I’m a sucker for creativity and crazy technical skills when it comes to food (or anything for that matter). So I compiled a list of fantastically creative Gingerbread “Houses” and creations for the holidays. Some of these have tutorials so you may make them on your own, while others are just edible masterpieces that looks far too impressive to munch down on.  

Since the range of the houses is so big, this gallery of Gingerbread Houses are not in any particular order.  Enjoy this feast of Gingerbread!

Happy Holidays from everyone at Livid Lobster!

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If you have been on a site like Lamebook or Damn You Auto Correct, you have seen amusing screenshots submitted by users who have seen funny things occur on their Facebook wall, on Twitter or though texts. They can be very amusing, sometimes cringe worthy and always entertaining.

But did you know that quite often they are fake? This is obvious from time to time, when little mistakes – or big ones – give it away. When that happens, you might be wondering how they went about making the fake ones in the first place. The answer to this is through tools that have been made to simulate these screenshots.

Here are five of the most popular tools for faking Facebook and Twitter wall posts, texts and even news stories.

Fake Convos

This is one of the easier fake Facebook convo/newsfeed generators available. It works by letting you log in using your existing Facebook account. You then browse through available profile images, such as Barack Obama, Snooki, Tiger Woods or Bart Simpson. Or, you can paste in a URL to get a photo from a web page. Then, you type in a comment and add it to the stream. You just keep adding while it creates a screenshot with each submission. The end result is very realistic.

Noob

Do you want to trick your friends into thinking a piece of news is real? This is a generator that creates fake news pieces that can be customized by you. The screencap resembles a real news site, such as “The Bluffington Post,” using the same layout as The Huffington Post. There are different ads, links and videos added in to make it look more genuine. You can choose from a list of preset headlines, such as “Wins the 2011 X Games, Breaks Back” or “Sued for Illegally Downloading Music, Movies, Porn.”

The Wall Machine

This is another cool fake Facebook wall generator. It works by giving you a basic status message box. By clicking various parts of the box, you are able to customize it. This means changing the name, the status message and the person who ‘likes’ it, and adding additional comments. You can easily upload photos for the profile pictures, as well. The end result is indistinguishable from real Facebook screenshots.

iFakeText

This is a text generator that creates iPhone screeshots like you see on Damn You Auto Correct, or Parents Shouldn’t Text. You put the name of the other person in the Name section, then write it like the following.

Person Who’s Phone It Is: Message

Other Person: Message

It will create a real-looking iPhone screeshot that you can save or share. You can select either Verizon or AT&T as the provider. There is no watermark.

Fake Tweet Builder

You use this one to create a fake Twitter feed screenshot. Each person in the conversation is put in a list form, like this:

Jackie_Chan: I am going to be in the new live action Sesame Street movie!

ChrisTucker: @Jackie_Chan who you playing man?

Jackie_Chan: @ChrisTucker Big Bird!

Then you can customize things like the color, the Twitter ID inclusion, background images and more. If you don’t check the box to allow you to see the names, it will censor them. All pictures are automatically blurred, and it doesn’t allow you to upload your own, which is a little disappointing.

Conclusion

Making fake Twitter, Facebook, news or text screencaps is a lot of fun. It is also very easy, thanks to these brilliant tools that make it fast and simple to do anything you could possibly want.

What are some of your favorite fake screenshot tools? Let us know in the comments!

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WordPress has long had a major problem, that has yet to be solved by the development team. Namely, the fact that there is no way to globally disable commenting on certain types of posts or pages – most notably images and media files.

Spammers have been attacking blogs for a very long time and targeting image and media file attachment pages. If you wonder what I mean by that, click on the thumbnail image above. You’ll see that it takes you to a page with a bigger embedded version of the image. Normally, those pages allow you to leave comments (you’ll notice that here on OMB it doesn’t).

Comment Spam on Images

I have been getting hammered with comment spam on images and was looking for a solution for some time, until finally today I came across the Disable Comments plugin.

This video demonstrates the seriousness of the spam comment problem with regards to images. As you can see, the vast majority of spam comments are on image only pages of the site.

5 minutes later, my site was impervious to comment spam on images because this beautiful plugin disable comments on ALL media across the website!

The Hard Way

Now, if you know what you’re doing and you’d rather do it by hand you can run the following MySQL query using PHPMyAdmin or whatever way you like:
UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status="closed";

But I don’t know why you’d want to do that when the plugin takes care of it for you automatically. Give it a try and enjoy your new spam free image pages plus your faster website since this will deter spammers and decrease the load on your server.

Frankly, I don’t understand why the WP core development team hasn’t added this as a basic feature yet. It would also ease the pain on the Akismet anti-spam service dramatically.

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I fell in love with the Editor’s Choice Award winning Magnepull, a tool professional installers use for fishing cables through walls, and I wanted to give it a try. Since we figured this tool would make it easy for anyone to run wires – not just professionals – Mark Z. grabbed a camera and filmed me fishing the cable through the wall so you guys could see how easy it is to do.

