Marcus McCurdy's Blog

Google Latitude a new Google service that supposedly allows you to find your friends through their mobile phone. Here are the phones it is currently working on:

• Android-powered devices, such as the T-Mobile G1
• iPhone and iPod touch devices (coming soon)
• most color BlackBerry devices
• most Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices
• most Symbian S60 devices (Nokia smartphones)
• many Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones, such as Sony Ericsson devices (coming soon)

My poor little iPhone will just have to wait. The page also has a video you can watch.

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Google Analytics is a great resource for anyone who runs a website. It is free to use and the statistics that it provides you with are very eye opening. The first step is signing up and it is totally free just go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ to sign up if you already have a gmail account it will add analytics to your Google account.

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I decided to test my typing at http://speedtest.10-fast-fingers.com/ and my results are below. Can you beat me? (more…)

I found this article on Wired via Digg and wanted to post about it. If you are hoping to one day don a metal suit and fly around through the sky like Iron Man then prepare to be disappointed. According to the article the energy requirements needed to put a person in the air and then fly around are simply too great to be supplied by the small suit with present day technology. One can only hope that those evil genuises / scientists work faster so we can get our sweet Iron Man suits.

The article did say that one feature of the suit that isn’t so much fiction is the cybernetic helmet and similar technology is already being developed.

read more | digg story

I found these advanced tips to speed up your website at Jaisen Mathai’s blog. He used yslow to get a grade on his website’s speed then used the tips from that program to speed up his site. He went from an F to an A so check it out. I’m going to run yslow on my site later. http://www.jaisenmathai.com/blog/2008/02/27/speed-up-apache-how-i-went-from-f-to-a-in-yslow/

First, I know there are plugins that do this, but I didn’t feel like using a plugin. Second, I got the idea for this from Jennifer Slegg’s blog post 52 easy ways to optimize your blog while on your coffee break. The link that she gave to Matt Cutt’s blog post How to highlight author comments in WordPress didn’t match up with the code my theme is using or the the default Kubrick theme (I think he designed his own theme). I’ll show you the method I used to modify my comments.php and style.css. (more…)

If you look at the comments section of some of your favorite blogs you will probably see some comments that may look a bit strange upon first glance. I was curious as to what these comments are all about and I found out they are called Trackbacks and Pingbacks. After a little research (and by research I mean a quick Google search) I found a great site that explains both of them and even gives a little tutorial on them. Pingbacks, if enabled, are basically automatic after you change one setting in your blog. Trackbacks require a little more effort, but not much. Check out the whole post at http://www.optiniche.com/blog/117/wordpress-trackback-tutorial/