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What to do with old computers?

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Do you have some old computers sitting around your home or office that you’re not sure what to do with? Have you thought of recycling them or using them in a creative way?


They say that the average lifespan of a computer is 3 to 5 years. So that means that on average every four years those of us with computers are going to be looking for a way to get rid of ours.

I’ll bet that one of the ways you’ve gotten rid of old computers in the past was to give the computer to someone that didn’t have one or to a kid. Am I right? Don’t be ashamed. I’ve done it too. Of course all we’re doing is getting the next generation hooked on technology aren’t we?

Here in Canada almost two million computers end up in landfills each year. Isn’t that a shame?

I don’t know if other countries have really good recycling programs but we do recycle here in Canada which makes it so much sadder to hear that some many computers don’t end up getting recycled and are placed in landfills instead.

As I already mentioned computers can be donated. This is a great way to make room for your new computer yet do something good for someone else at the same time.

Here in Toronto Little Geeks, a non-profit organization that refurbishes unwanted computers and gives them to underprivileged children. Look for a company such as this in your area.

There’s also a program called Computers for Schools. They accept donations of computers at drop off centers throughout Canada. They then refurbish the machines and distribute them to needy schools. They’ll also accept old computer accessories. Check for a school computer donation program in your country.

Then there’s Reboot Canada. There are eight drop off locations in Canada. They’ll accept computers of any age or condition.

Charitable organizations such as The Salvation Army and Good will are always great places to donate computers and peripherals. Just be sure that these products actually work when you drop them off as they are usually sold in their stores as is.

Computer manufacturers such as Dell, HP and IBM have launched donation campaigns. Donate your old computer through the companies website. Your old computer is then donated to those in need.

HP apparently began it’s recycling program way back in 1987, long before household computers were as common as house phones. They’ve estimated that they have collected and recycled more than 600 million pounds of used computer products.

If you choose to go the recycling route because your computer is hopelessly old or damaged you can drop your computer and or monitor off at a recycling plant. The computer and monitor will be stripped of any hazardous materials, and reusable parts will also be removed. The computers and monitors or what’s left of them will then be shredded and sorted into base materials such as metal, plastic and glass.

Recycling trucks won’t pick up computers or monitors that are left by the side of the road. As I said they have hazardous, or potentially hazardous materials in them so they must be disposed of properly. So be sure to check on the hours of your local recycling plant so that you can drop off your old computers and peripherals.

Earlier I mentioned that you could also use your old computers for things they weren’t intended to be used for … I’ve seen photos of computer arches, computer planters in outdoor gardens and creative sculptures made of computers and or computer monitors. If you’re feeling creative and you have enough old machines on hand you can see what you can come up with.




Create a second WP blog in a directory or Subdomain

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Want to create another blog on the same domain? Here’s how:

It’s actually very easy to create a new blog as a directory, or as a sub-domain.

My advice to you would be to actually create your new blog as a sub domain if you think there’s any chance that you might use it for pa1d blogging services, or that you might want to monetize it in some other way.

Some affiliate sites only accept new sites that are on their own domain which means blog.mydomain.com and mydomain.com are acceptable, but mydomain.com/blog is not. So, prior to setting up a new blog on a domain that already has a website or blog on it – think about how you will use the site in the future.

So it’s up to you, but if I was doing it all over again I’d create sub-domains. I have a number of blogs on my Feverishthoughts.com domain. I’ve actually purchased new domains that I plan to move the current /blog blogs over to once the new domains have aged and gained some page rank.

So I’ll tell you how to make a blog as a directory, as in mydomain.com/blog first:

Let’s assume that your webhost has c-panel and that you’ll be using C-panel to work with your domain and installations.

So … assuming you have C-panel

1. Log into your web host and get to your C-panel

2. In C-panel you’ll see an icon for Fantatico

3. Click on Fantastico and on the right hand side you’ll see a list of different types of programs that you can automatically install onto your domain.

