When I first decided that I wanted to venture into the world of custom domains and hosted web space, I did a little browsing and eventually settled on Midphase for my hosting. Let’s just say that my experience with them was less than smooth. It wasn’t a horrible experience, but when the opportunity to leave presented itself, I had no reservations letting go.

That opportunity came in the form of a tweet I happened to notice. It was last November, I think, when someone mentioned that Dreamhost was having an anniversary special. The offer was soon to expire, so I jumped on it. For less than $10 a month, I found myself with unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth forever.

That in and of itself was more than enough to kick my old host to the curb. When I got into the control panel for my account, I was doubly happy with my choice to move to Dreamhost. Their console is easier to navigate than the cPanel console Midphase uses. Everything is much more straightforward, and much more user friendly.

There are a lot of features that I could talk about, and it could easily span several blog posts, but I’ll just mention a few of the more eye-catching features here.

One-Click Installs

There’s an Easy mode and an Advanced mode available. In Easy mode, you can’t access the installation files, which means you aren’t able to upload additional themes, plugins, etc., but all upgrades and maintenance is taken care of for you. In Advance mode, you get access to everything, and can do whatever you want. Needless to say, I only use Advanced installations.

The software available in Advanced mode (as of 2009-04-21):

• Wordpress 2.7.1 (Blogging and CMS)
• Gallery 2.3 (Image Gallery)
• ZenCart 1.3.8 (eCommerce Management)
• PhpGedView 4.2 (Geneology Software)
• OpenX 2.6.4 (Ad server)
• Pligg 9.9.5 (CMS with Social Networking)
• dotProject 2.1.1 (Project Management)
• Moodle 1.9.4 (Course/Learning Management)
• Joomla 1.5.9 (Content Management System)
• phpbb 3.0.4 (Forum/Bulletin Board)
• MediaWiki 1.13.4 (Wiki)
• WebCalendar 1.2 (Calendar)
• Advanced Poll 2.03 (Poll/Survey)

I was excited to see MediaWiki listed as the wiki installation of choice for Dreamhost. It’s my preferred wiki platform, and was unavailable as an automatic installation in cPanel’s Fantastico.

Google Apps & GMail

Upon adding a domain or subdomain to your account, Dreamhost gives you the option of using Google Apps to provide their popular Calendar, Docs, and Sites platforms for you domain. With just another click, you can have calendar.yourdomain.com, docs.yourdomain.com, and sites.yourdomain.com set up.

In addition, you can use GMail to manage your domain’s email. Just another option when you’re adding your domain or subdomain, this lets you use Google’s very popular GMail interface for all of your hosted email accounts. This is what I use for all of my email addresses, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Flash Media

Dreamhost provides a free flash-based media player, similar to what you’d find on YouTube. While it can only play .flv formatted videos, Dreamhost provides an automatic video converter. All you have to do is upload your video to your account – it can be in any of the more popular video formats – and Dreamhost will convert it to .flv for you, ready to be embedded in your website.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a video that I can demonstrate this with, but I hope to be putting some videos together for this site in the near future. When I do, I will definitely be using this feature of my Dreamhost account, instead of uploading my videos to a third-party service like YouTube or Vimeo. And the great thing about it? With unlimited storage and bandwidth, I don’t have to worry about having too many videos.

…And More!

These are just a few examples of what Dreamhost can do. I’ve had no complaints so far; and with the deal I got, I don’t foresee myself moving away from Dreamhost for a long time. If ever.

If you’re looking for your first web hosting service, or are unhappy with your current host, you can click here to give Dreamhost a try!

A recent post over at PCMech.com reminded me of a very interesting and useful service I came across the other day.

The PCMech article talks about KickYouTube, but the one I found was called PwnYouTube. Both sites work exactly the same:

1. View a video on Youtube
2. Insert “pwn” or “kick” in front of youtube.com:
   

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= » http://www.pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=

3. Get redirected to a page where you can click a link to download the video.

Easy, quick, and works like a charm, all without having to bother with cumbersome plugins and addons. Give them a try!

