I was doing some browsing and stumbled across someone asking about bullet points. These are the little black dots that you can put in front of your text to help form a list

They asked if bullet points could hurt search engine ranking and SEO, to which some “expert” swore up and down that they do. Personally I don’t know what this guy was smoking but let me assure you that bullet points do not, have not, and won’t ever hurt a website or blogs standing in the search engines.

The only content you can add that will hurt your site is when you don’t add content, or copy that content from another source.

I get scam emails all the time, all claiming that I have untold riches waiting for me. All I need to do is fill out a simple form with either my credit card or social security information or simply send them a cheque to “release my money”

It’s hard to imagine that anyone would buy into these scams, but they wouldn’t keep doing them if there wasn’t some poor sucker out there buying into it. So for those of you who don’t know what these scams look like, never got one before, or not sure if what they received is real or not, here is an example below of what a typical scam email looks like. I didn’t change the email in any way so you can see all the grammar errors, punctuation errors, and obvious poor English skills often used in these types of scams.


Attn Please,

This letter is coming to you direct from the Bank that we have this Month June 2011
received a payment credit instruction from the federal Government of Benin Republic to
credit your account with your contract payment which is in the custody of our reserve
Bank account here in Benin Republic.

This is to notify you that your funds ($1.2M USD) United State Dollars has been
programmed for immediate release into your nominated account but we can not transfer
this funds directly to your nominated bank account,Because we are having a little
problem with International Monetary Fund (IMF) so our method of payment is by Diplomatic
Courier Service Via United Parcel Security Shipping Company.

Be inform that your funds have been package like a consignment box and deposited in the
custody of UPS United Parcel Services head office here in Benin Republic for immediate
delivery to your house address,The reason why UPS is chosen for the delivery is that
they are the best shipping company in the world and our government has issued and signed
all the necessary document needed to make the delivery safe.

Note: That the UPS United Parcel Services do not know the content of your box it is been
registered as a box of Family Valuables Belonging to avoid delaying in delivery of your
consignment,The Government of Benin Republic has already paid the official delivery cost
and (yellow Tag Paper,insurance) fee it was deducted from the interest your money
accumulated in the custody of our Reserve Bank here in Benin Republic before the total
sum of $1.2M USD was packaged as a consignment and sealed as metallic showing that it is
not a Drug Money or meant to sponsor Terrorist attack in your Country. The only money
you have to send to United Parcel Services Security Company Benin Republic Branch is
($55 dollars only) being Official Stamping fee which is mandatory.

Below is their contact details.
(UNITED PARCEL SERVICES UPS COOPERATE)
Contact Person: Dr.James Brown.
E-mail:{ups.deliveryservice40@live.com}
Contact Tel: 229-98454624

Here is the information needed to deliver your consignment box to you.
Your Full Name:_________________
Your Complete Address:______________________________
Name of Country /City of Residence:____________________
Direct Home Telephone /Mobile Number:_______________________
copy of your id for identification if any;_________

Waiting for your immediate respond once you received your parcel.
Best Regards
M. Mike Ofo.

If your currently running or thinking of running ads on Facebook, don’t advertise your Google plus account. It looks like Facebook has a hate on for Google plus, I can’t really blame them considering it’s their biggest competition and I think Facebook is getting more then a little worried about losing their number 1 spot in the social network scene.

Recently I heard about an individual who created a Facebook ad that simply asked people to add them to Google . The result of doing this was all their ad campaigns being suspended and a message from Facebook that went a little like this

“Your account has been disabled. All of your advertisements have been stopped and should not be run again on the site under any circumstances. Generally, we disable an account if too many of its advertisements violate our terms of use or advertising guidelines. Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations that have been deemed abusive. Please review our terms of use and advertising guidelines if you have any further questions.”


Is it just me or is Facebook getting a little scared?

Google is ramping out their new social network Google Plus and allowing more invites. This is an attempt at Google to dominate the social networking scene currently controlled by Facebook.

If you don’t have an invite to Google Plus yet and would like one, you’re in luck and I can hook you up. If you want an invite please leave a message below. Because invites are by email, if you want to keep your email address private you can fill out the form beside this post. Please include your email in the message and that you want an invite to Google Plus and I’ll send it right away.

All I ask in return for an invite is that you either stumble, digg, like, plus 1, or share something on my site it’s only fair after all

I like using Yahoo Answers, it’s an easy way to get the word out about your site and build some good back links in the process. I’ve noticed in increase in really stupid questions in the last little while though. And while there have always been people who ask the obvious, or ask questions that make you want to reach through your computer screen and strangle them. Lately it seems to be ever second question. Perhaps it’s because it’s summer, maybe it’s something in the water who knows.

So if you’re thinking of using this site to ask some question please do not ask the following

1. I’m 12 how can I convince my parents to let me use Facebook

If your 12 and your parents tell you no, it’s final listen to them

2. Will you make me a YouTube video; I can’t pay you or anything

No why should anyone make a video for you if you’re not willing to give something in return. Go make your own

3. What do you think of my YouTube video?

Nobody cares about your lame video about you talking about fart jokes. Or your video where you site in front of your computer and say umm a lot while you stare vacantly into the web cam.

