 |
 |
|
|
| |
| |
| |
|
Statistics |
| Unique Visitors: 0 |
| Total Unique Visitors: 0 |
| Visitors Out: 1436 |
| Total Visitors Out: 1436 |
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| Online Gambling For The Squeamish |
| 2008-01-22 05:15:00 |
A good friend of mine spends a large portion of their free time at online casinos. I've never really understood this obsession myself. I totally understand going to a real casino and joining in with the crowd to gamble away some time (and money, most likely). The excitement of the crowd, the rush of winning, even the commiseration of loosing I understand. Personally, I don't see how the same experience can exist online...that is I couldn't understand it until my friend turned me on to a feature that exists in almost each online casino: free gambling. Until my friend pointed out that a majority of the online casinos out there offer an option to play with fake money I never really got the point behind all the time he spent whittling away his money until I realized he wasn't really doing tha...
|
| |
|
| SEOdigger.com |
| 2008-01-19 07:30:00 |
I recently came across this very neat site that allows you to find which keywords you rank for in search results. Here's an example of the results you will get: If you click on any of the links you are taken to the search engine where the key word ranks. (Google for all of mine, apparently the other search engines don't like the blog at all or maybe it just hasn't been active long enough.) These results are updated every 2 weeks so it may not be entirely accurate. For instance, the #3 ranking shown for "what to do on sunday" is actually #8 but it is still accurate enough to estimate which page you are likely to be on. There are some humorous search phrases in that list like "breed my wife". That phrase results from the post that my wife wrote for the blog m...
|
| |
|
| LifeLock - Never Suffer Identity Theft Again |
| 2007-12-23 09:40:00 |
I recently saw an interesting commercial for LifeLock and had to do some research on the service being offered. In the commercial this guy had his social security number posted in 3 foot letters along the side of a tractor-trailer that was driving through a large city. That's a pretty decent demonstration that LifeLock would protect your identity from being stolen. I did some searching online and found this LifeLock Promo Code and a better explanation of exactly what LifeLock does. Credit alerts are placed on all of your credit reports within an hour of enrollment. Junk mail will be restricted and pre-approved credit offers are blocked. Your account is monitored 24/7. When you apply for credit the financial institution will contact you before making any approval. This way you are aware of every line of credit that is requested from your credit report. Now personally, I have such bad credit that I'm certain if anyone actually stole my identity, they would return it with an apology letter. However, if I did have credit worth protecting, I'd probably head over to LifeLock and use it's service. $1,000,000 in protection versus identity theft is a really decent offer. Not to mention, a reduction in junk mail. The service may be worth it, just for that. If you are worried about identity theft or just want to reduce the amount of junk mail you receive be sure to use this LifeLock Promotion Code for 30 days free and $21 off the annual enrollment price. Technorati Tags: LifeLock
...
|
| |
|
| How To Really Make Your Post Stand Out - Awesome CSS Tool |
| 2007-12-19 13:54:00 |
Wow, has it really been five days. I know that I have been a bit slack in posting as of late, but I had no idea it had been five days since my last post. So much has been going on with the holidays and everything that I didn't even realize the time had passed. I won't make any promises, especially with Christmas right around the corner, but I'll try to post more.In the meantime, I'm sure you have noticed by now that something rather interesting is happening with the layout of this post. I found a really cool CSS tool that allows you to customize the exact layout of text. With it you may specify the exact shape the text should follow using two lines on either side of the text. With the lines you can designate points that allow you to manipulate the line angles. You can place as many points on the lines as you like to be able to create interesting angles and designs.If that seems confusing to you, it would probably be easier to just check it out for yourself. The CSS tool generates code in a few different formats. There is simple div tags that specify the shape you have outlined that you place immediately before the text you wish to maniputlate. The second option only works if you use style sheets. Using this method you define the style in your style sheet and reference it just above the text on your page. The third option is done via javascript and is probably the easiest to implement. Either method you choose it is just a matter of following the directions on the site to get a really cool text wrapping effect on your own site. Technorati Tags: CSS Tool, Cool Sites, Idea Shower
...
|
| |
|
| Adsdaq - Name Your Price |
| 2007-12-14 07:01:00 |
I've recently discovered an ad delivery network that I have been using here on Zybron's Thoughts. If you've noticed some very eye catching ads showing up where Adsense was before then you've seen the new ad network in action. Adsdaq.com is the ad network I've been using. Adsdaq has a unique feature for the ads that are displayed on your sight. You get to specify the CPM for those ads. (Cost per thousand impressions.) Adsdaq will then try to match the CPM you have specified with ads from it's inventory of advertisers. If it can't match that CPM for a particular ad impression it will display a backup ad instead. You can specify what this ad is - using Adsense or some other ad network ad code. In my case, Adsense is the back up ads, so if you have only seen Adsense ads on the site and are w...
