2007 August | Shypy's Weblog

Monthly Archive for August, 2007

FIFA Football 08 [EA Sports] PC Demo Released!

Published

on August 31, 2007

. 2 Comments

Like the title says, the Demo version for the eagerly anticipated FIFA Football 2008 PC has been released.

FIFA 08 You can download it directly from the EA website here. Currently, their servers are heavily overloaded and you wont get too good a download speed, but we can expect the situation to get better in a couple of hours.

Here’s a link to the FIFA 08 official website for more information.

I’m really excited about this release, and I’m sure their AI and graphics will get a whole lot better from FIFA 07.

The FIFA 08 demo will probably be available from 10:00 am GMT or about 12:00 pm CET (Denmark, Germany, France and such).

The game itself is slated for a September 28 release.

Also, the demo for Xbox360 and Playstation 3 might be released sooner than expected. According to EA Sports it won’t take more than take 2-3 weeks - I’ll keep you updated on this one.

As the download is more than 490 MBs, I suggest you use a download manager, so that you can continue the download later if the current download speeds arent too good.

Ronaldinho playing FIFA 08

The easiest way to optimize your websites for search engines - Wordpress plugin

Published

Shypy

on August 30, 2007

in Plugins, Search Engine Optimization and Wordpress

. 2 Comments

You’ve probably read(and experienced) a lot on how Google penalizes websites/blogs for duplicate content.

Whats that? You say your content is 100% unique and home-made? Well, thats not the utter and complete truth, because google indexes your content from http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com, effectively crawling your blog/website twice. This also dilutes the effectiveness or incoming links as some may point to the www version and others to the non-www version of your website.

Now you might think that the Googlebot isnt so dumb, and it isnt, but all the same its best to fix the problem.

Thats where the enforce www plugin comes in. From the page:

This plugin will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference (http://example.com/ vs. http://www.example.com/) and will strip off index.php from the ends of URLs.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, set up your preference for your domain from Options->General tab on your Wordpress admin menu, and thats all there is.

I use the non-www preference for Shypy.com, so even though you type in www.shypy.com in your browser, it always takes you to http://shypy.com (no WWW!)

Edit: The same effect can be achieved by doing a .htaccess rewrite - more info can be found here

An easy way to use images in your blog posts - ImageShack WordPress Plugin

Published

Shypy

on August 7, 2007

in Blogging Tips and Wordpress

. 2 Comments

Using Images spruces up you blog posts. Period.

This has been said again and again, so I’m going to show you a little trick(read plugin) which I use to use images with my blog posts and save hosting disk space at the same time.

If you dont already know, it is more convenient to use an Image Host for uploading images, rather than upload it to your own server.

ImageShack and TinyPic are the most reliable ones, and the ones I use. But the problem is that everytime you want to upload an image, you need to go to their webiste, upload it, and use the link in your blog post.

Thats where the ImageShack Uploader plugin by Arne Brachhold can make things a lot more convenient.

You can download it by clicking here.

After downloading it, upload it to your wp-content/plugins directory and activate it.

After activating it, an ImageShack tab will appear next to the Upload tag at the bottom of

WP post editor. You can now upload files from your editor itself without opening a new browser tab/window.

ImageShack

You’ll get several optios after uploading the image:

ImageShack plugin

You can upload multiple images and use them as and how you want to.

PS: You can also use the edit image toolbar button in WP to change the alt tag, adjust alignment, etc.

Learning CSS

Published

Shypy

on August 5, 2007

in Coding, Learning and My Projects

. 0 Comments

I’ve been polishing my coding skills, mainly CSS and PHP for the past week. I’m still not experienced enough to say, code an entire WP theme by myself, but I’m getting better all the time
I’d started reading this book a couple of months ago, and almost finished it, except for the last 250 pages or so :p

Yesterday, I felt like brushing up my skills, so I got the Lynda.com video tutorial CD from a friend and got started. It took me only 3 hours to complete the entire course and make a demo page - entirely done in CSS.

If you’re new to CSS and want to learn too, I’d highly recommend Lynda.com’s video tutorials to get you started(athough it can be a bit(or a lot) expensive).

If you know me personally, or are willing to pay the shipping charges, feel free to contact me. I’d be more than willing to share .

I R Wiener

Published

Shypy

on August 5, 2007

in Competitions and Making Money Online

. 1 Comment

Yup.

Although 50$ is not that big a deal, its not bad for 30 mins work. :p

So thats about 7 new domains for me, and I’m already thinking about starting a video blog and a news-aggregator website.

And while we are on the subject of competitions, I’d like to add that JohnCow.com a parody blog of JohnChow.com are haveing a competition where you have the change to win a Playstation3,or an Xbox360, a Nintendo Wii, or an iPhone. The competition has been sponspored by their web hosting provider(I think I’m gonna try and convince my host to sponsor a competition too :p)

They already have something like a zillion entries, but it’d never hurt to try
Edit:

They’re closing their blog, but probably the competition is still on.