ant

The Internet was recently shocked with the news that Apple approved Opera Mini for the iPhone. Previously only Mobile Safari and other  browsers that used the WebKit engine were allowed to run on the iPhone OS. There was much speculation as to whether it would be approved by Apple due to past restrictions placed on third-party browsers and other applications which duplicated existing iPhone functionality or executed third-party code on the device.

The browser is free and is available for download [iTunes Link] but really is it that great? Here are my five reasons why Opera Mini sucks:

Clunky User Interface

This is probably the biggest pitfall for me in this app. The look of the app, while very ‘Opera’ doesn’t really fit into the iPhone UI. Maybe it is because I’m extremely used to Safari but the excessive red and black does nothing for ones visual appeal. No UI element looks or is positioned like the familiar CocoaTouch UI. Buttons are different, menus are different, switches are different. Lets face it, it doesn’t look like an iPhone app.

The buttons are also massive and take up a large proportion of the screen real estate. With only a 3.5″ screen, the UI controls take up about a 1/3 of the screen.

However there are some great UI features such as SpeedDial which make up for the clunky UI.

Security Risk

Basically when visiting encrypted pages, you have to allow Opera to get in the middle to decrypt and re-encrypt (via Opera Software), breaking what’s meant to be an end-to-end security chain. Due to the data being transferred between your phone and Opera servers your details could potentially be compromised to hackers, thieves etc. I’m actually surprised that Apple didn’t reject the app solely because of this flaw. Just imagine if your email, Facebook and even PayPal or bank details were obtained by hackers, major damage could be done.

If you don’t believe me, look here. Opera expressly states this problem in their FAQ.

“Is there any end-to-end security between my handset and — for example — paypal.com or my bank?

No. If you need full end-to-end encryption, you should use a full Web browser such as Opera Mobile.

Opera Mini uses a transcoder server to translate HTML/CSS/JavaScript into a more compact format. It will also shrink any images to fit the screen of your handset. This translation step makes Opera Mini fast, small, and also very cheap to use. To be able to do this translation, the Opera Mini server needs to have access to the unencrypted version of the Web page. Therefore no end-to-end encryption between the client and the remote Web server is possible.”

Have a look at this video for more information on the security concerns.

Page Rendering

Opera says that

“Streamlined rendering engine and server-side compression allows Opera to load Web pages much more quickly than other mobile phone browsers.”

While Opera Mini is very fast, the page rendering suffers with jagged fonts, small text is hardly legible and is more often than not reduced to thick and plain lines.

Here are some examples:

Here is Stuff.co.nz viewed in landscape, notice how Opera zooms right in to the page and it doesn’t seem like there is a way to zoom out.

No Multi Touch Support

Safari makes excellent use of the iPhone’s sensitive multi-touch, you are able to easily pinch, zoom, scroll and much more. However as mentioned, Opera Mini lacks an Apple like UI and the browser does not include such fundamental UI conventions such as pinch-zoom. With 100 million iPhone users  familiar with Apple’s multi-touch gestures it is crucial to have this supported.

Opera Mini offers only two zoom levels, one in which the text is either too big or too small, there is no in between. As well as this scrolling just doesn’t work as well with Opera Mini as it does in Safari. Sliding down a long row of text on Opera jitters while Safari scrolls smoothly.

It’s Just a Proxy Server

Unlike Safari, Opera Mini fetches all content through a proxy server that reformats web pages into a format more suitable for the iPhone’s screen. This presents many problems such as rendering, formatting and much more.

As well as this, the web page is compressed in Opera’s Binary Markup Language which often distorts the page. Being a proxy server many functions such as signing into WiFi hotspots do not work. If you’re looking for a fully fledged mobile web browser, Opera Mini shouldn’t be your choice.

However I have only discussed the problems here and there are many great features of Opera Mini such as great speeds. After all it’s free so I still encourage you to try it out!

Have you had a chance to test Opera Mini out? How does it live up to Safari? Which will you be using on a regular basis?

I’ve tweeted about this a few times and has got me thinking.

