Animation, like everything else, has evolved from the simple cartoon drawings of the early days to high tech computer generated data. It is everywhere we look, TV commercials, video games, and websites.

Animation is an area that I enjoy, although I do not produce animations. I am an avid gamer and I like watching animated cartoons, my all time favorite being Homestar Runner.

As technology progresses it is getting easier and easier to produce your own animations. We see them all the time on sites like YouTube, I recommend some Purple and Brown.

As in any industry as things become easier to do more and more people will dabble in it. This makes it tougher to stand out among all the other animators but if you have a fresh and exciting idea it will catch on.

There are many ways to produce animations. Adobe Flash is very popular. There is also a tool from Aniboom that helps you create animation called Shapeshifter that really simplifies the process for you.

If you enjoy playing around with animation or are a serious animator give this tool a try.

Rick Strahl has a great post on the C# ?? operator and how to chain the functionality to write tigher code.

C# 2.0 has a nice ?? operator that works as a shortcut for:

string value1 = null;

string value2 = "Test1";

string result = value1 != null ? value1 : value2;

which causes result containing Test1 or the second value.

In C# you can shortcut this special null comparison case with the new ??:

string result = value1 ?? value2;

which is a little easier to write. This is probably not news to you, but what’s really useful is that you can chain these operators together so you can do a whole bunch of null comparisons in a single stroke. For example, I frequently look for a few different querystring variables in a page:

string partner = Request.QueryString["GoogleId"] ??
                 Request.QueryString["PartnerId"] ??
                 Request.QueryString["UserKey"] ??
                 string.Empty;

which still yields a valid result for the first non-null querystring or if nothing is found returning “”.

Note that this also works with the longhand syntax in the first example if you use brackets, but more than one level gets pretty unreadable quickly. The ?? syntax on the other is easily readable. This can certainly save you from writing a bunch of nested IF statements to check for multiple conditions.

Reminds me a bit of JavaScript code using || syntax for null checking, and maybe that’s why I just ran into the chaining aspect now

A part of my daily routine includes skimming my RSS feeds with Google Reader, because I can view only the titles, looking for an interesting title that might peak my interest.

I would consider myself a busy person without time to waste so if you want me to expend seconds of my precious day to read what you have written it had better be good.

These days with so many people posting about there dog and what they has for lunch it can be hard to find a quality blog that will keep you entertained as well as up-to-date on happenings around the world.

That’s why when I stumbled upon (not with stumbleupon though :D) ArifsBlog it got me interested with categories like “Entertainment“, it got me to give it a second look.

For some reason I enjoy reading about political and scientic stories that are shaping our future like the race to produce the first 100% man-made geneome. I also enjoy reading rants, whether completely informed or not, they just are entertaining. When you combine the two you have a winning combonation.

I have been following the many stories on Slashdot covering the RIAA and their attempts to prosecute the “evil pirates” through threats of pulling university funding. Anyways, ArifsBlog, keep covering issues like that and I will continue to be a repeat visitor for a long time to come.

Google has laid the smack down on a number of sites which has affected a lot of companies, websites, and blogs all over the Web. They have made changes to their algorithm that determines and passes PageRank to the sites it indexes.

The Smack Downs

This alone would be enough to get people buzzing and even some hopping mad but what has really got the blogoshere up in arms is the manual penalties it has handed out to many sites, bloggers in particular.

It seems nobody is out of Google’s reach. Top bloggers like John Chow have been virtually removed from Google’s search results where they once were on the first page for their keywords.

Bloggers that use PayPerPost have seen their PageRank wiped out essentially killing their value to PPP.

So what is the reason for these attacks?

Well it is simple. Google has laid out the rules regarding manipulating their PageRank and search result systems. The people that got smacked were clearly in violation of these rules. they gamed the system and finally got caught. Yes there was some callateral damage to other sites related to or affiliated with the penalized sites but we all knew what these guys were doing was in violation of Google’s rules.

So stop whining already. Yes you may have been wiped from the face of the Google Earth but if you had half a brain you’d have seen it coming. John Chow saw it coming. He has said from the beginning not to put your eggs in Google’s basket. Luckily he follows his own advice and has reported an increase in revenue since the changes even though he doesn’t even rank for his own name!

