Move the Crowd

Over the last week or so I’ve been on a mission to improve the performance of my web server, and especially MySQL. I took Arne’s advice and turned on the query cache. That helped but I still needed to do more. After doing some research I discovered MySQL’s slow query log, which [...]

Check out the revamped (and well designed) Technorati. Here’s what’s new in the beta release:

We’ve improved the user experience, making Technorati accessible to more people and, specifically, people who are new to blogging. We’ve tried
to make it very simple to understand what Technorati is all about, and make it easy to understand how we’re [...]

Too little, too late? A ploy to get you to install the MSN search toolbar?

Weeks after promising tabs in its upcoming IE 7 release, Microsoft made the long-awaited browsing feature available for IE 6 through its MSN toolbar.
With the version of MSN Search Toolbar made available Wednesday, IE 6 gains the ability to open [...]

The Register interviewed a link spammer who revealed some of his methods and motivation. The bottom line — spammers can make up to seven figure incomes from some simple computer code. Some key points:

For even a semi-competent programmer, writing programs that will link-spam vulnerable websites and blogs is pretty easy. All you need [...]

If you’re using Movable Type be sure to install the new ‘nofollow’ plugin. It implements a new way of marking links in comments and trackbacks so that they will be ignored by search engines.
Let’s see what the spammers do now to try to get around this. (hat tip to Hashim)

Last night I happened across a post by Martin Schwimmer entitled “Why I Have Asked Bloglines To Remove My Site From Its ‘Service’“. It generally accepted that BlogLines is by far the number one news aggregator so I had to go read that post. Here’s Martin’s post (emphasis is mine):

This website is published [...]

I just implemented this FireFox speed hack for broadband users. It makes a noticeable difference, especially when opening multiple tabs at once.

There’s some important information MovableType’s blog about Movable Type creating server load issues when dealing with comment spam. It contains some tips for lessening your server load while Six Apart readies a patch. I’m glad to hear that Siz Apart is on this because I was really getting worried after reading ‘MT Plus [...]

The news of Yahoo buying Stata Labs, the makers of Bloomba, is very interesting indeed. It certainly seems like they’re buying their technology expertise in an attempt to “get with” Google’s GMail and their desktop toolbar. Here’s the news:

I see that TiVo has just hired a new chief marking officer who has worked at Herbalife, a network marketing company. Not that I think TiVo should go Multi Level Marketing, but I’ve long thought that they should compensate individuals who go around evangelizing TiVo. A good affiliate program (not the BS rewards [...]