Well I may be posting a weekly update of videos compiled full of FAIL, harassments and more! You’d like that yeah? I knew you would 
Let’s begin shall we:
Our first video really cracks up the volume, not exactly a funny video but really does show some cracking images and gets our ball rolling! LET’S PARTY!
Now we have the old log rolling down the hill, we might need to step it up slightly with a small tempo boost, let’s hand it over to… Uncle Frank?!
We all saw the finale of her riding into the sunset on her bike, or more so… riding around Albert Square on her bike (I actually hate any scenes with her riding that thing, just doesn’t seem right). So, has she left Eastenders for good?
No, well we all don’t think so. It was all after the argument and confrontation about the condom piercing. She just wants a baby like many other women, I don’t see what Jack’s problem is. Oh wait, I forgot he went and got Roxy pregnant with Amy a while back. With the whole controversial view of the killing Danielle off Eastenders episode, users were pretty much praying for the story writers to give Ronnie a break and give here some remote happiness in the hell hole of Albert square.
Image shown courtesy of and copyrighted to The Sun.
With the rumours that Ronnie comes back to steal Amy, comes back to be with Jack, stays away and Jack gets back with Roxy or she just returns and strips off naked on television, whatever the outcome is I think we can all be prepared for a blast. I hope JAck can resist Roxy’s charm and desperation to grow up, stays true to his word in loving Ronnie and she can return (on her bike, of course) to have a happy storyline for once.
Other than Ronnie (and Danille) I never have much like for Eastenders, storylines are too repetative and bland, heres an idea: bring back Danielle and reverse the time a bit
/Rich
Finally, my wait is over. Taking a week to reach me (I was starting to get worried), my Songbird stickers are in my possession, but something felt wrong with the packaging, it felt a bid too padded for just stickers. Well, to my surprise, a t-shirt was situated within the parcel too! For just being a shirt I am pretty excited over the design and overall ‘coolness’ of the thing. You must agree with me, that thing is pretty darn sexy:
That is a very nice tee right? Well, if you disagree (or agree) I will show you another:
Boy-oh-boy!
I have just updated the theme to suit the game I’m playing at the moment and i will start posting regularly! A lot of things have happened through June, here is a quick breakdown on what this post with cover:
A year older? Certainly doesn’t feel that way! Can’t believe a year has gone by, so much has happened in this year that it is almost hard to explain in one section. Having moved to Essex, “the lovely sunny county of chavs“, back in April 2008 I was in the process on joining the British Army as a future Combat Engineer (C3). While doing nothing, having no job, no friends down south (all back up in Lincolnshire), no school and no real sense of direction I plowed on with online gaming and sorting some websites out.
With meeting some great lads at the Army pre-ADSC and main 2 day ADSC selection days, I finally found out something when lying on a hospital bed in Hampshire: “The Army isn’t for me.”. Switching to a completely different line of work, SEO. I am currently an apprentice at a London based consultancy, Ayima Search Marketing, I absolutely love it. This has pretty much taken me up to June this year, other than the whole army and new line of work, it has been relatively quiet with mainly the Internet and forums taking up my time.
Forum Promotion, once my home on the Internet as a moderator and then head of the community team, is my hub once again. I have applied for the place on the review team and have been accepted.
Don’t go too crazy like I have! This is fantastic development news from the team behind the acclaimed, cross-platform media player. I have been using Songbird occasionally but iTunes and Windows Media Player really ruled my media aspects with an iPhone in my technological arsenal + Windows Media Player looking ‘pertty’. With Ubuntu finally having out the box support (apart from a crap resolution) with my Esprimo v5535, I needed an open-source, cross platform media player, “I wonder what I will use?”, Songbird!
Getting the download and installing the program was relatively easy on linux and I was away playing music, with ’scrobbling’ to my Last.fm account and some neat web browsing. Then I got an email from Ethan over at Songbird informing me of version 1.2’s release (I wasn’t keeping up with the blog due to not having much time to do so). I was ecstatic.
