WebDev, Internet & Geek

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While the Hideaway is NOT a porn site, the Hideaway is a community which has been specifically designed for adults and as such some of the community pages may not be family friendly or safe for the workplace. Please be 18 or over if you decide to drop by and pay us a visit. We’d love to have you join us at the Hideaway, where community, contribution and collaboration is a way of life.

I agreed to do a side bar link exchange with a mom reviews blog. I don’t see my link on their side bar anymore. I don’t mind them changing their mind but I think the courteous thing would be to let me know they were taking my link down so I could do the same.

I saw this little quiz over at Julie’s Journal so of course I had to take it too. Here are my results. Not a surprise there, I’m a purist because I totally hate ads on my blog. Every once in a while I get a wild hair and put up some ads but they annoy me so much I eventually remove them.

I got a MINUS 3 for sociability and it is so true! Haha, not much I can say about that.

Here is my result:

Greed: 0

You’re not in this for the money, for you blogging is all about the passion! Sure you might make a little pocket change now and again, but you know that it’s the content, the audience and the people that are what makes blogging great!

Experience: 2

You’ve been blogging since Nick Denton was in diapers. When it comes to blogging experience, you are the authority on blogging. Heck you probably even have a blog where you give advice about blogging!

Sociability: -3

Social media, other bloggers, networks and all that jazz don’t really interest you. You have enough friends in the real world, you don’t need more. You blog because you want to express yourself not to meet bloggers!

Whee… I was beginning to feel left out since so many popular and self-important bloggers have lost a little Google Page Ranking (John Chow, Darren Rouse, Shoemoney & Andy Beard to name a few)…

Every time I checked my PR with the Google Tool bar (you would think their own tool bar would be accurate!) it was holding steady at PR3, however today when I checked the average over several data centers it appears that I have dropped to PR2…

Oh, well… I say 2 is the new 3! People will just have to adjust their mindsets is what this really amounts to… *shrug*

So I did a review on my geek blog for Loretta of Gadget Girl Accessories and I like her blog so much I think I’ll write about it here too.

I just read her entry titled Not your average heart shaped necklace and for some reason it made me chuckle. If that isn’t the perfect gift for the geek girl in your life then I don’t know what is.

I visit this blog a lot but I can see that I need to put Gadget Girl Accessories into my feed reader because I was just there and noticed that I missed out on a contest! Darn. I’m loading up my Google Reader right now - I’m not going to miss out on the latest gadgets anymore!

Okay, here is my kind of luck. One week after I upgrade my PC I find out about CensusPC. I could have saved about $100.00 if I had purchased my upgrades from CensusPC instead of having the repair shop do the upgrade for me. Of course, I gladly payed for the repairman’s knowledge and expertise since I have no idea how to upgrade a PC.

All isn’t lost however, because there is always some new toy or piece of equipment just waiting to go home in my shopping cart. I’ve been thinking about holding a contest on this blog and I think one of these USB Flash Pen drives would make a really good prize.

I was looking around at some of the other items and noticed they have large selection of notebook AC/DC power adapters . Now, I’m not interested in that for myself but oddly enough my son mentioned that he needed a power adapter for his notebook the other night when we were out to dinner. He is also in the process of building his first computer so I’ll have to be sure to forward the website address of CensusPC to him.

Technorati Tags: video games, computer equipment

Welp, I finally got up off my butt after a month and took my computer to the repair shop. I was about 90% content using my husband’s computer but for some reason he kept asking me “have you decided what you’re going to do about your computer yet?” Poor guy seldom uses his computer but he should at least be able to sit down and use it when he wants to without having to pry me from the chair.

Along with the computer repair I treated myself to a new video card and a cordless keyboard and mouse and I’m just loving my new toys. My games are so much clearer and I don’t know what the big deal is about the cordless mouse but it just seems to make my life so much easier.