I don’t want to hear anymore about PPP their whole business model was built on Google’s PageRank. Not only did it defy all the guidelines Google set it was a stupid business model to begin with. Sure it made lots of money for a while but when you build your business on an ever-shifting foundation like Google’s PageRank then you are just asking to get whooped!

Come on people have a little sense and look at the long term picture!

Tough changes to AdSense

On the other side of the coin AdSense publishers have been brutally hit and from no fault of their own.

Google has drastically reduced referral commissions in just about every area, reduced CTR by narrowing the click area of the ads, and in a shockingly stupid move alienated a huge protion of their publishers by refusing to pay bloggers outside of North America, Latin America, and Japan.

I fail to see the reasoning behind why the bloggers pysical location has anything to due with it. If they are trying to target specific areas for their advertisers then why not only pay for clicks from USERS in those areas and ignore the others. That alone would be a big hit to publishers but to deny based on geographic location is just dumb!

They are slapping some of their biggest promoters and publishers in the face, like ProBlogger.

There are theories that Google is trying to prop up poor profits but we’ll have to see. At least advertisers will be happy as these changes save them money.

Content is the king of any site. There are instances when your article does not get picked up by search engine in spite of having a strong content. In this case, article linking will be very effective. If you link your site to any other popular site, then there is the maximum possibility of your content to get noticed. Marketing of your site can only make your content read by a large number of visitors. Article syndication is nothing but a powerful marketing tool. It is totally different from search engine optimization. By adopting this method, you can popularize your article and your site. For this reason, it is very important that you keep your content original.

Article syndication links up your article to various well known sites. For this, it requires an informative content. However, there are many writers that pay a foul game with content. They use those keywords in their content which are widely searched but do not have anything to do with the original content. If this is the scenario, then that site will not be picked up by any popular sites and in the later period of time it will be banned. While writing content, the content writer should be well versed with keyword density, meta tags, alt tag etc. An article is a very strong weapon of any site. If an article is not interesting and informative then adopting article syndication also will not be make your site visible. So, it is very important that you make your content highly readable, interesting and up-to-date. Always try to freshen up your site.

If your site is not noticed by any one then your effort to write new content will ended in smoke. Article syndication will link your article to another site and make people noticed your article and read it. In this way, the site and the article will become popular. To start with it, a site should hire a content writer to write articles for their website. After writing the content it is necessary to post the article in all the well known sites. The article should have the link of its site. It is very important that the article is submitted in all the popular bookmarking sites. Even if a surfer does not have any idea regarding your site, through bookmarking he will able to reach your site. In this way, your site will get a new visitor.

Article syndication will increase traffic and increase sales. It is all about marketing your article in all the popular sites. Before writing article, one should do some basic research on the keywords. There are many keywords tool that can be make into use while writing content. If your article has required number of keywords than only it will get picked up by popular site like Google, MSN, Yahoo etc. There are many websites that do an extensive study on how to advertise its article. One can also take the help of those sites and get ideas from them as how to advertise their product. By adopting this method, one can popularize its article as well as popularize its site.

Author Info:

Steve Waganer has specialization in web marketing. He is expert in search engine optimization,article syndication,search engine marketing firm,social media optimization.To get the SEO tips from,SEO firm for your website to get high rank and top position in major search engines visit www.cometsearchenginemarketing.com

I know everyone has been on YouTube at least once in their time on the internet. It’s a great source of entertainment because YouTube.com offers such a diverse range of videos from humorous videos to some that are just utterly pointless. If you want to have some relax after heavy day work, than visit www.turtlesays.com. Here you’ll find most funny videos from YouTube, pictures and funny quotes. Content – both You Tube videos and funny pictures - is safe for children to watch as well. This website is updated daily.

