PCNames allows you to look for domain names the easy web. When you type a name it instantly checks availability (thanks to its AJAX interface) and shows a list of used a free domains.

This makes it easy trying for name variations when looking for a free domain name.

PCNames
http://www.pcnames.com (via Larkware)

Technorati Tags: domain names

On the 4th and 5th November, I went for the first time to the Euroconference (held in Cambridge), which gathers MicroISV people from around the Europe and the world to discuss about software. The MicroISV work has the tendency to get you isolated from the rest of the world whom you interact just firing emails or chatting online. It’s great to meet these people that you have known for months online and know them in person.

The conference touched many topics dear to the heart of software entrepreneurs, like email marketing, customer support, SEO, Adwords, e-commerce and software protection. If you missed the event, you can find an in deep coverage of it at the Obligatory Blog, run by Gavin Bowman who is also the mind behind the Oriador staff scheduling software.

RSS is a great technology for monitoring news on websites but it’s kind of limited to blogs. What can you do if you want to monitor a website which doesn’t offer an RSS feed? For example, monitor your competitors websites for changes?

A good solution comes from a new product: UpdatePatrol from Bitberry Software.
UpdatePatrol monitors a number of websites of your choices and notifies you of changes.

I installed UpdatePatrol on my system and loaded a bunch of my competitors websites. You can insert your websites manually or with a simple drag and drop. Once set, UpdatePatrol monitors your websites (at the schedule you set) and notifies of any update, highlighting the changes. It uses a smart algorithm to ignore dynamic data in page comparisons, e.g. number of visitors, dates, timestamps etc. This is configurable using regular expressions (a pattern matching syntax) for maximum flexibility.

UpdatePatrol lets you monitor RSS feeds too. Although its a nice built-in feature, if you are used to a feed reader, you’ll probably stick to your old habits: I personally prefer to monitor my feeds using Google Reader, as I detailed in this post.

If you find yourself looking at a number of sites, just to check for changes UpdatePatrol can save you a ton of time. The only thing that I miss is a more tight integration with the browser to add sites more easily. Definitely, I warmly suggest that you give it a try.

UpdatePatrol costs 49.95$ and comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. You can download a fully functional 30-day trial at http://www.updatepatrol.com/download.html

Bitberry Software Update Patrol
http://www.updatepatrol.com

150+ clean and clear icons to use in your nifty web application, licensed as creative commons so commercial use is fine. Include photoshop source so you are free to edit them.

Sweetie
http://sweetie.sublink.ca (via Larkware)

If  you have an e-commerce site, it’s paramount to know if it goes down to take the proper countermeasures. Having an application running on your machine that pings the website is impractical and doesn’t work if you pc is turned off.

Much more reliable is a web monitoring service like Montastic, that pings your sites every ten minutes from two different locations and notifies you if something is wrong.

Montastic allows you to monitor up to 100 websites for free. If your server goes down it’ll send you an email. Another email is sent when the site is back up.

You can also see your sites status via RSS or using a Yahoo Widget (you can download the Yahoo Widget Engine here for free) so that you can always keep an eye on your sites.

I added three sites: my main website, my blog (which is hosted by another ISP) and my Plimus order page. I can sleep better now.

Montastic
http://www.montastic.com

Technorati Tags: montastic, website monitoring

They have many names. The dictionary calls them boilerplate text, but you’ll also find them as stationery, AutoText, templates, canned text or text macros. The idea is always the same: type a text once – use it many times.

How many times are you typing the same answers again and again to customers that are asking always the same questions (probably ignoring any FAQ)? Test it! For the next twenty answered mails, pause for a second and think if you didn’t write that answer (complete or in parts) before. You’ll see that it happens more often than you thought.

Having canned text or text macros handy can be a great time saver and taking a little effort organizing the text can quickly pay off. You just have to start it and the more boilerplate replies you have ready, the more time you can save.

Read the in deep discussion of the uses of boiler plate text is in the article Thomas Holtz (reproduced here with permission of the author) published in the September issues of the ASPects, the monthly magazine of the ASP.

Read the full article: boilerplatetext.pdf (40KB)

Technorati Tags: Boilerplate text, text substitution, technical support

Bartelme design is offering on its blog a shopping cart icon that you can freely use on your website. It also offers a collection of other nice icons.

Bartelme Design
http://www.bartelme.at/journal/archive/shopping_cart_icon

Technorati Tags: icons, shopping cart