The CrystalX Template

This template has a simple but professional looking design, and is originally adapted for Blogspot, from Wordpress. Who says that Blogger blogs can't look neat? Blended with the right Adsense units, heavy content, a few tweaks, and bingo, you have the pro blog layout of your dreams! To install, just download the .XML file from the download page, then upload the same file to the "Edit HTML" section of your Blogger dashboard.

The Connexion Theme

This awesome Blogger template shows a header picture of a skyline and a bridge. Great for blog authors who want their blogs to appear modern and reflect the beauty of city life! To download, just click the "The Connexion Theme" title above and you'll be taken to the download page immediately.

The Daya Earth Template

This is it! This three column template will surely leave you lots of room for links, Google ads, and lots of widgets on your blog! All you have to do is visit the download page, read the instructions there, and have this template incorporated into your blog in minutes! You may need to tweak some settings, though, so make sure you read the comments portion on the download page. The author of this template has answered most of the common questions.

The Minyx Template

This is an amazing, professionaly looking blog template/layout! Now you can use it on your free Blogger account and make your blog look more "legitimate'! The Minyx Template has a Web 2.0 style, customized for heavy content, and leaves you lots of room for your Google ads. The three column style and RSS subscription widget allows you to think and act like a problogger! Visit the download page now for more instructions!

Blogy Web 2.0 Template

Impress your blog subscribers with these simple but neat layout. Do you know that simple, professional themes like this are more attractive to readers? Now you do! And that's precisely the reason why the Blogy Web 2.0 template has been created. This template is great if you intend to add videos, pictures, widgets, feeds, surveys, and many other plug-ins to your blog! You may visit the download page now.

CAUTION: If you have no previous knowledge about downloading and installing blog templates, make sure you do a little research first. Feel free to post questions on this page, or do some research online. If your blog is already well established, be careful about impulsively installing .XML codes for template designs without prior knowledge. Some page elements might get removed and you do not want your blog to be messed up!

Feel free to leave questions on this page. Good luck and have fun!

Digg

I know I check digg everyday. What you do is submit a link, if people like it they "digg" it the more "diggs" you have the higher it is on the website. The result is time looking at videos of cats or political gaffes or things about digg itself. Its a fun website with a "unique" community with "unique" views.

Addicting Games

With a fresh load of games weekly Addicting Games never gets old. I have twiddled away many hours playing such favorites as "Bloons" and "Bowman." They don't lie when they say these games are addicting, and plus they have so many it can and will keep you occupied for hours.

YouTube

Not exactly an obscure website by any means. I am not going to tell you what Youtube is because if you don't know you must have been living in a cave in Azerbaijan. The fact is that there are millions of videos you can watch. Some entertaining, some so horrible you wonder why they bothered making it.  Youtube has its own culture and a huge community. You can spend hours watching original videos or videos of popular tv shows that have been illegally uploaded.  Either way you could watch youtube videos for years without seeing the same one twice.

Wikipedia

This website has revolutionized the way we get our information. A completely free non-profit site Wikipedia is a true gemstone of time wasting websites. I have frequently been looking up something useful lets say "Mark Twain" and after tangents and links from Wikipedia I will most likely end up with the mating habits of elephants. I learn little from Wikipedia as I never read enough to actually learn about the subject at hand. But the bits I learn stay with me so I can spew it out and inappropriate times and get looks of disgust by my peers.

StumbleUpon

Stumbleupon is the mother of all time wasting websites. Well its not really a website but a tool bar you install that takes you to different websites depending on your interests, you just hit stumble. I have spent at least a week of procrastination just hitting stumble. Do not install if you are prone to procrastinate as this is like the reverse of riddlin.

 

The first step is then to help other people find your blog.

Promoting your blog is rather easy, if you do it systematically. Here are fifteen easy steps to help you get more traffic to your blog.

1. Get an account at  Blogcatalog Post your blog entry there and surf around, make friends, visit their blogs and leave supportive intelligent comments.
2. Get a RSS feed from feedburner so that you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. RSS means Rich Site Summary. It lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication as headlines and summaries.
3. Join Bloglog service and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, and associates.
4. Join MyYahoo.com Choose “Add Content” and add your blog RSS feed.
5. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your subject area. Rather than writing comments like "cool" or "great post." leave intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.
6. Use  Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish content on your blog. But don’t do this every five minutes.
7. Submit your blog to blog directories. A comprehensive list of blog directories is here
8. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.
9. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website or ask other bloggers to exchange links.
10. Get your personal page at http://wiGoogle and add your blog details there.
11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures, and flyers. Tell everyone you know about your blog.
12. Write articles on the same topics as your blog and send them to different free article sites like Ezine Articles Include a link to your blog in the author info box.
13. Use sites like Faves.com or Delicious to favourite your blog entries, find interesting favourites from others and make friends.
14. Join StumbleUpon and start stumbling your blog entries and those of others.
15. Post your blog entries to your Facebook  contacts. If you contribute to writing communities like  Triond.com make friends there and mention your blog.

