TheAppDotNet

August 2007 Archives

Podfitness has been around for a couple of years now. Basically it's a workout program on your mp3 player. They are in the process of launching an upgrade to the service that is pretty exciting and want folks to go check out the Podfitness Homepage and see what they think.

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Each workout program is custom made specifically for the recipient and designed by the same trainers that the Hollywood stars use and they know how to get superb results. There are over a dozen different categories to choose from as far as the workouts go and you can have multiple programs and trainers at the same time. Depending on the equipment you have available, i.e. home or gym the workout is customized to fit what you have as well as the results that you want to get. Each workout is mixed with your mp3s and then downloaded into your iTunes or Zune library. Most likely it will work with any player, as they cannot use DRM protected music.




If you sign up for the trial at their homepage you get 10 days to try it out. It does require a credit card but if you cancel within those ten days they won't charge you.

When you first sign up you fill out a short fitness profile and then Podfitness matches you with trainers and programs that are more likely to help you reach your goals. If you are interested in listening to a sample of the workouts go over to the Podfitness homepage and click on the link. There are several different ones with explanations of the workouts and what they are used for.
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I used to work the graveyard shift doing Internet tech support for a
company that supported about 30 different ISPs and later on I worked
desktop/phone help desk supporting about 250 local and around a 1000
dial-up users. I just finished reading 20 Things I learned from Tech Support and it is hilarious.


I particularly like "the hold button is your friend" and "Users
always want a reason things are fixed. If you're not sure just lie.
They won't know anyway. "A stray electron passed through the processor
and caused..."'


I used to tell people their connection was down because of sun spots. hehehe.




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Offline...

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Charter Communications, Inc.

Image via Wikipedia

It appears as if Charter is offline again this morning. Hopefully my connection will come back up before I go back to work. Just came back from the basement as I had to reset the cable modem to see if that will do a bit of good. I am getting a connection but can't reach the DNS servers. I don't know about any of the gateways or anything as I just don't feel like fooling with it this early in the morning. It's very weird. I fired off a reply to an email a few minutes ago and it sent and then the connection went down. If it's still offline this afternoon I will do my troubleshooting and call them if need be. I just hate having it go down in the morning because that is when I get my free time and usually answer my emails as well.

Can't get to my web site but I just received a couple of emails so it is at least partially back up. Damn that is weird, still cannot get anything.

Back online again, good I have a couple of posts I would like to put up in the meantime...

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Windowblinds 6 Beta Released

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The Object Desktop 2.0 logo incorporates a woodgrain motif, echoed in many skins

Image via Wikipedia

I just saw this over at Wincustomize.


Stardock is pleased to officially announce that the beta of WindowBlinds 6 is now available for users of Object Desktop. WindowBlinds 6 represents a whole new generation of Windows skinning with advanced new features such as animation overlays, blur glass effects on both Windows Vista and Windows XP, user created sub-styles, full font control, explorer backgrounds, complete Windows Vista skinning, faster performance, and much more!

The final WindowBlinds 6 will include 5 brand-new skins created by Stardock Design (a team up of many of the top skinners of all time including the Pixtudio team and Skinplant teams combined) to help demonstrate some of the new skins.

More features and information will be released as the beta moves forward.

If you don't have Object Desktop, visit www.objectdesktop.com to get it.

More info and screenshots found here.

Very cool. I am in the process of opening Stardock Central right now to download it. Windowblinds 6 beta is only available for Object Desktop subscribers.

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Google is one of the most successful search engines currently available on the internet.

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This is #4. Optimize your blog for the search engines. This looks to be a bit more work than the other ones particularly since I run three sites, but let's give it a whirl.

Although I am doing this on all three of my sites I have to make the posts a little different on each for several reasons. One is that Google penalizes for duplicate content across sites. PayPerpost and some of the other paid advertising sites also want you to have content unique to the sites as well. I do post unique and sometimes relevant content, but too many of these on the sites all looking the same is just not a good idea for those reasons.

The first thing I am supposed to do is go read How to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines by Darren Rowse (Problogger.com). OK, I'm going right now...


There are several points to Darren's article but they are summed up in most of my posts on SEO that I have done in the past, whether they were paid or just stuff I was writing for myself. Looking for traffic. Where does traffic come from? Good quality back-links on search engines as well as other sites. What qualifies as a quality back-link?

  1. they are from higher ranked sites than your own
  2. they are relevant to the topic you are writing about
  3. they link to you using relevant keywords to your page

OK, that stuff makes sense, but how do you get these kick-butt links to your site? Several different ways...

1. Quality Content. I am already screwed :( One man's quality is another man's quantity I always say...We're talking about blogging, OK? That makes sense. If someone puts up a post that I find interesting I link to it. Very simple. I can't force that to happen, it's a natural progression of events. I've linked to other sites and had them link to me.

