Archive for the ‘TechNews’ Category
| 7 Jun 2008 |
Firefox Download Day 2008 – PLEDGE for your favorite browser! |
Download day will occur on the day when Firefox 3 will be launched. Till then you have the chance to pledge using your email address and you will be among the first to know the date of the official Firefox 3 launch.
Download day is Mozilla’s attempt to set a world record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. The number of downloads on the first day when Firefox 2 was launched was 1.6million, now mozilla aims for 5 million downloads in first day.
You can contribute by pledging, by hosting a firefox party, and if you have a blog by adding promotional banners to your website/blog. Of course you can help by telling your friends also about download day!
At this point here are the pledge stats:
So what are you waiting for! Go ahead and Pledge for your favorite browser!
| 13 May 2008 |
You can’t buy credits with Paypal on Sitepoint because their system is broke |
Back at the end of january i wanted to buy credits to post up a template for auction. I wanted to pay for the credits using my Paypal account and guess what?, i got a cool error message saying the system could not process my credit card(pretty hilarious considering that i selected Paypal as a payment method).
Back then i sent them a mail and check out the reply i got:
Hi
There may have been a problem with Paypal on that day or with your Paypal account – you could try another credit card with them – or you can order direct from us using a credit card.
Kind Regards,
Nonie Donald
SitePoint Support Team
Then i tried again, got the same error message so i abandoned my idea of buying credits, but now that i want to start monetizing my blog a listing there could get me some extra cash.
Same story as in January: i want to buy credits using Paypal:
eventually i get a “sexy” error message:
So this is clearly the opposite of what Nonie Donald said. I tired this yesterday and today also and faced the same issue.
In the reply to my email Nonie suggested that i directly purchase from them using my credit card. HELL NO! That’s not why i got a Paypal account. I got my Paypal account to minimize the use of my Credit Card on the internet.
If they don’t want to fix the issue its their problem, but trust me on this, till they don’t get the issue fixed i won’t buy any credits(not that its a big loss to them, but i don’t think i’m the only one feeling this way)
| 2 May 2008 |
Brand new Google PR update of my blog |
Exactly 2 months ago(on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 8:19 pm ) i blogged about the first PR update that hit my blog . Finally my homepage got the appreciation it deserves and got attributed Pagerank 5(iwebtool predicted PR 6, but who can trust it?)
Remember what i said in the first pr update post:
I really hope that on next pagerank update my main page will also get pagerank 4-5. The only problem is that i will have to work my ass off to get it:).
Now i can start monetizing my blog(i currently make about 120$/month from affiliate programs earnings), don’t worry i won’t fill every inch of your screen with ads. You won’t sense the difference, because there won’t be any, except the banners will change.
Once again i used the Google Pagerank checker tool made by SEO Junkie , and here are the stats:
(click image to see full stats)
In the stats picture i didn’t include the pages which didn’t get any pagerank value attributed, if you wish to see the full stats visit the stats page.
Releasing themes really got me a great value of IBLs(inbound links) which contributed to the high value of the index’s pagerank. Now the only thing that i have to do is to manage to keep it.
Technorati
Over at technorati thaslayer.com has 760 authority value and a rank of 5,251 with 847 blog reactions
——————
In other news Google still didn’t send the payment to those publishers who had their payments canceled due to a deposit payment technical error, and 10th may is arriving faster than the french TGV.
| 26 Apr 2008 |
IX Web Hosting – Are they a big joke? |
Today a friend asked my opinion about IX Web hosting. He told me that he saw a hosting package for $4.95/month which will give him UNLIMITED disk space and UNLIMITED bandwith along with 500$ worth of marketing tools and credits.
I told him that i have to check it out before i say my opinion.
The first things that got to my eyes were the following lines: Unlimited Domains Unlimited Data Transfer Unlimited Web Space.
I’m fine with Unlimited Domains, but Unlimited data transfer and Unlimited Web space sounds pretty fishy to me. I saw IX web Hosting’s offer last year, but back then they had normal values at the Web space and the Bandwith.
At this point i said to myself: “uuu…let’s chat a little with someone at live support”, what i did, and believe me i laughed a lot during my “small” chat with a Support representative. The most annoying thing was that Karina(the support representative) replied to my questions within minutes like she was working on something rather than chatting with me.
Here’s the chat:
Chat InformationPlease wait for a site operator to respond.
