Blogs

When Google first launched Google Chrome, I installed it and give it a test drive. I was fairly impressed. It had a super clean interface and was really fast. Pages rendered noticeably faster than Firefox.

Back then, even though I wanted to take the Chrome plunge, I couldn’t. It didn’t have all, or even half, of the apps I needed for web development and maintaining the content on Wopular.

I just noticed in the last couple of days that the sharing platform AddThis has removed “via @addthis” at the end of tweets using their widget. I use AddThis throughout the site. It’s a handy little widget that allows users to share articles through any social bookmarking/sharing site, like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Pinterest.

As a website owner, I use it to tweet articles to my Twitter account. I used to manually get rid of the “via @addthis” suffix each time to give me more available characters and to make the tweet cleaner.

I spotted Google Play on Google’s header menu last week. My first reaction was what the heck is it? I clicked on it and saw a menu for Movies, Music, Books, and Apps. I took a peek at the Movies channel, noticed and liked the clean design, and left.

The design for Google Play is comparatively more gaugy than the bare-bones design of the other items on the header menu, but still simple and elegant.

I’ve switched over to Facebook’s comment system a while back. I did it for two reasons. First, offloading comments to a third party takes the load off my server. Second, I’m hoping to get some Facebook traffic juice.

The first part worked out. I disabled Drupal’s commenting system, which resulted in less cron jobs and queries to the database.

The second part hasn’t quite worked out. My Facebook referrals have mostly stayed the same. I’m also noticing less comments, which is a surprise. I figured since most people are on Facebook already, I would get more.

I’ve been using the ASUS Zenbook for months now. It’s running on an i7 1.8GHz Processor and 4GB of RAM. I can’t say I’m completely satisfied with it. It’s the keyboard that I just can’t get used to. After almost four months, I’m still missing keys when I type. It gets pretty annoying, especially if you have to type often.

I finally found some time to replace the now deprecated Google Buzz with Google Plus. And it's probably a waste of time, but I'm just doing it out of completeness.

My personal Google Plus account has turned into a ghost town, just as soon as Buzz. It's sad. That's why I don't understand how there are still reports saying that it's growing. I bet it's just users from various Google products who are signing up and then taking a peek. And then never coming back again.

I’ve had the ASUS Zenbook for a couple months now. One of the most annoying things to me was all these gadgets that came with the laptop. They appear on the desktop. I don’t know about you, but I like my desktop free of stuff. I was able to disable every gadget except for PowerWiz.

I was looking all over the web for an answer because it’s increasingly annoying that I have to disable the gadget whenever I boot up the laptop.

As soon as I heard that Samsung is coming out with a smartphone with a 5.3” screen and a stylus, I became interested. The Galaxy Note runs Android 2.3 on a dual core 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor at a resolution of 1,280x800-pixel. The camera is 8MP. All great specs.

I’ve only heard of Andrew Breitbart when I was doing research for starting Wopular. I learned from Wikipedia that he helped Matt Drudge pick headlines for the Drudge Report during the early years. For the longest time, I had thought that Drudge ran his site all by himself.

I also learned that he had helped Arianna Huffington start the Huffington Post, but left when Huffington’s politics went towards the left. He later started Brietbart.com and a handful of other politically slanted sites.

Because of the shorten NBA season caused by the lockout, this is the first time the telecast of the NBA All-Star game went head-to-head with the 84th Academy Awards. I thought the basketball game would get crushed, even with Linsanity in attendance - technically, he was only in the Rising Stars Challenge which took place on Friday.

Who’s bright idea was it to go head-to-head with one of the biggest tv events of the year? Couldn’t the NBA have done it the week before or after the Oscars? Maybe TNT, which televised the game, thought it’s good counter-programming.