4. Look for blogs and select WordPress

5. If you have a current installation that you installed through Fantastico that will be listed on the right hand side, just above that you’ll see a link that says new Installation and it will look something like this:

New Installation (2.1.3)
Disk space required: 3.73 MB
Disk space available: 248167.5 MB

6. Click on the new installation link and you’ll be taken to the first of three WP installation pages

7. If you have more than one domain on your account you might see a drop down list – if you have this select which domain you’d like to install a new WordPress blog on. (** if you’ve made a sub-domain for your new blog it will be in this list **)

8. Install in directory

– Leave empty to install in the root directory of the domain (access example: http://domain/).

– Enter only the directory name to install in a directory (for http://domain/name/ enter name only). This directory SHOULD NOT exist, it will be automatically created!

9. Once you’ve selected the domain or sub-domain that you want to install your new blog on you’ll see an empty box beside the words Install Directory – if you want your blog to be in the root of the domain (like your current blog- but you can’t do that with this new one because you have a blog there already!) you’d leave it blank.

Start thinking about the search engines and how the spiders will see your site NOW. Don’t name your new blog’s directory – blog or blog2. Please think of a name for the directory that describes what your site is about. For example for my directory blogs I’ve named the directories Garden for my gardening blog, Celebrity for my celeb blog and so on. Now the search engines know immediately what the posts on the blog will be able because the main keyword for the site will be in every single url.

10. Follow the rest of the directions adding an email address, admin name and password to complete the installation. within minutes you’ll be finished.

Earlier I was suggesting that it might be better to put your new blog on a sub-domain instead of a /directory.

For this you would go into C-panel – assuming that you have C-panel and click on the icon that says Subdomain.

Once you get into the subdomain area you’ll see

_________________ your domain or drop down list of domains ADD

Fill in the blank box with the name of you want to use for your subdomain.

Then select your domain. If you only have one domain you’ll only see mydomain.com in the next box

After that all you have to do is click on the word ADD and you’ll create a subdomain that might be called:

myblog.mydomain.com

Once you’ve created your subdomain go back to the main C-panel page, click on Fantastico and follow the directions that I gave you above but in step 8 you would select your subdomain from the drop-down list and leave the directory name box blank if you want to install into the root directory of your new subdomain so that your blog will work simply as myblog.mydomain.com

Once you get started with this I’m sure you’ll find that it’s all very easy. Especially now that you have some instructions to use.

Htaccess to add www to all pages of a site

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I’ve been trying to work on my htaccess file for one of my other domains feverishthoughts.com for a few weeks. What I’d like is for the main website on feverishthoughts to have www in the url but ever new htaccess code that I’ve tried seems to fail and worse often ends up messing up how my site works.

I’m so frustrated I could start throwing folding chairs, and other things around!

I mentioned my problem in a forum and wrote a post about it on my main blog and some people have been very nice and offered up codes to try but nothing is working.

If anyone reading this post has an htaccess code for me to try that will put www in all the urls for my main blog even if they came to the site using a link without the www I’d appreciate it.

I wonder if part of the problem is that this domain thewebfiles.com is the main domain on my server?

What not to do to your Blog design

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There are some things that I just dislike coming across when I visit a blog or website. Does your site have or do any of these things?

  1. Autoplay video
  2. Autoplay music
  3. flashy buttons
  4. too many buttons (put them in a roll up menu if you must have them)
  5. advertisements that take up the whole header area making me scroll to see the actual header and posts below.
  6. Too many advertisements – don’t do the max google adsense – you actually make less money from them if you do too many!!! Plus it turns off your visitors.
  7. Pages with so many plug ins, large file size images, buttons etc that make the page really slow to load- or worse cause it to freeze when loading.
  8. Text that is hard to read – white on black doesn’t work if you are trying to read a long post – light gray text works better … same for florescent coloured text on black or white backgrounds, or neon backgrounds with black or white text.
  9. no paragraphs -makes posts very hard to read
  10. Set your posts so that only 5 or 10 display on the main page!!!! Not everything you’ve ever written on your blog for the last two years!

