So, what does MS do? It does all that stuff and more automatically. The keyword research module obviously investigates keywords, but it displays the number of searches in a much better way. It shows per day and the number of clicks you might expect if you were ranked #1 for that keyword. There’s actually so much more there as well, like OCI (worth of the keyword) and broad versus exact. In the SEO competition module it even color codes how bad the competition is with green, yellow, and red. There’s no need to EVER analyze the competition further down than the front page because searchers rarely go past the first page. The SEO competition module also analyzes the backlinks, showing anchor text and PR. Then you can go on to find content for that keyword that you can either republish or use as a source for your content. Then there’s a promotion module to help find places to create backlinks for your site. If that wasn’t enough, there’s also a module to track your rankings on various sites.

This simplifies almost everything for me, I don’t have to do anything manually saving me tons of time and effort, getting the same task done in a fraction of the time. Is this tool a magic bullet to instantly getting good rankings and finding great keywords? No, you have to be able to understand the data presented to you, but if you’ve been doing SEO for any amount of time you should be familiar with most if not all of the data presented to you.

Is it worth it? Well, it depends. If you do a lot of SEO then yes I would say it’s worth every penny. If you only do a little here and there maybe you can just do keyword research the manual way. I only paid $97 for it since I got it while it was on sale. To be perfectly honest, I would’ve paid full price if I couldn’t get it at a discount. The more I use this tool, the more I love it. Guess what else? They’re not even finished with it yet and if you buy now you get updates for free. Publish content, monetization, and the adwords module have yet to be added.

There’s not much else I can say about this tool, if you’re serious about SEO this will save you a ton of time.

Rank Tracker

When I first implemented the captcha, I didn’t get any spam at all really. Then the spam started to come more and more. Just think, if I had no captcha running or any other anti-spam plugin I would be dealing with 100′s of spam comments a day no doubt. WP-SpamFree has really kept it spam free so far. I wasn’t really looking for it either I just saw it in my WordPress dashboard and installed it from there. Gotta love WordPress. Be aware however that you will need to enable javascript and cookies so you can post. Most people have these on by default anyway.

If your blog is suffering a spam issue I highly recommend this plugin. I’m still going to leave the captcha in place just for extra measure, but I’m really happy to be living spam free for the time being.

What exactly does it do?

This program will order all your programs in the start menu, and keep them there. They will not move around. I always found this annoying, because I would go to look for a program, and I wouldn’t be able to find it right away, because the order changed.

This program also gives you a command and search option right on the start menu. The search function will try and find the program if you input it into the box. This is very helpful, I have been down a road where I couldn’t find a program I wanted to launch!

The start menu has also been made more friendly to using a keyboard 100% and not having to touch the mouse. For instance, I can hit the windows key and be presented with the programs menu. There are then different areas in the program list assigned letters. Once I hit that letter, some numbers for each program in that area show up. Then I can hit the number, and that program is selected. Then I can launch the program. This is very cool. In fact, I like this feature the most.

There are also tabs in place, so you can move to the quick start menu easily, and put in programs you use often.

New programs are highlighted, for quick reference. This is very helpful, because I would look around for a newly installed program for ages sometimes. If too many programs take up the screen, then they are scrolled through. I’ve never had this happen to me, but I suppose if it got to that point it would be useful.

I also really liked being able to re-size the menu and move it around wherever I wanted.

There’s a few different skins to choose from, such as Vista start menu classic, Windows classic, and Windows XP. Depending on what skin you’re using in windows, one of these skins will obviously blend better.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed using this software, I think everyone who runs windows should give it a shot. It really does make things easier to manage. It is basically the way the start menu *should* have been setup to begin with. I did not test the Pro version, but from their site it has some extended features like quick launch, quick uninstall, and menu customization. A lot of the complaints seem to be that you can’t customize the free version. However, the free version seems to have most of the features you would really want. In case you’re wondering, there was no spyware/adware attached to this program, and I’m actually surprised about that. It is very easy to uninstall if you don’t want it anymore, it doesn’t change any system settings.

You can check it out for yourself here: http://www.vistastartmenu.com/

There are three main components of an electronic cigarette. There is the cartridge, which contains a solution of mostly nicotine and water. Then there is the atomizer, which creates the vapor you inhale. The last component is the battery, which also contains the LED at the end.

When I first heard about these I asked a few questions. Why don’t more people use them if they work so well? The answer I found: Not many people know about them, there is very little advertising. Cigarette manufacturers certainly don’t want you to know about them, you’ll stop buying their product. There also may be something with the government, they want to continue to receive tax dollars from all the cigarette purchases. (Not sure about this one, just something I have read)

I am very pleased to tell you that smoking from an electronic cigarette almost perfectly simulates real smoking. I am simply amazed. The only real difference you will notice with this particular model, is that it takes quite a bit more inhaling to get a good “hit” compared to a regular cigarette. This could probably be remedied by trying out different models, I’m sure some produce tons of vapor, and almost perfectly emulate a cigarette.

