Value your mind » Internet http://rangit.com Interesting. Informative. Mon, 24 Sep 2012 05:02:34 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 93 Top Sites That Are Free, Cool And Interesting http://rangit.com/internet/best-free-website-cool/ http://rangit.com/internet/best-free-website-cool/#comments Sun, 18 Mar 2012 04:39:35 +0000 Chris http://rangit.com/?p=231 Arrived at the office early? Got some time to burn during lunch? Sitting comfortably with nothing to do? Look no further. I have compiled a list of 93 sites that I find very interesting. Interesting enough to distract me from finishing this article. Took me 2 weeks when it could have been settled in 2 days. Oh well, it just goes to show how entertaining the sites were. Some sites you may have come across before, some not. So far, I’ve only managed to find 93 that make the cut. So if you have one in mind, let me know, yes?

Have fun getting distracted!


    Generally Interesting

  1. Digg

    2. Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories. Voting stories up and down is the site’s cornerstone function, respectively called digging and burying. Many stories get submitted every day, but only the most Dugg stories appear on the front page.

  2. StumbleUpon

    3. StumbleUpon is an Internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. Web pages are presented when the user clicks the “Stumble!” button on the browser’s toolbar. StumbleUpon chooses which Web page to display based on the user’s ratings of previous pages, ratings by his/her friends, and by the ratings of users with similar interests.

  3. FARK

    4. Fark.com is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows users to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. It is one of the top 100 English language websites, receiving over 2,500 submissions a day and over 5 million unique visitors per month. It is generally seen as a destination for strange news stories and snarky commentary.

  4. Delicious

    5. Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks that has more than five million users and 150 million bookmarked URLs.

  5. Reddit

    6. Reddit is a social news website on which users can post links to content on the web. Other users may then vote the posted links down or up, causing them to appear more or less prominently on the Reddit home page.

  6. Yahoo Buzz

    7. Yahoo! Buzz is a community-based news article website, much like Digg, that combines the features of social bookmarking and syndication through a user interface that allows editorial control. Users can be allowed to publish their own news stories, and link to their own or another person’s site that links to a full story of the information, therefore driving traffic to that person’s website and creating a larger market for sites that research and publish their own news articles and stories, such as CNN or smaller, privately owned websites.

  7. Technorati

    8. Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google and Yahoo. As of June 2008, Technorati indexes 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

  8. Mixx

    9. Mixx is a user-driven social media web site that serves to help users submit or find content by peers based on interest and location. It combines social networking and bookmarking with web syndication, blogging and personalization tools.

  9. Kaboodle

    10. Kaboodle is a social shopping community where people discover, recommend and share products. Kaboodle’s powerful shopping tools allow people to organize their shopping through lists, discover new things from people with similar style, get discounts on popular products and find best prices. At the heart of Kaboodle is a fun and engaging community of people who love to shop.

  10. Propeller

    11. Propeller, previously known as Netscape.com, is a social news aggregator operated by AOL-Netscape.
    It is similar to Digg; users can vote for which stories are to be included on the front page and may comment on them as well.

  11. I Am Bored

    12. A site containing loads of viral videos, games, memes, lists and social networking for when you’re bored.


    Videos

  12. Youtube

    13. YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. It uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos.

  13. Dailymotion

    14. Dailymotion is a video hosting service website, based in Paris, France. Its domain name was registered one month after YouTube. As of January 2008, the site was getting about 16,000 new videos posted daily, and page views in excess of 26 million per day.

  14. Metacafe

    15. Metacafe is similar to other video viewing websites such as YouTube or Dailymotion, but with several differences that include a different type of Adult content filtering, a community member reviewer panel, VideoRank, and Producer Rewards. Additionally, Metacafe pays video creators for original work that has exceeded a certain threshold of both total views and VideoRank score through its Producer Rewards Program.

  15. MySpace Video

    16. A service similar to the YouTube video sharing website.

  16. Yahoo! Video

    17. Similar to sites like YouTube, MySpaceTV, MSN Video and Veoh, Yahoo! Video began as an internet-wide video search engine and added the ability to upload and share video clips in June 2006. A re-designed site was launched in February 2008 that changed the focus to Yahoo-hosted video only. The site now consolidates all premium video from across Yahoo! properties with user-uploaded video.

  17. Megavideo

    18. A video site for streaming flash videos like the other video sharing sites.

  18. Project Free TV

    19. Project Free TV does not upload any videos nor do they know who and where videos are coming from. Links to the videos are submitted by users and managed by users.

  19. FileCabi.net(NSFW)

    20. Lists of interesting videos divided into 4 categories, mainly New, Top Rated, Most Popular and NSFW.


    Photos

  20. Flickr: Explore!

    21. Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. As of November 2008, it claims to host more than 3 billion images.

  21. Photobucket

    22. Photobucket is an image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing website. It was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures. It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007.

  22. PicasaWeb Explore

    23. Picasa Web Albums is a photo-sharing web application from Google, often compared to programs like Flickr. It allows users with accounts at Google to store and share 1 GB of photos for free. Users can purchase more storage space, which can be shared between Google services.

  23. deviantART

    24. deviantART aims to provide a place for any artist to exhibit and discuss works which are organized in a comprehensive category structure, including photography, digital art, traditional art, literature, Flash, filmmaking, and skins for applications, among others, along with extensive downloadable resources such as tutorials and stock photography.

