Category Archives: Computing & Internet

Planning A Lake Tahoe Trip Interactively

I remember not too long ago when I was new to the internet and introduced to web cams, I spent a lot of time and money (dial up was expensive) searching all over the internet looking for live cams. I was fascinated because it was like traveling in my arm chair. Of course, it would be cool if I could pack my bags and travel but I was just a kid back then.

Today, I came across Lake Tahoe web cams from the Interactive guide of Tahoe360.com. Through this site, should I wish to go on vacation to Lake Tahoe, I could plan my Lake Tahoe trip interactively and check out a total of twenty three (yes, I counted!) live cams of popular Lake Tahoe ski resorts. I viewed them all for a short while because the images were very clear and there was no sluggishness to the video output at all.

Overall, this is a very well planned website and I believe, even someone who is not internet savvy would be able to find his way around because the whole site, starting with the map, is so intuitive yet interactive. I love this site and could only hope that other travel sites would emulate Tahoe360.com!

Driving Blog Traffic

I came across this new blog widget called Blog Rush while I was surfing the internet just now. What it does is that once you have signed up with Blog Rush and entered the feed of your blog to the Blog Rush system and installed the code to your blog, so that the widget will show up on the sidebar of your blog, you will then be giving your blog readers access to other blogs of similar topics.

Whenever a blog that is already on Blog Rush is updated, the feed will then be shown the widget of corresponding categories. Is this cool?

This idea isn’t new. I have my own blog syndication where I place all feeds of my blogs on the sidebar of my blogs. I managed to get some crossed readers from the more popular blogs to the lesser known ones and they will click on the feed when they see an interesting item.

I haven’t joined yet because I am not sure if this widget will do any good because once every blog has this installed, no one will click anymore. As for my own self-made “widget”, because it is not common, I still have people who are interested to click. At the end of the day, the bottom line is still content, or so I have been told!

P/S: I don’t want to subject BlogRush members to my sponsored post lol

Home Improvement Ideas

Just now, while I was surfing the internet, I came across the website of a company named Anglian Home and remembered that I was supposed t look for information for my friend regarding UPVC windows that he plans to install in his home. He is in the midst of a major home improvement project and he does not have access to the internet so I agreed to check out some information for him.

Anglian Home has been in business for more than thirty years and they have a lot of home improvement products and ideas. I browsed through the site and I really love the idea of a conservatory in the garden. I saw some pictures that are available on the website and I think that should I own a home in the near future, this is a “must have” for me. It would be great and I believe this hasn’t caught on by homeowners here so I would be one of the first to have it and I can show off!

Meanwhile, I have already gotten the information for my friend through the website of Anglian Home. Hopes he appreciate my “hard work”!

Lower Traffic During Ramadan

I am not sure if it is coincidence but since the start of Bulan Ramadan, internet traffic to my friend’s ultra high website has taken a dip. I am linking it to Muslims spending less time on the internet than they normally would but I am uncertain if my deduction is accurate.

I asked my friend to keep an eye on his traffic stats to see if there is a surge in traffic in the week hours of the morning after the Muslims have broken fast but he has yet to note a significant change.

One thing to note is that my friend’s site is local and most of his traffic is from within the country and the majority of the people here are Muslims and celebrating Ramadan.

Let’s see if his traffic will pick up after Hari Raya.

Ask Joe About Everything & Anything

As you know, I surf the internet a lot; too much for my own good actually, but I have a curious mind and I hop from one site to another reading and getting information on anything and everything. You should see my list of bookmarks. It is so long because I find so many sites that are interesting enough to want a second visit or not.

One of the sites that I got to know of recently, is at http://askjoeabout.com. If you ask me, I swear this is a blog what with its Word Press theme, but apparently, it is not because Ask Joe About has a separate sub-domain that leads to a blog but there is no blog content there except for a link out to an online shoe store. It is also the same case for the link to Friends and Terms. The only tabs that work are Home and Contact. I would like to Ask Joe About this.

I don’t know who Joe is because there is no “About” page but apparently, Joe welcomes questions from us and he is said to know EVERYTHING. I am not sure what field he specializes in and how accurate his answers to our questions will be. Joe’s “blog” does not have a specific theme judging from the long list of categories.

This blog was established in May, 2007 but there are only three months’ worth of content and the odd thing that I noticed is that Joe writes and publishes numerous articles ON THE SAME DAY which, although I do not think is impossible because I write more than thirty posts every day, reading through the posts for this review, I have a feeling that all the articles were copied from somewhere else. I know that there are sites that offer free blog content and this looks like one of the users. I should probably fire up Google or CopyScape to check for duplicate content but I’ll not go to such lengths. And if these were really written by Joe then I apologize for jumping to the wrong conclusion.

However, the impression that I got from Ask Joe About is that he is only interested in selling shoes. Now, after reading my review, Joe would probably give me a low rating. Well, I will just stick to giving an honest review.

*** This is a sponsored post ***

Blog Dino

While checking my traffic stats tracker, I came across someone coming from a site called Blog Dino. That got me curious, especially anything that has the name DINO to it since that is the name of one of my beloved dogs.

So off I went to check this out and it actually is a search engine for blogs and news sites. This is certainly different from my default search engine Google because there is a tag cloud below the search bar.

In my opinion, people who have lots of free time on their hands and without a specific site to read and just surfing aimlessly on the internet can find this really useful.

As an example, as you can see on the screenshot, SEX is one of the keywords. If you do not know yet, the larger the size of the font, the more times it has been mentioned,. As an experiment, I clicked on SEX and I was brought to a search page with relevant results from blog posts and news sites. However, on this page, there is also another larger tag cloud, with all sorts of keywords that are linked to the word SEX. So I clicked on PORN and the same thing goes on with a large tag cloud with keywords linking to PORN.

I did not actually have time to read how accurate the search results are rendered but it is like a game to jump from an article to another related one. Too bad I do not have time to explore more.

Salsa Boot Camp

Have you heard of this website called Salsa Boot Camp? I recently came across it and was very happy because I have been entranced with Salsa for a couple of years now and living in my cow town, there was no where I could learn it. The only popular dance here is ballet. Bah!

SalsaCrazy’s Salsa dance boot camp is actually a website that people who are interested in Latin dances can sign up and learn Salsa, ChaCha, Bachata, Mambo, Merengue and more.

Check out these images. Don’t they just make you want to let your hair down and dance to the Lain music in your head?

Signing up for classes offered by Salsa Boot Camp, we will receive DVDs of quality instructional videos that help us to learn Salsa, or any other Latin dance, at our own pace and convenience. Personally, I think I would prefer to learn from videos that to embarrass myself in a dance class and until such time that I am comfortable with my steps and moves, I will continue to be a closet Salsa dancer!