Monthly Archives: December 2006

Last TT of the Year

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Yes loyal visitors, this shall be the last Thursday Throwdown of 2006! Ready or not, here they come.

  • Just because your mentally retarded does not give you the right to physically take food out of my mouth in a public restaurant. Guardians should be responsible enough to control said, peeps.
  • Someone should invent freakin self leveling drywall mud….damn’t I hate sanding.
  • Why is this the first year I’ve had Dream Sickle fudge, I’ve been deprived my entire life. I blame my parents.
  • New cars don’t come with turn signals, just driver-side douche bags.
  • My wife won’t let me take the Christmas tree down until after her birthday. She was born on Jan 28th. :(

That’s all for now, I’ll be looking for all my friends across the net in the new 07. Keep it real kid, because your worth it.

Xbox 360 Gets Warranty Upgrade

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Xbox 360 Extends WarrantyHey, for those of you who do not know, I’m an avid gamer. Currently residing underneath my 42″ LCD TV is a GameCube and Xbox 360 and soon a Nintendo Wii. In addition, I was one of the first people in my area to get a hold of an Xbox 360 when they released over a year ago.

If you remember back to November of 05 your thoughts would be filled with hopes for the next-generation system. These visions of sugar plums quickly faded once you heard the terrible feedback from the first batch. Over-heating, freezing, and other annoyances plagued the 360 and Microsoft agreed to fix the DOA appliances. However, such an expensive entertainment tool only carried a short warranty, so get it fixed while you can.

90 days was the only warranty offered by the manufacturer, Microsoft, although you could purchase extended plans from places such as Best Buy. A lot has changed in the year gone by, including the release of 2 more next-gen consoles, the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii. Both of these systems offer a full 1 year warranty from the manufacturer at no additional cost.

In response to the longer warranty, at no additional cost, Microsoft has announced that they will be warrant their console for a full year. In addition, this is a retro-active warranty that will effect all owners of the system. If anyone had any work performed on their system, within the 1yr of purchase, they are entitled to a refund for labor/parts from Microsoft.

Rejoice and if you have had any problems with your system contact Xbox Support.

Hi-Def BBC Programs

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Zudeo HomepageHi-definition programing is quickly catching on to the masses. The prices are falling, therefore opening up the market to a whole new era of distribution. Often times the difference between a basic 30min program and a hi-def version of the same show can be up to a GB or more. Obviously distributors are looking at ways to curb the bandwidth usage and their bottom line.

The BBC are looking to be one of the first to utilize P2P technologies to distribute hi-def programing. Although the BBC will be using your bandwidth to distribute their products, the service will still not be free. No pricing structure has been announced as of this posting.

What shows can you look forward to in Hi-Def?

  • Red Dwarf
  • Dr. Who
  • League of Gentlemen
  • Fawlty Towers
  • others…

How do you get BBC hi-def?

The BBC will be utilizing Azureus software Zudeo. This program allows the sharing of large files, such as Hi-Def shows, via bittorrent. Reportedly, the BBC specific content will be available on their own channel and allow users to comment and rate different episodes.

Thursday Throwdown

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It’s time for yet another edition of Thursday Throwdown in which I complain and generally bitch about the things that annoy me. You’d think this time of year would provide plenty of material, but alas, people are being overly polite to me lately.

At any rate, here comes a list of annoyances I cannot avoid.

  • People who sit directly beside me in an empty restaurant.
  • How can people afford nice shoes, nice coats, but not deodorant?
  • At some point during the evolution of man they forgot the basics of merging into traffic.
  • Despite what my dog may do, your dog is not allowed to shit in my yard.

I know there are more, but at this time my creative bones are restrained from lack of caffeine. I’m sure I’ll post again before Christmas, but if I don’t I wish all my friends a Merry Christmas. Not a Happy Holiday, therefore if you do not celebrate Christmas, I wish you nothing. Get over it.

Playing along…

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I’m usually the person to break a forward and have everlasting bad luck for the rest of my life, but this time I’m gonna play. Yesterday I received note that I had been blog-tagged(not to be confused with bag-tagged) and I needed to post 5 things about myself others might not know.

Thanks for the tag Mrs. Bailey. :)

1. I quit smoking 1 week after getting married. Still clean, which others thought I couldn’t do and I’m on month 4 at this point.

2. I’d rather drink my mothers warm urine from a rusty bucket than play a board game.

3. I think racial profiling is a good thing.

4. My house received some damage a few months ago due to flooding. My house is not in a flood plane and the city I live in has already received over 20″ above normal rainfall. No flood insurance. :(

5. Although tentative, my 5 year goal is to earn enough from Adsense and Affiliate Sales that I will not have to work for someone else, ever again. I set this goal 4 months ago and it looks like it will be sooner than 5 years. ;)

I’m willing to bet these people will not follow suit, mainly because I’m too lazy to PM all of them like Cricket did, but maybe they will see me in their stats. Just maybe.

