Sabahan.com

Sabahan is a tech/web/money making blog. It’s a cool blog that posts about everything, from computers, to how to make money from your blog. It’s interesting because it isn’t just on one specific topic, but rather on many that relate to each other. It’s especially great for people like me, who are just starting a blog and need some good guidelines for how to get started, and how to be successful.

For example, here is a recent post on Sabahan which shows some ways that people are manipulating their Alexa rankings. It’s cool to see what others are doing, and maybe take advantage of some that aren’t completely immoral.

Sabahan, overall, is a pretty interesting blog, but it seems a little bit too cluttered. The page is jam-packed full of links and ads, but beneath that, there is some good tips and good information. I’m subscribing to the RSS.

www.sabahan.com
5 Useless tricks people use to increase their Alexa’s traffic ranking
Win a free domain and free hosting for your WordPress blog contest 

Apple store to start charging an entrance fee

In today’s completely stupid Apple news, Apple has decided to start charging an entrance fee, for people to come into their stores. Sure, this has some good aspects to it, but it has mostly bad ones.

Everyone knows that the Apple store is the coolest hang out in the entire mall. I never leave the mall without checking out the Apple store first. It’s so much fun to just walk in, look at all of the new and sexy products, and hang out for a while. There have been several times that I’ve walked into an Apple store, not planning to buy anything but then buying an iPod accessory or something small, and there have been even more times that I fell in love with the new iPod and decided to come back next time and buy one.

Paying $5 to get into an Apple store is STUPID, and I highly doubt that I will ever do that, but I do know that Apple will be losing the money that I usually spend when I randomly walk into an Apple store and buy something.

[via BBspot]

UPDATE: Apparently, this was a joke, and I fell for it.

Pownce

I guess the fact that Mark Zuckerberg was announced king of the world confirms the idea that social networking is taking over the world. There are already thousands of social networking websites out, and there are more and more being released each day. Only some of them are actually successful, though. Obviously, MySpace and Facebook have millions of users, but some smaller start-ups are quickly becoming a major competition.

I use social networks all of the time. I love them. I love getting in touch with my friends that I don’t see anymore, sending quick messages to people I do see and meeting new people to share and exchange ideas with. Also, not having much to do this summer, social networking, and sites like Pownce, Facebook and Twitter have helped me be less bored (aka waste time).

A few weeks ago, a new service was released, that was invite only. It’s called Pownce, and was developed by the founder of Digg, and internet legend, Kevin Rose. The invites were as good as gold, and were being sold on eBay for $10.

The service is similar to Twitter, in that users post “updates” for their friends to see, but with Pownce, it isn’t just short text updates. With Pownce, users can send the usual text messages out, as well as links, files and events. Pownce also lets you make ‘groups’, so you don’t send out a message meant for your friends, to your parents, too.

I really enjoy using Pownce. None of my real friends use it yet (no one really likes to constantly change their ‘main’ social network), but I do have a lot of Pownce friends. It’s fun to read what people have to say, see cool links that they send out and tell them what I think about it.

The biggest thing about Pownce, I think, is the ability to easily reply, and get replies. Each post has its own area for posting replies, along with a rating system, where the users can rate the post. This is great because, for example, I posted a link to my first blog post, and people were able to reply and tell me what they thought. It helped me determine what was good and what was bad and what I could improve.

Social networks are the future of the internet, and the more that come out each day, the more options the consumers have. Pownce is a great example of people seeing a problem, and building their own application to fix it.

Getting my domain name from Microsoft Office Live to Google Apps — for free

I’d like to start off by saying that I am not much of a web/domain kind of guy. I know a lot about technology and websites (I think) but not so much about what goes on in the background, so when I started off doing this, I wasn’t really sure about what needed to be done.

Microsoft Office Live is a service, by Microsoft, which allows users to make their own business oriented website, to help accomplish their goal of letting every business have a storefront on the web. Get more information from the Wikipedia page here.

Google Apps for your Domain is a service, by Google, which similarly to Office Live, allows users to get their own domain and manage a simple website, easily, without the need of knowing HTML or other website coding languages. It lets you use your own domain name with the Gmail service, Google Calendar and Google Docs, and lets you edit your webpages with Google Page Creator. It’s really simple and easy-to-use, and extremely useful at the same time.

Microsoft’s Part
I have had an account with Microsoft Office Live since around March 2006. I used their service to get my own domain name (because it was free, so I said why not) and use it for email and maybe a simple ‘about me’ website. Office Live uses, you guessed it, Office Live Mail to handle your email, which is basically Live Hotmail, with a different name, and your own domain name. I hate Hotmail. It has such an annoying and slow and cluttered interface, that whenever I want to check my mail, I get pissed off. Also, I wasn’t able to edit my page through Ubuntu (which is all I have right now) so I didn’t really have an option, unless I wanted to leave an ugly page that I made a long time ago up there.
I had to take my domain name away from Microsoft. I read here that I would need to cancel my Office Live account if I even wanted to touch my domain, so that’s what I did. I contacted Office Live and told them that I want the code that I need to access my domain and I want to cancel. I got the code after about a day and went in Melbourne IT’s website (Microsoft’s registrar) and was able to get control of my account. My ‘control panel’ on the site said that my domain was registered and wouldn’t expire until March 2008, which was good news, because I didn’t want to have to transfer the domain or deal with paying, for something that I wasn’t even sure would work. So now that I have control of my domain, what next?

Hosting
From this point, I wasn’t really sure what I had to do. I looked on multiple websites, including Google’s own instructions, and found out that I had to edit the DNS settings and add CNAMEs and many other abbreviations. I contacted Melbourne IT and asked them how I can edit the DNS settings, and they said I would have to sign up with a DNS control service thingy-majigy. That was bad news to me. I assumed that I would have to pay for that, and I didn’t really want to. I looked around and found out that I could use a free service called EveryDNS.net to control my DNS settings and add all of the CNAME and MX records that I needed to add, in order for my domain to be confirmed with Google. I was able to forward my ‘Name Server Settings’ from Melbourne IT to EveryDNS.net and have everything forwarded and organized with Google.

The Finale
After setting up the many different CNAME and MX records needed for Google (through EveryDNS) I was able to have my domain name verified, and begin to use all of the services. I can access a start page (start.mydomain.com), my Gmail-style email (mail.mydomain.com), Google Docs & Spreadsheets (docs.mydomain.com) and Google Calendar (calendar.mydomain.com). I also have the option to put my own logo in place of the Google logo in all of these pages. I use Google Pages to create my web pages, though it might be a little bit to basic for most people.

I love Google Apps, and it really saved me from the devils at Hotmail and Microsoft’s control. I love Microsoft, but for me, Office Live was just a way for me to get a free domain. Yay for free-ness!

Introduction

This is going to be my new blog. I’m planning on…wait…I don’t really have a plan. I’m just going to post up some news or information that I think is cool (mostly tech related) and share my interesting stories from life, or the web. It probably won’t be very exciting, but we can try. LET’S GET STARTED!