Most of the data on my hard drive was able to be recovered and if I’ve lost anything at all it is pretty minor. Funny thing though, when I woke up this morning and checked out this blog my template had been reset to the default Wordpress template! Now, that’s weird! I cannot come up with any reasonable explanation for this at all, but this is the second time something strange has happened with this blog. The other time I woke up and one of my recent posts had been marked to “private”. I would never mark a post as private here so I just figured I hit the wrong place in the WP dashboard while I was editing. I guess just to be on the safe side I’d better change my password. It really creeps me out thinking someone has the ability to go into my settings and mess around.

One thing the broken computer finally prompted me to do was make a backup. Do you hear that world? After years of saying “I need to get around to that” I finally got around to it! I backed up my data to my 80 gig external drive and I plan to do it weekly from now on. I don’t ever want to go through a scare like this again. The biggest stress about the dead computer was losing all my files. My silly little data would probably be stupid junk to anyone else, but by golly, it’s MY junk. :p

I read an interesting post over at A Cowboy’s Wife about blog depression. I initally took it as tongue-in-cheek but the fact of the matter is I think I’m suffering from some form of this myself. Blah, maybe I need a break from all of this because it doesn’t seem to be fun for me right now. Or maybe I’ll shake it out and get past this stage soon. *shrug* Or whatever. :p

This looks like a cool website. There are tons of social communities on the web but Cellfish is set up a bit differently. You can upload media to Cellfish from your computer or your cellphone as well as download to either your computer or cellphone. This makes sharing with friends both online and on their cellphones extremely easy. Your locker at Cellfish is a virtual storage area where all your uploaded graphics, videos and other media are stored.

My cell phone company provides a free storage area for my uploaded pictures but my storage is limited to a certain number of images, unlike Cellfish where you get unlimited storage in your locker. Ummm…. unlimited storage… don’t you just love those words? I know I do! Content will stay in your locker forever. Well, forever is a long time but your content will stay in your locker until you delete it, unless you violate the terms of service or something like that. I think most of us know the difference between appropriate and inappropriate material so I don’t think we have to worry about our content being deleted.

At Cellfish you can download premium as well as free ringtones. I had a good time listening to all the ringtones. I’ll have to download a few just to see the surprise on my husband’s face when he hears them. *grin*

Of course I had to try out the uploading feature myself so I uploaded a few pictures from the loaner computer I’m using.

I like the way I can embed my album into my website or blog and then scroll through it to look at my pictures. When I finally get a new computer or get my old one fixed I’ll be uploading a lot more pictures to my locker at Cellfish.

Last week I wrote about the cool way you can get personalized news delivered directly to your browser. I have to tell you though, reading the news at Thoof is almost as bad as watching videos on YouTube. I just can’t stop, hehe. There is always another interesting story to read.

One thing I didn’t go into detail with is the ThoofRank badge. The ThoofRank badge and the number shown on it is a measure of how interesting your submitted story is to readers that have interests in common with it. For example, at the time of this writing the story I submitted on July 26th has a ranking of 48%. That means that my story is 48% more popular than other related stories. That’s a little below average but not too bad for my first try.

In addition to personalized news I’m thinking that Thoof might be a good way to drive traffic to a blog or website. I suppose the only way to know that for sure is to conduct a little test. What I’m going to do is submit a few stories to Thoof and add the ThoofRank badge to them. Then I’ll keep an eye on my stats to see if I get any results from my little campaign. I’m always thinking! *grin*

I’ve talked a little bit about hosting and domains lately so I thought I’d share my favorite tool to find a good domain name - Instant Domain Search.

With Instant Domain Search all you have to do is start typing and you will know immediately if the domain you want is available. Your domain searches will not be recorded which is good because I think some sites record your searches and then register your desired domain themselves hoping to re-sell it back to you.

I really like this tool. It is the best one of it’s type I’ve found. Okay, I’m kind of a goof at times and I like putting in different combinations of names just to see they are available. Who knows? Maybe I’ll find a good domain name nobody has thought of yet and I’ll sell it for a million dollars. *grin*

For the Heck of It! is rated “G”. That doesn’t surprise me because I pay careful attention to the words I use here and have a personal policy against using curse words. For example, why use the word “damn” when “darn” or “dang” work just as well? hehe, I wonder if I just destroyed my rating? *grin*

I mentioned yesterday that I’ve been looking around lately for additional hosting and lo and behold, I ran across an offer today for free web hosting for one year.

