Archive for March, 2011
Smelling bad actually makes you look uglier [Psychology]
06
Mar
Has Evidence of Alien Life Been Found? – Discovery News
05
Mar
 Daily Mail | Has Evidence of Alien Life Been Found? Discovery News Published in the online Journal of Cosmology, Richard Hoover's paper claims to have made the discovery after finding "large complex filaments" inside "freshly fractured internal surfaces" of carbonaceous chondrite meteorite samples (including samples ... Scientist claims discovery of alien bacteria in ancient meteoritesExaminer.com Extraterrestrial Alien Invasion? NASA scientist claims ET discoveryAmerican Chronicle NASA Scientist Claims Discovery of Fossilized Alien Life on MeteoritesHULIQ B2C Marketing Insider -God Discussion -Mediaite.com all 92 news articles » |
Why aliens are hell and zombies are heaven [Steal This Pitch]
05
Mar
Essential Plugins for Every WordPress Installation
05
Mar
One of the reasons why people gravitate toward WordPress is the seemingly unlimited numbers of open source plugins available. Today, I’d like to go over a few plugins that I think absolutely warrant your attention. I’m sure I’ve missed some, though, so make sure to chime in within the comments! Hopefully, this article will morph into an absolute monster of a list that can act as a reference for fellow WordPress developers.
Jump to a Category
Comments
Akismet
Akismet is quite possibly the perfect spam management solution. It’s unobstrusive, manages to catch 99% of spam and is quite easy to get started. An absolute must have!.
Disqus Comments
Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community. It features the niceties you’d expect like Gravatars, feeds, rating and threading.
SEO
All in One SEO Pack
An exceedingly powerful solution to optimize your website for search engines. It automatically generates meta tags, lets you override a page’s title and description among a slew of other features. More importantly, you can pretty much make it work out of the box with minimal tweaking.
SEO Smart Links
Interlinking within your site is one of the most basic tenets of SEO. SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs.
HeadSpace2 SEO
HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site. It lets you control almost every aspect of your site’s meta-data, including advanced tagging and analytics.
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
Performance
WP Super Cache
Once you get beyond a certain size, WordPress can act really slow. Caching your content, as always, is a great solution. This plugin does exactly that. It create static versions of your content which is served instead. Works wonders specially when you’re heavily trafficked.
CDN Sync Tool
Uploads/syncs your static files to a Content Deilvery Network (CDN) with push CDNs such as Amazon S3 / CloudFront and CloudFiles aswell as Origin Pull CDNs such as MaxCDN / NetDNA. You can choose files from your media library, theme directory, WordPress’s wp-include directory and plugin directories aswell as new media library uploads.
WP Smush.it
An excellent plugin that automatically processes any image in the blog through the smush.it service, without requiring any user intervention reducing file sizes and improving performance.
WP Minify
WP Minify grabs JS/CSS files in your generated WordPress page and passes that list to the Minify engine. The Minify engine then returns a consolidated, minified, and compressed script or style for WP Minify to reference in the WordPress header.
WP-Optimize
This simple but effective plugin allows you to clean up your WordPress database and optimize it without phpMyAdmin. Also renames any username.
Social
Socialize
This provides an easy way to selectively add actionable social bookmarks to your posts content or below the post in a ‘Call To Action’ box. You can add bookmarks either inside the content or in a box below the content.
AddToAny
This WordPress plugin to help people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more sharing and social bookmarking sites.
Media
Scissors Continued
Scissors Continued adds cropping, resizing, and rotating functionality to WordPress’ image upload and management dialogs. Scissors also allows automatic resizing of images when they are uploaded and supports automatic and manual watermarking of images.
NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option. It is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with dozens of options and features which provides a simple administration system at the back end which can also handle multiple galleries.
Monetization
Advertising Manager
This plugin will manage and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads on your WordPress blog. It automatically recognises many ad networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. Other ad networks can be used as well.
Ad Injection
Ad Injection injects any kind of advert (e.g. Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, ClickBank, TradeDoubler, etc) into the existing content of your WordPress posts and pages. You can control the number of adverts based on the post length, and it can restrict who sees adverts by post age, visitor referrer and IP address.
Backup
WP-DB-Backup
WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.
EZPZ One Click Backup
EZPZ One Click Backup is a very easy way to do a complete backup of your entire WordPress site. In fact it’s so easy to use there are no required user settings, everything is automatic. Just one click and presto, you’ll have a complete backup stored on your server. One more click and you can download the entire backup to your own computer.
Analytics
Google Analyticator
Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.
WP-Stats-Dashboard
Display your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard. See how you’re ranking on Alexa, check out your Technorati authority, monitor your ranking across multiple sites and much more.
Utilities
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score†for each pair of posts on your blog. You choose the threshold limit for relevance and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less.
Organize Series
The Organize Series WordPress Plugin helps with the organization and presentation of articles/posts you write as part of a series. It helps make it easier for readers of your blog to discover all the series you’ve written and also to easily find post that are part of the same series.
