General

ReCAPTCHA - A great idea to make entering all those CAPTCHA codes usefull.

Now, I hate the idea of CAPTCHA in general. Having to enter cyptic codes to verify you’re a human is a not the best idea that has come around. I can’t tell you how annoying it is to have to enter CAPTCHA codes when you’re logged into Blogger and want to post a new post. I’ve logged in,, I think that’s enough to verify I’m a human. But obviously bots can log in too.  Anyway, they are annoying and waste useful time.

ReCaptcha takes all those codes you enter on every form and helps solve words that can’t be deciphered via OCR to help complete digitization of real books. If that’s not a good enough explanation visit Recapture.

I don’t use CAPTCHA codes on this blog just because I hate them but if you do maybe consider using Recapture. They have a wordpress plugin you can use if you do use CAPTCHA’s on your comment forms.

They’re Slogan is “Stop Spam, Read Books” - it’s so great.

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Are you tired of being paid per click from your adsense ads? It seems too simple to just place targeted adsense ads and direct people away from you site for pennies, maybe nickels in return. Isn’t it better to display seemingly untargeted product ads that require a user to click, sign up and fulfill an action like winning an eBay auction? It’s a far better idea right? Not!

I’m not sure if it’s just the market reach Shoemoney already has with his blog but he’s been pushing Auction Ads like crazy. Just earlier today I received an email from John Reese promoting Auction Ads even further with his company income.com. John calls Auction Ads “The Next Google Adsense”. He is offering people who sign up (through his affiliate link I presume) $5 free. This first made me think, why is John Reese of all people promoting Auction Ads? At first I thought, maybe Shoemoney paid him 20k, but then I realized John is probably marketing through his affiliate link in hopes to gather a hefty amount of people under him because Auction Ads works on a 2 tier system. Anyone you refer will be placed under you and so on. My surprise is that he has that much faith in auction ads that he is giving away $5 free to everyone who signs up.

Now Shoemoney has a great reason for setting up Auction Ads,, he wants to be eBay’s #1 affiliate. Everyone that signs up for Auction Ads is essentially under him so he makes even more by you signing up. It’s a great idea but what about the service? What are you exactly getting by signing up for Auction Ads? Well, Auction Ads can offer you a higher percentage from each sale because I believe essentially you are promoting eBay through Shoemoney’s affiliate link, ie. you refer a sign up and because your using his ID then you’re able to receive his commission because he is already in some of the top tiers if not the highest already. Right now they are offering you 100% of the commission but later down the road say 6 months as mentioned on a broadcast of Rush Hour on webmaster radio Shoe will begin collecting %’s of each of your referrals. A brokers free is fine since they are making it easier for you to make money. How much money I don’t know but the ads don’t impress me one bit.

After visiting Shoe’s blog and surfing through to one of the blogs he reads I actually found someone promoting eBay auctions via Auction Ads. I took the screenshot to your left so you can see just in case he changes his site (or takes them down cause he isn’t making any money). They look absolutely horrible in my opinion. What’s with the resized (misshaped) images? What readers of cpa-affiliates.com would see those ads, click on them and win an ebay auction? To me his blog isn’t the right place for those types of ads. They are better off on a crappy price comparison site, or MFA. I know you can customize the colors of your Auction Ads like you can adsense but I’m not sure about the photos. Those images being resized like that kills me. They look bad.

So did you sign up yet? Are you going to clutter up your site even more with ugly auction listings? I don’t think I’ll be signing up.

This is a “Free” unpaid review of Auction Ads!

Read my Update on AuctionAds

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I just realized it’s been almost 2 months since I last posted! I’ve been really busy with my new job as “Stay at Home Dad” or SAHD for short. My wife recently went back to work and now I get to watch my 1 year old daughter all day while she is at work. I’ve been working from home for myself for the last few years so I’m used to being at home but watching kids is something I’m new to. Let me tell ya, it’s lots of work! My daughter is walking now and boy does she go. I find myself running after her every 5 minutes so to say the least I’m not getting much work done.

I’ve been mostly surfing the net and reading blogs. I’ve learned a lot in the last month just surfing around. It’s something I don’t usually have time to do so it’s good to get out on the world wide web and wander around. I have all these new ideas now and will be hopefully tracking my progress here on this blog.

Oh,, and I accidentally stumbled upon a site showing a movie called “The Secret” which totally surprised me and kept me busy the last 24 hours. It was embedded on a site from Yahoo Video so I went over to see if I could download it to save it for later and I couldn’t find it. I did however see a bunch of short clips from Oprah’s show so I thought, Wow, this must be big. I dug a little deeper and found it on a torrent site. I couldn’t help myself to download it right away. It downloaded fast and I started watching late last night, or early this morning however you see it. Let me tell you,, The Secret is so profound and moving and I ordered 2 copies from Amazon.com (one for my mom which I recommend you do if you haven’t seen it. It is life changing and truly motivational. I haven’t read the book but the Movie is superb with great people talking in it including Joe Vitale - He actually has a clip of him talking on his homepage. Anyway, here’s a plot synapsis:

The Secret is a feature length movie presentation which reveals The Great Secret of the universe. It has been passed throughout the ages, traveling through centuries… This is The Secret to everything - the secret to unlimited joy, health, money, relationships, love, youth: everything you have ever wanted. All the resources you will ever need to understand and live The Secret. The world’s leading scientists, authors, and philosophers will reveal The Secret that utterly transformed the lives of every person who ever knew it… Plato, Newton, Carnegie, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Einstein.

