Vietnam Urban Forum

Archive for September, 2009

How would you like it if the visitors of your Adsense sites created FREE and ORIGINAL content for you? It’s possible and a lot easier than you think.

What is a Highly Optimized Forum?

There are a few important differences between a normal forum and one that is optimized for the search engines.

The problem with a normal forum is that spiders have a hard time crawling through them. This is because the pages of most forums aren’t normal .html pages. Most forums are PHP pages that have a lot of “junk” after them. This junk is actually a bunch of numbers (called a session id) that is assigned to a web site visitor and which is used to track the visitor’s path and the time of entry and exit.

For example, the URL of a typical forum URL might look like this:

http://www.domainname.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=5&sid=dada710f34b2dcc1eb79ea

Obviously that isn’t the ideal situation if your goal is to get your forum indexed into the search engines.

Instead, you want your forum’s URL to look like this:

http://www.domainname.com/forum/keyword10.html

Why You Need a Highly Optimized Forum

There’s a way to optimize a forum in such a way that, every time someone posts a new forum topic, it actually creates a new html page.

This is a big deal because it’s like the members of your forums are creating keyword-rich content for you every day!

And if your forum become really popular, this means hundreds or even THOUSANDS of pages of content is created for you on a daily basis! All this content is free, original, and useful to your visitors!

Another great reason why we put a forum on all of our Adsense sites is because it differentiates our web sites from all the other Adsense sites on the Internet.

As we’ve mentioned in previous lessons, you don’t want to make your Adsense sites look like all the other “Made for Adsense” sites on the Internet. Some search engines are starting to ban web sites that look like they have no other purpose but to display Adsense ads.

Installing the Mod

First, what is a mod?

Mod is short for modification. A mod, as it refers to forums, is something that is typically created by the public that adds features that aren’t available in the original forum script.

But this mod isn’t a typical one. It doesn’t add any cool features or extras. In fact, it takes some away. But the important thing is the fact that it makes every topic in your forum its own optimized HTML page.

The mod is provided by Able2Know.com and can be downloaded at:

http://search.able2know.com/cgi-bin/jump.cgi?ID=5478&view=File

We have a video in the A/V Department that will show you how to install the mod. If you need any help, just post a message in our forum and we’ll give you a hand.

Growing Your Forum

Now that you have your Highly Optimized Forum installed, you have to get people to start posting in it!

Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done. The problem is, most people don’t want to post in an empty forum.

So here are 7 tips for jump-starting a new forum:

Post a prominent link. Make sure you post a big bold link on your front page of your web site that advertises your forum. You want to drive as much traffic to your forum as you can when you are first starting out. Nobody can post in your forum if they can’t find it…

Create some starter topics. You can get the ball rolling by creating a few “starter topics.” One way to get people posting is by asking a controversial question. For example, if you have a political forum, you could ask, “Should George Bush be impeached?” This will get people to post because a lot of your visitors will have an opinion since this is an easily debatable topic.

Let guests create topics. A lot of forums on the Internet require visitors to register before they can post. This seems to discourage a fairly large percentage of people from posting. Some people feel that it’s not worth the hassle of registering just to post a simple question or comment. That’s why we recommend giving guests the ability to start topics on your forum… at least until your forum grows larger.

Link to your forum from every article. Most Adsense sites have a lot of articles on them. It’s a good idea to post a link at the end of every article that says, “Discuss this article in our forum!” Your visitor will be more willing to go to your forum since they are done reading the article any way.

Limit the number of categories your forum has. A common mistake I see a lot of people make when they first start their forum is they have too many categories. For example, your forum could have a “General Discussion” as well as an “Off Topic” category. If you have too many, and people only post in a couple of them, your entire forum will look like a ghost town! Once your forum becomes popular, start adding more categories if you feel like it needs them.

Start a poll. Most forums (such as phpBB) have the ability to start polls. We’ve noticed that even people who don’t like to post at all in forums will at least answer a poll to find out what the results are.

Create fake posts. Okay, this tip is a little controversial and not everyone feels comfortable doing it… but it is an effective way to make your forum look less “empty”. You can create a few posts with fake names in order to make your forum look more popular than it is. This seems to work well because people are more likely to post in a forum if they see other people doing it too.

Your highly optimized forum is a valuable thing! Remember, every time someone starts a topic, that’s a new HTML page that can be indexed by the search engines!

Exactly how valuable is your forum? Well, I’ll put it this way… some people pay writers $20 or more for articles that they can post on their Adsense sites. Each topic to your forum is just as original, keyword-rich, and useful as any article on the Internet… and it’s completely free!

Palm vs. iPhone 3.0: which one would you want to get?

iPhone or Palm Pre?

