Pseudorant Outages / Hosting & Database Issues
I would like to apologize to anyone who has been trying to access the site today. We have been experiencing service outages with our web hosting. Hopefully this is a temporary issue and we will be back up to normal soon. Please bear with us.
-Paul
EntreCard is Back Online after Fire at Hosting
EntreCard is backup and running after a fire at their hosting.
For those who use EntreCard you probably noticed that is was down from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning.
The message on their site informed people that a fire had broke out at their hosting company causing the company to shut down in order to address an issue of faulty power transformers.
As of today EntreCard is back up and running so you can all get back to dropping your cards. I have just recently started reading some articles about Power Dropping and was looking into some good ways of doing this when their server went down on Saturday.
I will have to get back to work on that tonight. If you are a member of EntreCard please feel free to drop us your card or advertise on the site.
Just a short post today, as I need to get back to work on a client’s website. Thanks for checking out Pseudorant. We appreciate the support.
New WordPress Theme & Logos – Revolution Hacked
New Logos Compliments of Aaron Gilmore
As many of you have probably noticed, Pseudorant has under gone a major change. That’s right! We have a new theme. The theme we are using is a modified version of the “Revolution” theme by Brian Gardner.
After collaboration between me and Joe we decided this theme would best suit the needs of the site in the coming months. We have been planning a lot of major upgrades and additions to the site so we are trying to get a good infrastructure in place ahead of time.
Areas to note in the new theme are the RSS Subscription Icon and FeedBurner Widget which Joe incorporated into the sidebar menu. The addition of 125px sponsor slots and EntreCard widgets. A Top Posts Widget which is currently under going some repairs, and much more!
For those who have been to the site in the past 20 hours you have probably noticed things breaking and being fixed. We apologize for the inconvenience. The bug search is ongoing and just when we have one thing fixed we come across something else that needs to be reworked. If you come across anything on the site that seems broken please let us know. (Email – Paul | Joe)
NEW LOGOS!
The biggest point of interest on the site is our new custom-made Logos! Pseudorant’s new Logos were designed by Aaron Gilmore.
He has an extensive background in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, traditional illustration techniques and classic art styles.
He accepts commissions for all of his work, and quotes very affordable prices so anyone can afford to have their site look better than the competition!
If you are looking for an amazing artist that you can afford to work with, I would highly recommend contacting Aaron for any of your project needs.
For more information check out Aaron’s website at:
As always thanks for checking out Pseudorant! We appreciate the support. Please bear with us through the new transition and you will be happy with the future updates we will be bringing you!
Pseudorant on FeedBurner! - Help us Burn our RSS Feed!
Blog now on Feed Burner, Please Subscribe to our RSS Feed!
Hey everyone! You have probably noticed the new Feed Burner icon on the site. Ya I know, it has a purple background in the widget space. As someone with the OCD this is all I have been able to think about for the past 20 hours.
Joe who is more of a wiz with stylesheets and widgets than I am, has already instructed me on how to fix it but being the creative individual that I am, I implemented the code in a ”unique” way so I am waiting to hear back from him on the new fix.
But other than that, Pseudorant is now signed up on Feed Burner so please subscribe to our RSS feed. We still want you to visit the site because that’s the best way to truly immerse yourself in the bulk of our rants, but when you can’t make it to the site then settle for the next best thing… RSS!
We are currently at 12 subscribers on our RSS feed, but we are hoping for a lot more.
We will be hosting a small contest for all the readers that once we hit 250 subscribers we will post several sets of custom made icons, available for people to use in their blogs.
I am very obsessed with “Glass” buttons and will be making a bunch for our new theme that we will be implementing soon. (But I can’t talk about that now.)
I will be making many extras that we will be hosting for our readers to download, once we have hit our goal of 250 subscribers! So tell your friends and get them to subscribe!
If you have not already subscribed please check it out. Every last subscription counts! Thanks again for checking out the site. We always appreciate the support!
Why Google Alerts are So Useful!
Why are “Google Alerts” so Valuable?
Many of you may already be aware that Google offers a service called “Google Alerts”. For those who were not, Google Alerts is a service that you can setup through Google to receive updates via email whenever a search criteria, that you specify is met.
This may sound pretty basic but it can be a very powerful tool for many reasons. The internet has gotten to a point where it is considered tacky to waste ones time browsing sites on a high speed connection. In the world we live in, where people feel they need instant access to specific information at all times, the RSS feed is king.
