If your Gmail inbox is getting a tad confusing, try organizing it using filters and variants of your email address. You can branch out your Gmail address to a variation of email addresses and hook them with filters when you receive emails. Say that your email address is starwarsfreak@gmail.com. Adding a plus sign (+) after your user nick and any letter-number combination will still result in you receiving an email. Try setting your Friendster account email to starwarsfreak+friendster@gmail.com. By doing this, all your Friendster notifications (if active) will go to starwarsfreak@gmail.com but the difference is now you can easily filter them based on the recipient address. In Gmail, go to Settings > Filters and type in your Friendster address in the To: field.

Then, specify what action to do if an email matches the criteria. Apply a new label to it called “Friendster”. Voila. From now on, all emails from Friendster will be labeled accordingly. Another neat trick you can do is create a variant to handle potential spam, like starwarsfreak+spam@gmail.com. Use this email when registering for “iffy” sites that you’ll never want to be bothered by or never come back to. Simply setup a filter to delete messages going to this email.

Adding periods (.) anywhere in your username produces the same result. Gmail ignores these dots, so star.wars.freak@gmail.com and s.t.a.r.w.a.r.s.f.r.e.a.k@gmail.com and starwarsfreak@gmail.com are one and the same, of course except when applying filters, the dots do matter.

If you’re wondering if this works for Gmail for domains, yes it sure does.

I’d like to let you guys in on my experiences of running a very large community site such as Dota Strategy. To be honest, it’s a stressful yet fun experience. Managing a site like this requires a ton of patience, perseverance and yes, a bit of money too. Initially, it was hosted on my shared account with Dreamhost, which I pay 20 bucks a month for to this day. But soon enough, I was forced to remove it because it was taking up too much resources and bogged down my server five times a day. Didn’t help that my users were hating me. So I moved Dota Strategy to a $90/mo. VPS plan with A Small Orange. The plan includes 512MB memory, 250GB Bandwidth, 20GB disk space and whatnot. The whole moving process was a nightmare. It took me forever to export and import my SQL database plus the domain wasn’t resolving to the new server as fast as I’d like it to. That caused some sort of a ‘time paradox’ as we lovingly call it. One set of users was accessing the old site while another set was seeing the new one. Sadly, I, the all-powerful owner and administrator ‘drew’, was seeing the old site. After one painful week I finally got things back to normal.
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Need to solve a simple mathematical problem with no calculator in sight? Well, fret no more! Google’s search engine can transform into a calculator if you tell it to! Ok, that was a stretch, but watch:

Let’s say that you just got your Google Adsense check worth $123.45. And you wonder … How much is this in Philippine pesos? Simple! Go to Google.com and type:

123.45 usd in php

And you’ll get something around 5,651 pesos.
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If you’re using Feedburner, I’m sure you’re aware of an option under Publicize called Pingshot that “pings” all the major aggregators whenever you make a new blog post.

From Feedburner:

PingShot is a quick notification service that enables your feed to be updated in the widest variety of places as quickly as you add new content.

There are a lot of different aggregators, search engines and like services with more coming on the market every day. Each of these services follows a different schedule when polling for new content. Without PingShot, it can take between 30 minutes and six hours for content to be updated everywhere it is consumed.

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Lately I’ve been tinkering around with the endless possibilities of the Technorati API. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I added a section in Ratified.org simply called “Meme“. In a nutshell, it’s a blog meme that tracks the current and most popular stories in the Philippine blogosphere. The story’s relevance is measured by its age and the number of other Filipino blogs linking to it. I used Technorati’s API to track all the stories from select blogs. I admit that it does seem Digg-ish and Techmeme-ish, but what the heck.

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I wrote about a free website monitoring service called Montastic last January and thanks to them I figured out how really sucky my webhost is. Not all my sites are what you would call extremely successful, but I’m proud to say that they bog down their respective servers from time to time. Anyway, for quite a while I was thinking how cool it would be if Montastic would send me an SMS everytime they find my sites to be down. Easy.
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This is the first of a series of Adobe Photoshop tutorials I’m going to offer on how to create a logo in “Web 2.0″ style.