Right now I am searching on Google, in Google Chrome, using Google DNS Servers, on my Android, checking my Google Apps Mail and writing Google Docs. Then surfing on YouTube and letting the world know my thoughts on Google Buzz. Now I’m planning my day using Google Calendar while checking Google News, then going home and booting up Google Chrome OS then checking my route on Google Maps, I get interrupted by Google Talk, I then use Google GPS to navigate home. Now I’m writing this post on Blogger while uploading photos to my Picasa and reading the news on Google Reader. Finally my post is published and it is put through FeedBurner for all my RSS subscribers to see.

Ok, so maybe I’m not using all these Google products/services at the moment but they are just a fraction of the Google empire. Basically nearly everything we do on the web is either owned or has some affiliation to Google. Don’t get me wrong, I think Google is a fantastic company with constant innovations but should we be woried about this world dominance?

Just think about it, if Google owns and runs such a huge proportion of our technological needs they have insane amounts of data at their finger tips. If they were ever to turn evil (assuming they haven’t already) we should all be petrified.

“If Google has your name, address, bank account number, credit card numbers, and other critical information — and it likely does if you’re doing business with them as an ad seller, ad buyer, WiFi client, or with any business that Google may happen to buy in the future — plus all of your email, your calendar, your online chats, your phone conversations, every address you’ve used Google maps to find direction to, every search you’ve entered, every spreadsheet and word processing document you’ve worked on, and so on and so on, the potential for abuse is massive.” – James Joyner

So what do you think? Should we accept our Google overlords or fight back and resist? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

On Monday I blogged about why I love Digg and all the unique and cool elements of this site. However there are certain things on Digg that annoy everyone including the almighty CEO Kevin Rose. While I love Digg I thought this would be a great opportunity to mention what I don’t like.

Spam

Everyone knows that spam completely sucks but its existence on Digg varies to being very subtle or extremely overt. Firstly you have the spammers that mass create new accounts to digg up a story to get it to the front page. The story that was dugg up by the spammers may be innocent or it could be trying to make increased revenue from ad sales. Either way it sucks and Digg needs to try and get rid of this.

Classic Digg Spammer

Also you have the subtle spammers. These are the people that find an ‘upcoming’ story that is slightly related to their site and comment on it with a link back to their own site. Once the story gets hundreds or thousands of diggs, heaps of people visit the link back. While this is not overt spam it is still assholes that are doing this for their own personal gain.

Douche bags

This basically sums up why Digg pisses me off sometimes. They exist as spammers, ‘power users’ etc. Firstly you have the idiots who comment totally inappropriately on sensitive stories such as a death. While Digg is a place that encourages freedom of speech you don’t have to always be a blatant asshole. Thankfully Digg has a ‘bury this’ option as a way of telling those douche bags to STFU.

Adding to this you have the idiots that decide to comment on every single story with ridiculous facts, accusations and more. However once again the ‘bury this’ option is there.

Now I talk about the real douchebags…

‘Power Users’

SEOmoz says that:

“When folks think of Digg, they’re often misled into believing that the content seen on the homepage is representative of what a wide base of Internet users think is news-worthy and important. The numbers tell a different story – that of all stories that make it to the front page of Digg, more than 20% come from a select group of 20 users.”

This guy has the facts straight. Regular users like you and me who submit great content have less than 10 diggs while a so called ‘power user’ who submits the story a few hours later with the exact same title will have hundreds or thousands of diggs.

This is a great explanation of the problems we face because of these assholes.

Failure to Attribute

This is again what pisses me off on Digg. Most of the stuff you see on the front page is quality content written or designed by talented authors. The least one could do to attribute would be to link to the authors work.

However common ‘power users’ often link the image/video/text to their own website and therefore gain ad revenue from increased traffic. It’s really not that hard not to attribute.

Overkill of Memes

Less important but still annoying. Memes are great and everyone loves them but due to the nature of Digg; common memes are repeated so often that they are killed. While somes memes such as the infamous pedobear get hundreds of diggs, others like ‘Dear Oatmeal..’ and ‘??? Profit!’ get to the point where they are so lame it is hardly funny.

These guys again fall into the douche bag category.

Bonus: Digg Bar

This feature has since died but I still think it was important enough to include in this post. Kevin Rose explains why the Digg Bar was killed.

What other flaws exist in Digg and what can they do to fix these current ones?

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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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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