  24. Behance

    25. Behance is a company that designs products and services that empower the creative world to make ideas happen. The Behance team studies exceptionally productive people and teams working in creative fields. They document the methods and resources that these productive creative professionals use to push their ideas forward.

  25. NASA Images

    26. NASA Images is a service of Internet Archive, a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA’s images, videos and audio collections. NASA Images is constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers. The goal of NASA Images is to increase our understanding of the earth, our solar system and the universe beyond in order to benefit humanity.


    Games

  26. AddictingGames

    27. AddictingGames is one of the first Flash game portals and helped popularize both the Flash platform and casual games. It is today part of the MTV Online Network, receiving over 10 million visitors a month.

  27. Yahoo! Games

    28. Yahoo! Games is the section of the Yahoo! website in which Yahoo! users can play games either with other users or by themselves. The games on the website are typically Java applets or quick Flash games, but there are others which require a download. Yahoo! Games has a large user base playing various kinds of games, such as card games, board games, fantasy sports, emulated arcade games, and word games.

  28. MiniClip

    29. Miniclip was first launched in 2001 by Robert Small and Tihan Presbie where Small was fresh out of university when he founded the company with futures trader Presbie on a budget of £40,000. 43 million unique users visit the site per month and the company has been valued at over £200 million, having been profitable for six of its seven years, with turnovers exceeding £20 million in the past two years.

  29. PopCap Games

    30. PopCap Games was founded in 2000 by John Vechey, Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka, and currently employs more than 180 people. Most of Popcap’s games can be played free in a limited form, with the full version available for a fee. PopCap’s games have been downloaded more than 1 billion times, and its flagship title Bejeweled has sold more than 10 million units across all major platforms.

  30. Shockwave

    31. They have been giving their large loyal audience its daily dose of online interactive fun since 1998, and Shockwave became a part of Viacom’s MTV Networks in 2006. They’ve got more than 450 games, with new ones added each week.

  31. Pogo Games

    32. Pogo.com is a gaming website that offers a variety of free casual games, from card and board games to puzzle, sports, and word games. Since 2006, Pogo.com has consistently been a top-10 Internet site for U.S. visitors when measured by time spent online.

    Some of Pogo.com’s competitors for casual and social gamers include Yahoo! Games, Viacom’s Neopets, Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, and IWon.com.

  32. Guild Wars

    33. Guild Wars is an episodic series of multiplayer online role-playing games developed by ArenaNet and published by NCsoft. ArenaNet hosts official Guild Wars tournaments where the most successful players and guilds may compete for the chance to play live at gaming conventions and win prizes up to 100,000 USD. The games in the Guild Wars series were critically well received and won many editor’s choice awards, as well as awards such as best value, best massively multiplayer online role-playing game and best game. Guild Wars was noted for being one of the few commercially developed games in the MMORPG genre to offer online play without subscription fees, its instanced approach to MMORPG play, and the quality of the graphics and play for computers with low specifications. The sequel, Guild Wars 2, was announced in March 2007. It will have updated graphics and gameplay mechanics, and will continue the original Guild Wars tradition of no subscription fees.

  33. Neopets

    34. Neopets is based around the virtual pets that inhabit the virtual world of Neopia. Visitors can create an account and take care of up to four virtual pets, buying them food, toys, clothes, and other accessories using a virtual currency called Neopoints. Neopoints can be earned through playing games, investing in the game’s stock market, trading, and winning contests. On 20 June 2005, Viacom bought Neopets, Inc. for US$160 million.

  34. Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates

    35. Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is a massively multiplayer online game where a player takes the role of a pirate, having adventures on the high seas and pillaging money from roaming enemy ships. The mechanics of Puzzle Pirates are driven by puzzles. As of December 2008, there are 4 million pirates registered to the game.

  35. IWon.com

    36. IWon.com is a free casual game site and web portal that offers the chance to win cash and prizes through activities such as clicking through links or playing online games. Iwon began as an internet search engine, offering daily prizes in exchange for points earned using their engine. Activities on the website earn entries into daily, weekly, monthly and the annual cash sweepstakes and other giveaways. For example, performing an internet search earns 30 coins; you can win coins by playing games. Entries cost 100 coins each. The site is most known for awarding an annual cash prize ranging from US$100,000 to US$1 million annually.


    Celebrities

  36. People

    37. Website of a weekly American magazine of celebrity and human-interest stories which focuses exclusively on celebrity news. In February 2007, the website drew 39.6 million page views ‘within a day’ of the Golden Globes. However ‘the mother ship of Oscar coverage’ broke a site record with 51.7 million page views on the day after the Oscars, beating the previous record set just a month before from the Golden Globes.

  37. TMZ

    38. TMZ.com is a celebrity gossip and news website, the result of a collaboration between AOL and Telepictures Productions, a division of Warner Bros. TMZ stands for ‘Thirty Mile Zone’, a term that represents the center of Hollywood.

  38. USmagazine.com

    39. USmagazine.com is the website for Us Weekly, a celebrity magazine that covers topics ranging from celebrity news and style, to the latest trends in fashion, beauty, and entertainment. It currently gets approximately two million visitors per month. In addition to features from the magazine, the site has a breaking celebrity news blog, exclusive photos, red carpet galleries from premieres and events, plus games, videos, quizzes and polls.