I’ve been using Dropbox for several months now, and I wanted to offer it my congratulations.

As I mentioned in my post about OtherInbox, I’m a bit lazy when it comes to my technology; it has to capture my attention and hold it with little to no effort on my part. I’ve tried a lot of different web services over the years and most of them don’t last more than a week. I give these services every chance to better my life, or to make it more interesting, but for different reasons, they fall by the wayside, forgotten. Either they’re too difficult to use, too cumbersome to use, or they just don’t fit into my online lifestyle.

Dropbox has cleared these hurdles that so many sites and services have run smack into and collapsed, twitching in a pile of twisted, useless data.

So, what exactly is Dropbox? Basically it’s a virtual file folder in which you can save pictures, music, documents, and whatever else you want to access on more than one computer. If you’re using Windows, you’ll find a folder in your My Documents called My Dropbox – this isn’t movable. On a Mac, however, you have a choice of where to put the folder. Then, whatever you put in this folder will be synced to the Dropbox servers. To access these files on another computer, you’ll have to set up the service just like you did on the first one. Log in, and the folder will be automatically synced. Depending on your connection and how much data you’re syncing, this could take several minutes.

The beauty and real strength of the Dropbox service is that it’s 99.9% transparent. Unless you’re saving large files to the folder (say, more than 5 or 10 MB depending on your connection speed) you won’t notice the syncing at all. It happens in real time, the instant you put the file in the folder. There’s no waiting, and no need to force it to sync if you’re in a rush to get out the door. There’s no annoying popups or alerts telling you that your files have been uploaded, either. Instead, each file icon is tagged with a small, unobtrusive green check mark. While the files are in your Dropbox folder, you can do whatever you’d normally do with them – drag and drop them into different folders, rename them, or open them for editing. When you’re done, save the file as you normally would, and Dropbox will sync the affected files immediately.

What makes the service even more useful and accessible is that you don’t need to have the software installed on your computer. While it does make it much more usable, you might not always be at your own computer. Wherever you are, you can get access to your files by logging on to their website.

Upon installation, there are two folders created inside your My Dropbox folder. Files in the Public folder can be shared to friends that aren’t Dropbox users. You can create more public folders, and invite people to share by listing their email. All the members of the folder can edit, add, and delete the contents. It works great for team projects and online collaboration. The other folder, Photos, will have its contents displayed in the gallery on the web interface. Here, you can get a permalink for each photo to email to friends and family.

You’re given 2GB of storage space, which I’ve found to be plenty. Remember, larger files take longer to sync, so the service works best with small files anyway. When deciding on what you should use your Dropbox to store and sync, you might want to read through the Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, etc.

THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES AND SERVICES ARE PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.

So in other words, use at your own risk. Don’t store electronic copies of your bank statements, text files with all your passwords in them, or anything else you couldn’t stand to lose.

Bottom line: Dropbox is a wonderful convenience; much more convenient than a flash drive or emailing files to yourself. Go sign up for it now!

TinEye is a service provided by Idée Inc. that allows you to search for an image using an image. If you haven’t signed up for the service yet, you can go to the main TinEye site and watch a demonstration video.

TinEye works by creating a sort of “fingerprint” of the pixels in an image. Then by comparing the pixels in the image that you provide, it can cross reference it with their index. It will give you a list of sites that the image appears on, in addition to images that are similar to your image.

I did a TinEye search for the image I threw together for my Making an iPhone Friendly Website post. Check out the results here. Obviously, this exact image isn’t going to appear anywhere besides my site, so you immediate get an example of how it can find similar images.

If you click on one of the result thumbnails, you’ll get a popup window that will let you compare your image to the image TinEye found for you by clicking the “Toggle” button. It may not be readily evident in this example, but when you toggle the images, TinEye will anchor the parts of the image that are the same – in this example, the hand – so you can see what changes between the two.

