web

I have a confession to make.

I am into “Blogging” more than I am actually into blogging.

By that I mean that I am more interested in the whole area of writing blogs, promoting content, internet marketing, search engine optimization,keyword research and that sort of thing - rather than actually writing on my blogs.

Just the same as I am more into the technology and ideas behind Flickr - rather than photography and actually taking photos.

It’s kind of like when, after playing guitar for 15 years or so I would go to see a band play and spend more time and concentration on seeing what chords were being played rather than enjoying the music.

Writing witty posts and having fun has been replaced with the technical aspects of PHP blog plugins, search engine hacking and trying to get some extra cash from what I was writing at the same time. There was a time that I was making about $3 per day from 1 page - until Mr Google blocked the ads that were being displayed as they were against their terms of service.

I have a lot of knowledge in “this here head of mine” and it’s time I did something major with it - so here is my promise to myself I made recently:

To have 100 websites active by the end of the year that earn me money.

And - the websites will be low maintenance, self perpetuating and income generating too. I don’t have the time to spend slaving over continual blog posts or networking with other “like minded professionals” either. I just want the cold hard cash!

It will take time to get this up and running - but the seeds are out there already and growing. I now have to decide on a few things to move forward. They are technical stuff like whether to use full domains like www.megatao.com or use subdomains like moneysite1.megatao.com. There are pluses and minuses to both though - but I will not bore you with the details.

I am not going to be able to quit my day job with this scheme - but if it works and I can bring in some spare cash then I will be more than happy.

There is some initial outlay for web hosting and domain names (100 domains = aprox £500 per year!) but I would hope to recoup this easily within the first month of the 100 sites being live.

Then I can go for 200 sites by this time next year!

So, unless you have been asleep all day or are reading this from another country; the main chat of the day has been “did you feel it last night?”.

I am of course referring to the Earthquake/tremor that happened at around 4 minutes to 1 this morning. The epicentre of the event was near Lincoln, which is about 105 miles from where I live - but not far enough that I didn’t feel the earth move and rumble for about 6-8 seconds.

I was just getting to the best part of reformatting my PC at this point (the bit where I realise that XP won’t validate its serial key as genuine again) when I mistook the ground shaking and windows rattling to be a ghost suddenly appearing behind me and tugging at my chair! By the time I had realised what was going on, my wife had jumped out of bed thinking it was a burglar trying to break in through the upstairs window and then rushed into see the kids to make sure they were ok.

We pulled ourselves to our senses, settled the one child that woke and my wife popped back into bed whilst I went back downstairs to see if I could find any information about the tremor on the Internet.

01:03 - My first port of call was the BBC News website. This was totally lacking any information - but bearing in mind it was only just after 1am and a few minutes after the event, I was not surprised that nothing was there.

01:05 - Reuters, Sky News and ITN news were then visited - but again, nothing to be seen.

01:06 - I logged onto my Twitter account and sent the following message:

I then jumped to the Twitter Public Timeline and picked up a message from Chris Alcock:

I did send him a reply, but he never replied to me though. I then saw a message referring to the tracking of tweets with the word “Earthquake” in on the TwitterSearch.com page and headed on over to see a glut of messages from various parts of the world reporting the quake and reflecting on the experiences of the people in the UK. Some poor chap was being sick at the time and missed it all - but he later informed me it was not a self inflicted sickness

01:15 BBC news page shows a “Reports coming in of earth tremor in west midlands area” ticker message but no real story to be seen. Still no word from the other news sites either!

01:16 I followed a link from the TwitterSearch.com list to TwitterVision and kept an eye on the BreakingNewsOn user based in the Netherlands who were providing the most information throughout the evolving news.

01:20 Twitter keeps serving up good links and information from people including the real information about the quake:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2008nyae.php

01:20 An old BBC news story about a UK quake from 2007 makes the top of the “most read” section to the ridicule of Twitter users:

01:25  The BBC post a Breaking News article with basic information about the quake and “more to follow” appears but it is all very vague and information lacking.

Conclusion

Twitter users beat the major news networks on the head last night!  I appreciate that any news story being reported by someone such as the BBC has to be checked, validated and double checked and validated before it even gets anywhere near being reported - but nearly half an hour before anything was put up is pretty poor.  The messages on Twitter were reporting the quake being in different places at different times and strengths, but until quality links were provided to actual data, this is par for the course.

