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.

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).

Woohoo! Its really nice to see that Microsoft finally included IE7 in automatic updates for Windows XP. And the best part is that most of the windows users choose express install when installing updates, meaning that they don’t check what they are installing.

Cool isn’t it? If you would do the same you would run the express install and after rebooting your PC you would be like “WTF? What happened to my Internet explorer?…it changed!”

This is a good thing, mostly for web designers. IE6 doesn’t respect web standards, and in most cases websites have a different style sheet for ie6. which means extra work. IE6’s era has come to an end,all you IE6 fans: its time to just let go and switch to IE7.

According to www.w3scools.com firefox is more popular than ie6, beating it with 5.2%, and having a total of 37.2%. If we combine IE5, IE6, IE7 usage percentages we get that the Internet Explorer versions are still dominating with a total of 54.7% this meaning that more than half of the population uses it.

Internet Explorer 8 is on the way and it seems that it will be quite a big hit, but remember that Firefox 3 is  coming out in the next 3 months, and i don’t think that IE8 will stand a chance!

Valentine’s day isn’t good just for couples and isn’t only about love, but business also. The most common promotions are the 2-1 promotions, which mean if you buy something you will get an other item for free.

I went in a few stores and noticed that starting from USB sticks to mobile phones you can get them on a 2-1 promotion. Some major mobile service providers also offer 2 mobile phones on the price of one, and subscriptions with a lower price and more features if you decide to buy a subscription with the loved person.

Don’t think that the sellers don’t have anything to win from this, trust me they win a lot! If they would loose they wouldn’t do it. Also keep in mind that they buy products in bulk and its a lot cheaper for them then the retail price.

I went to a few tech stores in my town and saw the promotions mentioned above, they also had contests: if you buy a product you will automatically be entered in a prize draw which consists in a brand new DELL Inspiron Laptop, a Cannon Professional camera, and a 22″ widescreen Samsung LCD monitor.

Remember to take advantage of the occasions that pop up and that can make you profit/buy quality stuff for free.

You may have noticed that since they started upgrading the theme viewer there is absolutely no way that you can upload a theme there.

It all started with the taught: “Lets not allow sponsored themes to be uploaded”. This had major effect on the wordpress themes prices and the sponsor links prices. They fell from 50$/1 sponsored link on a theme to 5-10$. Just because of the theme viewer.

But it is a good idea, the free wordpress themes should be clean(as in shouldn’t contain any sponsored links), a designer link is enough.

Back a year ago i used to sell sponsored links on themes, but now as you can notice my released themes contain just a link back to my blog(which some people still remove). An other thing about my themes is that they are pretty high quality themes, i saw some designers releasing themes that look like crap just to brag about them without knowing that it doesn’t give them a good reputation.

Getting back to the point of this post: When all the upgrading started everyone taught that the LOG-IN and Create account problems are just some bugs/errors, but then it turned out that the guys at theme viewer decided to rewrite the whole system.

After a while a notice was posted in the FAQ section of the theme viewer:

Open registration is temporarily closed. Email a screenshot or demo of your theme at wpmoderator[at]yahoo[dot]com, along with your preferred user id, and you will get permission to upload new themes once your theme is approved. This could take upto 3 business days due to high volume of incoming emails.

I sent 2 emails more than 3 weeks ago from different email addresses(yahoo/gmail) but i still didn’t get a reply. I asked some fellow designers to do the same, but they also didn’t get an email back.

Since 11th December the theme viewer is getting a brand new upgrade:

Just wanted to do a quick update for those wondering when you’ll be able to add new themes or update existing ones here in the directory. We’ve been working very hard on a new Subversion-backed database for themes that will allow you to upload themes as you did before, as a plain ZIP file, and we’re transparently check it into SVN so changes can be tracked just like we do for WordPress development.

I’m quite curious for how much time will the theme uploading to the theme viewer be down, but i have a feeling that it’s gonna be for a long time.

If you are a theme developer and you release free themes without sponsored links submit them to Weblog Tools Collection news and if your design gets in a theme release post many people will download and use them.

Link to the contest: http://abux.info/viewtopic.php?p=79705

The competition started on 16th January and will end on 7th February 2008

The winner will get “an amazing prize of up to 1000 refs”

What i don’t like in that are the 2 tiny words: “up to”. One of my ISP’s slogan is: “achieve speeds up to 2mb/s on the web” . Yeah right, if i would go and start yelling at them that i never get that speed they would explain as this:”that speed is available only in ideal circumstances”

The judging is split in 2 parts: 40% - user votes and 60% - judge votes

Here is an overview of what counts:

- Extremely creative and undeniably unique (20%)
- Perfect colour combination and typography (20%)
- Easy navigation and accessibility (20%)
- Clean, neat, properly-indented with no additional whitespace XHTML Strict / CSS standard-compliant with cross-browser compatibility. (10%)
- Table-less web design (i.e. CSS) that is non-graphic-intensive. Tables usage only when appropriate. (10%)
- Overall impression (20%)

By this time you should realize that any percentage counts and those 1000 referrals can bring you some great cash!

This means that you will have to invest a great deal of work in your design and ask designers to review it before you start coding it, because if your design sucks you will make a BIG mistake if you code it.

So the competition’s requirements are pretty clear: use photoshop to design how you would like bux.to to look like. It’s all about creativity and imagination, you just have to put your ideas on paper(photoshop in our case).

Basically what you need to provide is a sleek design with a web 2.0 feel. Do not implement useless elements in the design like links/content that don’t have their place there.

Make sure you respect the submission guidelines!(use the given pattern) or you will have a big chance of getting Disqualified!

