Going away..

Hey,
I'm going to be gone for a week on a family trip.  It's only to Weston-Super-Mare, but still it's a pretty mice place at the end of the day.

I would appreciate any suggestions you can make towards my blog.  How could I improve my blog? Anything in particular you would like to see?

If you do have any suggestions just e-mail me (nexus5.01@gmail.com)

Anyway, I'm going to get stuff ready.  See you in a weeks time guys!

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ISP's movement to stop piracy...

I must say, it's about time ISP's have seen that they actually need to communicate to irradicate something like piracy, as it is happening on such a wide scale. Piracy has been around just about as long as public internet, people always want something for free - it's human nature, is it not?

First off, ISP's are saying they will be sending letters to the users warning them that their connection is being used to download illegal content, in my opinion this is a good idea as some children/teenagers often download illegal content (movies, music and games) without their parents knowing, using the "three strikes and your out" approach is also a very respectable decision, as like I stated earlier the actual payer of the subscription may not be aware of this activity happening.

Obviously, another aspect of this that has not been brought forward as of yet, would be the invasion of privacy. Monitoring what people are downloading would involve the ISP's "checking" the packets being sent through your connection. Now obviously this will include every webpage you go on, which mean passwords, e-mails, bank details etc. may be checked, would you consider this an invasion of piracy?

As far as Torrentfreak know the ISP's that are expected to be included in this reduction of piracy scheme are rumored to be Virgin Media, BT, Orange, Tiscali, Carphone Warehouse (AOL, TalkTalk) and BSkyB. If you know any different then please do send me an e-mail (nexus5.01@gmail.com)

Anyway, I would love to hear your thoughts on this issue!


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Think my blog could be improved?

Let me know: nexus5.01@gmail.com
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Chris Pirillo

Some of you may of heard of Chris Pirillo.  Chris is a fellow blogger and a self made internet entrepreneur.  I've been following Chris for around 3 months now and often dropping in on his live stream.  His live stream is defiantly worth a visit you will normally catch him talking about something tech related or recommending new software/hardware to his viewers, Chris normally tries to aim the subject of talk to the average PC user, people how have some idea of computing but may need a little help or just want something to make their life a little easier/more entertaing - if you can't make it to his live stream or just don't have the time to wait around for something to happen, then I would recommend subscribing to his YouTube channel.

Due to Chris using uStream, he has weekly giveaways sponsored by uStream itself.  This is normally just a free webcam but not too long ago, Chris was approached by HP and asked to giveaway a HP Dragon Notebook to one of his viewers.  This is not the first time Chris has been approached by big names - Chris used to be a host on "TechTV" which dramatically boosted his audience, this was along time ago but still Chris has as many as 500 people watching his live stream, which offers up great publicity when it comes to companies wanting to get their name out there, so keep an eye on his lives stream or YouTube videos as he may just be giving away another Latop. ;)

Chris is currently developing his custom wordpress theme (which can be downloaded for free) which goes away from the traditional wordpress themes by adding extra functionality by incorporating Twitter updates at the top of his page along with many other little add-ons. Chris is also (along with his wordpress theme) developing a Social Relevant Network, meaning you can find people with the same interests as you, he has a very interesting idea of what he wishes to incoporate (here)

Cheers guys!

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Think my blog could be improved?

Let me know: nexus5.01@gmail.com
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For the web developers...

I've decided to make this entry something I wish I had when I first made my web page. Being a webmaster can be hard for anyone, that's why these tools are here to help make the little things easier so you can concentrate on bigger things.

Utilities

favicon.cc
A favicon as some of you may know is the little icon in the address bar:



This is Bloggers favicon, these images are 16x16px and can be very awkward to make, especially if it's your first time. favicon.cc gives you a simple box containing a 16x16px grid, a color pallet and the ability to draw one frame at a time (If your planning on making an animated favicon that is). Using the pallet tools you just select your color, draw your image on the grid and well...that's it really.

If you want an animated favicon then the process is now different apart from the fact that you just press "Append new frame" after drawing, which takes you to a new grid where you can draw the second frame. Now to me this free little utility was priceless, without this I would either have a really boring favicon, or I would be stuck with Drupals default.

Also to note, if your a big fan of the Creative Commons license, favicon.cc let you publish your creation under the CC license.

GICKR
This cool little utility lets you create your own .gif files for free! As with anything like this they have placed a 10 image maximum rule. Basically you upload 10 images from your PC (Flickr support is soon to be added) tell is the size you want the animation and the speed you want the end animation.

