Blogs

I just installed a really useful FireFox addon: Tree Style Tab. It allows you to place your tabs on the top (default), left sidebar, right sidebar, or bottom. For me, it's the option to put the tabs on either sidebar that's most useful. My screen resolution is 1440. Since most websites have a max resolution of 1024, there's still a lot of space left for either sidebar.

I'm just starting to submit stories from my blog to Digg, hoping against hope that they'll get some Digg love and drive some traffic back here. So far, no luck. The only Digg love my blog entries get is from me - and ONLY me. But I noticed a nice side effect - articles submitted to Digg almost instantly appear in Google's search results. Nice! Sure, the link goes to Digg, but from there, potential users can get here. It's a good trade-off.

I recently upgraded to FireFox 3.5 because I accidentally clicked on the upgrade button. I didn't mind initially because FireFox upgrades hadn't done me wrong in the past. My initial reaction was: "Hey, they copied Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 with the new tab button." Chrome and IE, of course, both copied FireFox's tabbed browsing feature to start with. So everyone's copying everyone. I'm surprised at how convenient that new tab button is. I initially thought that button would be useless. I didn't think I would ever use it because I'm so used to pressing Control-T. Well, I did.

I was testing a couple of caching software to stablize the site. Wopular used to crash 3-8 times a day. I had thought the main culprit was mysql because whenever resources become low, there is a logjam of queries waiting to be processed. They eventually pile up and consume all available resources and crash the site. Since I was able to set the server to reboot whenever it's near the melting point I didn't mind it too much because it only takes about 2-5 minutes.

You may have noticed a search bar at the top the page. It's brand spanking new. It searches the top newspaper sites (CNN, NY Times), aggregation sites (Google News, Digg), blog search sites (Twitter, Technorati), and video sites (YouTube, Hulu) for any news topic and lays them out like a newspaper rack. Now, you can instantly get the latest news and buzz on any news topic. Here are some examples:

Barack Obama
http://www.wopular.com/newsracks/barack+obama

Air France
http://www.wopular.com/newsracks/air+france

The Tonight Show
http://www.wopular.com/newsracks/tonight+show

Looks like I got all (or most) of the kinks worked out. The site's been pretty stable for the last couple of days. Yeah, I know, it's ONLY a couple days. Compared to crashing every couple hours (or completely out), I'll take that as very good news.

You may have noticed that the site has been pretty unstable lately. That's because I moved my site to another internet service provider.

Woohoo! Wopular made it onto Thrillist, a "gloriously free daily email on the newest food, nightlife, travel, entertainment and gadgets in your 'hood." Here's what they had to say about the site:

"This online newspaper rack sports a pleasantly slick interface for aggregation of hand-picked top stories from a variety of popular sources including CNN, BBC News, the New York Times, and Reuters, as well as social sites like Digg and Google News, humor rags including The Onion, and those sparkle-eyed dreamers over at Forbes. "

I've been tagging/labeling each featured article. Now, I'm putting up popular labels (topics) under each section in the header for quick access. For instance, under the "Home" section, there are:

* Barack Obama
* rod blagojevich
* economic stimulus
* Super Bowl XLIII
* Middle East
* Peanut Butter Recall
* American Idol

Those pages by themselves aren't very developed yet - just a chronological listing of articles related to that topic. It's a good way to keep track of a certain topic if you've missed out on the news from previous days.

Hi, welcome to Wopular.com! This is where I'll be announcing new features and, if I have time, blog about news-related topics.