Statistical trends show that the golden age of tech blogging has come to an end. This is almost the end of an era, as the tech blogosphere is over. According to famous tech bloggers analysts, there are some valid reasons for this change and for the extinction of tech blogging.
Is the era of Tech Blogging coming to an end?
— By Deeptaman Mukherjee
Vendor Benchmarker Ashwin Ramasamy Talks about his Entrepreneurial Experiences with ContractIQ
— By Robin Wilding
Ever had a new vendor let you down? Had trouble finding a company that does/sells X? Then ContractIQ has got your back. ContractIQ is a fresh new start-up matching the Small and Medium Enterprise space with top-of-their-class service providers.
With a continually updated list of benchmarked vendors ContractIQ advises SME business on their vendor selection — empowering them to make valuable growth-oriented decisions.
I got the chance to interview the brain behind the brainchild, Ashwin Ramasamy — founder of ContractIQ and graduate of the Founder Institute. After lead roles in several startups, and now ContractIQ, Ashwin is in a great spot to offer advice to entrepreneurs-to-be, so I asked him about ContractIQ and his entrepreneurial experiences.
Elisha Tan, digital skill Pimp and online Entrepreneur discusses her new learning platform Learnemy
— By Robin Wilding
The greatest inventions develop out of need. Elisha Tan found one. Her new web application, Learnemy plugs a hole in the marketplace — for peer-to-peer, formally informal learning.
Learnemy is a platform for knowledge-thirsty individuals looking to connect with others to learn skills and/or sell/utilize their skills. By providing the platform Elisha is connecting people to learning opportunities that you otherwise couldn’t find. For example if you want to learn the violin but the no local music schools offer violin lessons, or they do but its $100 a lesson — instead you can connect with someone in your community on Learnemy who could teach you the violin, at the agreed upon amount of $25 per lesson. Think of it as a Craigslist for skill learning — on steroids — with a built-in payment platform.
Occupy the Internet creates virtual tent city with The Global Square
— By Robin Wilding
In a digital cry Occupy Wall Street is screaming ‘Viva la Revolución!’ with their new Facebook-like virtual stomping ground, The Global Square. The Global Square is the movement’s new virtual Zuccotti Park, a place where Occupiers can squat virtually — free from state and corporate intervention, they hope.
The Occupy Wall Street movement along with developer Ed Knutson created their own social networking site to keep it from prying governmental eyes. “We don’t want to trust Facebook with private messages among activists,” says TGS developer Knutson. This new electronic tent city aims to connect the various global Occupy movements, along with similarly politically aligned social misfits, drum circle-ists, hippies-who-finally-found-a-cause and Occupy supporters. Many (this writer included) are glad to see this virtual occupation finally materialize, as it was only a matter of time before someone like Knutson began to Occupy the Internet.
DeSopa Circumvents SOPA — Despite its Anti-Circumvention Measures
— By Robin Wilding
Leave it to the internet to find a way to circumvent impending laws designed solely to control it.
Pro-internet developer Tamer Rizk designed a tool that can circumvent the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and ‘save the internet’. Rizk’s app is rather ironic given that it circumvents SOPA – despite its anti-circumvention measures. His new app, called DeSopa (source on Github), is a Firefox add-on extension that can outwit SOPA by manipulating the Domain Name System.
SOPA, if/when it is approved, would force ISPs to deny service to any websites found infringing on copyright material and would use the Domain Name System (DNS) to filter offending websites. DeSopa however found a loophole: a circumvention measure of bypassing the DNS and using IP addresses to load websites instead of the DNS-given name of the website (ex. using 209.85.175.99 instead of http://www.google.com/). By checking with foreign DNS servers DeSopa can find the correct IP address without using its DNS address — and would therefore not be caught in SOPA’s web.
[nsfw-ish] Responsive b**bs, err, responsive content with html/css
— By Brajeshwar
Working on a website that needs to be responsive.
Client: Can we get the boobs of the images of those females be responsive. Make them bigger in desktop browsers, subtle in tablets and “ok” in Smartphones. Perhaps extra large on very big monitors.
Me: Hmmmm, sure, why not. I can even do a “boobs.js” to do a 3D canvas resizing to make it more realistic. It can fall back to Flash for IE.
So, I went ahead and started styling the pages. Here is the code snippet for the responsive boobs.
I know, that’s a scary nightmare, right!
Today morning, I woke up totally sweating with those codes haunting and hurting my brain.
2 ears, 2 eyes, 2 hands but 1 pair of lips
— By Brajeshwar
Image Credit: A Japanese manga/character (let me know if you know).
Bulletproof your self-hosted WordPress blog: how to survive traffic spikes
— By Brajeshwar
There is a rather complex, long and detailed article on how to Bulletproof your blog: a guide for surviving traffic spikes, but for all the other self-hosted WordPress blogs out there, here is a simple non-geeky solution suited for most of us. You don’t need to edit anything, pull or push anything – you’ve to just worry about your actual writing/blogging.
Note: Recently one of my article, Desingineer – the mythical person every Startups are looking for, stayed on the frontpage of HackerNews for about 24 hours and it held up without any problem. Here is the video of the traffic onslaught.
Hosting
Host with a service provider who can scale up when you get a traffic spike. These days, there are WordPress speciality hosting providers. If yours is WordPress, why not host with them. I’ve hosted with both WPEngine and Page.ly and they’re equally good – go ahead and pick one.
Stop torturing yourself with plain CSS, code with a CSS pre-processor
— By Brajeshwar
First, let me tell you, I’m pretty good with CSS. However, I’ve always hated writing CSS. Writing CSS is like using dried woods, leaves and rocks to lit a fire everything you need to cook something. You may become very good with it, but it’s an unforgiving task and you’ve to do the rigorous feat every time you need the fire. CSS is bland, dumb, linear and it’s utter lack of intelligence is derogatory even to the most novice coder.
Many designers and developers have urged the need for variables, constants or at-least some rudimentary intelligence. But it is unlikely, a far-fetched dream and is not happening anytime soon. And, there is the often dreaded math you have to do every time you write CSS grids/columns.
Tool Mobile App Maker ShoutEm Mobilizer
— By Brajeshwar
Mobile application revolution is changing business, social and lifestyle landscape. They complement our online and offline presence and enable us new ways of communication and interaction. They are changing the way we live. They become our lifestyle. Where is your app?
ShoutEm is tech startup located in New York and creator of ShoutEm Mobilizer – a Mobile App Maker that enables users easy creation of iPhone, iPad and Android apps. It creating new ways for publishers, organizations and businesses to share their content, message and extend their reach.
We talked to their CEO Croatian entrepreneur Viktor Marohnić who told us about his entrepreneurial venture into mobile app creating for top smartphone and tablet platforms.