I have used this service many times, mainly for the small animation but still, it works, it's free and it made my life a hell of a lot easier.

Sumopaint
Sumopaint is in essence a free online photoshop. Fair enough it doesn't have every single filter that Photoshop does, but it sure is close. Sumopaint lets you use layers, filters, various brushes and then finally when you have created your master-piece you can download it as a high quality jpg. Oh, did I mention there was also no sign-up required?

I don't know about you but this is pretty amazing don't you think?


Extensions [Firefox users only unfortunately]

Firebug
"Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page..." - Firebug description.

This tool, really is indispensable, using this tool you can find edit any entity on any site, this is good if you trying to debug your site or just want to see how something would look if you changed it. I use this tool pretty daily, it didn't take me long at all to get used to the features it provides. This is definitely a recommendation for any webmaster or page designer.

Web Developer

"Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools."

As you can see from the image to the left, this add-on give you the ability to change any aspect of the site. Regardless of the fact that the shortcuts on the menu are built for the Mac in the image it does in fact work on Windows. This and Firebug, when used together really do make a good team and make debugging or testing new things for your site extremely easy.


I wont comment on anymore due to the fact that I have no used the other tools yet, but feel free to go to the Firefox Add-ons page and try them yourself!


Tips
These tips are for pretty much optimizing your website or just handy little utilities you may not of known about. Most of these services are provided by Google, so if you don't already have a Google account (Which you more than likely will if your reading this). However if you don't have Google account click here to register one.

Googles "Webmaster Central Blog"
This is Google's official blog, I would recommend subscribing to their RSS feed, they have some really useful tips and hints for getting your website optimized for their search engine and others!

"The Google Trifecta"
Google have released 2 services free for use by any webmaster, these three services are Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer, these three tools together have been rightfully dubbed "The Google Trifecta" hence the heading. Using these three tools in conjunction with eachother can improve your sites rating and posistionof your website in the results.

XML-Sitemaps
"A sitemap is a way of organizing a website, identifying the URLs and the data under each section." - XML-Sitemaps definition.

Sitemaps should be named "sitemap.xml" and placed in the root directory of your site. This will help search bots find their way around your site easier as they have guide, whereas if you don't have a sitemap it's like throwing them into a dark room and told to find the relvant information.

It takes 2-3 minutes to get a sitemap generated automatically, this is definatly recomended and for a 2-3 minute job, it goes a long way.
dmoz
dmoz is the service that drives your search engines. A world-wide community submit their own or others sites into the directory. If you have a site and it meets the dmoz requirements (here) then just navigate through the catogories on the front page of dmoz and keep browsing through the catogories (for example if your site is a tech-support community you would browse to - computers, chats and forums, online communities, computers: chats and forums etc) untill you feel into the exact class you want your webpage to show up in.

After submitting your site someone will look at it and approve your site if it meets the requirements. This will then be taken up by Google and put into their database. Hey presto!

So to conclude, I hope you find some if not all of these tools priceless. Thank you to each and everyone of you developers out their who go out of the way to make our lives easier and a big thank you to Google for well being Google!

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Think my blog could be improved?

Let me know: nexus5.01@gmail.com
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Flock Browser

I've recently just introduced myself to a new browser known as Flock.  Now I have no idea just how I came across it but I can tell you that I'm glad I did.  As I was looking at Flock homepage I wanted to switch but the only thing holding me back was the fact that I didn't want to leave me beloved Firefox behind.

This was mainly due to the fact that I have add-ons on Firefox that I use all the time, it was then that I saw "Mozilla" on one of the pages, a low and behold there it was. Flock is built on Firefox, this mean you can use all of your add-ons with Flock, that you would normally use on Firefox!

I downloaded the beta version (based on Firefox 3) and was amazed at the speed even though it had all of these extra features it didn't bog it down one bit.  So after a bit of playing around I finally got all of my account sorted and configured and now it's easier than ever to keep up with Digg, Facebook etc.

I got Flock the same day I started blogging here at Blogger, I saw the option to use the built in "Blog editor" and took it upon myself to start blogging as it was just made easier by Flock, I know love blogging and sharing my experience with people.

