Oct 13

iTunes 99 Cent Movie Rental Special

Posted in: Apple, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on February 22, 2008 by CyberNet.

It’s Friday night and your wallet is empty. You’re broke but you don’t know what to do. No worries, you don’t have to sit home bored without anything to do because Apple has come to rescue you! Starting every Thursday, the iTunes store will put up a movie to rent for just 99 cents. This is going to be a weekly deal. Every Thursday through Monday, the movie will be available for the low price of 99 cents and once you rent it, you still have the typical 30 days to watch it.

iTunes movie rental

This could really give a boost to iTunes rentals because at 99 cents, people might be more inclined to give it a try. While it’s only one select movie per week, it’s something to do on the weekend if you’re a little low on cash or you’re simply bored. Apple’s selection this week is a movie from Paramount Pictures titled The Hours. It came out back in 2002, so it appears as though the deal each week won’t be for something more recent. They do provide a link to view the trailer and the plot summary though, so that helps give you an idea if the movie is something you’ll like.  Either way, whether you like it or not, it’s just 99 cents so you won’t feel like you’ve lost money.

Sounds like a great move by Apple…

Source: TUAW

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Oct 13

It’s Baseball Season, Need a Ticket?

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on August 04, 2007 by CyberNet.

It’s baseball season! If you need tickets this year for your favorite Major League Baseball team, checkout StubHub. StubHub is known as a ticket reseller, and now they’re the official marketplace of MLB to buy and sell tickets.

Visit StubHub and you’ll notice they’ve got a category for MLB All Star Weekend, Playoffs, and Regular Season tickets. I clicked on regular season tickets, and then chose my team, The Chicago Cubs, and got a whole list of options for their upcoming games.  You’ll see a price range given for each game, and then you can choose to buy or sell.

Stubhub

While you are purchasing your tickets 2nd hand, StubHub guarantees that you’ll get what you paid for, and if you didn’t, you’ll get your money back. According to Bob Bowman, president and chief executive officer for MLB Advanced Media, “We believe this agreement reflects our commitment to providing dynamic platforms for fans to purchase tickets in authorized locations in the digital arena.” In other-words, you can feel confident purchasing from StubHub.

If you need tickets to a game before the season wraps up, I’d definitely checkout StubHub. How’s your team doing anyways? All I can say is Go Cubbies Go! As it stands, they’re heading for a division title, leading the Central division of the National League. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. :)

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Oct 12

How To Add Thumbnails When Users Hover Over Hyperlinks

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on September 22, 2006 by CyberNet.

WebShotsPro WebShotsPro came up with a pretty cool JavaScript package that you can add to your site which lets users see a small thumbnail of your hyperlinks. It is actually really cool and the best part is that you won’t have to provide the extra bandwidth needed to do it all! They host the JavaScript themselves.

Once you insert their JavaScript into the header on your site the only thing left is to format your hyperlinks like this:

<a href="http://www.webshotspro.com" class="screenshot">WebShotsPro</a>

It is nice that they have you implement it this way because you can pick and choose which hyperlinks you want to have the thumbnail. I thought about implementing it on our site but I already have a little too much JavaScript and I’m trying to minimize the amount that I use. Otherwise this is so simple to do and it is an amazing feature that is sure to impress many of your visitors!

View their demonstration

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Oct 12

Cheat Sheets For Programming Languages And More

Posted in: Software, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on October 19, 2006 by CyberNet.

Cheat Sheets - MySQL When programming I love to keep cheat sheets at my side because I’m surprised at how much I use them. There is no sense memorizing things that you can store on a single sheet of paper that is easily accessible.

If you are looking for some cheat sheets then this site has compiled a very long list of them with the following topics:

  • ActionScript
  • Apache
  • ASCII Character Codes
  • ASP
  • CSS
  • CVS
  • Firefox
  • Google
  • htaccess
  • HTML/XHTML
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • LaTeX
  • mod_rewrite
  • MySQL
  • Oracle
  • Perl
  • Photoshop
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Unix
  • Weblogs
  • XML

As you can see there is a large variety available and I think I printed off about 5 of them for right now. A little later though I will be going through and downloading a lot more in case I need them for future use then I’ll just need to print them off.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Oct 12

iJigg, the Digg for Music?

Posted in: Music, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on January 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

There’s a social network for just about everything these days, why not music? iJigg went live on January 15th and is a Digg-like social network for music. It’s not the first social network for music by any means, but to my knowledge, it’s the first Digg-like one. Here’s how it works: Artists upload their songs, and then they get “jigged” by fellow jiggers which then influences the music that becomes popular.  The music can be shared by embedding it into a blog/site, sharing it via email, or by posting it to a Facebook account.

