I am a massive fan of file and folder highlighting in OS X. If you’re not using it, check it out. Just right click on any file or folder and you can highlight it in a certain color. This feature has come in extremely useful for managing the writing of my book. Check out the screenshot. I created little text snippet files to act as a legend, and then I color the chapters with what I need to do. As you can see, I have very little left to do, but I can take a look at this from time to time and reassure myself of what’s going on.

I also highlight any folders relevant to current projects in my “Projects” folder. Currently there aren’t too many of those!

Ben Griffiths of Reevoo has let me know that they’ve attracted a nice funding round of $5 million from Eden Ventures. This is pretty good news to me, because Reevoo are based in the UK and are almost entirely powered by Ruby on Rails. Congratulations to the team!

PayPal has given the UK a great Christmas present! 11 months ago I asked them when it would be available and they fobbed me off with a generic “don’t know” answer, but now Website Payments Pro is now available to UK users. This is a big deal because it allows Web sites to process payments without customers having to go via a PayPal page. You even get a ‘virtual terminal’ that lets you take credit card orders over the phone, via mail, or from ‘walk in’ customers.

Website Payments Pro costs £20 per month (after March 31, 2007) and transaction fees are 1.4-3.4% + 20p. They’ve also got a recurring billing system tied into this, which is excellent timing considering I want to switch Feed Digest to a monthly billing cycle rather than an annual one.

Doctor Spiller is my hero. He’s a dentist from Massachusetts in the US who has put together an amazing, non-commercial site all about dentistry and teeth. I read it every time before I go to the dentist or get some work done. He goes into detail with how the procedures work, why certain work needs to be done, and is blunt about possible side effects and things that may occur.
The site makes really good reading. He goes into incredible detail, and everything is explained in a way that isn’t condescending, but isn’t complex to non-dentists. He also has tons of great diagrams and pictures (including some extremely scary ones of “Before” and “After” shots).

I would love to have Doctor Spiller as my dentist, although my current dentist is actually very good. This guy shows a real passion over his work and a deep understanding of how to write well and relay difficult concepts to the general public. If you’ve got to go to the dentist or are having some dental trouble, check his site out.. it’ll make you feel better.

Anyone know of any similar sites for other topics? I’d love to see a similar site from a general doctor or a surgeon.

I’ve found this amazing PDF presentation that shows how eBay’s architecture fits together and gives some mindblowing traffic numbers (1 billion pageviews per day!). There’s lots of juicy information about how their database system works too. They perform no client-side transactions, intriguingly.

Further to my previous complaints about iTunes Music Store, I’ve now discovered I can’t burn my downloaded Jay Z album to CD. The reason is that “Show Me What You Got” is a video, and iTunes doesn’t seem to want to burn a video’s audio to an audio CD (why it can’t figure it out is beyond me).

So.. I’ve now bought the song for the third time, but just as an audio track (this wasn’t available before - and is a whole minute shorter.. great). Advice to Apple.. if you’re going to put videos on an album, also include the audio-only track, otherwise people can’t burn their albums to CD like they’re supposed to.

I’ve complained to Apple because I’m sick of them parading the iTMS as being ‘convenient’ if we have to put up with crap like this. It’ll be interesting to see how they respond. This isn’t the first time I’ve complained about something to them.. perhaps I’ll get a reputation.

Over the past few days I’ve been amazed by how ridiculously fast the Internet’s DNS infrastructure is, compared to yesteryear. It’s been a year or two since I’ve had to make lots of DNS changes, but with the seemingly constant DDoSing of EveryDNS (my DNS provider of choice till now), I’ve had to dive back into it. I’ve set up a new DNS system, got two secondary providers for my most important stuff, and had to move scores of domains about (and finally bother to learn BIND in the process).

Years ago, it took an eternity for anything to update. If you updated the parent nameservers for a domain, it’d take 24-48 hours to work its way through the system. Now I can do it, and within merely two minutes I’m seeing the new parent nameservers. Within 10 minutes usually my ISP’s DNS server has caught on too. New domain registrations have also got a lot faster. I’ve registered new .com domains and had them resolving on non-authoritative DNS servers within 10 minutes. That’s exactly how it should be, but it’s still amazing compared to the “wait at least 24 - 48 hours” mantra of the past.

Some people argue the Net hasn’t changed significantly in ten years, but even if the protocols are mostly the same.. ten years ago you could register a domain, build a Web service, have it all up and running, then get 10,000 visitors in your first day via Digg. You can create popular sites within 24 hours now, back then it took months. The world gets faster, etc.

According to UN research, half of the world’s population owns just 1% of all wealth, with 2% owning half of the wealth.

I decided to feed all of the mini manifestos from GapingVoid into a Markov chain generator, and I got this entirely new ‘manifesto’:

1. No superhero could fill the people resist change and concerns. Good marketers will liberate you. Owning is NOT SEO. Here’s the next girlfriend, the links but also why - you often and the rest of ‘short run’. It is not applicable to step in, reframe the behavioural change and value for the cusp of success - and other departments about themselves while complaining about the company.

2. Marketing cannot live forever, and Ranking factors. There’s still only come from your own greatness is more porous the bills, so we can, and dedication and we have nothing left couldn’t tell the process of ideas. There are never faileth: but yours.

3. To take 500 words to each other. They have not enough to communicate benefit, but also I spake as they choose to drive your kids. If you – Swastikas, Crucifix, Crescents, it is not about understanding the way and off joining in.The

4. SEO glossary, and using them a game - you must have the deck in a culture of appearing as well as they arejust saying anything. Don’t just the gift of prophecy, and the conversion - which is possible to find for more. Your Marketing Sociable.You can’t fool your worst nightmare.

5. Choose now. Choose the discussion and conversion. Building link equity is the new angle to that you find happiness in which is NOT SEO. Here’s the next job, the spread of men and concerns.

After years of using Movable Type, I’ve finally switched to using WordPress for PeterCooper.co.uk. I’d been putting it off for years, literally.

The main reason for sticking with what I had was that my pages were all ranking extremely well in Google and I didn’t want to lose that. Recently, however, it’s all taken a bit of a dive, so I’ve gone for it. I’ve kept one foot in the past, however, and kept all OLD entries on Movable Type. You can still access the old blog here.

If all has gone to plan though, I’ve forwarded my feed URLs to the new feed, and you should be up and running on the new blog. I’m still doing some tweaking, so I better go sort that out.. but I hope you enjoy the new feel and everything looks good for you.