Gov.My – The Malaysia Government’s Official Portal
March 30, 2007 by Gaman · 2 Comments
www.gov.my is a website created by the Malaysian government to help members of the public access a host of government websites and obtain information ranging from payment to complaints, applications and services and more.
The website links to 395 online services of ministries, departments and agencies and 3,300 Government forms are available for free download.
The range of information on offer is mind boggling and because of this it is important to have them arranged in an intuitive ways. Currently I think the main page is a little over-crowded. There’s no single focus to guide users to help them find the info they wanted quickly and easily. Every element competes for attention and this lowered the usability of the website.
I don’t know if it’s just me but I noticed that government designed websites tend to use outdated designed elements. They should remove the animated gif and best viewed with Internet Explorer notice. That’s so 90s.
Malaysian Clones digg
March 26, 2007 by Gaman · 10 Comments
Perhaps in the spirit of ‘Malaysia Boleh’ a Malaysian has cloned the digg website. Cloning without permission from the original creator is one thing, but placing the Malaysian flag next to the digg logo is totally irresponsible.
It gives the impression that Malaysian in general is a bunch of thieves who couldn’t care less about stealing other people intellectual properties. They are basically ripping off the logo, entire layout and text from digg.com.
With AdSense ads all over the site, it isn’t too far fetch to assume that the main motivation for creating the site is probably to make money. The commenting system is filled with posts from anonymous spammers. Digg.com.my has been up since December 2006 and from the look of it, it doesn’t get that many visitors until it was recently dugg by the offical digg.com – ironic.
How to Protect Your phpBB Forum From Spam Bots
February 23, 2007 by Gaman · 11 Comments
While forum spamming either caused by bots or humans are not a security threat, it’s still very much a nuisance to the forum admin.
I have several phpBB forums which have running for a couple of years now and they were like magnets to spammers especially spam bots.
Deleting these spam bots manually was tiring and time wasting.
At some point, I turned off automatic registration completely and requested potential members to write to me manually if they want to join the forum. This of course presented another hurdle to users and had decreased the registration rate.
You can enable the built-in Visual Confirmation during registration but this measure can be easily defeated even by the simplest spam bots.
Then I searched for a MOD that I can install and came across Textual Confirmation by olpa.
Microsoft Launches SoapBox – YouTube Rival
February 20, 2007 by Gaman · 8 Comments
Microsoft has launched MSN Soapbox, an online video service that would compete with Google’s YouTube. This service is currently in public beta.
While it was reported that it supports Internet Explorer only, I was able to browse and view the videos with Firefox.
I find the interface quite intuitive where I can watch and browse from the same screen.
Check out MSN Soapbox here
Is AGLOCO A Scam?
February 12, 2007 by Gaman · 6 Comments
AGLOCO is a new money making scheme that pays its members to surf the web. Agloco also pay its members for friends they refer and so on. Basically it’s a combination of various online activities which are
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Social networking
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Referral program
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Online shopping
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Toolbar
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Software downloading
The concept is similar to the now defunct All Advantage, where people get paid by installing a toolbar on their web browser to view ads. It was reported that AGLOCO was founded by the same people who created AllAdvantage.
One of the biggest proponents of AGLOCO at the moment is John Chow who has recruited one of the largest numbers of downline in the AGLOCO network.
Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net has also written about his first impressions on AGLOCO. Like Darren, I also think that it just seems to be a lot of promises but nothing concrete as to how the concept would really benefit advertisers and members in the long run.
Digg 3.0 Launched
June 28, 2006 by Gaman · Leave a Comment
Digg has rolled out a public beta of version 3 of the service on Monday. The new version has expanded its coverage beyond technology and now includes several newly added categories from Business, Entertainment, Science and Gaming.
Digg is also branching out into YouTube territory by allowing its visitors to digg online videos.
Another significant update is the change in the design and placement of their Google AdSense ads.
Their AdSense ads are looking a little different from what the normal publishers have. The reason for this is because the digg probably have the premium publisher status.
The premium publisher program is for very large publisher with at least 20 million page views per month but that’s not a concrete number. They can also negotiate their price and once a pay rate is agreed, a contract between both parties is signed.
Netscape Relaunched As Digg Killer?
June 17, 2006 by Gaman · Leave a Comment
AOL is revamping Netscape.com from a typical web portal to a hybrid news site.
It borrows many elements from the social bookmarking and news aggregation sites such as del.icio.us and Digg where users can recommend news and article they find elsewhere and vote for their top choices.
To differentiate itself from Digg, several editors are appointed who will hand pick and highlight a couple of stories each day from the user-voted pool.
The new Netscape also feature related images and links to comments, for 30 different topic channels.
Netscape.com will still have links to weather, e-mail and other features commonly associated with portals, but they will not be as prominent.
I haven’t registered as a member yet but find some of the features interesting. However I find the advertising filled pages quite annoying.
Netscape.com beta can be found at http://www.beta.netscape.com/.
50 Most Popular Bloglines Feeds
May 31, 2006 by Gaman · 2 Comments
Bloglines is one of the popular free online services that helps you subscribe to and manage web information such as news feeds, blogs and audio.
As of June 8, 2005, Bloglines was already tacking 500 million blog and news feed articles in their searchable database.
I was browsing my feeds when I came across the Most Popular Feeds compiled by Bloglines. If you are interested to know the kind of information that attracts the most subscribers, here are 50 of the most popular feeds on May 30, 2006.
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No.
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Feed
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No of Subscribers
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| 1 | Bloglines | News The latest news and updates from Bloglines. It’s not suprising to see it occupies the top spot since it’s added into every subscriber’s feed by default. |
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| 2. | Slashdot News for nerds, stuff that matters |
71,715
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Find Out If A Site From SERPs Is Safe Before You Click
ScanSafe unveils a search service called Scandoo that analyzes links from SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) for malicious code, virus, spyware and other offensive or illegal content.
Currently it lets you search using either Google’s or MSN’s engine while Yahoo’s and Ask.com’s will be made available soon.
Scandoo works by displaying colour coded icons in green, yellow or red and black bug next to each search result to note safe, questionable and hazardous sites before you click the link.
There’s noting to install in order to use this service as it’s accessible directly via your browser.
Check it out here: Scandoo
Test Drive Yahoo’s New Home Page
May 17, 2006 by Gaman · Leave a Comment
Yahoo has finally unveiled the new design of its homepage at Yahoo.com to the masses. It was previously only available to a few randomly selected users. You can take a sneak preview of the new homepage by clicking the ‘Try the all-new Yahoo!” link.
So what’s new?
The new design gives prominence to Yahoo! search box and reconfiguring its menu to sit on the left column. They have added new features such as a Personal Assistant which displays recent messages from Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, and Weather among other things.
While the whole page fits nicely into my 17 inch LCD screen, I still find the interface too cluttered for my taste but some may like it.
While testing the new page, I’ve found something which looks like a bug. When I was logged on and put my mouse over the Messenger button, I noticed one of my friends whose stealth setting was offline in my Messenger app was shown as online on the page.
