Hostcult

Blogger Changes for Worst

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Sun, 13 May 2012 16:02:00 +0000

Ok, I admit it! I use Blogger, actually i use it on 2 of my sites (this site! and on ecchi), the reason for that is mostly legacy, that and they are 2 fanboyish sites, where i randomly post random stuff, so there is no big need for more control or whatnot, they exist mostly as scraps and places to vent, after all thats why sites like Blogger, Tumblr or Wordpress.com exist, to make it easy as pie to publish content, or so it would seem.

So why am im not enjoying the new Blogger? its a much needed refresh after mostly years of neglect! True, and change in my view is mostly always a good thing, but this new blogger feels and seems like change for the sake of change, like when Adoble launches a new product line or Firefox launches a new version (both have a tendency to instead of improving the old to push the new), so what are my gripes?

The Blogger Dashboard

Clearly the new dashboard is a remake of the old one, thats fine with me, also there are some good things about it, showing some micro stats and some quick links (although those were also on the old layout), thats good! if you have 2 blogs, but if you have 20, its pretty shitty! the whole design, is so wide and white that you are lost in it, it takes so much room that only 5 blogs appear.

Also the new dashboard is incredibly slow, everything takes a couple more than it should, Google sees html as slow, AJAX is the way of the future, everything updates itself, its all seamless and awesome!!! well No! Not really, the whole thing is a mess, its like when you click on a link on a html site you feel the microseconds to jump to the next page, its like a snap feeling (page refreshes to show a new page), here you have the slow drag feeling, the page doesn't refresh but it loads... eventually.

Also whoever designed this was high on orange and on wasting space, from the top down, first grey bar you have the blogger logo and on the other side my nickname and some links to edit my profile or google account... great use of space, especially on 2 features that... humm everyone uses all the time?

Second bar you have my nickname again and the title! my blogs! oh how sweetly irrelevant, on the other side of the bar you get 2 drop-downs, one for language (something i like to see all the time and change constantly to keep myself fresh) and options, of course all of these options are absolutely positively super duper handy! Here they are:

Blogger Help - The first option? I think this needs no further comment.
Send Feedback - Hum? Im seeing double, in the bottom there is a button saying the exact same thing, hell that button is on every page!
Connect to Google+ - Yes we all know Google hates Orkut.
Old Blogger Interface - My favorite option! i think it should have its own button and be called "Go back to the new new blogger, its the same as the old but still better than the new", ohh maybe thats too much text for a button, but im glad it made it into this crowded options menu.
About New Look - For when "Blogger Help" and "Send Feedback" is just not enough!

Then you get the blogs displayed, of course to create a new blog, you just click the button "New Blog" you cant miss it, cause that tiny button is taking a 1\3 column on the left side, I also like the responsive design tweaks, but just if you have 1024px or lower screen, if you go higher you just get extra empty space... how responsive of you.

They also decided to continue including the reading pane (basically a poor man's google reader), who uses this? Let me think of a time i needed to get into my blogging software to read other peoples shit? hummm suffice to say its not practical, its not nice, its basically throwing random feeds at you. Ohh and of course it takes half the screen and there is no way of minimising or closing it, you just have to try and use a bit of imagination, and think of a blogger dashboard without that oversized rss widget!

The new dashboard also hangs/goes into a infinite loop if you try to login forcing https, yeah, who wants encrypted logins... what do you have to hide, blogger guy! no one reads your cat blog anyways!

The Blogger Editor

Did i say the dashboard was slow? sorry i mean everything is slow, its slow in firefox, safari and even google's chrome, its slow by design, if you concentrate and listen... listen really well... you can actually hear the screams of javascript dying, thats how slow, unresponsive and obnoxious it is!

But when it eventually loads something, you are greeted with even more white and orange, its like writing in a Sunnny D comercial, its so refreshing that im actually becoming orange blind.

Here however there is a somewhat better use of the white space, but still their "responsive design" leaves a lot to be desired, their sidebar on the left side only minimizes if your screen is small, if its large its always open, no choice, also on the "Compose" side of things you have a tiny tiny box to write, while on the "HTML" you have a large box, and going back and forth actually loses formatting (a space written on html is not translated into compose, you literally have to put the html tag for space or paragraph), thats just silly, the HTML part on a editor is not really to edit html its to tweak the code of a post...

Also your infinite image posting options, not that its a bad thing, i prefer more than too few, its just a bit confusing, like you dont know if you are posting images on Picasa or Blogger (or is that gone?) from Picasa or from Google+ or from your webcam, where do those go? into Picasa or Google+, i dont know... maybe i shouldn't touch it more!

The New Themes / Dynamic Views

Should i mention those weirdly, barely functional, cooliris wannabe clones (being cooliris kinda a apple coverflowish clone), javascript infilled, bloat hazardous new themes?

Who had this great ideia? Hummm? I bet it was the same guy that designed the new blogger, he just went nuts on a power-trip, the new themes are simply not good, they break a lot of function and usability for the sake of fancy effects, blogs are to be read and enjoyed, not to be wowed by fancy sliding effects, although nice, they add little to nothing for the reader/visitor, it actually makes it worst.

These new themes are slow! - You betcha, a theme that has a loading icon is already a sign of bad things to come (like a software with a splash screen), especially when blogger staff says they load 40% faster... what? ohh you mean after the long loading signs it becomes faster? ohhh no? it must be one of those "perceived faster", or maybe a sidebar is 40% of the design, if we kill a sidebar... 40% faster! by the way the screenshot on top of a dynamic view loading was super easy to take, no need to hurry before it finished loading...
These new themes are not easy to navigate! - They aren't! Sure the fonts are nice and readable, but you can choose any font for your blog, but try and navigate anywhere on a dynamic view... let this scrolling quest begin!
These new themes are all basically the same! - They are and half of them aren't even that nice, and most are made for a specific kind of formated posts, so any average blog will look like shit in them!
These new themes have crippled search! - Try it on a average sized blog... i dare you! ... to find anything...
These new themes have no sidebar! - So they basically want to push oversized, slow jazzed up tumblr themes on everyone... nice...

