Before MySpace, Facebook and Twitter there was once GeoCities. Yes back in the 90’s, GeoCities was going to take over the world and change the face of the Web. So Yahoo spent a bunch of cash ($3 billion) and bought up that very ‘valuable’ piece of Web real estate.

…. Hmmm this kinda reminds me of the Facebook and Twitter hoopla.

Geocities is closing its’ doors

After a decade of spuddering about, it seems that Yahoo has finally figured out that there is no money in having a bunch of lame web sites filled with lame content:

Yahoo Inc. said Thursday that it would shut down its GeoCities free Web-hosting service after paying about $3 billion for the unit in 1999.

GeoCities isn’t accepting new accounts and will close later this year, Yahoo said. GeoCities, Yahoo’s second-biggest acquisition behind Broadcast.com Inc., lets users design personal websites to show off photos, promote local clubs or publicize business services.

.. As reported by the LA Times.

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The recent Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN Twitter race opened my eyes to the fact that celebrities are jumping all over Twitter. Being a curious nerd who is sometimes (mildly) interested in the next Internet fad (anyone remember Geocities or Friendster?) .. and so I decided to finally take a quick look at Twitter.

… Also, being a former student of psychology, I was curious as to why celebrities seem to be falling over themselves to get on the Twitter bandwagon?

So first, what is Twitter?

In a nutshell, Twitter is a virtual-home for narcissist and people who have no lives. The narcissist send out the messages and the people who have no lives, wait around to learn what fascinating things the narcissist chooses to write about in 40 characters or less.

Note: typo there, it is actually 140 characters.

… Wow.

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Some of you may know that killersites.com was originally founded by David Siegel to support his best selling book on web design: Creating Killer Web Sites.

What made this book important, was that it taught the web design community that design principles should be used in web design. Believe me, in those days, that was ground breaking!

So what is Dave up to these days?

Besides flying around the world taking pictures of orchids, David has been involved with something called the Semantic Web. I won’t go into details about it here, but suffice it to say that David is a strong advocate and he believes that it will shape the future of not only the Internet, but perhaps the way we do business and live.

That all said, the reason for this post is to help David get out the word that he is open to the possibility of helping to run Apple computers. Yes, he does have big ambitions … but why not? Apple is about forward thinking and innovation and David has a track record of both.

You can read more about his ideas on this personal web site: David Siegal

Thanks for reading,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

I just wanted to first wish everyone a merry Christmas and a happy holidays.

I haven’t been posting new blog entries … but I have an excuse! I’ve been busy working on putting up a brand new forum.

The old Java based forum was becoming a little too dated in terms of it’s features and the way it worked overall. It was showing its’ age.

Why not just update the forum software?

Believe me, I tried several times but for reasons I was not easily able to figure out, the new version of the forum just did not want to run on the live server. I could get it to work on my local development/testing machine … but not live.

So I then contacted the people who built the old forum and asked for assistance. To my surprise, they wanted 10-15 hrs of billable time to install their own forum software!

… I was willing to pay to have them do it, but 10-15 hrs to install a forum!! That’s nuts! Another classic example of Java’s tendency to over-engineer everything.

Sometimes it just makes sense to move on …

So I decided to start researching for a new forum given all the problems I was having, given that the forum had serious flaws to begin with and finally, when the people who built the thing want 10hrs+ to install it … it’s time to get the hell out!

Anyway, I researched and researched and finally found something that I liked. It is fast, modern, built with PHP and only takes 3 minutes to install … even if you never used it before!

I invite you to check it out: the new web designers forum at killersites.com.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Hi,

I’m a big fan of the Firefox browser; it’s fast, nimble and has a great plug-in architecture, that has made Firefox into a true tool for web designers. That said, Firefox has one big failing – it sucks on the Mac.

Yes, for reasons beyond the comprehension of this humble nerd, Firefox crashes like crazy on the typically ultra stable Mac OSX.

… It’s so bad in fact, that sometimes it feels like I’m using crash-crazy Mac OS 9!

What is the source of the Firefox problem?

I haven’t done any thorough testing, but it seems to me that the constant crashing has to do with the Firefox Javascript engine – it only seems to crash when I’m on a page that uses Javascript.

So if any of your Firefox developers happen to come across this post, please take a closer look at this glaring problem. Believe me, I am not the only one who has seen this.

PS: The Flash player also doesn’t work properly in Firefox on Mac.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com