webrampage

I was reading this post about faking getting hacked. Why do it? Well for publicity and some traffic obviously. Everyone’s going to be talking about it and some even linking to you. Not a bad idea. A pretty damn good one actually.

But, then I thought about the long-term effects. People are gonna figure out later on and some of them will hate on you. And what about your readers/visitors/users? Is it okay to lie to them? But, how could we take advantage of this? I wouldn’t obviously do it on the sites I care about. But, how about doing it on the sites which we made for money (I don’t have any, BTW)? That wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Wait, don’t just fake that you’ve been hacked. Try doing some of these shit. But, like Daniel (the blogger at DailyBlogTips) mentioned it will only work if you’re at least semi-popular.

• Site under investigation by the FBI
• You are dying a horrible death (ex: cancer)
• You’re selling the site for some good dough ($$$$)
• Your site was part of a research (ex: I don’t have one. My head hurts. You think!)
• Your site getting sponsored by Google or Microsoft.
• You’re actually an A-list blogger (like Darren Rose?) who is just blogging with a different tone

People will give you ideas, and some of them are going to be good. But, don’t forget its the web. If you can get the info then someone else can too (unless someone gave you the idea on Messenger). What I’m trying to say is that take people’s ideas and get inspired. Don’t just do what they said. Come up with your own idea, so you don’t do what a bunch of other people are doing.

Disclaimer: No, this is not some horrible joke. I’m serious and I wasn’t paid by Microsoft to post this.

Last week I tried out IE8 (Beta 2) and I freakin’ loved it. I’m just really surprised to see how things improved. Like IE8 is pretty much taken to the next level. And you know what? I’m thinking about switching to it (not joking).

Isolated tabs

You may have already heard of this feature. Like the tabs run individually and they’re isolated. So, if something goes wrong only that tab will crash rather than the whole browser. And then IE8 will automatically recover the tab later on. Now that’s pretty smart shit.

Chrome has this and everyone was like going “wow” and everything. But, guess what? IE8 had it first. And one thing I know for sure is that a lot of people are now going to say “well its not that cool”. (IE haters!)

Privacy mode (aka pr0n-mode)

Pr0n mode, that’s what most people call it. I gotta say that its a funny name and describes it properly too. The official name is “InPrivate” but you can just call it pr0n mode if you want. Anyways, I’m not really sure what else you could use this feature for, but it might come in handy. Like when you’re at a public computer for example.

It is fast!

This is the part that really shocked me. I was like “WTF?”. Sites load pretty much in a snap. IE8 beats FF3 at speed. I never tried Chrome (and I don’t plan on), so I can’t compare them. But, still this is like a huge improvement. Good job IE team!

They care about web developers, finally

Oh yeah, that’s right! They care about web developers. Well its about time. IE8 has this built-in feature called “developer tools” that lets you mess with a site’s HTML, CSS, script, disable stuff, outline DIVs and the cookies. There are tons of other features too. These are just the one’s that I felt was important and to give you basic idea of what they have.

Compatibility mode

You’re going to a lot find sites that were designed for old browsers. And those sites probably won’t work well with the newer ones. So, IE8 got this feature to fix that problem. There’s a button near the refresh button which just fixes everything for you. Just click on it and it works like charm. Everything just works fine.

Oh and you can also browse in IE7, IE8 or the IE8 compatibility style. Like the site would work like it would if you were using IE7, for example. You can do this straight from the developer tools.

My own suggestion for a feature

I really like IE8 and there’s a little feature that I would love to see. I wish IE8 was able to run FF plugins since most of IE’s plugins are a piece of shit. FF plugins are simply awesome and they make your life a lot easier. I hope they consider doing this.

Well there are tons of other features in IE8. I didn’t talk about all of them. Check this out for some more info. And one more thing, take IE8 for test-drive! Takes a few minutes to install it. And after you’ve done that let me know if you like it (or hate it), and if you’re thinking about switching over to it.

Submitting your own stuff to social bookmarking/news sites yourself is like a big no-no to almost everyone (well except for noobs and spammers). They think its selfish and people will hate (aka bury, vote down, etc) on them. Well that maybe true, but I don’t necessarily agree with that and here’s why.

Lets say you write a really good post about advanced SEO. You don’t submit it to sites like Digg, Reddit, SU, etc. You just sit back and relax. Now a total noob comes along and submits it. Uh oh! You’re fucked!

Its not always about the traffic. Sometimes you really wanna share something with the world, but too bad, the noob ruined it for you. Wondering why I’m saying that “the noob” ruined it? First of all, the guy is noob! He doesn’t know how to use the site properly, doesn’t do a good job with the title, doesn’t add a good description and he doesn’t care about promoting it (aka sharing with friends). He just submits it and fucks off.

So, do you get my point? BTW, I was talking about quality content (you knew that, right?). I didn’t mean that its okay for you to submit every single one of your blog posts (for example). I mean the things that make you say to yourself “man this is some good shit”. I’m talking about your masterpieces.

One more tip! Rather than submitting everything yourself, why don’t you ask a friend to do it? That way people won’t hate on you. But, again keep it to small number of quality content because sometimes you just need to let it go and give people the chance to decide if its worth promoting.