We all know Google quit the "Dont be evil" some time ago, and although i still use some Google products i cant say i trust them all that much, for sure me, like most of you will stay very clear from things like Google+ and Google Drive, as i would never sign up my cat to Google+ , if not the subpar facebook clone, the risk of his account getting banned and all his cute kitty pictures being lost forever... NOOOOO!

But when did Google stop making clean, simple and fast designs? Google Search is as bloated as ever, sometimes i have difficulty searching cause im writing something and instant is firing off and pages are loading and i realise that i cant even concentrate on what i was searching (and yes i know you can disable it, but how many times have i disabled instant or safe filter to have them show back on later on, even when im logged in!), what happen to the mili-second clean pages of search? what happen to clean, simple UI's and focused design on one thing that does one job awesomely well!

Well, yeah the new updated Blogger sucks, its slow, buggier, way more complicated than it should be, not that user-friendly and overall a disappointment, and most likely when this new blogger turns into the official one, ill have to pack my bags and move over to tumblr, apparently the only sensible offering on the market today.

Note: Why no Wordpress.com?, well I also have some minor issues with wordpress.com since they seem in comparison with blogger and tumblr, the ones that offer less options and flexibility, ohh and worst! they are way more picky about the kind of content they let you publish (the 2 blogs i had there were "suspended" at one point or another), yes i know its their choice and platform, and yes they eventually un-suspended me, but that just makes me stay away.

Note 2: As I wrote this post on Gmail and copy pasted to Blogger, im sure Google tracked that action down, later today some Google manager will look at that log and think ... humm this should be on the next Gmail build! so just after the Gmail+, Google will launch the brand new Gmailer+ hey and its a success already, from day 1 it has a bazzilion users! Blogging right from your Google+ i mean Gmail, ahhh you know what that means! Humm now that i think about it... at least it would be a better Blogger!

Apache OpenOffice 3.4 Vs LibreOffice 3.5.3

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:36:00 +0000

So I've been using LibreOffice on multiple computers on the office, as an obvious alternative to Microsoft's Office, now the reason for moving from OpenOffice to LibreOffice was purely because Oracle is probably the most untrustworthy company in the world (i joke, i joke, but they surely seem a very anti-opensource company), so with the spin-off LibreOffice and especially because they were joining with Go-oo, i thought the move to LibreOffice was the right one!

See my main concerns (and probably like most other users) with Office software are:

I need basic Office Functions (Writer/Calc/Presentation);
I need compatibility with Microsoft Office documents;
I need Performance (Opening fast, closing fast, editing fast, if possible low memory and low cpu)!

What i noticed first with my change to Libreoffice is that it was slightly slower than OpenOffice, i thought it was a bit strange since Go-oo was a bit faster than OpenOffice, still the difference dint seem much at the time and i put if off as the excuse from the LibreOffice camp that the focus right then was on code clean up.

So now that OpenOffice practically died off at the hands of Oracle and was handed down to the Apache foundation to try and become a more open source project again, i kinda would like to give it a go, at least to see how the performance is, so with OpenOffice 3.4 just coming out, lets make a comparison!

Basic Office Functions between OpenOffice 3.4 and LibreOffice 3.5.3

Well there are already a lot, especially on the LibreOffice side of things, but not all are for the better, sure LibreOffice has more tricks and features, but most are to my view (the view of someone that wants a basic office software for a business) mostly irrelevant, also Libreoffice color change is kinda obnoxious, who wants fluorescent green/blue/yellow documents icons? Besides that, i would say in basic office functions OpenOffice and LibreOffice are on par.

Office Compatibility between OpenOffice 3.4 and LibreOffice 3.5.3

Well almost the same, even tough here i kinda have to give a nudge to LibreOffice, since it has way less warnings and quiz options while opening Microsoft Office Documents, the OpenOffice "oh jesus christ i see a macro" warnings are a bit of a overkill and annoying, but yeah they both work pretty good with Microsoft Office documents.

Performance between OpenOffice 3.4 and LibreOffice 3.5.3

I'm using pretty modern computers (multiple core cpus, 4GB ram, fast 7200rpm hard drives), one with Windows XP the other with Windows 7, yes I'm not going to compare on the Mac or Linux cause I'm not using them on the business side, also although this isn't all that scientific, I'm going to take some precautions, my scheme will be installing/rebooting, running cold/running hot, also I'm not tweaking any of them for performance, this is out of the box performance, on both I'm only installing the writer/spreadsheet/presentation programs, on both I'm disabling quick start.

The small.doc is 40KB, the large.doc is 25MB with plenty of formatting and embedded images and graphs, the small.xls is 45KB and the large.xls is 4MB with 20 sheets lots of calculations and graphs.

Note: I've removed the cold start, since they both acted pretty much the same, if starting cold, it adds around 16 seconds whatever the document and whatever the software (that sucks on both software's). I also removed the Windows XP graphic cause it was kinda the same, although all a bit slower than on Windows 7, but that computer is also a bit slower than the Windows 7.

So as we can see, OpenOffice has better performance once warmed up, especially on the large.doc, the difference in opening is huge! Almost half the time to open, and with smaller files it also consistently outperformed LibreOffice, also OpenOffice was very responsive on the Large.doc, while LibreOffice kept hanging while i was scrolling or editing, also for the same document Libreoffice used 43MB of RAM, while OpenOffice used 35MB of RAM.

So now i'm not sure if i should move all my computers back to OpenOffice or if i should wait for LibreOffice 3.6 in a month's time, but i do hope that both distributions start focusing on performance, i think if OpenOffice keeps improving its performance like this, that it really doesn't matter the clean code and all the nice bells and whistles of LibreOffice, most business will make the decision on performance (literally the biggest reason to buy Microsoft Office is performance) to stay with OpenOffice or go back to it, just like me.

Note 1: Seems i should have published the documents i used in this comparison, sorry about that, my fault! but like i said in the comments they were random office documents, i promisse ill make a better comparison when LibreOffice 3.6 comes out!

