WordPress Themes

RSS Feed

Subscribe by email

New Contempt Theme

09 Apr

Posted by fx as Site

There has been a lot of talk on the Contempt Theme page about support for some of the newer WordPress features etc – we will be doing a Contempt v3 theme once WordPress 3.0 is released!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Comments Off

New Moon Premiere

02 Nov

Posted by fx as Cool

A local South African site is running a New Moon Premiere with online booking that’s pretty sweet! It’ll be screening the movie at Monte Casino in Johannesburg nearly a week before it’s release and you can buy tickets (no entering competitions etc).

If you’re a Twilight fan, check it out at www.newmoonpremiere.co.za/

Popularity: 2% [?]

2 Comments

Heroes of Newerth Beta Invites

08 Jul

Posted by fx as Gaming

We’re giving out Heroes of Newerth beta invitiations! If you don’t know about it check out www.heroesofnewerth.com/. We’ll give them out on a first comment-first serve basis and they aren’t infinite so leave your email address to get one!

UPDATE: We’ve had an overwhelming response! Please leave your email address in the actual comments and if you receive a key come back and invite users who want one!! We can only invite a certain number unfortunately – so give back!

Popularity: 10% [?]

369 Comments

Final Fantasy VII

08 Jun

Posted by fx as Gaming

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

It’s finally happened. Final Fantasy VII is on the Playstation store, for PSP and PS3. If you’ve played it before I’m sure you’re also busy swallowing the 1.3GB download (although it’s apparantly only going to take 55 minutes), but if not go and get it!

It’s without question in my mind the best Final Fantasy game, and I’m hoping it won’t feel old (as some older games do). The graphics were amazing (as was the story) and it’s really a part of the epic history of the game franchise.

Check it out!

Popularity: 3% [?]

3 Comments

Lightweight (<2KB) jQuery Tooltips

23 May

Posted by fx as Cool, Development, Tips, Web

If you’re a jQuery lover like we are, check out vTip at Vertigo Project.

vTip is designed to quickly provide very lightweight (1.11KB js, 272b CSS) tooltips to users of jQuery. The zip includes everything you need (including an example page), as well as jQuery for the examples to work.

They look great and are extremely easy to use, try them out.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Comments Off

Spam Elimination Technique

15 May

Posted by fx as Blogging, Tips

I’m assuming this wouldn’t do well full scale as the spammers would catch on, but I recently saw a wordpress plugin which adds input fields to your comment forms that are hidden using CSS (e.g. display: none). Then if data is submitted in those inputs you can tell it wasn’t a human with a browser, but rather a spam bot filling all the fields as they usually do.

It’s a pretty simple concept to implement into a personal project or smaller site, and according to the plugin writer, completely eliminated all spam.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Comments Off

Posts vs. Traffic

08 May

Posted by docmoo as Blogging, Site

: Image via CrunchBase

People have often questioned what the affect of irregular updates on a site have on their traffic ranking. Blogs have been introduced to many websites in order to help keep them “fresh” and make sure that search engines come back often. This has a direct impact on advertising earnings as well as visitor loyalty.

We’ve been pretty inactive on this blog over the last couple of weeks and we’ve noticed a decrease in our stats across the board. A stats package such as Google Analytics can help track these trends and here’s some proof to the topic.

The first thing most people look at when tracking stats is pure traffic; how many visits did the site have over a period. This can often be a misleading statistic depending on the purpose of your blog. Do you want many people coming and not doing anything else but reading what they found on Google, or would you prefer a few less people but they are an active part of your site commenting on posts and starting conversations which in turn increase the user experience of your site?

Let’s have a look at the visits on this blog over 2 separate time periods.

The last time period of consistent updates on this site was from 01/2009 until 04/2009

01/2009 – 04/2009

These stats show a pretty consistent amount of traffic over the period with it having the usual of trend of spike dip spike where the first spike becomes your new average after the 2nd spike (we’ve noticed this trend across a number of our sites).

Now we look at the period 04/2009 – 05/2009

04/2009 – 05/2009

The images speak for themselves.