  39. omg!

    40. omg! is a celebrity news and gossip website, run by Yahoo! News’s entertainment division. Due to heavy publicity on Yahoo’s front page and with its partnerships, readership took off, with four million readers logging on to omg! in the first 19 days alone. As of autumn 2007, omg! registered over eight million readers a month, and is the second most-read gossip website in the United States, ahead of People and behind TMZ.com.

  40. Starpulse.com

    41. Founded in 1999, Starpulse.com began as a link directory evolving from just 12 original pages. The website is independently owned and operated, consisting of approximately 5 million pages of deep content on entertainment news, movies, TV shows, music, red carpet events, movie premieres, and an average of 40 million page views per month.

  41. E! Online

    42. E! Online is the online arm of E!, an American cable television and direct broadcast satellite network, providing the latest daily news and celebrity inside information in a fun, irreverent tone. E! Online attracts approximately 2.5 million unique U.S. users per month.

  42. Perezhilton

    43. Perezhilton.com is the website of Mario Armando Lavandeira, Jr, an American blogger and television personality who posts gossip items about musicians, actors and celebrities. He also posts tabloid photographs over which he has added his own captions or ‘doodles’.

  43. PopSugar

    44. PopSugar.com is Sugar Publishing’s celebrity news and gossip site that differentiates itself from other gossip blogs by refraining from posting ‘snarky’ commentary about the celebrities it follows. PopSugar publishes between 25-28 posts daily on weekdays. The site’s content features up-to-the minute news, candid photos and magazine photoshoots, major event recaps, celebrity interviews, “Pop on the Street,” video comments, daily features (polls, celebrity “Guess Who?,” etc.) and highlights of the best of other gossip blogs/sites.

  44. The Superficial

    45. The Superficial is a website devoted to celebrity gossip. It was named one of the five best celebrity news websites by a Chicago Tribune writer. The Superficial is known for its sharply negative and biting wit. Unlike other celebrity news sites such as E! Online and TMZ.com, The Superficial lampoons the behavior of celebrities, to a degree even greater than Perez Hilton.

  45. Dlisted

    46. Dlisted is a celebrity gossip blog written by Michael K that garners more than a million hits a day. His distinctive style and humor have been described as ‘snarky’ and ‘unforgiving’ which fit the blog’s tagline: ‘Be Very Afraid’.

  46. What Would Tyler Durden Do?

    47. What Would Tyler Durden Do? is a gossip blog named after the Fight Club character Tyler Durden. The blog, which is occasionally not safe for work, is notable for publishing rumours, criticism and revealing photographs of celebrities. In a 2006 Youth Trends survey, What Would Tyler Durden Do? was one of two blogs top 10 most popular websites with females aged 17–25, a popularity the researcher attributed to ‘Gen Y females’ current adoration with content surrounding celebrities and their ‘uh oh’ moments.


    Travel

  47. TripAdvisor

    48. TripAdvisor.com is a free travel guide and research website that hosts reviews from users and other information designed to help plan a vacation. TripAdvisor reviews cover more than 212,000 hotels and 74,000 attractions in over 30,000 destinations worldwide. With more than 15 million reviews and opinions and nearly 30 million unique visitors a month, TripAdvisor claims to be the largest travel community on the web.

  48. Wikitravel

    49. Wikitravel is a Web-based project “to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable worldwide travel guide.” Wikitravel received a Webby Award for Best Travel Website in 2007. That same year, Wikitravel’s founders began Wikitravel Press, which publishes printed travel guides based on the Web site’s content. The first print guides were released on February 1, 2008.

  49. Lonelyplanet

    50. Lonely Planet’s online community used by over half a million travellers for trade tips and advice. The Lonely Planet website was upgraded in 2008; new features include the ability to rate and review sites and restaurants, save them to a favourites list as well as a Trip Planner tool.

  50. Fodors

    51. Fodor’s is the world’s largest publisher of English language travel and tourism information, and the first relatively professional producer of travel guidebooks. In 1996, Fodor’s launched a travel-related website fodors.com, which was nominated for a Webby Award in 2004. Today, Fodor’s has published more than 440 guides (in 14 series) on over 300 destinations, and has more than 700 permanently placed researchers all over the world.

  51. World Travel Guide

    52. Website of The Columbus World Travel Guide, the company that publishes travel guides to every country in the world as well as detailed city, ski, beach, cruise and airport guides. Their World City Guide, providing information on over 200 culturally important cities, adds to the portfolio of comprehensive travel information. One the other hand, the World Events Guide features over 4,000 events across five continents in some 80 countries, ranging from small-scale local events to major international festivals where new events are added to the site weekly.

  52. Travel Guides – Travel Channel

    53. The Travel Channel is a cable television network that features documentaries and how-to shows related to travel and leisure around the United States and throughout the world. Programming has included shows in African animal safaris, tours of grand hotels, and visits to significant cities and towns, with recent programming putting an emphasis on how the rich travel and on “haunted” destinations, like Most Haunted and Ghost Adventures.

  53. 10Best

    54. 10Best is one of the the trusted sources for online travel advice. One could find unbiased, top-rated recommendations for a city’s best sights, restaurants, clubs, and shops. No business can pay to be listed.