2. Notify Relevant Bloggers of Your Content. There are different ways to do this I suppose. You could email them and say "hey! I liked your article and linked to it, go check out mine on the same subject." I don't think I could do that but it is one way. Track-backs are good for this, particularly if you participate in open track-backs and the links show up in the post as I do.

3. Use Directories. I don't do this a bunch but I am listed in some of the blog directories. Darren links to Ari Paparo's big list of blog search engines as a starting point. As soon as I am finished posting this I will go and submit all three sites to the ones that I have not used yet.

4. Inter-Link Your Blogs. I am part of several loosely bound blog networks and blogrolls, and I also have all three of my sites hosted on the same server and regularly interlink them, but that's about it.

5. Buy Links - I have not tried anything like text-link ads, although I do get a few out-clicks on the ones that I host here. I am still on the fence as to whether it is worth it or not. Back at the end of May I spent $100 of the money I earned online and bought some reviews through Payperpost. I posted about the experience here. I think that if I were to do it again, I would use PPP Direct and choose the bloggers that I would want to post a review because it was most definitely not worth the money. Another example would be some of the reviews that I posted about my brother's book earlier in the year. He also used PPP at one point and had several posts on the Internet and with the exception of people coming from my site and maybe one or two others he also felt that it was a waste of his money.

6. Swap Links - I have done some of this as well. I don't do it all of the time as my blogrolls are particularly long and I generally only like to link to people whose blogs I like when I read them. With millions of blogs around, I like quite a few of them.

The article has quite a bit more useful information that I am not going to repeat here but you should go check it out. Darren at Problogger is a gifted writer and very good at what he does.

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Step #3 from 101 Steps to Become a Better Blogger is "Post at least once per day".

Boy have I got that one covered all over the place. If I posted once per day I have enough to get me through next May just from last months posts at Shadowscope :)

Actually on this site I don't always post every day, so I will have to start doing that. In addition I think I will change "Post Once A Day" to "Post Something Intelligent or Thoughtful Once a Day". That might be a challenge some days...Those are usually the days where I do nothing but post news reports.

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New Mexico state welcome sign

Image via Wikipedia

I wrote a post the other day about a projector rental company that services Arizona and New Mexico and made the comment that I wished I could rent something like this locally. Apparently I can. Whether you are looking for an Amarillo projector rental or live some place like Anaheim, Boston or Memphis, Projector123 rents projectors. They are great for stuff like weddings, conventions or even something as mundane as a movie party night in the basement.

They have great technical service which operates 24 hours a day and their projector rentals start at $99 polus shipping through FedEx. They have a toll-free number at 1-888-866-6123 if you are interested in more information, or just head on over to the web site.
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FeedBurner

Image via Wikipedia

Step #2 in the 101 steps to becoming a better blogger is to add your blog feed to Feedburner. I actually am on feedburner but I couldn't remember which blogs I had already added or even my account login :(

...so I did what was necessary and found a cool RSS icon. I like the one that Marcus has but I want a regular one, just bigger. Found this one floating around several places on the net...

I don't think Helen Keller could miss that one floating in my sidebar at 128x128. It definitely stands out quite a bit. Once I am finished with the post I will stick it in my sidebar.

I already has (what's up with my typing tonight?) have Shadowscope and TheAppDotNet set up with Feedburner feeds so I added Miles Business Blog as well. Marcus has a bunch of screenshots up on his post so if you want to see the steps in living color go over there and check it out.

OK, so what's next? Stick the big old button in the sidebar, that's what!! Oh yeah, and here are the feeds as well,

http://feeds.feedburner.com/theappdotnet
http://feeds.feedburner.com/shadowscope
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MilesBusinessBlog

Three times the useless drivel.

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After having run across that post on Karen's site I dropped in on Marcus and started checking out his posts on 101 ways to become a better blogger. Hell, I want to be a better blogger. I would also like to learn how to write a coherent entertaining sentence but that is probably beyond the means of this project. Anyway, I am going to participate in this project along with him and I will attempt to do it on all three of my blogs at the same time. There are several things I need to get in order on them anyway, so this will probably take care of them...

The first step is to Go to Popuri and check your page rank, alexa rank, and technorati rank. make a note of these so you'll have something compare them to next summer.