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In Wall Power Cable Wiring

While I was doing it I figured some other people might experience this need, so I made a little video to show you how simple the solution is. All you need is this kit: Datacomm 50-3332-WH-KIT Flat Panel TV Cable Organizer Kit (White)

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Hack Your Homework

By the way, you can watch the entire episode that this excerpt came from here.

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John P's Brilliance on Twitter

That’s just not enough when you need to find a link you or a friend posted, or look up a quote or a funny joke. There are many, many reasons we look up old tweets, and third party websites have come to our rescue! Let’s take a look at some options for searching old tweets and backing up your tweet stream.

Search

Keep in mind, with most of these options, you have the ability to choose who’s Twitter Timeline you’re searching. So, you can search your own timeline or you can search someone else’s tweets. I’m going to focus on searching your own tweets, because I’ve found that most of us wind up wanting to do that more often.

Also keep in mind that these services will search back 3200 tweets before it stops looking. How far back that goes in years, of course, depends on how much you tweet on a daily basis. This is a limitation of the Twitter API, not the services.

SnapBird: Search Tweets

Snap Bird

SnapBird.org says they won’t search the public timeline (the tweets that are currently available via twitter.com), but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I can easily pull up tweets that range from two minutes ago to a couple years ago.

Not only can you search a timeline, but you can ALSO use Snap Bird to search @replies and Direct Messages. This is a very easy to use interface, free, and I’ve always found what I’m looking for with the service. Highly recommended!

Topsy

Using Topsy.com’s free Advanced Search, you can search your tweets and even subscribe to the results via RSS. The way it displays results is interesting, though not all that visually attractive. You can look at tweets broken up into the Past Hour, the Past Day, the Past 7 Days, the Past 30 Days, the Past 71 Days (why 71, I don’t know!), or all tweets of All Time (up to the API limit of 3200).

Topsy gives you the ability to retweet a tweet you find. You can share the full search results on Twitter, or you can create an email alert for the search criteria you’ve entered.

But wait…there’s more!

It doesn’t JUST do Twitter. Want to search the entire web? How about photos or videos online? It does that too.

Social Searching: Search Facebook & Twitter

Social Searching

SocialSearching.info lets you search BOTH Twitter and Facebook. This one is also a very simple interface – choose the user you want to search and a keyword. You do have to login with your Twitter or Facebook account in order to use this service.

If you try it out and don’t like it, head on over to your Twitter account. Under Settings, then Connections, you can revoke access to the site. It’s a good idea to do this every once in a while if you’re the type to try out a lot of third party Twitter websites, by the way.

Advanced Google Search

If you trust Google more than anyone else, then you could just use an advanced Google search. Just type…

site:twitter.com inurl:”USERNAME” KEYWORD

…where an example search would be:

site:twitter.com inurl:”calilewis” amazon

Backup

Searching old tweets, whether your own or someone else’s is great and all, but do you ever get a little antsy about loosing all the work you’ve put INTO Twitter? I do! I spend a lot of time on Twitter, posting and interacting with my followers. Last year, I started backing up my tweets for safe storage. I have yet to actually need the backup, but if something terrible happens to Twitter one day, I’ll be glad I have them!

Backupify: Backup Your Tweets

Backupify

The one I use is called Backupify. You can backup your Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Flickr and more (up to 5 accounts) on a weekly basis for free. You can use up to 2GB of storage, and it’ll email you the backup files. They offer Pro accounts that gives you more accounts, more storage and more support, starting at $5/month.

Like all good backup should be, it’s a simple, painless process that doesn’t require your attention once it’s setup.

TweetBackup

TweetBackup.com is now owned by Backupify, but it’s still running separately and seems to have been untouched. However TweetBackup users can now take advantage of Backupify’s support system.

They offer free backup on a daily basis, rather than a weekly basis. Login with your Twitter account, and it’ll work automatically on the backend. It will allow you to export your tweets in a variety of formats.

BackupMyTweets

BackupMyTweets does things a little differently in the signup process. The actual backup process seems to be the same, but BackupMyTweets charges for their service…UNLESS you tweet about them. THEN they’ll give it to you for free.

Let me be very clear…I’m adamantly against being forced to tweet in order to try out a service. I won’t do it. So I have NOT tried this service, but I know some of you may not care, so I’m sharing in case you want to use it. At the very least, their website is the nicest looking of all. If that means anything…

Archivist

The Archivist, from the team at Microsoft MIX Online, lets you search for tweets and then archive that search. So rather than archiving YOUR Twitter feed, it’ll archive the history of the search terms. It’ll even give you graphs to go along with your archive!

Look at the Volume Over Time, Top Users for that search, how many Tweets versus ReTweets there are, the Top Words and Top URLs. If you’re into analytics, this is an interesting website!