Chat InformationYou are now chatting with ‘Karina Zalavskaya’
Karina Zalavskaya: Welcome, this is Karina, how can I help you?
you: Hey Karina,
you: i have just one pre-sale question
you: How can you offer UNLIMITED disk space and UNLIMITED transfer?
Karina Zalavskaya: What do you mean?
you: Business plus plan
you: Unlimited Data Transfer Unlimited Web Space
you: unlimited doesn’t actually exist
you: Karina? Are you still there?
Karina Zalavskaya: Yes.
Karina Zalavskaya: But we realy provide unlimited webspace.
you: i get that
you: for example
you: if i make an image hosting website and fill up 400gigs of space and use 50TB of band width each month won’t that be a problem?
Karina Zalavskaya: You have to understand that we provide shared hostimg and then servers have limits.
you: i understand
you: but with the above sentence you just said the opposite of what you said before
you: Karina Zalavskaya: But we realy provide unlimited webspace.
I waited about 5 minutes and because she didn’t respond i just closed the chat. I have a feeling that all the unlimited disk space and band width thingy is just a marketing tool to gain new newbie webmasters to sign up who are tempted by all the Unlimited words that they see on the packages page.
If an experienced web master sees the packages page he will surely close the tab and go search for an other web host. As you can see in the chat UNLIMITED bandwidth and web space doesn’t exist. It’s true that in the chat i said a rough example which is almost at the edge but still they wouldn’t have the right to suspend my account if i would reach those levels.
I didn’t even look at the marketing tools(they most probably offer vouchers and stuff), i just closed the tab and told my friend: DON’T be an idiot. Go search a little more, and after you find a web host search for reviews before asking my opinion.
Here’s a quote from Findhosts.com
Reviewer: Anonymous 02-06-2007
I have websites hosted by expensive apollohosting, poor control panel bluehost and Cheap Easy Setup Ixwebhosting. While I have minor problems with the first two, IX is PATHETIC. In less than 1month, IX has been down for nearly 12hours in total. Right now as I type, my ecommerce site is down, my newly launched news site is down and IX is unreachable. A complete WASTE of my money!
| 8 Apr 2008 |
The new Entrecard Credit system |
Entrecard earlier today changed the credit system. To be honest they did a huge mistake because this is just dumb.
Here’s how the new system works:
The price calculation is simple, for every spot there are a number of adverts waiting to show. We take a base price of 2 credits, then for each of the adverts waiting, we double the price. The following table shows how it all plays out:
Ads waiting on spot Formula Final price 0 2 2ec 1 2 2ec 4 2*2*2*2 16ec 8 2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2 256ec 10 2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2*2 1024ec There is no limit, so long as people are willing to keep paying the higher fees.
You got to be joking me! This isn’t rational. Even if now someone has 10 ads waiting on spot it will drop, but it will never be 0, because advertisers will always exist.
If we look at it in this new perspective each blog WILL HAVE at least 4 ads in queue which means 16 ec for the next ad.
My Perspective:
Implement a statistics feature in the Entrecard widget that would count the unique visitors who view the page where the widget is located. Or the set the stat meter to count the number of hits(yeah…i know that there are desperate people in the world who would refresh 1000 times a page just for extra credits)
In my opinion this would be one of the best options to set ec price to advertise on a blog.
The pricing would be something like this:
0-20 Page Views = 2 ec
21-50 Page Views = 8 ec
51-100 Page Views = 24 ec
101-200 Page Views = 50 ec
….
500-750 Page Views = 256 ec
751-1000 Page Views = 378 ec
1000-1500 Page Views = 525 ec
The above mentioned ec prices are just estimated values and represent the ideas in my head.
The old ec system wasn’t great either, but it was OK and way better than this one(my point of view). Everything changes in this world and on the web, we just have to live with it.
| 30 Mar 2008 |
The long waited moment is here! WordPress 2.5 available for download |
With some delay WordPress 2.5 was finally launched yesterday. This is a long waited version and it features lots and lots of new features and even more flexibility.
The whole admin panel got a facelift, good bye old theme, welcome new web 2.0 theme. As you can see the most commonly used features are way more highlighted than the less commonly used features(like plugins for example: you activate the plugins once and you won’t have to use the plugins tab till you upload a new plugin.
The use of widgets also invaded the admin panel! The dashboard contains a series of widgets which you can easily edit.
