You install the plug-in and click on your “Media Library” section and you can see a new column called “Smush.it” this uses the Yahoo service to compress images while losing very little image quality, I can’t even notice the difference in image by looking at it, even though this plug-in reduces the image footprint by 33.6% in some cases.

My page load times on pages with large images was improved greatly from 5 seconds to 3.5 seconds just after Smushing the images on that post. This performance gain is outstanding and this plug-in is one of my highest recommended ones for Wordpress bloggers who upload photos and images to their blogs.

-Dragon Blogger

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Submit To:

There are only a few day’s left to enter the Its a BluWorld contest where you can win one of five incredible prize packages.

Personally I would love to win the BluGamer package, because Final Fantasy XIII will only be released for the Xbox360 and PS3 and I need an Xbox360 to play the game. If I were to win I would be shouting about it on all my social media networks on how amazing it is that I actually won a contest for the first time.

BluFrog the makers of the great tasting and natural energy drink wants someone to win each of the five prizes and offers many ways to enter the contest.

You can submit a tweet on twitter with the URL: http://bit.ly/UiiJy and the hashtag #bluworld in your tweet, to be entered into the contest. Promote the contest and blufrog.

Or, you can leave a blog comment on http://itsabluworld.com/contests/ and mention which prize you want to win and why.

You could win either the BluGamer package which is a full Xbox360 bundle, an all inclusive trip to New York City, Chicago, Orlando or Aspen Colorado, and these packages include some great activities and hotel stays.

As you can enter the contest without even having to provide an email or sign up for anything, I recommend everyone enter and have your chance to win either a cool vacation or a new console system package. So what do you think of the contest? Have you entered, which package are you interested in winning?

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Submit To:

As a Tommy Lee Jones fan I decided to rent this movie and see what it is all about, the movie follows the detective Dave Robicheaux played by “Tommy Lee Jones” as he investigates recent killings of “working girls’ in Louisiana. The movie is based on the book In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead and after watching the film and then reading some other reviews on it, I realize the film does leave out several parts that are supposedly better explained in the book.

John Goodman plays a thoroughly disturbing role as the pimp Julie ‘Baby Feet’ Balboni, and he plays this character so well that the viewers will seethe with hatred for the character, as does Peter Sarsgaard as Elrod Sykes an actor who has drinking troubles and comes to rely on Dave for assistance and eventually to help him with sobriety.

The movie follows an intricate crime plot as somebody is killing girls who worked for or are associated with Baby Feet, the interesting aspect of the movie is the ghost of Confederate General John Bell Hood who is an idolized historical figure for Dave comes to him several times in the film to help provide guidance. We also learn that Elrod Sykes also saw the Confederate General at some point in the film, so we don’t know if the General is a ghost or a figment of their imagination.

The movie was good and Tommy Lee Jones does a fantastic job, the film plays with a little bit of a slow pace, and Dave’s methods of interrogating suspects is a little controversial but it further shows that not everyone on the side of the law is so black or white, there are shades of grey in how people handle things.

Dragon Blogger gives this film 3 out of 5 stars.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Submit To:

PayPerPost v4.0

You also don’t even need a popular or high traffic blog, as if you look at the screen shot above, one of my blogs has garned 6 opportunities and this blog only has an average daily traffic of 20 visits per day and still earned almost $50 in 30 days with advertising opportunities. It would seem though that my 2 blogs which have had opps are in the Entertainment categories and have a PR of 2 or higher, my poetry blog is a PR3 but has not earned any opportunities yet, and my personal blog which is a PR0 has also not garnered the attention of any advertisers yet, but this will change in time.

Now if you are an advertiser looking to get your message or product promoted online, you can Advertise On Blogs through PayPerPost V4, and choose only the blogs that meet your criteria. This isn’t a system where you just put a bucket of funds and it is grabbed by first come first server bloggers that meet the basic criteria, you can choose which blogs you want to advertise on, and you manually approve each and every taken opportunity to make sure it meets your satisfaction.

Clearly PayPerPost Version 4 in operating less than 60 days is proving itself to be a valuable option for bloggers and advertisers, and if you have not check out PPPv4.0 yet, then I highly recommend you do.

-Dragon Blogger

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Submit To:

I found plug-ins to provide shadow effects, curve text, render all sorts of patterns.  These plug-ins make Paint.NET much more efficient and useful at doing graphic art work, but still are shy of being as full featured as Adobe Photoshop, still for a free paint program based completely on .NET framework you will be surprised at just how powerful this paint program is.

To install these plug-ins, make sure you first download and install Paint.NET

then open the “Effects” folder where you Paint.NET installation directory is.

Unzip all of the .DLL files directly into your Paint.NET Effects folder and restart your program, and you will see all of the new options in your drop downs.

Enjoy, and let me know if you find any that I haven’t found yet, you can click here to download the Paint.NET Plug-ins

Here is just a screen shot of some of the plug-ins in the Render Dropdown:

-Dragon Blogger

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Submit To:

Here is my follower chart for last 30 days:

Here are my most commonly used Hashtags in last 30 days (Of course #FollowFriday) is #1.

You can see how many mentions you are getting on twitter, I only have about 1800 followers on twitter, but the site claims that my tweets have potential to reach 13,000 twitter accounts, I assume this takes into account retweets to other peoples followers and does averages to factor these numbers.

You can even see my most trendy “Subjects” in my tweets, which are all related to my random twitter poetry game in the top subjects.

