War is Boring, a political and wartime blog owned by David Axe (an experienced conflict reporter) just keeps getting better and better. It started up a few years ago as a small blog featuring a comic strip of the same name drawn by Matt Bors, based on David’s experiences as a war journalist. Since that time, the comic strips have taken a back seat with a more journalistic approach being adopted.
David began reporting from trouble spots around the globe such as Darfur, Iraq and Afghanistan. Money is raised through a donate button on the site for trips, equipment and in some cases to aid fellow journalists in sticky situations.
Every day there is at least two or three new posts so you’re never short of anything to read and feel like you’re missing out if you neglect the blog for a while. The best thing about War is Boring is that’s its not just some armchair general typing about Iraq all day, David actually goes to these places showing dedication and determination – something I found individual and attractive about War is Boring.
Recently, War is Boring underwent some changes including the addition of more correspondents. These include Kyle Mizokami, Bryan William Jones, Jason Reich and Kevin Knodell. These simultaneously cover different topics from around the globe ranging from US Politics, to Somali Piracy to Sri Lankan trouble. This gives the blog a good range in tone and subject matter instead of just following the one reporter. They also have some big trips planned soon such as heading off to Afghanistan and Dubai.
Overall, War is Boring is a cool blog that interest anyone who is in anyway politically minded or interested in warfare. 7/10
If you are a geek blogger like me, you would know that the having a good ranking within the most important search engines it is a big deal if you are trying to promote your blog. KPMRS (Keyword Position Monitoring Report Service) can help you with that by monitoring constantly the page rank you have with Google, Yahoo and Bing.
How to use it is very simple, you don’t even have to be registered to receive any result, you can query and get some instant results about your site and a special keyword. The free registration can also give you: Email Alerts (when position changes or when a competitor has passed you); weekly reports; and monitor for Google’s Page Rank and Alexa.
Here’s a query about my blog with a keyword that I know I have a good ranking about it:
It is pretty cool to have these results and see the differences between the search engines; and of course will be very helpful to you if you are setting up your business to evaluate the status of popularity.
Last Friday I treated myself to a new 17″ MacBook Pro (that’s a story for another post though!) One thing that always puts me off is as soon as I buy one a new one comes out, so I thought I would be safe buying a couple of weeks after the WWDC when it was upgraded. Of course the other big news at the WWDC was the upcoming official release of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard due to be released in September.
It made me think, do I have to pay the full price to upgrade my OS even though it’s not far away and I’ve just spent a small fortune in the Apple store?
So a bit of poking around on the Apple website came up with an interesting page (one I might add that is not well linked to!)
So the deal is simple if you bought a new Mac on or after June 8th you get a special upgrade price! $9.95 USD and £7.95 GBP (gotta love Apples currency conversions!) You have to claim within 60 days of purchase and before December 26th 2009 but it seems well worth it.
You can apply at the above links pay by credit/debit card and it will be shipped upon release. Makes a nice change for Apple to do something nice seeing as they charged me £20 to buy a Mini-Display Port to DVI adaptor!!!!
BlogBackupr it’s a simple and nice web app that automatically backups all your posts in your blog. It represents a very easy way for you to not worry so much about vulnerabilities in the platform, loosing data, accidental deletion, etc.
It works with all blogs that have RSS-feed, that is the minimum requirement. Among the features that you can find in this web app:
Completely free.
No installation required.
Once you register, the backups are performed regularly without requiring your intervention.
You can export and import all those backups whenever you want.
Automatic restore supported for WordPress.org, WordPress.com and Blogger.com
WordPress users include these backups: full posts, comments, pages, categories and media.
You can have backups without giving your WordPress credentials. Will just use the public feed.
CSS file and images from the blog template are also saved.
This is your administration site where you can execute all necessary tasks with the added blogs:
The main differences are related in bugs fixing about the previous version. Here are some of them:
Translation of role names fixed
wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
Upload error messages are now correctly reported
Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
Switched back to curl as the default transport
Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload
To see all tickets that were fixed from Beta 1, check this link. I really enjoy watching this kind of transparency in projects, where you can give your feedback, insert about a bug and see the evolution about it: owner, priority, state.
Have you ever wanted to make any word you want into the same style as the Twitter logo? Well then Twitlogo is the place for you. Twitlogo makes it easy to turn any word or phrase into a simple Twitter like logo.
Here is one I prepared earlier.
Features:
Generate Twitter like logos.
