll get to see all of the themes as the slowly become available to us. When? They’re saying within a few days. I guess they’re just waiting till it gets all hyped up and everything. Good strategy.

Now I was also wondering if they did this to bitch slap Hotmail. I would say yes. Hotmail got a redesign and it was just fubar. And look at Gmail. Damn! This is something I like about Google. When they do something, they do it right (or at least take things seriously). Microsoft, dude what happened? You’re nothing but a failure right now.

I’ll probably start using Gmail more. But, their privacy policy freaks me out. I’ll have to do my research and see if they’ve made any changes to their policies. I hope they did.

Update (40 mins later): Holy shit! They just rolled out the themes to all of us. That was fast. Well go play them.

Update #2 (2 hours later): Okay not all of us can see the themes yet. So, don’t freak out if you can’t see the “Themes” tab under “Settings”.

Excited? Can’t wait to use them?

What do you think of the whole theme idea? Any fav themes? And do you think they rolled this out to show the finger to Hotmail? Oh and anyone switching over to Gmail? Or going to use Gmail bit more than usual because of the hot new looks?

Do you think McDonalds cares if they lose a few hundred customers? Do you think they’ll try to improve? Do you think they’ll start using real meat? Do you think they’ll stop serving food that’s gonna really mess you up?

TechCrunch… the web’s McDonalds? 1327K subscribers. Lot of readers, huh? Quality content? Not so much. Quantity of content? More than quality. Why do people read TechCrunch? Why do you people still eat at McDonalds? Is it because we tend to think that just because its big ‘n popular, it must be good?

What if you don’t want that (branded) crap? What if you want something that’s worth eating? What if you want something nice and simple? What if you want the real deal? Where do you go? Well the answer is simple. Go to a local restaurants.

Small local restaurants are like hidden gems. Its in your city, but you never knew it existed. Its got great food, but you never heard a buzz about it. You gotta work a bit to find it, but its worth the effort. Once you’ve had a meal there you’ll get hooked on it.

What’s my point? Next time when you stumble across a blog don’t judge it by the number of subscribers it has or a site by the number of users/visitors it has. Look around and see if its any good. Don’t jump off a building just because everyone’s doing it.

(I just hated how bloggers were showing off their Feedburner chicklet. You can fake it. I can fake it without anyone knowing I faked it. I just hated how people were judging blog’s by this fake number. I had to do something.)

You can ask me anything. Anything related to the web. Like domains, hosting, SEO, social networks, bla, bla, blah. You get what I mean, right? I’ll try my best to answer it. Oh and you can also ask for reviews or even ask me to predict the future. I’m pretty good that too.

Sounds good? Okay… so lets kick it off. Just post your questions here by leaving a comment and I’ll post all the answers next weekend.

Photo credit: Sean Dreilinger.

When I first heard about that I was like “Yeah Obama’s a cool guy. He’s using the web and stuff.” But, then I questioned myself if he was doing the right thing when Allen Stern tweeted that he hated this whole thing.

First of all, it doesn’t look professional. Like c’mon, you’re the leader of a country and you’re going to use YouTube? A place filled with idiots, copyrighted videos, retarded video blogs and spam. He could instead post the videos on Change.gov or make a completely different site for this. Its not that hard to make a flash video player.

Second of all, isn’t this like taking YouTube to the next level? Aren’t they getting like an unfair advantage? Isn’t Obama killing all of YouTube’s competitors? Everyone (literally everyone) is going to use YouTube and no-one will give shit if there’s a better alternative out there. And think about all the new users/traffic YouTube is going to get.

So, what’s next? Bin Laden ranting on YouTube? International conferences being recorded live from webcams? Leaders of different nations pissing each other off by video blogging? Change…we got that. But, this? I’m not sure if this is a good kind of change.

Update: There’s a big discussion going on about this on Plurk. Some great points have been posted. Take a look.

What happened? I don’t know. I sent an email to MSN. Let’s see what they say. But, I’m pretty sure they’re gonna feed us some technical difficulty bullshit. I wonder what really happened.

Oh and you guys wanna see a screenshot? “Picture or didn’t happen.” Well good thing I took one. Here it is:

MSN was apparently like this for about 2 hours. Thanks for this info, @kellyvbrown.

Over to you

I wanna hear what YOU think happened? Someone screwing with MSN? Or just a simple technical difficulty? Any crazy theories out there? And participate on my poll, okay?

Twitter just hit the one-billion tweets milestone today. Its not official or anything. The number of tweets were being counted by a 3rd party site called GigaTweet. Twitter might have hit this milestone long time ago since we don’t know when GigaTweet started counting. But, at least we know that we have more than a billion tweets.

You know Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart? Well anyone with a TV knows them. So, they were talking about Twitter on Indecision 2008. That probably got the whole “Twittosphere” twittering. Colbert and Stewart? They like took Twitter to the next level that day. Now the average Joe knows about Twitter and probably even started using it (or at least gave it a shot).

What really convinced me that Twitter got into the mainstream was when I was seeing this presentation by a few folks from a local tech company at my school. They were talking about Facebook, MySpace, Xbox Live, etc. And then they mentioned something that really surprised. Guess what it was? Yeah, it was Twitter.