So here are the results for my three sites:

Shadowscope

Google PageRank: 5
Alexa Rank: 62,365
Compete Rank: 363,408
Quantcast Rank: 71,180
Google BackLinks: 560
Yahoo BackLinks: 16,495
Live Search BackLinks: 1
Technorati Links: 3,216
del.icio.us Bookmarks: 1
Bloglines subscribers: 9

TheAppDotNet

Google PageRank: 4
Alexa Rank: 214,827
Compete Rank: 0
Quantcast Rank: 0
Google BackLinks: 71
Yahoo BackLinks: 1,875
Live Search BackLinks: 1
Technorati Links: 237
del.icio.us Bookmarks: 1
Bloglines subscribers: 0

Miles Business Blog

Google PageRank: 3
Alexa Rank: 309,724
Compete Rank: 0
Quantcast Rank: 0
Google BackLinks: 36
Yahoo BackLinks: 288
Live Search BackLinks: 0
Technorati Links: 249
del.icio.us Bookmarks: 0
Bloglines subscribers: 0

The first step actually assumes that you run Wordpress and that you know how to set it up to ping some sites when you update your blog. I don't run Wordpress but I do know how to have it ping and have it set to do so.


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New Links Directory

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I may have posted about this earlier in the week but since our Google page ranks depend on backlinks I have added a links directory off of my main sight. It's brand new thus there is no PR yet, but that is only a matter of time. You can get added for a reciprocal link or if you want to pay and be added without a link that is fine also. Go check out the Shadowscope Links Directory and get added!

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Submitting Stories to Thoof

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A while back I wrote an article about Thoof, a site where you can submit personalized news with relevant tags. Thoof is a bit more fair than services like Digg and gives users a chance for news and articles to stand on their own merits and newsworthiness. I have used it off and on since I wrote about them and have found some really good articles through the site.

Thoof has now added the ThoofRank button which you can see at the bottom of this post. I tried it out initially on a post I wrote last week on Net Neutrality and the FCC and submitted that article to Thoof!. Of course I already have an account there so it was very quick and easy to submit, but even if you don't have one yet it doesn't take long at all to get started. The ThoofRank button is extremely easy to submit in your post as well. It's a very short piece of code containing an iFrame. All you do is copy and paste (ctrl-c, ctrl-v). Can't get much easier than that.

ThoofRank is basically a fair measure of how interesting a story is to other readers with interests in common with that story. So if I embedded it in one of my BeyondTV reviews you would think it would have a decent ThoofRank after awhile as that has been one of the more popular articles here. When a story is first submitted it normall y has a low rank and as it grows in popularity as ThoofRank of 50% or better means that it is of above average interest to other readers. The more people see the article the higher in rank it goes. That's the reason that Thoof is so much different than other social netowrking news sites because with them, if you don't get a sufficient amount of hits at the beginning it is hard to hit critical mass and get noticed before the story is buried by 600 more that have come along.





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I wrote about this as soon as I heard about it last night. Here is the latest news of the Mississippi River bridge collapse, at least as far as I have seen.








Yahoo is reporting at least seven people dead right now. They
had to call off the search efforts as it just got too dark for
searchers to safely operate. I'm sure that will be back out again this
morning as soon as it gets light. It won't be too much longer before
the blame mongers get involved and start pointing fingers. Expect the
Bush Administration which has nothing whatsoever to do with it, to step
up to the plate and show you how more Federal Government involvement
would have stopped this as well. I predict that before Sunday night at
the earliest.


Cross-Posted to Shadowscope and TheAppDotNet


Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, The Random Yak, Allie Is Wired, DeMediacratic Nation, Big Dog's Weblog, Stuck On Stupid, The Pink Flamingo, Planck's Constant, Wyvern Dreams, Leaning Straight Up, Conservative Cat, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Linkfest Haven, the Blogger's Oasis



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Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation

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It is amazing to me how much technology has changed over the last 40 years. Medical science in particular has evolved and improved so much more than people think. For instance, when my daughter was born in 1997 part of her small intestine never expanded properly so they had to cut her open and remove 10cm of her intestine and stick a little balloon in there to keep it open for awhile. She was less than 24 hours old. We (and the doctor as well) weren't even sure she would live it was so serious. It is called something like a Jujeunal Atresia if I got the spelling correct. She came home from Scottish Rite 40 days later. There were a few hairy moments there but she made it through OK. I did some research and if she had been born in the late 60's when I was, she would have just died. 30 years and technology had made such a jump that it saved her life.

Cosmetic surgery has also grown and evolved by leaps and bounds. I don't mean just boob jobs and botox obviously though. I am talking about other areas of plastic as well, such as labiaplasty. Vaginal cosmetic surgery is a growing field. The fact is that your body image and how it looks can seriously effect how you feel about yourself, whether that be a large nose, funky looking chin, or a weird looking vagina. Cosmetic surgery can help correct it and help you feel better about yourself.

There are other reasons for it as well though. Childbirth can change things around down there making the vagina relax and lose sensation that you otherwise would have had. The Laser Vaginal Institute of Atlanta is nationally known for it's procedures and can really make a difference in a woman's life.

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About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from August 2007 listed from newest to oldest.

February 2007 is the previous archive.

March 2008 is the next archive.

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