  54. TimesOnline: Travel

    55. Tourism and travel arm of The Times newspaper of UK.

  55. Destination360

    56. A producer of online travel guides throughout the world.

  56. Yahoo! Travel

    57. Yahoo!’s travel service offering travel guides, booking and reservation services.


    Education

  57. Wikipedia

    58. Wikipedia’s 12 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone who can access the Wikipedia website. Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, it is currently the most popular general reference work on the Internet. Wikipedia is not only important as an encyclopedic reference but also as a frequently-updated news resource.

  58. HowStuffWorks

    59. HowStuffWorks is a website that was founded by Marshall Brain and is dedicated to explaining the way many things work. The site uses photos, diagrams, video and animation to explain complex terminology and mechanisms in easy-to-understand language.

  59. eHow

    60. eHow is an online knowledge resource of articles and videos offering step-by-step instructions on “how to do just about everything”. eHow content is created by both professional experts and amateur members and covers a wide variety of topics organized into a hierarchy of categories.

  60. National Geographic

    61. The website of one of the largest non-profit scientific and educational institutions in the world. Its interests include geography, archaeology and natural science, the promotion of environmental and historical conservation, and the study of world culture and history.

  61. Discovery Channel

    62. The website of the American satellite and cable TV channel that provides documentary programming focused primarily on popular science, technology, and history which reaches 431 million homes in 170 countries. In the U.S., the programming for the main Discovery network is primarily focused on “reality-based” television themes, such as speculative investigation (with shows such as Mythbusters, Unsolved History, and Best Evidence), automobiles, and occupations (Dirty Jobs and Deadliest Catch).

  62. Internet Public Library

    63. IPL is a non-profit, largely student-run website at Drexel University. Visitors can ask a reference question and the volunteer librarians and graduate students in library and information science form collections and answer questions.

  63. NASA

    64. Website of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States government responsible for the nation’s public space program. NASA’s self-described mission statement is to “pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research.”

  64. Innerbody

    65. Innerbody’s vision is to provide high quality educational content about human anatomy through low bandwidth Internet access to children, parents and schools worldwide. At the time of writing this, Innerbody is serving approximately 500,000 people with about 12,000,000 page impressions per month. The Inner Sites have become part of the curriculum at many schools around the world.

  65. Britannica

    66. Website of Encyclopedia Britannica, a general English language encyclopaedia that publishes articles in aimed at educated adult readers. The size of the Britannica has remained roughly constant over the past 70 years, with about 40 million words on half a million topics. It won the 2005 Codie award for “Best Online Consumer Information Service”.


    Life Improvement

  66. Lifehacker

    67. Lifehacker is a blog about life hacks and software that covers Microsoft Windows, Mac, and Linux programs as well as time-saving tips and tricks. The staff updates the site about 18 times each weekday, with reduced updates on weekends. Time magazine named Lifehacker one of the “50 Coolest Web Sites” in 2005, one of the “25 Sites We Can’t Live Without” in 2006 and one of the “25 Best Blogs 2009″.

  67. Dumb Little Man

    68. Jay White started Dumb Little Man after realizing that his time had literally disappeared with the birth of his second child. As the site’s audience grew so did the site. People began sharing their experiences and today, most of the articles are from people who started out as readers. Dumb Little Man covers all sorts of ideas from budgeting at home to starting a business or trying to lose weight.

  68. Zen Habits

    69. One of the top blogs on the internet covering goal achieving, productivity, being organized, GTD, motivation, eliminating debt, saving, getting a flat stomach, eating healthy, simplifying, living frugal, parenting, happiness, and successfully implementing good habits. Leo Babauta, Zen Habits’ creator, produced his first print book, The Power of Less, that reached Amazon’s best-seller list on its first day and remains one of the top business motivation books on Amazon.

  69. Steve Pavlina

    70. Steve Pavlina’s blog covers topics such as personal development and success; consciousness and courage; productivity, motivation and goal setting; career, wealth and business; and spirituality. Some of his most popular writing is around lifestyle and lifestyle experimentation, where he will try a different style of living and transparently blog about the day-to-day experience. Examples include raw veganism and polyamory. His most famous experiment in this regard is with polyphasic sleep, the practice of taking multiple naps in a 24 hour period.

  70. Stepcase Lifehack

    71. Leon Ho founded Stepcase Lifehack in 2005, a blog on tips and tricks that get things done quickly by automating, increasing productivity and organizing.

  71. PickTheBrain

    72. A website dedicated to self improvement with a focus on personal productivity, motivation, positive psychology, and self education.

  72. Brian Kim

    73. Brian Kim inspires, provides and shares what he learned and successfully applied from his analysis of several hundred self improvement books he has read for over a decade that have helped him achieve all his goals in life.

  73. 43 Folders

    74. Merlin Mann started 43 Folders in 2004 focused on an arc about how to improve the quality of your career and life by managing your attention in a way that allows you to work your ass off on the creative projects that matter most to you.

  74. Self Growth

    75. Self Growth’s mission is to provide informative, quality self improvement and natural health information to help people improve their lives. The site provides information ranging from goal setting and stress management to natural health.

  75. Stevenn Aitchisen’s Blog

    76. This contains lots of different links, articles, blogs, thoughts anything and everything that will help you make yourself a better person.

