BotHack

How to Make your Own Cell Phone Holster

LeVoltz — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:00:22 +0000

Now a days, everyone seems to be looking for a way to save some money. As easy as it may be to try and save money by not getting a cell phone cover, don’t. Cell phones are so expensive; the best way to protect them from scratches and nicks is to keep them in a cell phone cover. If you would like to save some money, why not consider creating your own cover out of fabric.

If you were to go to the store to buy a cover, it would most likely be made out of vinyl. If you wish, you can use vinyl to make your own cover, or pick a fun fabric to make something a little more unique. To make things even easier, consider using a fabric with a little bit of stretch to it.

Purchase a portion of clear plastic as well. This plastic should be just thick enough to provide protection for the phone, but not so thick that it is hard to sew. A great place to pick this up is a local home improvement store.

To begin, take measurements of the phone. First, measure the distance from the top most part of the phone screen to below the final row of keys. Next, measure the entire width of your phone. Cut the clear plastic to match these measurements. Next, measure the phone from the top part of the pnhone screen to over the very top part of your phone and just about 1/3 of the distance down the back portion. Cut a piece of vinyl to match these measurements. Finally, measure from the bottom row of keys and around the bottom portion of the phone and all the way up to the upper most part of your phone. Cut another piece of vinyl to match this measurement.

Begin by sewing the bottom part of the clear plastic to the piece of vinyl measure from the bottom. Next sew the top vinyl piece right to the top most portion of the clear plastic. Next, sew a Velcro strip or down to the underside part of the top piece (the portion that wraps right around the back). Now, sew yet another piece of the Velcro to the back part of the vinyl. You should now have a stitched piece that fits around the cell phone. It should fasten at the back.

Use a small piece of colored elastic in the same color of the vinyl or fabric you are using for the cover. Ideally, the elastic will be ½ inch in width. Cut two lengths of elastic, each just a bit shorter than the length of the side of the phone. As a guideline, try and make the elastic and inch from both the top and the bottom of your phone. Don’t forget to figure in the volume controls if there are any located on the side of the phone.

Sew in the elastic by attaching to the front side of the cover. Sew the opposing side of the piece of elastic strip to the backside. Cut a small slit to allow for your phone charger. For a finished look, consider stitching this slit.

To add welt, be sure to do so prior to sewing on the elastic strips. Sew it around the complete perimeter – both the back and the front. By attaching a piece of colored elastic vertically on the back portion of your phone, you will be able to easily attach and remove your phone to a belt. Alternatively, use a small piece of metal, formed like a small tongue depressor to fashion a pocket. Fold the metal in approximately in half. Using glue, attach one half to the interior of the pocket. Use the remaining side for attaching the phone to your pocket, belt or purse.

25+ Inspirational Blog Designs

LeVoltz — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:38:26 +0000

It’s time for an inspirational post that will sure take your breath. This time we are going to look at 25+ of unique blog designs that set themselves apart from the rest of the blogs out there on the internet. These designs would undoubtedly inspire a lot of designers about the endless possibilities of our creative minds. Please go ahead and get inspired with these great designs.

Note: This list is totally based on our opinion and so there might be some blog designs that you might not like, on which case you are free to comment your list here. Please make your opinion heard. Similarly if you know of a design that should have made this list, please drop us a comment and we’ll include it as extra.

1. Boompa

Nice layout and love the water paint as background

2. 10 Steps

Blue color is used in a very good way and love the layout and cute thumbnails

3. Justbcoz

I like the header and the footer

4. Dieout

Another interesting header and choice of color is strangly cool.

5. Gaduman

Nice cartoon header

6. Sew Chic and Unique

The colors and writing style of this cool mom just captivate any stumbler to this beautifully designed blog.

7. Get Back To Work

Grungy and cool blog

8. Kris Colvin

Interesting use of paper clips and cool art in the footer

9. Juxt Interactive

Unique background and interesting layout

10. Leffetcrea

Nice natural colors beautiful header and good use of jQuery

11. Social Snack

Cool header the size of a full site

12. Leg Work Studio

Very white but nice navigation system and cool backgrouand hand drawn images

13. Miasto Fantastyki

Nice and simple cool structure and good use of black and white colors

14. Mark Forrester

Another animated character driven site and love the footer

15. Muchasmaracas

Nice header and good use of images blending well with the background

16. Single File Rock

Cool animated header and the colors are amazing

17. Paper Jet Wednesday

Cool layout and nice backround. Beutiful big font on the menu.