Where can you watch great videos on internet? The answer will come to you in a moment – YouTube. I also find a website which is the TopYoutubeVideos.com which portrays chosen YouTube.com videos that are significantly the best. Sometimes we can’t filter what we watch in Youtube. The convenience of navigation with menus on the left with the tabs of Start (Homepage, Bookmark Us, Help Us, and Add to del.icio.us), YouTube (With all knowledge about YouTube), Best Movies of All Time and Worth Watching gives you information and updates on regular basis. At www.TopyYoutubvideos.com, it gives us the opportunity to view only the best. Topyoutubevideos.com is very the dynamic website, so you might want to check it out often since they’re always updating it!

The internet, I believe is a cool place. It meets every criterion. It is educative as well as entertaining. Every so often, I get tired of having to sit and work long stretches at my computer and I take a break. You know what my break is? A game, on the computer. Thanks to the internet, I get to play a different game every other day. I just do a few searches with different internet tools and I find me a new game every time. I never get bored playing these games. I think there is still a bit of a child that remains in me. The games online bring out the child in me.

The internet offers you a variety of games online. Some games are fun as well as educative; I reckon those are the games one should allow children to play with. There are other games that cater to a lot of violence or language. I would recommend that you supervise the kind of games you allow your kids to play with online.

Another great plus point about the games is that they are free. They don’t require you to pay anything. There are many games that give you the option of playing with other players, they are even more fun. You get to play with people residing in the other part of the world. Very often you tend to build a relationship with these players. You even have several tournaments online and you are free to participate in any that you are interested in. I don’t think I ever complain of boredom when I have access to playing games on the internet. I find that there are games that challenge me and there are games that just give me pleasure and are enjoyable, so depending on my mood, I choose a game.

What is cPanel?

Wikipedia defines cPanel as “a graphical web-based web-hosting control panel, designed to make administration of websites easy. cPanel handles all aspects of website administration in its interface. The software, which is proprietary and distributed by cPanel Inc., is designed for use by commercial web hosting services, so the company does not offer a reduced-cost personal use license; however, owners of non-profit organizations such as educational institutions and charities can request a license at a reduced cost. Reduced prices are frequently available from dedicated-server companies, who install it along with the operating system.”

Basically cPanel is software you can access through a web browser to manage your website and hosting account. cPanel is a very common product used by hosting companies to make it easier for thier customers to manage their websites through a nice web interface that can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

What does it do?

Again to quote Wikipedia, “To the client, cPanel provides front-ends for a number of common operations, including the management of PGP keys, crontab tasks, mail and FTP accounts, and mailing lists.

Several add-ons exist for an additional fee, the most notable being Fantastico, a bundle of scripts which automate the installation of, but not the update of (see article), web applications such as SMF, phpBB, Drupal, Joomla, TikiWiki, Moodle and over 50 others.

Unlike some other web hosting control panels, cPanel manages some software packages separately from the underlying operating system, applying upgrades to Apache, PHP, MySQL, and related software packages automatically. This ensures that these packages are kept up-to-date and compatible with cPanel, but has become a cause for consternation to some, as it becomes difficult to easily install newer versions of these packages.”

That sums it up very nicely. With cPanel you can manage every aspect of your website and hosting account from the content to the database to the users that have access to the account. cPanel is a very impressive and easy to use system.

How do I get cPanel?

cPanel is not free, however a lot of webhosts provide cPanel to their customers at no extra cost. You have a lot of options when choosing hosting, so which company is the best cpanel web host? There are many good companies out there so it would be hard to say which is the best but if you are unsure of a company do a simple Google search for reviews of that company.

Dean Edwards has released the next version of his IE7 script to fix IE’s implementation of JavaScript.

I’ve made some important changes to the script which I’ll now outline.

* The IE7 project is now hosted on googlecode (I got fed up with SourceForge).
* IE7 is no longer modular. Instead I’ve merged the scripts into two: IE7.js and IE8.js
* IE7.js includes only fixes that are included in the real MSIE7 browser.
* All other enhancements are moved to IE8.js.
* IE7 is now much smaller (11KB gzipped).
* IE7 is now much faster (it uses the selector engine from base2.DOM)
* There are no dependencies on other files (except blank.gif)
* You can hotlink IE7/IE8.js directly from Google’s servers (usage instructions below)

Some fixes are removed completely:

* the :root selector
* support for XML files
* support for CSS namespaces
* the fix for base64 encoded images