  76. The Positivity Blog

    77. The Positivity Blog is focused on positivity and opening up new possibilities through motivating and practical articles on how to improve your life.

  77. I Will Teach You To Be Rich

    78. I Will Teach You To Be Rich is a community focused on personal finance and entrepreneurship. It’s been featured in Wall Street Journal, New York Times, NPR, ABC News, and CNBC.

  78. Wise Bread

    79. Wise Bread is a community of bloggers who pitch in ideas to live large on a small budget. The goal is to maintain financial independence while enjoying life at the same time.

  79. The Simple Dollar

    80. Trent Hamm went through a complete financial meltdown in April 2006. He threw himself head first into trying to figure out every nuance of fixing his financial situation, and after a few months, he began to get the picture. Within eight months, he paid off all of his credit card debt, paid off his vehicle and also established an emergency fund. Since he had a passion for writing and had learned so much about how personal finance really works, The Simple Dollar was established near the end of 2006 to tell the world about what he had learned and help people who were struggling with the same things.

  80. Get Rich Slowly

    81. Get Rich Slowly, named most inspiring money blog by Money magazine, is devoted to sensible personal finance. JD, the author, publishes stories about debt elimination, saving money, and practical investing. He started out when he found himself deep in debt and when it finally became too overwhelming, he began reading personal finance books, hoping to find answers.

  81. Litemind

    82. Website of Luciano Passuello who realized that his deep fascination for the mind was his greatest underlying passion and, in some way, intersects with many other interests of his.


    Comedy

  82. I Can Has Cheezburger?

    83. I Can Has Cheezburger? is the name of a blog featuring lolcats (a cat with humorous caption in broken English). Created by Eric Nakagawa (Cheezburger), a blogger from Hawaii and his partner, Kari Unebasami (Tofuburger), the website has become one of the most popular lolcat sites on the internet, receiving as many as 1.5 million hits per day.

  83. I Has A Hot Dog

    84. Similar to I Can Has Cheezburger? but dogs instead of cats.

  84. FAIL Blog

    85. Contains pictures and videos of blatant stupidity or incompetence with captions involving the words “[Epic] Fail” prominently.

  85. CollegeHumor

    86. CollegeHumor is a comedy website that features a collection of original and user-submitted videos, as well as pictures, articles, and links. As the name implies, CollegeHumor is directed towards and features content that would appeal to the university and college-aged demographic.

  86. funny or DIE

    87. A comedy video website founded by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s production company, Gary Sanchez Productions with original and user generated content. Funny or Die is also unique in that it contains a good deal of exclusive material from a number of famous contributors like Judd Apatow and James Franco.

  87. Stupid Videos

    88. A viral video website dedicated to humorous, off-the-wall videos, including wild stunts, wacky animals, sports bloopers, funny commercials, song and dance parodies. and more.


    Others

  88. Quizilla

    89. Quizilla is a user generated online quiz website.

  89. Jalopnik

    90. A weblog covering cars, car culture, and the automotive industry. The blog began publishing in 2004 and is known for its mix of automotive news with an ‘irreverent’ style and tone. The site gained prominence relatively quickly upon its founding. Its contributors have been included in media events and press conferences hosted by major automotive manufacturers.

  90. Autoblog

    91. A web site that offers daily weblogs and podcast news and commentary about automobiles and the automotive industry. The blog began publishing in 2003.

  91. Mashable

    92. An internet news blog about MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Google, Twitter and startups, but it also reports on less high-profile social networking sites. It garners 5+ million pageviews per month.

  92. Yahoo! LAUNCHcast

    93. LAUNCHcast allowed users to create personal radio stations or playlists of songs tailored to their musical tastes. Music videos could also be rated, allowing users to create personal music video channels as well.

  93. Last.fm

    94. Last.fm is a UK-based Internet radio and music community website, founded in 2002. It claims over 30 million active users based in more than 200 countries. Users can create custom radio stations and playlists from any of the audio tracks in Last.fm’s music library, and are able to listen to some individual tracks on demand, or download tracks if the rights holder has previously authorized it.

]]> http://rangit.com/internet/best-free-website-cool/feed/ 4 8 Ways To Deal With Web Traffic Spikes To Your Site http://rangit.com/internet/handle-sudden-traffic-increase-to-website/ http://rangit.com/internet/handle-sudden-traffic-increase-to-website/#comments Tue, 28 Feb 2012 01:59:12 +0000 Chris http://rangit.com/internet/8-preparation-methods-that-everyone-should-know-about-for-the-next-digg-slashdot-effect/ And so it was my first time getting into the frontpage of Yahoo, experiencing the sudden spike of traffic exceeding 60,000 users in 2 days. What a phenomenon. So much that I got a notice on my website looking like this :

I had mix reactions actually. Good in the sense of exposure, bad in the sense of forking out additional cash to buy extra bandwidth. I wasn’t really prepared for the wrath, but nevertheless it’s an eye opening experience.

Over the hours, I scoured the web for all the information I can find about preparing myself for the next StumbleUpon, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google Plus effect. Some of the methods suggested seemed complicated but anyhow, all are useful. Anyways, here are 8 simple things that everyone should know about preparing for the next sudden increase of traffic due to social network sites.

