Claire's Random Thoughts

I’ve been using gmail for the past couple years and have always regarded it as the best email service that I have used. However, I have found another one worth consideration. crawler.com seems to offer more features than gmail does, although they might not be very well-known right now. I’m guessing that most people who are reading this have never heard of crawler, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with their service.To make sure that they weren’t a tiny company that would disappear overnight without notice, I checked their Alexa ranking which was 44,333 indicating that they were decently sized.

Here are some of their features:
Large 5 GB storage with 20 mb attachments
Customize “From” addresses (send mail that looks like it’s coming from another one of your accounts or use a forwarding alias)
POP3 access
External POP3 accounts (to poll all your other mail)
Autoresponder
Sort rules (called filters in many other email services)
Option to create a public or private photo album

Crawler mail uses a nice interface with no ads, whatsoever. The layout can be either one similar to Yahoo mail beta (shown in the picture above) or one of their other 3 choices. There are also simplified, text-only, or access black and white skins for faster loading, but the default is probably the best. You may also change the color scheme if you wish. The list of emails is displayed on top while the actual message is displayed below it in the default view.

There is also a storage panel that you could use to backup or store your files. If you use the web uploader, then the file size limit is 20 mb, but if you download the toolbar which can be found on the site or here, then you can the virtual storage folder to upload files up to 50 mb


The crawler folder looks like any other folder in My Documents. If you open it, then you will be able to upload files that will also appear in your storage panel next time you access your mail with a browser. You can drag and drop files or folders as well as create folders, similar to a flash drive. This feature is very convenient, because I am able to upload folders with lots of files by simply dragging and dropping or copying and pasting. This is definitely easier than selecting every single file in a browser uploader.

To Anime fans out there: You probably hate the slow torrent anime downloads or low quality youtube videos. Of course there are some direct download sites out there, but they’re either just as slow as torrents, infiltrated with ads, or cost money. Don’t you wish you could download your favorite series with direct downloads of decent speed? That’s why Anime Dreamer was created!

This site is fairly new, so there might currently be a limited selection. However, series are being added at a quicker rate than the rate at which I can watch them. Current hosted series are: Bartender, Rescue Wings, Death Note, REC, Itsudatte My Santa (single episode), and Densha Otoko.

Animedreamer.info is also great, because there are very few ads. Most download sites that host large files also have lots of ads to pay for the bandwidth, but on Anime Dreamer, there is only one leaderboard on each page of the main site, and the user even has the option of hiding it if he/she wishes to browse without distractions.

If you do not have site statistics built in with your web hosting provider, then I would recommend google analytics for very detailed statistics. When I first started this blog, I just used a freewebs counter to count page views. However, this did not tell me how many pages each visitor viewed, how many new/repeat visitors I had, or where my main sources were. Therefore, a couple days after I made this blog, I started using google analygics. Here are some of my statistics for those of you who want to see how google analytics is like:

Google analytics tells me how many of my visitors were new and how many were repeats. I seem to get mostly new visitors, but a few loyal visitors are returning. This is good in the sense that a lot of different people are looking at my blog but bad in the sense that not that many are bookmarking it and coming back later. Oh well, the main reason most poeple visit sites is for information. Once they get that information, they usually leave…

My traffic is still very unstable. If I write an interesting technical article and sumbit it to digg and reddit, then I get a lot of hits for a few hours. Once the story gets a few hours old, the visitors decline. I guess I still need more updated information if I want more visitors from those two sites. I have also been losing traffic since I have been posting less in bloggerforum. My signature was a link to my blog, and I often posted links to my blog with relevant information to certain threads.

Most of my visitors are still from the United States. This doesn’t surprise me that much, because a lot of the major computer nerds are from here.

It looks like I get links from various sources. The two big ones are digg and reddit, because they get lots of visitors themselves. I’m guessing that most of the direct requests are repeat visitors who have bookmarked me. Posting on bloggerforum and 110mb forums have also helped me a bit. It’s nice to see that I have a variety of sources, because 22.12% are still from other places. I’m guessing those places include some other forums, my xanga, and my main site.

Pretty graph! People are entering my blog at many different posts

I found this interesting. Statistically, over 60% of all internet users use Internet Explorer while a little over 30% use Firefox. Most of the other browsers are almost never used, for example, Opera is used less than 1% of the time. It’s interesting how since most of my visitors are webmasters, internet explorer is less popular. Firefox is the most popular browser among webmasters, because it actually is not only easy to use, but safer. Most of the more technologically experience people use Firefox.

Also interesting how my main audience is more likely to use an operating system other than Windows. Over 95% of all internet users use windows, but only 83.99% of my visitors were using it. Windows actually does suck, but I’m just using it because it has basically become the standard and is more compatible.

HAHAHAHAHA! I can’t believe 8.14% were still using dialup.

I first got introduced to Opera, because I was just browsing betlik’s general discussion forum. Somebody advertised it as the fastest browser, so I decided to try it. Why spend exta time waiting for things to load when you do not have to?
Compared to Firefox, Opera didn’t seem bad for loading pages. When I tried to download large files, however, it actually seemed slower. I’m probably still going to use Opera in the future for its other features. It seems to be more complicated and has more built-in features than Firefox does in addition to some widgets that you can add on.

One thing I like about it is that it’s smarter when you’re using a WYSIWYG editor and you press enter, you go onto the next line do rather than going on to the next paragraph and skipping a line. One thing that drove me nuts in internet explorer and Firefox was needing to open the html editor and waste time letting it load just so I could add one little thing to a new line in a post but not start a new paragraph.

I also like how you can start browsing from how you last left the browser rather than starting at a home page every time. I can even have multiple tabs opened with my favorite sites whenever I start the browser.

Opera is also smarter in opening things with the target “_new” or “_blank. Instead of opening those in a new window, you just get a new tab. I hate having too many windows open at the same time, so this feature makes my life easier. Now I don’t have to keep right clicking and clicking open in a new tab whenever something’s target is a new window.

Another feature, although not that important, is the hover over thumbnail feature. If you are browsing with tabs and you put your cursor over a tab, then you get a thumbnail of the page of the tab that you are hovering over.

There is bittorrent support so you do not have to download torrents from a regular torrent client, but I haven’t gotten it to work yet. I think I would probably still prefer bitcomet.

Those were just a few examples of the features. If you are interested in this browser, then visit Opera’s page.

Some potential drawbacks are the fact that it uses more CPU power and that all pages may not be designed for it. Some template designs do not look the way they are supposed to in Opera. Since it’s not that popular of a browser, I doubt many webmasters optimize their pages for it. I have not had a huge problem with this yet, but since things do not look exactly the same in Opera as they would in the more popular browsers, some templates could be distorted. Overall, Opera is still a nice browser that should be worth trying.

So, what’s different between this screen and the old gmail home page? Cough* cough* look towards the bottom left. Someone brought this to my attention yesterday morning, but I didn’t feel like publishing three posts in the same day.
The storage is stuck at 2800 mb and not increasing by its usual 4 bytes per second anymore. Are google employees afraid that they’ll run out of storage space, or is this just another bug like the contact list hacks? Somehow I think that if every account used even half of its full 2800 mb, google would be screwed. If you use a lot of storage then they’ll give it to you, but they don’t expect the majority of their users to use the full 2800 mb.
Oh well, I’m guessing that most normal people can’t use that much storage anyway. If you happen to use something like gmail drive for backup, then you probably have multiple accounts anyway: one for mail and some others for file storage.