One more thing! Content is king. Do write interesting things in a sensible way. A Niagara of complaints about your boss or your spouse may not make occasional readers come back for more.

By doing all these steps the traffic for my blog at Original Wavelength increased 1000%.

Enjoy your blog!

While online sites like Associated Content and Triond provide links to StumbleUpon, I never really understood what it was all about until very recently. A fellow Triond writer asked if I was on StumbleUpon, and I decided to check it out. There is a great section in the Triond help area about how to use StumbleUpon to promote your articles, so I signed up at the site and created an account.

There is a learning curve at StumbleUpon, and it took me a while to figure it all out. I have to confess that I'm still pretty new there and still trying to understand the etiquette of StumbleUpon. I often feel like I'm just stumbling my way around StumbleUpon (literally and figuratively.)

Some Lessons Learned on StumbleUpon

I did learn a few things from my experiences so far that could be useful to online writers who are new to StumbleUpon. First of all, even though sites like Triond provide links you can use to stumble your articles, it is really essential to download the StumbleUpon toolbar.

StumbleUpon is a huge pool of users who share their favorite websites with other users in the system. When you sign up for a StumbleUpon account, there is an option to download the StumbleUpon toolbar. This toolbar will embed in your browser, usually right under the Menu bar or Google toolbar. After downloading the StumbleUpon toolbar to your browser, you are ready for the full StumbleUpon experience.

On your StumbleUpon toolbar, you'll see a thumbs up or thumbs down button. When visiting a website, simply hit the thumbs up (the button will go green) or thumbs down (the button will turn red). Then you have the option to tag and review the site also. If you want to remove a rating, just visit the site and hit the thumbs up button again, it will turn blue and the site will be removed from your StumbleUpon favorites. This whole process is what is referred to as "stumbling."

Your site must be stumbled to see benefits like increased traffic, but it's frowned upon to just stumble your own work or too many of your own stories to get them in the system. That can be a dilemma for beginning stumblers. I've learned there is a great Triond community at StumbleUpon willing to provide help and advice for new stumblers. I've had a few fellow Triond writers show me kindness by adding me as a friend and stumbling my work, even though I didn't have many sites stumbled as I was getting started on StumbleUpon.

In my opinion, if you are new to StumbleUpon and not sure how to get started, let other online writers like the ones at Triond know you are now on StumbleUpon. Then start reading some of the other writers you enjoy and stumble and review some of their articles. Go to these writers StumbleUpon pages and hit "show me a friend's page." Then if you like it, stumble that page. You'll find that soon, other StumbleUpon members will find you and stumble and review your own work also.

I find that this is the best way to build a presence on StumbleUpon. I like to stumble within the Triond community, because I feel that it is a very safe and enjoyable way to stumble. It's very similar to building a network of friends on the Triond site itself. If you are new to StumbleUpon, you'll find many Triond writers on StumbleUpon willing to help you understand how to stumble and get started on the site.

Tips for Staying Safe While Using StumbleUpon

Recently, I've found out the hard way that you have to be very careful sometimes about sites that lure you to share stumbles with strangers. It's easy sometimes to want that extra traffic so badly that common sense goes out the window and you toy with the idea of engaging in this kind of stumbling. We all want an increase in visits to our Triond or Associated Content pages and there are some sites out there that promise to build massive StumbleUpon traffic, for free or for a fee.

When I saw a site that wanted me to give up my StumbleUpon password in exchange for the promise of massive stumbling and lots of traffic, I immediately recoiled. I wouldn't consider it at all. First of all, think of the loss of security in giving up your StumbleUpon password, and the real possibility of being banned on StumbleUpon, as the site frowns on this behavior.

Another security issue is stumbling strange sites you know nothing about. The other day I visited a free site that offered a stumble, if I stumbled a site in return. Intrigued, I agreed to look at the site in question, and if I truly liked it, I'd stumble it (I felt that was fair.) I kept refreshing the page to get a new site to look at, because so many of the sites I kept seeing were either spam or looked questionable (not like a real website.)

Eventually, I clicked on an interesting looking URL, and a window popped up. Immediately, I knew I had made a mistake, and possibly harmed my computer by clicking on this site. The window I clicked on went transparent and there was nothing there, so I closed it. Right after that, my computer acted very strangely. My browser toolbars were no longer in my control. The browser kept hiding my Menu bar, and I couldn't right click to bring it back. Soon, my Google toolbar disappeared. Then as I opened a new tab on my browser, the toolbars would appear and disappear in a ghostlike manner.