Going Mobile

If you’re an iPad user, you could archive and search your tweets in a mobile fashion with an app called Tweet Library. When you use it for the first time, it’ll download the back catalogue of your tweets and (I presume, though it doesn’t say specifically) continue to keep the archive of new tweets. It’ll also allow you to search through old tweets and curate them by categorizing into groups.

That’s a Wrap!

I think that’s about enough to get you started! What services do YOU use? Leave a comment below!

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Nail Through the Wood Puzzle

Well, here is the secret behind how the old “nail stuck impossibly in the wood” trick is pulled off. Its actually pretty easy to do if you’ve got a bandsaw, a drill, and some hot water handy. Take a look…

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Trey Ratcliff's Horse HDR

Well, I’ve got some good news… Trey now has a NEW downloadable version of his HDR Workshop! And, thanks to the magic of friendship, you can get 10% off any version of the HDR Tutorial using the coupon code: “JOHNPISAGREATGUY“. So feel free to Order the HDR Video Tutorial Now! (Oh, and don’t bother looking for a bigger discount code anywhere. It doesn’t exist, so no need to waste time.)

What’s This All About?

This isn’t any old HDR Tutorial… this video was shot on location in Austin during Trey’s sold-out HDR Workshop which people paid $1,000 to attend. (And I should know… I shot it!)

And lets not forget that Trey Ratcliff is the greatest HDR photographer on the planet, and the first person to ever have an HDR hang in the Smithsonian Museum.

So for the first time ever, if you want to learn to take HDR photography, or simply take your HDR photography to a whole new level, you can buy Trey’s complete 300 minutes of instruction for $99! And you can be watching the video in minutes. Here is a little sample of the kind of detailed instruction you’ll find in the video:

And here’s what people had to say who attended the training, along with a little context from Trey.

So, what are you waiting for, go and buy the Downloadable HDR Workshop now using 10% off Coupon Code “JOHNPISAGREATGUY”!

I’VE GOT A FREE COPY TO GIVE AWAY!!!

How do you get qualified to win? Simple! Just leave a comment below and let me know what you think of Trey’s work!

Oh, and make sure I’ve got your name and email address. 48 hours after this post goes live I’ll get together with Trey and we’ll send one lucky person a code to download a free copy of the Workshop!

UPDATE: DAVID DOTSON (COMMENT 183) WAS THE WINNER CHOSEN BY RANDOM SELECTION! David we’ll send you an email with the download code very soon. Congrats on the win!

Trey Ratcliff’s HDR Video Tutorial Discount Coupon

Remember, if you are interested in buying a copy I’ve arranged for a discount with Trey for ANY of the version of the HDR Tutorial. Just use coupon code:

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I’ve got a lot of friends on Facebook. And those friends are very busy inviting me to events, pages, Farmville, Mafia Wars, and every other little thing anyone ever invented for Facebook. The problem is, I don’t have time to go through literally hundreds of invitations to confirm or deny them. (And I mainly just want to deny them…)

So I was looking for a way to automatically deny all invitations on Facebook when I came across this nice little Firefox extension that lets you do just that! Well, it will also let you accept all invites on Facebook, if you’ve got a lot of extra time in your life to spend looking at all that stuff.

But if you have a whole boatload of page invites, friend invites, calendar invites, game invites, or any other invites that you want to either automatically deny or confirm – here is how to do it!

You just need a few things to be able to deny all the Facebook invites too.

• First you need the Mozilla Firefox Web browser. You can get it free here: http://www.mozilla.com/.
• Then you need an add-on called GreaseMonkey. Get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/748.
• Finally you add a GreaseMonkey script to work with Facebook here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/43682.

I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it. And after you do, when you visit pages in Facebook where there are a lot of invitations waiting you’ll see options at the top of the page to deny all of the invites. You just basically tell it to start, and then wait till the countdown is complete!

The script also allows you to:

• Bulk add users: Adds a bulk add box, in the greasemonkey menu on the bottom right of the browser, go to “script commands” and choose “show bulk add friends” and you can add users by the bulk.
• Invite boxes: In the invite box of an app, it’ll bring up a link to refresh the list of friends who have this app and then select them in the invite box.
• Friends’ list: You can put all your friends who are using an app into a friends’ list by visiting the invite page of the app, click “refresh” to collect all the users, then visit your friends’ list and click “edit list” and choose “select your friends from the previous app”.

Though I haven’t tried any of that. I’m just happy with my newfound ability to automatically delete all those invitations!

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Here in Texas it is HOT outside! I mean it’s still nearly 100 degrees at midnight during the summer. So, it’s no surprise that Watermelon is a favorite around these parts. If you keep it in an ice chest for a while before you carve it up it makes for a cool refreshing treat!

But there are chefs out there who are using watermelons (and other fruits) for much more artistic purposes! And I was amazed to see some of the things these people can do in a very short time.

Here is Vid Nikolic going to work on a watermelon.

Here is an obviously promotional piece created for a client. Bonus if you wait till the end to see the carver’s (Tiron Gaby from Romania) mustache. ;-)

This carver’s technique is a little different from the others. He seems to start carving the watermelon from the opposite direction, but the result is still impressive!

