Now that every search engine in planet shows search results on the basis of who pays the most, the web users have now turned to social bookmarking. First there was http://del.icio.us , the site that allows users to share their bookmarks by tagging them with keywords and making it public. You get to see what others have bookmarked and its much better sometimes than what you might find using the search engines. See my delicious bookmarks as an example. Now I stumbled upon this new site http://stumbleupon.com that allows users to setup what kind of sites they would like to stumbleupon and it starts throwing sites that other users stumbled upon and found useful. Actually its pretty cool. I only tried it for 10 mins , I am already hooked.
I think social and community aspects of the web is the next wave and companies that can bring such innovative collaborative products to the web will make it big.
Check out what I stumbled upon …. Someone with a lot of time in their hands.
You might not be aware of didtheyreadit.com or other such services , but it would be good idea to know what it does. If you have used microsoft exchange server and outlook , there is an option to track delivery and read status of email messages. This allows the sender to receive notifications once their emails have been read and when they were read. Of course in Outlook, as a recipient of the email I can choose NOT to send a notification back.
Now back to this service “didtheyreadit.com”, it brings this same service to the web based emails. And it does it without the the recipients knowledge, which is what I hate.
After you signup for this service (there is a free one for 10 email messages), you will be asked to add didtheyreadit.com to the end of the email address for every email you want to track. So If you want to send an email to abc@xyz.com, you will actually write the email to abc@xyz.com.didtheyreadit.com and didtheyreadit.com will then forward your message to abc@xyz.com. And you can now log into didtheyreadit.com and see when the email was read and if they have forwarded it to someone else etc.
So how does this work?.
Didtheyreadit.com adds a single pixel jpeg file to the message and makes the message a HTML message for the recipient. The image looks like this:
<img src=”http://xpostmail.com/745637733fe8414505563ab5f8112449aaworker.jpg” nosend=”1″ name=”dtri” width=”1″ height=”1″/>
When this email is read and IF you have turned on images in your HTML email, this image will be downloaded from xpostmail (which I am guessing is didtheyreadit.com’s domain). And since this URL is unique for the message and the recipient, didtheyreadit.com now knows you have read this email.
I guess this makes it really easy for someone to see if you have read their email. So no more “Oh, you sent me an email!!. I didn’t get it!!” . They will know you are lying 
. If you really don’t want to be tracked, don’t turn on images in your webmail or block xpostmail.com in your firewall.
In the interest of full disclosure though, I have thought of doing something similar by putting an image in my email signature with different URL parameters generated uniquely for every message (wouldn’t have worked for tracking individual recipients , but you can tell a little bit more based on the referer). But I dropped the idea because it was very sneaky. I am sure web based email providers like yahoo, google don’t want to do it for the same reason.
Harry’s next adventure is out and I can’t wait to get a copy. This time the book is supposedly darker and tackles more mature themes as Harry battles “the one who must not be named” in “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince”.
If you think Harry Potter books are only for kids , you muggles have a lot to learn.
If you pay close attention to your favorites in IE or URL bar in firefox , you will notice that when you view some of the websites like google and yahoo , you will see their logo before the URL. So how did these sites manage to do this?. Simple, browsers look for a file called favicon.ico in the same directory as the current page or in the root of the website and they use this file as the icon. This was something that IE started supporting in IE 5.5 and how pretty much all modern browsers support it. It adds a nice touch to the small business sites making their bookmark or URL standout from the rest.
You will notice that there is an icon for my website as well. Here is how I made the favicon.ico online:
I first created a transparent logo from text using the cooltext website. I then saved this logo to my desktop . I then used the favicon.ico generating service to create the favicon.ico. Once you upload this file to the root of your website, all modern browsers will start recognizing it and showing off your icon in favorites and URL bar.
Two weeks of intense research and three different web hosts later I finally have a webhost that satisfied all my requirements. chandraonline.net is now finally online.