I actually have the movie playing in the background right now and plan to watch it again and again. I also plan to tell others about it like I’m doing now. Just found the first 20 minutes of “The Secret” on youtube… Enjoy

Go get it at Amazon.com

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Every time I get on myspace to log on or reply or do anything it has errors. It is so frustrating. I’m thinking that a site that makes 25 million a month could afford more servers or programmers or whatever they need so their site works, but I am way wrong. It’s been like this for awhile too. Nothing they have added in the past months has made my experience any better. I’ve never added myspace videos or used their IM service or what have you. Why would I use their video service when youtube is much easier and more familiar? Why hasn’t google started a Gspace site to rival them? Orkut doesn’t count, it’s a bad name and isn’t easy to spell or something you want to tell your friends about. It looks ugly from the start. It’s not a site you want to join, atleast for me.

Myspace seems like it’s totally out of control. They seem to be building more features onto a site that doesn’t work. It needs a total overhaul from the ground up. I’m sure that won’t happen any time soon. It would cut into their monthly ad revenue. I’ve said this for awhile, but Myspace’s time has come and gone.

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An online tool to help you find new colors for your next design. Easily find complimentary colors for your design that are pleasing to the eye with this new color tool. It seems to work pretty well and is free to use. Genopal also offers a desktop version that I guess offers more. I haven’t tried it yet but might think about it once I try it on my next design. Give it a try and see if you can come up with anything good. I’ve been playing with it for a few minutes and like it so far. Plus what designer doesn’t like to play with colors?

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Godaddy had Orange County Chopper build them a sweet chopper recently. If you haven’t seen the show American Chopper then it might be something to check out if you like bikes/choppers. It’s a pretty good show and is always entertaining to watch if you are into building/customizing bikes or just like them. They do amazing work and build totally customized choppers for big companies all over the US. Each episode of their show they are building a new bike for some big company. Anyway check out Godaddy’s Chopper:

I definetely like the style of the bike, but the colors,, yikes! I know it’s for promotional purposes only but damn. The colors are horrible. There’s a video here to check out as well as some more photos of the bike.

I wonder what Google’s Chopper would look like if they had one built?

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Well most of you who run blogger blogs (blogspot) have heard about blogger.com moving out of beta and requiring all users who switch to start logging in with their google account or gmail account. I was quite skeptical of this at first and did not want to switch over because I didn’t see the point. Being part of a community blog however forced me to switch because one of the other participants switched and that required everyone that was apart of the community blog to switch. I was not happy.

After switching over (blogger.com makes you switch every blog you own) I noticed on one of my blogs that the nofollow attribute was added to every single link on my bog. Nofollow is the search engines way of trying to control spam by not allowing valuable pagerank to be passed on to spam sites, that is after all why spammers spam your blog,, to get some of your pagerank and to have their site quickly spidered by the search engine bots. Anyway, after viewing one of my blogspot blogs (after switching) revealed nofollow links on everything,, my post titles, my blogroll etc. I have a firefox plugin called “searchstatus” installed (which btw is a great tool for viewing pagerank and alexa rank as well as a host of other details about any site you are on) allowing me to see who is using nofollow links and to my surprise every link on my blog had the nofollow attribute on it. Btw, here is what nofollow links look like when using the searchstatus plugin.

If you install the searchstatus plugin for firefox you can easily see if your blog has these nofollow attributes applied by simply viewing your blog with the “highlight nofollow links” selected in the toolbar. Here is a screenshot of it:
Nofollow is bad if you want to pass some of your google pagerank onto other sites you own. So I immediately looked at the source code of my bog (right-click and view source) in firefox. I noticed in the meta tags there was a noindex/nofollow tag who was the culprit. So I went into blogger.com’s control panel and viewed the template for that blog. There is a tag called {metadata} or something similar in the head of the template. To fix the nofollow problem I copied the meta info from the source code of the blog and pasted that where the {metadata} tag was and removed the noindex/nofollow part. That fixed the problem and I was much happier.

Before I found this fix I wanted to move all my blogs off of blogger.com altogether. I had already installed the latest version of wordpress on another site of mine to get ready for the import.. which worked on the old blogger btw. Now, after looking into it wordpress is no longer capable of importing all your posts from a blogspot blog into your new wordpress blog. This looks like blogger.com’s new way of keeping people from moving away from blogspot. Hopefully wordpress can come up with a fix for this because I never recommend people start blogging with a blogspot domain (even though it’s free) simply because they will never own their blog, blogger.com will. If you build up a popular blog on blogspot you will always have to succumb to blogger.com’s user interface and their rules.

