Or, If you’re buying domains with the intention of selling, this list will also be very helpful!

1. Check if your name is available. InstantDomainSearch provides a fast way to check without having to reload the page. (encrypted version)




2. Find a Registar to purchase your domain with. I’ve registered domains on Godaddy, Netfirms and 1and1, and the only I still use is 1and1. I’ve never had a problem with them, and I have to like their great prices and fast support.

   If you’re a teenager like me and don’t have a credit card, don’t sweat. Lots of domain registrars accept Paypal, or you can just ask your parents to help you out.

3. Use Valuate to calculate your domain’s value. Valuate is a free and automated domain appraisal service that gives you an estimated value of your domains. It your domain name’s keyword search frequency, keyword cost per click (CPC), how many searches, how much simliar domain names sold for and other factors.
   
   Even if it values a domain name in the three digits ($000) or higher it doesn’t mean you should jump over to your register and quickly buy it. I put in ExpensiveColleges.com and ExpensiveCollege.com and even though no one would ever use ExpensiveCollege.com for a site it was still appraised $700 and the other at $290, mainly because of the search frequency. (I own both of these btw)

   Estibot also does the same type of thing, but you’re limited to 10 searches a day and can’t enter multiple domains at once.

   

4. Once you purchase your domain name make sure you set it on private registration! Unless you turn this on all of the details you used to pay for the domain will be publicly available. Some laws may require companies to display their registration information, but if you’re an individual and don’t want all of your visitors knowing where you live, it probably is a good idea.
   
   Some registers will provide private registration for free and other can charge up to $30 a year for the same thing. That’s another thing you should take into consideration when choosing a registrar.
5. If you’ve paid for a hosting plan along with your domain name you can get started and start adding content on your site once your name is available. Depending on the TLD, this can take up to 72 hours, but for some extensions it can be a few hours.
   
   If you’re not ready to add content you can “park” your domain and earn money instead of having it sit around. Parking domains simply means displaying ads based on your domain key word. So if I park YourPowerBoat.com (which I own) ads would be displayed for power boat auctions, boating sales e.t.c

   I personally use Sedo to park my domains, but all parking services pay around the same per click and do the same thing.

   
   

   An Example of a Parked Page

Hopefully I helped some new domain buyers and some remember these domain purchasing tips!

Let me know if you have any questions or tips of your own!

I’ve created this neat little site to display some of my domains which I’m selling, using my awesome domain www.Porfolio.tc! .tc is actually the ccTLD (country-code Top Level Domain) of Turks and Caicos islands.

I used the awesome HTML template by LoewenWeb, “Domain Broker” and tweaked it a bit.

If you’re interested in any of the domains on the site don’t hesitate to send me an email, I’d be happy to discuss any reasonable offer!

Like the other post, I’ll give you something to think about and I’d like to know your view.

Some of us feel we belong on Earth to be a doctor or an electrician, like our parents aspire us to be. Or some of us who are religious feel we’re here to reproduce and keep the human race alive. I’m not talking about that though, I’m wondering about the BIGGER picture, why the human race is here at all?

If you believe that God created us, I’m really interested because I can’t possibly come up with an answer. The world was doing fine with animals alone, and look at all of the problems we’ve caused for the millions of species?!? I just can’t think of why God would create humans, we haven’t really helped anything in Earth overall except ourselves. (You can argue we care for animals or something, but they did just fine and better for thousands of years without us)

The Evolution Theory of a monkey evolving into a man could be possible as well. But then we have to think what was the point of animals in the first place? The Earth was fine without them as well, so I’m a bit stumped how they got there and why.

I’ve heard the argument that animals are here for humans, but if animals evolved from humans they could’ve have been around for humans?

Very deep… Fire off in the comments!

Don’t get me wrong I love Christmas, even as an atheist. I feel Christmas is a great way for family to reunite and share together as one. Yep, I said it. I don’t only enjoy the gifts!

Going back to the whole selling Christmas items, I feel it removes some of the impact of celebrating it and turns it into more of a business opportunity. Should be there a law that restricts people to only selling decorations a few weeks before a holiday?

Regardless of that, Christmas is approaching and if you celebrate, go out and buy some hand painted Christmas ornaments or go and buy a tree!

TIP: You can click on any of the images and they’ll be enlarged with a lightbox. If you don’t know what that is, try it!

Colored Stadium

By iUneWind

Botanica

By Phanox

Aurora Borealis

By Titusboy25

The Trip

By Titusboy25

Please comment if you know of any high quality awesome abstract wallpapers and I’ll include them in the post!

Why is Google spelt wrong? Isn’t google spelt with just one L? This is so confusing! Well actually today is Google’s birthday.

The two Ls represent Google’s 11th birthday. Happy B-day Google!

For more of Google’s Holiday/Special logos, click here.

Upload Robots provides a simple and beautiful file manager with the ability to sort files into groups and search, something most other file sharing sites don’t have and haven’t done as intuitively.

Aside from a beautiful design and user experience there are a few things I wish they had. Marketed as “an online thumbdrive,” they really should have an iPhone app that shows your files and allows you to attach a link to your file in Mail and store files. It would also be nice if they had integration with social networks like Twitter and Facebook to post your files.

