BlogAllAlong

One of my concerns about it was how many hosts are available. Last night I did quick search and found out Ruby on Rails now has many many hosts, and it has been integrated into the cPanel as well. You can view a full list here of Ruby on Rails hosts. And to my surprise as well, my HostGator have already added support for it.

Full details about how to use Ruby on Rails with Hostgator through SSH is available here. Guess that rules out one of the reasons why I thought PHP Symfony would be easier to manage. The quest continues however as to which one is better. I started to like Ruby on Rails, but general comment is that Ruby by nature is slower than PHP. Then I came across the PHP Symfony framework which is also amazing, cleaner in certain aspects like the syntax, class files and database creation. However it is still new, and there is the CakePHP competitor for it. On the other hand, Ruby on Rails seems to be expanding fast, I would like to be among the people who start with it, and it’s heavily pushed by the community, already many high quality books are published about it. So I am a bit inclined to the RoR road. Any second opinion and discussion is welcome on this.

Popularity: 27% [?]

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It is best said here “How hard is it to send out an e-mail letting people know about [any changes]?”. For long, many web based companies let you sign for terms and conditions that could be changed at any day without prior notice. Why the hell is that? Most companies send you lot of promotional emails, some go beyond and ask you to vote for them as best company. However they are not welling to let you know the terms of the contract have changed!

This is no more the case as the US Court of Appeals have ruled out new obligation on web companies to notify customers of any change in the contract. Our hats off for Joe Douglas, who had made all this happen. The story began when Dougals signed for voice services with America Online. Later on Talk America acquired America Online and did some changes to the terms including some price increase without notifying the Douglas of the changes. Douglas ofcourse did not notice the changes immediately as his credit card was billed directly. 4 years later only he came to know of this change and filed a lawsuit against the firm. Luckily he has won the case and we should all be thankful to him.

Popularity: 17% [?]

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That’s the idea behind Grub, the open source search distributed resources search engine. Part of the source code have been made open to the world, and clients are available to download and share your resources to help build the world’s largest web index database. Clients running on PCs all over the world will use the CPU and bandwidth resources to index the web and update the Grub database with the new information. Only that part is done on user machine, real time queries are sent to their server directly.

Do you get paid for sharing your resources? I didn’t think so, no you don’t. But if you are a believer in the open source, want to help build the largest web index, you may like to do so, same as people are doing with Wikipedia. If you are a webmaster also there is an extra advantage. Clients you run will start crawling closer content first, i.e. your sites before moving outside. You will not have to wait for a search engine to decide to include you, you include your self, and see how your website is being crawled. Even though, I think that offering some advantage in return is a must given that we are building their search engine which they will be making money out of. If it succeeds, we are talking about a hell lot of money not only few thousands or millions. Since the client uses registered username, and all his shares resources are tracked, this could be a good start to promise small shares for contributers in return.

As for the Grub site it self, I haven’t been much impressed with it so far, even though I think the idea is marvelous. Initially page did not load any content. Some files are empty, some pages are giving run time errors, and the downloaded client log is full of “Primary exchange with the server failed”. I don’t believe the Wikia sponsored project has come to a good public start. Let’s wait and see how it goes after.

Thinking about what could be the affect of this project shall it succeed. Possible Google threat? It sure is. Some people hate Google, many others don’t like to be locked to single resource, and I really believe competition is healthy. What else? Spammers. I could be running many spam junky sites, and share big amount of resources to ensure my sites are indexed. There is still no details about how spam sites are handled.

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Popularity: 19% [?]

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As I have promised one of my friends, here I list the WordPress plugins I am using and what I think of them:

• AdSense-Deluxe: If you are an AdSense user and frequently want to insert Google Ads within your post, WordPress editor by it self can get annoying in the way it manipulates certain scripts within the post. This plugin helps you organize the library of Ads you use and include them in your post with simple <!–keyword–> way.
• Anarchy Media Player: To allow easy embedding of videos inside your post. I still find problem with it however. I tried many solutions and figured the best way with my current WordPress release is to copy/paste embedded code from say YouTube and save at once. Any edit will require I remodify the code to be on a single line again. This problem does not seem to exist with WordPress 2.2 which is used to power my Daily Gizmos blog. However the list of not-supported plugins there is huge so the migration is not a walk in the park.
• Challenge: The protector of the universe.. Arr I mean my blog. It does not completely stop spam though, spammers still find their way through, but without it I get like 50 spam comments per hour.
• DoFollow: This is controversy. Google is completely against it. DoFollow removes the NoFollow from your commenter’s backlink. Meaning that the link will be counted by Google as a weighted link. The idea is that you did not chose to actually link to people who comment on your blog, i.e., it doesn’t actually reflect you were referring to them. It’s them posting, and many times just for the sake of backlink, that is true. So Google believes those links should not interfere with the site ranking weight. Others like Yahoo however don’t believe in this method and count all links, disregarding NoFollow attribute. I am having a second thought about it, but this is the issue of another article I will discuss it in detail later.
• FeedBurner Feed Replacement (Now called FeedSmith): This is a wonderful plugin. FeedBurner first of all is a site that will help you monitor and optimize your blog feeds. To do so however you have to map your feeds to them. This plugin does it in one click. Unfortunately this plugin is not WP 2.2 supported yet.
• Feed Footer: I am just trying out this plugin, and if you are reading my post through Feed Reader you should see a small Sponsored Ad at the end of the post. Many people (like me) like to read posts through RSS Reader as it’s much more practical. This however forbids blog owner privilege of delivering ads, unless they post incomplete RSS Feeds, which I hate to do. This plugin lets you make your readers happy while still get a chance to make some income.
• Google (XML) Sitemap: Sitemaps are easy way for webmasters to tell search engines about pages on their site that are available for crawling. For a normal site, this is possible manually. However with a blog, every day you are supposed to add a new page. So keeping up the Sitemap.xml file updated all the time is a tedious job. This plugin does it for you. On every new post, edit, or delete, this plugin builds the new XML Sitemap. You can also adjust the pages priority from a user interface. All you have to do then is tell Search Engines about your sitemap for better indexing. Use Google Webmasters for starter.
• Popularity Contest: This you can see at the footer of my posts. The popularity rank of each post based on number of views from main page, singe post view, feed view, comments etc. You get to decide how each factor weights in the equation. Ofcourse old posts will not have their history reflected here, but on the long run it’s good to have. Note to make however some posts have somehow strange results, like one that had %100 popularity, I don’t know how. Nothing special about it, and it’s like saying you got %100 votes in election. Not possible if you’re not alone.
• Sphere Related Content Widget: I recently disabled it to go easy on my blog response time. It got loaded with stuff it needs serious attention now. This plugin gives the user list of related articles to your post. The links are shown in new sliding window on click only, making it user friendly
• Show Top Commentors: Reward top commenting people on your blog by listing them on your side menu. Also, this most probably means that they are eligible to have the NoFollow removed, which the plugin does by default.
• Subscribe To Comments: Keep your users tied to the post. Alert them of new post comments by email. Pretty straight forward and useful. I was surprised how often people use it.
• WordPress Database Backup: For the bad days! Mostly you can do that through your host console as well.
• WP-Amazon: This is the strongest AJAX plugin I came across. It allows you through side menu in editor mode to include Images and links to Amazon with your affiliate id in it. This thing should be sponsored by Amazon it’s much easier and faster than using Amazon Affiliate site it self. You search for your item and is fetched on the fly with you affiliate Id added to it. last time I checked, it was not WP 2.2 supported as well :(.
• Wp-Cache: Some people have spoken great deal of this plugin, others and I have not see performance improvement of post caching. Either way, Do no come near this if you have Challenge plugin activated. I did so and ofcourse, the question got cached and displayed everytime, but the real answer is different. People couldn’t post anymore. Trying to remove did not seem so simple at all as well. Read my older post if you want more information on this.

If anyone’s got some comments on those, or further plugins to add, do share them please.

Popularity: 33% [?]

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While others are still planning and promising a come back to the adventure classics in 2015, others have already started making money and are moving on with Season 2.

I mean really. How many successful adventure games  have been released recently, after public thought it’s almost dead. I agree adventure games are not that much money making as heavy action adventure ones, but then again, they don’t cost or take that long to develop either. I’ve heard of games that keep in the development for over 2 years. Now that’s too long to wait to see if you will really make money or not. Meanwhile, have something short on the side that will cash some money in. Right now, I can’t tell how many new adventure games I still have to play but don’t have the time for. But it’s not less than 5 I’m sure. This and more is coming like A Vampyre Story and Insecticide. Better get started before it’s too late to call my self adventure fan :).

Popularity: 32% [?]

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This is a useful link for all Google Talk emoticons. Enjoy.

Popularity: 19% [?]

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I realized recently that by mastering what’s called Firefox Bookmark Keyword you can ignore something called Search Engine Plugin. The idea is very simply. Bookmark any search page, name your desired keyword, then start searching using the format below in your address bar:

<selected-keyword> query

Let’s see it in practice now shall we?

1) Right click on the desired search box field and select “Add a Keyword for this search…”.

2) Specify the name you want for this bookmark, and the associated keyword you want to use. Make it something short and descriptive. For instance BAA is Blog All Along Initials. Click OK when you finish.

3) In the address bar of your Firefox browser type: “<selected keyword> <query>” and hit enter. Example if you have followed this practice literally is: “baa Firefox”. Put it in your address bar and click Enter.

VIOLA! If you see the Firefox results from BlogAllAlong then you are there. Never care about search engine plugins again. Below is a list of keywords I find useful:

• Google: Keyword G
• Google Images: Keyword IMG
• Google News: Keyword NEWS
• Google Bookmarks: Keyword BOOKMARKS
• YouTube: Keyword UT
• Q8Ba7th Search: Keyword Q8
• IMDB: Keyword IMDB
• DailyGizmos: Keyword DG

* NOTE: Keyword is case in-sensitive here.

Ofcourse you would chose your favorite News and Image search source. It can be Yahoo for instance. Trying with Live Image Search however didn’t work. This is due to the way of implementation. It seems to be setting some variables dynamically at a certain point. So if you are Live Search user, yes you would still need the old fashioned Search Engine Plugin. But how many Firefox users are really Live users I wonder?

Popularity: 25% [?]

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