Simple URL Shortener
Simple URL Shortener is the simplest, yet most powerful URL shortening plugin available, with over 100 shortening services available.
Wrapping Up
As you may have noticed, I’ve chosen to stick to free plugins. There are, however, plenty of killer paid options to consider — CodeCanyon, for instance, is the web’s largest marketplace for premium WordPress plugins, amongst other sorts of scripts and components.
We’ve, of course, only merely scratched the surface here. Chime in below with the plugins you use and love on a daily basis, and I’ll make sure to keep this list updated weekly. Thank you so much for reading!
Essential Plugins for Every WordPress Installation
05
Mar
One of the reasons why people gravitate toward WordPress is the seemingly unlimited numbers of open source plugins available. Today, I’d like to go over a few plugins that I think absolutely warrant your attention. I’m sure I’ve missed some, though, so make sure to chime in within the comments! Hopefully, this article will morph into an absolute monster of a list that can act as a reference for fellow WordPress developers.
Jump to a Category
Comments
Akismet
Akismet is quite possibly the perfect spam management solution. It’s unobstrusive, manages to catch 99% of spam and is quite easy to get started. An absolute must have!.
Disqus Comments
Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community. It features the niceties you’d expect like Gravatars, feeds, rating and threading.
SEO
All in One SEO Pack
An exceedingly powerful solution to optimize your website for search engines. It automatically generates meta tags, lets you override a page’s title and description among a slew of other features. More importantly, you can pretty much make it work out of the box with minimal tweaking.
SEO Smart Links
Interlinking within your site is one of the most basic tenets of SEO. SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs.
HeadSpace2 SEO
HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site. It lets you control almost every aspect of your site’s meta-data, including advanced tagging and analytics.
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
Performance
WP Super Cache
Once you get beyond a certain size, WordPress can act really slow. Caching your content, as always, is a great solution. This plugin does exactly that. It create static versions of your content which is served instead. Works wonders specially when you’re heavily trafficked.
CDN Sync Tool
Uploads/syncs your static files to a Content Deilvery Network (CDN) with push CDNs such as Amazon S3 / CloudFront and CloudFiles aswell as Origin Pull CDNs such as MaxCDN / NetDNA. You can choose files from your media library, theme directory, WordPress’s wp-include directory and plugin directories aswell as new media library uploads.
WP Smush.it
An excellent plugin that automatically processes any image in the blog through the smush.it service, without requiring any user intervention reducing file sizes and improving performance.
WP Minify
WP Minify grabs JS/CSS files in your generated WordPress page and passes that list to the Minify engine. The Minify engine then returns a consolidated, minified, and compressed script or style for WP Minify to reference in the WordPress header.
WP-Optimize
This simple but effective plugin allows you to clean up your WordPress database and optimize it without phpMyAdmin. Also renames any username.
Social
Socialize
This provides an easy way to selectively add actionable social bookmarks to your posts content or below the post in a ‘Call To Action’ box. You can add bookmarks either inside the content or in a box below the content.
AddToAny
This WordPress plugin to help people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more sharing and social bookmarking sites.
Media
Scissors Continued
Scissors Continued adds cropping, resizing, and rotating functionality to WordPress’ image upload and management dialogs. Scissors also allows automatic resizing of images when they are uploaded and supports automatic and manual watermarking of images.
NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option. It is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with dozens of options and features which provides a simple administration system at the back end which can also handle multiple galleries.
Monetization
Advertising Manager
This plugin will manage and rotate your Google Adsense and other ads on your WordPress blog. It automatically recognises many ad networks including Google Adsense, AdBrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. Other ad networks can be used as well.
Ad Injection
Ad Injection injects any kind of advert (e.g. Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, ClickBank, TradeDoubler, etc) into the existing content of your WordPress posts and pages. You can control the number of adverts based on the post length, and it can restrict who sees adverts by post age, visitor referrer and IP address.
Backup
WP-DB-Backup
WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database.
EZPZ One Click Backup
EZPZ One Click Backup is a very easy way to do a complete backup of your entire WordPress site. In fact it’s so easy to use there are no required user settings, everything is automatic. Just one click and presto, you’ll have a complete backup stored on your server. One more click and you can download the entire backup to your own computer.
Analytics
Google Analyticator
Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.
WP-Stats-Dashboard
Display your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard. See how you’re ranking on Alexa, check out your Technorati authority, monitor your ranking across multiple sites and much more.
Utilities
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score†for each pair of posts on your blog. You choose the threshold limit for relevance and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less.
Organize Series
The Organize Series WordPress Plugin helps with the organization and presentation of articles/posts you write as part of a series. It helps make it easier for readers of your blog to discover all the series you’ve written and also to easily find post that are part of the same series.
Simple URL Shortener
Simple URL Shortener is the simplest, yet most powerful URL shortening plugin available, with over 100 shortening services available.
Wrapping Up
As you may have noticed, I’ve chosen to stick to free plugins. There are, however, plenty of killer paid options to consider — CodeCanyon, for instance, is the web’s largest marketplace for premium WordPress plugins, amongst other sorts of scripts and components.