Note 2: Also the Windows XP computer has Microsoft Office 2003 (the only office i have ever bought) and all of the files i tested open INSTANTLY! and in COLD START! even the huge 25MB file, although it seems in that one it only loads the first 6 pages, but scrolling down it keeps showing the rest pretty quickly and smoothly, soo i would add that in the performance department LibreOffice and OpenOffice have still a long Long LONG way to go, even in 2012 they are no comparison in performance to a 2003 software.

Cloud Storage - Skydrive's Storage Claims

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:06:00 +0000

Guess I'm back to talking about cloud services, still this time I'm on Skydrive's tail, when this new Skydrive was announced on the MSDN blog, there was something that i found odd, the reason Microsoft decided to give 7GB of free space to new users, the reasoning being that 99,94% of all Skydrive users only used less than 7GB! Ill even give you their graph!

Neet, but something seems off, and some things do come to mind...

Skydrive was a crippled service, less we not forget but the fact that Skydrive wasn't that popular, was that you had 25GB but you could only upload files through a web form, you had like 100Mb limit for file size, stuff like that, with this... of course the vast majority didn't have the time or patience to upload a lot of files to Skydrive, its completely different from the service that Skydrive is offering now!
25GB was the calling card, the reason you had so many users in the first place was the 25GB, even though it was hard to use the space, people like big numbers.
There will be some storage envy, even with pretty spanky awesome lower storage price tiers and older users being able to have their 25GB, people that before ignored Skydrive because it was a crippled service, will now just compare it with Dropbox, Google Drive and such, hell with Dropbox you can get way more than 7GB with referrals, and Dropbox is still the superior service!
7GB is a weird number, it IS! 8GB or 10GB would be better, or better yet, keep the freaking 25GB, if most people just use 7GB there would be no harm at all! RIGHT!!!

As a sidenote I've tried this new Skydrive and i must say it works pretty well on windows 7 (on mac it sucks bad, since its only available to lion), comparing with Dropbox that uses like 60/80 Mb of Ram and about 2/3% CPU, Skydrive uses about 10/20 Mb of Ram and barely touches CPU, it also runs pretty smoothly, so good job there Microsoft, shame about the storage shenanigans.

Google Drive and Cloud Storage

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 17:44:00 +0000

So Google just launched Google Drive and although this has been quite a week on the cloud, and the response from the web to "Google's Dropbox Clone" has been mostly "meh", i do understand the sentiment, it is basically a Dropbox Clone, sure it has some new features but those are mostly baked into Google Docs already, so what is my view on this Goggle Docs+ i mean Google Drive...

Oh Shit it does Sync!

That's awesome if it was released in 2006, its 2012 now and there are plenty of sync everywhere including cloud services, some more simple, some more fancy, but that's pretty much the service, Google launching it now, feels and seems like an afterthought, because Microsoft and Apple went into it, they better do it as well, also it pretty much does only that, its a sync engine for Google Docs and that service although cool is not that awesome and it doesn't replace at all using a local office software.

Oh Snap Google Owns Me!

So most of us are loyal and use a lot of Google Services, i know i do, and the day some algorithm in Google decides to suspend my account for some random reason (ie a bad Google Adwords ad, or putting my nickname on Google+ or whatnot), and of course i can trust the non-existent Google support to help me out, so yeah, using Google nowadays should be done with a backup/alternative always in mind.

Worst! Google unfortunately resides in the USA the home of such nice things as the Patriot Act and the reason why a lot of companies don't host any personal/private information in the USA, cause its too easy to just go into your files, you need warrants and judges to go to your home to check your computers, but going to your cloud files... hummm not so much, and with the latest CISPA, it will just get worst, if banks/governments dont trust putting anything inside US borders, why should we trust Google with our stuff? (ie i know most other cloud hosting are on US, im just stating the fact that Google is also).

Oh Jeez i have to Pay!

So Google launches Drive and decides to updates its storage price, and the web gives a sigh...

If Google Drive was launched with the previous storage prices it would have been an awesome cloud hosting mini revolution, i would see people using and integrating Google Drive in lots of different ways just to find uses to that cheap pricing on storage, but no! the new prices are 4X or more expensive than it used to be, and now its price is just on par with the cheapest of the pack, so why choose Google Drive? Not on storage price!

Its a Google App Engine all over again, they start with a really cheap price and then when people start using it they change the rules of the game, so if anyone is already deep down on Google Services and needs more storage, they will have to pay 4 times or more just to have THE SAME STORAGE THAT THEY USED TO HAVE! its ridiculous and in my opinion its another huge fail from Google.

But wait it gets worst, now with the new storage prices, Google Services have all different storage limits, like Gmail has 10GB, but Drive has only 5GB and Picasa has 1GB what? but Google+ Photos is unlimited, its ridiculous and besides making it more complicated it also kills the gmail "you never have to delete an e-mail ever again" popular slogan, cause now gmail storage stopped growing... thats just sad T_T so sad...

Oh Wow it kinda Sucks!

Ok so Google Drive is syncing to Google Docs, but...no not really, since your documents formated with Google Docs wont sync, yeah thats right, they will only live only on the Google cloud, so when Google kills your account those files will be lost forever, nice file sync Google, its mostly one way... plus at least in my opinion, not supporting linux is just another silly mistake.

Also Google's new "all services have the same terms of service" makes Google retaining/granting ownership or license of any material you upload, unlike competing syncing services, if you put something on Google, even if you delete it later on, Google still owns some rights to it, i know! its fucking embarassing and ridiculous.

Oh chucks i quit!

So whats my take on this Drive... humm ill skip this one, it kinda just makes me dislike Google even more, the old Google ignored users, but this new Google just doesn't respect its users, Google's moto "dont be evil" is pretty close to becoming moot.

Ultimate Adblock Privacy List

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:15:00 +0000

[ For you guys that know how this works, the filter subscription url for ablock plus is http://p.oito.eu/privacy.txt ]

I was having a chat the other day about privacy and how the value of facebook is around not only the people/clients, but also everything you/upload/say on facebook is property of facebook and even when you are online all those like buttons, means they are still tracking you and selling who you are and what you do to the highest bidder...

That got me thinking, first thing i did was "clean up my facebook account", ill still use facebook its a great site and communication tool, and i know facebook works like a subversion repository and everything you do is recorded for all time, so my clean up is purely esthetic, but still this way not only is my facebook a bit cleaner but its also a reminder for me to not add more personal stuff there...

