I am usually not an evil person but when it comes to marketing my blog sometimes I can get a little evil. A few months ago I found about this blog http://www.johnchow.com/ which is somewhat popular well at least more popular than mine, I used to visit this blog once in a while and I found myself making a typo when I typed the blog address on my web browser, I would type the "N" before the "H" , so I figured that there’s probably more people who do that mistake and I setup to get the misspelled domain name http://www.jonhchow.com/ and have it redirect to my blog which is http://www.josenet.com/ , I have already known of people who stumble to my blog my misspelling the address. I am definitely not the only person online doing this but thanks to this technique more people have discovered my blog. Below are the stats about the misspelled domain name and you can see most of my visitors come from the United Kingdom, Canada and USA.

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Looks like the folks at American Express are so good at protecting your information that they have decided to allow your password to be no more than 8 characters. Which is one of the more secure feature I have ever seen in any site, really, that was so brilliant, 8 characters is way more secure than say hmm 7?

I usually like to make password at least 12 characters long with a combination of multiple words, special characters and numbers just in case someone tries to brute force my account and guess my password. Usually hackers can get into someone’s account if they know your username then all they have to do is use brute force (try as many passwords as possible) until they get the password right, now with 8 characters that might not take long for someone to brute force the password at least not as long as a password that might be 12 or 15 characters long.

I would really like to know what were they thinking when they decided to make it no more than 8 characters.

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Digg Labs has some cool visualization programs but the one that looks most “interesting” is one called arc and you can see it in the picture. All the visualization tools basically display stories or being dug on the digg.com page nearly real-time, they are flash based and also you can get it as a screen saver. They are not useful unless you like to watch what’s hot at the moment, since the stories get colorized by category when painted in the arc; it definitely has a neat kind-of-look to it; other than looking cool, there is not much you can do with that.

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I am writing this post using Microsoft word, and I have to tell you it seems to be very quick when publishing my posts compared to the windows live writer application. The user interface seems very familiar and therefore intuitive. I really like using all the ribbon menus that come with word to write post, especially when putting pictures up using the picture formatting tools.

A nice feature of these tools for bloggers is that you can coy and past code from visual studio and since it Microsoft Word, it will maintain its formatting, here is an example of code that I copy from one of my projects:

[XmlArray(“TOKENS”)]

[XmlArrayItem(“T”,typeof(string))]

public
string[] TOKENS;

You can see it maintained all the nice font and colors for the formatting of the code, which is pretty hand for putting sample code up in the web in a snap, just copy and paste.

As I start writing more posts using Microsoft Word, more likely I won’t go back to Windows live writer, unless I have a very good reason that is.

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Today at work, I was trying to find information about Global Unique Identifiers or GUID’s which is a feature of Microsoft SQL Server, while surfing the Internet for information, I came across a forum with information on the subject, however this particular site got my attention because among all the people posting questions and answers I saw someone that either is very funny in a clever way or is a TOTAL NERD.

Basically people wore debating the best way to obtain a GUID, and a nerdy guy had this answer:

<Yoda>

Use the Search page you must. Find the answer you will.

Cursors, path to the Dark Side they are. Avoid them, you must.

Use Order By NewID() to get a random record you will.

</Yoda>

You already might have noticed the  < > brackets before and after the clever (or nerdy) lines, this officially makes the person a nerd because that is from a computer markup called XML. All I have to say is:

<Jose> Keep talking like this, a nerd  you are. </Jose>

You guys have any other ideas, since I am not very good when it comes to talking like Yoda?

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A few posts back I reviewed JohnChow.com, my goal for doing the review was to let people know about what the site is all about and why it could be useful to them, I also did it because the site will provide a link back mine in exchange for doing the review, at the time I did the review John’s site had a Page Rank of 4, so it  was a good deal for me to have a link back to my site from a site with that kind of page rank, that way Google will like me more.  Today after browsing Jon’s site I noticed that he linked to one of his friends site www.tylercruz.com which as a Page Rank of 5, and for my surprise he was doing another review me and I’ll link back deal.  You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that a PR of 5 is better than a PR of 4, but there are a few things to consider:  what kind of audience both sites have and how many visitors could potentially discover my site from either john’s or TylerCruz.

I already got an email from John Chow who mention that he already included my site in his, because of the review I made, which is great, the more the better, although Johns’ site has a lower PR than Tyler’s site, I feel I can gain more traffic coming from JohnChow.com than from TylerCruz.com

So if you haven’t reviewed any of these sites yet, which one will you review and why?

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