CYBERNAUTIKA

How To Share PirateBay (Or Any Torrent) Link On Facebook

dandellion — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:56:34 +0000

Last night I tried to share a link to a torrent with my Facebook friends. Mind you, the movie that torrent seed was for is perfectly legal to copy and share. But, Facebook didn't mind.

"reported as abusive by Facebook users" is a dirty cheap lie. Message should read "censored by Facebook stuff". But we're not going to play that game.

The easiest way to workaround the censorship is to use a third site to change the url in question. Here's how:

Go to tinyurl.com
Paste your URL (address of the torrent) in the field on the site
Press the button
Copy the new URL
Paste it in the Facebook ;)

Filtering Your AdSense – Better Not

dandellion — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 06:41:59 +0000

If you have any AdSense ads on your blog, you probably know that you can filter them, thus excluding those that are not matching the content of your site. But, is it a wise idea? While it sounds reasonable to have targeted ads on your blog, it might be different in the practice.

If you check your stats a bit carefully, you'll see that one part of that traffic is just "bouncing". Those are people who came, been there for five seconds and left to never come back. Usually, most of that traffic comes to you by the search engines. Probably Google. They came via search engine, they have seen that they have missed what they're looking for and went away.

Photo by angela7dreams

AdSense is choosing ads for your site based on its content. And for that it uses more or less the same algorithm that's been used to generate search results for the visitors that bounces of your site. So, maybe the ads are not compatible with the content of the site, but they easily might be pointing to what your short-term visitor is looking for. And that visitor is just ready to leave. So give them a chance to leave via your ads and earn you a few cents. More than ever, ads that are above the fold are performing good in this case.

Sure, this is for ads on the site only, not for the ads in the feeds. Your subscribers are looking exactly for what you are saying, so keep those ads relevant. Luckily, filters for content and feed ads are separated.

And yes, as always with the ads, every blog behaves differently, so what works for one might be completely wrong for the other. Experiment!

How Not To Be Ambushed By FaceBook Chat

dandellion — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 08:08:07 +0000

Familiar scenario: You log into FaceBook and chat window starts popping-up. Everybody, known and unknown who has nothing to do is poking you for a chat? OK, here's what to do.

In the lower right corner of FaceBook page are two squares.The left one is for notifications, the right one is for the chat. Number near the small silhouette is number of your friends that are logged into chat.

If you click the square, options window will show and you can log in or out into chat. That way, you also show your presence (in)visible.There is also link for chat settings, for popping another window just for chat (so you can continue to browse and field for your status updates.

How To Download A Video From YouTube

dandellion — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:47:25 +0000

Downloading a video from YouTube or similar sites is something that pops up as a question so often. You can always reach the video and watch it, but what if you need it off-line or at a place without an Internet connection? Or if you want to edit it? Then you use one of the video downloaders. My favourite being Media Converter.

Media Converter supports conversion and downloading of files up to 100MB. Larger files (up to 500MB) are available for premium members, check the site to see the details. List of formats and sites from which you can download is impressive. I won't bother you with those details.

How to do it? Despite the number of options, it's simple. You go to Media Converter's web-site or you use FireFox add-on. In the case of FireFox add-on, you invoke it from the right-click menu option "Convert this video" or by clicking the blue arrow-like icon near the browser's address bar. If you're using the web-site, you should enter the URL of the page that contains the video.

The next steps (four of them) are the same for both approaches. First, you should choose the output format. Nice thing about this tool is that it also converts formats, saving you from using another tool to do so if you need something specific. If you don't know which one you need, then it's safe to choose avi here. If you want just to rip the music from the video, then choose mp3. Click next…

Next window offers some options for converting the video. If you just want to download it, leave everything as it is ("no changes").

Third step requires nothing from you but patience. This step is where your video gets converted and processed, which can take a bit of time.

When you reach the fourth step, it's time to actually download the video to your hard drive. Click the big blue sign that says "Download now" and you'll be presented with regular FireFox download window. You know what to click there, right?