Soon I realized that my whole computer was in serious jeopardy. I closed Internet Explorer and tried to reopen it, but it wouldn't load. I went to My Documents, and I had hundreds of documents, but I couldn't see any of them, just a blank space. It was the same story with My Pictures folder, so I decided to run a McAfee virus scan.

I ran the virus scan a few times, but each time, the scan would stop at about the same place, and the scan would go no further. I also discovered in McAfee that my internet security needed attention, and I didn't have my firewall protection enabled.

So I put up my firewall, and decided to clear my cookies, my Internet Explorer browser history, and my browser cache, and then power down my laptop PC (running Windows Vista) and start up again. I felt horrified because I hadn't backed up my files in a while, so the thought of losing all my writing was unthinkable.

Fortunately, even though my computer had a major freak out and possibly picked up a bug clicking on that unknown site, I don't feel there was major damage. I was able to open my browser, surf the internet and access my personal computer files again. For a few moments my computer was really messed up, and since I rely on my laptop so much, that was pretty scary. I believe that someone put an unsafe site into a swapping site for stumbles, just to cause harm and possibly get some kicks from temporarily messing up another person's computer.

So I'm avoiding these kinds of sites that offer a random stumble for a stumble. I noticed that one day I had an increase of a few hundred page views at Triond, and I wondered where the traffic was coming from. I found out that a fellow Triond writer had liked my story and stumbled it, and I hadn't realized it. To me, that's really the true spirit of StumbleUpon, and the whole purpose of stumbling, to share sites you like with other users who will give them thumbs up in return, building traffic in an intelligent way.

A Few Thoughts for Safe Stumblers

A few final tips for safe stumbling: keep your firewall up and your virus protection up to date if you are going to be out there stumbling strange sites you don't know anything about. If you are going out there and stumbling unknown sites to build traffic, back up your important files in case you click on a harmful site.

For the safest StumbleUpon experience, stumble sites from your trusted friends, or stumble sites you're familiar with. Use sites that will promise free stumbles at your own risk. Know that StumbleUpon frowns on that kind of activity, and you could get your StumbleUpon page banned. Also, these sites have the potential to direct you to a page that may harm your computer.

Don't just stumble your own pages at StumbleUpon. If you do, you'll find it harder to make friends and gain credibility at the site. The more friends you have, and the more high quality, diverse stumbles you make, the better your chances of increasing traffic to your pages. I've learned that some people at StumbleUpon won't add anyone as a friend who hasn't stumbled enough pages, or has stumbled too many of their own pages.

The more thumbs up you have on your pages, and the more friends you have, the better your chances of seeing some major traffic to your pages. So it's important to understand how StumbleUpon works as a social website.

There's definitely a culture and etiquette to StumbleUpon, and I'm still figuring it all out. I'm grateful that my computer is intact, and from now on, I'll be a lot smarter about stumbling. By familiarizing yourself with StumbleUpon, and following a few simple guidelines, you can have a safe and enjoyable StumbleUpon experience and make the site work for you.

1. Do not promote you Propeller link in other social bookmarking sites like Digg or StumbleUpon but especially in StumbleUpon. I attempted to do it in SU. When I first submitted my article, I had no read and prop. After I waited for more than two hours, I checked my stats again. There was no change in stats and there was nothing to do but a small cheat. I submitted my Propeller link to Stumbleupon. Ten minutes later,I had only three props and more than 200 reads and my rating increased to 5.0. After one hour passed, my rating increased to 7.5 with more than 1500 read and only four props. At the end, my article was in the frontpage. However, in the next two hours, my submission in Propeller was removed then I was completely banned from the system. This was a great experience since I am not cheating anymore.
2. Join the groups but send related contents to them. I was joining every group I saw. As far as I remember, I joined more than 50 groups before my ban. When I submitted an article, I was sending it to all groups and doing this continuously. This might be one of the reasons for my ban. You should send related contents to the groups. Try to become an active user in the gropus.
3. Make a lot of friends. Follow their submissions and prop their articles if you like. You can always follow your friends' submission from the “Friends' submissions“ part.
4. Check it frontpage articles and try to understand their main properties. Try to learn what active propellers want to read about and what they prop.

Every article has only 24 hours to come to the frontpage. After 24 hours, even if your submission has been rated to 10.0, it will not come to the front page. It will stay as a passive submission in Propeller. So, you should be as fast as you do. Otherwise, your article will pass away without seeing the front page.

This will link you into the top favorite videos of YouTube for the day. Not just the ones with the most views but actually see which videos people enjoy watching.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a great plugin for Firefox allowing you to stumble upon new websites (hint the name) with the click of a button. This will link you to the top sites added for the day.

Alexa: Movers & Shakers

Alexa is a web traffic tracking service. You can view the top viewed websites, read a synopsis and view rankings based on country. This is a link to Alexa's Movers and Shakers, which are the websites that are fastest gaining popularity and page views.