Interview

• Nicholas: What is your policy on illegal files like music and movies?
• Upload Robots: If we know of any illegal files, we will delete them immediately. More info at http://uploadrobots.com/terms
• Nicholas: What happens when you max out your storage space?
• Upload Robots: You can no longer upload files, and you get a notification via email as well as on UR. With pro accounts [you get] plenty of space. If you need more, you can contact us and we could work out a deal. (120 GB of yearly storage for Pro accounts.)
• Nicholas:Any plans on creating an API?
• Upload Robots: Yes, sometime in the next six months
• Nicholas: What file formats do you support?
• Upload Robots: Any file type.
• Nicholas: Thanks, and best of luck!

Demo and Photos

If you’re looking for a simple and affordable way to share files, Upload Robots is the perfect option.

Kanye West! You did it again, made the front page of YouTube, there are 8,017 articles about you Google News and a trending topic on Twitter! And according to Times Online, President Obama called you a “jackass”

What basically happened was Taylor Swift (who I love, shhh) was getting an award a the VMAs and she starts her little speech about how grateful and excited she is to be receiving the award and Kanye West runs onto the stage, grabs her microphone and says:

“Taylor, I’m really happy for you, and I’m gonna let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time”

(Video after the break)

So I first thought that this was a stunt, but based on his previous history, it could be real… An example below:

There’s also another one, but I can’t remember it right now. (comment please!)

BTW: 50 Cent makes a comment about all this on Much on Demand:

“I wish he would come take one of my awards so I could black his eye in front of everybody,” he said on MuchOnDemand.

Do you think this is staged or just Kanye being himself?

The transition from Elementary to High school: you’re excited and anxious yet scared and nervous at the same time. You know it’ll be great and suck in other ways. Eventually all that anxiety comes to an end and you being your high school career.

What’s it like? I can’t tell you that, you’ve got to find out yourself. I asked a bunch of my older friends what it was like and the results of my consensus were heavily varied. It depends on what district, neighborhood, country you live in, or the connections and school to you go to.

One thing I everyone can know is that in the first week you should try to meet as many new people as possible. In my school, people came from 30 or so different schools (150 9ers) so not that many people already had a group that they hung out in. Since everyone is just getting to know the place, they’ll generally all be willing to hangout.

Another tip is not to goof off and talk in class, somehow I’ve managed to follow this one. Lunch, in between classes, before school, parties; go wild, but keep it cool in class. At least for the first month… so you’ve set a good reputation with the teachers.

Those are probably the only useful tips I can make. Of course there are other basic ones like not forgetting your school supplies on the first week, getting to class on time and all that other junk.

Tips using Facebook, Twitter and Blogs as a Research tool

I’ve also come up with three modern ways to find information for a project on the web.

These tools can be useful for basically any type of project. If you you’re doing a project on John A. MacDonald’s (first Prime Minister of Canada) life you could use these tools to get info to write a paragraph about what people think of what he’s contributed to Canada nowadays. Or if you’re doing a World Religion course you could use Twitter search to find out what people generally think about religion nowadays.

Important: As with all research, use multiple sources! This is one suggested source of additional material.

Using Twitter for searching for crowd-sourced research

Twitter is a great way to find out what your friends are up to, however most people don’t realize power it has from the functionality of searching everyone’s posts in real time.

You can search Twitter at twitter.com if you’re not logged in or search.twitter.com

Using Facebook for searching for crowd-sourced info

The difference between searching Facebook and searching Twitter isn’t that great, but you can search your friend’s wall posts, videos, notes, links, status updates and photos. The downside to Facebook is that a large portion of the users have public status updates turned off and you can’t see them, unlike Twitter.

You can access Facebook search by logging in and seaching in the top right hand corner.

Using Blogs for searching for gathering crowd-sourced info

Blogs are a longer and mostly more formal way of getting information, but as real time as Twitter or Facebook and sometimes not as much info. Google Blog Search, Technorati and IceRocket are all great blog search engines. Google Blog Search and Technorati both provide charts showing how many blog posts

Anyways if you’ve got tips of your own for people in high school or other great online research tools for crowed sourced info, please comment below.

[Image via Seeing-Stars]

In geek-speak, the site is heavily powered by AJAX and Javascript. In normal peep speak, this means everything on the site will load without you having to reload your browser or load a new page. Pretty awesome, I know, I know…

So besides that super cool feature, what else is in stock?

Features here now

• iPhone Optimized site – Yep, another new design for your iPhone or iPod Touch. (Thanks to WPTouch)
• You won’t see ads after your 20th or so visit, as a thanks for coming back. (Or you’ll just have to comment/subscribe in the future)
• Faster page loading. I’m using JavaScript to Footer, Script Compressor, WP Smush.it (smaller image file size) and WP-Minify
• Page Peel. Just eyecandy, but really cool.
• Full AJAX/Js site. The entire site will load real time without having to refresh your page (even comments, try it out!)
• Social Networking icons. I gotta give big props to komodomedia for releasing these sexy icons.

Features coming soon.

I’ll be updating the list, and you can click “Plugins” in the footer to get back here.

Uh, things like a YARP that show related posts are really easy to implement, you know right? Yes, nichmtalkingtohimself, but because of the theme’s nature, activating them causes “Internal 500 Error”(s). I’m working to make them compatible, and I’ll cross them off the coming soon list as I do.

So keep checking back or just subscribe to the RSS Feed.

So what do you think of the new design?