I have 2 slots open for anyone to put an advertisement on my other blog (http://blog.thetwilightcollection.com) for free and for as long as you want it.  So if you want advertise on my blog for free just send an e-mail with a image and a link to your website, details are as follows:

Image type: .jpg, .gif or .png

Dimensions: 125px by 125px

Please also provide a link to the webpage you wish to advertise.

I will only accept blogs and websites that are fully completed and do not push the law to any extent.

E-Mail: nexus5.01@gmail.com

Thanks!

TWMedia is starting to get quite a few more visitors now and it’s actually starting to attract some people!  Hopefuly this is a good sign that the word is spreading.  I’ve been spending the night sorting out the server and freeing up some space that was taken up by stupid test files I had in their previously.  Now we have a bit more space to play with, which is always a good thing.

TWBlog has had nothing much done to it to be honest, apart from the nice new theme and the fact that all of the older posts have gone now, but I’m starting to build them back up no so it’s no biggy!

TWImage is actually not working as I have found out in the past few days, it seems the images can be uploaded and directy linked to but embeding doesn’t work… I will be looking into it anyway.

That’s all I have for you today unfortunatly nothing terribly exciting! It’ll be better next time

Have a good day tomorrow!

What’s new?
Well to start with everything, everything has changed dramatically.  Lets go through a list of the new additions to the TWCollection shall we?

TWMedia is a video sharing website for custom music videos, we have a nice little starter set of videos, which is gettning bigger week by week.  Were really aiming to get the people who enjoy creating custom music videos to upload them on our site, not just for getting them attention in the media side of the internet but to also give them a place to recieve constructive critisism and/or help others.

So really, if you have any custom music videos you have made then put them on TWMedia, we will also host any band videos you have done.  Just as an example here’s an example of what were on about!

TWImage is a free image hosting service, a lot like Photobucket and Tinypic but not built to have all the amazing features, it’s just a quick and simple.  It also has high bandwidth quota for the images so your images will always be there!

TWBlog this is another WordPress blog hosted on my account.  This is where you will find out about all of the latest news to do with any of the services, as well as competitions.

A quick note
I’m offering free advertising on TWMedia so if you want to advertise your site/blog for free, for more information on the advertisment sizes, formats and how to submit your advertisement click here.

I’ve been having a go with it for about half an hour now and I have to say I impressed. I’ll let ping.fm tell you what it’s about:

“Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.”

That’s basically what it is, I’m posting this through ping.fm right now and as soon as I click “Ping it!” it will post this to both of my blogs!

Now, if that isn’t enough let me tell you that you can do the same for status updates for Social networks such as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. There is also no limit to how many you can do this with either, for all ping cares I could be posting this to 10, 20, or hell 50!

The fact is I can tell it’s going to make my life a hell of a lot easier, so come and sign up if your a blogger with multiple blogs, or even if your just fed up of updating all of social networks. For all those Google fanatics you can also find a iGoogle widget to make it even easier.

For those people who are interested it’s www.ping.fm.

Anyway, if you do start using ping.fm give me a shout and tell me what you think!

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Think my blog could be improved?
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Hey these are all of the “hacks” I use to make my Flock faster (they will also work Firefox), and believe me they do improve speed, noticeably!

about:config alterations
As you should know to apply these alterations you should open a new tab and in the address bar type “about:config” after agreeing not to break anything, I can guarantee you are going to be overwhelmed if your new to this. These are all of the settings you can change for Firefox, don’t go changing anything unless you know what you are doing or unless they are listed below. If any of these particular values don’t exists, you can add them yourself by right-clicking anywhere in the config page and choosing “new”
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To alter any of the existing settings just double click on them and change the existing value to the one shown here.

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Find network.http.pipelining. Set this value to True.

Next, go to network.http.pipelining.firstrequest and set that to True, as well.

Go to network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and change that to 8.

Now we’ll get to network.http.proxy.pipelining and again set it to True.

Find nglayout.initialpaint.delay and change it to a 0.

Go to content.notify.interval and set this to 0.

Locate content.switch.threshold and change this to True.

And finally, change content.interrupt.parsing to True as well.

DNS Service
“OpenDNS is the world’s largest, fastest-growing DNS service provider. Millions of people worldwide (and growing) trust us to handle their DNS and Web-content filtering needs. Why? Because we take a fresh approach to the Domain Name System and make it smarter and more powerful than it’s ever been.” – OpenDNS about us.