Along with the new release wordpress achieved a great milestone and wordpress.org also got a facelift. It was about time you guys!
The new wordpress admin panel has some really neat features, but the thing that i like the most is that it’s organized and even more simple to navigate and manage your blog.
The boxes are completely reordered which are like a STEP-BY-STEP guide on how to write your posts.
For example:
- you start with writing the post
- after which you add tags
- you select the categories
- use custom fields
-set commenting/trackback settings
- select author
When writing a post the permalink is generated and shown, which you can edit in real time at a simple push of a button:
You can instantly add and delete tags without reloading the page using the Tags box features:
Adding pictures/videos/audio/media/ is just one click away using the Add Media feature:
Also the WYSIWYG editor got a new look, and the newest feature that i love is the REDO button, because sometimes when i messed up something i pressed Ctrl+Z by reflex and couldn’t redo it
WordPress 2.5 is truly a revelation. It gives you the flexibility you need and the feeling that your using a very advanced CMS with all the settings at the tip of your fingertips.
Upgrading to wordpress 2.5 won’t really affect your blog, because 2.5 supports themes and plugins made for older versions of wordpress, although as i saw there are a few plugins that are incompatible with 2.5.
Currently i’m at college(damn…some classes are just way too boring), but tomorrow i will try to make a video overview of wordpress 2.5.
Till then here are some helpful links for you:
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-brecker/
| 28 Mar 2008 |
This year’s biggest marketing contest is ending in 5 days! $13,647 worth of prizes! |
Overview
The Craziest Internet Marketing Contest started just 20 days ago on 8th March and will end in 5 days on 2nd April.
This is not any ordinary contest, the prize of this competition is $13,647 which isn’t an amount that you can just pass by of which most part is cash and the rest are marketing products and services.
Prizes
- Most of the cash prizes are offered by advertising networks like AzoogleAds, NeverBlueAds,Bidvertiser.
- Shoemoney sponsors the contest with an 8GB Apple IPOD Touch, which i’m sure anyone would like to have(in my opinion it’s the coolest Apple product after the Macbook)
- SEO memberships are offered by SEOBook,SEOmoz and RankSense
- Softwareprojects is offering $2,000 in email marketing services
- Lots and lots of affiliate marketing and website tools are put up to the grab by the winners
- Last but not least: Lots of advertising prizes are offered mostly by bloggers
To be honest i would have also sponsored the contest with a custom blog theme(i like contests 
) so those of you who want to make a contest in the near future don’t hesitate contacting me, because i might offer my services(design) as a prize.
How to enter?
Subscribing to the newsletter is a must and will gain you 1 entry. If you blog about the competition and link back to the post you will get 10 extra entries. Also for every 5 comments you make on Winning The Web blog will get you 1 entry.
You have the chance to gain more entries by following the contest’s clues which range from stumbling the page to signing up to advertising network, and my favorite: by submitting your own clues!
The top 20 participants with most entries will also get a free Winning The Web T-Shirt, its value isn’t big but it looks cool!
Winners
There will be more than 100 winners(including the 20 shirts), this means that you have great chances of winning a prize. Heck!, it’s better than trying to win at the lottery where the odds of winning are like 1 to 1billion.
The random draw will be held on 2nd April(5 days from now), so we can say that this is a short term contest(if i would have held it, most probably it would have lasted at least 3 months)
Conclusion
So trust me on this: this competition is something that you just can’t miss. You can’t bypass a chance of getting free money/gadgets/advertising/premium services for free!
| 5 Mar 2008 |
USA’s Top 20 most admired companies |
Fortune magazine recently published a list of top 20 most admired companies in the US. In the top 20 we find well known brands like Apple(1st place), Google(4th place), and Microsoft(16th place). What is odd that Yahoo isn’t part of this prestigious top 20 Most admired companies list.
Here are some informations about the above mentioned companies:
Steve Jobs really knows how to run a company.By creating high quality products like iPod, iPod Nano, iPhone, Apple Touch, iMac and ofcourse the MacBook Apple built up a great reputation. And the best thing in their products is the warranty and the quality. If you buy a Macbook for example you know that it’s not MADE IN CHINA and that you can rely on it. The prices aren’t too high, so even if you can’t afford to buy a iPhone for example then you can save your funds and buy it the next month knowing it’s a good investment. The other thing that gave Apple a good reputation is that you can connect one item to each other and link them together. It’s like expanding your PC with stand alone components.