If you want to learn how to get started, here is a Watermelon Carving Tutorial:

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Today while performing a WordPress upgrade on another blog the update failed! Grrr. If that wasn’t enough of a problem, when I checked the site it was stuck in “Maintenance” mode – meaning that no matter what you tried to do the only thing that showed up was a page telling you the site was in “Maintenance Mode”.

I Googled like a madman, and searched the WordPress site too, but there is no documentation as to what to do to get it out of this mode! So, I fired up my FTP browser and manually performed a complete upgrade of WordPress. Still no luck!

Next I checked the .htaccess file to see if the system had added some sort of line to it, but no luck. Finally, I noticed a strange file in the root of the site called .maintenance. The date stamp was just minutes old, so I deleted it and VOILA, the site was back to normal.

So, if you are unable to load WordPress because it’s stuck in Maintenance mode, just FTP into the root directory and delete the .maintenance file. Too bad this wasn’t documented somewhere, and too bad that with this in place you can’t even access the WP Admin area. Sheesh…

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Seems like I’ve been talking to more and more people lately who are just getting started with WordPress, so in order to put a few materials together for you so you don’t have to search all over the bloody internet I’ve compiled the following WordPress Video Tutorials. I consider all of these good enough that I wouldn’t even bother remaking them because they really can’t be improved upon.

So let’s get started learning how to use WordPress, shall we?

Tutorial: How to Use the WordPress Dashboard

The first thing that happens when you log into any WordPress installation is that you are taken to the Dashboard. So we might as well start out by learning what’s here and how to customize the Dashboard.

Tutorial: How to Write a Post in WordPress

There’s nothing more important to your blog or Website than the content! So, it’s fitting that the first question we should answer is, “how do I write a post in WordPress”?

Tutorial: Saving Draft Posts and Pages in WordPress

Now that you know how to write a post, it’s important to know that you can actually start a post now, but save and finish it later! Indeed I usually have about 50 blog posts in draft format in my blog, so if you think of something interesting just get a post started and come back to it later. Here is how to save your post as a draft.

Tutorial: How to Embed Images, Video and Audio in a Post in WordPress

To be honest, if you just put a bunch of text on a page with no images or multimedia it’s going to be really, really boring. So next lets take a look at how to embed pictures, video and audio in a post.

Tutorial: How to Create Categories in WordPress

Now that you know all about writing a post let’s make sure that you are keeping things nice and organized. Here is how to add or delete a Category. You should assign categories and keywords to each of your blog posts so that visitors can later find related content.

Ok, I’m not going to keep going on and on here. If you’ve been through these videos I think you’ll be able to get the hang of WordPress and I recommend you just play around and experiment with the rest of the stuff. Don’t worry, you won’t break anything and it’s really easy to get around in WordPress!

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Folks, I travel a lot. And I use my iPhone, and I use Google Calendar. On my recent trip to the Indy 500 my phone apparently did all sorts of automatic stuff based on my time zones and kept me in good shape. However, when I returned to Dallas I had something strange happen!

Although my Google Calendar was reflecting the proper time zone on my computer, and ALL of my time zone settings were correct, my Google Calendar as viewed through Safari on the iPhone was off by exactly one hour – which happens to be the same as the difference on the trip I took.

I searched EVERYWHERE for settings on how to fix this, and finally figured out the incredibly complex way to do it!

Turn your iPhone off and then on again.

Yeah. That’s it. Power cycling the phone corrected the time zone immediately. So if it happens to you, now you know.

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Folks, listen up. If you are still using your ISPs slow DNS servers you are probably suffering needlessly and not taking advantage of the full speed of whichever connection you may have – even high speed ones like cable, DSL or Fiber Optics. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about – this means you!

I’m going to show you how to speed up everything you do online by switching to a better, faster Domain Name Server (DNS) system run by either Google or OpenDNS. Best of all, it will only take you like 5 minutes to make a change that will benefit you every day from now on! But before we get started, let me explain what DNS does for you in non-technical terms.

What is DNS Anyway?

When you launch your Web browser and want to navigate to a new Website, at first your computer doesn’t know where that site is. So what it does is the following:

1. Looks at your own network settings to determine, “Where are MY DNS servers?“
2. Makes a call to your DNS servers and asks, “Where is this Website I want to go to?“
3. Gets the IP address for the Website you are trying to find, and then heads on over to it.

To complicate matters, it doesn’t just do it one time per Website you go to. Web pages have lots of images, videos and other things embedded in them, and you have to check DNS for each one! So this happens hundreds of times a day when you are online, and it represents a huge opportunity for improvement.

Testing and Recommendations

This might be a little too technical to get into for everyone, but suffice it to say that before I chose which DNS I wanted to use, I did a little testing. There were two parts to the testing. The first consisted of running a series of Ping tests to the various DNS server to see which one would respond to me faster. (Kind of like playing Marco-Polo with the DNS server.)