I swear by this service, it’s fast, it’s safe, reliable and free. I’ve been using it for around 2 years now and I have never had a problem. The people I have recommended it to have been very impressed, the only think I can recommend here is for you to try it for yourself.

Here’s the link: http://www.opendns.com/

Thank for reading guys!

“hacks” were obtained from Chris Pirillo.

“Knol is a Google project which aims to include user-written articles”.

As soon as you start publishing on Knol and getting used to the UI (which doesn’t take long at all) you will notice it has the “Google feel”, by this I mean the UI is clean, easy to use and you just, know where everything is. Writing/Editing any Knol (what Google uses to refer to the articles) is very easy, formatting, links, images, videos, etc can be added using the toolbar

As I hope you can see from the image the toolbar contains everything you need and I bet you can tell me what all the buttons in the toolbar do without going and checking can’t you?

Users are also able to set permissions of their articles, there are three permission settings anyone can use for their article:

1. Open collaboration model - All signed in users may edit the Knol.
2. Moderated collaboration model – All signed in users can suggest edits in the Knol, but these need approval from an author before being published.
3. Closed collaboration model - Only owners and authors may edit the Knol.

Some other neat features of Knol include the choice of license you publish your “Knol’s” under (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License and All Rights Reserved).

The future of Knol looks bright, with it’s clean interface and constantly expanding user base and not too mention to boat loads of money Google can throw at Knol it’s going to improve, it’s going to get more users and it’s already got Wiki worried.

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This is where Firefox came in, with Firefox’s clean interface and blazing fast Gecko rendering engine Firefox was the wow factor.  Firefox has since then “stolen” around 18% of IE’s market share, this is shared also with other browsers such as Apples Safari, Opera and other smaller browsers.  Firefox after being spread among literally millions of people, mainly due to the record breaking download day. 

Firefox has not only set the standards for many of today’s modern browsers, but has also gone beyond just being a web browser, you can now apply “add-ons” these add-ons enable users to enhance their browsing experience for example the add-on Foxmarks will synchronize your favourites between multiple computers automatically upon closing the browser. 

Firefox is an Open source browser, the really means that you are free to see every piece of code that went into making the browser.  A great example of the possibilities you can do with an open source browser has been mentioned previously in my blog, Flock is a web browser that has been built on Firefox, Flock and Firefox are in essence the same browser the only differences being the fact that Flock has features that rely on new technologies that enable software to communicate with various API’s, this adds features such as being able to interact with the social networking site Facebook without actually going to their site eg.  You can  send a shout to friends, Nude friends, leave a comment on their wall etc.

Firefox has changed web browsers in many different ways, it has innovated and explored places that IE probably hadn’t considered prior to Firefox.  This has attracted millions of people and has replaced IE on many people computers.

Whether you use Firefox or not, I would like to hear your views on the browser.  If you like Firefox, why? If you don’t, why?

First off, ISP’s are saying they will be sending letters to the users warning them that their connection is being used to download illegal content, in my opinion this is a good idea as some children/teenagers often download illegal content (movies, music and games) without their parents knowing, using the “three strikes and your out” approach is also a very respectable decision, as like I stated earlier the actual payer of the subscription may not be aware of this activity happening.

Obviously, another aspect of this that has not been brought forward as of yet, would be the invasion of privacy. Monitoring what people are downloading would involve the ISP’s “checking” the packets being sent through your connection. Now obviously this will include every webpage you go on, which mean passwords, e-mails, bank details etc. may be checked, would you consider this an invasion of piracy?

As far as Torrentfreak know the ISP’s that are expected to be included in this reduction of piracy scheme are rumored to be Virgin Media, BT, Orange, Tiscali, Carphone Warehouse (AOL, TalkTalk) and BSkyB. If you know any different then please do send me an e-mail (nexus5.01@gmail.com)

Anyway, I would love to hear your thoughts on this issue!

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Think my blog could be improved?

Let me know: nexus5.01@gmail.com
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Due to Chris using uStream, he has weekly giveaways sponsored by uStream itself. This is normally just a free webcam but not too long ago, Chris was approached by HP and asked to giveaway a HP Dragon Notebook to one of his viewers. This is not the first time Chris has been approached by big names – Chris used to be a host on “TechTV” which dramatically boosted his audience, this was along time ago but still Chris has as many as 500 people watching his live stream, which offers up great publicity when it comes to companies wanting to get their name out there, so keep an eye on his lives stream or YouTube videos as he may just be giving away another Latop.

