RSS Feed Submission

Many bloggers including myself find it quite tedious as every time we do an update we have to go through the process of manually telling all the feeds and directories about the new content. It is a very repetitive task and since I have an injury, excessive keyboard work would put me in a lot of pain for several weeks, and you can imagine it’s something I try to avoid. Word press automatically sends out a ping to a list of directories whenever an update is done, however blogger appears not to do the same and so I have taken it upon myself to look for an alternate solution.

I am not a big supporter of automated submission software as you don’t really know if a submission was successfully done or not. Also, many blog directories will block automated submissions and won’t necessarily be reported by the software that you have just purchased. Another good reason for not using automation software is that it is overpriced for what he actually does. Of course, there are people willing to pay the price as they are looking for ease of use rather than peace of mind. I am look for a tool that would make my life easier but at the same time to know that when I pressed a button to submit my feed, I can see it was successively done.

Today I installed a new piece of software that is very simple to use and doesn’t do this submission as such. What it does is to store the values of form boxes and then when you go to the various web submission pages, it pre-fills the forms so that you only have to do press the okay button to send the information to the server. This means you get to see whether the submission was successful or not. Unlike with automated software you get peace of mind by doing it yourself, without all the repetitive strain injury of excessive typing.

You can configure the program to add your own feeds, meaning that you do not have to rely on the author to update the database of engines. Simply speaking, you just set a profile up that contains information about your feed and then visit each web site listed in the right-hand panel and the software automatically pre-fills any registration or submission pages and then you click okay. That is all there is to it. It is very easy indeed.

The software itself is very cheap at a mere $30 which in real money is less than 15 UK pounds. I prefer paying this tiny amount can pay it to the $250 plus that is being charged for many of these auto submission applications. For more information about rss planter visiting their website by clicking here

Cat Cam – Feline Photography

Cat Cam is a brilliant idea. Take a mini-digital camera, connect it to a timer controller, stuff it into a plastic wildlife proof case and strap to a cat. Then send the cat out on its journey whilst the Camera takes pictures of where your cat has been and what its been up to. Then when the beast returns, you take camera off your cat and upload the pictures from its memory card to your PC.

I must point out you should use an appropriate collar so it doesn’t strangle itself if he/she catches the camera on something like a fence. Badly fitted collar or straps can be lethal.

I would had liked to see a smaller camera and so its not so bulky for the cats. Perhaps a device like this could include GPS at some point and so when you lose your cat, you could track it down without all that embarrassing asking complete strangers if they have seen this “black cat” and it looks like every other black cat. I know from personal experience how heart wrenching losing a pet can be.

The Cat Cam is in its early days, but I will be watching its development with interest. I see sidelines, like toddler Cam and of course slave cam, the ultimate in personal control.  lol

MSN Writer Review

I’m a person that blogs allot and I personally find its better to have multiple blogs rather than one massive journal that cover a multitude of topics. Search engines seem to like this way of doing things too.

It all gets rather complicated if you start getting allot of blogs and having to log into each system in order to post something new. For along time I have been looking for a free tool that would allow me to post to my blogs remotely from my desktop. I came across MSN Writer completely by accident, after upgrading my MSN Messenger client application.

The installation process was a little slow, but smooth and you can easily find the program icon under the “Windows Live” section on the Start menu (on XP). Once started, you can add multiple blog definition profiles for each of your blogs. Then all you do to post an new entry to your blog is to select that profile and then it drop in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) type editor window. Its using it now to type this entry.

You can use this program to manage your many different blog platforms. I use both Word press and Blogger at the moment, but using this software I could quite easily use any platform without the need of having to worry about the differences in their interfaces. When you use voice recognition like I do, you do have find it difficult to use interfaces that are different and its hard to change one to another. So, using MSN Writer I am hoping that will take all these problems out of the equation, making it possible for me to write even more.

Further more MSN Writer is compatible with your spell checker and like with other Microsoft based word processors it under lines any misspelt words. Right clicking, gives the standard contextual menu that supplies choices of corrections to use. For me personally, right clicking on anything is difficult as I don’t use the mouse but instead the arrow keys on the keyboard. Luckily though, I doubt very much I will be using the spell checker, as voice recognition tends to spell words correctly, it’s just so inaccurate that you spend twice as long making correction when it’s refusing to recognise your own voice properly. I find it very annoying at times, but there’s not an awful lot I can do about it.

I will be testing MSN Writer very thoroughly with all my blogs over the next week. I will post another entry next week to let you know as I get more experience.

Novatech Bad Memory

It was only 2 weeks ago I purchased a stick of 256 SDRAM PC100 memory for my Ubuntu box. Everything was working well for a couple of weeks, until yesterday when bizarre events started to occur. I thought it might had been the hard drive on its last legs because it is a really old and cheap. I did a full test and even reformatted the disk. When re-installing Ubuntu, I noticed the distribution comes with MEMTEST which enables you to test your memory. I ran this on the original configuration, which showed an error.

