Google Adsense is a great tool for both publishers and advertisers. Is a great tool that needs to be understood and used more carefully.

I was on a respected site the other day and they had the adsense changed to match the links and fonts of the site. Most people do that, there is a common belief that users will click the links thinking it’s a part of the site. This particular site had the adsense right above the text, no space between them. If this is they way some people do business, I am in the wrong place, i thought we publish nice things and people will come. Not that they will come and then we will trick them to click the money links.

Why? Well, mostly because after he gets cheated a few times, he will leave the site or block the ads. That does not matter, right? Others will come…

About 6 months ago I got this crazy idea of renouncing at categories and use just tags. Various reasons for this, mainly because a lot of categories needed to be created and I hated that.

So I started using tags. At the beginning it looked fine. But what about old posts without tags? How can I tag them? After some searches, I found an easy fix.

I used the Search and Replace plugin to add embed tags to key words like youtube and digg. I would simply go to the plugin, select only the content, main word youtube replaced by [tag]youtube[/tag]. I did this for all the important words. It is not a time effective technique, but it will pay in the end

Then I used Ultimate Tag Warrior’s feature of importing embed tags and i got all the tags i created before.

After this, i got a bunch of tags. And, because i don’t like embed tags (i think they are somehow confusing), i went to Search and Replace again and deleted [tag] and [/tag].

Be careful and backup your database before. Better safe than sorry.

Got up this morning, and seems the world has stopped. Not so many news in my feedreader. Well, except the terrorist attacks in Glasgow. Could they be all playing with their iPhones?

A very good and comprehensive analysis of the .ro TLD state.

It’s sad somehow, yet it illustrates perfectly the shape the country is in.

I’ve benn hoping that, once june 29 arrives, this iPhone madness will be over. I’ve been hoping really hard for this. ‘Cause i am tired of bumping into it. Over at digg, at techcrunch, every blog and site has a few articles about this gadget i don’t really care.

Oh, an apple-hater, am i? Nope, not really. I’ ve been using some mac computers some time ago and i stayed to windows. I remember a time where i worked 2 part-time jobs, one with Os X, one with RedHad, and then i was coming home to my XP.

I don’t care for iPhone because i am not a gadget enthusiast. I don’t really care how much it rulz, i am not paying 500$ for an useless shiny phone and that is final! (Not that the phone is available in Europe yet). I got a Sony-Ericsson w880i which a very cool and slick phone (just a phone), i have some computers and soon a laptop and that is it.

I hope soon people will end this blabbering. I really do.

Organized Crime police officers arrested Thursday morning 2 Romanian citizens form Bucharest, that were running a torrent tracker with 16.000 members, mostly Romanians.
After a 2 months investigation, police and D.A. officers search an apartment in Bucharest (Romania’s capital), were they arrested 2 40-year old persons and seized 4 computers and 5,200 cds and DVDs. The two were released in the afternoon, but are charged with copyright infringement, punished with 2 to 4 years or 10.000$ fine.
Police said the tracker was one year old, but for the last 6 months the administrators have been asking for donations and running ads on the site, which attracted attention.
The domain hasn’t been seized (yet).

That’s what Kevin Rose and teh rest of the staff at digg.com are.
If they delete the stories with the hd-dvd decryption key, they will lose users. If they let them, MPAA will sue them.
Simple as that.

It seems Rose has already made a decision, explaining in a blog post they will let the stories and fight the consequences.

I’ve just been informed by the owner of wintweaks.ro that the domain will no longer be available. So update your bookmarks with wintweaks.org.

The rumors are getting louder about Google launching a mobile phone. The future, a mobile device that has other functionalities like email and browser. The Future.

The today reality is that Apple’s device will have to fight a bigger battle than iPod. the iPod situation was easy. On an empty and disorganized market came a device that was cool and easy and had a way to put music on it. As i said, easy. But the mobile phones is not an easy market. Nokia and Ericsson have been fighting for the top place a few years now. Samsung, LG and others are biting hard. A new comer will have to try hard.

And, guess what, there isn’t any room. Mail? They already have it! MP3? My w880i has 1gb storage! Camera? Nokia N95, 5 megapixel!

iPhone doesn’t bring anything new to the table. Except a fanbase, eager to buy Apple products. Will this be enough? We will see…

Hei, Adobe, if i wanted my software to look like i’m on a Mac, i would have bought a Mac.
Otherwise, not impressed. Going back to PS8.

Over the time i have been changing registrars and hosters a few times. I like to pay for a whole year, or maybe just half, because i don’t like to be bothered every month with bills.

Some hosting providers are offering free domains with registrations. In 2001, i step up to that offer and selected a “free domain with a hosting account”. Not a good idea. The domain was a good one, a .org, kinda popular now among certain people.

What did i do with it? Use it for about 2 months, put my site there and started advertising it. It got about 100 hits a day. I was happy. After a while, due to some problems, i wanted to move my stuff to a different hosting provider. Not an easy thing to do. Copied my files, but not the domain. I tried for several times to move from the former hoster, but no go. There was always a problem. The domain was locked, the registration was prohibited, i didn’t answer in time, something was always wrong. After 5 tries and a lot of emails, i gave up.
I felt bad, i registered the same domain with .net and didn’t think too much about it.

When i registered with dreamhost.com, i saw the “free domain” offer. Nope! I am not falling for this trick again!
But some of my friends did, when they registered their  name dot com with yahoo or others and now they can’t use it!

Just say no!

This is a great video. And a great lesson. I’ve been watching it 4-5 times just to laugh myself more.

And it’s true. You want to be famous? What are you doing? Are you blogging? Are you working hard? Do you have something smart to say?

As far as i have noticed, there are but two types of people. Those who work hard and those who sit on their asses and wait for fame to struck them. It doesn’t work like this.
Me and a couple of folks have been dragging the .ro blogosphere almost 2 years now. And everybody want to profit. Nobody wants to work. Nobody cares that i am blogging everyday, day and night, and “doing something at 3am”, but they want the fame that comes with the hard work. It doesn’t work this way.

Following the RegisterFly/eNom scandal, i decided to move my domains to namecheap, just to be sure nothing happens to them. I unlock the domains, i set the transfer, i paid the fee and waited.

The next day i received a transfer request from eNom. Not Namecheap, eNom! eNom wanted me to tranfer my domain to them. Why? Well, to keep me safe from bad bad registerfly. I know, they bold and stuff and watch, waiting for users to unlock domains and unsuspectingly transfer their domains to them.

I voted “ney” to that and keep on trying to transfer my domains from registerfly. ‘Cause it’s a long trip.

One of my friends has opened up a website where he talks about hosting. Just Reviews looks like a good idea and if you are interested in this field, drop him a visit.

On the verge of discontinuing the relationship with enom.com, registrar registerfly.com receives a low blow from enom, which is refusing to let some domains go.

Last year, domain registrar RegisterFly got it’s ICANN credentials, becoming more than a eNom reseller. After that, they began transferring domains from eNom to them. Now eNom send an email to some registerfly customers, urging them to create an account with enom and transfer all domains there.

Although you purchased your name at RegisterFly, eNom is the actual registrar of record for your domains. As we are severing our relationship with RegisterFly, we are aware that this may have an impact on you as the domain owner.
Create a free account at eNom using the link below. Your domain names will automatically be moved to the eNom control panel where you will immediately have the ability to manage your domain(s).

Registerfly responded after a few hours, explaining the situation and telling customers to stay calm.

I have only one domain (pigbrother.us) that is in the situation of being registered from registerfly and in the whois to appear eNom and i am not sure what to do.