So as most of you will know back in July I got myself a brand new black iPhone 3GS 16gb. The iPhone is simply amazing, I could never go back to another phone. The iPhone’s level of intuitivness as well as a great combination of hardware and software makes it the ultimate phone. The iPhone really is more than a phone, it acts as a computer as all my normal tasks on the computer can be accomplished on this phone.

A huge motivating factor in my purchasing of an iPhone was apps. In my opinion this is what sets it apart from any other phone. Thousands of apps exist on the App Store which can accomplish pretty much all the tasks you would want to do. the iPhone is truely the phone that has changed all others.

As shown that is my first page of apps. You can find my full pages here.

Apps are great, I love them. They are carefully made, beautiful and easy to use. Where else to show how much I love them than my blog!

So over the next wee while I’ll be reviewing post by post my top ten favourite iPhone apps! (Bearing in mind I do have exams on next week.)

So I’m sure you’re wondering what are my favourite apps? Well here they are in the order I’ll be reviewing them in:

1. Tweetie
2. Facebook
3. Doodle Jump
4. LogMeIn
5. NotifyMe
6. MobileRSS
7. SBSettings
8. CameraBag
9. Wordpress
10. Dropbox

As each post is written and published a link will appear here as well on the relevant app I have reviewed.

Review number one: Tweetie will be published later this week!

Any other favourite apps you want reviewed? Post a comment!

This time period is all about awesomeness. Coming up in June, this blog will be one year old! I’ve used over three blogging platforms in this time and have always without fail come back to Wordpress. You know why? Cause it’s awesome!

This is why I think Wordpress is the best blogging platform:

It’s Free!

This is the best thing! People love free stuff and so do I! Other platforms such as Movable Type Pro cost quite a bit of money and people don’t generally want to invest in a blog without any traffic and are unsure if it will succeed or not. Wordpress is built by the community and for the community. With plugins and themes anyone can to their liking. Which brings me to my next point…

Plugins

Wordpress plugins are awesome and incredibly easy to use with Wordpress 2.7. They allow you to add great features to your blog or website with little fuss and ease of use. They provide great functionality and are free! My favourite plugins are  Twitterpress by Peppery, Optimal Title by Aaron Schaefer, FireStats by Omry Yadan and flickrRSS by Dave Kellam. What are yours?

Ease of Use

I use Dreamhost as my web host. As with other web hosts they provide awesome one click installs of some popular software. This makes it incredibly easy for someone to install Wordpress. The navigation and admin panel in Wordpress looks and acts amazing. It’s very easy to get around. They key elements are easily positioned. Wordpress gives you the ability to operate a website without any programming knowledge. If installing Wordpress on your blog is too hard for you, you can always try wordpress.com!

It Just Works!

It’s Apple’s favourite line but it’s very much applicable to Wordpress. Since Wordpress is so easy to use and there is such a large community behind it, it is always in its best form. Only occasionally do you get any error messages, if you do it’s normally on your end not Wordpress’s. If you do come across an error with Wordpress there is a huge community to help. Or feel free to Google it!

Themes!

With one click of a button you can easily change the look and feel of your blog! There are thousands and thousands of themes out there to easilly change your blog. A simple visit to the Wordpress Themes Repository or a simple Google search will get you away with finding awesome Wordpress themes!

Using WordPress makes you smarter.

Yes, it’s true, you’ll gain IQ points when you blog with WordPress because you do need to learn to take full advantage of it’s power. Wordpress may be intimidating at first but after a walk-through of the system and a few tips, you begin to add plugins, try out different features, and generally start exploring all that WordPress has to offer.

Download Wordpress today!

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I have just touched on what Wordpress has to offer. There are so many other features out there! What I love about Wordpress is the versatility. Feel free to point out any other awesome uses or features of Wordpress.

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Today is my one year anniversary of tweeting! My first tweet was posted on 29th May 2008 at 7:27:24 pm. Yep, and this blog post was published exactly to the minute I posted my first tweet! Over the past year I have tweeted nearly 4000 times and have ove 300 followers. The stats are not so important to me though, the connections and awesomeness I have discovered is priceless!

So as you know I love list posts! Here I will describe the best parts and uses of Twitter I have discovered over this year.