Part 1

In my test results I compared Time Warner (my cable provider) with OpenDNS and Google

• Time Warner: Average Response Time – 29.70ms
• OpenDNS: Average Response Time – 27.99ms
• Google Public DNS: Average Response Time – 62.58ms

In the ping test it seems that OpenDNS provides the fastest response time, even beating my own ISP by about 10%, and outperforming Google’s public DNS by about 100%.

Part 2

The second part involved running a script which compared actual look-up response times. So not only which DNS server pinged me back quickest, but which could look up an actual domain name and send the results back quickest.

These tests are hard to do because there is caching occurring upstream from me somewhere. This means that once a domain is looked up, the DNS servers are holding the results in memory for a while so they don’t have to look it up again. You can see the difference in the two times I ran the test above.

For example, look at MyRecip.es results. Time Warner took 700+ms for the first look-up, but the second look-up was only 39ms because it just served the results from recent memory (cache).

However, it’s clear that Google’s DNS consistency is just plain impressive. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first look-up or subsequent ones, nor does it matter which country the domain is from.

EDIT: By request, if you want the script to run this test yourself, here it is. Save it to your hard drive, change to that directory in Terminal, then at the command prompt type: bash dns.txt

Choices, Choices…

It’s hard to say which is going to be faster in the wild. OpenDNS seems to respond about twice as fast for sites it has in it’s cache, which will certainly be all the big ones. But Google’s consistency is hard to argue with! Personally, I’ve gone ahead and switched to Google for now. Though OpenDNS has been good for a long time.

The main thing that pushed me over to Google by the way is NOT the speed. But the fact that Google DNS is doing something extra for me now. If you just type in a domain and leave off the .com, .net, or .org Google seems to take a guess at what you are looking for and loads it for you. So if I type in “onemansblog” and hit enter in my browser, it brings me to this site. If you type in something that it can’t find, it takes you to a Google search results page!

Now that we’ve covered that, you are going to need to choose which one you want to use. And you are going to need the IP addresses for the one you’ve chosen. Don’t worry, we’ll get to how to set them up in just a minute…

The Google Public DNS IP addresses are as follows:

• 8.8.8.8
• 8.8.4.4

The OpenDNS IP addresses are as follows:

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220

How to Configure Your DNS

Now that you’ve made up your mind, the following instructions should help you get your DNS set up to speed up your personal browsing experience.

Microsoft Windows

DNS settings are specified in the TCP/IP Properties window for the selected network connection.
Example: Changing DNS server settings on Microsoft Windows Vista

1. Go the Control Panel.
2. Click Network and Internet, then Network and Sharing Center, then Manage network connections.
3. Select the connection for which you want to configure DNS. For example:
   • To change the settings for an Ethernet connection, right-click Local Area Connection, and
     click Properties.
   • To change the settings for a wireless connection, right-click Wireless Network Connection, and click Properties.

   If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

4. Select the Networking tab. Under This connection uses the following items, click Internet
   Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4), and then click Properties.
5. Click Advanced and select the DNS tab. If there are any DNS server IP addresses listed there, write them down for future reference, and remove them from this window.
6. Click OK.
7. Select Use the following DNS server addresses. If there are any IP addresses listed in the Preferred DNS server or Alternate DNS server, write them down for future reference.
8. Replace those addresses with the IP addresses of the Google DNS servers: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 or the OpenDNS servers: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.
9. Restart the connection you selected in step 3.
10. Repeat the procedure for additional network connections you want to change.

Mac OS X

DNS settings are specified in the Network window.
Example: Changing DNS server settings on Mac OS 10.5

1. From the Apple menu, click System Preferences, then click Network.
2. If the lock icon in the lower left-hand corner of the window is locked, click the icon to make changes, and when prompted to authenticate, enter your password.
3. Select the connection for which you want to configure Google Public DNS. For example:
   • To change the settings for an Ethernet connection, select Built-In Ethernet, and click Advanced.
   • To change the settings for a wireless connection, select Airport, and click Advanced.
4. Select the DNS tab.
5. Click + to replace any listed addresses with, or add, the Google DNS servers: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 or the OpenDNS servers: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.
6. Click Apply and OK.
7. Repeat the procedure for additional network connections you want to change.

If you need additional information about changing settings, see the complete documentation over at Google.

Ok, that’s it! If you do a little testing and make the changes on all your computers you’ll notice that everything speeds up for you. And if you are technically savvy enough, you can even go in and change the setting in your router so that everyone accessing your network automatically gets the DNS servers assigned when they connect.

Let me know if this helps. Especially drop me a comment below if you make the changes and notice an improvement. I know I did!

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Well folks, I’m extremely excited to finally unveil the new OpenCamp Conference that I, and a team of volunteers, have been secretly working on for months. (BTW, follow OpenCamp on Twitter and Facebook!) For those of you who were waiting on the announcement for WordCamp, well consider this it! We’re taking it to a whole different level this year by inviting WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and everyone else to the event!

