Ever since Jack Dorsey published Twitter’s first tweet on March 21, 2006, the online service has skyrocketed in popularity. Almost four years later, the 10 billionth tweet has been broadcast.

It is unknown exactly when the message was sent. Twitter’s best estimate is some time within the last 24 hours of the announcement.

Personally, I’ve never really understood Twitter. It looks like a great way to make short announcements, but the everyday individual does very little that is newsworthy on a day-to-day basis. Something tells me my friends don’t want to know that I just bought a cup of coffee or that I’m sitting bored at work. But hey, if that’s your thing, tweet on!

Source | The Hosting News
Photo | Flickr

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If you’ve ever done business online, you may have heard the words “efax” or “online fax” before. As the terms imply, an efax is a fax sent through the Internet. Dozens of services have popped up over the last decade offering efaxes. Why are they worth your time?

In simplest terms, an efax service takes a document (usually in Word or PDF format) and sends it through the web to a fax number. Because the Internet is used instead of a traditional phone line, efaxes are much less expensive than the traditional method– in some cases free.

In addition, some providers will even give you a dedicated number for receiving faxes. This costs at little as $10 a month. If you do a lot of business online or only fax occasionally, internet faxing is a great alternative.

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Topeka, a city of 120,000 in America’s Midwest, has changed its official name to Google, Kansas. Before you update your maps, however, take note. The new name is only temporary and will revert back at the end of March.

Topeka made the change in hopes of boosting its chances to become a test site for Google’s “Fiber for Communities” program. The Mountain View company is currently looking for a guinea pig to test a fiber optic Internet service capable of speeds up to 1 gbit per second.

Google hopes to provide service to 50,000 and 500,000 people as part of the trial, making Topeka a perfect match. If the Kansas city isn’t picked, at least it won’t be stuck with the new name.

Photo | Flickr

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These days, it seems like Google runs everything. From Google Desktop to Google Search to Google WiFi in some areas, the company is in a position to collect all sorts of data about its users. The fears of privacy advocates will not be put to rest any time soon, however. In a keynote address to the Mobile World Congress today, Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated bluntly:
…[W]e can literally know everything if we want to. What people are doing, what people care about, information that’s monitored, we can literally know it if we want to, and if people want us to know it.

Fortunately, Google isn’t in the habit yet of collecting and analyzing all our personal data. But in my opinion, we should be wary.

Photo | Flickr

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If you play PC games online, chances are good you’ve heard of TeamSpeak, a voice chat software popular within the gaming community that lets players easily communicate with one another. In order for peers to converse, however, a server running the TeamSpeak software must be set up. Luckily, there are a number of solutions for TeamSpeak hosting out there.

A number of providers offer TeamSpeak hosting for a low price comparable to an entry-level web hosting plan. Because it is so cheap, however, many game server companies offer it for free with a dedicated game server plan.

If you have the bandwidth and your ISP hasn’t blocked port 8767, you can even host a TeamSpeak server yourself at home. This forum post provides a good overview on the process.

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Part of managing a server or even a single website is making sure the DNS is sound and in compliance with established networking and Internet standards. While you can evaluate each of your DNS entries manually, there are many services out there that make evaluation very easy.

One such service is called intoDNS, which is currently still listed as beta, but it functions very well. To use it, simply visit intodns.com and type your full domain name (excluding the “www”). Then, click “Report”. It will then scan your domain and report on a number of important issues: Domain Nameserver records, TLD parent check, CNAMEs, etc.

When your domain passes one of the tests, the service will give you a green circle with a check next to it. When there is an area of concern, you will receive a blue circle with an “i” in it. When you have an error, it will give you a red circle with an exclamation mark. All of the information is displayed in basic HTML so that you can easily print or save it.

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Google Apps is a cloud computing suite of services that includes web-based email, documents, and other services. Unlike standard Gmail, you can use it with your own domain (i.e. instead of yourname@gmail.com, you would have yourname@yourdomain.com). To setup your domain to use this service in cPanel, you need to edit three things:

1. MX records.
2. CNAME record
3. SPF record.

To edit the MX record, go to the Mail section in cPanel and click MX Entry. Enter the records according to Google’s specification, but exclude the period at the end, as it is not needed in cPanel.

To edit the CNAME records, click Simple DNS Zone Editor in the Domains section. If “mail.yourdomain” is already taken, you can choose another name or click Advanced DNS Zone Editor to change it.

Finally, Google recommends setting up an SPF record. This is also found in Advanced DNS Zone Editor. Once you have that setup, you are finished setting up Google for mail service, but the DNS will take some time to propagate.

Photo: Flickr

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Amazon S3 is a storage service provided by Amazon.com. It is part of Amazon’s cloud computing offering, and it used by all sorts of individuals and businesses. Although anyone with a Linux server can theoretically backup their server manually to S3 storage, it helps to have a tool to do it for you.

S3cmd is a command-line S3 client for Linux. It can be used with cron to create automated backups of your data.

“S3cmd is a command line tool for uploading, retrieving and managing data in Amazon S3. It is best suited for power users who don’t fear command line. It is also ideal for scripts, automated backups triggered from cron, etc.”

S3cmd is available for download from the project’s website in both source code packages and binaries for major Linux distributions. It is free and open source software released under the GNU General Public License.

Source: S3cmd

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Whenever you start a new website, you want to make sure everyone can see it, that it loads quickly, and that hackers can’t bring it to its knees. Here are a few useful web tools to make sure you cover all three:

1. Accessibility. A-Checker - An accessibility testing tool. Simply enter the URL or upload the html file of the site page you want to evaluate, and it will test it according to HTML standards and accessibility standards.

2. Speed. Pingdom Full Page Test - This complete tester will load your entire web page, including images, CSS, flash, and anything else you might have stuck in there. It then evaluates the overall speed as well as each item.

3. Security. Zero Day Scan - An online service that tests your website for security vulnerabilities such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and more. It then generates a report of the test results. Domain ownership verification is required.

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When most people think of Ubuntu, they think of the award-winning community-driven desktop Linux distribution created by South African billionaire Mark Shuttleworth and his army loyal supporters. But Shuttleworth is still a businessman, and part of his investment is making sure people who use Ubuntu at the server level have support.

Don’t worry. Despite how it sounds, this is a good thing. It means those who use Ubuntu at the server level are not up a creek if something goes wrong. Most server-ready Linux distributions are backed by companies that will offer support for them. Ubuntu offers a service called Landscape that helps you monitor and manage your server.

Landscape has two versions: Hosted Edition, which is hosted remotely and accessed over the web and Dedicated Server Edition, which you install directly on your dedicated server. Canonical currently offers a free 60 day trial, and a subscription to Landscape is $150 per node per year.

Source: Canonical

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