Note: I have indeed used their services so I know what I’m talking about.

Some of the following are my own experiences while others are from reviews I’ve seen.

1. Their data centre lacks quality. Sometimes the servers are fast and sometimes slow.
2. They can change from cPanel to Parallels without asking it’s clients or even telling them.
3. If you have a problem you can contact the support team. They will tell you your scripts are faulty. If you insist and bring proof that their servers caused the problem they will ignore you.
4. Sometimes the CEO can personally take a look into your problems. This means he will personally ignore you.
5. If you ask for your money back (after you have proven they caused your problems) you will, again, be ignored.
6. They will never admit it’s their fault.
7. Their services are only for professionals. If you aren’t one you might just fall for what they tell you.
8. I heard the 24 minutes response time is a lie.
9. They can become very rude on Twitter.

Do you have anything else to add to the list?

… I observed the following:

1. The vast majority don’t know how to write properly.
2. A lot offer SEO and blogging tips on wordpress.com or blogger. People also offer tips on how to get easy money over the internet on these services.
3. Most don’t use the MORE tag when posting videos or any other flash content.
4. Blogger is used more than wordpress.com although blogger sucks when it comes to design and functionality.
5. Loads of people use widgets like calendar and categories. As far as I know, these two are considered useless. Also have seen a lot of flash clocks.
6. Some can’t read. On the first page you have a post stating you are not accepting link exchange requests and someone leaves a comment (in romanian on an english blog ) on your latest post (without any link the the post’s topic) while there’s a nice ‘Contact’ link in your blog.
7. The easiest way to make a blog is putting miniclip games on your site and naming your site something-containing-the-word-games. This can be done with or without your own domain. In the case a domain is used then it’s double trouble. You just wasted some money.
8. Most blogs (on blogger and wordpress.com at least) are made in a moment of boredom.
9. The most common description in About pages is “I am me (and no one else)”.
10. Some have captcha + moderation + akismet activated on comments.
11. Right-click protection is so ’95. If I want to steal something from your site, that will not stop me.

Did I miss anything?

I’ve seen that a few blogs I have in Google Reader take around one hour to update. Updating your blog to your readers is called pinging. Of course, you can add as many services you like, but this list is working just fine. To add services you have to go to Settings > Writing and add the following list of sites in the Update Services area:
You can use Filip’s insane ping list, or:

• http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
• http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
• http://bblog.com/ping.php
• http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
• http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
• http://ping.feedburner.com
• http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
• http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
• http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
• http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
• http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
• http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
• http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
• http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

Pretty simple and effective. Found in the WordPress Codex. Bumps go to blogdan, Vlad and ‘mnealui .

Thingler – simple and fast way to create a todo list. very nice and sleek design too.

Mockingbird – create website wireframes. Only one drawback: after it comes out of the beta stage, it will cost.

Cacoo – another wireframe creator, free this time. best I could find out there.

Was it Up? – monitors your site and sends an email if it goes down. another email when it’s back up.

Pick&Zip – tool for downloading whole facebook albums.

Wakoopa – software tracking

I never was a big fan of gradients, thought of them to be part of the oldies in design. Yesterday I was proven wrong. A few weeks ago I made a ribbon for titles in the sidebar. It looked like this:

Pretty dull, right? Right. I wanted to make it a bit better (limited by my skills of course). I modified the drop shadow, added a gradient and a small border and got:

In my opinion the second one looks better, more realistic and less noob-ish. It’s not quite magic but I think it’s an improvement .

There are two ways of doing this.

Editing the WordPress core

Open wp-includes/comment-template.php, and search for:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow' class='url'>$author</a>";

You should find it at around line 155 in WordPress 3.0.1. You have to add target='_blank' so that you will get:

$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow' class='url' target='blank'>$author</a>";

Be sure to use single quotation marks because the double ones are already used, and you will mess up the whole thing.

Editing your theme

Open the functions.php file found in your theme’s folder and add:

// Make comment author link URL open in new window
function comment_author_link_window() {
	global $comment;
	$url    = get_comment_author_url();
	$author = get_comment_author();

	if ( empty( $url ) || 'http://' == $url )
		$return = $author;
	else
		$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow' target='_blank'>$author</a>";
	return $return;
}
add_filter('get_comment_author_link', 'comment_author_link_window');

Bare in mind that the functions.php file admits only one php beginning (<?php) and only one ending (?>). Found this method here (thanks ).

I personally prefer the second solution. Using the first one means you have to modify the respective file every time you update your WordPress version.