The first thing I notices when booting up was it’s not a linux live CD, considering I’m used to installing Kubuntu it’s a change from having to wait and I love it no need to wait around booting up a Linux distrobution from your possibly slow CD drive, you just get a simple installation screen, you might say its a bad thing as you don’t get the option to chat on ‘AIM’ or play your games while your installing. It would be nice to see Ubuntu to have the option to install straight off the CD but I can’t see it happening anytime soon unfortunately but its a great way to give people a simple demo before they install the OS.

Now moving on to the options you get, there isn’t many options but what you get is amazing the main one I like is picking your file system like EXT2, EXT3, ReiserFS and XFS which is what I am currently installing, I cannot remember seeing this in many other flavours of Linux normally you get stuck with EXT3 which is a brilliant and a very advanced file system but ideally its not all that good for the low end machines in my opinion, you need all the speed you can grab and EXT3 doesn’t allow that when comparing to ReiserFS and XFS which you might notice XFS is the recommended one in Zen Walk for the better speed of it, the good thing about XFS is that its growing in popularity meaning it will get better and better!

After doing all the above you get to select your partitions which I am sorry to say I disliked, unlike other Linux flavours you get much better options in the department for partitioning your HDD with ease so be careful and I recommend you have a copy of partition magic next to you!

Another thing to pick on is selecting driver options such as SATA and PATA don’t know what PATA is?

Well PATA is Parallel Advanced Technology Attachments doesn’t help does it, but it’s also known as Enhanced IDE (E-IDE) which is also known as IDE; which luckely I learned about a week before installing so it’s not all that good for novice users, but then again it is based on slackware and as the saying goes most hackers are slackers. So try to remember that if you have a ribbon cable (40 Pins) its a PATA, and normally in red a very thin cable on HDDs it will normally have 4 Pins and that is your SATA HDD.

So using a client like Ultra VNC or even Tight VNC it really makes life simple, for example a while back a community member of UVNC developed a great mod which is basicall a one click VNC server, so you can send a exe to your friend thats having computer trouble he runs it and pop you get screen showing their desktop brilliant right, saves you a lot trouble, and its a great way to avoid security issues with windows remote desktop, you will find these applications are much more secure as its not running constantly its a one off thing they open it and you close it.

You can find the OneClick VNC files here http://forum.ultravnc.info/viewtopic.php?p=35885 A podcast that gives you a great walk through can be found here http://www.hak5.org/archives/199 it will also walk you through how to make it into a complete exe file making it easier.

Another use for Ultra VNC is to access your computer at home, there is one main reason I choose Ultra VNC over Tight VNC especially for server reasons, when using UVNC I get the choice to use Java to access my PC remotely, which if you use LogMeIn you will find familliar, the idea behind web based viewer means it allows you to access your PC from secured networks, on some networks you may find that you cannot run certain EXE’s without playing around on their network so this makes things much easier. Else you can run a VNC viewer from a USB stick which can be found here http://portableapps.com/node/2031.

But if you don’t want them to scrape your content you have to write a 10 page essay on why it is your site and tonnes of proof, I’m sorry but I shouldn’t have to do this for some dumb ass company stealing my content for their one use.

They could at least be nice and not allow any search engines to visit their site but no, instead of that they use it to their advantage okay maybe I’m being hard on them they do only use a limited amount of words!

So here is what I will be doing, I’m going to be scanning my logs to see what this bot is called then making a plugin for wordpress to use this bot to your advantage, allowing you to show them what you want use their cheating service to your advantage.

If anyone knows how to detect them I would love to hear how, would save me looking through logs.

The reason I am doing this if you haven’t caught on is that Google do not like duplicated content the links coming back will not do my site any good.

About Sleek
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Sleek is a relatively new theme produced by Markie Designs, the idea is to make it easier for newcomers to WordPress to control their blog for example supporting widgets as much as possible, as well as popular plugins readily integrated into WordPress.
Widget support, Widgets are a relatively new product coming from WordPress and in my opinion the best thing on WordPress, using these widgets allows you to control your blog without the need for HTML knowledge which is a large reason why I have chosen to add widget support.

There is only two sidebars with a small box above them, this box allows you to place what ever text you like using widgets, this allows you to use the about me widget if you like or just the general text widget and place information about your blog.
The other two sidebars are mostly used for categories, archives and what ever else you can fit on it.

If you know something about CSS the sheet style is layed out to make it easy for you, it has comments separating each section.

Browser Compatibility
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The theme has been tested under:
Windows XP
Internet Explorer 6
FireFox 2.0

Please if anyone runs anything different tell me if the theme is compatible or report any bugs.

