Helping You Make Better Tech Decisions

A blog’s sidebar is a great place to show content to everyone who visits your site. Instead of wasting the space with huge tag clouds (which you could place in the footer) or going through lists of boring widgets, take some of the ideas below and optimize your sidebar!

Poll – No matter what type of blog you have, a poll can help you find out more about your visitors. Rotating through several polls can keep users coming back and interacting with your site.

Yesterday we switched our forum software from phpBB to IP.Board. We’re happy to report that everyone loves this move. IP.Board is easier to use for the members, and moderation and administration are easier for the staff. The software definitely feels much more stable than phpBB; we don’t have to worry about downtime every time we install a new modification. The community and support behind the software is also great; and it’s nice to have proper styles and modifications. The built-in search engine optimization is also incredible, and we couldn’t find any faults with it. We won’t attempt a full review because you can always find great reviews from other sites which specialize in reviewing software.

I just started Steam to play some Counter Strike: Source and I noticed my total play time.  It was over 100 hours! Wow, I didn’t feel that go by. I’ve had the game for two months and I occasionally play (no hardcore gaming from me) but I guess it really does add up. It makes me think what else I could have done during those 100 hours.  Just think how much I could have accomplished if I wasn’t at my computer pointing and clicking in a game.

I would say that a blog is the easiest way for a person to make themselves a website. Blogs provide great content management and you won’t have to worry about coding anything to set up and run your blog.  Making money from your blogs is a bit more difficult.

Putting up AdSense (or any other pay per click ads) on your blog isn’t the smartest way to go. It’s the easiest, but unless you get several thousand visitors to your blog every day you won’t be making much of a profit. If you start directly selling products from your blog you’ll have to put some work into it but you’ll make a lot more.

This is one plugin all web surfers should install. Wot is a community powered trust tool which can tell you if a website is trusted before you click the link. WOT can help everyone, from children to web shoppers to the most experienced surfers. It’s a great tool to keep you safe online.

WOT integrates nicely into the most popular web browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, IE, and Safari. Sites are rated based on trustworthiness, vendor reliability, child safety, and privacy. Ratings are shown by links on webpages and by search results; green means the site is trusted, yellow is unsure, and red means a site is not trusted.