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From my experience, Digg has chosen a very intrusive advertising method. Here is a screen shot of my Digg home page and the ad that popped up. Notice the very subtle close button, for all intents and purposes, hidden in the top right.
From my experiences, starting a blog is exciting, fun and a lot of hard work. Well, actually, starting a blog isn’t hard work, maintaining a blog is extremely hard work. Let me define maitaining: writing blog posts on a regular basis. This blog, From My Experience, started with lofty goals of being a resource to help other people by user and bloggers sharing their personal experiences in daily life situations. It hasn’t gone as I would have hoped. I have written the majority of the posts even when I had hoped I would only be kick starting the blog Read the rest of this entry
From my experience Google is the best search engine on the web, but it isn’t the only search egine and sometimes even the almighty Google has come up short in the search results. Of course there is Yahoo! and Live Search by MSN and a few people use Ask. But there is another search engine that I like very much and recommend you give it a try: ChaCha
Here is a description of the ChaCha Search Engine from ChaCha’s About page:
Tired of search engine results that aren’t even close to what you’re looking for? Us too. So we started thinking about a better way to search the Net… and we figured out what was missing… people.
That’s how ChaCha was born. The first search engine that uses the brainpower of really smart people to find anything you want on the Internet. Here’s how you use it:
INSTANT SEARCH – Just like all those other search engines… only better. Because ChaCha keeps getting smarter. Our search experts are constantly handpicking cool, hard-to-find sites so you get only the best, most relevant results… OR
LIVE GUIDED SEARCH – Instant search not cutting it? One click hooks you up with a live ChaCha Guide. A real person that will ask you questions, understand exactly what you want, and send you results that are dead-on. Computers can’t do that. It takes a community of people who are motivated to help you get the answer you seek – no matter what it takes. The brainpower behind ChaCha.
While you may not agree with all the search results being the most relevant you can see the differences from your first search. Try the guided search, but be careful what you search for, it can be a bit embarrassing.
If this iMovie tutorial still doesn’t help, I can recommend ScreenCastsOnline. They have excellent tutorials for all your Mac products: iMovie, iPod, iPhone and so forth.
From my experience posting your iMovie video to YouTube requires the following settings to get the best quality you can. You want to send YouTube the highest quality you can while still staying within their video and audio limitations.
Of course the settings I’m providing can be used with any video editing application, but since iMovie is used by so many novice videographers I felt some specific instructions would be useful. If you aren’t using iMovie 6 for this, be sure that your application can export to a .mp4 with H.264 video. Quicktime Player Pro version can also do this.
Since YouTube upload limitations will scale the video to 320 x 240 pixels there is no point to export it at a larger size. Better to apply higher quality settings to your file size limit, which is 100 megabytes set by Youtube.
I am assuming your video has been edited and is ready for export. Follow these steps to have a video that you can upload with confidence to YouTube.
Choosing the best settings for iMovie when exporting for YouTube:
In this window choose the following setting under the video choices. (see image #2)
You can see the latest video I have posted using these settings by viewing my family’s Zip Line in Hawaii.
If you need more help and you like the video instruction method. I can safely recommend ScreenCastsOnline.
From my experience on the http://moon.google.com web page I found out the moon is indeed made of cheese. I had my doubts at one time, especially when there was talk of the man in the moon, but now I know that is pure foolishness. Google’s mapping program, which shows the Apollo 11 – Apollo 17 landings on earth’s moon, will also show that the moon is made of cheese when you zoom out to the highest setting.
Hard to believe? Yes, but who would doubt the authenticity of Google and Google Maps. Try it yourself at http://moon.google.com. All your chilhood dreams are now in question.
Update 9/13/2007: Google has removed the cheese image from the moon maps page page. The screen shot will have to suffice.
Google Moon Gets Major Updates
“This update brings higher-resolution map imagery, text search,
and photos and stories from every Apollo landing,” stated
Michael Weiss-Malik, a software engineer, on the Google LatLong
Blog.
He then continued, “We even included Street View-style panoramas
of the moon’s surface, taken by the Apollo astronauts …
something you won’t see anywhere else. And last but certainly
not least, we tossed in scientific charts that are good enough
for actual mission planning and science classrooms alike.”
Excerpted from an article by Doug Caverly, staff writer at WebProNews.
From my experience, Firefox is the best browser out there for surfing the web. I speak from experience of using an Apple Macintosh computer from home and a Dell Windows computer from work. I use Firefox on both as opposed to Safari for the Mac and Internet Explorer for the Windows computer.
Tabbed browsing and fast load times are the features that intrigued me enough to try it years ago, but the most amazing thing about Firefox are the add-ons. What are add-ons, you say? Here it is from the Firefox site:
“Add-ons are small pieces of software that can add new features or tiny tweaks to your Firefox. They can add new search engines or change the look of Firefox with a new theme, or much more.”