We’ve, of course, only merely scratched the surface here. Chime in below with the plugins you use and love on a daily basis, and I’ll make sure to keep this list updated weekly. Thank you so much for reading!
How did humans really evolve? [Io9 Backgrounder]
04
Mar
Microsoft kicks off effort to rid the world of Internet Explorer 6
04
Mar
"Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer 6." A quote from any random web developer over the past ten years? Nope, that's from Microsoft itself, and it's featured on the Internet Explorer 6 Countdown site that the company just launched today. As you can see above, the site also includes statistics on IE6 use around the world (China is apparently the biggest offender by a wide margin), as well as information about how you can "join the cause" and educate others about the perils of using such a horrible, outdated web browser.
Microsoft kicks off effort to rid the world of Internet Explorer 6 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Mar 2011 19:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
PermalinkÂ
ZDNet  | 
IE6 Countdown  | Email this | Comments Research proves online gaming at work is good for you – and for your boss [Mad Science]
04
Mar
A Million Random Digits: review of reviews
04
Mar
Recently on his blog (here), Robin mentioned an amazing book, called "A Million Random Digits" published by RAND corporation. The book was initially published in 1955, but RAND published a nice (and expensive) second edition.
A great thing is that on Amazon, there are several extremely interesting reviews of the book. E.g.
Didn’t like the ending, February 10, 2009 By Damien Katz
Even though I didn’t really see it coming, the ending was kind of anti-climatic. But overall the book held my attention and I really liked the "10034 56429 234088" part. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who feels that way.
I found a typo, September 14, 2007Â By fanfan
To whom do I write to report typographical errors? I noticed that the first "7" on the third line page 48 should be a "3". The "7" that’s printed there now isn’t random. Other than that, this is really an excellent book.
Superb and original plot, April 21, 2007 By Herr Tarquin Biskuitfaß
This one has a very unpredictable plot, sublime character development in a style that stubbornly defies any sort of development in its rare and iconoclastic brilliance, and is told remarkably with numbers instead of letters. Take, for example, this passage on page 202, "98783 24838 39793 80954". I’m speechless. The symmetry is reminiscent of the I Ching, and it approaches a rare spiritual niveau lacking in American literature. It not only reads well, but it looks great too. I have a tattoo of page 214 on my arm, and I’m hoping to get 202 on my belly to celebrate my next birthday. It is an injustice that Rand Corporation has not received the Nobel Prize for Literature, nor even a Pulitzer.
A serious reference work?, October 16, 2006Â By BJ
For a supposedly serious reference work the omission of an index is a major impediment. I hope this will be corrected in the next edition.
Not Nearly A Million, September 3, 2006Â By Liron
This book does not even come close to delivering on its promise of one million random digits. My expectations were high after reading the first sentence, which contained ten unique digits. However, the author seems to have exhasted his creativity in this initial burst, because the other 99.999% of the book is filler in which those same ten digits are shamelessly reused! If you are looking for a larger offering of numerals in various bases, I highly recommend "Peter Rabbit’s ABC and 123".
Wait for the audiobook version, October 19, 2006Â By R. Rosini "Newtype"
While the printed version is good, I would have expected the publisher to have an audiobook version as well. A perfect companion for one’s Ipod.
Wait for it…, February 10, 2009 By Cranky Yankee
It started off slow, single digit slow in the beginning but I stuck with it. I eventually learned all about the different numbers, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and 0 and their different combinations. The author introduced them all a bit too quickly for my taste. I would have been perfectly happy with just 1,2,3,4 and 5 for the first 20,000 digits, but then again, I’m not a famous random-number author, am I? After a while, patterns emerged and the true nature of the multiverse was revealed to me, and the jokes were kinda funny. I don’t want to spoil anything but you will LOVE the twist ending! Like 4352204 said to 64231234, "2242 6575 0013 2829!"
OK, I have to admit I tried to check a few of them (that's my freaky part). For instance the first one is a fake: the two first numbers - for instance - never show up together (consecutively),
> DIGIT=read.table("
+ http://freakonometrics.blog.free.fr/public/data/digits.txt")
> DIGIT=DIGIT[,2:11]
> k=1
> I=apply(DIGIT[,1:2]==c(10034,56429),1,sum)==2
> for(k in 2:9){
+ I=cbind(I,apply(DIGIT[,k+0:1]==c(10034,56429),1,sum)==2)
+ }
> I0=which(apply(I,1,sum)>0)
> DIGIT[I0,]
[1] V2 V3 V4 V5 V6 V7 V8 V9 V10 V11
<0 rows> (or 0-length row.names)
Nevertheless, I did have some fun reading those reviews. About the book, unfortunately I have to confess I stopped after 99998 appeared (the first time).
| This post was kindly contributed by Freakonometrics - Tag - R-english - go there to comment and to read the full post. |
A drug that can make your old memories like new [Mad Science]
04
Mar