Next we look at “visitor loyalty”. When it comes to blogging, visitors are more likely to come back to a blog that is regularly updated than a blog that seems to be dead and forgotten. This is a harsh rule and can apply rapidly. For example; if you have been running a blog for 2 months and have managed to make at least 1 original post per day, people start to see this and will come back every day to read what you have to say. But then, you go on a long weekend holiday and don’t have an update for a couple of days. Next thing you know your stats are showing a decrease in return visits and less traffic from search engines etc. The word “loyalty” in blogging can be thrown around loosely. To me it doesn’t carry the standard definition of “faithfulness or devotion to a cause or person”, but rather something along the lines of “I’ll keep you around while you’re of use to me”.

01/2009 – 04/2009

04/2009 – 05/2009

This is the “loyalty” I mentioned before. Returning visits are down and there is a steep decline in the 2nd period’s graph. The other sharp decline can be seen in first time visits. A blog will never build up a base of returning users if users never get to the blog in the first place. Most of the blogs I frequent were found through Google – I was looking for something and came across an answer on a blog and enjoyed the content and as a result I know frequent that blog to see what else is going on. This is probably one of the most common scenarios in building up a returning user base.

Search engines enjoy new content. If a site is regularly updated it is seen as a good source of information and search engines will give it preference over “stale” blogs. Search engines can be just as cruel as visitors and will drop you in the blink of an eye.

01/2009 – 04/2009

04/2009 – 05/2009

You can see clearly from these graphs that when the blog was being kept up to date with regular posts, the amount of referrals from Google were on the rise. This doesn’t just relate to the new content i.e. the latest posts being the most searched for but also some of the older posts that have been crowed pleaser’s for a while. When your blog becomes less attractive to Google even your most popular posts will start drifting off to the 2nd page and even further down on the search engine result pages.

To put it quite simply, no matter how popular your blog is today it can be a baron island that no one can get to in a matter of days if you do not work on it.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Comments Off

Oracle Supernova

21 Apr

Posted by docmoo as World

On the cards for a while now, it seems it’s finally happened;

“Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt. ‘We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,’ said Oracle President Safra Catz.”

Let’s just hope that MySQL isn’t let go in favour of Oracle DB. That would piss a lot of people off and make the internet explosion slow to a fizzle without the help of a top end free database engine.

Assassin’s Creed 2

07 Apr

Posted by docmoo as Gaming

I played the first installment of the series, for maybe 15mins. Then I gave it back to fx.

I didn’t like it at all. There was so much hype surrounding the game, that for me, it just didn’t live up to the expectations created by all the mad stories and bloated press releases. I would like to say something detailed about the game and what I didn’t like, but to be honest, I don’t remember. The game was just that for me, forgettable.

Now it’s time for part 2, and I wonder if it will go the same way.

So far, it looks like they’re going the viral route. They’re giving just enough of nothing to give you something, but not enough of something to give you anything. There’s a teaser trailer on the official site done to the style of the famous Da Vinci blue prints. That’s already establishing quite a level of expectation for the game, Da Vinci sketched finned mortar shells after all.

Now I am torn. In my mind I’m thinking “Holy shit, this is going to be epic. It’s a guy with a blade as his arm” but at the same time I’m thinking “What the hell was level 1 :/”.

April 16 has been given as the date for more information to be published in Game Informer, and we will probably be given some more pictures and the plot of the game. But until the game is out, and people have actually played it and the hype has died down. I don’t think I’m going to be spending a cent on this franchise.

Here’s some artwork as well as the teaser trailer…

Popularity: 9% [?]

Comments Off

Travian: The New Promisance?

02 Apr

Posted by fx as Gaming, Web

I’m going to go ahead and assume majority of the blog readers have played Promisance (aka Prom) at some time; if you haven’t you can google it. It’s always fun to play once in a long while and when one pops up everyone seems to get in to it but there is a new, more graphical and more in depth online (once a day style) game called Travian.

It’s by no means brand new, but its new to me and I’ve been enjoying it for more than a week now (on Server 7).

When you start out you get a section of land, covered in resources and a city centre with hundreds of options of where to go from there mainly focussed around either being a military force or a market leader. There are thousands of players online at any given stage, and if you want to join them have a look! [and its free of course]

Popularity: 12% [?]

2 Comments

« Previous Entries Next Page »

New Contempt Theme

New Moon Premiere

Heroes of Newerth Beta Invites

Final Fantasy VII

Lightweight (<2KB) jQuery Tooltips

Spam Elimination Technique

Posts vs. Traffic

Oracle Supernova

Related articles by Zemanta

Assassin’s Creed 2

Travian: The New Promisance?

Recent Comments

Categories