|
| |
|
| What National Blog Posting Month Taught Me |
| 2007-12-12 11:58:00 |
As many of you are aware, I signed up for National Blog Posting Month last month. For the most part, it wasn't much of an issue. There were a couple of days that I just had absolutely nothing to write about and if you look back through the archives you will definitely be able to pinpoint those days. If you are looking back through the archives now you'll notice that I didn't quite make it. I'd like to share what NaBloPoMo has taught me. Before November began I was posting about 0.9 articles a day. Most days, I had a new post, sometimes there would be a day without a post. When I heard of National Blog Posting Month I thought it would be no big deal. A post a day...I already do that. So, I can easily sign up for this and g...
|
| |
|
| Voting Begins For Mystery Topic Challenge #5 |
| 2007-12-10 06:18:00 |
The Christmas Ninja presents The Mystery Challenge #5! The topic was proposed by Scott of Scott-O-Rama, the winner of MTC #4. Below you will find all the entries for this challenge. Please visit and read them all. Once you've read all the entries, please vote for your favorite. Members of the forum may vote in the poll HERE. Guests can place their vote in this thread HERE. Voting concludes on Dec. 16th. Read - Robby Rational: Holiday Traditions Read - Peter Namtvedt: What are your favorite holiday traditions and why? Read - Uninhabited Man: Mystery Topic Challenge #5: What are your favorite holiday traditions and why? Read - Jester: The Christmas Colonic Read - Leaf Probably: Mystery Topic Challenge #5 Read - Jayne d'Arcy: Holiday Traditions - MTC #5 Read - Zybron: That Holiday Spirit Read - BunGirl: MTC #5: Christmas Traditions Read - Some Go Softly: Traditions Are Our History Read - ShadyLady: MTC#5 Read - Mr President: The Christmas Ninja Read - Seaguy8: Mystery Topic Challenge: Favourite Holiday Traditions Read - Geekgrl64: Mystery Topic 5 - What are your favorite holiday traditions and why? Technorati Tags: Mystery Topic Challenge
...
|
| |
|
| That Holiday Spirit |
| 2007-12-09 08:21:00 |
What's that behind you? Are those sleigh bells you hear? Did you see something? I think it was wearing red...could it be the Christmas Ninja? Happy Holidays from the BlogNinjas. They are the crazy internet group behind the MTC. The members rock the blogosphere in varying degrees, and can sneak up behind you in a moments notice. You can join the clandestine group after undergoing a severe and heavily scrutinized Blog Ninja review that verifies your actual existence and BN worthiness (basically, we read your blog). Post an entry, vote, maybe win, and you may be selecting the next topic. It's like a blog party. Click here to join. The topic for Mystery Topic Challenge #5: What are your favorite holiday traditions and why? This has been a rathe...
|
| |
|
| PayPerPost And All That It Means |
| 2007-12-06 16:56:00 |
Some time ago, perhaps even before all the hubbub about Pagerank and definitely before the recent news of Google stripping PR from PayPerPost bloggers, I had signed up for the PayPerPost blog network. Obviously, since I had not met the minimum criteria at the time, my blog wasn't approved. I didn't think much of it, really. When I heard about RealRank it prompted me to check out PayPerPost again and when I did so, I realized I could still do direct offers via PayPerPost without having my blog approved and so I added the appropriate links and such. Well, today, my blog was finally approved and I'm already looking at quite a few offers that would seem to fit well within this blog's niche (what little niche there actually is) and I personally see no rea...
|
| |
|
| How Not To Hold A Blog Contest |
| 2007-12-05 12:02:00 |
Please see this post from A Blog About Nothing for something I totally missed before and my apology in the comments. Much of what is below has been somewhat invalidated, however it is still good advice for holding a contest. Pick a random winner whenever you can and be very clear on how to enter the contest and how it will be judged.A while back I entered a competition to describe what I would do if I had $50 to spend on my blog. I wrote this post for a competition on A Blog About Nothing and the winner was chosen recently. If you read through the comments from the post announcing the winner you will find some interesting responses. In particular, Beth from afrogtokiss.net summed things up rather well: A bit offensive? ...
|
| |
|
| The Blog Ninjas Present Mystery Topic Challenge #5! |
| 2007-11-29 20:37:00 |
Signups are open until Dec. 2nd when the Mystery Topic will be revealed by the last winner, Scott-O-Rama. You don't have to register to signup, but you're missing out on so much more. Besides, don't you want to be a Blog Ninja? For more information on what the Mystery Topic Challenge is click HERE. To signup, click HERE. Technorati Tags: Mystery Topic Challenge, Blog Ninjas
...
