Leaning with Intent

Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

Have you ever been wondering what to write about because it seemed like you run out of ideas? I have seen bloggers writing about various ideas that may help others to choose the subject of their posts. I would like to do the same, and that is why I present a list of ideas that hopefully will prove to be useful:

• Write a post that will include a poll. Participating in polls is interesting to most Internet users as it allows expressing one’s opinion. Having various polls on a website can increase the loyalty of visitors, as they will feel that they contribute to the website.
• Post results from a poll that you run. Writing a post that discusses poll results is also a good idea. This way you can prove that it matters to you how your readers voted. Those who participated in the poll will surely like it.
• Reveal some secret from your niche. It might be tricky, but if you think you possess some valuable knowledge, it could be a good topic to write about.
• Post a picture/graph and comment on it. Picture is like a thousand words, so do not be afraid to use them. You might even decide to use charts as well.
• Based on the data from your visitor traffic software/plug-in comment on the visitor tendencies. There might be some interesting data, including what keywords people used to visit your site. Of course, this only works if you have a traffic statistics software.
• Create an advantages/disadvantages post. It might be about a product, service or anything else you want. Discuss what are the advantages and disadvantages of something.

Make sure you write about something you like to discuss, because if you do so then your post will be higher quality.

A few years ago almost nobody heard about social networks, or at least they were not as popular as they are today. Currently, social networks are among the most popular Internet sites in the world. I think that is because talking with other people is a lot of fun. That is why phone cards are so popular as well. Anyway, millions of people who would otherwise probably not use Internet that often are spending many hours in front of their computers. Social networks allow people to make friends with others who live very far away, possibly even in other counties. Social networks are also used to communicate with those who we know in real life. With so much recent success of these networks, the question is whether they pose any danger. After observing people socializing on the Internet, I have to say that there might be a danger that since people are anonymous, they might say things they would not dare in real life.

The most popular social networks in the world are MySpace, Facebook, Windows Live Spaces, Habbo, and Friendster. Some social networks are popular only in specific parts of the world. For example, Friendster is no longer that much popular in the Western world, but is very popular is Southeast Asia. Hundreds of millions of people are part of various social networks and this number seems to be growing.

Most shows available on the Internet were usually hosted illegally. This is changing now, and an example of this trend is Hulu. Hulu is one of the best ways to watch any of your favorite TV shows that you might have missed. It is indeed very convenient. No one wants to miss their favorite TV shows, and waiting for a rerun is not always as convenient as it might sound to some people. At this point you might be wondering about the price of watching the shows. I am pleased to tell you that the site is free to use. The quality of videos is also excellent and even allows full screen. It appears that Hulu makes profit by integrating ads in their streaming videos. This allows them to host TV shows and movies from NBC, FOX, and other networks and studios. While currently it is only offered to users in United States, I am sure that more sites like this will be created, which will be aimed at an international audience. All I have to say is that I hope that even more websites like this will be created. I think that sites of this type will become very popular in the upcoming years, because Internet users are going to appreciate them.

Very often writing a high quality and unique post is enough to ensure that people will read it. On the other hand, there are many marketers who say that most readers make up their mind if they want to read your post just after reading the title. That is why choosing the title of your post might be the most important thing to do in order to make people stay on your blog. Of course, writing high quality content is also necessary if you want to interest your readers so you should not neglect that.

There is no magic rule when it comes to choosing the title, and it depends what kind of visitors you have. It also depends on what you exactly want to achieve. A good way to attract readers to read your post is to simply make them believe that they will learn something valuable from reading it. If you have some kind of unique content, do not be afraid to clearly state so in your post title. Depending in what niche you are, there will be completely different post titles that will try to attract visitors that are interested in that particular niche. The knowledge of the preferences and interests of your visitors is definitely going to help in creating a great title. Will your visitors be drawn to a shocking title, a funny one, a puzzling one, an intriguing one? Your job is to try to figure that out because you need to know the preferences of your readers.

Many people decide to use Firefox as their preferred Internet browser due to many features not found in other browsers like Internet Explorer. One of the really useful things in Firefox is the built-in spell checker. It is a great tool that will help you spot any mistakes you make while you type in Firefox. Unfortunately, Firefox only checks the spelling on large text fields, not all of them. In order to enable spell checking for all fields, you will have to do some small modification. To do so, you should first type “about:config” in the address bar. Later type “layout.spellcheckdefault” in the filter box, and double click on preference to change value from 1 to 2.

After restarting Firefox your new settings should be applied. You will see that it works, if typos are going to be underlined in red. You can even try to misspell some words on purpose to see if it works.
This tweak will allow you to spot any mistakes you make, even if you are typing in small fields, such as when you fill out forms. From my personal experience I can say that spell checking can be very useful. However, if you really want to avoid making mistakes, you should only be writing when you feel rested, because being tired can greatly reduce your concentration.

