As your site grows in popularity you are bound to face some downtime with your site, particularly if you end up getting dugg or slashdotted. Once your site reaches its bandwidth limit, users will start seeing error messages and may end up forgetting about your site and not coming now. There is a new service cleverly called L8ter which should help out. If you find a site that’s down, but that you’d like to come back to, simply head over to L8ter and enter the link of the site as well as your e-mail address. L8ter will then query the site until it comes back up, then inform you, via e-mail so you can go back to it and check it out. Additionally, L8ter offers a Firefox extension called Monitor with L8ter, so you can monitor a site right from your browser. Like all great things, it’s 100% free.

A couple of days ago I wrote about how it would be possible to ward off telemarketers by creating disposable phone numbers, and now I present you with a way to turn all your numbers into one thanks to a new service called GrandCentral. Just like Grand Central station is a main terminal in New York where subway lines from around the city meet, GrandCentral provides a way to connect your landline, cell number, work number, and more into one so you can pick up the call from any of the numbers you list. The really cool feature of GrandCentral is that you can set up how each incoming call is handled. For example, you can have your significant other’s number ring on any of your lines, but have only the office phone ring when your boss calls. Another very interesting feature is the ability to switch calls between any of your lines with the push of a button.

I’m sure that those of you who have a blog or website are always looking for ways to gain a wider audience, otherwise, you’d probably just write on a paper journal. One way to increase your readership is to have higher rankings on popular search engines. There are many methods of doing this, but one easy way would be to analyze how search engines spider your site.

I’m a big fan of Google Talk (my username is ferrettim in case you want to get in touch), but didn’t really like how limited its VOIP capabilities are, so I’m stuck using Skype, at least for now. Today, I found a pretty cool tool called Jabphone which allows you to make outgoing calls directly from Google Talk! The service uses libjingle, Jabber, and Asterisk to work and looks quite promising. You get 15 free minutes of calling time and more minutes can be bought by creating an account at the Jabphone website.

One of the big Google announcements while TipMonkies was on that crazy hiatus was that Google Talk would now work with other Jabber servers, a term dubbed federation. As a result of this, it was only a matter of (short) time before people started trying to connect to other IM protocols through Google Talk. See, Jabber clients can connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and other networks through server transports, which not many people may know about. BigBlueBall has put up a very easy to follow article on connecting Google Talk to AIM, MSN, and Yahoo using the free Jabber client, Psi. Once done, you’ll have your AIM buddies available right from Google Talk.

Ok, well not by me, but by PC Magazine. The PC Magazine site has a pretty nice writeup on BitTorrent including some information on the protocol, a little on its history, and even a short interview with its creator, Bram Cohen. The best parts of the article though are the short reviews of three popular BitTorrent clients. The three reviewed are the lightweight uTorrent (that’s a MU as in the Greek letter, not a U) which is my favorite at the moment, the ever popular and expandable Azureus, the brand new BitPump, and of course, the original BitTorrent client. It sure is nice to see BitTorrent get some positive media attention for once. Oh, and if you haven’t used uTorrent, trust me, you won’t be disappointed.

As the internet has evolved, setting up your own website or blog has become increasingly more simple. Many hosting companies offer packages which require almost no setup on the part of the user (Typepad and Wordpress.com come to mind). Setting up your own website isn’t terribly difficult, but if you’ve never done it before, you may not know exactly what steps to take. I thought about writing my own guide for TipMonkies, but came upon Site-Helper recently instead. Site-Helper is a fantastic resource to help you set up your own site and goes over pretty much all the important and relevant topics, from e-mail to scripts to databases and more.