It’s incredibly shocking how short some people’s memories are. In the late 1990’s the Web became inundated by frames such that content was practically inaccessible. Fast forward approximately 10 years later and we’re facing the same problem once again. In response to the surging popularity of Twitter and the need to tweet shortened URLs, Digg and others (HootSuite, Krumlr) have resurrected the sleazy technique in an attempt to take advantage of this ever growing trend. By repackaging its frame based toolbar as a social media sharing service Digg hopes to artificially inflate their own visitor statistics and steal traffic from other publishers. Read more »

While it appears that most publishers understand the serious negative implications that the technique of framing incurs (and hopefully they all add frame breaking script to their websites), most Digg and Facebook users do not. What is of the utmost importance to users is the usability of a product/service. Thus, in an attempt to explain the effect that frames have on browser/website usability, I submit this single image to the Digg and Facebook community as well as all Web users to ask one simple question: Read more »

Over the past few weeks I’ve been searching the web to find the best hosting providers available. After encountering so many, I thought it would be helpful for others if I reviewed each hosting company and provided a comprehensive comparison chart. I have evaluated each company according to features such as the type of hosting offered (Windows, Linux, or both), base price for least expensive shared hosting plan, if they offer free hosting, the allotted amount of monthly storage and bandwidth, whether a free domain is included or not, and if there are any extra (setup) fees incurred. Read more »

Notify.me – This is a notification service that alerts you of any new content that’s added to an RSS feed. I’ve used Yahoo! Alerts, Yotify, and Google Alerts prior to testing and I can say without a doubt that Notify.me beats them all hands down in terms of the least amount of lag time. Using a test blog I measured the elapsed time between the instant an article was published to the RSS feed and the actual time the notification was received from Notify.me. In three separate tests, Notify.me alerts were delivered within one to four minutes after publishing. This is extremely fast in comparison to the others listed below and why Notify.me is an excellent tool for following favorite blogs for which you are interested in commenting as well as other feed based content that is extremely time sensitive. Notify.me can be used for other things such as tracking items on eBay or Craigslist, receiving automatic notification of new job posts, following breaking new stories, and much more. Alerts can be sent to you via SMS, email, instant messaging, or via Notify.me’s own Adobe AIR application. Read more »

Today is a glorious day for T-Mobile G1 owners, whom as of now can download the Loopt app for free from the Google Android Market and install it on their beloved phone.  Loopt, a location based mobile social network, made the announcement today and as of 8 PM CST it had Read more »

Great web designers and developers are very hard to find. While it’s advantageous to work with local developers and be able to meet in person to discuss a project, it’s not always possible. It’s my opinion that your developer’s skill sets should match Read more »

Hype and naysayers aside, Google Chrome (download here) has been able to obtain over 1% of the market share for web browsers in only one day after launching.  While the browser itself is very fast and it offers some great benefits, it does have it’s share of problems too.  Most notably, its bugs Read more »

These search engines were built to eliminate the clutter that results from Google’s main search engine. Instead of searching the entire web, these search engines only search sites with relevant content for a given topic. Please suggest any sites that should be added to a given search engine and let us know of any [...] Read more »

StumbleUpon is a free social bookmarking site that enables you to share and discover web content. When signing up for a new account, the user indicates his/her interests from a keyword list. These likes are then used to identify and suggest web content (i.e. websites, videos, games, pictures, etc.) to you.

During registration, a simple toolbar is installed on your IE or Firefox browser. This toolbar allows you to browse the Read more »