BlogMunch

Thank You, Philip!

This morning, I fired up my gmail to find a piece of excellent news. I am the monthly winner of the Contestblogger $100 Draw. Wow, that really make my day. Thanks, Philip.

For those who don’t know Contestblogger.com is the Big Daddy of the online contest scene. Its site is full of every kind of contests and sweepstakes you can find. You can practically stay all day at the forum joining any contest that caught your fancy. As they say, the more you play, the higher chance you win.

Philip is also very concerned about the (mis)conception of online contest in general. Whenever someone mention online contest or especially sweepstake, the first impression will be a scam. Philip try hard to filter out all the scam like the infamous Ashwin Khanna contest scam. Recently, he also wrote an well thought out article about avoiding contest scam.

I don’t know how he did it, but he has now expand a single Contestblogger site to a network of contest site, like my favorite Photo Contests site. As far as I know, he is doing this alone. I can’t even manage three of my (not so successful) site and he is doing this while being a Marine of the US Army. Very efficient.

So do you want a chance every month to win $100? Set a permanent linkback on your blog/site to any of Contestblogger’s network of sites and wait for your name to be call. It will come.

Incredible stop-motion animation - MUTO

Of all the things I am amazed by creative people on the web, stop motion animation is one of them. These animations takes sooo much time to make and the results are always inspiring. Here’s one I found today. From what I can see the creators just use white paint and markers to draw each sets. All their drawings are surreal art a la Salvador Dalí. The full website is http://www.blublu.org/sito/video/muto.htm. I embed it here so that I can watch it anytime I want.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Wow, incredible stuff…

Some fun stuff to give out…

Although I am quite busy with a couple of projects nowadays, I still find some interesting sites that I want to recommend. Here they are. Enjoy!!

The first one is a great one if you play Scrabble. Especially if you play online Scrabble. The scrabble solver will let you input any tiles you have on your rack and the tiles in play. Then once you click "Get Solutions", it will give you all the possible solutions available, sorted by the highest points descending order. Now, you can cheat all you want in online play to become the Scrabble L33T Godz.

Playstation 2 Emulator

If you have played any console emulators on your PC, you would know it is very difficult to get a perfect emulation even with a console like NES. Now, the best emulator for PS2 is the PCSX2. At the moment, the compatibility list have 1858 games of which 748 games are playable. That’s very good for such a complex system. Just a warning, the installation can be quite technical and requires a dump of your bios from a PS2 system (although, if you look hard enough, you can find a bios online too). Then, you will need a image of the PS2 game you want to play. Try it.

Colorzilla

There will always times when you wonder "What is the bloody color for that logo/background/font color?" Now you can just use a Firefox extension Colorzilla (From the maker of FoxyTunes) to find out the RGB value. This is especially valuable if you want to blend your Adsense ads with your color scheme and you have no idea what is the various colors you should use.

Lastly, just look at this video. If you are a poker player, you will understand all the bad beat you have cannot compare to this. Watch it all the way, it gets more amazing as it ends.

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I DoFollow you…really

(credit:Yael Fran)

After the recent debacle with Google on PPP and its insistence on Nofollow tags for paid links and advertistment, I decided to find out more on this Dofollow/Nofollow tag.

What is Nofollow

Nofollow is apparently used so that spiders reaching the link will not score or rank the link. But recently, it can also mean “do not follow this link”. The initial purpose is to prevent comment spam, but Akismet stats show the tag have not reduce spam comments. Wordpress starting from ver. 1.5 have also set the Nofollow tag for all comments and trackbacks on WordPress blogs.

Join the movement

There are now a “You Comment|I Follow” movement started by Randa Clay. I like what he has done and decided to join the movement too. I believe in giving out incentives, especially if a blogger takes the effort to comment on your blog. Why shut down the linklove?

I use the Dofollow plugin from Semiologic. It’s really simple. Just install and activate. No flickering with different options. All your nofollow tags from comments are gone.

To know if the plugin is working for you, you can download the firefox extension NoDofollow. So on your blog or any site on the web, you will see nofollow links in pink and dofollow links in blue. As you can see, the links in my blog comments are now blue.

Okay, now some more resources about nofollow/dofollow:

• Ultimate list of dofollow plugins - Banish nofollow from comments and trackbacks
• CommentHunt - Search engine for dofollow blogs.
• Dofollow community @ Bumpzee
• How To Identify That A Blog Has NoFollow or DoFollow Comments
• Technoratic: tagged Dofollow
• Does Dofollow Influence Your Willingness to Comment?
• 13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck

So make a choice Follow or No Follow?

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good reads from my feeds

I run through my feeds to bring you some of the best reads from last week.

1. How to Profit from Google’s War on Paid Links - Hot topic at the moment about Google cracking down on paid links. A few blogs like Daily Blog Tips and David Airey are wary about the situation. But Ben Cook though about profiting from the war zone. Good Stuff.
2. Making Real Money Online: Expanding Your Operations - Chris Garrett have some original ideas about making money online. This is the 3 part of a series. Read them all!
3. Splash Pages: Do We Really Need Them? - I have been limiting myself to blogging about Smashing Magazine, or else I might be writing about them every time they post. Good collection of splash pages, as usual.
4. How To Decide How Often To Post On Your Blog - I myself have ask this question and blog about it. Good to know there are others that are facing the same problem.
5. Mashable’s Best Resources Online - Not a read per se, but the best list Mashable have chunk out. A squidoo by Seth Godin. Didn’t know he is into list too.
6. Open Sourcing My TechCrunch Work Flow - Learn a lot from this article by Marshall Kirkpatrick, an ex-writer for Techcrunch. Be the first to report news by creative uses of rss feeds.
7. Registrant Search - Finally, a tool to search for the domains owned by someone. Be it your friend, colleague or your enemies. Can be easily used for unscrupulous acts. Having it as a paid report lessen the impact slightly.

That’s all, folks….(Looney tunes).

I will be handing out good reads and links every week. Subscribe to the BlogMunch Feed to read them first.