Here’s the submission pattern in case you didn’t see it on the forum:

Submission Format -
Name: …
Username: …
Design Screenshot: …
Design HTML Preview: …
XHTML Strict / CSS Compatible: Y/N

The guys over @ bux.to decided to make the contest instead of hiring an external designer. Its cool of them to interact this way but i don’t think it’s the best solution judging the designs i saw so far.

If you have a bit of creativity and know some web 2.0 terms and you’ve got photoshop than you can easily win the competition.

MAKE SURE THAT THE DESIGN WILL BE WEB 2.0 ! This means no ugly gradient usage, no excess usage of images, and most importantly NO BEWEL AND EMBOSS!

If you will make a design like: http://i11.tinypic.com/6tvids3.jpg than your chances to win the competition will be somewhat close to 0.00000000000000001

A guy from DP wanted to hire me to design him a winning design with a great accent on the winning word. When he told me he wants to pay 100$ for a job like this i was like: “okay, lets forget about it” and said good bye.

As a designer i checked the submissions and to be honest you have quite good chances to win the contest, if your smart that is.

Use any resource you can! but don’t be a dumbass! DO NOT COPY an existing design/website because sooner or later they will figure it out that the design isn’t original.

Notice that the header image from this design: http://nlhu.kooit.net/buxto/ is a copy of a wordpress design’s header image which is sold on Template Monster.

I say it again:Keep it original!

Here are a few resources that can come really handy:

www.dafont.com - Free fonts site

www.dezinerfolio.com - You will find packages of photoshop gradients and styles

www.famfamfam.com - The well known website of FAMFAMFAM’s icons.

www.pixel2life.com - Photoshop tutorials

www.tutorialized.com - Photoshop tutorials

Which designs are in front so far?

As said above i checked the submissions and so far i think these guys lead the competition:

http://img99.imageshack.us/my.php?image=080119123152msie60windoyn8.png

http://www.masteringyourdesign.com/buxto1/

http://www.masteringyourdesign.com/buxto2/

http://i143.photobucket.com/albums/r139/anthony_phan/buxtopng.png

All of the designs look good but they could require improvements.

A special compliment goes to

http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/7964/buxtobf3.jpg

along with a suggestion:

The design is great, it really looks pro, the only problem is that i don’t think that a trashed design(its a design type) would quite fit a website like bux.to

Good luck to all of you who participate, i’m crossing fingers for all of you

If you want me to review your design or just share something with the readers about the problem feel free to email me at tom@thaslayer.com

Servage reached 151000 hosted websites milestone and as a token of appreciation for its clients upgraded all accounts to 510GB space and 5010GB bandwidth.

Everything is great if you have a static website(that doesn’t use databases) and if you have an imagehost running these news will just make you happier.

To be honest these are great news for me too because i’m also planning on starting up an image hosting website(its an old project of mine), but what i’m not comfortable with is that still the mysql connection problems persist.

What i’m talking about is that if you want to backup a larger database from phpMyAdmin the connection will be interrupted and the transfer stopped. This is quite a pain in the ass because i don’t really like their backup system(they have their own backup system that you can use to save in the root of your account any database you want) and because i just really like to manage stuff from phpmyadmin.

I have a forum hosted at servage, and the good thing is that vbulletin can save the database on the server.

Check this out:

1) The backup made with phpmyadmin(connection got interrupted:

2) The backup made on the server with vBulletin:

Clustered hosting isn’t as good as i taught it would be when i read the promo about servage, but eh we just got to live with it.

You may have noticed that for quite a while google changes its logo for special occasions like christmas, halloween,new year,eastern. But now it isn’t just the logo, but where the logo takes you after clicking it.

After clicking the logo you will be taken to the search query: http://www.google.com/search?q=January%201%20tcp/ip

So here’s the story:

In 1975, a two-network TCP/IP communications test was performed between Stanford and University College London (UCL). In November, 1977, a three-network TCP/IP test was conducted between the U.S., UK, and Norway.Between 1978 and 1983, several other TCP/IP prototypes were developed at multiple research centres.

A full switchover to TCP/IP on the ARPANET took place January 1, 1983.

We all have to be grateful to Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf(the inventors), because if it wasn’t for them most probably i wouldn’t be here writing this blog post, and you wouldn’t be x,y miles away reading my blog, also we would have a huge lack of information, all the news appear first on the internet(okay okay, either on CNN)

We start up 2008 in a great way! Starting from yesterday support for php 4 is discontinued!

IMO it was about time they discontinued support for php 4, because it is pretty old and not as flexible as php 5 is, plus php 6 is almost knocking on our doors.

Quote from php website:

PHP 4.4.7

Support for PHP 4 will be discontinued at 2007-12-31. Please consider upgrading to PHP 5.2.

This means that all you php4 fans will have to suffer, and most probably you will have to tune-up your scripts to work without problems on php 5.

The conclusion is that most probably medium/major webhosts which run php4 will most probably upgrade to php 5.2.

Now you can finally understand why the Chameleon theme was made to run flawlessly on servers that run php 5.

About 15 hours ago the guys at wordpress released version 2.3.2. This version is an important security update, but along with the 3 important security fixes bugs have been fixed as a bonus.

Quote from Release page:

WordPress 2.3.2 is an urgent security release that fixes a bug that can be used to expose your draft posts. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations. Get 2.3.2 now to protect your blog from these disclosures.

The coolest bonus in Wordpress 2.3.2 is that you can define a custom database error page by placing your custom template in wp-content folder with db-error.php name.

This page will handle database errors(for example: when wordpress can’t connect to the database) and wordpress will use this page instead of the default error page.

I already upgraded my blog, and you should really consider upgrading also