gadget news and reviews

Skatter Tech Gets Facebook Connect 12

About two months ago, Skatter Tech upgraded the commenting infrastructure by adding threaded comments. Today I’ve got some good news. Facebook users can now “connect” to Skatter Tech with just one-click. Just scroll down to the commenting area, click on the “Connect with Facebook” button. If you aren’t already logged into Facebook, you’ll be prompted to do so. Afterward, your profile image, name, and a link to your profile will appear each time you leave a comment. You can even share the blurb expressed here with your friends on Facebook immediately!.

Of course, if you wish to opt-out after signing up, you can do so easily at anytime. Just hit the logout button or delete the Skatter Tech App in your Facebook App settings. We honor Facebook’s privacy settings so your real name and profile photo won’t appear if you have it locked down. Also we haven’t done away with the traditional commenting system. You’ll always be able to manually type in your information and even pick a Gravatar when posting a comment!

So what are you waiting for? Leave a Facebook-powered Comment below!

Links: Skatter Tech Facebook Fan Page

Skatter Tech: September 09 Upgrades +

For the second consecutive month, I’m glad to announce a whole new set of enhancements that have been applied to Skatter Tech. Our code is more efficient than ever, light weight, and faster to load. Plus we’ve maximized compatibility for 90% of the browsers that access our blog. Here’s whats new:

Web Compatibility:
Since last month our content has been valid for XHTML 1.0. Today I’m glad to announce that the same applies to CSS 2.1. That won’t mean much to the average user, but it’s a step to keep within the web design guidelines. Our databases got refreshed, images optimized, and scripts compressed meaning things should load a lot faster than before. We try to make sure compatibility with every browser, but these browsers will render Skatter Tech properly: Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome. (If want to help us throw in support for Opera, please feel to give us a hand. We might need it!)

Social Networking:
We launched a Facebook Fan Page and a Twitter Account last month. It’s been a great source of traffic and letting new readers know about our site, we plan to keep those going strong. We also added easier methods to share reviews on Skatter Tech with some of the most popular sites including Delicious, Digg, LinkedIn, MySpace, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Yahoo Buzz. You can find those icons conveniently placed below each article. We encourage you to share the stories you enjoyed most with your friends!

Advertisers:
We kept hearing about irrelevant and the occasional “spam nature” of the Ads on Skatter Tech. Unfortunately we can’t entirely get rid of ads since that’s our main source of income, but have taken steps to change what’s seen. The majority of Ads are now hand selected and approved by us. Same rules applies to sponsors. If it’s inappropriate or shady, no one will ever have to see it here. Ads that are generated for relevance, now are targeted and optimized to help you find relevant deals.

Author Info & Contact
Although we’re still updating it, you can find out more about me and the rest of Skatter Tech’s authors on the Author Page. And did you know that you can call us if you have a question instead of email? (No, we do not offer tech support!) Just visit the Contact Page to find out how!

Skatter Tech: August 09 Upgrades +

Skatter Tech has received some new features and enhancements over the past couple of days. Things will be faster, easier to use, and more compatible with the technology you use. We’re not stopping here either, more upgrades are due soon including the ability to allow you folks to leave comments on Skatter Tech using your Facebook account. For now, here’s what we’ve got for you:

Follow Us and Be a Fan:
Skatter Tech is now officially on both Twitter and Facebook. We’ll be posting updates both sites about newly published content. We’ll also be doing a few giveaways before the end of this year of gadgets that have been reviewed here. So if you’ve followed or become a fan of us, you’ll be notified when it happens!

Comments:
Discussions on articles will now be easier than ever before. The “quote” feature has now been dropped in exchange for a threaded commenting system. Replies to a person’s comment will be displayed directly below the original comment. For now only one level of replies have been enabled, however if found useful more depth will be implemented. User images are now fully powered by Gravatar. If you have setup an account there, your photo will be displayed on any comment you leave on Skatter Tech.

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We’re Back! 3

A lot has happened behind the scenes here at Skatter Tech since we nearly vanished since earlier this year. Some pending issues were preventing us from publishing any new content without running into legal issues. Everything has been resolved and we’ve good to go. This has been the longest downtime we’ve had since Skatter Tech was launched in 2004. Things are only getting started and we’ve already got a ton of content lined up that has been waiting to be published. So get ready, we’re back!

Links: Subscribe

Skatter Tech: Get Your Own Gravatar +

We recently upgraded Skatter Tech to WordPress 2.5 and along with it we decided to make some changes to the icons that go along with each comment. Previously, each commenter’s icon was based off the favicon from the provided url. Today, we have switched to using Gravatar, “the globally recognized avatar.” Starting now the associated image will be linked to your email instead of the url.

To setup your own Gravatar, visit Gravatar.com/signup. The registration process is as simple as entering your email address. Then just login and upload an image to become your Gravatar. Now the next time you leave a comment on Skatter Tech or any other blog using the Gravatar service, you should see your icon appear! And in case you are wondering about privacy, your email address is kept private by both Gravatar and Skatter Tech so you’ll have nothing to worry about.

Links: Gravatar.com SignUp

Skatter Tech IP Finder 4

We were tired of seeing “what’s my ip?” websites which were slow and messy to use so we launched our own service! All you really need is your IP address, so that’s exactly what we’re going to provide you. Nothing else. The page is just under a kilobyte and will load as fast as it possibly could. Skatter Tech IP will provide two pieces of data at this time: your ip address and your domain host. At this point this is all we plan to offer, but we plan to expand our tools in the future. And just like the rest of Skatter Tech, any tracked data is completely kept completely private. We will ONLY use it for statistical purposes. Any specific user information will be not be available for ANYONE to view. Anyways, to find out what your IP address is, just visit http://ip.skattertech.com. Even hit CTRL+D add it to your bookmarks!

If you have any suggestions or ideas to implement into onto this site, just leave us a comment!

Link: ip.skattertech.com

100k Spam Comments Caught +

Since we switched over to the WordPress platform about a year and half ago, we’ve have continuously been hit by large numbers of spammers. Luckily with some tweaks, pieces of code, a few services, and some manual labor we’ve been able to catch 100% spam comments on our site. If you were wondering what was our number one tool, one word, Akismet. This innovative spam catching tool, alone, has caught over 100,000 spam comments for Skatter Tech this year. Akismet works by checking checking the data that is posted onto our server with a huge database of items known to be spam. Since the spam database learns by users moderating their own comments, it automatically adapts to new types of spam. According to their website, Akismet has been able to catch 93% of all the spam that would hit a website.

Although this only caught about 60% of the total amount of spam, it took another 3-4 tools, including Bad Behavior, to block another 30%. We still end up having to manually catch and throw out about 10% of what gets onto our sites. We could always implement a captcha system or require registration, however that would only be annoying and would deter everyone from participating in discussions. This tool has been primarily created for WordPress, however it is also compatible with plenty of other systems including Movable Type, Drupal, phpBB, Expression Engine, Joomla and more! We highly recommend giving Akismet a shot if you already haven’t heard about it and are having problems fighting spam.

P.S. We’ll be posting a WordPress tutorial on combating spam very soon!

Links: Akismet.com

Digg Drops Blacklist 2

Since the digg started, they have had a large issue combating spammers. This eventually lead to an amazing large list of banned sites. About six months ago this site, Skatter Tech, was for some reason added to that list. We had sent digg a few emails requesting the reason it had been blocked, but we received no response. We expected the ban to be lifted, but it never was until now! Digg has apparently lifted the blacklist on thousands of domains and has implemented a new algorithm for submissions to prevent spam from entering the main page. Hopefully the new code will do the trick and lifting the banned sites will not cause an inflation in spam.

Anyways, for our readers, this means the “digg” link found besides the del.icio.us on our permalink pages will now function properly. (No more submission error messages) Finally, if you find any of our articles “digg worthy” you are welcome to submit them.

(P.S. The digg logo in the image atop can be downloaded from DevianArt.)

Links: digg.com | digg blog
Related: Digg Search Widget

Media Temple Grid-Server v1.2 +

Media Temple (mt) customers are in for a treat. The recently launched GRID server is getting a second major upgrade, v1.2. All customers using the new Grid-Server (gs) will soon receive an update which will consist of many stability enhancements, “micro-updates”, user request implementations, bug fixes, and plenty of new features.

GMR v1.2 System Upgrade:

• Over 800+ Core count cluster – faster than ever
• MySQL GridContainers – currently private beta only
• Email Upgrades – performance, spam, virus scan, & security
• FTP Update – faster connection and transfer rates
• Storage Performance – around 400% faster data access
• Network Speed Increase, DNS cluster, and much more!

We left our previous host, 1and1, we joined Media Temple in September 2006. Since then we have been quite satisfied with their service and the peformance of their servers. (great customer service too!) Anyways, Media Temple will be rolling out the new GMR v1.2 update on 03/02/07 (friday), a week from today, and no action is required on your end.

Links: Media Temple | GMR v1.2 Info

Skatter Tech Forums +

We recently launched Skatter Tech Boards a few weeks ago, but soon ran into quite a few issues. We were using phpBB and had quite a difficult time managing content due to large spam surges. We didn’t like the fact that we had to spend more time cleaning out spam than responding to questions. As a result we took it down and decided to try Lussumo Vanilla instead. So far we have been pleased as the forum software looks much cleaner and organized than phpBB was. You may now access Skatter Tech Forums at forums.skattertech.com or through the link at the top.

Also note that registeration is now easier than ever. Just enter an email address and pick a username/password and you are done. Sorry for any inconvience switching over may have caused. We’ll stay put for now.

Link: forums.skattertech.com