|
Join Me on Zurker!
Posted February 18, 2012 by evangelism and filed under
Facebook is so lame. It's going where MySpace went. The new social network is Zurker! Zurker is totally awesome and so very very cool because it makes a distinction about news that's relevant to you personally - like someone liked your comment - and news that's interesting...
My Name is Nick Oba
Posted February 18, 2012 by headhopper and filed under egomania
So I have a personal home page now, under nickoba.com. Even though I've made living entirely from the Internet since 1996, I've never really had a navel-gazing home page. But I've sort of been forced to putting one up now, due to the fact that a lot of people are trusting me with...
Warning When Looping Through Arrays in Perl
Posted November 24, 2011 by headhopper and filed under perl
Well, I've been working with Perl for more than ten years - unlike most humans I haven't moved on to Ruby or even PHP - but I still learn something new now and then. What I learned is that when you are going through an array counting instances of keys, if something comes along to screw with the array, it starts looping...
Rush Sale for Qirina
Posted August 31, 2011 by headhopper and filed under firesale
I just put qirina.com on Flippa. It was frustrating because yesterday Flippa's payment processing was kaput all day. Unbelievable! For a site of Flippa's...
SEO Bidz is on the Block
Posted August 18, 2011 by headhopper and filed under seo
I've decided to let someone take over SEO Bidz. It's on the block at Flippa. This is a project I've been...
Qondio 3.0 Released
Posted August 4, 2011 by headhopper and filed under app
Qondio, launched as Qassia in early 2008, has undergone another overhaul. It was rolled out on July 20, 2011, and an announcement went on August 2, 2011. In this in-depth post we will cover what Qondio is about, its history, and the significance of the latest release, which is more than merely cosmetic. Indeed...
Such Low-Calibre Leadership in London and Paris
Posted July 29, 2011 by headhopper and filed under libya
Libya used to be a fairly prosperous country, well-run by the standards of Africa or the Middle East. It had, and still has, a free press. Then there were the demonstrations, which Qaddafi's regime started repressing, as most sovereign governments are want to do. After all, attempting to overthrow the leadership...
New Initiative Interviews Leading Plastic Surgeons
Posted July 5, 2011 by headhopper and filed under pandaproof
Later this month we are launching a new site called SurgeryFaces which will feature interviews with the nation's leading practitioners of cosmetic, plastic, and reconstructive surgery. This initiative is aimed at putting forth authoritiative information about...
The Windbags Win
Posted June 26, 2011 by headhopper and filed under panda
Don't you just hate people who post never-ending posts that start off nicely but go on and on and on, so you just give up and start scrolling... and scrolling... and scrolling, forever grateful that you didn't make the mistake to slog it out and read the whole thing? Are you one of them? Well, congratulations to...
Introducing SEO Bidz
Posted June 10, 2011 by headhopper and filed under seo
We're in the process of launching SEO Bidz. This is an app where website owners can go for obtaining SEO estimates. It's not rocket science. A business owner goes to SEO Bidz and asks for an estimate. In response, participating SEO providers enter estimates, such as "$500...
DataBlender is Here
Posted May 27, 2011 by headhopper and filed under fatalism
Well, I got tired of being hammered in the results by mega-sites that do little more than aggregate. In response, I am today releasing DataBlender. If you can't beat them, join them. This site does exactly what the dominant sites are doing, only a little better. And I have tried...
The Qirina API - The End of Modern Slavery
Posted May 25, 2011 by headhopper and filed under qirina
Every day, tens of thousands of submissions are manually approved by web directory owners worldwide, by directory owners wishing to prevent spam from getting into their directories. Well guess what. We've launched a web directory and it has no manual approval process...
Dorothy McGurk Blog URL
Posted April 17, 2011 by headhopper and filed under bait
One of the news stories being passed around virally right now is about a woman, Dorothy McGurk, whose divorce settlement was reversed. Her ex-husband told the court that she claimed disability but then posted about bellydancing on her blog, replete with photos. The court agreed and her alimony was reduced...
Have You Heard of Parkour and Footbiking?
Posted April 14, 2011 by headhopper and filed under qirina
When I started coding Qirina I expected to learn a lot of useful things about how search engines crawl and index sites. And I did. What I didn't expect is to discover two new sports I'd never heard of. I mean, I don't live under a rock, and, being a news...
How to Train a Cadaver Dog
Posted April 7, 2011 by headhopper and filed under news
There's a story in the news right now about a bunch of bodies being found around a Long Island beach. Most of the bodies were 'escorts' who advertised their services on some third-rate web site. The authorities are hunting for more bodies using...
Sale of Cebu Site Postponed
Posted March 30, 2011 by headhopper and filed under sale, cebu
On March 5, 2011, I announced that I was divesting my Cebu, Philippines, portal, Wa'y Blima! Cebu. This site was scheduled to be divested before the end of this month, along with sister site SurgeonCheck, a website dedicated to public safety by means of educating consumers about the competency of plastic surgeons, joins the LocustSwarm family. I rarely acquire sites as my job is developing them, but this one is...
Response to the Marshallese Press Release
Posted March 25, 2011 by headhopper and filed under sigh
This blog post is in response to a press release from the government of the Marshall Islands, which in turn responded to a story on CBS...
No Text, No Dice
Posted March 5, 2011 by headhopper and filed under qirina
We receive a steady stream of queries from users whose sites our keyword analysis engine Qirina refuses to index due to paucity of identifiable text content. The website owner will have, for instance, a gallery of daguerrotypes, or artisinal...
Divesting Cebu, Philippines Portal
Posted February 10, 2011 by headhopper and filed under sale
I'm in the process of divesting two of our properties, a portal for Cebu in the Philippnes [wayblima.com] and its sister site, a hotel directory [cebu-hotels.info...
Finally, Google Do Something Right
Posted February 1, 2011 by headhopper and filed under google
Have you seen Art Project by Google? Forget Google Earth (pretty cool) or Google Maps (fairly useful) or Google Search (I heard it's popular). This is the greatest thing to come out of Google yet. Art Project basically lets you look...
CBSBN Sets the Standard for Breaking News
Posted December 12, 2010 by Head Hopper and filed under projects
We've released a new site entitled CBSBN. This is basically social commentary verging on (dare I say it) cyber art, as it makes you think about what news is. It's a little rough around the edges but we rushed it online to break the Qirina and discovered a bug in Analytics' new asynchronous code (which in itself is a fabulous thing as it means Analytics loading is independent from your page loading). It's nothing major. The Javascript...
Cool Sites Found via Qirina
Posted November 4, 2010 by Head Hopper and filed under qirina
While debugging Qirina, I rediscovered a joy I'd forgotten since 1997 - the joy of surfing around the web at random and discovering quirky, cool, or awesome sites. You can't really surf around anymore because people tend to hoard their links...
Assigning Unique Serial Numbers to Multiple Simultaneous Processes
Posted November 4, 2010 by Head Hopper and filed under Perl
I am quite smug because I recently solved a messy problem that had been bothering me every now and then, namely assigning unique serial numbers to multiple processes doing the same job simultaneously. This may sound basic but it's actually quite a serious problem. Let's say you have a forum. A new user signs...
A High-Performance Hybrid Search Engine Using Perl
Posted November 4, 2010 by Head Hopper and filed under Perl, search
Let's say you have a site with more than 20,000 pages, and you need a search function. These days, people are so spoiled by Google, they expect search to be lightning fast, and highly accurate. If they have to wait for more than 3 seconds, they start dissing your site. You could solve the problem by using G's site...
| 