Tips!

Use roll up menus in your sidebars if you have lots of buttons or blogrolls etc. It really makes the page look so much tidier.

Test your blog design in Firefox, Internet explorer, Opera and Netscape – all easy to download and have on your computer. Make sure your site loads correctly and works well in all the browsers listed above,

Also look at your site on different computers. Text and background colour might look great on your monitor but really really bad on 5 other computer monitors that you test it on.

As I said in the last point- visitors only need to see your last 5 or 10 posts when they load your page. If you have more than that showing your page will load very slowly.

Same with categories and archives. Do your visitors need to see your archives dating back to 2001? That’s a long list taking up valuable blog sidebar real estate. Use a roll up menu or modify the code in your page so that only 5 or 10 archives and or categories are viewed. You could also create a page just for your archives and link to it from the main page of your site.

Every once in a while ask your readers their opinion on your page. Ask for constructive criticism. If the majority of your readers state they don’t like something or that your page loads slowly – do something about it.

One way to lessen the spam on your blog

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I’ve always had Akismet activated on our WordPress blogs, and we do get a fair amount of comments. However, in February I also added Bad Behavior to our sites because the amount of spam Akismet was catching was getting out of hand. I was easily getting 400 spam comments on some sites!

That’s a lot of spam to go through to find a real comment or two!

I still find that anyone who leaves a link or two in their comment often ends up having their comment go to the spam folder. I hate that, you’d think that if I approved their comments once or twice in the past both WordPress and Akismet would learn and not put the post in the spam folder. I even increased the amount of links allowed in a comment on one of my sites because I run several blogrolls out of that site and it still puts the comments with one or two links in it in spam.

As I was saying, in February, I downloaded Bad Behavior, and it actually hides the site from some bad bots so the amount of Spam hitting our sites dropped dramatically.

Yes we still get spam, but it’s down to at most 10 spam per day on the busiest sites, and often only one or none on some days. It’s great … 400 spam a day down to 1 to 10? I love it!

So if you are sick of dealing with spam download the Bad Behavior plugin, install it in your WordPress plugin folder and then activate the plugin. That’s all you have to do. It works along side Akismet without any problems.

Recover files that you’ve accidently deleted

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file-recovery-logo.gif I almost decided to call this post “Oops I did it again”. Why? Well, I know some people who constantly have problems with their computers. I spend hours with them either online, on the phone or visiting their homes fixing their computer for them. Days or weeks later I inevitably get a call from them saying “Remember that problem I had a few days ago? Well it happened again.”.

The problems that I fix most often are due to opening email that contains a virus or downloading a program that contains a virus. If these people would get decent anti-virus protection perhaps I wouldn’t waste so much time helping them!

The viruses they get on their computer end up either deleting files that their system needs to work properly or corrupts the files. What’s worse is that sometimes the people I try to help try to fix the problem themselves and not really knowing what they are doing they end up deleting important files as well.

That’s why I’m so happy that there’s a new program called Active File Recovery. You can use the program to restore files that have been accidentally deleted or that have been deleted or altered by a virus attack. It will even help restore files that have been lost when your system crashes or that are lost when the power fails.

It’s easy and safe to use. The program is definitely a reliable and efficient data recovery tool. I’m planning on purchasing a copy of this program myself, and you can bet I’ll be urging the people who’s computers I fix regularly to get a copy of this software too!

One great thing about this software is that if you suddenly find that you can’t boot up your computer you can use the CD/DVD ISO image that comes with the Active file Recovery Enterprise Installation. You can burn a copy in order to get a bootable CD or DVD with a lightweight version of Windows Vista that will run in RAM. Once you are able to boot your computer with the disk that you made you can then use the Active file Recovery software to recovery important files that might have been deleted and that might have caused the crash.