On this same note, services like Google Alerts can meet a very specific need. If you do not have the time to find the information you need on the internet, tell Google to find it for you and to email you when it’s finished.
In a way the alerts are somewhat like an RSS feed in that they provide constant updates throughout the day (depending on how you have them configured.) so you can spend your time doing other things until the information you need arrives.
The best way to understand why they are so convenient is to go to the Google Alerts homepage and set one up to see just what they are all about. You can reach the homepage from the following link:
On the Google alerts page you will notice two things, a welcome message that gives you a brief description of what Google Alerts are, and a form with drop down menus labeled “Create a Google Alert”.
We want to start by creating an alert. Now you will notice the four information fields that are required to create the alert. They are “Search Terms”, “Type”, “How Often”, and “Your Email”.
Let’s start by putting in our search terms. For our example let’s use:
“Pseudorant”
This way we can receive an alert whenever the site gets mentioned online. Notice I have left out the “www” and “com” part of the address. I have done this because I would like to be informed of any general mention of Pseudorant. If you were interested in knowing when the site address gets mentioned you would put in www.pseudorant.com.
Keep in mind that you are not limited to just words or titles. You can setup alerts for advanced search queries to find very specific information. Google Alerts will let you setup search terms using all the common Google operators.
For more information on Google Operators and how to use them, refer to my Google Guide which is located at the following links:
Google Guide 01 - Introduction & Search Operators
Google Guide 02 - Definitions, Maps, Driving Directions
Google Guide 03 - Services, Features, Advanced Operators
Google Guide 04 - Web History, Bookmarks, Labs & Easter Eggs
Once you have setup the search term to your liking, you need to complete the rest of the form to make sure you receive your alerts.
The next option we need to set is the “Type” of alert. There are six options here to choose from, News, Blogs, Web, Comprehensive, Video and Groups. These options will determine where Google should look for the information you are searching for.
When I setup Google Alerts I tend to use the “Comprehensive” option because I like to know if the information is coming up in multiple areas. Though sometimes selecting one area may provide better results if you are looking for something like a news story.
In this case because you are looking for confirmed news, you will probably want rule out other sources like “Videos” “Groups” and “Blogs” which may contain information that is based on opinion and not necessarily on fact. Although sometimes bloggers do tend to have the inside scoop like my article on “Google Office in Madison Confirmed by The Capital Times Newspaper“.
After you have determined what type of alert is going to get you the most relevant information you need to set the frequency of the alert. This can be done by using the drop down menu on the “How Often” field. Here you have three options, “Once a day“, “As-it-happens“, and “Once a week“.
How often you receive the alert can be an important decision based on how interested you are in the material you are asking Google to send you. In the case of a blogger you may setup multiple news alerts that you want to receive immediately so you can be one of the first to post links to any breaking news. Although if you are just setting up alerts to keep an eye out for a new game you are waiting to play, you may only want to receive updates once a day. If you set them too often it may feel as though you are being spammed because depending on the topic you can receive several updates per hour.
On the other hand if you do not set them to come often enough you may miss out on an interesting story or topic that you would like to have been in on from the start. These are just a couple things to keep in mind when you decide how often you would like to receive updates.
The last thing you need to do to complete the Google Alert submissions is to enter the email address you would like the alerts to go to. As I mentioned before updates that come to often can feel like spam, so you may want to consider setting up a secondary email address that your Google alerts go to.
I actually have this setup on my iPhone so that my normal mail goes to one email address and my Google alerts go to another. This way when an alert comes in and my phone dings, I can decide if I want to look at it now, or save a couple for later and go through them all at once.
You can set this up however it best meets your needs but it can be a nice alternative to sorting through your email every couple hours if you’re getting alerts “As-it-happens”.
Once you have submitted the email address to send the alerts to, you can click the “Create Alert” button which will finalize the Google Alert submission process.
It will now take you to a webpage that says there has been a confirmation email sent to the address you specified. You will want to log into that email account and click on the link in the email to confirm that you would actually like to receive the alerts.
Once you have done this you will start to receive alerts based on the criteria you specified. You can now sit back and relax as the latest updates on Warhammer online come right to your email, or the latest scoop on any news in your city.
As with most Google services this provides yet another very useful feature to help people get the most out of their online experience. If you are a blogger I highly recommend setting up Google Alerts for your interests because it will help you come up with interesting topics for posts on a daily basis.
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