As part of their summer sale Easy CGI is now offering a one time promotion of their windows web hosting services. Anyone that signs up through the special promotion URL will receive one year of windows based free web hosting.

Some of the features of Easy CGI’s free web hosting offer are:

• 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
• 24/7 Phone Support
• One Step Script Installation Tool to install some the Internet’s most popular applications.
• Web Traffic Reports
• Set Up and Knowledge Base Tutorials
• Access to some of the Internet’s commonly used tools such as DotNetNuke, OSCommerce, and Community Server

We all know there are sometimes strings attached to “free” offers but I did check the Easy CGI website the best I could and I couldn’t find any gimmicks or strings attached at all. There are 3 hosting packages to choose from and with 24/7 support I think this offer from Easy CGI will be hard to beat if you are looking for windows web hosting.

Have you ever wanted to read the latest news but didn’t want to sift through stories you weren’t interested in? At Thoof you can have your personalized news delivered directly to your browser with stories and articles that are tailored to your individual taste.

Signing up and submitting a story is easy. Well, I should say submitting an article was easy the second time I tried it. I goofed with the first article I submitted and it didn’t go through completely. The article was there but it showed as submitted by “anonymous”. The sign-up isn’t as intuitive as I think it could be so I recommend that Thoof adds step-by-step instructions for new people signing up. (I know web savvy people shouldn’t need this but I guess I’m not as web savvy as I like to think, heh.)

At first glance I thought Thoof was like Digg, but actually, Thoof is very different. At Thoof you will see a personalized page with stories you will find interesting. After a while Thoof learns what you like and will only show you the articles they think you might be interested in, so each person that visits Thoof will see a different page. It really is a fun website and I had a good time clicking and reading the articles. Be careful though, I think Thoof can become addictive!

I had a good thing going here with my “Did You Pass Math” captcha plugin. I hardly ever found any spam in my Akismet moderation queue. Unfortunately, my spambot visitors got smarter and smarter until they could finally add simple numbers and my Akismet queue started filling up again.

I’ve changed to a graphic captcha, Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam Image Plugin, so let me see them try to read that! Actually this won’t be too far in the future because I read that some spammers are working on graphic readers to bypass graphic captcha programs so they can keep spamming. *sigh*

Hooray! A thanks and a shoutout to John for prompting me to fix the font in the text area of the comment box! I myself was irritated by it but I tried several times to fix it but never could.

I finally went to the support forums for Brian’s Threaded Comments and found out that my problem was not in my styles.css or my commments.php. These were the two files I have been trying to edit forever!

Nope, the problem was in the plugin itself. I never would have figured that the plugin had a stylesheet inside it. This probably seems silly but I’m thrilled to no end to have that one little glitch taken care of.

Geez, you would think I was some kind of Hitler or something after the comment I got a few minutes ago…

I like comments, I like the “do-follow” movement and I’m happy to help people improve their PR and traffic by putting their website URL into the URL field of the comments section… That’s what the “do-follow” movement is all about from my understanding… maybe I’m wrong though and I’m asking for guidance here…

I do have one pet peeve and that is people that do not use a name, handle or alias in the name field but instead put the name of their website there, for example “FOO ACME PRODUCTS ONLINE ORDER TODAY!”… I just hate that and if that makes me some kind of bad person then so be it. bah humbug to the lot of ya! hehe

Now I want to know, am I really being unreasonable by asking people to use a name instead of a website name in the name field? Hell, I don’t care if it is your real name or not, but FFS how about having some common courtesy and decency when you visit a personal blog…? this is not a FFA links page ya know…

Please tell me, am I out of line here? I can take gentle corrections but if you think I’m being an a-hole go ahead and tell me, I really want to know…

Edit: The bad outweighed the good. I removed the “do-follow” plugin. *sigh*

I think I still have just about every bookmark for every page I’ve saved the last 5 years. I’m at the point now that I may as well have no bookmarks at all because when I decide to go back to a page I’ve saved I cannot find it for the life of me! I suppose I’ll have to buckle down and go through and start deleting some of them.

