Published terribly early in the morning of February 29, 2004
This week, INQ7.net marks its third year as the the Philippines’ largest news site. The service now boasts 30 million page views per month, attributed greatly to their in–depth coverage on local politics and the entertainment business (and don’t confuse them despite their countless parallels).
The anniversary’s special section mentions the need for balancing tech innovations and providing better services, something I find rather contradictory. For quite some time now, they have been serving “light versions” for mobile devices and WAP browsers, aside from the main site for desktop browsers. Instead of using this aged, costly approach, the site and its visitors will be better served by embracing web standards, minimizing the need for multiple versions. The benefits can be very impressive.
Another article proudly praises the site’s gains in online advertising, a fact too hard to dispute looking at the frontpage cluttered with ads, twelve of them as of my last count. Should they really reduce their frontpage ads? Maybe, but a little organization might help; this allows users to really “see” the content and let advertising stand out.
Why do I keep hitting on scrutinizing them? Simple—because it deserves to be made even better. It has been every Filipino geek’s news source, probably the only one at that. Making it more accessible would allow it to serve more people, which is really what online publishing all about.
In retrospect, there is one thing that cannot be ignored—content is king.
1 Reply·
2004.02.29
Published at around evening time of February 27, 2004
For the past few days this site has been offline because of some pretty unfortunate (and stupid) events. I was having problems with the blogroll feature on my WordPress install, so I decided to write my own hack, inspired by Phil Ringnalda’s PHP blo.gs blogroll. Stupid me, little did I know I was trying to do an fopen() on a non–existent file!
According to my hosting provider’s upstream provider (yeah, I know it sounds complicated), my little function() in WP’s my-hacks.php took down the whole server. Of course I feel sorry about it, but I thought servers should have safeguards against this, and just let the script die upon reaching maximum execution time.
They decided to suspend my account indefinitely, and I was left with no access to my site and my emails as well. It occurred to me that perhaps they thought my-hacks.php was one of those script–kiddie hacks, and I was doing something illegal. Good thing for me, the guys at my host ploghost we’re very helpful, and moved my service to another one of their servers. Just a simple nameserver update and the site was up and running again, and now with the correct blogroll hack.
Plug: In case you’re looking for a good local webhosting service, ploghost should be more than enough for your needs. Give them a try!
1 Reply·
2004.02.27
Published terribly early in the morning of February 19, 2004
Ever since Outkast came out with the song Hey Ya from their Grammy–winning album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, I’m left to wonder—should I really “shake it like a Polaroid picture?”
1 Reply·
2004.02.19
Published terribly early in the morning of February 18, 2004
French photographer Jean-Marc Bouju of The Associated Press wins World Press Photo 2003, with his image of an Iraqi POW comforting his young son in a regroupment center in Najaf, Iraq.
Unrelated: Dunstan Orchard has some new photos, Webmonkey signing off, brave words from Mozilla Firefox’s Ben Gooder.
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2004.02.18
Published terribly early in the morning of February 17, 2004
Kuro5hin is running a very interesting story regarding the recently leaked Windows 2000 source code. It actually does not talk about the code, but the funny comments within. Quite surprising how much they use the word moron in their comments. Nice read to keep you up in the morning. 
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2004.02.17
Published terribly early in the morning of February 16, 2004
Slashdot mentioned a story in the Houston Chronicle about people fed up with inappropriate cellphone users utilizing detectors and jammers to disrupt communication between phones and “cell–sites”. This appears to be a viable option in certain places like churches and movie houses, where strict silence must be observed.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this more than a year ago, after going to several movies and hearing a ringing cellphone throughout the movie. Unfortunately, the detector & jammer combo has its downsides—both legal and technical, and the need for a better alternative continues.
My idea is the use of mobile “transmitters”, a device that can be placed inside a venue and send out a message to all phones in the vicinity as to what profile or setting it should be using. The phone must have the ability to instantly recognize such a notice and automatically switch to the required profile. I think this is a fairly straightforward feature that can be easily implemented by phone makers like Nokia and Ericsson using existing technologies like Bluetooth or WiFi, or even custom–formatted SMS. Also, the phone can have a setting you can switch on to override the venue’s “preset,” when you feel like you really need to. Sounds simple, right?
1 Reply·
2004.02.16
Published terribly early in the morning of February 11, 2004
The browser formerly known as Mozilla Firebird—which I’ve mentioned several times before, has been rebranded again and is now known as Mozilla Firefox. The name change FAQ provides some answers for the identity change, while Ben Goodger, Steven Garrity, and Jon Hicks write on the rebranding process.
Dunstan Orchard reports an issue with the famous Tabbrowser Extensions, and shows us how to fix it.
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2004.02.11
Published in the wee hours of February 8, 2004
The bridge photo was taken on the long road from Quezon to Bicol, and really reminds me of the movie Stand By Me. The rainbow photo was quite a treat, the first time I ever saw a rainbow that seems to end on the sea! But no pot of gold.
1 Reply·
2004.02.08
Published late at night of February 6, 2004
After a few weeks of inactivity, rebelpixel productions is now back with a new design. My own weblog software has been set aside for now, in favor of the actively-developed WordPress, an excellent weblog publishing tool based on the old b2/cafelog source.
The decision to go with a readily-available system allowed me to focus on the design aspect of the site, as well as hack into WordPress whatever I needed. To my surprise, there are already several hacks that can be easily applied to suit your needs. Matt Mullenweg, Mike Little and the rest of the WordPress team have done a very good job.
The current layout validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2, and makes good use of Pixy’s CSS-based preload-free rollovers as well as Dan Cederholm’s Faux Columns and Stuart Robertson’s CSS Design: Custom Underlines articles at A List Apart.
More contents coming soon.
5 Replies·
2004.02.06
