Scott Yang's Playground

Thanks to Andrew from Niphal who posted these $250 worth free advertising coupons for Facebook on OzBargain, I went and got some free credits, spent 3 minutes in Gimp doing up a 110×80 logo, created a campaign on Facebook Ads Manager and sat back to see the flood of traffic coming in. Actually the last [...]

TechCrunch: Alexa overhauls ranking system where it now uses multiple sources rather than just their toolbar data. I actually noticed the change in Alexa ranking before I spotted the post at TC. Good move I think, at least Alexa is now in the position of competing with Compete and Quantcast, which are almost useless for [...]

Deep Jive Interests: TailRank Exposes Massive Number Of Blogs Hacked — turns out all the latest spam sites are legitimate but hacked WordPress sites. I have also experienced a surge of trackback spams over the last couple of days, from hacked WordPress sites with their wp-content populated with static spammy content. WordPress 2.3.3 wasn’t even [...]

LowEndBox.com: Virtual Private Servers Comparison Matrix for VPS plans and providers under $7 USD a month. I am talking about a complete Linux server with root account and a dedicated IP address (not some dodgy oversold shared hosting plans), although most low-end plans have no more than 64MB of memory. Well, my first web application [...]

ZDNet: auDA took away a domain from Sydney-based web-business after dispute, with only 24 hours notice, and it wasn’t even that poor guy’s fault! His business lost the domain name because 12 months ago NetRegistry mistakenly registered the dropped domain for them, although the original owner has renewed it. That just sounds dodgy. How can [...]

A few Google weirdness discovered today. See Mum! No PageRank! I was shocked this morning when the SearchStatus Firefox plugin shows the Google PageRank of this blog as — nothing! It was 5 last time I checked which wasn’t that long ago. It wasn’t even a zero — the PageRank bar basically blanked out as [...]

DailySearchCast: Microsoft Wants to Buy Yahoo! Some of the best commentary from Danny Sullivan the Godfather of “search” on the whole Microsoft offering $45b to buy Yahoo event.

If you google for Chinese New Year right now, you’ll see the AdWords engineers trying to be creative. This does not occur with other search terms. Thanks for reminding me that it is indeed the Chinese New Year eve today!

This is a follow up to yesterday’s post, where I looked at Network Solutions’ domain tasting practise. It has long been warned on various Internet forums that you should not make WHOIS queries on registrars’ web interface if you do not intend to buy straight away. Your queries might be logged by the dodgy registrar [...]

Network Solutions is the best because they registered Scott-Yang-Rocks.com even before I asked them to! All I did was making a WHOIS query on their website to check the availability of this domain, and they have registered that domain without me going to the checkouts! How can I say bad things about a company that [...]

Matt of WordPress.com has announced domain registration and mapping for their blogging service — $10/year if you already have a domain registered, or $15/year if you register through them. Very well priced service on a very scalable platform. I’ll sign up if I don’t already have more blog sites than I can currently handle.

Bah! I thought it was crazy earlier this year when DreamHost quadrupled the storage space and octupled monthly data transfer. Apparently it was saner than I thought, as they have just increased the storage by 10 fold and doubled the bandwidth. Now there are over 200Gb of storage and over 2Tb of data transfer in [...]

Have you noticed that Scott Yang’s Playground has been quite a bit faster over the last two days? It loads faster, renders faster, and Scott’s meaningless muse appears in front of you faster! How did I do it? No. I did not have a secret version of WordPress that can render the same page 5 [...]

Jeremy Zawodny revived the discussion about the actual usefulness of rel=”nofollow” mechanism in hyperlinking. In short, it does not prevent comment spams. Moreover, it hinders visitors from commenting as there lacks “reward”. Jeremy concluded, which I completely agree. Look. Linking is part of what makes the web work. If you’re actually concerned about every link [...]

I wrote this quite a while ago on Whirlpool forum over a debate on Australian verses overseas (usually US-based) web hosting. Thread has since been closed (not my fault :) but I think I will repost my thoughts here, looking at what is the most suitable web hosting solution for Aussies.