I’d really like an online bookmark manager but I don’t know of any that fit my specifications. I tried del.icio.us but it was more complex than I wanted plus I really don’t care to know what the whole world is bookmarking. I can barely keep up with my own.

I tried FURL and don’t remember why I stopped using it. I think I just got tired of logging in or maybe it was that I was required to add yet another toolbar to my browser. On an side note that’s why I don’t use StumbleUpon. If I’m required to install a toolbar to use a service then I just don’t use it.

Now, where is that site I know I bookmarked last night! arrrrrghhhh…..

Not that I think it makes much difference at this point since I have very few visitors to my new blog “A Geek Mom’s Net Journey“, but I am having a dickens of a time finding and settling on a Wordpress theme.

I found a really neat plugin called Admin Theme Preview that is a great help to me in my time of need. With this plugin I can preview a theme without having to enable it first. This makes sorting through different themes a whole lot easier.

The only problem I have with it is there doesn’t seem to be any way to turn it off except for disabling the plugin in the admin section. That’s not such a big deal though.

I’ve sort of lost interested in my “Bloggers for Dollars” (make money online) blog and don’t really feel like using that domain for a blog anymore. I will be replacing “Bloggers for Dollars” with my new blog “A Geek Mom’s Net Journey“.

Now I have to decide what to do with the domain. I can sell it or use it for a different type of site. I’ll probably just let it sit there and collect dust.

Well just have to see how it goes.

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Yep, I’m a “do-follow” blogger. That means I have removed the “no-follow” tags from your URL when you post comments. I welcome comments and as long as your comment is relevant I really don’t mind that most people comment just to get a back-link. I’m happy to help!

However, this does not mean that I have turned my blog into a Free For All Links page. This is personal blog, it is not an advertising site. If you use your web site title or business name instead of your name (or handle) then that’s pure ol’ spam. dang. I’m going to start deleting spam comments. For goodness sakes be kind enough to use your name or handle/alias when commenting.

Use a name or handle/alias to comment please. Comments with a business or website name are spam and will be deleted.

I already have the domain name picked out in my mind but I won’t say what it is because I don’t want to jinx it. The kind of blog I want to have won’t be for fancy recipes or the kind of cooking you learn at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago (http://www.chic.edu/career.asp). Nope, the recipes I want to write about are some of my favorite short-cut recipes - the kinds of meals you can throw together in thirty minutes to an hour and make it look like you have been slaving away in the kitchen all day.

I was thinking about naming my cooking blog The Lazy Gourmet but I’ve decided to name it something different than that now. I really like the name Quickie Chef but that one has been done to death already. I’ll get to it one day - I have too many other irons in the fire right now and can’t take on another project. Some day I will have a cooking blog though. yeppers.

BlogFollow is a cool Wordpress plugin I just found. In addition to being a “do follow” blogger I will now show a snippet from your blog at the bottom of your comment. All you have to do is input your normal URL and your feed will be determined automatically.

Feel free to try it out by commenting to this (or any other) post. If you like the plugin head on over to SiteAMonth and download it for your Wordpress blog.

Added note: This plugin has been disabled. I gave it a good try but it made my comments page too cluttered and messy looking. I still think it is a good idea and if there ever is a way to modify the plugin with different options I might take another look at it.

If you are interested in having your Wordpress theme customized (includes new custom header) don’t pass up this chance to enter the free drawing. The winner will get their current theme customized, based on the basic theme customization, including a new custom header, changing theme colors and graphics to make them all match and blend in.

To enter simply leave a comment AND add a link to Wordpress Reworked on your site letting Eve know you want to enter and telling others about the contest. The lucky name will be drawn Friday afternoon. Good luck!

I don’t think I’m going to learn until it is too late but who knows, maybe there is hope for me after all. With the two scares I’ve had recently maybe I’ll actually back up a few files from my computer.

