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Ramblings from the Pingdom team about the Internet and web tech

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Posts Tagged ‘Free’

Nginx, the little Russian web server taking on the giants

Nginx

When it comes to web server software, Apache has been king of the hill for a long time. It currently has about 54% of the market. This is followed by Microsoft’s IIS, with about 24% of the market. Then, surprisingly, a new contender has started to rise, and it’s coming out of Russia: nginx (pronounced “engine x”).

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10 free iPhone apps for effectively managing your website

iPhone appsIf you are a webmaster and you have an iPhone then prepare yourself, because here is a list of ten of the very best iPhone apps for webmasters. These apps will help you to manage your website, on the go and with ease. Best of all these apps are free to download. With the exception of Chartbeat and Analytics Agent Lite, these apps are fully functional versions, and each is useful in its own unique way.

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New! Desktop notifier for website downtime

Pingdom Desktop NotifierDo you have a website? Do you like knowing that it’s working ok? Pingdom exists for this very reason, to alert you when your site has downtime, so you can fix it. With this in mind we have released a new application that we call the Pingdom Desktop Notifier, which sits in your Windows system tray.

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Thank you Google for the SLOOOW Internet

Pingdom’s management team recently visited Boston, USA, for some meetings. On their way back they had some time left over at the airport and decided to get some work done. Nicely enough, Google is currently offering everyone free Wi-Fi at a large number of US airports, including the Logan International Airport in Boston.

So, free Wi-Fi. Sounds great, right?

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10 of the most popular (and useful) WordPress plugins

Wordpress has risen to be a powerhouse on the Internet that now dominates the blogosphere. It was started by the (now) 25-year-old Matt Mullenweg. Last week he was on This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis. On the show Matt revealed that Wordpress has such a strong presence on the Internet that at least one in three Americans online have visited a Wordpress blog in the last month.

Wordpress lets you use thousands of powerful plugins that complement and extend the platform in a variety of ways. I have scoured the Wordpress Plugin Directory to find the very best plugins to share with you in this post.

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Creative Commons: Best practices for webmasters

For webmasters and web designers, the question of where to find high quality images and other media to use on your sites can be complicated. It can be expensive to purchase photos, even if you stick to stock photography. If you run a blog or another site that requires lots of photos, you can go broke just by purchasing images. But there is a way that you can legally use photos, music and even text for free: Creative Commons.

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Are young Internet users more likely to pay for content?

Are young Internet users less stingy than old ones? That certainly seems to be the case when it comes to paying for online content according to a new survey by paidContent:UK.

In the survey, 1,188 UK adults between the ages 16-64 were asked what they would do if their favorite news site started charging money. The results weren’t exactly what you might expect.

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Music and video streaming services in themselves are nothing new (as YouTube and others can attest to), but what is new is that finally some companies seem to be getting the big content providers on board. Spotify is gathering buzz with its music streaming service, and Voddler is about to launch a similar service for movies and TV series. And guess what? Both can be used for free.

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A whopping 40% of Mozilla’s work is done by volunteers

Few have managed to make better use of the Open Source model than Mozilla, and we recently saw some very impressive numbers on how much of Mozilla’s work is done by volunteers versus its internal staff that we thought were worth sharing with you (emphasis in the quote below added by us).

Even as Mozilla’s internal staff has grown to 250, from 15 in 2005, an army of volunteers still contributes about 40% of the company’s work, which ranges from tweaks to the programming code to designing the Firefox logo.

Since we are a naturally curious bunch here at Pingdom, we had to ask ourselves how much the time that these volunteers contribute is actually worth in terms of money.

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How Spotify got the big record labels on board

Spotify, the European peer-to-peer music streaming service that gives its users access to millions of songs for free is gaining more buzz every day. The service already has millions of users and has managed what many thought was impossible: it got the big record labels on board a free service and gained access to their music libraries.

Spotify has deals with Sony BMG, Universal Music, Warner Music, EMI and Merlin. The first four of these are often called the “big four” record companies.

How did Spotify pull this off?

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