The amount of time a cartridge lasts is kind of disappointing, I popped one in at 4PM and by 8:30PM it was done. However, I have purchased  60mL e-liquid that should get here fairly quick. I may have to rely on analogs for a little while till it gets here. Battery life seems decent enough, it’s still going strong after 4 and a half hours of use. I will update with a more full review of this particular e-cig once I’ve used it longer. Expect me to be trying out a few other models and listing the reviews here as well.

Do I think this will become a big hit in the near future with smokers everywhere? Yes I do. How can you go wrong with something that feels and tastes just like a cigarette? One exception! There is no other chemicals to harm you. No more tar, no more staining your teeth, the walls, no more smelling up the entire room when you smoke, and no more mess with ashes. How can you go wrong? My mind is made up, I’m going for the switch.

Remember, most do not advise that you use electronic cigarettes to try and quit. They are too similar to real cigarettes. I know it might sound like I am marketing or something, but I’m not. This is the truth.

Anyway, if you’re a smoker, and feel the need to switch to something healthier, I would say electronic cigarettes are going to be your best bet.

If you’re thinking of switching, you might also want to check out http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/forum/ They seem to have the largest e-cigarette community

You can buy the DSE-901  here.

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Okay, so at first glance that seems easy enough right? Well yeah.. Not so much. First of all, I had to enable mod_rewrite in apache. (Remember I’m on a VPS) That wasn’t difficult, you just use the command a2enmod on Ubuntu/Debian systems. Now with that done, I could use the .htaccess file generated by WordPress to serve up the new fancy URLs. Wait.. My old /?p= are not being forwarded to the new fancy urls. Well, a simple plugin called Permalink Redirect solves that issue.

Now comes the real fun. Everytime I go to try and access my stats, I get a 404. The stats folder is clearly there, but I cannot access it. So, I remove the .htaccess on that folder. I can now access it, but it’s no longer password protected I really wasn’t sure if this was caused by ISPConfig or the .htaccess.

So I searched around for quite some time. The solution is simple, when you go to a password protected area it looks for the 401 and 403 error files first, before giving you a login prompt. With the new rewrite in place, all the errors are now on the WordPress theme. It doesn’t have these errors, so the resulting error is 404 not found.

Anyway, how do you fix this issue? Simple, add the following lines to your .htaccess file in the root directory.

ErrorDocument 401 /[path_to_file]/myerror.html

ErrorDocument 403 /[path_to_file]/myerror.html

That’s it! Problem solved. I can now access my stats directory with the password, and permalinks are working.

Forum

Discussion

Analytics states that I’m getting approximately 117 – 150 unique per day, since I started dropping less with Entrecard.

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Now, switching over to just search engine traffic with analytics we see that approximately 50% of my traffic per day recorded by Analytics is search engine based. It’s growing slowly.

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Analytics seems fairly consistent with my ProjectWonderful stats, which means that various blocking plugins for FireFox are not only blocking ProjectWonderful, but Analytics as well.

Webalizer

Now let’s have a look at what webalizer has to say about my traffic.

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Seems as if Webalizer is painting an entirely different picture. It shows that my traffic really didn’t drop off when I started to drop less on Entrecard. I believe this can be explained by my search engine traffic growing, which lead to my drop off of EC not showing up. It’s actually quite apparent to me I’m part of the search engines. Why? Well, I get a lot of spam comments even with BadBehavior running. Without BadBehavior, I once received 50 spam comments in one day.

Conclusion

If you’re using Analytics, I would consider switching to something that is blocked less by the various plugins out there. Clicky analytics was recommended by nukeit.org, and I have to agree. Anything that is being blocked by NoScript/Adblock Plus and the other assortment of things out there, is not going to give you reliable stats. The best stats come from log analyzers such as Webalizer.

Here’s the real kicker, Comodo is free! ZoneAlarm Pro is not. The regular ZoneAlarm doesn’t come with nearly as many features as the free version of Comodo does. I think I have just found my new favorite software firewall and antivirus. Anyone not running something like ZoneAlarm or Comodo needs to go get one of the two now. No matter how savvy you think you are, there are a lot of strange things on the internet that could trick you, and Comodo or ZoneAlarm will block such things.

In conclusion, Comodo gets my vote now, ZoneAlarm is good, but I don’t think it’s as good as Comodo even in the “pro” version.

All my issues getting CrunchBang up and running correctly.. Maybe this will  help someone?