Ok, now I need to tag a few peeps to keep this viral seobs rollin:  Cass Knits, irregular, bullet proof, webpuffs, wonova

Session ID in PHP, Bad for SEO

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Up until yesterday I was oblivious to the fact that SessionID’s were affixing themselves to my cached pages in Google. I had noticed the odd looking url’s but assumed it was old indexing before I switched to SEO friendly urls. I was wrong, very wrong and it may cost me more than I know.

Supplemental results abound and the best way to land yourself in them is through duplicate content. Google was indexing my pages and finding the standard /cat/45 url AND they were finding the /cat/45PHPSESSID…..?3424 blah blah. This told google that I had duplicate content and may have already given my directory a bad name.

So what to do? Now that I’ve found the issue, I need to fix the issue and there are apparently a number of ways to do this. First, I’ve contacted my host, as the script creator for IndexScript suggested. Next, I did some searching and found that I could probably take care of it through my .htaccess file.

RagePank.com has a great writeup on preventing these Session ID’s from becoming a nuisance  and provides a few workarounds. I will be awaiting a response from my host to see if I need to take any further steps and hopefully put my directory back on the right track.

Excerpt from RagePank article:

Session IDs in PHP can cause some real problems when search engines index your pages. For this reason, you should disable PHPSESSID on your sites, and keep session IDs in cookies instead. If you disable PHPSESSID in the URL, this can become a usability issue, as all visitors must have cookies enabled to make use of any code that requires sessions (such as login scripts).

Things I Wish Would Come Back

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A few weeks back I made a post regarding thins on the internet that I wish would take off. That is they started, grew, stumbled, and then fell and have yet to be revived. Well, this is a take on that same concept, but some of these never really took off.

Unfortunately, these are the things that are still waiting to jump out of the nest, like it or not.

Again, that’s all for now, there just isn’t enough time in the day to take care of all that needs tending to. I’m guilty of a full plate, are you?

sNews Template OCTemplate

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Celebrating my first CSS cherry pop, I’m releasing OCTemplate for sNews. If your not familiar with sNews is an extremely light weight content management script and relies wholly on CSS stylesheets for it’s look. I decided I needed to try out my CSS skills and what turned out was fairly decent…I think.

OCTemplate for sNews

Simple, sleek, and fully CSS.

OCTemplate for sNews

OCTemplate Features:

  • Left Side Navigation
  • Rollover Navigation Buttons
  • blockquote CSS Attributes
  • extracontent Index Placement
  • LOGO PSD included
  • Free!
  • No Bread Crumbs(which may lead to another release)

I’ve only been using sNews for a few days, but it’s growing on me quickly and I think I’m gonna use it on my next project. 1 file script and SEO friendly urls, it’s hard to compete with. It packs a lot of necessary features and holds out on the fluff, which causes my distaste of PHPNuke, Joomla, Mamboo etc…

If I have one tip, it would be to use the ‘extracontent’ to distribute contextual ads and affiliate ads throughout your site. sNews enable you to control which category specific ‘extracontent’ is displayed. Have fun and let me know what you think, criticisms are appreciated.

If you missed the download link, DOWNLOAD THE TEMPLATE HERE.

Creating a List

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I’m starting to become aggravated with the ability to create and maintain an email list. It looks like I’m going to finally have to breakdown and invest some money in a monthly subscription to manage newsletters and email addys. Garr, frustrating.

Here are a few email management services I’m considering:

I am leaning very heavily toward the Constant Contact, but I’m only hesitant because I’m not sure how successful my email marketing campaign will be. Only one way to find out I guess. Also, I most likely will not use AutoBot…because they retain the right to email anyone on my list….hell with that.

Lastly, I am currently building an email list via FeedBurner. They provide the opt-in code, the verification and the opt-out ability. The problem is that you obviously cannot directly mail anyone a newsletter from this application. It’s not a waste of time though, because I can export my email list at anytime into csv format…for importing into the service I choose.

Amazon Associate Update Delays

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For anyone who happens to check out the official discussion boards for the Amazon Associate program you are familiar with 2 topics. The first is that lately reports are not updated on any kind of schedule and are always late. The second topic is that some guy is making $10,000 per quarter and wants everyone to know about it. This individual also deems it necessary to post on the DP forums as well.

At any rate, props to the Amazon Associate team to produce an official response to the reports taking longer than usual to be updated.

To avoid having to post the same announcement every day that reports are running late, we thought we’d let you know that through the end of December you can expect the previous day’s reports to be available by 1pm PST.  On very heavy days they may be later, but we will post an announcement if that is the case.

Contrary to rumor, we do not have caged monkeys generating the reports, snow and ice in Seattle do not prevent us from running them, and we do not have our youngest engineer just out of college forgetting to push the “Start” button after oversleeping.

But we do have a great deal of data to parse because of the spike in holiday orders, which means the reports take longer to run.  We’re working on ways to speed up the processing.  Thanks for your patience, and we appreciate that you all have referred so many orders on which to report!

-The Associates Team

To tell you the truth I had doubts on whether or not they had a sense of humor, I stand corrected. Also, I prefer the belief that the snows in Seattle are causing my reports to take longer.