|
| |
|
| Entrecard vs BlogRush - And The Winner Is... |
| 2007-11-27 10:26:00 |
By a mile. I first heard about Entrecard earlier this month and kept meaning to check it out. It kept slipping my mind, though, and I didn't get around to looking at it again until a couple of days ago. I installed the Entrecard widget and began dropping my card at other's sites. It was a simple process and the benefits have been tremendous. Entrecard is what BlogRush wished it could be without the need for an affiliate program. How good is Entrecard? I'm glad you asked. Above are the stats from Entrecard for the first two days of being signed up. As you can see, there were 18 referrals from entrecard.com. 18 hits in two days sounds pretty good to me. So, how does that compare to all the traffic I received from BlogRush? That's right, that is all of the traffic I had ever r...
|
| |
|
| How I Would Spend $50.00 On My Blog |
| 2007-11-26 20:07:00 |
A Blog about Nothing is offering an interesting competition. You are to describe what you would do with $50 to spend on your blog. For me, that decision is pretty simple: self-hosted Wordpress. I've always held that I would not spend any money on this blog that it didn't earn. Fifty dollars would go a long way towards getting this blog set up the way I would like to have it. First, I would buy a domain name. I still haven't decided exactly what that would be since someone wants almost $30,000 for zybron.com, but I would pick out a decent .com of some sort. In that way, I could begin my slow transition to a self-hosted Wordpress blog. I could set this blogspot to associate with the new domain and give it some time for everyone to make the transition and for me to slowly but surely update all the links that I can that point to the current blogspot address. Next, once most of my traffic is coming in from the new domain name instead of the blogspot address I would want to get a host and set up Wordpress there. I'd get everything moved over to the hosted site and point my new domain there. My final blogspot post would be a simple message letting everyone know that we had moved to the new address and host. I believe $50 would be just about enough to accomplish all of this. If I happened to have anything left over after that, I would probably set up a very cheap ad campaign with Adwords or perhaps find some cheap advertising somewhere else. What would you do with $50 to spend on your blog? Technorati Tags: blogging, blog contest
...
|
| |
|
| rssHugger ยท Increase RSS Subscribers with rssHugger's Blog Promoting |
| 2007-11-25 08:45:00 |
rssHugger is a new site that is offering a feed directory service for bloggers. Here's a bit from their site about the service: rssHugger is a new website developed to help bloggers promote their blogs, and to help visitors discover new blogs that write about subjects that the readers are interested in. Through the power of the internet and viral marketing, rssHugger looks to bring blog writers and blog readers closer together. If you own a blog, you can get your own page on rssHugger for 10 years for giving an honest review of the site on your blog. If you want to join rssHugger but do not want to review our site, you can pay a one time review fee of $20. rssHugger will be the first ever quality, spam free, and viral rss directory strictly for bloggers. Just a simple review like this one can earn you a listing with rssHugger for 10 years, which seems like quite a good deal to me. There are already 96 blogs being indexed by rssHugger as I write this and I'm sure with the free review system for admission to the service that number will increase exponentially. Why not write your own review and get your listing? Technorati Tags: rssHugger
...
|
| |
|
| Help Save Kelso |
| 2007-11-23 07:11:00 |
Kelso is a wonderful greyhound rescued by PantherGirl. Kelso has a spinal injury that requires surgery. Already, before the surgery, PantherGirl has had to pay out $3200 in veterinary bills for Kelso. She is a single mother of two and with the holidays approaching I'm sure you realize how difficult such a bill can be. Here is how you can help out. I know will you be shopping during this holiday season and likely some of that will be through Amazon.com. Simply use the link provided, either in the image here or on my sidebar, and do your normal shopping. PantherGirl will receive a portion of the proceeds of every purchase. If you will be shopping via Amazon this holiday season, please use this link and help Kelso and PantherGirl pay off this large vet bill and raise money for the surgery. Technorati Tags: Help Save Kelso
...
|
| |
|
|
| BlogRush Gives You Traffic If You Already Have Traffic |
| 2007-11-19 17:17:00 |
This is the conclusion I have come to concerning BlogRush. If you are already getting tons of hits, like JohnChow or Shoemoney, both of whom have recently posted topics about BlogRush, then the BlogRush widget works for you. John Chow is getting something around a .35% CTR with BlogRush. That's not great, but it's not horrible either. I think the main reason BlogRush works for big blogs that are already receiving traffic is name recognition. Since the BlogRush widget shows the title of the post and the blog the post is from on the widget, those blogs that are already well-known, like JohnChow.com or Shoemoney, are much more likely to get a hit from the widget than John Q. Public's blog. I know that seems to be the case for me. Some argue that it's the catchy headlines and maybe it is, but I don't think that my headlines have been any less catchy and interesting than some of the bigger blogs out there. Despite that fact, for the history of running the BlogRush widget on my site my posts were syndicated a total of 37843 times. Out of those, I've received 10 hits from the widget. That's a CTR of 0.026%. And that is also exactly why you'll notice that the widget is no longer on my blog. That's the other thing about having a popular blog. John Chow and Shoemoney, both, I'm sure, could take the widget off their site and never use it again and still get the same kind of traffic they are getting now. John Chow reported he has over 10 million credits in the system. If he stopped earning credits entirely, that's still enough to syndicate his posts for years. Having a really popular blog has meant being able to advertise this system and get thousands of affiliates. All of their affiliates' traffic is what is really powering their own BlogRush traffic. Those are my conclusions on this little experiment. Have any of you had any success with BlogRush? Technorati Tags: BlogRush
...
