Lately it is kind of popular to trash Google. Very much like Microsoft, people love to complain about companies that take an important part of their daily life. Google is now an integral part of our life not only for search but for many other things. A good friend saw me convert foreign exchange on Google search and was very surprised you can do that. So here is a list of things I do in Google search which are not search related.

Looking up What’s the Time in Other Places Around the World

Living in a far away island in the pacific with friends in Europe and America, this tool is a great help.

I get spam comments all the time, it drives me crazy and make me wish I didn't have a web site at all. Spam really bring the evil side of most site owners.

Yesterday, I finally had enough, I got 300 spam comments and only 4 real ones - I had to go over 3 pages and read bogus comments like:

"I have a question [link to gambling site]"

or "nice post [link to viagra]"

and the ho-so-known "dgsdgsdghsdfhdf [link to a SEO company]".

I went to drupal and looked for the most popular anti-spam module they listed and found Mollom.

Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop spam on your blog, social network or community website. When site moderation becomes easier, you have more time and energy to interact with your community.

I have recently upgraded my cats idol site to Drupal 6 and enhanced its functionality. I have also created several other sites (including this site) using the following set of useful Drupal modules.

Here is my list of useful (AKA Best IMHO) Drupal modules:

Apache is one of the most popular web servers in the market today. It usually runs on Linux-based machines but lately there are more and more deployments, for development as well as other reasons, of Apache on Windows. Nowadays, running Apache web server on Windows is very common for PHP developers. Many developers develop their PHP application on their home windows or Mac and deploy to a remote Linux server.

Visuals aids such as photos, are very important because they help you pass information and feelings, attract attention, maintain concentration, and help explain abstract concepts. Most professional presenters use photos and other images in their presentation. I personally find that the audience is better tuned when I present images than words. The problem is that most images cost money – most photographers want you to pay royalties for the images you use. Lucky enough, there are many images released under an open source license called creative commons

The cost of common shared hosting starts at 3$-10$ per month. While this is a cost many can afford, there are many out there that find it hard to spend 120$/year. Well, in the past 4 years I have used the idea of hostMates very successfully, saving money and learning from my mates.
Please note: HostMate is an idea, best practice if you want. It is not a product or a service, although someone might want to provide this service.

I have been making money blogging. A lot of money blogging. In the last 5 years I have calculated that I have earned above 70,000 USD in blogging alone. And I have managed to do so very easily and without marketing or any other related costs. The money was guaranteed every month and I got free editing and proofing services.

Here is my simple secret.

I have made Blogging a part of my job description. In the last 5 years I have been working for an open source company with only 20 employees, and for the one of the biggest and most profitable hi-tech companies in the world, with more than 80,000 employees worldwide. And they both paid me to blog as part of my job.

And you can do it too:

The following happens in many software projects -
At start, it seems you only need one environment for your web application, well, at most two:
One development environment (AKA your PC) and one server.

But as time pass, you find you need additional environments:
The clients might want their own testing environment, sometimes you need to have a pre-production environment or a staging environment, so business managers can approve the ongoing content as well as look & feel.

Do you really need these environments? What are these environment good for?

Here is a short description of some of the more popular environments and their purpose.

Lately I have been asked by many people how much should they pay for a personal or small business website. It seems that these are good times to get some extra cash from a web initiative.

The problem is that, for most people, building and hosting a website is somewhat of a mystery. And when people treat something as a mystery they tend to over complicate it and over pay for it. Some people I talked to spent 20-100$ on simple basic hosting alone! That is, in most cases, more than what they need to pay.

How do you spot a good software consultant? A good software consultant could be the key for your business success and bad consultants could be very damaging and counterproductive. Here are 10 cummulative ways to spot a good software consultant (can also be read as - 10 tips for the good software consultant)

He == he | she

1) He will listen to you very carefully

A good consultant knows that we were born to this world with one mouth and two ears and there is a good reason for that ratio.