There are a couple of ways you can share files on the web for free, for instance you can create a website to share your files (although that depends on whether you have a hosting plan) or you use websites like minus.com to share it (but they have limits to the file size etc etc). For sharing large files like your wedding photos, may require you fork out a bit of cash to truly have unlimited downloads and good connectivity.

If you’ve got a large 1GB file for example you’re hoping to send out to a bunch of friends and colleagues, your best bet may be Amazons Simple Storage Service (S3). The reason why I like S3, is that just like everything else with Amazon it’s a pay as you use model, which means there are no monthly fix fees and the moment your files stop becoming the flavor of the month, you’ll stop paying bandwidth for it. Plus I’m applying for a job at Amazon and hopefully this scores me some points :)

The internet Corporation for assigned Names and Numbers (more affectionately known as evil ICANN) has recently announced a new .xxx domain specifically for adult content online. Basically a safe place we can store porn on the internet away from our children. What’s interesting though, is that a .xxx domain are by definition associated with pornography and smut, that certain corporations and even people would not want to be a part of. For instance, I’m quite sure everyone’s lining up for www.BillClinton.xxx but Bill Clinton may not be too happy about it. So in light of this rather special domain name, comes a very special process that involves ensuring regular tax-paying adult content providers can bid for domain names they want, while allowing the rest of us to also work towards preventing others from getting our names tarnished with an .xxx post-fix.

So can we work on preventing my name from being associated with pornography?

Imagine for a moment you’re an ancient social activist, somewhere in Babylon or Persia, or even ancient Rome, and you’ve just uncovered a secret of money laundering among elected officials. Armed with this information and a burning desire to expose the elected official you march out to tell the world of his exploits and hopefully stand over him in the expectation of swift justice to be executed.

How would you do it?

If you like most ancient social activist (if ever there were) would go out to the streets and shout it aloud, you’d meet the judges and the kings, and you may have your story heard. However, if you were known to be a troublemaker (as most social activist are) you’d probably not be taken seriously (at best) or even executed (at worst). This was how it was in the ancient world, where money bought power and the control of information was strongly held by those with power and by extension the money.

Mission Accomplished…GWB style!

When I started this blog on my birthday, I wasn’t so sure what was going to happen. I didn’t have a target, I didn’t have a goal and all I wanted to do was to start a website and keep it to myself.

Over time as I learnt about the awesomeness of wordpress, and the wonderful stuff you can do on the web, I knew I had to share that or at least write about it. So I started blogging about setting up wordpress blogs or Joomla on nearlyfreespeech, dreamhost and amazon web services. If you didn’t know how much I loved wordpress, let me tell you now…I Love it a Lot !!(arms stretched wide open)

So I set about a goal to create a blog that would get a modest hit rate of 1000 hits a month, and as of yesterday I finally crossed that target and now have had 1003 hits in the past 30 days….AMAZING!

A couple of days ago, I met some guys from Amazon web services strutting their stuff out in a brilliant presentation about cloud computing. Now I must admit I haven’t been the most ardent cloud computing follower (I wasn’t really sure what it meant) , but I was ‘converted’ by these guys….to the point where I wanted to dive in and learn about the cloud.

And in keeping with my belief that the best way to learn is to do, I decided to host a website on Amazon Web Services and see if it really could be setup in minutes (as promised by Amazon). Amazon also promised year long free trial of their EC2 platform, basically you get a very small virtual machine hosted on Amazon for free (for a whole year), which was too damn ridiculous to turn down. So if Amazon was spot on their promises you could setup a wordpress site on Amazon in minutes AND it would cost you nothing for the first year…now that IS interesting.

What is a top-level domain, in simple terms it’s the part of the url after the last ‘.’ , so in my case my blogs url is http://keithrozario.com , my top-level domain would be .com.

There’s a long list of top level domains besides the regular ‘.com’ that you should be aware of if you’re hoping to start a website. Consider the case of Guy Kawasaki who bought 55 domains for his startup truemors, just to prevent cyber squatters from getting their hands on an obscure truemors url. If that doesn’t convince you, take a look at one of my favorite blogs, the EvilHRLady who in her own words:

For those of you who don’t know, I host this blog on an awesome webhost called nearlyfreespeech. It’s a different kind of webhost because it doesn’t offer fixed price per month packages, but rather a pay-as-you-go model. Now what that means is that you can get your website fully operational for under 1 US dollar (and I’m not kidding), however as your blog grows and you utilize more space and use up more bandwidth you’re probably wondering what kind of charges you’d be looking at, and whether it would be better off forking money for unlimited packages from the regular godaddy type host. The answer is NO. Here’s my analysis on real-life data from my blog.

These past few weeks has been hectic, I’ve been moving into my new house which inevitably involved talking to a lot of contractors/plumbers/repairmen and I had a very busy go-live period for my project. (Go-Live refers to the point of an IT project when it successfully becomes available to the users). To top it off I upgraded my blog from wordpress 3.1.1 to 3.2 and the upgrade wasn’t as smooth as I thought it would be.

Reflecting on my blogging and my goal to reach 1000 hits/month, I think there’s a lot I learnt from this blogging experience so far from a technical perspective (setting up a website/installing a database..etc etc), but there’s a whole lot more I learnt about other things as well. Here’s the top 3 things I learnt from blogging that have nothing to do with programming.

Ever get tired of your office network administrator blocking youtube or facebook? Wished you could surf and get your daily dose of facebook and blogs from your office? Well there are many ways around this…most straightforward would be using a web-based proxy service like hidemyass .com or proxy4free.com. However, contrary to general opinion, your network administrators aren’t lazy(or stupid!). If you know about these proxies they probably know about it as well, so they’ve probably have a whole loooong list of sites categorized as ‘proxies’ that are completely blocked from access. So how do you access those web-sites your administrators have deemed…unworthy?

The solution is  simple. Host your own proxy. This too can be blocked, but if you work in a fairly large company your own little private proxy is unlikely to generate enough traffic to warrant investigation and ultimately be blocked. So if I hosted my proxy on http://proxy.keithrozario.com its unlikely the traffic it generates would warrant anyone looking into it and eventually blocking it.So you have to strike a balance, surfing too much via proxy will arouse suspicion, too little and it defeats the purpose.

So how do you host your own proxy?

Updating Wordpress is a pretty important step in keeping your blog safe and secure. Older versions of wordpress (even those just months old) have security flaws/bugs that are public knowledge, what this means if that if you run an older version of wordpress for your blog you’re vulnerable to these security bugs unless you upgrade. What’s even worse is that the security threats are public knowledge and even a un-skilled hacker could compromise your site. So upgrade to stay secure and get the most out of blogging experience.

So here’s how you update your Wordpress. It’s actually very simple, and I’m going to use the manually way which should be applicable regardless of which webhost you’re on. For this example, I’m using my own blog at www.keithrozario.com which is hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech.