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

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!

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.

RSS Feed:
Due to certain incompatibility issues readers were facing, all feeds on Skatter Tech are now optimized with Google’s FeedBurner. Our feeds have and will always continue to be full length feeds. We will never force you to have to leave your RSS Client to retrieve the rest of the content, although we do encourage discussion. Current subscribers should be able automatically begin to receive the newly formatted feeds without any action necessary on their part.

Web Compatibility:
All content on Skatter Tech is now 100% XHTML 1.0 Valid. We’re trying to keep up with web standards and requirements. Skatter Tech should work in just about any major browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, or Google Chrome.

Mobile Edition:
If you’ve got an Apple iPhone, RIM BlackBerry, or any other mobile device that has a web browser you’re now in luck! No special mobile URLs are needed, just visit skattertech.com as you would do on your computer on your mobile device. A mobile friendly version of Skatter Tech should appear in your browser. We’ve got an interface for both touch screen and standard browsers. So what are you waiting for, give it a shot and let us know how it works!

Other Info:
We’re also running on the latest version of WordPress (2.8.3 at the time of publication) and running on Media Temple’s Servers. More upgrades are on their way including resurrecting our forums and integrating social networking authentication. Check back for more updates!

Links: Subscribe

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

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

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

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 (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

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

Only about two weeks after the launch of WordPress 2.0.6 and 2.0.7, the WordPress crew finally pushed v2.1 (aka “Ella”) out of beta. WP2.1, rather than a patch, is a major upgrade from the 2.x series. The blogging engine, which Skatter Tech is currently running, now has a more powerful back-end for administrators to manage content. Although many plugins no longer work for 2.1, we recommend updating since it also includes over 550 bug fixes. The following is some of the major changes implemented.

WordPress v2.1 Features:

• Ajax AutoSave Posts – prevents loosing posts
• Tabbed Editor – WYSIWYG and Raw Code
• Ajax-based Spell Checker for composer
• XML Import/Export – transfer data between blogs
• Search Engine – custom indexing privacy settings
• Front Page – set any page as the main page
• Blogroll – many improvements and changes
• Login – redesigned screen from Shuttle
• Ajax Admin Panel – helps speed up tasks
• Comment Feeds – includes all rather than last 10
• Uploads – management for uploaded data
• Other: Cron support, new APIs, and more

We are pleased with the overall improvments the update brings. Managment and content seems to be flowing much faster than ever before. As we mentioned we are having diffucluties with some plugins, but most of the major ones either already have been updated or work.

Links: WordPress 2.1 ‘Ella’ | Download
Related: Instructions For 2.0.x to 2.1

2006 was an amazing year for Skatter Tech. I thought I’d let everyone know some interesting statistics about our site. Last year alone, we had about 1.12 Million visitors from all 193 internationally recognized countries in the world. The most popular Operating System is still Windows XP and Internet Explorer is still the most popular browser. About 80% of our readers are now using Cable or DSL, while 8% are still on Dial-Up. There are many more interesting statistics below such as popular ISPs, Keywords, Screen Resolutions and so on… (P.S. The data provided is not 100% accurate!)

Total Visitors for 2006: 1.12 Million
Average Per Day: 2,100
Countries Visited From: 195 (thats all of them!)

Popular Posts:
1) Stream iTunes To PSP
2) Soda Machine Hack
3) Russell Peters Video
4) Motorola KRZR Review
5) Sony Pocket Station
6) How To Block Fasterfox
7) Royale Theme For XP
8) LG VX9900 Review

Top Web Browsers:
1) Internet Explorer – 55%
2) Mozilla Firefox – 36%
3) Apple Safari – 5%
4) Opera – 2%

Popular Operating Systems:
1) Windows – 90%
2) Macintosh – 7%
3) Linux – 2%

Network Connection Type:
1) Cable/DSL – 79%
2) DialUP – 8%
3) Others – 12%

Geographical Location:
1) USA – 56%
2) Canada – 10%
3) U.K. – 10%
4) Australia – 4%
5) Remaining 20%: Singapore, Germany, Netherlands, India, France, Sweden and so on…

Referring Source:
1) Google.com
2) Direct Access (skattertech.com)
3) Digg.com
4) Yahoo.com
5) CollegeHumor.com

Top Search Keywords:
1) PSP
2) KRZR
3) Fasterfox
4) iTunes
5) enV

Top Internet Service Providers:
1) Comcast – 9.5%
2) SBC – 5.6%
3) Verizon – 4.5%
4) Road Runner – 3.9%
5) Other ISPs – approx. 74%

Screen Resolutions:
1) 1024×768 – 46%
2) 1280×1024 – 19%
3) 1280×800 – 7%
4) 800×600 – 6%

For the past few months we have been running off our new new servers hosted by MediaTemple and the results have been extremely satisfying compared to 1and1. If you haven’t already done so take a look at our new “Tag Browsing” feature,the new Skatter Tech Mobile, and our Message Boards. We’d also like to let everyone know that we will be getting new authors soon, therefore increasing the content on our site. Also check back next week as we will have heavy duty MacWorld 2007 Coverage.

And Finally, Happy New Year!

Over the past few days Skatter Tech has been working on a mobile version of our site and it is finally up and running. To access our site from a mobile phone simply enter skattertech.com into the address as you would on any computer (no special URLs required). The portable web pages are XHTML complaint and should work on most WAP 2.0 phones, PDAs, Pocket PCs, and similar devices. From our testing, we found it to work on Verizon WAP 2.0 supported phones, Windows-based Pocket PCs, and on the Blackberry. (also works on the PSP!) If you’ve got a mobile device with a browser, let us know what you are using and whether our site works.

Links: skattertech.com
Related: Skatter Tech Forums

After two years running and thousands of requests, Skatter Tech has finally created some message boards. All our readers are more than welcome to participate. Consider this new feature “beta” as there are still a ton of changes that will need to be made. Anyways for now the forum has got a few categories and sections. Feel free to post any questions you have and help others out by answering theirs. If you have any suggestions please let us know.

Also note from this point on, please avoid posting supported-related questions on the comment feature on this portion of the site and direct them to the message boards. We feel that by doing this it will be easier for everyone to communicate with each other using a forum system. The phpBB-based forum unfortunately requires registration unlike the comments on this part of the site. Please take a minute to register and get it over with, you’ll never have to deal with it again, I promise.

Links: Skatter Tech Boards (boards.skattertech.com)

Update: (02/14/07) The NEW NEW Skatter Tech Forums are now up and running! Just visit http://forums.skattertech.com or press “Forums” link.

We recently had some requests to offer a wider version of our theme. Our server statistics showed that over 80% of our readers had screen resolutions greater than 1000 pixels wide. Therefore we decided to integrate a second CSS to our site’s theme and a bit of java to allow switching back and forth instantly. With a click of the “Toggle CSS” button, Skatter Tech’s theme should instantly expand from its original 800 pixel wide format into one 1000 pixels wide. We will also leave a tiny cookie in your browser which will save your preference for future visits.

P.S. We have tested this in MSIE 6.0 and Firefox 1.5+, let us know if you were able to get this to work in your browser or if you experienced any problems. Please reply in the comments.

Links: Skatter Tech | Related: We’re Back!

Skatter Tech recently run into problems with our hosting provider 1and1, who decided it, would cost them too much to host us. The had pulled the site from their hosting server and decided to hold it until we upgraded our hosting plan. Anyways we decided to leave and after going through another hosting provide Yahoo, where we once again ran into some technical issues, we wound up with Media Temple. Media Temple seems to be working out for the time being. With this being said, Skatter Tech has been restored and we’ll be getting back on track right away. Definitely expect more posts, new authors, and better content soon!

Links: Skatter Tech | SahasKatta.com

We have just released v2.0 of the Skatter Tech Widget. It displays the latest 5 stories from this site. It requires Yahoo! Widgets (aka Konfabulator) to run. (Mac + PC Support) This widget, as well as the previous one, are available for download in the Widget Gallery. The previous Skatter Tech widget was downloaded over 1000 times! This new widget has the same theme as our site does unlike the previous version. Some other features it has include setting update intervals to check for new stories. It also checks for new stories when the “X” button is clicked. (default 2 hour interval) The widget also has a search field so that all our archives can be searched though the widget. Please download a copy and leave it on your desktop for easy access to the latest stories from Skatter Tech.

Download: Skatter Tech Widget
Links: The Old Skatter Tech Widget
Related: Install Yahoo! Widgets

Skatter Tech has just created a “Widget” for all our readers. To use this widget you must have Konfabulator installed. Konfabulator is a free tool that allows placing widgets on your desktop on either a Windows or a Mac machine. These widgets can display any type of information such as news, weather, time, stock quotes, and much more. This specific widget will show the latest five stories posted on this site. As soon as a new story is posted the widget will automatically update itself with the newest items. Clicking on the title of any item will directly open the story in your default browser. The arrow mark will take you to our homepage www.skattertech.com. This widget works on both operating systems, but is currently still in BETA. Please install and tryout our widget, it is available in Konfabulator’s Widget Gallery. Note: Konfabulator was recently purchased by Yahoo and their product is now called Yahoo Widgets. The service still offers the exact same features and has not been compromised with ads or anything else.

Link: Get The Skatter Tech Widget | Get Konfabulator
Related: Yahoo Widgets | Widget Gallery
Recent Posts: TiVo 2 Go 2 PSP + iPod | Top 10 Majors

As of August 27, 2005 this site has had over 100,000 unique vistors. I recieve about 1000 visitors a day, who uses over 1GB of bandwith a day. It took 6 months for my site to reach 50k, but has grown faster, which has gain another 50k in only 2 months. To this day about 90% of my visitors are using some version of Windows and the rest is a mix of Mac, Linux, ect… Then for browsers Internet Explorer dominates by accounting for about 45% while Firefox is about 40%. The remainder consists of Opera, Netscape, Safari, and others.

Link: www.sahaskatta.com | blogger.sahaskatta.com
Related: And thats 50,000

As of 06.30.05 there have been over 50,000 people (unique vistors) that have viewed pages on www.sahaskatta.com. This month, June, was had the highest amount of vistors, bringing in about 20k. Over 90% of the vistors were using a Windows based operating system (almost 90% of that was some version of WinXP). The last 10% of vistors consisted of mainly of MacOS users (using Safari). On the overall chart Microsoft Internet Explorer accounted for about 48%, and Mozilla Firefox was about 44% of the total vistors. (the remaning 8% was either Safari, Opera, or Netscape.) The current daily traffic is about 800-900 hits, using up about 800 MB of bandwidth per day. Here is a list of some of my current sites: www.sahaskatta.com | blogger.sahaskatta.com | torrent.sahaskatta.com | mobile.sahaskatta.com | (and finally www.skattertech.com comming soon)