I’m sure there are more bad things about the new blogger.com coming out of beta and if you know of more please leave a comment about it. Or if you have something good to say share it.

Update: March 22nd.

I’ve been notified by Mark Wilson who kindly enough shared a new blogger import plugin you can use to import your blogger blog posts into wordpress. Read more of Mark’s post Bye-Bye Blogger Hello Wordpress. Thanks Mark!

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Wordpress 2.1 has just been released! You can download it here. It has a lot of new great features and includes… Amazingly enough “over 550 bug fixes!” Which is a lot of bug fixes. Some other features include:

• Autosave
• New tabbed editor
• Lossless XML import and export
• Spell checking
• New search engine privacy option
• Upload manager
• and more!

Think I will have to upgrade soon.

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This is off topic but probably the best thing I’ve found in a long time. I’ve been wanting to stream media off my computer to my xbox 360 since I got it last year but haven’t yet because I don’t have Windows Media Center. I’ve been just waiting I guess and haven’t put much work into finding an alternative method, till now.

I stumbled on this great article while searching Google for “play xvids on xbox 360″ and it totally opened my world to a whole new entertainment experience, one that I’ve totally embraced,, haha.. Can you tell I’m excited?

The great folks over at Tweaktown.com have put together a great article for playing divx and xvid files on your xbox 360 from your computer. It totally opened my eyes and introduced me to Tversity.

Tversity is the media streaming software you’ll be using to stream/play movies on your xbox 360. And man does it work great! I followed the article exactly as it said and I was up and streaming movies and mp3’s in a snap.

Of course there are system requirements that need to be met if you want everything to work smoothly and they are pretty basic. Basically the faster your machine the better. I’m running a p4 3ghz dell with 1gb of ram and it works really well. Here are the requirements you need to meet quoted from Tversity’s site:

# The minimum requirements will allow real-time transcoding of media files with bitrates up to 300-400 kbps. Higher bitrates will require faster machines.
# Media files that do not require transcoding, i.e. can be played by the media hub as is, will work well on systems meeting the minimum requirements, disregarding their bitrate, and in fact can even work on slower machines.
# Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz with support for Hyper Threading and with 512 MB of memory is recommended for real-time transcoding of standard definition video (e.g. WMV 720×480 1.5Mbps).
# Dual core or dual CPU systems with 1 Gbyte of memory are required for real-time transcoding of high definition video.
# Non real-time transcoding of any bitrate video can be done on any machine, with the speed of the machine determining the time it takes to complete the transcoding.

To be able to play/stream all your different media types you will need the codecs for each one.

Transcoding of some file formats require the installation of third party directshow filters that are compatible with TVersity. TVersity recommends:

* ffdshow - for MPEG2/4, H.264, Divx, Xvid, AAC, FLAC, Vorbis, FLV, and many more
* Haali Media Splitter - for better MP4 and H.264 support and for OGG/OGM and Matroska.
* Real Alternative - for Real audio and video.
* Quicktime Alternative - for MOV.
* MP4 Source/Splitter* - for better MOV support.
* FLV Splitter* - required for FLV playback.
* AC3 Filter - recommended for better AC3 support (in which case AC3 should be disbaled in ffdshow).

After you’ve installed Tversity and installed all the required codecs, hooked up your xbox to your router you’ll be ready to start watching and listening to all the media on your computer without having to fork over more money to Microsoft for Media Center.

You can share whole folders in Tversity or just single files and you can even stream media to your xbox that is online… Image Feeds, Video Feeds or Audio Feeds etc. So you can listen to your favorite podcasts while lounging on the couch, browse your Flickr photos and watch Youtube videos all while relaxing. You simply have to tell Tversity where to grab the feeds and your set.

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate Tversity for producing this software. As the article from Tweaktown says, once you set everything up it only takes about 10 - 15 seconds for a movie to start playing on your tv, and it plays back flawlessly. I first thought you couldn’t fast forward your movie because it didn’t work for me the first time, but when I tried it a second time it actually worked. I can fastforward now fine which is something I thought you couldn’t do with streaming media. Again it all depends on the machine you are running.

To sum it up go get Tversity if you want to play and stream DivX, Xvid, WMV, AVI, MOV, RSS Feeds, Podcasts, MP3 Files on your xbox 360. It’s freakin sweet to say the least.

Oh and Tversity is totally FREE!

Update: has Xbox360 stopped seeing your videos?

Microsoft has released today a new firmware update for the Xbox 360 and this broke compatibility with TVersity. Tversity as cool as they are quickly fixed this and made some cool improvements to the interface.

Go download the Tversity patch.

Instead of having to view all your files in one long flat list (quite annoying if you have hundreds of videos to scroll through) they now allow you to create folders and tag your videos for easier browsing.

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