|
| |
|
| What If You Earned Money From Digg? |
| 2007-11-18 06:46:00 |
That is part of the idea behind Swypefile.com. This is another site, similar to BloggingZoom or Pluggy, with one major difference. The site is monetized by Google Adsense and you are encouraged to add your publisher id to your account. When you do so, ads with your publisher id are used for all of your submissions. What is more, is that your ads are shown 50% of the time for each member you refer to the site as well. Here's some info from their site about the concept: How to make more money with swypefile How can swypefile help you make more money online? Let us count the ways ... You'll profit from the latest online marketing news, tactics and strategies Get more exposure for yourself, and the products or services you promote Auto...
|
| |
|
| Gameplay Footage For Upcoming Ghostbusters Game |
| 2007-11-17 22:53:00 |
Late next year, Vivendi/Sierra will be releasing a Ghostbusters game for the Nintendo DS, PC, PS2, PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii. The game is being developed by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis so we know that the feel of the game will hold true to the original movies. I'd still much rather have another movie in the works to report to you today, but since that isn't the case, I'll settle for what looks to be a fairly nice game. Attack of the Show on G4TV managed to get a bit of actual gameplay footage which you can see being aired during a segment of the Loop. Technorati Tags: Ghostbusters
...
|
| |
|
| NaBloPoMo... |
| 2007-11-16 21:33:00 |
...Is causing me issues. I don't have anything to write about today, but I need to post something because of it. So here's the post.
...
|
| |
|
| Girl Gamers, Not Such A Rare Breed After All! |
| 2007-11-15 17:55:00 |
My wife has recently started a new blog to kind of vent about her daily life. I suggested she do a guest post on my blog to kind of get the ball rolling and she agreed. If you enjoy her writing style be sure to check out Too Busy To Notice. "I have heard a lot of talk recently about girl gamers. The comment was posted about girl gamers being a rare breed and the conversation blossomed from there. Are female gamers a rare breed? It all depends on who you ask! "I being a girl have to admit that certain types of gaming hold quite a bit of interest for me. I've been gaming for a number of years and have played in a variety of table top and live action game settings. My first gaming ex...
|
| |
|
| Mystery Topic Challenge #4 - Voting Begins |
| 2007-11-14 06:20:00 |
This challenge promises to be quite an interesting one, not only for the rather interesting topic, but also because there are 18 participants. It seems like each time the challenge rolls around there are about 5 more bloggers participating. Here are links to all of the participants in the fourth Mystery Topic Challenge: Blog Ninjas present The Mystery Challenge #4! The topic was proposed by Mr. President of Textual Relations, the winner of MTC #3. Below you will find all the entries for this challenge. Please visit and read them all. Once you've read all the entries, please vote for your favorite. Members of the forum may vote in the poll HERE. Guests can place their vote in this thread HERE. Voting concludes on Nov. 22nd. Leaf - Read More Scott - Read More BunGirl - Read More Grumpamoose - Read More from Reason to Freedom (4 entries) Peter Namtvedt - Read More Bob Bachus - Read More Michelle L. - Read More MJ Taylor - Read More Jayne - Read More Zybron - Read More lonelygurl - Read More TooBIG - Read More An Honest Woman - Read More Stepford Mom - Read More ShadyLady - Read More Some Go Softly - Read More Debaloo - Read More Jan - Read More Technorati Tags: Mystery Topic Challenge
...
|
| |
|
| Mystery Topic Challenge #4 |
| 2007-11-13 06:22:00 |
What's that behind you? Did you see something? I think it was black...could it be the BlogNinjas? They are the crazy internet group behind the MTC. The members rock the blogosphere in varying degrees, and can sneak up behind you in a moments notice.You can join the clandestine group after undergoing a severe and heavily scrutinized Blog Ninja review that verifies your actual existence and BN worthiness (basically, we read your blog). Post an entry, vote, maybe win, and you may be selecting the next topic. It's like a blog party. Click here to join. Mr. President barely edged out Romi for a win on the last Mystery Topic Challenge. On the 6th, he announced the next topic for the c...
