Super big Dell Inspiron notebook coupon from Dell Home today. Raves on all the deal boards. $750 off a $1499+ purchase. For example, get a 700m for $755, 9300 for $849, or 6000 for $751. You can also get the Inspiron 1000, 8600, or 9300. I bought the 600m a while back & I like it, plays World of Warcraft fine. :)

So if you want to pick up a notebook with this coupon, what you do is go to Dell Home, pick out one of the supported Inspiron notebooks, customize it so that it costs more than $1499, add it to your cart, & then add the below coupon code on the checkout page.

Coupon Code: J096TQ8TFFG2VX

Fine print:

ONLINE ONLY: Save $750 on select Inspironâ„¢ notebook purchases of $1499 or more (before tax and shipping)! Not combinable with Inspiron notebooks containing Celero n Processors, Inspiron 2200s, Deals of the Week, Outrageous Deals, dollars off, percentages off and select other promotions. Only one coupon may be applied per cart at checkout. Coupon code expires after first 10,000 uses, or when the limited quantities available through this offer are depleted, whichever is earlier. Offers subject to change. View details in My Cart. Enter coupon code at checkout to receive this offer.


So, head to the Dell Home Inspiron Notebooks section & see if you see something you like at this good price. Or buy it & ebay it. Up to you. BTW, you don't have to use my Dell links if you don't want to, but it does help me keep the site running. :)

The grammar is a bit off, but I wanted the rhythm right. Anyhow, I've been using Blogger for a while, and I'm probably going to be switching soon due to some gripes I have that I don't see changing.

Pros:

Easy to use

Free

Hosted solution, you don't need your own server

Some nice features, like multiple users per blog, email entries to your blog, etc. Maybe those are considered standard nowadays, though.

Googlebot will take a look at your blog pretty quickly. No guarantee you'll get indexed, though.

Cons:

No category system. I blog on a bunch of different topics, and I need to offer my viewers a chance to see related articles. If you're a reader and you like a post of mine on Visual SourceSafe, why would you have to go through the past 6 months of archive pages to read my other VSS posts? Answer: you won't -- you'll leave. If there were a nice link saying "Click here for all my VSS posts" then you'd get more value out my my blog, read it more, maybe come back more often.

No RSS feed. Yes, Blogger has Atom. Yes, supposedly some people say Atom is better. Yes, a lot of RSS consumers also read Atom feeds. So what? RSS is all over the place, and if you can't offer up an RSS feed, you're going to miss out some.

No trackback system. If I post about someone else's blog post and link to it, other systems will automatically instead a trackback in that other blog, linking back to my post. Very handy, very nice. Totally missing from Blogger.

No comment spam protection. Other frameworks have CAPTCHA tests built-in or addable. Blogger allows you to limit it people with Blogger accounts, or moderate your comments. It's easy to get a Blogger account, so that won't stop the spam. And comment moderation is s fine if you have a small blog, but it doesn't prevent spammers from submitting comments in the first place. So as your readership grows, you won't have time to sift through all the comments & filter spam from legit comments. Eventually you'll end up not allowing comments at all, like Rosie probably did. By the way, her blog isn't half bad. Much better than I expected. But anyhow.

So, I'm looking into alternative blogging software, and of course there's stuff you can pay for. But on the free side, if you're running Linux, Apache, PHP, & MySql, you're set. If you're running a Windows box...meh, not as much.

Stay tuned as I continue my investigation -- maybe one day soon you'll see a new blog up here. Maybe I'll do a little review of the systems I looked at. Maybe I won't do anything at all. Only the nose knows....

Application: HTTPLook
Vendor: BinaryAge Software
Home Page: www.httpsniffer.com
Price: $29.95
Rating: 9/10
Pros: Cheap, lots of features, easy to use, works with any browser or application that makes HTTP calls
Cons: Plain-looking, not free, missing a few higher-end features

If you're working on an application that makes a bunch of HTTP calls (a spider, a data-driven Flash application, a web browser, a browser plugin, etc.), there aren't a lot of easy ways to monitor the calls. Yes, you can step through the code in debug mode, but that's problematic when debugging production installs. Not to mention slow and overkill. You can also look at the web logs, but sometimes you don't have access to those, or you have to wade through thousands of lines. You could write a call-logging mechanism, but that takes time & might have bugs of its own. What you need is an easy way to log & view all the HTTP calls that a machine is making. Enter BinaryAge Software's HTTPLook.

We have a data-driven flash application on a number of our sites. It calls web services, retrieves XML, downloads images, and hits "pixels" for traffic reporting purposes. But sometimes it would hang, or fail to load an image, or fail to poke a pixel, & it would be a PITA to see what it was doing & which calls were broken. With HTTPLook, you simple load up the application, click "Start", and start surfing/using your app. HTTPLook records the HTTP calls as you make them. It lists the outbound requests & the returns. Status code, cookie settings, headers, bodies, all there. Plus you can filter results, save logs, etc. Here's a screenshot:



More screenshots are here.

Now when we have problems, we can quickly pinpoint the troubled URL. We can easily inspect the XML being returned from the web services to see if there's errant data. We can see if there are any missing images by looking for "404" return statuses. Our debugging time & troubleshooting time was cut down to less than 10% of what it was. But the best part is that it's under $30, compared to several hundred dollars for competing products I found. And there's a free trial, too.

I don't mean to pimp this app too hard. I don't get any kind of referral fee, nor do I have anything to do with the company. I was just happy to find an inexpensive app that filled a niche & saved us a ton of time, and I thought others might appreciate the tip, too.

Now, I should mention that if you have to have a free solution, you could use Ethereal, a free network analyzer. But installing it, setting it up, configuring the filters, etc. isn't nearly as easy as HTTPLook. If you have the time, enjoy jumping through hoops, and don't have thirty bucks to burn, try out Ethereal. But be sure to also install the trial version of HTTPLook, too -- after a little while you might decide $30 isn't too much to pay for a no-frills app that does exactly what it's meant to do.