Show me the goodies is moving to Flexiblog

***UPDATE*** Show me the godies is moving to Flexiblog…

In case anyone’s been wondering where I’ve been, I’ve moved to a new blog over on Blogspot. Content will probably be pretty similar, although time will tell

News highlights at one of the most popular sites on the web

• The ‘Drudge Report’ highlights some of the top stories from around the world in a basic & quick to read format
• Its got a HUGE readership: over 15 million hits in the past 24 hours!!! and over 4.5 BILLION hits in the past year

Blogging for profit - get more people to your site

• Simple, little article about blogging for profit
• In summary, it recommends doing a bit of ‘blog promotion’ to get lots of users to your site, rather than just doing lots of posts to get your site to the top of blog directories

Cool web games, reviews etc at Web Game Magazine

• Growing blog-style magazine that reviews and rates web games
• You can look up games by type or popularity. They also have some handy quick links to their favourite games in the left hand column.

Funny… Weekly caption competition archive at the BBC

The BBC do a weekly caption competion. You can see the archive here.

BBC’s ‘ten things we didn’t know last week’

• The BBC do a weekly magazine item listing ‘10 things we didn’t know last week - you can see the archive here
• Some examples… ‘Scouting for Boys by Lord Baden-Powell is the fourth bestselling book of the 20th Century, after the Bible, the Koran and Mao’s Little Red Book’
• ‘We each get a completely new skeleton every 10 years, because of cell renewal’
• ‘Spiralling obesity rates are forcing councils to upgrade their crematoria, to take wider coffins.’
• ‘It is cheaper to ship waste from London to Shenzen in China than it is to send it by road from London to Manchester.’

Very cute and funny kitten pics

• Some very funny/cute pics from ICanHasCheezburger
• In case you’ve never heard of the site (how?!?) - it seems to be top/almost top of the ‘today’s hottest blogs’ section at wordpress every day!

Take visitors to a random post on your WordPress blog

• All you need to do is add ‘?random’ to the end of your URL and the link will go to a random page on your blog e.g. click here for a random post from my blog
• See the article on this function here

Share big files with a ‘Box.net’ widget

• WordPress have just joined forces with Box.net to give us a cool widget to let people download big files
• You can see an example and learn more here

Laughter quotes

- 10 or so ‘Laughter quotes’ at Sugar Shock
- e.g. ‘He who laughs, lasts!’

People sharing their secrets anonymously by post card…

- VERY cool site where people send in postcards with their secrets written on the back
- Some are quite intense/adult in nature (you have been warned!)
- Cards are usually done in quite an arty way
- Site claims it is ‘the largest advertisement-free Blog on the Web’ (hit counter shows 74 million + visitors)

Cool (though a little weird) pics of ’sculptures’…

Nice little collection of pics on someone’s blog. Some are pretty gothic, using skulls and bones etc. The site (uncommonpictures.blogspot.com) has some other arty pics as well.

Becoming/being self-employed… hints and tips

*Becoming/being self-employed article here*
Especially aimed at web-workers, a nice little summary of ‘best practices’ for the self-employed is available at WebWorkerDaily (lots of other interesting posts here as well.)

Free traffic! Increase web site traffic for free.

Get some free traffic to your blog / web site (through a site called ‘ipings’.) All you do is fill in 4 boxes on a form (name, URL etc), and click submit. When you do, a bunch of sites get notified that you have new content for them to come and index. Its a dead easy way to increase traffic to your web site / blog.

**WARNING! - you should only use the service when you add new content to your site. Pinging without having new content “probably will get you banned or ignored”!!

If you want to know about how the site works and what happens when you ‘ping’, check out the ‘about‘ and ‘to ping or not to ping‘ pages. Well worth reading IMHO - there are good explanations of how web spiders work and how pinging can help you get listed on major search engines!

Robots in our future

Scientists are predicting that in the very near future (within 5 years) we’ll have robots for things like child-minding, care-home work, and prison monitoring! This is according to an article in the Daily Mail, a large UK national daily paper… “Are we safe from robots that can think for themselves?“

The BBC also have some interseting articles on this subject. An article written yesterday talks about future robots being autonomous, decision making machines. It also talks about ‘robot rights’! amongst other things. There are some other good robot articles in the right hand column as well.

Blog marketing - get your blog known

If you want to do a bit of ‘blog marketing’ and get your blog known, there’re a whole bunch of blog directory sites where you can get your blog listed. There’s a good list of them at Google, and another list here from IsPopularOnline. The IsPopularOnline site also has a big list of sites (on the same page) where you can submit the RSS feeds from your blog.

(a few of the links seem to be down, but most of them are good)

Reiki healing for free

Free Reiki healing is available at The Reiki Experiment. All you need to do is leave a comment on the ‘Request a healing’ Page and someone will ’send’ you a healing. There’s a Wikipedia entry on Reiki if you want more info about this type of healing.

The Secret of Wealth and Happiness

Possibly not what you’d expect from the title, this is a short, but uplifting little post.

7 ways to drastically improve your learning

Great post and very interesting site ran by a guy called Ririan.

Are UK house prices beginning to crash?

There’s a website dedicated to this topic, which has some interesting graphs and a great wiki style news blog. The BBC have also written an article on this subject which includes comments from someone from the website. In today’s news, they also report a slight fall in UK house prices.

Blogging for beginners

I just found a great series of free lessons by a professional blogger on blogging for newbies.

Make money through your blog

Blogitive and similar sites let you earn money by making blog entries for advertisers. I’ve never tried this but it does look interesting, so any hints/tips, do’s/don’ts, recommendations, general comments etc would be greatly appreciated. From a quick scout around though, there seem to be mixed opinions about making money this way (i.e. is this just another form of spam!)

For a list of similar companies check out supermom’s page (a page or so down.) There are loads of other web-based money making systems/ideas etc, as well.