Next i searched around for that privacy protection, from Noscript, to an improvement on my hosts file (mine is already a beauty to behold, but more on that on another post), but i realized that i could use the awesome adblocking extension, adblock plus to do that job, especially cause i want for instance to block facebook or twitter buttons, but i dont want to block facebook or twitter, so i searched around and actually found they already have a couple of nice "privacy" filters, i put "" cause although good, they aren't as cutthroat as i want them to be, that took me to my next step....

My very own privacy filter for adblock plus, it isnt huge and its not all encompassing, i have no big issue with small vendors or even a big vendor knowing a bit about me, my issue is they know too much, so this adblock filter is more of a privacy crippler that in conjuction with my hosts file and adblock plain list, makes my web oh so much more wonderful and safe!

How to Install this Beauty

Its simple, get yourself a good browser like firefox or chrome (remember both these browsers already track some of what you do, so if you want to go private all the way go for SRWare or something), then find on their respective Add-Ons/Extensions sites Adblock Plus and install it, then on the adblock plus options you will see a Filter Subscriptions, just add a new one and put whatever name you want, like "Awesome Privacy List" and put this url ~~http://p.oito.eu/privacy.txt~~ and thats it! It will update itself once a week when i add or remove hosts, the original list is part my personal choices and the awesome privacy lists from Abine and Privacy Choice.

Note: Well this was shortlived! but mostly cause a few friends pointed out that other people were already doing this, so why should I! hehehe sorry, so check out Fanboys Anti Tracking+ Annoyances as well as Adversity! Its the ones i use and they kick ass!

Oito Mini Services

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Over the years i've created some tools to help me out or just for fun, i had them all over on s2r.org, but i thought with the creation of oito.eu, it would be nicer to share those tools with everyone, the idea was always for them to be simple and fast, hey you might find them useful like i do!

oito.eu/ip > the most plain find your ip ever!
oito.eu/qr > quick and dirty qr generator, based on google's qr api
oito.eu/htm > full featured html editor, for those times where you forgot what was that tag
oito.eu/host > pulls the ip and hostname of a site
oito.eu/up > the most plain is this site up ever!
oito.eu/whois > fast simple whois
oito.eu/http > this one is to make quick checks on a site's headers and stuff

Update on the Anti-Spam Txt

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 12:41:00 +0000

In the never ending fight against spam, i decided to update my imageboard anti-spam list, but im also centralizing it and caching it (cdn and stuff on our oito.eu mirror domain), so its easier and quicker to use and update, so now the spam list is here at http://p.oito.eu/spam.txt just copy it over to your own spam list or just use as an extension! Voilá bad-guys gone!

As a note, it mostly includes common bad hosts,spam sites,short url providers and overall nasty sites that have spammed one of our image boards on one time or another, also if you think your site is wrongfully added to our spam list, then just send us a mail on the contact page and if you are right, we will remove you at once!

New Site - Yokatta

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:39:00 +0000

Hey hey new site, i introduce to you yokatta.org, its a plain and cute anime/japanese inspired wallpaper site! Always wanted one muhahahaha ^_^

Merry Christmas and 2012!

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 11:13:00 +0000

From everyone on S2R and here on Hostcult, have a awesome Christmas and New Years!

Cloudflare Review Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:10:00 +0000

So a couple of months ago i did a test and review of Cloudflare, it was getting popular and i wanted to check it out, so why a second part? Well 2 reasons, first instead of using it for a week, now i've used it for a couple of months on a couple of my sites, so i have a better view of the service, second cause i still have a couple of gripes with Cloudflare but also some nice tips to share.

My Hits with Cloudflare!
So like i said i've been using Cloudflare for a while now and i would say, its still a hit and miss for me, but mostly a hit, even with hosting your DNS through Cloudflare (and therefore losing control of your DNS ), but to be honest, unless you are paying for the really good DNS hosting, Cloudflare's DNS service is far superior, i know, cause i've used a lot of free and paid dns hosters and hosted my own and i checked it here, with just a couple of tweaks/added services their DNS could compete with the best.

Now in terms of site performance i would say its pretty spanky awesome, i've had sites that were literally hanging for dear life bashing the server and just by turning Cloudflare on, it not only relieved a lot of the stress on the server but also turned the site speed way up, that's by far the best thing about it, how much performance and how easy their CDN/Proxying system is.

My Misses with Cloudflare
But there are still today a couple of gripes, the first and largest is with their security settings and their intermission publicity type of thing they do when they block a user, as far as feedback from my visitors, i would say 100% of my visitors freak out when they reach a site and they are greeted with the cloudflare "you might be infected"! its just a fact, they expect to see a site, it really doesn't matter if they are infected, their network is bad or they have an unlucky ip, its just not standard web usage to go to a site and be greated with something else, it feels like a pop ad or intermission ad to force someone to do something, what sites like wiki-whatever.info/exclusive-experts.com (i made them up, but you know what kind of sites im talking about) do all the time while spamming Google, its a disaster in terms of usability and no type of customization will ever change my mind, people never expect a warning from a site, even Google disabled their "you might be infected" because people freaked out even if it was with the best of intentions.

There are also some misses with the "html,css,js..." optimizations, with external objects (javascript mostly), with search engines, 1 of my site was heavily penalized while switching to cloudflare (and yes turning it back after a week made it slowly return to normal, it was weird and it was reported to cloudflare staff), but 2 other saw a huge increase on traffic (I MEAN FREAKIN 400% more 300.000 users HUGE WAY!), probably due to getting faster, hehehe so again hit and miss.

What is the Cloudflare Structure?
Cloudflare seems to work a bit like this, they get datacenters on popular internet hubs around the world, popular in the sense that a lot of traffic goes through them, i would bet that altough they spend quite a bit on hardware, that they dont pay or pay very little for bandwith and do what most large providers do and have peering agreements, thats were the free cloudflare users come in, altough clouflare provides a free service they kinda need those users to have enough critical mass for these peering aggrements to be worthwhile for both parties, so altough we arent paying they need the free users, note that this isnt something evil, its awesome win-win for everyone.