Real Time Search and Results

Twitter Search has been named as a Google killer. What do you think? The keyword here is real time. With Twitter Search you can instantly know what is going on in an event straight after or during it. For example the Mumbai attacks were tweeted by thousands of people in real time. Events first were heard about through Twitter rather than any other classic news source. The news about the Hudson Plane Crash was first heard on Twitter by Janis Krums who posted a picture.  Another example was the President Obama inauguration. The list of events tweeted real time are endless.

Immediate Answers

Another awesome feature of Twitter is almost immediate answers to a question or anything else. For example if I were to ask “Why do some folders in Windows have blue text?” I would get the answer that the “folder is compressed” instantaneously. How cool is that?

If you are working on a project or trying to brainstorm ideas Twitter is even better! Just post a tweet and get loads of responses (depending on how many followers you have). The possibilities are endless!

Interact with your Favourite Companies

The companies on Twitter I love to interact with are Orcon and Vodafone. Not only can I know what is currently happening on the network and know about new features but I can easily message them for support. If I’m having a problem with any one of my accounts I can just send a message to one of the awesome guys there and they can
easily help me out! I’m not saying this is the right channel to go for support but it is one awesome way to get it quickly!

Building Awesome Relationships

This point is short! Over the past year I have made awesome online friends, you know who you are. With these people I haven’t tried to befriend them to get information or help, just want to hang!

Just Interacting with Your Friends

Well, isn’t that the point of Twitter? You’re right! Just finding out what your friends are doing is the best feature for me. Long are the days when you would have to wait to call your friends them to find out what’s new in their world. Twitter is here and it’s set to stay!

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Here I have just surfaced the uses of Twitter. Have anymore? Discuss! Can’t wait for my next year of tweeting!

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Over the past month I have started getting much more involved in the micro-blogging site Tumblr. When you sign up for Tumblr, you create a tumblelog, A tumblelog is a variation of a blog that favours short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts associated with blogging. Most peoples tumblelogs associate with the pictures, videos, links and quotes they discover while surfing the web. However tumblelogs have other creative uses such as Trailwaker, a tumblelog set up to broadcast Team Stiles participation in the Oxfam Trailwalker New Zealand Challenge. Or another creative tumblelog is Lunch Bag Art, a dad who creates unique and impressive lunch bag for his kids.

This is why I love Tumblr:

Easy As

It’s literally not much more than a click of a button (ok, maybe two or three clicks) to update your tumblelog. This feature of ease of use attracts many people to Tumblr as most people don’t have the patience to maintain a blog and write lengthy posts. My favourite ‘Goodie’ in updating my tumblelog is their bookmarklet. if I come across a nifty photo, video, link, quote or piece of text I want to share with my readers and friends all I have to do is click the Share on Tumblr bookmarklet in my bookmarks toolbar in Firefox and it automatically reads my mind in what I want to post. All I have to do after that is click Create and it posts the content to my Tumblr. Easy huh? Other nifty goodies for updating your tumblelog is an iPhone App, Mac OS X dashboard widget, call in audio, email posting and a variety of other awesome third party apps.

Customisable

With very little design or tech know-how you can easily create a beautiful tumblelog. One can choose a theme from Tumblr’s extraordinary Themes Garden or easily create one themselves. (It’s not that hard!)

Another cool feature is that you can register your own domain and link it with your tumblelog. This is a nifty idea for a lot of people as they can have their easy, great looking space on the web with their own domain name. This also provides uniqueness so that you are not just a subdomain of Tumblr.

Great Content

One can follow different tumblelogs and they can appear in their dashboard. As I look through my dashboard I see awesome  types of content. The content is almost always aesthetically pleasing and great looking. It’s great to know that people are putting out this awesome content not just to profit off ads but to add benefit to the Tumblr community.

It’s Cool

Tumbling is cool. It’s easy, takes little effort and a lot of fun. I can often sit and spend the whole day looking throughout different tumblelogs. Tumblr helps to promote your creativity and uniqueness.

If your not on Tumblr you should definitely sign up. It’s the place to be. While your exploring why don’t you check out my tumblelog?  Have any other reasons why you love Tumblr? Comment!

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I love RSS, the ability to gather all the information and news into one application is phenomenal for me. RSS readers (the application that lets you read all this content), come in many different shapes and forms. I went with Google Reader, a web based RSS reader that would let me read my feeds from any computer with an internet connection. This is very useful for me as I am normally on more than one computer during the day. However some people prefer a desktop application, it’s a personal preference.

