Ooops – missed another week last week – that happens – gave you something to look forward to this week. 🙂

This week’s site is Flight View.  This is a great website if you need to follow a flight to see when it’s going to be at its destination.  You can check on a variety of flight information here including a report for an airport of how many flights are on time or delayed, viewing all air traffic for a particular airport, or detailed flight information for a particular flight.  There is even a real-time view that constantly updates the position of the airplane on a map with estimated arrival information.  For flights not in the air you can view estimated departure and arrival information.  For flights in the air you get the live tracking ability and flight information including aircraft, speed, and altitude.  So next time you need to get information for a flight – don’t forget to check out Flight View.

It’s probably about time that I recognize WordPress through a Website Wednesday post.  WordPress is the software I use to run my blog site. WordPress comes in two flavors.

The first is how I’m using WordPress – I downloaded their free software and run it on my own server.  The website for using their software on your own server is at http://wordpress.org/ It takes a little more work to get the software running on your webserver and you need to run your own webserver to use the software like this.  This way does allow more customization of themes and plugins though.

The second flavor is the WordPress hosted solution where you create an account on their site and use their servers.  You don’t have quite as much flexibility in customizations but they take care of all the setup and installation for you.  The website for this method is http://wordpress.com/

A further explanation of the differences between the two is at http://support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/

WordPress is very powerful and I’m sure I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I can use it to do with my website.  Hopefully as I find motivation and time I will explore other things I can do with WordPress and my website.

So if you are looking for an option for running a website that focuses on blog type content you might want to consider WordPress.

Today I present a new site to me and a new site overall.  It’s called Raffstar It’s still in Beta, but from what I’ve seen and used – everything seems to be working fine.  To summarize it I will quote what the title bar says on the home page “Win prizes. Support charities. How cool is that?”

You register for a free account.  Then after you sign in you can get tickets for various prizes from gift cards to resteraunts to a Ninentdo Wii to a Blu-Ray player.  These tickets are free.  Each drawing happens after so many tickets are issued or after so many days.  The only catch is after the drawing ends – if you win the prize you have one hour to claim it, otherwise it goes to the next person on the list.  Some raffles you can get a ticket each hour, while others you can only get one per day.

Each raffle item has a charity associated with it.  The raffle page has information about the charity, a link to the charity’s website, and a link to make a completely optional and voluntary donation.  Eventually after the site gains popularity the charities will get some of the advertising revenue as well. This site is free because the prizes are donated or paid for by an advertiser and through the advertising revenue.

So go ahead and check out Raffstar and let me know if you win something!

Did you know there is a website for the Official US time?  Did you know today there is a leap second?  If you didn’t know either or both of these – then you should check out www.time.gov This is the website for the official US time and will also provide information about the leap second being added today.  The website is provided by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and the USNO (US Naval Observatory).  So if you ever want to know the accurate time – go to this site.

Now onto leap seconds.  Not only did 2008 get an extra day – but we get an extra second as well.  Although some areas of the world get the extra second in 2009.  UTC (based on atomic clocks) is monitored against UT1 time (based on the rotation of the Earth) and if the two times ever look like they are going to get more than .9 seconds different, a second is added to or taken away from UTC to bring it back in sync.  So this year they are adding a second.  Leap seconds are always added at the end of the day in UTC, so the local time they are added varies based on your timezone, for the Eastern Standard Timezone – this works out to be 7:00 p.m.  So leading up to 7:00 p.m. we will have 6:59 and 58 seconds, 6:59:59, 6:59:60, and then 7:00:00.  Normally it goes from 59 seconds to 00 seconds.  If you watch the time at time.gov you’ll be able to see the extra second.  You can find more out about leap seconds at the Leap Second Wikipedia entry.

So – enjoy your extra second – spend it wisely!