Now, some of you may have been to WordCamp Dallas in the past, and some of you may have seen me lecture on blogging and other related topics, but I assure you – nothing you’ve seen in the past will compare to what we’ve got planned for OpenCamp!

We’re going to bring together about 1,000 bloggers, webmasters and podcasters all in one spot for an entire weekend of lectures, entertainment and networking. I promise you, it’s going to be absolutely amazing. And best of all, while other people are charging $1,000 for conferences half this good, we’re keeping OpenCamp CHEAP!

Here is a little intro video we put together to explain the concept:

Now, hurry up and get registered! Attendees are going to be listed by order of registration, so trust me YOU WANT TO BE FIRST ON THE LIST! Of course, there is a little issue at the moment with the automatic feed, but get registered anyway because the clock is already ticking and there are people ahead of you now!

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God only knows how many times I’ve whined on Twitter about the sharp edge on my MacBook Pro right where your wrists rest while working on it. I swear to Buddha that after 15 minutes of working on this thing I have lines deep enough imprinted in my forearms to make people think I’m trying to slash my wrists! Furthermore, this laptop nearly makes me want to!!!

But tonight I’d had enough. After a marathon session of pain, I finally got off my lazy butt and did something about it. So, here is a video of me taking a file to my MacBook Pro and doing what Apple should have done long, long ago!

If you want to do it yourself its actually quite easy. Just get a couple of clamps and gently attach your MacBook to a strong, stable surface. Then take a fine file to the edge and slowly begin removing material. After 10-20 strokes you’ll feel a world of difference in the edge of the device. Just make sure you don’t get the aluminum shavings in your finger. You do not want aluminum splinters!

Have fun, and feel free to ask questions.

EDIT: For those with comments and questions about this process.
For all those who are worried about removing the anodized finish, don’t. I did this a month ago, and there is no “black stuff”or any other sort of residual. (AKA – My sleeves aren’t dirty.)

You should know that I’m also a trained welder, blacksmith and bladesmith. I’ve got hunks of aluminum in my garage that I machine on my milling machine, cut on my CNC plasma cutting machine, and weld on my big ass Lincoln TIG welder. In other words, I’m experienced at working with Aluminum.

This tiny amount of filed area is not going to get exposed to a harsh environment because your laptop can’t take it! Plus, the oil from your skin rubbing in this are will actually keep that small area further protected.

Note that I used a file and did this by hand. That is because the file removes metal as shavings – not dust. I would highly NOT recommend doing this with sandpaper or another abrasive. As you can see from the video the shavings are too big to become airborne and can be swept right up. Also, there is no chance of any of them getting inside the computer.

Finally, turn your machine off. I ONLY left mine on so people would not think this was a hoax. YES, I really did this to my MBP. And yes, I can afford it if I broke it. So guess what, I took the risk so you don’t have to wonder if it can be done. Not the first time I’ve done something like this, nor will it be the last.

So, you’ve got two choices if your bothered by the sharp edge on your MacBook.

1. Listen to the guy who did it and had zero negative consequences.
2. Listen to people who did NOT do it, but who have a desperate need to sound like a metallurgist or some sort of authority despite their lack of hands on experience.

The only thing I’ll advise is that when you are filing be careful about brushing the shavings off with bare hands or you might end up with aluminum splinters. They are no fun. ;-)

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As you may know, I use WP SuperCache on all of my blogs to enable them to handle the rather high loads the server runs at occasionally. One of the things that WP SuperCache does is enable compression for all of the cached pages. It’s an option in the control panel, which I ALWAYS enable. This saves a lot of bandwidth and makes pages download much faster for readers.

Well, what I didn’t realize was that the compression is only being performed on the cached files apparently. Because I did some testing and on the non-cached files there was no compression. So, I’ve got a really, really easy trick that anyone can do on their PHP blog to enable GZip compression.

Of course I’m going to show you how to do it in WordPress because that is what I know – but a simple one line addition to your theme file will enable it on any PHP based system (Drupal, Joomla, or whatever). If you have instructions for another CMS please let me know and I’ll add them here too.

What we are going to do is add a very simple line that tells your server to compress all of the HTML pages that it creates using the build in function that PHP has. In order to do this in WordPress all you need to do is go into your Admin control panel, and choose the Theme Editor under the Appearance menu.

Instructions

1. Select the Header.php template
2. Add the following line to the very beginning of the template (before anything else)
   <? ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); ?>
3. Save the template
4. Have a cold beer.

That’s it. Your job is done.

GZip Compression Improvement

What will this do for you? Well, in my case lets look at the before and after results from OneMansBlog.com. These results were measured by the Firebug plugin for Firefox and each example was the best of three back to back pageloads. I also enabled the compression immediately between the before and after reloads to try and ensure similar load circumstances. The test was conducted via a 15mbps cable internet connection.

