Look around on the net and search for a digg-like software to create a social voting news platform, you will most likely find Pligg as the popular choice of open source software that does pretty much what Digg.com does.

After evaluting the platform, I find the platform easy to implement, with one catch being that at its current state, you can’t install it locally or even on a production server under a virtual directory.  For example you will not be able to install it under http://www.52my.info/digg, instead you will need to install it at the root of its own domain, so here’s my site: http://news.52my.info

Obviously, I have localised it for Chinese audience..and the back-end admin have made in-line translation easy and the use of smarty template made customizing easy (I stuck with the wistie default template, as I found it to be good enough).

Enjoy.

blog posting, evaluation, recommendations clone, digg, news.52my.info, pligg

After so many blog posts, it has finally hit me that I need a better screen capture tool to do screen captures for web pages.  Did a quick search and I came up with ScreenGrab, it’s definitely the one of the must-haves for bloggers who deals alot with screenshots.  Before I would do a print screen (PrtSc), and the crop the image in Photoshop…NO MORE!

Download ScreenGrab here

Attached image is grabbed using the tool.

blog posting, recommendations Firefox add-on, screen grab

Since Starbucks is kind of like my second office, and I do a lot of work and client meetings there.  Again Casual Commerce stands for casual meetings with clients over a cup of coffee.  Quite often clients are surprised when I tell them that I can use Starbucks’ wireless access to get online for free, and they want to know how to do this.  It’s actually quite simple, all you need is a starbucks card, which is free, but you just have to load money into it and buy coffee with it, and you use the PIN number in the back of the card to sign up for an account with AT&T to get a login/pswd.

For some reason, Starbucks’ web site makes this information hard to find, so here it is:

https://secure.sbc.com/sblp_index.adp

Get a card, have a cup of coffee, and get online.

blog posting, recommendations at&t, free wi-fi, starbucks

Saw this posting on mashable.com - 20 Great Free Wordpress 2.7 Themes, it’s just what I need as I start my practice building corporate sites for clients.  These will serve as great foundation for my new designs for the clients.

I have picked 2 themes that I think are great for redesign and repurpose for clients of all business types.

blog posting, recommendations, services, templates, wordpress templates, wordpress

Having helped so many clients set up their web hostings and e-mails with the web hosting company where the sit is hosted…i have come to realize, why use the primitive “free” email provided by the web hosting companies when you can use the best e-mail application from Google: Google Apps for Business; essentially this is simply gmail with your own domain name.

I have recommended this solution to so many friends, and yet everytime i mentioned  this service, they were so surprised that such great thing existed.  With Google Apps for Business, you can essentially host up to 25 user accounts for free, and anything above that you would have to pay for their service.  My honest opinon is that even if you have to pay, it will be worth every penny, as Gmail has one of the best Spam filters out there.

The best feature i liked about Google mail is that i can actually point multiple domains names to the same mailbox, so i can have jerry@domainA.com and jerry@domainB.com point to the same mailbox, and i can send from either addresses. Pretty cool imo.

Drop me an email if you need assistance in setting this up.

Microsoft’s Office Live and Yahoo’s Business Mail offers similar features, I would say Yahoo is second to Google, but you would have to pay for it, as for Microsoft Live mail, it offers similar service for free, but as a veteran user of hotmail/live mail, I suggest you just go with Google Apps for Business.

blog posting, recommendations, services email, gmail, service