With this program you’ll also be able to perform Partition recovery. So if you have had a partition loss or the partitions been damaged by formatting you can repair it using Active File Recovery professional. The program can also be used to recover media files such as photos, deleted files from flash memory, and data that’s been lost or formatted from memory cards.

You can download a demo version of the Active file recovery software if you’d like to check it out, or you can simply purchase one of three packages – Standard, Professional or the Enterprise package that are priced from $29.95 to $99. Corporate licenses are also available. All of these products include free updates and technical support.

Computer trouble? Try 866GeekNeed.com

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I think I just found the service that I’m going to be refering some of my friends and relatives to! It’s called 866GeekNeed.com. The company provides phone based tech support.

They can help you with any of your computer related problems over the phone. It does cost $1.99 a minute after the first three minutes, so if you have a problem I’d be prepared when you call.

Looking at their site it seems that they are experienced in dealing with all types of computer, software, hardware and computer accessory (printers, scanners) type problems. Naturally the most common types of problems that people need help with are virus removal, spyware removal, email support, and connectivity trouble.

Techs from 866GeekNeed.com are available to assist you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Give them a try if you have a problem that you can’t figure out.

Aligning image and video code in blog posts

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Earlier in the month I did a series of posts about preparing and adding images to your blog posts. I think the only thing that I failed to discuss in much depth was the tags that you can put around your image or even embedded video code.

WordPress has to modes – Visual (Rich text) and Code (plain text). You can add images to your posts while in either mode. However, you should only add embedded video code or even javascript code (say for a blogroll) while in code or plain text mode as it messes up the code when in rich text mode.

For the purpose of this discussion I’m going to discuss the coding that you can added around embedded images, video and other code while in plain text mode. I will just say that it’s easy to center or move an image to the left or right while in visual or rich text mode simply by clicking on the alignment icons near the top of your wordpress post writing area.

To center an image in your post you can use this code (removes spaces):

< p align=”center” > image code < /p>

and to have a photo to the left or right of a paragraph have the paragraph tags around the particular paragraph that you’re sticking the image in:

ie < p >text of paragraph < /p>

with your image code beside the first paragraph tag

< p > < image code > text < /p>

Unfortunately you need to do a little bit more to the image code to make the text of the post wrap around the image. With the code that I’ve listed above the image will still be higher than the text. However, if you want to have the text wrap to the right or left of the image simple include:

align=”left” or “right” near the img tag like this:

< p > < img align=”left” rest of image code ….> < /p>

radia_phone.jpg To illustrate the full code, in order to place this thumbnail image to right of this text, and have the text wrap evenly around it I had to use the following code. Remember, you must remove the spaces for this code to work on your site. I’ve only put spaces between the code here so that I could actually demonstrate the code:

< p > < img align=”right” src=’https://thewebfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/radia_phone.thumbnail.jpg’ alt=’radia_phone.jpg’ / > < /p>

Tips on how to get more comments on your site

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One great way to get more visitors to your site is to visit other sites. You have to give comments to get comments.

Over the last year I’ve spent at least an hour each day if not more going around to my favorite blogs and commenting on their posts. They in turn come back and visit my sites.

When people come to your site and leave a comment you should try to respond to them in someway. Whether you reply to their comment by email, or respond to their comment on your site – do respond. It helps keep the posts conversation flowing.

Think about it. When you go and visit a blog are you more likely to click and leave a comment if there’s already some comments there? Often that is the case. I know that I’ll sometimes click on a posts comment area specifically to read the other visitors comments. If I choose to leave a comment of my own it’s not always directly about the post as it might be in response to one of the comments that I read.

Another way to start to get some response to your posts is to make them interactive. Write in a way that your readers will be compelled to leave a comment.

Ask questions of your readers in your posts.

“Has that ever happened to you? Tell me about it.”

