You may want to consider changing your default DNS server on your Windows 7 computer to Google Public DNS.  There are a few reasons why you’d want to do this:

• More speed
• Enhanced security (debatable)
• Perhaps most importantly, goodbye sponsored DNS error pages from your ISP.

You’re running Windows 7, so you’re either fresh off an upgrade or have a relatively new computer.  Either way, now is the time to switch over to Google Public DNS.

DNS (Domain Name System) is the Internet’s lookup system whereby easily remembered domain names are translated on-the-fly to cryptic IP addresses where the content resides that you’re trying to access.  In an effort to speed up the web, Google launched a free DNS service in 2009.

To switch over to Google Public DNS on Windows 7, please follow these instructions (or check out Google’s):

1. Click the “Start” button
2. Click “Control Panel” in the menu
3. Click “Network and Sharing Center
4. Select the connection for which you want to configure Google Public DNS (I recommend doing this for all connections)
5. A prompt will open showing the connection’s status, click “Properties”
6. Under the “Networking” tab, double click on “Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)” beneath “This connection uses the following items”
7. IMPORTANT: Make note of the current settings (write them down!) and also write down Google’s Public DNS telephone support numbers which are 877-590-4367 (inside the USA) and 770-200-1201 (outside the USA).  You’ll need this stuff if you mess up.
8. Select “Use the following DNS server addresses:”  (Note: do not modify the IP address section)
   1. Change the “Preferred DNS server” to 8.8.8.8
   2. Change the “Alternate DNS server” to 8.8.4.4
9. Click “OK”
10. Click “OK” again (on the Connection Properties window)
11. Repeat these steps for all connections you wish to enable Google DNS for (wireless, LAN, etc.)
12. Restart the computer

After this, you’re all good to go!  Remember, if you want to use Google Public DNS on future connections (at the office, for instance), you’ll need to configure it for each new connection.  Just remember to use the DNS servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.   The steps above can also be roughly followed on other versions of Windows, but the prompts may be slightly different.

If you run into problems getting Internet access after making these changes, Google Public DNS telephone support can be reached at 877-590-4367 (inside the USA) and 770-200-1201 (outside the USA).

Sometimes when using Twitter’s global search functionality (http://search.twitter.com/), the result set is sub par because  a user by the name of your keyword hogs all the results.

Let’s say I wanted to search for what people are tweeting about the popular deals site, dealnews.  But when I go to the aforementioned Twitter search, and use the keyword ‘dealnews,’ I get back a ton of tweets from the official dealnews Twitter account.  Given that I was looking for people’s opinions, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind:

So how do you get around this?

Fortunately, Twitter allows you to include search operators, so the quickest way would be to reform the keyword search to look like this:

dealnews -from:dealnews

The minus sign means to omit any matches that were sent from the user dealnews.  And there you have it:

Use this trick to filter your search results and remove any users junking up your search.  In this case, the result set was still poor, but that’s because not a lot of people wrote about dealnews in the past hours.  Just a lot of retweets.

I was getting 500 errors after an installation. After surfing some forums I learned that the permissions should be the following (magento/ being your root Magento folder).  For some reason, they weren’t necessarily correct by default:

777

• magento/var/.htaccess
• magento/app/etc
• magento/var
• all the directories under magento/media

755

• magento/
• magento/install.php
• magento/index.php

644

• all other files

Hope this helps anyone who may have been in the same situation.

If you have happen to have a list of ASINs and you want the product images from Amazon, it’s a lot easier than I expected to grab them. Their consistent naming structure makes it easy to put together a list of URLs to their Amazon’s product images of different sizes.