Who doesn’t know the story of the no.1 search engine in the world? 2 Stanford university students – Page and Brin create a simple search engine in 1998 which today is the world’s no.1 search engine which offers other services like: contextual advertising, free mail, feed tracker(feedburner) and will soon break into mobile operating systems niche(with the OS Android). As i read on other websites life at Google is great and the employees are really satisfied with their jobs. Well to be honest, who wouldn’t want to work at google?
Most of us use their product(Windows) day by day and lots of times swear saying how much it sucks but yet we still use it to be able to play our favorite games, run our programs and enjoy the GUI. In my opinion Bill would never taught that his “hobby” will turn into a such big company. I’m really curious that will he retire this summer. You need an iron will to do something like that when your on top of a huge corporation. It seems that Microsoft gained the american’s trust and admiration which got it on 14th position.
All the 3 above mentioned companies are well known and solid names in the world of IT&C, and each one of them has made a great contribution to its users and will continue to do it.
| 24 Feb 2008 |
Youtube.com down – ooops problems pop-up at large sites also |
Currently it’s 7:35 PM (GMT) and it seems that youtube.com is down for more than 30 minutes. No, its not because of my internet connection. It’s a problem at youtube 100%(see pictures below)
It seems that large sites can also have major problems, even if we would think that this is impossible. Who would have taught that this would happen.
I bet that many people are pretty pissed now and they are cursing their ISP because they can’t interact on youtube.
After asking some friends to check if youtube is working I also did a check using internetsupervision, just to make sure that i won’t write stupid things on my blog.
(click to enlrage)
Currently the only question is that for how much will the downtime last.
| 21 Feb 2008 |
v7n network for sale – i bet you didn’t see this comming |
I noticed yesterday on digitalpoint and on sitepoint marketplace that John Scott (the owner of v7n) is selling the whole v7n network which includes:
- Forums ( http://www.v7n.com/forums/ ) with almost 40,000 members and 800,000+ posts. Running vBulletin with VBSEO.
- Web Directory ( http://directory.v7n.com/ )
- Affiliate Program ( http://partners.v7n.com/ )
- Host Ratings ( http://hosting.v7n.com/ )
- Scripts Directory ( http://www.v7n.com/scripts/ )
- SEO Blog ( http://blog.v7n.com/ )
- Survey @ V7N ( http://survey.v7n.com/ )
- Graphics Tutorials ( http://www.v7n.com/graphics/ )
- Job Marketplace ( http://www.v7n.com/marketplace/ )
- Tech Blog ( http://tech.v7n.com/ )
- SEO Insight Newsletter ( http://newsletter.v7n.com )
- Contextual Links ( http://contextual.v7n.com/ )
The whole network has 700,000 unique visitors/month along with 3 million pageviews/month. You can’t call that small traffic!
The v7n network exists for almost 4 years:
Record expires on 08-Mar-2016.
Record created on 08-Mar-2004.
It also has sitelinks displayed on Google along with Listing in DMOZ:
The starting BID is 400,000$ and the BIN is 500,000$. There are no bids yet, but the auction still has almost 2 weeks to run.
John claims that this is the real deal and he decided to step away from SEO and go back to school because “I must admit that SEO no longer holds my attention” – as posted on v7n Blog
The v7n network is a great money maker and the BIN represents 12-24 months of revenue:
“PayPal receipts: Nov: 12,349.05 Dec: 39,246.70 Jan: 27,660.40
Those do not include 2checkout, Adsense, or direct wire transfers. 2CO usually isn’t more than a couple thousand, Adsense is minimal, and wire transfers haven’t been too much these days. “
The main flow of revenue comes from directory submissions and advertisements on the network.
Many people critiqued the price and say that it’s worth more and i agree with what Colleen said on dp:
“Just cause people say it’s worth more does not mean John’s gonna run and up his price, he knows what it’s worth to him, he’s set a price and I am sure that’s where it will stay.”
If you have the $500,000 than this really is a great investment, since you can pull up the revenue to 40,000-50,000/month, just as John did last year:
“Last year the revenue topped $40,000 per month for the most part, until I was diverted by my studies.”
You would gain back your investment in a matter of a year, and after that just continue generating passive revenue(free money).
