Everyone who knows me, knows that I’m a passionate fan of 3 things.

Manchester United.

AC/DC.

and Wordpress!!

It’s time to take a step back and contemplate the meaning of wordpress, this is an immensely popular blogging platforms that powers nearly every blog on the planet (and a lot of non-blogs as well) was created by Matt Mullenweg on May 27th 2003 as a ‘project’ , and now wordpress powers 15% of the web–for FREE!!

I’m a big fan of Nearlyfreespeech. I think they’re a great webhost, and so far I haven’t been proven wrong. Sure their interface is a bit ‘simplistic’ and they’re site looks a bit dated, but overall I like the speed the provide, their infrastructure hasn’t failed me and their security hasn’t been compromised. The same can’t be said about my dreamhost account, for which I happen to pay nearly USD7/month for.

The best part about nearlyfreespeech however, is their pricing plan. Unlike other webhost that charge a flat fee per month, nearlyfreespeech charges on a pay as you go model. Basically if you don’t start a website, or nobody visits it, you don’t pay a thing. While many beginners look on the pricing plan as ‘risky’ since you could end up paying a lot of money once your site ‘really starts take off’, the real risk beginners should consider is subscribing to a 3-year plan for a blog they’ll stop updating past the first 3 months. The real risk is paying these webhost large one-off payments and use no where near the amount of bandwidth or storage to justify the $5-$10 dollar per month price tag…for the next 3 years.

If you don’t know what RSS is, prepare to have your mind blown. If you’ve never used RSS, chances are you’re still bookmarking your favorite websites and blogs and visiting them on a regular basis painfully one at a time. RSS feeds allow you to magically consolidate all the content you read online, into one platform where you can get your daily dose of information all at one go.

RSS stands for really simple syndication, and it was designed as a simple way for web authors to syndicate their content across the internet. Conversely (and more importantly), it also provides a way for web users to consolidate all their favorites blogs, searches and forum threads onto one single platform.

So what is it really? Well I’m not too sure of the technical specifications to be honest, but here’s how I think it operates.

The first (of probably many) xxx domain hijacks have started springing up. Earlier today, a reader contacted me about a recent post I did on the .xxx domains. He mentioned that he spotted popebenedict.xxx in the wild and was curious if this was the first .xxx domain hijack. He maybe right, but in a post on his blog, he also mentions that while ICM registry doesn’t find PopeBenedict.xxx a ‘sacred’ url, it thinks osamabinladen.xxx is sacred and should be blocked from registry. In fact a quick check on the domains reveals that osamabinladen.xxx is a “Domain that has been reserved from registration”.

If you’re curious, PopeBenedict.xxx leads to a page titled “Everyone will find Islam” and notes that the website is for sale – I suspect that sale would be to the highest bidder. The website further adds that it has a long list of other pope related urls, including josephratzinger.xxx (the popes real name) and holyfather.xxx. On a slightly off-tangent topic, I don’t think anyone would be visiting josephratzinger.xxx to look for porn, but holyfather.xxx may have some promise (tongue firmly in check).

In a remarkable infographic I stumbled across over at website 101, 25% of users will leave your page if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. 25% more will leave if it takes more than 7 seconds, so in essence if your pages takes 8 seconds to load you’ve lost a half your audience even before your page starts loading. This is pretty remarkable, 8 seconds is all it takes to lose 50% of your customer base, that’s the time it takes for people who are ‘waiting’ to turn off and head on over to other websites, presumably websites who don’t take more than 8 seconds to load.

As unfortunate as it sounds, this is really a case of webmasters and blog owners screwing themselves over, after getting half the battle won which is getting visitors to click links to your site or heading over to your site via SEO or Social Networks, you then shoot yourself in the foot by having a slow websites.

Pinterest is an awesome social site that let’s you ‘pin’ up interesting articles on boards that other users can view and then continue sharing. It’s absolutely amazing, and I’m in love with it. If you’re still curious about what Pinterest is or want to snag an invite (it’s still invite only btw), then just leave a comment at the bottom of this page and I’ll send you an invite as soon as I can. If you don’t know what Pinterest is, just head over a board I created from random quotes I saw from other users over here http://pinterest.com/keithrozario/quotes/.

Wordpress 3.3.1 was released today. This latest version of wordpress comes fresh of the heels of the 3.3 release and fixes 15 issues including a security vulnerability fix which Wordpress doesn’t fully disclose.

Wordpress admins should see the prompt to update their blogs, and a update can be done fairly quickly via the automated update from within the admin panel itself.

One thing that caught my attention was the blog post on the update from the wordpress team:

My blog & name was mentioned on BFMs tech talk today. Woo hoo!! I’m so happy!!

You can download the podcast of the show at BFMs website here , and it’s fantastic (partially because it mentions my blog).

So while MOSTI still hasn’t given up on the bill, apparently no one in the Industry wants the bill except MOSTI, and they’re just a Government Ministry. Where were the Industry players MOSTI engaged before proposing the bill? The sad part is that even drafting out the proposal of the bill would have cost money and resources that could have been better spent elsewhere…sad!

The Malaysian government is a crazy bunch, just today I saw two bits of news that left me squirming with disgust. First a short piece on Christmas Carollers requiring Police Permits to go Carolling (not just permits but full details of every activitiy) and then later today there is a new Computing Professionals Bill 2011.

Why would a government want to regulate the computing Industry? It’s not like we’re bankers or something? Why is there a need to regulate an industry that first off is too broad to define under an umbrella called computing, and secondly isn’t exactly a threat to national security.

Lowyat has done a great deal to summarize the bill and post it up for reading here..

But where we should be really intrigued is a part of the bill (according to Lowyat) that says:

Last week I migrated my blog from Nearlyfreespeech (who are awesome by the way!) to dreamhost (who are also quite awesome in their own way). What prompted the move was that I’m already subscribed to a year of hosting to dreamhost at about $6/mo, while my blog at Nearlyfreespeech is still costing me money, although admittedly not much. So I thought why waste my dreamhost hosting, and instead switch over from Nearlyfreespeech to dreamhost.

Before I start, let’s me first explain what I want to do. I want to migrate my blog from nearlyfreespech to dreamhost, in essence I want to change my hosting provider from Nearlyfreespeech to dreamhost. I do not want to change my url, I still want readers who type www.keithrozario.com to visit my blog, it’s just that the blog is now hosted on a different service provider and will ultimately have a different IP.

I also want to point out that although I already have a parallel blog setup on blog.keithrozario.com, I decided not to migrate because nearlyfreespeech kicks ass in terms of reliability, up-time and speed :).