Scriptbloggers

It’s a shame that I’ve been working as an SEO consultant and I’ve never used any kind of Press Release for my own websites. I always preferred to do article submissions as opposed to PR and the reason was I never wanted to spend money on it but sooner or later I had to give it a try so finally yesterday, I did it.

As the first experiment, I chose Free-Press-Release.com to publish and distribute my Press Release.

Well, the domain name says “Free” and you can choose to publish it for free but if you want to get real results you have to bid on your placement which caused me to spend a good amount of money on it.

Now, it’s close to 24 hours my PR page is up there but it hasn’t been indexed by Google which makes me thinking I did my first mistake by choosing the wrong publisher.

For now, I don’t want to post a link to my press release here, not to boost its indexing process and keep it on its own so that I can have a pure natural experience.

I’ll keep here updated so that others without PR experience won’t do the same mistake as mine.

Cheers,

Soroush

UPDATE (March 5, 2009): After more than 36 hours, my post still hasn’t been picked up by Google which isn’t a good sign. Looks like spammers are faster than Google and they’ve already picked up my email address and started spamming it.

Anyways, I’ve scheduled the same PR to be distributed on PRWeb tomorrow. Hopefully that one shows better results.
UPDATE (March 7, 2009): Today, after more than 3 days, finally the PR submitted to Free-Press-Release was indexed and showed up in Google. The one submitted to PRWeb showed up in Yahoo news within 4 hour. Now it’s obvious to me which one was a better investment.

UPDATE: Well, I guess by now, everybody knows that Dynadot is back up after more than 36 hours of downtime, that’s a good thing but I still can’t believe they have just left it with no announcement, no explanation and no apology like it has never happened! I could understand if it was 2-3 hour downtime but 36 hours isn’t something you can ignore. I still can’t accept a hardware failure could bring Dynadot down for such a long time.

The file system on our main server was corrupted, probably due to a hardware failure. It took us this entire time to rebuild our servers from the backups.

A Dynadot staff said on their forum. (Source)

It took them the whole time to recover the data from the backups? This means they don’t have proper RAID or fault-tolerance system which means the same situation or even 10 times worse can happen any time.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: I just got off the phone with Dynadot’s customer service. They said that there was a hardware problem which brought the site down and they are trying to get it fixed this evening. On the side note I should say they actually picked up the phone! No answering machine or anything which is amazing!

UPDATE: I can’t believe Yahoo’s problem was only for the “All-New Mail” and when I switched to “classic mail” everything is back to normal!

I feel bad not posting anything interesting here and it looks like Scriptbloggers is becoming the status report of what site “is down” blah blah blah!

Well, I think I’m a domainer more than a blogger and when I face the following error message for more than 16 hours when trying to go to my main domain registrar where hundreds of my domains sit I become stressed and pretty much miserable:

This stress becomes 10 times worse when I can’t even log into my mailbox at Yahoo! Mail:

Well, I can only hope that it’s nothing serious (with Dynadot) but anyways there is nothing I can do and I guess I have to live with that

Thank God Scriptbloggers is up and running…

I’m afraid so! If you’re one of the thousands of people who keep refreshing the browser with the hope to get on DP, I’m sorry to let you know that your internet connection is not the problem. DigitalPoint forums is currently down.

You want to check it yourself? Go to SiteUptime.com and type forums.digitalpoint.com in the Quick Check box on the sidebar and click Check.

Make sure you’re not checking “digitalpoint.com” ’cause there is nothing wrong with that site. It’s only forums.digitalpoint.com subdomain which is down and not the parent site.

Well, It’s not necessarily a bad thing! I’m already writing in my blog after 3 months (beside the post about ArticleSale launch.) instead of wasting my time reading all the posts in its marketplace to make sure I don’t miss any good deal.

Anyways, Just in case, if you’re here from a Google, searching for anything related to DigitalPoint being down, and you’re an article writer who use DP as the place to sell unique articles, you’ll probably find ArticleSale interesting, specially now that you have some time to spend on it

Have a great day.

Cheers,
Soroush

After getting ripped off several times and wasting hundreds of dollars, trying to find high quality unique articles, either for my websites or to submit to article directories, I came up with the idea of an Article Marketplace where article writers can put their articles for sale and make their own portfolio, selling unique pre-written articles, while building their reputation by a feedback system. Buyers should be able to see a sample part of the article and know who they are dealing with. They also need to be assured that they will receive the article after making the payment.

