Category Archives: Blogging Stuff

Scour – how to make money by … searching

Scour

Ok, folks, you all know what Google means and you know just how much money they earn. It’s simple and it’s very useful for everyone: web search. You do it at work, you do it at home, you probably done it to find this page too.

So, here’s the thing about Google: although it’s free, it doesn’t earn you anything!

Here’s where Scour comes into play. This social search engine returns results for Google, Yahoo and MSN .. and the best part: it also pays you to do what you normally do anyway: to search. Well, actually it also pays you to vote and to comment, but that only means even more money.

Sure, it’s not a fortune, but when you can get $400 a year from doing … when you have to do for free anyway, why not?

Oh, and if you also get referrer points: 25% of what they make.

Just give it a try, you sure can’t lose anything: http://scour.com/invite/indy2kro.

Black Hat is getting even more popular

Ok, I am a normal person, never really thought too much about Black Hat SEO techniques since by definition is a nearly sure way to get banned from various services, but lately I’ve seen plenty of articles related to this area, so it’s hard not to wonder why this is happening. Google hacked and slashed through blogs everywhere (I didn’t really get any major hit so far, but it is still a concern).

And so I read about lots and lots of ideas, including this one on
Anthology of Ideas, which pretty much found a way to create a 3-way linking scheme using popular websites such as Technorati to raise your own PageRank.

I’m not sure PR is really the issue here, but more your general number of links. What this technique does (which I don’t find illegal or destructive in any way), is to link to people that link to you. It might sound complicated, but it’s quite normal: by linking to people who consider your website interesting, you raise their PR, their credibility in the end, and since they link to your website as well, you benefit from this as well. Generically speaking, you tight the bonds between your website and related links.

Quite smart.

How to crash IE6 with one line

Hamachiya2 found out a way to crash Internet Explorer 6 (and on some systems even the entire operating system).

<style>*{position:relative}</style><table><input></table>

A simple line (which you can test it here) – no one figured out why caused an exception in mshtml.dll (and knowing Microsoft we’re most likely never going to find out the answer to that).

Internet Explorer 6 crash

The code doesn’t have any problems on Firefox, IE7 or other browsers. Well, I hope you’re not still using IE6 – although according to these browser statistics 37.3% were still using it in June 2007.

Easily highlight nofollow links in Firefox

If you are a blogger (or if you read blogs at least), you most likely know what nofollow is (if not, read this article from Wikipedia).

Also, if you are a blogger you’re most likely interested to get as many links as you can, but avoid nofollow links (why? because they simply don’t count for search engines – yes, I know this is different for various search engines, but big G doesn’t care about them).

Comment with nofollow links highlighted

What you need in this case, is this little script to highlight links (it colors them in pink, but can be easily modified if you know a bit of CSS).

What you need in order to use this script is Firefox with Greasemonkey extension – both very easy to install.

After this, just install this little script: nofollowhighlight.user.js (1KB)

If you want to highlight the links in a different color (or add another styling, go to Greasemonkey options (right click on the monkey head from the taskbar), select Manage user scripts, there select Nofollow highlight and click on the Edit button.

This will edit the file in your text editor. What you need to change there is this line:

theStyle += "background-color: pink";

You can change for example this into theStyle += "text-decoration:line-through;"; – this will make the nofollow links have a strike through. It simply depends on what you like best.

The script is based on Gareth Simpson’s first version.

Annoyed by the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress?

Ok, please tell me I’m not the only one annoyed by the stupid WYSIWYG editor in WordPress (the Visual one). I lost 2 posts because it simply didn’t like me 😐

And after years (ok, minutes) of searching I found out how to turn it off (I sure look like a newbie by now) – and no, if you thought you can just edit a file and get rid of it, you can’t that easily, but then again, there’s an even a more simple way.

Wordpress profile editor

In your profile editing page (Users -> Your Profile) you have a check box Use the visual editor when writing. I strongly suggest you turn the damn thing off (and I still don’t get it why it’s turned on by default – it’s one of the buggiest editors I’ve seen so far).

If you want to get rid of the editor completely (you’ll end up with a simple box – not exactly too friendly, so only use this if you really know what you’re doing), you can simply delete or rename the directory wp-includes/js/tinymce/.