Sprint, Palm Pre’s exclusive carrier announced that Palm Pre would be launched on June 6. Then this summer that’s the question many would-be-smart phone purchasers just might ask themselves. Both have their pros and cons. The iPhone has a huge profile and market presence, but the Pre has the old-school Palm faithful who have been waiting a long time for their Next Big Thing. The iPhone has massive channels and even Sprint admits they won’t be advertising the Palm Pre much due to low initial supply. But those most likely to want the Palm Pre already know it’s coming, where to get, and may well be reading this while already standing in line.

But what about the consumer on the edge? The consumer who has an older iPhone or Palm, or the one who’s about to move up from a feature phone for the first time. What about the dreaded “undecided”? This article is for them. Now let’s get it on.

Display

[img]http://nidesoft.com/forum/iphonevspalm/iphone-vs-palm.jpg[/img]

IPhone: beautiful, large (3.5 inch diagonal), high-resolution (480×320 screen) multi-touch display.

Palm Pre: Beautiful, large (3.1 inch diagonal), high-resolution (480×320 screen). The screen is not as large as the iPhone (0.4 inch smaller) but this is balanced against other hardware features such as the removable battery and sliding keyboard further below.

Advantage: Tie

Keyboard

Palm Pre has a physical, hardware-based QWERTY keyboard while the iPhone has a virtual, software-based keyboard that can be QWERTY (or anything else).

For those who need to feel those keys, the Palm Pre is the obvious choice. However, the Pre’s keyboard is reportedly somewhere between a Treo Pro and a Palm Centro: softer, more gummy keys with a narrow width overall. It might not be to everyone’s liking. That said, at least the Pre has one, and it’s a slider to boot, which means if you don’t need it, you can just tuck it away back under the screen where it came from.

The iPhone, can draw any kind of keyboard it wants. So if you need to type occasionally (or often) in Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, or most any language, you can easily switch between those exact keyboards. You can also automatically be presented with web-optimized, or video, audio — any task at all — specific keyboards.

The iPhone is an excellent touch screen phone, no doubt. But for heavy texters and e-mail addicts, the lack of a physical keyboard can be annoying. Now Palm Pre combined a touch screen and keyboard, pleasing both touch screen and keyboard fans. So Palm Pre wins.

Advantage: Palm Pre

Network

In the US — which is the only country with initial availability — Sprint has exclusive rights to the Palm Pre, much as AT&T has a lock on the iPhone. When you choose mobile phone, also make a choice between the carriers. There are two factors to consider:

1. AT&T is a GSM network, which means you can theoretically pop out your SIM card and put it in another mobile phone. It is great in emergencies, and if you travel and don’t want to deal with roaming charges. Sprint is CDMA, so any phone switches involves a call to your carrier at the very least.

2. Sprint doesn’t currently allow simultaneous voice and data. This means if you’re talking on the Palm Pre, you can’t use the web or email, and vice versa. If you’re using an iPhone on AT&T’s EDGE service, you’ll have the same problem, but if you’re on 3G, there are no worries at all. For the Palm Pre, you’d have to switch to Wi-Fi to do that.

Again, for me, using voice and data at the same time has become a must. Looking up information while out and about on a call is a frequent occurrence. If you’re not accustomed to it, you may not miss it, but once you are, it’s hard to go back.

Advantage: iPhone

Applications

Installing new applications on the iPhone is a complete joy.  It’s ultra simple and quick – an absolutely superb experience than virtually nobody has matched today.  With 15,000+ apps now available there is something here for everybody and although there is a lot of rubbish there are also many superb applications.

Palm has already confirmed that it will create a full App Catalog – one that will presumably have the same functionality and ease-of-use as Apple’s App Store. Though maybe there will not (initially at least) be as many apps available for the iPhone as for the Palm Pre.

Advantage: Tie

Multimedia

For Palm Pre, it offers a 3-megapixel camera. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to snap any photos, but early reports say that the quality is pretty good. Disappointingly, the camera won’t have video recording capabilities at this time, but those could be added in the future. In terms of music and movie, it is reported that the music sounds very beautiful, also the movie looks perfect with the 320*480 pixels screen. However Palm Pre can only play MPEG-4, H.263, H.264 videos and MP3, AAC, AAC+, AMR, QCELP, WAV audio files. What if you have large music or video collections you want to carry around with you on your mobile? I have got third part software to do this admire job: use [url=http://www.nidesoft.com/dvd-to-palm-converter.html]Nidesoft DVD to Palm Converter[/url] to convert DVD collections into Palm Pre and [url=http://www.nidesoft.com/video-converter.html]Nidesoft Video Converter[/url] to convert video or music collections into Palm Pre.

As far as iPhone, there’s no doubt that iPhone is wonderful music mobile phone. Listening to music, viewing photos and watching movies/videos is just “something else” on the iPhone. IPhone can play MPEG-4 videos with resolution of 640 *480, up to 160 Kbps. Also it supports audio formats including AAC (16 to 320 kbps), MP3 (16 to 320 kbps), and WAV. With its beautiful 3.5-inch wide screen display and Multi-Touch controls, iPhone is an amazing iPod. Watch movies and TV shows in wide screen, iPhone brings you a video experience unlike any other portable device.