The Economics of Cloudflare
How do they get paid! Humm i would say affiliates (through their detestable intermession security warning and through some of the plugins), and of course paid accounts, on this i wonder why they start the price at 20$, maybe they think most of their free users have only 1 site, and if they have more they only have to pay 5$ for each after that, well in my case at least for now its simply not economicaly viable to pay for clouflare pro, for 20$ a month you can buy yourself a whole lot of hosting, even with the added savings of a Pro account.

How do I use Cloudflare

Basic Security Level: Essentially Off (because the bonus of blocking potential bad users doesnt outweight the really horrible spammy intermission alert)
Caching Level: Aggressive
Minimim Expire TTL: 4hours (but adjust this to the update schedule of your site)
Auto Minify: JS=OFF CSS=ON HTML=ON (avoid the JS, until now it hasnt work in any of my sites and also makes Googles PageSpeed Apache Addon freakout)
Rocket Loader: OFF
Outbound Links: OFF
E-Mail Address Obfuscation: OFF
Server Side Exclude: OFF
Always Online: OFF (still a good feature, it only shows a bar on top saying that the site is currently offline, i just turn it off as a personal preference)
IP Geolocation: OFF
Browser Integrity Check: OFF
Hotlink Protection: OFF

Conclusion!
Yeah i disable most of the features, dont get me wrong if you need it or its good for you, please turn it On, still the only feature i really cant live with is the Basic Security Level for the reasons i already ranted about hehehe, but hey, freaking thumbs up for Cloudflare its free and it works pretty damn good, my only real gripe is with the security warnings, i would prefer pure blocking than any kind of warning, the more transparent and white-label the better and im really waiting for their announced new pricing scheme to see if i can get a few pro accounts for a couple of my sites, but even so Cloudflare isnt perfect, well damn if it isn't pretty close.

4Kun! Halloween Competition

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 11:19:00 +0000

Yay we are starting a quick and dirty competition on 4kun imageboard, best picture, best halloween picture and just a random draft, with prizes, yay, so come on over and get your feet wet on the very first 4Kun! Scary Halloween Competition ^_^ and by the way have a Happy Happy Halloween!

Google Adsense is Ridiculous!

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 11:15:00 +0000

This shit keeps getting worse, talk about monopoly, i follow google adsense rules to the letter and i still keep getting the "review of your account we found that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our program policies", the fact is that im always in compliant, but since there is no recourse with Google, there is no one on the other side, i have no choice but to NOT use Google Adsense on that site, its silly, stupid and arrogant.

Why? Cause they give you no choice! and i quote "Your AdSense account remains active. However, if we continue to find problems, we may disable your entire account. Therefore, we suggest that you take the time to review the rest of your network to ensure that all of your other pages are in compliance with our policies.", the sites in question, are pretty big sites, galleries, blogs and directories, there is no adult content or linking to adult content, but Google decided that it links to Adult sites!

What? what are the urls of these sites that Google considers to be adult sites?

Who? are these sites, it could be any comment on the blogs/galleries or site on the directories, this is the 4th site that was found in "violation", well last time i checked the internet is all about linking, then all the fucking internet is found in violation of google adsense policy! they dont give a fuck, they change the rules in the middle of the game all the time, im a tiny client on their list, but ill tell you this, I keep finding myself getting more and more stressed with Google's bullshit and that has consequences, not today, but some day.

New Site - Eleito

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:57:00 +0000

Eleito is on its second incarnation, the first version was a bit to sparce and boring, and i wanted Eleito to be like a mixture between a political news blog, but also a good source of news and information around politics in Portugal, so now its a popurls like portal with all the news from all the parties in Portugal (if you are on a party that is not there, just contact us), as well as news from the major news sources, joined with our own editorial and in the future we will make more in depth articles.

Ohh and for short news bits we have our own twitter account, you can check it here eleito por todos.

New Site - Luz Portugal

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:10:00 +0000

Huhumm, new site, its called Luz Portugal, and of course its about Praia da Luz, Algarve, Portugal, its kinda a portal of sorts, i know there are a couple of sites kinda like this, but i wanted to make one that is nice to look at and nice to use, mixing helpful information and funny and interesting things about Praia da Luz, hehehe cool humm.

Google Vs Web Developers

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:58:00 +0000

With the recent news about Google's App Engine pricing, i kinda want to give my own 2 cents, not only on that but also on Google's attitude towards web developers in general.

So just incase you werent following up, Google on its spree of canceling products, decided to not cancel the App Engine product but instead turn it into a enterprise product, the App Engine is basically a scalable hosting solution, were you can build websites or applications.

So when the App Engine debuted it was touted as a one stop app hosting solution, were you could build your web applications quickly and they would run on Google High End Systems, kind of like Amazon Cloud offerings but simpler and easier to use, well it wasnt really easy, you have the choice of Java or Phython (pretty much) and the system is a bit trickier, but at least it was cheap and once you got it up and running, it was pretty cool, so that premise brought a bunch of developers to the App Engine, hey it wasn't perfect but it was pretty easy and cheap.

So fast forward to now and the App Engine is a completely different beast, by switching their pricing model the App Engine has become way more expensive (mostly because before you paid for what you used and now you pay for what you need to use, even if you don't use it, big difference) and im not saying like 20%, im saying 200%, and so Google's answer to the outcry was:

Pack Up and Go, well that would be great, but most cant, cause to make the site or application you had to custom build it to fit App Engine, even if the languages were universal, moving away turns out to be a costly en-devour, so Google has you locked in (whenever i see Google announce another fake information liberation campaign i cant help but chuckle),
Optimize your Code, if you optimize your code you can make a lot of savings, yeah im actually all for that, but to me, like many other developers, we optimize code for performance and for security, optimizing code to run cheaper is for lack of a better word idiotic! developing something is most of the times a hack job that you perfect and improve with time, with App Engine your code better be perfect from the get-go or you gonna have to...
Pay More, you betcha, this one is easy, pay enterprise level prices or fuck off.

