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.

A lot of my blogs are tech-centric with a focus on web 2.0 technology. However, this decision to start this ’new’ blog and abandon my old political slanted blogger blog was in part due to a book I read by Guy Kawasaki. Guy seems to be of the opinion that good is good enough, and if you’re going to do something…do something first, and then improve it as you go along.

In that spirit of doing first and improving along the way, I started www.keithrozario.com, which is the blog you’re reading right now. I’m absolutely loving blogging about tech and it’s an inner passion I should have pursued much much earlier in life.

Google has just hit back at Facebook with the new +1 button. Similar to facebook’s like, it’s a one-click button to symbolize you ’like’ the site. However, that’s where the similarity ends:

Ever since they took down drop.io I’ve been struggling to find a site where I could share content/files with my developers and service providers. I work for the IT department of a multinational company and sometimes I require to share content with developers and service providers that are not from my company (and therefore don’t share access to the intranet). I’m sure many people struggle with this, how do I share those large files with my team?

Last week, I blogged about how to start a wiki on your blog. One of the great things about wiki was to run a entire project using a wiki, however a wiki is limited in functionality and a lack of any concrete structure makes wiki unacceptable for certain projects.

If you’re looking to run a full project management suite that lets you look at task, tasklist and milestones. Manage time and resources, provide 1-page updates for stakeholders. You’re in luck because that’s what I’m doing here today. However, before we proceed to the how-to-install, I thought it’s best if we revisit why you’d need a web-based tool for project management and how it can help overcome the 4 major pitfalls of the traditional method of managing project plans via MS Project and emails.

Previously, I posted about using Google apps to take care of your websites email needs. However, there was one nagging issue which always bugged me. My personal account was a gmail account, and if my website email address was hosted on google apps, that meant I could only login to one email at a time. This was troublesome especially if I was expecting an email on both accounts at once.

The workaround that solves this is simple, consolidate your email accounts into one login. This makes things a easier, and allowed me to check my websites emails (keith@keithrozario.com) while still using my personal email (keithjosephrozario@gmail.com).

Wikipedia isn’t the only Wiki around. A wiki is a generic term us geeks use to describe “A website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users”

Now wasn’t that a mouthful.

To put it simply, a wiki is a website that contains many articles, and ANYONE can update those articles.

Why do you need a site wiki, well the website gigaom has 15 different uses for a wiki. You can use it for anything from project management to knowledge retention. So having one certainly does score you points with the ladies,…well not really but you get the picture.

While Facebook and Google wage holy war for the soul of the internet, the front line of the battle it seems is the login credential area. Facebook with it’s 100’s of millions of users are really making headway in this category. The premise is simple, for new and existing website designers, you can have your users log in with their Facebook credentials rather than your own unique credentials. What this means is that you as a web designer don’t need to worry about keeping a separate module for username and passwords. The extra advantage is even better, users don’t have to fill up crummy web forms to register for your website before actively participating in them. This has proven to improve the user uptake of your service, because it removes an extra step from your web design, users no longer have to register, they can do a simple 1-click login that immediately pulls data of the social network and then populates that into your website DB.

Subdomains are a tricky thing. In laymans terms all it means is to have something else in place of the ‘www’ in your web address. So for example:

http://www.keithrozario.com <- This is my domain

http://resume.keithrozario.com <- this is my sub-domain, more specifically the resume sub-domain.

Creating a subdomain allows you to section out your website, while allowing your urls to look cleaner. Personally I’m a bit ‘allergic’ to the ‘/’. I much prefer a subdomain over a  ‘/’.

http://resume.keithrozario.com (good!) http://www.keithrozario.com/Resume (not good!)