18. Ryan Mcmaster

What can I say, cool background.

19. Jay World

Clean and simple looking blog with good layout and easy navigation menu

20. Zinaz

Nice colorful blog

21. Sing Star Blog

Nice use of full image

22. We Critique Designs

Clean and with a touch of textile and I like the tag on the header

23. Stephen Kui

Beautiful header and use of colors

24. The 9513

Simple 3 layout blog with magazine style. Clean and nice

25. Visual Designer

Cool red coloring and nice big footer

26. W3sh

Good use of dark colors and attractive layout I also like the logo

27. Yanko Design

Cool dark wood texture used effectively to allow the content to shine

28. Gustavoolmedo

Natural colors and cool use of drawings to attract attention. attractive footer.

Shutdown Your PC At The End Of iTunes Playlists

LeVoltz — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:37:28 +0000

If you are a nocturnal creature like me and would doze off in the bed, listening to music. There are lot of chances that your PC would be running all night, though all the songs in your iTunes playlist gets over.

NightTunes, a simple system tray application for Microsoft Windows that automatically turns your PC off once your iTunes playlist is completed. You can also configure the application to put your computer in standby/hibernation mode.

Once NightTunes is installed, Nighttunes is started automatically every-time you start iTunes application.

Check the ‘Active’ button in the window that appears as shown above and specify what needs to be done when the iTunes playlist is finished. Then choose your playlist in iTunes and start playing. When all the songs in the playlist have finished playing, NightTunes will execute the specified action.

Free Directories To Submit To: Get Hundreds Of Inbound Links

LeVoltz — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:13:46 +0000

Are you looking for free directories to submit to? There are literally thousands of web directories available today. Almost every day a new web directory is being created and it is difficult to judge the quality and relevance of these websites. But you never know which website will be ranked high by the search engines when the next round of indexing happens.

Today the site may be free and ranked low but next week the same site may be ranked high in the search engines with high page rank and become a paid service! So, how to judge free directories to submit to?

Here are some factors to help you judge the free web directories

1. Are the directories search engine friendly?
2. Do the web directories provide static text links to the website? Many directories use javascripts, which are not search engine friendly. So you won’t get any SEO benefit. But if it a high traffic web directory then you can still consider placing your link on the web directory to get targeted traffic.
3. Has the directory been around for a long time? Search engines value older directories more than newbie sites.
4. Quality of the web directory.
5. Quality of sites linking to the directory.
6. Human edited directory, response time to questions.
7. Are the directories listed in the top search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN?

A Few Top Directories That Are Search Engine Friendly

dmoz.org – The Open Directory Project
yahoo.com – Yahoo Directory
botw.org – Best of The Web Directory
sbd.bcentral.com – MSN Small Business Directory
joeant.com – Joe Ant
tygo.com – Ty Go.com
skaffe.com
wowdirectory.com
goguides.org
01webdirectory.com
abilogic.com
allthewebsites.org
topicalbeach.com
sitesnoop.com
web-beacon.com
yeandi.com
rlrouse.com
elib.org
portalboost.com
linkopedia.com

Some are free directories to submit to and others accept only paid listings. Some like DMOZ are difficult to get into but once your site is listed you can expect a big boost in your rankings and traffic.

Many of the directories on the list are highly regarded by the search engines and getting listed on them gives your site more credibility, visibility and a better chance to get higher ranks in the search engines.

These directories are crawled frequently so your sites will be indexed lot quicker. These one-way links are much better than reciprocal links in terms of seo value and your site is sure to rank better in the search engines. With thousands of free directories to submit to you can get tons of one-way links pointing your way some of them from top-quality web directories. With so many links search engines have to take note and your rankings will dramatically improve.

By including attention grabbing titles and key word descriptions your website might even get some amount of traffic. Most important if the human editors do not modify your descriptions you can a lot of links for the desired keywords and phrases, which gives you an added boost in the search engines.

Do not neglect the newer web directories especially niche directories even if they do not have page rank or search engine rankings. Niche directories that cater to your particular area of interest will tend to attract people who are looking for what you are offering. So it is a better match and you can expect highly targeted traffic to your website. So, when you are looking for free directories to submit to do not neglect the niche directories.

Interview with CEO Evan Williams on Monetizing Twitter

LeVoltz — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 03:29:02 +0000

I have a high degree of admiration for Twitter’s CEO, Ev Williams. At the Web 2.0 Conference he was interviewed by John Batelle, where he asked what everyone wants to know, “How will Twitter Make Money?”. The answer that Ev gives is an example of why he is such a successful entrepreneur.

