Net Sieve

Zero Dollars Templates has some excellent HTML-based Website templates for … 0 dollars. Imagine that. There are 20 free ones accessible right now and some of them are extremely professional. You can preview the HTML before you download. Good to let you know how tweakable the page will be.

If you find some things you like, don’t be afraid to visit a sponsor ad or two that interests you. This is also free and helps keep web sites like this alive. Of course you knew that. You already do that everywhere you go.

Right?

Are you among the domain addicted? Be honest… how many domain names do you own? Do you know what VRE means? Have you flipped any virtual real estate?

There’s no arguing that creative domain flipping can be lucrative if you can come up with a decent name available at a decent price. If you’re looking for a domain name generator to help you brainstorm, give Nameboy a look.
Nameboy offers domain name creation, domain name lookup and domain registration, but the cool tool is absolutely free.

Enter a few keywords to find, register and back-order related available domain names. NameBoy will generate domain names based on the keywords you enter, and you can register or back-order them right here!

One option that I haven’t seen before in name generators is the rhyming selection. Never thought of that.

If you have a calendar fetish - and don’t we all? (Don’t we?) - you need to take a look at the freeware Calendar Magic. This is a date freak’s dream. I’ll list just a few of its features:

• Full year and individual month Gregorian, Afghan, Armenian, Baha’i, Bangla, Chinese, Coptic, Egyptian, Ethiopic, French Revolutionary, Hebrew, Hindu Lunisolar (3 variants), Hindu Solar, Indian National, Islamic Civil, Julian, Revised Julian, Parsi Fasli, Parsi Kadmi, Parsi Shenshai, Persian (2 variants), Sikh Nanakshahi and Vietnamese calendars.
• A month-by-month, side-by-side comparison of any two of the 23 calendar systems listed above. The display remains synchronised as you change day, month and year values in either calendar system being viewed. Again, users may choose between displaying each month with weeks starting on a Saturday, Sunday or Monday.
• “This is your life” information including day-of-the-week on which you were born, number of days you have lived, your Zodiac sign, some biorhythm data, and the day-of-the-week on which your next birthday falls. Your “Chinese age” and your date of birth in many other calendar systems are also displayed.
• Solar and lunar eclipse data for any year up to 3000.
• The ability to create, display, update and delete reminders for events (birthdays, anniversaries, meetings etc.) for “this year”, “next year” or “every year”.
• An “alarm clock” facility for defining an alarm for a given time on a given date. A user may specify the duration of the alarm which may be repeated, after a specified “quiet” time, up to five more times. A separate “stopwatch” function is also provided.
• A Pregnancy Calculator for calculating the due date of a pregnancy and other pregnancy related dates.

Yeah, that’s just a few of the features. Listing them all would be more appropriate for a book than a blog. So visit the Calendar Magic site and read up. This is a cool tool, recommended by the Freeware Guide. 2.2MB and guaranteed spyware/adware/virus free.

I’m no fan of the music industry and its stranglehold on “its” artists and their free expression, but copyright is something I do stand behind. The Web is all about sharing and freedom, peace, love and happiness, but somewhere in there we still need to respect the content creators in the morning.

Fair use. Citation. Quoting. Giving credit where credit is due. It’s not a hard concept and for the most part, if you do screw up and get overzealous with a creator’s work they’ll usually just write a note asking to remove their content before they go reporting you to the authorities. (Your service provider.)

If this happens, respect the request. If you can’t live without this content consider - gasp - offering them compensation. Barring that, ask if there’s a way you can work it out by citing, linking, something. If you’re not going up against the RIAA you’re probably not dealing with blatant flaming arseholes.

And should you find your own pearls of wisdom appropriated on someone’s site, try a civil discussion before you pull out the RPG. Most times, copyright violation is simply a lack of knowledge and not maliciousness. Of course, if the little offender doesn’t respect your request you are free to blast away.

Egregious thieves suck. A great place to learn more is Copyright Website.
(This post is copyright 2006 Net Sieve. Natch.) har.

BBSpot has a laugh out loud list of the Top 11 Reasons You Shouldn’t Forward Me That Email.

The list includes some of my personal favorites … some that I’ve actually used.
11. I eat puppies, kittens, and other cute animals, and sending me pictures of them only makes me hungry for more.

9. You’d like me to remain your friend.

7. I have a sense of humor and that joke isn’t remotely funny.

Check out the rest and a lot more lists. It’s a good break From IM/SEO/other acronyms.

According to JupiterResearch, online holiday retail sales will equal roughly $32 billion in 2006, with 114 million Web users expected to shop online during the holiday season.

With that much money passing through virtual hands, it’s hard to believe that a large number of people still refuse to use their credit cards online or have no idea how to protect themselves if they do.

To counter this, some Michigan State University professors compiled their smarty pants tips on how to shop - and shop safely - online. Even if you’re an old hand who brought your car on AutoTrader, your house on eBay and your spouse on eHarmony, you might learn something.

Visit Holiday Shopping Tips for the shopping scoop.

No matter how many Web sites I’ve created over the years, I’ve always had this mental block on the robots.txt file. For some reason I never remember to include it, Google bitches at me, and my sites don’t get indexed properly.

Finally, linking myself into a good generator resolved this. I mean really. How hard is this anyway? Take a trip over to Hypergurl’s site and save yourself time with this great generator.

Here’s the blurb:

The robots.txt file is the first file search engine “spiders” look for when indexing a website. The robots.txt file tells search engine spiders (robots) which files and directories they are NOT allowed to index. This helps to prevent incomplete site indexing as well as prevent exposing the files and directories that you don’t want listed. You may disallow, for example, “Google Images” from indexing certain directories and pages on your site, but not block “Google” itself from indexing those same files.

OK, I’m not one to blame all the ills of the world on hapless teens, but I have to admit they do worry me on the road. And it’s not that I consider them irresponsible for the most part, they’re just inexperienced.

That’s why I have to give a thumbs up to GEICO for creating its teen safe driving Web site. The information will help drivers of all ages, but with this campaign, GEICO is particularly interested in providing teens with solid info when they’re first learning to drive.

The “Teens and Trucks” section offers some great tips to young drivers:

* Stay out of a truck’s blind spots or “No Zones”

* Avoid “Squeeze Play” when a large truck needs to make a wide turn

* Do not swerve in front of a truck or cause the driver to come to a sudden stop

* Be careful when attempting to pass a truck

Thanks to CarInsurance.com (where you can research the best car insurance rate for yourself online) for the heads-up.

So far so hot.

Other than the fact it took one million internet years to ftp to my server, FireStats is a huge go. Nothing buggy so far and I’m just looking forward to a few days of information accumulation to proclaim it good.

I make no promises that my posts will actually be spelled correctly from now on, but I’m very happy to have found Orangoo nonetheless. It’s a super simple online spell checker for any text you can copy and paste. It’s developer is Amir Salihefendic, so as you may guess the Website’s English is a bit … freeform. Still, it’s quick, easy, doesn’t log your text, uses Google spell checker and Aspell, is open source and you can download the code right from the page. Sweetness!

Amir says:

• This little application lets you spell correct from any system or computer that has Internet access.
• Spell check in 27 languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Čeština, Dansk, Deutsch, ελληνικά, English, Español, Eesti keel, Français, עִבְרִית, ? ��? ��? ��? ��? ��, Hrvatski, Italiano, Latviešu, Lietuvių, kalba, Nederlands, Norsk, Polski, Português, Română, Slovenščina, Slovenčina, Suomi, Svenska, Türkçe and �? УССКИЙ! (eds note: Let’s see how WordPress handles all that)