This allows you to customize Firefox in ways you can’t imagine. They even give you a lift of some of their favorite add-ons to get you started. One of my favorite add-ons is StumbleUpon, which I will post about later, but just know it will eat up your free time so be careful when try it.
If you haven’t tried Firefox, download it and surf for a few days and see if you don’t love it as much as I do. Once you start searching through and adding the add-ons you’ll wonder how you surfed without them. You can read about Firefox’s features before you try it.
If you need more convincing, here is a site dedicated to helping you make the switch from Explorer to Firefox.
From my experience using the Squidoo web site as a money-making online tool isn’t the best use of your time. Instead, setting up a blog of your own, with Google’s Adsense, that you host is a much better idea. But, Squidoo is easy to set up and kind of fun. It offers a community feel to it and you can rank rather quickly with it for less competitive terms in the search engines.
I have two lenses, what Squidoo calls your page, and they were a blast to create and I do add to them occasionally. The real fun for me is trying to rank my lens in the top 100. I have reached 128 but that is my personal best so far. There are over 200,000 lenses at this time. It is also personally rewarding when someone ranks or votes for you lens which you can do by visiting my Smoothie Lens and my Jean Grey-Phoenix Lens.
But I just don’t see any decent money coming from this, but my smoothie recipe blog brings in over $350 $650 per month, with little to no effort through Google Adwords. I’ll update this if I see any change or increase in my $0.00 earnings from either of my Squidoo lenses. The real use for Squidoo is using the lenses to direct traffic to your main site such as my smoothie lens to my smoothie recipe site and providing quality one-way links that the search engines will follow and reward you with higher listings in the search results.
From the Squidoo About Page:
Squidoo’s goal as a platform is to bring the power of recommendation to search. Squidoo’s goal as a co-op is to pay as much money as we can to our lensmasters and to charity. And Squidoo’s goal as a community is to have fun along the way, and meet new ideas and the people behind them.
Read more about Squidoo at The SquidLens.
I hope this helps in your decision of creating a lens and what to do with it.
I have included a YouTube video on Making Money with Squidoo.
Update 10/12/07: Well, my 2nd full month netted $11.40. I did manage to make the Jean Grey lens the #4 ranked lens overall so even having a highly ranked lens in the Squidoo ranking system won’t help, you’ll need lots of visitors to help with that.
Update 11/14/07: I earned $98.58 this month. I worked to keep it going pretty well this month.
Update 12/15/07: Earnings dipped to $48.06 for Squidoo, but I didn’t spend any time on it. So literally, money for nothing.
Update 1/12/09: I didn’t even look at the lenses hardly and my earnings went to $24.32, but I also noticed traffic dropped from Google. I do believe they are penalizing all Squidoo lenses now. We’ll see.
From my experience war driving is a lot of FUN! Simply put war driving is driving around and using your laptop to search for wireless networks.
There are several ways to go about war driving that can make it more fun than a pain. First off, get a wireless network card with a prism2 chipset and a little hole for an external antenna. Orinoco (now owned by Proxim) makes a PERFECT card for that meets these requirements. It’s almost like the company made it specifically for war driving! Next get yourself a copy of Linux. I use a bootable version called Knoppix STD. It should also be noticed that there is a new distribution of Linux called “War Linux” I have yet to try it out but “War Linux” promises to be the best choice in bootable Linux war driving. It comes complete with Kismet, Wavemon, and nmap! If you are a windows users and you insist on using windows and your prebuilt wireless in your laptop be sure to get NetStumbler.
Some of the fun things you can do while war driving is keep a record of all the wireless networks you come across and submit them to other sites to share with others. It should also be noted here that while scanning for wireless networks connecting to them without consent of the owner, is ILLEGAL! So don’t do it!
Resources:
http://wardriving.com/
http://airsnort.shmoo.com/
http://www.netstumbler.com/
http://www.proxim.com/
http://www.cantenna.com/
Watch this:
http://revision3.com/thebroken/ep1
Watch this too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8EQ8HR
post by Ricky Raymond
http://www.rickyraymond.com
Image via CrunchBase
Online dating started before the World Wide Web in the early days of the Internet. Those familiar with the sophisticated technologies of online dating sites today will probably consider the old prototypes of online dating as somewhat primitive given that text-only communications incorporating simple discussion groups were the only standard concept available.
Another approach when discussing the evolution of online dating is to look at it based on the actual establishment of online dating websites in the mid-90s. Here, meeting users for the purpose of forging romantic relationships was the sole purpose. Whatever viewpoint chosen, however, the idea of online dating remained the same: Meet a potential love interest without going to clubs and bars.
