Here it is today… After working on it for so long, i’m finally launching Rotatee.com today. As i said in my last post, Rotatee is a remotely-hosted banner rotation service. It can also be considered as a simpler and better alternative for my GotBanners plugin. Users can get going in three simple steps:

1. Create a campaign
2. Add the ad codes that you wish to rotate and assign them a weight
3. Just place the one-line code, that Rotatee gives, on your website

For more details, check out the site Rotatee.com. The site is in closed beta. But, as the readers of GotChance, you can get a taste of our service before others do. Just enter “gotchance” as the invite code to Sign up. (This is not like the testing mentioned in my previous post. All data will still be there even after the site opens to the public). Hurry, it is only available for first 100 sign ups.

Looking forward to hearing your comments and suggestions…

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YouTube have today, launched a new feature called “Custom Player”. With this, users will be able to create their own customized video player. They can choose the name, descriptions, content, color theme and layout of the player. There are two types of layouts available currently. One is the usual player and the other is a wider one with the related video being displayed on the right. The content feature allows users to include their own videos or other videos from a YouTube Favorites List or YouTube playlist. This new custom player feature can be accessed via www.youtube.com/custom_player.

Here is an example of my favorite video played in the player that i created to follow the color scheme of GotChance.

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Ning is a simple service that allows anyone to create their own Social Network easily without and coding Knowledge. I read about it on TechCrunch and tried it only a few days ago. ah, it was great. Actually, very good for being free. They are following the Freemium business model. They offer their basic service for free and have some other premium features.

How do i create a Social Network ?

Thats extremely simple. You just go to Ning.com and sign up for a free account. Then, you can create as many social networks as you want for free. A wizard walks you through the various steps to create your social network.

On the other hand, scripts like phpFoX, Handshakes offer a fully built social networking script that you can host on your own servers. They offer very much sophisticated features. But i would prefer to go with Ning rather than waste time with these scripts. Now, let me tell you my reasons.

Lets say that you want to create a social network for your school or something like that, then you wouldn’t want anything like the next MySpace or the next Facebook. Something simple would be more than enough. And thats what Ning offers. Scripts like phpFoX and Handshakes are for those people who plan to build the next big thing like MySpace. But, thats not practical with pre-built scripts like these. Also, considering the numerous bugs in them, only one out of 50-100 installations maybe successful. I have not used phpFoX. But a friend of mine had a Handshakes license and i had a chance to try it out. In my opinion, it has a very poorly coded Administration panel. Many of the features available in the admin panel fail to show up anywhere on the Handshakes site. Building a custom theme is tougher than the toughest thing in the world. Lol.

So, my advice is that, if you are planning to start a Social Network, go with Ning.

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Feedburner was acquired by Google a few days ago and made two of its PRO services free of charge a week ago. And the next Google-ish announcement is here. If you host your content on a Blogger blog with a blogspot.com address (or use Blogger’s “custom domain” feature), you can now redirect your native Blogger feed to your FeedBurner feed. With this you need not worry about adding autodiscovery tags in the Blogger template. Thought the new feature seems clean, Google OS reports that it redirects only one of the 4 feeds of Blogspot to the new one.

Why is redirecting so important?

Feedburner’s Blog says, “By redirecting your feed, you can get a true picture of how many subscribers you have. Some of you might even see a few more subscribers magically appear, though results will most certainly vary. Why so? Sometimes, publishers inadvertently fragment their feed audience by offering more than one feed address on the blog itself or within their autodiscovery tags (the method by which feed readers automatically detect the address of your feed for syndication purposes). This results in some subscribers not being counted, and no one wants that in a world where everyone should count for something. By redirecting your feed, you can consolidate any straggler subscribers and greatly improve your ability to effectively measure your audience.”.

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Yahoo have introduced a new Suggest feature at Yahoo.com. It isn’t new. It works just like Google’s Suggest Tool. You’ll automatically be given suggestions based on what you have typed - as you’re typing. So, not only does this limit the number of words you need to type into a query, it may also present similar queries to shorten your searching time and get to what you’re looking for quicker. This feature was earlier introduced in Yahoo toolbar for Firefox. It is also available in Google Toolbar.

The nice thing about the suggestions is that they’re not obtrusive, so if you already know what you’re searching for, you can overlook the suggestions without them getting in your way. But, when you experience those brain dead moments, it’s the type of feature that just might get things moving again. If you don’t like change, you can turn it off altogether by simply selecting “disable” in the bottom right corner of the drop down menu. And, if you’re having regrets, you can reinstall it by selecting “more” above the search box.

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Digg’s iPhone version website is now live over here. Kevin made the announcement on Digg’s blog and also on Pownce yesterday. You would need an iPhone or Safari’s Webkit software running to see it working properly. You can browse the normal Digg website on your iPhone too. But this is faster and makes things simpler by taking advantage of some of the iPhone user interface.

Some features in the iPhone app:

• Native iPhone-like story scrolling
• Mini permalink pages with top 5 comments
• Login and Digging
• Pagination
• Jump to any topic

Top Stories (24 hours/7 days) feature is coming soon. Looking forward to see iPhone versions of more site in few days.

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eBay have today launched a special “eBay edition” of Mozilla Firefox browser in partnership with Mozilla. It is available for download here and it is only 638 KB. It seems to be good news for eBay users and offers some very nice features.

• An eBay sidebar that provides quick access and real-time updates on items users have bid on, are selling or watching
• Status alerts, including outbid notices
• Integrated eBay search
• Built in support for eBay’s Account Guard

Be a better bidder

You’re always securely signed in so you can check out your progress ever you like. Customise your alerts so you stay on top of your bids. Be told when an auction style format listing you’re bidding on is about to end.

Get updated, instantly

Never miss the eBay action. No matter where you’re browsing, and whatever you’re doing online, you can get an at-a-glance update on all your eBay activities: watching, buying or selling.

Safer browsing

You’re safer with the Firefox Companion. You’ll know you’re on a genuine eBay page and not a spoof site or lookalike. When you’re using Firefox you’re also at less risk from pop-up ads, spyware and other web threats.

Source

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