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Archive for the ‘ General ’ Category

September 21, 2008 | No comments

Tactical Outdoors

Ever wondered where to get those cool jackets that you tactical teams using on TV or in a movie??  Well, i have just found out one place to get them.
5.11 Tactical is a web store specialized in delivering tactical products such as pants, shirts, knives, jackets, watches and a lot more. They have a huge inventory so that’s why they can deliver most offers in just 24 hours.

The prices seem fair to me. Actually there are products that i thought they where more expensive, but tactical knives surprised me. I didn’t expected that they could be expensive.

I know someone that could like this site :)

Popularity: 1% [?]

September 17, 2008 | 7 comments

Feeling Sick

These 2 days, i have been feeling sick, and im not in conditions to blog and reply comments.

Im still a bit weak, but i hope to resume blogging tomorrow.

Hope to see you tomorrow. Cheers

Popularity: 14% [?]

September 15, 2008 | 8 comments

Monday Link Love

Again for the second time in a row im giving the link love on Monday instead of Sunday. I can’t make a habit out of this lol

Week In Review

I started the past week by giving you a simple tip to make your posts look better. Followed by a post about wordpress themes. This time, it was about themes that we should runaway from. 7 themes were mentioned but some more were mentioned on the comments.

And finally, i ended the week by showing you how to create unique content in seconds. This post created some unexpected buzz on a social media site. More about that below.

Link Love of the week:

Sadly, this was a week that i haven’t had the pleasure of reading as many posts from blogs i visit, as i wanted. But still i managed to read some cool articles. Here is my selection:

Sire from Wassupblog made a useful post to all the blogger community that uses comment love plugin. The author of Comment Love, as made a new cool feature to his plugin. Visit sire’s blog to see what it is.

Syed from Balkhis made a case study to find Which Blog Posts get the most traffic?

This i had to mention. lol The Tragedy stroke Johncow TV. The cow was “cownapped”!  Pretty funny! hehe now serious…. poor cow… it must be terrified!

Yan from Thoushallblog made a list of 20 things we should do after installing wordpress.

The Buzz about Create Unique content post

On the first paragraph i said that the “create  unique content in seconds” post generated some unexpected buzz around it. Unexpected and negative buzz.

I have submitted that post as i usually do, to several social media sites. One of the sites was sphinn. After a few hours i started to see traffic arriving from sphinn to that post.

I logged in, and saw the post was “desphunned” 6 times, and a discussion started.

A few comments were made (some very ironic) such as:

well, it’s sucky advice, a sucky attitude. if i need 50 more characters, i thought it sucked.

Let’s make scraped and copied content OK by moving around words and “giving credit.”
this made me throw up in my mouth a little. it’s this sort of thing that ruins the internet for all.
and a some more.
There were also some discussion on the comment area, again, in a negative way.
Those who read this article through Sphinn, didn’t liked it at all. For them, using this technique is a complete abomination.
Although i can understand their side, i think some of them may have misunderstood the point of the article.
The method in fact does generate unique content. It does in fact need some modifications to make some sense, and to express what the author wants to say. I in fact, endorse users to give the credit to the original author. Some of the comments surprised me because of this. Some of them “laughed” , Like if this was made to smooth the “anger” of the authors. Like if giving credit was just a lame excuse to rip the content of an author.
A member even said this was a plagiarism. I wrote the definition of plagiarism:

Plagiarism is the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.
If we mention the author, where we can access the original article (AKA: giving credit), where is the plagiarism? Now, if some one does not do what i say about this, and/or have the guts to put in the end of the post :Author: his own name, then yes it plagiarism.
I even gave essays from college and school as an example. We take some articles and use them on our work. We can paraphrase the author, or write the content in a different way.  I don’t know how it is with you, but i have some rules to obey in these works. In each paragraph, if im not writing “ipsis verbis” what the author says, then i have to put this in the end: (author’s surname, year of publication). Im giving credit to the author, but the text is different from the original article… What is the difference from this and doing the same online (apart from the automatic process)?
Another member even said that to write good essays we need to bring something new! How untrue that is. I have made several works about anatomy and physiology (just to mention these) where i wrote several theories from several authors, but i haven’t brought nothing new (how could i dare to do that?). The work was evaluated as excellent.
If you want to take part in this discussion, sphunn or desphunn the topic, by all means feel free to do it :)
You can access the discssuion by going to this address: http://sphinn.com/story/72093

Conclusion

If there are users who don’t agree with this method, then it is up to them. I can understand, but first they should think a bit about it before saying something. They have read the words “create” “unique” “content” “translate” and assumed that it was a really bad advice… They should understand that i condone the use fo this technique to take an article as their own (i thought i cleared this in the post!). But in the end. What one of my readers do with this, is completly out of my hands. It is their responsability to act in the right way…

I don’t really care that i got a negative buzz out of this. Really. I don’t care. In fact, im loving it. The reason? im getting some exposure and traffic to my blog, and has many say good or bad, what matter’s is they talk about us. lol

Sony is one of the most commited companies to eradicate piracy of the world, but it is also on of the major creators of CD-R and DVD-R, used in a large percentage to record pirated products. Ironic? (Santos, 2008)

P.S. - Santos it is my surname in case you are wandering who the hell is santos. And don’t get me wrong about this quote. It is just a little thought to take the right conclusions….