  1. What’s The Host’s Reaction?

    2. I for one, am a client of a shared hosting account. If you are like me, you don’t have much control of the situation when a spike occurs. When it happened to me, I thought that i could bring forward some of next month’s transfer limit. However, the only choice presented to me by my host was buying additional bandwidth which will only last until the end of the month. I bought it today 28th May, and will last only till 31st May.

    I found out that some other hosts may even think that the spike is an attack of some sort. So it’s pretty important to find out the actions of your host. Cause once the server is down, none of the steps below will help.

  2. External Media Hosting

    3. This includes images, videos and audios. All the media for all my websites are hosted externally. It helped me tremendously. I had over 60,000 visitors before I exceeded my bandwidth transfer quota of 10GB. It meant that the size of a page is about 166KB. If I had included the 8 screenshots, the total size of the page would’ve been over 500 KB, capable of serving 20,000 visitors, 3 times less, before exceeding bandwidth.

    I host ALL my images in imageshack, videos in YouTube and audio files in imeem. All 3 are highly reliable media hosting sites in their respective categories. Thanks to them, I have lifted a huge burden on my server’s side by keeping page sizes as small as possible.

  3. WP-Cache 2

    4. Super efficient caching plugin by Ricardo Galli. It improves pages of self hosted WordPress blogs by caching and storing them in static files, improving efficiency by skipping the process of compiling the entire PHP code and building the page from the database. Serve hundreds more for each passing second and improve performance from near a minute to millisecond. WP-Cache 2 is a huge improvement over its predecessor, WP-Cache.

  4. PHP Accelerators

    5. alt=”eaccelerator” />

    The name says it all. As long as the application is written in PHP, you get to enjoy the performance boost. What it mainly does is
    cache the compiled bytecode form of PHP scripts to avoid overheads on ALL page request of parsing and compiling source code that may never even get executed.

    Depending on execution time and the percentage of source code executed, the PHP code will experience speed boosts of an average of 6X on a given request. Check out the list of PHP accelerators. The current general preferred accelerator is eAccelerator. However, you will need to ask your host about installing this. Your webhost may have already installed a PHP accelerator.

  5. Mirrors

    6. duggmirror and Mirrordot are the most famous mirrors for social networking sites like Digg and Slashdot. Both sites will mirror articles that hit the front page of both social bookmarks, keeping a copy in their servers in the event that the ‘dugg’ site goes down. For example, here’s my site’s ‘dugg’ article mirrored in duggmirror. Put the mirror link in the comments of Digg or MirrorDot, to redirect traffic in the event the site fails.

  6. Switch Off Plugins

    7. Know that plugins are also files that are called by your themes to generate queries to the database to yield the information on your blog. The more plugins, the more queries to the database. Sudden increase in web traffic will last mostly around 2-3 days. Choose a few from among the list of plugins that you can live without for a few days. Once you realize an incoming surge of traffic, quickly turn a few off temporarily.

  7. Optimizing Apache Server

    8. This article lists 5 steps that you can take to configure Apache for maximum performance.

  8. Upgrade Hosting

    9. If frustrations still appear after executing the above steps successfully, then it’s time to move up. Take everything a step at a time. If you’re on :

    • Shared hosting, try upgrading to Virtual Dedicated Hosting.
    • Virtual Dedicated Hosting, try upgrading to Dedicated Hosting.
    • Dedicated Hosting, try upgrading to a higher-powered dedicated server.
    • High-Powered Dedicated Hosting, go for multiple Load Balanced Servers.

    If it is a bandwidth transfer problem, try negotiating for an increase. If not, move over to a different provider that can feed your traffic bandwidth requirements.

]]> http://rangit.com/internet/handle-sudden-traffic-increase-to-website/feed/ 3 15 Of The Most Useful Facebook Applications http://rangit.com/information-technology/most-useful-facebook-applications/ http://rangit.com/information-technology/most-useful-facebook-applications/#comments Fri, 29 May 2009 06:30:46 +0000 Chris http://rangit.com/?p=229 Facebook, the social networking site that has more than 200 million active users nationwide, is as interesting as it is today thanks to its awesome base of applications. As of July 23rd 2008, the total number of applications have exceeded 33,000. What’s more, they’re growing more each passing day as developers identify potentials of having their stuff all over millions of Facebook profiles.

Sounds good but let’s be honest. Facebook is not a tool. It is an escape. Very few people go there or would want to go there to write a document, plan a meeting or collaborate. Out of the tens of thousands of applications, only a handful is truly worth your time. Below are some of the most useful Facebook applications I’ve come across.

    Default Applications

  1. Photos.

    2. In my opinion, this is the most popular and useful Facebook application. There is no limit to the number of albums and photos an user can upload, you get to control your own privacy settings and label users in the photo with the ‘tag’ feature. What an interesting, natural interaction generator.

  2. Block Application.

    3. Frustrated by annoying applications? No more. Since the introduction of the ‘Block Application’ feature, you could easily block the application directly from the request. Once blocked, it will not be able to send you any more requests.

  3. Mobile.

    4. Facebook while taking a crap in the toilet or waiting for the bus.

    3rd Party Applications

  4. kaChing

    5. Great application that is worth getting addicted to. Relevant to the world and your career. A cross between Google Analytics, Yahoo Questions and Seeking Alpha. Ka-Ching is easy and simple to understand, all stocks and shares ARE REAL, based on real time and experts from all sorts of fields to learn from. The combination of visual risk metrics, statistical tools, and a structure conducive to high-value interactions amongst its community investors makes Ka-Ching the #1 in terms of investing ideas.

