Just over 1 year

We’ve just passed our 1-year anniversary 11 days ago; the first post on this site was published on February 16, 2007.

I’m still recovering from a viral illness, and will be back in business — as they say — by tomorrow.

The Geekie.org domain was successfully renewed a few days ago, and I’m moving on to transfer FreddyWare.net and renew a few of the other domains we own.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Subscribe to our RSS/ATOM feed

Free! Of course it is. Subscribing to the RSS/ATOM feed of Geekie.org will always be free.

If you are viewing this message in your RSS/ATOM reader, you can disregard this message completely. If you’re a user of our site who does NOT use an RSS client to subscribe to our feed, read on!

RSS/ATOM are standards for creating portable XML files which contain — essentially — links to pages on sites. Extended to the context of blogs like Geekie.org, RSS/ATOM are easy ways of providing posts (or excerpts of posts) in plain text, to be read in a format comfortable to the user.

Why might you use our feed instead of our site? (We don’t mind if you use either one, but we encourage both.)

• You might not like our site design, or you might find it difficult to load our site on a slower Internet connection.
• You want to be able to access new posts or be notified of new posts without receiving our newsletters
  • Tip: webmail clients like Gmail, Geekie.org Apps Webmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Mail, and AOL Mail are all capable RSS clients
• You want to read the highlighted posts of various blogs in one place
• You are using a mobile device

Typically, “subscribing” to an RSS/ATOM feed is a free process that usually requires a browser, a service on the Internet OR a software client.

1. Find the URL of the feed you want to subscribe to.
   • For Geekie.org, this feed URL is http://www.geekie.org/feed (the easy way) or http://feeds.feedburner.com/geekie
2. Go to the URL of the feed in your browser -OR- enter it into your software client
   • If you’re using our site, just click on the top orange feed icon (illustrated below) or use the button below our site search
     
3. Use the links or menus available on the feed page to subscribe.
   • For our feed, simply choose from the variety of buttons offered. (NOTE: the HTML page does not always show.)
     

This process isn’t very specific. However, hopefully you’ll show how much you appreciate Geekie.org by subscribing to our feed!

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

PageRank at 0? Huge PR drop!

This seems surreal. Dropping from PR3 to PR0 in a matter of hours isn’t something a webmaster expects. But that’s what has happened to Geekie.org and ALL of its subpages today (January 30, 2008); querying different datacenters return the same result — PageRank 0.

Strangely, this isn’t reflected in my Google Webmaster Tools dashboard, nor have I received any indication that my site has been banned from the Google index. As it stands, Geekie.org still shows up second for the search term “geekie” and almost all of my posts are available in Google Blog Search.

In such a case, one must ask, why?

According to several webmaster forums, a PageRank drop to 0 (zero, nil, nothing) for a site previously of high PageRank (such as PR5 or PR6) is indication of a Google PageRank update or change in the algorithm. Apparently, losing all of your accumulated Google PageRank is a normal part of such an update.

(Which means you have to lose it all before you can gain anything.)

Let’s hope that the loss is due to an update. If Geekie.org’s PR stays at 0, I’m going to be asking some serious questions: what have I done wrong?

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Subscribe to our newsletter

Since early 2007, Geekie.org has remained dedicated to providing useful content about technology. We’d like to extend that now by offering a newsletter, and perhaps going into podcasting in the next while.

Our newsletter is now active, and we’d like to gain a few subscribers. You can go to the newsletter page at http://www.geekie.org/newsletter and subscribe, after which you can receive occasional mailings. (The page might not display properly in IE — I’m trying to fix that.) We will never send you SPAM, and your e-mail address will never be shared with a third party.

You can also opt to subscribe to our feed, to read the most recent posts easily and hassle-free.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Try PersonalLog

After several months of inactivity, we’ve finally reopened PersonalLog for free signups to the blog hosting service. Currently, we’re trying to use SPAM-preventing techniques such as a human verification question on the first-time blog signup and CAPTCHA on the login pages to minimize the amount of useless junk we get. (More than 130 blogs so far have been created by SPAM bots for no purpose.)

Try our blog hosting, and see how you like it. It offers similar features to an ordinary WordPress installation, except plugins and themes are centrally managed, and there’s no code or database to handle. Just leave the details to us.

Vote on a logo

Of the two logos below, which do you find more appealing? Vote using the form below. (I’ll blog about the poll service in the next post.)

	Which of the two logo styles do you prefer?
	The dark button
	The brighter button
free polls

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

New Geekie.org Tech Tools

In my spare time, I am creating new Tech Tools to serve some of my own needs. Hopefully others will also find them useful.

As of January 11, 2008, the Tech Tools include:

• Shortened URL’s - allowing one to easily and painlessly create short anonymous URL’s in the form of http://go.geekie.org/ud5ur. Administrators and staff in the FreddyWare Solutions Enterprise Network are authorized to create ad-free or custom short URL’s in the form of http://go.geekie.org/googleanalytics.
• IP Address - allows one to see one’s own IP address (outside one’s NAT firewall, of course) with one pageload. (You can link to it for free, or contact us to link to a custom ad-free version of the tool.)
• Hostname - based on the IP tool above, goes further to perform a reverse DNS lookup on the user’s IP to display the IP address as well as the corresponding hostname. (Reverse DNS does not always work as expected, however, when one computer is identified by several hostnames.) (You may only link to this tool if you have our approval, as it consumes system resources and bandwidth.)
• Media Conversion - utilizing a partner account with Media-Convert, this is the first tool we have utilizing an external service. The Media Conversion tool recognizes many audio and video formats, including WMV, FLV, MOV, MP4, MP3, RM, DV, and AVI, and can output in even more formats. It’s an excellent way to convert your media file from one thing to anything else. (Note: file-size limit of 150 MB.)

These tools are designed with the same interface as that used on our Geekie.org blog, so we feel that users can become familiar with the layout. We maintain a consistent appearance for the optimal experience.

In the near future, we will once again add Google-powered search to this site, with results on a page of similar layout.

On another matter, we are planning on developing FArticles.info into a content site for articles on various subjects. We’d like to install a PHP/MySQL content management system, but are undecided on which one to use. (If Joomla! 1.5 were released, I would have no doubts.)

Vote on this matter, and choose from our options or type in your own.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...