The interface is clean and simple, and they break the music up into ‘Most Popular,’ ‘Recently Posted,’ ‘My Favorites,’ and ‘Genre.’ For artists, it is easy for them to come and post music, and for listeners, it’s just as easy to come listen.  They use tags so that it’s simple for people to search and browse the music.Right now only MP3 files can be uploaded, however there are plans to include other formats in the future. Below is an example of an embedded song.  I went to the “Most Popular” section and found the song “Unravel” with 77 Jiggs which seemed to be the most out of all the listed songs.

 

A few of the downsides: First, you’re unable to download music, so if you really like a song, you’ll be stuck at iJigg all day listening to it. Because it’s a social network for music, you’d assume that you could create a friends list.  Unfortunately you can’t. And of course, just like Digg, they will be battling with spammers, it’s a given.

With it’s clean easy on the eyes interface, iJigg is a good place to go to find independent music.  Hopefully the gaming and spamming won’t get the best of them. So far it appears to be under control. Good luck iJigg!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Oct 12

YouTube Down For Maintenance – New Features?

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on August 15, 2006 by CyberNet.

YouTube Maintenance

YouTube is either cleaning out their car or making some upgrades…I can’t really tell from the message they have posted. :D

The key part to the message that caught my attention is “new features.” I am hoping that one of the new features will be similar to the one that Google recently implemented that allows users to hyperlink directly to a specific spot in a video. We often display movies here from YouTube but there is normally just a specific portion that is worth watching.

Let’s cross our fingers and hope that this isn’t just a generic maintenance message.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Oct 12

WordPress Hacked: Anyone Can View Future/Draft Posts

Posted in: Hacks, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on December 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

WordPress Hackers There is a bug in WordPress right now that is rather critical for anyone who uploads posts without immediately publishing. Simply by manipulating the URL any visitor can view all future, draft, or pending posts. Our site was vulnerable to this issue, but we patched it quickly because it could be used to retrieve the CyberNotes posts that we write ahead of time.

Why is this such a big deal? By gaining access to our future and unscheduled posts other sites could copy our articles. They would then look like the ones who originally wrote the article, and we would look like the copiers since our post would not publish until after theirs. To make things worse your future/draft posts may also be available in the format of an RSS feed.

–How it Works–

Without going into too much detail we’ll just say that WordPress is incorrectly checking to see whether a user is an administrator. Using Problogger.net as an example, you can visit this URL to reveal some of his upcoming posts:

http://www.problogger.net/index.php/wp-admin/

If a website is not using the FeedBurner redirect plugin all of the future posts will be available through an RSS feed as well. The URL for that would look something like this:

http://www.address.com/?feed=rss2&x=wp-admin/

That would not be good because there are thousands of sites out there that are setup to scrape feeds from websites, and then publish the content to their own site. This would give them easy access to all of your unpublished content.

–How to Fix It–

UPDATE: The workaround below didn’t do as much good as I thought, but a new version of WordPress has already been released which corrects the issue. We recommend upgrading your WordPress as soon as possible.

WordPress 2.3.2 is in the works, and the bug should be fixed by the time it is released. The How-To Geek tipped me off on a quick fix for all of you who just want a temporary workaround. Here’s what you have to do:

  1. In your blog’s WordPress files open the wp-includes\query.php file.
  2. Find line 37 which should look something like this:
    WordPress Future Posts Before
  3. We need to make the wp-admin/ portion more specific. For us we changed it to cybernetnews.com/wp-admin/, but yours will be a bit different. Just go to the page where you login to your blog, and copy the portion after http:// and before wp-admin/. Then paste that before the wp-admin/ on line 37:
    WordPress Future Posts After
  4. That’s it! If you’re using a cache plugin you may need to clear the cache, or give it some time for the pages to be refreshed.

This is just a temporary fix, and when WordPress 2.3.2 is released you’ll obviously want to upgrade.

[via Black Hat Domainer]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Oct 11

Relisir Helps You Keep Up with your Favorite Music

Posted in: General, Music, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on April 06, 2010 by CyberNet.

Die-hard music fans are going to love what Relisir has to offer. Relisir is a fairly new start-up that offers users the chance to keep up with their favorite bands whether it’s when they announce a new album is on the way, or if a new album has been released.