I removed the new memory and re-ran the test and these errors disappeared. I did try the memory card in different slots as advised on the Novatech themselves. The only time this error got displayed was when the Novatech memory was plugged in. From now on, I’ll be looking at higher quality parts that are produced in South Korea or Taiwan.

I posted back the memory to Novatech and I await for a replacement. I do have a small problem that Ubuntu now won’t run very well with a mere 256meg of Ram and so I have decided to look around for an alternative Linux distribution.

Novatech said they had received the memory, but have chosen not to send a replacement. Some time afterwards I got a delivery of the replacement which was also faulty! I cannot be bothered to send it back again for yet another batch of dodgy memory from this company. It now sits in a bag, on my desk waiting to be dispatched to the dustbin!

BBC iplayer Downloader Problems

Tonight I watched an episode of Doctor Who (yes I know.. its nerdy!) on the iplayer and I enjoyed it. I thought of downloading another episode to watch tomorrow and so I installed the download Manager. All I can say is I wish I hadn’t as its a terrible bag of nails that made my CPU almost overheat and it was making my firewall go crazy. IP addresses were being requested from all over the place and I couldn’t shut them off, as every time I denied one, yet another box was popping up.

There were 2 processes loaded into memory that were causing a huge amount of problems; one of them being KService.exe and the other Khost.exe – I took a look on the internet and I found that the download manager is no more than a PSP File sharing application. So, this means there’s going to be people trying to share your connection to download portions of your copy of the program that you have downloaded. This activity makes the CPU go crackers. I counted 60 extra open ports at one point caused by this piece of crap from the BBC. I have un-installed the software, which thankfully went fairly smoothly but slowly. Slowly because it was still requesting access to the internet despite my deleted from a computer – Why?

The Iplayer on its own works without any issues, but its the accompanying down loader application software that appears to break things allot. This download Manager had similar behavioural characteristics of a virus in the way it was slowing the computer down so much that it was becoming unusable. My PC isn’t a low specification machine either, it has 3gigabytes of memory and set-up for voice recognition.

Would I recommend Iplayer Manager: Not even to my worst enemy.

Internet Help Desk

Having worked once many years ago on a help desk I can understand where this guy is coming from. Its very stressful work and a silly amount of typing too as companies think the world is going to explode if the customers every word is not logged.

You know what surprised me about many of the people that worked in these help desks, was that they actually knew less about computers than anyone I have ever met in my life. What some of those cheap call centres actually do is just give their staff some manuals and access to the internet. They are doing no more than what you could do for yourself. Remember that when you call an help desk; they are reading the same manual as you could be lol

What is MySpaceIM.exe?

I had a little bit of time on Sunday afternoon, so I decided to install the instant messenger that My space distributes. What attracted me to it is that firstly I thought wrongly that Skype would download with it and save me that trouble of doing it separately. This of course, didn’t happen and the instant messenger installed without asking for any additional software to be installed.

The installation process itself was annoying as my firewall kept popping up saying that the instant messenger was constantly trying to call home or change something in the registry that it really shouldn’t be. I didn’t let it change my registry, but I did let it call home as the installation just froze until I approved each request for an out bound connection.

After clicking approve or accept (i forget which) a thousand times, the software installed. Its okay looking, but it won’t win any beauty contest. What was the worse bit of the software is that there’s a file called “MySpaceIm.exe” that keeps trying to call home all the time whilst the messenger is loaded into memory. If you have your messenger starting up with windows this is so very annoying. Actually the message suggests that the file myspaceim.exe is trying to send hidden data out. Which sounds like a trojan, but I don’t think it is. The file appears to be some sort of ad server as when you block the connection, no advertisements are displayed within the messenger. If you let a connection through, then an ad appears.

Myspaceim.exe appears to be adware and seems to call home allot, which is something I find suspicious. On my system myspaceim.exe has been denied all access when calling home. There’s also a quite a common, though nasty worm (like a computer virus) that is being spread by using messengers like these – Its not restricted to the myspace application since you can be infected by using MSN. Because don’t click on anything you don’t recognise is your best security.

The messenger software itself is probably something I wouldnt use very much as I just don’t have the time. My chosen messenger is really MSN that virtually has all the same functions as the My space offering, so I cannot see the point of swapping to another one. I plan to remove it in the near future.

Alexandra and Beyonce

I just watched Alexandra Burk and Beyonce perform on the X-Factor (UK) and quite frankly its the most stunning performance I’ve ever seen in my life. Absolutely without doubt incredible.

Not only were the voices great and complimented each other rather well. I’ve seen comments on youtube saying Beyonce up staged her on the song. Well, Der, Of course she did. She is an established act and its her job now! Can you imagine the headlines otherwise, Beyonce was upstaged.. nah.. I won’t even go there.

The other two acts in the X-factor I just thought they were okay. The 16 year old that was poking Diane Vickers on the side in my book never had a strong enough voice and reminded me too much of the Disney channel or High School Musical (I hate that film). And then there was the Jackson five, err I mean four; JLS. Now, I did think they had a certain something, but their performance with West Life was a mess to my ears. West Life really did an awful job of supporting their act. Where as Boyzone’s was actually quite good and certainly did out class Eoghan’s.

