OK, I’m a day late, and every blog in existence has already announced it, but… OpenOffice.org 2.0 is out. Looks and “feels” much better than the 1.x versions. I haven’t tried doing so, because I’m not much of an Office user, but people are saying that OO.org 2.0 reads old MS Office documents better than new MS Office versions do!
Whether you’re using Windows or Linux, you should really try this (assuming you need an Office suite at all - I, for one, use it only about half a dozen times a year). It’s free, it’s easy to use, and it opens your old documents. It’s not harder to move from any MS Office to OO.org than it is to move from MS Office 97 to 2003, for instance.
Also, it supports OpenDocument, which MS Office doesn’t (at least yet). That may well turn out to be the format of the future…
Yesterday’s Google PageRank update was the main SEO-related happening, of course, but there was another: they also updated backlinks.
Backlinks are what you get when you go to Google and search for “link:address” (e.g. “link:www.thetlog.net“). It was a bit annoying that MSN Search and Yahoo Search showed many backlinks to my (less than 3-months old) blogs, but Google didn’t. Until yesterday.
That update also made Silktide SiteScores go up a bit, which is always nice.
Again, my gaming blog seems to be too new to be affected: it still has a PR of 0, and 0 backlinks. 
Oh well, that’ll change 3 months from now…
Really, you have to read this Ars Technica article. It’s almost unbelievable.
Excerpt:
Jack Thompson, a Florida lawyer who became infamous in 1988 for accusing Janet Reno of being a closeted lesbian with a drinking problem and a strong candidate for blackmail, has recently been making waves with his crusade against the video game industry. Earlier this year, he launched a wrongful death lawsuit against Take Two Interactive and Rockstar Games, makers of the Grand Theft Auto series, claiming that the video game was directly responsible for 18 year-old Devin Moore’s shooting of three police officers in 2003.
Jack recently appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes trying to drum up support for his efforts. However, this publicity was apparently not satisfying enough for him, as he went on to try and create more outrage on his own. Attempting to emulate Jonathan Swift, he issued a “Modest Proposal” that offered a US$10,000 reward to anyone who would create a video game featuring Osaki Kim, a father whose son was beaten to death with a baseball bat by a 14-year-old gamer. The game would feature Kim extracting brutal revenge on the video game industry itself, including beating game company executives to death, removing their heads and urinating on their brain stems.
And the best comes after that…
Again, I have to be completely unoriginal and credit Darren for the information.
Google is, at this very moment, updating the visible PageRank (PR). You can see the update almost in real time by using the Future PageRank Tool - it shows the PR for a particular URL in several of Google’s servers. A few hours ago, the PR for this site had only been updated in 2 servers; right now it’s been updated in 6 of them.
A little explanation: Google updates the PR continuously. However, the visible PR is updated only every 3 months or so. That means there’s not any jump in hits from Google when they change this site’s PR from 0 to 5 (it was 0 because it’s less than 3 months old). They do it this way because, otherwise, SEO people would spend all the time changing little things and checking how they influenced PR.
PR, by the way, is determined by how many sites link to yours, but also by how high those sites’ own PR is. So, a link from a top site (without the “rel=nofollow”) is very, very desirable.
As I said, this blog now has a PR of 5. My philosophical blog and my personal blog will both have a PR of 4. My forum is PR 3. And, unfortunately, my gaming blog will remain as PR 0, apparently… it’s too new. Oh well…
And on the 19th of October, 2005…
Not bad… 
(news from SpreadFirefox)
Saw a post about using article repositories to increase traffic to your blog on An AdSense Blog: Make Easy Money with Google (an useful blog, despite being IMO poorly named).
I’ll have to try this out; if everything goes well, I may have to write a part of the “Blogging Tips” series about this…
The method is a bit dumb (calculating it in relation to the AOL-Weblogs Inc. deal), but…
How much is your blog worth?
This very one is “worth” $16,936.20! I’m rich and I didn’t even know it!
OpenBSD is 10 years old today!
OpenBSD is my favorite Unix variant, although due to laziness I use Linux on my work desktop. But for servers… it’s a dream. Fast, secure by default (instead of closing stuff after installation, everything is already closed down, and you open what you need), lightweight, with the best man pages of any Unix in the world (which other Unixes almost never update, or simply forget about)… it just works. pf, the firewall, is incredibly easy to configure (makes Linux’s iptables look like a sadistic joke, if you ask me… yuck!) yet powerful. It doesn’t include everything but the kitchen sink as part of the OS, just mostly the OS itself - the rest can be installed as packages, ports, or from source.
All my sites, along with my internal proxy server, mail server, DNS server, etc. run on a single OpenBSD box. I’ve tried other server OSes, but I always come back to OpenBSD - it’s everything I want, and perhaps as important, it’s no more than what I want.
So… Happy birthday, OpenBSD!
(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)
Chitika eMiniMalls (affiliate link: I get some extra money if you subscribe using that link; that money does not come out of yours, you still receive 100% of your earnings) is a new-ish product-oriented banner ads service. At this moment, you can see it in action in the top banner, or, if you prefer, as a smaller banner on The Games of my Life, on the right sidebar.
A lot of people are reporting great results from those, typically better than AdSense earnings; I’ve just started using them, a couple of days ago, so nothing to report… as of yet. They work very well because they’re “dynamic” (move the mouse cursor over the tabs and see for yourself), and also because they have nice pics of the announced products. They draw attention without being annoying.
Note: the code they give you, by default, has contextual advertising (that is, “understanding” what your page is about, and showing relevant ads) turned off. It’s that way so that they’re compatible with AdSense ads (which disallow other contextual ads on the same page - it’s in their rules). That means you have to manually edit the code (it’s easy) and say what types of products, or products themselves, you want the ads to show. That’s very useful for some kinds of blogs, such as political ones, or blogs about blogging, because they’re not directly related to a type of products, but you can figure out that your visitors are probably interested in a particular product type. On the other hand, if you don’t have AdSense on your blog, it may be better to turn on the contextual advertising.
The Revolution begins here. Saw the link on Slashdot.
Very interesting article about what will be my main console in the next generation.
Following the recently-written part 17 of my “Blogging tips” series, I’m beginning to wonder whether that series deserves - and would be better served by - a blog of its own.
It’s got 31 parts as of now, which is certainly a lot of content. And I could start the new blog, then post one part a day - “free” content for a month! It would specialize the Tlog more into “technology”, and a “blogging tips” blog is certainly on demand - although there are already a lot of them, and some are probably better.
The argument against doing it, on the other hand, is that the series itself is limited - that is, it will end. I doubt it will have 50 parts, so it’s past half way. So, after a while, the posts would end. A blog needs life, needs new articles.
Then again, there will always be blogging-related news to write about. I must think about this…
Opinions, anyone? Should I keep the “Blogging tips” series, and related articles, here, or should I start a new blog with them, and stick to technology here?
(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)
How do people blog?
In the most basic sense, there are two kinds of blogs: personal ones (also known as “everything but the kitchen sink” blogs), and topical ones.
Most people start with a personal blog, although they may not see it as such. They call it original names like “random thoughts”, and talk about what whatever they feel like. Nothing wrong with that… but those blogs tend to have one post a week, and after a year or two, the blogger gets tired and shuts it down, or it begins to have 6-month intervals between posts.
The other possibility is when you really have something to say, or have a subject you want to write about. A lot. Computer games, politics, cheese dip… You choose. Sometimes, a blog has more than one topic: for instance, there may be a blog about computer games and comic books, or about movies and music. The possibilities are limitless, which is a phrase that always sounds deep.
Continue reading ‘Blogging tips #17: when to start another blog’
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