Google Reader has some awesome feature like beautiful and very fast interface. However it is missing a pretty important feature:  password protected feeds support. Examples of feeds that are password protected are your Gmail inbox or your Twitter feed.

The secret to get password protect feeds into Google Reader is a third party application called Feedburner. Warning – Your feed is most probably password protected for a good reason, by parsing it through Feedburner it takes the secure layer off it and is potentially viewed by anyone.

First

Find the password protected feed you want to import into Google Reader. I’ll Use my Twitter RSS feed. http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/123456789.rss

Second

Take the Feed URL and burn it into Feedburner, you can sign up here. Feedburner will tell you that it is not possible to burn the feed as it is password protected but it does tell you how to correct the feed and let it parse.

The feed address you entered is password protected. You can specify a username and password in the URL like http://user:password@www.website.com/index.xml.

So what you would do is stick your username and password in the specific part of the feed URL. http://user:password@www.twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/123456789.rss. You should then burn your feed into Feedburner.

Third

You should now have your Feedburner feed. Now all you have to do is add that feed to Google Reader. Now everything should work! Remember that you should not give that feed URL to anybody as it is of your confedential account.

That should do it! Any better ideas? Comment!

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After months of discussing and debating we have finally made the move to Orcon. I couldn’t be happier. I will give you an outline on how hard it was to change to Orcon.

1. Call Orcon, give them all the relevant details
2. Wait a few days
3. Congratulations, you are now with Orcon!

It was really that simple, nothing went unplanned, it worked perfectly. The hardest part was deciding whether to switch to them or not.

The reason we did decide to switch to them was the horrible and expensive service from Telecom (phone line) and the slow, unstable, annoying broadband from Xnet. Xnet was the main issue for us to switch. On the Geekzone Xnet forums there has been a lot of issues with Xnet in general but more to do with their slow international speed. During peak hours the internet with Xnet came to a grounding halt. YouTube videos took an age to load, nothing could be downloaded. It was practically dial up. Xnet went downhill from there, introducing a Torrent plan which would let users download 80gb of data at off peak hours (12am – 7am). Xnet have still failed to realise their mistake and have lost a lot of customers because of this. Over the past few months frequent outages have occurred, no not just normal ISP outages but the connection being lost every couple of weeks. However we signed up to Xnet for a totally different reason. Xnet was a revolutionary ISP, only charging for gb used, no excess $10 fee and a great customer service. While all those factors have remained they have really been trodden by shocking speed, outages and sheer annoyance.

So like many other Xnet users we spoke with our feet.

We couldn’t be happier that we are with Orcon. On the the Silver+ plan with a 25gb addon for $99.95 a month. This was the same price we paid with Xnet + Telecom but much faster speed, better reliability and more bandwidth.

I’ll give you a small comparison: Xnet vs Orcon: speed.

That’s a huge difference! Also remember that this is international speed, national is much faster. I advise all of you to change to Orcon if you are not satisfied with your current ISP. It’s very easy.

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Short URL addresses have changed the way we share links on the internet. Short URLs have their advantages and disadvantages. An advantage is having a link that is easier to share so that more people will remember the link and less of a chance of it being wrongly written. A Short URL can also be useful if you have a limited space to write, for example, in Twitter where the limit is 140 characters. Also, in an email, a short URL isn’t as error prone to having breaks in it than a longer URL.

However there are also disadvantages for short URLs, since you cannot see the end link of a short URL, you can be led to spam or shock sites. However their are solutions to this problem, having a preview link, so that the user knows the end link. Another problem is that if the URL service crashes then all the links registered with that service don’t work.

In this blog post I’ll be outlining my favourite and the most common short URL services and deciding which is the best.

TinyURL

Probably the most common truncator service around. TinyURL has common features such as an easily remembered domain, fairly short URLs, preview link, custom alias and a bookmarklet. TinyURL says it has around 154 million URLs in its database, this doesn’t allow them to have the shortest link (6 characters).

TinyURL is also prone to crashing, since it is the post popular service on the web it receives over 1.5 billion hits a month, this can lead it to get overloaded and crash, meaning your links don’t work.

There are also many features that TinyURL does not have, such as statistics on your URL, being able to register account to keep track of your links and choosing whether a URL is public or private but overall it does the job well.

is.gd

The main drawing card to is.gd is that it creates one of the shortest links. is.gd can create a URL that is only 7 characters (including punctuation). However like TinyURL is.gd lacks a few features, customisation, stats etc.

