Site Updates

New features or changes on Michael’s Piece of the Web

07
Sep
2005

2 New Michael’s Guides Available Now!

While the blog part of my site was down, Michael’s Guide was growing. I’ve created 2 new guides.

Michael’s Guide to Wireless Security will help you learn how to better secure your wireless networks. It’s amazing how many people just plug in their router and never set up any security.

Michael’s Guide to Choosing Passwords is a short guide on how to pick better passwords. Your passwords is are the keys to your life. Don’t leave doors unlocked because you chose a weak password.

Check them out today in Michael’s Guides

Posted by Michael in Interesting Links, Site Updates, Technology
07
Sep
2005

Blog Outage

You may or may not have noticed that my blog was down for the past few days. Apparently my webhost (Vizaweb) was having some sort of MySQL database issues again. I like them as a host over all, and the price is sure right. However, I hope they get over these “growing pains” that they’ve been going through.

I don’t check my site every minute of every day, so the only way I realized it was down was that several of my scheduled entries never showed up in the RSS feed.

If you ever notice any part of the site isn’t working, please feel free to e-mail me.

Posted by Michael in Site Updates
01
Sep
2005

Hurricane Katrina Relief

Red CrossUnless you’ve spent the past few days in a cave, you know that the City of New Orleans has basically been wiped out by the flooding that has followed Hurricane Katrina. I just added a llink to the American Red Cross to the homepage. Please use it to donate to the massive relief effort in New Orleans and the surrounding areas, including Mississippi and Alabama.

Posted by Michael in Life, Site Updates
03
Aug
2005

Construction

You may have noticed that the homepage is kind of torn apart at the moment. Hopefully you also noticed that the whole site has a slightly new look. The elevator buttons are gone! I liked them and a few people complimented me on them, but they were too big and weren’t easy enough to use to navigate through the site. Hopefully you’ll find the new design easier to use.

The homepage will be done soon. I was going to wait until it was done to upload the new pages, but I think most people look at the other pages more anyway. If you have any suggestions about what conent I should put on my homepage e-mail me and let me know.

Posted by Michael in Site Updates
28
Jul
2005

Server issues

My site is currently hosted a company called VizaWeb. They provide good service, but they seem to be having some growing pains. Many people, including myself, switched to them because they were recommended by technology guru, Leo Laporte. The onslaught of new customers seems to be causing problems. I’ve experienced some downtime as a result.

What I’m asking of you is that if you see my site is down or unreachable, please e-mail me and let me know. If you don’t know my address you can use my contact form once the site is back up. You can also post it in the comments of this entry.

Thanks!

Posted by Michael in Site Updates
17
Jul
2005

Searching my site/blog

Using I set up my site with Google’s new service, Google Sitemaps. It should result in better indexing of my site by Google. This means you’ll get more accurate results and some of the lag I’ve mentioned before will no longer be a problem when I make changes.

Posted by Michael in Site Updates, Technology
11
Jul
2005

I’m an RSS feed

One of the benefits of having an actual blog is that it has an RSS feed. There’s a feed of my posts as well as feeds of comments for each post.

For those of you who don’t know what RSS is, it’s a feed that can be read by a news aggregator. Basically, you get information from a bunch of websites at once. The program collects the items and displays them for you. I personally check about 50 feeds everyday. I could never visit all of those websites, but its only takes a few minutes to scan through the list of items in my news aggregator.

For more info on RSS visit Wikipedia’s article on news aggregators. They even list some good choices. Personally, I use NetNewsWire for Macintosh.

Once you have a program up and running, subscribe to my feed at http://www.michaelgatti.com/blog/feed.

Or subscribe to my comments feed at http://www.michaelgati.com/blog/comments/feed

Posted by Michael in Interesting Links, Site Updates
11
Jul
2005

Blog Upgraded

You might have noticed that this blog looks much diffrent than before. I installed some new software this weekend. Now it’s running on actual blogging software. The one I chose is WordPress. I saw it demonstrated on Call for Help on G4-TechTV Canada. So far, I like it. I’m slowly getting the hang of editing the CSS and PHP files to customize the look and feel. I think you’ll see the Blog become a bigger part of the site now that it’s a million times easier to update!

Posted by Michael in Site Updates, Technology
08
Jul
2005

Run, Googlebot, Run!

If you’ve tried using the Google Search box on my homepage lately, you may have noticed a lot of broken results. When I updated my site, I changed the directory structure and until the Googlebot crawls my site again, Google’s indexing still points to the old files. They usually crawl the site at least once a month so you should see it updated anytime now.

Posted by Michael in Site Updates
04
Jul
2005

All New Family Tree Site

It’s done! I just finished updating my geneaology website, The Gatti Family Tree. It’s all new from the ground up. Besides having a whole new look, it has a lot of new content. Check its homepage for more details.

Posted by Michael in Genealogy, Site Updates