So basically Google did a bait and switch, pulled in all this small developers that had the time, interest and risk to create stuff on an untested new platform as the App Engine (cause understandably Large Companies seldom risks trying new things), but now that the system is somewhat stable and ready for prime-time, those same developers get shafted, so in the end whats the point of having a scalable hosting solution if a developer cant afford it.

But this wasn't the first time and it wont be the last, Google's only interest is Google bottom-line, that's it, developing anything on top of Google Services is a huge risk, they also recently disabled a ton of API's, that a lot of sites depended on and were created on top of, also pushing Google Chrome Only/Optimized features, as well as a bunch of other services.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing Google for doing it, i'm just saying that when Google says they are making new tools for developers, new API's, new hosting platforms, support open source, supporting webmasters... that you should take those offers with a huge grain of salt, for myself, well im off the App Engine and most of my apps wont be moved over, im keeping to what i know, i learned this lesson before, with Ning, with several Hosting Providers and such, never build anything you don't have absolute control of, lesson learned.

New Site - Kity

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 17:05:00 +0000

Awwww, its a site about kittens, and yeah i know kity isn't quite the correct spelling, but i don't care, and yes its supposed to look like a sickly sweet eye candy orgasm! haahah its wonderful, guaranteed to lift anyones spirit hahahaha (or at least mine hehehe) ^_^

Site Update - Smutish

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:12:00 +0000

Smutish was always kinda the black cheap of the family, kinda weird design, no real purpose, it was a experiment left abandoned to itself, still people seem to like it and wanted more, so after a bit of tweaking its finally something pretty cool, its still the same posting cute naked people, but now its simple, clear and way faster and with HUGE picture sizes hehehe, enjoy!

Moving to Addthis

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:01:00 +0000

Oh this is funny, remember when there were like all this influx of buttons to save/post/share/like and then came the aggregation buttons, like addthis and addtoany or sharethis, all of this was a freaking drag on webpages and i was never a big fan, cause they weren't really very useful, sure 1 or 2 people might use it, but the vast majority doesn't, and why make your pages load like shit just to make life better for a couple of visitors?

Most people that use delicious have and use other ways to bookmarks, users of stumbleupon probably have the bar installed, so there wasn't any point, that is until facebook started with the like buttons, those seemed to be way more practical and a stronger promotional tool, same goes later on to the tweet buttons and now the google plus button, so we are back to the same problem, although the buttons are more useful and practical its still at least 3 or 4 hits to different places dragging your own pages down (ohh and the tweet button is kinda the worst of the bunch).

That is were addthis comes along and just adds these buttons to their standard setup, so now instead of all those hits you are just hitting the addthis site, add to that asynchronous loading and you are pretty much having the best of both worlds, adding to this the fact that i dont need to hardcore parts of the template or some referral on the buttons to make them work properly, makes addthis even more practical, so expect some more buttons popping out of s2r sites hehehe.

Blogger FAIL with 503 Errors

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 10:57:00 +0000

This is getting ridiculous, but Google Blogger is having a fit since Saturday at about 11:30am CST, random actions give you random 503 errors (by the way 503 Service Unavailable: The server is currently unavailable.Generally, this is a temporary state), from settings to posts, practically everything is being affected, comments as well, hell this post gave a couple before being able to post, and worst is that although there is a huge amount of posts on twitter and Google groups and help regarding this in the last 24hours, but there are no updates on this on Blogger Status or Blogger Known Issues, such a dumb fail again from Blogger >_< but well kinda getting used to the Google wall of silence.

Most likely Blogger hosting system is under some form of unscheduled maintenance or just failing all over the place from overload or just plain fail, pretty much after they announced the new interface (that is a mix bag, for one hand is nicer and cleaner on the other hand its difficult to read and slow as hell to use) for anyone using the draft panel.

Downtime - Hentaish and Neechan

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:16:00 +0000

Txxxa this sucks but seems the filesystem on that server has gone awry, so we are in the process of fsck, this is gonna take some time (its been down for 5 hours already), sorry about that everyone, but shit happens with moving parts, now depending on the outcome, we can be back in a couple of hours (problem resolved, RAID worked), or if we have corruption, ill have to bring from the backups, the hosts or mine whatever are the freshest, from what i checked, my backups are from this Saturday, so not so bad if they come from me ^_^

Ill update with more news in a couple of hours, sorrryyyy ^_^'

Update 1: Yep still going at it, that's what happens when you put several Tb in one place, still no major issues until now, 8hours of downtime... this sucks... a bit hehehe

Update 2: Final stretch on fsck, its been down for almost half a day 11hours >_<

Update 3 - Final: Yay every site is back online and working fine, still 13hours of downtime... tsss wasn't pretty...

Free Hosted DNS Review YAY... I think...

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 15:14:00 +0000

So i got an e-mail from EveryDNS warning that they are moving on from the freemium model into the dyndns paid DNS (they were merged or acquired some time ago), that's cool, i guess, i was only using them as backup DNS for Hostcult, since that domain runs pretty much all our hosting (so if it fails 90% of my sites start failing), before i was just using my domain registar DNS ( ResellerClub ) and they pretty much failed a lot on me over time (with glitches, maintenance, performance issues), so having a backup DNS was a pretty good idea, so with this e-mail from the now defunct EveryDNS, i think i have a opportunity to check my options (and in the process share them with you all).

So why not choose a professional/paid DNS? well if i don't find a good alternative, them ill probably pay for it, but DNS is such a thing that 95% of the time im running it myself on each server, i only really need dns for off server domains or for my main hosting domain, so checking the free alternatives seems like the place to start, so i'm doing a showdown between: Hosted VS ResellerClub VS InternetBS VS NameCheap VS CloudNS VS Hurricane Electric VS PointHQ VS XName VS CloudFlare.

Added info for the tables:
Europe Avg: A 24 hour average from my computer in Europe.
Monitoring Avg: A weekly average from Pingdom DNS (From 2 locations in Europe and USA), 5min intervals.
Monitoring Spike: The worst performance for that week from Pingdom DNS (From 2 locations in Europe and USA), 5min intervals.
Uptime: If it was online or not.
Location: where the DNS server is.

