Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



You are here: Home / Archives for Web and Technology

Get the Atomic Alarm Clock for your computer

by

If you want to get more organized, or if you are the type of person why likes to keep track of things such as appointments, birthdays and other events you might be interested in visiting the Atomic Alarm Clock – home page. The atomic Alarm Clock was created to be an advanced replacement for the Windows tray clock.

You can install a copy of the Atomic Alarm clock and use on your desktop as an actual alarm clock, or even as an event reminder. The Atomic Alarm clock is fully customizable. You can set it up to remind you of multiple events, perhaps with a pop up window or by playing a sound or an MP3 file.

Actually it seems that a number of people are using the Atomic Alarm clock as a real alarm clock. Why? Well, I think they are doing so because it’s so easy to customize. You can set it up to play an MP3 at a certain time each morning to wake you up, or it can play any sound that you like. You can also set the clock so that the alarm only works from Monday to Friday and doesn’t wake you up on Saturdays and Sundays when you want to sleep in.

It’s quite a versatile program.

One thing that I like about the Atomic Alarm clock is that you can download over 100 different skins in order to customize the look and feel of the Atomic Alarm Clock.

Here’s some of the skins that you can download:

clock_b.gif

If you’d like to try the Atomic Alarm clock you can download clock right here.

The Atomic Alarm Clock comes with multilingual interface support, and you can display the ti for any time zone. Check it out.





Adding video content to more of our sites

by

I’m totally loving The News Room. See the post I wrote below about it.

I’ve been going over the News Room site and I found some great video of Paris Hilton going to jail that I put up on Celebrity Scoop. I can really see having a daily entertainment video feature on my celebrity website.

Now I’m going through the site to see if I can find items that Chris can use on Odd Planet (ie weird news) or his music and guitar related site Guitar Licks.

The content that we can put in our sites by using the News Room is fantastic. I’m so happy I joined the site.

Before I go hog wild on this let me ask you something:

If you visit a website that has video on it are you as likely to watch the video if it appears to be something that interests you as you might be to read a plain text post?

Add current news video and feeds to your post and make money

by

I just signed up with a site called The News Room. This website allows website owners to publish news content on their sites. Not only does The News Room provide content that you can use to enhance your posts, but it also allows you to earn some money just by using the service.

So how do you make money by using The Newsroom? It’s simple really. Just sign up for the service and then browse through the current news listings until you find news that’s relevant to your site, or find a piece that is something you’d like to post about and add a feed or video to your article.

CPM (cost per thousand) starts at $1 which means that for every thousand views you’ll be paid a dollar – at the very lowest, for the content that you chose to provide on your site. You might also be interested to know that the payout for placing a video feed on your site is $4 per CPM. This payout is excellent compared to many other affiliate type programs, and what’s more, you’ll be adding content to your site that will enhance your articles.

One of the really cool things about The News Room is that if someone visits your site and they like the news story that you’ve posted they can take a copy of it right from your site. That’s called Mashing. You’ll make some money when they Mash a story from your site too.

For example, I decided to post this news video in this post to demonstrate to you how you can use news content in your articles, and to show you how the story can be mashed from my site.

You know that artist that gets large groups of people to pose naked for photographs in public places? Well he did it again. If you watch the video I don’t think you’ll find anything offensive on it – naked body parts have yellow dots on them.

Do you see that Mash symbol? Well, if you want to put this content on your site too, you can just Mash it.

How does mashing work? The diagram that I’ve included below shows how a person can make money when a great news story is shared from site to site:

33_mash.gif

There’s yet another bonus to this program:

I’m not sure how this works, but there’s a loyalty program that allows those who use the site to provide content on their own websites a chance to win prizes such as vacation, electronics and even cars.

When I first signed up I spent some time on the site trying to find out exactly how to get the video on my site. It’s simple really. As I said earlier, just browse through the sites content, find something that you want to add to your site, decide if you want just the video news story, a full feed of the section you’re in, a text story or even make up your own feed of news stories then hit the Mash button and follow the instructions. Easy.

There are hundreds of thousands of news stories to choose from and all are fully licensed new stories from major content providers such as Reuters, Associated Press and so on.

Give it a try. There’s lots of great news content available and you can earn money by adding it to your site. Start by mashing the video that I placed in this post if you like.

Great reading at Dan Rua’s Florida Venture Blog

by

I wanted to take a moment today to tell you about Dan Rua’s Florida venture capital blog. Now, I know, I’ve just said venture capital and you’re probably thinking that the blog is all about business and finance. While that certainly is part of what this blog is about, that’s certainly not all.

