Sorry for the lack of posts lately; some quick stuff  

Submitted on November 3rd, 2005 by admin
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I want to apologize for the lack of posting over the past few days. I haven’t disappeared or gotten lost anywhere, I’ve just been a little sick and haven’t done much of anything since Monday. I am feeling well enough today though that I will resume posting later on in the day. Again, I apologize.
As far as the contest goes, I still haven’t been able to get through all the entries because I got way more than expected (plus the fact that I’ve been sick didn’t help). I should be done sorting through entries today or tomorrow so I will definitely announce a winner by this weekend. Finally, expect a couple small visual changes to the site over the weekend as well. I’ve gotten e-mails from a few color blind folks who can’t see our links very well, so we’ll be changing that as well as a couple other things slightly, though I’m sure most of you won’t be able to tell.

Happy Halloween!  

Submitted on October 31st, 2005 by admin
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As for the haiku contest we’re having, you have until 12PM Eastern Standard Time to send your entries in. I’ve received way more than I anticipated (in the hundreds) so I will do my best to get through all those entries today, but from the looks of it, I won’t be announcing the winners until sometime tomorrow. If you are a winner, you will be contacted via e-mail prior to my announcing it on the site. Happy trick-or-treating!

TipMonkies turns 6 months!  

Submitted on October 28th, 2005 by admin
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So as I mentioned yesterday, today marks our six months on the web. As a result, I’m taking the day off from posting and relaxing at my in-laws house for the day. I want to thank everyone for helping us get to this point- contributors, tip submitters, and all readers- and for helping us grow so fast. When I started this site on April 28, 2005, I never thought it’d be as big as it’s gotten, at least not so quickly. We hope we can continue to bring you the latest and greatest information for many years to come. Don’t foget that we’re having a contest with some cool prizes. I’ve already received 200+ entries, but keep sending them, and remember, you’re not limited to one entry either. Deadline for entries is Monday morning, and I’ll announce the winner sometime Monday afternoon. So about the growth…here are some stats to show you where we stand today:

• Unique visitors per month, from 65 in April to nearly 50,000 in October so far.
• Monthly hits have gone from 1,400 in April to nearly 2,000,000 in October.
• According to Alexa.com, we’re the 110,000th most popular site on the web (last I checked there were several billion websites). We started out at around number 2,995,000 six months ago.

Thanks again to everyone, and we’re looking forward to many more months and years to come. I’m already hard at work planning some things for our one year celebration!

We’re celebrating 6 months on the web with a contest!  

Submitted on October 27th, 2005 by admin
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Tomorrow marks our 6 month anniversary (YEY!) and because all of you guys have made this site such a joy to work on, we’re having a contest to give something back! If you want to participate, write a geeky or tech-related haiku and either post it in the comments or e-mail it to us. I will sort through the entries and choose the top three this weekend (be sure to include an e-mail address with all entries, don’t worry, they won’t be given out to anyone, it’s just to notify you if you win). Winners will be announced on Monday, October 31, 2005. So what are the prizes?

1. First place will receive a $50 (USD) Amazon or iTunes gift card (your choice)
2. Second place will receive a $25 (USD) Jinx.com gift certificate
3. Third place will get a free book from No Starch Press (our choice)

Don’t know what a haiku is? Head on over to this site to learn how to write one. Be creative! Here’s a little haiku which TipMonkies contributor Brian wrote as an example:

TipMonkies, now with BlinkList support  

Submitted on October 26th, 2005 by admin
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About a week ago, I mentioned that we were going to be adding support for the fantastic social bookmarking site BlinkList on TipMonkies, as soon as the service fixed their bookmarklet. Well they have, and you can now save your favorite TipMonkies posts onto BlinkList with just a couple of mouse clicks. You can find more info on how to do it over at the BlinkList blog. Thanks to Mike from BlinkList for letting me know and making it happen so quickly!

You can now get TipMonkies in your inbox  

Submitted on October 19th, 2005 by admin
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The title says it all; after quite a few requests, we’ve added the ability to subscribe to this site via e-mail using Blogarithm which we discussed yesterday. If you look at the sidebar (scroll down), you’ll see that you can enter your e-mail address in there and receive new posts in your inbox. Enjoy!

Also, we’re working on adding BlinkList support to the site as well. It’s not currently possible, but Mike from BlinkList assured me that they’re working on this, so expect that functionality soon. Any other things you’d like to see around here? Let us know!

My experiments at hacking sleep  

Submitted on October 17th, 2005 by admin
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This isn’t really TipMonkies related, but a little experiment I’m working on which I thought some of you might be interested in. I’ve decided to experiment with polyphasic sleep to see if I can cram more time to do stuff I enjoy, and started a blog tracking my progress over at Blogger. This was, of course, inspired by a recent post on Hack A Day about hacking sleep. If anyone has any experience with this stuff, let me know!

When using someone’s info, link back  

Submitted on October 14th, 2005 by admin
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A few months ago, we decided to license all our content under the Creative Commons license to make it easier for people to use our information on their own sites. So far, it has worked well and thousands of sites are linking back to us, but not everyone is abiding by the license. If you use any information on this site (or any site really), be kind enough to link back to the original post, it’s the least anyone could do. We do our best to credit our sources, and you should do the same; just a heads up. You can read our license right here, it’s the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5 license.

Update on the site problems  

Submitted on October 11th, 2005 by admin
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I’m sure many of you noticed database and WordPress errors here on the site over the past few days. At first I thought it had to do with our hosting, but the latest problems seem to stem from WordPress itself. As a result, I’m going to be optimizing certain things so pages load faster and our servers have less overhead. I am considering moving the site to a different blogging software, so if anyone has any recommendations, please leave a comment. Whatever software you recommend MUST be able to read WordPress databases or at least have a way to convert WordPress databases to whatever structure the new software uses. Thanks in advance!

Welcome digg users!  

Submitted on October 6th, 2005 by admin
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Looks like some articles of ours made it to digg yesterday, and we got a huge influx of traffic. Boy, am I glad we have obscene amounts of bandwidth. Welcome to all you guys (and gals). If you’ve never been to digg, it’s a social bookmarking/news site which is pretty cool. Lots of great stuff in there. And you diggers, be sure to look around the site, and don’t be a stranger!

UPDATE: when I posted those two articles on digg I never thought we’d see this much traffic. We’re getting HAMMERED (we had 250,000 hits as of 12PM EST and still going). We didn’t even see this much traffic when we got Slashdotted! Fortunately, we have plenty of bandwidth so keep them coming!