  5. SocialVibe

    6. SocialVibe is a great way to give back to the world that we live in. What happens is you get yourself sponsored by your favourite brands and earn donations for the charity of your choice. The idea is to enable everyone to play a great part and network globally.

  6. Selective Twitter Status

    7. Update your Facebook status from Twitter, but ONLY for the tweets you choose. IMO, better than the original Twitter developed Facebook application as it avoids confusion with your Facebook friends and prevents swamping your profile with too many updates.

  7. How well do you know me?

    8. Have fun constructing your own questions and have friends answer them.

  8. Extended Info

    9. Winner of the Facebook F8 Contest. Extended Info allows you to add extra fields to your profile, such as Currently Reading, Favorite Foods, or anything else you can think of. Supports videos, images, music, and HTML.

  9. Similar People

    10. Discover people that share your personal sense of humor, style, politics, art, and more. The best way to connect with people you’d actually want to be connected to in Facebook.

  10. Shopaholic Magazine(For Girls)

    11. You’d love this. Shopaholic Magazine keeps fashionistas ahead of the curve with insider info, exclusive photo shoots, a virtual store and addicting fashion games.

  11. Sexgames

    12. Sex Games is a tongue-in-cheek multiplayer game where you work with an Entourage to prove your skills in the Club. Complete sexual conquests and pick up all the hottest players on Facebook.

  12. Groupcard

    13. An application that allows you to create group birthday cards, group greeting cards, and other group cards for your friends. Start the card and then invite your friends to sign it.

  13. Quitclock

    14. Most motivating application for smokers. It keeps track of how long you’ve been off the ciggy and a total running cash you’ve saved. Youc an also read handy health tips and collect support messages on your Quitclock wall.

  14. Myxer

    15. Select from hundreds of thousands of ringtones, wallpapers, videos and games for your mobile phone available at no charge. Also, make your own original mobile content and share it with millions of other Myxer users. You can even make money by selling your own original content as ringtones. Limited to North America.

  15. On Track

    16. A practical online application that helps you save time and effort by keeping you focused on goal objectives, tasks, and progress. On Track significantly improves the chances that the goal will be achieved on target.

]]> http://rangit.com/information-technology/most-useful-facebook-applications/feed/ 2 Types Of Pop-Up Ads http://rangit.com/internet/types-of-pop-up-ads/ http://rangit.com/internet/types-of-pop-up-ads/#comments Mon, 25 Jun 2007 06:22:20 +0000 Chris http://rangit.com/internet/types-of-pop-up-ads/

Pop ups. The annoying advertisement method that disrupts your browsing activities. If you are browsing the web with Firefox, Opera, Safari or IE7, most pop-ups are blocked automatically. Below are the 12 pop-up methods that are used by amateurs all over the world wide web to gain traffic and capture email addresses. The link at the end of the post will take you to a pop up tester website.

  1. Multi Pop-Up

    2. The website will launch multiple pop ups upon entering. Different techniques are used.

  2. Come And Go

    3. Pop-ups are launched upon entering and exiting.

  3. Timed Pop-Up

    4. Pop-ups are programmed to launch after a certain amount of time. Normally, 5 seconds.

  4. Mouseover Pop-Up

    5. Just hovering your mouse over a picture or text will trigger the pop-up. No clicks required, just movement.

  5. Floating Pop-Up

    6. This is a pretty annoying type of pop-up. It doesn’t go away until a certain action is accomplished.

  6. Channel Opener

    7. Doesn’t affect Firefox users. This type opens a full-screen channel mode window in IE.

  7. Modeless Window

    8. It will stay at the upper section of the browser until the page is closed.

  8. Full Screen Trap

    9. This is a type of pop-up that opens full screen and doesn’t include any exit button or action. The only way to close it is by pressing Alt+F4.

  9. Drop Down Pop-Up

    10. This type will drop down like a curtain. My Firefox 2.0.0.4 couldn’t stop this.

  10. Floating Banner

    11. You will see an airplane fly the banner across the site.

  11. Chromeless

    12. It is non standard and borderless.

  12. Sticky Pop-Up

    13. Floating pop up that will appear in a corner no matter how high or low you scroll in the webpage. My Firefox 2.0.0.4 couldn’t stop this.

Pop Up Tester
Test how well your pop up blocker is doing

]]> http://rangit.com/internet/types-of-pop-up-ads/feed/ 0 Guess My Age http://rangit.com/internet/guess-my-age/ http://rangit.com/internet/guess-my-age/#comments Mon, 25 Jun 2007 05:27:35 +0000 Chris http://rangit.com/internet/guess-my-age/ age project

Here’s a pretty cool site that lets you guess ages of randomly selected users. Test how well you can judge a book by its cover. Click here to start guessing with my profile. =)

]]> http://rangit.com/internet/guess-my-age/feed/ 0 Experience Is The New Reality http://rangit.com/internet/experience-is-the-new-reality/ http://rangit.com/internet/experience-is-the-new-reality/#comments Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:05:02 +0000 Chris http://rangit.com/internet/experience-is-the-new-reality/ Prosumers. Users who consume and produce at the same time. It’s amazing how media has evolved from physical to digital. Watch videos for free, read news for free, chat for free, hold conferences for free, etc. Virtual life will become the biggest market on the planet. Start investing. I have, have you? =)

