I have, for the most part, restored the site back to its old condition. My old host had a hard disk failure on the server and everything was lost. Luckily I could find all of the old posts in the Google cache and was able to repost everything. You will find that the site is more or less just the same as it was before. Thanks to all of you readers for bearing with me and the site through this. I will be posting new stuff soon.

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Listed in Site Related

In this post, I will outline 12 things that you must know and do for proper Search Engine Optimization.

Ask any webmaster out there what one of the most important things for a site is. He/she will tell you search engine optimization. If you own a site and want to get ranked highly in search engines (therefore getting a lot of traffic from them) you will want to make sure it is search engine optimized.

Here are my tips (in no specific order):

1. Keywords! You need to have good, strong keywords that relate to your subject matter. Make sure you have keywords in your meta description and keywords area. Although any expert will tell you that meta tags are not nearly as important as they once were, however they are still important nonetheless.
2. Make sure you have fresh, original content. In your content, make sure you include your keywords. However, do not spam/ overuse them.
3. Describe all of your links and images. In the html of your site, make sure that you add the “alt” attribute for images and include good anchor text for your links.
4. Page title. Make sure you have a good, solid page title, preferably with some of your keywords in it. Also, try not to have the same exact page title on every page of your site, this could cause some search engines to disregard your pages if they all have the same title.
5. Remember that backlinks are golden! The more sites that link back to your site, the better off you are. This is especially true when concerning Google ratings specifically. Plain and simple, whenever you have an opportunity to get a backlink, seize it. Try to mixup the anchor text for inbound links to your site. Too much of the same and your links may look automated. I do not recommend using link farms/link cloud websites.
6. Have deep links in your own website that link back to your main page on every page (this can be accomplished with a site-wide footer/header/sidebar link. Try to include them in your content sometimes as well though.
7. Have good, valid HTML coding. I have heard numerous times from experts that poor coding can and will hurt your rank with some search engines. Good URLs are equally important. Search engines are more likely to index a “static” .html page than a dynamic .php page.
8. Do not get too many backlinks at once, and submit to directories and search engines manually. If you use automated services to do these things, you could get banned from some search engines or be ranked poorly because of it.
9. <h1> tags! Many people forget about this small aspect of SEO. Every one of your pages should have <h1> tags on it, with good keywords and content. Search engines look at these tags more and more as of late. Also use <b> tags around keywords sometimes when they appear in your content. The same sort of idea applies here.
10. Spelling. How can you have good content and search engine results if there are numerous spelling and grammatical errors on your website? Always proofread all of your content!
11. Have a sitemap. This is especially true if you have a big website (such as a forum). Make sure to link to this sitemap from every page on your site. This will allow search engines to find all of the pages of your site.
12. Finally, be ethical, and be patient. Ranking highly in search engines is a long, time consuming, and, frankly, slow process. Success comes with time, and there is not a super fast and easy way to do it. Just be patient. And furthermore, stay away from “shady” and underhanded SEO tactics.

I hope this will help some people. If you have any questions, please leave a comment and I will try to answer them!

NOTE: You may notice that not everything I’ve stated here is being “practiced” on this site. The reason for that is simply that I am not trying to get the bulk of my traffic on this site from search engines. I do have some SEO done on this site, but not as much as I would on a different type of site. I know I could do some more for SEO on this site, however I really don’t feel it is necessary for this particular site.

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Listed in Internet

Well, if you are anything like myself, you love to have random and useless knowledge. I did a little bit of research to find exactly where April Fools’ Day (Sometimes called “All Fools’ Day”) comes from.

There is some debate/confusion over exactly how April Fools’ Day has come to be. Most opinions on the matter do center around the same astrological event: the Vernal Equinox. The Vernal Equinox (from the Latin aequus (equal) and nox, noctis (night), literally “equal night”) is one of two days during the year which day and night are of equal length. This day was celebrated, by some ancient cultures (such as the Romans and Hindus), as New Year’s Day. Also around this time (March 25th) much of Europe celebrated the Feast of Annunciation, as the beginning of the new year in medieval times.

Now I could go into this load of garbage about Pope Gregory and the switch across Europe to the Gregorian Calendar from the Julian Calendar, however this could not possibly be the origin of the holiday, regardless of what many will try to tell you. (The idea being that the Gregorian calendar had not yet been widespread for some time, and many people continued to celebrate New Year’s on April 1st as opposed to the new January 1st celebration, resulting in them being called “fools” and pranks being pulled on them.) Simply stated, the holiday had already been around before this point in history, and therefore did not come of this (For instance, the holiday was actually already established in England before the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar there).

The way I like to think of the origin of this day is simply this: Overtime, various cultures converged with their ideas of lightheartedness around this time of year (the transition into Spring from Winter) and various festivals and age old traditions formed this holiday. To me, this random method of creation is perfectly fitting for a holiday of randomness and pranks. A set in stone explanation of the day would be far too boring anyway!

One rather funny explanation for the origin of April Fools’ Day:

Constantine and Kugel
“Another explanation of the origins of April Fools’ Day was provided by Joseph Boskin, a professor of history at Boston University. He explained that the practice began during the reign of Constantine, when a group of court jesters and fools told the Roman emperor that they could do a better job of running the empire. Constantine, amused, allowed a jester named Kugel to be king for one day. Kugel passed an edict calling for absurdity on that day, and the custom became an annual event.