What do I mean by Web 2.0-Style Logo? If you follow Web 2.0 closely, you’ll see similarities in the way logos are designed: Simple, glossed, gradient, bright-colored and often came with a slight reflection and a beta sign just like this:

Pretty ain’t it? Here’s a quick 6-minute video tutorial I prepared:
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Related Link: Adobe Photoshop Tutorials Thousands of free photoshop tutorials with new tutorials added daily

I caught wind of a page on Multiply.com called Sundry Online that sells a plethora of products from cosmetics, bags, household items and sexual enhancers. It was the typical amateurish merchant website you would see on Multiply — sparkly logo, badly lighted pictures, words in ALL CAPS followed by exclamation marks (!!!) But what caught my attention was their headline:

Want to have a 4-DIGIT VANITY NUMBER to advertise your products? Only PHP5,600/yr!!!

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When I was in Manila in June of this year, I had my Compaq laptop with me thinking I can just chill in cafes in the city and surf the Internet via WiFi. I was dead wrong. It costs P100 at Starbucks for 60 lame minutes! It’s a shame that everything that I wanted to do in Manila cost me something and it’s not even cheap! Parking in particular was expensive. I dunno. It’s either Manila just got ridiculously expensive or I’m dirt poor. To think I’m not exactly the thrifty type.

Comparatively, Davao City has a long way to go in terms of development. It’s a bit tricky to do business in the city. There’s this thing called the “Davao fad mentality” where businesses thrive only when they’re a few months old and eventually fade away until they close down. It’s different in Manila because every time I hang out in Makati, all the restaurants and bars are packed! Here, restaurants make money only in the weekends. But the cool thing about Davao is that WiFi is free everywhere. I just need to buy a cup of coffee and I’m good to go. I guess one reason for that is there is no B2B WiFi service available here such WiZ and Airborne Access. And I doubt that Davaoenos will ever bite WiFi for pay.

Update: I’m wrong. WiZ is already being used by several establishments but is offered free.

Here’s a list of free WiFi hotspots in Davao City:
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About a year ago I had my PC repaired here in Davao City at Columbia Computers. The only problem it had was a faulty power source. Being the smart computer owner that I am, I took out my hard disk and connected it to my PC at work to check if my files are intact and if they were, back them up. Indeed they were still fine, and I copied some of them just to be sure. That hard disk was a 40 gig Seagate.

When I took my PC to Columbia, I was pretty darn sure there wouldn’t be any problems because:

1) I had the same problem before and was quickly resolved by just replacing the power source with a new one, albeit by a different repair center.
2) I checked the hard disk if it was still ok, and it was and was able to back some files up.
3) My PC, although already about 3 years old that time, was working perfectly. Everything was updated from the OS down to the anti-virus and firewall.
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How do you browse with tabs?

Do you?
Press Ctrl+T to open a new blank tab, type the URL and hit Enter?
Right-click on a link on an existing page and choose Open Link in New Tab?

Did you know that there are easier ways like:
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I was doing my homework on upgrading my plugins a while ago and discovered an awesome Wordpress plugin called “Edit N Place” by Headzoo’s Sean Hickey. It kinda speaks for itself. Made possible with AJAX, what it does is it allows you to edit your articles, their categories and tags right from your blog’s front page! What a time saver! One of the best Wordpress plugins ever created. Add that to my list of plugins I can’t do without.

Here’s a screenshot of the plugin at work:
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Some technologically challenged people I know keep complaining to me that they spend an enormous amount of time deleting unwanted messages from their Yahoo! email accounts. I ask them, who sends you all the junk? The spam filter should take care of it. Turns out that the ‘junk’ comes from the Yahoo! Groups they are subscribed to.

Are you experiencing the same thing? You may not know it, but there is a simple solution for this.
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How I wish eBible.com existed in my days of studying theology in college. I have to admit that theology (or theo, as we fondly called it) isn’t exactly my thing nor did I excel in it like I did in Calculus and English. We used the New American Bible a lot. It’s that red-colored bible that’s probably the easiest version (for us at least) to digest. I believe Marc and other Ateneans will know what I’m talking about.

I think other Filipino students will benefit a lot from this revolutionary Web 2.0 approach to Bible study. It’s definitely a more enjoyable experience than having to sift through the fragile pages of the real thing. Not that it’s a bad thing, though. You can save excerpts that you like in a drag-and-drop fashion and share them to the whole community. The site also features a tag cloud of popular keywords, a search engine and an online store.

I received an invitation to use eBible.com and I got 25 more up for grabs.
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I was sniffing around for some nifty loading gif’s for one of my projects when I found Ajaxload, a drive-thru Ajax-powered site that spits out loading gif animations to your liking on-the-fly. Yeah … for you graphically-challenged Web 2.0 geeks out there, this is the place to go if you want your apps to look cool while they’re pretending to load something. Hehehe.

Some samples from their site:
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