Twitter might not be to everyones tastes, including mine at times, but it was very good at getting information quickly and easily from a large variety of people and services.  Twitter can be good fun if you know people on there but it can also be a lonely place too.

If you want to learn about Twitter, read the excellent guide by Caroline Middlebrook and then follow me!

“Gotta download them all!”

If you are one of those people who likes to grab content from web pages to save for digesting later, then you might be interested in this list from Mashable of Firefox plugins you can use.

It lists plugins for saving web pages, files from the pages and video content.  I would have liked to see a bit more options listed - such as grabbing MP3 files, but its a good place to start!

The Helpdesk system we use here is far from great. In fact, its slow, crashy and down right bad. Unless you add new columns to the screen layout and monitor the contents every refresh, you cannot even see that a call has been updated 20 times when the customer calls for an update! Especially when the people taking those irate calls from the aforementioned customer don’t tell you they are chasing either..

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to change web pages by executing Javascript code after they have loaded. A simple explanation would be that you can force Google, for example to have larger fonts for the links and no pictures. You can pretty much change webpages to suit your whims.

All I needed to do was to get the script to parse a table of information, identify the time that a record on the screen was updated and if it had been updated in the last 30 minutes, make the update time turn red or green if it had been updated within the last hour.

After learning XPath statements and getting through the security models behind XPCNativeWrapper, I came up with this:

1. function $x(p, context) {

2. if (!context) context = document;

3. var i, arr = [], xpr = document.evaluate(p, context, null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);

4. for (i = 0; item = xpr.snapshotItem(i); i++) arr.push(item);

5. return arr;

6. }

7.  

8. function do_rows(r) {

9. var headings = document.evaluate(“id(’rltr_”+r+“‘)/td[3]“, document, null, XPathResult.ANY_TYPE,null);

10. var thisHeading = headings.iterateNext();

11. var row_hours = thisHeading.textContent.substr(9,2);

12. var row_mins = thisHeading.textContent.substr(12,2);

13. var row_day = thisHeading.textContent.substr(0,2);

14. var current_date = new Date()

15. var current_day = current_date.getDate();

16. var current_mins = current_date.getMinutes();

17. var current_hour = current_date.getHours();

18. var time_diff = (current_hour*60 + current_mins) - (parseInt(row_hours)*60 + parseInt(row_mins))

19.  

20. if (time_diff <= 30 && (current_day == row_day))

21. {

22. var paragraphs = $x(“id(’rltr_”+r+“‘)/td[3]“);

23. paragraphs.forEach(function(paragraph)

24. { // Loop over every paragraph

25. paragraph.innerHTML = ““ + thisHeading.textContent + ” “ + time_diff + ““;

26. });

27. }

28.  

29. if ((current_hour == row_hours) && ((current_mins - row_mins)<=60) && ((current_mins - row_mins)>=31) && (current_day == row_day))

30. {

31. var paragraphs = $x(“id(’rltr_”+r+“‘)/td[3]“);

32. paragraphs.forEach(function(paragraph)

33. { // Loop over every paragraph

34. paragraph.innerHTML = ““ + thisHeading.textContent + ” “ + time_diff + ““;

35. });

36. }

37.  

38. }

39.  

40. // do the main loop for each row

41. var i=0

42. for (i=0;i<=30;i++)

43. {

44. do_rows(i)

45. }

For the technical gimps out there, it reads the XPath data from the table into a variable called headings and then grabs the data into another variable called thisHeading. A few calculations later, it rewrites the data with bold tags either side if it meets certain criteria.

Not the prettiest code in the world, but it works!

I got an email on Friday from Rapidshare.com in Switzerland asking me to remove my Rapidshare Blogsearch page. Here’s the email:

To whom it may concern,

we have recently become aware of your website

http://megatao.com/rapidshare.php

and your use of our company’s intellectual property on this website.

The trademark “Rapid Share” has been registered both in the European Union (trademark number 004753828) and the United States (trademark number 78717634). By using our company name/logo on your website you are therefore violating our company’s right in the trademark “rapid share” as well as our company’s copyrights.

We demand that you (a) cease and desist using the aforementioned material and (b) remove any content that concerns Rapidshare.com.

We consider your website an attempt to harm our business. If you insist on continuing your illegitimate service, we will take legal actions.

Best regards,

RapidShare AG - Abuse Team
abuse@rapidshare.com
|2695|

RapidShare AG
Gewerbestrasse 6
CH - 6630 Cham
Switzerland

Not being one to laugh in the face of authority or cause a kerfuffle, I contacted them and we agreed that I could change the name of the file to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. They also suggested that I add a disclaimer in case I get in trouble for supplying links to copyrighted material. So thats next on my list too.

