VietCali.com

Well just want to post a note to let everyone know I closed down my Cafe75.com web site. It was fun and I learn a lot setting up the site. I was hoping to build something similar to Facebook, yeah I wish. But after so many years the site only has small number of members and it’s not really active. Now looking back, I think it was all my fault. I didn’t work hard enough to make it more user friendly and not spend enough time and effort to promote it. If you are one of Cafe75.com’s member and is reading this article, let me just say thank you very much for being a member and I regret that I can’t maintain the site any longer. If you have any input please let me know.
In a next few days, or maybe week, I’ll try to move some of the archive from Cafe75.com to Vietcali.com and all traffic to Cafe75.com will be redirected to this site.

I think a lot of people now a day are run into this problem: keeping up with various user and passwords. I don’t know about you but I always forgot the user and password on those rarely use accounts. What make it worse is some of login system keep forcing you to update the password. So there are website and companies that making product to address this issue. But I can’t find any really good free solution out there.  There is so called single-sign-on solution that help you get around this.  But you have to purchase special key token and it cost you money. Why would I want to pay more money just to keep track of my logins.  There are website that also help you keep track and log in but then another set of user/password to remember as well.
So what is my solution? I think it’s not perfect but at least it’s free and easy to maintain. I just use my Yahoo’s email account, which I use very often, and compose an email contains account URL, users, and passwords and just save it to Draft folder. Whenever I need to look up log in information for those rarely use account, I just open the email and look up the info. For added security, I don’t spell out the password in the file but just include hints or short phrases that help me recall the passwords. This way the one main password I have to remember is just my email account, which is not an issue because I use it pretty much everyday.
What is yours solution? Please comment and tell me what is yours solution to this passwords headache.

I finally moved my VietCali blog from Blogger to my own hosting server and power it using WordPress. This way I have more control on how I post my special stuff, like the QEVP. Yes, the Quick English Vietnamese Phrases is now back in VietCali.com and working properly.   So far I love the WordPress blog engine.  It’s much better than using the Blogger since I have it installed on my own host server so I can pretty much customize anything I want.

One big challenge was figuring why the Vietnamese characters wasn’t displayed properly and after a long Googling session I figure out it was a mySQL database thing and able to fix.  Drop me a note if you have similar issue.  The short answer to the problem is you need to cofigure the database to accept data in UTF8 Unicode format,  not some Swedish set up by the installing script.

I’ll try to clean up VietCali blog and put in more articles.   I’m glad I finally have some free time to work on it.  Thank you for coming by.

There are still a lot of visitors visit this site mainly for Vietnamese translation help. So I’ve decided to keep VietCali.com domain for this site and create another domain cafe75.com for my new “Vietnamese and friends” social networking site.
The site is in beta stage and ready for visitors. So please come to cafe75.com and join as member so you can interact with many Vietnamese friends. As a member you can share music, video, post articles, create your own blog, chat or IM to other members, classified ads, games, and many other features. Oh, we will also create a special Vietnamese-English forum so you can post your Vietnamese help to all members for faster help.
Click here to check out cafe75.com. Please join and also invite your friends to join and help build our new Vietnamese friends gathering space on the Web.