I should use a company like IBackup. One of the things that attracted me to IBackup is the mapping of my online account as a local drive. All I would have to do then is drag and drop and edit my files in my online account. I’m not the most technical person in the world and the ease of use of IBackup for backup and online storage appeals to me.

PC Magazine listed IBackup as the top online file sharing and backup service provider in an article on a dozen ways to boost a small business (November 2006 issue). That’s a pretty high recommendation.

I almost picked up another Trojan, and that’s 2 just in the last few days.

The first one was “errorsafe” and the second one was “amaena”. I don’t think I actually got the second one because as soon as I saw the error screen I reached over and turned off my computer. It is a good thing I wasn’t in the middle of something because I don’t think I lost anything that time. It gave me a good scare though!

Boy oh boy, I had a bad scare yesterday. I don’t know if I had a trojan or if my computer just decided to take a dive on its own but for about 3 hours I thought I had lost it for good.

I had one of those boxes keep popping up that wanted me to buy their software to clean the trojan they had put on my computer theirself! After a few minutes of that I could not boot my computer at all - it was safemode or nothing. I finally got it scanned, cleaned (I think!) and restored to a previous date but I’m thinking that might be a wake-up call for me. It is time to stop talking about an online backup for this computer of mine and finally do something about it.

Now, I’m all about saving money and I found a company called IDrive-E that will let me quickly and securely back up 2 gigs for free with no backup and restore restrictions, no bandwidth limits and no file type restrictions. If I need more than 2 gigs the monthly fee is only $4.95 for unlimited storage. I will be definitely be looking into IDrive-E.

I used to run a HTML Help forum. I was pretty darn good at HTML and helping others learn web design. I did most of my coding by hand and really enjoyed it. After a while I took several years off from web design because I found another hobby. (MMORPG’s FTW!)

Fast forward to today. Now in addition to HTML we have CSS and PHP and heaven knows what else and I am totally lost with some of it. If the world would have just been satisfied with HTML I’d still be sailing along smoothly now. I guess a little frustration is worth it for the reward so I’ll just keep plugging along and goofing up until I can get it right.

I am so freeking sick and tired of Google Adsense. I guess I’m not smart enough to figure out how people make money from it because I have never made one thin dime. I think I’m going to take it off of all my sites and just forget about it. blah!

I never thought it would happen to me, but I am actually making money by blogging.

I have been paid $10.00 for 2 blog posts that I made on my original personal blog and I have 4 posts on another blog approved for $5.00 each (for a total of $20.00) and I’ve been tasked to write a post tomorrow for $10.00. None of these posts were made on this blog, of course, as it is too new to submit to any blog ad networks yet. That’s $40.00 for the month of March so far, woo hoo!

I’m very happy about it. The only problem at the moment is that the blog I’m writing paid posts on has a very narrow niche so there aren’t that many tasks I can take yet.

P.S. If you are wondering if you too can make money by blogging please feel free to check out my affiliates. They are listed on my sidebar under, er, “Affiliates”. heh

This is my third attempt at a blog. I moved the first time because I didn’t like my subdomain name and I decided I liked Drupal better than Wordpress. So what did I do but move to another subdomain? lol I’d call myself a dummy but who knew? I had no interest in monetizing a blog back then.

So now I have a PR2 blog on the subdomain and a PR0 blog on this new domain. And now I’ve decided to switch back to Wordpress! geez

There is no use crying over spilled milk though, is there? The only thing I can do is pick up and move on from here. Only 3 months (approx) until Google updates their page ranks and hopefully I can be ranked by then. *fingers crossed* I don’t like having a PR0 website.

I’ve started and deleted so many blogs it isn’t even funny.

I always found something I didn’t like about them though so I just deleted them instead of trying to fix them. After all, if you’re on a subdomain instead of you own domain you either have to grin and bear it with a subdomain you don’t like, or you can grin and bear it by starting over again.

I choose to start over. By golly, I’m going to keep doing it until I get it right!