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Ordering ice cream online

Jacob — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:09:39 +0000

Did you know that you can buy ice cream online that is delivered to your home? IceCreamSource.com does just that, selling the more expensive brands. To ship, they put the ice cream in a freezer box, and add the right amount of dry ice for it to be delivered frozen and fresh. It comes at a price, because shipping costs start at $30/order.

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Alternatives to eBay?

Jacob — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:32:40 +0000

eBay, the online auction marketplace, facilitates somewhere in the range of $50 Billion in gross sales a year. Thats $50,000,000,000 worth of commerce that takes place because of eBay.

Recently, eBay has been making some changes, including changing its rates, eliminating seller feedback, and other various changes. Many sellers, including the power sellers, are not happy with all the changes, nor are they happy with some of the bugs they’ve been seeing because of the changes. There has even been talk of a boycott of eBay and all sort of embattlement accusations between eBay and its sellers.

Which leads me to the question: if not eBay, then what? Who is directly competing with eBay as far as providing an online market place? Craig’s List and Amazon.com both provide marketplaces, but neither of them provide a sufficient online auction system. The closest competitor was Yahoo! Auctions, but that site was taken off-line last year.

Obviously for an auction site to be successful, it would need to have a critical mass of both sellers and buyers, and with eBay around, those sort of sustainable numbers would be hard to achieve. But suppose sellers and buyers decided to leave in droves from eBay to another online auction site. Who is available to take them? Or does eBay have such a monopoly that there is no other alternative. If eBay were to suddenly stop existing, what would happen to that $50B of economy?

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BYU’s new website theme fosters identity theft

Jacob — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 20:05:12 +0000

On February 15th, BYU will launch a new look and feel for its various websites including the BYU homepage, Route Y, and department and college sites. The administrators for BYU’s webpages have nicknamed this new look and feel Collage. The Collage theme sports new colors and new methods for user interaction, but will increase a hacker’s ability to steal student’s identities.

An essential component to Collage is a login form on the top of every page. Students can type their username and password into the form to be shown a custom set of Internet links. Webpage administrators expect that students will frequently enter their password to gain access to their preferred links. Students will then be trained to frequently type their password on top of any page with the Collage theme.

Within a matter of minutes, anyone with a technical background can set up a page using the Collage theme. They can make it look like a genuine and legitimate BYU site. In particular, hacker’s can create a fake site that looks like a BYU site, but it really just a technique to trick student users. Many student users could be tricked into giving their username and password to a fake site created by a hacker. The hacker could then gain access to the student’s personal information, email, and financial accounts. Once the hacker has access to the student’s information,

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New LDS.org website

Jacob — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 12:35:35 +0000

This morning the LDS church launched a new version of their website at LDS.org. I wanted to send out a special congratulations to all those who worked hard on the new design. I know a little bit of what it is like to launch a big website, and it is a great experience (assuming nothing goes wrong).

I first saw parts of the new website design almost a couple of years ago. The new design represents a more reverent feeling as well as a greater ability to translate the site into languages other than English.

In similar but unrelated news, a new BYU homepage is set to launch in about two weeks. However, BYU’s new design does not represent anywhere near the amount of testing and work that was put into the new LDS design.

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BYU releases new web site look

Jacob — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 07:01:11 +0000

Today, BYU released a preview of their new look for the home page and Route Y. This new look is code-named Collage and will eventually be used universally across BYU.

I first saw previews of this new look about a year and a half ago. I expressed anticipation for some good changes, and I made many suggestions about how it could be better. Some of these suggestions were implemented, and others weren’t. Over the last year and a half, I’ve watched my colleagues at BYU debate and discuss different features of Collage. At this point, most suggestions about the templates have been resolved to, “let’s see what the users say about it.”

At this point, it is absolutely critical that users provide as much feedback as possible. I invite you, even if you aren’t affiliated with BYU, to take a look at the design and provide feedback about what you do and don’t like about it. The feedback button can be found near the upper right corner of the page.

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Sustain this

Jacob — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 07:21:07 +0000

If you’ve ever seen digg.com you will feel right at home with Sustain’d. Sustaind.org is a website with links to LDS-related articles and posts on the Internet. Like digg.com, users can vote, or sustain, their favorite articles, which controls which articles show up on the front page. Users can also submit articles or comment on articles.

Sustain’d is kind of addictive if you are an LDS news junkie like myself. I think it would be even more fun if there was a bigger user base so that there will be more action on the site and more comments about the articles.

I hope you like Sustain’d. If you ever end up submitting an article, may I please request that you put a little bit of effort into the summary/description. The description should be short, yet long enough for the reader to understand what the article is about without having to actually read the article. This will allow me (and other users) to more quickly sort through the articles so that I can read and sustain the ones that are most important to me.

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Vanilla House Designs

Jacob — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 06:51:22 +0000

Perhaps this is just a shameless plug, but I recently set up Wordpress to be used for my mom’s business website. She really likes it, especially how she can edit and post content herself instead of having to go through a webmaster. I really hacked the template to get it to look like a regular website instead of a blog, like Wordpress sites normally do. The url is: http://www.vanillahousedesigns.com . Maybe one of these days I’ll tell her that she actually has a blog.

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