Tech analysis

Over on the software side of the Less Annoying world, Tyler and I have recently been working on a pretty substantial redesign of the interface for LAS.

There are a number of decent software tools to help you stay organized, but I was never able to find anything that seemed to really do the trick. Until now.

In a recent lifehacker poll for best registrar, however, while both of those showed up on the list, the top honors went to a lesser-known (at least by me) site called namecheap.com.

Regular expressions are an extremely useful programming tool for finding and manipulating patterns in text. Unfortunately, the syntax can be pretty overwhelming if you've never used them before (or even if you have).

I've recently had occasion to try out a variety of different sports websites. During the process, I ran across a live game cast from Comcast SportsNet that I hated on first glance; after about 5 minutes of using it, however, it had turned in to one of the best game cast tools I've used.

I live in San Francisco. As you may know, AT&T cell phone service is absolutely awful in San Francisco (like many other major U.S. cities).

When we made our own mobile website, we commented that many iPhone apps would probably be better served as mobile websites.

A friend recently told me about an online service called Ninite which makes installation easier than I could have ever dreamed.

Much like just about everyone else, Microsoft has spent a lot of time of late talking about the importance of the cloud in the future of both computing and of Microsoft.

One of our main goals with this blog is to help our readers choose the best software possible. There are many things to consider when evaluating software such as price, platform, reliability, speed, etc. but I think the most important thing is design.

As a matter of fact, "link building" is one of the most important, and difficult parts of online marketing. It's a topic too large to tackle in one post, but luckily there's a pretty easy way to get started.

With how important technology is in business these days, it's becoming increasingly common for small business owners to hire programmers.

While one of the nice things about a small business can be the avoidance of much of the overhead, bureaucracy, and paperwork ubiquitous in the corporate world, at some point, even the smallest business is likely to require a foray into the legal realm

As you probably know, publishing content online is a great way to promote your business. Unfortunately, the things that make information so easy to share online also make it almost impossible to protect your content.

As part of their security features for Gmail, Google has a security checklist of things to do and keep in mind to help protect the integrity of your Gmail account. Many of the 18 items are fairly obvious or specific to Google, but it's a useful checklist not only for your Gmail account, but for any online account.

You may have heard that Windows finally released a new mobile operating system called Windows Phone 7.

I'm going to suggest a small challenge for the weekend: set aside an hour or two this weekend and try out some new software.

I wanted to give a very basic overview of how scripting works in Google Docs. In addition to being useful for thinking about the mail merge, hopefully this introduction will give you a sense of how you can use scripting in Google Docs to extend it's functionality in any number of ways.

Have you ever wondered why it runs along the bottom of the screen? Well I have. From a UI standpoint it makes way more sense to have that bar running along the left or right side of the screen instead of across the bottom.

If you ever find yourself seeking for an available domain name, Domize.com is a great place to start.

As far as I know, there is only one truly scalable way to add content to your website: User Generated Content (UGC). If you offer your followers a way to speak their minds on your website, you'll be able to build up a respectable source of information without any ongoing work on your part.

As you may have heard, Google is giving up on Google Wave. Wave was a new communication and collaboration tool that was meant to reinvent email.

I was looking through the table of contents of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) earlier this week, when I ran across this article about how search volume can be used to "predict the present" as well as the near future.

Allowing comments on your blog can be a great way to engage your readers, but there's always the chance that some of the comments will be negative.

Plenty of options exist for performing mail merges, including Microsoft Office and online resources such as Mail Chimp. If you just need to send a few basic scripted emails, however, Google Docs can do the job fairly well.