|
| |
|
| Yuwie.com - October Earnings Report |
| 2007-11-12 07:12:00 |
Despite the fact that the RSR for October was less than the RSR for September I earned almost 4 times as much from Yuwie. Obviously, it's still not exceedingly impressive, but the potential is obviously there. I only have 13 referrals total and there are Yuwie members out there with over 1000 referrals and those members are actually making decent amounts on Yuwie. I was a bit more active in October and I had a full month of views there whereas I only joined in the middle of September and it made quite a difference. I gained a bit more than 4 times as many page views for October as September, which, obviously, matches the increase in pay out, as well. RSR for October 2007: $0.35 Status: Pending Audit Level Your C...
|
| |
|
| What To Do With Sunday |
| 2007-11-11 21:30:00 |
I've been wracking my brain for most of the day, off and on, about what to do on this blog that might provide more reader activity or something that could become a regular feature here that could help to get you all involved. I usually don't have much to post about on Sundays and I thought it would make a great day to do a nice regular feature that really gets all of you involved. I've seen several different concepts at work on different blogs and one that I've always enjoyed and often participated in myself is Comment Friday feature at Blog About Your Blog. The concept is pretty simple, a short post introduces a topic that readers are encouraged to comment about. One person is selected out of those comments to receive a link back on the blog until the next winner is chosen. I think I would like to do something similar, but obviously I don't want to just copy the idea entirely. I'd like to add something else into the mix that might somehow make it worth more to my readers than just a link back to their blog. I'm not exactly sure how to accomplish that, though. This blog doesn't currently make much at all, so offering some sort of monetary incentive is out. I could offer to review the winner of the comments and that still might be a possibility, but a review each week could be a bit more time consuming than my schedule will allow at the moment. I'm still considering it, though, so that might be the answer I'm looking for. Until I have it all sorted out, though, what would you like to see as a regular feature here? Technorati Tags: blogging, regular feature
...
|
| |
|
| BloggingZoom |
| 2007-11-10 08:05:00 |
In my quest to find a service that works similar to Digg but is designed specifically for blogs and bloggers I have discovered a great site called BloggingZoom. BloggingZoom and Pluggy share many qualities (in fact, they use the same code) but whereas Pluggy is a portion of Blogsrecord, BloggingZoom is specifically a blog social bookmarking site and the focus really shows. Because all that BloggingZoom does is the blog social bookmarking, it is much more popular than Pluggy and having the extra users makes a big difference. In the past week of me using BloggingZoom I've had 6 visits to my site from it and I've only had one post become popular. Compared to the 1 hit I've received so far from Pluggy, that's a huge difference. As far as the interface, it works the same as Pluggy or Digg. Yo...
|
| |
|
| How Do You Make The Internet Smarter? |
| 2007-11-09 09:53:00 |
If you are Gabriel Ortiz and his team of engineers, you develop a system that filters away the meaningless drivel that many people tend to spam across the Internet in the form of illegible comments, undecipherable forum posts and, in general, what seems to be random keystrokes. Ortiz's team is working on a system that, if installed on a site's server, would scan a user's comment or forum post and determine if it contained intelligent text or just something a lolcat might have chuffed up. If it determines the user's text to be the latter, it would prompt them to attempt to re-type their post or comment for something more akin to what a human would actually submit. They could keep trying to turn their cat's wandering across their keyboard into something t...
|
| |
|
| Are You In My Top Spots? |
| 2007-11-08 06:29:00 |
Update: Grizzly brought to my attention that the Scratchback widget uses no-follow attributes on the links. I didn't realize this, so pay no attention to the reference to Google below, it won't really matter with the nofollow attribute set on those links. I'll try to find a link back service like Scratchback that doesn't use the no-follow and if I do, I'll start using it instead.You may have noticed a new little widget on the right asking "Are you in my Top Spots?" In my wanderings around the Internet I happened upon a site called Scratchback. The premise of this site is the neat little widget you now see in my sidebar. When you click on one of the Get In My Top Spots links in the widget it takes you to Scratchback where you can pay the tiny fee of $1.00 to get a link on my site. That li...
|
| |
|
| Nothing To See Here, Move Along |
| 2007-11-07 07:01:00 |
Today is a day that I would have likely not posted anything on my blog. Not much is really happening that's all that interesting, to me, anyway. I could probably comment on Open Social and Google, but that's been done to death. I could probably say something about Facebook's new ad structure, but honestly, I use Facebook so rarely that it doesn't really matter to me what sort of ad structure they decide to use. The biggest news I've seen recently in gaming is that Cryptic Studios sold their City of Heroes/City of Villains MMO to their publisher NCSoft. That is at least news of interest, but there's not a whole lot to say about it. They assure their users that they won't see any changes in their accounts and that the games will continue to run as normal. If anything, this might be good n...