Generate as many logos as you like .
Customize logo colors and text size.
Save created logo on your computer.
The tool itself is very simple to use and easy to use, but im not really too sure how many uses it can have.
Smashing Magazine has released some free icons for Twitter. The set is available in both pixel and EPS vector format so the icons can be rescaled to any size while retaining their original details. As usual, the icons are free for both personal and commercial projects. This set was designed by IconEden.
ClassiPress is the first and only professional classified ads theme for WordPress. Its Craigslist for WordPress. ClassiPress is a very simple and affordable way to turn your Wordpress into a classified ad board. ClassiPress is a simple theme that is easy to install and activate within Wordpress.
Features include:
PayPal Integration – Turn your Web site into a money maker. ClassiPress is built with PayPal integrated right into the theme. This allows you to charge a fee for anyone who wants to post a classified ad on your site. You can also turn this off if you want to offer free ads.
Instant Image Uploading – No more having to wait for customers to email you their images before posting the ad. Your customers can attached multiple images directly to the ad submission form.
Image Manager – Easily see what images have been uploaded and moderate as needed.
Auto Expire Ads – Automatically prune ads older than x amount of days. Makes it easier to set an ad price based on a specific time limit.
Subcategory Support – Our classified ads system supports nested categories for those who are looking for deeper listing capability.
Currently the single use license is only $69 (without the credit link).
I wanted to share with you a very, very cool set of posts from Scott Hanselman: Building your own arcade cabinet. This I’m sure fulfills almost every man’s dream, that spent a lot of time with these magnificent toys.
Within the articles Scott will guide you to the entire process about how to build this machine. Including all the tips regarding to the materials used, where to buy them, etc:
Here’s a video that gives you a tour to the entire process:
Here are some of amazing facts about it:
Cost = $441. Yep, only 441 dollars. But there are some disclaimers about it, for example, the monitor was recycled from an old one. But still, sounds like a great number to me.
The work hours took him around 24 hours total, divided in six weeks. I know what you are thinking, if you start building it right now, by this time tomorrow you’ll have it all set
Don’t tell me that you are not considering the idea!
Over at Tutorial9 they have just released a new icon pack for free. The icon pack is called Watercolor and is created by ilovecolors.
Each icon is in .png format sized at 256×256px with transparent backgrounds. The 36 different icons have varying opaquness that allow the background and texture seep through the icons like watercolor on canvas. This is a freebie you can’t pass up!
The NY Times published an interesting article about a very surprising (at least for me) statement: Around 95% of existing blogs are abandoned completely. According to a study made by Technorati, only 7.4 million of the 133 million blogs that the company tracks down had been updated in the past 120 days. Meaning that 95% of blogs existing on Internet are abandoned and never updated again.
Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.
But why is this happening? Why people just suddenly looses motivation to write or share experiences, information, articles, etc? The article also remarks that people usually confuse the idea of blogging as a fast way to financial independence and rapidly find themselves discouraged.
But, besides the possible financial disappointment, is it twitter related to this? In a small way, I think.
Over an year ago (maybe more) when I started to hear about Twitter I found this short comic (from Gapingvoid), metioned also on an old post of mine about Twitter:
For some cases, I’m sure this is a very realistic comic. After all, Twitter it is a way of micro blogging, share information and (current) experiences. And it is easier and simpler to keep updated your Twitter account instead of your blog. It is the same? Absolutely not.
Blogging is so much richer, states as a permanent document (Twitter also does, but not so friendly to review them), or even as your historical experience in a given subject. It’s all about sharing: information, opinions, expertiece, experiences, etc etc.
War is Boring, a political and wartime blog owned by David Axe (an experienced conflict reporter) just keeps getting better and better. It started up a few years ago as a small blog featuring a comic strip of the same name drawn by Matt Bors, based on David’s experiences as a war journalist. Since that time, the comic strips have taken a back seat with a more journalistic approach being adopted.
If you are a geek blogger like me, you would know that the having a good ranking within the most important search engines it is a big deal if you are trying to promote your blog. 
Last Friday I treated myself to a new 17″ MacBook Pro (that’s a story for another post though!) One thing that always puts me off is as soon as I buy one a new one comes out, so I thought I would be safe buying a couple of weeks after the WWDC when it was upgraded. Of course the other big news at the WWDC was the upcoming official release of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard due to be released in September.
BlogBackupr
As we’ve announced earlier 
The 