If you’re writing a post about an old friend ask your readers when the last time was that they bumped into an old friend on the street.

If you’re writing about something ask your readers their opinion.

-what would they do in that situation?
-What item would they have purchased?
-How would they have responded when someone said that to them?

In one post that I wrote recently on my other blog I was talking about a shopping trip to Walmart. It’s a new Superstore Walmart. It replaced the smaller Walmart that we used to shop at. The old one sold food – but only dried and canned goods and frozen foods. Nothing fresh. This new one has a true grocery store section with fresh meat, and produce. I checked out the meat while I was there but I was leary about purchasing meat because from past experience I know there’s some stores that it’s just better to not buy certain types of food from. In my post I decided to ask my readers if they ever purchased fresh meat at Walmart and if it was quality meat. Several people responded with the majority answering that the meat is really good.

I made my post interactive, got a question that I wanted answered and got a lot of great comments.

You can even throw a poll into your posts every now and then. Try to word the poll questions and answers in a way that your readers want to expand on their answer in your comment section.

Just keep trying different things like that and I’m sure you’re readers will start to respond and leave comments. When they do leave comments respond to what they say in your own comment area, through email and or by visiting their site.

It can be a lot of work but I guarantee that it will work.

Adding an image to your WordPress post

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If you read the last post you now know a little bit more about preparing photos and images prior to including them in a post on your blog or an article on your website. Now you are ready to include the image in your post.

For the purposes of this article I’m going to tell you how to put images in WordPress blog posts, as that is the blogging platform that I use and to which I’m most familiar. I think that some of the methods might be slightly different on other blogging platforms but the theory should be the same.

As I said in the last post there are at least two ways to get an image into your post. You can upload them directly from your computer, or you can upload them to a free photo hosting service first.

Let’s discuss uploading an image into a WordPress post first:

While you are in the post writing area of WordPress you’ll see an upload section right below the writing area. When you want to add a photo that you’ve already prepared for your post simply scroll down to the upload area and:

Find the Browse button in the upload section. Browse through the files on your computer to find the image that you’d like to upload.

Once you find the image that you’d like to use in your post click on the Upload button in the bottom section of the Upload area.

Once the file has uploaded you’ll see a thumbnail of the image on the left. If you are using a version of WordPress that is less than 2.1:

– you’ll have to click on the image to choose either thumbnail or full size

If you are using WordPress 2.1+

– Beside the thumbnail of the image you’ll be able to select between full size, thumbnail, or title. I believe title will just be a link to the photo on the server. Below that you’ll see that you can link to the file, the page or none. I tend to use full size images in my post so I usually select full size and none.

Now, before you click on the Send to Editor button place your cursor in the area of the post that you’d like the image to be located. Ok … now click on send to editor.

If you are in rich text or visual mode you’ll see the image. If you are in code or plain text mode you’ll just see the code for the image in your post.

If you are in code mode you can use < center > or < p align="center" > to align the photo in the center of the post. You can also use the paragraph tag to align the photo to the left or right side of the post. The text will come up and wrap around the photo if you set the photo to the left or right.

In Visual or Rich text mode you can simply click on the alignment icons near the top of the post to move the photo from left, center or right.

Then TA DA you have a photo inserted into your post.

If the photo is still a little bit too large for your post you can click on the photo and you’ll see points in the corner that you can drag to make the photo larger or smaller. You’ll only be able to do this while in visual or rich text mode.

The other way to get photos into your posts is to get the photo links from the free photo services that you’ve already uploaded your photos to – ie Flickr or Photobucket. Simply visit either of those sites, upload your photos if you haven’t already, and then depending upon which service you choose to use, select the photo and get the link for the approximate correct size of photo that you need for your post.

Once you have the image link, you can use the link button at the top of your WordPress post writing area to add the http link to your post.

Now you’re all set. You can create great posts with photos and images in them to illustrate whatever topic you happen to be discussing in your post.

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