|
| |
|
| iPod Video Nano Contest |
| 2007-11-06 06:15:00 |
I wish that title meant that I was giving away an iPod Video Nano to some lucky reader, but alas, that is not the case today. What is the case, however, is that Browie, on his personal blog, is giving away an iPod Video Nano. In this post, if you make a comment, you'll get one entry into the contest. If you write a post about the contest, you will get two entries into the contest. The contest ends on November 15th, so don't wait too long to get your entry into the contest. Technorati Tags: Blog Contest
...
|
| |
|
| Worldwide D&D Game Day Recap |
| 2007-11-05 06:53:00 |
This last Saturday was Worldwide D&D Game Day. I previously mentioned that the local HobbyTown USA was actually participating in the event, which somewhat surprised me. As it turns out, their D&D section was rather light and pretty much what I expected from a store that definitely caters to more mainstream hobbies than Dungeons & Dragons. It was somewhat of an adventure that day for my family to actually recover the treasure trove hidden at the HobbyTown. Our local store opens at 10:00 am and figuring this event to be sort of a first come first serve type of thing, we are ready to leave at about 9:45 to arrive at the store shortly after it opens. Upon our arrival we spend a few minutes looking around the store, mainly just to check it ou...
|
| |
|
| 1000boxs.com |
| 2007-11-04 07:57:00 |
1000boxs.com is an interesting marketing idea by Marius Arkselson, a 22 year old student from Norway. The concept behind the site is a page presenting a number of boxes that contain text and a link to a site. The design is rather nice, when you click on a box it expands to display the text and link for that box. Marius is offering the first 100 boxes for free for those who contact him, on a first come first serve basis. I offered to write this post about the site if I was given one of those boxes. Currently there are only 14 boxes accounted for including Marius' own box, so if you act quickly, you may be able to grab a box for free. Otherwise, he will be selling boxes for $100 each. On the 1000boxs.com blog, Marius has stated that boxes will be available for resell. Additionally, Marius ...
|
| |
|
| Pluggy |
| 2007-11-03 08:14:00 |
Recently, I've been using a Digg-like service called Pluggy. It's part of Blogsrecord.com and works pretty much exactly like Digg except it is designed solely for blog posts. You submit a blog post to Pluggy in the same manner you would at Digg and members can vote it either up or down. I think it is a rather nice idea but is very underused. I think it could be a great place to discover new and interesting posts if more people were using it. So, I decided to do some Plugg-ing of my own and make more people aware of this rather nice site. The interface is clean and simple to use. Submitting a post is extremely easy. They offer a direct bookmarklet for post submission. Using that bookmark will open a new window from the site you are currently on and have the post url and title already pre...
|
| |
|
| A Sign Of Things To Come... |
| 2007-11-02 06:22:00 |
It figures that as soon as I decide to sign up at NaBloPoMo and agree to make a blog post every day during the month of November, I can't really decide on what to post. It's kind of like writer's block, but not quite the same. There are a number of things I could write about, but none of them are really inspiring me to compose an enjoyable piece of writing. So, I will discuss what this National Blog Posting Month is all about while I cogitate on other matters that could eventually make their way here. As I am writing this, over 4000 bloggers have joined the NaBloPoMo social network, all pledging to compose at least one post a day on their blog for the month of November. Now, I'm sure my regular readers are thinking, "but you already do that." And, for the most part, that's true...
|
| |
|
| Lucas Arts Press Release About KOTOR MMORPG? |
| 2007-11-01 06:34:00 |
Lucas Arts and Bioware will be collaborating on a project described as "an interactive entertainment product." Given the recent leak about a KOTOR MMORPG, it stands to reason that the product referenced should likely be this project. More importantly, the press release makes mention of Lucas Arts and Bioware jointly publishing the game. Let's hope that remains the case and they don't decide to farm it out to a company like Sony where it can possibly be ruined much like Star Wars: Galaxies. Also included in the press release is a new web site where you can sign up for a Bioware account to stay informed about upcoming news about this joint venture. The new website is www.lucasartsbioware.com. If you'd lik...
