What’s All This Then!

Imagine winning (yes, it’s a contest) $80,000 for the sole purpose of writing in your blog for a year! It’s the stuff that dreams are made of! I could take a sabbatical from my jobs (well, ‘quit’ would be the proper term) and have some fun. But there’s a catch. You have to go to blogforayear.com to complete a profile, make a donation, AND then get votes based on the persuasiveness of your profile. I think I can do two out of three. But get votes? Get real! From my past experience, I don’t care how good I make something, I am not Mr. Popularity in the Internet world … or the real one for that matter. Whether it’s kissing a baby or kissing a bottom, I’m not that kind of a schmoozer.

Unless you can pursued me to think otherwise, I’ll keep blogging and working, working and blogging. If you sign up, let me know so I can at least go vote for you.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Yesterday I was reading a great site by a fellow technical blogger, Chad Smith. There I discovered that he had information about Gimpshop – an open source GNU Image Manipulation Program. Apparently, it was designed to have the feel of Abode Photoshop to the point that you can use Abode’s tutorials in learning image creation. I’ve been looking at Abode for sometime because Paintshop Pro just doesn’t quite get it. But who has several hundred dollars just laying around? GIMPshop is free and may be the start that I need until I find several hundred dollars.

Has anyone out there used GIMP? Let me know your experiences please.

Popularity: 21% [?]

On my “Warning: Life Under Construction” blog, I had been covering what seemed to be a scam by a company offering to unlock cell phones. My posts and the comments from readers reached a point when the owner of the company contacted me to try and set matter straight. I haven’t heard any more about this matter until today when I received this comment:

In fairness, I must say that Mr [name withheld for this post] refunded my money very quickly (less an admin fee) after I told him that I would be informing Sprezzaturaron of my bad experience.

Thanks Sprezzaturaron for giving me this forum!

That’s great! Though I believe the owner would have refunded the reader’s money regardless, it is a pleasant stroke to the ol’ ego to think that my posts helped out. In fact, I hold all of your comments as very valuable. So feel free to write to me at any of my three blogs so that I can improve them for you. And if you don’t want your comments published, just let me know. Either way, your thoughts are very important to me. Thanks!

Popularity: 14% [?]

I finally got a chance to watch and listen to the podcast interview between Jason Calacanis and Ted Murphy. For the first 30 minutes, Jason did it excellent job at being the devil’s advocate and Ted showed how committed he is to his vision of PayPerPost. After that, it seemed that Jason got a little full of himself. You can always tell how skilled an interviewer is by the way they let their interviewee answer the questions, which includes allowing your guests to finish answering the question. I lost my respect of Jason at that point. In the final moments of the interview, Jason went so far as to throw down a gauntlet that he probably thought Ted couldn’t handle. But with the spirit of an entrepreneur who believes in his vision, Mr. Murphy showed where his heart is — with PayPerPost, with the advertisers, and finally, with his posties.

I have no doubt that Mr. Murphy has a difficult balancing act between the investors, the advertisers, the posties, and his company. From my side of the equation, I wish that things were as profitable for me as they were a few months ago. But this is business. After listening to the interview, I do feel better about the man that I’m dealing with. Even though I’m now competing with almost 30,000 other bloggers for a limited amount of opportunities, I still hope that PayPerPost will continue to have the success that it deserves and that that success will roll downhill towards my end. After watching that interview, I think that maybe there is a better chance of that happening now. Assuming, of course, the PPP wants me to continue blogging for them.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Today was a pretty good day, at least in terms of this blog. I managed to play with the primary and secondary sidebars of my CSS file. Now everything lines up properly in both Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers. My next task is to change all the color representations that are in name form (like “solidblue”) into their RGB form (like ’0033CC’). It seems that Internet Explorer doesn’t understand names and automatically converts them into black. More and more it seems like this CSS standard isn’t applicable to Microsoft.

I also managed to get some links established in my “link love” page by using a an old JavaScript code courtesy of my fellow blogger, Colleen. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that this list is up to date. I know there has to be an easy way that we could share our links in a single data base link. I know how to create databases on a local machine and on an AS/400 machine. So it looks like my next class in the school of hard knocks will be on “how to develop an Internet database that doesn’t involve Microsoft.”

After this, I have got to find time to trade links, increased traffic, and basically get the Internet world to fall in love with all of my sites. You know, this is worse than dating. Instead of trying to win the affection of one woman, I’ve got to win the support of 6 billion people. No pressure though, right? How am I doing so far?????

Popularity: 22% [?]

I’ve grown quite fond of using Dragon Naturally Speaking version 9 (DNS) to dictate my posts whenever I can. It has definitely reduced the time of taking my thoughts from stream-of-conscious mode to a blog entry. Great that is until last Friday. I started up DNS and got a message “The vocabulary you have chosen ‘General – Large’ is incompatible.” It took a while to search online for a reason and a solution. The reason for the error was due an system restore that I had to perform the previous day to get XP up and working after a bad crash. Apparently, the XP Restores routine ALWAYS corrupts your user files. Fortunately it was a simply matter of going into my DNS profile directory, renaming my user profile name to ‘old’ and the backup directory to my user profile name. All is well now!

Technorati Tags: dragon naturally speaking, vocabulary incompatible

Popularity: 19% [?]