One feature of is.gd I really like is their bookmarklet for Firefox. This is a little button that sits in the Firefox toolbar, click it and it automatically shortens the link of the page that you are currently on and copies the new shortened link to the clipboard. So with one click you have your short URL ready to be pasted anywhere.

bit.ly

This shortener service boasts features that most sites don’t have. You can to sign up to an account so that you can track all your links, view information for each link, number of clicks etc. It also has common features such as a bookmarklet, easily remembered name and an option for a custom alias.

I really like this service as it combines features and simplicity equally so that the user can have the best experience.

Google Short Links

This is my favourite service and the one I use most often. What I love about Google Short Links is the ability to have your domain in the URL. For example instead of the short URL being tinyurl.com/1234 it is instead ant.geek.nz/1234. This is great for me because when someone sees the short URL they are curious and visit the parent URL (ant.geek.nz) which generates traffic for this blog! Great huh? Other than this Google Short Links has other great features such as statistics for each link, a bookmarklet and an option whether to make the link private or public.

This service is available with Google Labs for Google Apps.

Lenks

Developed and coded by Rowan, Lenks offers features that no other short URL services offer. For example, huge customisation options when you sign up and the ability to put your links in various folders, humour, informational etc. Lenks also gives you the ability to view other Lenk user links via their profile. With AJAX fast speed Lenks is definitely a short URL service to start using.

Of course Lenks has features common to all short URL services. Overall I highly recommend this service!

The Winner

My favourite short URL service is Google Short Links. I love this service as it is used by only me on my domain. It may not have as many features as other services but the features it does have majorly outweigh the features that are missing. Since this is a Google Labs project we can expect to see many more features to come.

Runnerups are Lenks and is.gd. What I love about Lenks is that it is feature rich. It has a lot of features that most truncate services don’t have. Lenks is still in beta so we can expect to see more great things. On the other side is is.gd, a very simple URL truncator, the stand out feature for me is the one click URL shortener feature, this makes it so easy to post a short link. I hope that other services take after is.gd in this regard.

So there we have it! Of course I only reviewed a sample of short URL services, there are many more avaliable for you to test out!

Have fun linking!

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I really do love Mozilla products, the flexibility and features of their products are something truely to be admired. Of course my favourite product is the browser Mozilla Firefox. See my post on Top 5 Reasons to Switch to Firefox. When I got my new notebook I decided to try Outlook 2007, this failed badly on Vista. I was searching for an alternative and due to my awesome experience with Firefox I decided to give its sister, Thunderbird – Mozilla’s email client a go.

I liked Thunderbird, it was great, reliable all the basic features I needed but there was one thing lacking. Yes, the supurb features of Gmail.

So the other day I decided to make the switch, it was the easiest switch I have ever experienced. On Thunderbird I was using IMAP with Google Apps so all my emails were there, beautifully intact.

Reasons I switched to Gmail (Google Apps).

Labels

This is an awesome feature that most people don’t know about. You can basically make “labels” to label your incoming messages on where they are from. For example every night this website is backed up and a copy is sent to me by email. I really don’t want to receive these emails everyday so I archive them straight away and a notification shows up on my label that my backup has been received.

Filters

Labels cannot work without this important feature. Filters lets you filter your message depending who it is from. For example all my Facebook, Twitter etc notifications are directed to their respective labels and do not even hit my inbox. As soon as I receive an email from Facebook it is automatically archived and sent to the Label, it never shows up in my inbox.

For anyone with overcrowded email problems, this is probably the best email management tool I have ever come across.

Amazing Search

This has got to be my favourite feature in switching to Gmail. The awesome functionality of Google search is applied to email. I can search by from, subject, body of the message or even label! Thunderbirds inbuilt search feature was really hard to deal with. Google search for Gmail is awesome for anyone who wants to find email fast.

Keyboard Shortcuts

This is a huge productivity booster. All I have to do is click a few keys and I am away composing, managing or sending email. For example all I have to do is press “c” an magically the compose window shows. There are heaps of shortcuts though, I am planning to learn them all slowly so soon enough I will have learnt them all.

Spam Filtering that Actually Learns from your Actions

Spam is a huge problem these days. With Gmail I get very few spam messages a month. I also get very few normal messages that go into the spam folder. However with the very few messages I tell Gmail to mark it as spam or to not and it actually learns. No spam filter system is fool proof and Gmail does a great job of combating spam.