Twitter Analyzer, is one website you should check out if you are interested in looking at your twitter stats, trending and patterns on twitter, it also will show you trends/patterns of your followers as well.

-Dragon Blogger

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Submit To:

The latest version of TweetDeck which is Version 0.26.4 has several clear features that stand out from the last version, including these is the notification to register so that you can sync your tweetdeck columns between multiple computers, which is a nice feature for people who run the application in several places.

After signing in you will notice a “From” option right at the top, and now Tweetdeck can manage multiple twitter profiles simultaneously and allow you to easily flip back and forth as to which profile your “tweet” originates from. This is in addition to managing a facebook profile and being able to use Tweetdeck to post as your facebook account. You can manager additional accounts by clicking on Settings and the Accounts tab.

Also in you have some new General Settings including “Show Follower Count in Tweets”, which displays a little # under the profile pic showing how many followers each twitter user has who shows up in your columns. This is good for people to see how much reach their followers have and can play well into specific targeting of mentions and other social networking tactics.

Tweetdeck also changed the word “Replies” to Mentions, which probably more accurately reflects a tweet that mentions your twitter account, not all reply’s were really replies, when most of them were retweets anyway.

You will also notice a new “What is popular in this column” button at the bottom of your columns, when you press this button, you will see a popup with the most popular hashtags and mentions for the column. This is ideal for finding trends that your followers are talking about, and is very useful to join in on conversations with groups of followers.

One feature I noticed, and I don’t know if it is new with this release is the “Filter” button at the bottom of columns, with this button you can instantly search all tweets in the column for specific “keywords”, and filter out if anyone is saying anything. To test it I did a quick search for the keyword “food” and saw all tweets mentioning that word.

Some things I noticed is you have to go into Settings / Services menu now to switch back and forth between which URL shortening service you want to use, you can’t do it at the actual Shorten URL button anymore. Tweetdeck also really should implement a “dating” feature for tweets and a column for “scheduled” or “queued” tweets, in addition to maybe using a URL tracking service and displaying some analytics on your clicks. If it were to implement these last two features, then I would have no reason to continue to use Hootsuite, which is still used as my alternative twitter application since Tweetdeck lacks these features.

-Dragon Blogger

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Submit To:

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is based off of the best selling novel with the same title and focuses on a German boy name Bruno whose father is a soldier during Nazi run Germany in the early 1940’s. Bruno’s father is a high ranking soldier and is relocated to run a concentration camp, his entire family is forced to move into a home that is located within a mile of the camp itself.

The film is all about the innocence of Bruno as he learns that the farmers wearing Striped Pajamas are different and not really farmers at all, his boy like innocence is maintained through the whole film though as the story darkens and he starts to learn what is really going on, his courage and commitment to his new friend are unfailing.

A touching and moving film that shows the decency and caring of children, with the horrible conditions forced upon Jewish people in those times. The film simply was stunningly emotional to watch and is heartbreaking at times. If you enjoyed The Kite Runner, you most probably will enjoy this film but bring tissues, it is a very sad movie.

Dragon Blogger gives this film 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Submit To:

Some interesting things though, PayPerPost Version 4.0 just went public and live out of Alpha in the past month and I netted $16.25 on my dragonblogger which is pretty good out of the gate.  SocialSpark between CPC and Paid Opps was my biggest earner, and if you count all IZEA company earnings, I netted about $54 dollars just from IZEA offers for June.  Adsense made me another $20 which is the easiest earnings since I don’t have to do anything, it just earns by itself.

This was my first month in my 10 months of blogging to be contacted by SponsoredReviews with a paid opp for $13, so I accepted it just to see what it was like and how it fared against other systems.  I think SponsoredReviews has potential, but many cheap and low quality advertising opps are the norm there.  I also netted another $6 from a few AssociatedContent articles, and though it isn’t really blogging, it feels like it.

Here are my full monthly breakdowns, I hope to make double this in the month of July.

-Dragon Blogger

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Submit To:

I have been a big Steve Martin fan since I was a kid and have enjoyed virtually all of his comedy shows, movies and stunts over the years. I was also a fan of the first Pink Panther movie with Steve Martin who I thought provided the humor and comedy not seen since Leslie Nielson in the Naked Gun movies.

So I was excited and ready to see Pink Panther 2 which recently had come out on DVD, my five year old son had also wanted to see the movie and since the movie was rated PG it seemed like it would be even better than the typical PG-13 movies he always wanted to see in the Superhero genre.

Pink Panther 2 turned out to be a fair movie, it wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible. It lacked the charm of its predecessor by having Inspector Jacques Clouseau be a little to obsessed with innuendo’s and stereotypes which tended to make his character less likeable in the second films. I thought some of the scenes were a little too much like retreads of the original, though I though John Cleese did a good job as Chief Inspector Dreyfus.

I actually liked the 2nd half of the film much better than the first half, and some of the fun of watching Ponton and Clouseau spend a few minutes making fun of the pronunciation of JoJoba was pretty funny, I myself was making fun of that word when I visited Hawaii for the first time and learned all about the plant.

My son laughed at several of the slapstick bits in the film, and appeared to enjoy it very much, which shows that the film was geared toward younger kids, but the innuendo’s are a little too much. Even though they are over a kids heads, as a parent I thought they just weren’t needed in the film.

Dragon Blogger gives this movie 2.5 out of 5 stars, it could have been a lot better. Steve Martin is still very funny with the role but they need to make him more likeable if they make a third film.

-Dragon Blogger

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.

Submit To: