1. Milos asks:

Best ways to market and promote a site/product/service? Go

It really depends on the type of site, product or service. But, in general I would say Twitter. Build a profile with your logo as your background and match the colour scheme to your site’s. And simply start tweeting about things related to the site. After that become friends with a few power tweeters and make them tweet about you or your site.

2. MarkCarras asks:

How do I get more people to try and fight for this free Ausus Eee laptop I’m trying to give away at HeavyAsHell.com?

Well did you promote your contest? Did you tweet and plurk about it? Did you talk about your contest on different forums (ex: Digital Point)? Did you submit it to blogs that promote about contests for free (ex: Submit Your Contest or Contestu.com)?

And try not to make the contest too hard to win. But, don’t make it too easy either (not worth your time and money). You want it to seem like its possible to win. And make sure you post updates about the contest regularly. You could also try making a leaderboard.

3. javierjrdg asks:

Ok, here you go. What’s the quickest way to promote a brand online?.
Thanks!

I just answered this question. Please take a look at what I said to Milos (question #1).

4. Shalltell asks:

Whats are the best forms of online guerilla campaigns?

The thing is no-one is going to promote your site for free or without a benefit for themselves. But, there is an exception. If you can make your visitors say “This site is absolutely amazing. Its got great content and a kick ass design.” then you might have a chance. People might Stumble you, might tweet/plurk about you or might spread the link to a few friends.

But, if you want the real deal then you gotta piss off a big fish. That’s probably the best one. Read my post about that and you should be able to get a few ideas. And good luck because not everyone can pull this one off.

5. neboor asks:

Hi, im a web designer/developer with an entrepreneur soul and i love the web, my goal is to be rich with an online project. Can you give me some advice ? Thanks

I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but let me ask you this. What makes you better than all the other people trying to make some money online? Dude literally everyone is trying to earn the big bucks online, but only a few can.

My advice to you would be stop trying to make money online! Build something that you’re interested in, promote it, grow it and money will come with it. The amount of money in your pocket is like the weather. Its good sometimes. Its bad sometimes. So, don’t worry too much about it.

And if you’re looking for an idea for your online project then I’ll say you should look at what people need. See what you need. Think about what you wish was online. The simplest things can be the most successful ones.

With every problem comes an opportunity. You need to be able to see that problem and use it your own benefit.

More questions for me?

Hmm so lets do this again. This went well. I wanna try it for another week or so. Drop your questions in the comments and I’ll get you the answers again next week. See ya around.

You can ask me anything. Anything related to the web. Like domains, hosting, SEO, social networks, bla, bla, blah. You get what I mean, right? I’ll try my best to answer it. Oh and you can also ask for reviews or even ask me to predict the future. I’m pretty good that too.

Sounds good? Okay… so lets kick it off. Just post your questions here by leaving a comment and I’ll post all the answers next weekend.

Photo credit: Sean Dreilinger.

So lets talk about what the perfect NFS would be like and maybe, EA would take this into consideration and put these stuff into one of their future releases. That would be pretty awesome, huh? The perfect racing game. Yay! So lets start.

Car tuning & customizations

I love how you can tune and customize your car in ProStreet. I would defintely want that. Like you can do your own aerodynamics, move and resize the decals and vinyls. You can really make your own car. Like your car isn’t going to look the same as your friends car when you guys race online. You know what I mean?

Another thing that would be cool is the ability to unlock special vinyls. Like the way you could do that in Underground 2. Remember? You race people and sometimes you get a special part, vinyl or a body kit. That would let you make your car really stand out.

Street racing or track?

Both. Yeah I think we would all love the option of street racing and racing on the tracks. Like most of the time you race on the streets and somedays there’s races on the tracks and you go there. That would be pretty cool, wouldn’t it? We get the best of both worlds.

Free Roam? Hell yeah!

Okay that’s one thing we need to have. We need free roaming abilities. Just like in Underground 2 and Most Wanted. And we also need to add some more street racing abilities. Like you are just driving around town and you see another street racer, you flash your lights and the race is on.

Another cool feature would be the ability to get out of your car. That would be frigin cool! We can like walk around, talk with people, start races, etc. Oh and we need to drive to race events rather than just teleporting there. Like how we could do that in Most Wanted. That’s just no realistic.

Pigs Cops??

What would be street racing like without cops? Please we need some badass cops like in Most Wanted. Like the spike strips, levels of heat, wanted list, etc, etc, etc. And hey, we need the cops to be smart (so that we have a bit of hard time shaking them off).

Driving style? Realistic or arcade-like?

Realistic please. Now its all about being realistic. The more realistic the more fun. The arcade-style driving in Underground and Most Wanted is too outdated now. Its just not cool. We want it to be as realistic as possible. The driving abilities from ProStreet would be just fine.

Types of races

Hmm….Drag, circuit and drift, of course. Those are like the classic ones. We need them. But a few other new types wouldn’t be bad. I was thinking of some kind of challenges. Like the ones we had in Most Wanted. Speed camera, heat level, etc.