Prior to implementing GZip Compression the homepage was 99.6kb and took 1.96 seconds to download (click the image to view full size):

After turning on GZip compression in WordPress the homepage was compressed to 18.3kb, and it took only 1.15 seconds to download. The 80% page compression saved about 40% of the download time (click the image to view full size):

Once you’ve enabled compression you can go here to test your Webpage to see if it is working.

Whoopee! 1 Second. Who Cares?

Hold on there honcho. I managed to save about one second on just one pageload. On average I routinely get over 20,000 page loads per day. So that would be 20,000 seconds – or 5.5 hours – per day saved. That is 2,027 hours per YEAR – or the equivalent of an entire full time employee.

In addition, we saved over 80kb of data from being downloaded or 1.6 gigabytes per day. That is almost 600GB per year (128 complete DVDs) in what would have been completely wasted bandwidth.

Now, just imagine if everyone did this how much time we would save, and how much faster the Internet would be going. Heck, its a moral imperative for everyone to turn on compression!

So, what are you waiting for? Your readers are begging you to speed things up for God’s sake!

PS – You can try and find a plugin to do this for you too. But it’s so easy why not just add the line and be done with it?

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Creative ideas are everywhere, if you know how to listen.

In this article I’m going to show you how you can automatically split videos into images and then use those images to generate traffic for your website. When John Pozadzides (aka the man behind One Man’s Blog) did this, he got 10,000 pageviews on a single blog post in just 7 days.

At a recent Dallas WordPress Meetup, John P. gave an excellent presentation on how he uses content to attract visitors to OMB. John gave a lot of great tips and advice during his presentation, and the one thing that stuck with me most was the few minutes he spent telling us how he used screenshots from a video to attract a ton of website visitors.

As a traffic experiment John had manually screen captured a bunch of images from a Lady Gaga music video, cleaned them up, and then uploaded them to his WordPress blog. He included the final 60 images in a blog post using the built in WordPress photo gallery feature.

Since the gallery is meant to take the work out of displaying images in columns and rows, it also automatically created the thumbnails he needed to present the images as a collection. When his blog visitors click an image in the post they’re taken to another page that shows a larger version of that image. At the bottom of every one image John links back to the 60 images he posted.

I thought this was a great idea for a couple of reasons. He is feeding Google images, which a lot of people use to visually search for popular celebrity figures like Lady Gaga. That means he is using more of Google’s power to attract visitors to his site. Also, by using the photo gallery feature he is automatically getting 60 pages created for him that all point back to one topic related Lady Gaga post.

Each of these images can be tweaked for keywords using titles, descriptions, and captions so they are keyword searchable, which is a good thing for Google images and a good thing for Google search in general.

So, with all these benefits, I definitely wanted to do something similar on my own websites. The only problem is, I am extremely lazy and the idea of manually taking hundreds of screen shots, cleaning them up in photoshop , and then sorting through the images to pick the best ones doesn’t appeal to me at all. That’s when it occurred to me, why not automate the process?

After a few minutes on Google I found a collection of tools that let me automatically download videos, convert those videos into images, and then quickly filter those images to help me pick the best ones.

Here’s how the entire process works.

Downloading Videos

Since I’m assuming the video John used was from Youtube or some other video sharing site, I found a tool called iSkysoft Free Video Downloader with a built in sniffer that would automatically download the Flash format video file to my computer when it detected them on a webpage. This is very cool because most the other Youtube downloaders make you copy and paste the embed code or the video url into a text box. The one draw back of the tool though is that it doesn’t let you pick where you want your video downloaded to, so I had to accept the default download location. It wasn’t a show stopper, but it would be a nice to have.

Converting Videos
Once the videos were downloaded, I could manipulate them however I wanted. Before I could strip the video to images though, I had to convert them from Flash format (.FLV) to a format that my video to image stripping software would accept. That means I needed to convert them into another format like .MOV or .AVI.

By design the iSkysoft Youtube downloader has a video converter built into it. So, if I was willing to pay for that feature, I could have converted the videos straight from the tool. But I already own a copy of another iSkysoft video conversion tool that provides the same video end product, so I decided to use it instead.

Because I use a Mac, I usually convert my videos to .MOV format, but I would recommend that you play around with settings and formats because the quality of your video will directly affect the quality of the images that are produced. I know this for a fact because I stripped images from a lower quality Youtube video and then compared that with images stripped from a high quality DVD movie. The high quality movie produced great images, while the low quality video produced lesser quality images.

Stripping Video Images

With the video in .MOV format, I could then run the video through software to automatically convert the video to a series of images. The software has several options for stripping images. It let me create images using frames, second, minutes, or hours. This is very handy because not all videos are the same length or have the same frame rate.

Most videos are produced at either 15 or 30 frames per second (FPS). That means there are 30 images between each second of video. If I wanted I could tell the software to create an image for each frame. That might be a little over kill for most videos, but depending on your subject matter and the quality of your video, it might be exactly what’s required.

