Websites
A few days ago, I tried to switch to BuySellAds to do my advertising. I figured that if I could get enough money to give the server a bit more memory, everyone’s experience would be improved. You may also have noticed that I changed the site’s domain from poromenos.org to korokithakis.net.
I tried to join the site a week ago and they turned down my application. When I asked them, they said that I didn’t have enough views.
A while ago I stumbled upon GitHub, which calls itself a “social coding” website. Initially, it seemed to me a code repository like all others (Google code, Launchpad, Sourceforge, etc), but using it more and more I came to realize there’s a pretty interesting twist to it.
You see, with the advent of distributed VCSes, people don’t need to work on a central server any more. They can just commit their changes to basically wherever they have write access.
So, yesterday I took a day off and decided to create something. I wanted to use a new web framework and various other things to create a service, so I decided to create an IMDB API for accessing shows’ episode names.
For my web framework, I used Bottle. It’s very easy to write in (the whole thing took a minute to learn) and very light (only one file to include).
If you are a Greek Cypriot, you will be glad to learn that my company, Spoon ltd. has launched our latest creation, aggeliesnow.com.
It is a classifieds site for Cyprus, and it’s free! So go add all your classifieds in there.
Still here? Go!
As some of you might have noticed, we had some downtime yesterday. This is due to some gentlemanly folk who decided to use the server to send out spam. I thought I had configured the mail server well, but apparently some things can go wrong. For example, the fact that the root account doesn't have a password set doesn't mean that people can't log in. Apparently my SASL service thought that by "no password" I meant "log people in with whatever", and allowed people to log in anyway.
Good news, everyone! Moneygement is finally good enough to provide some basic functionality, and thus I have opened it up for everyone to use.
As you have perhaps noticed, I recently installed a new Drupal theme, Nonzero. It is all fine and dandy, but the right sidebar was moving to the left as the text in it grew, and it started to run over the text in the posts, making the layout look bad (particularly in Opera, which I use).
People (especially Diggers, I think) like to compare Digg and Slashdot in various areas (and often say how one will kill the other). This comparison has always struck me as baseless, but I’ve never seen anyone saying anything about it (yes, that may be because I haven’t looked :P), so this is what I think: Digg and Slashdot are two very different beasts, and comparing one to the other is very much like comparing apples to boobs. Sure, both may be firm and round, but, well, it’s just sick. Plus, babies can’t eat apples.
- Digg posts items on the main page by having its users vote on them, effectively using members as editors. Slashdot uses hired editors who have more stringent submission criteria. Because of this, Digg is more of a “cool links of the day” site than a news site. Personally, I like that, since I get my news along with the occasional cool flash game to waste half an hour on. This fact also means that digg has many more stories, typically 15-20 on the homepage per day (or a few hundreds, if you like to view everything everyone submits), whereas Slashdot has about 7.
When I visited Digg today I came upon this site, called Allofmp3. From it you can buy songs totally legally for as little as $0.02 per megabyte. They even have this cool service that encodes the files to whatever format you want (I recommend OGG Vorbis at Q6), so you end up paying about $3 for a whole CD (and not old ones or anything, they have almost everything).
A few days ago I stumbled upon this great website called Moviepig. In short, it will tell you if you’re going to like a movie or not. You tell it a list of movies you have seen in order of preference (most liked to least liked) and then you ask it how much you’re going to like a movie you haven’t seen. It uses collaborative filtering to search for other people with the same tastes as you and tells you how much they liked the movie. It’s quite handy, and it beats asking all your friends and then coming up with nothing because they have different tastes than you or re
