August 2007 Archives

iBackup Online Storage

iBackup Online Storage allows consumers and business alike to backup and store their valuable data efficiantly and quickly and keeps it secure and free from worry. No more worrying about when the last backup is that you did for your valuable payroll or accounts payable data or trying to find the last tape or DVD that you stored something important.



With convenient integration with your Windows PC mapped drives appear in explorer and it's easy to drag and drop files that you want to back up online. It's not just for Windows however, iBackup offers a full range of off site backups for SQL Server, Oracle, Linux and MS Exchange. iBackup also guarantees superior performance which is up to 20% faster than other competitors according to internal testing.

According to PCMag, iBackup is their favorite among all of the online storage solutions available. The same holds true for PC World, WebUser, PC Pro Labs and CPU (Computer Power User). With so many professional users holding the service in such high esteem they have to have something going for them.

One of the really nice features, whether you run a small or large office is that you can set up accounts for collaborative sharing among co-workers, thus backing up all data in large or small projects.

Enough With The Tweets...

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OK, the wife just asked why the hell I have 100+ new posts showing up in Google Reader. oops. I have disabled Now Playing from sending tweets on everything that gets played. I will just have it update an xml file via ftp server and put it in a sidebar widget or something. I am surprised nobody has beaten the hell out of me for it yet.

This way the only ones that should start showing up are the actual tweets that I send from my cell phone or IM.

Podfitness: Custom Audio Workouts

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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.

logo_buds.png

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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Up And Running Again?

I don't know for sure but I did manage to ghost my hard drive over to a new one. This one is about a hundred gigs smaller than the other but I had it partitioned in half anyway and just backed up all the crap that was on the second partition. It was kind of a pain in the ass as I had to do a repair on my boot image in order to boot up.

I am also trying Readyboost, which is a utility built in to Vista (at least the ultimate version) that basically creates a ram drive on my 2GB USB drive and is supposed to spedd things up a bit. The jury is still out on that one. I can't tell right now since my system was moving at a crawl before I swapped out hard drives anyway.

Exactly How I Feel About It...

My Day

Hopefully I will be back online this afternoon at some point. I have moved my music and stuff over to another hard drive, just need to burn Ghost to a CD. I used to have a couple of floppies with it but unfortunately they are gone so I installed the latest version last night and just need to use it :)

I have known for several days that I had a hard drive going out so it shouldn't be a surprise but it certainly is killing me. Back to the irregular programming very soon...

Free Web Hosting For A Year

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Easy CGI is one of the largest Web Hosting Marketplace's around right now and they have got a pretty good deal going on right now, one year of free web hosting. You don't have to worry about any kind of tricks or rebates to get back, just one year of hosting plain and simple.

Easy CGI has a history of stable uptime, and offers a 99.9% Uptime Guarantee with 24/7 phone support and a one-click script installation center for most of the popular server applications. Rated as a  Top 10 Hosting Company in the HostReview Web Host Awards, Easy CGI is a no-brainer if you are looking for reliable fast hosting for your web site or blog.

I'm also looking for a couple of Diggs if you have the time. The link is in the footer of the post.

20 Things I Learned From Tech Support



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...

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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Current Desktop


I just finished installing Windowblinds 6.0 Beta, here is a screenshot of my current desktop. Nothing major going on right now. Windows Sidebar, 5imple Alpha Windowblinds, animated background.



desktop_080307.jpg


Windowblinds 6 Beta Released

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.

Image via Wikipedia

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 - Post at Least Once Per Day...

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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Feds Release $5 Million For Bridge Cleanup

Step #2 - Sign Up For Feedburner

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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101 Steps to Become a Better Blogger

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

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

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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Nine Dead, 20 Missing in Bridge Collapse



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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Audio Links

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Thanks to a comment by Matthias I decided to revisit Odiogo and the code that I was using for the link to the audio on each post. They sent me an email about it awhile back and I had forgotten all about it. There is code to add into your sidebar that will insert the player, which works much better than my little javascript. After the page loads entirely a "listen now" button should appear just below the title to each post on the main page. I have not installed it on each individual entry template.

Almost forgot, here is the code itself,

<div class="module-widget module" id="widget-Odiogo_odiogo_listen_button_YOUR_FEED_ID">
<div class="module-content">

<!-- BEGIN ODIOGO LISTEN BUTTON V1.5.4 (TP) -->
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://podcasts.odiogo.com/odiogo_js.php?feed_id=YOUR_FEED_ID"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
<!--
function odg_ScanPageTypePad_YOUR_FEED_ID ()
{
    odg_ScanPageTypePad ("YOUR_FEED_ID");
}
odg_AddEvent (odg_ScanPageTypePad_YOUR_FEED_ID);
showOdiogoSubscribeButton ("YOUR_FEED_URL");
// -->
</script>
<!-- END ODIOGO LISTEN BUTTON V1.5.4 (TP) -->

</div>
</div>

You can get the code here as well as email support to get your feed ID if you have lost the email from them that contains it.




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About this Archive

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

July 2007 is the previous archive.

September 2007 is the next archive.

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