Four Island

While I did write this post four months ago, and this post was written within the last week, I loooove Pingbacks.

One day, a few weeks ago (read: four months ago), I was reading an article about blogging on I Help You Blog. A link on this article led me to Freelanch Switch, where I found a great article about how to get the most out of your memory stick. On this article, I found a link to a wonderful mini-suite called Tiny USB Office.

Tiny USB Office offers all you could want in a portable office at 2.5 megabytes! Some of the most interesting things it carries are a Notepad replacement (with more features than Notepad itself), an MSN client, a web-server file-sharer, an FTP client, a secure file shredder, a vector-image editor and more!

Try Tiny USB Office out. It's great. You won't regret it. Promise.

This post is an attempt to complete Lorelle's Unusual Blog Subjects Blog Challenge.

I'm here to talk about two strange things that I saw recently. One, is the fact that when I logged in to write this post, I had to solve a reCAPTCHA. That's normal. What wasn't normal, however, was the fact that the second word I had to type in wasn't, in fact, a word. It was "3" and then a "one over two" fraction glyph. Now, there normally isn't a fraction key on the keyboard, is there. I just put in "3.5"

The other strange thing is this blog I found out about recently (on Plurk, in fact) called One Red Paperclip. It's the story about this person who takes a single red paperclip and trades it to someone for something of higher value. He then trades that item for one of greater value and so on until he receives a house.

That is a pretty strange idea, I thought. But apparently, apart from getting a house, he also because Mayor for a day, had a giant red paperclip constructed right outside his house, received $500, got the Key to the town, became Honorary Lifelong Citizenship and had a local holiday created to honor his paperclip quest. Goodness, that's one big prize! And all for one measly little paperclip. 8D

NOTE: I am sorry about the double posting thing. I don't know what's wrong, and I'm going to check it out as soon as possible. Thank you.

I've been reading a blog recently called Lorelle on Wordpress. It's a blog about blogging, and it's UBER GOOD. I don't know why, but it's like a jinxed book. I can't get off of it, there's so much good content on it.

Even if you do not have a Wordpress blog (like me), I'd still suggest Lorelle on Wordpress. Not everything posted there is strictly Wordpress related (like the title of this post, for example). A lot of it is just blogging in general.

And that brings me to the second point of this post. Dually inspired by Lorelle's "Blog Challenge" series (a type of post challenging you to post something belonging to some criteria on your blog--besides being fun, it gives you post ideas) and the comment thread of Dream Weaver's Entry 2 - "Are all Angels bad?", I've created a challenge of my own. But, since I don't want to copy Lorelle completely, I've decided I won't do a blog challenge. No, I'll do a comment challenge.

I want you to find a post on some blog (not on your own blog!) with some content that you can really reply to. Write a very long comment on it, like the ones on the DW post. Make sure you fill out the "Post Comment" form with your website's address in it, because when you write your comment, you need to comment on this post with the URL to the blog post you commented on and the username you are going as. Then, if your comment strikes me as particularly well thought-out and long, I'll post a link to your blog on my blog.

This challenge expires in exactly one month. I think it'll be interesting to see who actually cares enough about getting their blog linked to to actually manage to complete this challenge within the time limit. After the 30 days are up, I will take a day to judge, and then I'll post the results the day after. And comments posts exactly 30 days after this post will be rendered invalid.

I've recently started using Entrecard. Entrecard is a service that helps you to advertise your blog in an easy, fun way. And let me tell you, when I say easy, I mean easy.

To advertise your blog, all you have to do is find another blog who also uses Entrecard, click on their "widget", thus "dropping your card". Then, both you and the person upon whose widget you just dropped your card get an Entrecard Credit (ec). These ecs can be spent upon buying advertising on other sites, buying real things from the shop and much more.

And really, it's fast. I signed up for Entrecard, put the widget upon my site, and five hours later five people had already dropped their cards.

There's a good tutorial about using Entrecard productively on CK Marketing called How to use Entrecard to Grow your Blog, and let me tell you, it's really useful. Go read it. Nao.

