Scoopy's /home

Since we are not earning as much as we use to from Google’s Adsense program, we decided to start experimenting by joining other advertising networks.

WidgetBucks had created a huge buzz among webmaster’s circles everywhere with their crazy ads and promises of a high cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and a $25 sign-up bonus and quickly became the “Internet’s fastest growing ad network.” These banners feature pay-per-click shopping widgets that instantly display the most popular products based on buying trends of 100 million shoppers.

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We just rang in the New Year… but what about our web sites ? Did they ?

Most sites have a little line at the bottom of each page displaying a copyright notice and year. We try to remember to update this line every year at this time. We are also all probably guilty of forgetting about that line sometimes.

PHP has nice built in date function which allows you to display dates in human readable formats. As long as your site is coded in PHP, which most of today’s content management and web scripts are, it should be very easy to add one small line of code in your site’s footer page.

Just replace the year with <?php echo date(Y) ?> and your pages will then automatically display the correct year and change at midnight like clockwork. You will no longer have to edit all you site’s templates like I just did.

Domain Owners Beware!

If you own any domains, please beware of any unexpected bills arriving by mail about your domain name expiring and expected a payment of three times the amount you would normally pay at legitimate registries, such as GoDaddy or Tucows. I get them all the time and toss them right into the garbage where they belong.

This particular deceptive letter I get comes from a shady company called Domain Registry of America (droa.com). They also use the names, Domain Registry of Canada, of Europe and of Australia and have been tricking technically challenged people since at least 2002.

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CHEAT !

Having a few arcade websites in our portfolio, what better to add to our collection — and of interest to the more serious gamer — a video game cheats site.

We have almost 20,000 cheats from over 3,500 video games, so chances are, if the game has cheats, then we got ‘em at Turbo Cheat. Every system from the Nintendo, PlayStation, to the XBox 360 and more is covered at Turbo Cheat.

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I was swapping some hard drives around the other day and was reminded about an old portable USB drive that I had laying around. So while I had one of our family boxes open and its drives disconnected I figured that this would be as good a time as any to tinker around with that drive that was presumed dead for many years now.

My computer was not picking up any signs of life from this device and I had written those files off long ago. I figured maybe I could salvage the USB connection or possibly learn something else from this loss.

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Building Better Computers

It seems there is a new holiday tradition in my household. This is now the third consecutive year I found myself piecing together the parts to build somebody a new “super computer”.

This year it was for my son’s best friend who was tired of the lag he encountered while playing games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars on his aging “rent-a-pc”. So after getting Santa’s approval for the financing, we ordered the hardware to make his games fly and an uber leet box just for show.

We were both like little boys the day the package arrived. We purchased an Asus motherboard, AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor, 1 Gig of DDR2 RAM, Diablo X-Man tower, and an extra translucent fan to keep it cool. The harddrive and CD-ROMs were getting recycled from the old box to save some money.

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