Top: Lifehacker

Life hacker posts great tips and tricks for saving time on the little things in your life. From iPhone tricks to personal organization, Life Hacker doesn't post 500 feeds a day like some websites, but the tips it does offer are quality.

MySpace Vids

This is a link to the top myspace video views, which is going to lean toward the younger audience, with popular blogs and music videos mainly.

This concludes part two of web buzz, hopefully you can now spend even less time hunting through the throngs off websites by use this guide to narrow your search for what's hot. Maybe with all the time you save you will be able to spend some time outdoors and away from the computer. Happy Surfing!

I had 'dugg' an article about Eva Peron City: Buenos Aires which collected a lot of reads so I went to Digg to find out if they had come from there. I had a message from someone who was supposedly a fan of mine. I didn't take much notice of the name of the person because I was interested in their link.

The link was to a video which claimed to show everything there is to see in Buenos Aires, so I clicked on it. A box popped up and told me that I needed a plug in to view the video so I clicked the button and allowed it to install.

At this point AVG virus checker started to flash up virus warnings. I also use the Microsoft virus protection system (the one with the shield)and this started to give warning signals.

Then, I got warning sounds and boxes from a virus protection system that I didn't recognise. I thought that I may have installed extra protection and perhaps forgotten about it, so when the programme indicated that I had a serious virus infection, I clicked the button to heal it.

At this point all kinds of warning signals were going off on my laptop.

I investigated the virus which had HREU in the name but no other details and discovered that there are fake virus protection programmes being circulated around the internet and some actually introduce trojan horses to your system.

I am not a computer geek by any means but I did know that I shouldn't close my system down without eradicating these viruses in case they were executable files and they installed on my system when I started it up again. . AVG revealed 28 instances of viruses and Adaware found 40 instances of malware.

My system is checked thoroughly every day and it was clean last night. So, the only conclusion I could come to was that I shouldn't have opened the video link sent to me via Digg. It had disabled my virus protection and allowed viruses into my system.

Video and other file links sent to you via Digg, StumbleUpon and other social networking sites need to be treated with the same caution you exercise when opening your personal email.

Fortunately, I have been able to clean my system up but it has wasted three hours of my day. Be warned.

I closed my system down thinking that I had cleaned it up. When I restarted it I thought everything was normal but when I tried to get onto the internet I was bombarded with adverts for porn sites, gambling and all kinds of things. My browser had been hijacked and I was being redirected to various website.

I discovered that these sites were all being fed to me by something called 'adjuggler'. I tried several Adware removal tools including Adaware but nothing worked. Each time I restarted my computer it was back again. I eventually found something called Superantispyware which removed the problem.

1. Safari Compatibility


The thing that bothers me the most about StumbleUpon is the fact that it doesn't work in Safari. Now I know most people out there don't have macs, and even those that do might still prefer another option such as Firefox or Camino, but I would like to have the option of using Apple's native browser (which runs much faster than Firefox can, or ever will run). This one flaw has kept me from using Safari and has forced me to use Firefox for the time being as I cannot stand to "browse" the Internet without StumbleUpon. ( I do love Firefox, it just isn't the best option for mac users as it crashes often) I do realize this is probably more Apple's fault in their design with Safari, but someone needs to act soon!

2. I can't really think of anything else, the program is genius.

What is StumbleUpon?

Before we go too much further into this, lets take a look at what StumbleUpon is and why it must be destroyed. StumbleUpon is a Firefox/IE extension that allows it's users to explore the internet based on what their interests are. When you install the extension, you will be asked to create a user account. Then given a variety of content types and subjects that you want to find. You will then be given a toolbar with an evil little green and blue button that is placed on the far left of that toolbar. It is that button that will eventually be the downfall of the internet.

Once you click on that button a few times, you will get sent to various sites that StumbleUpon thinks you should go to based on what information you give it. Once you visit the site, you then have the option to tell the evil extension whether you "Like it" or you "Don't Like it". That is just when it begins. The more you click "I like" or "I don't like" after you visit a page, the more narrowed down your websites will be that you get to see every time you "Stumble".

So basically, you more you click the button, the more interesting stuff you get to see each time you click it.

Why it Must be Stopped

All this might sound fin, but have you thought about what will happen to all of the content that gets produced on the internet? Let me show you a relevant graph on the subject:

As you can see in the graph, when you install StumbleUpon, you productivity is slowley lost, until you are not doing anything productive on the internet at all, just clicking that button for endless nights at your computer chair.

What would happen if everyone gives into this and installs the extension? All third-party internet production would be lost, thats blogging, youtube, etc. Once everyone has given in, the internet will be controlled by websites like Myspace, Facebook, Google, and Digg. But with no content being created by its users, the interweb will collapse in upon itself. While users, are Stumbling at their computers, looking for good content, there will not be any.

Stop the Stumbling, Fight the Power!!