Warning all Blog Farmers!

Some people have "Blog Farms" -- hundreds of Blogger blogs created for the specific purpose of milking AdSense dollars out of random visitors.

Usually such blogs are forgotten parked in one remote corner of the Internet since it's not activately updated and cultivated.

NEWS: Blogger has recently stepped up deleting such blogs after a grace period.

What's happening is Blogger is inviting the owners of such blogs for a CAPTCHA verification. If you neglect typing in the CAPTCHA characters and telling Blogger to stop, your blog will be deleted before you even know it.

That's a good thing to keep the Internet free of blog spamming.

But the downside is, Blogger does that to perfectly legitimate blogs as well, like it happened to me. Since I do not spam and keep this blog updated on a regular basis that was not a problem with me.



What about you? Have you updated your Blogger blog recently? Don't be surprised if after a few months down the road you try to log in to your blog and Blogger informs you that your blog has been locked or deleted since you did not respond to their call to validate and prove your identity.

WORDS OF WISDOM

"Your time is limited; so don't waste it living someone else's life."

~ Steve Jobs

TOC with Thumbnail Page Sketches

I like this innovative way of presenting a TOC with the thumbnail sketches of the Chapter title pages. Good job, SitePoint!

"Consulting" too much...

The verb "consult" is overused in technical documentation.

Why say "if you don't have a TV signal, consult with your TV company" instead of "if you don't have a TV signal, call your installer or the TV company"?

We're not really "consulting." We're just giving them a call. That's all.

It gets worse when we tell people to "consult" with inanimate objects!

"If the parts don't fit, consult the parts list in your User Guide." Ugh!

I prefer: "If the parts don't fit, check the parts list in your User Guide."

CONSULT:

• get or ask advice from; "Consult your local broker"; "They had to consult before arriving at a decision"
• seek information from; "You should consult the dictionary"; "refer to your notes"
• confer: have a conference in order to talk something over; "We conferred about a plan of action"
• advise professionally; "The professor consults for industry"

Are you using your MySpace blog?

MySpace has a built in blog for every account. That represents a potential pool of 100 million readers.

1) Click the Manage Blog link on your Home page to display your MySpace Blog page.
2) Click the Post New Blog link under My Controls to open up a new post screen:



You can follow your post with any link you like. This can be a link to any product or service you offer, or an article which both shares information and invites your readers to click a link that leads to a landing page or a marketing offer.

Visit Sports Nut

I invite you to visit a new web site launched just today by my friend Al Porter.

SportsNuts of America was developed for the purpose of providing avid sports fans the opportunity to tell the world about their love of sports - to tell everyone they know and don’t know “Hey, I’m a Sports Nut”. The clever caricature of a SportsNut includes a symbol of each of the major four team sports in America (baseball, basketball, football and hockey) but a true sports nut is a fan of almost all sports, including soccer, golf, tennis, boxing, NASCAR and others.

I'm a basketball nut (great Celtics and Lakers fan from time immemorial) and I'm sure I'll keep visiting SportsNut in the days and months ahead.

Book Covers Created in Inkscape

Front Cover

Inkscape is a free open-source vector drawing program, similar to Adobe Illustrator.

I am aware that nothing can match the vast capabilities of the Illustrator. But for my own purposes Inkscape is doing just fine.

I have for example created the following book covers for my new report on Article Marketing, executed totally in Inkscape.

Click on the images to see a larger version.

Back Cover

I kind of like it. What do you think?

Would you like me to share some Inkscape tutorials with you here about how to design book covers and other graphics ?

Two Reading Factoids from New York

1) New York Times web site recorded 1 BILLION page views in October 2008.

2) Professional book group "facilitators" in New York City charge $250 to $300 a member annually for their services, which include making book recommendations to the group and facilitating the meetings.

How to Recycle Through Open Documents in NeoOffice?

Imagine you have 10 documents open on your NeoOffice. How would you recycle from one to the other?

One way to do it of course is to click the Window menu and select the document you want. But this gets very tiresome if for example you've got two or three documents open and you need to toggle back and forth constantly among them.

Here is a short cut:

If you press COMMAND (Apple) + TILDE (~) your Mac will toggle from one open document to another and save you untold amounts of time.

How to link an image to an URL with Image Map in NeoOffice?

1) Select the image and right-click on it to display the pop-up menu:


2) Select the Image Map to display the Image Map Editor:



3) Select one of the 4 image map buttons on the menu bar: Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Freeform Polygon. My favorite is Polygon and I'll select that one for this exercise.

4) Draw the polygon you like around the image. The edges of the polygon will be marked with a dotted-line:



5) Finish drawing the image map by double clicking your mouse. A grayed-out area will mark your image map.



6) In the Address field, type in the web address to which you want to link:



7) You can select from the following Frame options:

Named entries: File opens in a named frame in the current HTML document.

_self: File opens in the current frame.

_blank: File opens in a new page.

_parent: File opens in the parent frame of the current frame. If there is no parent frame, the current frame is used.

_top: File opens in the topmost frame in the hierarchy.

I prefer BLANK to the others since it leaves the source window intact.

8) Click the Apply button (green circle with a check mark in it).

If you'd like to save this image with this image map you can save it by clicking the Save button (third from left -- the one that looks like a Mac hard drive).

9) Click the Close screen button (red circle with a X in it) and your Mac will prompt you if you'd like to save the changes. Click Yes and you're done.