Comic book shots and angles.

Here is a great video tutorial on different types of shots and angles that one can draw in his or her comic books.

On the the Ads’ target.

If I was not involved in the online advertising sphere I wouldn’t have probably noticed this, but this morning I visited att.com and Vonage.com. Ever since I can say that about 85% of the banners I have seen on all of the web sites I have visited, so far, are att and Vonage!

Oh noes, I’m being tracked on the web. Lol. I should probably check which company is serving the banners.

Invites - Tripwolf

Tripwolf is a traveling journal/social network that service as you guide and trip planner. The information is provided by other travelers, as well as local guides and experts.

They are only letting few hundred people at a time. So get in while you can.
http://www.tripwolf.com/invite/backdoor

Annual theme change.

This blog underwent the annual theme change. This year I wanted to go with something simple, something plain, but still very functional and pleasing to the eye. Seeing that Twitter is so big (popular), and as I mentioned in a tweet from earlier today, I have decided to mainly use Twitter, if I am going to use a micro-blog platform, at all. So what better than have a matching Wordpress theme - Blue Bird by Randa Clay.

I have made bunch of changes to the theme and I am pretty much done with reorganizing my blog. Just making it more user friendly.

Twitter Tool - I love you, I hate you!

The Twitter Tool, a Wordpress plugin, is an awesome tool. I love that it posts to my Twitter account whenever I make a post on my blog. It also provides me with the ability to make new tweets from my blog’s sidebar and from within the Wordpress administrator menu. But the feature I find most valuable is the Twitter digest. The plugin creates a blog post with the day’s tweets, thus creating a back up of my Twitter activity. This is also the feature, which makes me HATE this plugin.

The damn thing creates the digest posts, which are scheduled to appear at midnight with the days tweets, but it generates the posts 4 to 6 hours prior to midnight, right before my active time and thus missing my tweets from the day the post is supposed to reflect. I tried contacting Alex, the creator of the plugin, weeks ago, but I never received a peep from him. I told him about the problem and asked him how can I tweak the code to compensate for this problem, but like I said - not a peep.

It is a love-hate relationship.Unfortunately there isn’t another plugin like it. I guess I will just have to spend the time looking through the source code, line by line, until I figure out how it all works and what needs to be changed to resolve this headache. It won’t be the first time I have had to improve a plugin.

Ham Toss - most useless site. On second thought, maybe not!

I spend massive amount of time on the Internet, partly due to my job. In that time, I have come across a wide array of websites. I have seen a lot of useless sites, but thanks to a recent mass mail email mistake by the insoshi.com project my email became available to a lot of people, and some of them turned out to be spammer. What a surprise there, right? Anyway, one of those assholes sent out this sites - hamtoss.com. Now I know I have seen the most useless site.

You know what? Thinking about it as I write this, this site is not useless. At least not for its creator(s). Its purpose is to collect emails for that spammer. It shows you, the casual surfer, a silly animation. You like, you think it is funny, and you fall in their trap - “wanna know when we toss something new?”. You read this, seemingly harmless, words and you provide your email address. Damn that’s genius.

I think I will use one of my SPAM trap emails to see how this turns out.

I very much dislike scrapers!

I just spend 15 minutes blocking splogs and scraper IPs for jutiagroup.com. It is a pain in the rear. I have to spend time sorting through comments, that are marked as SPAM, to make sure there aren’t any good ones. Almost always they are bad, and 99% of the time they are trackbacks from scraper sites, that steal content and place it on their ads bloated sites. Do they really believe that having a trackback link makes it OK to steal the content?

Ahh, it is so annoying!!! That is the problem when you have a real site that allows commenting. You have to deal with this kind of crap. This doesn’t happen as often on this site, though. But I had one last week on my post about Alerth Thingy, now that douche doesn’t have a Google Adsense account any more. I hate this loozers.

By the way, I ended up blocking freehostia all together from being able to read content on Jutia Group. There were a lot of trackabcks from blogs hosted by them this time around. So more no longer!

Alert Thingy - maybe not!

Lately I have been hearing a lot of noise about the Alert Thingy. A desktop client, build on Adobe AIR, which allows you to monitor updates on your FriendFeed, and as a side bonus of its latest release you can also post to Twitter and Flickr. FriendsFeed, for which Alert Thingy was build, is profile activity aggregator. You sign up with FriendFeed and add the usernames to a number of web services like Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and number of other others. Then when there is any activity on the linked profiles, it is distributed to FriendFeed and any other site via API or a RSS feed. FriendFeed takes those feeds and mashes them up into one.

Image via WikipediaBut back to Alert Thingy. The app has been hyped up so much by Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, in the last two weeks that I decided to turn off my Twhirl and try it out. As I finished installing it, Twhirl had an update, so I installed it, too. Looking through Alert Thingy I found myself with very limited options and customization choices. I mean Alert Thingy counterpart, MySocial 24×7, which is a FireFox plugin, offers more options. Yes Twhirl requires two different windows for each service, but I will stick with it. Especially after tonight’s update, which added few new features, and now I can get my FriendFeed through it as well. Not that I care much about FriendFeed, at least at this time. If anyone is interested in adding me as a friend on FriendFeed, this is my profile.

So Michael, why all the hype? Other than freeing desktop space, I just don’t see how Alert Thingy is better than Twhirl.