Online dating in the days of plain text and discussion groups did not pan out because it lacked one important element — visual. It was only with the integration of digital technology which allowed attaching a photo to an online profile so users can get a preview of what a person looked like before initiating correspondence did online dating enjoy wider popularity. Friendfinder.com and Match.com, established in 1995 and 1996, respectively, were the very first dating websites to incorporate visual elements and set the standard for thousands of online dating sites which sprouted through the years.
Despite the growing popularity of online dating in the 90s and early 2000s, those who dared use these services had to deal with much stigma; they were thought of as desperate and perhaps even strange. Date seekers who had faith in the powers of Internet technology to bring people together even from the farthest corners of the world plodded on, however, eventually convincing their family and friends to join, thus, increasing the user base of these dating services into the many millions based on today’s statistics.
The birth of social networking sites which started with SixDegrees.com in 1997, then Makeoutclub, Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Bebo the following decade pushed online dating even further into the mainstream. Then, Facebook came along in 2004 and online dating was never the same again. Unlike standard dating websites whose main selling point was helping users find potential love matches, social networking sites brought family, friends, former classmates and colleagues and not just virtual strangers in search of potential dates. The ‘incidental love’ element of social networking sites has diluted the stigma associated with online dating and made social networking sites a very appealing proposition to make friends as well as ‘Facebook friends with benefits’
By December 2007, ComScore reported that the number of users of online dating sites has dwindled by 10 percent compared to the past year. Analysts say this had something to do with the proliferation of social networking sites. Online users simply had more varied websites to join which served the same purpose as online dating sites even better. Still, many refused to believe that online dating sites were over and done with, citing that in the same year, online dating sites generated revenues totaling $1 billion. It is estimated that the figures could climb to $1.65 billion by 2012, with huge help from the baby boomers.
Dating sites also learned to fight back, using sophisticated matchmaking algorithms for matching members to lure users to them. One of the hottest trends in online dating is matching users with similar facial features, the idea being that people who look alike are believed to be more compatible than those who don’t. Dating websites that cater specifically to a particular religion, race, and sexual preference, and to single parents were also established, further fuelling the popularity of online dating sites.
Online dating websites also took advantage of mobile technology. Smartphones equipped with GPS now let users check out the list of singles in a particular area while on the go.
About the author: Matt Fuller provides articles and news items on a number of areas including online dating sites Australia, social networking and free online dating websites reviews.
Image by lovelihood via Flickr
Roman shades are a beautiful and functional way to decorate a home. Using sustainable recycled fabrics lets you feel good about your sustainable project and it saves money. The only limits are those of your imagination.
Here are some ideas for recycled fabric, some of which might seem obvious, others, not so much:
Material List
Fabric and lining recycled from other fabric items
How to Make a Sustainable Roman Shade for Your Home
If you are knitting up recycled yard for your shades, you don’t need a lining, so you can skip steps 1 – 3. Simply knit to desired finished height and width. Felted fabrics also need no liner. Shades like this are great light blockers and insulators.
Step 1: Measure and cut the fabric and liner to the desired length. Place the two together so that they are facing each other, then pin together.
Step 2: Sew a 1” seam all the way around the edge of the two fabrics. Leave a 6” opening at the top so that you can turn the shade right side out when finished.
Step 3: Iron the fabric, turn it right side out, and sew the opening closed.
Step 4: Next, you will create dowel pockets. On the back of the shade, measure 5” from the top. Make a mark on both the right and left side. Next, mark 1” below the first one. Continue down the shades, alternating between 1” and 5,” all the way to the bottom.
Step 5: Fold and pin the 1” marks in half, so that you are creating a ½” pocket. Sew in place. Your dowel pockets should end up 5” apart. If working with a thick knit or felted fabric, it’s best to attach dowels by crocheting around the dowel and then whip stitching the top of the stitches to the wrong side of the curtain to attach them.
Step 6: Sew rings on every 6” on the lining side of the shade.
Step 7: Attach the roman shade to the header. Sew hook and loop tape to the top of the curtain and glue or staple other side of hook and loop take to header board. Alternatively, you can tack the shade to the header board using designer pins. Once finished, screw the board to your window frame. This will be easier if you drill a pilot hole first.
Step 8: It’s best not to use pull cords because they are a strangulation hazard for small children. Instead, use ribbon or buttons to secure the shades in the open position. These options are safer and they save money.
For tie up shades, simply cut four lengths of ribbon the length of your shade plus 2”. Sew them vertically along both the front and back a few inches from the outside edge of the shade on each side. Tie the ribbons into a bow at the bottom of the shade. For button up shades, sew buttons on the front top. Sew two 4″ tabs with buttonholes on one end. Sew the opposite end to the top back of the shade a few inches from the outer edge on each side. To secure, roll up the shade from bottom to top and then secure with button.
AffordableHousingforRent.com is a site dedicated to helping low-income families save money, live sustainably and find affordable apartments.