Story-line needed

We don’t just wanna race. We need like a story-line. Just like in GTA. Otherwise it gets boring. I can’t think of an example but I’m sure one of you guys can come up with one. Drop that in the comments, please.

If a NFS had all those things in it then it would be like heaven. Man that would be so addictive and fun to play. Now I need you guys to digg this if you like the idea. Once this gets enough diggs, I’ll write to EA.

Please digg it if you like it. You’ll be voting for this by doing that. And feel free to drop in your own ideas. That’s it for now folks!

OMG finally a public release. So yeah this is my first release to help make the web a bit prettier. Let me know what you think of this free style for vBulletin 3.7 Admin/Mod CP. I had originally made this for Whooked, but since I was going to release it for public use, I added a few tweaks.

Installation Instructions

Just follow these simple instructions and you’ll get this thing running in no time.

1. Download a copy of Wkd Custom

2. Upload it to “cpstyles” (its where index.php, /images, /admincp, etc is)

3. Login to AdminCP and click on “vBulletin Options” then “Admin Control Panel Options” and then choose “Wkd Custom” and click on “Save”.

That should be it. Let me know if you need help installing and I would love comments/suggestions. They’ll help me with my future releases.

[download#1#image]

Don’t have a clue about what I’m saying? Just look at the picture on the left. Okay that picture is not fake. Click here and it will take you to Google Maps and you can see for yourself there. Weird/funny, huh? I know.

Either the people at Google are messed up or this horse is really, really important. Oh well who cares. I wish Google would respect our privacy as much as it does about that horse or maybe all the other horses.

<joking>Oh shit. You know what. I think Google is being runned by horses. Yep I got it. Frigin horses are running Google. OMG. The horses are going to wipe us out. Shit! Run while you can!</joking>

People complain that Vista makes their computer slow. Now that’s just bullshit. Its 2008. Time to get a new computer or at least upgrade it. I have a “okay” laptop and Vista (Home Premium) isn’t slow for me.

Wondering what my specs are? I’m on a Dual-core 1.60ghz with 1gb DDR2 (RAM) and a 100gb HDD. And yeah Vista runs fast on my laptop. Plus I didn’t turn off Aero or any other features.

And the incompatibility issues. I didn’t have any. Well I did have a few minor ones with security softwares and my printer. But its all good now. Its a new OS. How can you expect everything to be compatible with it? You need to give it sometime.

I’ve heard more shit about Vista than good stuff. And I don’t really agree with them. Plus I didn’t find any bugs.

Everyone loves XP. But wait, XP wasn’t like this when it first came out. It was really buggy. It got ironed out and got better with the service packs (SP).

So, don’t worry. You’ll start to like Vista eventually. And if its slow then get a new computer. Well you will have to get a new computer sooner or later. Right?

Detailed explanation

Okay companies try to make sure that someone doesn’t buy their script and allow other people to use the script for free. One of the most common ways to make sure this doesn’t happen is by putting something called a “callback”. After you install the script, it sends information (like your URL, version, license number, etc.) to the company. Then the company can check if a license was bought for that URL or not. If not, then the company can close your site or do whatever they can by taking you to court. You can just remove those callback codes and it won’t send any information to the company. Now you have a nulled script which actually works the same, but is safe to use if you didn’t buy it.

Who “nulls” scripts?

Well there are groups who null scripts and release them on their site for people to download them for free. And even you can null scripts if you know how. For example, the script was made in PHP and you are really good at PHP. You can then read through the codes and you’ll know which codes to remove.

Is it safe to use nulled scripts?

Now you can’t be so sure that a script has been nulled properly or someone just got the original script and released it as a nulled one. So, make sure that your source is reliable. Plus if someone reports your site to the company then the company might be able to tell if the script you are using is licensed or not.

Netscape Navigator was the most widely used browser in the 90s and Microsoft had just started working on IE 1.0 which was released later as part of Windows 95 Plus! Pack in the August of 1995. Both Netscape and Microsoft released new versions of their browsers as fast as they could. They added new features, but didn’t really care about fixing the bugs and so it was a time of unstable browsers. Microsoft started to win the first browser war as they supported scripting and CSS, IE was also the default browser in all Windows (95% of the people used Windows) and most of all, Microsoft was a bigger company than Netscape and that means, they had more money to develop their browser. And in 1997, IE was also the default browser on Macs for five years.

IE won the first browser war, Netscape fell from 85% to less than 1%. And IE is now being used by 95% of the people. Then the second browser war begun. Now it was between IE and Firefox. Firefox was basically an experimental project of Mozilla, started by Dave Hyatt and Dave Ross. Right now, we don’t know which browser will win the second browser war. But at the moment, IE is on the lead as Firefox has only about 16% of the market share (it’s the second most popular browser). And if you are thinking about Opera and Safari. Don’t worry, most people don’t even know they exist.