Supported Plugins
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Gravatar - This is a central avatar database, allowing thousands of people to use a avatar on your site.
Author Highlight - This highlights the author’s comments, allowing them to stand out above other cementer’s.
Pagebar - Makes the theme easier to navigate through old pages, and looks much better recommended plugin.
WP-Poll - If you do not want to use WP-Poll through widgets its placed in the left sidebar.

Widget Usage
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This theme is highly recommended that you use widgets over the regular taskbars; it is mostly built around them.

Author Highlight
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To use this method you must set the highlighted name to “highlighted” and else to “nothighlighted”, contact me if you do not know how to change it.

Download
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As you might remember my recent posts where I cought up on some important SEO reading How To Make Keywords Stand Out , Making your Layout easier for Google and the most important Links to and from your website.

But the traffic can be a god send for your site, heres a basic method to get backlinks setup 3-4 dummy sites make it look nice and put a bunch of your main site links all over it, then go around placing these sites all over the internet say around 2,000 links on each of them, this will then direct google to your site a lot more which could be like having 4,000 backlinks to your site, which = a high PR.

So black hat methods are a way of increasing your sites growth much faster than sitting and waiting to get a limited number of backlinks, with your main site if you get too many links coming to your site you will find that your ending up in google’s sandbox which isn’t good for your traffic coming from google, and it will take a while before you get out of it.

So what do you think of black hat SEO , would you use it for your sites or do you think it is now too much of a risk now?

1: I can kick out a load of plugin’s,before I had around 20 or so doing a lot of things, but after this update it is now doing a lot more for example the tags in your write post/page that kicks out a few of my plugins by itself, especially Ultimate Tag Warrior, but I occasionally use it for the keyword suggestions.

2: More editor buttons, now if you do most of your work in the WebUI then you will love this, not only can you clean up the coding but you can also colour your text this has taken tinymc editor to the next level and saves me making my own modifications to it, I am also using my wordpress blog instead of google doc’s and spreadsheets.

3: Plugin updating, this has kicked out another plugin for me when you go into your plugin tabs you will now see if their is a new version of the plugin, I rarely update my plugins unless its something I really use a lot for example the most important plugin is WP_Cache and Throttle, so if i want to check if their is a new update I can just go to the plugins tab, I haven’t looked at how it works but a old plugin i used to check for updates used to take a while to load but now its just their.

What I’m Waiting For

Now I have a lot of things I want, which I can’t be bothered to create myself for example the instant upgrade plugin, now I love this plugin it is one of my favorite when it comes to updating, all you need to do is click one button and everything is done for you, Now I would love to see this actually built into wordpress, maybe even a automatic updating tool.

A sitemap generator, automatically generating a ror.xml file for all the search engines considering wordpress is well known for its SEO friendly CMS why does it not already have this built in its easy enough so why are we not seeing this yet.

I hope that I will see these soon built into wordpress or at least come with wordpress Drupal stick a load of modules with their CMS why can Wordpress not do it, would make life easier for newcomers to blogging.

What would you like to see on Wordpress and what do you think of the 2.3 update?

You know what amazes me though, I remember the old days of touch screen and frankly they where huge the monitors you could buy for your computer where very big and expensive, now you compare this with the itouch its astonishing how you can turn that into that its so small too hard to get my head around it!

The display looks amazing, if you own a iphone it’s a fairly similar look it display’s everything from the album art to the information from your mp3 file. Has many other options like display photos you have taken to even things like video files!

This is a amazing ipod or itouch should I say and is well worth buying in my opinion so go for it!

Here is the first prize:

• Logo design from David Airey. Add a touch of professionalism to your business with one of my logo designs. If you’re unsure what my designs are like, check out my graphic design portfolio.
• Custom WordPress theme design from Nate Whitehill of Nate Whitehill dot Com. It’s vital to set yourself apart from the crowd, and Nate will help a great deal with your very own custom WordPress theme.
• Personal marketing / advertising plan from Maki of Dosh Dosh. Maki is an expert where blog advertising is concerned, and he is kindly donating his time to help you make the most of your new custom blog.
• One year’s hosting and blog setup from John Boardley of I Love Typography. John has kindly donated his time and will do everything you need to get your new custom blog hosted on one of Media Temple’s dedicated servers.
• Signed copy of Blogging Tips by Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress. I bought this book myself, and it contains excellent blogging tips for beginners to pros.

Seriously you have to be crazy to miss out on this, to tell you the truth all i want is the:

Behringer Podcastudio USB Podcasting Kit, kindly donated by Fraser’s Affiliate Marketing Blog. Looking for a new way to express yourself? Ever wanted to be a famous producer? Then podcasting is the answer and the BEHRINGER PODCASTUDIO USB bundle has all you need to make high-quality podcasts and home recordings.

That was just a hint .

For some extra credit I posted it on: DigitalPoint and Web-mastery