Updating Songbird is probably the fastest, most painless and simple updating function for any media player, which I have used. It requires almost no human input, apart from selecting ‘check for updates’ in the help menu and then clicking ‘update’, then it allows us to sit back and have a nice cup o’ tea.
Showing how painless the update process is.
With the download and installation fully automated and fast, Songbird then moves onto check your current installed add-ons for compatibility issues, which is pretty handy. If add-ons are not compatible with the new update, the media player will check for any updates in the repository of Songbird add-ons and download + install the newest versions. All in all, this process took me around 2 minutes (may take longer depending on Internet connection, computer specification etc.).
Not too much is noticeable if you are the average user that just hits ‘play’ and rams the earphones into your head. The main new features/improvements/updates for this version are as follows:
The performance enhancements are fantastic, I am already seeing a lower RAM usage (with up to 50% less threads needing to run), faster startup time and better stability. The main listed improvements from the update post on the official blog are that the search is faster, which I can certainly agree with. The search used to take a while to actually render the list, which wasn’t so much of a problem, but more of a nuisance. Deleting more than one track at any one time is quicker, I haven’t really noticed this due to the fact that I don’t need to delete multiple tracks or have ever needed to, I would assume that this would be normal speed when compared to iTunes or an equivelant.
They have also been working extremely hard in narrowing down the number of bugs and crash errors, checking the bugzilla will give a full rundown on the current fixes.
Last.fm radio/scrobber integration.
Last.fm integration has had a vast improvement with the readio becoming part of the fuction, we now have the ability to play: Recent Stations, Recommended Artists, Top Artists, Your Tagged Tracks and Your friends & neighbourhood. Including the radio directory, users can now explore tag and artist relationships on Last.fm, which is always a welcomed feature!
Songbird 1.2 is well worth checking out, being much more stable and feature packed than 1.0 and having a fantastic iPod sync addon, there is no more need for iTunes! (Unless you own an iPhone, this isn’t supported in Songbird… yet 
)
/Rich
No way? Yes way! How many of you actually use Social Media for your advantage? Not many I bet.
You can use it in a number of ways, I actually can’t list them all as people will use social networks and social media sites differently. You can easily optimize your profile with a few links to your site, maybe a few pages and then start making friends, lots of friends. Comment on their profiles, look at their interests etc. and if they use forums then message them about yours (this is especially effective if you own a promotion board as they are in the exact same boat as you).
Once you build (or have built) a good network ‘hub’ on the big sites, you can start to branch out onto smaller networks, submit articles to Digg, tweet with Twitter and comment on blogs. “But blogs aren’t social media sites or networks Rich!”, this is true but what you have to remember is once people start commenting on blog posts they leave marks with links to their blogs, then they have links on their posts to other blogs from commenter’s. This process gradually grows in size until you come across maybe 100 blogs you have never heard of that are fairly popular or (even better) cover your forum theme.
You can just keep enlarging your horizons on advertising, promotion and commenting while your site gets larger. With having a steady rise of links as your forum grows in size, it should accommodate the increase in demand for more traffic, while catering for the visitor’s needs with a wider variety of content.
The main big bonus (and that’s a Brucey bonus!) for using Social Media in promoting your forum is traffic, lot’s of traffic. Remember the games where you can link up score multipliers?
Think of promoting on Social Media (using correct and effective practices) as a bonus multiplier of a million. “That can’t be right Rich, a million would get me so much traffic!”, well that is true, maybe not a million but you catch my drift. So why are you sitting around and not jumping on this bandwagon of traffic miners? Think of how many hits you could get on your Facebook or MySpace profiles alone, they average millions of visits per day.
The only disadvantages are the most obvious, if you have already started your SEO homework and have got a comfortable knowledge of what to do. Some of you may find disadvantages as follows:
Other than the above listed, you should be fine with Social Media promotion in the long run along side your forum. If you are serious enough on gettign a successful community under your belt, start it all off, get the ball rolling and you should find some hope at the end of the tunnel.
One last thing: If you can, do yourself a favour and install Google Analytics on your forum.
/Rich