Lets face it, all the professionals out classed the contestants to some degree. Only did West Life sound like they may be auditioning for next years show.

Easily the highlight of the show was Beyonce and Alexandra. You are both awesome without a doubt. Brilliant.

Adsense Review

I’ve never really been a great supporter of the Google Adwords programme primarily on the grounds that its unethical for Google to manipulate its SERPS in order to encourage more businesses for buy link position from them but at the same Google openly punishes other sites that sells links and those that buy them. I personally believe there’s a conflict of interest and that Google should either stop selling links or allow others to do the same.

I decided to run a little experiment with one of my other blog sites to see how affective Adsense performed as publisher. signing up as a publisher was a rather difficult and time-consuming experience. Its not a normal sign up process but you have to go through an advanced identity check similar to setting up a bank account in the United Kingdom. In order to release payment Google posts out a pin number to your postal address and then you must enter it within Adsense the administration screens. It’s all a bit overboard for something that is just a partner program for God’s sakes!

I continue to use the program two months in which time I saw very little in return, with click ratios very low indeed when you compare to other ad networks. By comparison I had another ad program running a second website which inexplicably appeared to attract twice the click as Google ads. I felt there was something very wrong here and I began to mistrust Google’s statistics.

Very strangely Google has decided to disable my Adsense account and thus I no longer have their irrelevant adverts displayed on the right. I’m sure if I complained they will have some excuse; their email implies that there’s a problem with the content of this blog. What I find particular annoying is that I have been very ill and off-line for about a week. Not that Ad sense made much money. I think it did about $40 in 2 months; absolutely pathetic! Ad sense isn’t going to be missed at all.

PPC is abit of a waste of money for Advertisers as it doesn’t really encourage quality hits, only expensive ones. Many small site owners regard Adwords vital for getting traffic, without properly considering how to get ranked for free without spending lots of advertising dollars. What annoys me about many SEO companies is that they are all offering PPC management when they all know that its a complete waste of money. You can get your site seen without spending a cent on Google or any search engine and the only thing it takes is a bit of time and dedication.

I have not changed my opinion of pay per click at all, I don’t believe that the statistics being published by Google are accurate and I wouldn’t like to be a business paying Google money for advertising when I believe that other networks provide better value from money.

I believe in gaining good search engines ranking through hard work and perseverance. sure it can to take time and you going to need to be a full-time marketing professional to keep up with the changes that search engines implement in their indexing strategies; in the end is worth it. I do agree that there is a problem in the way Google constantly changes them way indexes websites, especially if one day a web site can be number one and after a re-index it can drop down 10 pages or more for no apparent reason. this is obviously very costly for business that are relying on organic ranking entirely and so it makes the inevitable that anyone making money from the Internet is going to have to pay Google to ensure that their listing stays on page 1 even after the quarterly updates. This is very unfair and it’s something I strongly disagree with on principle.

What is Google Chrome

Chrome is a new browser that was developed by Google to enable them get a foot hold in the browser market. Most people probably just use Microsoft Explorer and that is okay (I am using it now), but there are other alternatives such as Firefox, Opera and even if you’re a real geek, K-Mellon. Opera is quite good and can actually be found on many mobile phone handsets. You might not know it, but you probably have used Opera on your cell phone.

Google Chome is a very interesting browser in terms of the way its been developed. The manner in which is manages memory is something I like very much. The other main browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera then to keep hold of memory until you exit/close the application. So, imagine you have firefox open with 8 tabs with 8 different web sites loaded. You’ll notice that despite closing some of the tabs firefox still keep hold of the memory, where as the same action in Chrome will realise memory that was being used by the specific operation. This does or will mean that Chrome will be inheritly more stable since its memory management is far superior.

The page loading speed Chrome demonstrates is quite astonishing too, though it doesn’t work with all pages. For example with Chrome I am unable to view “youtube.com” as it returns the following error : “Error 320 (net::ERR_INVALID_RESPONSE): Unknown error.” Refreshing the page or/and emptying the cache makes no difference. Youtube operates fine and can be seen by all the main browsers without an issue. Strangely, going to http://www.youtube.co.uk then the site displays without an issue until you try to log into your account when it returns the same error: Error 320 (net::ERR_INVALID_RESPONSE): Unknown error.

Also it must be added that, Google Chrome won’t display embedded youtube clips on any web site and currently just leaves a big gap. For me, Google Chrome is no where near ready for release as it appears some of the simplest functionality tests with their own web sites just haven’t been done. Its a real shame that Google couldn’t be bothered to get the browser a bit more ready before releasing to the public.

I have also noticed some display problems with some wordpress templates that use cascading style sheet, particularly if they make use of the @import function. What you see instead is the HTML page without any of the style sheet applied to the page. Its still readable, but not pretty, well ugly as hell would be a better description. That being said Chrome is still a Beta product and I hope Google fixes these issues in time.

I will be using it in my daily life, no. I have enough browsers and really cannot see a need for yet another one. It is abit faster than Internet Explorer, but currently the Microsoft piece of software can do an awful lot more. I wouldn’t recommend it generally as it stands.