These are my favourite web Gmail features. Of course there are other great ones such as Chat, Contacts and Labs however I think these universally apply to most people. There are also awesome Gmail features whether you use an email client or not, such as awesome security, spam filtering etc.

So what are your favourite Gmail features?

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NB: In the diagram the word ‘modem’ should be replaced with ‘router’

Getting the best out of your router is what every geek strives for. You want that top notch download and upload speed. Even if you don’t need it, you want it and its worth a lot of effort.

So over the past week I have been playing with my Linksys WAG54G modem/router and been having a lot of fun. However I have been unlucky increasing Wi-Fi speed to my laptop around 10 metres away. I tried DD-WRT to try ‘hack’ my router to run to its maximum potential, however it wasn’t compatible with my particular version.

It took me over a week to really point out the obvious, my router was positioned extremely badly, it was nestled under computers, printers, wires and plants. So being the geek I am, I decided to run a few tests on whether the change in placement of the router would increase my speed.

So from these results we can see that placing a router just half a metre higher can double your speed. Try this trick before you try any other of those ‘tin foil’ or ‘mega-booster’ ones. I’m certainly looking forward to improved speeds.

So you have created an awesome website that you want to get up and on the internet? How? Firstly this is not a post on how to create a website. I am not going to go to in depth about this, if you need any help don’t hesitate to contact me.

Buy a Domain Name

A domain name is basically your home/address on the internet. This is the key to looking professional to have a domain such as yourname.com, instead of yourname.someone.com as this can easily link to someone else’s site, which will detract traffic from your site and help either your competitors or domain name provider. I am not going to go into detail about choosing a good domain (that will be covered in another blog post). A good domain provider will be reasonable (no more than $15 USD a year) and provide a great service. I use Dreamhost which is a great site for all my needs, they provide Domain name forwarding (forward your website to another), URL Masking (make your visitors think they are still on your original site) and of course Domain name servers (the link with your domain and hosting.) If you buy your domain and hosting from the same company you shouldn’t have to worry about this. There are also other popular Domain registrars/hosting sites such as GoDaddy, BlueHost and Homestead.

Buy Website Hosting

Website hosting is the place on the internet where your website is stored for everyone else to view it. Here are 5 important points to choosing a great webhost.

1. Don’t be cheap – This never works. Before I found Dreamhost I had been through around seven different webhosts that seemed great but had false promises and never suited my needs. Such as too little space, wrong programming languages, banned file types etc. This brings me into my next point.

2. Assess your needs first – Think of what you will need for your website and go with that. If you need any special programming languages such as java or Perl make sure your webhost offers it. If you think that you need 150mb of space, go with 250mb as your website can rapidly grow and you don’t want to be left with no more space. As mentioned earlier be sure that your website doesn’t ban selected file types such as .zip, .doc, .pdf or .exe. As you may need those file types and will have to resort to hosting them on an external website.

3. Don’t pick a site that sounds too good to be true – Because it probably is. Website hosting sites that offer unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth often are dodgy. They are either are too expensive, can steal your credit card details or have another catch. Stick with what you need not what you want.

4. Thoroughly read through the Terms of Conditions/Service – This is where most Web hosts sites catch you out. You are probably paying for something you don’t want. Such as if you wanted to create a proxy server or a secret forum, web hosts often don’t allow that and will cut your website with no refund. Stay safe and read through the Terms of Conditions to know exactly what you are signing up for.

5. Read many reviews on your potential web hosting sites – This will help you greatly as most users have experienced the advantages/disadvantages that you will experience. It is also great for others opinions on what you are going to put your hard earned money into.

Again I use SmokyHosts for my web hosting as well. The other sites mentioned above also provide great website hosting services.

Download an FTP Client and Upload Your Website

To transfer your website to your webhost you must use a FTP client, (FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol) this is your door towards uploading and updating your website. There are many great FTP clients out there, (they should all be free) my favourites are FileZilla (made by the people who make the popular browser Mozilla Firefox) and SmartFTP. These are both free and very easy to use.

Once you have downloaded just enter your FTP details that you should have received in an email when you signed up for a webhost, enter those into your FTP client and add your sites files to the relevant directory. For updating your website you can change/add/replace different web files and reload them.

You’re Done!

It may take 24-78 hours for your website to become live (depending on your hosting company and ISP) then your website should show up at your chosen domain name. Just sit back and watch traffic increase. You may also want to add your website to Google.

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