The basic pingdom package can be signed up for USD9.95 per year which includes monitoring of up to 5 different checks and it includes 20 free SMS. Other notable features of pingdom includes:-

1. Uptime and response time reports
2. API to allow you to include your uptime on your website
3. ping is not the only way to check, you can do HTTP, TCP Port, SMTP, POP3 and other checks.

It does not only check from a single location, but from 12 different locations (at the time of writing and this changes over time). For small to medium size businesses, this may prove to be one of the most useful tool on ensuring your Internet presence. A really useful tool but with some minor reservations on SMS usage.

Ian Tan is a blogger that blogs about life, camera, photography and everything under the sun. You can find out more about him at his blog, IanTan dot net

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Server monitoring with pingdom.com

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With the population of 1.3 billion, China is definitely the biggest market on the planet for anything. YOBO is China’s first intelligent personalized online streaming music, which is similar to the popular online music discovery service in the USA – Pandora. Similar to Pandora, YOBO allows users to listen to specific songs or singers. Based on your music preferences, YOBO will recommend other music or singers that suit your listening taste. Currently, YOBO has a huge database of music with more than 7000 artists and 50,000 songs. Thus, if you are fan of FREE online music and you like to listen to online Chinese or English music, here is a simple guide on how to use YOBO.

This guide will be written in the following order:

1. General Info
2. Main Page
3. Functions and features
4. Business Model
5. General Opinions

1. General Info

YOBO is an intelligent personalized online Chinese music discovery service that is based in Beijing China. With the tagline – “Find your music DNA”, YOBO is poised to be the largest online music provider in the world. Similar to any online music streaming service, you can listen to music from YOBO from your Firefox or Internet Explorer browsers with Adobe Flash installed.

2. Main Page

* Please click on the picture for an enlarged and translated version of YOBO’s starting page.

The main page of YOBO is pretty simple and straight-forward. You can start to listen to your favorite music by entering the name of artist. You may enter any name of a Chinese artist or foreign artist. Once the artist is found, you can start to listen to your favorite music instantly.

3. Functions and Features

* Please click on the picture for an enlarged and translated version of YOBO’s music player page.

One of the unique and coolest features of YOBO as compared to other online music discovery service is the lyric page. YOBO allows you to view the scrolling lyric page as the music is being played.

Page with the list of top male Chinese artists

Page with the list of top male foreign artists

You may listen to your favorite music based on the top Chinese male, female or group artists. You can also choose to listen to music from other foreign artists i.e. American artists and European artists. Artists from Korea and Japan are also available for selection.

Individual artist page – Michael Wong (光良)

Once an individual artist is selected, you may listen to all your favorite songs from that artist.

With MiniYobo – YOBO widget, you can embed your favorite artist’s music onto any webpage, blog or any social networking sites e.g, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and many more.

4. Business Model

Similar to Pandora, YOBO aims to provide free online music streaming services to online users. Currently, there are no advertisement on YOBO. However, in the near future, one may expect to see more advertisements and music related promotions in YOBO.

5. General Opinions

I know that most of the great software and cool online services are from the heart of the technology of the world, Silicon Valley, USA. However, I feel with so many talented and creative minds in China, it would be very cool to explore more exciting and promising technology from this part of the world, Asia.

Sounds interesting?. Check out YOBO for your free online music.

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Listen to FREE Chinese and English Music online via Yobo

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For my review, I have collected three free blog editor software, namely Microsoft Windows Live Writer Beta 2, Zoundry’s Blog Writer and Post2Blog. I shall start with the “big brother” of software.

1. Microsoft Windows Live Writer Beta 2
Microsoft has just released the latest version of Windows Live Writer Beta 2. This WYSIWYG blog editing software is a vast improvement over the previous version and a must-have upgrade.

Live Writer allows blogger to publish to Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Moveable Type, Community Server, and many other weblog services. Moreover, Live Writer makes publishing rich media as easy as sending e-mail. Insert and customize photos, maps, tags, and lots of other cool content—then click the “Publish” button. It’s that easy. If you are interested to add features to Live Writer, you can try out plugins compiled by Digital Inspiration. New features that are available in Live Writer beta 2 include:

New Authoring Capabilities

• Inline spell checking
• Table editing
• Ability to add categories
• Page authoring for WordPress and TypePad
• Support for excerpts and extended entries
• Improved hyperlinking and image insertion
• Paste Special

Integration and Compatibility

• SharePoint 2007 support
• New APIs enabling custom extensions by weblog providers
• Automatic synchronization of local and online edits
• Integration with Windows Live Gallery
• Support for Blogger Labels

2 . Zoundry’s Blog Writer
Zoundry’s blog writer has got nice and good feature set and simplicity and stability gives it additional points. It’s as easy to use as a word processor, plus there are features like tools to add links, tags, photos, music and video files, and more. Another unique feature of Zoundry’s Blog Writer is that it allows you to make money online too. What?! Did you say make money online? Yup!. If you write about books, music, movies, or other cool products, by inserting an affiliate link from various merchants, including Amazon.com, Buy.com, eBags.com, Ritz Camera, and more, you can earn money online when your readers click through your product links and buy.

Similar to Live Writer, Zoundry’s Blog Writer enables you to manage multiple blogs, multiple accounts, and multiple blog platforms including Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, WordPress and more. Other options on posting include sending weblog pings and trackback pings, all of which will simplify the process of posting.

3. Post2Blog
Another handy blog editor software is Post2Blog. Similar to Live Writer and Zoundry’s Blog writer, Post2Blog is a really easy to use WSIWYG blog editor for publishing posts to blogs on a number of platforms including WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, and a few dozen of others. Previously Post2Blog cost around USD39, however, Bytescout Software has decided to release Post2Blog version 3.0 as freeware. Now that is a good news. Hey, everyone needs a free good blog editor software. Right?

Here are some of the features available for Post2Blog:

• Live spellechecking
• Depending on what blog platform you’re using, images can be uploaded automatically to your blog, to Imageshack, Flickr, or other locations
• Plugins for Internet Explorer and Firefox let you copy and paste text from the web to your blog with just a few clicks
• Microsoft Word toolbar lets you compose entries in Word and upload them to your blog with just a click
• Quickly add images or documents to your entry by clicking “send to” and “Post2Blog” in Windows Explorer

So out of the three blog editor software, which one I would recommend? I actually prefer Zoundry’s Blog Writer as it is easy to use. Live Writer is not bad too, but I dislike the fact that I am required to install Microsoft .NET framework 1.1 before I can install Live Writer.

So which blog editor software you would like to give a try?

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Review of Free Blog Editor Software

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