Popularity: 16% [?]

September 7, 2008 | 3 comments

Really bad weekend

This was a really bad weekend… It was all going fine, when i arrived today from my parents house.

Connected to the internet, did my usual stuff and i soon found out that 3 things happened. Bad things!

Out of space!?

The first one i found was that my blog was all messed up, apparently because i ran out of hosting space!!! I immediately knew what was it, because it is the second time this happens to me in a week.

I have been getting errors on some plugins updates, and it seems that every error will make the updater to create dozens of .core files with 100mb each, until it fills my hosting capacity. Alinks reported that there wasn’t enough space…. Can you believe it?

The blogs was inaccessible too much time… damn it… :(

Sandboxed by google!!!

My top performing BANS store was kicked into google sandbox. This is a major drawback to me, because earnings from that store were starting to be real good. Now what can i do? Wait?

If anyone knows what to do when a BANS store was sandboxed by google then let me know…. i need to reasearch a bit about this…

IE7 Issue

For those who visit my blog with internet explorer, then im sorry to say that for now this blog isn’t showing how it is supposed to be. Just found out this after i corrected the “lack of space” issue. I have been trying to fix it but with no results, so i decided to update the theme of the blog to see if i can correct it.

Theme update

Ok, i have updated the theme, and i still haven’t managed to correct the IE7 visualization problem. Also updating options is showing (again) that it is a pain in the ass…

Bahh, i think im going to shoot something in a game… there is no better thing than to release our stress in a shooting game lol

Popularity: 6% [?]

This is the 5th part of the creating a forum series.

We have covered so far:

And today we will be focusing on adding mods to our forum.

Now that we have members on our forum and traffic coming, it is time to add something more to the forum. This “something more” is achieved with modifications, or mods for short. We can look these mods in the same way we look for wordpress plugins.

Getting mods

SMF has a big and  active community that constantly releases new modifications for SMF. And happily for us, they all post their new mods at the SMF mod site.

There you can easily browse mods, read a description about them and see if there is a version compatible with your smf version.

Installing the mods

A great feature that SMF has, is the package manager (located in your admin panel: Main»Packages).

For now, you will only need to focus on the “Download Packages” link. Here you will be able to upload a mod to use. You just need to download the desired mod  that comes in a zip format, to your drive. Then hit the upload button, select your recently downloaded mod and hit ok. Don’t worry. The script will install all the files on the proper places and make the necessary alterations to the theme code.

Warning

Although this is an easy process, sometimes this will fail and you will see some error messages. Don’t worry. It is usual, specially if you are using a different template than the default one.

You need to remember that almost all mods are ready to be installed in the default version. When using a different template, the code structure is different and the installer script does not know where to place the necessary template modifications. We will take care of this in a future topic.

Recommended mods

  1. SEO4SMF: this was my favourite mod for SEO. Sadly it is a bit insecure and not that easy to configure. It seems to be discontinued. While i used this mod, i have seen a big increase in search engine visitors.
  2. Pretty URLs: This mod does the same thing as seo4smf. Actually, the url seems more seo friendly. And it is easy to use. Sadly, it is showing not to be as much effective as the previous one. It is the only seo mod compatible with SMF 2.0 beta.
  3. SMF Sitemap: having a sitemap always helps right?
  4. vBulletin Style Meta Tags: This will let you configure your forum tags
  5. Auto Embed Video/Audio Clips: this will allow your users to insert a link in a post and automatically change it to the respective video. Very useful.
  6. SMF Arcade or E-Arcade: every forum should have an arcade for users to play. This will atract new users and make the old ones come. This is an excelent addon as long you know how to proper use it in your advantage.
  7. Gender On Registration: useful to know who is a guy or a girl
  8. Registered Images: this will prevent from guest to see images on the forum, and will recommend them to register at the forum
  9. EmailValidator: This is to prevent members to register with a fake email. We want real mail address.
  10. And last but not the least Ad Management mod: This is one of the most important mods available for your forum. This will let you place ads in 2-3 clicks.  You chosse where to put them and the mod will do it for you.

These are just a few that i reccomend. You won’t need them all, but they will surely help your blog.

When browsing for for a mod, just remember to see if the mod is compatible with your version.

Friendly advice: make regular backups, specially before adding mods that make huge modifications to the smf installation.

Popularity: 3% [?]