These are the 2 largest free email providers, and most people, have one of each. But which one is better overall? We’ll compare the details and give our honest opinion. Don’t worry we aren’t going to be spouting off a bunch of nonsense stats that do nothing more than make us sound smart, and confuse you.

A Few Similarities
Let’s look at some of the similar features, that make the 2 systems related. They both offer  inbox, drafts, sent, and all of this in a nice fast loading interface. They both now offer some sort of social chat or online friends report. I think yahoo has had this feature forever. Google picked it up at some point.

They both display advertisement, but this is expected. Something needs to cover the cost of the free email service. Managing servers, archiving data, managing spam filters, storing media, updates, and whatever else they might need in order to run a successful email hosting program.

They both do a decent job of taking care of spam. Just as good as any spam company like Barracuda.

I’m not going to talk about storage limits, I really don’t think this is a determining factor. No one runs out of space. If you want want to host large files there are more free file hosting services than you ever use. I think Yahoomail has unlimited and Gmail has 10GB or something. No one ever fills this stuff up.

A Few Differences
Gmail doesn’t seem to have a “trash can” or deleted items folder. If they do please tell me because there is all sorts of crap in there that I would like to retrieve.

Gmail does have an undo button. If you send an email you can “undo” or retract the message for something like 5 seconds. I’ve used this feature on more than one occasion.

Google Talk is an awesome new feature/concept. Google always has crazy stuff going on in their labs, but this is one of the tops.

YahooMail will ban any forwarding email address if you don’t watch out. It’s happened to be before. Say I have an email account at work mike@someworkplace.com and I want to forward that account to Yahoo so I check it while I’m on the road. If my mike@someworkplace.com account gets spam, forwards it to my yahoo account. I read it then mark it as spam. Yahoomail will blacklist the account mike@someworkplace.com that kinda sucks so watch out for that one.

Speed & Reliability
As far as reliability goes I would have to slightly give the advantage to Gmail. Sometimes Google crashes or hangs up, but this often due to local network connectivity issues and not gmail itself. Yahoo is fairly stable, but it does seem to crash more often.

I also get incompatibility messages when using different browsers and screen resolutions in yahoo mail. When this happens I’m prompted to use the old version of yahoo.

Gmail definitely presents a much faster and cleaner loading user interface. This may be because Google has way more data centers. I guess the data centers manage some of the gmail data. I’m not sure to tell you the truth.

Overall Winner
if i had to choose a overall winner I would have to go with Gmail at the momment. They seem to have the more stable platform with more features than Yahoo Mail.

What’s your oppinion? We’d love to hear it.

IPStat.com, a site that has offered free web site analytics since 1998, has recently upgraded their user reports page to include some pretty cool looking flash charting.

IPStat.com Web Analytics

This site has always been great for tracking data like “keywords”, “site referrals”, monthly views, bounce rate, page views, and unique views.  It’s recently modified flash graphing loads faster and is very pleasing to the eye. They should have done this sooner.

If you think Google already knows to much about you and your website, then maybe you want to try IPStat instead. It’s free, and just takes seconds to create and account, and get the code integrated.

At the very least you can use this project to monitor small to medium size sites. If you’re already a user (some 60,000 sites currently are), then you may want to login and check out the new updates if you’ve not done so already.

URL Shorteners make long URLs tiny, so they can fit into less space. Here are in our opinion 6 of the best URL shortening services online today. These are in no special order, and they are all 100% free.

tiny.cc

Tiny.cc site may be the original service, we are not sure. Site was first started back in 2006.

bit.ly

Bit.ly is twitter’s tiny url shortening service of choice. They may even own it, im not sure.

goo.gl

With a name like goo.gl this url shortening service has to belong to Google. The utility isn’t too fancy, but has a few features the others do not.

is.gd

is.gd claims to be the shortest of all of the url shortening services, as as far as I can tell they are right. A 4 character domain (including the extension)

ow.ly

Last but not least is the birdy shorty ow.ly. (just as short as is.gd mind you) This service actually allows you to share files as well!

URLInto.com

This service has a larger name than the others, but offers one thing none of them do. Revenue. This one shrinks your urls and allows you to create an adsese revenue page at the same time. This way you get paid to share.

I’ve been using Winrar for about 10 years now and even though Windows now ships with a version of Winzip, WinRar is still my compression utility of choice. So we figured we would offer up a free winrar download, and see if we could port some users over from winzip.

Why winrar you ask? Well I think it loads faster, it creates .rar files as well as .zip. It offers up tons of options as far as compression range.

Allows you to split huge groups of files into dvd size files, cd size files. So in this case it makes many rar or zip files instead of one large one.

It offers about 7 different archiving options including

1. Delete Files After Archiving
2. Create SFX archive
3. Create Solid Archive
4. Put recovery record
5. Test archived files
6. Lock archive
7. Put authenticity verification

It also has a nice update mode with another 7 or so features as well.

It allows you to include or exclude files based on date, and even add a comment to the file for other people to read in the future.

All this in a freeware application. Of course you get a screen when loading that says you are using WinRar unless you pay for the upgrade, but most apps show you that anyway, and If you just right click a file and archive or zip then you get no warning at all.

So download now and start using what we consider to be the best free compression application out there.

As always please tell us what you think.

If you’ve ever seen an article online that seems to go on and on for ever, you can understand the need for the WordPress “<!–nextpage–>” Tag. It breaks long pages into multiple pages one the fly.

The command must be used under the “html editor” region of wordpress. If you don’t have wordpress, and just own a web page then you can obviously do this by hand. Just cut your page into 2 or more pieces and then link them together.

This nifty concept also means you get to serve more ads, and decrease your bounce rate. (the % of viewers that leave after just viewing one page).

Since adsense only allows you to display 3 ads per page, a long article on one page could only have 3 ads. That same article broken into 2 pages would yield ad space for 6 ads, broken into 3 pages 9 ads.

If you also serve up CPM ads, then this could be a boost to your cpm ad revenue as well.

So in summary webmasters using WordPress should use “<!–nextpage–>”
tag when wanting to split up long blog posts. This tag should be added in the html text editor region. If you ad it in the visual editor you’ll just end up with “<!–nextpage–>” being displayed on your page.