Yahoo has launched a new beta service called My Web. The service represents a mix of Furl, Googles My Search History and an online bookmark service. This is how it works: you search through Yahoo and all your searches get saved (if you turn the My Search History feature on), then when you find something interesting you click the “Save” button which saves the copy of the page in your “personal web” and, optionally, your bookmarks get updated too. Oh, and it allows all sorts of public sharing, including RSS. Really nice one, Yahoo!

Here’s some info directly from “My Web”:

My Web Beta is a free service from Yahoo! Search. It enables you to save a live link and a personal cached copy of any web page from the Yahoo! Toolbar or directly from search results, and instantly retrieve it online from any computer.

With My Web you can:

Build your own personal, password-protected collection of favorite web pages.

Instantly search all My Web saved pages using the power of Yahoo! Search.

Organize your saved pages into folders.

Personalize site titles and add notes to help you remember pages.

Email and share your favorite saved pages with friends and colleagues.

My Web is better than bookmarks:

It saves a cached copy and a link of the page.

It’s searchable. You don’t need to organize your collection –although you can if you want to.

It’s accessible online anywhere, not just from your computer.

My Web lets you rest-assured that the pages you want to see will be there ––whenever you want to revisit them.

Read more from the Yahoo Search Blog.

OK, so you’ve become a proud owner of an internet domain. You’ve built your website and also setup the email service so that you can send and receive messages from/to [you]@[yourdomain]. You’re all excited and everything seems to be perfect. That is, until people start telling you the email they sent you bounced back, or even worse, start asking why haven’t you replied to that important message they’ve sent. Well, you never recieved it. So you start scratching your head…

This post will explain what is happening in the background and how to fix the problem (for free). Don’t be discouraged by the length of the post, the process is quite simple.

When you setup your domain email you generally either forward it to another email address (FastMail, GMail, Yahoo, your ISP, etc), or you decide to take full control and go for the more advanced solution - host your own email, either at your webhost or on your own home machine. I’ll leave the forwarding case for another post and discuss the hosting solution here. So, the main question is, what happens when your mail server (or webhost) is down?

Very simplified, when someone sends an email to [you]@[yourdomain], the sending server checks the MX (Mail Exchange) DNS records for [yourdomain]. This record tells the sender where the email for [yourdomain] should be sent to. It gets the first one, resolves its IP address and tries to send the email to that server. All is fine if the server is up. Sometimes however, your server will be down for maintenance or other reasons and the sending server will either store the message and try again later or just discard the message completely. Huh, not exactly what you wanted!. So, how do you prevent this?
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Google has today launched a very cool new (beta) service called My Search History.

“My Search History lets you easily view and manage your search history from any computer. This feature of Google web search enables you to find information you thought you lost. And over time, you’ll see an increasing number of relevance indicators in your search results that help you find the information you want.”

This is something I often wished for and I’m sure it will prove very handy in the years to come. Too bad it doesn’t yet work with Opera 8.

RSS readers have lately been appearing all over the place, however, until recently I wasn’t able to find the perfect one. My needs are not huge. I want a reader which can synchronize feeds and read posts between several PCs, have a useful and selectable notification mechanism so I don’t miss important news, but still don’t get bothered with less important ones, display feeds in a tree without favicons, be robust and fairly fast, provide descent search functionality and saved searches, flag news items for easy follow up and review.

I have tried most of the existing Windows and web based aggregators, and each one had some of these missing. I recently checked the new version of RSS Bandit and my quest for the perfect RSS reader seems to have come to an end. RSS Bandit features all I need and provides even more nice goodies like integrated Feedster and Google searches.

If you are not completely satisfied with your reader, give RSS Bandit a spin. You won’t regret it.

I’ve spent a couple of days in Brussels last week and was most amazed by the wonderful beers they have over there. I’ve always been a descent beer drinker (or so I like to think), a great fan of Budwar, Erdinger, Guinness, Smithwicks and have enjoyed a bunch of Irish and British ales, but I have never tried a Belgian beer before apart from Stella Artois and was most impressed by the fine Belgian beers I tasted in Brussels.