Local DNS

	Europe Avg	Monitoring Avg	Monitoring Spike	Uptime	Location
ns3.hostcult.com	170	129	419	100%	USA, TX
ns4.hostcult.com	166.5	109	325	100%	USA, TX

Notes: Running on Cpanel, Complete DNS functions.
Restrictions: None.
Comments: Well running your own DNS isn't perfect but its simple and doable, the client when doing a DNS query will have a quicker time, connecting again to the site (since both are in the same place), also changes to DNS are done quicker, overall good if you are hosting the sites on the same place as the DNS, and not that important the reliability, since if the server is down, the DNS being up or down is irrelevant.

Branded ResellerClub DNS

	Europe Avg	Monitoring Avg	Monitoring Spike	Uptime	Location
ns11.hostcult.com	FAIL	112	301	100%	USA, TX
ns12.hostcult.com	FAIL	98	293	100%	USA, TX
ns13.hostcult.com	FAIL	105	283	100%	USA, TX
ns14.hostcult.com	FAIL	82	258	100%	USA, TX

Notes: Didn't get any response from my own tests >_<, Average Control Panel, Complete DNS functions.
Restrictions: Its only available for domains hosted there.
Comments: Humm ResellerClub is my main domain registrar, and my current main dns host, but like i said above and as you can see on the tests, ResellerClub leaves a lot to be desired, its average at best, normally not so good, it also doesn't help that all of their servers are in the same place.

Un-Branded ResellerClub DNS

	Europe Avg	Monitoring Avg	Monitoring Spike	Uptime	Location
mercury.orderbox-dns.com	FAIL	93	275	100%	USA, TX
venus.orderbox-dns.com	FAIL	77	219	100%	USA, TX
earth.orderbox-dns.com	FAIL	88	212	100%	USA, TX
mars.orderbox-dns.com	FAIL	118	363	100%	USA, TX

Notes: Didnt get any response from my own tests >_<, Average Control Panel, Complete DNS functions.
Restrictions: Its only available for domains hosted there.
Comments: Much like the Branded, the Un-Branded DNS is kinda slightly better, that makes it even more disappointing since i use the branded, ResellerClub is average at best, normally not so good, it doesn't help as well that all their servers are in the same place.

InternetBS DNS

	Europe Avg	Monitoring Avg	Monitoring Spike	Uptime	Location
ns-canada.topdns.com	175	88	245	100%	Canada, QC
ns-usa.topdns.com	133.5	91	205	100%	USA, NJ
ns-uk.topdns.com	109	74	176	100%	USA, TX

Notes: Average control panel, Complete DNS Functions, although ns-uk has uk in the name, its actually hosted in USA, weird...
Restrictions: Its only available for domains hosted there.
Comments: Well InternetBS is also one of my domain registrars, and i can say im pleasantly surprised, even though my own test weren't awesome, the weekly average shows that they perform pretty well, so kudos to InternetBS for a solid DNS Service.

Namecheap DNS

	Europe Avg	Monitoring Avg	Monitoring Spike	Uptime	Location
freedns1.registrar-servers.com	95.5	78	200	100%	FAIL
freedns2.registrar-servers.com	95.5	82	188	100%	FAIL
freedns3.registrar-servers.com	178	72	187	100%	Germany

Notes: Good Control Panel, Complete DNS Functions.
Restrictions: None.
Comments: My last and least used domain registrar was surprising, not only do they provide DNS services for free to anyone, but the performance was outstanding, they clearly know what they are doing, this is one of the best candidates to this point, excellent job.

CloudNS DNS

	Europe Avg	Monitoring Avg	Monitoring Spike	Uptime	Location
ns1.cloudns.net	60	86	190	100%	FAIL
ns2.cloudns.net	160.5	88	242	100%	USA, TX
ns3.cloudns.net	112.5	72	233	100%	Bulgaria

Notes: Good Control Panel, Complete DNS Functions.
Restrictions: Free for only 3 Domains.
Comments: Cloudns has a good panel and a pretty good DNS performance, even tough a bit weird, clearly their ns1 performs awesomely well, while the other 2 are a bit more weak, also hosting DNS in Bulgaria is just plain weird, you should keep DNS near major backbone transit facilities, that's what i think.

Hurricane Electric DNS

	Europe Avg	Monitoring Avg	Monitoring Spike	Uptime	Location
ns1.he.net	232.5	119	265	100%	USA, CA
ns2.he.net	229	196	740	100%	USA, CA
ns3.he.net	234	194	712	100%	USA, CA

Notes: Average Control Panel, Complete DNS Functions.
Restrictions: None.
Comments: Hurricane is kinda horrible in everything, clearly putting all their DNS servers in their facilities in California, doesn't help little old me half way across the world or anybody else for that matter.

PointHQ DNS

	Europe Avg	Monitoring Avg	Monitoring Spike	Uptime	Location
dns1.pointhq.com	63	111	242	100%	FAIL
dns2.pointhq.com	133.5	110	238	100%	FAIL
dns3.pointhq.com	228.5	92	210	100%	FAIL
dns4.pointhq.com	63.5	96	225	100%	FAIL
dns5.pointhq.com	67	73	186	100%	FAIL

Notes: Good Control Panel, Complete DNS Functions.
Restrictions: Free for only 10 zones.
Comments: PointHQ has some servers closer, some server further away, still pretty good performance overall, but i wonder, normally a browser checks the first nameserver or it just chooses randomly, so you want a excellent first nameserver performance and then good performance from all the secondary ones, with PointHQ we don't have that, if my browser checks dns3 im gonna have to wait 3 times more than if i was lucky and it choose dns4, so yeah, its ok i guess.

XName DNS

	Europe Avg	Monitoring Avg	Monitoring Spike	Uptime	Location
ns0.xname.org	83	79	302	100%	France, Paris
ns1.xname.org	69	106	336	100%	France, Roubaix
ns2.xname.org	109.5	118	311	100%	France, Villeneuve

Notes: Good Control Panel, Complete DNS functions.
Restrictions: None.
Comments: Xname has been around for some time, and it shows, in a good way, they have some great performance, and i find it even more remarkable because all their DNS is in France, but USA monitoring still was quick, that just shows that you don't need to put DNS servers across the world to give good performance, good job.

