Month: December 2007

Last Updates Of 2007

Year 2008

This will officially be the last post of 2007. What a year it’s been for this particular blog. Jeffro2pt0 started in May 2007 and since then, has continued to grow by leaps and bounds. I wanted to take a moment and thank each and every one of you for making 2007 a hell of a year for the blog. All of you who have subscribed to the RSS feed, commented on the blog, participated in the discussions and helped me out along the way have really helped to make this blog a success. I couldn’t of done it without you and I look forward to what 2008 may bring.

To illustrate the kind of year this blog had, I’ve taken the following screenshot of my AWStats page for the year 2007.

Blog Stats

There are currently 401 posts and 820 comments, contained within 15 categories and 1,872 tags.

Spam

Akismet has protected your site from 6,547 spam comments.

Stats In Total For 2007:

Stats Totals

New Year Means New Design:

As you may have noticed, the blog now sports a new design. It’s not really a major redesign, it’s more like a reshuffling/reorganization of content. I’ve removed one of the sidebars and have opted for one, large sidebar. I’ve also installed an Archive plugin and have turned the Archives into it’s own seperate page so that I could free up more space within the sidebar. I’ve made the shoutbox wider, moved the MyBlogLog reader widget to the bottom left part of the site, replaced the Recent Forum Posts module at the top left corner of the site with the Last 5 Blog Posts module and in 2008, I will add in a tag cloud. I will be condensing all of the categories into tags and from now on, blog posts will be organized by tags instead of seperate categories. Last but not least, I have widened the content area of the site by about 30 or 40 more pixels.

I also realize that the blog looks horrible in IE7, again. I will work on this during the month of January but until then, please browse my blog using FireFox.

On the backend of things, I have uninstalled numerous plugins. Most notable is the SideBlog plugin. I’ll stick to Twitter for those types of posts. You might also be surprised that I have removed the SezWho comment rating system as well as the Cliqin widget. It’s not that I don’t believe in these services, its that they weren’t being used to their fullest extent on the blog. So instead of keeping the blog polluted with stuff thats not being used, I opted to get rid of those features completely.

If you are one of the bloggers that joined Cliq or displays the Cliqin widget because of me, you now have the option to keep it published or take it off your own blog.

One other thing worth mentioning. A loyal RSS Feed Subscriber notified me today that the HeaderEntry plugin which adds copyright information to the beginning of a post when it’s being scraped or read through a FeedReader was actually keeping him from seeing what any of my posts were about. My guess is, he has his FeedReader setup to display this blog’s feed as a summary and that summary was nothing more than a copyright spiel. So, I have removed the plugin. Please let me know if the Feed returns to normal for you and thanks Lee also known as LGR for pointing this out to me.

The Forum Is No More:

The forum which is powered by Vbulletin and cost me $85.00 has been taken offline. The forum simply has not worked out as well as I thought it would. It’s actually had a negative effect on the blog. The forum has separated the forum users, from the blog users. I’m running out of time trying to update the forum to keep content fresh and there hasent’t been too many new members signing up as late. Therefor, I am going to go back to using the blog as a forum and not worry about having a seperate entity for the forum until I become uber popular. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. All of the forum posts and user data will be backed up and saved onto my hard drive so nothing will be lost. If I have a change of heart, we’ll start right back where we left off.

In Closing:

Thank you for your support throughout the year of 2007. I hope you and yours truly have a successful and happy New Year. Only four more to go until 2012!

Funniest David Blaine Spoofs

Thanks to Mark Lima, I’ve discovered the insanely humorous David Blaine Street Magic Spoof videos. A guy that pretends to be David Blaine wreaks havoc on two individuals that fall victim to more than just Davids magic. The spoofs are very well done and the reactions and language used within the videos is down-right hilarious. After watching the third episode, I had to go back and watch the first and second episodes because I couldn’t get enough. In fact, the first spoof video that was created has over Twelve million views on YouTube.

I bring to you the first installment of one of the best comedy series on YouTube.

Don’t forget to check out Episode 2 and then Episode 3. If you put this up on YouTube, I’m going to EFFING SUE YOU DAVID BLAINE!