Back in October, there was an “Office From Hell” contest. The winner not only won a new office but also got to be flown to New York to have lunch with George Ross (Donald Trump’s right hand man in the show, “The Apprentice”). Obviously, I didn’t win. I guess you can tell why from my top ten reasons for “why I need to move out of my office from hell”:

# 10. Mice are beginning to charging me rent,
# 9. My friends can’t find me amongst the clutter,
# 8. I need a keyboard that doesn’t serve as a meal tray during my lunch,
# 7. The roaches are complaining about the mess,
# 6. I think that Jimmy Hoffa’s remains are buried somewhere in my clutter,
# 5. Satan is whining that it has gone beyond his expectations,
# 4. I’ve started putting the picture of my missing paperwork on milk cartons,
# 3. If I hear my boss say, “A clean desk is a happy desk” just one more time….
# 2. Two words, Wet Bar! As in … I NEED ONE!
# 1. I need to be able to sleep without using a stapler for a pillow!

What do you think? It won’t kill you to comment or even use the handy-dandy social bookmarks that I have on my posts. Your thoughts are important!

Popularity: 12% [?]

Today, I happened to view my site in Internet Explorer … 6 and 7. Everything looked great a couple of weeks ago. Today, my sidebar was gone! Well, not gone just moved to the bottom of the page. WordPress forum were very helpful. One after another post told me that this is an old issue and that there are 1000s of posts on how to fix it. Apparently there are a million of these “informative” entries without a single link to any of the 1000s of helpful posts. Eventually, I discovered a mention that any object on your page can make the overall page width exceed what the CSS files calls for. But only Internet Explorer can’t handle this! Hurray for standards!

I’ve checked my page. I had created my own CSS style file and everything adds less than my page width format. If any one has a clue how to fix this little problem with Internet Explorer, please let me know!! Thanks!

This may be one (though very convoluted) solution

Popularity: 10% [?]

A couple of weeks ago, I got involved with several other bloggers on the Alexa Project. Basically, we use the Firefox add-on, Search Status, and strive to visit each other’s site no more than once a day. Search Status then sends Alexa a notice that we visited a particular site. All these reports are supposed to better our Alexa score.  For the most part, it has.

If nothing else, my visit to each site has be an interesting experience. Each blog creation is as unique and varied as their imaginative authors are. The entries have been very informative and entertaining and even heart-wrenching to read. I’ve also discovered that some of my fellow bloggers are using some of the same pay-to-blog services that I’ve started using to supplement lost revenues from PPP.

As I review these sites, one thing has puzzled me. There are just a handful of the blogs have great ranking scores yet they’ve only been around for a few months. Or, they only have two to three posts for their entire blog. How did they earn such popular rankings?

In any case, I find myself in the midst of an amazing community of people. Now I have to figure out how to enrich their lives as much as they have enriched mine …

Popularity: 10% [?]

I’ve been putting off the WordPress upgrade to 2.1.2 because of the time I thought that it would take — backing files, deleting some files and not others. Today, I couldn’t put it off any longer. All-in-all, the upgrade process took an hour. But while I was going through this, I didn’t want any of my visitors to be inconvenienced by any error messages. So the first thing I did was create an index.html file in the root of blog directory. If you stopped by my site, you were greeted by a brief message letting you know what was going on. At the end of the upgrade process, I simply deleted the file and … here you are. As you can see, upgrade went well and I’ve added social bookmarkings (and digg-it) to each post as well.

So what do you think so far? Comments?!

Popularity: 15% [?]

Using PhotoShop, I created a new header picture. This led to a change in background colors and a need to resize the main bar and sidebar. Comments, of course, are very welcomed.

The biggest obstacle was in using PhotoShop. This header pic is close but not quite what I wanted. More to come …

Popularity: 9% [?]

Do you like these pop-up images to links? I found them useful in deciding whether to go to a link or not. So I’ve gone ahead and added them to my blogger site and this one. LiveJournal doesn’t allow javascripts so too bad, so sad. Anyway, you can add them to your sites by going to snap.com. It’s a free add-on. If you have a WordPress blog, you’ll also need to get this plug-in as well. Don’t worry, this setup is easy!

Popularity: 20% [?]

Here’s another important site as I work to optimize my web pages. Web optimization takes a look at the speed at which your page loads into a browser at different connections. It then gives a report on any problem areas. For this site, I need to reduce the size of graphics and combine some of my style sheets. Ah, no rest for the wicked…

Popularity: 13% [?]

Using Blogger.com as one of my first blogs spoiled me. It had an easy method to add widgets in my blog’s sidebar. Now I’m working to develop my blog in WordPress. Very configurable but with a learning curve. So I found Sidebar Widgets Plugin so I don’t have to edit my K2 theme’s sidebar.php file every time I want to add something new. Pretty slick because it allows you to rearrange the order of the sidebar’s sections by dragging and dropping the widgets in the admin configurator.

Popularity: 19% [?]

I ran into difficulties as I made changes to my sidebar.php. I was HOPING to add a ‘subscribe’ feature. While it sort of worked, I couldn’t figure out how the PHP file was working in the grand theme scheme of it all. For now, I’ve come across a great tutorial on adding a digg-it plug-in. The site is impressive with its header constantly changing pictures. Let me know what you think…

Popularity: 27% [?]