|
| |
|
| Justice League Movie |
| 2007-10-18 23:35:00 |
A Justice League movie is in the works. The Internet Movie Database lists the title as Justice League of America. The film is being directed by George Miller and written by Kieran Mulroney and Michele Mulroney. Miller's recent directing works have been Happy Feet and Babe: Pig in the City, but don't worry, he can direct action films, too. He directed all of the Mad Max series. The Mulroney's are newcomers to writing movies but with decades of comics to reference the job won't be too difficult, I don't think. The movie is currently scheduled for release in 2010. Production for the movie is currently in casting and Peter Sciretta of /film provides some insight into the role of Wonder Woman: Apparently they are looking for an actress aged 21-29, and anywhere from 5′ 2” to 5′ 9” in height. So chances are that we’ll be getting a younger/shorter Wonder Woman. Read more about the current casting choices for Wonder Woman at /film. Personally, I'm kind of glad they are focusing on younger actors for this film. The Justice League comic books date back to 1960. That's a huge wealth of stories to draw from and with such a popular franchise it stands to reason that there could easily be several movies made for the super group. With young actors there is less of a problem of having to recast halfway through the series. With the 20's age range, who would you cast for the Justice League? Technorati Tags: Justice League Yuwie.com | invite friends. hang out. get paid.
...
|
| |
|
| One Step Closer To ET? |
| 2007-10-17 15:15:00 |
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/apr/25/starsgalaxiesandplanets.spaceexploration Scientists discovered a small rocky planet orbiting a star 20 light-years from Earth. This planet is within the habitable zone, which means it's far enough away from it's sun that temperatures fall into the range that could support life. It is thought to have an atmosphere, and should have water as well. There are 129 stars within 20 light-years of us. So, if the odds continue on this trend, that could mean 1 out of every 65 or so stars should have a planet capable of supporting life. There are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone. That makes the odds for life being out there somewhere highly likely. It's exciting news in my opinion. If nothing else, it means there may be options for us in the future when we completely drain this planet of its resources. Technorati Tags: Earth-like planet, space exploration Yuwie.com | invite friends. hang out. get paid.
...
|
| |
|
| Why I Wish I Had Started With Wordpress |
| 2007-10-16 16:26:00 |
In September of 2006 I had the notion to start a blog. I wasn't really sure what I would blog about at the time but I had felt a creative urge to put words down in a medium that I could easily share with others. There were plenty of free options available to host my blog, though I admit I didn't really do much research into those options. Instead, what had caught my eye was that Google had acquired Blogger. Well, I thought, Google has produced a number of very fine products and I can't imagine them not providing a robust blogging platform. Wow, was I wrong. In part, this is why you may notice that there are two posts in my archives for September of 2006 and then not another post until the following year. I had become so disgruntled with the limitations in Blogger that it turned me off blogging for a while. Well, that and some events in my life that kept me from really focusing on writing for some time. When I finally decided to pick it back up I didn't even really consider other platforms since I knew I had this Blogger blog just waiting since 2006 for more posts. Obviously, I had forgotten my frustration in the past. Now I really wish I had tested the waters before really committing to this platform. In my Blog Action Day post, I included a number of links to other blogs I read that also wrote a post for Blog Action Day and I dutifully recorded trackback urls. I already knew that Blogger doesn't support trackbacks, instead that have some inane system designed to provide links back to a post that only really works if you have a Blogger account. However, I use Windows Live Writer to compose most of my posts, and it includes a ping feature that allows you to send pings to any url when you publish a post. I've read up on trackbacks and how they are supposed to work and realized that this should probably work for the purposes of publishing trackbacks to those blogs I linked in my Blog Action Day post. I added the necessary trackback urls, where I could actually find them, for all the blogs I linked into the ping addresses for Windows Live Writer and happily published my post. Well, today, I was reading one of the blogs I linked and realized that my trackback didn't show up in their comments. Odd. Ok, so I start checking the other blogs I had linked and none of them have any trackback comments showing up. So, either something to do with the trackback process doesn't work because I have a Blogger blog or Windows Live Writer's ping capacity doesn't really work for trackbacks, I'm not sure which. I've seen other trackback comments in some of the blogs I linked, so I know they all aren't refusing trackbacks or anything like that. What I do know, however, is that if I was using Wordpress right now not only would this process have worked like a charm, but that there are options in Wordpress that allow you to have it try to discover if the blog you are linking to has a trackback link and automatically sets up a ping to that link. This isn't the first issue I've had with Blogger, either. I posted about the hack that is required to set up a 3 column Blogger template. I am a programmer by trade, so fortunately it was easy enough for me to adapt the instructions I found to the template I am using, but if I hadn't known what most of the code in the template actually does, I wouldn't have been able to use the modification I found. As popular as 3 column layouts are, why doesn't Blogger have built in templates to use for this layout? You may have seen my post about