The term linkbaiting is not new in the blogosphere. It can be also referred to as link baiting, link bait, or linkbait. In general, this expression describes the actions that webmasters and bloggers undertake in order to increase the number of incoming links to their websites. They do this because they are hoping that it will bring more traffic and increase some important ranks including Google Page Rank. Here are some examples of linkbaiting:

1. Running a contest where one of the requirements is to link back to your site from a post.
2. Commenting on other blogs hoping that the author of this blog will link to you.
3. Providing other webmasters and bloggers with free tools and widgets that they will be able to use. In case of linkbaiting, you should make sure that such tools and widgets include a link to your blog.

It is true that webmasters and bloggers have been doing things mentioned above for many years now, even before the term linkbaiting existed. There is currently a debate going on as to whether linkbaiting is ethically right or wrong. There is no doubt that bloggers have different feelings towards such practices. What some consider as spamming, others might even appreciate. From the three points I mentioned above, I do not consider any of them to be ethically wrong. However, there are more linkbaiting techniques that I did not include in this article that can rise a question whether they are ethically justifiable.

A lot of bloggers might be interested in trying to earn some money online. There is nothing wrong with that, however, it is important to avoid scams. In this article I am going to write how specifically you can check if a particular website is a scam. Great tools for this are forums that are created for this sole purpose. The website that I use the most is scam.com. This forum has almost two dozen different scam categories like: Internet scams, work from home scams, auction scams, and even religious scams. I was not reading about scams from each category; however, I understand quite well what this site has to offer.

Anyway the best way to use this forum is to take advantage out of the search box. I will give an example of Doba which is an online dropshipper. Simply write Doba in the search box. In this case, this particular query returned a few dozen results. After reading a few posts you will see that although Doba is not completely a scam, and might not be categorized as a scam by some people, the prices are so high that you will not make any profit by selling on eBay, even though Doba encourages it. I would still categorize this company as a scam, since they are selling products that are suppose to make you money, but of course they will not. This is just an example of what you can learn by checking whether a specific company is a scam.

I hope this information will make you better equipped to recognize scams. Feel free to search Google for similar websites, as there are a lot more places where people are discussing specific online businesses. There are many scams on the Internet, but we do not have to be helpless.

Very often I write about the importance of quality of content. This time I would like to say a few words about the importance of checking your spelling. Your readers who perhaps visit your blog every single day are hoping that the posts you write look professional, without any spelling errors. Posts without such errors simply look more professional and are easier to read. Visitors might not take seriously into account what you are stating in your posts, if you are making many spelling mistakes.

With the current technology it is not that hard to spell check your posts. I know many bloggers who check their spelling with the aid of text editors like Microsoft Word’s that have a built-in spell checker. It might not be a perfect tool; however, it definitely detects almost all of the errors people make. For those of you who feel that you are making many mistakes in your posts, it might be a good idea to write your posts in a text editor like Word. Alternatively, you could at least copy them to Word in order to check the spelling of your post before publishing it. You could also use the default spell checking tool that Firefox offers.

AutoComplete is a quite useful tool in Firefox that allows your browser to remember what you enter in forms. For example, you may want Firefox to remember your personal details such as name, address and email, so that you do not have to type it each time. This can save you a lot of time, especially if you fill out various forms on a daily basis. This feature is great and I use it a lot, but there are also some potential problems. One of them is when you misspell some important information such as email. Next time when you will try to enter your email, Firefox will suggest this misspelled email. That is why when you make such a mistake it is important to erase the saved form data. You can do that by going to Tools -> Options -> Privacy and clicking Clear Now. Just make sure you indicate what you want to clear. Of course, if you had any other information stored, it will also be deleted. That is why you should only use this feature when you are absolutely certain you want to do it. You should be especially careful if you have been using Firefox for many months, and possibly have a lot of personal details stored. Once you press Clear Now, all of them will be lost. Anyway, I believe that AutoComplete is a very useful feature, and I recommend that you take advantage out of it.

Handling dangerous files is definitely risky. You might receive such dangerous files through email from someone you do not trust. However, there are things that you can do to greatly limit the risk. The thing that you should be worried about is whether the file contains a virus, spyware, or malware. You can make a scan with your own antivirus software, but most people do not have a good antivirus program, and scanning with only one antivirus might not detect a potential threat anyway. If you would be completely sure that a particular file does not contain any malware you would need to scan it with at least two or three antiviruses. Since buying multiple antivirus programs would be very expensive, you might be wondering at this point what I am going to suggest. My recommendation is to visit a site like virustotal.com, and upload the file so that it will be automatically scanned by 33 best antivirus programs available. You do not have to pay anything, and you get the best protection. What else could you ask for? The only disadvantage is that each time you want to scan a file you will need to upload it, but that is not a problem if you are uploading small files.