One more thing before this post is over. If you want a whole ton of drops, you can sign up for U Drop / I Follow. It's an interesting service where you get a drop everyday and a link on a webpage that recieves tons of hits everyday. I you want tons of EntreCards, joining this would be a good idea.

Okay, okay, one last thing. If you decide to sign up with Entrecard, you can post your site's address here, if you like, and I'll drop you a card. 8D

Recently, I read an article on ProBlogger about the difference(s) between Twitter and Plurk.

I started using Twitter about a year ago, and stopped a few months ago, because it was boring me. However, when I read that above article, I had to have a try at Plurk.

Plurk is already a whole lot more fun than Twitter. As the article on ProBlogger shows, Plurk runs more like a fourm. You Plurk something, and people can Plurk replies to it which show when you click on the original Plurk. You can also see people you've friended's Plurks on your timeline.

With Twitter, the only way for people to reply to tweets are for them to send you a private tweet that A: Doesn't have any connection to the original tweet, and B: Only you can see it.

Because of this, I've decided I like Plurk. I've been using it recently, and as I've said above, it's fun. Have a look at it. Why not even sign up and give me a plurk? Come on, it'll be fun. Please?

Well, once again, I'm hosting another site. This time, it's a blog for Timbo94! It's called Dream Weaver and he's already populating it with interesting posts! Find it at http://timbo94.fourisland.com! It's also on the Four Island Links page!

In other news, the new Four Island is doing great! The quotes db has been completely re-written, and I've now decided that, if you are logged in while posting a quote, you don't have to get it verified. You only have to get it verified if you're anonymous.

Recently, I came upon a web servive entitled reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA system. For those who don't know what CAPTCHA is (shame), CAPTCHA is a method of preventing bot spam on your website. A picture is generated with one or two distorted words on it. A user doing whatever it is you want to protect must type in the words (s)he sees to be allowed to submit his/her comment/whatever.

Many CAPTCHAs annoy people. It seems that all they do is obstruct and prolong the time taken to do something. But reCAPTCHA is different.

reCAPTCHA doesn't just help stop comment span on your website. It helps digitize books. reCAPTCHA sees CAPTCHAs as a way of harnessing human power into doing something useful that cannot be done by a bot. This way, you are not only verifying that you are not a bot when you fill out a CAPTCHA, you are also contributing to a cause.

The people at reCAPTCHA have scanned many books and attempted to convert the scanned pictures into words with OCR software. OCR software cannot always get all of the words, so the words that the OCR doesn't understand are send to be used in a reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA then generates a picture with one word that is known and another word that isn't known. The reCAPTCHA assumes that if one of the words are correct, the other one should be as well.

reCAPTCHA can be used everywhere. They've exported their API to many platforms and written plugins for many web applications. For some of these and some better explained information, please visit the reCAPTCHA website at http://recaptcha.org.

I would also just like to mention that the website has a page with a demo reCAPTCHA that you can use to digitize books without verifying anything. It's at http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html and it's really addicting.

Okay, don't run away. I just want to share some of my favorite websites with you.

• The Daily WTF - This website provides a daily resource of computer humor. Note the name WTF. I do not endorse profanity, you should know that by now. I would just like to inform you that WTF stands for Worse Than Failure.
• CSS Tricks - OK, I admit it. I'm a CSS junkie. I love what you can do with CSS. So I just had to find a good website with daily CSS goodness, so here we are.
• CrunchBang - I do not use CrunchBang Linux, nor do I think I ever will. However, this is the blog of an open source developer so it's often full of the type of stuff I enjoy. Code.
• XKCD - A good webcomic. I love this comic. I love the style of drawing, I love the computer humor, I love pretty much everything except for the inappropriate references and the profanity.
• Web Resources Depot - A good resource for all of your web resource needs. I only just found this site recently and it's already joined the ranks of the sites with their RSS feeds on my Bookmarks Toolbar.

Well, that's all I can think of right now. These are all of my absolutely favorite sites (except for Four Island, of course). I have all of their RSS feeds in my Bookmarks Toolbar where I can access them when I want to. I hope you've gained something from this random post!