No, I’m not a technophobe.

I’m actually a techie… I’m really tempted to say ex-techie because the word conjures up sordid memories of multiple pagers strapped to my side all going off with numbers for hand-wringing, hypertensive IT directors.

The real problem is - I’m just not feeling like a big adventure right now and if I break this blog it’s likely to suck hours of time that I don’t really have just to fix it.

So why bother? Well, I guess I’m a little greedy.

There’s a nice new plugin that I was introduced to by Dennis Becker  - it’s called Comment Luv.

What makes this plugin so desireable is that it provides a really cool link back to the latest blog post for the commenter.

For some reason it’s not picking up this blog’s feed. I was thinking that an upgrade might solve the prob with the feed being picked up.
It should work fine here going the other way though. If you comment I expect you’ll get your link back.

Or the blog may go up in flames.
Anyway, if you have your own  blog, try it out. I think you’ll like it.

Or at least the idea.

I don’t like tedium and that’s what cleaning up after spambots or paid-to-posters is. Big time.

So today I took these steps…

• On my niche blogs where I’m not engaging in any conversations I renamed wp-comments-post.php and wp-trackback.php so comments are impossible.
• On this blog I deactivated DoFollow and installed Lucia’s Linky Love. This  means that spammy comments won’t be given any link juice. So there… (Thanks to Tinu for the tip.)

That should save me an hour’s work every now and again. Heaven knows every minute counts. You should try it if you need a little more comment control.

Sabrina

If you have not spent a lot of time online downloading various files or documents, you may be curious about these ‘.zip’ files that you see being offered everywhere.

Here is a quick summary that will bring you up to speed.

A file that ends in ‘.zip’ like bonus.zip for example may have two characteristics that we care about:

- It is a compressed file
- It is often several files bundled into one (aka an archive)

Why compress files?

Despite the fact that manufacturers are continually assembling computers with ever-increasing disk space, some consumers’ disk requirements seem to outpace what’s available. Storing files in a compressed format frees up some valuable disk space.

More important though, bandwidth is a precious commodity. What is bandwidth? For now let’s say that bandwidth is the speed at which data can be transmitted to and from your computer via networks or the capacity for transferring that data.

If you reduce the size of files being transmitted by compressing them, you will complete your transmission faster and free up those bandwidth resources for other transmissions.

When transmitting multiple files from one location to another, it is usually more convenient to bundle all those files into one package / single zip file, often called a zip archive.

When the transmitted file is uncompressed at the destination, any bundled files return to their ‘pre-bundled’ or original states.

Where Can You Get The Zip / Unzip Software?

A very popular compression software is WinZip. It is now owned by Corel.

You can get a free trial version from WinZip.com

There are some other archival software applications that are totally free however. I have used ZipCentral and it has worked well for me. You can search for this on Download.com

What Are Self-Extracting Executables?

Instead of creating a ‘.zip’ file when you do your compression, you have the option of creating an executable file.

Making the compressed file an executable means that the person who receives it does not need to have software such as WinZip or ZipCentral in order to extract the file(s).

In other words instead of creating a file called bonus.zip, you create the file bonus.exe. When the recipient gets it, just doubleclicking on the ‘bonus.exe’ will start the extraction process - no additional software required.

How Can Self-Extracting Executables Bring Me More Traffic?

One of the largely unused features of these types of files is the ability to launch an application, in particular a browser, when the extraction starts.

So, let’s say you create your ebook and it is being distributed on a free ebook site. There’s no guarantee that a user who downloads the file in ‘.zip’ format will ever visit your site.

If you choose to distribute the ebook as a self-extracting ‘.exe’ instead, while you’re creating it, you can choose to include the option to execute a specific command after extraction. That command could be something like iexplore.exe|http://yourdomain.com

In fact, just placing the URL http://yourdomain.com as the command will launch whatever browser is default on the recipient’s computer.

So once they open the ebook, you get a visit to your site. Once the ebook and the site are related they’re likely to stay on and browse what you have to offer.

Simple and easy. See if it works for you.