I’ve long been amused by the marketing of country top-level domains for other purposes — recently, I saw an ad for domains using the .me extension (Actual ad slogan: “It’s all about .me”). Pretty funny, if you know what’s really going on. Turns out, it’s not about me. It’s about Montenegro. Here’s the deal:...
Beta Software: Not just for techies anymore?
I’ve got Olympic spirit, yes I do. But when I wanted to watch some online video a few days ago, the NBC Olympics Web site told me I needed to install Silverlight (a Flash-like multimedia player from Microsoft). Weird, thinks I, ’cause I’m pretty sure I’ve already got Silverlight installed. But I clicked the...
It's Free! (With purchase)
People seem to expect Internet content and services to be free. We happily use the Internet to pay for tangible goods, such as a DVD or flowers, but if the thing we want is a service or information, we’re unwilling to pay. So we walk to the store to buy the newspaper, but if...
Live Streaming Video (Part Three): Tech Settings
Okay, if you’ve read Part One and Part Two, you know what the story is. Below are the technical details. (Warning: if your eyes glaze over at tech stuff, stop reading now…) Upstream connection (from the church where the choir is singing): DSL about 722 kb/s (note for any newbies:Â upload and download speeds...
Live Streaming Video (Part Two): End User Experience
Note: If you haven’t read Part One yet, you might check it out. So, as schedules happened, I was in San Francisco during the event — which meant I wasn’t going to be in Brentwood to handle the encoding and/or troubleshoot any problems that might arise (and arise they did…). But it’s a Webcast,...
Live Streaming Video (or, how I aged ten years in a few weeks!)
I just finished helping out a nonprofit client of mine to broadcast live streaming video of a concert, and in the process am stumbling into some video expertise. Since it’s the season for sharing… here goes. First, some background: Every year, The Angel City Chorale takes its holiday concert on the road — to...
IE7 and FF2: Will my Web Sites Still Work?
As you may know, Microsoft recently released a major upgrade to Internet Explorer (version 7.0) and about the same time, the Mozilla Foundation came out with Firefox 2. Both are major upgrades, but IE in particular is significant, since it had been so long since the last major upgrade (and since about 80-90 percent...
PayPal vs. Other Payment Systems
PayPal’s basic ecommerce system allows vendors to sell online with very little setup, and with a decent fee schedule. Which raises the question: why would anyone use a traditional ecommerce system? First,...
Domain Ownership Woes — or, What Do You Mean, I Don't Own Myself?
Two stories of note about the ownership of domain names — one recent and one in the past — both, thankfully, with happy endings. Each illustrates the need to maintain some control over your domain name (i.e. your URL, such as brianwold.com). Note about Domain Names A registered domain name is owned by the...
Goodbye TABLE, Hello DIV
When I recently switched this blog to WordPress, I made another switch as well, to a table-free layout. Yep, this page is now a CSS-only page. There are no tables, and all layout, images and positioning are located in the CSS stylesheet. Why? Several reasons: Pages are smaller, so they load faster. The stylesheet...