4. My girlfriend or boyfriend treats me like crap what should I do?

If you can’t figure out that this is no good for you then it’s a match made in heaven.

5. I’m going to ask a question that doesn’t use any decent grammar, makes no sense, and I expect you to be a mind reader and understand what I’m saying.

Take the time AND LEARN TO WRITE A PROPER SENTENCE, that one really ticks me off. How do you expect someone to answer you if you can’t even communicate?

So please end the madness, if your going to go on there don’t ask one of those types of questions. Sorry for the rant but this is getting ridiculous.

Recently I’ve been looking around at different web hosting sites, offline, and online website builders to make a new website. While there are lots of really good website builders such as Yola, I wanted to go the free route or at least as free as possible.

Not being an HTML expert I wanted to find something that was relatively easy to use, that’s when I was told about 000webhost. What they offer is not only free hosting, but a free domain name and website builder all in one, sounds pretty good right? At least that’s what I thought until I tried their service.

After almost two weeks, trying 3 different accounts and following their advice to the letter, I still don’t have a working website, or can even go to their website builder to create it. Every time I do I get a white screen with the words “no license” in the upper left corner on both.

As for their help, don’t count on any answers apart from the standard check your internet connection and clear your cache answer. Or my favourite

“At this time we can only suggest using advanced builder available with a premium account. We are still waiting for the developers to supply the necessary updates but did not receive any estimates from then when they will make them available.”

No why would someone pay them money when their free service doesn’t even work. I want to know what I’m getting into and play with the site builder first before I decide it’s the right fit. You never buy a new car without a test drive, and the same applies when it comes to picking a site or program to build your website.

So if your looking for a free website builder I highly recommend not using their service. If you do use them or was able to fix this problem drop a comment below and explain how you got it to work.

One of the biggest challenges when starting a new blog or website is deciding what the topic of your site is going to be about. You also want to take into consideration what people are looking for online. If you’re stuck on an idea for your site here are the 10 most popular topics that are searched for online besides porn of course and the rough percentage of traffic each one gets.

1. Health 14%

This includes anything from weight loss, to how to stop smoking, to exercise tips

2. Games 13%

Everything from game reviews, tutorials, cheats, machinima, and walk through’s

3. Auto’s 10%

Buy, reviews, car parts, hot girls on cars etc etc

4. It & Tech 9%

Topics include computer reviews, new gadgets, seo

5. Sports 8%

6. Home & Recreation

7. Music 4%

This includes both paid (itunes) and free music downloads (torrents)

8. Movies 3%

9. Love & Family 3%

This also includes dating sites

10. Women 3%

Again this is the 10 most popular topics other then porn which is probably the real number 1 topic online.

Yesterday Webstarts.com suffered a major crash resulting in the entire system going down for over 24 hours. That’s why if you tried to visit this site yesterday you couldn’t go on. Fortunately everything appears to be up and running again. Webstarts found and CEO Adam Barger issued this apology on FaceBook.

“To our valued customers,

We've literally been working around the clock to solve this problem and we commit massive amounts of money to ensuring these types of problems don't occur. The failure was on the third party who we contract to provide us with our hosting environment. We told them we wanted total redundancy at whatever the cost when we went into contract and they assured us this situation would never happen.

I personally stand to lose tens of thousands of dollars over this situation but more than that my reputation has been damaged. Every second has been extremely painful because I know people have entrusted me with the success of their business.

We're nearly all the way back and will not stop working until all the problems are solved. I'm hopeful that will be within a few hours. Our staff knows how critical this is and will not stop working until everything is 100%.

Once everything is backup we'll be conducting a full audit of our systems and committing even more money to preventing this sort of thing from happening in the future. Please accept my deepest apologies and know I don't take this lightly.”

Personally I don’t mind Webstarts and you get a decent bang for your buck for what they offer. But it’s only fair to know about anything like this, especially if you are planning on using their service.

Let say you found a video you want to share with some friends. Or perhaps you want to post it to your website. The problem is that it’s long and the stuff you want people to see is in the last half of it. Rather then trying to fast forward it here is some code you can add to the video to have it play half way instead of at the beginning.

Simply add the following code to the end of the video you want to share

#t=1m47s

This will start the video half way through rather then at the beginning. 1m47s represents 1 minute 47 seconds, if you need to change it just change the numbers to what you need.

I was recently asked this question

“If I add content to my blog too fast does that mean Google will penalize my blog?”

Google won’t penalize your website for adding a lot of content fast; in fact it’s the complete opposite. If you add content everyday to your blog or website it actually helps. Adding content on a regular schedule encourages your visitors to come back. It allows you to ping your site more when you add a new page or post which lets the search engines know something is new on your site. It gives you more keywords you can rank for making your site stand out even more. And if you want to make money having more pages that have ads (Make sure you don’t choke your content in ads) could result in more cash.

The only time adding content will be penalized is when your content has been scraped from another website, duplicate content, or your content is crap.