Tag Archive for: Websites

Vanity domain names seem to be the current fad. Apparently .coms are no longer cool in the web world. I’ve been debating a move from mikeschepker.com for a long time. Since the title of the blog is piece of shep it would make sense to move it to pieceofshep.com. Now I’m thinking of something entirely different. To go with the trend, maybe I should change the title of my blog and go with the domain I just purchased, shepis.me. The title of the new blog would obviously be shep is me. I don’t know yet. I also purchased imshep.com. Right now all these domains point to mikeschepker.com. Any thoughts? Should I move to pieceofshep.com or shepis.me or keep the site at mikeschepker.com?

In case you haven’t noticed, Last.fm has received a makeover. The new site looks fantastic compared to the old one. It probably has to be one of the best site redesigns by a popular website that I’ve ever seen. The best part about the redesign is the user profile page. If you look at mine, you can see how clean the new design looks. I love how it has thumbnails of the artists (or album covers) next to the recently played songs. The images for the artists in the user’s library are excellent as well.

Last.fm displaying artists I\'ve played (click to enlarge)

Last.fm displaying artists I've played (click to enlarge)

Notice how nice and clean they look. They charts are now ajax-ified and are quite nice. The color scheme of the site is much easier on the eyes. They managed to create a new site that totally changes the look but still feels familiar. It goes to show you can have a complete redesign without losing your identity. Overall, it is a really successful redesign. Maybe MySpace and Facebook should take note. Much props to the design team at Last.fm.

There are a few shows I watch on TBS. I missed an episode of one of them. Luckily, at TBS.com you can watch episodes for free. Or not. I go there to catch up on a missed episode and guess what. We’re sorry, you must have Microsoft Windows to watch this video. Wtf? Seriously. Aren’t we at a point where specific operating systems shouldn’t be a requirement to watch a video on the internet? It’s not like my MacBook is a new invention and Macs haven’t been around for a while. They have. And their market share is growing. Rapidly. Support other operating systems so you don’t alienate users. I know I’ll never be going back to their website again. That’s a shame, because I could have generated them revenue by visiting to watch videos. Now if I miss episodes, I’ll have to find some other way to watch them.

Now if I could just get Adobe to allow for the most recent flash to be on the Wii so I can watch Hulu, I’d be happy. Not the Wii’s fault. Not Hulu’s fault. It’s all on Adobe.

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow: /

Yes, I’ve blocked you msnbot. I’m tired of finding you in my stats coming from random searches that don’t even show my site in the search results, such as “keeping,” “album,” “comments,” or any of the other thousand or so one word searches you come to my site for. I don’t show up in your search results (at least not high enough for me to care) nor do I really want to show up in the top 100 pages in search results for the word “keeping.” So, you are no longer welcome here. I don’t want to see you on my property anymore. I don’t really care that this may drop me out of live.com’s search altogether. It’s a crappy search engine and anyone who uses it is an idiot and shouldn’t come to my site anyway. So, in conclusion, stop visiting my site msnbot. You’re not welcome here.

I use a service called Lifestream.fm to aggregate my online life. It gathers my tweets from twitter, pictures from Flickr, my Diggs, recently played songs, my Del.icio.us feed, and blog posts from this blog. It’s a great service. It’s very easy to use, includes more social services than Socialthing, and looks great. There’s just one problem. The site has disappeared. When you go to Lifestream.fm, there’s just a GoDaddy parked page. Very odd. Anyone know what’s happened to it?
EDIT: It seems to be back up now. Weird.