And that's it. Video (or audio, if you set that option) is on your desktop. Have fun.

Why Do You Say ‘Internet’ When You Think About ‘Web’?

dandellion — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 06:23:20 +0000

I thought I'll never have to write this one, and I apologize to all of you who find this explanation as a surplus. Internet and web are not synonyms.

Internet is a system of interconnected computer networks. It consists, among other nifty services, of e-mail, FTP, chat, IM services and… the last but not the least, the world wide web. Web is a system of interlinked documents. It is just one of the Internet's services. Just one part of it. It doesn't matter that you can, and do, use some other services via the web. It is not the same.

OK? Thank you.

Blog Setup Checklist

dandellion — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 20:10:22 +0000

I have that weird fondness of working on a website in vivo. That is, directly on the web so that every change is immediately visible. That includes all the missteps and mistakes like crashing the theme in front of the eyes of readers, too. Now taking one step forward, this post is my personal plan and checklist for setting up this blog. It is something that I'm supposed to do on a piece of paper but this way, it may be of use to other bloggers and there is no risk of myself losing the precious piece of paper. At the end, when each bullet is checked, it may be useful as a roadmap through one category of this site. So, what should be done in the first phase of blog's life?

Name and domain Not much point in doing anything before these are known. I spent last week letting my mind spontaneously brainstorm about this. I needed something that sounds good and is more or less SEO friendly.
Instalation and basic setup Installing WordPress, going through the options page, setting up permalinks and other hard-core stuff. It is quicker if it's done before other plug-ins are installed. Also editing the "Hello World!" post and writing another one. Those will be useful in the next step. Yay! I did this one!
Basic theme Now, heading to the WordPress Theme Directory looking for something appropriate. We're looking layout not colors now! Colors and graphics are easy to change, I just look for something that is clean, has two sidebars on the right-hand side. Of course, your preferences may vary, e.g. you might want something that supports widgets. I have to check if the theme works in Internet Explorer too. I don't know why anybody on Earth is using IE but I don't want painful surprises in the near future.
Plugins This one should be easy because I will use the list of plugins I'm already using on my other site. For the start I need spam killer, WYSYWIG editor, something to make tags and feedburner to manage feeds.

image by turbojoe

Basic taxonomy It is hard to think about categorization of the posts while there is one named hello World! and the second one is been written right now. But I do have some ideas what about this blog is so I'll let the ideas clear up as we go. Categories will change over time anyway, so there is no hurry with this one.
Some pages People who come to the blog might want to know who you are and what is this in their browsers. I need about pages for the site and for the author. I like to have credits page also, to link to WordPress site, theme, all the plug-ins and maybe something other.
Starting blogroll Blogroll comes with time. No point to go over the blogosphere and collect the list of links. Blogroll is social feature and it will develop as the blog grows. But two or three links of the blogs I read and enjoy are OK for the beginning.
Theme tweaking Now we are talking about colors, images and other things to make the site visually appealing. We also talk about arrangement of sideblocks, adds and details of the navigation. At this step widgets can make life easier but most probably the basic knowledge of HTML and CSS will come handy.
Basic networking a.k.a. wireing No, not social networking. I'll save myself from that now. In the next phase there will be too much of that. Not more than it is natural when one is into these things. But here we have to make the highway for the bots. That means, connecting to Technorati, Google Analytics and Feedburner. Make the engine ping around when something happens.

Huh! I think that is quite enough job for the next couple of days. It will take a considerable amount of time so there will be not much for SEO, promoting and social networking. Those things are not important now. Still, to give my mind a bit of diversity I'll also write a post here and there. It is nice opportunity to write about blog setup while I am doing it. But, no pressure about posting frequency nor promoting the site. That is the next phase.

Hello world!

dandellion — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 10:24:17 +0000

Another one is born just couple of minutes ago. When I press save it will ping its first cry to Technorati. In some hours (or minutes?) uncle Google will send its bots to see the newcomer. In the meanwhile, plug-ins should be installed, and some layout prepared.

photo by oskay