He says that they focus 97% of their time in making Twitter “better”, instead of looking of ways to make money, then he subtly hints at the point that the “magic” of making money is on having a large user base. He understands that without a large and growing audience, you can’t make money at all. Just like Microsoft, Google and any other resilient business, you must have a large installer base, so that you can reap your riches. What good is Twitter if only a couple of users are on it? However, Evan Williams understands that if they keep making Twitter better and they keep attracting more-and-more users, whatever monetization strategy Twitter comes up with, can be successful because they will be able to tap into an “existing” large customer base. They have USERS. They power is in having not someone, but an entire community of thousands to millions of people use your technology, service or product, so that you can make money.

My 2 cents

25+ Highly Detailed Web Layout Tutorials

LeVoltz — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:33:53 +0000

Adobe Photoshop has become the standard tool to create web layouts. When designing for the web, using other designers tutorials to help yourself grow in Adobe Photoshop is a great way to grow in both confidence and technique. In this post, Levoltz showcases a numerous web layout tutorials that are both perfect for Beginners and for advanced users.

How to Create a “Worn Paper” Web Layout Using Photoshop

Hosting Layout #2

How a Simple Layout Can Be Mixed ‘n’ Matched with Patterns, Photos and Backgrounds

Photo Portfolio Web Page Layout

Creative Studio Web Page

Old Paper Layout

Manilla Grungy Web Design

Making the ‘Clean Grunge’ Blog Design

Design a Beautiful Website From Scratch

Web 2.0 photoshop layout tutorial

Design a Cartoon Grunge Web site Layout

Creating A Professional Magazine Web Layout

Modern Website Design

Sound System Studio Web Layout

Create an awesome portfolio layout

Modern Web 2.0 Web Layout

Full Photoshop Web Design – Journal

Design a Unique Grungy Website Layout

Photographer layout – Portfolio layout

Corporate WordPress Style Layout

Premium wordpress photoshop layout

Creative Design Layout Tutorial

Design a Clean Business Layout

Create a Very Simple Portfolio Web Layout with Photoshop

The iPhone’s Limits For Reading The News

LeVoltz — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 08:13:55 +0000

The good news first: Josh Marshall and the good folks at Talking Points Memo are working on a mobile app for the iPhone and Blackberry and it’s likely to be free! Josh has a lot of good ideas about what the app is going to be like. In his post, this bit stuck out to me:

…these mobile platforms may eventually become dominant ways to read the site, perhaps even rivaling the number of people who read TPM on the web. It would provide resources for building these different applications and customized versions, which isn’t cheap.

As a rule, I say never say never with technology. If anything, the minute you say building a better phone or news-reading platform can’t be done, it’s then destined to happen. So, in this case, I won’t say it’s impossible, but as the iPhone and computer are now, respectively, I think the computer will be a much more comfortable way of reading the news.

I love my iPhone but it definitely has its limits and I tend to use it to read the news when I don’t have my computer and/or a stable internet connection handy. The problem with the iPhone is that you can’t really skip around the internet as fast as you can on the computer. This is partially because there isn’t a large keyboard on the iPhone like there is on the computer. But also because even on a good day, a strong 3G connection isn’t quite as comfortably fast as a strong wireless or broadband connection. Additionally, there’s something about being able to have open tabs on a computer that makes reading the news much more pleasurable —I think the sensation has to do with the fact that some news and feature sites update automatically and you can notice as they do while focusing most of your attention on something else. That just doesn’t happen on the mobile phone browsers.

These critiques could (and I bet will) change sooner if not later but as it stands now I think the optimal way of surfing the news is on the computer, not the iPhone or Blackberry or whatever.

How to Display Facebook Status on Wordpress

LeVoltz — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:38:58 +0000

How you can Display your Facebook statuses on your Wordpress Blog

If you are hosting on a Wordpress blog that blocks installation of plug-in, but you want to show your Facebook statuses, pay close attention. This article will teach you a proven method to help achieve the task you desire. This method uses the Wordpress RSS widget as well as the Facebook status feed. If you have your own self-host Wordpress blog, you can still use this, however there are some better plug-in that you may be interested in. Some that might be a lot easier and nicer.

Follow these steps to achieve the desired outcome that you wished to get.

Step 1

First off, you most log into your Facebook, and place your cursor under profile. Once you have clicked profile, look for something called Mini Feed and once you’ve found it, click on See All.