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Tucows @ HostingCon 2007 Today Through Wednesday

HostingCon 2007

Tucows will be in Chicago at HostingCon 2007, which starts today (Monday, July 23rd) and runs until Wednesday, July 25th at Navy Pier. HostingCon bills itself as “the largest gathering of hosted services professionals in the world” and for more details about the conference, check our their conference program.

We’ll be making our presence known there — I won’t be there, but my coworkers Kim, Leona, Adam and Hasdeep will. Be sure to keep an eye out for squishy cows and…

Our Booth

We’ll have a booth in the exhibitors’ hall — booth 817, which is right beside the networking lounge. Feel free to come chat with us about our new Email Service, Premium Domains and other upcoming things from Tucows.

You can look for booth 817 on the official HostingCon map or use our slightly customized one below to find us:

Map of HostingCon 2007 highlighting location of Tucows' booth

Our Session: Rethinking Domain Name Search

This Wednesday, July 25th, from 3:30 – 4:15 p.m. in room 109, Product Manager for Domains Adam Eisner will be making his presentation, Rethinking Domain Name Search.

Here’s the description of his presentation:

With the rise of the domain name aftermarket, many expired names never return to the public for repurchase. This, combined with the fact most web hosting companies don’t provide an effective domain name search feature on their website, results in many lost sales opportunities for domain names, web hosting, email and more.

This session will show web hosts how to “re-think” their website’s domain name search strategy in response to market developments like better name suggestion technology, fewer available names, and the rise of the domain name aftermarket. The strategies outlined and demonstrated will help web hosts obtain tangible improvements in their domain name and web hosting sales.

Topics covered will include:

  • How to improve sales by improving your existing domain name search process (using tangible examples)
  • Maximizing the number of relevant results provided using name suggestion technology
  • Using domain name aftermarket to ensure customers receive the most relevant domain name availability results possible

Come on out and say hello!

Cross-posted to the Tucows Developer Blog

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Hey, Facebook: It’s Spelled “availAble”!

One area of user interface development that could stand some improvement is spell-checking. I’m not aware of any widely-used system for spell-checking a web application’s template or resource files, but good spelling certainly helps an app look more professional.

The latest spelling mistake in an application I’ve seen comes from the “Edit App” page for Facebook developers. One of the fields on the page lets you specify the “Canvas Page URL”, the URL within apps.facebook.com where your app can be found. It uses Ajax to give you instant feedback as to whether the URL is available or not as you type — but the word “Available” is misspelled:

Facebook Developer UI telling me that my chosen application URL is “availible”

Cross-posted to the Tucows Developer Blog

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Jing’s Approach to Installing on the Mac

In the most recent posting on Jeff Atwood’s excellent developer blog Coding Horror, the question is posed:

Why does the Mac require the user to jump through a bunch of manual hoops to install an application? Why not use a traditional installer (a.k.a. setup.exe) that automates this manual work for you?

Rather than get into the details of the debate in the comments to that article over the ease of installing apps on the Mac the manual way, let me instead show you Jing’s answer to the question:

Jing’s installer options

(I wrote about Jing in the last post.)

The Jing approach is to give you two options:

  1. The incredibly easy way: Double-click the installer script and you’ll be shown this a dialog box that tells you that you’re about to initiate an action that will:
    • Copy Jing to the Applications folder
    • Eject the disk image
    • Start Jing
  2. The traditional manual way, in which you drag the app to the Applications folder. An alias to the Applications folder is provided, so you don’t have to open another Finder window.

No options dialog boxes, no EULAs, no extraneous messages for the purposes of marketing — just install and go.

I think it’s a good solution. What say you, Jeff?

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The Jing Project: Screen captures, Screencasts and Sharing

Jing Project logoMy job as Tucows’ Tech Evangelist often requires me to take screenshots and screencasts. Although Mac OS X (Tiger) is my primary laptop OS and Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) is my primary desktop OS, I shoot and edit screencasts on Windows because Camtasia is the one screen recording app that does the job for me.

TechSmith, the folks behind Camtasia Studio, have announced something called the Jing Project. Jing is software for both Mac and Windows that promises to do three things:

  • Capture images: Snap a picture of anything on your desktop.
  • Record video: Record video of what you do, or what you see.
  • Share online: Instantly uploaded. Share in email, IM, or blogs.

Here’s what they have to say on the site:

What is this thing called Jing? Video tour.

The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.

It’s something we want to give you, along with some online media hosting, to see how you use it. The project will eventually turn into something else. Tell us what you think so we can figure out what that is.

Try it, you’ll like it. Find out more in the FAQ, or on the weblog.

I’ve been hoping that someone would make decent screencasting software that ran on the Mac (and so have the people at 37signals). I’m hoping that this — or whatever springs forth from the project — is it.

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Guitar vs. “Guitar Hero”

Guitar Hero comic
Click to see the comic on its original page.

Trust me, kids: learn to play a musical instrument reasonably well before college.

As for accordion playing, the “coolness graph” looks like this:

Accordion coolness chart

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One Lapdance Per Child

OLPC with screen that reads “IM IN MY DEVELOPIN CNTRY WATCHIN UR PRON”

Sometimes I write a blog entry just for the sake of getting a funny title out there. This is one of those times, thanks to this report: Nigerian pupils browse porn on donated laptops.

(With apologies to the fine people at the One Laptop Per Child project)

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Facebook is the new…

Jason Kottke wrote that Facebook was the new AOL. Dave McClure disagreed and said that it’s the new Visual Basic, Brandon Paddock disagrees with both of them and says that it’s the new Windows.

According to a Google search for the phrase “Facebook is the new”, Facebook is the new…