All images are available at http://images.amazon.com/images/P/

Then, you tack on your ASIN, in this case, we’ll use B0018QUCL2 (the excellent Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World), a “.01″ to designate the US country code, and one of these final suffixes:

• Large size: _SL500_.jpg
• Medium size: ._SL160_.jpg
• Small size: ._SL110_.jpg
• Thumbnail size: ._SL110_.jpg
• Tiny: ._SL75_.jpg
• Very small (swatch) size: _SL30_.jpg

The final URL looks like this:
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0018QUCL2.01_SL500_.jpg

Once you get your list together, throw it into wget, and in minutes you’ll have the images you need for every single ASIN. For bonus fun, to add a “30% off” (or any percentage) badge to an image, append “_PE30″ to the URL, right after the “.01.” http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0018QUCL2.01._PE99_SL500_.jpg

I recently wrote an article for Website Magazine that will be published in the August issue.  The article covers deal negotiation with Internet ad networks and affiliate programs, maximizing your site’s earning potential, and how to conduct the legwork to put you in good positioning for a higher revenue share from your ad provider.

The article will be out in a few weeks, so head over to their site now for a free subscription.

Website Magazine is published quarterly in both print and digital editions, and focuses exclusively on the business of running a website.  It is read by over 135,000 industry professionals and has the largest audience of website owners and managers in the field.

I doubt I’m the first to see this, but I certainly won’t be the last – a spammer just started following me on the popular micro-blogging service, Twitter.  With a name of diecastmodelcar, I immediately thought this was the case,  and clicking on the account’s link confirmed my suspicion:

A Twitter spammer.  The language used certainly conforms to the unwritten guidelines that all email spammers tend to adhere to:  Very poor grammar, repetition, excessive nonsense, and lots of links to buy stuff.

My remedy is to block this cat, but I hope this doesn’t become a common occurrence.  To my friends working at Twitter, you better get ahead of this issue before it blows up and destroys your service.

Yan Bezugliy at ProBargainHunter.com created a Shopzilla WordPress Plugin that makes price comparison integration within a blog post insanely easy. Users just need to provide their own Publisher ID and API key to use it (those can be attained by registering for the Shopzilla Publisher Program).

Here’s an example of the plugin in action, comparing the prices on Robert Fagles’ translation of Virgil’s Aeneid:

I’m heading to the TechCrunch party in Hollywood on Thursday… the theme? Geek-meets-chic. So witty.

Why not crash the fun? Here’s the info:
Date: Thursday, April 10, 2008
Time: 6:30 pm – midnight
Venue: Vanguard, 6021 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood

Who else is going?

For anyone who recently tried to view this site in Internet Explorer, my apologies for the following error message that you probably received:

Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site.
Operation aborted.

This pop-up message occurred because the default ScratchBack JavaScript code that I used tries to modify the parent container from inside a child <div> container.  The original code given to me from ScratchBack looked like this:

<div id=”ScratchBackWidget”>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.scratchback.com/widget.php?id=de957c64-c563-1e04-8581-e5ffa72cf5fa”></script>
</div>

This code works fine on Firefox and Apple’s Safari browser.  Unfortunately, due to a bug within Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers (5.5 – 7), the error message gets displayed, preventing the page from loading.  For anyone else experiencing the same issues, I hacked the ScratchBack code to the following (obviously it will be slightly different for your widget ID):

<div id=”ScratchBackWidget”>
</div>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.scratchback.com/widget.php?id=de957c64-c563-1e04-8581-e5ffa72cf5fa”></script>

This corrects the problem in IE, and there doesn’t seem to be any discernible difference in viewing the page in Firefox or Safari.  The widget works as it should.

Special thanks to my brother Mike for noticing this issue, since it probably would have lasted for months had he not brought it to my attention (indeed, it had already been broken for a few weeks).

This taught me a valuable lesson to check my site with Internet Explorer whenever I make a code change.  Get with the times, folks, and please switch to Firefox already.

A new site called Infochimps is making available tons of *huge* datasets for free.

There are many sources to find out something about everything. Until now, there’s been no good place for you to find out everything about something.

From population to organ transplants to native languages to higher education – Infochimps has already compiled quite a worthy collection of comprehensive statistics (see more here).

Stay tuned for interesting results..