These days you can’t really go anywhere without hearing of Twitter, Facebook or some form of social media. It’s everywhere and the reason is, because it’s instant and easy. What you aren’t hearing about as much is newspapers.

Newspapers used to be the only game in town and then TV but newspapers still had their place. Well in today’s “I need the news RIGHT THIS SECOND“, newspapers have been pushed out of the way but social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

I stumbled across this article from the The Independent in the UK about how people are moving away from traditional ways of getting news and moving more towards alternative means such as social media and various online resources. People, myself included, don’t have time to wait around for tomorrow morning to find out the news of today.

Some people say that they still get the daily paper for the coupons it comes with. Nowadays, you can type in “PRODUCT promo code” and get a multitude of deals on whatever you want. Plus Amazon is still pretty cheap if you’re okay with not going to a store to pick something up. Also, with the advent of Groupon, LivingSocial and other group couponing sites, this will only get better with time and further push the papers out.

Classifieds have moved aside for Craigslist and blogs have taken the place of Editorials. These are just more reasons why there really isn’t a need for newspapers any more other to cover my table with when my kids paint.

What do you think?

A few days ago I was working on a project for a client here at work. I had a situation where I just needed to create a simple web service that made a call to ExactTarget’s API. Was pretty easy and had it working flawlessly on my local computer within a couple of hours. I pushed it up to our site on GoDaddy to test and received an error. I found out that there is an assembly that the ExactTarget code needs to work and that it needed to run with elevated trust. Well apparently GoDaddy doesn’t allow for that.

So in my nerd rage, I posted to Twitter that I was upset:

Is @GoDaddy really an ASP.NET host or do they pretend to be? Anything I try to do mildly difficult, their shared hosting fails on.

I had seen that GoDaddy was pretty quick on their responses that day but not with my message. The next day, I did receive a message from them asking what my issue/question was and I promptly responded. I still haven’t heard back.

But what was interesting to me about this was that not long after my response to GoDaddy, I received a message from WinHost:

@digijustin What was it that GoDaddy had issues with doing?

I was pretty impressed and responded quickly and they even responded back saying that they could in fact do with GoDaddy couldn’t. Cool. Score one for them and hang another zero for GoDaddy.

Right after my response to WinHost, I received another Tweet. This time from DiscountASP to tell me that they too support what I was trying to do.

I was really impressed with these 2 hosts that they would jump in to help me out while GoDaddy left me hanging. I didn’t end up needing a Windows solution as the PHP option I was chasing ended up working but still time after time, GoDaddy fails me every time I try to do something that deviates from easy.

Next time I need a Windows host, I will have an easier time looking in the direction of WinHost and DiscountASP before I even think about GoDaddy.

Lately there has been a lot of talk about whether or not to have web sites support Internet Explorer 6. Personally I think we should get rid of it NOW. Out with the old, in with the new is how the phrase goes. Well in my mind, there is only one way to make users who haven’t yet switch to make the switch: force them.

We can easily get the browser info when a visitor comes to your site so I say if it’s IE6, tell them they can’t view the site until they get a real browser *COUGH FireFox COUGH* and try viewing your site again correctly. Or if that’s a bit too harsh, still code for something better than IE6 and give visitors a message to upgrade and show them the crappy version of your site.

Nothing will change until it is forced onto people. They will stay with IE6 because they are scared to upgrade, too lazy or some other asinine reason. Well enough! If everyone stops making sites that work in IE6, people will change. Plain and simple. Please join me in my crusade to rid the Internet of this horrible beast. Then maybe we can move to get rid of IE in general but that’s a rant for another time.

Today is the first day of the WWDC in San Francisco and the web world is all abuzz about what might come out.  I’m really looking forward to hearing what they have to announce as I have recently joined the ranks as a Mac user.  I still have my Blackberry Curve and I love it but the iPhones are just so damn sexy that I want one of them too.

Hopefully today they announce a way for me to get one.  I doubt it but I can dream right?  I just read a rumor that the new iPhones might just be available today after the keynote so that would be pretty cool.  With all the buzz surronding this, I can’t tell what might happen.  I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what the next 2+ hours brings.

Let me know what you think and I’m surely going to post my thoughts post-keynote as well.

Last night I was lucky enough to attend my first Phoenix .NET User Group meeting and enjoyed it.  Microsoft is nice enough to let them use a room in their Phoenix office and gave away a keyboard/mouse set, a web cam, and a few books.

Tim Rayburn started it off with an Intro to WCF Services and for a guy who has barely touched these, it was very informative.  Tim did an excellent job presenting and made it easy to follow along.

Rob Paveza followed up with a discussion on a new Facebook API that he has developed.  I worked with Rob at Terralever and know that he does an awesome job whenever he has the chance to run wild in code and from the looks of it, this isn’t any different.  It’s not released as of yet but it will be found here by the end of the week so check it out.

Thanks to Scott Cate and Rob Bagby for helping out with this.  I hope to check out a few more of these in the future.