We went to a place called A la Mort Subite (In the Sudden Death) which specializes in beers brewed in small breweries which are rarely exported (understandable, I would keep those to myself too). I was lucky that we had some Belgian friends to recommend the drinks throughout the night, otherwise it would be a hard time choosing the right items from the lengthy menu. Here are the best of the beers I tried:

Lambic Blanche: My favourite, a delightful, spontaneously fermented and aged ale with a perfect tartly taste.

Duvel: A very strong one, most Belgians will recommend this as their best beer, but beware, don’t have too many of these!

Kriek: This is the general name for cherry beers. I had some doubts before I tried it, but it is really great. I tried several different brands, the best being Lindemans Kriek (Cherry Lambic Beer). It is however sweeter than others, so I guess not many beer drinkers would be fascinated as I was.

Orval: Another strong ale with a very nice complex taste

Apart from these, I didn’t miss to check out the more famous ones such as Hoegaarden and Leffe, both very interesting and with a rich taste.

So, the next time you’re in Brussels and like exploring beers, don’t miss a visit to the Sudden Death. And, in case you are not an expert, take a note of these few beers, it might help when selecting from a lengthy menu!

LinkaGoGo is a powerful online bookmark manager. I’ve been using it since 2002 on a regular basis and it is a truly remarkable service.

This tip will show you how to search your LinkaGoGo bookmarks from your Opera address or search bar without having to go to the Linkagogo site to invoke the search. This will work only for LinkaGoGo members, which starts at $3.95/year.

To add this search close Opera, find your Opera profile (same place where your adr file is located) and backup your search.ini file. Open the original and add the following:

[Search Engine [ID]]
Name=LinkaGoGo
URL=www.linkagogo.com/go/Search?search=%s
Query=
Key=L
Encoding=utf-8
Is post=0
Has endseparator=0
Search Type=0
VerbText=17063

Change [ID] with the first free search engine ID. Save the file, open Opera and type “L whatever” in your address bar and magic - your bookmarks that contain “whatever” are displayed in the browser. You can also perform the search by typing the text in the Opera search combo and select “LinkaGoGo” from the list of search engines.

If you don’t feel comfortable editing search.ini yourself, you can use the great Opera search.ini editor from this site.

Tags: LinkaGoGo

You might have noticed that I’m using WordPress as the blog engine. Apart from using WordPress for my 3G Handsets blog and CuteNews for my IMAPSize news, I’ve tried numerous other tools. The main features I was looking for in the “perfect” blogging tool were a small footprint, easy configuration and easy integration with the rest of the site. Being able to hack it around in order to satisfy my needs was a must. Plugins would be a huge plus.

The choice first came down to two excellent tools: AJ-Fork and blosxom. AJ-Fork is a fork of CuteNews and its main goal is to make CuteNews more flexible and powerful while preserving its simplicity and small footprint. Blosxom is really small and beautiful (well, as blossom is supposed to be) and I had a great time playing with it.

However, I had some problems with both of these tools, be it RSS feeds, automatic pings, posting by email and posting methods in general, so I decided to give WordPress another try and everything I needed worked straight away. Its footprint is not as small as the previously mentioned tools, but it is small enough to comfortably live with it. I feel kind of sorry to have abandonded AJ-Fork and blosxom, with some additional effort I’m sure I would have adapted them completely to my needs. I’ll keep them in mind for some other blog!

After years of playing around with RSS (mainly related to my hobby projects) and recently starting a news blog related to 3G Handsets, I’ve finally felt a need to create a blog space where I would drop some of my own thoughts, ideas, and cool things I stumble upon every day.

This blog will revolve around things that are of most interest to me, but which could be of some interest to others too (I hate being boring!). These are all kinds of software tools, webmaster stuff, cool sites, high-end mobile phones, messaging, travelling, photography, hedonism, etc. Basically, I’ll just let it roll and see where it goes. I hope you enjoy it!