Crenk » make

How to Make a Lolcat

Steven Finch — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 16:08:07 +0000

If you’re Internet-savvy, you’ve probably come across a “lolcat”–an image macro usually featuring a cat and a caption in broken English. You might subscribe to them through RSS, or even collect them. Now you can make your own by following these steps!

Search for (or take) pictures of cats. Get several of them and choose which one would look funny with ‘capshuns’. If you use someone else’s image, make sure to ask for permission, or if it’s a Creative Commons image, give them credit appropriately.
Think of a caption. Remember that spelling/grammatical errors are deliberate. This “language” is sometimes called lolspeak, kitteh or kitty pidgin. You may be able to find some translators online^.
- Try these caption templates (replace the blanks with your desired noun/verb):
  - “IM IN UR ___, ___-ING UR ___”
  - “IT ARE ___, I HAS IT”
  - “OH NOES! MAH ___ IT ARE ___!”
Try finding cats in positions that look as if they have an ‘invisible object’. Put a caption describing what is the ‘invisible object’. A good (existing) example would be “invisible bike.”
Open up the desired cat picture with Adobe Photoshop or GIMP, place your desired “capshun” on the picture in Impact font, Bold it, colour the text white and enable a black outline around it.
You’re done! Now send to friends or post on forums for the world to view your creation! Many lols will come forth!

How to Make Custom iPhone Ringtones for Free

Steven Finch — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:30:48 +0000

So, you bought an iPhone. You love the phone and all its features, but wish you didn’t have to pay for your songs twice to get a ringtone. There are plenty of songs in your music library, but no way to make ringtones from any of them. Or are there? Actually, with a little bit of trickery (nothing illegal) you can create ringtones from any one of your non-DRM songs in your iTunes library easily and for free. This works on both Mac and Windows PCs.

*Please note: there may be differences among all the possible combinations of iTunes versions and operating system versions (see Tips below for a way to work around the syncing issues).

Open iTunes.
Find the song that you want to make into a ringtone.
Listen to the song and find the part of it you want to use. The chorus may be a good place to start.
Write down the start and stop times of the clip.
Right-click the song and select “Get Info.”
Click the “Options” tab.
Type in the start time of your ringtone in the text box next to “Start Time” in the minutes:seconds (i.e. 2:01) format.
Type in the end time of your ringtone in the text box next to “Stop Time.” Make sure the ringtone is no more than 40 seconds long.
Click “OK.”
Right-click your song again and select “Convert Selection to AAC.” Wait for iTunes to convert your song. It will create a duplicate version.
Right-click the ringtone and select “Delete.”
Click on the “Keep Files” button.
Find the file. It’s usually in your User folder under Music > iTunes > iTunes Music and under the band’s name. It will have an extension of “m4a.”
Replace the “m4a” extension of your ringtone with “m4r”. You can either double-click slowly to rename your file, or right-click and select “Get Info” on a Mac or “Rename” on a Windows PC.
Click “Use .m4r” or the PC equivalent when the system warns you that the change may affect the use of your file.
Double-click the ringtone file. ITunes will automatically add it to your ringtones folder in your iTunes Music Library.
Connect your iPhone and sync your ringtones.

How To Make My Blog Stand Out From The Crowd?

Steven Finch — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:24:43 +0000

Yesterday I was having a great conversation with Marshall Kirkpatrick (Vice President of Content Development at RWW, not sure what that means) about how to get your blog noticed in the current environment. The discussion started with me posing the basic question “how can I get my blog noticed because we seem to be producing very good content but not getting the rewards”?

It was first mentioned that Problogger is the best source for this information on the web, however I have been reading his site for many years now and most of the content seems to be getting a little reproduced. Additionally, Problogger talks a lot about social media and how to use it to your advantage, but these days everyone has been reading those articles for year and most bloggers use StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, Buzz and other very proficiently. If most bloggers are using these tools to their advantage then you still have the same issues, how to stand out from the crowd?

I know that here in Europe a blog that has been on the rise lately is TheNextWeb, but I know these guys have been writing that blog for several years now and they also have one of the best technology conference on the mainland of Europe. Therefore if I want to improve my readership it is a little difficult to just start a conference, or is it worth adding some add-ons to the site such as job board, marketplace or others?

Content is also a major player in this issues, cause most good bloggers say that content is king. However, I think that content is king when you are either a small blog or a large blog, but definitely in the middle content isnt king and it is all about promotion and push.

This is main problem with web 2.0, noise! Currently, there is just simply so much noise in most niche’s, so why instead of writing individual sites and keeping a little revenue, maybe the plan should be to join forces with other blogs and create a larger blog and take a smaller slice of a much larger pie.

I propose this question to you, “how can I get my site to stand out from the rest, especially considering we produce amazing content that is much better than the majority of our competitors”?

The Blog Sale Rush… Are You Next!

Steven Finch — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 21:57:43 +0000

Over the last few weeks there has been a surge of blog sales at various prices, but will your blog be next and what will your site actually be worth.

We have seen the Bloggy Network sell off their most popular blogs to Splashpress Media (Bloggy now to focus on Blogflux), Blogging Fingers sold for $6000, Ryan Shamus sold for $2500, OneMansGoal sold for $8500, NxE sold for $8200 and Shylock Blogging for $4000.

These sites have had a great mixture of statistics with relevance to visitors, pageviews, subscribers and blog life. At present because of this a lot of bloggers are trying to work out how these blogs have be evaluated, with mixed views. 45n5 divides subscribers by the sale amount and then average the amounts per subscriber, thus averaging about $30 per subscriber. This $30 per subscriber seems to be a great amount to judge if you should place advertising on your site for the little income in the short term compared to the value you will have from subscribers in the long term.

If you site currently has 100 subscribers and has been making $200 per month ad revenue, but your subscriber growth has been slow. Wouldnt it be a better idea to remove the ads if your goals are set beyond 6 months so that you can allow subscriber numbers to grow at its full potential. There is no point monetizing your blog as much as possible in the early days unless you are looking for an income or getting ready to sell.

Additionally, how come there isnt a place online that specifically provides auction space for blogs that are trying to sell?