angiEmedia

We’ve switched over to a new web server as of early on November 29, 2010. Everything should work the same as before, only significantly faster than the previous configuration. We hope this will help our readers have a more pleasant experience compared to the repeated slowdowns and service interruptions we’d been seeing with the previous web hosting service provider despite months of trying to resolve the problems there.

If you notice any problems with this change, please let us know as soon as you can. You can email us at [email protected] if there’s anything confidential involved with a web site problem you’re experiencing or leave a reply comment on this posting if not.

If you are like some of our readers, you may have been wondering why we show your IP address in the control bar on the website. Some of our readers feel their privacy is being violated by this. On the contrary, it is intended to assist them in preserving their privacy. Here’s why.

Widespread Monitoring Of Your Computer Usage

Every time you use your computer to access a web site, there are several, likely even dozens, of pieces of software running on computers spread across the Internet that log bits and pieces of information about you. Such information typically includes your IP address as the unifying element to glue it all together. Other bits of information include the web browser your are using, the operating system your computer is running, web sites you visit, comments you post, email addresses you use, and questions you answer in surveys of demographic information that may not seem at first glance to be related to your web browsing at all. They might be software registrations, surveys for “free coupons”, “free email newsletters”, or something else. Your IP address can be used to tie it all together, to track your “Internet identity” and the usage of the Internet associated with it. Such information is being collected about you all the time. Every day, it is bought and sold routinely as a matter of regular business practice by many of the top brand names in the Internet world.

Have you installed any of those popular browser toolbars from Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft? Such software can log similar information about your usage, too. So can Flash, Java, and other apps that are common on many popular websites.

Your Internet Service Provider (Cox, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc.) probably logs a substantial amount of this type of information and retains it for multiple years. Some countries actually have laws requiring this. Even if they don’t, the ISP and hosting providers for any websites you visit log and save similar information for years, too. Your web browser also retains such information, too, and it will persist for months or years unless you take steps to erase it. Even if the company, organization, or people running the website you are visiting go to great effort to discard that information, virtually nobody else is going to do likewise. Like it or not, you are creating a great big trail that others can use to find and track you, be it for reasonable or very hostile purposes. Your IP address is often the single most important piece of information typically used to glue together the bits and pieces of your Internet trail into a cohesive whole that somebody can portray as representing you, rightly or wrongly.

Why We Show Your IP Address

We show you your IP address for two primary reasons:
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Our web site was unavailable to our readers for just over a day as our hosting provider, GoDaddy, decided to move the site to another server without letting us know in advance. While the outage was certainly not welcome, if it helps resolve recent problems with slow performance and error messages then it may be worthwhile.

So far as we can see, everything appears to be working normally at this point and site performance has improved, too. If you notice otherwise, please send us an email at [email protected] .

We’ve added Google Translate as a feature on our site. Now readers who read better in a language other than English can easily have Google translate the page for them. Simply look down at the new control bar at the bottom of the web page and pick the desired language from the pop up menu on the right side. A control bar will appear on the top of the page showing you that the page has been translated to another language and giving you the option to go back to the original view.
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We’ve noticed that some phone and mobile devices, particularly those with small screens running Windows Mobile Internet Explorer, are really clunky at viewing our site and many others, too. If you’ve got a Windows Mobile device, we’ve noticed that Opera Mobile seems to work a lot better in our experience. We’ve done some brief testing using version 8.65 running on a Sprint Touch on a CDMA 3G network and it works reasonably well for viewing our content.
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Are you a Gmail user? If so, have you ever noticed the headlines and tips that appear near the top of the Gmail screen? These are obtained from RSS or Atom feeds.

It’s really easy to add new RSS or Atom feeds to your Gmail account so you get updates from them, too. This includes new posts on angiemedia.com. Here’s how to do it:
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(Click here for more information on our web site features.)

We’re trying out the idea of posting Twitter tweets containing links to our new posts to make it easier for fans of that service to follow our writings and news.

Click on the logo to the left (or upper right of our web page) to visit our Twitter page. Add a comment to let us know if you like it.

We’re using a WordPress plug-in called WordTwit to do this. At first there were there were some technical issue with getting it to work for “local URLs”, so we used the tinyURL service to shorten up the URLs in the tweet. But we came up with a workaround, and are now able to use our own URLs in the tweets.

Among the new features we’ve added recently to our web site is a link to Sphere’s related content for each of our blog posts. The link appears at the bottom of each post and looks like this:

Sphere: Related Content

We’ve set that link up for you to see how it would work if you were to click on it from our recent posting More CPSIA News and Blogs. Give it a click to try it out! You can grab the window that appears by the title bar and move it around the browser to make it or something underneath it easier to read.

We hope you’ll find Sphere related content searches a handy way to find more news articles and blog posts related to the information we post on our site.

Enjoy!