Dan is a managing partner of Inflexion Partners, and being in the business of venture capital he does talk about some very interesting technology startups from time to time on his blog. If you have an interest in the internet, technology, social media, cool new companies and gadgets then I’m sure that you will enjoy reading about these things on Dans blog.

I really enjoy Dans writing style. I’d been to his blog from time to time over the last 8 months or so, but over the last few days I’ve taken the time to read pretty much all of the posts that he’s written so far this year. His writing style is engaging, and you can tell that he’s quite passionate about Florida, the Florida Gators, Innovative technology that’s developed in Florida and elsewhere, entrepreneurs and enjoys what he gets out of life.

When I read a post like the one he wrote as a recap for the Florida Venture Capital conference I begin to wonder if I’m in the wrong field. He traveled to Boca Raton, stayed in a luxurious resort, got to play golf on a fantastic golf course, had a nice dinner, wine and gambled on a yacht, and of course learned about some new, interesting, and up and coming businesses.

I do hope that you like Dan’s blog as much as I do. If you do I know he’d appreciate it if you’d subscribe to his RSS feed, or his newsletter.

I’ve actually signed up for his newsletter. I signed up because I like his blog and I’d like to be updated about his latest posts or whatever else he might choose to discuss in his newsletter. I’m not sure how often his newsletter comes out, but I suspect it’s once a week or less.

The other reason I signed up for his newsletter is because I have also created an account with the same newsletter program – Z0okoda – that’s he’s using and I haven’t taken the time to set up my newsletter yet. I’d love to see what he does with his newsletter, maybe I’ll steal an idea or two.

As I said, I really enjoy his writing style so I’m sure his newsletter will be both informative and entertaining.

Visit Dan’s blog and play the games. Maybe you’ll get an idea and end up making a game of your own too! While your there spend a bit of time reading the posts. I hope you’ll find that this is a blog worth reading and take the time to subscribe to the newsletter.

Comment problem? Htaccess problem? help!

by

I had been wondering why I hadn’t had any comments between Sunday and Tuesday. I posted enough posts that surely some of you must have tried to comment … at least on my Green Thumb Sunday post. Didn’t you?

Early Sunday morning I put some code in this sites Htaccess file that would create a 301 redirect so that all pages on this site would go to an url with www in the address. It didn’t work well when I just put the code in, so I went to the options area in my blog and changed the blog directory address so that it had a www in the url.

That worked. Ta Da .. when I visited any page on my site the url had www in it. I wanted it that way because this site is a PR5 when the www is in the url, so to consolidate all the links to my site that are out there – some with www and some without I wanted to force the www.

What I didn’t realize was that if someone was visiting an url on the web that had been listed without the www they were automatically sent to the index.php page of this site.

I also just discovered that when I wanted to comment on one of my own posts that it just came up with a blank page when I hit submit. Did you guys encounter that too? Or were you ignoring me for the last couple of days.

Tell the truth, I promise I won’t be hurt if you ignored me.

So I guess I need some help. What I’ve tried to do on my own didn’t work. Julie tried to help me for quite some time last night but the codes she gave me to try didn’t work either. I contact my webhost support and they say “they don’t help people with scripts”. Hmmm nice.

I want this sites url to include the www so I need to do a 301 redirect. Anyone want to give me Htaccess codes that I can try? Please. What I was using didn’t work obviously.

Also, do I need to change anything in my blogs configuration? Maybe my mistake was adding the www to the blog address in the wp dashboards option area? But the code I tried didn’t work without me doing that.

One more thing … if you are a 301 redirect htaccess wizard … what code would I use for our other blogs that are listed as mydomain.com/blog I’ve tried to figure out an htaccess code for them that sets it so that they do NOT have the www in their urls, but I can’t figure that one out. Everything I’ve tried fails.

Help!

Oh and with the minor changes I made my wordpress wasn’t adding new categories anymore either. I only changed the two things that I mentioned. I couldn’t have messed things up that badly could I have?

Meta

Search this site

Tags

blog blogs camera Canada Chris computer crohns dinner dog Family flower flowers Food friends funny garden Gardening Green Thumb Sunday Health and Fitness Health Fitness and Beauty holiday home Home and Lifestyle house husband IBD Inflammatory bowel disease Internet Music neighbors pain photo photos plants puppy Shopping sick sleep spring Toronto TV Video visit website Wordless Wednesday