The service works by uploading an image from your computer or by linking to an image on the web. To extend its functionality, there are plugins for Firefox and Internet Explorer, as well as bookmarklets for other browsers like Opera and Safari. The Internet Explorer and Firefox addons all you to right-click an image anywhere on the web and do a TinEye search for it in a new background tab.

Right now, some more obscure images may not produce any results; a few of the images on this site got zero results. TinEye has just a shade over 1 billion images indexed, which is actually a very small portion of all the images on the internet. Nonetheless, it’s an amazing service that will only get better with time.

Well, I’ve had my OtherInbox for a couple months now, but I haven’t really used it a whole lot. I talked about what it does in an older post, so I won’t rehash that.

I’m going to be perfectly honest right now and confide in you a little secret: I’m lazy. When it comes to my technology, I’m lazy. What I mean is that I don’t want to have to work too hard in order to take advantage of my technology. Not only does it need to be easy to use, but it also needs to be readily available. It needs to keep itself in the brackets of my attention span, otherwise I’ll forget about it. OtherInbox is succumbing to this malady, albeit more slowly than other apps and services.

In order to make use of my OtherInbox, I have to click the button on my bookmark tab, which requires me to actively think about doing it. I’m the one putting forth the effort.

It’s a great service, don’t get me wrong; the concept is nearly brilliant, and the execution has been done well. But until they come out with a Firefox addon perhaps, or maybe an iPhone app, I’m still going to have trouble remembering to check my OtherInbox. Granted, there is a notification service built into it that will send an email to my main address, but doesn’t that just defeat the purpose?

I recommend this site, especially for those less tech-lazy than I am. If you want to give it a try, I think you still need an invitation to the beta. I have some I can hand out so if you’d like one, leave a comment here – but mask it [i.e. me(at)mailhost(dot)com] – or send a message through my Contact Form.

Google just recently rolled out a new option for their image search. For some time now, they’ve had an option which lets you search for images that are only faces. The feature was especially helpful if, say, you wanted to find pictures of people named Rose, but didn’t want pictures of the flower.

Similar to this, Google’s image search now lets you filter images by style. Once you’ve done your search, look for the pulldown menu labeled “Any Content”. Here is where you’ll find options to filter the images according to their style: Line Art, Clip Art, or those containing photographic elements.

I just came across an email service called OtherInbox. From what I’ve read, it serves as a dumping ground for all of your necessary spam email. For instance, if you need to sign up for a service, but don’t feel comfortable giving your personal email address, you can give it an email address to OtherInbox, thus saving your personal email for family and friends.

There are many other “throw-away” email services available. Just search Google for disposable email. These let you set up a temporary email account to be used for those one-time sign-ups. You sign in to get the activation email, then you never need to use it again.

What’s different about OtherInbox is that it’s a little more permanent than the disposable services. Instead of creating one junk account, you create a personal subdomain. For example, instead of creating a “junkemail@gmail.com” to collect all of your necessary spam, you would have a personal domain at OtherInbox in which you could create separate accounts for different services. For example, you could have amazon@username.otherinbox.com for all your order confirmations from Amazon. Or twitter@username.otherinbox.com for all of your Twitter notifications. By using these addresses, the email can be sorted and organized into corresponding folders.

This is a very unique way to handle all of this email that we may not want cluttering up our “real” email accounts, but which we can”t completely ignore.

I would like to mention, however, that GMail has a feature that can be used similar to this. With GMail, you can literally add words and letters to the front of your email address. For example, sample+add@gmail.com would be considered by GMail to be the same as sample@gmail.com. In other words, the GMail system ignores the plus sign and anything after it until the @ symbol. Thus, when giving an address for your Amazon account, you could give myemail+amazon@gmail.com. Then in your GMail account, you could create a folder and setup a filter to automatically drop your “+amazon” emails into that folder. This works a little more efficiently than trying to filter emails by sender’s address or by subject, since they may not always be the same.

OtherInbox is in beta, according to their website, so I put my name in. Hopefully I’ll get an invite soon so I can get my hands dirty and see how well it’ll work in practice, rather than just in theory.