blogs

As I recalled, deal sites first started around 1999, 2000 during the dot com period. Everything was crazy back then. Retailers had a lot of glitches(like stackable coupons) where people could easily exploit.

There was anandtech's hot deal forum, then bensbargains.net , techbargains.com etc

but admins on anandtech started banning coupon posting. Then Fatwallet started. Whenever some practices get banned in one site, other sites will appear to support the practices.

Tags: deal fatwallet bensgarins techbargains business_model vc funding shopping slickdeals anandtech

The day where your server program can just send emails to anyone without getting rejected or filtered as spam is long gone because of the exploiting email spamming program.

In order to ensure successful email delivery to GMail, MSN(Hotmail/Live), AOL email addresses, you need to use SPF(Sender Policy Framework)

1. Make sure your mail server is not openly relaying emails.
2. Gather the list of IPs where your server program(s) will send emails from for your domain.
3. Set up reverse DNS to associate your domain name with the IPs.
4. Use Sender ID Framework SPF Record Wizard or The SPF Setup Wizard to generate SPF record.

Tags: email delivery anti-spam spf gmail hotmail live.com aol

Google hot trends show how people are googling "santa" at Wed, Dec 24, 2008 3:52 PM:

• santa tracker 2008
• google earth santa tracker
• where is santa right now
• where is santa claus
• santatracks.com
• santa radar norad
• track santa christmas eve
• santa claus tracker norad
• www.santatracks.com
• santaclaus.net
• is santa real
• santa locator
• santa sightings
• santa finder
• when will santa come to my house
• santa s naughty or nice list
• santa radar.com
• santa s phone number
• santa search
• noradsantatracker
• tracksanta.com

Tags: google christmas hot trend santa_claus

This exciting news is all over the web:

• The day Merb joined Rails
• Merb gets merged into Rails 3!
• Rails and Merb Merge

Rails 3 will certainly become more modular, and run faster! One will easily take out components that are not useful(such as URL routing/rewrite when developing a backend service) for his/her projects and plug in other implementations instead using default(such as DataMapper or Sequel instead of ActiveRecords).

Tags: ruby ror rails merb activerecord

Clickriver Ads, the sponsored links program from Amazon, lets service providers reach active shoppers on Amazon.com via pay per click advertising. For example, for a lawyer, he can advertise his service targeting users in his region that browses and searches for legal books on Amazon. Amazon has a good "How it works" page.

Here's my impression with Clickriver:

• Clickriver structures your ppc marketing with the hierarchy of campaigns and ads. * A campaign with a daily budget can hold multiple ads.

Tags: google yahoo amazon adwords ppc msn service clickriver panama adcenter advertising

Who says that you must shell out big bucks for software when you switch to Mac?

• NeoOffice - Microsoft office replacement
• Thuderbird - Email client
• Adium - IM clients for varies IM networks
• Disk Inventory - visualize disk usage
• NoobProof - firewall
• CyberDuck - FTP/SFTP/Amazon S3/Web Dav client
• iTerm - better terminal
• Navicat Lite - MySQL GUI client with SSH tunnel support

Tags: mac software

Just call me paranoid:

• Why does Twitter NOT offer oAuth to authenticate users via API? Many twitter-api-powered applications ask for one's twitter user name and password in order to use the service. Because Twitter doesn't support something like oAuth, Twitter-api-powered applications have to store your credentials themselves. When ANY of your twitter applications get compromised, your twitter credential will be stolen. so I don't really think using Twitter to send money via a app like twitpay is a viable option until Twitter fixes this problem.

Tags: spyware twitter, api, security, oauth, twitpay, virus, malware

I've upgraded Scuttlelicious to version 0.2.4:

• Click here to install
• If you are using Firefox 3, and Firefox disables the extension or doesn't allow you to install the above version, you will need to get the version at the official Firefox Add-ons site because Firefox 3 requires a extension hosting site to be SSL-enabled

Changes:

• fixed problems with Firefox 3.0 due to the change of login manager in Firefox 3.0.

Tags: firefox scuttle scuttlelicious extension

You use memcached server and memcached-client for caching with your Ruby on Rails application. One day, monit tells you that memcached got restarted. Sounds good. But when you check your Ruby on Rails app, it gives you 500 errrors all over the place. You check your server logs. Tons of errors on 'lost connection' with memcache. It turned out that memcached-client doesn't automatically retry on failed memcached connection.

Fortunately, FiveRuns fixed memcached-client and released it

Tags: ruby_on_rails memcached fiveruns memcache-client

I finally had a chance to play with Heroku cause I wanted to quickly try out OneBody - open source Ruby on Rails based social network.

I followed the instruction to create my app. What's missing there is that you'd need to generate public/private key before calling 'heroku create urapp'. It's as simple as issuing 'ssh-keygen -t rsa' for Linux. see GitHub docs for more information.

I also tried to use the import interface at Heroku to import OneBody, but it always timed out. Heroku should have provided a simple import command via Heroku gem to create a new application through importing.

Tags: aws ec2 vps heroku ruby_on_rails deployment