Arts and Crafts in the Family

In tonight's post, I'd like to return the favour to two talented artists and wonderful individuals who have helped promote Life User.

My mom is a talented impressionist painter and a budding photographer under her husband's tutelage. She showcases her pictorial work on her blog, Lunamoth, which updates one to five times weekly (no regular schedule) and is free of external ads.

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Arts and Crafts in the Family

Updates every Wednesday and Sunday

Experts say blogs that follow a regular posting schedule get more return traffic, so from now on, you'll see a new post on Life User every Wednesday and Sunday, starting tonight. Updates about the blog itself, such as this post, won't count toward this frequency (although technical tutorials resulting from my experience with the blog will).

The Sunday post will always contain at least 400 words that are previously unpublished. The Wednesday post will be at least 100 words and may include writing that I've posted elsewhere before.

Updates every Wednesday and Sunday

Best Machinae Supremacy Songs Reviewed

If there were any justice in this world, the Swedish electronic/metal band Machinae Supremacy would be among the best-known rock bands in the world. With both generic and specific references to video games, sci-fi animé and occasionally English literature, and a clear but not overplayed message to be different, think, learn and evolve, MaSu is a thinking young man's band.

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Best Machinae Supremacy Songs Reviewed

Good news on ads: Category Filter

I'm pleased to announce that Google AdSense has just extended the Category Filter to me. It's still in beta, but at Google a lot of things are "in beta" for years even when they work almost perfectly.

A Category Filter from a major player such as Google is the first step toward cleaning up the online ad industry as a whole. Granted, it will take a while for Google to refine the filter, for webmasters to become aware of it and for certain webmasters' audiences to pressure them into using it. Still, I think by the end of 2010, ads for dangerous or useless products and services will be the exception rather than the rule, Web-wide.

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Good news on ads: Category Filter

Disclosure of financial interests (update 12/31/09)

I'm not trying to make a living writing Life User, much less become a millionaire at it, but I am trying to graduate from university with a little less debt. This article will explain what I'm doing to that end, and how it may affect the content and presentation of the blog.

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Disclosure of financial interests (update 12/31/09)

Anti-Semitic Semantic Search

Nazis cause Jews, Arabs cure them, hookers are best treated with steroids and Adobe Photoshop, and one of the benefits of diabetes is copying documents. Narcissism is treatable by both aggression and Freud, but the latter may cause arthritis and great anguish and destroy your career. Marijuana can "assess psychometric accuracy" and help you "achieve wider social acceptance".

This is just a sampling of the medical advice dished up by HealthBase, a new semantic search engine evidently released into public beta prematurely. As TechCrunch reported last week, HealthBase drew some minor controversy for listing "Jew" as a cause of AIDS. Treatments include "Arab", "gene", alcohol and coarse salt. In an analysis of the benefits and drawbacks, "Pros of Jew" include "endorse extrinsic religiosity" and "facilitate Americanization", while cons include "enemy", "plague" and "kill Christian". On a more paradoxical note, the causes include "Nazi" and "Hitler".

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Anti-Semitic Semantic Search

Floating Widgets in a Blogger Post

(Note: Those of you using ad blockers will need to turn them off to see examples in this post.)

In my last post, I explained what to do if your JavaScript widgets, added to the body of a post in your Blogger blog, weren't displaying. But doing that didn't solve all my problems and may not solve all yours. If your widgets are aligned to the left (or right if you write in a right-to-left language) and put an ugly break in all but one line of text beside them, this tutorial is for you. While I've only tried this with Amazon widgets, it should work with any copy-and-paste widgets with a preview page.

This   is what an Amazon widget looks like when it's an inline element, which the MP3 Clips widget is by default. It's fine for small images that are used as icons or to display foreign scripts that the user may not have fonts for, but it's ugly for images of any significant size, as well as for video embeds and most Amazon widgets.

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Floating Widgets in a Blogger Post