Haloscan. I signed up for Haloscan because Blogger doesn't provide the very simple option of allowing comments to be displayed on the main blog page. It's just not an option, I don't know why. This especially doesn't make sense if, say, you wanted to format your blog so that only a single post shows on the main page. That's the idea I had had when I was investigating other comment options. When I discovered that there was no way to export my comments from Haloscan, should I decide to change platforms in the future which is likely at this point, that I decided not to use that service. Especially after reading that many had tried contacting admins at Haloscan and never heard anything back from them. And somewhere along the way, the Haloscan code that I finally managed to extract from my template and replace with the original code has prevented comments from showing on single post pages, too. I'm still trying to figure out what happened there. All of this is fully available in Wordpress, though. I would really like to change platforms at this point, but that means all of the links back to this blog would mean nothing. That saddens me. I do have another option, of course. Blogger does allow for a domain to be used, and they will point users that come to the blogspot url to be automatically forwarded to the domain. So, I would need to purchase a domain, allow some time for the domain to become the default instead of the old blogspot url around the blogosphere, modify all the entries in all the directories where I have submitted the blog, go through the painful process of extracting all the posts and comments from blogger to another platform and then point that domain to the new platform. All of that is doable, though admittedly a rather painful process since Blogger doesn't provide an easy means of exporting posts and comments like Wordpress does, but one that I will probably undertake at some point. However, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't spend any money on my blog that it didn't generate on it's own. At the current rate, I should be able to buy a domain sometime next year, maybe. Add to that, though, that someone out there is squatting on www.zybron.com. I have no idea why. I've been using that name online since 1994 and I guess I should have registered the domain years ago, but it never really crossed my mind to do so. For some unknown reason, to me at least, they want $30,000 for that domain name, which is laughable, and I said as much in my response to them when I inquired about the price. So, I have to settle for something else when I buy the domain. Whenever that will be. In the meantime, I'll suffer with Blogger and continue to try to tweak it into a real blogging platform, I guess, though it frustrates me to no end sometimes. In the interim, though, does anyone have any thoughts on getting trackbacks to actually work with Blogger? I imagine the missing element is that the ping isn't coming from the domain that actually hosts the blog. Or maybe since Blogger doesn't support trackbacks, there is no return ping to say yes I actually do have a post that links to you? I'm not sure, I haven't delved too deeply into the actual processes behind trackbacks. Yet. If I manage to find some sort of workaround for trackbacks to work in Blogger, I'll definitely pass it on. Technorati Tags: Blogger, Wordpress Yuwie.com | invite friends. hang out. get paid.
...
|
| |
|
| Blog Action Day |
| 2007-10-15 19:17:00 |
Today is Blog Action Day. A day where over 15,000 bloggers around the world are uniting to write about the environment. Normally, I'm not much of an environmentalist, but there are a few areas where I try to reduce my impact on the environment. One of those is compact fluorescent light bulbs. I always buy compact fluorescent light bulbs to use around the house. These light bulbs use on average four times less energy than a standard 60 watt light bulb. Assuming you only have one light on in any room that you happen to be in, (And you do only have one light on in the room you are currently in, right? Because if you aren't in a room, why is the light still on?) and you only need lights on an average of 4 hours a day, by using compact fluorescent bulbs instead of incandescent bulbs you use 67000 fewer watt-hours of electricity in a year. The next time you get a power bill take a look at how much it costs you per kilowatt-hour and think how much you could be saving yourself and the environment if that was 67 kilowatt-hours less per room in your house per year. This is just one helpful hint on improving our environment, here are some others from bloggers that I regularly read: Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim Blog Action Day - What if Akismet Could Save our Trees? copyblogger The Butterfly Effect and the Environment Problogger How Can Bloggers Be Environmentally Responsible DailyBlogTips Environment Friendly Blogging: 5 Practical Tips JohnCow.com And We Support World Peace David Airey Are you an eco-friendly designer? JohnChow.com Blog Action Day - Being Environmentally Responsible (The Blog Formerly Known As) Taosbound Halloween Survival Tip #21: Blog Action Day Special Textual Relations The Inconvenient Untruths Political Friends Hurricane Forecaster Disputes Man Made Global Warming As more posts come in throughout the day on blogs I read, I'll add their posts here. So take a moment out of your day and think about what you could do to lessen your impact on the environment. Feel free to leave any helpful suggestions in the comments. And if you are a blogger yourself, why not take a moment and make your own Blog Action Day post. Technorati Tags: Blog Action Day Yuwie.com | invite friends. hang out. get paid.
...
|
| |
|
| The Diet Coke/Mentos Guys Are At It Again |
| 2007-10-13 14:18:00 |
Personally, I don't think this is quite as impressive as the Diet Coke/Mentos geysers, but it is still very entertaining. I imaging this took a bit longer to set up than the Diet Cove/Mentos fountains took to set up as well. Technorati Tags: Diet Coke/Mentos, video Yuwie.com | invite friends. hang out. get paid.
...
|
| |
|
| |
 |
|
| |
| |
|
 |