Chris is currently developing his custom wordpress theme (which can be downloaded for free) which goes away from the traditional wordpress themes by adding extra functionality by incorporating Twitter updates at the top of his page along with many other little add-ons. Chris is also (along with his wordpress theme) developing a Social Relevant Network, meaning you can find people with the same interests as you, he has a very interesting idea of what he wishes to incoporate (here)

Cheers guys!

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Think my blog could be improved?

Let me know: nexus5.01@gmail.com
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Utilities

favicon.cc
A favicon as some of you may know is the little icon in the address bar:

This is Bloggers favicon, these images are 16x16px and can be very awkward to make, especially if it’s your first time. favicon.cc gives you a simple box containing a 16x16px grid, a color pallet and the ability to draw one frame at a time (If your planning on making an animated favicon that is). Using the pallet tools you just select your color, draw your image on the grid and well…that’s it really.

If you want an animated favicon then the process is now different apart from the fact that you just press “Append new frame” after drawing, which takes you to a new grid where you can draw the second frame. Now to me this free little utility was priceless, without this I would either have a really boring favicon, or I would be stuck with Drupals default.

Also to note, if your a big fan of the Creative Commons license, favicon.cc let you publish your creation under the CC license.

GICKR
This cool little utility lets you create your own .gif files for free! As with anything like this they have placed a 10 image maximum rule. Basically you upload 10 images from your PC (Flickr support is soon to be added) tell is the size you want the animation and the speed you want the end animation.

I have used this service many times, mainly for the small animation but still, it works, it’s free and it made my life a hell of a lot easier.

Sumopaint
Sumopaint is in essence a free online photoshop. Fair enough it doesn’t have every single filter that Photoshop does, but it sure is close. Sumopaint lets you use layers, filters, various brushes and then finally when you have created your master-piece you can download it as a high quality jpg. Oh, did I mention there was also no sign-up required?

I don’t know about you but this is pretty amazing don’t you think?

Extensions [Firefox users only unfortunately]

Firebug
“Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page…” – Firebug description.

This tool, really is indispensable, using this tool you can find edit any entity on any site, this is good if you trying to debug your site or just want to see how something would look if you changed it. I use this tool pretty daily, it didn’t take me long at all to get used to the features it provides. This is definitely a recommendation for any webmaster or page designer.

Web Developer

“Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.”

As you can see from the image to the left, this add-on give you the ability to change any aspect of the site. Regardless of the fact that the shortcuts on the menu are built for the Mac in the image it does in fact work on Windows. This and Firebug, when used together really do make a good team and make debugging or testing new things for your site extremely easy.

I wont comment on anymore due to the fact that I have no used the other tools yet, but feel free to go to the Firefox Add-ons page and try them yourself!

Tips
These tips are for pretty much optimizing your website or just handy little utilities you may not of known about. Most of these services are provided by Google, so if you don’t already have a Google account (Which you more than likely will if your reading this). However if you don’t have Google account click here to register one.

Googles “Webmaster Central Blog”
This is Google’s official blog, I would recommend subscribing to their RSS feed, they have some really useful tips and hints for getting your website optimized for their search engine and others!

“The Google Trifecta”
Google have released 2 services free for use by any webmaster, these three services are Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer, these three tools together have been rightfully dubbed “The Google Trifecta” hence the heading. Using these three tools in conjunction with eachother can improve your sites rating and posistionof your website in the results.

XML-Sitemaps
“A sitemap is a way of organizing a website, identifying the URLs and the data under each section.” – XML-Sitemaps definition.

Sitemaps should be named “sitemap.xml” and placed in the root directory of your site. This will help search bots find their way around your site easier as they have guide, whereas if you don’t have a sitemap it’s like throwing them into a dark room and told to find the relvant information.

It takes 2-3 minutes to get a sitemap generated automatically, this is definatly recomended and for a 2-3 minute job, it goes a long way.
dmoz
dmoz is the service that drives your search engines. A world-wide community submit their own or others sites into the directory. If you have a site and it meets the dmoz requirements (here) then just navigate through the catogories on the front page of dmoz and keep browsing through the catogories (for example if your site is a tech-support community you would browse to – computers, chats and forums, online communities, computers: chats and forums etc) untill you feel into the exact class you want your webpage to show up in.

After submitting your site someone will look at it and approve your site if it meets the requirements. This will then be taken up by Google and put into their database. Hey presto!

So to conclude, I hope you find some if not all of these tools priceless. Thank you to each and everyone of you developers out their who go out of the way to make our lives easier and a big thank you to Google for well being Google!

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