I was like “Woah! WTF! They know about Twitter? They don’t look like the type of people who would use Twitter. WOAH! Holy shit! That means little birdie made it to the mainstream.” I was really happy for Twitter actually. Its a great, unique idea and its pretty useful too. It deserves to be more popular than Facebook (not kidding).

Well Twitter just took its first step into the mainstream. I’m not sure if it will be as popular as Facebook. It might. It might not. Who knows. But, it sure is on the right path and its getting more popular everyday. Until then follow my tweets!

I’m not going to talk good about Hotmail anyway. First of all, I would like to say that Hotmail just totally fucked itself up with the new design. I wouldn’t call it ugly. I wouldn’t call it nice either. It just doesn’t look right. The old design was better in my opinion.

Well who cares about looks? Usability and functionality is more important, right? But guess what? I can’t fucking write emails on the “new” Hotmail. I just can’t type in the textbox. I’m using FF3 on Ubuntu. It works fine on IE6 though. Maybe its because of Ubuntu.

And why does it always ask me to upgrade my browser when I got to Hotmail? Did I mention that I’m using FF3? I think I did. And…most Hotmail users hate the new look.

Wow, I can’t believe this is happening. Microsoft can’t afford to screw up right now. They’re gonna lose a lot of their market share because this. I don’t even know what to say. I’m starting to get pissed at Microsoft. I don’t wanna use Gmail. Fuck!

Why do I get the feeling that this redesign thing was rushed out? Reminds me of Vista when it was first released for some reason. Microsoft, please take your time with IE8. Please.

Few questions for you

What do you think of Hotmail’s new look? Do you use Hotmail? Do you use Gmail (more)? Are you having the same problems as me on Hotmail? Do you think you’ll stop using Hotmail because of this? Anything else that you would like to add?

I’m sure you all heard of Mashable. Its the 11th most popular blog on the web according to Technorati. They get over a million unique visitors per month (don’t worry, I did my research). And they have a shit load of subscribers. They’re almost as big as TechCrunch.

Well anyway, some smart ass made a social network for music and named it Moshable. They just jacked the name from Mashable. Well the folks at Mashable got pissed and they blogged about it. And guess what happened? Traffic wave! Nice one, Moshable.

Its a good idea, but it might not work all the time. You need to look for a blogger that would whine like a lil’ bitch. Some bloggers couldn’t care less. Like this guy made Live Crunch and TechCrunch didn’t give a shit (epic fail!). Or maybe the guy just lacks creativity.

So, do your research and find a good target. And don’t just do what the people at Moshable did. Find other (and better) ways to piss off A-list bloggers (without of course, doing anything that could get you in legal shit). Here’s a tip, try fucking with Darren Rowse the “ProBlogger”.

Anyone can write a knol and publish it, right? Now that’s good. People are sharing their knowledge. But, the problem is that its not very user-friendly. Its not the type of site you would go to if you needed some info.

I searched for “SEO” there and it came up with 976 knols. Fuck me! 976! Would you go through all of them and see which one has the best info? I wouldn’t. And it would be like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles if you wanted to get the best knol about SEO.

What’s the difference between a blog post and Knol? I don’t see a difference. Wikipedia on the other hand is a place where people come togather and share what they know. Its just one big page full of info. Everything is in there. You don’t need to dig through hundreds of page to find what you need. Its all infront of you.

And do you think people who write Knols are doing it because they wanna share their knowledge? No. Well maybe some. Most of us are doing it for backlinks and traffic. Its a bit spammy to be honest. But, that doesn’t mean you won’t find some quality content here and there.

I don’t think Knol will be popular. Right now, the average joe doesn’t even know about it. And most of the geeks forgot about it. Its pretty much dead from the beginning. Well who cares if its an epic failure? We can still use it for SEO “purposes”.

Making the backup

1. I download all the files and databases to your computer.
2. I zip everything and put a password on it. I use WinRAR to do this.
3. Name the .zip file to something like “wr_oct-5.zip”. (Make sure you have the date on it!)
4. I make sure that the .zip file isn’t corrupted by unzipping it and checking if everything is there.

Storing the backup

The biggest mistake I ever made was keeping all the backups on my laptop only and forgetting that someone could steal my laptop or my hard drive could crash. Please don’t do that or else you’ll get fucked! Trust me!

I started putting my backups on three different places. This way I’m safe if something goes wrong.

My server: Yes, my server itself. I make a folder where I just keep all the backups. Make sure you keep this folder at the root of your server where it can’t be accessed by the public.

On a CD: The old school way! I have a bunch of blank disks lying around, so why not burn the backups on it? Plus its not that expensive to buy blank CDs. Or if you want, you can just put them on a pen drive.

Online storage: I put one more copy on Windows Live SkyDrive. Don’t just trust any site with your precious little backups! Meaning don’t use shit like RapidShare and Megaupload.

How often do I backup?

The best way would be to backup everyday. But, that’s not possible. I’m just way too lazy to do that. I try to do it weekly. And sometimes randomly when I feel like doing it.

Some shared hosts back your stuff up daily, so consider yourself lucky if you’re on a shared hosting.

How about YOU?

Tell us how you do it! I wanna know how often you do it, where you store it and if you have any suggestions for us.