Well, all these thoughts and ideas led to my “state of the art” project, ArticleSale which is now open to public, 100% free for both buyers and sellers.

Nothing complicating! Writers, sign up with their PayPal email. They post the article, specify the price and category and the system automatically calculates the word-count, also takes care of the sales and the delivery of the article. It also generates the code for a button for the author to advertise the article elsewhere. When someone clicks on the purchase button, the system puts a hold on the article, so that nobody can buy it while someone else is in the process of the payment for it, then when the payment is done, it sends the article to the payers email address, notifies the seller and removes the article from the store.

Beside the article itself, there is a special link sent in the email to the buyer. That is the link, allowing the buyer to leave feedback for the seller. This way, after a while, the writers can gain more trust by referring people to their profile at ArticleSale as a reference.

comments and feedbacks will be highly appreciated.

Cheers,

Soroush

I can’t stop laughing since I saw this spam comment on one of my posts at Scriptbloggers.

to: Admin – If You want to delete your site from my spam list, please visit this site for instructions: stopspam.10fast.net

Out of curiosity I checked the website mentioned above and it made me laugh even harder:

And submitting the form results in the following message: (Obviously I’m not stupid enough to use real information!)

Thanks! You will no longer receive messages with advertising from us.

See! Getting rid of spam has never been this easy!

… And I lived, spam-free happily ever after.

The little Sackboy can’t wait!

Since there hasn’t been any official word about the new release dates, this countdown timer is currently based on Nov. 4th taken from Amazon.com.
If you like it, here is the link to the LBP countdown timer page containing the code you can use on your own website and tips to customize it.

After launching LittleBigPlanet Blog, it’s time to hear back some voices from LBP fans community and that’s what LittleBigPlanet Discussion Forum is all about!

It may sound stupid but I can’t get rid of my thoughts and ideas about LBP! I almost can’t find any limit and eveyday something new comes up in my mind! This is one of the few games worth discussing (IMHO) and that’s why I’ve launched LBP Forum.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t mean playing and wasting all my time with video games, I mean there are much more you can do using this “game”. Can’t see what I mean, check out Sony’s presentation at E3 2008!

Unlike the last time which I decided to make a forum and purchased a commercial script for that (Which ended up being a terrible decision), this time I found nothing better than Vanilla. It’s clean, light and free with no crazy feature which reduces the risk of bugs and security holes. (Comparing to phpBB)

Now I’m hoping that other people are also going to like the idea of simplicity.

Cheers,

Soroush

If you like it you’re welcome to use it on your site.
Just copy/paste the whole code below into your html page:


<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0" width="230" height="250" id="lbp1" align="middle">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="false" />
<param name=wmode value=transparent>
<param name="movie" value="http://www.lbpblog.com/flash/lbp1.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" /> <embed src="http://www.lbpblog.com/flash/lbp1.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="230" height="250" name="lbp1" wmode="transparent" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" allowFullScreen="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>


I know, it seems too off-topic for this blog to host posts about video games and it’s too strange for me to write them but with such masterpiece like Little Big Planet (or LBP) I can’t resist! But wait, it has something to do with topics in blog! If the concept “Making Money” sounds interesting keep reading!

If you’re not familiar with this “game”, the short description is a wicked PS3 game which everything is customizable by user, and the objects simply follow physics rules. There is no crazy complex built-in machine but you can use your creativity to make something useful out of simple tools and then publish it for public use!

I put the word game in double-quotes sometimes because I can’t really consider it only as a game! Let’s put it this way; Is “second life” a game? hmm, yes but for some people it’s much more than a game!

In LBP, you may be able to create custom levels with useful tools and cool prizes and even charge people interested for downloading them but first you have to get approved, which takes some time and work but it can totally worth the effort. 

Anyway I decided to create and dedicate another blog for it, so if you’re interested checkout my new LittleBigPlanet blog which follows news, updates, ideas and anything cool about this awesome game.

The game is not out yet and hopefully will be released Oct. 2008, so there’s still time to plan but sooner the better, considering its potentials.