So Rapidshare Blogsearch now becomes RSS Link Search. I have set up a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file to allow people to still navigate directly to the page and carry on using it without a hitch.

It kind of came at a good time as I am working on something else a little bigger and better, so I will now concentrate on that rather than re-designing the page as I was going to do. Shame though as I was going to easily get enough from the Adsense earnings to pay for my next year of webhosting. Still, it will still be there “bringing home the e-bacon”.

All I need now is for Index, the catalogue company (now Argos) to email me asking me to remove all my index.html and index.htm files and I will truly be screwed!

I have just finished my Rapidshare Blogsearch interface!

If you came here looking for Rapidshare Links, check it out

Click here

Powered by PHP, Simplepie and some late night blurry eyed coding by the seat of my pants, it searches and displays RSS feeds from blogs and sites that contain links to Rapidshare downloads. You can enter your own search criteria too and it will filter the feeds accordingly.

I still have a few ideas up my sleeve for this, so expect the design to change and a few extra bells and whistles added!

But for now, enjoy - and let me know what you think!

Click here to download an amazing Rapidshare guide showing how to get files quickly and for free!

Since finding the joys of using Rapidshare, I have been using a forum called Th3zone.com to find rapidshare links. But one site is just not enough for me!

Step up mighty Google and help me out!

1. Copy and paste this search string into Google:

“rapidshare.de/files/”|”rapidshare.com/files”

2. Add your search criteria at the beginning or end of the string. eg:

free ebooks “rapidshare.de/files/”|”rapidshare.com/files”
or
“rapidshare.de/files/”|”rapidshare.com/files” free ebooks

3. Browse the list of results and find your Rapidshare links from there.

You can also click the Cached link next to the results to go back in time and bring up pages from the Google Cache where the original page with the link has been removed or updated.

You can also paste the search string and criteria into the Google Blog Search page as there seems to be lots of links created there too each day.

Tsk! To think that I have been using that slow Wordpress editor for so long…

I posted a question over at the Wordpress support forums in search of a web based editor I could use to post to my blog from work - without actually ever visiting it.

Not that this blog is subversive or contains illegal material , slanderous comments or items of a sexual nature . It’s just that I have started a new job and don’t want to make it obvious I am a blogger, that I blog and yes, I might be blogging about YOU.

The moderators over at the WP support forums came back with this site: WriteToMyBlog is a web based editor based on TinyMCE which allows remote posting to your blog - but via an excellent WYSIWYG editor. The editor is much better than the ones supplied with Blogger and Wordpress and it even handles a copy/paste from Microsoft Word - the enemy of working HTML!

I welcome my new interface to MegaTao.com and hope you will all heed my advice to start using it.

You can get a TinyMCE plugin for Wordpress too though - but I shall be sticking with WTMB.

I recently spent some time downloading new episodes of The Simpsons to watch during my lunchbreak at work.  Yes.  I work in front of a screen all day and then at the time I am supposed to be resting my eyes, i sit and stare at another screen for an hour - then go and stare at the first screen again until home time.

I am usually a Torrent FanBoi, but using a combination of these two sites, you can get lots of episodes - and quickly too!

• http://www.keepvid.com
• http://www.dailymotion.com

1.  Go to Keepvid and drag the Keepvid Lite shortcut to your browser toolbar.  This will allow you to click the shortcut when watching a video on YouTube, Google Video, Dailymotion and many more - and then get the option to save the video file to your hard disk for watching later.

2.  Go to Dailymotion and search for Simpsons or any similar cartoon (family guy etc).  When you find an episode or video you want to save, click the Keepvid lite shortcut and right click and Save As on the links provided to store the video on your hard disk!

I came to this method after finding the dailyepisodes.com site where they link to the majority of Simpsons and Family Guy episodes on the Dailymotion site - but I could’nt see how to integrate it with the Keepvid Lite shortcut though.

You might also need to get yourself a .FLV player such as the excellent VLC to watch the content.

Add the DailyEpisodes site to PeekVid.com and you might be sorted for a very long time.  Its a shame that Keepvid support for PornoTube.com has not yet been implemented!  Maybe this firefox extension is the answer…
Not wanting to be too controversial - Is it just me?  Or is Family Guy funnier than the Simpsons?