I ran into some issues with my Ethernet controller and my sound card! Those two things did not work at all out of the box. I searched around for my prism wireless card and was able to get online. I found what the model number the problematic hardware was via lspci. I found it was the BCM4401. Then I tried to enable the module via modprobe b44. It gave me errors. I searched around for the answer to this on the Ubuntu forums, and found it was related to my Kernel version, or possibly an installed package. Anyway, I removed that certain package, because I didn’t need it for my Wifi which doesn’t need any special drivers.

Eventually what I did was edit the sources.list file in /etc/apt and removed all the commented out lines did sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade. Restarted, wow ethernet works.

Next issue: SOUND! ICH4 – Intel 82801DB-ICH4 did not work at all! Went through the guides to get audio working, checked alsamixer to see if anything was muted or something weird. Apparently it’s related to external amplifier and all the switches. You can enable external amplifier in Alsa, and then go into your sound controller and uncheck all the switches. It works.

So, now everything works. Yay. Now I have a laptop that is 15X faster booting up and running applications. Worth the trouble? I think so. Maybe others wouldn’t. It took some time to get all the bugs fixed. I have gotten too used to Linux working out of the box, but with older laptop components, it doesn’t seem like that’s the way it goes. I know some wifi cards aren’t even supported, so you should definitely pick up a prism based wifi card if you’re using Linux on a laptop.

CrunchBang Review

CrunchBang is a modified Ubuntu distribution with a light weight open box GUI. Perfect for lower resource computers. I could barely play a youtube video in Windows XP, on CrunchBang, it’s no problem. Why use CrunchBang instead of some of the other light weight distros? Some of those light weight distros are a real pain to configure, probably A LOT worse than what I had to deal with.

CruchBang is a nice mix of usability while still being light weight. All you have to do is right click on the desktop to get a list of all the applications installed, and there’s many that come already installed. Almost anything you would want is already there. Because it’s Debian/Ubuntu based, you can also just use apt-get or aptitude to install various things without issues. It can’t get much easier

Also, CrunchBang is open-box meaning you can customize the GUI the way you want it. Personally, I like the default config, it looks fine.

So, have a low resource computer you want to get a little more out of? Try out CrunchBang Linux. If your computer is really low resource however, you may need to look into something like Slackware Linux with a very light weight GUI.

However, it has been reported that Windows 7 looks and feels strikingly like Mac OSX. Very similar to Vista, but not completely. Still, if you’re running Vista right now, you may want to give Windows 7 a go, because I’m sure you’re annoyed with it’s performance and memory usage. If not, well you should be

For me, I’m still sticking with XP and Ubuntu primarily, but I may give Windows 7 a go at some point in the near future. If I do, expect a full write up on my experience. I absolutely hated windows Vista, I thought it was a piece of garbage that should have never been released. I actually may feel exactly the same way about Windows 7 because I’m more of a minimalist when it comes to GUI garbage.

I had Compiz running on Ubuntu and it gave me a bunch of problems and performance errors. Eventually I asked myself is this worth it? I came to the conclusion it wasn’t, and turned it off. If I could turn Windows 7 into XP with the default theme and windows 98 look I would be happy, because to be honest the only thing I like  about Vista/7 is the fact it has DX10.

Why do these companies keep focusing on GUI so much. I could care less about GUI I care more about functionality. Does it run better than XP, is it more secure, reliable? The answer to those questions for Vista is no. Trojans for XP still worked on Vista? Are you kidding me? I’m going to guess the same is true for Windows 7. No real improvements, just looks pretty and is less of a resource pig.

Maybe more people will switch this time around. I might, who knows. Maybe I’ll wait until all new games no longer work on Windows XP Again, those of you running Vista, it might be a good idea to check out Windows 7 if you want to free up some resources.

I have found, that for chatting Irssi can be very powerful. You can connect to any number of networks, and rotate through them with ctrl-x, in the same window. Then you can join any channel on that network. It uses an interesting window system, where you change windows with /window #. There are many other features like auto connect etc.

I find myself rotating through the windows a lot to see what’s going on in each, but that’s expected. It’s really not a problem. I like to have my SSH/FTP or whatever else right next to each other in the command prompt. Tabbing programs is great.

There are many plug ins available for Irssi, that are perl scripts. They are very easy to install and run. One thing many people do not like to start is there is no user list off to the side. This can be remedied by installing a user list plug in, something like this http://www.bellot.net/cyril/contribs:irssi-nicklisthoriz . I have yet to use it, since I haven’t really found a need for a nicklist. When you join a channel, it gives you a list of users, that you can generally use the PgUP button to see.

In conclusion, Irssi is a very useful command line based IRC application. I believe the developers did a great job. I’ve enjoyed using it quite a bit, since it keeps my programs more organized, and it’s easy to use. Check it out!