CloudFlare DNS

	Europe Avg	Monitoring Avg	Monitoring Spike	Uptime	Location
carl.ns.cloudflare.com	175.5	70	235	100%	FAIL
sue.ns.cloudflare.com	178.5	65	173	100%	FAIL
lady.ns.cloudflare.com	178	71	203	100%	FAIL
todd.ns.cloudflare.com	176.5	93	245	100%	FAIL

Notes: Basic Options, Lacks DNS Functions.
Restrictions: None.
Comments: What is cloudflare doing here? well cloudflare can also host you DNS, you can disable their CDN system, so basically you can use it as a pure DNS host, that's why its here, so i have to say its weird, on my personal tests it goes from blazing fast 62 to 284 that's why it has that average, also their system is probably a distributed one, as it doesn't matter what dns server i point to, it will always reach the same place, probably they are leveraging their own CDN for their DNS hosting, and that's a good thing, check the weekly average, that's some impressive performance, with cloudns and namecheap with close results, probably cause all 3 are leveraging some sort of CDN cloud system as well, still it seems inconsistent at times and the lack of full DNS features, kinda kills it from the start, but still something to watch out for the future.

Conclusion
So what am i going to use, well most likely ill go with Namecheap and maybe Xname or Cloudns as backups, Namecheap clearly has a combination of full features and outstanding DNS performance, and also a namebrand you can trust with something as important as DNS.

As a sidenote, good job everyone, 100% UPTIME!!! YAY!!! (i include myself on this, so *pat pat* on the back) also i know this review is a bit unfair, DNS is more than these checks, and everyone can have a bad day, you just need a DDOS on one of the nameservers and bye bye average, also there are tons of providers missing, but i choose these ones according to popularity and namebrand, since that makes this choice of providers a bit more trustworthy, still i think this is a good broad view of them and good enough for me to make my choice.

New Site - Mamilo

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Tue, 31 May 2011 08:49:00 +0000

Ohhh the re-launch of mamilo (means nipple in portuguese), its a simple but cool public image gallery about... guess... boobs and cute and awesome ones hehehe ^_^ yes it shares the same design as gomenasai and functions (anyone can register and upload), but totally diferent goal and language, since this is also a portuguese only site ^_^ still pretty easy to browse in any language and who doesn't love boobs hehehe

Review of Facebook Comments

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Mon, 16 May 2011 16:28:00 +0000

Well this isn't a rant just about facebook comments as to the facebook API in general, I've learned this the hard way, you should never ever, EVER EVER put any part of your site under someone elses control, that means that hosted software or software as a service, regarding websites is a big NONO, only completely internet illiterates should go that route, cause its a very tricky one.

Lets say that my hosting provider goes down, or bankrupts, or decides my site is ugly, well that sucks, but i can move my site elsewhere, even if they shut me down in the middle of the night without any warning, i have my offsite backups, i can move on, it could take some hours or days, but its not the endgame, same goes for any of my domains, even if someone steals them or the government decides that a site about anime panties could burn children's eyes, i would lose traffic, but i can always move to another domain, see no single point of failure, there is a fail-safe for all my work.

Now with facebook you are relinquishing control of your comments, login, data, for the sake of easiness and more widespread promotion, so what happens when facebook bans your site, or decides to change/end the API and you are left with nothing or at least a big headache, cause your users are not your users, your comments are not your comments, they are facebook's, and they decides what is best for them, not for your site.

Also facebook as a kinda personal social effect on people, by basically forcing you to be yourself and not a nickname or handle, and transmitting to your friends pretty much everything you say, it breeds a different kind of internet user, one that instead of honest or idiotic commenting, you have a bland audience, that says stuff as much about the subject as about what they think their friends would want them to say, its vanity commenting, and for that shit, you can just stay inside facebook's walls.

I don't think what you get from facebook is all that great, the conversations are bland and it detracts most of the time, you get a bland looking comment box and bland people talking on it about bland things, were is the awesome juice?, trolling most of the times is comedy genius, like when techcrunch put facebook comments and said it was the best thing evah!, well i guess not, cause they went back to their old comment system, ill say it again, when you put your data in someone elses pocket you lose value and in the case of facebook comments you lose value and gain boring banal conversations instead, winwin? not really.

Anyways don't get me wrong, its not just facebook, the disqus, intensedebates and cocomment of the world, with the rare exception, like if its a temporary page or comments are not the focus, just a add-on for help or faq, yeah then its a somewhat good idea to outsource, but for all other cases, naaa the shinny extras you get, don't pay for the fact that what you create from their own is out of your hands.

Well there is an exception, the "like button", but i view that as any other "share me" button, maybe it has better hits than most, but nothing completely awesome or mandatory, you can as easily turn it off, with no impact to your site ^_^ .o( maybe if facebook looked more like the picture in the top... hehehe )

New Site - Gomenasai

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Thu, 12 May 2011 08:50:00 +0000

Well it goes a little like this, i wanted to create a gallery for buriko, cause even though i love updating buriko with cutie japanese girls, it was kinda a drag for user to search on it and find the girls they wanted, so i decided to create a gallery for buriko, however that proved to be a bit tricky and weird, when i wanted something easy and simple ^_^

Sooo like a lot of my sites, this one is a spinoff of a shortlived buriko remake, its a simple and easy to use japanese idol gallery, its called gomenasai (means "im sorry" in japanese), anyone can register and upload their favorite girls and well browse away ^^ its simple, easy and cute, i hope everyone likes it hehehhe.

As a sidenote buriko will focus now on single posts and high quality images (its going to be a mix of automated crawling and random posts) ^_^ enjoy

Site Updates - Buriko & Irred

noreply@blogger.com (fiend) — Tue, 10 May 2011 11:16:00 +0000

Yeah did some major changes on irred (the list is long), mostly around the design to make it nicer and cleaner, also on the backend, so the site should run smoother, also a new nice uploader and finally some cleanup of the public folder and new uploads, yay!!! looking good!!!

On buriko, i've cleaned up the design, should also run smoother, and started a companion gallery (ill post about that later).