“In a way,” explained Prof. Boskin, “it was a very serious day. In those times fools were really wise men. It was the role of jesters to put things in perspective with humor.”

This explanation was brought to the public’s attention in an Associated Press article printed by many newspapers in 1983. There was only one catch: Boskin made the whole thing up. It took a couple of weeks for the AP to realize that they’d been victims of an April Fools’ joke themselves.”

~Quoted from InfoPlease.com

I do hope that everyone at least finds this post somewhat interesting, I did when I was researching it. Well, enough of this stuff. Go pull some pranks on your friends. April Fools’ Day only comes once a year, don’t waste it.

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Listed in Random

The Halo 3 system for giving ranks in online ranked matches has dumbfounded me for quite some time now. If you are like most people (and me), you haven’t a clue how EXACTLY this ranking system works. And perhaps no one will ever know precisely how it works except for the bungie staff and a handful of computers. However, we can speculate and hypothesize exactly how it works.

Most of us have won three matches in a row and not gone up a rank, or lost 1 match for the first time in a winning streak of 5 and gone down. I don’t know about you, but I get rather upset when these things happen. After being utterly owned by the ranking system a few times, I decided to start collecting some data and doing a little bit of research.

Halo 3 uses a system which is commonly referred to as “TrueSkill”. This system is not linear as it was in Halo 2, which is the source of all this frustration. This system takes into account factors such as the skill level of your opponents, your total matches played in a certain ranked game type, and what kind of game you are playing.

Based on my own experience (In Lone Wolves), how drastically your level is effected by a win, loss, or otherwise is directly based on the skill level of your opponents. This means that if you are a level 10 and you beat a level 20, your skill will be effected drastically, in that you would go up more than if you beat another level 10 or a level 11. Likewise, if you were the level 20 that got beaten, you would go down more so than you would if you were playing others close to your level. Also, if you are playing with others that are a lower level than you, your skill is minimally effected as this means that you are correct for being at your current skill level/rank. This is not to say that beating people your level isn’t good, because it is very much so.

In free-for-all playlists, there is obviously more than just winning or losing. I’ve done some experimenting and therein drawn some conclusions.

• Getting first or second place is always good for your rank, no matter what. Likewise, getting fourth or fifth place is always bad for your rank.
• Getting third place, however, is slightly more difficult to understand. I personally have gone up a rank from getting in third place, and gone down a rank from getting in third place. This place is ENTIRELY dependent on the ranks of the other players in the match in my opinion. If you get in third place in a match where most players are a higher level than you, then third place is good, and the same goes for the corollary of this.
• Also, I am fairly certain that there is an outlier failsafe. This means simply that if one person in the match completely owns and the final score is something like 25-12, then, for one the person with 25 will get effected very well, and for two, the person in second place will be treated as if they got first place and everything will be calculated with the score of the person in first excluded (meaning second place is like first, third place is like second, and so on).

Team playlists add a slightly different dynamic to everything. They take into account how well you individually did in a match as compared to others and the levels (or possibly average of the levels) of the opposing team as it compares to yours. As there is no gray area between a win and a loss in team playlists, I think that the system takes into consideration how well your team did. This means that losing 49-50 would not reflect nearly as badly on your score as losing 20-50.

One other thing that I have noticed is the effect of “Novelty” gametypes on your rank. These are gametypes such as swords, snipers, king of the hill, oddball, shotty snipers, etc. Overall these seem to have less of an impact on your rank that the “normal” gametypes (Slayer, Slayer BRs, etc). (Obviously all gametypes in control and objective playlists are “novelty” and therefore this does not apply there)

Another factor that I know for a fact to be true is the percentage of matches won. If you have played team slayer 500 times and lost 400 games, it is much harder for you to go up ranks than someone that has played 500 times and lost 100 games. All gametypes abide by this rule. This is, without a doubt, true.

One last item to address. That is quitting. I did some experimenting on my own account with quitting. As far as I can tell, quitting a match effects your rank just as if you lost the match to players that were all your level. This means that I think that if you are at level 10 and quit a match, it will have the exact same impact as getting in last place in a match with all level 10s. This (and the -1exp penalty) are good reasons to not quit matches!

Hopefully my conclusions and research will help shed some light on the way Halo 3 ranking is done. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment and I will try to answer as best as I can.

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Listed in Video Gaming

First off, I’d like to say that I am happy to be posting my first TV show review on the blog! I will be frequently posting reviews of South Park episodes as I like the show very much, and think it is very humorous and semi-intelligent at the same time.

This was yet another hilarious episode of South Park. Included in this episode were political satire, a parody of a movie, and a historical spoof. What more can one ask for? Between all of the children “cheesing”, Kenny getting cheesed out of his mind, and Cartman standing in for Oscar Schindler from the Holocaust era, this episode was constant laughs.

This is was a very clever episode and I was satisfied with it! My rating for this episode of South Park is 4.5/5.

Haven’t seen the episode? Watch it here.

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Listed in TV Shows and Movies

Hey everyone! I’m happy to announce that I have finally started my own blog. I am sure this blog will be a great success and will give me something to do in my free time. I always love to talk about everything, so it should be very interesting. This blog is going to have a little bit of everything. From video games to politics, it’s all here.

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Listed in Site Related