What we like about Relisir:

  • It could initially take some time to manually enter all of your favorite artists which would make using this service a bit of a chore. However, if you use Last.fm, you can import your favorite artists which will simplify the whole process. Nice touch.
  • As you type in your favorite artists, a drop down list appears which again, helps speed up the process of getting started with Relisir.
  • Once you add your favorite artists, it’s like you’re on auto-pilate and Relisir goes to work for you, keeping you informed with no additional effort on your end. You don’t even need to return to the website (unless you want to), because all of the important info will be sent to your email inbox.


relisir-1.png

What we don’t like about Relisir:

  • Email is the main method of communication – Relisir relies heavily on email to let you know when your favorite artists have released anything new. Other communication options would be nice – perhaps an iPhone or Facebook app?
  • One one hand, it’s nice that Relisir focuses simply on helping you keep up with your favorite artists. However, it might be nice to see a “music discovery” feature as well. If it knows you like OneRepublic, for example, it could suggest other artists similar to it with new releases and give you the opportunity to listen to it
  • Someone who loves their music probably likes to see these artists live and in concert. It would great if they incorporated a tool to help you track when one of your favorite artists will be performing in your area and provide a link to purchase tickets.

MySpace used to be one of the key ways that music fans kept up with their favorite artists. These artists may still have pages, however, many people have moved away from MySpace and no longer use the service. If you’ve been hanging on to MySpace, simply for the purpose of keeping up with your favorite artists, Relisir might just be what you’re looking for.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Oct 11

Newshutch: Top-Notch RSS Feed Reader

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on December 05, 2006 by CyberNet.

Newshutch

It seems like all of a sudden everyone is using Newshutch as an RSS feed reader. Well, maybe not everyone because it isn’t even in the top ten most used feed readers for this site yet, but I noticed that it was mentioned over in the forum along with several emails I have received referring to it.

I decided to check it out for myself and have to admit that I am amazed with the simplicity (and power) that it offers as an online feed reader. I use the freeware application from FeedReader.com myself but if you are looking for something to manage your feeds online then I would rank this right up there with Google Reader. It is loaded with the AJAX goodness that we all love but not enough to overwhelm you.

They do, of course, have the OPML compatibility so that you can import your existing list of feeds. The options are appear to be a little scarce right now but that might be because it is so well designed. One thing that really impressed me is that when you subscribe to a feed you can customize the length (days, weeks, forever, etc..) it will show you previous postings…and the number of items that we provide in our feed for CyberNet is 10. Newshutch must have had us in their database because it was able to retrieve 87 of our previous postings which makes it easier to analyze the quality of a new feed that you are adding.

So if you’re still in search of an online feed reader that will fit your needs I would surely try out Newshutch. If you already found the perfect match why don’t you share it with us over in the forum! ;)

Thanks to everyone who sent in this tip and the people over in the forum!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Oct 11

Buy from Amazon via Text Message

Posted in: amazon, mobile, Phones, Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on April 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

Each year, communicating through text messages continues to grow and has now turned into an extremely popular communication medium. Millions upon millions of text messages are sent every single month and carriers only anticipate that the number of messages sent by their subscribers will continue to grow. Amazon knows this and obviously sees a tremendous value in it because they have just launched a new service called Amazon TextBuyIt.

TextBuyIt is a brand new service that will give shoppers the opportunity to find and purchase products sold on Amazon via a text message on their mobile phones. Here’s how it works. Say a customer is looking to buy an MP3 player. They would text the name of the product, a description, a UPC if they have it, or an ISBN number to Amazon. If Amazon carries it, they will return matching results via text to the customer, two at a time. If one of the two options is something they want to buy, they text back either a 1 or a 2, or ask for more results by texting M. If the customer made a purchase, they will enter in their email address that’s associated with their Amazon account and a shipping code, and then they’ll receive an automated call that will guide them through the checkout process.

textbuyit

It’s a very simple process and once everything is done and a purchase has been made, shoppers get a confirmation email and a text message.  Given the number of people who obsessively text message, this could be dangerous, especially for shopaholics because the purchasing process can be done in a matter of a few minutes.  For those who really get into it and use TextBuyIt as a regular shopping method, there are other commands that they could use. For example, you could text 2D after you’ve seen matching products and you’d get more details about the 2nd item that you saw.

Of course there’s good and bad to a service like this. The first good thing that came to mind was that this could be an awesome way to comparison shop. If you’re at the store and you see something you’d like to buy, you can use TextBuyIt to see if Amazon has it cheaper and save yourself some money. You’re not required to buy anything after texting a search, which is nice. The bad is that any item that is a “Deal of the Day” or a “Gold Box Discount” will not be discounted if bought through text messaging.

I never thought we’d see the day where you’d shop via a text message, but the day is here and other retailers are likely to follow if Amazon is successful with this new method.

Source: AP

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