WordPress Releases V 2.3.2

WordPress.org Logo

With just under a month to go before the expected release of WordPress version 2.3, Automattic has released WordPress version 2.3.2 which contains what else, security fixes. This release fixes a bug that would allow your draft posts to be exposed to the public. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that would occur that could give away information related to your database structure. On top of all that, this fix stops information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations.

As a little bonus, 2.3.2 allows you to define a custom DB error page. Place your custom template at wp-content/db-error.php. If WP has a problem connecting to your database, this page will displayed rather than the default error message.

For more detail on what’s new in 2.3.2, view the list of fixed bugs and see the changes between 2.3.1 and 2.3.2.

Special thanks to Alex Concha for his help on this release.

As with any new version, please upgrade as soon as you can, preferably after a fresh backup. As of this time, this blog has successfully been upgraded to 2.3.2.

Google Takes Feeds Out Of Search Results

Not sure how long this has been going on, but a post on the Google Webmaster Blog talks about the removal of feeds showing up in search results with the exception of podcast XML feeds. I for one am really happy that Google took this measure because it was becoming increasingly annoying, to browse search results, only to click on one XML feed after another without ever actually coming across the content.

As a webmaster, you may have been concerned about your RSS/Atom feeds crowding out their associated HTML pages in Google’s search results. By serving feeds, we could cause a poor user experience:

  1. Feeds increase the likelihood that users see duplicate search results.
  2. Users clicking on a feed may miss valuable content available only in the HTML page.

To address these concerns, we prevent feeds from being returned in Google’s search results, with the exception of podcasts (feeds with multimedia enclosures).

You can check out the entire blog post here.

Series Of Updates

No Shortage Of Birthdays

The Birthday Boy

I’d like to start off this post by saying thank you to each and every one of you who stopped by to wish me a happy 24th birthday. I truly do appreciate it. As you can see from the image above, there was no shortage of birthday wishes to go around. What’s funny though is that, I receive happy birthday emails all year around. I only configure the correct birth date on forums or websites that I take seriously or that I know I will be able to be apart of. So during the year, each website or forum that I signed up to for one reason or another generates a happy birthday message on some of the most unusual days of the year. How many of you guys are reminded by your inbox that it’s your birthday?

New PC Build

Speaking of birthdays, I happen to receive two gifts that will make there presence known in the new computer I will be building for myself. So far, here are my thoughts as to what I’ll be building:

On my birthday, my girlfriend purchased me a Creative X-FI Audigy Gamer card from BestBuy for about 100$. Then, I picked up a 700 Watt, RocketFish power supply via the giftcards I received. Now that those two items are out of the way, here is what I need.

Case – Thinking about getting the CM Stacker case. This thing is big, roomy, not meant for LAN parties and also has a bit of style. 2 Huge 120mm fans for cooling and plenty of bays for expansion.

Ram – I’ve made the choice to purchase DDR2 ram instead of DDR3. Apparently, DDR 3 gives you high clock speeds but with higher latency. DDR3 is also pretty expensive.

SATA Hard Drive – This one won’t be too hard to find. A low storage SATA drive on New Egg. Don’t care who makes it.

Video Card – Still undecided on this one. But it will be an Nvidia based GFX card and I will most likely not be going in the direction of SLI.

Motherboard and CPU – Not sure on this one either except that I’ll be going Intel instead of AMD. Going the AMD route would be like throwing money in the garbage.

If you have any suggestions as to which route I should take as far as single graphics card solutions, motherboards, Ram, and Intel CPUs, I’d be willing to hear them.

Ongoing Forum Discussions

Not to be forgotten, we do have a forum attached to this blog for discussions YOU want to begin. I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you a few of the discussions that are currently ongoing:

What happens…? – Mark Lima, a brand new user to Forum2pt0 has brought up the question, “What Happens When Jeffro2pt0 Goes 2.1?

Got Some New Toys – This thread is for my PC Building project. Again, suggestions wanted.

True Life MMO Messes up family – I posted a link to a YouTube video where you can hear a child being scolded at by his parents for being obsessed with his computer. It was funny to me, but you have to wonder how many families are actually struggling with this issue of their children being obsessed with MMORPGS.

My Apologies

I have to take this time to apologize for leaving the blog go post less for a number of days. Apparently I, like so many others, have succumb to the holiday season. I’ve been busy spending time with family members as well as reading books and generally, just doing things other than blogging. I plan to get back on track before the new year. I’m also hoping that I can prepare a new years gift that I really look forward to hearing your feedback on.

Also, I’ve written two posts so far on WeblogToolsCollection which have bother garnered a good amount of positive feedback. I do have a few more posts in mind for WeblogToolsCollection that I hope produces the same amount of feedback, but we’ll have to see.

Conclusion

I’m reading, writing, and coming up with ideas behind the scenes. With the beginning of 2008 around the corner, I am trying to develop a timeline or series of goals that I would like to accomplish in the blogging world for the new year. I started this blog back in May and I can’t believe that at the end of 2007, I have the opportunity to write for one of the biggest blogs pertaining to WordPress.

I wanted to take this time to thank YOU, the people who have subscribed to the blog, the people who visit this site on a daily basis, those who contribute, either by sending me a link via my contact form or by leaving a message in the shoutbox, all the way to those who post messages on the forum. I really appreciate the sense of community you guys and gals provide at this particular blog. I love being around like minded individuals who contribute to conversations. Differences of opinion are welcomed here as well.

I hope each and every one of you had a happy holiday season. I hope you’ll be here with me as we progress through the year of 2008. What will happen to Jeffro2pt0 during 2008? I don’t know, but it sure will be interesting to find out.

5 Emoticons You Have Never Seen

Ever get sick and tired of seeing the same old emoticons, over and over again? Wouldn’t it be nice to see some fresh, creative emoticons instead? In this post, I highlight 5 emoticons you may never have seen before. DeviantArt is awesome!

:Factory: by *Jtcgh Factory

Error guys… by ~Big-E Error Guys

The Legion of emoticons by *Lorna36 Legion Of Emoticons

Juicy by ~iTop-edition Juicy Top

Dangling by =synconi Dangling

What are some of the best emoticons you have ever seen?

Web 2.0 Everywhere You Look

What if the whole world went web 2.0? We’re talking about products such as Pepsi, Nike, McDonalds, going web 2.0. What would their associated logos look like? Enthree has published a page that highlights all of the Web 2.0 logos that were created for major companies as spoofs. This trend originally started on the Yayhooray Forums and then continued on from there. I have to admit, some of these logos are outrageously stylish and in my opinion, look better than the original logo.

My personal favorite out of this bunch is the Nike logo. Whoever created this one definitely has a taste for style and creativity.

Nike Web 2.0 Logo

Jeffro2pt0 Invading Your WordPress Dashboard

Weblogtoolscollectionlogo

For those wondering, if you were wondering at all, I am the same Jeffro2pt0 that wrote the post, “Technorati Lacks Authority” which is published on the WeblogToolsCollection Website. This website is one of the premiere WordPress material related blogs that show up in a WordPress user’s administration panel. We are talking about a big audience here.

Let me say that, writing this first post on WLTC has been an eye opening experience. I’ve already learned that first, since it’s not my blog I’m publishing on, it’s Mark Ghosh’s, I have to ensure that the post I write makes complete sense and is backed up by factual statements or statistics. Secondly, dealing with a big audience is a task all of it’s own. When I wrote the post, I tried to make it come across as the way I was thinking about it. Undoubtedly, it didn’t come across with the same meaning to everyone. Some people took the post one way, while others took it in another. I’ve had to go in and correct things in the article and I’ve also had to defend or re-explain my stance on the issue. As you know, I’m one of those people who has to respond back to just about everyone who comments. Unlike many other blog authors, I can’t let the conversation die, I have to keep it going!

I’m not a journalist, I’m not a reporter, I don’t know how you would classify citizen journalism or citizen media but if someone asks, I tell them that I’m just a blogger. I write things how I see them. If I’m wrong, I’m hoping that someone will step up and correct me in the form of a polite comment. That way I learn what I did wrong, and the article is that much more accurate.

At any rate, the post on WeblogToolsCollection.com is one of what I think might be many posts, depending upon how many fires I start. I have to thank Mark Ghosh for giving me the opportunity to blog in front of a WIDE audience. I’d appreciate it if you guys would send me an email sometime or leave a comment letting me know what you think of the articles I write over there. I don’t know how you would feel in my position, but I look at it as an honor to write for an established site such as WeblogToolsCollection.com You just don’t get those sort of opportunities every day.