As an experiment, I decided to create one image for every 30 frames. For a 4 minute video that translated to 241 images in 27.7 seconds (yes, I timed it). The software let me preview the images before exporting them, so I could try multiple settings before picking the one that worked best for my video.

Filtering Images

You might think that 241 images is a lot to pick through to find the best shots, but I found a tool for that as well called Xee. It’s a photo viewer that lets me quickly flip through images in a folder and delete the ones I don’t want.

Before I used that tool though, I opened up the exported images folder, bulk deleted all the obvious images I didn’t want and then used the tool to refine the list. Xee lets me use arrow keys to flip back and forth between pictures and deleting an image automatically takes me to the next image. So I was able to get down to just the images I wanted very quickly.

Renaming Image Files

At some point during the process I noticed that my image file names weren’t named what I wanted, so I found a tool to bulk update them as well. The tool is called “Name Mangler” (yes, I love that). It lets me find and replace words within a file name, number file sequentially, add a prefix or suffix, etc. Using Name Mangler, I can rename all 241 images just as quickly as I created them originally.

Posting To WordPress Gallery

Once the images were all created and filtered, it was time to post them to the blog. Creating a gallery in WordPress is not a straight forward process so there are a few things you have to remember when creating a gallery in WordPress.

The first thing I had to do was upload the images to my blog using the WordPress Media Uploader.

This next step is very important, so pay attention here.

When you upload images to WordPress it puts them in the Media Library. If you click the “Save All Changes” button after the images are finished uploading, the media uploader will association those images with your post and it will automatically create a gallery tab in your media uploader. This is an important step for getting all the images into the gallery and associated with that post. If you miss this step the gallery won’t be automatically created and you won’t know why.

The other important point I discovered is that the image descriptions must be updated directly after the gallery is created. So I had to expand each image and insert the text I wanted. In John’s case, he probably copy and pasted the same text and link in all 60 images. Once the descriptions are inserted, I had to click the “Save All Changes” button again to update the images.

Again, this is important so pay attention

Make sure to update your image descriptions when you create your gallery. As of WordPress 2.9, descriptions don’t seem to update on the page once they have been updated in the editor. I don’t know if this is a glitch, but it drove me nuts during testing. So play it safe and make sure your descriptions are correct from the start.

Once the images were uploaded, I still needed to keyword tag them so that Google Images and regular Google Search would be able to properly understand what they were and index them. This process took a good bit of time. I would recommend that you take as much time as was necessary to get all the images done right. This is a value add part of the process, so I didn’t try to automate it.

I made sure to update all the image titles, alternate text, and captions.

After you click the “Save All Changes Button”, you can click the “Insert Gallery” button to insert the gallery place holder into your post.

The resulting gallery should show up as a collection of thumbnails in your post.

When visitors click one of the images they are shown a page with a single view of that image along with your image title and description. If they click the image again they will see the full size image that you uploaded to the media library.

And that’s it. You can use this process to create picture galleries, attract visitors to your website, or export images of your kids first sporting event. All the pieces can be easily mixed and matched to meet your needs and although I referenced Mac tools in this article, you can find Windows equivalents just as easily.

One thing to keep in mind in term of traffic though. John P. picked a popular subject and used provocative headlines as a traffic experiment. Depending on your subject and audience, you might not get the exact same results that he did. But, with a little creative application, I’m sure you’ll do just fine.

By Guest Star: Charles McKeever of OpenSourceMarketer.com.

Charles is the Founder and co-geek at Open Source Marketer where he shows people how to use open source tools to run their online businesses.

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On January 30, 2010 I did a lecture for the DFW WordPress Meetup group which we called, “Make More Money with WordPress, Social Media and Analytics”. This lecture was similar to the one I did two years ago called, “45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog” in that it covers a wide range of topics all targeted at helping you learn to drive more traffic and earn more revenue from your blog or Website.

As a follow up and companion to this lecture I also posted “The 8 Best Ways to Earn Money With Google Adsense Alternatives“, and I suggest that you investigate that post as well, but not until after you’ve endured this grueling 1.5 hour lecture. I know it’s long, but just remember that it took me many, many more hours to prepare for and deliver this lecture than it will take you to view it. And I’m holding nothing back here, so if you want all the secrets this is the price you have to pay.

Huge thanks go out to Cali Lewis for filming and assembling the video for this lecture, and also to Giovanni Gallucci for assisting with the videography. Also, show some love to Tony Cecala for talking me into doing this and organizing the entire venue and event, and of course thanks to the Art Institute of Dallas for hosting. Now, without further ado, here is the lecture.

By the way, Viddler allows you to leave comments right on the video, so feel free to make those comments. They are most useful when you create a “marker” for a particular point which you might want to go back and reference later.

I also uploaded the presentation to SlideShare, so you can now browse through the slides if you are having trouble with seeing the detail within the video. You can do both at the same time, so feel free to work the slides independently as you are watching the video.

When you are done with that, you may be interested in the follow up show we did on Wealth Nation, Episode 16 Increase Blog Visibility and Revenue.

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