]]> http://rangit.com/internet/experience-is-the-new-reality/feed/ 0 New Windows Live Hotmail Released http://rangit.com/internet/new-windows-live-hotmail-released/ http://rangit.com/internet/new-windows-live-hotmail-released/#comments Tue, 08 May 2007 07:55:51 +0000 Chris http://rangit.com/internet/new-windows-live-hotmail-released/ windows live dashboard

Yeap, no longer Beta. yeap, they’ve joined the race. It was announced on Sunday by Microsoft that the popular MSN Hotmail free web based email service is now fully upgraded. They were the first web mail service that I’ve signed up for, but I haven’t been using it since Yahoo and Gmail. =P Although I use MSN Messenger a lot, I don’t check mails with Hotmail. Anyway, they’ve sported several new features and security enhancements.

  1. Storage capacity increased from 1GB to 2GB of storage.
  2. Ability to customize own design and layout.
  3. Check out suspicious looking e-mails
  4. It gives me the feel of a web based Outlook
  5. A reading pane for previewing messages
  6. Ability to drag-and-drop objects everywhere
  7. Online integration with MSN Messenger

send message

Well, they are actually lucky to still have a user base of more than 280 million active accounts, which is about 2% of the market share. However, Yahoo Mail is still the most used online web mail service. Most of the features like drag and drop and a 2GB storage capacity have already been implemented by Yahoo! Currently, Live Hotmail users will have an option to remain using the old version. I guess that users with lower bandwidth capacity won’t do so well with Live Hotmail’s rich graphic interface. Somehow or rather, all users will be moved over to Live Hotmail. Maybe that’s the time when everyone’s using broadband.

Microsoft Delivers Hotmail Upgrade
Hotmail’s migration process begins

]]> http://rangit.com/internet/new-windows-live-hotmail-released/feed/ 0 Unproductive Internet Usage And The Most Threatened IM In The World http://rangit.com/internet/unproductive-internet-usage-and-the-most-threatened-im-in-the-world/ http://rangit.com/internet/unproductive-internet-usage-and-the-most-threatened-im-in-the-world/#comments Tue, 24 Apr 2007 03:27:41 +0000 Chris http://rangit.com/internet/unproductive-internet-usage-and-the-most-threatened-im-in-the-world/ scan safe

That is according to ScanSafe’s Global Threat Report on February 2007. Unproductive simply means that the sites visited are not in line with the work of the company. Unproductive sites include :

  • online chat
  • gambling
  • music
  • porn
  • dating & relationships
  • webmail

During sporting events like the Super Bowl and World Cup, gambling and sporting sites will top the list. ScanSafe saw a traffic increase of 77% in US based request to gambling and sporting sites during the week before Super Bowl.

The highly unnecessary internet usage risks the company to exposure of :

  • legal liability
  • disclosure of confidential information
  • breaches of compliance requirements
  • unnecessary bandwidth consumption

Did you know that MSN is the most threatened IM in the world? and it has been the No.1 since February 2006. A total of 54% of unique threats were blocked for MSN while 21% went to Yahoo.

ScanSafe
Web security as a service

]]> http://rangit.com/internet/unproductive-internet-usage-and-the-most-threatened-im-in-the-world/feed/ 0 Little Known Ways To Trace IP Addresses From Anywhere In The World http://rangit.com/information-technology/little-known-ways-to-trace-ip-addresses-from-anywhere-in-the-world/ http://rangit.com/information-technology/little-known-ways-to-trace-ip-addresses-from-anywhere-in-the-world/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2007 10:28:00 +0000 Chris http://rangit.com/information-technology/little-known-ways-to-trace-ip-addresses-from-anywhere-in-the-world/

Trace Any IP Address In The World
See a satellite image of the place in the world it comes from

]]> http://rangit.com/information-technology/little-known-ways-to-trace-ip-addresses-from-anywhere-in-the-world/feed/ 0 Big Web Links : A New Concept Web Directory http://rangit.com/internet/big-web-links-a-new-concept-web-directory/ http://rangit.com/internet/big-web-links-a-new-concept-web-directory/#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2007 15:15:01 +0000 Chris http://rangit.com/internet/big-web-links-a-new-concept-web-directory/ bigweblinks

Now here’s a web directory that has a new kind of concept that aims to showcase the best and most popular websites on the Internet. Sites are not ranked by traffic or Google PageRank but by the bid for placement dollars contributed to the listing. The obvious benefit from such a ranking system is getting indication of site’s traffic quality. It is an attraction point for advertisers to come and search for potential publishers.

Interested websites have only to pay a low one-time fee of USD$29.90. After that, anyone can add to the contribution to increase the ranking of a website. Note that listings are sorted by bid amount. If it’s high in ranking, it’s high in price.

bigweblinks

Currently, there are 48 categories covered. From advertising to sports to travel and wedding, you can find it there. The top 10 sites are found at the front page, whereas the categories will show the top 20 of the page. If you can find a site over at BigWebLinks that you really enjoy surfing and have a dollar to spare, why not show some love and help promote it. I would, if only Blizzard Entertainment was in there. =P

* sponsored review *

BigWebLinks
Awesome links for awesome people

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