[img]http://nidesoft.com/forum/iphonevspalm/iphone-video-preview.gif[/img]

Advantage: Tie

Conclusion

So there you have it. Two companies that both pride themselves on their high-skill products. One who’s Newton spawned an industry that the other is Pilot defined and dominated, went on to converge with the Treo only to fall behind and get eclipsed by the iPhone, and is now poised to come back with the Pre. Apple is going on to the third version of their smart phone line while Palm is introducing the first version of their third act.

If it seems like the only real deciding factors are where you live and work, what you want to do, and how you prefer to do it, well — yeah. That’s it.

Bottom line, the competition between iPhone and Pre is good for Apple and Palm — it keeps them on their toes and on top of their games — and it’s better for us. We’re lucky to live in a time and place where we have such increasingly awesome mobile options to choose between.

Come this summer, we’ll have a few more choices as well. Which one will be yours?

Over 165,000 searches are done online each month for the term glycemic index. That means a lot of people are curious about this. As they should be. It also means that a lot of people are confused about it… and they shouldn’t be.

Here are four questions and answers that hopefully will clarify some of the “mysteries” surrounding the glycemic index. Let’s start with…

What’s the Glycemic Index Diet?

The most important thing to know about the glycemic index is that it is not really a diet. You can use the glycemic index list to guide your diet and show you what foods are likely to work best for you.

The power of the glycemic index is that you can use it to choose your foods wisely, because it shows you which foods will have the greatest impact on your blood sugar.

Use the glycemic index chart to find those foods with the lowest glycemic index. For best results, stick to foods with a glycemic index of under 50. Occasionally, you will eat something with a higher index, but you will probably be OK if you eat foods under 50 most of the time.

What’s missing from the glycemic index diet?

If you have been using the glycemic index food list to look up your favorite foods, you may have noticed something’s missing. There are almost no meats, or other protein foods, for that matter.

My first thought when I noticed this a couple of years ago was that the glycemic food index was simply unfinished. There will always be more foods that could be added, but that’s not the reason.

The real reason is that the glycemic index of foods is all about carbohydrates. Meats and other proteins are not listed on the index because they raise your blood sugar so slowly that they don’t make a measurable difference to your blood sugar over the first hour or two after eating.

The glycemic index list of foods is another way to think about planning your meals and snacks. Remember to include protein, and choose low-GI carbohydrates.

How does what you do affect the glycemic index of the foods you eat?

You may have glanced through the charts and tables and made some adjustments to your diet. But did you know that your food preparation methods may be affecting the glycemic index of the food you eat? The more your food is modified, the higher its glycemic index will be.

In the extreme case, imagine that you are eating a handful of wheat heads directly from the field. Probably not pleasant, but you could if you wanted to. Now imagine eating a tablespoon of flour. The very act of turning the wheat into the soft, fine flour removes almost all of the fiber, and the flour will raise your blood sugar much faster than the handful of natural wheat will.

In the same way, although to a lesser degree, grinding and cooking our food raises its glycemic index.

Some examples of ways to maximize the fiber in your foods and keep the glycemic index as low as possible:

-When you cook pasta, cook it for the minimum possible time. It should still be firm, not mushy.

-When preparing vegetables or fruit, use the skin or peel if you can.

-When possible, eat your vegetables raw (lots of salads).

-When cooking vegetables, allow them to retain a little of their crunch—imagine the best stir fry you have ever eaten—and you will keep some their fiber, too.

Although the carbohydrates you eat have each been assigned a number on the glycemic index, remember that you have some control over just how quickly or how slowly they turn into sugar in your body.

What is glycemic load?

The concept of Glycemic Load (GL) was developed in response to concerns that large amounts of low glycemic index foods might still cause unacceptable increases in blood sugar levels. The glycemic load index links serving size to the glycemic index so that it is easier to use.

Carrots, for example, have a very high glycemic index, (higher than white bread), but this was measured with 50 grams of carbohydrate. Since one carrot only has about 4 grams of carbohydrate, you would have to eat a lot of carrots to get a huge blood sugar response.

Pasta, on the other hand, has a low glycemic index compared to carrots, but a serving of pasta contains about 40 grams of carbohydrate. This means that the blood sugar response you will have with a plate of pasta will be several times higher than even a whole serving of carrots.

If you’re at all concern about what you eat, your weight, your blood sugar level, and your health in general, it’s a great idea to consult a glycemic index list and choose your food wisely.

Eat well, be well, live well!

Daniel G. St-Jean

Editor of Help For Hypoglycemia

Publisher of the Help For Hypoglycemia Blog