Two other services that Flock introduced to me were Twitter and Evernote - both of which I use regularly.  I would never of started using any of these services if I had never found Flock.  I would recommend this to anyone who has quite a few accounts at various different places, it's easy and has built in features for many sites such as:

• Digg
• Gmail
• Blogger
• Facebook
• Youtube
• Picasa
• Twitter
• Photobucket
• Flickr
• Pownce
• Piczo
• Blogsome
• del.icio.us

The list just keeps going.  If you wondering just like so many other people are "Where's MySpace?" I can tell you, the people at Flock are working on MySpace integration.  Media Bar is another built in feature that will allow you to display all of the images/videos at the top of the browser, this can be set to retrieve media from RSS feeds or the current page, I currently use it for keeping track of my YouTube subscriptions.

Another cool feature of Flock, I choose to use is the Web mail service. This is compatible with Gmail, AOL and Yahoo and will check your e-mail every x seconds (whatever you set it to - default is every 20 minutes) and alert you when you receive a new e-mail.  The fact that they have built this into the browser so seamlessly has made it a lot easier and has saved me disk space as I now no longer have any use for any e-mail software. 

The only bad feature of Flock would be the fact that Google gears does not yet work on Flock as it is still in Beta, but apparently when it comes out of Beta it will work 100%.

So really, if your looking for an all-round powerful web-browser that works on a PC (Windows or Linux) or a Mac... 

Then Flock is for you.

Drupal 6.x

Well I must say, I have only been using Drupal properly for the best part of 3 months now and I love it!

Drupal is an Open Source platform used for many different sites but mainly for community based sites.  Before Drupal I could make a basic site, but nothing special.  Now using Drupal I have a fully fledged site with a small but growing community.


Why do I prefer Drupal over other CMS's?
I have used many different system such as Joomla, Plume, Elgg and Dolphin and as great as they are I also found myself going back to Drupal.  This is mainly because it is amazingly easy to maintain/administer and everything is laid out as you would expect it.

Drupals community is also very dedicated, if I need any help to do with Drupal I will post and small description and add anything else that may be relevant and within normally around 12 hours I have a helpful reply, this is where I would normally have problems with the other CMS's not because they wasn't friendly but because with some problems for example the layout of a certain page, it required a lot of work to get it done and installing some module that you were only going to use that once.

Drupal after installation is a simple template, it has a very basic navigation bar.  So basically when you first install Drupal you have web page of sorts, not a very elaborate or big web page but a basic one.  Expanding a Drupal site is easy, to add a feature to Drupal (for arguments sake we shall add a blogging feature) this would require you to access the admin page, goto modules and click to box next to "Blog" when you have saved your setting you will have an option in the navigation to submit a story to your blog.  It's that simple.

To further expand your site, with options that are not baked into Drupal you have to download and install modules, these can be found on the Drupal site, there are thousands of modules to choose from and vary from adding features such as a "Gallery" for each user complete with albums, to features like advanced CAPTCHA.


Who would I recommend Drupal to?
I would recommend Drupal to anyone seeking a personal or a professional level site with maximum customization and excellent usability. Drupal really is for anyone whether they have a very good knowledge to web developing or very little knowledge, but I can guarantee that the latter will learn a lot during their time with Drupal. 

So to sum up, if your looking for a powerful foundation for your web page then Drupal is probably the best your going to get.  However if you are considering switching to Drupal I would recommend reading a bit about it here.

Heres the drill...

Hey guys,
Well this is my first blog entry on the all famous "Blogger" anyway.  Basically here you can find out all the latest news, update etc for the TWCollection (The Twilight Collection) if you don't know what this is then your reading the right blog.

Basically The Twilight Collection (which can be found here) is an Open Source social community based around EA Games "The Sims" games and it's expandability via custom content. 

As well as giving members a free and safe environment to share their creations and build up fan-bases it is also showing that Drupal can be used for many different uses with limited knowledge of web developing.  To begin with I wasn't really that good at web-design, I could do it really well but I wouldn't know how to make a log-in form, comment boxes etc. but after around 3 months of using Drupal, I have built up a small web page that is slowing growing and developing a small group of followers.

Anyway, TWCollection is a free service provided by Twilight Services which at the moment also offers and free proxy service (which can also be found here). 

TWCollection will always be free to it's users, possibly at a later date we will enable the users to host donation packages but apart from that we will always be free and offering high-quality custom content.

We do hope to form partnerships with other sites whether they be Sims related or not. 

Anyway, I'm going to get back to being geeky.  See you soon guys!

-- Nexus

Blogged with the Flock Browser