I think that IE is great for security while Firefox has some features like you can choose from about 2000 add-ons, change the theme and installing plugins are fast and easy. Firefox has it’s anti-phishing feature, but still it doesn’t make me feel as safe and secure as IE does. Plus, Firefox might have some privacy issues. Yeah because it sends out information to Google to check if the web page is safe to browse and that’s basically how their anti-phishing works. Well I’ll look into this and post more about it.

I would suggest that you go with Firefox if you are into web developing or like to do something more than just checking your email and surfing the web, because it has some really great add-ons. And it’s always good to keep both, IE and Firefox installed on your computer if you are web designer/developer, since you need to see if your pages work and look good on both browsers.

By the way, here is some interesting stuff. Okay in 1997, the IE team had a big party in San Fransisco to celebrate the release of IE 4.0 and they had this big 10 feet IE logo. And after the party they put the big logo in front of the Netscape office and it also had a sign saying, “From the IE team”. Then the Netscape team had their dinosaur mascot hold a sign reading, “Netscape 75, Microsoft 18″ (representing the market distribution at that time). Another interesting thing is that the IE team and Firefox team are so nice to each other. They worked together on making Firefox compatible with Vista, and IE team sent a cake to Mozilla to congratulate them on Firefox 2.0. Though Bill Gates criticized Firefox by commenting, “so much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?”.

Well it’s pretty obvious that spammers would need a huge list of email addresses to start spamming. First of all, there are companies who sell millions of valid email addresses. Thinking where those companies get the email addresses? Well they have programs that surf the web looking specifically for the telltale “@” sign that tells them it is an email address. These programs are called spambots. Then there are sites set up to get email addresses. Such as a sites asks you to type in your email address to win $1 million. Most people would have an idea that this is a spam but sometimes they still give it a shot.

Another source of these email addresses would be chat rooms, newsgroups, etc. where new users often leave their email addresses. Then there are also sites that sell email addresses to those companies. Like when you are buying a product, it might say that please uncheck this check box if you do not wish to receive emails from our partners or sponsors. If you did not uncheck it or misread then your email address would be sold.

Spammers also attack email servers of large email hosting companies like Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, etc. And one of the common attacks is a dictionary attack where a spambot connects to the email server and submits a lot of randomly generated email address then checks for valid ones. Hotmail didn’t have any protection against these attacks back in 2003 and so people used to get a lot more spam on Hotmail than now.

After a list of email addresses is created spammers use programs to send spam emails and they use their own servers to do this or use zombie computers to do this so that they cannot be traced and blocked.

Well if you want to stop getting spam emails then you could do some basic stuff such as put a contact form on your site rather than just putting your email address and never give your email address to strangers or leave your email addresses in chat rooms, newsgroups or put them in suspicious forms.

If have a spammer gets your email address then he/she would probably share it other spammers and leading endless spam into your inbox. So think again before sharing your email address!

Wondering what was written in the email?

Hey, people.

Sorry to break the news, but looks like all of those warnings were real!
The use of MSN and e-mail will cost money from Summer 2007 onwards. If you
Send this message to 18 different people from your list, your little MSN
Icon will turn blue and that will make it free for you. If you don’t believe
Me, go on to (www.msn.com) and see it yourself. Don’t forward this message,
But copy and paste it so that people will actually read it.

It is Andy and John – the directors of MSN – sorry for the interruption, but
MSN is really closing down. This is because too many inconsiderate people
Are taking up all the names (e.g.. Making up lots of different accounts for
Just one person), and we are only left with 578 names.

If you would like to close your account, DO NOT SEND THIS MESSAGE ON. But,
If you would like to keep your account, then SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE
ON YOUR CONTACT LIST. This is no joke, as we Will be shutting down the
Servers. Send it on, thanks.

WHOEVER DOES NOT SEND THIS MESSAGE, YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE CLOSED AND IT WILL
COST YOU 100.00 (pending) A MONTH TO USE. SEND THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR
CONTACT LIST. NOW YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO. PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD THIS OR REPLAY.
COPY THE WHOLE E-MAIL. RETURN TO YOUR INBOX AND CLICK ON NEW. THEN PASTE
‘THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION’.

Hey everyone, I don’t normally send this sort of stuff out, but I had a Look
on the Internet and its actually true that by the 30th November, we Will
have to pay for the use of our MSN and e-mail account(s), unless we Send
this message to at least 18 contacts on our contact list. It’s no joke, but
if you don’t believe me, then you can see for yourself -Go to the site
(http://news.BBC.co.UK/1/hi/business/1189119.stm) – and See For yourself.

Anyway, once you’ve sent this message to at least 18 contacts, your MSN icon
Will turn blue. Please copy and paste, but don’t forward it, as people won’t
Take notice of it.

Microsoft was actually planning to charge surfers for the improved services of its MSN portal in 2001. But, they planned on keeping Hotmail a free service. Eventually Microsoft cancelled this plan when they thought of loosing to their competitors Yahoo! and AOL.

I am guessing that this chain message started spreading in 2001 when Microsoft was planning to do so. And that message is still being forwarded while it is 2007. I would suggest that if you receive one of those messages then delete it.