Rev2.org » Brandon West

Domain Parking and Development

Brandon West — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 20:34:52 +0000

Simply put, a domain is a website address. When someone decides to develop a website, generally one of the first things they do is register a domain name. The domain name tends to be something unique that reflects whatever the website is promoting. Once registered, the domain name belongs to that person for as long as they continue to pay for it. Once registered, the URL will be pointed to a dummy page and parked until the website is developed.

Sometimes URLs are purchased with the sole intent of parking them to make money as an advertising site. This type of ...

Songerize: Play Any Song NOW

Brandon West — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 16:27:18 +0000

So I was sitting in my room listening to my random mix radio station on Slacker.com, when all of a sudden, I had the urge to listen to Regulators (by Warren G). Typically I would have to head over to the Amazon MP3 store or wait until the song plays on my random radio station. I was too impatient for that. Enter Songerize. Songerize is as simple as a website can be. With Songerize, users can play a song by entering the ...

Goldmail: “High Impact E-Messaging”

Brandon West — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 01:40:39 +0000

GoldMail, a service launched last November, is a new messaging platform combining text, image and voice communication. GoldMail allows users to create “talking slide show messages” in 3 steps. First, a slide-show of sorts is created using photos, images and documents uploaded from a computer. Next, users can record a voice track over the slide-show to explain or enhance the show. After that, GoldMail provides a link to send via email, instant message, or to post on a website or blog. These multimedia messages can be used in a wide variety of ...

MintEmail: Keep Your Inbox So Fresh and Clean

Brandon West — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 19:46:39 +0000

MintEmail is a fantastic disposable/temporary email service offering a great mix of functionality and simplicity. Similar to other disposable email services, MintEmail provides visitors a temporary email address they can use to register for email-spamming sites. However, MintEmail has added some great features that make the site much more user friendly.

First, MintEmail automatically copies your new temporary email address to your clipboard as soon as you visit their homepage. Although this may seem like an unnecessary feature, it is a definite time-saver. This also ...

Mint: Organize Your Finances Online

Brandon West — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:37:23 +0000

Mint is a personal finance manager created by Aaron Patzer. According to Aaron, personal finance can really be reduced to three basic principles. First, spend less than you earn. Second, make the money you have work for you. Third, plan for the unexpected. The Mint.com crew have taken these ideals to heart and have designed a very useful free service. Mint is nothing new, having been awarded the TechCrunch40 Best of Show award and having received at least one large round of funding. I am reviewing Mint now because I ...

HelloTxt: Centralize Your Microblogging Services

Brandon West — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 23:05:53 +0000

HelloTxt is “an aggregate of microblogging services through which the user can insert their messages on all main microblogging services in a simple and simultaneous way.” What does all of that mean? For users of Twitter, Jaiku, Yappd, Meemi, Beemood, and Tumblr, managing multiple microblogging services can be a hassle. HelloTxt centralizes the insertion of messages to these services, saving many trips for the microblogging addicts.

As explained by the developers of HelloTxt, having to visit numerous microblogging services ...

TeamSnap: Manage Your Sports Teams Online

Brandon West — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 17:53:01 +0000

This last year my school’s softball team won very few games. Some blamed our lack of skill, some blamed the beer drinking prior to our games, but I blame the lack of a great web 2.0 team management service. If only TeamSnap had been around last semester, maybe our team would have won a few more games. TeamSnap is a very unique new service designed to facilitate the complicated management of recreational adult or youth sports teams. With TeamSnap, team leaders can manage rosters, publish and track ...

Pidgin 2.2.0 Released

Brandon West — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 23:06:17 +0000

I realize that this announcement may stray a bit from the “web 2.0″ theme of Rev2, but I feel that Pidgin and the open IM platform it supports do play an important role in the “new” internet. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Pidgin, it is the open source IM application formally known as Gaim. Pidgin works with Windows, Linux, BSD and other Unixes, and supports many networks including AIM, ICQ, JABBER/XMPP (includes Google Talk), MSN Messenger, Yahoo, Bonjour, and IRC.

Netscape’s Digg Clone Becomes Propeller

Brandon West — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 00:13:04 +0000

Propeller: A rotating device, with two or more blades, that acts as a screw in propelling a vessel. Now we can add to that definition the less-than-successful Digg clone that is hosted at Netscape.com. According to the Netscape Blog, the Netscape “social news experience” will be migrated and revealed at http://www.propeller.com.

The Netscape browser saw great success through the years, at one point holding as much as 85% of the browser usage share. However, the Netscape browser now holds less ...

Microsoft Launches Windows Live Translator

Brandon West — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 01:39:25 +0000

The Google-Microsoft battle wages on, as Microsoft released its Windows Live Translator in a beta testing stage. Similar to the established translators created by Babel Fish (owned by Altavista) and Google, Windows Live Translator simply takes text entered in one language and translates it to another.

The new translator service uses Systran machine translation. Systran is no rookie to the translation field, as it was established in 1968, and has worked with the United States Department of Defense ...