DreamHost is an awesome shared hosting provider, and I’ve recently received five infamous DreamHost Invitations to share!

Here they are:

• 625757887169
• 277301713800
• 507753713227
• 539745279065
• 300954978821

These DreamHost Invitations give you $15 off if you choose a one-year plan or $100 off a two year plan! Keep in mind that there’s still a free trial period in case you change your mind.

To use the invite code, go to https://signup.dreamhost.com/ and enter the code in the Promo Code box.

I’ll remove these codes as they’re used.

This post is a work in progress. View it here.

iVPN is a personal VPN service - I just setup my account last week and I’m really liking it so far. They offer low-cost plans that feature multiple endpoints, no logging (so they say), and unlimited monthly traffic. They also seem to be very fast - I have noticed almost no slowdown since switching.

(read Wikipedia for more info on VPNs)

iVPN came highly recommended by many commenters on Lifehacker, so I though I’d give them a try. My iPhone and MacBook Pro are configured to use L2TP/IPSec as OpenVPN is not supported on the iPhone and I did not want to run another client on the Mac. My linux media server is configured to use OpenVPN and is running quite nicely, though I think I did mess up my remote network access somehow (the Plex server and DynDNS ddclient were reporting iVPN’s endpoint’s IP address), but I have fixed that with dynamic DNS on my Time Capsule router.

All in all, I would definitely recommend iVPN if you’re looking for a way to stay secure on the internet.

Check out iVPN

NOTE: these links are affiliate links - if you do signup for iVPN, I’d greatly appreciate the support that these affiliate links provide… thanks!

Bastion is an awesome game, and here are a few of the fun Bastion-related YouTube videos:

My blog is now running on the excellent Octopress static site generation framework.

In the process, many nonessential posts were deleted - if you find something you’re missing, feel free to shoot me an email.

Let me know in the comments what you think and feel free to post any suggestions you might have.

This page collects some of my favorite YouTube videos - feel free to leave a comment with yours!

There is a particular crowd that is very interested in optimizing their website for search engines, usually using terms like “white hat” or “black hat” to describe their methodology.

I would propose that both methods are fundamentally incorrect. Obviously so-called “black hat” SEO is bad, but in my opinion, trying to optimize a website for the sole reason of listing highly in the search engines is fundamentally flawed. Here’s my reasoning:

Since,

• Optimizing a webpage using “black hat” methods are a temporary fix and will eventually result in being banned from search indexes – bad idea.
• Optimizing a webpage for a particular keyword other than the true content of the page is deceptive and therefore a bad idea.
• Optimizing for a particular keyword that will produce the biggest return on investment runs the risk for the keyword to not be the exact true content of the page – still bad idea.

Therefore,

• Your content markup (HTML), writing style, and content organization should have one goal – providing the best experience for the end user.
• Search engines have the stated goal of providing the best content on a particular topic to the end user.
• In the long run, therefore, your site will perform well in search engines, not because it was search engine optimized, but because it is one of the best sites on the topic.

Another new source of marketing / visitor power is social media marketing. If you have properly optimized your site to deliver your content well, and that content has been optimized, people will want to let their friends know about your great resource.

Put simply, it’s time to stop SEOing our sites and start creating sites worth sharing.

Installation of APC as of Ubuntu 10.04 is much simpler than in past releases of Ubuntu and only requires two terminal commands:

1
2

sudo apt-get install php-apc
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

That’s it! Much simpler, isn’t it?

If you’ve ever wanted your andLinux disk to be bigger than 2GB (the space runs out pretty quickly), here’s how to do it. First, download TopoResize 0.7.1. This will allow you to create a new disk file. Unzip and run toporesize.bat. You will be greeted by the following screen:

I just released the first version of my Hulu filtering bookmarklet – check it out and let me know what you think! It automatically mutes sections of Hulu videos that contain profanity for a more “family-friendly” experience.

This is part of a broader movie filtering project that I’m currently calling “The Movie Filter Database” (or tmfdb.org).