Yesterday, I received an email from my domain name registrar Name Cheap asking me to verify my contact data for domain names that will be expiring in the following month.

According to NameCheap, this is a new rule stipulated by ICANN and I certainly can understand why. It’s fine to use Who Is Guard but some domain owners just would rather save that Who Is Guard fees and put some fictitious name and address as the domain owner. This would solve that problem.

By having our real contact details associated with our domain ownership, this would help ICANN identify people who are misusing their domains for fraud activities like the recent phishing attack via Gtalk.

So I have installed Windows Live Writer a couple of days ago and since then have used it to publish more than ten blog posts on both Blogger and self-hosted WordPress blogs.

While it is a very simple to use desktop publishing programme, I find that the HTML coding for my posts rather messy and I usually have to view source and edit them before posting on my blog, particularly when I have included images in my posts as well. That’s why when I have images, I usually post directly to my blog without using Windows Live Writer.

I like Windows Live Writer generally but wish that it comes with grammar suggestions and auto-correction of words like Microsoft Word. That would help us blog a whole lot faster too! And one other thing that I wish it has is the ability to nofollow links.

For those of you who blog with fancy rainbow coloured text, I am sorry to say, you can’t do that with Windows Live Writer, but then this isn’t something that I would miss.

As a blogger, I have come across quite a number of blogs that live off the content of original blog posts of other bloggers. Truly, I get extremely pissed off when I see my posts on other people’s blogs!

I have a friend who once told me that she somehow stumbled upon a blog that stole her posts, including photos of her children! Could you imagine how angry she was? We thought that the content was scrapped from her blog feed but we could be wrong.

Back then, unfortunately, we did not know of any avenue to force this scrapper to remove the copied post, except to report to Google AdSense and I am sure for those who had done so, there was no action taken at all.

Just now, I read on Web Pro News that we now have an avenue to make a report on violation of scrapped content. The post by Web Pro News has step by step instructions on how to lodge a report. The only bummer is that in today’s technology age, Google doesn’t accept such a report by email.

Source: Web Pro News

A few hours ago Yahoo! sent out an announcement that they are closing Briefcase. Frankly, I have forgotten all about Briefcase even though it is a great concept which allows us to store files securely online, much like Windows Live SkyDrive.

I used Yahoo! Briefcase a long time ago and like I said, I forgot all about it. Upon receiving notification from Yahoo!, I decided to check what files I still have, though I figured that the files couldn’t be all that important if I could store and not remember them, but still I wanted to be sure.

It’s funny that what I had in Yahoo! Briefcase are three mp3 files. I don’t know why I stored them there; these aren’t even songs that I particularly like. And get this! The files were uploaded at the end of 2004, which means it was 4.5 years ago, and I never even accessed them since then. Yeah, I know, I’m bad.

So you can imagine, I wouldn’t be missing Yahoo! Briefcase. I’m glad though, that Yahoo! has given ample time to users to download files stored on Yahoo! Briefcase since it will only close on 30th March, 2009. All files will be deleted and no longer retrievable after this date.

Yahoo! Briefcase: http://briefcase.yahoo.com/